You will
love this one, I guarantee it.
Part 1Part 2QUOTE
One does not succeed at Wikipedia by adding content. One succeeds by reverting un-sourced edits, and nominating pages for deletion. They even have a group for this, the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians, who, in their utter lack of logic, seem convinced that adding content to Wikipedia dilutes it. This is despite the fact that the other side has realized that Wikipedia is not paper and thus is not constrained to the limits of a paper encyclopedia. Of course, the Association of Deletionist Imbeciles have their little size breakdown, which implies it’s difficult to find what you want when more content exists. Clearly, these people have not heard of search algorithms.
QUOTE
When Wikipedia is brought up to a technical crowd, invariably there are many negative opinions. The disaffected horde grows by the day; Alienated by the bureaucracy and those who enforce it, many former contributors are quick to voice their discontentment with the direction the project has taken. The project as a whole is losing momentum — Both in edit frequency and article creation rate, and it doesn’t take a statistician to see the relationship between increased bureaucracy and the decline of Wikipedia.
The fact that the edit count and article creation both peaked in 2007 is quite telling. While article creation would theoretically dwindle as we approached documentation of the sum of human knowledge, it’s laughable to think Wikipedia is approaching that.
This open-source blogger was neutral toward Wikipedia.....until he saw the argument to delete the
article about dwm, a window manager for the X11 windowing system. Fairly obscure software, but then there's a lot of obscure software written up on Wikipedia.
The two AfDs were
total screaming
disasters. Even the creator of dwm (
AnselmgarbeÂ
(T-C-L-K-R-D)
) got involved---and banned as a sock. Thank you,
Blueboy96Â
(T-C-L-K-R-D)
, you arrogant little toad.
And Guy just had to stick his big greasy nose into it. (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/angry.gif)
Oh, and the
deletion review? The article's still there. Funny that.
Plus! The related
squabble on AN/I links to a
similar AfD, about something called JWASM. A perfect example of why letting idiot non-experts determine what is "encyclopedic" or not......is a really stupid concept. (Why doesn't
OrangeDogÂ
(T-C-L-K-R-D)
, who claims to be an experienced and degreed software developer, know better than to start insane battles like this?)
You will see more arguments like this in the future. The open-source scene is huge, complex, poorly documented (in a fashion acceptable to Wiki-lawyers anyway), and prone to getting into violent disputes over originality and usefulness. (Plus, they really hate bureaucracy.)
If open-source nerds turn against Wikipedia, it will be very bad for both them and WP.
This post has been edited by EricBarbour: 
Ubuntard weighs in on WIkipedia's decline
