Personal appeals from prolific Wikipedians, New Jersey High Schools Options

[Peter Damian]

I suppose we have all noticed the new fundraiser today. Random pictures of people claiming to have generated lots of valuable yet free content. For example Alan Sohn – user:Alansohn – who says “On Wikipedia, I’ve created 2,463 articles. All of them for free. “

Great stuff, Alan, your most significant contribution seems to be ‘List of people from Teaneck, New Jersey’, 68 edits, but I couldn’t be bothered to check any further back than this year. Nearly all of your 2,463 articles are about High Schools in New Jersey. This does not persuade me to part any of my hard-earned cash to WMF, particularly not if I have to divert it from my current financial support of institutions like the Warburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_Institute . Interesting that the Warburg article is far smaller than any of the voluminous articles about New Jersey schools.

This post has been edited by Peter Damian:

[It's the blimp, Frank]

Here's an odd character.

I feel like I’m living the first line of my obituary.

You can't see his photo on that page, but when it pops up at Wikipedia, he looks like he works part-time at a meth lab.

[Abd]

Here's an odd character.

I feel like I’m living the first line of my obituary.

You can't see his photo on that page, but when it pops up at Wikipedia, he looks like he works part-time at a meth lab.

The rest of that paragraph.

I don’t think there will be anything else that I do in my life as important as what I do now for Wikipedia. We’re not just building an encyclopedia, we’re working to make people free. When we have access to free knowledge, we are better people. We understand the world is bigger than us, and we become infected with tolerance and understanding.

It follows, then, that those who are banned have been working to make people slaves, to oppress them, to deprive them of "free knowledge," to ban them, uh .... never mind, strike "ban." What was I saying? Ah, yes, Wikipedia is the embodiment of all Truth and Goodness, send usyour money.

Give a man a fish, he's fed for one day. Teach him to fish, he's fed for life. Give him "free knowledge," he's, he's, he's ...

Addicted to editing Wikipedia.

Knowledge is never free. Acquiring it takes experience, work, and courage. Sometimes even money. If one needs a taste of knowledge, a hint, one can sometimes find it at Wikipedia. Real knowledge, the kind that actually does make people free, cannot be found on Wikipedia, what remained of it has mostly been deleted or revised literally to death. Used to be you could find links to truly useful web sites on Wikipedia. Gone, for the most part, for this or that "reason." "Site has advertising on it, remove as spam." "Site advocates a point of view."

(people who have knowledge advocate the points of view developed through the knowledge, so of course they advocate it.)

(Those, by the way, were made-up standards, but are based on real situations that actually damaged the project because an admin enforced the idea.)