The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

A couple interesting comments I found this morning in my comments. The first.

I have a job, I don't suffer from OCD and I edit wikipedia... free of charge. I'm an admin too.
Your entire post is an insult to the 5000 or so active editors who dedicate their hard work to building a FREE encyclopedia so mouth-breathers like you can look up big words.
I'm not a brilliant author.  I'm barely a competent one... but I believe in the goal of the project... so I work on the administrative side.  I help keep 12 year olds from replacing article with random curse words. On the more serious side I try to help clear up copyright violations... like, you know, when some shitbag tries to copy and paste some website on to wikipedia to claim it's his own work.
The admins on wikipedia aren't some elite class of editors on wikipedia.  Administrators get no more say in how the project works then any random editor.  The requirements to become an admin is basically a firm grasp of the rules, the ability to get along with people you m ight not like in a civil manner and a few months experience editing.  Cliques do exist... but cliques exist in every organization and in every nation, city, school, or church on the planet and are vital to the functioning of any larger culture.
Who can take the site seriously? It has been cited in over 40 court cases and used as a source in several hundred newspaper articles. The site gets literally millions of hits a day and 300 edits a minute.  The shear number of man-hours being spent on improving and maintaining wikipedia is comparable to a billion dollar corporation.  It was once estimated that if wikipedia wasn't a non-profit it would be worth in excess of 300 million dollars.
You think taking pride in your hobby and wanting to see it improve is a OCD, then I somehow doubt you have even bothered to read the article on it.
If someone is sick... truly sick with addiction to the internet then that's a terrible thing, but it's not the fault of wikipedia.  It's ridiculous to imply that somehow wikipedia is responsible  for someones physiological problems.
Let me ask you a retorical question and I hope you spend some time reflecting on it:  Why do you get off on tearing things down?

...and the reply...

>I have a job, I don't suffer from OCD
They never want to admit it, do they? 

>The admins on wikipedia aren't some elite class of editors on wikipedia.
Then why do they try to micromanage non-admin's? And shouldn't Wikipedia be capitalized?
>Administrators get no more say in how the project works then any random editor.
What? Just one example: They get to lock pages so random editors can't edit them.
>Cliques do exist... but cliques exist in every organization and in every nation, city, school, or church on the planet and are vital to the functioning of any larger culture.
And how are they vital, etc...?
>Who can take the site seriously? It has been cited in over 40 court cases and used as a source in several hundred newspaper articles. The site gets literally millions of hits a day and 300 edits a minute. 
Yeah, the same thing could probably be said for National Enquirer's site.  Perhaps this is one reason so many newspapers are losing readers and credibility.
>It was once estimated that if wikipedia wasn't a non-profit it would be worth in excess of 300 million dollars.
Like Enron?

>Why do you get off on tearing things down?
Why do you have trouble accepting criticism?

Great comments all-around that needed to be preserved.

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Perhaps the point here is that while the comments *here* are preserved, the editors and admin at the Wikipedia delete things with wild abandon based on the assumption that if THEY don't think the stuff is important, no one will.

Wikipedia has now reached a point where it is buckling under its own bureaucracy. Why should anyone contribute anything if Joe Peabody can come through and have it tagged for deletion and have it deleted only because Joe's peers didn't come to the rescue of the article - and had he asked them to, they would have been accused of being meat puppets.

Wikipedia isn't about community anymore. Its about elitism and censorship.
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