I liked The Joy. Their reincarnation as The Sorrow as one of the many capable critics who felt it necessary to break away from Wikipediocracy and participate in so-called splinter forums in those turbulent years, all because for some insane reason Jake/Zoloft saw value to the cause in being more we!coming to the very people and philosophies I had always thought would be the natural objects of criticism for a site dedicated to peering under the rocks of Wikipedia and shining a light on the ick beneath."The Joy" wrote:I was made a Trustee not long after this site was set up and I worked very briefly worked on maintaining the blog. We had a large pool of Trustees when this site started, though that dwindled over time. Trustees had no admin or mod powers, though we worked to establish the rules and norms of the site. Eventually, I resigned and decided to do other things not related to Wikipedia. While my memory of those early years are patchy, I do remember being involved in choosing the forum's color. We kept it grey. Now, it's... Pink Panther Pink?
It's informative to go back and look at the earlest blog post on their site....
https://wikipediocracy.com/2012/03/27/w ... t-matters/
It's Dan Murphy quite rightly talking aim at Wikipedia's scary arrogance and obsessive immaturity when it comes to writing about living people. That was my kind of Wikipedia criticism.
In a scary look forward to what Wikipediocracy has become, we recall that Wikipedia used to react to criticism like that with huge arrogance and total immaturity. Quel surprise. But because they're not so stupid, they altered the strategy slightly. If an issue garnered negative publicity and led to awkward questions from powerful people who might just want to take a look at the legal framework that allows Wikipedia to exist, they would respond, in some small but seemingly significant way.
And so it came to pass, and It is now theoretically possible that at the very fringes, the extreme edge cases, a non-public figure might, just might, succeed in requesting, and note the word requesting, that Wikipedia might do them a kindness and remove them from their giant and highly visible database.
And that sadly, these days, seems to be enough for the Wikipediocrats, who can scarcely be seen even mentioning the themes highlighted in that blog post these days, even though they still exist, because they're indivisible from what makes Wikipedia, Wikipedia. Not least the mismatch between someone who knows the game and has 23 hours in a day to play it, and a victim with a real life that leaves little time to study the myriad pages of Wikipedia's giant bureaucracy (and realise none of it means shit anyway, and Wikipedia is merely about power).
To any sane, rational, sensible person, there is no possible reform of Wikipedia to fix these glaring issues, that doesn't completely take away the defining characteristics of Wikipedia.
What passes as criticism on there these days, is a tool like Hemaichdnia saying it's embarrassing that Wikipedia declared Eminem to be dead for two hours. He suggests this could be fixed by banning such vandals as a first offence. Not realising that is entirely possible to declare Eminem dead on Wikipedia as a first edit. And it is already policy to ban death hoaxers on sight (why the fuck wouldn't it be?).
This death hoax was caused by two related things, Wikipedia not having enough editors to even patrol a high profile biography like Eminem in near real time, and the ones they do have not doing the right thing when they spot a vandal edit like that all too late, because they don't understand Wikipedia's rules (due to neural divergence in this case, or stupidity in Hemiauchenia's case).
If you're thinking that creating a separate edit right for all BLPs or applying pending changes to all BLPs would be a way to keep Eminem alive until his actual verifiable death (the hoax being effective and causing real upset in Eminem fans because it is realistic to think that could come at any time), as Wikipediocracy's Vigilant suggests, you're only showing yourself to be a Wikipedia apologist.
Even if it did work and even if it was possible to get the Wikipedia community to implement the changes, neither of which are remotely plausible, it only moves the problem elsewhere. There will always be something a vandal can do, to cause serious distress.
They're not asking the right questions. Is Wikipedia still Wikipedia, If after all these reforms, quite literally the only thing a newcomer can do as a first edit, a tenth edit and a 500th edit, is edit something nobody cares about? Does that sound like an encyclopedia "anyone can edit"? No, and that slogan has been debunked many times, despite still being on their masthead.
But Wikipediocracy refuses to take the next step. They refuse to acknowledge what Wikipedia is generally about these days, and was probably always going to become. It is a cult. A cult built around the idea that anyone can write an encyclopedia, If their definition of an encyclopedia is something that is not an encyclopedia, but which is close enough to matter. Because that is all Wikipedia editors want. A sense that their insignificant lives matter.
You can be an editor of Wikipedia ONLY if you prove your loyalty to the cult. This started out merely as believing in Wikipedia as a concept, but it is now more refined, and is increasingly signalled in a number of specific and deeply troubling ways....
* Putting an insane number of hours into Wikipedia, in ways that show complete deference to your betters, people who are also doing that, but started before you.
* Holding a strident belief that some random dickhead on the internet knows what a reliable source looks like better than a reliable source.
* Being fine with using tokenism and PR to deal with the known problems of Wikipedia (assuming of course that just pretending your critics are mistaken doesn't suffice), rather than making real change.
* Being fine with Wikipedia having a House POV, rather than a neutral POV.
* Being a virtue signaller, such as being fine with punching Nazis, beheading paedophiles and taking the lunch money from TERFs, and not spending a second's thought about whether any of that dumb shit was what actual encyclopedia editors used to do as part of their daily jobs.
Wikipediocracy refuse to say people as unethical as that, have no place in society at all, and most assuredly do not deserve to be writing an encyclopedia on behalf of it. They should be returned from whence they came. The fringes. The psych wards. Their mom's basements. McDonalds.
This unwillingness to advocate for anything more than largely pointless or completely unrealistic changes, or incremental changes down a path of ever restricting perfectly sensible people's ability to edit Wikipedia without having proven themselves loyal to the cult, without doing anything to ensure the people who are trusted by the cult are actually sensible, or indeed even ethical, is merely helping the cult survive.
The fact this is what passes for criticism on Wikipediocracy these days, is of course explained by the fact most if not all of that forum's membership are now committed members of Wikipedia, content with mere tinkering with its rules to avoid negative publicity, but only if that publicity has meaning to them. So you're talking left wing media, or progressive bloggers.
Real critics either left or were pushed out. Including yours truly.
And what became of Dan Murphy? He was last seen talking some absolute bullshit about Wikipediocracy being over-run with Nazi apologists, with apparently me as their ring-leader. Which was quite a surprise to little old me, who has never knowingly praised Trump, and really rather quite likes pointing out how the world's greatest democracy and several supposedly progressive European nations have in this last decade actually given real power to some pretty far right individuals via the ballot box, while the UK just keeps doing what it does best, preventing Nazis from being anything other than street thugs. A mere public order threat comparable to climate activists and militant leftists.
But of course, Dan Murphy's attacks were indulged, not stomped on as the vicious lies of a disgusting toad. Why? Because they suited the management of Wikipediocracy, who really didn't like me pointing out that rather than being Wikipedia critics, on a whole range of issues, they were only too willing to defend and enable their Wikipedian friends, most notably in their efforts to co-opt a neutral encycopedia into a piece on the political chessboard.
The Wikipediocracy of today is Wikipedia's friend. And that is apparently how the only last remaining Trustee Zoloft, and the one last remaining Administrator, Jake, seem to want it. Their animosity towards real critics is as steadfast as ever.
Christ knows why. You can ask them, but they 'ain't telling. You just get bullshit, or the defence of bullshit.
