Back in the day, I joined Wikipedia Review because I thought Wikipedia was an entertaining and promising idea and was appalled at the shenanigans over there.
Over the years, I concluded:
1) The powers that be are well aware that the whole thing is a scam that they are getting enriched on.
2) The general populace are too stupid to be interested. Trump is a reflection of that population. The whole Brexit debacle is another reflection of contagious stupidity (that is, I have no problem with people arguing that Europe/Government/whatever is corrupt so we ought to get out, but the mental gymnastics that go with it are truly amazing to behold).
3) The press are too stupid to be interested.
4) The editor community was too readily absorbed into the cult - people are very tribal and it takes very little to trigger the defensive interests of being part of a group.
So all in all, I concluded we were pissing in the wind. I stopped reading Wikipedia politics as there was nothing new to understand, the worst behaviours were all there out in the open in public and nobody cared. Like Greg, I believe that the culture of Wikipedia stems from that corrupt man Wales. When I look at the energy Greg has expended trying to right the wrong that is Wikipedia and how little in real terms has been achieved, I recognised that the time soak of this forum was not for me.
My main interest is a bit of personal research of trying to understand what the mechanism of failure of these megasystems is and how they are corrupted by the immaturity of communications and the lawlessness on the Internet. I don't have the intellectual rigour to piece it all together, but I can see that there are key commonalities of the broken thinking in things like "opinion becoming the new fact", and how people are manipulated by the media and social media.
Yep.
