Post
by Lir » Mon Jan 08, 2024 4:25 am
Yes, I don't know anything about that, but I've come to see that this is a consistent pattern across many communities, especially in an online environment. Inevitably, there are people who are doing something, but there are other people who have nothing to offer, and this latter sort insists that they provide some kind of leadership - so maybe they aren't a writer, but they are an "editor". Look, they even have a barn star!
These people are parasites, and they just sink themselves into a community, and begin building themselves up by tearing other people down - they do it again and again, until they themselves suffer the same fate to some more aggressive ladder climber (most of the people who campaigned to ban me, were themselves banned years later). When such institutions endure, it's not because of the leadership, but in spite of it. It's the people who are actually doing the work who get things done, but they don't get a big Barn Star award - they instead get to deal with endless reverts from pedantic idiots, and if they dare to argue back they get banned for "edit warring". Why put up with it? It's a cult mentality, and people get sucked into trying to please the cult leader - but why bother? Just get out, stop editing, write your own stuff and move on with your life. It's not a paid job, and it's not going to change the world or fundamentally improve human society.
It's the old Animal Farm metaphor, and the problem starts at the top - Why was Jimbo Wales ever head of the project? What did he bring to the table? He isn't any kind of intellectual or academic, he wasn't innovative or brilliant, the idea for Wikipedia was hardly novel and in the late 1990s the Yahoo! web portal was originally heading in the exact same direction. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a Wikipedia run by someone who lacks an education is inevitably going to reflect that weakness. Regardless, for Jimbob the Porn Hustler, Wikipedia was never about knowledge or humanity - it was about personal profit and narcissistic self-promotion.