User:BjKa/Rants

Admins are killing Wikipedia
For me the "Wiki" always came first in "Wikipedia". By definition a Wiki always reflects its users very strongly. So I can't at all understand the criticism some people put forward like "There's tons of articles about everything Pokemon, but not enough about famine in Africa". Well, the articles reflect the users! What do you expect? Wait till this generation grows up. I'm sure my grandma could have added a lot of information about the history of Riga, but she didn't because she was 95 at the time I wrote this, and didn't know how to use a computer. But I just can't grok this "either-or" mindset! Isn't wikipedia large enough for all kinds of knowledge? I think it's a great thing, which I am thankful for, that at least the Pokemon world is well documented (to stay with my example) even if it is of no real concern to me or most of the world at large.

Thats why I just don't get it: What is it with you people who hold up some kind of artificial encyclopedic standard, but pay no heed to sacrifice any information that might be useful to someone. Am I really the only one who used to love wikipedia especially because it held all kind of strange knowledge? Why would one want to intentionally destroy any shred of knowledge, even after it has been proven that the wiki-collaboration resulted in articles at least at the quality level of commercial encyclopedias? I strongly feel this kind of behavior can only be detrimental to any collection of knowledge, and certainly it is anathema to the wiki paradigm.

For me Content will always come before Form. Don't revert an edit or delete an article solely on the grounds that it's not up to your standard – be thankful for every contribution of information and improve the quality or the style yourself if it bothers you.

And by the way: What is it with demanding sources for every sentence written? Don't you see that the power of wikipedia lies exactly in the open editing by users of intimate expert personal knowledge, and not in the traditional copying from respected textbooks which has often propagated much bullshit for centuries?

Donate? My Ass!
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. -- Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Please note that he did not say "...access to textbook knowledge acceptable to academic quoting standards", nor "...access to information mercilessly purged of individual experience".

Since not donating is the only way of a protest which is open to me, I will not donate.

National Spellings
And another rant in the same vein: It's a shame that we're not allowed to profit from recent scientific and linguistic state of the art in choosing a lemma, but are required to submit to the deeply disturbing Power of Google. Sure, I agree that there are some well known placenames or country's names which would come across very alien, if the latest official local spelling or official transliteration were to be used, but I'll never believe that much confusion would ensue if the article Krakatoa would be moved to Krakatau, which evidently is the spelling most modern scientists have agreed on. That's one more chance to create something better than an old publishing-house paper encyclopedia needlessly thrown away. I find it deeply deplorable that official Wikipedia policy dictates the perpetuation of old rubbish instead of dynamically incorporating the progress of our times.