User:Daß Wölf

I am retiring from Wikipedia. This has been a long time coming and as much as I want to find satisfaction in blaming it on one event, it's been a combination of various things.

There are the usual reasons: growing real life obligations, less free time, mounting stress on and off-wiki. I feel pretty proud that I've had GAs and DYKs passed with the few edits I've been able to put in the last few years, and especially at the one time I saw my handiwork pop up on social media.

What I've grown tired of is the way Wikipedia works nowadays and the direction it's headed. I always felt that the WP:IAR attitude is one of the things that keeps Wikipedia relevant. We (should) value bureaucracy and conformity because they create stability and reputation, not for their own sake and popularity. We need a way out of it when people exploit them for their own ends. It seems like these ways are being closed, because Wikipedia is (seen as) a mature project and IAR feels like taking an unnecessary risk.

For example, see some of Wikipedia's highest RfC turnouts on WP:VECTOR2022RFC and WP:ROLLBACKVECTOR22. Compare the !votes, the discussion, the admitted astroturfing, the closing arguments, and what was actually implemented afterwards (including later comments by closers). There are ever longer deadlines, new changes of venue, and new platforms editors and readers are expected to participate in. Average editors shouldn't be presumed to regularly take part in Meta discussions, understand the MediaWiki wiki's talk page format, or be willing to fill out Google surveys. And while I appreciate that WMF hosted a Zoom meeting to hear out the complaints, this specifically excluded anyone not willing to part with their privacy and anonymity.

I've always found anonymity key to editing Wikipedia and wouldn't have written some of what I did if I had to sign my real name to it. This is unfortunately why I still don't edit the Wikipedia in my native language even after a successful RfC (see also) that removed several admins who engaged in sockpuppetry and all kinds of mobbing behaviour to get rid of other admins and editors who disagreed with them.

We're creating a place that may feel more familiar to newcomers, that conforms with the current tech world status quo, that looks like it's based on consensus, but what has happened is that by trying to weed out one kind of gatekeeping, we're (unintentionally) creating another.

This goes along with my other concern, that the large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are here to stay and are going to affect us. Large business is using our open and free community and encyclopedia to construct closed and paid apps, and these apps emulate the worst of humanity's troll arguments and mansplaining -- because they have a perverse incentive to do so, just like Google Search makes less money if users get where they want by clicking "I'm feeling lucky", or why Facebook had an incentive to work with Cambridge Analytica, and probably why people create nightmares such as Elsagate.

Wikipedia/WMF is highly focusing the efforts to attract new users at people who are stuck in corporate walled gardens and echo chambers these corporations (un)wittingly encourage. We aren't going to get to these people at the level of competence we're showing. At the same time we're alienating our existing users, who depend on us being basically the closest thing to a NPOV information and news source on the internet. WMF writes they can't offer certain user interface customisability because the extra caching would cost more (hosting is a small expense on WMF's balance sheet). Yet caching is necessary because we're implementing leading edge web technologies while serving the same type of content we've been serving since I learned about Wikipedia. Is it important that Special:Preferences can load all tabs at the same time? How often do you change preferences on 3-4 tabs at one go?

We're either going to become irrelevant as users turn to these LLMs for misinformation (or even disinformation), or we'll find an acceptable way to harness these LLMs to create articles. The latter (which I think is more likely in a couple years) would mean I would lose the most enjoyable part of contributing to Wikipedia in favour of some kind of supervisory process. Regardless of the quality of such articles, that's not what I came here for.

For that and for personal reasons I won't go into, I found myself editing more and more topics that increase rather than decrease my stress levels. There have been many "new normals" in the last several years and few of those have been for the better, and editing Wikipedia somehow keeps reminding me of that.

(There's also the annoying conundrum that scrutinising and "making an example" of removing WP:IPC namedropping, professional PR, and even the innocent ugly puffery by new editors, ends up helping similar articles that I wasn't interested in editing, especially when they're getting parsed by less scrutinising readers, such as LLMs.)

To put this in short, my free time and effort is limited, and I don't feel that at this point editing Wikipedia is a good use of my time nor a good way for me to help others.

I want to thank everyone who has helped me along with editing, especially everyone at WP:WikiProject Croatia and WP:WikiProject Film, and say I'm sorry I'm venting at this project we're colleagues on, and that I still wish you all the best on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

P.S. Please don't G13 the drafts in my userspace, I intend to finish them eventually.