User:FETSmoke

My goal on Wikipedia was originally to empower the public with a valuable, reliable reference, with as little uproar and human suffering as possible.

Most recently, I've come to question whether Wikipedia should exist. The chemistry information is useful and seems not to have been damaged yet, although many professional chemists might disagree with me for all I know. However, one should keep in mind that anyone can edit an article on Wikipedia, and what stays would appear to be what was put there one time more often. There's a lot of fanfare about controls, but without teeth. We should always keep in mind what personalities are going to have their work left in articles, always contemplating the full range of beliefs (e.g. "knowledge is evil"), integrity and mental health, and also of familiarity with knowledge as a tool, rather than a game. What kind of people are we going to hear from? When I think of a damaged article now, I find myself wondering whether, under the circumstances, the disgrace is more valuable than a credit would be. I'm far from being ready to damage articles myself (though I've found a few times that I have by mistake), but I've been forced to wonder. I also worry about the commercial harm to real encyclopedia products.

Those who poison the well of knowledge may yet die of thirst.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that Wikipedia isn't doing it right. You don't choose the better boxer to do your brain surgery. There should be parallel content, and probably a powerful way of choosing a preference order for individual contributors and formal coalitions thereof, multitudes of which might endorse content, and each other, even specifying a numerical strength of endorsement. We don't like to think of knowledge that way, but are we really thinking at all? Isn't this what we really do when we need information? Science and Nature (and Britannica) aren't a relevant paradigm for a free-for-all like Wikipedia; one fundamental difference deserves another.

It's official: Wikipedia is a failure!

The rulers of Wikipedia have, I hear, banned IP addresses of a certain organization, upon which I refrain from commenting, from editing articles. As Orwell wrote, "Some animals are more equal than others." It didn't work, it's a failure, before it degenerates into a ghastly, hypocritical morass of "whom do we ban this week," stop trying to ride a dead horse and start doing something sensible.