User:GrahamN/Rant

It's depressing that so often on Wikipedia you spot something simple that needs doing only to find that the power to do it is now a privilege granted only to administrators - the Wikipedia ruling class. By taking away normal people's ability to edit, out of fear that we may do damage, the Wikipedia aristocracy have also taken away our ability to revert other people's edits and repair damage. The whole point of a wiki is that while anybody can do anything, anybody can also revert anything anybody else has done. Thus nobody can do any permanent harm, and on average over time, since more constructive things are done than destructive things, everything gets better and better. The discovery of that simple principle, which led to the rapid growth and huge success of Wikipedia, seems now to have been forgotten by the so-called "Wikipedia community". These self-appointed guardians of Wikipedia are gradually eroding away the underlying principle on which the site was built, and thus, predictably, making it work less and less efficiently. It now seems to me to be in danger of becoming moribund or even going into decline. The logical conclusion of all this would be for Lord Jimbo of Wales to ban all editors who aren't fully vetted employees of his "foundation", drop the word "wiki" from the name, and be done with it. GrahamN (talk) 02:41, 23 October 2012 (UTC)