User:Nemakoristodime

Quotes from my favourite article:

Wikipedia isn't very good at all. At a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper. Look at any Wikipedia Talk page on any controversial subject, and, instead of "people working together in harmony", you will typically and unsurprisingly see a bunch of mediocre nerds with too much time on their hands and with rather uninformed opinions on too many subjects, bickering among themselves in an attempt to forge an entry that will represent a "consensus" of their uninformed opinions." This means that the wiki will go the way of the rest of the Net: downhill. Fictitious posts, spam, grudge pages, lies, politically motivated opinions, online vandalism, and all the rest will inevitably ruin the wiki concept, since the whole idea is utopian. Wikipedia entries are nothing but the emergent effect of all the angry thrashing going on below the surface...if you want to really navigate the truth via Wikipedia, you have to dig into those "history" and "discuss" pages hanging off of every entry. That's where the real action is, the tidily organized palimpsest of the flamewar that lurks beneath any definition of "truth." Even project founder Jimmy Wales has been obliged to admit its entries are "a horrific embarrassment". Readability, which wasn't great to begin with, has plummeted. Formerly coherent and reasonably accurate articles in the technical section have gotten worse as they've gotten longer. And most interesting of all, the public is beginning to notice. What they don't like to talk about is that on Wikipedia, the truth is determined in the end by a physical contest: whoever has the endurance to stay awake at a keyboard and maintain his version of the edits wins.