User:Neuromath

Before today (2008-08-27), it had been a long time since I signed in to Wikipedia, and I have become so thoroughly disaffected with it that my contributions to it for the indefinite future are likely to be very limited (as they had already been for a year or more), and I may not bother to document all of them fully in an easily accessible editing history (linked below), as opposed to the Wiki's automated tracking of each individual edit. I may also not bother anymore to log in every time I edit, so some edits may show up as those of an unregistered user.

Today I contributed to the article on TopologiLinux, its talk page, and the current (as of 2008-08-27) deletion debate about it. I had come to that page for information, and found that it had been tagged for deletion. My alienation from the policies and guidelines of Wikipedia - and especially my rejection of the belief that Wikipedia's peculiar concept of Consensus can usefully govern the setting of broad policies and guidelines - made it easier for me to see the value of a brief Google search to defend against the deletion of a page on a Linux distribution. But that same alienation has been a powerful deterrent to any temptation to spend much of my time contributing to Wikipedia, especially when Wikipedia policy has been leaning more and more towards ruthless deletionism. Why waste my effort?

The content of a specific page is no longer subject merely to "consensus" among those interested in the page's topic; that notion of "consensus" may be intellectually shaky, but it worked reasonably well in practice, much of the time. But any such topic-specific consensus can be overruled by a policy or guideline forged in a debate that few concerned about the particular topic will want to bother with. Such policies and guidelines can then be applied to a large number of pages in assembly-line fashion. When I first edited Wikipedia, I was prepared for disagreements on particular topics, but not for assembly-line deletionism and the need to be concerned about "consensus" debates on broad policy topics. Wikipedia "consensus" is basically "silence as consent" - and Wikipedia applies this notion of consensus to its entire corpus of policies and guidelines. To hell with that!

For that matter, if Wikipedia's published policies had been as deletionist when I first joined in late 2006 as they are now, I probably would never have gotten involved in the first place.

Subpages

 * Wikipedia policies and guidelines (critiques - work in progress)
 * Editing history (may be incomplete after 2008-08-27)
 * New user history
 * Sandbox

Other Wikimedia user pages

 * meta:User:Neuromath
 * commons:User:Neuromath