This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump miscellaneous. Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic. I've used Wikipedia for years. I've had an account for years.
I'm posting this anonymously because, in the past, when I've been candid, I've found some people become personally abusive as a result. Tonight, I happened on a page where perfectly legitimate, double-sourced material was removed as "defamatory" in a POV edit by what appears to be both an ignorant and overzealous "administrator" cum "censor. This "administrator" clearly doesn't understand defamation I am an attorney -- I do.
To me, this sort of behavior articulates the growing problems with Wikipedia in a nutshell: Wiki used to be about building a big base of free knowledge.
Now it's all about people trying to become administrators and their petty powers and suck-up circle. When I see people asking to be administrators and organizing little suckup campaigns, my first reaction is, "that person does not deserve nor merit to be an administrator. Wikipedia is now an AV Society of Asocial Geeks who are obstructive and self-protective of their ridiculous little circles of power. To preserve that power, they're destroying Wikipedia in the process.
As a result, Wikipedia is narrowing its potential pool of contributors by becoming an entrenched bureaucracy as petty as the faculty of any also-ran community college. Just look how frickin' complex footnotes have become; how is a new contributor supposed to understand all that coding? Who wants to waste time learning?
