[WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

Wed Mar 2 16:18:08 UTC 2005

172 has announced on his user page he has left. I know that this is not 
the first time and I also know that not everyone on this list will 
necessarily find this unfortunate, but I think it is a pity as his 
contributions have been enormous. The issue appears to be, not so much 
the brief de-sysoping yesterday, but rather the editorial process. Here 
is the text on his user page:

[quote]

I am an historian specializing in international political economy, which 
allowed me to work on a diverse range of time and place on this site. I 
was a Wikipedia contributor from late 2002 to February 2005, and an 
administrator from May 2003 to February 2005.

Over the past couple of years, I was using a pseudonymous account, and 
the name I was using in my Wikipedia email account was not my own. Given 
Wikipedia's sketchy reputation in some circles, I wanted to avoid any 
possible negative consequences in the "real world"; and I did not want 
the less-than-friendly environment on Wikipedia to come back to haunt me 
off-line. Unfortunately, when the community knows you as 'just a 
number,' you don't tend to be treated so well.

I will no longer contribute to Wikipedia. The project is no longer 
workable. There are no signs of Wikipedia developing an authoritative 
public review process. The absence of one fosters a total disregard for 
expertise in this community; whether nor not you are taken seriously 
depends not on the merit of your work but rather how many friends you 
have made with the users who dominate the mailing list, IRC, and the 
administrative pages.

Instead, we have a dispute resolution process fetishizing increasingly 
rigid (and idiosyncratic) community norms and customs without reference 
to who's writing encyclopedic material and who's not. As a result, far 
too much power and status is given to people who are frankly nothing 
more than trolls, as long as they're good at gaming the system. The 
admins are increasingly obsessive of process, disregarding the public 
credibility of the project. Far too many seem to get off on "patrolling" 
conflicts between other users that they do not understand, an aspect of 
Wikipedia that is poisoning the atmosphere.

Thus, in recent months I was spending more time dealing with users with 
no intention of writing encyclopedia content, who were spending many 
hours a day feeding off conflict between other users or were dumping 
sheer nonsense in as many articles as possible. I no longer have the 
patience to deal with this. I will return, however, if there are any 
changes allowing me to become a more efficacious user in the future.

172 14:44, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[/quote]

From: [[User:172]]