Oh boy, here we go.
Wikipedia and me have history. In response to L’incident de 2014, a group of 10-12 mostly-mentally-ill Wikipedia administrators decided that any and all mention of me would be permanently blacklisted on Wikipedia. Seeing as 10-12 administrators are not the whole of Wikipedia, and the guy was nuts and got perma’d for being nuts, I cannot see any World in which this shit still flies.
But I hope it does.
Because I don’t want fucking nerds writing about me.
I fucking goddamned hate Wikipedia.
Let’s get this shit started!
A lot of people hate Wikipedia. Most of them have good reasons for it: they were spurned by it, their work thrown back in their faces. That, and many people have been burned by the clique-ish, lawyer-esque population who pedantically control, but especially remove content. Content that these people have not only worked hard on, but feel proud of. The end result is that it’s very easy to hate anyone on Wikipedia with any modicum of power. Power corrupts, and Wikipedians are cunts.
I’m not sure I ever seriously fantasized about having a Wikipedia page. There sure are a lot of admins who seem to have, given that I’ve found a handful of them who have not only created, but currently maintain their own (non-notable) articles— all while regularly blamming other people’s non-notable articles.
But, for me, that’s not what’s repulsive about Wikipedia. What’s repulsive to me, is I detest the very notion that someone as repulsive as a human being (retch! gag! puke!) would even think to write about me.
Why?, you may ask?
Well, shit, my dude. During my heydey, I had 5 separate motherfuckers write scholarly articles about my penis.
That is not a joke.
No, I will not help you find them.
After that shit? No way in Hell would I let these dipshits write about me.
As I once put it in a older draft: “Who wants these pricks writing about you?“
What is a Wikipedian?
A miserable little pile of oh no jackass you don’t get a joke. Fuck you, Wikipedian. Fuck you.
On the one hand, I can kind of ‘appreciate’ what Wikipedians are doing. After all, these people claim that they’re trying to improve the wealth and breadth of human knowledge. But, there are problems with this. For starters, why would you crowdsource a source of knowledge like this? And, for free? You’re only going to get Reddit mod types who want power, as fleeting and useless and meaningless as that will be. Plus, they’ll be fucking stupid, so you won’t even be able to aggregate and collate any useful information, nor will you be able to successfully synthesize anything.
In the poorly-paraphrased words of a Wikipedian: if a trusted source has the wrong information, that would be what Wikipedia says.
To paraphrase yet another Wikipedian: public court records can’t be used for pages on here, of living people.
With rules like this, what the fuck are these people even writing?
In recent years, it’s gotten worse. The sources that Wikipedia will allow in articles are dwindling: some are trusted, others are verboten. Admittedly, this is probably to avoid future hoaxes that would inevitably just make Wikipedia look even fucking stupider than it already is.
But that’s the thing: there’s only so much you can do with a thing like this. If you want to cite a fact, but none of the trusted bloggers have written about it, then you cannot list the fact. Would Wikipedia be able to write that the sky is blue? I don’t know. It depends on if the source was allowed.
There is also the simple fact that Wikipedia is putting blind trust in journalists, to always write the truth about historical events. And as someone who’s lived through like 5 of them motherfuckers, I have never seen a single journalist write anything resembling the truth. They always get things wrong, because they are so rarely actual eye-witnesses to what’s happened.
So, at best, Wikipedia can never be ‘the truth’. It can only be what a select group of journalists write. Without allowing for original research, you’re just parroting what the media says. Hope the media doesn’t lie!
It’s not like the United States of America has ever lied, using the media, right?
At that point, what the fuck even is Wikipedia?
At some point, Wikipedia encountered the inherent problem of Truth: it is damned near impossible to prove what it actually is. This became obvious when the founder of Wikipedia tried to correct his birthdate, and his work was reverted.
And don’t get me started on the other problem: the people. Given the kind of people you have working on it, what the fuck can you even expect? The only people who will work on Wikipedia, and survive the hostile editing environments, are complete cunts.
You have one toxic environment. All the good people leave; and only the people who thrive in said toxicity will remain. And the vast majority of these people treat the website like their personal pet project, trying to comb out of it what they don’t like, and only allowing to stay what they do.
The part of Wikipedia that I have a major problem with is those people who take great pleasure in removing articles about anyone and anything that they’re not personally familiar with. In the end, you have admins who are maintaining their own non-notable autobiographical articles, angrily hunting and deleting pages by people doing the same damned thing. And they act self-righteous about it, too.
In the end, because the people with power are like this, the only things that will remain will ultimately be those things that the ones with the power personally approve of. And this will only result in Wikipedia becoming the pet vanity project of its most-obsessive power-users.
Bully!
That is it for me, by the way. Having seen so many admins work on their own fucking autobiographical pages, while deleting the work of people doing the same fucking thing, and then acting like they’re superior? Oh, shit, my scro. I don’t fucking like people who enforce the rules, in general; but I have a very special place in my heart for those people who break the very same rules that they enforce.
The Failure of Wikipedia
The idea that is Wikipedia is just plain bullshit to begin with. The service, as much as it purports to strive towards complete and total neutrality, is just like any other collection of information on people: it’s made by people! And people are genuinely shitty.
When placed under the obligation to remain ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, people will always find ways to be the worst versions of themselves imaginable: they will always find ways to skirt the rules, in order to enforce the sort of ‘environment’ that only they thrive in.
To put it a different way: Wikipedia has a shit-ton of rules, and it has only made the place worse, because all of the people with power, who have been there the longest, use and bend these rules to get their own way.
It’s like office politics: you require someone to be ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, and they will alwaysi find a way to be genuinely antagonistic in a way that’s couched in ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’ terms.
In short, Wikipedia has failed. There is no true ‘cooperation’ possible here, on a macro level. Whether or not it’s prevented by human narcissism or not, I have no idea. All I know is, there is no ‘civility’ or ‘neutrality’: it’s as civil and friendly as a person typing per my last e-mail…
Wikipedia is, at its worst, best, and finest, simply the closeted incivilities of ‘office politics’ splayed over the reality of the Beautiful Ones. This is a closed system so filled to the brim with drama that it almost reminds me of a bunch of people stuck in a buried bunker, looking for meaning, slowly going insane. This shit is genuinely hard to look at.
Wikipedia, the very idea of it, would be fine— were it just the idea of it. But the people, have ruined it.
One of the things I’ve learned about everything that humans touch, is that they ruin it. Every fandom; every ‘community’; every single group of people will ultimately be ruined by its members’ worst inclinations. Every ‘community’ will turn into a disastrous Homeowners’ Association; every website will endure the gradual, meaningless, inevitable degradation of its very purpose and its total function.
Entropy might be a human-defined law of the universe, but that’s only because everything you motherfuckers touch turns to garbage. Outside of here, there are beautiful things. You don’t have a clue how fucking ugly you really are.
In a way, I’m not even really talking about Wikipedia itself.
I’m talking about people.
People say things like, people suck, wholeheartedly never grasping the fact that they themselves are people.
And so, I realize that my ‘gripe’ is not with Wikipedia.
It’s with people.
People suck.
Almost everyone who’s stayed with this project has twisted themselves into this completely unrelatable ‘WikiPerson’, who has memorized so many esoteric and nonsensical rules that, when these people argue back and forth with each other, it resembles wizards casting spells. Only it’s not cool and no one gives a shit.
They have Wiki Court.
Can you fucking imagine? Wasting your precious time on this.
And the drama! Holy shit, my dudes! There’s a reason why Wikipedia has spawned so many goddamned spin-offs: it’s damn near the same reason that 4chan was birthed from Something Awful’s rotten womb. Wikipedia is to drama as third-degree-burns are to the concept of fire.
For the vast majority of the craziest motherfuckers using Wikipedia, it’s all about power. These are people who have vendettas: they’re severely maladjusted, and think that they can use the service to get one over on other people. Some of them also think that they can enrich their own lives by using it as free personal webspace. The craziest of the crazies think that they can use it to definitively decide how the public views certain individuals. Which is crazy, because nobody even gives a shit anymore.
The Internet is largely over.
I should also note that people on Wikipedia largely act like the ‘professionals’ did on Usenet. There is this bizarre arrogance that many of the prejudiced older white men have, where they assume that, if they act like total shitbags, but they couch everything they’re saying and doing in ‘civil’ language, that that somehow makes it a-okay!
As for Wikipedia itself? Its heydey is over. People often say that they use Wikipedia all the time; but these people are proselytizing. They’re preaching because they fear that it’s being left by the wayside. Which it is.
There was a time when people would read Wikipedia for basic information about something. To educate themselves. But the problem is, it’s an ever-changing resource, being fought over by the very people who are producing it. Without a userbase that selflessly and objectively protects the information it has curated, the Encyclopedia itself can never be useful. Because it can never be trusted. As long as it’s being fought over by maladapted people— as long as there is no peace— there can also be no real cooperation, and without that, humans cannot build anything worthwhile.
People say that they read Wikipedia for basic information about something. But the reality is, when they read it, after they’re finished, they go,
well, that was interesting! Still don’t know if any of what I read was true, though.
An Unfixable Problem with an Untenable Solution
Only a selfish person is going to edit Wikipedia for very long. And it requires many selfless people, in order to properly function.
One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is that it’s just as bad as the worst people on it, who have the most fucking power. That is to say: the most-powerful people, who are not there to build an Encyclopedia, but are rather there to abuse their power? They are the slowest moving members of the herd. And they hold everyone else back.
And the main problem Wikipedia has is hatred. The hatred that some of its users feel for anyone who isn’t a straight white male.
For a long time, Wikipedia’s worst did their level best to keep out everyone who wasn’t a straight white male. And there were admins who were, to put it mildly, fucking psychotic about this. As the project ages and there’s nothing really left to do on the website save for argue with one another until one person or the other leaves one way or another, slowly but steadily, administrators are being removed. Because there’s only so much crazy you can be before no one can actually work with you any longer.
Wikipedia has a ‘humorous’ article on its own ‘decline’. There have been numerous claims that Wikipedia was ‘dying’; and none of them have been taken seriously, because no one who actually wants to use Wikipedia wants to hear about its faults. They self-identify with the project, and they stop up their ears. They go la la la and they don’t want to face the problems.
Irrespective of that, they know that there are problems.
And there’s one big one.
What the people who proselytize for Wikipedia don’t know, is, when people say that the website is ‘dying,’ they do not assume a context of, oh, one day, this website will be kaputski. It likely never will be ‘gone’.
But MySpace is still online.
So is Friendster.
Twitter is still up and around. But like a person with dementia, Twitter’s never gonna be the same. Twitter might still exist; but something has changed, irrevocably. The Rubicon has been crossed. There’s nowhere to go but down from here.
This is it, Luigi!
People on Wikipedia already know that editorship is declining. They’ll argue, back and forth, over the cause; but just like how Humanity itself keeps looking in the mirror, getting disgusted by its reflection, and then immediately braying, but I’m so beautiful! Who is that?!, they’ll never see what the fuck is actually happening.
What’s happening, is, when you have toxic people with power, and they have the power to forcibly ostracize others (ban them), and the entire Encyclopedia is locked up tighter than a nun’s purse (I personally witnessed an administrator block something like 17% of the total IPv6 space, one day), this is what the fuck is going to kill the website. Nothing that humans make can ever hope to thrive, or continue, without constantly introducing new blood.
I have no desire to fix Wikipedia’s problems. I enjoy watching the inevitable decline of everything that Humanity has made. It’s funny to me— not primarily because I’ve been gate-kept out of everything, but because I like to see you fail. I like to see you have to deal with the fact that what you have created is not eternal. You are so fucking conceited. It does my heart good to see you have to acknowledge reality.
I started this ‘article’ about 4 or 5 years ago. At the time I wrote this, Wikipedia was filled to the fucking brim with racists, sexists, and especially transphobes. They especially hated people from India, which is amazing, considering how many fucking people in India know English. Leave it to a white man to think he owns a whole fucking language. Anyways, good fucking luck getting an article on there if you’re a woman. They fucking hate women.
Again: prejudiced white men, controlling a resource and keeping it from everybody else. Sound familiar?
Pair a lot of editors’ genuine desire to keep anyone who’s not a straight white male out of the Encyclopedia, with the bizarre and increasingly-stringent citation requirements (which only become more nonsensical as time goes on), and you have a recipe for utter fucking disaster. Because sexist men in the past purposefully did not write about women, denying them their history as a way of keeping them from ever gaining agency, there are usually next to no acceptable sources to cite for many female historical figures. Fast forward to today, and you have, yet again, white dudes gatekeeping women out of being acknowledged. Only this time, they can claim that the women in the past were not notable because no one ever wrote about them.
Do you fucking see how this shit just does not work?
In the past, racist white men did their level best to keep non-whites from ever being remembered. And, today, racist white men do their level best to do the same. Only this time, instead of a book, it’s fucking stupid-ass Wikipedia.
I suppose my only solace is that the newest generations, the Zoomers and Gen Alpha, don’t really seem to be actively using this shit. They hold basically no stock in it, and future generations are, inevitably, just going to leave this thing to gather dust. Before any of us know it, Wikipedia is just going to be another website in our collective past, where we have no idea how or why it’s still online.
Because you have to remain relevant for people to give a shit about you.
I still have to ask a question, though: why did they think that this shit was gonna work? Did you really think we were all going to learn who invented the Electric Toaster?
And to the people saying, well, Wikipedia is the number 6th most-visited website in the world!, just remember:
Twitter is the seventh, and that motherfucker’s deader than shit.
Ladies and Jellyspoons
As it stands right now, Wikipedia is broken. Its environment is toxic to normal people. The sources of its information are dwindling, and the quality of those sources are often suspect.
Essentially, Wikipedia is a negative feedback loop: garbage-in, garbage-out. With no real information coming in, and with insane people patrolling the Mojave that is this place, there is nothing left to do here.
Wikipedia is the Turd-Polishing Centre of the known Human World, and I am glad to press Publish on this post, so I can finally stop fucking thinking about it, forever.
For more about what I’ve been talking about this entire time, please consider reading: Why the News is Not the Truth, from Harvard Business Review, by Peter Vanderwicken.
UPDATE: June 17th, 2024
Check out this article, “Why so few creators have Wikipedia bios“, by Scott Guthrie, for more about why Wikipedia sucks.
