User:Tharthan/The Fall of Wikipedia

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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WP:NIGH

This page in a nutshell: Old Wikipedia is dead and gone, you'll never see it more. It used to be a lovely site that helped you out before.

It seems that Wikipedia is in the process of falling to the mobs. If it ends up fully falling to the mobs, the Golden Age of Wikipedia will draw to a close.

Wikipedia was founded on the belief that the sum of all human knowledge ought to be freely accessible by all. What made Wikipedia different from other encyclopaedias like Encyclopaedia Britannica was that it was written with a neutral point of view in mind.

But it seems that a neutral point of view is not what the future generation of Wikipedia editors has in mind. Instead, those who wish to push a specific point of view throw policies upon policies at others in an attempt to force their personal biases to be able to clutter up the encyclopaedia.

Some may say that it is naïve or foolish for one to strive for a neutral point of view, but if that is truly the case then Wikipedia shouldn't exist at all. Wikipedia is only supposed to exist so that it can provide as neutral information as it possibly can on the subjects that it covers. If people think that that is a silly ideal, then they ought to not use Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is not a social network, and yet more and more people will fight tooth and nail to make it like one. Indeed, there are even proposals to "gameify" the editing process, and to "beautify" the design of the website.

Some may say that what is actually happening is that the community is evolving, rather than devolving. But once again, considering that Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia was founded on the belief of a neutral point of view, how can steps away from that very end be making the encyclopaedia any better?

Today, Wikipedia's community discussions are often just large battlegrounds. Civil discussion over possible policy changes or the creation of new ones rarely happens at all. Instead, name-calling, logical fallacies, and votestacking abound.

Controversial articles are often articles that are written with the least amount of neutrality, but even when such articles stop being hot topics, they still remain non-neutral due to editors standing by their watchlists reverting any edit that they do not personally like.

Question dodging and simple silence are becoming the tactics of the community to avoid having to stand up and admit wrongdoings.

And, in addition to all of the previous, more and more individuals are becoming extremely tolerant of non-disclosing paid editors, even though it has been declared that such goes against the rules without question. Some even claim that these types are paramount to the success of the encyclopaedia.

Finally, even the Wikimedia Foundation itself seems to be being corrupted by current biases as well. Whether it eventually cleans up its act and returns to being what it was before remains to be seen, but as it stands now it more resembles a certain well known fictional shark than it does the Wikimedia Foundation of old.

All of this leads me to believe that more and more people are living by the ideal of "the ends justify the means" rather than by the ideals of "do unto others as one wishes to be done unto oneself", "one should set a good example for others", and "two wrongs don't make a right" that most held in high regard in times prior. If this is indeed the case, then that is a crying shame.

See also