Wikipedia Is Like Hitting Yourself In The Head With A Hammer
editIt feels so good when you stop.
Soon after I first arrived here at Wikipedia, I got sucked into the maelstrom on the page about the Catholic Church--a topic about which I happen to know a fair amount. I spent more time and energy than I could afford trying in vain to talk sense to the handful of Catholic apologists and True Believers who "owned" that page--people who, I later found out, had driven off a large number of other well-intentioned editors over the years by their continual belligerence and intransigence. The True Believers repeatedly broke every rule in the book--incivility, name-calling, failure to assume good faith, unsourced assertions, falsehoods and fallacies at every turn--and no one said a word to them; but if those of us who were the targets of their misbehavior dared to defend ourselves, we got slapped down and treated with contempt. The rule seems to be that we must all be tenderly solicitous of the feelings, needs, and sensibilities of bullies, ax-grinders, and ignoramuses, but those who actually know something about the subject and are trying to behave reasonably must be held to a higher standard and smacked down at every opportunity. A lot of good people have been thrown beneath the wheels of that bus, even in the time I've been here. No doubt a lot more will suffer a similar fate in the future, because it doesn't look like it's ever going to change.
As has often been pointed out, Wikipedia is not about truth; nor is it really about "verifiability"; as Peter Jackson correctly points out, verifiability on Wikipedia is a fraud. In fact, the very structure of Wikipedia and its underlying assumptions about human nature are fatally flawed and simply unworkable in the real world. Wikipedia's core values of civility, collegiality, and consensus are all well and good when everyone actually follows them; but all it takes is a small knot of committed ideologues to subvert the entire system and turn it into a mockery of the very values it was intended to embody. Gresham's law applies just as thoroughly to scholarly discourse as it does to monetary transactions; if those who are genuinely acting in good faith are required to "assume good faith" with respect to those who are demonstrably not acting in good faith, then the latter will soon control the field, and everyone else will be forced to either accommodate themselves to their regime or else leave the arena entirely. Consequently, as others have observed, contributing to Wikipedia--especially in areas where people hold strong views--is like writing on water. Life is just too short for that.
All this is bad enough, but the deeper reality of Wikipedia is even worse. Although Wikipedia pretends to be about the real world, it is nothing of the sort. Wikipedia is actually a MUD, in fact the mother of all MUDs: It is the world's largest and most complex multiplayer virtual-reality text game. The purpose of this game is not to accurately describe the world we live in, but to redefine some portion of the gamespace according to one's personal fantasies of how things ought to be; and the way one accomplishes this is by outmaneuvering and outlasting one's opponents through wikilawyering and incessant psychological warfare. Those who prevail in this game "win" in multiple ways: They get the enjoyment of crushing and humiliating their opponents, and the adulation of their allies for doing so; they get to instantiate their fantasy world on Wikipedia; and, best of all, they get to delude a significant portion of the English-speaking world into thinking that their fantasy world actually is the way the real world works. It's a lot of fun for those who get off on that sort of thing. But for those of us who care about truth and genuine scholarship, it is no fun at all; and after a while, being continually subjected to this sort of abuse becomes an unbearable agony.
But that's just the way Wikipedia is, and if we don't like it our only recourse is to leave. I should have departed a long time ago; it would have spared me a lot of needless angst and freed up a lot of time for things that actually matter. In the final analysis, nothing I've done here has made one iota of difference--not because my contributions were inherently valueless, but simply because the True Believers weren't having any of it, and the "moderates" not only let them get away with it but actively appeased and enabled them.
I can't recover any of the time I've already wasted on Wikipedia, but at least I can refrain from continuing to make the same mistake in the future. The sandbox is theirs; they can do with it as they will. I don't care anymore. Harmakheru ✍ 19:33, 5 November 2010 (UTC)