Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Editor Says Site's Toxic Community Has Him Contemplating Suicide (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A longtime Wikipedia editor wrote an email to a large public mailing list Tuesday, saying he was contemplating suicide due to online abuse by his fellow Wikipedians. "Nobody on Wikipedia seems to be kind," he wrote. "You are all so busy power tripping that you forget there is a real, live person on the other side." He lamented that obstructionism by other editors stopped him from contributing to the site's "great mission -- one I feel so keenly." The email was sent to the Wikimedia-L mailing list, which is one of the largest community-run Wikimedia mailing lists and has hundreds of subscribers. The editor was upset after an ongoing disagreement with other editors on the "talk" pages of an article about a local politician. The debate devolved into name-calling, the editor wrote, and eventually he was completely banned from editing the site he had devoted so much time to.
... It's entire model can literally be summed-up as, "King of the Hill." Whoever camps at their computer to edit pages is the editor,...
In my experience, that is a valid statement.
.
I had the few hours to research and edit an article, complete with citations. I did not have the time to sit around, hovering over the article to argue with an "editor" who reverted my change because he had verb-tense disagreements with my edit.
If the only problem he had was the tense of the verb (and he said that was the only issue he had with the changes I made), then why didn't he just fix the tense of the verb?
The Wikipedia model has deep systemic problems that are largely ignored by the powers that be at the top of Wikipedia.