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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.
The online world is like drunk people. Some drunks are mean, some are nice. You get to know the real person if they have had a few drinks, honest, crook, lecherous, moral. Same for how people behave when they have some power online and can ban folks they disagree with. They are online drunks.
Back in the day, I hade almost several 1000 quality edits - which is to say slightly more than typo correction - but walked away for many of the reasons that this guy puts light on. Suicide would have been a bit of an over reaction, though.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Take this from one person who circles these feelings on a fairly regular basis. When you are really contemplating suicide you don't tell people. When you are serious, you go quiet. The saw about"we knew we should worry because he stopped talking" is true. Saying I'm thinking about suicide is generally a plea to stop the argument and oh by the way, let me win kind of thing.
I'm not trying to be dismissive. I'm sure some very terrible things were said. If he can't handle the heat he should probably step out of the kitchen for awhile. No one owes you happiness.
...fuck Wikipedia. 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, regardless of any acumen or credentials with the subject matter, and without regard to any actual rules that govern article structure or citation.
If Wikipedia wants to fix this, they need to disallow users from camping on pet articles. They need to disallow reverts based on style that have nothing to do with substance and have no real benefit, and they need to ban users that continue to engage in these practices. Until that's done the entire process will be at the whim of the cave trolls that patrol the site because they have nothing better to do.
Still it beats by a hundred fold the encyclopedia set that used to adorn every middle class household's and library's bookshelf as their first view of the world. Wikipedia is a treasure of useful information, a starting point for unknown topics.
In such an endeavor striving too much for perfection is the enemy of the good. People always have to understand the perspectives and biases of their sources. That isn't a flaw, that is just reality.
Wikipedia is still the most successful attempt to provide a starting point, an entry point, to all of human knowledge.
Sure it still sucks, but show me something better and that will suck too.
When anything you're doing is evoking feeling so extreme, time to step away and do something completely different for a while to recollect yourself and regain some perspective. Don't do the futile thing of hoping you can cope or change things for the better in your current position while you are experiencing such extreme feelings.
Wikipedia is not a way of life, it is not someone you love, it is not worth suffering or ending yourself for. Find something that makes you happy.
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And it's worth it.
It's not my intent to be callous to its effects on the people who put the effort in, but Wikipedia is without a question the most correct, current, and expansive singular source of knowledge that mankind has every seen. It's far from perfect, but it's literally the best that has ever been. It might just be that zealotry and incivility is the only known way to provide a rigid standard of quality control in an organization where there are no genuine laws, authoritarian oversight, or wage structure to hold over peoples' heads. So, if the ends justify the means, then keep it up!
But if it doesn't-- if the emotional effects on some is too great a cost for the benefits, then someone needs to find another way to facilitate the intellectual and emotional drive for people to volunteer their own time to put so many hours of work into building and maintaining such an important source of information.
Complaining about its imperfections is insufficient.
I have no objection to a net resource that is not accurate (that pretty much describes the whole Internet universe, in my opinion) but I am uncomfortable with a resource that claims accuracy, but can't actually reach that goal, and worse, as in this example, actually promotes nonsense.
This is pretty much my take on it too. I got into an minor edit skirmish a few years ago regarding Disney World's monorail system. My problem was that most of the authoritative references are copyrighted by Disney and not for distribution outside the company. So, even though I'd worked there for many years, had been a trainer, and knew the trains and system inside and out, it didn't matter because someone found some content on some Disney fan site (that also happened to be inaccurate) and wanted to continually invalidate my corrections with the aforementioned inaccurate (but attributable) info. I just said "fuck it" and haven't even looked at the article since then, and take most things on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. Being able to attribute sources doesn't make a lick of difference if the info is wrong to begin with.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas