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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.
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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