I do not really think I’m an atheist — but there’s some stuff critical of religion that I’ve recently stumbled across, liked, and wanted to repost here:
“But for me, at any rate, it was all part of dissolving the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” — John Lennon (from here)
“Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.” — Blaise Pascal (from here)
“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.” — Bertrand Russell (from here)
Summarizing the Theologian’s Paradox: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” — Epicurus (from here)
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Well, I promised a better explanation as to why I suddenly got a bug up my ass about leaving Wikipedia — and here you go.
I will tackle the easiest part of the question first: why I want to excise Wikipedia from my life as a reference source. The unreliability of Wikipedia as a factual source has been addressed by many far more thoroughly than me — an example of a good essay on this subject is Jason Scott’s “The Great Failure of Wikipedia.” I see no need to simply repeat their efforts here. But for me, Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade put it best when he described Wikipedia as “a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn’t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.”
The problem is: Wikipedia believes truth derives from consensus. It doesn’t. Pablum derives from consensus; popular belief derives from consensus. And if you’re lucky, the least offensive common denominator of the truth derives from consensus. And the contributions of people who devote their careers to a subject are treated with no more weight than the average anonymous editor — and if that career expert’s commentary isn’t part of the popular belief, then he or she’s going to have to devote time (and, moreover, want to devote that time) playing internal politics to get consensus to swing their way.
Wikipedia articles do not represent truth; they represent popular consensus. Often, the two do intersect like Venn diagrams on less popular subjects. But on anything mildly popular or in the public eye? Not bloody likely. Yet, I’ve grown sloppy, as have most of us (including professional publications); Wikipedia has become the de facto reference source. I’ve not grown used to digging elsewhere. That’s why I took such measures to rid Wikipedia from my browsing experience; I wanted to retrain myself not to rely upon the “quantum consensus of a discordant fucking mob” in order to discover facts, as I don’t think I can rely upon them. (Of course, the question then remains whether other sources are just as ‘quantum’ or not — but that’s much better addressed by someone else, whom I’ll quote later.)
There’s really two areas in which you can focus your efforts on Wikipedia: the articles and the bureaucracy. People who simply slog away trying to make the encyclopedia articles themselves better are referred to as exopedians, and are, undoubtedly, the cream of the crop. Although I think Wikipedia’s policy of anarchic rule (”anyone can edit! consensus will magically transform errors to truth!”) dooms their efforts to failure, I think it is their efforts that gives Wikipedia whatever paltry quality it actually has.
There are also metapedians — the pencil-pushers, the paper-lovers, the “fill out Form 123 in triplicate” lovers. Metapedians love the bureaucracy — the policies, the essays, the processes. Actually contributing to articles? Ehhhhhhh.
Because I had little to contribute as an exopedian aside from “wikignomish” grammar, punctuation, and spelling fixes, my efforts were primarily metapedian in nature … and, oh, let me tell you, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy has continued to expand in a positively fractal fashion. And, since anyone can create new Wikipedia pages, new sections of bureaucracies spring up there like the worst species of parasitic growth imaginable.
I had become involved in the “articles for deletion” venue, where I began becoming the target of immense hatred, as I would go through and nominate numerous articles covering aspects of incredibly tiny and unimportant minutiae written by drooling fanboys of Star Wars, Star Trek, Lost, and any other fanbase large enough to accumulate a good enough gathering and enough of an encrustation of “fancruft.” I would attempt to eradicate the more pernicious extreme end of the fandom articles (list of foodstuffs mentioned in Harry Potter! list of companies mentioned in the Star Wars extended canon! list of plants in Star Wars! sexual compliments made to James T. Kirk! and only one of those was made-up!), and severely socially retarded drooling fanboys would promptly spring out of the woodwork, spattering me with acidic bile for daring to touch their creation. I swear, I think I heard one of them frothing, “Worst. Editor. Ever.”
All the while, I wondered why the hell I was doing it. I began to realize that, for me, the nasty truth was that much of it was a power trip. Oh, don’t get me wrong: my actions were taken because, in part, I did truly believe that the articles I nominated didn’t belong. But it was indeed a manifestation of a darker side of me — I enjoyed the fact that I could hurt someone — make them angry and mad and defensive. Because in my real life, that’s not something I do. I’m Mister Friendly with nearly everyone I meet, and I’m actually a really nice guy in about 99% of circumstances. But something about the process brought out the worst in me — aggression and adrenaline, all funneled through a keyboard without danger of being punched in the face. Resisting the temptation to say “fuck you, fanboy,” and instead turning it into a passive-aggressive “I truly believe that your article is not notable, and would remind you that Wikipedia has policies regarding not attacking your fellow editors and being civil to them” (ah, did I have a gift for the bull-lingo) … I got a dark thrill out of seeing people froth and rage and turn into drooling rabid ready-for-heart-attack messes because they weren’t getting the fight they wanted out of me. And another side of me looked at that dark thrill and went, “What the fuck are you doing, Mike?”
The deletion work petered down after a while, mostly because of my self-realization regarding the dark joy involved in the process.
I had wanted to become an administrator. If I become an administrator, I thought, this would be acknowledgement by the community of all my hard work and effort. Yes, I know they say that it’s specifically not an acknowledgement — but given that it truly is a supramajority popularity contest, it’s of course an acknowledgement. I flat-out flunked my first take on it — but people encouraged me to try again in a few months. I decided to become the perfect model Wikipedian editor in the meantime, so that I’d be a shoo-in.
But then … well, it happened.
I have always been a friend to people of different sexual orientations, and seen no problem with it. I believe I met the very first gay person I ever knew when I joined the drama club towards the very end of my spring semester of my first year of high school — and as I spent my high school years in drama club and later attending a performing arts magnet school, and then graduated to a college where I studied theater for a bachelor’s degree, I was perenially exposed to gay people. It’s a stereotype, yes, but in my experience it has been a stereotype rooted in some truth: just from my empiric experience, yes, you do seem to find a higher proportion of gay people involved in theater.
After I graduated and moved to Chicago, I took a job in which I ended up working for a lawyer who I later learned was a lesbian. She and I grew to have a fantastic working relationship, and I respected the hell out of her — so much so that when she told me she wanted to run to become a judge, I told her I couldn’t think of anyone better, and put in a lot of extra hours over the next year (including a 13-hour stint in front of a polling place in brutally cold Chicago weather) to ask people to vote for her. In a world where people scoff at the concept of every single vote counting, every single voter did count — in a primary where she was running against the candidate “slated” by the local Democratic party, she won the primary by a mere 56 votes out of 40,000 cast. (There was no Republican candidate, meaning she ran unopposed and was elected; we knew this prior to the primary.) She became the very first judge ever in Cook County to run and win while being an “out” lesbian.
All of this is to say that I really do not care for people who are intolerant of other sexualities. I don’t care if someone’s trans, gay, lesbian, or whatthefuckever — they’re a human being, and their sexuality ain’t their whole being, and whatever it is, it’s really not any of your goddamn business. I’ve seen way too much of the opposing opinion to suit me.
Enough personal history — to the matter at hand. A person going by the handle of Erik the Rude asked the administrators if someone could set up a request for adminship for someone he felt was worthy. It doesn’t take an administrator to do that, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt my future chances if they saw me helping them out (cf. the term “pathetic lapdog” here), so I set it up for the guy. And then I investigated the nominee’s contribution history — and it was model. I mean, this person slogged away exopedian-style at Wikipedia, remained civil when challenged, and in short would have been a fantastic person to deal with the ins and outs of Wikipedia adminship. I honestly didn’t perceive any faults to the person.
Only one problem: they had a sexuality evidently too unpalatable to the masses at Wikipedia: being genderqueer. (If you’re not familiar with the term, here’s something.) They weren’t straight, they weren’t gay — they preferred to be genderless, and to be referred to using the singular “they.”
The masses just went nuts at what was different to them.
That’s when I learned that admin elections weren’t anything but a very huge popularity contest where you had to please not just a majority, but a supramajority of 75% of the voters. And the bigots focused right in on Catamorphism being genderqueer and voted them down soundly. I can do no better than to suggest you read the dialogue yourself, to see what an intensely distasteful affair it was. (”I find the the dominant insistence of your personal position inappropriate.” In other words, stop insisting you’re genderqueer.) My pleas to the vote-counters to ignore the bigotry fell upon deaf ears, and Catamorphism was soundly defeated, for the sheer reason that their being genderqueer made them too unpalatable to the cattle.
I looked at this — and it was then that I realized quite a few truths, all at once.
First, I realized I realized the fact that the Wikipedia process for nominating new administrators was an awful, awful process that ensured nobody but the most generic, most evenly palatable individuals would get through. Just like how, with the American political system today, you’d have to be really fucking nuts to actually want to put yourself through the significant trials necessary to become a Congressperson, Senator, or President, and that’s why we’ll almost certainly never get anyone worthy of the job — well, same problem there at Wikipedia. To require candidates to be so inoffensive as to pass everyone’s personal homegrown metrics leads to inoffensive pablum. I realized that even had I tried again, I would have certainly remained unpalatable enough to the masses to once again not be passed through. And why would I want to be palatable to a process in which such bigoted opinions are perfectly acceptable?
Second, I realized that I simply didn’t want to be an administrator anymore. For the first time I contemplated: why do I want this goal, and what do I want from it? What would life be like on Wikipedia after I became an administrator? The harsh answer was, I realized — not significantly different. I’m still going to have people fighting, whiny little people fighting about the minutest of trivia — nothing will change for the better. Just more annoying sturm und drang.
But more importantly …
Third, I asked myself: is this the organization that I truly wish to be contributing freely of my time to — an organization that sanctions and permits bigotry simply because it is the “consensus” of the people? Why the hell I was on Wikipedia, and who the hell I was contributing freely of my time to? The various criticisms of Wikipedia out there — Holkins’ comment, Scott’s talk, Wikitruth, and a few million other references — all of which I had heard before — had been in the back of my mind for a while, making me doubt more and more the idealistic “mission” of putting all the world’s knowledge together, free. (Free, except, of course, for the eternal Wikipedia funding drives and selling Wikipedia content to Answers.Com and whatever else can wring a dime of the volunteer efforts of millions of contributors.) Did I truly want to tremble at the awesome autocratic Objectivist might of Jimbo Wales, Danny Wool, and the WP:OFFICE dictat — or of the various hidden cadres, cabals, and cliques of internal cachet and power that I might cross unawares? Were any of these people deserving of my respect? Or were they just fucking twerps without a life on a massive power trip? In short — I realized that Wikipedia, the way it was, simply wasn’t an organization that deserved my time or efforts. They don’t really deserve anyone’s time or efforts, and if you’ve left them, well, then, God bless you, my friend. Doesn’t the world seem a little brighter?
Finally, once I stopped devoting time to my Wikipedia metapedian addiction — once this mouse stopped hitting the little wikicrack bar in his cage — all of a sudden, I had a lot more time to focus on the little neglected projects around my life and my computer. Much more time became free. I realized that for me, Wikipedia had been an addiction similar to the infamous EverQuest “EverCrack” addiction. For me, it was WikiCrack. In the linked-to article there, player Rick Vanderpool is quoted as saying about Everquest, “There’s so much going on in the game, it’s easy to get wrapped up in it, just like real life, so it’s hard sometimes to log off.” That’s so very much the same situation. There are so many different venues for “social” interaction with your editors that it’s hard to realize you’re actually only interacting with text on a screen — not with real human flesh and blood. In short, as Wikipedia itself puts it puts it, the site creates “large numbers of wikipediholics who could be doing something more useful.” Oh, God, yes. I think we could’ve cured cancer by now!
As put by Kyle Gertwitz of Gullible.Info:
[T]he nature of information is changing. The people who don’t fundamentally alter the ways in which they interface with information will find themselves misled. [...]
The safe thing to do is assume that any information you find online isn’t necessarily wrong, but assume that it isn’t very valuable. What does that mean? Basically it means that you shouldn’t use it to make any decisions that could 1) cost you money, 2) damage your health, 3) etc, etc. It could be impeccably accurate, it could be completely off the mark, or it could be somewhere between those points. But the key thing is that you have no way of knowing for sure where on that spectrum it falls.
People are busy. And we need to have information that we can trust. That’s why we pay for things. We pay for newspapers, we pay for news organizations. We pay these people to verify information for us. We pay them to make sure that it’s correct. Of course just because we pay for something doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily true, but for the most part, it’s a safe assumption to make that it’s probably more true than false. That is to say, on our spectrum, the information they tell us is going to fall more towards the true side.
Now whenever we process information, we should run through a little check: what is the value of this information and what is the significance it will play in my life. For the most part, I believe that everyone does this already. Sure people will go to Gullible.info and erroneously believe that the Titanic was carrying 750,000 plates when it sunk. But 99.998% of people won’t have their lives changed by that piece of incorrect information. It’s worthless information, so people don’t devote too much energy to verifying it.
I’ll close with a paraphrase, with apologies to William:
Wikipedia’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets its hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it tells tales
Told by idiots, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
And thank God I’m out of there.
EDIT 08/10/2006: Corrected references to asexuality.
EDIT 08/15/2006: A friendly little bird twittered in my e-mail telling me there were a-rumblin’s and a-doin’s, so I disabled my filters and took a look at a certain Wikipedia page the little birdie pointed me towards. All I can say is: Hee. Evidently, this essay is so “disruptive” that any links to this need to be “expunged” from not only my user page as I left it, but even from that page’s history, so no one could ever look upon the link again. [beat] My, my, my. Maybe I should be charging admission. (Wikipedia does bring out that certain instinct in some people, doesn’t it?) — Mike
EDIT 03/01/2007: Wikireality and reality very amusingly collide and simultaneously prove my point.
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