I was looking back to see the first years’ audited statements and my contributions in those first two years were very significant. When I tried in 2006 to continue helping all I got was flack and misrepresentation and double talk; I felt as if I was being exposed to a racket. When I complained I never was granted a proper forum to review my complaints, just an offer that Jimbo would “order” a certain person to tell me they were “sorry”. If that does not sound like racketeering I don’t know what does.

I never received a penny for all the legal services I contributed to Wikimedia. I never took advantage of Wikipedia, never used it to start a for profit company and hired my venture capital law firm’s lawyer as my NPO CEO and erroneously suggested that the organizations volunteer lawyers “agreed” to such an action and when I was told that I had to follow the “orders” of the organzation’s “leader” things really began stinking very bad. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the time I was the elected chair of the fundraising committee and my thirty years experience in the not-for-profit sector as fundraiser, lawyer, former npo executive and innovator was reduced to being treated as a secretary for a hack that was sucking money out of Wikimedia.

As far as I am concerned the people who “control” Wikimedia are conceited ego maniacs who have no consideration for all the contributions people put into Wikipedia projects and just like a priesthood in organized religions they drive truly spiritual people away from such institutional superstructures that stink of corruption. They want publicity, money, fame and fortune for themselves, they are NOT altruistic people AT ALL.

The idea that somehow Wikipedia’s databases are going to be the repository of all the world’s knowledge is just total overreaching jibberish. Wikipedia started out as a humble project, now it is a repository for rules that demonstrate a lack of sanity because they are created by people who do not really know much about anything beyond php coding and dealing with mailing lists and silly disputes. Anyway, most contributors just copy the content on Wikipedia from other web sites that are also just a partial view of humanity; what is needed on Wikipedia is non-internet content, people with a perspective outside the self-referential world of internet content reproduction. The powers that be screwed up a lot of what could have made Wikipedia a really positive social experiment because they are so ignorant of everything besides computer networks. Yes, I studied computer science in the 1970s at Princeton but even then I knew that the world was much larger that 8080 processors and machine language and that such simple systems cannot replace the knowledge that has accumulated by humanity over thousands of years and it does not just need to be “scanned in” not all knowledge can be “scanned”. Knowledge fundamentally is vast and infinite and without respecting what has gone before you destroy knowledge; such action or inaction does not preserve it. When it comes to dealing with knowledge that is not edited on a wiki page, the powers that be at Wikimedia are just totally ignorant, unlearned and without any respect for those with experience and something valuable to contribute; why should someone like me waste my time contributing to such a self-destructive endeavor?

That is my opinion as a “missing” Wikipedian.

When groups on opposite ends of a political divide (whether repub/democrat or inclusionist/deletionist) take, en mass, different rhetorical strategies — when members of one side are likely to downplays their less-mainstream views and members of the other side forcefully convey all their views — then the consensus gradually drifts towards the forceful side.

This is why the U.S. political center has been drifting rightward, and part of why wikipedia is becoming more deletionist. To break it down into a spiral-of-silence-esque social model:

People triangulate the center of a debate by listening to the general tone — if you have a loud political right and a faux-centrist left, then the leftmost goal post has disappeared from the public debate and the result is that people incorrectly triangulate a “compromise” position in the center-right.

One more point: the biggest difference between online social organization (wikipedia) and offline organization (church) is that online, you can spend all your time among people who share all your views, even if those views would be uncommon among people you met (say) walking down the street.

Physical geography acts as a check on radicalization because you immediately bump into people who disagree with you about important things. But the virtual city is fluid and discontinuous. It’s easy for online groups to become cloistered, for members to reinforce each other’s views and drift away from the mainstream.

This has sort of been my kick for awhile, but I really think society is already much more fragmented than it was 10 years ago (witness vocal ron paul supporters; 9/11 “truthers” infiltrating various events; etc.) and is going to keep getting more fragmented. People are very unprepared for this.

One of the more interesting essays/talks about Wikipedia, even if I don’t agree with all of it, is by Jason Scott. See: http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt

As for the “Missing Wikipedians” section, glancing down the list I sense that there are as many reasons for people to leave Wikipedia as there are Wikipedians. Not all left due to burn-out: “lack of time” or the demands of career & family seem to be another common reason. But I find it sad that many were not recognized for their value until *after* they had left, instead of before.

Geoff

Does that happen with Wikipedia too?

Strangely, Wikipedia has no charismatic leader. I think one has to look elsewhere to understand what ties Wikipedians together — and how Wikipedia decides who is “in” and “out”, too. Given the current firestorm, with many of Wikipedia’s hoi polloi yelping their distaste at Jimbo desysoping someone for reversing one of his blocks, it’s quite obvious that the masses do not accept Jimbo as their unquestioned leader; in fact, it appears that many of them actively want him not to lead at all.

Interestingly, nobody has yet added my name to the list of “missing Wikipedians” even after I had my entire user space purged and stopped editing. One may wonder slightly what the dynamic involved in that is.