The saga of wikipedia will always make me depressed about mankind in general.
At first it was just a user-created and maintained not-for-profit encyclopedia.
Truly a revolutionary concept and people responded. They came together to make a ton of pages on every conceivable subject.
The only problem with that was there was a lot of inaccuracies, but then the Universities responded and there was a significant effort from our post-secondary institutions to clean it up, correct every article and provide excellent information. There was many post-secondary classes that had a group project devoted to cleaning up wikipedia and doing good citations.
Then came the defacing, and the heavy-handed moderation, and the mod drama, and finally the politically-motivated censorship.
I think the turning point was when the page dedicated to fascism was defaced and censored for the sake of political philosophy, to make a central tenant racism and link it with right-wing ideology.
It's truly depressing how it went from an un-credible but interesting user-created encyclopedia, to an outstandingly-referenced credible encyclopedia and then to an un-credible user-censored encyclopedia within the span of what? 20 years?
Humanity is fucking ridiculous.
The saga of wikipedia will always make me depressed about mankind in general.
At first it was just a user-created and maintained not-for-profit encyclopedia.
Truly a revolutionary concept and people responded. They came together to make a ton of pages on every conceivable subject.
The only problem with that was there was a lot of inaccuracies, but then the Universities responded and there was a significant effort from our post-secondary institutions to clean it up, correct every article and provide excellent information. There was many post-secondary classes that had a group project devoted to cleaning up wikipedia and doing good citations.
Then came the defacing, and the heavy-handed moderation, and the mod drama, and finally the politically-motivated censorship.
I think the turning point was when the page dedicated to fascism was defaced and censored for the sake of political philosophy, to make a central tenant racism and link it with right-wing ideology.
It's truly depressing how it went from an un-credible but interesting user-created encyclopedia, to an outstandingly-referenced credible encyclopedia and then to an un-credible user-censored encyclopedia within the span of what? 20 years?
Humanity is fucking ridiculous.