I actually wish there was some censorship in wikipedia. The reason why I left was because there was no "censorship". What others call censorship I call moderation and it is the only way an online community can exist.
The new wikipedia scandal about "Censorship against censorship" revealed by Wikitruth is very interesting and at the same time funny and sad as well. The problems of wikipedia will never end.
Wikipedia seems to me a little like the political movement of communism. Just like the soviet union did, wikipedia is going to collapse. In its present state anyone who gets involved with it eventually ruins his own personal peace by sacrificing all his spare time in pointless debates and arguments. And the funny thing is that no matter how much you engage into it you can never be sure that your voice will be heard. Sure, in democracy the majority decides. And yet the elections and votes are conducted in a much more fair way. Eventually power is given to few representatives of the people. Wikipedia claims to give power to everyone. This is bound to fail.
A scenario: How wikipedia gets killed by its own power
All wikipedians suddenly come to their senses and realize the futility of the project. The spent some time wondering whether wikipedia should be kept as a work of knowledge and soon decide that it is not objective enough. "Half knowledge is worse than ignorance". Wikipedias realize that the way wiki funtions it will never meet high quality standards and recognition from the academic communities. So they decide to use the power granted to them by wiki and they all simultaneously attack the wikipedia sites. All users delete every page they can find causing chaos and havoc in the wikipedia servers. The system crashes and for a few days wikipedia is not accessible. Backups saved an amount of the pages but when it comes online again the same global attack takes place. Until the owners of wikipedia decide to claim the content as their own and start a private and non-free encyclopedia.
3 comments:
That does seem like a likely thing to happen. It would also be interesting to flood the site with frivolous modifications rendering all the information really useless.
Probably in the end it will become as unmanageable as the Roman empire with articles breaking off into subjectivity and falseness. No one will have an overview to even realize how it becomes degraded.
Why am I under the impression that already a great majority of the new wikipedia postings are useless? :)) *being mean*
Well we threw the idea out in the cosmic cyberspace and maybe someone will grasp it. So far it has been individuals attacking wikipedia (vandals) and individuals correcting it (reverting). Could wikipedia handle a global attack?
However, there is another scenario. It also likely that people just stop being interested in wikipedia. It will go out of fashion. Google will stop ranking it so high and it will eventuall die a peaceful death, forgote from everyone...
Forgot to sign as... Nostradawitch :)).
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