kooirer9e0re90re0

 I'm no regular at Wikipedia Sucks, but I do like to read a good Crow rant now and again. One has to admire his consistency and dedication, which reminds me of a fire-breathing Jesuit of a bygone age. Anyway, here's the money section of a long post of his from Dec. 13:

You can be an editor of Wikipedia ONLY if you prove your loyalty to the cult. This started out merely as believing in Wikipedia as a concept, but it is now more refined, and is increasingly signalled in a number of specific and deeply troubling ways....

* Putting an insane number of hours into Wikipedia, in ways that show complete deference to your betters, people who are also doing that, but started before you.

* Holding a strident belief that some random dickhead on the internet knows what a reliable source looks like better than a reliable source.

* Being fine with using tokenism and PR to deal with the known problems of Wikipedia (assuming of course that just pretending your critics are mistaken doesn't suffice), rather than making real change.

* Being fine with Wikipedia having a House POV, rather than a neutral POV.

* Being a virtue signaller, such as being fine with punching Nazis, beheading paedophiles and taking the lunch money from TERFs, and not spending a second's thought about whether any of that dumb shit was what actual encyclopedia editors used to do as part of their daily jobs.

Wikipediocracy refuse to say people as unethical as that, have no place in society at all, and most assuredly do not deserve to be writing an encyclopedia on behalf of it. They should be returned from whence they came. The fringes. The psych wards. Their mom's basements. McDonalds.

Now I'd argue that the cult days of WP are more or less in the rearview mirror with the attenuation of Jimbo and his personality cult — but that's neither here nor there. In my estimation, what we have now is more akin to a flavorless WMF corporation that dispenses money and patronage to its minions with the information database product an almost parallel institution populated by hobbyists. Your mileage may vary.

What I found particularly interesting is this observation made by Crow: "Being fine with Wikipedia having a House POV, rather than a neutral POV" as an absolutely unworthy concept.

Yeah, that's true, right? Wikipedia does have a House POV, which is a notion at odds with the theoretical construct of Neutral POV.

I'm okay with that, frankly: science and egalitarianism and antinationalism and antipathy to corporate meddling with content as House POV.

But Wikipedia was founded on the Sanger–Wales doctrine of Neutral POV. I wouldn't say the concept is quite dead, but there is no doubt that "facts" are given more weight than "alternative facts," to borrow a line from a Trumpist functionary