User:EvanCarroll/Why I Fucking Hate Wikipedia
This network has really gone to shit in the last 5 years: I highly suggest those refuse the urge to donate. Under the stewardship of any other non-profit organization we'd be much more likely to get a system of governance worth taking pride in. The content is free, it isn't going anywhere, except in the case that Wikimedia bankrupts, than we'll probably see a more a responsible responsive group emerge to host our works.
A quick overview of a few of my gripes:
- Lousy Bots
- It seems to me as if a sizable chunk of all annoyances are made by bots. There are bots that will senseless go through all media, mark it as being improperly licensed, and strip it from the network. Bots don't have discretion, more than half of those types of mistakes could be cleared up by an investigative team, or solved with a little bit of a technology.
- Voting
- For a network that prides itself on being democratic, this one has the worst mechanisms for voting. [Check out how it's done.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/Today#William_Hamman)..
- Speedy deletions
- I can see the purposes in them, but even after the content is *deleted* you can't easily start a forum to appeal that decision. Not even the original poster has access to his content -- even though it still resides on the server.
- Life tenure and veneration for sysops
- Checkout this Ops deletion list, he's successfully discouraged what 5 people from contributing by deleting articles without providing a justification. The only recourse is to file a Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_problem/Delete_or_undelete.
- Policy is not integrated into the UI.
- Ever go to a page an think this should be deleted, or undeleted? Or, possibly wanting to see the deleted article? You can't. In fact, to do so requires you to have an intricate understanding of Wikipedia, and a ability to navigate to the respective page burred in the abyss of policy. This should of course all be accessible on the page, with the voting options, and the discussions on that page. You wouldn't want to navigate through 20 pages to a article's "Discussion" page. Why would you want to navigate so much more and have to learn so much more just to get to what should be its "deletion" page.
- Wikitext
- Seriously the most esoteric and badly formed extant markup. It's a horrible mix of XML, and syntactic markdown, and the inclusion of templates makes it almost impossible to parse. There is no spec on parsing wikitext: it's officially defined by the effects of the implementation.
- Content Held Hostage
- If for any reason, your content is removed from Wikipedia - you're denied access to that future content.