The increasingly useless Wikipedia

It’s no myster why fewer and fewer people are bothering to contribute:

The research found that in the first three months of this year the English-language version of the site suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period last year. Such contributing editors are vital to the integrity of Wikipedia, which relies on volunteers to create pages and check facts.

The study, conducted by Felipe Ortega at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, analysed the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages.

They’re all being driven off by a small cabal of privileged editors who camp on sites and attempt to push their left-wing ideological agenda. From what I’ve seen on the transformation of the page about me over time, they appear to be mostly college students who have plenty of time on their hands and a complete inability to understand the either the concept of objectivity or an encyclopedia.

Look at the difference between the page for Sam Harris and my page, for example. My page is little more than an attack on my views and attempts to minimize anything that might be viewed as positive, whereas Harris’s resembles a defense lawyer attempting to exonerate his client. The part about “conversational intolerance” is hilarious. On my page, for example, it’s very telling that the editors go out of their way to inform people about certain members of my family and not others, even though the positive story was a much bigger one in the global media than the negative story. Of course, it’s not at all Sam’s fault that his defenders are overly enthusiastic propagandists, but the difference between the two pages is indicative of the intrinsically flawed nature of Wikipedia and its uselessness with regards to anything even remotely controversial.