Talkin' Future Plan Blues

Unfortunately we ran out of year to drop bombshells on Wikipedia, but then this in an organization that gets to fundraising goals and then won't shut down to please Jimbo, an outfit that has a category for users who DGAF (don't give a f--k), and a category discussion thread to keep or delete the "Wikipedians who DGAF" category....I think at this point they can't be humiliated/shocked/bullied into realizing that they are wasting their lives on a project that is too byzantine to ever be completely finished because the unpaid bureaucracy that has sprung up around the project never wants the thing done - a finished Wikipedia means a dead bureaucracy.

So what is the future of Wikipedia Sucks?

Some of it will be the Wiki-biographies we've done before, but the more important parts are trying to explain to outsider readers (including this writer) how the various branches of the aforementioned bureaucracy work: who started them, who were the victims, who staffed the boards, and so on. I loathe the perverts with a passion,  but we need to hit more of the pedophile Wikipedians, the child-groomers and people passing porn through Commons....what we have written is always the tip of the iceberg, never the chasm underneath the floating ice mountain. A lot of it was deleted, or hidden, or lost when Wikipedia crashed in the early 2000s. We need to talk about Essjay, the faker who pretty much began the decay of Wikipedia. We need to review the genius book The Myth of the Britannica, the first book-length examination of an encyclopedia set that had gotten long in the tooth.

Finally, we need to thank Eric Barbour and Peter Damian, because without them, this blog, the messageboard - all of it would be nothing. Thank them if you have to thank anybody.

Thanks to some Russian guys or Tor users spoofing through Russian ISPs or 'bots trying to steal the site, we are nearly at 7000 views for one month. Thank you 'bots or guys or spoofers!

Wikipediocracy today....

.... is a very sad place. The last blog post they did was in June. The board is being dominated by the guy who allegedly owns the domain, Greg Kohs (thekohser), and some of the key people have walked away to join another forum.

"It's like watching Mussolini run the Salo Republic in 1943!"

Wikipediocracy's message board (WO-MB) originally was a "survivor's group" made up of the personalities that made up the Wikipedia Review forum (that board had been sunk by a crazy sysop, comedy recounting here), then it stated collecting everybody and anybody (this author included). It has been slowly collapsing since 2014 as people like Peter Damian and Eric Barbour and Mancunium decided that Greybeard (Steve McGeady) and Zoloft (William "Monty" Burns) along with thekohser were not worth the time. Since then Andreas Kolbe (HRIP7) has vanished and Alison Cassidy bailed. They have people, lots of people, just not the people whom the journalists will be clamoring to interview when Wikipedia dies hard or explodes like a supernova. All those people, plus irreplacable voices like ilvadel and the WO-banned Internet Warrior King Daniel Brandt are now out in the snow or have joined this blog's forum*.

Kohs has left such an ungodly stench in the minds of ex-WO members, we now have a thread about him....that runs 15 pages. It has taken most of a year to get to that point, and I'm not ever locking it, because we need to document when he finally crosses that last line and Greybeard or Zoloft finally cans him, somehow.

Doom

Implosion seems to be a real problem with Wikipedia-criticism boards and websites; the people running them are mostly ex-Wikipedians who lack journalistic training, so it isn't about writing news story-like blog posts, just a lot of shop-talk and ranting. WO-MB has people who could bring down, or at least badly cripple Wikipedia, and yet they hold off because they still love the place. I have no love for Wikipedia, and I can easily see the site winding up as a series of thumbdrives key-ringed together and sold in piles on tables next to bowls full of jade necklaces in souks and bazaars across the developing world. Wikipedia will not end well, and it is our duty to transmit the knowledge of its failures to future generations.



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* Truth in advertising: I didn't start "Wikipedia Sucks!" the board, that was Mutineer. Barbour and I administrate. What there really needs to be is an unauthorized oral history of Wikipedia, journos asking the heavy-hitters real questions, no dealings with the WMF people - they can write their own book.