I used to be a moderately active casual editor, but was driven out by (a) aggressive, insane kooks, who glommed onto me like moths on a porch light, and (b) aggressive rules-bound editors who start shouting acronyms at you before you've hit the enter key. "Not notable!" Wikipedia's a closed, insular boy's club, and there really isn't room for casual editors anymore.

My favorite kook was the guy who insisted that the article on "Red Hair" should include an extensive section on the "fact" that the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, Ireland is the source of the word "gay" meaning "homosexual". I ended up in arbitration over that guy. He had a number of other obsessions, including inserting pictures of young Japanese girls covered with food into articles containing the word "messy".

I also had fun with the guy in Wigan who vociferously denied that the 1974 English county and postal-code reorganization had taken place. "There's no such bloody place as Greater Manchester, you fucking bastard!". Also, the fellow who liked to go through various artworks and change the artist's name to one he preferred. I got a barnstar out of that one. There's only so much of that a person can put up with.

Unfortunately, the super-obsessive pendants and "ultimate authorities" will still be there, ruining Wikipedia.

I don't see this as a problem. Part of the fun of Wikipedia was getting the chance to write new articles about topics. Now that pretty much everything has an article, only the hardcore editors will remain. I'm sure enough people will stick around to make sure that Wikipedia remains a viable project.

Wikipedia is losing editors because Wikipedia is getting harder to edit. A more difficult job means fewer people are qualified to do it. It's getting harder to edit because it's getting better. In the past you could get away with crap that you can't any more. There are more rules and the the rules are more complex. These complicated rules define the difference between quality and crap.

But bitch and moan all you want and list all the knocks against Wikipedia you like. Constant's, uh, insight? about The Thing is certainly... interesting? But the bottom line is that if you really didn't think Wikipedia was any good, you'd stop relying on it and use something else.

If you have an SPL card you can use the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Grolier, Encyclopedia Americana, the New Book of Popular Science and the New Book of Knowledge. A KCLS card adds the World Book Online. All for free, all on the web.

You have no reason to ever use Wikipedia. So quit using it if you mean what you say, and STFU.

Where's the undo button on this thing? I want to revert #4 back to Fnarf's comment.

I'm down to occasionally fixing grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Anything beyond that's is too much aggravation.

sigh...can someone edit that...lol...

Great headine for this post, Paul.

Ahhh. Just spent a few minutes revisiting the wonders of "Akidd Dublin", who wrote things like

I believe many people relate queer to gai, but it is not very related (if at all). My interpretation was "looks ginger", in a meaning of way of "unserious and queer". For instance, striptease is completely gai (by the word meaning), see dictionary.reference.com. It is not much used that way. People who produce edits here should really get encouraged to use a dictionary.

as a defense for adding this to [[Red Hair]]:

*[[Cockney rhyming slang]] uses the term Ginger to refer to [[Gaiety_Theatre|gaiety]] people - Ginger is short for Ginger Beer, a slang term for "queer".

. And hundreds more. Maybe you had to be there.

@10, @11, he had fits every time he came across the word "gay" -- he would always, always change it to "ghey" or "gai", even in references to the Wikipedia article for "gay", which broke them. Hmm. "Special population group" was one of his catch-phrases.

In the "Red Hair" article, he also tried to insert a link to rottentomatoes.com, on the grounds that "tomato" is a common nickname for a redhead. Which...wha...I mean...where do you even start?

And when you corrected his spelling or grammar he would say things like "I am normal, nike, skeletor". I never got involved in his "work" on some computer topics, like "SDRAM", where he repeatedly fucked the article so hard you couldn't tell what it was supposed to be about. Those are fun to look at too.

The weird thing is, I saw a picture of him once, and although his English sounds like he might be Japanese, and he was obsessed with Japanese topics, he was white, with a normal-sounding (for Ireland) name, Alex something. Fun times.

Oh! Another one: he wanted to change the page for "Deschutes River" in Oregon to "Chutes River", because "Des-" just means "the".

I guess it's nice to have someone(s) to moderate a dispute with a person like that, as such are so out there that you can never use reason to demonstrate who is right and who is wrong.

I'm so glad I gave up on editing. I look back at the old nooks and crannies a couple times a year and it's just gotten ever more absurd.