Wikipedia . . . and the ship you rode in on!!!

After a couple years of tolerating the deplorable state of a Wikipedia article I have a particular interest and expertise in, I decided to revise the thing from top to bottom. With all the propriety I could muster, I made a point of announcing my plans in some detail on the discussion page. I told everyone concerned exactly what I planned to do, how I planned to do it, and why I thought it was necessary. At that point I had almost no experience with either Wikipedia or the poor bastards that guard the gates there. I was, however, quickly introduced.

After crafting a radical revision of the lead—turning what was before a series of clumsily-joined sentences and seemingly irrelevant facts into a cohesive argument-driven introduction—I was somewhat shocked to read a trite and testy condemnation of my work. “None of your goals were achieved in the edit,” it said; “it's wordy, unsourced [sic] opinion.”

Now, I’m well aware of the philosophy behind Wikipedia. Nobody owns an article; we are all supportive members of the collaborative process. Fine! Great! No problem! I’m not offended by criticism. Indeed, I rather welcome it. But I’m typically exposed to constructive criticism. This seemed like a tantrum in the form of a text message.

Undeterred, I responded to the criticism with a long, deliberate, subtly condescending (hence the pompous [sic]) defense of my work. I then proceeded to entirely redesign the historical background section. I changed the tone, injected some important details about how the event affected life beyond the English-speaking world, and corrected some foolish harping about the significance of this doctrine and that official.

About a week later, as I was working on the next few sections of the article, I notice that someone had made some slight corrections to a single sentence within a major edit. This person, at least, had the courtesy to post an explanation of his corrections. But his concerns were trivial and his edits left the sentence awkward and broken.

Needless to say, this continued to happen—a word change here, a clause deletion there, an occasional testy comment, and several random acts of vandalism that were quickly corrected. If I’ve lost you, I apologize. But what I’m trying to get at here is that the people running Wikipedia, the many editors and administrators with tens of thousands of edits to their credit, lines of awards on their talk pages, and clearly more time than they deserve all seem to have nothing of any real substance to add. Their criticism is often unnecessary at best, poorly rationalized vandalism at worst.

So, to any and all of you out there. . . . Thanks for being there to keep articles free from things like “Sam was here” and “America Rocks.” But, please, back off a bit and let the people who invest real time and have real experience work.