Why Wikipedia is Dying
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2) Wikipedia does not have a shortage of editors. It is in fact overwhelmed with editors who have a net-negative impact on Wikipedia's stated mission. By failing to read the rules and failing to accept the rules when informed of them, you have made yourself a net-negative contributor. These rules are not inscrutable, but are publicly available and explained in depth. The admin who removed your content provided a link to the relevant rule.
3) Wikipedia's primary challenge today is quality, not quantity. The overwhelming number of abusive users create an enormous burden of editing. The pedants, petty tyrants and robots of Wikipedia may be a deterrent to new contributors, but they also form the immune system that protects Wikipedia against abuse.
4) In the space of 15 years, Wikipedia has become the largest and highest-quality encyclopedia available. The community has developed a complex set of processes to ensure continued quality. Those processes may be imperfect, but they are demonstrably effective. Your criticism comes from a position of complete ignorance as to the necessity and efficacy of those processes.
(1) The metric that matters, active user growth, has been declining since 2007.
(2) Right, the 1 MB of bandwidth I took up and 5 KB of storage space I consumed with userspace pages outweighs the hundreds of minor corrections I've submitted over the course of a decade. By the way, Wikipedia does have a shortage of editors relative to its popularity and potential.
(3) Deletionism destroys more information than it protects. This is easy to establish. Educate yourself.
(4) You are circularly using the status quo to justify itself without having explored alternatives and without having performed any research into the historical evolution of Wikipedia and Wikipedian culture. Again, educate yourself before posting.
How do you expect it to continue growing? There aren't enough people to continue active user growth. It's like your expecting it to be a pyramid scheme that makes money as long as you sign up more people than exist on the planet.
Take a look at this graph: https://www.gwern.net/images/2012-henkvd-activewikipedians.p...
First, one would typically expect the number of active users to keep increasing but for the rate of increase to gradually decline, not for the number of active users to actually start decreasing gradually after multiple years of very rapid increase.
Second, if you don't see something wrong with that graph, get your eyes checked out.
There are many legitimate concerns about deletionism. There is a legitimate debate about what the word "encyclopaedia" means and should mean. There are legitimate concerns about how Wikipedia manages human resources. Your complaints vis-a-vis your personal recipes are emblematic of nothing other than your sense of entitlement to use someone else's server space.
You can choose to present yourself as an innocent newbie who was ambushed by a nasty editor. You can choose to present yourself as a time-served Wikipedian with deep insights into their editorial process. You can't choose both.
Wikipedia is no longer a scrappy little community of people who like writing essays. It's a walled garden of information and the only way to moderate is with an iron fist.
Have you considered, for instance, the possibility that relaxing the moderation (and -- yes -- allowing some real abusers to slip through the cracks) but dealing humanely with those who the admins can interact with would be better for Wikipedia on the whole? (Probably not.)
That Wikipedia has fewer volunteer editors does not in itself indicate a decline in quality. Maybe all the people that left were shitty editors.
That you disagree with the way they handle enforcement of the rules you broke is not evidence of a deficient system, only that you don't like it.
I have my own misgivings about wikipedia, but the post linked here doesn't mention any of them.
People pretty much DO use them as personal websites -- the differential enforcement seems to come mainly from how established a user is.
On the other hand, here, let me list a bunch of my recipes for safekeeping is NOT a description of the user in any way or shape.
The only relevant fact is that it was consequentially better for the administrator to behave otherwise. Even if we assume that the user was 100% in error and that the pages should be removed, the administrator's actions still served to objectively harm Wikipedia (in net).
Off the small fraction of people who do try to do this, most will probably think, "I guess I was out of line, since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not my personal storage space." Anyone left over who is going to ragequit over someone not being nice enough when they enforce the rules, frankly, probably doesn't have the type of personality that can handle a lot of the often heated discussions that go on on Wikipedia.
Honestly, I imagine the extreme edge cases represented by the productive editors likely to be seriously dissuaded by this are not a real contributing factor in any perceived death or decline of Wikipedia (one of the most successful and widely used products on the internet).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_pages#What_may_...
I still find Wikipedia to be a good source of information and don't consider it dying. Even if it is dying, I don't believe this to be the reason.
This allows you to ignore the actual consequences of actions.
What's the point of a rule if it doesn't lead to positive consequences?
Make a Google doc next time.
You also seem to be mixing up what "is" with what "ought to be". Feel free to read more about this common fallacy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
Wikipedia may or may not have a problematic culture. You were still obviously in the wrong and no one owes you their time to go into a gentle negotiation about it.
> It's pretty clear that you are confused about what Wikipedia is (not your personal cloud server) vs what you think it ought to be (your personal cloud server).
Nice "clever response," but you would realize -- if you had read and comprehended my article & comments -- that I have no such confusion.
> Getting angry about your clearly-against-the-rules behavior being stopped and using that as a reason to go on a rant about Wikipedia dying of incivility is ridiculous.
"Ridiculous" is not a counterargument.
> Wikipedia may or may not have a problematic culture.
Meaningless statement. Waste of space.
> You were still obviously in the wrong
A factual restatement of what the rules are does not even come close to constituting a reply to the linked post, let alone a counterargument.
> and no one owes you their time to go into a gentle negotiation about it.
Normative statement. It's also incoherent. My position is that it is consequentially better for administrators to act otherwise. If you can't reply on consequential grounds and without making appeals to what people "should" or "shouldn't" do, then just don't reply, please.
I recommend that you direct your passion towards expanding the Wikipedia community into a new direction commensurate with your goals. Sometimes communities need to separate in order to make everyone happy. A good city needs both the quiet streets with toddlers on bikes and the hot nightspots with pounding music. Do you have a right to play your music? Damn straight, I say, and play it loud and proud. But your neighbors may be perfectly justified in saying "not here, we believe this is supposed to be a quiet street". That seems to be the nature of your disagreement with the community.
I'm not aware of Wikipedia having any policy against deep linking. There have also been a number of success stories of special interest Wikipedias (e.g. wookiepedia, Conservapedia) which have been successful. In theory, you could start an "everythingopedia" which includes Wikipedia as a subset through deep linking (therefore making it very useful) in addition to your other items which would be deleted in the normal Wikipedia. I don't know if someone has already tried this, but it seems to me that you will find more success making a place for your own type of community than trying to change the minds of a community which does not agree with you.