Why Facebook makes us worse but Wikipedia makes us better

  s/political/personal/g

All slashdot style humour aside, the ongoing issue of petty fiefdom edit wars on the most inane topics is pretty well known. This and the acceptance of deletionist mindset despite the fact that there is so much automated tooling and maintenance helpers to negate the arguments around viewpoints purporting that without deleting things the wiki would become so big it couldn’t be maintained.

I don’t even bother fixing obviously out of date stuff anymore because I honestly can’t be fucked. I don’t want to play a game of Russian Roulette with my personal time/effort or engage in some pseudo-MMORPG by “grinding for rep” on Wikipedia. If I want to fix an old low profile article about a science mission and correct its launch date (which is still in the future) … it should take a few seconds to edit 2020 to 2023 … not a few minutes spread over several days

Over the years I have read countless stories, either through the freedom of information act, or other journalist investigations, that show what is clearly a widespread pattern of government agency infiltration into not-for-profit media based, or political based groups.

I wish I had saved them, but that pattern is always the same. The government agents are paid to be there, therefore they can be far, far more helpful than the 'real' members. This allows them to move quickly to the top, then move their own people in.

Then comes the fun part, they start acting like radical assholes. Annoying everyone and driving away any rational reasonable people. This toxic environment eventually destroys the movement, but not before giving them complete control to push it in whatever direction they wish.

To me it is incredibly obvious that this is what is happening at Wikipedia.