The anonymous user and top-tier “editor” Slp1 is representative of the culture of narcissism (grandiosity, entitlement), bullying, and prideful ignorance that is rampant in the cult or cabal known as Wikipedia.
On her user page, this senior contributor shockingly boasts:
“I tend to edit articles that take my fancy and have no connection to my professional and academic background. Articles to which I have made major contributions … including some subjects I had no interest in at all until I waded in.”
Her Talk page exposes this pattern of intimidation, power plays, and nauseating hubris. Obsequious editors such as BlockArranger flatter her to her face and snitch on others, all the while disparaging her elsewhere:
“I suggest you attempt to not call a spade a spade … she doesn’t own the article”.
This is an explicit reference to a Wikipedia policy that advocates giving in to bullies.
But Slp1 and her minion BlockArranger are the rule, not the exception.
Wikipedia poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it has initially attracted masses of teenagers as “contributors” and “editors”, not to mention the less savoury flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life. People who are regularly excluded or at least moderated in every other Internet community are welcomed, no questions asked, by this wannabe self-styled “encyclopedia”. Most of these wannabes are now gone. Those who remain are hard-core control freaks and their puppets.
There is nothing new about the collaborative model that is Wikipedia. Before the age of Gutenberg, copyists (usually found in monasteries) used to add their notes and comments to the texts they were copying as they went alone, without indicating which is the original and which their own contributions. The Talmud had been crowdsourced from hundreds of luminaries over centuries: its layout resembles the world wide web with text “hyperlinks” to boot.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), first published in 1928, was the outcome of seventy years of combined efforts of 2,000 zealous and industrious volunteers. The difference between Wikipedia and the OED, though, is that the latter appointed editors to oversee and tutor these teeming hordes of wannabe scholars.
The concept of “mob wisdom” or “crowd sourcing” is equally dated. Ancient Greek and Egyptian luminaries, from Eratosthenes to Ptolemy, relied on eyewitness accounts of travellers to compose their enduring (albeit utterly erroneous) masterpieces. The distinction between layman and expert is a modern invention, an aberration in historical terms. Even so, every scholarly article and book submitted for publication first goes through peer review: scrutiny by qualified experts who suggest additions and amendments to the material. Once published, authors frequently act on input by academics and the wider public and issue errata, revisions, and new editions to reflect this newly-gained knowledge.
“Before today’s internet, the primary way to preserve something for the ages was to consign it to writing—first on stone, then parchment, then papyrus, then 20-pound acid-free paper, then a tape drive, floppy disk, or hard-drive platter—and store the result in a temple or library: a building designed to guard it against rot, theft, war, and natural disaster. This approach
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