User:AJHW
I have now retired from Wikipedia. This userid is kept only as a way to keep my preferences. Any edits I make from now will be anonymous.
To my way of thinking, Wikipedia has too many problems to be worthwhile. Until now I was prepared to mothball my userid in the hope things would get better; but the Media Viewer mess has convinced me that Wikimedia isn't a suitable host for my effort and that Wikipedia is unlikely to be rescued from its problems.
The problems include:
- too much fussing around on the edges. When there are such obvious holes in the information available, it seems a waste of effort to do things like converting all the units in an article to SI.
- too many cleanup tags on pages. Too many editors seem to view tagging an article as sufficient to get it fixed and don't try to fix it themselves. The result is that most pages I view have some sort of tag on them, which devalues the really important tags. Some pages have tags years old, . I'd like to see an option to disable the showing of tags, or to reduce them to icons.
- too much emphasis on competitor-chasing. Despite the insistence that "Wikipedia is not" all sorts of things, it seems that most of the changes that are made are intended to mimic other sites. Wikipedia is not Britannica, and it's not realistic to expect Wikipedia to consist entirely of featured articles - if it did, it would be merely an analogue of Britannica, and it would miss out on a lot of articles that need time to develop. Wikipedia is not Flickr, but Wikimedia seem to be of a different opinion.
But what really turned me off Wiki{p/m}edia is the Media Viewer and more particularly Wikimedia's response to the consultation. Wikipedia is supposed to be founded on consensus - what message does it send when Wikimedia ignores the clearly-expressed consensus of the English Wikipedia's users? When I joined Wikipedia I didn't realise this wikipedia that's supposed to be independent could have under-developed, unwanted software foisted on it by Wikimedia. Wikimedia have shown themselves to be untrustworthy, and I'm not going to waste my time adding to a site that may quite well be messed up a year or two down the line.
So now I shall be an anon like most of the rest of the people that use Wikipedia. But I won't have the Media Viewer, because I've disabled Javascript for Wikipedia. Thus I don't get the Media Viewer or the Visual Editor. Pity about the Vector skin, but browsers have custom CSS nowadays, which cuts out most of the annoyances. Perhaps someone should document ways to disable all the unwelcome default features - it could be a useful help page. Not me, though - unless I find another host.