User:LittleDoGooder

I read somewhere that Wikipedia works in practice, but it will never work in theory. That is suppose to be a joke. People often say the expression the other way around.

If Wikipedia was dictated solely by the preferences, prejudices, feelings and emotions of anyone to come along it would never work. If anyone could put articles of any kind or delete articles on any sort of whim or fancy, then there would be stupid articles in the first instance and no articles in the second. So Wikipedia works on a complicated set of rules, rules that are themselves predicated on a bunch of basic principles set up by Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales. If Mr. Wales decided to change his principles, the rules would likely change and Wikipedia would likely collapse. As it is, however, it is almost impossible to permanently %^*&^ up Wikipedia, though doing that to a few articles at any one time is absolutely unavoidable -- a weird paradox that winds up working if you step back and look at the very big picture -- all 2.6 million articles taken as a whole.

It is easy to see the flaws in Wikipedia -- even show wrong facts. But try to show a link to a single easy-to-navigate site where anywhere near as much TRUE information can be found. You can't do it because such a site does not exist. There is no more serious competition (besides its mirror sites perhaps) than there is a serious competition for eBay or Amazon or Facebook/MySpace taken together. There are attempts, but nothing even close.

Anyone who comes to Wikipedia hoping to clean it up of the work of thousands of serious editors who have played by the rules, based on principles, are in for a rude shock. Their attempts won't work in the long term. I don't know why this is to be honest. I have watched and read for a long time, and while things go a bit hay-wire here and there, it strangely heals itself like the cells of the body. Weird. To be honest I don't really get it. And I don't think anyone else does either. I bet one day it will provide a model for many other kinds of institutions, or at least clues. And maybe in hindsight it can be understood. LittleDoGooder (talk) 17:45, 21 October 2008 (UTC)