User:GFHandel

Retired

This user is no longer active on Wikipedia as of March 2013.

In the many years I edited at Wikipedia, I tolerated:

• Bullies.
• Cliques.
• Editors with sociopathic personalities.
• Editors who crave power (often with little content-building desire or activity).
• Editors with no desire to learn, let alone respect, policy and guidelines.
• Editors who dominate others via a too-strict adherence to policy and guidelines.
• Wikipedia's inability to define, let alone apply "consensus".
• Wikipedia's unusual and inconsistent definition of "notable".
• The mysteries of Wikipedia's hierarchy (including communications not transparent to the community).
• The admin job-for-life culture.
• Spending most of the first hour of my day fighting vandalism.
• Software development not completely specified by the developers' customers: the editing community.
• Editors who believe that the aesthetic appeal of articles is more important than their content.
• Luddite editors who fight to the death to resist progressing Wikipedia from being a nineteenth-century textbook (especially when it comes to referencing).
• The degradation of article content mainly due to the poorly-worded additions of the uninformed.
• Inconsistencies across articles which are largely due to the bizarre "first major contributor wins" philosophy.
• The exodus of good editors.

I woke this morning with the certainty that I no longer want to tolerate these, and I can't envisage a reversal in Wikipedia's failure to deal with such issues.

Thank you to the editors whom I respect and with whom I've enjoyed working (you know who you are, so I wont risk omission via enumeration). Best wishes to you all, and I hope that you can continue the good work with strength which I no longer posses. In quiet moments there was joy in building content, however I now realise that it is only a matter of time before one or more of the above points further destroys that joy.

I wonder what's happening outside ...?
:-)