User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/Vogonization

The creeping vogonization of Wikipedia is apparent to anyone who has been contributing to it for a some time. It manifests itself in an unbelievably huge collection of policies, rules, and guidelines, mostly filed in the "Wikipedia:" namespace; on the formation of a class of wikivogons — official or unofficial "bureaucrats", who, instead of editing article contents, spend most of their their time writing rules and policies; or evaluating, classifiying, tagging, debating, criticizing, impeding, or deleting the work of other editors.

Like Douglas Adams's proverbial vogons, the typical Wikipedia bureaucrat apparently believes that his opinions carry infinitely more weight that those of ordinary editors, and assumes that his time is worth infinitely more than theirs. Therefore, the actions of a wikivogon are usually guided by purely formal rules and criteria, that do not require them to actually read the articles that common editors write. He canot waste his time discussing his actions on the article talk pages, and will often abuse editors who question or reverse those actions. Many wikivogons operate robots that allow them to edit thousands of articles in a row, sometimes with a single click of the mouse.

The vogonization of Wikipedia has been growing unchecked since its completion. The root causes are the same human tendencies that underlie the growth of any other bureaucracy: the lust for power and the pleasure one derives from wielding it, the tendency of like-minded people to assemble into cliques, the natural desire to achieve more effect with less work, and so on. Unfortunately, the same features that allowed Wikipedia's plain editor base to grow exponentially for the first five years years also allowed its bureaucracy to grow in the same proportion; but while the former stopped growing abruptly in 2006, the latter has continued unabated and unfettered. While the deletionist faction of the wikivogons has been in an unendig orgy since then, not a single rule or policy has been deleted; quite the contrary.

Wikipedia "consensus"

As in many other organizations, the Wikipedia bureaucrats have instinctively acted so as to increase their own power. Most of the Wikipedia policies and guidelines are labeled as "consensus", and many indeed were instituted after what superficially looks like a voting process. However, on close inspection, one sees that these polls were never taken over a representative sample of the editor base. The polls are usually carried out in the discussion pages of the policy text itself. Thus voting is automatically restricted to those editors who read that discussion page regularly. Needless to say, the majority of the voters are not only wikivogons, but wikivogons who are in favor of the policy.

As complex as the common laws are, imagine what they would be like if they too were created by thei process. Imagine one guy who hates apple pies and want to pass a law against them. He finds another ten people in Netland who like the idea; they draft the text, vote it among themselves, and presto — apple pies become illegal, by "consensus". Even the Nazis would envy Wikipedia's decision-making process.

[to be finished]