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| '''Tutankhamun''' (alternate ] '''Tutankhamen'''), named '''Tutankhaten''' early in his life, was ] of the ] (ruled ]/] – ], lived ca. ] – ]), during the period known as the ]. His original name, Tutankhaten, meant "Living Image of ]", while Tutankhamun meant "Living Image of ]". He is possibly also the ''Nibhurrereya'' of the ]. | |||
| = THE GREAT FAILURE OF WIKIPEDIA = | |||
| Tutankhamun is perhaps best known to modern Westerners as the only pharaoh to have had a (nearly) intact ] (]) discovered. (The wealth of objects discovered in this young king's tomb naturally leads to speculation on what might have been contained in the plundered tombs of far more significant Pharaohs.) However, he is historically important as well. | |||
| I have now tried extended interaction with Misplaced Pages. I consider it a failure. In doing so, I will describe why, instead of just slinking off into the night on my projects. Maybe it will do some good. Maybe it will not. I'm sure, at the end of the day, there must be hundreds like me at this point. Burned, slapped, ejected from the mothership for not following the rules, no matter how intricate and foolish. Let me at least go with some smoke. | |||
| == Life == | |||
| ===Family=== | |||
| Tutankamun's parentage is uncertain. An inscription calls him a king's son, but it is debated which king was meant. Most scholars think that he was probably a son either of ] (though probably not by his Great Royal Wife ]), or of Amenhotep III's son Amenhotep IV (better known as ]), perhaps with his enigmatic second queen, ]. It should be noted that when Tutankhaten succeeded Akhenaten to the throne, Amenhotep III had been dead for some time; the duration is thought by some ]s to have been seventeen years, although on this, as on so many questions about the ] period, there is no scholarly consensus. Tutankhamun ruled Egypt for eight to ten years; examinations of his ] show that he was a young adult when he died. Recent CT scans place Tut at age 19. This conclusion was reached after images of Tut's teeth were examined, and were found to be consistent with the teeth of a 19 year old. That would place his birth around ]-], and would make it less likely that Amenhotep III was his father. | |||
| The concept of Misplaced Pages is a very engaging and exciting one, especially to someone like myself who spends an awful lot of time collecting information and then presenting it to people. Normally, the work I do is the work that's done. That is, if I don't give much attention to a specific section of my sites, that section will stay static, even if it's in need of improvement. This is not very enjoyable. In collaboration, you will put your tools down for the night, and when you wake up the next morning, more work is done. This is very exciting, very enjoyable. It's why people work in teams in the first place. | |||
| Tutankhamun was married to ], a daughter of Akhenaten. Ankhesenpaaten also changed her name from the -'''aten''' endings to the -'''amun''' ending, becoming Ankhesenamun. They had two known children, both stillborn – their mummies were discovered in his tomb. | |||
| Within the social spectrum of information specialists, I am best classifyable as a moody loner. I don't work well with others, at least, that is, people who I don't like. Which is a lot of people. As a result, the vast majority of my sites are one-man operations, meaning that the firehose of my concentration goes from one site to another, giving it some sort of monsoon season of attention and update before firing in another direction. This means that some are truly ghost towns for months at a time. With the additional strike of my documentary, my time is almost completely eaten up, and so the other sites have been suffering. | |||
| ===Reign=== | |||
| During Tutankhamun's reign, Akhenaten's ] revolution (]) began to be reversed. Akhenaten had attempted to supplant the existing priesthood and ] with a god who was until then considered minor, ]. In year 3 of Tutankhamun's reign (]), when he was still a boy of about 11 and probably under the influence of two older advisors (notably Akhenaten's vizier ]), the ban on the old ] of ] and their ]s was lifted, the traditional privileges restored to their priesthoods, and the capital moved back to ]. The young pharaoh also adopted the name Tutankhamun, changing it from his birth name Tutankhaten. Because of his age at the time these decisions were made, it is generally thought that most if not all the responsibility for them falls on his vizier ] and perhaps other advisors. | |||
| The idea of Misplaced Pages, on its face, is really neat. A bunch of people can work on an entry in a huge, growing encyclopedia, its subject matter gaining far and wide, and deep, into the whole of human knowledge. Pretty cool stuff to hear about, as you browse the outside of it. You click on some of the more complete entries, and really, you just say to yourself "wow, such a great thing is man" and so on. Maybe you wave a little flag with a logo on it. Misplaced Pages's watchword is entirely collaboration. With a few exceptions, anyone can modify anything in any way, and anyone can undo their modifications, with a full tracking of the history of edits and methods included to keep track of these changes. Exciting stuff. | |||
| === Events after his death === | |||
| A now-famous letter to the ] king ] from a widowed queen of Egypt, explaining her problems and asking for one of his sons as a husband, has been attributed to ] (among others). Suspicious of this good fortune, Suppiluliumas I first sent a messenger to make inquiries on the truth of the young queen's story. After reporting her plight back to Suppilulumas I, he sent his son, ], accepting her offer. However, he got no further than the border before he died, perhaps murdered. If Ankhesenamun were the queen in question, and his death a murder, it was probably at the orders of ] or ], who both had the opportunity and the motive. | |||
| I had run into people who spoke of Misplaced Pages in a near-fanatical aspect, of how all these hands were forming these great and beautiful entries, and that it was just a matter of running along and having a great time making the whole project better. Naturally, I regarded this with suspicion and hopeful interest. I'm always interested in people doing stuff tangental to the work I do, but I always wonder if it will turn out my work has been for naught, or if in fact I'm still doing something unique and the efforts being expended on the other project are unrelated. | |||
| In any event, after Tutankhamun's death, Ankhesenamun married Ay (a ], with both Ay and Ankehesenamun's name was found), possibly under coercion, and shortly afterwards disappeared from recorded history. | |||
| On the other hand, it is an awful lot of work tracking down the history of America Online or John Paul Aleshe or any of the other subjects I am always researching, and a bunch more hands kicking in would be fantastic. So I bought in, for a little while. Signed myself up and started some work. | |||
| Tutankhamun was briefly succeeded by the elder of his two advisors, Ay, and then by the other, ], who obliterated most of the evidence of the reigns of ], Tutankhamun, and Ay. | |||
| I should pause for a moment, before I continue further. If you work on Misplaced Pages, I'm just going to make you angry. What I am doing is trying to stop people from working on Misplaced Pages with the idea that they're accomplishing good. I am quite convinced, from the outside, over here, that no amount of suggestions from a lone voice will have any effect. Mobs don't listen. So please, traipse happily back to Misplaced Pages and get cracking; someone is not eschewing a NPOV, even as you read this. Go! Go! | |||
| === Name === | |||
| {{Hiero/2cartouche|align=right|era=nk|name=Tutankhamun|praenomen=<hiero>ra:nb-xpr-Z2</hiero>|nomen=<hiero>i-mn:n-t:w:t-anx-HqA-O28-Sma</hiero>}} | |||
| Under ], Tutankhamun was named Tutankhaten, which in ] is: | |||
| <hiero><-i-t:n:ra-t:w:t-anx-></hiero> | |||
| Technically, this name is ] as twt-ˁnḫ-ỉtn. | |||
| Note, also, that in what I'm writing about, I'm not speaking about the concept of a "Wiki", or indicating that a collaborative tool such as Wiki software is a failure. Confined with a number of limitations on who does what in the context of undoing work, it can certainly work. It's just software, after all. it's the implementation that's the sticking point. | |||
| At the reintroduction of the old pantheon, his name was changed. It is transliterated as twt-ˁnḫ-ỉmn ḥq3-ỉwnw-šmˁ, and often realised as '''Tutankhamun Hekaiunushema''', meaning "Living image of ], ruler of Southern ]". On his ascension to the throne, Tutankhamun took a ''praenomen''. This is transliterated as nb-ḫprw-rˁ, and realised as '''Nebkheperure''', meaning "Lord of the forms of ]". The name ''Nibhurrereya'' in the ] may be a variation of this praenomen. | |||
| To understand Misplaced Pages, it helps to understand the Usenet FAQ and its unique place in history. | |||
| == Cause of death == | |||
| For a long time the cause of Tutankhamun's death was unknown, and was the root of much speculation. How old was the king when he died? Did he suffer from any physical abnormalities? Had he been murdered? Many of these questions were finally answered in early ] when the results of a set of ] on the mummy were released. | |||
| The Usenet FAQ was (and is) to me, one of the true great advantages and creations of the Internet age. Previously, it had always been the case that the same 5 or 10 questions plagued a subgroup, cultural icon, hobby or occupation. These questions, while quite valid, quite reasonable, would be asked so many times that it would eventually be the case that no-one was willing to step up for the thousandth time and explain them. This led, inevitably, to speculation, wrong information and misquoting that would come back to bite everyone later. For no good reason! But the Frequently Asked Questions list fixed that. It allowed all the common questions to be answered, and even for the common controversies to be addressed even if no firm conclusion had been reached. These things grew like crazy in the 1980s and there's massive collections of them out there, still with good information (as long as its a general subject, and not a pop star or the like), and the work of many people coming together to build something good. Like Misplaced Pages is supposed to be. | |||
| The body was originally inspected by ]’s team in the early 1920s, though they were primarily interested in recovering the jewelry and amulets from the body. To remove the objects from the body, which in many cases were stuck fast by the hardened embalming resins used, Carter's team cut up the mummy into various pieces: the arms and legs were detached, the torso cut in half and the head was severed, and the removed from the golden mask to which it was cemented by means of hot knives. Since the body was placed back in its sarcophagus in ], the mummy had subsequently been X-rayed twice: first in ] by a group from the ], and then in ] by a group from the ]. | |||
| I would attest that the reason for the success of the FAQ was a lot of collaborators but a short list of people maintaining it. A very large amount of maintainers leads to infighting, procedural foolishness, and ultimately a very slow advancement schedule. There's an interesting book called The Mythical Man-Month that goes into this in some detail, but the basic idea is: the more people you slap into a project that's behind, the more the project will fall behind. Unintuitive, but true. Even in the case of raw horsepower, this becomes the case; you would think that if the basic job (photocopy this paper) was simple enough, the job would go faster with more people, but it doesn't. You end up with people photocopying stuff wrong, collating wrong, bending pages badly, skipping pages... and the errors increase as you smack more people on. And you fall behind. | |||
| ]s of his ] had revealed a dense spot at the lower back of the ]. This had been interpreted as a chronic ], which would have been caused by a blow. Such an injury could have been the result of an accident, but it had also been suggested that the young pharaoh was ]ed. If this is the case, there are a number of theories as to who was responsible: one popular candidate was his immediate successor ]. Interestingly, there are seemingly signs of ] within the supposed injury, which if true meant Tutankhamun lived for a fairly extensive period of time (on the order of several months) after the injury was inflicted. | |||
| Now, at the risk of sounding a tad elitist and exclusivist, a low barrier to entry leads to crap. Maybe not initially, but with any amount of quality attached to a project, once it gains some respectability and perhaps fame or infamy, it is then beset upon by crap. By making it really, really easy to change, fundamentally, the nature of a project, you run the risk of the project becoming a battleground. A really, really crappy battleground. | |||
| Much confusion had been caused by a small loose sliver of bone within the upper cranial cavity, which was discovered from the same X-ray analysis. Some people have mistaken this visible bone fragment for the supposed head injury. In fact, since Tutankhamun's brain was removed ''post mortem'' in the mummification process, and considerable quantities of now-hardened ] introduced into the skull on at least two separate occasions after that, had the fragment resulted from a pre-mortem injury, it almost certainly would not still be loose in the cranial cavity. It therefore almost certainly represented post-mummification damage. | |||
| For exhibit A, one merely has to traipse over to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), which is now a sub-company of Amazon. For better or worse, Amazon now defines that body of information's future, and along the way they ended up adding a few nice features (like a very fast search engine, and links to buy the movie if you so choose). But they also added user comments. | |||
| ===2005 research=== | |||
| ] that contained his internal organs]] | |||
| On ], ], Egyptian archaeologist ] revealed the results of a ] performed on the pharaoh's mummy. The scan uncovered no evidence for a blow to the back of the head as well as no evidence suggesting ]. There was a hole in the head, but it appeared to have been drilled, presumably by ]s. A fracture to Tutankhamun's left thighbone was interpreted as evidence that suggests the pharaoh badly broke his leg before he died, and his leg became infected; however, members of the Egyptian-led research team recognized as a less likely possibility that the fracture was caused by the embalmers. 1,700 images were produced of Tutankhamun's mummy during the 15-minute CT scan. | |||
| Have you seen the user comments there? Choose a movie; I won't bias you. Go find the threads under a $100 million picture, an Oscar-winner or an independent production. Go browse them and bring to me a thread that isn't a garbage pile of one-line off-the-cuff nothings, a handful of withered one-sentence dandelions. Devoid of insight, meaningless to anyone truly trying to find insight into the film at hand. In many cases, these films represent years of work in someone's life, but because tourist3398 can just log right in and ask a completely stupid question, or make an inane comment, they get equal time on that front page for a while. Ultimately, it's insulting to the work done and it adds nothing. | |||
| Much was learned about the young king's life. His age at death was estimated at 19 years, based on physical developments that set upper and lower limits to his age. The king had been in general good health, and there were no signs of any major infectious disease or malnutrition during childhood. He was slight of build, and was roughly 170 cm (5½ ft) tall. He had large front incisor teeth and the overbite characteristic of the rest of the Thutmosid line of kings to which he belonged. He also had a pronounced ] (elongated) skull, though it was within normal bounds and highly unlikely to have been pathologic in cause. Given the fact that many of the royal depictions of ] (possibly his father, certainly a relation), often featured an elongated head, it is likely an exaggeration of a family trait, rather than a distinct abnormality more typical of a condition like ], as had been suggested. A slight bend to his spine was also found, but the scientists agreed that that there was no associated evidence to suggest that it was pathological in nature, and that it was much more likely to have been caused during the embalming process. This ended speculation based on the previous X-rays that Tutanhkamun had suffered from scoliosis. | |||
| The reviews that accompany each movie are slightly better, because it appears there is a moderation system in place. Reviews that are fundamentally wrong are in place, but they're wrong in a matter of opinion, not often in a matter of being unreadable. You disagree with what's being said, not the brickheaded way it's being said. | |||
| The ] conclusion by a team of Egyptian scientists, based on the CT scan findings, confirmed that Tutankhamun died of a swift attack of ] after breaking his leg. After consultations with ] and ] experts, the Egyptian scientists found that the fracture in Tutankhamun's left leg most likely occurred only days before his death, which had then become gangrenous and led directly to his death. The fracture was not sustained during the mummification process or as a result of some damage to the mummy as claimed by ]. The Egyptian scientists have also found no evidence that he had been struck in the head and no other indication he was killed, as had been previously speculated. | |||
| The simple fact is, a low barrier to entry and an easy access to an audience tends to lead to problems. A web-based comic named Penny Arcade captured this succinctly, but I want to add that the issue is not that damage will occur immediately, but will occur over time. And eventually, given enough time, damage and low quality will win over high quality, because high quality requires effort and low quality does not. | |||
| Despite the relatively poor condition of the mummy, the Egyptian team found evidence that great care had been given to the body of Tutankhamun during the embalming process. They found five distinct embalming materials, which were applied to the body at various stages of the mummification process. This counters previous assertions that the king’s body had been prepared carelessly and in a hurry. | |||
| So we come to Misplaced Pages. | |||
| ==Tutankhamun in popular culture== | |||
| {{main|Egypt in the European imagination}} | |||
| I often get myself into trouble and lose my audience with my metaphors, but so be it. Think of Misplaced Pages as a massive garage where you can build any car you want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else, and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you. There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no anything. In fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't read the manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And leave it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there's no problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're traipsing down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted, covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning. | |||
| Tutankhamun is the world's best known pharaoh, partly because his tomb is among the best preserved, and his image and associated artefacts the most-exhibited. He has also entered popular culture - he has, for example, been commemorated in the whimsical song "King Tut" by comedian ], and in a series of historical novels by ]. As Jon Manchip White writes, in his forward to the 1977 edition of Carter's ''The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun'', ''"The pharaoh who in life was one of the least esteemed of Egypt's kings has become in death the most renowned." '' | |||
| This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove something, you're now in the situation that anybody can change it. And while that's all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way, it's when you realize that the people who are going to change it could have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see where we are. | |||
| === Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb === | |||
| ] | |||
| If you've ever worked in a large company, one where not everyone's name is known by everyone else, you've bumped into these people, who don't know the thing the company makes very well, don't keep on top of new ideas beyond buzzwords, yet wield the kind of power where they can stop and start innovation and positive growth because they simply feel like it. It's pretty heartbreaking stuff and I hope a bunch of you never have to deal with it. | |||
| Tutankhamun's existence is believed to have been mostly forgotten at some point not too long after his death, until the ]. It has been suggested that his tomb was never opened, by either ]s or priests, exactly because he and it had been forgotten. | |||
| But thanks to Misplaced Pages, you can experience this on a daily basis! College students with too much free time deciding your subject matter is not worth reporting. Bizzare insight from strange lands telling you they didn't think your paragraph was relevant. And ever the bizzare need for a Neutral Point of View. Neutral Point of View is a doctrine about how Misplaced Pages articles should be written. Like wikipedia itself, it is a great idea in theory. In application, of course, it turns into yet another hammer for wonks and whackjobs to beat each other and innocent bystanders. | |||
| The ] ] (employed by ]) discovered Tutankhamun's tomb (since designated ]) in ] on ], ] near the entrance to the tomb of ], thereby setting off a renewed interest in all things Egyptian in the modern world. Carter contacted his patron, and on ] that year both men became the first people to enter Tutankhamun's tomb in over 3000 years. After many weeks of careful excavation, on ], ] Carter opened the inner chamber and first saw the ] of Tutankhamun. | |||
| Misplaced Pages is a relatively new creation, but it already quite beset with the same problems that inhabit any self-styled intellectual collaboration. People make little empires, have their agendas, push through ideas and themes they want, and disregard and delete things they do not. The main difference between this and other similar academic environments is the pure speed at which stuff can happen; you can literately have 30-40 little editing nibbles on a page within a single day. If people are feeling frisky, it can take place in a few hours. This means that you get all the politics and turf war of Ivory Tower Academia without the mitigating barrier of time to cool down or consider. That is, you get a nice big mess. | |||
| For many years, rumors of a "]" (probably fueled by newspapers at the time of the discovery) persisted, emphasizing the early death of some of those who had first entered the tomb. However, a recent study of journals and death records indicates no ] difference between the age of death of those who entered the tomb and those on the expedition who did not. Indeed, most lived past 70. | |||
| One of the stated concerns of nanotechnology (wherein a bunch of tiny things make a lot of small changes very quickly, which should sound forever) is the 'grey goo' problem. The concern with grey goo is poorly programmed nanobots will make a bunch of wrong incremental changes to the world and reduce everything to a grey, goo-like substance of all creation. It is not hard, browsing over historical edits to majorly contended Misplaced Pages articles, to see the slow erosion of facts and ideas according to people trying to implement their own idea of neutrality or meaning on top of it. Even if the person who originally wrote a section was well-informed, any huckleberry can wander along and scrawl crayon on it. This does not eventually lead to an improved final entry. | |||
| ] ] games were found in the tomb . | |||
| Let's put it another way. In the motion picture industry, there's a term called "on the screen". It's phrased in this way: "is this money going to end up on the screen?". And what is meant by that is that if you pay a bunch of money to rent a spectacular shooting location, then it's going to end up on the screen, that is, people will see the spectacular location and go "wow" and they'll feel the movie is giving them their money's worth. If you pay for the rights to use a location, and then there's a hurricane and your location is wiped out and you didn't get insurance, then you just spent a lot of money, and did no shooting. Your money is not on the screen. Other than on a bunch of reciepts, there will be no trace of the $2 million you spent on that location rental. So there's wasted money, energy and time, and that can add up. This is what plagued movies like Cleopatra, Waterworld and Heaven's Gate, which contained huge behind-the-scenes costs that did not result in footage, meaning the movies were now expensive blockbuster budgets with medium-level footage to show for it. | |||
| === National Geographic's 2005 Facial Reconstruction === | |||
| ] | |||
| I would contend to you that the Great Failure of Misplaced Pages is how little truly ends up "on the screen". | |||
| In ], three teams of scientists (Egyptian, French and American), in partnership with the ], were able to develop history's most accurate facial likeness of King Tutankhamun since the ancient embalmers cast his burial mask. | |||
| As I said, you are no longer in the role of content generator soon after your works are exposed to the wonks and twiddlers and procedural whackjobs. You are a content defender and that means that time you could be spending finding new and interesting facts or finding original sources or otherwise making the world a better place (or at least an entry or two) is being spent explaining for the hundredth time that no, this really happened and yes, I got clearance for that photograph, and yes, I believe this shows a neutral point of view, and so on. It's like you get to play one note of your trumpet and then you spend 20 minutes defending it. To anybody who walked in. Just now. | |||
| '''Three teams''' | |||
| I'm sorry, but content creators are relatively rare in this world. Content commentators less so. Content critics are a dime a hundred, and content vandals lurk in every doorway. Misplaced Pages lets the vandals run lose on the creators, while the commentators fill the void with chatter. It is, a failure. | |||
| The Egyptian team worked from 1,700 ] ]s of the Pharaoh's skull. The French and American teams worked plastic molds created from these -- but the Americans were never told ''whom'' they were reconstructing. | |||
| Naturally, the question that arises is what solutions would I suggest to fix this situation. Well, I continue to run my own private collection of data and research and will continue to do so. You know, generating content. I made the mistake of gifting over a photograph to Misplaced Pages back when I thought it would be a success and not a failure, but I will not make that mistake in the future. I may offer the works I have collected and generated essentially for free to the public, but I will not give permission to Misplaced Pages to use them. This actually breaks the Misplaced Pages way, because they need explicit permission to function. It's another fatal flaw; they will not mirror content. They are terrified of copyright violation. They are scared of what might happen if they were to copy over some text in a fair use situation and they were to be sued. So they do nothing. This is why so many links from Misplaced Pages are dead. | |||
| All three teams created ] ]s bearing what decades of ] and ] research show to be the most accurate replications of Tutankhamun's features since his royal artisans prepared the splendors of his tomb. As expected, the Americans -- uninfluenced by foreknowledge -- produced the most "natural" of the three busts, with the other two expressing subtle but perceptible prominences. | |||
| I've seen people point to Linux/Open Source as an example of a Misplaced Pages-like entity accomplishing things, but the fact is that this is a false comparision. The vast, vast, vast majority of open-source projects have a small amount of maintainers and an audience of users who, upon being able to see the code, suggest changes. If maintainers suck, they fork, but more often than not, the maintainers are told of their bugs, of feature requests, and so on, and implement them, sometimes slowly and sometimes not. Incremental improvements, not waking up one day and finding the I/O libraries gone or switched to a neutral point of view. Maybe this is a natural maturation of collaborative projects that Misplaced Pages hasn't gone through yet. Time will tell on that level. | |||
| '''The Afrocentric Non-Controversy''' | |||
| Already, there are many Wikis out there, sites using Misplaced Pages-like software (but interestingly, not often the exact software, choosing instead to implement their own version of the heirarchy and approach) and then collecting knowledge. Misplaced Pages calls them "Knowledge Bases". I call them "Wikipedias". I think over time, people will want to get away from the grey goo of Misplaced Pages's mess and move towards specialized or properly-run Wikis, which contain, not a cabal, but at least a slight barrier to entry that will ensure that the person who is going to undo your hours of work with a few mouse clicks is at least, from some relatively objective standpoint, vaguely entitled to do so. | |||
| In June, 2005, a radical ] roots-empowerment group, in no small measure inspired by ]'s ] additions to '']'', protested both the ]'s and the ]' new, CT-based depictions of the post-adolescent king (above left), on the basis that his skin appeared inaccurately pale. Archaeologists and Egyptologists were quick to point out that no one knows or will ever know the King's true skin color, since ]ns of the era varied in tone. The frequent use of white alabaster and bright gold in Tutankhamun's busts, statuettes and other depictions (as shown), though, appear to negate the notion of him having been dark. Additionally, Ancient Egyptians are generally regarded as master portraitists -- if not in their sometimes naive, perspective-free ink drawings, then certainly in their sculptures. Indeed, some of the artifacts discovered in Tutankhamun's burial vault seem to attest that, had Tutankhamun been "black," there would be no question of it today -- see Plates LXIX, LXXA and LXXB below, as excerpted from Carter's ''The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen'' , which show just how fine and distinguishable the differentiating characteristics of race were rendered. Still, Terry Garcia, National Geographic's executive vice president for mission programs and a presenter at the new traveling exhibit, which hosts all three busts created by the French, American and Egyptian teams, replied to the Afrocentric protests on ], ], with: | |||
| Meanwhile, I will aim my energy in my own direction, knowing that while my tools will be where I left them the previous morning, they'll also still be recognizable as my tools. | |||
| ''"The big variable is skin tone. North Africans, we know today, had a range of skin tones, from light to dark. In this case, we selected a medium skin tone, and we say, quite up front, 'This is midrange.' We'll never know for sure what his exact skin tone was or the color of his eyes with 100 percent certainty. ... "Maybe in the future, people will come to a different conclusion."'' | |||
| =UPDATE: A Criticism of Misplaced Pages Now Exceeding a Scream= | |||
| ==Further reading== | |||
| * Howard Carter, Arthur C. Mace, ''''. Courier Dover Publications, June 1, 1977, ISBN 0486235009 | |||
| ** ''The semi-popular account of the discover and opening of the tomb written by the archaeologist responsible'' | |||
| * C. Nicholas Reeves, ''The Complete Tutankhamun: The King, the Tomb, the Royal Treasure''. London: Thames & Hudson, November 1, 1990, ISBN 0500050589 (hardcover)/ISBN 0500278105 (paperback) | |||
| ** ''Fully covers the complete contents of his tomb'' | |||
| * T. G. H. James, ''Tutankhamun''. New York: Friedman/Fairfax, September 1, 2000, ISBN 1586630326 (hardcover) | |||
| ** ''A large-format volume by the former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the ], filled with colour illustrations of the funerary furnishings of Tutankhamun, and related objects'' | |||
| * Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Sarwat Okasha (Preface), ''Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh''. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1963, ISBN 0821201514 (1976 reprint, hardcover)/ISBN 0140116656 (1990 reprint, paperback) | |||
| ** ''A useful early work covering the environment as well as his tomb'' | |||
| * Thomas Hoving, ''The search for Tutankhamun: The untold story of adventure and intrigue surrounding the greatest modern archeological find''. New York: Simon & Schuster, October 15, 1978, ISBN 0671243055 (hardcover)/ISBN 0815411863 (paperback) | |||
| ** ''This book details a number of interesting anecdotes about the discovery and excavation of the tomb'' | |||
| * Bob Brier, ''The Murder of Tutankhamen: A True Story''. Putnam Adult, April 13, 1998, ISBN 0425166899 (paperback)/ISBN 0399143831 (hardcover)/ISBN 0613289676 (School & Library Binding) | |||
| ** ''This book contains useful information about Tutankhamun's medical condition'' | |||
| * Iorwerth Eiddon Stephen Edwards, ''Treasures of Tutankhamun''. New York: ], 1976, ISBN 0345273494 (paperback)/ISBN 0670727237 (hardcover) | |||
| * Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, ''The Mummy of Tutankhamun: the CT Scan Report'', as printed in ''Ancient Egypt'', June/July 2005. | |||
| Quite a ball has begun rolling in other quarters regarding Misplaced Pages and various criticisms from various quarters. As it is, I enjoy all the verbiage flying around, and reading the varying complaints and defenses that are going on. I have tried some social experiments with Misplaced Pages in the last month on and off (the Documentary takes precedence over everything of course), and intend to eventually report on those observations and findings in a future time, when I am not trying to get a major production out the door. | |||
| ==External links== | |||
| * by Dennis Forbes (KMT 8:3 . FALL . 1997 � KMT Communications) | |||
| * (Mark R Nelson, ''British Medical Journal'' 2002;325:1482-1484) | |||
| * | |||
| * | |||
| * Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs | |||
| * E-Learning application covering ancient Egypt's history and the Pharaoh in detail. | |||
| But I did want to step in and lance some of the growing redundant arguments going on in all the commenting I'm seeing posted, since I'm now seeing my essay used for these arguments pro and con and that's not entirely what I intended. | |||
| ===Appearance/death=== | |||
| * Wired Magazine | |||
| * NPR | |||
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| First of all, Misplaced Pages has, basically, forked. People have been running copies of Misplaced Pages that are following different rules for inclusion and exclusion. The problem is what a lot of projects encounter when they fork, which is brand recognition and brand dilution. Right now, Trillian has it set up that you can use Misplaced Pages to look up terms. That's a lot of weight placed into Misplaced Pages, to the detriment of other approaches that are not getting such attention. Until another project achieves critical mass or a big following that gets such high-profile regard, it's really a one-horse race, and so people are fighting over control of the horse. I think eventually we'll see a Coke-Pepsi situation, where the now-battling factions that are tearing apart Misplaced Pages on the inside will spit off into two major approaches with different goals, and that'll be that. It will be quite ugly, as, really, a lot of Misplaced Pages's internal political structures are. | |||
| {{Pharaoh | Prev=] | Dynasty=] | Next=]}} | |||
| People are defending Misplaced Pages by downplaying its importance. I am seeing an awful lot of arguments by people responding to criticism about Misplaced Pages by going "well, duh, it's just wikipedia", or "don't put so much weight on Misplaced Pages, it is what it is". I call this an "auto-straw man argument" or a "decoy self-ad hominem attack", although of course I'm sure the debate world has a more efficient term. Basically, you respond to criticism about your project by demeaning and debasing it yourself, before anyone else could get a chance to, and then stand there with your arms crossed at your swift hari-kiri in a swordfight. It's a pretty vacuous tactic; obviously Misplaced Pages is an important project, or so much effort would not be expended on it. And if it's important enough that people are literately pouring weeks and months of their lives into it, it's important enough to question basic tenets of how it is functioning. Look around for this argument by fervent Wikipedians. It's scarily everywhere and should be dismissed. | |||
| {{Ancient Egyptians}} | |||
| My primary disagreement with Misplaced Pages's approach is not about expertise, accuracy or quality; it is about procedure energy dispersal. The arguments about Misplaced Pages are being hijacked left and right by indicating this is a battle by the Old Guard against the New Better Way, or that this is a hue and cry by ivory-tower academia trying to prevent a pretender to the Throne of All That Is Good Intellectually. This makes someone who spends a lot of time on Misplaced Pages feel good about themselves (I'm fighting the Power) but my issues as stated in my previous essay were not about whether Misplaced Pages was in competition with other reference sources, but how minor procedural decisions have essentially doomed it on its own. | |||
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| As an off-the-cuff example, Misplaced Pages has a login system, wherein for free and with no effort, you become a "Person", an entity with a name and a history and even your nice little page that you can use to build a fun little world of pictures and information about your work on Misplaced Pages. It is essentially effortless, and it is pretty easy to create a mass of user accounts and foment your opinions in votes and other situations. (This situation is called "sockpuppetry" by active Wikipedians and is a frequent call-out in votes; people who agree with someone they don't like can be accused of being a "sock puppet" and a meta-battle ensues). But this level of unaccountability isn't an adequate situation in the current Misplaced Pages political structure; instead, they allow totally anonymous full-content editing by random users. In other words, no accounting at all. People don't even have to submit to a rubber-stamp login process to begin screwing with entries that someone may have just spent hours getting just right. How could that second person possibly want to continue to be a part of the process? | |||
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| This is what I am talking about; pure procedural defects that I think are fatal to Misplaced Pages's continued usefulness as a reference material, or even as a repository of information. It is why I will be making no further contributions to it beyond meta-interaction. (My social experimentation has had some neat responses and things I can report on, but I've not really been editing anything significant or worthwhile.) Indicating that my essay is about expertise or committes or the rest is kind of missing the point. | |||
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| What's the point? A quick list: | |||
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| There is no barrier to entry to cause wide-spread changes to Misplaced Pages and this is bad. | |||
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| Misplaced Pages allows Votes for Deletion and will, upon one of these votes, erase information that may represent a lot of work and effort, based on shifting and arbitrary standards, and this is bad. | |||
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| Misplaced Pages has a large contingency of users who play the Misplaced Pages Rules of Etiquette and Procedure like they were Role Playing Games and function within them causing havok and personal gratification at the expense of moving the project forward. | |||
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| Academic review, experts vs. non-experts, use of Misplaced Pages as a replacement encyclopedia, and other such high-level concerns are way down the road and not my concern; my concern, and ultimately the reason why I have stopped contributing to the project (and why many others have, too) rests in aspects much closer to Misplaced Pages's core. | |||
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Revision as of 07:23, 23 August 2005
THE GREAT FAILURE OF WIKIPEDIA
I have now tried extended interaction with Misplaced Pages. I consider it a failure. In doing so, I will describe why, instead of just slinking off into the night on my projects. Maybe it will do some good. Maybe it will not. I'm sure, at the end of the day, there must be hundreds like me at this point. Burned, slapped, ejected from the mothership for not following the rules, no matter how intricate and foolish. Let me at least go with some smoke.
The concept of Misplaced Pages is a very engaging and exciting one, especially to someone like myself who spends an awful lot of time collecting information and then presenting it to people. Normally, the work I do is the work that's done. That is, if I don't give much attention to a specific section of my sites, that section will stay static, even if it's in need of improvement. This is not very enjoyable. In collaboration, you will put your tools down for the night, and when you wake up the next morning, more work is done. This is very exciting, very enjoyable. It's why people work in teams in the first place.
Within the social spectrum of information specialists, I am best classifyable as a moody loner. I don't work well with others, at least, that is, people who I don't like. Which is a lot of people. As a result, the vast majority of my sites are one-man operations, meaning that the firehose of my concentration goes from one site to another, giving it some sort of monsoon season of attention and update before firing in another direction. This means that some are truly ghost towns for months at a time. With the additional strike of my documentary, my time is almost completely eaten up, and so the other sites have been suffering.
The idea of Misplaced Pages, on its face, is really neat. A bunch of people can work on an entry in a huge, growing encyclopedia, its subject matter gaining far and wide, and deep, into the whole of human knowledge. Pretty cool stuff to hear about, as you browse the outside of it. You click on some of the more complete entries, and really, you just say to yourself "wow, such a great thing is man" and so on. Maybe you wave a little flag with a logo on it. Misplaced Pages's watchword is entirely collaboration. With a few exceptions, anyone can modify anything in any way, and anyone can undo their modifications, with a full tracking of the history of edits and methods included to keep track of these changes. Exciting stuff.
I had run into people who spoke of Misplaced Pages in a near-fanatical aspect, of how all these hands were forming these great and beautiful entries, and that it was just a matter of running along and having a great time making the whole project better. Naturally, I regarded this with suspicion and hopeful interest. I'm always interested in people doing stuff tangental to the work I do, but I always wonder if it will turn out my work has been for naught, or if in fact I'm still doing something unique and the efforts being expended on the other project are unrelated.
On the other hand, it is an awful lot of work tracking down the history of America Online or John Paul Aleshe or any of the other subjects I am always researching, and a bunch more hands kicking in would be fantastic. So I bought in, for a little while. Signed myself up and started some work.
I should pause for a moment, before I continue further. If you work on Misplaced Pages, I'm just going to make you angry. What I am doing is trying to stop people from working on Misplaced Pages with the idea that they're accomplishing good. I am quite convinced, from the outside, over here, that no amount of suggestions from a lone voice will have any effect. Mobs don't listen. So please, traipse happily back to Misplaced Pages and get cracking; someone is not eschewing a NPOV, even as you read this. Go! Go!
Note, also, that in what I'm writing about, I'm not speaking about the concept of a "Wiki", or indicating that a collaborative tool such as Wiki software is a failure. Confined with a number of limitations on who does what in the context of undoing work, it can certainly work. It's just software, after all. it's the implementation that's the sticking point.
To understand Misplaced Pages, it helps to understand the Usenet FAQ and its unique place in history.
The Usenet FAQ was (and is) to me, one of the true great advantages and creations of the Internet age. Previously, it had always been the case that the same 5 or 10 questions plagued a subgroup, cultural icon, hobby or occupation. These questions, while quite valid, quite reasonable, would be asked so many times that it would eventually be the case that no-one was willing to step up for the thousandth time and explain them. This led, inevitably, to speculation, wrong information and misquoting that would come back to bite everyone later. For no good reason! But the Frequently Asked Questions list fixed that. It allowed all the common questions to be answered, and even for the common controversies to be addressed even if no firm conclusion had been reached. These things grew like crazy in the 1980s and there's massive collections of them out there, still with good information (as long as its a general subject, and not a pop star or the like), and the work of many people coming together to build something good. Like Misplaced Pages is supposed to be.
I would attest that the reason for the success of the FAQ was a lot of collaborators but a short list of people maintaining it. A very large amount of maintainers leads to infighting, procedural foolishness, and ultimately a very slow advancement schedule. There's an interesting book called The Mythical Man-Month that goes into this in some detail, but the basic idea is: the more people you slap into a project that's behind, the more the project will fall behind. Unintuitive, but true. Even in the case of raw horsepower, this becomes the case; you would think that if the basic job (photocopy this paper) was simple enough, the job would go faster with more people, but it doesn't. You end up with people photocopying stuff wrong, collating wrong, bending pages badly, skipping pages... and the errors increase as you smack more people on. And you fall behind.
Now, at the risk of sounding a tad elitist and exclusivist, a low barrier to entry leads to crap. Maybe not initially, but with any amount of quality attached to a project, once it gains some respectability and perhaps fame or infamy, it is then beset upon by crap. By making it really, really easy to change, fundamentally, the nature of a project, you run the risk of the project becoming a battleground. A really, really crappy battleground.
For exhibit A, one merely has to traipse over to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), which is now a sub-company of Amazon. For better or worse, Amazon now defines that body of information's future, and along the way they ended up adding a few nice features (like a very fast search engine, and links to buy the movie if you so choose). But they also added user comments.
Have you seen the user comments there? Choose a movie; I won't bias you. Go find the threads under a $100 million picture, an Oscar-winner or an independent production. Go browse them and bring to me a thread that isn't a garbage pile of one-line off-the-cuff nothings, a handful of withered one-sentence dandelions. Devoid of insight, meaningless to anyone truly trying to find insight into the film at hand. In many cases, these films represent years of work in someone's life, but because tourist3398 can just log right in and ask a completely stupid question, or make an inane comment, they get equal time on that front page for a while. Ultimately, it's insulting to the work done and it adds nothing.
The reviews that accompany each movie are slightly better, because it appears there is a moderation system in place. Reviews that are fundamentally wrong are in place, but they're wrong in a matter of opinion, not often in a matter of being unreadable. You disagree with what's being said, not the brickheaded way it's being said.
The simple fact is, a low barrier to entry and an easy access to an audience tends to lead to problems. A web-based comic named Penny Arcade captured this succinctly, but I want to add that the issue is not that damage will occur immediately, but will occur over time. And eventually, given enough time, damage and low quality will win over high quality, because high quality requires effort and low quality does not.
So we come to Misplaced Pages.
I often get myself into trouble and lose my audience with my metaphors, but so be it. Think of Misplaced Pages as a massive garage where you can build any car you want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else, and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you. There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no anything. In fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't read the manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And leave it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there's no problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're traipsing down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted, covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.
This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove something, you're now in the situation that anybody can change it. And while that's all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way, it's when you realize that the people who are going to change it could have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see where we are.
If you've ever worked in a large company, one where not everyone's name is known by everyone else, you've bumped into these people, who don't know the thing the company makes very well, don't keep on top of new ideas beyond buzzwords, yet wield the kind of power where they can stop and start innovation and positive growth because they simply feel like it. It's pretty heartbreaking stuff and I hope a bunch of you never have to deal with it.
But thanks to Misplaced Pages, you can experience this on a daily basis! College students with too much free time deciding your subject matter is not worth reporting. Bizzare insight from strange lands telling you they didn't think your paragraph was relevant. And ever the bizzare need for a Neutral Point of View. Neutral Point of View is a doctrine about how Misplaced Pages articles should be written. Like wikipedia itself, it is a great idea in theory. In application, of course, it turns into yet another hammer for wonks and whackjobs to beat each other and innocent bystanders.
Misplaced Pages is a relatively new creation, but it already quite beset with the same problems that inhabit any self-styled intellectual collaboration. People make little empires, have their agendas, push through ideas and themes they want, and disregard and delete things they do not. The main difference between this and other similar academic environments is the pure speed at which stuff can happen; you can literately have 30-40 little editing nibbles on a page within a single day. If people are feeling frisky, it can take place in a few hours. This means that you get all the politics and turf war of Ivory Tower Academia without the mitigating barrier of time to cool down or consider. That is, you get a nice big mess.
One of the stated concerns of nanotechnology (wherein a bunch of tiny things make a lot of small changes very quickly, which should sound forever) is the 'grey goo' problem. The concern with grey goo is poorly programmed nanobots will make a bunch of wrong incremental changes to the world and reduce everything to a grey, goo-like substance of all creation. It is not hard, browsing over historical edits to majorly contended Misplaced Pages articles, to see the slow erosion of facts and ideas according to people trying to implement their own idea of neutrality or meaning on top of it. Even if the person who originally wrote a section was well-informed, any huckleberry can wander along and scrawl crayon on it. This does not eventually lead to an improved final entry.
Let's put it another way. In the motion picture industry, there's a term called "on the screen". It's phrased in this way: "is this money going to end up on the screen?". And what is meant by that is that if you pay a bunch of money to rent a spectacular shooting location, then it's going to end up on the screen, that is, people will see the spectacular location and go "wow" and they'll feel the movie is giving them their money's worth. If you pay for the rights to use a location, and then there's a hurricane and your location is wiped out and you didn't get insurance, then you just spent a lot of money, and did no shooting. Your money is not on the screen. Other than on a bunch of reciepts, there will be no trace of the $2 million you spent on that location rental. So there's wasted money, energy and time, and that can add up. This is what plagued movies like Cleopatra, Waterworld and Heaven's Gate, which contained huge behind-the-scenes costs that did not result in footage, meaning the movies were now expensive blockbuster budgets with medium-level footage to show for it.
I would contend to you that the Great Failure of Misplaced Pages is how little truly ends up "on the screen".
As I said, you are no longer in the role of content generator soon after your works are exposed to the wonks and twiddlers and procedural whackjobs. You are a content defender and that means that time you could be spending finding new and interesting facts or finding original sources or otherwise making the world a better place (or at least an entry or two) is being spent explaining for the hundredth time that no, this really happened and yes, I got clearance for that photograph, and yes, I believe this shows a neutral point of view, and so on. It's like you get to play one note of your trumpet and then you spend 20 minutes defending it. To anybody who walked in. Just now.
I'm sorry, but content creators are relatively rare in this world. Content commentators less so. Content critics are a dime a hundred, and content vandals lurk in every doorway. Misplaced Pages lets the vandals run lose on the creators, while the commentators fill the void with chatter. It is, a failure.
Naturally, the question that arises is what solutions would I suggest to fix this situation. Well, I continue to run my own private collection of data and research and will continue to do so. You know, generating content. I made the mistake of gifting over a photograph to Misplaced Pages back when I thought it would be a success and not a failure, but I will not make that mistake in the future. I may offer the works I have collected and generated essentially for free to the public, but I will not give permission to Misplaced Pages to use them. This actually breaks the Misplaced Pages way, because they need explicit permission to function. It's another fatal flaw; they will not mirror content. They are terrified of copyright violation. They are scared of what might happen if they were to copy over some text in a fair use situation and they were to be sued. So they do nothing. This is why so many links from Misplaced Pages are dead.
I've seen people point to Linux/Open Source as an example of a Misplaced Pages-like entity accomplishing things, but the fact is that this is a false comparision. The vast, vast, vast majority of open-source projects have a small amount of maintainers and an audience of users who, upon being able to see the code, suggest changes. If maintainers suck, they fork, but more often than not, the maintainers are told of their bugs, of feature requests, and so on, and implement them, sometimes slowly and sometimes not. Incremental improvements, not waking up one day and finding the I/O libraries gone or switched to a neutral point of view. Maybe this is a natural maturation of collaborative projects that Misplaced Pages hasn't gone through yet. Time will tell on that level.
Already, there are many Wikis out there, sites using Misplaced Pages-like software (but interestingly, not often the exact software, choosing instead to implement their own version of the heirarchy and approach) and then collecting knowledge. Misplaced Pages calls them "Knowledge Bases". I call them "Wikipedias". I think over time, people will want to get away from the grey goo of Misplaced Pages's mess and move towards specialized or properly-run Wikis, which contain, not a cabal, but at least a slight barrier to entry that will ensure that the person who is going to undo your hours of work with a few mouse clicks is at least, from some relatively objective standpoint, vaguely entitled to do so.
Meanwhile, I will aim my energy in my own direction, knowing that while my tools will be where I left them the previous morning, they'll also still be recognizable as my tools.
UPDATE: A Criticism of Misplaced Pages Now Exceeding a Scream
Quite a ball has begun rolling in other quarters regarding Misplaced Pages and various criticisms from various quarters. As it is, I enjoy all the verbiage flying around, and reading the varying complaints and defenses that are going on. I have tried some social experiments with Misplaced Pages in the last month on and off (the Documentary takes precedence over everything of course), and intend to eventually report on those observations and findings in a future time, when I am not trying to get a major production out the door.
But I did want to step in and lance some of the growing redundant arguments going on in all the commenting I'm seeing posted, since I'm now seeing my essay used for these arguments pro and con and that's not entirely what I intended.
First of all, Misplaced Pages has, basically, forked. People have been running copies of Misplaced Pages that are following different rules for inclusion and exclusion. The problem is what a lot of projects encounter when they fork, which is brand recognition and brand dilution. Right now, Trillian has it set up that you can use Misplaced Pages to look up terms. That's a lot of weight placed into Misplaced Pages, to the detriment of other approaches that are not getting such attention. Until another project achieves critical mass or a big following that gets such high-profile regard, it's really a one-horse race, and so people are fighting over control of the horse. I think eventually we'll see a Coke-Pepsi situation, where the now-battling factions that are tearing apart Misplaced Pages on the inside will spit off into two major approaches with different goals, and that'll be that. It will be quite ugly, as, really, a lot of Misplaced Pages's internal political structures are.
People are defending Misplaced Pages by downplaying its importance. I am seeing an awful lot of arguments by people responding to criticism about Misplaced Pages by going "well, duh, it's just wikipedia", or "don't put so much weight on Misplaced Pages, it is what it is". I call this an "auto-straw man argument" or a "decoy self-ad hominem attack", although of course I'm sure the debate world has a more efficient term. Basically, you respond to criticism about your project by demeaning and debasing it yourself, before anyone else could get a chance to, and then stand there with your arms crossed at your swift hari-kiri in a swordfight. It's a pretty vacuous tactic; obviously Misplaced Pages is an important project, or so much effort would not be expended on it. And if it's important enough that people are literately pouring weeks and months of their lives into it, it's important enough to question basic tenets of how it is functioning. Look around for this argument by fervent Wikipedians. It's scarily everywhere and should be dismissed.
My primary disagreement with Misplaced Pages's approach is not about expertise, accuracy or quality; it is about procedure energy dispersal. The arguments about Misplaced Pages are being hijacked left and right by indicating this is a battle by the Old Guard against the New Better Way, or that this is a hue and cry by ivory-tower academia trying to prevent a pretender to the Throne of All That Is Good Intellectually. This makes someone who spends a lot of time on Misplaced Pages feel good about themselves (I'm fighting the Power) but my issues as stated in my previous essay were not about whether Misplaced Pages was in competition with other reference sources, but how minor procedural decisions have essentially doomed it on its own.
As an off-the-cuff example, Misplaced Pages has a login system, wherein for free and with no effort, you become a "Person", an entity with a name and a history and even your nice little page that you can use to build a fun little world of pictures and information about your work on Misplaced Pages. It is essentially effortless, and it is pretty easy to create a mass of user accounts and foment your opinions in votes and other situations. (This situation is called "sockpuppetry" by active Wikipedians and is a frequent call-out in votes; people who agree with someone they don't like can be accused of being a "sock puppet" and a meta-battle ensues). But this level of unaccountability isn't an adequate situation in the current Misplaced Pages political structure; instead, they allow totally anonymous full-content editing by random users. In other words, no accounting at all. People don't even have to submit to a rubber-stamp login process to begin screwing with entries that someone may have just spent hours getting just right. How could that second person possibly want to continue to be a part of the process?
This is what I am talking about; pure procedural defects that I think are fatal to Misplaced Pages's continued usefulness as a reference material, or even as a repository of information. It is why I will be making no further contributions to it beyond meta-interaction. (My social experimentation has had some neat responses and things I can report on, but I've not really been editing anything significant or worthwhile.) Indicating that my essay is about expertise or committes or the rest is kind of missing the point.
What's the point? A quick list:
There is no barrier to entry to cause wide-spread changes to Misplaced Pages and this is bad.
Misplaced Pages allows Votes for Deletion and will, upon one of these votes, erase information that may represent a lot of work and effort, based on shifting and arbitrary standards, and this is bad.
Misplaced Pages has a large contingency of users who play the Misplaced Pages Rules of Etiquette and Procedure like they were Role Playing Games and function within them causing havok and personal gratification at the expense of moving the project forward.
Academic review, experts vs. non-experts, use of Misplaced Pages as a replacement encyclopedia, and other such high-level concerns are way down the road and not my concern; my concern, and ultimately the reason why I have stopped contributing to the project (and why many others have, too) rests in aspects much closer to Misplaced Pages's core.