Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by El Sandifer (talk | contribs) at 20:50, 18 November 2007 (Leaving Misplaced Pages). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

There is not presently an effective way to work on this project. Too many people with too many senses of what it means to "write an encyclopedia" collide, and while the article space has means to regulate these differences (NPOV, V, etc) there is no effective means of ordering the creation of policy, and as a result no effective way, in the end, of continuing to order the article space. The failure, nearly two years after the Seigenthaler disaster, to come up with any effective way of writing articles on living people is emblematic of this. So is the continued failure to come up with useful standards for fiction articles that elevate them beyond fannish wankery, or the continued failure to figure out how to deal with the fact that Misplaced Pages is big enough to have real world consequences for things.

In short, there is no way left to think programmatically about how to improve the project. We are left hoping that Jimbo's increasingly distracted attention will provide a major push for something - as was needed to even fix the basic problems of BLPs. That's not a sustainable model, and given that my interests in Misplaced Pages have long been as much (if not more) in its meta and policy levels than in its individual articles, the lack of any sustainable model to make progress there leaves me feeling very much out in the cold.

I do not take this as a failure of the wiki model for writing articles. But I cannot find any persuasive evidence that the wiki/consensus model functions on this scale for organizing the project. Instead, article number grows dramatically without a corresponding increase in quality, the methods of improving articles clog up with process, mindless and automated thinking leads to articles getting dismantled in the name of improvement, and it is impossible to usefully have discussions about how to prevent any of this because people are utterly hung up on models of research that do not have any resemblance to anything that actually leads to writing good articles.

In the end, despite a fearsome number of edits in the Misplaced Pages namespace, I am hard pressed to identify anything substantive I have accomplished in that realm since 2005 when I wrote WP:DICK. And since I've never been a prolific article writer (less so since excessively arduous sourcing requirements got put into place) I can't really point to accomplishments elsewhere.

The project may not have failed, but I seem to have.

So I'm gone. I've changed my password to a random string, and I don't anticipate returning at this juncture.

Best of luck to you all - I still believe firmly in the principles underlying this project. But I don't believe that it's set up in such a way that my skills are useful to it. It seems mostly to drive me to distraction and to anger. And that's worse than unproductive. Phil Sandifer (talk) 20:50, 18 November 2007 (UTC)