It seems to go this way often in several different arenas. Policing spam on the web is a great idea. People who volunteer to help reduce the amount of spam should be applauded for their efforts.
The admin team and the creators of wikipedia are also to be applauded for buiolding such a great information portal. Many volunteers put in countless hours to make that a great project.
The same goes for those editors who started and worked on DMOZ years ago.
But then the same thing begins to happen. Some of these volunteers for some reason begin to believe they are all powerful and some begin to weild that power to suit their own agenda rather than for the reasons they began volunteering for.
Many DMOZ editors began adding their friends websites to the open directory project and making sure that some websites they did not like were not added. There were rumors at one time about editors offering to add sites if you paid them. I cannot verify that any editor was caught doing that and if they were you can bet they were banned immediately.
And look what has happened. DMOZ is pretty much outdated and not worth the effort anymore since they take so long to add a site.
Some spam police or anti-spam programs began nobly then became power hungry as well. Some even doled out “fines” to take your site off the blacklists even if you could prove you were not a spammer.
Now we have this story about wikipedia;
Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia
By Cade Metz in the RegisterControversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.
Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia “ruling clique” grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list’s existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.
“I’ve never seen the Wikipedia community as angry as they are with this one,” says Charles Ainsworth, a Japan-based editor who’s contributed more feature articles to the site than all but six other writers. “I think there was more hidden anger and frustration with the ‘ruling clique’ than I thought and Durova’s heavy-handed action and arrogant refusal to take sufficient accountability for it has released all of it into the open.”
Bang! Bang!
Jimbo’s silver banhammer
Came down upon her HEAD
OK, seriously, this is why Democracy can’t be trusted. There is no “egalitarian” system in the world that will remain egalitarian for two minutes once one person has been appointed as overseer of the “rules.” The rules will invariably be interpreted to favor the appointed, who will use their “experience” as evidence that they should remain the appointed. Ultimately, democratic systems fail because of their own perceived “strengths,” which are themselves false positives.
Unfortunate but true.
I have experienced this first hand. I wrote an article about a year ago questioning the validity and the value of Wikipedia, when some rogue editor decided that Matt Cutts did not deserve his own page in Wikipedia.
I had been a committed part time editor at the Wikipedia for just over one year at the time. The article was titled, “How Important Is Wikipedia In The Grand Scheme Of Things?” and can be read at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com/free_content/db/p/how-important-is-wikipedia.shtml
Within one week of the publication of this article, someone decided that I did not deserve to be an editor at Wikipedia anymore. My account was promptly killed at Wikipedia… They slammed the door in my face.
I guess their message is that they are always right and they do not tolerate opposite points of view.
I’ve had trouble with wikipedia myself. There is a clique there that believes they alone know what is or is not important to everyone else in the world.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Too bad those at wikipedia don’t read this quote.
I’ve come up with a process that uses the default WYSIWYG editor (or a free service), 1 plugin and 1 CSS class to post any type of code into your Wordpress blog.