Oden

Retired

This user is no longer active on Wikipedia.

Retirement

Regretfully I have decided to retire this account. Here is why:

Incivility on the part of others

I have suffered harassment several times when removing copyrighted content. One editor created three puppet accounts and vandalized by userspace repeatedly (like here). I've also had the dubious pleasure of users creating vandal accounts with descriptive terminology appended to my username (User:Odenass, User:Odinass).

The way my contributions have been portrayed makes it sound as if I see deleting images as an end. They are at best means to an end, then end being a free encyclopedia.

Other thoughts

No one starts editing Wikipedia with the intention of becoming a part of some large bureaucracy. Of course Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy and we should be bold and ignore all rules, but somewhere along the way it seems like process has become more important than content.

There are so many rules that more experienced editors can be likened to traffic cops, directing traffic (content) rather than creating it. No wonder most of the text in our articles is written by anonymous users, the registered ones are busy doing all kinds of mundane tasks, and once you have seen all the flaws it is hard to go back to writing again. From being an inclusionist when I first came here, my philosphy has shifted to incrementalism and finally to deletionism.

There are never any easy solutions for difficult problems (here are a few other problems: permanent link). If I could nominate one page to WP:MFD, it would be WP:RFC (I doubt that I would be successful, and I would only end up making a point. For those who are interested my RfC it can be found here.)

It is also healthy to do a reality check once in a while, like here. If you start thinking that this place and what happens here feels like the most important thing in the world, the answer is that it is not.

Incivility on my part

As for any incivility on my part on January 15, 2007, it is of course disruptive and inexcusable. I have only one question though: quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Bye (for now)

I will probably drop in from time to time and make the odd edit as an anonymous editor. After all, it is the anonymous editors who actually write the majority of the text of this encyclopedia, and since anonymous editors cannot upload any images (or create new pages) I doubt I will get into any more hot water! How nice it would be to be able to get back to writing articles again... :-)