Chris Bennett

Retired

This user is no longer active on Wikipedia.

I have received an offline request to explain why I retired. Here is a copy of my response, in case anyone else is curious:

Well, WP is a cult, like Facebook, and I've never really drunk the Kool-Aid.

The fundamental reason I quit is that the overriding rule in WP really is "verifiability not truth". My potential value was to contribute some expertise I happened to have acquired about some obscure topics. But ultimately WP is not about imparting knowledge, it's about aggregating the "wisdom of the crowd". There is a lot of overlap, which is why WP is actually useful for many things, but they are not the same thing, and I am not interested in being an aggregator.

The details of the trigger don’t really matter, but FYI. The last straw was a WP administrator who decided to censure me for "ownership" of an article I had contributed to in 2006 and mostly just monitored since then to keep out the obviously harmful. The accusation was made in the course of a discussion of an obviously baseless proposal to delete this article, moved by an editor who actually admitted he was out to troll me -- and nobody called him on it. Nobody bothered to explain how I had supposedly acted as an "owner"; my best guess is that it relates to a dispute I had on the Talk page in 2008 with a particularly pig-headed IP editor, which consumes much of the Talk page space, and which was resolved by a WP admin in my favour at the time.

As you probably know, "ownership" (equated by WP with being a dog in the manger) is one of the deadliest of sins in WP. This admin decided to keep the article but censured me for "ownership", not that my behaviour, good or bad, had any relevance to the issue at hand. The admin made no effort to discuss it with me, and didn't even grant me the courtesy of notifying me personally that (s)he had censured me. I don’t believe (s)he made any effort to investigate the charge, but just assumed the accusation was true and passed sentence accordingly. When WP admins are that bad there is very little hope.

Chris