Wikipedia Blowup

Source

Fox News is running a story about the self-imposed demotion of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. The change at the helm is the latest development in efforts to deal with the large library of pornographic images that appear on the online encyclopedia and related sites.

It turns out that a number of big-name Wikipedia sponsors like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! finally got around to asking why Wales et al thought it was a good idea to make hard-core porn readily available to middle-school children.

Wales had shrugged off just these sorts of comments and questions in the past. When the guys with the big pocket books said their own PR could be affected, however, the chief of the world's largest collaborative online effort made an executive decision and began purging thousands of porn images from the various Wikipedia sites.

Wrote Wales, "We were about to be smeared in all media as hosting hardcore pornography and doing nothing about it. Now, the correct storyline is that we are cleaning up. I'm proud to have made sure that storyline broke the way it did, and I'm sorry I had to step on some toes to make it happen."

The outraged yells and protests from the Wikipedia editorial community erupted on cue.

There was the predictable warbling about the lack of fair play inherent in Wale's "unilateral, king-like massive action." There was also the objection to the lack of egalitarian considerations and the betrayal of the essence of the open user-generated online encyclopedia.

In my view the quotation that sheds the brightest spotlight on the puerile minds running amok at Wikipedia is this one:

"By rush-imposing his views and decisions on people who are not out of the debate yet, he is browbeating their inner self, ignoring their beliefs and opinions, discarding the value of the Other."

Take note: this is everyday banter for the Wikipedia editorial community -- they talk that way all the time. These reprobates are concerned that their degenerate pet projects are actually being treated as miscreant afflictions. They have been campaigning for their distorted notions to be normalized in popular society; they erode and finally eradicate the natural modesty and healthy reserve of their audience; they despise innocence and purity. Wales, for all his faults, had sufficient business acumen to at least try to give his enterprise the appearance of reasonableness. With Jimmy off the conductor's stand, the crazies at the Wikipedia keyboards have no smiling front man to divert attention from their morbidly sophomoric and self-indulgent rants and digressions.

A result of the blowup is that the operations of the virtual giant are in jeopardy. From the Fox article: "By Thursday the discussion had devolved into an all-out war pitting board members against board members, and with top leadership sparring with lower level administrators."

Indeed: the Revolution eats her children.