It has been a while since I have alighted here. The wiki world isn't improving any. The promising reality of true social networking, openness, sharing and truly free information is something else very different in reality. At the end of the day, human nature will out and competitveness, greed, lopsided interpretations of what "being wiki" means and selfishness are what wikis truly boil down to. That's for the wikis that even survive.

How can a wiki be free and supportive of the desire to share human knowledge freely when it slaps the very people who give of their time, abilities, ideas and help? The phenomenon of the drive for factual accuracy undermines the very soul of creativity and innovation on wikis. Original content is viewed with suspicion and even hatred, viewed with the same fear that traditionalists fear the oncoming technological changes of a new age. Are wikis stagnating in their own muck so soon?

And just what does it mean to be a "member of a wiki community"? On some wikis, anonymous users are considered a little higher than dirt; on others, they are banned from all but reading. It is argued that anonymous users are detractors from the goal of openness. This is ironical since the reality is that the nastiest, most perverse and most disruptive edits made by anons are generally made by logged out disgruntled community members and even admins who hide behind the mask of anonymity. To reach this stage of infuriation, just what has the wiki community done to one of its members? Plenty, I can reassure you, and none of it positive, supportive or caring. Even the most benevolent actions can result in ousting decent wiki conributors when the leadership team fails to contemplate the consequences of its actions long-term and more broadly. Or to consider the impact of key omissions to act and to support where needed.

How would you feel if someone told you this: "You are not very wiki." Or, "You are not wiki-spirited." This is the wiki equivalent to shaming, or pointing the bone at a contributor for not toeing some wiki line.  It is considered to be a fair game comment despite the fact that the assumption laden statement is always without fail a subjective assessment by the person making it. What that person means by this statement is basically: "I don't like what you're doing. It doesn't conform to my idea of how this wiki ought to be run. So I shall slap you with un-wikiness." It really stings when it comes from a paid staff member of a wiki too. Yet saying "You are not wiki-spirited" is very un-wiki itself and staff inability to grasp this demonstrates the limitations of their true world experience and interactive abilities. But go figure. It seems the leadership knows best.

I am tired of trying to fathom the point of the wikis I have spent time on. I once believed in them and their point of existence. I now suspect they are time-sucking vortexes that destroy liberally-minded, caring and giving people who have social neuroses but feel they can still give to society via an easy-to-use medium. In turn, wikis give ultra-conservative, irrational perfectionists the opportunity to attack their liberal foes by tearing down the utopian online ideals with tiresomely constructed arguments about factual accuracies, referencing and standards, as if humanity thrives on such esoteric intellecutalism. Nobody really gets what is going on in those wikis; they're still very much the Wild West and they're still very much an unknown quantity. Enter if you dare but remember that exiting may be much harder than any other addiction you might fall prey to in life. They're just like that.