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blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 29 December 2009

The Wikipedia of today is not the same entity it was 5 years ago – everything grows and changes. They’ve had staff churn, moved locations, and gone through several dozen rounds of what I labelled “information fads”; changes in policy and outlook on information classification mean that there have been what could sensationally call pogroms but in fact are just slow paper-pushing of other peoples’ work to show you’re “improving” wikipedia. I’ve watched the entries of living people fossilize and the Wikimedia Foundation add what is essentially a hotline to complain about bad changes to them, and I’ve watched the locking down of entries increase dramatically, like all tools of control tend to. Through all of this, the project has survived, but the missing fact in all the lauding of Wikipedia is that when you turn collections of information into living things, those living things have an actual life cycle, and at the end of the life cycle is decay, irrelevancy, and destruction. Jason Scott

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