I want to thank Chaz for reminding me a few days ago about Wikipedia.

It's still too raw of a subject for me to be completely objective about, but it's something that needs to be discussed since whenever you google something nowadays, Wikipedia is the first thing you get most of the time usually due to their heavy google bombing.

I figured it's only fair to explain why I am so opposed to Wikipedia and how it is run, so I wanted to share the part of my story on Wikipedia that irrevocably turned my opinion that way.

To begin, let get some of the terminology out of the way.

If you make an account on Wikipedia, you're given something called a "user page", basically a home page for your account. Some users have made things called userboxes: little boxes with opinions or classifications in them to help users express themselves.

On New Year's Day 2006, an administrator from Chicago named Kelly Martin decided to delete hundreds of userboxes just because he/she (Kelly is in between genders), felt like it, despite the fact that there is a process in place to delete things from Wikipedia, and as an administrator, Kelly should have followed those processes more closely due to his/her position of responsibility, but actually enlisted other administrators in the deletions.

That went on for a few weeks and became known as the "Great 2006 New Year's Day Userbox Purge", and ironically enough, people actually made userboxes to commemorate the occasion.  Martin was brought to something called a "Request for Comment" which in theory is supposed to be the initial process of Wikipedia's judicial process, but 99% of the time is just a place where everybody yells at each other.

However, the battlelines that had been boiling beneath the surface now more volatile than ever, as supporters of userboxes claimed them to be forms of free speech and ways for the Wikipedian community to help express itself and understand the inherent biases we all have, while critics of userboxes claimed them to be distractions and perversions of what Wikipedia "should be", as they believe that userboxes made Wikipedia into little more than a glorified MySpace.

The irony and hostility continued when Jimbo Wales, the Dictator King of Wikipedia, tried to step in by saying that userboxes are bad, and then  people made userboxes in support of Wales' statement against userboxes, but they didn't reach a peak when one user decided to test the limits of free speech by making a user box for people who wanted to classify themselves as pedophiles.

Of course, nobody classified themselves as a pedophile. Nobody except for one user named Joey Ramoney. In mid-february, Joey said he was 16 years old, he had just made an account, and had no clue that hundreds of people were going nuts about this issue, but he was about to learn.  

Almost immediately, anti-userbox administrators blocked Joey, and almost immediately after that happened, pro-userbox administrators unblocked him, and the blocking and unblocking continued for days.

Finally, King Wales blocked Joey, despite the fact that he was breaking two rules he had made by fiat: "Assume Good Faith", and "give newcomers the benefit of the doubt". And there was only one person willing to stand up to Jimbo's blantant disrespect for the laws of the website: me.

I unblocked Ramoney, and in return, Wales unilaterally blocked him again and stripped me of my "powers" as an administrator.

Things like that are the norm rather than the exception on Wikipedia. What you know or how you act is immaterial in comparison to who you know and suck up to. And it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the 9th most visited website in the world and a source of information for millions of people despite the fact that it's wrong far more often than other encyclopedias and it claims to be "open source" despite the elitist power structure that purges people and things and ideas on a regular basis like Kelly Martin and Jimbo Wales did back in early 2006.

Josef Stalin changed the USSR from a backwater to a superpower enslaving his people and keeping them in a state of fear, and Jimbo Wales has done the exact same thing to turn Wikipedia into one of the world's most influential websites.