I'm well aware of the nature of Projects and their Council. The problems with those are actually even worse than you describe, since they are also often used as platforms to exercise ownership and organise canvassing. Perhaps the worst recent example, one which verged on a complete co-option of the wider community as some kind of sub-cult, is the recent war over medical videos.ericbarbour wrote:I will give you that SOME of those portals have legitimate uses. But most tend to be fanboy jack-off sessions that never end--they are just forgotten.
Wikiprojects are even WORSE. Bet you didn't know there's a "Council", that appears to do nothing but be a bureaucratic shitfest. They have semi-coherent blathering "ROOLZ" and all kinds of pointless overhead. They THINK there are 833 "active" projects. Unfortunately if the shits bothered to look at any of them, they would discover than 90% or more are basically dead and drifting hulks.....
Their talkpage is a catch-all squabble, just like most other "offishul" noticeboards. They claim at the top there are 2,600 Wikiprojects, but admit they don't know how many are active or who is participating--or even which is the most popular (it's still Military History if you go by noticeboard traffic).
And there you are, clear proof that Wikipedia generates useless bureaucracy. And refuses to deal with it openly.
(What is this shit?? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... s_in_media)
The issue at hand is the difference between practice and theory, reality and potential. These attempts by the Wikipediots to get rid of anything that is not 'working' in some misguided belief that it will produce a dividend in their 'core' interest, is the whole point. It is self-defeating and indeed nonsensical. Their arguments for binning Portals specifically, literally make no sense.
When did anyone ever hear of a scandal or massive time-sink emerging from the Portal space? Up until this pointless proposal, in terms of actual drama to drama potential ratio, Portals have got to be the best thing to have ever happened to Wikipedia. Their cost-benefit ratio must be huge, largely because it seems like they don't involve much beurocracy, and maintaining them is surely a piece of piss for any editor who is deeply immersed in the topic (and that person is also most likely to be a heavy lifter in the articles themselves).
If they ever choose to evolve their community in the direction of recognising topic specialists as a thing, people who are entitled to more say than randoms over a specified domain, then quite obviously their first duty would be to be the keeper of the keys to the Portal, as well as probably grand Chief Poobah of the Project.
This current trend, part of Wikipedia's panic-decline phase undoubtedly, the purge of what they see as worthless orbital junk (and Outlines and Projects will surely be next) belies their total failure to appreciate what Wikipedia's theroetical model actually is, namely collaboration. Understood in practice to be for any given topic, one or two heavy lifters, with sporadic help from others who all have their specialisms. Done well, this requires coordination. Projects are the factory floor, but Portals are their shop window, noticeboard and recruiting office.
When they've binned the Portals, and the Outlines, and the Projects, and indeed every last thing that meets these bizarre definitions of what is useless and distracting, and it still doesn't result in any improvement in how well or even efficiently they create and maintain the core business of articles, what then?
Everything on Wikipedia is basically a fanboy jackoff session, it's a byproduct of not paying editors and not providing any other legitimate reason for smart and sane people to contribute. That's kind of the point.
If Wikipedia was transformed tomorrow, becoming the exclusive domain of serious and smart people with a genuine desire to build a respected encyclopedia, then I cannot think of a single reason why they would not be enthusiastic advocates of Portals and Projects (but I have no doubt they'd bin Outlines as useless duplication).
As many people in that debate have pointed out, if the criteria for getting rid of something on Wikipedia on the grounds it must be extraneous if it is little read and poorly maintained, that has serious implications, describing as it does much of the actual content!
