The Purity Of Our Precious Bits

My Wikipedia user page now holds my retirement notice and three short essays that explain my departure, two concerning the Jews and Communism fiasco which was satisfactorily resolved, and one concerning GamerGate, which was not. They predict just what’s happening now: an organized professional cadre can and will dominate any unguarded Wikipedia page simply by swamping it with seemingly-competent, apparently well-meaning editors who share a common goal. Against professionals, volunteers seldom stand a chance; the volunteer must appeal to reason, the professional just calls Howard in the London office and asks him to get to work.

I do have a sneaking fondness for these notes, especially the nomination for deletion of Jews & Communism. In my line of work, you don’t generally get much call for this sort of rhetoric. It’s fun to take a hand now and then.

Some editors take exception to these essays, which are critical of Wikipedia, and want to delete them. That’s fine with me: I could move them here. This page gets lots more readers, and I bet I could find pages with lots more than this page sees. This would break some WikiLinks, of course, but that’s a drop in the ocean.

But what’s on the User Page of the fellow who wants to delete my essays? Chiefly a picture of a young woman who, it seems, has misplaced both the top of her bathing suit and her contact lenses, and who is in consequences crawling about the pavement in search of one or the other. Now, that’s crucial to the project, isn’t it.