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Wikipedia is run by a group of longtime editors who effectively assert ownership over the project by abusing the consensus policy to prevent any change to other policies, guidelines, and norms that are in need of reform. Even when the policies are not being abused, consensus-building here is effectively cat-herding. Since this effectively requires editors who wish to edit to be subjected to rules that are not functional and that they have no ability to change, there does not appear to be much of a reason to continue to participate in this project.

Also, many longtime editors also feel no need to cite policies or guidelines in edit summaries when they revert your contributions or contest them on talk pages—despite supposed community norms for determining consensus through discussions and editing and the recommended practices of other supplemental project pages to do so—while other longtime editors abuse the non-bureaucracy policy to take a broader interpretation of policies than what the letter of the policies suggest the larger principles of the policies actually are—despite the fifth pillar of the project and the editing policy's requirement to preserve content unless it truly cannot be fixed—which both strongly suggest that your contributions are not valued just because some longtime editors don't like them. All of the criticisms that could be made of Wikipedia's self-governance processes and talk page discussions remain just as true in 2026 as they were 15 to 20 years earlier.

The only solution to Wikipedia's internal problems would be for the Wikimedia Foundation to put the project's self-governance procedures into a kind of receivership, but they're never going to do so. Besides, research on digital divides has shown that greater equality of internet access has not reduced knowledge divides, so continuing to participate in a project to give free access to the sum of all human knowledge must not be a worthwhile use of time (if it ever was). I've also concluded that that while Wikipedia could have an on-net positive impact on society and the public sphere (the latter of which was the main possibility of the project that kept me participating), its dysfunctional norms will prevent it from ever doing so (much like the rest of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 as well). Moreover, considering that Wikipedia is being used to build large language models, I don't know why I should continue to contribute to a project whose product is being used to develop a technology that has the potential to puts millions of people permanently out of work and cause various other problems for society that will probably never be redressed.

Your contributions are missed. Alexandraaaacs1989 (talk) 07:24, 19 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]