the fanatical and anal retentive policies of the wikipedia editors are destroying the website

It's supposed to be a serious secondary source. Clearly, that's not what you want to use it for.

Who says? It's supposed to be driven by the community. I want to use it like a vast collection of semi-reliable trivia, and I suspect that's what most users want. But several editors at the top, for no particular reason, are making dictates (like the one you just made) about what wikipedia "is" and "is not" without listening to the needs or wishes of the majority of the users.

Wikipedia's an encyclopedia, and that's what it has always aspired to be. And a "vast collection of semi-reliable trivia" is not an encyclopedia.

I know adults who use Wikipedia with their children on school projects, and (as you may be aware) the news media generally comes down hard on Wikipedia whenever it proves to be accurate. Wikipedia says it's an encyclopedia, so those expectations are quite reasonable.

You may be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars particularly the first pillar. Click on some links. Look at how old some of the core policies, which you believe are imposed by "several editors at the top," actually are.

I never said that the editors at the top are new, or anything. The time of the policy doesn't matter at all to the discussion; the editors have said, on one hand, "wikipedia is run by the community; make it good." And on the other hand, they say: "Anything you publish that we disagree is noteworthy, or worthwhile, or interesting, will be put up for quick deletion and nothing anyone can say or do will sway us because the community has no say in the matter and we don't care." A perfect example of this is the now former article on slashdot subculture. When I was new to slashdot, this article (that sourced all of the comments that started the in-jokes, was well written, high quality, and detailed) was extremely useful to me. However, it was deleted despite the desires of most people, and merged into a much crappier article, with a majority of the information removed, and no sighting of the slashdot threads and comments that backed up anything in the article. I had nothing to do with this article; but the day it was removed was the day wikipedia died for me. I signed out of my account, and have almost never been back. Wikipedia is not run by the community, it is two-faced, it's policies reflect the desires of only a small cult of big name users, and the average wikipedia drone would rather spend time trashing britanica while trying to be *exactly* like them, throwing out everything that made wikipedia wonderful.

nobody needs an article about your dog's crazy antics

i agree there should be standards for what qualifies for an article, keeps the site proper

Wikipedia's run by people trying to write an encyclopedia, and its core policies aren't negotiable because they're what's necessary to make an encyclopedia.

Users who don't want to make an encyclopedia--who, in other words, reject Wikipedia's basic principles--aren't part of the community of editors in any meaningful sense, so I don't see why you think they should have the right to make exceptions to policy for their favorite articles.

The encyclopedia comes before the community.

If you don't like it, start your own website. You can even copy over all of Wikipedia's content if you want, and I'm sure you could even get ask to undelete a copy of the slashdot article for you.

Hmmm, I might do this. Is there anywhere I can get a database that includes all deleted articles? I have the technical ability and money to do this; a wikipedia mirror that disallows all deletes. sounds useful.

Yes, but that's not the only thing destroying Wikipedia. There's plenty of things wrong with it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks

Fanatical and anal retentive editors? Have you ever been to Fluther.com ?

I agree 100%, they're a bunch of jerks