User:Rivertorch
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[edit] THE RIVERTORCH FAQ*
* Okay, so it's actually an IAQ.
Who are you? I am Rivertorch. I come in peace.
Where are you? On the North American continent of a small blue planet, third from its star, in a solar system near the edge of the Milky Way.
What are you? Stardust. Billion-year-old carbon.
Why are you (here)? I have three honest answers to that: one sounds grandiose, another sappy, and the third pathetic. Therefore, I decline to answer except to reassure anyone who may be frightened: I mean no harm.
What are your areas of expertise? Ummm . . . I'm sure I have some. Could you rephrase the question?
Are there any topics about which you might have more knowledge than the average person? Nice job. You avoided ending the sentence in a preposition without making the sentence sound pretentious.
Just answer the question, okay? [sotto voce: I see we have issues with accepting compliments graciously] I'll try. I'm not sure what constitutes "the average person," but I did just manage to slip the comma inside the quotation marks, where it belongs—and that's about as radical as I'll ever get at Wikipedia.
You're boring everyone. No one is reading this far. Answer the question, please! D-mmit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a Wikipedian! No, wait, that's relevant. Really. I know more about Star Trek than most people. I'm hardly an expert, however. I'm not even a Trekkie/Trekker.
Anything else? Ditto for I Love Lucy.
TV shows. How impressive. And Green Acres.
The opiate of the masses. The Munsters.
This is deteriorating. What else are you interested in? Truth, justice, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, human rights, global warming, the environment, peace, diplomacy, nonviolent protest, harmony, pastoral and sublime landscapes, risky art, poetry, music, landscape architecture, Italian Renaissance gardens and their water features, high-end audio, loudspeaker design, mental health, hypnogogic and hypnopompic experiences, astral projection, the myth of sustainable development, hypocrisy, Robert Silverberg, Walt Whitman, typography and type design, whole grains, lemmings, Mac OS, Claude Monet, airliners, pipe organs, Frederick Douglass, obscure and defunct soft drinks, dialects of English, Quetzalcoatl, Mexican pyramids, Egyptian pyramids, metaphysics, haunted houses, ergonomics, Tolkien and Lewis (the books, not the films), Duesenbergs, Bösendorfers, selective nonconformism, education reform, medicine and certain forms of alternative medicine, waterfalls, crocodilians, elephants, wind power, Emmylou Harris, Leonard Cohen, media consolidation, dark matter, the rise of Christian fascism, the fall of Humpty Dumpty—
All right! Stop. Thank you. You have lots of interests. Yes.
But they're all over the map. And you're too lazy to code the links. True, but I may get around to it eventually.
You're a procrastinator. You've been lurking at Wikipedia for years. Sorry, was that a question?
You've been lurking for years but just recently registered. Why? I wanted to do more substantive edits than the minor proofreading I've done for a long time, and I figured a username is a happier thing than an IP.
A happier thing, huh? Yeah. Happiness should always be the goal.
Anything else you'd care to say? Well, I would like to say that I'm really not very comfortable creating a user page, but I wanted my name to turn blue.
[Months pass. The conversation resumes.]
You finally got around to the links! Congratulations. Thanks. I feel an enormous sense of accomplishment.
Don't be sarcastic. As if!
So what do you really think about Wikipedia? I think it's a grand social experiment. It fascinates me.
Will it succeed? Precognition is not one of my major powers.
Give it your best guess. If our definition of success remains somewhat fluid, it will succeed.
That's encouraging. Do you have any advice to your fellow Wikipedians? Umm . . . sure. It's an encyclopedia, stupid.
Nicely put. Now who's being sarcastic? It was a none-too-subtle reference to 1992, a year of possibilities.
Everybody knows it's an encyclopedia. But it's easy to forget that. Each of us brings to our experience here a passel of preconceived notions and prejudices. I'm no exception. If we do our best to check those at the door, we'll make better articles and have less friction in the process.
Is that really possible? To varying degrees, it is perfectly possible. If we try.
"Can't we all just get along," in other words? No, we can't. But we can minimize discord by reminding ourselves of our common objective and trying to remain actively aware of our own biases.
Make love, not war. I didn't say that; you did. And you're being annoying. There are worse philosophies to live by, though.
As of 14 March, 2007, you disappeared. It seems like longer.
Now you're back. Ha!
You're not back? I really don't have time anymore to contribute frequently. There are several articles that I was working on but had to set aside. I'm not sure if I'll get around to them.
Are you disillusioned with Wikipedia? Yes.
Is that why you vanished? No. It has played a small role in why I'm taking a long time to return, though. Frankly, I've been disillusioned almost since day one.
Why? I lack confidence that WP can ever be anything other than a mediocre encyclopedia. It is incredibly easy for an empty-headed but crafty individual, or an individual with a hidden agenda, to create all manner of mischief in an article—basically ruin an article—and do so while working wholly within WP policies and guidelines. This actually happens every day. We have to outwardly assume good faith while witnessing prolonged assaults on articles we care about. Sometimes the perpetrators of such assaults are educable, sometimes not, but at some point one has to decide whether it's worth risking wasting one's time to even try.
And is it worth it? If one has more pressing concerns in life than what's changed on the watchlist, probably not.
So you're not going to contribute anymore? I didn't say that. I may still contribute, time and energy allowing. There are many things about WP that fascinate me. It may be a lousy encyclopedia, but it's a brilliant technological achievement, and I still think it's a grand social experiment that will teach us a lot about cyber-based societies.
Cyber-based societies, huh? WP is something of a society, yes. It consists of thousands of communities, many of them overlapping, and it has its own culture and subcultures. It is structured and it has a government of sorts. That sounds more or less like a society.
Anything else you'd like to add? For now, just this: the adjectives such as "mediocre" and "lousy" that I used obviously aren't directed toward the many excellent articles that exist. It's just that even the best articles are subject to severe damage that would take the patience of a saint and an extremely liberal interpretation of WP policies and guidelines to undo.
Could the policies and guidelines be improved? Probably so, but I'm not sure that would solve the problem.
