Hello fellow Wikipedians!
Tolkien enthusiast as well as history buff.
Temporary – I will avenge the sparkles emoji even if Wikipedia does not.
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An open letter sort of after I ranted in the latest Wikipedia beta feedback survey about personalized features (6/6).
P.S. to what I wrote yesterday, if any Wikipedia mod bothers to read this.
I hope what I wrote yesterday has not ended up in an AI database already. It would be kind of ironic if my impassioned, spur-of-the-moment, irreproducible internet rant is now being used to train ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Tiktok algorithm, whatever. Sort of like the online version of Fahrenheit 451, a book about burning books, which is also a commonly banned book. I am not trying to point fingers at red states or whatever the fuck.
I suppose the future of French punctuation may suffer somewhat. I was quite enthusiastic about that point, and I also wrote the entire thing in English with basically zero trace of the punctuation I was describing.
Looking at YOU, Wikimedia. Please do not "partner" with AI platforms and companies like Firefox did. Instead, do the opposite: Make sure NOTHING gets through from ANY websites that start with wiki- and end in .org (yes Wiktionary too for the pedants). But ALSO (and I REALLY MEAN THIS) please do NOT Glaze and Nightshade every image, text manipulation, etc. I 100% support this for personal use/artists and writers, but NOT for a global organization that reaches millions daily. Pardon my political compass slang, but the line between Auth Left and Auth Right is far too often far too fine. (Also why be Auth Left when you can be Lib Left???) I don't want some random unsuspecting third grader's school project to be caught in the crossfire of a political battle. And we should never undermine the very freedoms that we once swore to protect. This is one thing that I learned from the studying the French Revolution and the history of socialism.
(also the metric system, a cracked solar calendar, some cool flowery names, and a song about cherries if anyone's interested)
P. P. S. Using Wikipedia on my phone to write this, then switched to my computer for faster typing. When I opened Wikipedia on my phone, the FIRST recommendation for edits was a person of a certain ethnicity which I will not name, but...just SAD, PATHETIC. I guess I gave away too much identifiable data in my rant yesterday and SOMEONE or maybe just the algorithm managed to find me online. I guess it makes sense someone who runs a university is also a Wikipedia moderator.
A few minutes later I reloaded the page on my phone, and I guess they turned up the fucking diversity volume by 400% since now the top 10 were Indian person, Malaysian person, "List of gospels" like thanks I'm atheist, La Familia Burrón and Michael Counts, which are like liberal arts stuff judging from the blurb, Trinidadian person, South African musician person, Indian director person, Italian opera singer with the most photogenic profile photo by FAR, Nigerian person.
Like if you have any ounce of pity or mercy, PLEASE resist the fucking temptation to fucking Claude my rant and this one too to GUESS which race I am based off my writing style. You know I tried to make an international language once, am still trying, and was so disappointed that all the existing ones are basically cursed Portuguese x Latin. And remember the person who bit the apple in the first place, which started all of this.
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This following is not a Best Of by any means. I cited a socialist/Marx’s theory in my original rant (basically: Wikipedia needs us, we do not need Wikipedia, and we can go build something else like Bluesky but nonprofit). I also cited Jesus, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, Utopia, and the Enlightenment. Trying to argue that democracy and the rights of the individual predate 1750, the Industrial Revolution. And FYI, I do not support everything woke.