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Say what?

I decide to check out the AfD articles, not something I normally get involved in. I come to an article for deletion, A Course in Miracles (book). I look over it  I see it's been documented and footnoted almost to the very last comma. I observe a tremendous argument ensuing over one word, ""cult"", that's being interpreted multiple ways. Multiple editors are squabbling over whether User:Ste4k is being ""POV"" for using it. I change the wording to eliminate the troublesome word while meeting what I see as the intent of the original author of the quote, Garrett. I think I do an adequate if not very eloquent job. I go to a lot of effort to explain what and why I made the change, citing the dictionary, etc. I do screw up and forget to sign some of my work, which you helpfully catch and fix.

I then vote in the AfD to delete the article but to keep its content and merge it into the main article. I explain my reasoning, but without going into detail as to my views of both articles as they presently stand. If I had, I would have said something along the lines that the main article flows well and is comprehensive; I think it's generally well written. At the same time, it screams out for about 200 {{fact}} tags. It's not clear to me how reliable it is. The book article, by contrast, is not as pretty and, as the principal author herself more or less says, reads like a U.S. District Court decision. There's a reason judges' decisions are not high literature and that's because they're shooting for reliability and precision, not memorable prose. There's considerable overlap between both articles with much discussion as to whether there should be a book article and a movement article or just one combined article; there's even discussion as to whether the word ""movement"" should be used. It seems to me as it all this talk of different articles is putting the cart before the horse (reliability), so I vote ""merge and delete"" so that the overall Wikipedia coverage can get fixed and streamlined with some sort of consensus built.

Now I wake up and I find that you've spent hours during the night sarcastically mutilating your own article. It appears that one word, ""cult"", and my good faith editing of its usage may have been your tipping point to go into a frenzy. That or my one vote in the AfD process. If you don't like my cult edit, just reverse it and explain how I got it wrong.

Then there's this message on my talk page:
""I'm not originally from the U.S. I was born in Kharkov. In our country, we beat liars, and if one wants to eat, they work. The only POV in that article I wrote was that I wanted to find out the truth, did research, marked it with citations for verifiability, refused to consider any source that came from some primary provider, and all I found out for my trouble was that this encyclopedia isn't even worth quoting. You should be ashamed to have your familiy member's name on this medium.  ""

What do I make of this? Are you saying that I'm a liar and should (or would) be beaten? That I should be working harder to eat? And what's this about my family?

And as for Wikipedia, being flawed, it certainly is that. It is profoundly flawed in terms of the reliability of some of its material. In fact, if so many millions of people didn't use it, I'd say forget about it. But the fact is, Wikipedia is very important and growing in importance everyday. Every day, more people abandon traditional sources of reliable information such as Britannica and turn to Wikipedia. Every month, Wikipedia's Google rankings move up higher and are often in the top 5 for a given search. The fact that so many other sites such as answers.com mirror the content makes what's written in Wikipedia seem all the more ""reliable"" since to the undiscerning, it looks like other sites are agreeing with Wikipedia.

So like it or not, Wikipedia is here to stay and further grow in importance. You can fume and I can fret, but our children and grandchildren will use it more and more as their first source of knowledge, reliable or not. That almost pessimistic view of Wikipedia's growing role is what motivates me  not some idealistic, Woodstockian notion that ""information longs to be free"" or so much of the other idealistic stuff that motivates thousands of mostly earnest, smart but very young editors on this project.

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