Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice   As my contribution for today take a look at this UserDbucknerObviouslyincompetent  example of obviously incompetent writing  Let me stress straight away that the problem is not the fact that the writing is absolutely absolutely horrible  That is easily corrected  The problem is a that it is obvious to anyone who is a reasonably competent user of English that it is very bad and b it is not at all obvious to the writer that it is bad  This creates the problem that even with the utmost good faith on the part of the writer he or she will get upset by this apparently unfair treatment  why is this brilliant and deathless prose being treated in this way  Obviously there is a cabal a conspiracy  So the author in a sense justifiably given their belief gets angry  In turn the competent writers get angry because the incompetent author seems to be acting unreasonably or in bad faith  Result anarchy and chaos  Then the Wikipedia police turn up  They have been taught that all this sort of stuff is a kind of playground fight  Come on guys stand apart have a cup of tea just talk it over like mature adults  So the competent writers naturally leave  The incompetent ones sensing in some way that this process is biased in their favour naturally stay on  The result a natural tendency for articles to get worse   A few years ago when Wikipedia was in its infancy there was the theory that by a process of continuous evolution articles would monotonically improve over time  Ladies and gentleman I put it to you that this article is a living refutation of that hypothesis  It started life as a notsobad article by Larry Sanger five years ago  It has steadily and continuously and monotonically deteriorated  Si monumentum requiris circumspice    Many articles are quite good  That is because they are on technical subjects whose nature does not arouse the interest and passion of the stylistically challenged  The difficult ones are the big grand subjects philosophy truth and apparently physics  Banno asked why I hang around here if it is so bad  Well it wasnt so bad even a year ago  The popularity of Wikipedia ensures it will be a magnet for all and sundry and this problem will get worse and I think if people like me keep banging on long and loud enough things will change  That is my belief  How should they change  Im not saying we should ask for credentials but there should be a way of showing the door pretty rapidly to obviously incompetent editors   For a real experts view on it see