eddie the main problem with wikipedia is that it benefits from the free time of many hundreds of thousands of individuals so much spare time that it can treat them individually with contempt if it chooses and get away with it and not care very much however much ill feeling that generates if it had to pay people for the time they input it would use that time responsibly but it doesn't have to pay for it so it doesn't have to manage the resource responsibly wikipedia cares very little how much effort any particular individual happens to put into any particular article as far as wikipedia is concerned all of that effort can just be swept into the waste bin by someone else the next person who happens to come along if it suits that other person and if that happens it costs wikipedia nothing so why should wikipedia give a damn really it won't wikipedia can smile shrug its collective shoulders and say the time you happened to waste isn't a cost to us so we really couldn't care less the system lacks responsibility and wastes the time of countless individuals behind the scenes and wikipedia doesn't care about that why should it care if it has millions of individuals as a free resource once one understands the system and one returns to articles and finds that one's contributions have been generally mucked about with to the point where there was very little point in contributing in the first place and that the essence of wikipedia is to waste people's spare time and that people aren't being organised sensibly the only intelligent thing to do is walk away and not bother contributing what is the point in carefully drafting things concentrating on getting everything right if anybody else is just at liberty to come along and chuck the whole thing out if it suits them it's a daft system the system works because you have so many people contributing but the amount of individual time that gets wasted and the amount of irritation that gets generated in the process is i imagine collosal