Wikipedia is one of the world's most surprising phenomenons.
It started as a wild garden, where things would grow in any direction. People added the most fantastic non sourced facts, which some people believed and some people laughed at. The result was a wild jungle of information, where you had to check double check every plant before you could trust it.
English Wikipedia is now moving in a much stricter direction. There is an army of clueless youngsters, who know very little, but who want Wikipedia to be "encyclopaedic", which to them means without anything that does not look nice. They carry machetes and clean up in the jungle, which now more and more looks like a French garden. It looks better but contains less.
This of course frightens potential authors away. What good is it to write information, if it may be deleted by an ignoramus with the only reason that it to them looks "unencyclopaedic"?
It was a wonder that the jungle version of Wikipedia worked. It will be another wonder if the French garden version will survive.
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