Watching Wikipedia's extinction event from a distance / Boing Boing

"After being a major contributor for many years, I've cringed as Wikipedia slowly devolves like a dying coral reef. Today's example is hemovanadin, an innocuous article deleted through a mix of vandalism, bots, and incompetent humans.

[...]

So what's the big deal about one tiny little article? Who cares if one little sea squirt on the reef gets destroyed? I care, but not enough to re-engage with Wikipedia's deletionists. Wikipedia went from people writing an encyclopedia to people writing rules about writing an encyclopedia, or writing bots to defend an encyclopedia, but without enough safeguards to save content from deletionists.

Sadly, this tiny article death is far from isolated. The same thing has happened to articles I wrote about psychologists, hip-hop songs, television hosts, and who knows what else since I took an extended break. I wrote a couple thousand articles and made 50,000 edits because I believed in the promise of Wikipedia. Some are improved, most are unchanged, some are objectively worse, and too many are dead. Sea squirts are pretty, and hemovanadin is an interesting chemical worth including in an encyclopedia. Brittanica covers it, which is why it was on a list of missing Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia used to cover it, but as the bleaching caused by bots, abuse of speedy deletion, and incompetent editors continues apace, will Wikipedia eventually reach a biotic crisis?"