To a true believer in an alternative therapy, Guy said "Neutrality is not the average between bollocks and reality. In science, any compromise between a correct statement and an incorrect statement, is an incorrect statement." Good, eh?
Alaric Hall's essay Are you an academic who vandalises Wikipedia? Then stop it!. I just love that it begins with a little box, all in Icelandic, on why it wasn't written in Icelandic. (I can't exactly read Icelandic but with Swedish I can sort of parse quite a lot of it.) He tells his fellow-academics to treat Wikipedia with more respect, given that they use it all the time...
Dr. Blofeld: "...out of the 6,872,236 articles on Wikipedia... Adding good and featured articles and lists together gives a total of 51,112 articles (about 1 in 135). Good enough? No.". i.e. over 99% of articles are not good, or if you like 'decently written'. (Auto-Updated Parameters are in Bold)
George Monbiot again: "Immersed almost permanently in virtual worlds, we cannot check what we are told against tangible reality. Is it any wonder that we live in a post-truth era, when we are bereft of experience?" ("Our Greatest Peril", 2017)
Antandrus's perceptive "Observations on Wikipedia behavior", such as "The very existence of Wikipedia is a massive proof that there are more people in the world wanting to build than to tear down. Were that not true, vandals would have overwhelmed and destroyed us years ago."
John Julius Norwichsaid in The Times that "As a writer of history I resort to [Wikipedia] at least a dozen times a day. I could never have written my last two books without it, and I have never caught it out yet, which is more than I can say of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its range is astonishing: it is almost impossible to find a person, place or subject that it has left uncovered." Nice of him (not sure if it's heroism, exactly, but never mind), but we editors do occasionally find one or two small gaps here and there.
Jimmy Wales celebrated Wikipedia's 15th birthday with the request "rather than succumb to fear, hatred, exclusion, and isolation, I believe we have reason to celebrate. Make an edit on Wikipedia."
Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman comment in "'Anyone can edit', not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap" that "First, Wikipedia's identity as an encyclopedia for facts is still governed by historically conservative (male) scientific understandings of expertise and authority. Second, viewed as an infrastructure, Wikipedia requires highly technical expertise, expertise that is traditionally gendered."
David Auerbach for his Encyclopedia Frown: "rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic": guess which encyclopedia he had in mind ...
Aaron Swartz (sad story) for his provocative but well-supported claim that newbies write most of Wikipedia, while the oldies with editcountitis mostly just do cobweb-polishing. That chimes with my own desire to remain a content[ed] writer-editor, alongside (I notice) a small number of the top N-hundred editors.
Martin Kettle on First Past the Post: "In the British norm, the absurdity that a government with a majority of seats is entitled to a monopoly of power is surpassed only by the absurdity that a government with a minority of seats is equally entitled to it."