Read Don't Program on Fridays.

I don't know if there has been a similar study saying Don't Program After 8 Hours, it's a little harder to measure.

(Something wrong with the c on this keyboard apparently. Sorry.)

I too believe it's partly due to the asinine name. The department I work for used to call it Computing Sience (which makes a lot more sense) but changed it to Computer Sience a while back. All this while we do have a different department that is in fact involved in the science of computer hardware: Electrical Engineering. Next thing you know they rename geometry to Earth Science.

Thanks for explaining what the OP should have done.

Smalltalk's creators didn't agree with you - I wonder if they do today.

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'civilization'. I think it's fairly well accepted that language is much much older than our evidence for it: people can speak for a long time before they have any inclination to start writing their words down.

IMO /. has justed the shark with this "story". Thank you for no longer wasting my time.

While they're at it, why don't they create a Brainfucks database. Now that would be useful.

Looking forward to see the API bindings on Google Code.

The problem is not lack of expressive power, it's excess. JavaScript was unmaintainable until jQuery came around. I'll start trusting JavaScript code as soon as we get a checker that enforces some sane coding conventions based on jQeury or something equivalent (if it exists).

Nowadays, it takes more than five minutes to raise the quality of most articles I could, in principle, improve (and there are lots of them). It takes more thought and research. I can no longer indulge in drive-by editing as much as I used to. "Raising the bar", they called it on everything2.com, where the same thing has happened, with a rating system. I think the other things we're seeing, such as the diminishing number of active editors, are largely a side effect.

There is another argument for inclusionism: if you delete an article that doesn't satisfy someone's quality standards, countless others will replace it. Incremental improvement won't work if you don't allow it. The banners are a better method.

Who are "they"? Your remark doesn't make sense - Wikipedia is not a "they".

I do think Wikipedia is "complete" in the sense that most things most people can contribute are already in there. This alone can explain the slowdown, as the WSJ article mentioned.

Some people do get very protective of articles and/or principles. I definitely felt a barrier when I wanted to start to contribute. This is another impoprtant effect. But these people do not form a "they", they don't act as a collective.

Please look up the word "fascism". What you're describing is anarchy, not totalitarian all-encompassing control. I associate it with kindergarten, not with Mussolini. (YMMV.)

I don't find the WSJ story dumb at all. Perhaps you should try reading it with your prejudice filter disabled.

Is this a real number? If it is, where did you get it?