Essay:Why RationalWiki is not so great

Inspired by

Technical issues

 * Infrequent updates; responses to technical problems are usually slow or non-existent.
 * Talk pages are clunky and difficult to use. Edit conflicts may result in accidental removal of other people's comments.
 * Wiki markup can be difficult to use for non-technical users. While there is an edit toolbar to help, there is no "true" editor.

Social issues

 * RationalWiki is an anarchist mobocracy with no leadership and very few rules. While this works reasonably well in many cases, it sometimes hampers decisive decision-making.
 * Like most wikis, "activity is might" on RationalWiki; this does not necessarily mean that person is also right.
 * Personal insults are tolerated in a higher degree than most other communities.
 * Most prolific editors are male, and a disproportionate amount of those people are "geeks" or otherwise technical minded.
 * There is a lack of users with dissenting viewpoints on some topics. For example, the overwhelming majority of editors are atheists or agnostics (although there are a few active theists).
 * RationalWiki only has a small number of active editors, compared to a much larger wiki like Wikipedia.

Style and content issues

 * RationalWiki's Snarky point of view may be off-putting to some.
 * RationalWiki is not neutral, and some pages show a lack of understanding of the opposing side's position and/or world-view.
 * Anyone (even unregistered users) can add subtle nonsense or erroneous information to pages, which might take days, weeks, or even years to get corrected.
 * Similarly, anyone can remove reasonable and constructive text from pages, ruining another editor's work.
 * RationalWiki suffers from "trend editing" where popular current issues gain disproportionate attention in comparison to other possible articles. Because of this, some articles can contain outdated information.