Maybe it's because I haven't had a drink in a few days; I'm not sure. But it seems to me that too many of us have lost the mission statement somewhere along the way.
I'm seeing more and more nonsense, bullshit, generally weird crap, bad fiction, bad poetry, bad formatting, misspelling, grammar errors, titles with no caps for proper nouns, and on and on. The most troubling thing is that I'm seeing more and more folks jumping in here with apparently no intention whatsoever of adding anything to the data base which would be considered permanent knowledge.
I heard someone on the radio the other day speaking about the idea of modern monks who would, on their own time, strive to write down what our culture has accomplished in order to save future cultures in the event of a disaster. He was comparing this effort to what the monks did prior to the Dark Ages so that the ideas of former civilizations were not lost and the wheel would not have to be reinvented. I thought of E2, and how we were all supposedly attempting something along these same lines.
I realize that it's a free online world in here, and the worst that can happen to your efforts is that someone deletes your writeup or jacks you down a few XP; but can we not get some sort of self-imposed guidelines going for us? How about this (which has always been a sort of rule of thumb for me, since I figured out what this was all supposed to be about):
For every self-indulgent or nonsensical thing you write here, you pledge to write at least one factual or well-researched idea or theory which would actually be useful to someone a hundred years from now?