aaronsherman

I used to contribute liberally to Wikipedia. One day, pages I had worked on started to be merged together into footnotes because they were interesting only to a small fraction (but still sizable in absolute terms) audience.

Then my photographs, posted with fair use rationales for their subject matter (such as the "Are you prepared for the Rapture" signs of the early 1990s in New England) began to be attacked for their lack of adherence to new policies.

Then my edits began to be reverted for lack of adherence to modern template usage guidelines.

As Wikipedia became more insular, I became more alienated until I just stopped.

How is Wikipedia going to address this isolationism?

I've covered this at length elsewhere on reddit a year or so ago... but here's the short version:

That can never happen. :-( [edit: here's my original comment on why from most of a year ago]

The original master CG data files are lost, so yes, they would have to re-do all the CG from scratch, not even just upgrade the textures and re-render.

But that's only a small fraction of the problem. It seems that most of the widescreen footage that was filmed (remember it aired pre-HD's adoption) was also lost, and a lot of the show is digital sets, so they'd have to do the Star Trek style cleanup and enhancement on every frame of the broadcast-quality footage that they have and then manually tear out all the CG sets and then insert new virtual sets with the enhanced live-action. That's a ton of very manual work!

It's doable, but by the time you're done, it's definitely more money than a Blu-Ray release is going to net... so who's going to pay for it?

I'd love to see a B5 reboot, because I think the story is worth it, but I would think another 10 years of technology would really help. Once you can do more or less Hobbit-level effects on a TV budget, then I'd say B5 could be rebooted. I'd change quite a bit, actually, and I suspect JMS would agree:

• The Talia subplot cold be pulled back in in full, since you don't necessarily lose the actress this time around.
• As JMS realized, there was too much plot wrapped into one character: the Commander. Once the actor bowed out (turns out, to seek treatment for mental illness) Straczynski had to unpeel that character into two different people, and it worked much better. I'd go with that from the start.
• Now that the tech is better, I'd return to a male Delenn in the first season. The reason they abandoned it in the original show (you can see the male makeup in the pilot movie, The Gathering) was that they just couldn't get the voice and features quite right, and she always came off looking and sounding like a woman in male drag.
• Replace the individual stories that just didn't work at all with the audience (TKO, Grey 17 Is Missing, etc.)
• Don't rush to wrap it up in season 4 this time. We know how it ends, so even if it gets cancelled, there's no need to rush to tell the rest of the story. That lets a serious season 5 rewrite take place, and frankly I think it needed it.

Edit 2: Also, a previous comment on why and how to watch the series.

Brings new meaning to "mining for Bitcoin" when you're literally sifting through dozens of used machines to find wallets... :-)

Giant robots with incomprehensible angles!

I disagree with your position on the second item, but thank you for your a answer and time. I've taken the rest of my response to my blog (essays. ajs.com) so as not to waste everyone's time with a long, "how it should be" type rant.