User:AndyTheGrump/Advocacy Dragons

Advocacy Dragons

A personal response to the Wikipedia:Advocacy ducks essay.

There is a genre of fiction no doubt familiar to many of our readers which goes by the name of sword and sorcery - a genre full of tales of derring-do by a hero who repeatedly triumphs over his (or occasionally her) enemies by a combination of artful swordplay, the judicious use of magick, and good old-fashioned street smarts. A genre perhaps entertaining enough in its way, but frequently somewhat lacking in substantive plot development, and by the time the hero has demonstrated his (or her) foe-slaying skills for the twelfth time, the reader may feel somewhat bored by the whole thing, and look for other forms of entertainment. Perhaps, being fond of words, the reader might turn to Wikipedia for something else to read. And perhaps being fond of words being properly spelled (or spelt), of punctuation being at least approximately plausible, and of things not being obviously wrong on the internet, the reader may take the opportunity to embark on the adventure that is Wikipedia editing. As adventures go, it probably starts off with nothing more adventurous than a battle in which our foe takes on the Wikimarkup-monster (fearsome to see, but not actually capable of inflicting more than psychic scars) and beats it into submission in order to add a reference to our article on L. Sprague de Camp's The Goblin Tower. The markup beast defeated, our hero may then do the sensible thing, and go outside, to take part in that great adventure known as 'a life'. Or possibly may choose to remain in the semi-darkness to seek out further foes/things that are wrong on Wikipedia. And (this adventure having a little more of a plot than his/her past reading) may encounter other heroes, likewise seeking foes. Or possibly, seeking our hero, to explain that he/she is doing it all wrong, and that foe-destroying must be done according to the rules of Magick, known (ominously) as Policies and Guidelines which must Always be Obeyed (including of course the rule that says that rules need not be Obeyed, which can only be Obeyed some of the time).

Emboldened by the knowledge of the Rules (or by the belief that he or she knows the rules: true wisdom comes later with the realisation that nobody knows all the rules, and if anyone ever did, they would be out of date anyway - but I digress), our hero looks for further foes - and comes across a whole new menagerie of fearsome beasts - not error-monsters, but malevolent creatures deliberately let loose by fellow adventurers - the dreaded pushed-opinion snake, the bias-ogre and the malevolent misshapen creature that some who have encountered have described as the Google-mined cherry-picked half-quote - a thing so fearsome that nothing but summary deletion followed by a cold shower and a rub down with emery cloth can erase the stink. Having defeated the new monsters, our hero once more sets forth, traipsing across the Land of Wikipedia looking for further foes. And then makes an unwelcome discovery. A bias-ogre once defeated may rise again from the dead! Grasping his or her sword firmly in hand, our hero smites it again - and sees it rise again! Some foul 'fellow adventurer' is reanimating the ogre each time it is slain. And so the dreaded edit-war starts - our hero fearing that he or she may be trapped for eternity in a battle against an ever-returning beast. But no, an eternal edit-war is against the Rules, and a hero (or villain) will turn up soon enough to put a stop to it, inflict a fearsome punishment at random on one or other (or both) of the contenders, and leave them both trembling in the knowledge that they have encountered an 'admin' - a creature possessed of supernatural powers, and no sense of humour.

Shaken from the encounter with the mysterious 'admin', our hero may choose for a time at least to tangle with lesser foes - once more smiting the bad-grammar-hound, the misplaced-comma-weasel and the emdash-for-a-hyphen-python. And with growing confidence as the memory of the fearsome 'admin' fades, our hero may begin once more to take on what he (or she) comes to recognise as the most dangerous of foes - the 'fellow adventurers' who fill the Land of Wikip with dreadful misinformation-lizards, facts-plain-wrong-rodents, and things they read in the Daily Mail. And what is worse, these 'adventurers' are going around in gangs! Gangs who's identifying mark is the infamous advocacy-dragon, boldly tattooed for all to see on their foreheads as a mark of defiance. Even the supernatural admins appear to tremble as the dragon-gangs rampage across the Land of Wikip, summarily beating the *#@% out of anyone who gets in their way. At last, our hero has met his (or her) true purpose in life - to slay the advocacy-dragons, and leave the land of Wikip in peace. But can the dragons be slain by our hero alone? Surely not, there are too many, and with too much power. Then fellow-adventurers must be recruited, for one final battle. But strangely, ominously, few fellow-adventurers seem interested - and few seem even to recognise the dragon gangs at all. The tattoos our hero sees emblazoned on their foreheads are seemingly invisible to others, and when asked to provide actual evidence of dragon-gangs, our hero seems unable to find anything that convinces anyone of anything much, beyond the fact that our hero has read too many sword and sorcery novels, and has failed to notice that the Land of Wikip is an encyclopaedia, not a realm of myth and mystery, and that contributing to it isn't actually the same thing as playing a role in a life-shaping adventure where good must triumph over evil - but only with the hero's personal intervention. Sure, there may be fellow-adventurers engaging in the dreaded advocacy - and even (dare it be said) getting paid to do it. And sure, such advocacy (when it can be identified) needs to be dealt with. But not by dragon-slayers. By evidence. Presented to people who don't believe in dragons, and won't believe in dragons until they see at minimum the scorch marks and the sulphurous dragon-scat. Because no matter how much you personally believe in dragons, you aren't going to convince anyone by recounting your heroic adventures, your personal encounters with fearsome fire-breathing beasts, and your narrow escapes from their fiery blasts. Slay one and bring its leathery asbestos pelt before the mighty Lords of ArbCom and maybe people will recognise you for the hero after all, but short of that, all your tales of bravado, of skilful swordplay, of well-timed magick incantations and of artful sidesteps as the beasts lunge at you with their red-hot claws will convince nobody of anything but the folly of reading too much L. Sprague de Camp.

The moral of this story: neither dragons nor ducks exist. If there is advocacy on Wikipedia, it is carried out by people, and needs to be identified properly and dealt with accordingly.

AndyTheGrump (talk) 08:35, 29 July 2015 (UTC)