Marc Shepherd

Hail and unfarewell

After about 9 months away, I've dipped my toe back into editing. At the moment, I have no intention of watching 1,291 pages again. I would prefer to make more selective contributions.

The reasons I gave for retiring (see below) remain valid. I still feel that far too little of the content has reached even the very modest demands required for Good articles. I still feel that far too many trivial subjects become Featured articles.

And I also feel that far too much of a conscientious editor's time is spent undoing the mischief caused by good-faith mediocre editors. Wikipedia's "anyone can edit" philosophy makes mediocrity the rule, rather than the exception. [Added by Marc Shepherd on June 7, 2007]

Hail and farewell

I've decided to leave the Wikipedia community. I'll shortly be emptying out my 1,291-page watch list and logging out. I'll still use Wikipedia as a reference tool, but I no longer wish to contribute. I wish to thank all the editorial colleagues I met here for their contributions and suggestions.

Part of my reason for leaving is personal. I have other projects I want to work on. Since I started contributing to Wikipedia regularly, those projects have fallen by the wayside.

I have also become somewhat dismayed with Wikipedia's limitations. I do not expect anything to change, but I would make these observations:

• Wikipedia has excellent processes for rooting out vandals, trolls, shills, and blatantly useless edits.

• Wikipedia has very poor processes for rooting out good-faith mediocre edits.

• A huge proportion of the edits are, in fact, mediocre. The relatively small number of excellent editors spend a disproportionate share of their time repairing the mediocre.

• With the time remaining after rooting out bad-faith edits and mediocre good-faith edits, even excellent editors tend to spend a disproportionate share of their time on what is fun, rather than what is useful.

• According to Wikipedia:Good article, just 0.1% of the articles in English Wikipedia are "good articles." This appalling statistic illustrates the magnitude of the problem.

• According to Wikipedia:Featured article, just 0.1% of the articles in English Wikipedia have been "featured articles." This would seem to be a reasonable quantity, until you consider the extremely high percentage of low-importance topics that make it to Featured status. Recent examples include Jabba the Hutt, Rush (band), and Watchmen.

• Wikipedia's structure of barely-controlled anarchy is an excellent way to generate a ton of mediocre content, and occasionally very good content. It is not a very good way to generate an excellent encyclopedia.

Best of luck to all! Marc Shepherd 18:26, 20 September 2006 (UTC)