User:Thebiguglyalien/Stray thoughts

Everyone has their own collection of thoughts and observations about Wikipedia, so here's mine.

Civility and conduct

• There are some really mean, nasty, bitter people on Wikipedia. There are also some really kind, thoughtful, pleasant people on Wikipedia. The former get more attention, but that doesn't mean they're larger in number. See also: real life.
• Anyone who uses phrases like "civility police" or "tone policing" is almost certainly going to cause problems in regard to civility and tone.
• Creating a sockpuppet account is the dumbest thing an editor can do. It's so easy to just... not do that. Once you get caught, any goodwill you could have salvaged is gone.
• In many instances, "retired" or "semi-retired" translates to "still active but wants attention".
• One should always be wary of professional opinion-havers. If an editor's primary contribution is participating in contentious discussions and they rarely produce anything of value beyond their opinion, consider whether they're actually here to build an encyclopedia and be ready to give them less rope when their actions are scrutinized.
• Cliques and in-groups are incompatible with collaborative projects. Destroy them.
• "More heat than light" is an old Wikipedian phrase. It roughly translates to "there's a legitimate issue here, but we're not competent enough to address it. The resulting discussion ended with unbecoming conduct, but we're too cowardly to address it."
• "Don't template the regulars" is sometimes misused to deflect criticism. All it does is explain the problems with using default user warning templates. Attempting to avoid scrutiny with "don't template the regulars" is all but a confession of guilt.
• If an editor is doing something inappropriately, there's a responsibility to correct them. If they're allowed to continue doing it, the behavior only becomes more entrenched, and everyone who didn't say anything shares some of the blame the next time it happens.
• When someone justifies a unilateral action with Wikipedia:Ignore all rules, it's a confession they knew they were doing something wrong. Ignoring all rules is for when the community has agreed that applying a certain guideline would be detrimental, not for when one person wants to violate it with impunity.
• Many of the "more experienced editors" and the "in-crowd" with civility issues are seeing developments like WP:BRIE and relevant ANI discussions, and they're realizing that the community is running out of patience with their antics and drama. The smart move would be to mature a little bit and treat others with respect. But they're not going to do that, either because they think that being right entitles you to be uncivil or because they can't see past themselves and they think that it's "no big deal". What we're seeing is that instead of improving, they're getting more aggressive and defending each other more passionately, as they feel like they're being backed into a corner. After all, if one of them is indeffed for constant incivility, the others are at risk as well. The irony is that when all of them consistently show up at the same time whenever one of them is called out, it just makes them look guiltier and erodes the community's goodwill more quickly

Neutral point of view

• When a civil POV pusher is caught, there are several key phrases that indicate guilt, including but not limited to: "I'm being censored!", "editors are allowed to have their own opinions", "have you considered that [more reliable source] is also biased?", and "as long as each individual edit is permissible then there's no larger problem".
• Editors who edit heavily in national/ethnic disputes (Armenia-Azerbaijan, India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine, etc) are rarely here to build an encyclopedia, even if they old accounts or lots of edits.
• The more an editor feels the need to announce that their personal views diverge from mainstream scientific/political/social views, the more trouble they're going to cause with point of view editing.
• Controversy and criticism sections just about never benefit an article.
• There's a concerning style of editing in which some editors insist on negative content in an article before it can be considered neutral. Specifically working to put negative content in an article simply because it's "too kind", "too laudatory", or "too hagiographic" isn't neutrality, it's point of view pushing.
• The louder someone proclaims that they're fighting systemic bias, the more likely they are to simply be trying to right great wrongs or otherwise push their own point of view as the "unbiased" truth. This goes doubly for people who go out of their way to explain that they're not trying to right great wrongs. Systemic bias on Wikipedia is fought through painstaking encyclopedic work, not by picking fights.
• If someone feels so strongly about a political/philosophical belief that they have to display their position on their user page, they are almost certainly not capable of editing neutrally in that area. Such edits should be closely scrutinized.
• If someone insists on their userpage that Wikipedia or its coverage of a topic is not neutral and needs to be fixed, you can rest assured that they are incapable of editing neutrally.
• The ideal editor is indifferent, uncaring, and amoral regarding any subject they write about. If someone thinks they are doing an act of public service by revealing how good or bad something is—even if writing only straight facts—they are not a good fit for Wikipedia.

Maintenance, sourcing, and writing

• Most backlogs are difficult to solve because each aspect of an article affects the others. In most cases, improving every aspect of one article is more efficient than improving one aspect of many articles.
• Sourcing discussions often conflate academic scholarship and literature reviews versus peer-reviewed opinion pieces. The latter are not nearly as reliable as the former.
• If an edit summary begs you not to undo the edit, there's a high probability the edit needs to be undone.
• Every editor should seek review of their work from time to time. That's where you learn best practices and discover areas for improvement in your editing that you didn't even know about. Peer review, good articles, and featured articles all offer this at different levels. Editors who don't occasionally go through review are likely to be writing sub-par articles without even realizing it.

Administration and organization

• WikiProjects are rarely helpful when you need them, but they're great at creating issues through ownership of content and infighting. They function most efficiently as noticeboards and resource repositories where editors can go for help, with the optional bonus of facilitating collaboration when multiple editors show interest in the same article.
• For a project that puts so much emphasis on policy and procedure, very little is done to teach new editors best practices. The most common practice is to let them get each thing wrong one at a time and then maybe fix it after the fact.
• In the News is nothing more than a small group of editors handpicking their favorite news stories with no regard for encyclopedic merit, lasting significance, or avoiding original research. With the exception of newbie-focused areas like the Teahouse or Articles for Creation, it has the greatest concentration of clue problems anywhere on Wikipedia.
• No one is going to get started on that project you all have been discussing. If you want it done, then just do it. Once there's inertia, then maybe others will be willing to help, but don't get your hopes up.
• The Wikimedia Foundation is like an abusive landlord. It hosts your space, but it tries to manage the details of how you act in this space, and it expects entry and involvement whenever it pleases. It also puts signs in your yard asking for money on your behalf, lies about why the money is needed, and then keeps the money for itself.
• The WikiEd program is nothing more than a paid contribution program, where the editors are paid in grades instead of money, and this is reflected in the quality of the edits.

See also

• User:Thebiguglyalien/Letters from the editors – For more illustrative examples
• User:Thebiguglyalien/Philosophy – Essays I endorse
• User:Antandrus/observations on Wikipedia behavior – An inspiration for this page
• Wikipedia:Things that should not be surprising – An inspiration for this page