Wikipedia:China cabinet
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Editors on Wikipedia often begin with or acquire the view that Wikipedia is a china cabinet and that the majority, if not all, editors, aside from oneself, are bulls. Instead of viewing editors as the content creators that they are they are viewed as content destroyers. This results in incivility, a hostile editing environment, and instruction creep.
This view often results in nihilism, the opinion that editors exist outside of causality; instead of editors reacting to causes it is assumed that editors act without reason (both without choice and without purpose). Editors may thus forgive the bulls for not having the good sense to act appropriately in a china cabinet. However, this coping mechanism results in a failure to ask how the bull suddenly appeared in the china cabinet ex nihilo and prevents any attempt to investigate or determine the cause and effect and thus does not allow prevention of the problem and progress/improvements in the future.
Worse still, this view often results in pessimism, the opinion that the majority of editors are not competent and that the majority of competent users do not have good intentions, leaving an extreme minority (such as 5%) of users (which always includes oneself) who are not bulls since they are both competent and well intentioned. If a user is tried and found guilty before their first edit then the reactions to all of their edits will statistically almost always include the assumption that the edit was destructive and the user will be accused of disability, stupidity, bias, and malevolence without cause by users who judge themselves to be smart, unbiased, kind, and possessing free will.
The attitude that editors are inherently destructive rather than creative may be part of the reason Wikipedia is mostly negative and productivity is punished.