Wikipedia:Redirects to nowhere

Those who would commit genocide first displace their victims.
Those who would commit infocide first move or "merge" articles.

There seems to be a HUGE temptation for Wikipedians who are not Subject Matter Experts to try and police articles on whatever subject matter they know nothing about. No sooner do these Wikipedians—present company excluded—seem to have vaguely grasped that X is a kind of Y, do they get a huge rush of insight, to satisfy which perceived achievement they immediately push for X to be redirected to Y, and of course the fashionable "compromise" of the then-ensuing discussions among mostly similarly-minded non-SMEs tends to be a merger, which inevitably eventually results in a redirect to nowhere. That's because even if the information in the X article being assimilated assassinated is at all initially added to the Y article, it's rarely well worked in, and over time, deletionist editors who consider it off-topic will remove it. Thus the information that was in X is then no longer in Y either, but people looking for X are redirected to Y, where they find nothing much relevant – so that might as well be nowhere.

How to murder information

You might think the best way to assert your "authority" by deleting useful and correct information from Wikipedia was to put it up "for discussion", but those discussions can and sometimes do go the other way. There seems to be a much lower bar for merging or moving perfectly good articles and stubs. If there's no obvious merge target, just move the victim article to draftspace, which you can do on chutzpah alone, with no discussion. Said "space" of course is custom-formulated to be out of the limelight, less likely to be seen by others – much less improved, so it's really homicide on HP. But in terms of covering your tracks while pretending to good faith, nothing really beats mergers and redirects, leaving behind only displacement, confusion, and an edit history that's hard to find even if the rare odd reader realises it might be there and starts looking for it. All too frequently, the displaced literally lose their name just as their history is lost.

Discrete example

The following example, encountered after "a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object", is what finally motivated the creation of this essay. Everything kvetched about herein is true as of the time of this writing:

There currently is no good explanation on Wikipedia (that yours truly could find) that would explain to a novice just what it means for an electronic component, transistor logic especially, to be discrete.

• Discrete logic redirects to logic gate. Not to any section of logic gate, just to the article in general. The article does not contain any section that explains anything at all about discrete logic. It does sport a multi-hatnote, which points readers to other nowheres, which also do not explain even the fundamentals of the fundamental concept in question.
• The aforementioned multi-hatnote "helpfully" suggests information on discrete TTL logic could be found in the transistor–transistor logic article, but it can't, because information on discrete TTL is nowhere in that article.
• The other diversion target suggested by the multi-hatnote is discrete circuit, but that too is a redirect, to electronic circuit, which never explains what a discrete circuit is. The word "discrete" appears three times in that article, in two different senses, none of which is that of a discrete circuit, and all of which mentions presuppose the reader's pre-existing understanding of the term.
• Readers looking for discrete components are redirected to the electronic component article, which among the current lineup comes closest to explaining just what distinguishes discrete from more integrated components, but ultimately it too falls short of that.
• Readers savvy enough to start looking for a discrete transistor are redirected to Transistor#Packaging, which finally explains everything. Nope, just kidding! It doesn't really explain discrete transistors either. It does say "Discrete transistors can be individually packaged transistors or unpackaged transistor chips", and "Other packaging techniques for discrete transistors as chips include direct chip attach (DCA) and chip-on-board (COB)" — which is confusing at best, arguably at least bordering on being technically incorrect, and will just confound any reader who didn't already know what it means for transistors to be discrete as opposed to more integrated. At least the Transistor#Importance section does contain a very brief parenthetical hint that might enlighten, but that's not anywhere any of these redirects are pointing and makes very short shrift of a concept and category of components that could have used its own article.
• If you look for a discrete device, you will also just be redirected to nowhere in particular in the electronic component article.

Oh, but it gets worse

There was a perfectly nice little article that gave an explanation of the essential concept, but it got murdered by merge over a decade ago.

The same fate befell an even earlier stub.

There was an even better discrete transistor article at one time, but there again, the Deletionista had it in for it.

There even was a discrete circuit article, which also linked to discrete components, which now no longer exists.

Procedural vandals

The popular excuse for such procedural vandalism seems to be claims that the victim articles were "unsourced opinion" or similar.

The fundamental problem here is one of people not understanding—and having complete disregard for—the purpose of rules.

Rules exist for a reason. That's actually acknowledged—as a rule—in various places on Wikipedia. But procedural vandals don't care for those rules, they only care for some particular rules they can cite and use and abuse to seem important and authoritative – "making an impact" and "helping the project" (by vandalising it).

Not everything on Wikipedia needs to be cited. Citations are needed to settle real disputes. Material likely to be disputed should be cited, but otherwise sound material should not be disputed purely on the basis of its being uncited. (When you're arrested for resisting arrest and for no other reason, that usually gets thrown out if ever charged at all.) And yet, you get these procedural vandals on patrol, who don't understand what's being said, who don't have the interest or patience to look into the subject, but who can't let it go either, and who on the most non-controversial and technical of content think you should donate more of your time to satisfy their hurried and uninterested bogosity because They Have A Rule (like a one-trick pony).

Ironically, categorically true content, topics with thousands of examples are much harder to produce bogosity-compliant citations for. You might and should be able to cite who it was that said Oedipus had a thing with his mother, but it's much harder to produce procedural vandal-proof citations for a tragic hero article in general.

Thus, people who do not understand the purpose of a rule often succeed in misapplying the rule, and they're using it to redline content areas they do not understand or care for – which really should be a big hint to leave that for somebody else to look into and after, but their ego won't allow them to do that. They have stats to uphold and a rep to maintain. All watched over by machines of loving grace in the blind pursuit of participation badges.

Into oblivion

And that's how you create categorical unhelpfulness in an encyclopædia: You send obviously good content and the editors that brought it here into oblivion, for all the wrong reasons.

Epilogue

As for little old me, I was just looking for an article suitable to point a student to, one which would explain the difference between discrete and more integrated electronics. Now I've written this essay instead. Was that helpful? I don't know. It depends on what the rest of you do about it, I suppose. I do know that had I even tried editing Wikipedia to put back in place an actually helpful little article I could have pointed other people to, the procedural vandals would have pounced, and tried to police the heck out of the attempt. Which is really quite disgraceful more so than merely unfortunate. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 03:51, 18 December 2023 (UTC)