User:BlankVerse/rants

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BlankVerse's ever-lengthening Wikipedia rants

note : I have started an evidence subpage that will be used to provide examples for some of the topics that I've covered below. At the moment there is only one example on that page. Also, for some of the topics, I will probably create separate subpages that will discuss the particular topic in more detail, but, that will happen sometime later.

Please, if you want to respond to any of my points don't edit this page, but instead reply on the Talk page.

I've started this collection of rants mostly because of the ever-increasing number of articles on the internet and in print, both pro and con, about the Wikipedia. For both types of articles it seems like most of their authors have not spent that much time examining the Wikipedia. Furthermore, it is obvious that none of them have spent much time actually editing articles on the Wikipedia. Especially for the anti-Wikipedia articles, it seems like each writer is like one of the blind men in the Indian parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, where they examine one single aspect of the Wikipedia, or even just one article on the Wikipedia, and assume that is representative of the rest of the Wikipedia.

This is my collection of criticisms of the Wikipedia as written by a regular editor, who, despite these criticisms below, still holds out hope that the Wikipedia can improve both articles and procedures.

One problem with Wikipedia administrators

There is currently no effective way to quickly stop an admin from doing mischief in the same way as a block with regular editors, which leads to wheel wars and other problems. my longish essay on this topic, which had been "featured" on my user page, has been moved to "On misbehaving administrators".

Editor laziness

My personal opinion is that laziness is the number one problem with the Wikipedia. It takes only one or two minutes to type what you think is true, but it can sometimes take an hour or more to verify that information. That means that for every person who adds some random factoid, the Wikipedia probably needs at least 15-20 conscientious editors who are doing fact-checking, assuming that is the only thing that they are doing, and many more than that if those editors are doing other things on the Wikipedia besides fact-checking.

Repeating internet nonsense

Although there are some wonderful resources on the internet filled with well-researched information, there is also plenty of misinformation and just plain nonsense on the internet. For example, in one of my areas of knowledge, Japanese poetry and especially haiku, the number of very good haiku websites is outnumbered by the so-so and nonsense websites by at least ten-to-one. The bad websites repeat misinformation and state opinions as if they are facts, among other glaring errors. ^(evidence)

Know your sources

Too many editors don't know the difference between a primary source and a secondary source, and are often way too trusting of the information they find on secondary sources. For example, although the Urban legend website snopes.com does a good job for most of their articles, I've caught them repeating misinformation found on the internet. For one example, it took them several months before they finally corrected the article after I had notified them of their error.

Unintentionally narrow coverage

I'd call this section Correcting systemic bias except that name seems to raise the hackles of some editors. Part of the problem with that name is that I think that some people assume that it is accusing them of intentional bias. Instead, the problem in most cases is that people only write about what they know, and since most people on the internet are from Europe and North America (and to a lesser degree, the Far East), so the coverage both in the types of articles on the Wikipedia and within the articles themselves, reflects that. There are so many articles on the Wikipedia that have broad applicability to many different nations and cultures around the world, but the articles themselves are written as if the topic only applies to First World countries or only Western nations, or sometimes even as narrowly as only to the US or the UK. That leaves huge portions of the world without any coverage in the articles.

I think that one partial solution for this is creating a checklist subpage similar to the todo template—especially for articles that are intended as comprehensive overview articles. The checklist would say: This is a topic that has broad applicability, but as currently written only covers certain areas. Please help improve this article by expanding its coverage." Below that would be a checklist of regions, nations and cultures where editors could mark basic coverage, better coverage, and very good coverage for each particular region, nation or culture.

Another part of the solution is to seek more press coverage and actively recruitment editors in areas outside of Europe and North America.

Tribal conflicts

Sometimes it seems like every single conflict around the world that has happened in the last two millennia is getting relived in the editing of articles on the Wikipedia. I would have thought that the basic humanitarian impulse of creating an encyclopedia of human knowledge for all mankind would mostly attract individuals that were not imbued with strongly partisan, nationalist, bigoted, intolerant, or prejudiced viewpoints, and, for the most part, that is true. The problem is that it takes at least a half-dozen individuals that are more even-tempered and dedicated to a neutral point of view to counter each rabid nationalist. Although their numbers may be small, each obstreperous chavinist is like a spanner in the works of the Wikipedia (and getting each one banned through arbitration is a interminable process).

Revert wars: Part I

Especially after having been in one very short-lived revert war, I believe that they are a much bigger problem on the Wikipedia than most editors and administrators on the Wikipedia seem willing to acknowledge. One of the problems with revert wars is that they are counter-productive—they harden the attitudes of the individuals on both sides of the revert war. That means that the only way to "win" a continuing revert war is to either out-stubborn the opposition, or get them banned (temporarily or permanently). Until a page is protected, there is no incentive for either side to compromise or try to reach consensus.

As the Wikipedia:revert article says, a revert is like a metaphorical slap in the face. It is a direct insult that says "I found absolutely nothing in what you added that was worth keeping". A revert is also, in many cases, an indirect acknowledgment by the person doing the revert that they are either unable or unwilling to work towards consensus or compromise on the article.

My personal opinion is that the WP:3RR rules should be modified so that for any continuing revert war without any substantive discussion on the article's Talk page, even if it is only one or two reverts per day, that all the individuals involved should be temp-banned (at least from editing that article—remember that it takes at least two editors to have a revert war). Also, any reverts against a clear consensus for the article (especially if shown by a survey), then the individual(s) involved could be temp-banned.

Revert wars: Part II

There is a side-effect of revert wars that I've never seen anyone talk about. Whenever there is a discussion on the Wikipedia on the internet where there is the ability for people to add feedback (for example, the Yahoo! blog entry about the agreement between Yahoo! and the Wikipedia), there are always people who will say "I tried to edit on the Wikipedia, but as soon as I added something to an article, someone deleted everything I had written". Usually they will mention that they were insulted as well.

How many people have been discouraged from editing on the Wikipedia because of an aggressive revert warrior? This is something that will be very hard to measure, but my guess is that it is probably a dozen or more people give up on editing the Wikipedia for each aggressive revert warrior. I think that it is in the best interest of the Wikipedia to start tracking some of these complaints, and even trying to contact some of the people who added the complaints, to try to find out which articles and which editors might have been the problems. It might also be worthwhile to try to track down some of the editors who did a fair amount of editing (1,000-2,000 edits) but then suddenly left the Wikipedia, to determine the reasons why they quit editing.

Royal pain-in-the-asses

Perhaps it's just because I was born in the colonies, but I absolutely cannot understand the fascination that many people have with royals, nobles, and peers. All the protracted edit wars over titles and styles are something that I have no wish to get entangled in.

I should have know better when I wandered into the discussion into whether the William of Orange article should be a disambiguation page that covered the two main monarchs that are called that name (one British and the other Dutch), plus numerous other less distinguished royalty who have been called William of Orange, or the UK-centric position that it should be a redirect to "King Billy". Because I had added my opinion to that survey, one of the participants decided that I must be one of the partisans in the royalty debates, so they added an appeal to my Talk page (as part of their vote-spam campaign) asking me to get involved in yet another extended discussion on naming royals. This one was over someone (Elisabeth of Bohemia, aka the Winter Queen 1596-1662) who shared multiple names with other people (see Elisabeth of Bohemia (disambiguation)-(1 of 8), Elizabeth Stuart (disambiguation)-(1 of 7), and Winter Queen (disambiguation)) To disabuse him of the idea that I might give a damn, I left a message very similar to the the following on his Talk page:

To be extremely blunt, I care not one whit about the naming and styles for 99.999% of the Wikipedia articles about any lucky-by-birth stiff who had some pretensions to a hereditary right to rule over others or had the remotest ancestral connections to such a person. Once in a blue moon I may add my two centavos to a discussion, but that is far as I will get involved. BlankVerse ∅

Diacritics

What! No diacritics in the English language? What an utterly déclassé position to take. I will sit in a café, eating canapés and drinking Curaçao. and consider your assertion. Perhaps I'll order a soufflé while I contemplate writing a roman à clef. My dining companion will wear a macramé wrap over a gold lamé blouse and tell me about a feeling of déjà vu she had when she met a naïve débutante. During our tête-à-tête, I will tell her a risqué story about an ingénue I once knew. A street vendor might come along and try to sell us a piñata made from papier-mâché.

Voilà! An overabundance of words that still usually maintain their diacritics when used in more formal written English, even though the words have been naturalized into the English language. Words that I couldn't shoehorn into my example would include fiancée, ménage à trois, outré, El Niño and chargé d'affaires, as well as numerous French cooking and music terms. ^BlankVerse 13:29, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

For more words, see wikt:Appendix:English words with diacritics.

Entropy

Crappy little substubs are easy to improve. On the other hand, the very best articles on the Wikipedia, such as the Featured articles, are destined to degrade over time as various editors dull the brilliant prose that made that article a Featured article in the first place. Not all of the new edits will lower the quality of a FA, but the preponderance of them will.

The Wikipedia is an encyclopedia!

Too many Wikipedia editors seem to forget the only purpose (of the Wikipedia is to create a great encyclopedia. In too many cases it looks like an editor doesn't share that goal.

On joining WikiProjects and Regional notice boards

I have deliberately not listed myself as a participant in any of the WikiProjects and Regional notice boards that I participate in—including the Southern California WikiProject and California WikiProject that I created. Here's why:

When I was preparing to create the two WikiProjects I looked at many of the existing WikiProjects and Regional notice boards trying to identify the things that worked and the things that didn't work. One thing that I noticed in passing was that I kept seeing some of the same names signed up as participants. Sometimes they actually did do something with that WikiProject for a little while, but many times the only thing they ever did was add their name as a participant. The extreme example is the Stub-sorting WikiProject, where they had so many people that signed up that they had to create a separate page, yet it's mostly the same 3-4 people that do almost all of the work and a rotating cast of about a half-dozen that do stuff for a month or two before disappearing. Since I am much more of a doer than a joiner, I'd rather not be listed as a participant. If someone is really interested they will notice my participation on the talk page and in the history of the projects page and subpages. Besides, my goal is to get both WikiProjects to the point where they are self-sustaining without any need for my input.

Why I don't 'do' barnstars

The main problem that I have with barnstars is that I've seen a few too many instances of editing cliques who have circle jerked each other with barnstars, essentially rewarding each other for their POV edit warring. I greatly appreciate any of the personal thank you's that I've received over the past couple of years (including yours), but I am not fond of barnstars and so I have preferred to keep my user pages barnstar-free. ^BlankVerse 23:55, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Note: I've now created a subpage, User:BlankVerse/Kudos, that currently has a couple of more formal Wikipedia kudos, but I may eventually go back and add some of my favorite informal thank yous to that page as well. BlankVerse 08:08, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Schools and Wikipedia vandalism

As my watchlist has grown, I have, of course, encountered more vandalism of Wikipedia articles. Recently I've started doing reverse DNS checks on some of the anon IPs to get a feel for where the vandalism is coming from. Most of the vandalism, as to be expected, is from the larger ISPs such as AOL. I have been surprised, however, to see how much vandalism is coming from schools, especially high schools and colleges. (My guess is that school IPs constitute roughly 15-20% of all anon IP vandalism.)

Almost all of the vandalism that I've seen has been from U.S. schools, but that is, in part, from the selection of articles in my watchlist. Yet that is not the whole cause since I see a fair amount of international vandalism from non-schoool IPs. I have also seen some vandalism from Canadian and English schools, but none from any other schools except for a single English-language school in Japan. (However, I've read about problems from school IPs from New Zealand.)

Just as disappointing as seeing all that article vandalism from schools is how unimaginative most of the vandalism has been. It is also surprising to see how many of the students are apparently using their real names (adding themselves as distinguished alumni, for example), plus the names of their friends and enemies. With cases of repeated vandalism, it is very tempting to consider reporting those students to their school's administrators.

Checkuser

Because of the way that my ISP handles it's POPs, I could easily look like three different users that would come up completely negative on a checkuser check. If I wanted to risk inconclusive checkuser results, I could also look like users in two different counties, in four different area codes, up to 30 miles apart. If I started borrowing or paying for internet access from friends, neighbors, work, the local libraries, Kinko's, etc., I could have a dozen or more sockpuppets that would get completely negative results from a checkuser check. That's one reason that doing a check is as much art as science and access to the tool is limited to those who can interpret the results.

When the checkuser capability was first added to the MediaWiki software, I argued strenuously that access to checkuser should be restricted to the smallest number of individuals necessary. Especially with the expanded ArbComm, I think that there are now too many people who have access to checkuser.

What especially worried me was that there were a number of admins who essentially tried to grant themselves checkuser through a poorly advertised RFA-like procedure. This was very worrying to me because checkuser is something that could easily be used for mischief or revenge. In the beginnings, I saw many requests for checkuser that were obviously just fishing expeditions. Those with checkuser capability wisely declined those. However, I am starting to see some use of Checkuser outside the formal Requests for checkuser that has started to get me worried again. I have no doubt that there will eventually be a huge controversy over one or more uses of Checkuser. It is possible that one or more of the smaller Wikipedias may be at the greatest risk of experiencing abuse of Checkuser as some of them gain access to Checkuser.

One problem with Checkuser is that IPs can, for example, reveal the company (and sometimes department) where a person works, where they go to school (and sometimes which dorm or department they are in), etc. I know there have been at least two cases where there have been threats to go to an editor's employer over the editor's behavior, with one admin leaving the Wikipedia because of the threat.

Jimmy Wales / or How big is the Wikipedia?

Recently User:Ericsaindon2 complained when he didn't get a personal response from User:Jimbo when he appealed his on-year ban that was one of the results of his Request for arbitration. Here is my response.

Jimmy Wales is the co-founder and chairman of the Board of Wikia a multi-million dollar for-profit corporation [1]. He is also the co-founder of the nonprofit Wikipedia and chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Wikimedia Foundation [2].

Just for the English-language Wikipedia there are over 1,000 administrators. The next 13 largest Wikipedias add over 1,000 more administrators. Then consider the fact that there are over 150 Wikipedias, over 50 Wiktionaries, over 30 Wikiquotes, over 45 Wikibooks, a number of Wikisources and Wikinews, Wikispecies, the Meta Wiki and the Wikimedia Commons. [3] [4] Even the smallest of those Wikis has 1-10 administrators. There are currently almost 3,000 administrators just for the different Wikipedias [5]. Keep in mind that those are just the administrators, and there are many more editors who regularly edit on the Wikipedia who are not administrators [6] (for example, I'm not an administrator, but I have over 10,000 edits in over 18 months.)

Ask yourself: Does the head of a large regional American Red Cross chapter usually get involved in problems with a single volunteer. Or does the superintendent of a large school district normally get involved in the suspension of a single student. Since nobody else is protesting your yearlong banishment, and the ban does not involve any change in Wikipedia policy, I think that you are being very unrealistic in expecting a personal response from Jimmy Wales.

FYI: The sorts of things that he might get involved in would include the recent controversial approval [7] of the restoration of adminship for User:Carnildo. If it looks like that storm is going to blow over, however, he may not even get involved in that case. ^BlankVerse 19:11, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Article titles

Redirects are cheap! Entering any number of possible titles into the Wikipedia search field will still end up at the expected article if the redirects have been created. Why are there such huge arguments made over the "official" Wikipedia title of an article?

All the debates are predicated on the assumption that there is a "best" or most appropriate title. In some of the debates, my opinion has been that neither of the proposed titles really has a better claim of priority for the most appropriate title. In those cases, it is usually the most stubborn or most partisan group that wins out. Maybe the best solution in those cases is to use both suggested titles as redirects to some generic Inoffensive title #1. That may slightly lower the Google rating of a Wikipedia article, but probably not by much. ^BlankVerse 18:39, 10 September 2006 (UTC)