User:Moni3/Slacker

Slacktivism is a portmanteau word combining "slacker" and "activism", that describes easily completed online tasks that make an Internet user feel better about himself regarding social issues, but have no significant effect in the real world. Examples of this across the Internet include signing e-petitions (in the 1990s petitions that were forwarded from one email user to an entire list of contacts), joining online action groups, or changing one's Facebook avatar to protest or bring attention to an issue for a week, or some other such action that takes little to no effort on the part of the person performing it, and therefore requires no real sacrifice.

On Wikipedia, this kind of effortless action takes several forms. Where a social issue, a dying child, or medical research and advances are often the focus of slacktivism in general, on Wikipedia the social issues are replaced by content. With more than 3.5 million articles, the majority of these are of subpar quality. Significant concerns arise over copyright problems and verifiability, which then also lead to controversial arguments over neutrality in some cases. It takes sometimes days, weeks, or months to write and cite an article at GA level, but it is much easier to spend a few minutes reading the lead of an article, make assumptions about the content in the body and tag it with , , , or tags without doing any work to answer the very questions posed by the tags, then move on to the next article and do the same, ad nauseam.

Article-flight tagging

Wikipedia is famously a collaborative encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Nothing bars a user who is able to put a tag on an article from verifying or rewriting information himself. More concerning are editors who take pride in these article-flight actions, labeling themselves gnomes or fairies but spending no time investigating issues on the talk page, or asking questions about something they might find confusing or "off". There are article-flight copy-editors who find stray issues to settle then move on to the next article. That is different. A quick necessary copy edit for a misspelling or punctuation mistake is always welcome.

Tagging an article with an {{unreferenced}} template and moving to the next article is the epitome of slacktivism. What's worse, it's also very much like pulling out all the toilet paper in a public restroom and leaving it on the floor because you know someone at some future point will clean it up. Clearly anyone who can access Wikipedia can also search a variety of search engines. Not everything on Wikipedia can be found online, but it can be found somewhere. Public libraries are located worldwide where basic reference books can be used to verify simple information in short articles. Although it is not ideal to use an encyclopedia to cite for Wikipedia, it certainly is better than a tag asserting that all information in the article is in question because it is unreferenced. All it takes is a little bit of work, a trip to a library, or a search online to find sources to resolve a tag.

When the article is a B class or higher, placing a fact tag or a template in the article without explaining or engaging editors on the article talk page is a similar act of slacktivism. Worst is using a tag or template to dispute an article when you have no sources to back you up (because you have not searched for them?) and expecting or demanding the editors who have already built much of the article to resolve your questions for you. This does not help build an encyclopedia in any way. Discussing vagaries and issues on the talk page to clarify confusion does. These discussions always go much better when the editor disputing information in the article has a source or two to present to say "Have you considered this?"

Talk page and forum arguing

Differing points of view are inevitable on Wikipedia, but really the only way to approach editing here is backing up one's claims with the absolute best reliable sources. Wikipedia cannot and should not be a forum to advance or discredit any specific point of view. It merely mirrors what has been published in reliable sources. When finding and reading these sources takes too much time, however, many editors just settle for arguing a lot on the talk page, or taking an article to an administrative noticeboard to complain about it. The time spent arguing, which turns from content quickly to editor behavior, then editor personality, takes of course just about as much time in the end as actually reading and summarizing a source to solve an issue.

People love to argue, though. Administrative noticeboards, Articles for Deletion, article assessment pages, and other process forums are hotbeds of bickering and we enjoy it so much sometimes that we assume the worst of other editors. Some editors take to it so well that they pride themselves in their bombastic approach. Because who needs reliable sources when everyone else is just an idiot? We have to admit a kind of Roman bloodlust in the way we watch some of these discussions.

While certainly there are valid disputes in articles when the editors involved have read the best sources and still have different opinions about their reliability, there are appropriate processes to resolve these differences. However, a good many arguments on talk pages and forums are members of WikiProjects, Wiki-friends, or general passersby who just want to tip in their two cents, without having any familiarity with the issues at hand. Again, this resolves no part of the issues surrounding content. In fact, it creates a culture of reinforcement when editors continue to support each other and their various WikiProjects, concluding that because other editors agree with them that they must be correct in their approach, actions, and grasp of policy and content, when in fact reliable sources and the summarization of them are neglected, nothing changes in the article, and it remains poorly written, disputed, and confusing to casual readers.

Grey areas

Tags and templates in Biographies of Living Persons (BLPs) should be resolved immediately. There are some editors who assert that anything that is unreferenced in a BLP should be removed, and while this certainly protects the accuracy of information relating to the subject of an article, removing information does not improve the content of Wikipedia. Searching for reliable sources and citing what is not referenced does.

Similarly, current events articles are often so rapidly edited that information is inserted by dozens of editors in an hour. Not all of it is accurate. In both BLPs and current events articles, everything should be cited, and attention to these details should be stressed more so than in general articles. In a current events article, however, news about it is widely available and there is simply no excuse not to cite information. Furthermore, these articles are so rapidly edited that removing uncited facts is a temporary solution. Enough editors watching the article and accessing reliable news sources should replace it with cited accurate information immediately.

Are your actions slacktivism?

If you're new to Wikipedia and you wish to assist in building the site, it is waiting for you to do so. Really the easiest way to determine if your actions are slacktivism is to ask yourself if what you are doing is adding to the quality of content on Wikipedia. While fact tags and {{unreferenced}} templates serve to remind casual readers that everything they encounter (not just on Wikipedia, but everywhere) should be questioned, simply placing the tags and templates does not improve content. If you've been around for several months or years, however... you don't really have much of an excuse if you're still doing this.

Similarly, if an article is in dispute and several editors are asserting their opinions about its quality, how many of them can claim they actually have read the sources and can discuss them intelligently? In the amount of time you have spent reading and arguing with other editors, could you have retrieved a source or two (or several!) and resolved the issue as soon as it started?

Remember, anyone can edit Wikipedia. There is no excuse for any editor to tag or template an article without being the person to resolve it. If after reading all this you recognize that what you have been doing is slacktivism and you don't really care, nor are you planning to change your behavior, is Wikipedia the right hobby for you?

See and go

• Slacktivism
• Snopes.com on Slacktivism, also
• NPR on Slacktivism
• Wikipedia dispute resolution