User:Alansohn

About me
I have a particular interest in local area and New Jersey governmental topics. I have been gathering information about New Jersey and its municipalities, and I am looking to create a structure to load expanded information into pages for all of New Jersey's 564 municipalities, as well as consolidating other encyclopedic information about New Jersey.

Notes to self
Per Manual_of_Style/Linking / MOS:REPEATLINK: "Generally, a link should appear only once in an article, but it may be repeated if helpful for readers, such as in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, hatnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead. Citations stand alone in their usage, so there is no problem with repeating the same link in many citations within an article; e.g. |work= The Guardian ."

An endorsement from an article's subject
I bizarrely came across an article in the Brown Alumni Magazine written by Jamie Metzl, in which he discusses my participation at AfD. "Alansohn came to my defense. 'Maybe we read different articles or found different search results,' he said, 'but this is clearly a leading scholar in the field and published author, whose work has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Globe, which confers a strong degree of notability.... The person is clearly notable in full compliance with [Wikipedia standards] and passes the 'multiple non-trivial published works' standard with flying colors. Strong Keep.' I loved Alansohn."

A matter of good and evil
We all have our pluses and minuses, both in real life and in Wikipedia. The problem is that most admins treat people on a binary basis -- you are either good or you are evil -- failing to recognize the positives in the people they deem evil and failing to see the negatives of the people they have judged good. The goal ought to be to seek ways to maximize the positive from each editor. Blocking policy's mandate is that blocks are intended "to protect the project from harm, and reduce likely future problems", an approach that might have some success with vandals. The unfortunate reality is that blocks to experienced editors end up being punitive. They are applied in an "all your edits are bad" approach that fails to solve the issue at hand and only ends up creating more problems than they seek to solve. The real problem is finding admins who have the common sense needed to apply blocks that push people from areas where there are challenges to areas where they genuinely benefit this project.

Dumping poop
Between Huggle and AWB—and I've used both—we have turned so much of Wikipedia editing into a mindless game in which undoing the addition of the word "poop" counts as progress. Spending even a few minutes on Huggle, let alone an hour, it's clear that the vast majority of IP editors have no interest whatsoever in improving this encyclopedia.

The issue I have is not with those fighting vandalism. Just as in the real world, we need people who will scrub off graffiti and replace shattered windows. The problem is that we have no barrier to entry for vandals, which means that people who could be devoting time to creating new content and expanding Wikipedia end up spending inordinate amounts of time cleaning up the messes the vandals create. Imagine if you removed every window and outside door in your home, allowing anyone to enter at any time. Sure, some of them would come in to your home, wash the dirty dishes in the sink, make your bed and vacuum the floors, and some may even volunteer on their own to build you a new bookcase or extra bedroom. But most won't. While many will just walk through and have little effect (positive or negative), perhaps sharing a snarky remark about your decorating choices, a small number may decide to trash the place. The time you spend cleaning up after those vandals is pure wasted effort that is not counteracted by the positives of those people who make your home cleaner and better.

Just as with a home, even small barriers to entry can be effective. Locked doors and windows will keep out most people, but sufficiently determined crooks can break the door down. Wikipedia needs barriers of its own, such as requiring registration and performing some basic identity checking. A brief required course on how Wikipedia works—what is required, what is allowed and what is forbidden—will let new editors know what our rules are before they get started. Less vandalism will mean that all those folks who have been spending much time fighting vandalism will be able to spend less wasted time undoing damage on Wikipedia and more time filling in Wikipedia's holes by expanding existing articles and creating new ones, all of which make Wikipedia better rather than less bad.

We only add to the problem by "ranking" editors on List of Wikipedians by number of edits exclusively by the total number of edits. By allowing these vandalism reversions to count towards building a high score, we encourage our most productive editors to accomplish next to nothing in terms of forward progress. When vandalism is reverted, the encyclopedia isn't better, it's just less bad. With even the flimsiest registration process, we could get rid of most of our vandals and free up huge amounts of time from people who really want to do work to help. As of July 2009, the English Wikipedia's top ten editors (myself included) have made more than 2.5 million edits in total. If much of this was vandalism reverting and error correction that could have been done by bots or prevented with mildly effective registration requirements, we'd have freed up thousands of hours that could have been used productively to make Wikipedia better. It's time we found some way to rank users by how much they've added to the encyclopedia, not how much "poop" they've removed and used effective procedures to keep out much of the vandalism in the first place.

Words of wisdom from our leader
Let me make my point more clear: arguments about what we ought to [do] if someone really starts to abuse wikipedia with thousands and thousands of trivial articles do not prove that we ought to delete any and every article that's too trivial today.

Put another way: if someone wants to write an article about their high school, we should relax and accomodate them, even if we wish they wouldn't do it. And that's true *even if* we should react differently if someone comes in and starts mass-adding articles on every high school in the world.

Let me make this more concrete. Let's say I start writing an article about my high school, Randolph School, of Huntsville, Alabama. I could write a decent 2 page article about it, citing information that can easily be verified by anyone who visits their website.

Then I think people should relax and accomodate [sic] me. It isn't hurting anything. It'd be a good article, I'm a good contributor, and so cutting me some slack is a very reasonable thing to do.

That's true *even if* we'd react differently to a ton of one-liners mass-imported saying nothing more than "Randolph School is a private school in Huntsville, Alabama, US" and "Indian Springs is a private school in Birmingham, Alabama, US" and on and on and on, ad nauseum.

The argument "what if someone did this particular thing 100,000 times" is not a valid argument against letting them do it a few times.

--Jimbo (dated November 7, 2003 )

Vandalism I almost let stay (almost)
Other than the fact that there was no reliable and verifiable source to evidence a connection to Haddonfield, New Jersey, this entry almost seemed fine. Sadly, it was reverted before I could figure out how to keep it. Well, that's nice vandalism. First time I've ever seen that... TomBarker23 (talk) 22:10, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Alansohn (born 1938), dedicated his life (waking and sleeping) to this page and in so doing made all of our lives better. Thank you, Alansohn! People everywhere love you!

Areas of Focus

 * Municipalities in New Jersey: The pages exist, but 80-90% are only a few steps beyond mere stubs. The ones that have been updated have a melange of useful and useless information with no standardization whatsoever. As part of WP:NJ, I would like to identify kindred spirits who would coordinate each individual county (and the municipalities therein) in an agreed upon format. My idea is to send this template to local libraries and public schools, with the goal of encouraging local resources to do the mind-numbingly tedious task (for an outsider, but not a native) of data gathering and entry tasks.
 * New Jersey Forms of Government: See Faulkner Act (New Jersey) for a starting point into a web of pages that describes New Jersey's 11 forms of government (5 traditional and 6 modern). There are still two outstanding pages in this ring, for City (New Jersey) and Town (New Jersey) that I will get to when I have a chance.
 * Template:New Jersey is an effort to tighten up the template for the State of New Jersey and make it more similar to the Template:United States found on each of the individual state pages.
 * Board of Chosen Freeholders was a page referenced in many places that just didn't exist. I went through web pages for all 21 counties and found almost all of the relevant information. I will follow up to verify what I have found and fill in any missing details.
 * New Jersey Legislature has been updated to list all 40 legislative districts and the municipalities included in each one. This may not be the best place, but it does allow for a link to view what is included in each district.

Loud and clear?
May 11, 2016: "Message received, loud and clear." I wonder whether it will be days, weeks, months or years before yet another edit war is reported at WP:3RRN. I didn't include minutes or hours as options, but I'm betting on the shorter to medium-range durations.

More...

 * My Contributions

Userified articles
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