User:Ankababel

I have been a user for about three years now, and was looking up things on Wikipedia before that. Unfortunately, like so many things, it seems to be in decline. Let me explain. Given Wikipedia's aim to be an encyclopedia, one would hope that contributors have some notions of scholarly values, as I do, but then I am an academic, so it's my profession. If I have time, I tend to correct mistakes, or make enhancements, that I notice while consulting an article. My contributions all, I hope, respect scholarly norms (including grammar and style!). And, until recently, my edits were accepted and, if someone corrected or undid them, there were good reasons for it, cogently explained.

But recently militant partisanship appears to have become the new trend. Edits are undone because "I don't like it"; or "Hey, that's not mine". We have not (yet) got to the stage where people will actually write that, so instead new "rules" are invented by these undoers to justify their actions, like cited references have to be freely accessible online, any point made has to cite at least two sources, books or journals cited have to be "notable" (who is the judge of that, I wonder), musn't break the flow of the prose.

Aggressive, unfounded claims are made (e.g., "Hey, that's promotional!"), or even vague threats ("there will be no further warning").

Sure, I do promote certain things—objectivity and clarity among others, or simply excellence.

Even minor corrections of spelling or grammar can be reverted, because "that's not my [unique] spelling".

And sure, I do make mistakes; e.g., "doi link is broken"—I checked and it was. So thank you. I should have checked it myself before including it. Perhaps the website was temporarily down for maintenance, but probably in general it's safer not to include dois, they are anyway unnecessary if the full, exact citation to the source is given.

There is also a growing carelessness: e.g., one user recently deleted a source I had cited because it was "primary", s/he stated. But it was actually a review article! I guess many of us (myself included) are short of time and we do a hasty edit. But is that better than doing nothing? Surely the whole point of an open resource is that carelessness through haste does get corrected.

May I humbly ask that users respect civilized dialogue and explain their actions. One can always respond to a definite criticism.

One recalls that Encyclopedia Britannica started in 1768 and reached its zenith in 1911 with the 11th edition, which contains many articles worth citing even today. Thereafter it went into decline and since 2010 has been online only. I hope that we have not already reached Wikipedia's zenith.