User:Astronautics~enwiki/Wikipedia

Assorted notes on Wikipedia
Some of these thoughts might seem obvious or outdated, but they were written quite a while ago.

A revert is an edit made with the intent of reversing some or all of the changes made by someone else.

Wikipedia may never define, only describe.

It's bad form to perform a sysop action a second time after someone else has reversed it.

It is also bad form to unblock yourself.

Edit wars on the front page are not exceptionally harmful.

Pushing an agenda (or "POV pushing") in Wikipedia pages is completely acceptable. However, agenda pushing in Wikipedia pages must be done by improving the articles according to Wikipedia's standards, including What Wikipedia is not and Neutral point of view.

What if every time an administrator performed an action, their adminship went away until they had made 10 normal edits to articles?

Many of Wikipedia's social problems are caused by confrontational male personalities. Thus, Wikipedia would function much better if all the administrators were women.

All admin functions on Wikipedia are preventative. None are to be used in a punitive manner. (An exception is enforcing the decisions of the Arbitration Committee.)

The creation of unlinked test pages is not exceptionally harmful.

"Troll" is not a binary state.

From User:Biekko: "My personal view on adminship is that it is simply an access to a few technical options that should be granted to anyone who has been around for a while and established him- or herself as a trustworthy editor. I oppose all tendencies to make this a social class within Wikipedia that carries rights and obligations beyond that of any other Wikipedian."

If two users are fighting tooth-and-nail on a talk page, and they are politely asked to stop, the first one to apologize is usually the one to watch.

One useful metric of NPOV is that you shouldn't be able to tell which point of view a particular sentence was written from.

A common myth about Wikipedia is that it is not intended to be expert or authoritative. But, in fact, all of our efforts are to accomplish just this: Our field of expertise is what others say, and we intend to be able to authoritatively inform people about what others have said about the topics our articles are on. Our content policies hinge upon this.