User:Cretog8/proactive

''This is saved from previously, when I planned to change my approach to proactive, rather than reactive. Since I'm back to reactive, I'm saving this here in case I decide to try it again.''

I started editing Wikipedia for real in April, 2008. As of this writing, that's 8 months ago. During that time, I've mostly been a reactionary editor, and that's been becoming more and more true as time goes on. Rather than make a plan to improve an article and working on it, I've been watching articles and responding to others' edits.

I don't think in principle there's anything wrong with this. At its simplest, it means I revert a lot of vandalism, which needs to be done. By reacting to non-vandalism edits of various quality, I can help gradual movement toward improvement of articles. It also matches how I spend time on WP--I tend to edit just a few minutes at a time when I need to give my brain a break from something else, which makes reaction a lot easier than planning article development.

On the other hand, being reactionary puts me in conflict more than I want. Conflict happens, of course, but it gets tiring and some conflicts linger in my mind when I should be turning it away from WP to other things.

So, I'm trying a new strategy. I had accumulated 2,701 articles on my watchlist (of course, plenty of those were user talk pages and other not-really-article things). I've cut it down to 17 (still including various not-really-article things). I'm going to try to keep focused on just a very few articles at a time, and then cycle in from my extensive list of things to do.