User:James084

Where to find me
I have joined some other hardworking Wikipedians in attempting to clean up the Dead-end pages. Most of the rest of the time I spend reading through Wikipedia's various guidelines to help me work with the dead-end pages project.

Observations
Anyone that has been here for a few weeks or more can tell you that there are two very obvious philosophies concerning article deletion. Of course, even within each of these groups are a wide range of philosphies. Neither group has any clear evidence that their philosophy is better than the other. Nevertheless, a great amount of strife seems to exist between these two groups. My philosophy falls into the second group. My line of thought here is that if a person comes to Wikipedia for the first time and searches for a term then receives a "crap" article, i.e. very low quality article with little to no context or usefulness, they will then go on about their way searching for answers elsewhere. I firmly believe that quality should take precedence over quantity. By raising the quality of acceptable submissions Wikipedia would then send a message about the type of articles it is looking for. By keeping the quality of the articles low then Wikipedia will find itself becoming a repository of "crap", something that I believe is beginning already.
 * 1) The first group believes that bad articles about valid subjects should stay. The line of thought seems to be that if a person comes to Wikipedia and searches for a term that they should receive a page back rather than a "page not found" message.  The hope being that this person will see that not much material exists on this subject and will edit the page to add more.
 * 2) The second group believes that bad articles should be deleted. The line of thought seems to be that if a person comes to Wikipedia and searches for a term and gets a "page not found" message that this person will then start the article.

A word about stubs
There also is a faction of editors out there that just seem to believe that the greater number of stubs the better. I personally cannot understand this philosophy. Does this faction believe that they can collect enough stubs to buy something? Does this faction believe that the Wiki with the most stubs wins? I don't know. There are currently hundreds of thousands of stubs. They are even categorized and sub-categorized. It really is quite amazing. Some of these stubs contain very little information but they stay, nevertheless. I believe that the depreciation of value for a stub article is greater than that of a new car being driven off of the lot. With every passing second that an article remains a stub it's value dwindles. I don't have anything against valid stubs; however, I really do believe that if an article can't become something more than a stub after a few months then the interest in that subject simply doesn't exist and the article should then be deleted. Ultimately, stubs will not buy you anything and there is no competition in which the number of stubs will push you over the top to victory.

Consistency
I know this is asking for a lot but consistency is seriously lacking in this community. What I mean by this is that there are many articles stating what Wikipedia is not, and the types of articles that Wikipedia wants, etc. These guidelines come about by a consensus of the community. However, they are not consistently followed because those that do not agree with these guidelines simply ignore them. A wise man once taught me that "Consistency is better than better". All this means is that by doing things in a consistent manner it is better than any "earth-shattering" improvement that may be possible. Also, the lack of consistency makes it very frustrating for new people. When I started here I read the articles about what Wikipedia is and isn't. They made since to me so I ventured out into the articles and I began to apply these guidelines. Nominating articles for deletion because they did not match the guidelines, etc. I quickly discovered that the community didn't seem to give a rat's ass about the guidelines. I became confused and did not know what to do. As it progressed I became frustrated and stressed out. Finally, I decided to lighten up and do what I thought was best for Wikipedia. I still get frustrated over things but I don't let them stress me anymore. (By the way if anyone is interested the articles that are causing me the most frustration right now are Crumber, and Chimney starter. I just don't know why these articles are needed, frankly.) The guideline that seems the most inconsistently enforced is the Wikipedia is not a dictionary guideline. There appears that this guideline may have been adopted prematurely as I don't see a clear consensus for either side here. The question is, "Is an encyclopedia a dictionary?". The answer isn't real clear. In the phsyical world (versus the cyber world) we do have volumes of encyclopedias and we have dictionaries. This makes a person think that there is a clear division. The problem is that a dictionary can really be viewed as a type of encyclopedia. And then you get into the whole question of word orgins, etc. By the time you add all of this information to a definition of a word you could very well have a encyclopaedic article about a word, or a definition that is an encyclopaedic article. My thoughts are that Wiktionary and Wikipedia should be reunited and that dictionary articles should be allowed to reside here at Wikipedia. I dare say that a fair majority of people don't even know of the existence of Wiktionary and would come to Wikipedia first anyway to search for a word or a term. Why not just have it here for them?

Conclusion
Another wise man taught me "If you know the heart of a person then you will not be offended by that person." I think I know the heart of a vast majority of the community. To better this project and to make it a repository of information and knowledge. Most of us are working towards the same goal no matter how we go about it. Hopefully by sharing some of my observations and philosphies here I have revealed my heart to the community. We are all working for the same goal just on different paths.

My templates
Here are some templates that I created and that I use. If they will help you feel free to use them, just make sure you use subst command in front of them.


 * 1) User:James084/Template:Dead End Page - I use this one when I am running through a section of Dead-End pages.  This is just a boilerplate message that I post on the submitting user's talk page to encourage them to help clean up their own articles and turn them into better articles.
 * 2) User:James084/Template:Wiktionary marked for prod - I use this one when I tag an article with the  tag to notify the submitting user about the proposed deletion.  This makes more sense when it follow my first template text above.
 * 3) User:James084/Template:Not Notable marked for prod - I use this one when I tag an article with the  tag to notify the submitting user that his or her article is being deleted for notability issues.  This makes more sense when it follows my first template text above.
 * 4) User:James084/Template:Copyvio - I really just borrowed the text from the  template for this template.  However, it is worded to make a more natural followup to my Dead End Page template above.