User:Noyster/thoughts

It seems crazy that...
• Anonymous editing is still allowed.

• You can sign up without having to confirm your email as you do all round the internet.

• Before signing up you don't get a message blazing out of the screen saying "Stop! This is no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit just any way they want! All contributions have to be studded with references to etc. etc.! Don't copy chunks from other websites here! This site is so not Facebook! Don't you dare try to promote yourself or your family, band, product, company or opinion! New articles have to be about something Notable and most of these have already been written! Ignore this and your efforts will just get deleted or reverted! Oh, and welcome, we hope you like this place and want to stay.

• Software development is way behind. Vital bots and tools that we all rely on still each depend on the goodwill and daily attention of one or two individuals. Meanwhile, WMF accumulates millions of dollars it can't think what to do with.

• Articles for Creation usually has a month's backlog while everyone waits for the next Drive. Meanwhile, any IP can create a Mickey Mouse account: then, depending on the exact process you use to input your new article, it may: still get stuck in AfC; be checked by a New Age Patroller; or never be vetted at all.

• We drive conflict-of-interest editors underground, forbidding them from identifying themselves as such by their username. We should insist that corporations and PR firms use their real name as their username and spell out their role on their userpage.

• Any amount of unreferenced tripe is tolerated about any unremarkable village or high school. When people see this, they are unlikely to realise that other standards (sometimes) apply on other topics.

• At AfD if just one editor takes part and puts six good arguments, it is closed "No consensus". If six come along each with one of the same arguments, it's a definite verdict.

• You have to press Return twice for a paragraph break.

• Edit summaries can be as long as War and Peace. Talk pages have gone out of fashion. But you still have to check both just in case.

WikiEntropy
Anyone who does much patrolling will come across many cases of valueless and damaging semi-literate additions to articles of a credible standard. They are not intended as vandalism. They are symptomatic of the results of the world's population still thinking of Wikipedia as "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit".

Typically these will be found tacked on to the end of an early paragraph. There are likely to be misspellings and no capital letters.


 * Air pollution
 * Asian black bear
 * Biosphere
 * Chinchilla
 * Conservation of energy
 * Edmund Barton
 * George Orwell
 * Government
 * Government 2
 * Headache
 * Human-computer interaction
 * Lever
 * Locks
 * Meaning of life
 * Network virtualization
 * Oyster
 * Pearl
 * Petal
 * Piano
 * Plain
 * Salinity in Australia
 * Social research
 * Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game
 * Stomach
 * Tress (sic)
 * Wind turbine
 * World Health Organization

This, more than vandalism, is what is degrading our articles day by day - a process sometimes known as "WikiEntropy" ("the slow degradation of content quality over time" - ref WP:WikiCyclops). Randy in Boise (who these days should perhaps be renamed "Ranjit in Bhojpur") is alive and well and now has a smartphone under his school desk. To catch the vandals we have our ClueBot, our Huggle and our STiki; but no comparable tools for spotting these well-intentioned but deleterious contributions, and because they seem to be made in good faith we hesitate to revert on sight and move on. Our model is stuck in the past, when contributions to Wikipedia were assumed to come from a finite band of well-educated native English speakers who used accounts, edited many articles, engaged in discussions and became socialised into collegiate working. If this was ever the case it is not like this any more, and we're going to have to fundamentally rethink the "anyone can edit" model.