User:RandomHumanoid

I am a random humanoid. I suspect you may be one too. Welcome fellow being.

Among my primary interests with my time spent here is how to make Wikipedia more widely acceptable to the academic community. I am passionately dedicated to the principle of making knowledge freely available.

By the way, I hold in extreme distaste people who author their own autobiographies on Wikipedia. If one merits an article here, someone else will eventually write it. See Autobiography for more information. (Were it up to me, autobiographies would be strictly forbidden.)

Philosophical outlook
Here is a list of fundamental problems plaguing the current instantiation of Wikipedia in my opinion. No doubt, this has all been discussed by others, but it will explain my editing philosophy:


 * Wikipedia suffers deeply from regression to the mean. Colloquially, this means that the more people who edit an article, the more mediocre it becomes.  (You'll notice the irony of how poorly written the article explaining this basic concept is.  Here's a better definition: Mathworld's explanation.)  This particular flaw is so fundamental and egregious that fixing it would require a major shift in the philosophy underlying Wikipedia.


 * Wikipedia gives no deference to expertise. A grammar school student is considered as competent an editor as someone with deep academic credentials in an area.  This has nothing to do with elitism.  Someone who devotes his/her professional life to a subject is going to have a fundamentally deeper understanding of it than a casual commentator, who seems to consult one source and then treats it as the gospel on the material at hand.


 * Wikipedia contains vast amounts of content with no historical significance. Will anyone remember or care in 20 (or 50) years who the contestants on a random reality TV show were?  WP:Note specifically says "notability is not temporary."  A large number of the articles here cover unmemorable, pop culture phenomena.  I would hope for their deletion without hesitation.  At the very least, I would have such articles automatically subject to a prod template at some fixed period (e.g., a year, five years) after creation.


 * Wikipedia confuses volume with quality. The measure of an encyclopedia should not be the number of articles it contains but instead, the number of worthwhile articles it contains.  Having perused a large sampling of articles here -- by the way, peruse means to read deeply, not to scan cursorily; funny how so many people get this backwards -- I would guess that fewer than 25% of the current articles would survive a pruning process by my reckoning, and I think undertaking such an effort would be a good thing.


 * Blatant vandalism is rampant here. By current policy, vandals require three or four warnings to get banned.  What a waste of editors' time.  I would have a zero tolerance policy for vandals who add obscenities, patent nonsense, or obvious falsehoods to an article.  In other words, one strike and you're out.