User:Shreevatsa/Userpage

Motivation
As in real life, I'm a student on Wikipedia; I edit articles as I learn. (In particular, my interests vary, with small obsessive spurts.) Mostly I read Wikipedia, but sometimes I edit, whenever I see an obvious opportunity for improvement. Sometimes there's that other motivation.

My Wikipedia philosophy: Wikipedia is for readers, not editors
Wikipedia is meant to be a helpful resource for readers, not a playground or social network for editors. Our primary goal is (or ought to be) to create and improve articles. All other social-networking aspects — administrative bureaucracy, "Wikiprojects", rating articles, fiddling with categories and stubs, awarding barnstars, etc. — are secondary trivia. I recognize that some of them may sometimes be necessary to avoid disruption, or even have marginal utility to readers, but I hope not to waste much time on them myself.

It is important to be welcoming to newcomers who take initiative. Please do not bite the newcomers. They write Wikipedia.

Bullypedia
For more thoughts on how the Wikipedia community has become a playground for entrenched editors who close ranks against newbies, see here, and (somewhat radical) follow-ups here and here:

"…the "lust for power" of editors who are tired of being just "workers" and want to be "bosses". In academia, [where] I work, this sort of thing happens all the time: people get tired of being just ordinary professors or researchers, and try to move to a position where, insted of working, they direct and control the work of other people.

How can one rise to be a "boss" in Wikipedia? Certainly not by editing contents: even if you edit 10,000 articles over several years and create a handful of "featured" ones, you will be just a "worker" like any of the other 10,000 regular editors. The same applies to any work (such as sourcing) that requires reading each article and thinking about its contents: no one can do that on more that 50-100 articles per day, the same top rate as for contents editing. Moreover, in that sort of work you often have to justify your edits to other "workers", and that puts you in the same "social level" as them.

A "boss" must do something that affects hundreds of thousands of articles, and does not require interacting with "workers" at their same level. It must be something definitive that an ordinary "worker" cannot stop or undo. It must be something that clearly put the "boss" on a higher level than the "workers".

That is the only explanation I can find for why we got the editorial tags at the top of articles. Robot-assisted tagging does not require thinking, so one can easily tag 1000 articles a day. The tagger is clearly "boss" because the tags are not "work", but "comands": every editorial tag says "I want this to be done, so some worker had better do it". A tagger is clearly above ordinary editors, because (by definition) the only way these can remove a tag is by complying with the wish of the tagger. Article tags have also the "advantage" that they violate the basic rule, "all editorial comments must go in the talk page": that is an advantage because (as in real life) one's social status is measured by the rules one can violate impunely.

[…]

Five years ago, Wikipedia could be defined as "three milion encyclopedia articles which anyone can edit". I am afraid that today it has become "a decadent social networking site with 10,000 members who have three million articles to play with". One just has to look at the pages in the "User talk:", "Wikipedia talk:", and "Template talk:" to realize that most Wikipedia decisions are being made by a small minority of "bosses" who seem to derive more plasure out of social interaction (and, in particular, the sense of power that comes from "bossing" over other members) than on making real substantial contributions to Wikipedia."

Most of Wikipedia's actual content is written by people devoted to an article, happy to spend hours or even weeks polishing an article into something they can be proud of. Most of Wikipedia's edits are by the "bosses" who go around making mass edits to hundreds of articles, often bot-assisted, trying to impose their trivial preferences.

Defacing articles you don't like
Particularly obnoxious are messages left on articles that are directed at editors rather than readers. Effectively, these (from User:Fences and windows):

and these (from User:Jorge Stolfi/Templates that I sorely miss):

The number of readers on Wikipedia is far greater than the number of editors, and the readers (many of whom cannot edit Wikipedia because it is too confusing) are not helped in any way by these tags.

Random observations on the editing process

 * Dangers
 * Editing Wikipedia is addictive. Taking a few months off helps break the habit.
 * Once you figure out how easy it is to improve articles, it is annoying when you encounter articles where this has not been done, and feel compelled to (e.g.) waste time tracking down references for "" tags.
 * It is tempting to add pages you edit to your watchlist; you want to know what happens to your contributions. My watchlist had grown to nearly 2000 pages before I realized my folly. It takes some optimism to believe in Wikipedia anyway; a little more optimism will help you let go.


 * Other things to keep in mind

"All material in Wikipedia articles must be attributable to a reliable published source to show that it is not original research, but in practice not everything need actually be attributed. This policy requires that anything challenged or likely to be challenged, including all quotations, be attributed to a reliable source…"
 * Verifiability, not truth. This is a stupid policy, but unfortunately necessary to keep the project going. But though verifiability is good and useful, having footnotes is not a goal in itself:


 * Neutral point of view. If you have a bias about an article, either lose it when editing, or, if this is hard, don't edit the article. (It's perfectly fine to have a point of view in real life.)


 * Wikipedia is not a battleground, or a place to fight real-world wrongs.


 * Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. The policies and guidelines are reflections of community consensus, not "rules". We are not here for wikilawyering or exegesis. So avoid instruction creep, ignore all rules, use common sense, and do whatever improves the encyclopædia. (And please don't excessively quote policy as this paragraph does.)

Tool(s)

 * Greasemonkey script I wrote to automatically generate citation-format text, from Google Books. Other tools for Google Books:
 * User:Ash improved my script here but also introduced a few bugs and crippled functionality. He has also taken the idea far and written many more useful scripts for all sorts of sources: here.
 * User:Apoc2400 has written Reftag, a website you can visit.
 * User:Smith609 has started writing Cite google book on the lines of other such amazing templates; it is not done yet.