User:Styyx/Trwiki

I left the Turkish Wikipedia indefinitely in February 2022. This came after a short break a few months prior in September 2021. I realized I never made a clear reasoning in detail, anywhere, to no one, so that's what this is intended to be. I'm writing this in May (update in October), so 3 months have passed. I believe this is a sufficient cooldown period to write something when I'm not as furious as I used to be and reflect my experience without exaggerating.

Oh golly, where do I even start? First of all: Articles for Deletion. AfD was where I spent quite some time on the project. Being a relatively small project, the users !voting are almost always the same. I've always encountered stupid arguments, a common thing on any project, so this isn't unnatural. However for some reason on trwiki, they take shit to the next level. Apparently interviews are actually independent, because the subject of the article is not the editor-in-chief of the media outlet and because it isn't a type of content that the person produces about themselves, despite the explanatory supplement of independent sources firmly stating the contrary. Another issue is made up inclusion criterias. No, I don't mean the actual criterias featured on subject-specific guidelines, I mean people making up previously non-existent criterias on the spot during an AfD. This on many projects is done by single-purpose accounts, but on trwiki it's the regulars. Additionally, there is a user running around on BLP AfD's, !voting keep on them just because an article he nominated in January 2021 ended up being kept.

I also believe that some user rights are being handed out way too early, particularly the patroller/pending changes reviewer/rollback flag. You can only get these rights together at once; they aren't given out separately. Because of this, I believe that we should be quite a bit careful when handing these out. Giving them to inexperienced users who have been registered for just a month and simply have a couple of reverts is not a great idea, yet it happens frequently. The result is a mess. There has been once where a patroller used these rights to patrol utter-bullshit articles about companies and patrol edits that add the same spam link to articles. There are many patrollers who engaged in undisclosed paid editing, with adverts of article creations showing up on third-party websites.

Another issue with inexperienced patrollers is that well... they are inexperienced, and it shows. You can't know every guideline and policy, you don't have to. However an understanding of the basics is required. In August 2021, there were five patrollers, three of which had been on the project for less than 3 months, reporting an IP at VP:KET—Turkish version of WP:AIV. The IP had been removing/diffusing large categories from articles in line with WP:DIFFUSE (which also exists on trwiki). Those edits were reverted multiple times by the aforementioned patrollers. While the IP only saying "It has to be removed" didn't help, ""experienced"" users getting in an edit war over this and violating the 3RR is unbelievable, and going as far as using rollback—which can only be used to revert vandalism and vandalism only—is even more concerning. In the end, the IP got blocked for 24 hours, and no fuck was ever done against the patrollers except for one. Most of them correctly dropped the stick and stopped talking about the whole incident, while one still insisted that the IP was in the wrong, and I believe it's not a coincidence that their patroller rights ended up being revoked less than a week later, partially related to this.

Both instances are a headache to actual patrollers who were getting stuff done. The whole dramas caught the attention of a few other patrollers. The former because it was a big thing and a ton of edits had to be reverted, the latter as it spiralled into some personal attacks and ended up at AN/I, with nothing being done again. So instead of actually working on reducing the backlog, we got to treat ourselves with this bullshit. I also used to re-check some of the logged actions of these inexperienced patrollers, ending up reverting some, which again, meant that I was doing something else other than actually patrolling.

The project is a fucking battlefield. Usually the same people get dragged to AN/I, with people labelling others as a "Kurdish nationalist", "Turkish nationalist" or an "Armenian nationalist" based on their edits; "Hrrr, he reverted my genocide denialist edit so he must be a part of their diaspora". Occasionally this spills into AfD's, talk pages or high-traffic pages (such as the village pump of AN), so you can't just simply by-pass the bullshit by not looking at AN/I, which I wasn't doing much anyway. It's not a healthy environment if you are genuinely trying to find some useful discussions that took place in the past.

All of this leaves a frustrated Styyx. Everything comes to an end, and I believe it had to be here. I do not plan to return to the Turkish Wikipedia anytime soon, though I occasionally go back to deal with cross-wiki spam, answer questions at the local embassy and watch for LTA's I'm familiar with. I hate those kind of people more than I hate the Turkish Wikipedia. However, unless it's a part of one of the aforementioned exceptions, don't expect me to make any substantial contributions. A short summary of this whole page is currently displayed on my user page on the project, which also has a link to here.


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