User:TParis/Signpost

Priorities

I've been paying a lot of attention to administrative threads lately and I think I've seen a trend developing that begins to explain why Wikipedians have the unique culture that we do. It explains some of the biggest headaches we face and why we seem to do things backwards but it also explains why the project has been successful as well. To the right, you'll see a table. I've organized this table into what I perceive to be a list of our, as in the English Wikipedia community, priorities. I could be wrong about the order of this table or any other facet of it's contents but that can all be worked out later. Let's just roll with the general idea and analyze its applicability.

I believe that when making decisions as a community, our collective minds follow a pattern where we analyze each of these items in descending order to make a determination on a course of action. What I mean to say is, that any lower priority can be forgiven if a particular user shows good work in a higher priority. Let me make a demonstration. Let's look at User:I, JethroBT-draft to start off with. Back in 2011, there was a about his username which, at the time, contained the suffix "bot". Now, I wouldn't say that this user had a plethora of featured content prior to the RFC, infact they had only a few hundred prior to the June 2011 RFC, but their edits demonstrated they were clearly not a bot and that they positively contributed to content building (also, the argument that the prohibition against -bot suffixes didn't exist when the account was created helped). So the decision was to allow the username.

Let's take another example. Without judging User:Eric Corbett-draft, let's take a look into why there continues to be a split among Wikipedians. If we accept the premise that Eric has on occasion been uncivil, without going into details on the reasons or circumstances, we can see that Eric's primary, well documented, and highly valued contribution to the higher content building priority will excuse the lower priority of civility. On another front, User:Martinvl-draft was recently blocked. Although he remained civil, his tendentious editing and edit warring caused him to be indefinitely blocked. In this case, Martinvl's higher content building contribution was not substantial enough to escape a lower TE block.

I think these priorities is where we have difficulty in solving some of our more entrenched issues. We, as individual editors, have a slightly different priority list. I developed the one displayed here based off my perception of community consensus. But even in community consensus, there are editors who personally feel slightly or drastically different than what I've developed.

Overall, I think that the most important part of this list of priorities is where on the list "Content Building" falls. We need to be mindful that the most items we give higher priority than content building, the less time we'll focus on content building. We're here to build an encyclopedia and in my opinion, anything above content building should only be in that position because it's lack of attention would be detrimental to content building.

So I throw this to the community. What are your individual priorities? How do policies rack and stack? Are these priorities definitive or are there exceptions to the order? Then, when we have our individual priorities straight, what are the priorities for the project? Can we ever even agree on which our biggest and most important issues are? Maybe if we can solve this, we can have a baseline to break some of the more contentious issues facing us; such as civility, paid advocacy, ect.