User:TheFearow/Balance

Here on Wikipedia, work is all about balance. We differ from a traditional encyclopedia in the fact that Wikipedia requires constant maintenance - additions and modifications are not controlled, and a lot of it needs rewriting or removing.

The relationship
Article writing and maintenance share a symbiotic relationship. Without any maintenance, Wikipedia would become a collection of random facts, views, and data, and it would be impossible to write good articles. Without any article writing, there would be nothing to maintain, and Wikipedia would become an online community.

The importance
It is impossible to give any amount of weight to either article writing or maintenance. Without the other, the purpose of them is defeated. If weight is given to any of them, then it starts becoming less important. If a lower weight is given to something, it becomes more important than the other.

An example: A large number of vandal fighters decide article writing is more important, and switch to writing FA's. Almost instantly, we develop a vandalism problem, that becomes difficult to clean up. Therefore, those vandal-fighters switch back to vandal fighting, as do some people who were always doing article writing. The disruption then escalates in another direction - articles stop getting written, we get less things to maintain, people get bored. DYK and TFA wouldn't have enough articles, and we end up with not very many good quality articles

It is partially unbalanced
Regular editors are slanted towards maintenance - it's not something that any random person can do. This can cause a problem. The reason this is not a problem is due to the non-regular editors. These editors are almost always 100% article stuff, and not maintenance (excluding vandals). Therefore, it stays balanced. This is one of the many reasons that blocking anonymous edits will not occur - without anonymous edits, and that of new or inexperienced editors, we would loose a huge amount of article work, and the already existing unbalance between regular editors would suddenly become prominent.

This essay
Thank you for reading my essay, and thoughts. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to tell me on the talk page. I ask you to not edit this page except for minor changes, and I reserve the right to revert changes that change the essence of this essay.