User:Vanilla Wizard/Essays

This subpage is intended to hold my thoughts on various matters relating to the encyclopedia. Essays may either be my opinion on what to do in a situation, how to identify a situation, or direct commentary on a situation. User essays are not policies, and they should not be regarded as them.

Actions that damage the encyclopedia in good faith
The wholesale removal of content perceived as problematic does not help anyone. It doesn't help to build an encyclopedia. It doesn't help the readers. It doesn't help the editors. If an article is in poor shape, if an article potentially contains copyrighted material, or if an article is otherwise problematic, then fix it. The thought of actually solving a problem manually instead depriving readers of the content they're looking for whilst preventing editors from doing their jobs seems to be heresy among deletionists and copyright hawks, but it is the only solution that solves the problem. Vandalism is punished because it is unproductive and destructive. Vandals that blank pages are blocked. Any editor that routinely and unjustifiably does the same in the name of deletionism or perceived yet inaccurate copyright concerns should lose the privileges that allow them to do this. Though their actions may be in good faith, they cause more damage than any one vandal could.

TL;DR:
 * Don't destroy it, fix it.
 * Doing more harm than good, but doing it out of good faith, is still unacceptable.

On deletionism
Most articles proposed to be deleted should instead be improved or merged. The sole priority should be to ensure that the readers interested in the subject have the ability to conveniently access reliable content. When an editor proposes deletion, they are proposing the complete removal of all content. There are very few instances in which this is necessary, yet WP:AFD exists while WP:AFM was an unsuccessful proposal. Being an article of poor quality is not a rationale for deletion. It's a rationale for classifying the article as a stub. It's a rationale for fixing it yourself. If an article is bad, improve it. In some cases, notability guidelines on articles of certain topics may be stricter than others.

On WP:NPOL
A three sentence stub on a little-known individual with one source may be left alone, but an article several paragraphs in length covering an unelected politician running for an office will likely get proposed for deletion. In these cases, deletion should not be proposed at all. The proposal should be to merge the article covering a candidate into the article covering the election in which a candidate runs, because this solution does not needlessly deprive the reader of the information they're looking for. The notability of politicians should be determined by the amount of reliable sources covering them. If a well-written, policy-compliant, well-sourced article covers a failed politician using a sufficient number reliable sources, there is no justification for voiding all of the editors' hard work and ensuring that no reader will ever see it. In the event that a discussion arises to challenge WP:NPOL, I would support modifying it in favor of a notability guideline based on reliable sources.

On copyright
Never initiate the slow, bureaucratic process of assessing the copyright of material based solely on the fact that you're not sure if it's uncopyrighted. If you don't know the answer, look for it first, do the necessary research, and then flag as needed. If it has already been demonstrated that the content you've flagged or templated is not subject to copyright, do the right thing and withdraw your actions, even if it hurts your pride to do so. Our purpose as editors is to benefit the readers, and it is never okay to knowingly do the opposite.

Copyright regarding national symbols
A good rule of thumb is that nearly all official + legally recognized national symbols are - either constitutionally or otherwise legislatively - explicitly public and exempt from copyright. Read the copyright laws of the country which recognizes the symbol. Flags, seals or other insignia, anthems (and their sheet music and lyrics), and other national symbols are very rarely the subject of copyright, and you should first read the text of the relevant laws before purging content from articles. This unnecessarily decreases the readers' access to information, and creates unnecessary headaches for editors.

ITN / RD
For the sake of consistency and to better explain my approach to ITN, I may ramble in this section from time to time.

What should the standard for posting be?
On ITN section, any news story that is demonstrably a front page news story worldwide is more than deserving of ITN. However, it's very possible that a story is more than worthy of being posted to ITN based on a consensus that it's significant, even if mainstream coverage of the story is limited or confined primarily to the region in which the story occurred. The standard for bumping a recent death from RD to ITN should mirror the ITN standard; if the death of an individual is widely covered throughout the world, then it is by definition a news story, and a significant one at that. As the primary objective of the encyclopedia - both its articles and its mainpage - is to serve the readers, a useful metric is the daily article page views. Many news stories will receive spikes ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, so the newsworthiness of any article whose page views peaks in the millions should not be in question. If an article is read by millions every day, readers have selected what news is important to them for us, and it would be a disservice to not post what has been demonstrated to be significant news.

When to post an RD to ITN
A frequently cited most rigorous standard is that a figure should be comparable to Nelson Mandela or Margaret Thatcher in politics or Stephen Hawking in natural sciences, that is to say, an individual that will unquestionably be taught in schools for generations to come. A still rigorous (though more open) standard is that an individual should simply be at the top of their respective fields, whether in a certain music genre, in performance arts, in politics, or other fields. However, deaths promoted to ITN are more often than not of figures whose professions frequently put them in the public eye, which means that individuals with little name recognition may be the top of their careers, but attract fewer editors to their respective discussions. These standards are subjective, and the standard by which individual editors determine whether or not a death deserves a news blurb may change over time based on the editors' past experiences with ITN, either from developing a belief that a precedent has been set by consensus, or from the rejection of precedent-based arguments based on perceived hypocrisy or inconsistency. Those that will be remembered in history easily warrant an ITN blurb, but ITN is not prestigious. An ITN blurb is not a rare medal of honor, and it is routinely granted to stories which have near zero impact internationally, or even locally. Annual routine events, including tournaments limited to specific regions or even municipalities, are not more notable than deaths covered globally. ITN's standards for which events should be regarded as automatically notable (such as the deaths of well-known heads of state) do not mean that any deaths that fail to meet these criteria must be excluded; any article that becomes the most viewed page on Wikipedia should not be regarded as too unimportant. However, this does not mean that the inverse of this point (that articles with few page-views are by definition unimportant) is true. Major stories in parts of the world that seldom get attention are not unimportant, and posting them to ITN can help combat systemic bias and bring attention to them. In short, any article with an extraordinarily high number of views is important, but not every article with a small number of views is unimportant.

Is ITN too Americentric?
TBA

Shorter summaries of the above sections:

 * An appropriate (though little used) standard is that a death or news story which is covered internationally is worthy of a blurb. Consider looking for articles from publications in languages other than English.


 * An additional metric rarely cited is an article's spike in page views. This is primarily useful for upgrading an RD listing to an ITN blurb, as many recent events may not yet have articles. Any page that becomes one of the most viewed on Wikipedia is without question notable enough for ITN, but this does not mean that the inverse (that any page with little views should not be posted) is true.


 * ITN is not prestigious; stories should be notable to a worldwide audience of readers, but blurbs are neither highly exclusive nor highly inclusive. This does not mean that a story must affect multiple countries simultaneously, but it does mean that a story being covered throughout the world should be regarded as important enough to mention on Wikipedia.

Nominations I would !vote wait
My threshold for whether to !vote wait or not is whether or not the story being nominated happened at all. A common counterargument is that this is red tape, and we tend to post general elections rather than inaugurations. However, winning a general election is the sole obstacle to ensuring that the winner of a given public office is to be regarded as the next individual to hold said office. In cases such as the examples below, this is not the case:
 * ''The parliaments of Greece and Macedonia approve a proposal for the country's name to change to "North Macedonia"
 * These are not the only obstacles preventing Macedonia from becoming North Macedonia. Until ratification by NATO, Macedonia is simply Macedonia (or the former Yugoslav republic). This is an example of a story that has been nominated many times (every step of the way), but the threshold for posting that the country changed its name should be that the country changed its name.
 * In the US, the longest government shutdown halts after the government is funded for 3 weeks.
 * This nomination prompted disagreements about whether or not this constitutes an end to the government shutdown. Because the cause was a lack of funding for the fiscal year, there should not be a blurb until the funding for the fiscal year exists.

Projection
A common and troubling characteristic of single-purpose accounts and POV-warriors is to endlessly and hastily declare editors around them to be the POV-pushers. This assumes bad faith and views Wikipedia as a battleground which may be a sign that an editor is not here to build an encyclopedia, but is instead motivated by a desire to achieve a long-term goal. Some examples of users projecting their own intentions onto others are immediately obvious, but this is not always the case.

This does not mean that an editor focusing primarily on their own niche areas of interest necessarily makes them a single-purpose account with malicious intent, and this does not necessarily mean that it is wrong to raise concerns over content with a perceived non-neutral point of view. However, a combination of these behaviors: editing restricted to a single subject, frequent accusations of POV-pushing whilst promoting a non-neutral point of view, and accusing others of being single-purpose accounts in spite of their own limited interest on Wikipedia, raises severe concern that an an editor is here not to create an encyclopedia, but to rewrite it to fit a single POV.

TL;DR:
 * Single-purpose accounts have a tendency to believe they are surrounded by single-purpose accounts.