User:Weeklyd3/Essays/Some facts about Wikipedia

I've listed some things that might not be the best, but are true.


 * 1) A lot, I daresay most, of the drafts in the Draft namespace probably won't make it into mainspace. This may be because the subject truly isn't notable enough and can't be improved, or simply that no one cares enough to improve and submit the draft.
 * 2) On the Internet and Wikipedia forums, there somehow is this idea that being an administrator can exempt you from certain requirements, like notability or verifiability. I've even seen people selling administrator accounts. I've even seen people attempting to sell them, claiming that it will help create articles. The truth is that administrators are subject to actually more scrutiny than normal users. Administrators are just normal editors that the community thinks can be trusted with functions like delete and block.
 * 3) People who say "I want to be an administrator someday" or "I do not want to be an administrator someday" probably won't become administrators, even if the latter's choice changes. "I want to be an administrator" makes the user seem like they don't understand that being an administrator isn't a big deal.
 * 4) Becoming an administrator isn't easy, although emphasis is placed on the fact that it isn't a big deal. The requests for adminship process was called "a horrible and broken process" by Jimbo Wales (if I remember correctly), and You can see Hell from here used to redirect to the requests for adminship page until it was deleted after a RfD.
 * 5) Users who ask how to "upload" a "profile" or something like that typically create an article that doesn't meet notability standards. Wikipedia isn't like Facebook, where everyone can create a page about themselves. On Wikipedia, creating an article about yourself is actually discouraged.
 * 6) Citing the "right to free speech" is rarely successful. The Wikimedia Foundation isn't the government, and the free speech amendment only prevents the government from making laws that restrict free speech. For example, if you run a wiki like this, and I keep posting stuff you don't want on there citing the "right to free speech", it's your site, not the government's, and you ultimately get to decide what stays and what doesn't. Related: Free speech.
 * 7) Recent changes patrollers can get into edit wars. Non-vandalism edits that are against the manual of style or have some other problems that require the edit to be removed entirely still count towards the three-revert rule. Even if your reverts are making the encyclopedia better, you still can get blocked for starting an edit war.
 * 8) Nobody needs to have every single user right on Wikipedia. For example, requesting Rollback, New Page Reviewer, Pending Changes Reviewer, and AutoWikiBrowser at the same time may reveal that the user is trying to get user rights just to show off or something, not to actually use them. For example, being a new page reviewer is a stressful job. So is being an arbitrator. One person can't do everything on Wikipedia, so don't request all the rights. Related: Hat collecting.
 * 9) A user with a huge edit count might not be in good standing at all. There are users that rack up hundreds, even thousands, of edits by making minor edits to a huge list of pages using semi-automated tools like AutoWikiBrowser. When using AutoWikiBrowser, you input the changes to be made, and AutoWikiBrowser shows the changes to be made to each page. Then, you can choose whether or not to apply each change. Such an editing process is a lot easier than adding quality sourced content.
 * 10) Wikipedia runs into so much vandalism and spam each day, some people need to dedicate their entire time on Wikipedia to fighting vandalism and spam instead of actually improving articles.
 * 11) User:ClueBot NG is stealing some of recent changes patrollers' jobs by reverting obvious vandalism. It's really helpful, but sometimes new users wanting to fight vandalism will see that every act of vandalism they notice is reverted before they can.
 * 12) A lot of blocks and such happen without explaining it to the public. This is probably because they don't want you to know. One reason this might happen is because disclosing it publicly could cause actual harm to an actual person. Related: There's a reason you don't know.
 * 13) A lot of speedy deletion nominations happen really quickly after the page is created, leaving little time to improve it. Related: Beef up that first revision.
 * 14) Signatures with a bunch of background colors and text sizes like  Ex  am  ple  An example page! / A sandbox! (yes, that was a bit too much) often draw away readers' attention. You probably paid a lot more attention to that signature than the rest of this. Related: Don't use a billboard signature.
 * 15) Once you say "thanks" too many times, it seems to become a word that doesn't have any meaning. Related: Don't make a smarmy valediction part of your default signature. Thanks for reading!
 * 16) If your signature, like  Example  |  talk  is missing an end tag or something, it can mess up the whole page. That's why this is red - the red color span tag wasn't closed. If your signature includes small text, like this, but you forget to close it, the rest of the page is also small like this.