Wikipedia:Editor review/Fox Wilson

Fox Wilson
I've reached 150 edits across all namespaces, and I'd be interested to know where I could improve. Fox Wilson (talk) 23:34, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

 Questions


 * 1) What are your primary contributions to Wikipedia? Are there any about which you are particularly pleased? Why?
 * My primary contribution to Wikipedia is reverting vandalism. I'll sometimes do minor copyediting of random pages.
 * 1) Have you been in editing disputes or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future? If you have never been in an editing dispute, explain how you would respond to one.
 * No. If I were in an editing dispute, I would attempt to make use of the talk page and try to settle it there.
 * No. If I were in an editing dispute, I would attempt to make use of the talk page and try to settle it there.

 Reviews 

Review by Ritchie333
It really depends what you want to get out of Wikipedia. Looking at your contributions, as you say, they seem to be mostly using Twinkle and STiki. One obvious problem with this is that the tools leave fairly generic edit summaries, which if you are reverting things in good faith, might not give an obvious explanation as to what the issue is. For instance, this edit to Consultation (Texas) had a rather ambiguous edit summary of "Irrelevant edit", which isn't really a suitable justification and puts it at the risk of somebody reverting it soon after with a summary like "unexplained removal of information cited in reliable sources". In fact, another edit you made here was reverted soon afterwards for that very reason.

I think the trouble is that if you focus too much on a narrow niche such as vandalism and automated tools, you loose sight of what else Wikipedia has to offer. If you really want to shine as an editor, there's only one real way to do that, and that's to write lots of really articles that go to good article and featured article status. You'll learn about sourcing, and verifiability, and that will help you with distinguishing vandalism from good faith edits at a glance. Obviously, it depends if you're sufficiently motiviated to do that, but I can see you tiring of the vandalism tools in years to come. You'll probably discover it's an endless task that's rarely thanked, and lose motiviation for it. In particular, if you ever decide to apply for the admin tools, your record of lots of automated edits and lack of article content will be a severe handicap and almost certainly result in an unsuccessful request. Having a look at the other areas of Wikipedia will at least help your enthusiasm pick up. -- Ritchie333 (talk)  (cont)   16:20, 13 December 2012 (UTC)