Wikipedia talk:Requests for checkuser/Case/General Mannino

Note
Just to clear up a couple things:

1) the IP4240207xx account was originally created because of a login issue with the WikiDon account. Jimmy Wales was aware of it at the time. It was never meant as a sockpuppet because it wasn't used to abuse anything. I only kept it to revert vandalism, and protect myself from abuse. The rules of sockpuppetry state that there is no reason you can't have more than one account, that is not sockpuppetry in itself, but only if you use those accounts for abusive purposes. Which in the last two weeks I did cross the line.

2) I did put in four years of good edits, I only degraded over the past two months, accelerating in past two weeks, because of my severe frustration over vandals, certain users that I became frustrated with who would not work with others. I am not working now, and this added to my frustrations. I did have some really good quality contributions. If you look at the bulk of the work, 90%?, you will see a good quality product. But, I let the Roger Sieger's (user:Rms125a@hotmail.com), user:HarveyCarter's, user:Diamond Joe Quimby's, user:Usman Hashmi's, of the Wikipedia world drag me down to their level. I got so tired of dealing with these assholes that I couldn't wait for the normal chain of command to act and tried to accelerate the process. There are users on here that do like me, and have valued my assistance.

While letting anybody edit sounds like a good idea, the open scheme of Wikipedia is flawed. Pure Communism and Pure Capitalism are both great ideas on paper. But, once you introduce the theory to human nature it becomes flawed. A certain percentage of people will not want to follow any rules, and another certain percentage of people will actually be destructive. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, you can do to alter these basic percentages of human nature. A certain number, say 10%, are without moral compass, they will never have it, and there is nothing you can do to change that. The only way to alter it would be medically, and that in itself becomes The Boys from Brazil evil. If you try to alter human nature in this manner, you superimpose one persons thinking on another. So, that is not an answer, but neither is Lord of Flies, which is closer to what we have here on Wikipedia. You must find a balance in the middle. You must have some controls, but not let the thinking of a few try to change the thinking of the mass.

Letting anonymous IPs edits is not good. Now, Wikipedia makes a big deal that they "let anybody edit." And, I am not saying that you don't do that, but if "anybody" wants to edit, then why can't "anybody" login to do it. And the plain fact is some people have been banned, are they still "anybody"?

Here is something to think about: How much time are good contributors spending on patrolling and reverting vandalism and poor quality edits? What if that time could be spent on POSITIVE edits, making quality improvements to articles, instead of on NEGATIVE edits? You have to look at this from a business administration point-of-view, even though this is a non-profit entity. Although you are not trying to make a profit, you are trying to put out a quality product (or at least you should be). So, if you sincerely want to put out a quality product, you should act like and put the quality controls in place to do so. Wikipedia could really learn something about business school productivity curriculum. The percentage of "productive" edits needs to be at a certain level to achieve the quality product status. If a good quality editor is spending 50% of their time reverting vandalism or cleaning up inferior quality edits, that means they are not going to get enough quality edits done to improve the overall quality of the product. This product.

What if you have a 1000 quality editors, and they spend an average of four hours a day here, two hours just cleaning up trash and two hours actually making constructive edits? Now, lets use 200 days for out metric. 1000 x 2 x 200 = 400,000 quality hours of actual positive contributions. But, it also means 400,000 hours of spinning in place counter-productivity. What if through editing controls you could get that number to 80% instead of 50%? Now multiply that by two years, three years, four years, etc. If this was a for profit entity it would have either been gone or changed the business model by now. Now, I am not saying that it should be a "for profit" concern. The idea of a free-global encyclopedia is one of the brightest things to have come out of the Internet ever. But, at the same time, that doesn't mean you can't attempt to skew the number of quality editors and the percentage of their productivity in your favor.

The present, totally-open, policy of Wikipedia (Wikimedia) is flawed. The negative articles about the vandalism and agency's altering their own articles proves this point, and will continue to do so. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, you need some "hops". You can't change human nature, and it is a crime to attempt it, so you must have some process controls to achieve quality output.

One, no IP eidts, you must login. It is the fastest, simplest way to start to improve the product. If you can't sign up for an account, then that is not Wikimedia's problem.

Two, when you add something new (lets say over a certain number of kilobytes, you can't save the page unless you provide references for the addition. No, no ability to save the page, unless you have reached-achieved a certain status of good standing.

While the thought of a pure-open encyclopedia is a great idea, it is like the communism of encyclopedias, great idea-flawed execution. Why didn't what Marx write play out in Russia? Human nature. Human nature causes greed, self-serving, corruption, theft, etc., in some individuals and there is nothing you can do about to change that human nature. But there are things you can do to protect your product from it.

I hope that you understand what happened with my frustrations,

WikiDon - — Preceding unsigned comment added by WikiDon (talk • contribs)


 * I'm fine leaving this here, but don't spam this stuff all over your sock accounts - you're "outting" the RL names of other editors (banned or not, it doesn't matter) - A l is o n  ❤ 00:15, 25 June 2008 (UTC)