User:Worldtraveller

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Some time ago I became convinced that without some radical change, this project would never achieve its aim of creating a reputable encyclopaedia. At the moment, it's largely a vast repository of really shockingly bad articles with a tiny number of excellent articles drowning in the seas of mediocrity. I wrote an essay detailing this (Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing), which uncovered even more problems when some people took it bizarrely personally and misunderstood the concept of an essay, changed it to conceal the evidence I put forward, blocked me for reverting those changes, moved the essay to my user area, deleted the redirect to prevent people seeing it, and finally tried to have the whole thing deleted. Most people are so resistant to criticism that change is impossible and things will never improve.

Then I encountered a problem that took me utterly by surprise. There are people here who sincerely believe that if an administrator totally ignores policy, and you call them a terrible administrator for that, that is a personal attack; that trying to start a meaningful dialogue with a terrible administrator is harassment; that criticism of a terrible administrator is incivility. The stupidity of this makes my mind boggle, and it was the final nail in the coffin for me here.

I'll leave the manifesto I wrote when I took a long break last year here for posterity.

1. Too many articles, not enough editors

   There are well over a million articles but perhaps only 1,000 currently active dedicated editors. With more than 1000 articles per dedicated editor, clearly only a tiny fraction will ever be a) brought to a high standard and b) kept at a high standard.

2. Too many editors with poor understanding of what encyclopaedia is

   The aim of being as authoritative as Britannica is impossible when large numbers of editors want to create 'trivia' articles or sections, endless lists of 'X in popular fiction', enormously detailed articles on ephemeral pop stars, etc, or who write from such a narrow perspective that their work is not of interest to the vast majority of readers. Very few editors are actually working on fundamentally important articles, many of which remain of very poor quality. People like this guy don't want a britannica-quality encyclopaedia.

3. AfD strongly works against any but the most clearly unencyclopaedic articles being deleted

   Even articles which cannot possibly fail to contravene basic policies are not deleted, such as The Beatles trivia. Given the requirement for consensus to delete, a minority of people who fail to understand basic policies can ensure that unencyclopaedic articles are kept.

4. There is no incentive for vast majority of articles to reach even very low quality benchmarks.

   The assumption that 'someone will fix it up later' is flawed: see #1. There is a need for strong incentives to get certain things done from the start, most obviously referencing. Finding sources for what other people have written takes up huge amounts of time, and realistically will not happen for the vast majority of articles. A lot of Wikipedia editors don't even believe in ensuring that articles are verifiable: DYK people aggressively rejected calls for DYK entries to be restricted to articles which cite their sources.

5. No protection for articles which have reached high quality, and they inevitably degrade through well-meaning but bad edits.

   An FA which is not maintained by someone will eventually seriously decline in quality. For some topics this occurs extremely rapidly. Some sort of static version is essential if Wikipedia is ever to be regarded as authoritative.

6. Too much emphasis on very long articles, when for vast majority of articles short would be sufficient

   Some people even say 32kb should be a minimum for FAs, although guidelines have always suggested that beyond 32kb articles might be better off split. Many FAs are appallingly verbose and boring, when a shorter article could say exactly the same and be far more interesting. Emphasis on length encourages bloat, and drastically slows the output of high quality content.

I have solutions to these problems. I've suggested some before. If they were adopted, I am sure the prevailing culture here would change, and I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't like it so much, but I'm also sure it would help to encourage higher standards and a better encyclopaedia.

1. Delete all articles which are unreferenced, six months from now.
2. Make a lack of references after three days a speedy deletion criterion for new articles.
3. Hide from the viewer all articles which have not been reviewed.
4. Create a static version of some sort.
5. Change AfD from requiring consensus to delete to requiring consensus to keep.

But, it's never going to happen. So, goodbye and all the best to all my friends here. I disabled my e-mail address but if anyone wants to contact me for any reason, you should find it fairly easy to do so by looking at any version of this page from before August last year.

-- Worldtraveller