Hi all,
I am fairly new to Wikipedia and I would like to ask the advice of some of the more experienced wikipidians.
To begin with, I am impressed with the high quality of the writing of some of the articles. But there are also plenty which need lots of work, and I enjoy wrestling with these ungainly creatures, restructuring them, chopping out redundancies, tightening up the prose, adding sub-headings and good intros, improving transitions, etc. etc. etc.
Of late, however, I have been coming into conflict with another user, whom I will refer to as X.
X is a prolific contributor to Wikipedia with a proclivity for gathering large amounts of information about fairly obscure topics, such as provincial towns and cities, transportation networks, and the like. It is perhaps an extreme example, but I even encountered a entry he had written on a metro system currently under construction in a major European capital, listing all of the proposed subway stations. All well and good; it is all valid information, except that this metro system won't be operational until 2011 (!). It made wonder about X's priorities.
And herein lies the crunch. To begin with, X favors wikifying words, such as
beach theater city hall performance pool reflection beach
in situations where there is no high-level thematic relation; they are simply used as common English words. In my view, such items shouldn't be Wikified. In support of my view, I found the following Wikipedia page:
Make_only_links_relevant_to_the_context
(I have also noticed other users unwikify contextually insignificant words so I know I am not alone.)
X wrote on a Talk page that he thinks they all belong, that people can ignore them if they are not useful, that they alert people to other articles in the encyclopedia.
OK, no big issue.
More critical for me, however, is that X adamantly opposes removing ANY information from Wikipedia: everything that goes in cannot go out. X doesn't oppose my copyedits -- fortunately, because he is no stylist -- but if I remove so much as a single factoid from an article he has edited, X replaces it within fifteen minutes or so.
In brief interchanges via Talk pages, it is becoming clear that X and I have diametrically opposed philosophies on how to create encyclopedia articles. X appears to believe that all information is of equal value and all should be collected in the encyclopedia, what I would call the "warehouse" approach. I feel an encyclopedia is more like building a pyramid, developing hierarchies, prioritizing information, developing a critical eye for what should be included and what not, all with the aim of producing well-organized, well-written, balanced articles containing the right amount and right kind of information.
Up until a short while ago, X rolled back deletions I made one by one, which didn't please me, but I could live with it. However, yesterday he reverted an entire article in which I dewikified a couple of common words, thereby junking other edits I had also made. It was a short article, not particularly important to me, so I let it be. But there are other more substantial articles dearer to my heart (that X has also worked on) which I feel need work, but I don't feel that now I can comfortably do so.
I respect X's formidable information gathering skills; raw data is of course indispensable in the construction of an encyclopedia. But he doesn't appear to respect me as an editor interested in presenting information in a useful way. I would be interested in suggestions anyone may have for resolving my predicament, as I would very much like to continue to contribute freely to Wikipedia.