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.
Why don't you start by forwarding this post to X privately using the link on his user page if he has one.
Fred Bauder
http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org
From: viajero@quilombo.nl Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 13:58:00 +0200 (CEST) To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: Warehouse or Pyramid?
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.
Hi,
viajero@quilombo.nl wrote:
except that this metro system won't be operational until 2011 (!). It made wonder about X's priorities.
We are all volunteers; nobody gets paid to contribute. Therefore, I don't see how anyone should impose any priorities on somebody else. In other words, if someone wanted to work on obskure and insignificant topics, there's nothing wrong with letting them; there is no way of forcing them into other topics that interest them less. Who knows, maybe in 2011 we won't find someone to write out the list of stations, so it's good to already have one.
And herein lies the crunch. To begin with, X favors wikifying words, such as
The question what words are relevant to the context and which aren't is purely subjective -- unfortunately. I understand from my own experience that it can often feel to you like it's completely obvious that "beach" has no relevancy to an article on the [[Sun]], say. But it's not actually this obvious. Someone else might feel this link is relevant, and they might feel that this is completely obvious.
We cannot formulate a rock-solid policy that will dictate which words should be wikified and which ones shouldn't. We have to live with the fact that there are, and always will be, disagreements about this. Probably the best way to handle it (for both you and "X") is to try not to have too strong feelings about it.
More critical for me, however, is that X adamantly opposes removing ANY information from Wikipedia: everything that goes in cannot go out.
Well, I would agree to that. Of course you can refactor articles and perhaps move little insignificant factoids to the bottom, but seeing as one of Wikipedia's goals is to record as much of human knowledge as possible, why should any of it ever be removed?
For example, I'm pretty certain that somewhere in Wikipedia it says that humans at some point in history used to be under the impression/belief that atoms are unsplittable (as evidenced by the word's etymology). You see, even if some ground-breaking research brings to light new facts that contradict existing information in the Wikipedia, perhaps it's best *NOT* to remove it, but only prefix it with "It used to be believed that" and add "until in [[2003]] an experiment by [[John Doe (physicist)]] proved that ......"
developing a critical eye for what should be included and what not,
Everything should be included ;-)
However, yesterday he reverted an entire article in which I dewikified a couple of common words, thereby junking other edits I had also made.
This is, of course (not taking into account possible bias due to your point of view) not very nice, but the best you can do about it is reinstate your other edits. Of course, you could also revert his revert, and if it ends in an edit war, then a sysop will take care of the article and (hopefully) keep your useful information in while making an educated decision regarding the linking of common words.
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.
Indeed I am starting to suspect that this is one common reason people leave us before we ever see substantial contribution from them. We have a page telling people to be 'Bold in editing pages', but some people are bolder than others. Especially when an existing contributor ("X" in this case) is being bold in reverting, it is relatively uncommon for the other party to initiate an edit war (a revert war) if they're a newbie (you in this case).
Greetings, Timwi