Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards <Martin at velocitymanager.com> wrote:
The other problem that vandalism causes is that it wastes so much time of editors who would otherwise being making articles better rather than stopping them being destroyed.
Is that really true, though? How many editors do we have doing RC patrol? I'm on #wikipedia-en-vandalism right now and there are about a dozen voiced users (ie regulars) on channel. Most of them are idling.
Indeed. I discovered #wikipedia-en-vandalism just the last few days and it's bloody hypnotic! Watching stuff come up and shooting it is like playing a fast-twitch video game. Except it's real life. (Ender's 'Pedia?) I'm now planning not to look at it too closely so I can get on with other things ...
(I was in bed sick with the laptop for a few days, so coherent thought to a tightly-written encyclopedic standard was not going to happen; but twitch games are *fun* and require very little higher thought. And it beats playing cardgames.mozev.org.)
Vandal fighting is not only useful and important work, it's *fun* as well as productive.
(May I add that I try to make a point of article editing as well as the community yak-shaving [*]. I started one on the weekend and extended another with two key references.)
- d.
[*] a geek term meaning "doing something in order to do something in order to do something in order to do something." May be ultimately productive or may be a sophisticated form of procrastination. Possibly the greatest feat of yak-shaving in geek history is Don Knuth taking several years off "The Art Of Computer Programming" to invent TeX. His book needed better typesetting, you see, so he wrote a typesetting system ...