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 ...