[WikiEN-l] When did RfD Become Toxic?

[K P]

On 7/21/07, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw at armory.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 21 July 2007 08:46, Ron Ritzman wrote:
> >
> > This come back to my favorite question. "Are you here to participate
> > in writing an online encyclopedia or are you here to do "X"?".
>
> This brought something to mind:
> Why do we care WHY someone is here in the first place, or WHAT he spends most
> of his time here doing, as long as he is polite and amiable in his
> interactions and the contributions he DOES make to article-space, however
> insignificant or minute, are nonetheless beneficial?
> --
> Kurt Weber
> <kmw at armory.com>
>
We care why someone is here in the first place, because, in fact, it
appears that those who are not here to write an encyclopedia are the
most likely to be those with non-polite, non-amiable interactions, not
making useful contributions to article-space.

There's a lot of time on Wikipedia spent dealing with certain people,
not writing articles.

One of my least favorite Wikipedians, a rather weird deletionist,
recently threatened to come to plants and start writing articles.  I
invited him to do so, because, the fact is, he spends so much time
freaking out when anyone disagrees with him that the chance he'll ever
show up and write an article is 0.

He's not here to write an encyclopedia, he's not polite, he's not
amiable (although I'd grant him that if he met the first).  I don't
know what he's here to do, it appears he's here to whine to people and
bully them, but that can't be a goal in itself.

I like sharing my knowledge and research skills with Wikipedia, plus I
work on-line, and I can do it while scanning and editing.

It should be a lot more fun than it is, though, and it's not, because
there are so many people at Wikipedia who aren't there to write an
encyclopedia.

Some of our best editors make only insignificant or minute
article-space edits, those who copyedit, spellcheck, and do the real
janitorial chores, or what would be the real janitorial chores if not
for all of the folks here for some other reason.

IMO.

KP