Contents [hide] 1 About Me 2 A matter of good and evil 3 Dumping poop 4 Words of wisdom from our leader 5 Barnstar 6 Areas of Focus 7 More... 8 Userified articles 9 References
About Me
This user lives in the state of New Jersey.
I have a particular interest in local area and New Jersey governmental topics. I have been gathering information about New Jersey and its municipalities, and I am looking to create a structure to load expanded information into pages for all of New Jersey's 566 municipalities, as well as consolidating other encyclopedic information about New Jersey.
A matter of good and evil
We all have our pluses and minuses, both in real life and in Wikipedia. The problem is that most admins treat people on a binary basis -- you are either good or you are evil -- failing to recognize the positives in the people they deem evil and failing to see the negatives of the people they have judged good. The goal ought to be to seek ways to maximize the positive from each editor. Wikipedia:Blocking policy's mandate is that blocks are intended "to protect the project from harm, and reduce likely future problems", an approach that might have some success with vandals. The unfortunate reality is that blocks to experienced editors end up being punitive. They are applied in an "all your edits are bad" approach that fails to solve the issue at hand and only ends up creating more problems than they seek to solve. The real problem is finding admins who have the common sense needed to apply blocks that push people from areas where there are challenges to areas where they genuinely benefit this project.
Dumping poop
Between Huggle and AWB -- and I use both -- we have turned so much of Wikipedia editing into a mindless game in which undoing the addition of the word "poop" counts as progress. Spending even a few minutes on Huggle, let alone an hour, it's clear that the vast majority of IP editors have no interest whatsoever in improving this encyclopedia. By allowing these vandalism reversions to count towards building a high score, we encourage our most productive editors to accomplish almost absolutely nothing, in terms of forward progress. The encyclopedia isn't better, it's just less bad. With even the flimsiest registration process, we could get rid of most of our vandals and free up huge amounts of time from people who really want to do work to help. Our top five editors have 1 million edits between them. If most of this was vandalism reverting and error correction that could be done by bots, we'd have freed up thousands of hours that could have been used productively. It's time we found some way to rank users by how much they've added to the encyclopedia, not how much "poop" they've removed.
Words of wisdom from our leader
Let me make my point more clear: arguments about what we ought to [do] if someone really starts to abuse wikipedia with thousands and thousands of trivial articles do not prove that we ought to delete any and every article that's too trivial today. Put another way: if someone wants to write an article about their high school, we should relax and accomodate them, even if we wish they wouldn't do it. And that's true *even if* we should react differently if someone comes in and starts mass-adding articles on every high school in the world. Let me make this more concrete. Let's say I start writing an article about my high school, Randolph School, of Huntsville, Alabama. I could write a decent 2 page article about it, citing information that can easily be verified by anyone who visits their website. Then I think people should relax and accomodate [sic] me. It isn't hurting anything. It'd be a good article, I'm a good contributor, and so cutting me some slack is a very reasonable thing to do. That's true *even if* we'd react differently to a ton of one-liners mass-imported saying nothing more than "Randolph School is a private school in Huntsville, Alabama, US" and "Indian Springs is a private school in Birmingham, Alabama, US" and on and on and on, ad nauseum. The argument "what if someone did this particular thing 100,000 times" is not a valid argument against letting them do it a few times. --Jimbo (dated November 7, 2003[1])
Barnstar
The Award of the Arabian Barnstar
I, Ralhazzaa, hereby award you with the Award of the Arabian Barnstar due to your appreciated and significant contributions in starting and editing articles related to the Arab world and culture, والسلام عليكم