Wikipedia talk:Vandalism does not matter

Allow me to give some background to my motivations in writing this essay. I am an meta:exopedian (article builder) by inclination, but several months ago I became heavily active in recent changes patrol, new pages patrol and monitoring new usernames. Relative to article building, a thankless and laborious task, countering obvious vandalism was easy and offered instant gratification (i.e. the whack-a-mole of having persistent vandals and spam usernames blocked). I did so without the use of automated tools, with the exception of Twinkle.

However, in recent months I found myself patrolling recent changes fruitlessly, finding that any time I went to warn or report a vandal or revert a vandalistic edit, it had already been done. I could still report a suspect username to WP:UAA and nominate obviously inappropriate articles for speedy deletion, but these too became more competitive, with someone else beating me to it more times than not. After a dozen or so times spending half an hour or longer without being able to warn or block more than one or two vandals – while the amount of vandalism seemed undiminished – I relented, figuring that given my low success-to-effort ratio, my efforts would be better focused elsewhere.

Musing idly as to why this had become the case while browsing the active requests for adminship, I saw that several applicants were being opposed for their heavy use of new, automated counter-vandalism tools to rack up thousands of edits. Aha! I looked into it a little, and found that when an editor rather than a bot was beating me to the vandal-fighting, they were frequently using a tool called Huggle, nicknamed "Twinkle on steroids". I thought a little more on how difficult and time-consuming it would have been for me to do what I used to without the help of Twinkle to rollback and warn, and how rarely I encountered vandalism while browsing through articles as a reader, and concluded that overt vandalism is much easier to combat as it once was.

During the same period, I noted with increasing concern efforts at restricting editing by anonymous users. Though I feel it is antithetical to the spirit of Wikipedia, I can understand and regretfully support forbidding unregistered users from creating new pages; as as a new page patroller I know we simply don't have the manpower to patrol or the willingness to immediately clean-up the deluge of articles that would result. However, I saw an strengthening culture of highly active users and admins calling for more restrictions on anonymous and non-autoconfirmed users; specifically the decision to raise the autoconfirmation level (no link at hand, sorry), and the increasing trend of indefinitely semi-protecting templates (ref: [1]). Why I wondered, were we becoming more paranoid about vandalism just as it seemed to be becoming less of a problem? When inflation is steadily decreasing, you don't keep raising interest rates to combat inflation; you keep them stable or cut them to encourage growth. Wikipedia, I thought, could do well to do likewise. Skomorokh 13:21, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]