English Wikipedia has a number of broken elements to it. They are:
- The emergence of an unproductive bureaucracy. There is a growing contingent of editors who do nothing but offer their own opinion, which is often unqualified, on AfDs, RfAs, and a variety of other votes. Wikipedia really has four classes of productive editors:
- Article-writers. The most important part of Wikipedia.
- Developers. Without software, there would be no Wikipedia. This includes bot writers.
- Community Managers. This is sysops, arbcom, medcom, et cetera. These people are important in making sure that everybody behaves.
- Maintenance. Vandalfighters, organisers, typo-fixers, people who do those small jobs.
- I have a problem with the continuing attitude that adding your opinion to a debate is actual productive contribution. This problem includes "myspacers", people who argue over userboxes, and those who play silly political games with RfA.
- A lack of respect for anonymous and new contributors. I tried contributing anonymously and making BOLD edits anonymously once. I ended up spending quite some time explaining to somebody why giving two vandalism warnings for "particularly bad vandalism" was a bad idea — and why removing unsourced information anonymously is not vandalism.
- A lack of accountability for individual small admin actions. Sysops will often block willy-nilly, or for very silly reasons, or simply as a power-trip. Obviously a single block can't go to arbcom, and a pattern of bad blocks is time-consuming to establish. Therefore, there should be some sort of mechanism for disciplining sysops for minor sysop mistakes. A "three strikes" system, temporary desysopping, or a combination of the two would be most appropriate here.
- A lack of rigid enforcement of verifiability. There seems to be this terrible attitude that we can just leave unsourced information in and wait for somebody to source it, which, of course, nobody does. THIS IS WRONG. We must work aggressively to remove ALL unsourced information from Wikipedia until such time as it can be sourced.
- The emergence of a "class distinction" between article-writers and other contributors. Many times, article-writers think they're better than everybody else. THIS IS WRONG. You are not better than somebody else because your best work is done in writing, rather than the myriad of other productive tasks.
Comments
editA nice collection of observations. There is a contradiction b/t 1. and 5. [article writing *is* the most important single task], and 4. is probably stated too strongly. +sj + 13:24, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
- Yep, was just about to mention that. I strongly agree with point 4, but I hardly see anyone with my same sentiment. W3stfa11 04:09, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Among productive contributors, I would also add people who participate in featured content discussion and other improvement-related discussions. While it may be just opinion that's being offered, it can be very constructive for article-writers (or photographers and photoshoppers) to hear opinionated critiques.--ragesoss 06:57, 3 December 2006 (UTC)