User:Ed Fitzgerald

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This Wikimedia Project contains too damn many cleanup tags!. Please improve this project by eliminating disfiguring, inappropriate and frivolous tags, or by moving them where they don't get in the way of the people who actually use the encyclopedia.

This page relies entirely upon a single overly opinionated primary source! Please help improve this page by finding secondary or tertiary sources without direct knowledge of the subject to say precisely the same thing, only in different words.

Note to visitors: You are invited to leave comments or questions on my talk page, where they may or may not be responded to, depending on their content and my interest in them. Any comments or alterations left here will be treated as vandalism and reverted unread.

Contents 1 Some bare facts 2 My succinct WikiPhilosophy 3 Some things I've noticed... 3.1 Policies, guidelines, rules and dogma 3.2 Wikipedia fetishism 3.3 Tags 3.4 Consensus 3.5 Ownership 3.6 Wikipedians 3.7 Backstage, and getting sucked in 3.8 The nature of Wikipedia 4 EF:EWAD 4.1 Executive Summary 4.2 Explication 5 Miscellany

[edit] Some bare facts

• Ed Fitzgerald
• 1954
• Westchester County, NY
• Flatiron District, Manhattan, New York City (1976)
• theatrical stage manager (1973) (Off-Broadway,Broadway)
• married (second), two kids (college and elementary school)
• atheist, curmudgeon, Democrat, hermit, humanist, liberal, pragmatist, rationalist, skeptic
• Afro-pop, art rock, avant-garde, classical, electronica, minimalist, new wave, punk, reggae, rock, rock'n'roll, show tunes, ska
• Adams, Eno, Glass, Reich, Riley, Sondheim
• Peter Gabriel: Passion, Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship: Blows Against the Empire
• The Archers, Busby, Capra, Coens, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Marxes, E. Morris, musicals, noir, sf, screwball, P.Sturges, war
• The Maltese Falcon, The Red Shoes, Singin' in the Rain, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, Footlight Parade
• baseball, cognition, evolution, hard-boiled, history, journalism, language, law, L.A., media, music, politics, plays, science, sf, war
• Ballard, Dick, Thompson, Tolkien
• Chandler, Cherryh, Connelly, Crumley, DeLillo, Gibson, Hammett, Lethem, Vonnegut
• Dawkins, Dennett, Gould, McPhee, Sacks, van Creveld
• quotes, baseball (Yankees and Mets), casual recreational cycling
• Kaypro 16 (1985) - 256kB RAM, 10MB HD, 5.25" 640k FD, MS-DOS 3.1
• online (1985): CompuServe, Delphi, The Source, GEnie, Prodigy, BIX, Usenet, AOL
• Wikipedia: 21:26, June 26, 2005
• sometimes a jerk, but not often an asshole

• ed fitzgerald's unfutz (2003)

[edit] My succinct WikiPhilosophy

Wikipedia exists for the people who use it, not for the people who edit it. Every edit should either improve the factual accuracy of Wikipedia or make it easier and more useful for the reader. Any edit which does not serve these goals is a waste of time and energy, and quite possibly counterproductive.

Wikipedia needs good information, well presented.

[edit] Some things I've noticed...

...about Wikipedia and Wikipedians:

[edit] Policies, guidelines, rules and dogma

• A tendency among some editors to treat policy guidelines as absolutes.
  • When guidelines are followed slavishly, with no allowance for deviation or experimentation, they are no longer guidelines, they are absolute rules. Since Wikipedia was made ex nihilo, if what was wanted was absolute rules, that's what would have been created – but, instead, we have guidelines, and the spirit of Wikipedia lies in treating them as such, as guidance and not as dogma. We need to allow them to breathe, to live and grow and, if necessary or desired, to evolve; but evolution cannot happen unless change is permitted, and change cannot happen if every time someone tries something very slightly different, their efforts are automatically snuffed out by those wielding the guidelines as if they were absolutes.
    • For further discussions, and active examples of the use of guidelines as absolute rules, see:
      • bolding in "cast notes"
      • use of italics in cast lists
      • formatting and linkage on disambiguation pages (two entries: Links and A slippery-slope objection)
      • image sizing and here
      • placement of clean-up templates
      • guidelines vs. rules
    • Note that in these discussions, the counter-arguments presented are almost always (1) the Manual of Style says you can't do that and/or (2) I don't like it. To the arguments about function and utility I present, the response is the argument from authority and the argument from personal taste. It's very, very rare that anyone even deals with the functional reasons to pursue these formatting adjustments, which I find particularly telling.
  • "[S]ometimes it's better to follow the spirit of a guideline instead of the the letter." User: Wisdom89 on WP:AN/I, thread: "User_talk:Viriditas", 19 April 2008

• There is also apparently a tendency to treat policy as saying what they want it to say, instead of what it actually says. This is somewhat similar to George W. Bush signing bills passed by Congress, and then changing the intent of the law by tacking on "signing statements" which fundamentally alter the way the law is interpreted.

• The history of the United States since 2000 has demonstrated to most people of intelligence and perception the dangers inherent in acting primarily from ideological preconception instead of from practical and pragmatic concerns guided by logic, principle and rationality. Untrammelled ideology, of whatever kind, is dangerous, because dogmatism is blinding, and if the tenets of the ideology are mistaken or warped, the conclusions based on it will be wrong. The same goes for those who edit Wikipedia entirely from an ideological stance, instead of doing what it best for each article considered separately.

[edit] Wikipedia fetishism

• An almost religiously fetishistic devotion by some to NPOV, regarding it as dogma rather than as an ideal that's impossible to maintain.
  • Ironically, in the one area where a semblence of righteous NPOV-attitude would be welcome, the management of Wikipedia, there's a distinct lack of it to be found. Wikipedia administration is a hot bed of bias, bullying, abuse of power and rank authoritarianism instead of an oasis of neutrality. (see below)

• The same tendency towards fetishism applies as well to the proscription against "original research." While a ban on using Wikipedia to put forward novel theories that haven't been tested in the marketplace of ideas makes sense and is practical to enforce, the notion has been extended so far that it is being applied to simple observation and summarization, which are core requirements for any Wikipedia article. Not only is this ridiculous, it is untenable and unenforceable. If applied to the extent that some have attempted to, the entire encyclopedia would be gutted and unusable.

• The preference for citation of second- and third-hand sources over first-hand knowledge (which is decried as being "original research" and therefore verboten) is rather bizarre. Apparently, according to this theory, Wikipedia is more likely to be accurate and factual if it relies on my representation that I read something that quotes an expert source, than it would be if it relies on my representation that I personal observed something or know it from life experience. (This is especially true for the description and analysis of fictional works.)

[edit] Tags

• Wikipedia is undergoing a plague of overly prominent clean-up tags on articles.
  • The promiscuous tagging of articles, and the proliferation and expansion of tags, has contributed to tagging having become a new form of vandalism, one that's acceptable to the Wikipedia community because it appears, superficially, to be aimed at improving Wikipedia. It may be, however, that, that the impulse of at least some taggers is equivalent to the one that prompts grafitti in the real world, and the more prosaic forms of vandalism in the Wiki-world (blanking a page, inserting crude or personal messages, deliberate attempts to shock, etc.). It would be interesting for a survey to determine what percentage of Wikipedia articles is tagged -- I suspect it would approach 50% -- and for a concerted effort to be made to remove unjustified or petty tags. Perhaps tags should have a pre-set life, and run out if they're not renewed.
    • Many tags are essentially a vehicle for an editor to exert his or her POV without alerting the POV Patrol -- "opinion graffiti", in a very apt phrase. If you disagree with what an article says, you can edit it radically, and probably get caught up in an edit war, or you can slap a tag on it to discredit it without seemingly doing so. A "dispute" or "NPOV" tag will certainly raise hackles and might get one involved in extensive debate (or even an edit war), but since the vast majority of articles on Wikipedia are undersourced and poorly references, it is almost always true that one of the various "unreferenced" tags will be applicable, and that a decent case can be made in support of it. In this way, the article is discredited or marked as suspicious to the unsuspecting reader, without the tagging editor being accused of promulgating a point of view.
      • There are approximately 3 gazillion facts in Wikipedia, and 2.84 gazillion of them are unreferenced. An unreferenced fact is the norm, not a rarity. If someone comes across a fact they disbelieve or are suspicious of, they should research the question. If they find evidence that the fact is untrue, then they should remove the "fact", if, instead, they can't find any particular evidence to support the fact, then they are justified in putting a "fact" tag on it. Slapping a fact tag on something you question without researching it is simply asking that someone else check out your suspicions. It's sloppy editing.Talk:Dr. Strangelove 03:46, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Consensus

• It turns out that Wikipedia's vaunted "community consensus" really just amounts to counting the votes of the people who bothered to turn out for a discussion or debate, so the basic philosophical underpinnings of Wikipedia wind up being empty air — nothing more than mere arithmetic.
  • Update: To be more precise, according to its fundamental precepts, Wikipedia supposedly operates on a community-consensual model, where the consensus of the community as a whole is determined through debate, discussion and the history of editorial revisions, but it turns out that on a practical day-to-day basis, "consensus" is actually approximated (with no appreciable degree of accuracy) through a supermajoritarian count of the statistically insignificant group of editors who showed up to join the debate. With no inherent mechanism for determining whether this outcome is truly reflective of the consensus of the overall community, and with the severe restrictions on "canvassing" (i.e. getting people who might agree with your point of view to take part in the discussion), Wikipedia has apparently decided that the cure for the evils of democracy isn't more democracy, but instead randomness and self-selection. While that's an interesting (if odd) model for running an enterprise such as Wikipedia, it's vastly less interesting than true community consensus would be.
    • Further thoughts: Essentially, Wikipedia is an anarchy. Although it masquerades as being a form of democracy ("community consensus" being the putative mechanism), in actuality, because the policing powers of the administrators are applied according to each administrator's own criteria, and because the mechanisms for controlling adminstrator misbehavior are weak and also run by the same "community consensus" standards, there is effectively no coherent police function at all. Administrators aren't disinterested parties, trained to a code of conduct which avoids taking sides and treats everyone equally, they are participants in the debates, and are not shy about using their powers against their adversaries when it suits them. The tremendously complex and self-contradictory set of Wikipedia "policies" allows an administrator to pick and choose which policy to enforce against their opponents, because almost everyone is in violation of some policy at any particular time. What this brings about is a situation where policy is not a neutral guideline, but instead a set of clubs to be wielded by the administrator depending on their needs. Add to this the propensity for policy to be mis-interpreted to match the user's desires instead of by the "letter of the law", and the problem is compounded. As an anarchy, there is little or no protection for the editor who runs afoul of rampaging Wikideologues bent on shaping Wikipedia to their own desires.

[edit] Ownership

• Another contradiction inherent in Wikipedia's structure is the attitude towards "ownership" of articles. I fully understand that no one "owns" an article on Wikipedia, but the reality is that when someone works hard on an article, puts in a lot of effort, shapes it, researches it, smooths it, whatever, then certainly there develops a feeling of protectiveness about it. I've compared it to the feeling a parent has for their children, in a weaker form, of course. I don't own my kids, any more than I can own a Wikipedia article, but I'm protective of them, and want the best for them, and have to be convinced that someone else wants the best for them too before I allow them to do it. And that's important, because the reality is that if it weren't for the sense of what we might call stewardship that people feel for the articles they work on, Wikipedia would be in constant danger of devolving into a heaping mass of vandalism, high school hijinks and irrelevancies. It's a somewhat under-acknowldged fact of Wikipedian life that the project is dependent on the feeling of attachment that people get for the pages they contribute to, and yet Wikipedia's official policy does everything it can to discourage this attachment. Adapted from Talk:Dr. Strangelove 04:04, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
  • More seriously, this deliberate systemic discouragement of a sense of ownership flies in the face of basic human psychology. People connect to the things they own as an extension of their personalities, and that goes for the things they work hard on as well. Denying them this feeling is trying to negate or ignore an extremely strong aspect of the way we think and feel. It's worth noting that the last well-known system to attempt to survive despite ignoring a basic fact of human psychology was Communism, which tried to suppress the profit motive and, again, private ownership. The result was not pretty, and eventually the system crashed, since its fundamental foundation was unsound. Whether the same thing will happen to Wikipedia, or if the system will correct itself by instituting some official or semi-official acknowledgement of editor-control (or enhanced influence) over articles they've done significant work on remains to be seen. 21:07, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
    • The flip side of "ownership" is the problem of editors who come to an article with a particular agenda, make the changes they want to the page according to their preconceived notions of what should be, and then flit off to their next victim, without ever considering whether the page really needed the change they made, or whether the change improved the article at all. These hit and run editors certainly never take the time to evaluate the article in question, consider what its needs are, and spend the time necessary to improve its quality. Their editing is an off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all proposition, premised on the idea that what improves one article, or one type of article, will automatically improve every other article or type of article. In the grand scheme of things, "ownership" may cause conflicts when two editors take the same degree of interest in a particular article, and disagree with it, but mostly it helps to preserve what is best in an article. On the other hand, hit-and-run editing, including the plague of hit-and-run tagging that's defaced so many Wikipedia articles, is a much more serious problem, because it's more difficult to detect, frequently flies under the flag of the MoS (and therefore is presumed at first blush to be legitimate), and is more widespread. Wikipedians should worry more about those who hit-and-run, and less about those who feel stewardship towards the articles they work so hard on. 03:04, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedians

• Gene Spafford's remarks about Usenet, which are generally applicable to any online community, specifically apply to the Wikipedia community as well.

• Having probably spent a majority of their lives believing in nothing in particular, when post-teens (18-25 year olds) finally believe in something, they really believe in it. Since Wikipedia is swarming with these folk, including many of the people supposedly in charge, and is subject to the usual problems of an online environment, which mitigate against moderation and compromise, it's practically impossible to sway anyone's opinion in a Wikipedia debate.

• It appears that there are people on Wikipedia who spend large parts of their time going through articles with an eye towards removing information that they feel is too unimportant to be included. Their ability to differentiate between what is important and what is not seems to be limited to what has been labelled as "trivia" and what has not.
  • Although some editors don't seem to understand it, there is a distinct semantic difference between "trivia" and "miscellaneous facts" -- one implies triviality, while the other denotes factual items that either do not fit readily into existing sections, or that are interesting or important enough to be noted, without being weighty enough to justify further exposition.
    • see here

• Another group of editors works entirely from a negative perspective. Their watchwords are "Wikipedia is not a [insert particular phobia here]," and they work overtime to delete (sometimes systematically, and often using their powers as administrators) anything that smacks of their personal bete noire. While they are often correct in an absolute sense, they are at the same time totally wrong. Wikipedia may not be a social networking site, for instance, but that doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't have aspects about it which are similar to a social networking site.
  • It's amazing that these obstructionist editors can be so definite about what Wikipedia is, considering that Wikipedia is an entirely new kind of thing, and its nature is still in the process of being determined. By slamming the door shut on a specific evolutionary pathway, these editors are, in fact, forcing their personal point of view on the project. When they say "Wikipedia is not [whatever]," what they are really saying is "I don't want Wikipedia to be [whatever], and I'm willing to force my preference on everyone." Their actions are the result of prejudices and closed minds, and their actions do a disservice to the project.

• It's a bit disturbing that so many Wikipedia editors, who, as a group, are probably fairly young, when they come across something they're not familiar with, in the way of article formatting or layout, do not ask "Does this work?" or "Is this good for the user?" or even "Is this best for the encyclopedia" but instead ask "Do the rules allow this?" Such a tendency towards groupthink doesn't bode well for the continued value of the encyclopedia: how can such a group, collectively, produce work of true utility? - 06:57, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

• There's a style of editing on Wikipedia which consists primarily of looking up "rules" (that is, guidelines, but the distinction is lost on this kind of editor), and then applying the rules, whether or not they're appropriate, and whether or not the circumstances call for some amount of independent thought. Considerations of what is best for the reader, the article and the encyclopedia never come into play: there's a "rule" and that's that. We might call this style of editing knee-jerk nickel-and-dime authoritarianism.00:04, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

• It appears to me that a fair amount of editing on Wikipedia is rather semi-random; that is, editors move through the project, doing various things, but without a clear sense of what the purpose of the project is and how their edits help or hurt that purpose. They either have no overall editing philosophy, or their philosophy is so constricted and limited in scope that it might as well be non-existant. I get very little sense that many editors ever ask themselves "Is what I'm doing now good for the project? Does it advance the interests of Wikipedia? Will this make the encyclopedia better?" 21:00, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

• It's often said "Those who can't, teach." That's an unwarranted slap at educators, but it can certainly be said on Wikipedia that "Those who can't edit, review." 07:01, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Backstage, and getting sucked in

• Bureaucracies are a necessary evil, but have a tendency to get caught up in the mechanisms and details of the rules and regulations they run by, to the exclusion of the work they were initially created to accomplish. This condition may be exascerbated when the bureaucracy is dominated by people who have only recently matured (or are on the cusp of doing so), with no wide experience of life to temper their youthful enthusiasm and arrogance. In this situation, the actual purpose of their enterprise -- for instance to make a free online encyclopedia that is a trusted and usable reference resource -- may be forgotten in favor of an emphasis on tweaking policies, burdening articles with multiple obtrusive tags, and other internal matters of little interest or importance to users of the encyclopedia.

• As with sausage-making, the less one knows about the process by which Wikipedia is produced, the better off one is, and the more authority it will have as reference work. Getting involved in behind-the-scenes activities (other than simple copy-editing or the correcting of mistakes in articles) will only detract from one's regard for the project, the people who have taken it upon themselves to shape it, and the encyclopedia itself.

• The path of editors on Wikipedia is to gradually get more and more sucked into the non-editing processes that clutter it up: the requests, reviews, notices and arbitrations. These things make the claim that "Wikipedia is not a social networking site" ridiculous on its face. A survey should be done to determine what percentage of edits in the project are actually devoted to what is supposedly its primary purpose, the writing and editing of an online encyclopedia -- I suspect that the number would be quite small, perhaps 20 - 25% Editors who enter with the intention of making articles better sooner or later run into the many barricades and detours that Wikipedia's policy labyrinth and culture of confrontation create, and begin spending more time dealing with ancilliary issues and less with article editing. The balance between these two needs to be redressed, if Wikipedia is to reach its fullest potential. This may not be possible, because the structure of the project, and the choices made in setting it up, work against an emphasis on serious encyclopedia building. Especially damaging is that editors are not required to use their real names, and that anonymous editing is allowed. These turn what should be a serious project into a gigantic multi-player role-playing game. 07:16, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The nature of Wikipedia

• An encyclopedia, to be worth anything as a work of reference, should have as close a relationship with reality as is possible, but Wikipedia's design of using consensus as a determinative engine unfortunately conflicts with that goal. While any number of social facts may be determined by group consensus (but by no means all of them), scientific facts (even though they may be determined by consensus of relevant scientists) are not, nor, for the most part, are historical facts. Wikipedia's reliance on group dynamics over scholarship, expertise and the scientific method — the most powerful engine of knowledge ever invented in the history of mankind — will prove to be its continuing weakness; whether that weakness turns out to be fatal remains to be seen.

• There's a onfusion among some editors between a Featured Article (FA) or Good Article (GA) and a good article. They're not the same thing at all. The community-consensual standards for Featured Articles and Good Articles do not guarantee a good article, and especially do not necessarily promote a well-written article.

• I find it absolutely extraordinary that apparently intelligent people cannot seem to understand the simple idea that Wikipedia exists for the people who use it, and not for the people who edit it. In fact, these people will vigorously and vociferously deny that there is any difference at all between those groups — and even some who accept the precept that every user is merely a potential editor and not necessarily an editor-in-fact, deny that Wikipedia owes those users anything at all, such as ease of use or a clean and functional layout.
  
  • Another circumstance where the functionality of Wikipedia articles to users takes a backseat to internal policies is in the fight against "spam". Like "terrorism" in the real world, "spam" in the WikiWorld is such a terrible thing that almost any action is justified in fighting it. Administrators can act as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner all in one, and rubber-stamp their own complaints to block users who are perceived as spamming -- and the definition of spam extends, apparently, to posting links to useful websites onto relevant articles.

• Wikipedia's in a bind, because the philosophy behind its creation - "The Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit" - is also the root cause of many of the problems which bedevil it, and which may (possibly) be eating it up from the inside. If this is true, then the only way to solve these problems is to change the essential structure of the project in ways that are anti-thetical to its founding philosophy. For instance, some suggestions (which, I'm sure, have been made by other Jeremiahs in Wikipedia's past):
  • No anonymous editors - there goes a significant amount of vandalism right there;
  • A one-year probationary period for new accounts, during which the editor has more or less full access to Wikipedia (although there might be value in placing some aspects, like image-uploaging, off-limits), but during which any incident of vandalism or bad faith editing earns a lifetime block. Not many people are going to hang around being good citizens for a year just so they can go off the deep end on the 366th day. (And, of course, there should be due process controlling all of this, but a simplified system before specialized administrators serving as judges -- perhaps they might even be elected to those posts by the general population, instead of self-selected by other administrators? Oooh, that's a good idea -- let's call it "democracy".)
  • A significant reduction in the amount of policy, and a consistent and predictable approach to the policing of it. Policing needs to be stricter, to cut down on the problems, but everyone has to know in advance what's OK and what's not. Right now, the interpretation of policy skews all over the place, depending on who's administering it and what ox they plan to gore. There's much too much leeway for administrators to act in a way that brings about the result they want. Administrators need to be neutral, and that seems to be rarely the case, especially when the issues get controversial. Less administrators, better trained, to a more coherent ethos, enforcing clear and understandable policies. 09:00, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

• Somewhat without realizing what they've done, Wikipedia has created a new class of super-users who have the capacity for making wholesale changes to Wikipedia, essentially without any practical oversight. I'm referring to bot-operators and users of semi-automated programs such as AWB. Because these users are able to make a large number of edits to Wikipedia in a short period of time, they're able to make significant changes to the encyclopedia without any effective restraint. - 21:04, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

• Like many other addictive, compelling and consuming online experiences, it is tempting to think of Wikipedia as a self-contained world, different and separate from the "real world". This is not an unreasonable response to submersion in an artificial experience such as this is, but regardless, it's important to remember that however set-apart and distinct we feel the project is, the point of contact with the real world is the user of the encyclopedia, the person who pops into Wikipedia to find some needed information or just to browse a bit, and couldn't care less what the Wiki-world experience is like to those inside of it. It's for those people, the users, not for ouselves, the editors, that the encyclopedia exists, and we forget that at our peril, and the project's. 13:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

• In general, Wikipedia cares more about precedent than it does about quality or accuracy. Consistency is valued more than getting it right. 21:53, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] EF:EWAD

(Ed Fitzgerald's Evolving WikiAntiDogma)

[edit] Executive Summary

• Being human requires a point of view.
• Facts and accuracy are more important than neutrality.
• Fairness is better than blandness.
• You can't vote about facts.
• Results outrank rules.
• Err on the side of inclusion.
• Artifacts speak for themselves.
• Observation is observation, not original research.
• Counting is counting and calculation is calculation, not original research.
• Guidelines are good, dogma is bad.
• When guidelines are followed slavishly, they become rules.
• "Avoid" ≠ "Do not".
• Users and editors are not necessarily the same set.
• Wikipedia exists for the users, not for the editors.
• Tagging is goading someone else to do work you should do yourself.
• If it's better, it's better.
• If you're not making it better, you're making it worse.
• Good information, well presented.
• For Wikipedia to stay alive, it must evolve; to evolve, there must be change; for there to be change, new things must be tried and allowed to see if they can flourish.

[edit] Explication

• It's not possible to be human and have no point of view -- being human requires a point of view. Attempting to write about anything without a point of view is the same as trying to write about it without thinking about it.

• I'd rather have a source that honestly admits to their prejudices but works hard to be fair, than one which pretends not to have any prejudices at all, because that source is a liar, and will be unreliable.

• Facts and accuracy are much more important than neutrality – and facts, especially scientific facts, are not determined by counting noses.

• The best and most authoritative sources of information about books, films, CDs, TV shows and other media artifacts are the artifacts themselves. It should not be necessary to find a secondary source to say something which you've just seen or heard or experienced for yourself directly from the primary source, since the artifact can always be consulted to confirm the observation.

• Observation is not "original research", observation is observation. Counting something is a form of observation, and it is not "original research" either. Simple calculations are part and parcel of life, a more complex and extended form of observatiion, and are not "original research".

• Guidelines are good, dogma is bad. Dogma is absolute, guidelines are advisory. Wikideology should never override logic, practicality and rational choice. But even guidelines should not be followed slavishly. It's better to help make an article good, no matter what it takes to do so, than it is to mechanically follow guidelines trying to make a "Good Article" or a "Featured Article".

• If everyone is forced to follow guidelines all the time, with no allowed deviation, they are no longer guidelines, they are absolute rules.

• Be careful when following guidelines to understand what they're trying to tell you. For instance, "avoid" does not mean "do not".

• If Wikipedia's policies have become so complex and convoluted that an editor can shop around for a justification for an act he's already decided to do, rather than following simple guidelines to find guidance as to what to do, then they've become useless and counter-productive, and the net result will be that Wikipedia is doomed to dissolve into irrelevance.

• We have a word for doggedly following procedures and policies determined by committees, without due regard for individual evaluation of functionality, utility or aesthetic values — it's called bureaucracy. Results should outrank rules.

• Wikipedia may be doomed to dissolve into irrelevance in any case, because it fails to acknowledge the inherent contradictions of its tenets, and because no online community can survive for long when the inmates are in charge of the asylum.

• The value of Wikipedia in the future may well depend on whether it decides to be a reference resource or an online community. The apparatus and paraphernalia of a community - the cliques, the wrangling, the territoriality, the awards, the quasi-religious disputes about official dogma - are all counterproductive if the goal is to produce an accurate, factual reference resource, and not to provide a place for people to hang out online.

• On Wikipedia, there are users, and there are editors, and although the twain do indeed meet, they are still generally two separate communities with distinct needs. If Wikipedia is to succeed in the long run, this distinction needs to be recognized, and the needs of the user made paramount. If Wikipedia exists primarily to service the desires of the editors, it will, eventually, become unusable and irrelevant. Wikipedia must exist for the users, not for the editors. Any Wikipedia policy which doesn't serve the primary purpose of doing what's best for the user is dangerously flawed and needs to be radically rethought.

• Tagging an article should be approached conservatively, and clean-up tags, in particular, should appear at the end of articles and not at the beginning. The current plague of tags is detrimental to the acceptance of Wikipedia as a reference source, as they tend to reduce the user's confidence in what they're reading. If tags are to be placed at the beginning of articles, they should be redesigned to be less prominent. (Perhaps each tag template should insert two elements, a large informational one at the bottom of the article, and a smaller one at the top which points to the bottom one.) Tags, especially clean-up tags, are basically internal memoranda addressed to Wikipedia editors, and should be treated as such, not as warning labels for the general user. In this instance, transparency gets in the way of utility and the diffusion of Wikipedia's acceptance.

• It appears to me that many times the use of the "Fact" (citation) tag is an indication not of a lack in the article, but of the ignorance of the tagger.

• While Wikipedia needs all kinds of people with all different kinds of involvement — people who create new articles, people who whip old ones into shape, copyeditors, researchers, stylists and word geeks — it perhaps has an overabundance of people who spend more time tagging articles than they do editing them. If all the Wikitaggers would put the time they fritter away defacing articles with multiple layers of tags to use simply editing the article and fixing the perceived problem, Wikipedia would be in much better shape, and the articles wouldn't look like a refugee camp for dispossessed electronic post-it notes.

• It is much more important that Wikipedia be inclusive, even at the fault of occasionally including information that might be considered (by some) to be "trivial", than it is to be exclusive, at the penalty of not including information that it interesting and informative. When in doubt, information should be published rather than suppressed. The general rule of thumb should be err on the side of inclusion.

• If an edit makes an article better, then it's counterproductive to undo it simply to follow some guideline. If it's better, then it's better, and undoing the edit is hurting the article.

• There must be agreement that the purpose of Wikipedia is to provide an accurate, interesting, useful, convenient and user-friendly free encyclopedia for the general Internet public, and not to serve as the playground or fiefdom of the people who edit it. All edits should be judged on this basis: Every edit should either improve the factual accuracy of Wikipedia or make it easier and more useful for the reader. Any edit which does not serve these goals is a waste of time and energy, and quite possibly counterproductive.

• The ultimate goal for Wikipedia should be good information, well presented.

(under construction -- I'm sure there'll be more)

[edit] Miscellany

• Stats

Hoorah for me: This trivial edit turns out to be my 10,000^th mainspace article edit, made at 22:52, 25 April 2008.

• Wikiquote user page
• Wikinews user page

		The Editor's Barnstar
		Awarded for your "above and beyond" editing efforts. FWIW Bzuk (talk) 23:29, 2 February 2008 (UTC).

This user has been a member of Wikipedia since 26 June 2005.

This user has been on Wikipedia for 2 years, 11 months and 20 days.

11,000+

This user has made over 11,000 contributions to Wikipedia articles.

14,000+

This user has made over 14,000 contributions to Wikipedia.

This user is a stage manager.

This user is not a number, he is a free man.

This user is an atheist.

This user is a bright.

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