User:Abyssal

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[edit] About Me

I'm a wannabe paleontologist majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology at a university in the southeast USA. I'm interested in just about anything science-related, but most of my edits will be to articles related to paleontology. Other subjects that receive my touch will likely be about biology, the paranormal or religion, which are subjects that also fascinate me. More about me can be found here.

[edit] As a wikipedian

I know I didn't spend much time talking about myself on a personal level, but I don't think anyone will mind; if you want to know about my personal life, then visit my blog. What is more relevent is my Wikipedia-related philosophies, so I figured I'd talk a bit about that so you'd understand where I'm coming from when I make all those crazy edits that make everyone so mad.

Bias

Many have charged Wikipedia with rampant liberal bias. Sorry, I'm not buying it. The accusation is just a right wing excuse to set up their own little parallel universe with its own "facts." First they made Fox News to filter reality for them, now they have Conservapedia. Maybe Stephen Colbert put it best: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." I won't discount a slight leftward slant outright, but most of the accusations are baloney.

More likely to be an issue, Wikipedia has a latent cultural bias resulting from the vast majority of contributors being English speaking Westerners. I don't believe however, that any bias is a major detriment to the project currently, and I think what bias is present will mostly be ironed out over time as more contributors with differing perspectives and backgrounds join.

Censorship

I support the idea of Wikipedia being uncensored, but I believe that common sense should be used in the implementation pf possibly offensive materials. I mean, does the article on anus really need pictures of human anuses right near the top? And is it necessary to ensure that anuses from people of both genders be prominently displayed right next to each other for easy comparison? I'm not saying they should be removed, but I do think that offensive/pornographic/shocking/etc images shouldn't be needlessly prominent. I also believe that WP:Uncensored should not be hijacked by exhibitionists who wish to treat the site as their own personal nudist resort.

Eventualism/Immediatism

I am a fervent eventualist and tend to think long term about the development of articles. What alot of people don't seem to realize is that Wikipedia will continue to exist for decades and maybe even centuries to come. I don't see any need to rush and I don't think that projects should be canceled because they'll take a long time to finish.

Inclusionism/Deletionism

I'm not ashamed to be a fairly radical inclusionist. Furthermore, I think its opposite, namely deletionism is actually detrimental or even dangerous to Wikipedia as an enterprise. I hold this view because these philosophies undermine Wikipedia's strengths while they try to force Wikipedia to bear the burden of its weaknesses, a task I maintain to be impossible. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit at any time will never be an acceptable "academic" encyclopedia the way Brittanica is. Never. Ever ever ever. The idea is absurd on its face, at least until Jimbo implements his "stable versions" plan. The idea that "unencyclopedic" topics need to be removed should have been aborted in the first trimester. Wikipedia is not paper. We're not running out of server space. If you don't want to read about the topics, then, *gasp* don't read them!

And that's just the tip o' the ol' iceburg as far as my hatred of deletionism goes. Let's not forget about deletionist arrogance. I mean, how presumptuous is it, to go and delete other peoples' hard work? It drives me absolutely bonkers to know that people are out there slaving their asses off to add content to Wikipedia only to have some middle schooler with editcountitis erase hours of work in seconds because it isn't "encyclopedic" enough for him. Of course "unencyclopedia" in deletish usually translates to "I'm not interested in it." It is my firm belief that major deletions should only occur after a firm justification has been put forward, and the article's contrbuting parties notified. And then probably not gone through with anyway, because does erasing that article really improve Wikipedia in any way? Didn't think so.

Deletionism is frequently used as a cloak to mask laziness and advance the personal career of the deletionist that's doing the deleting. Deletionists are very open about the fact that part of their philosophy is "articles that they allege are short and poorly written, unreferenced or referenced only by Web-based sources and blogs, that they claim fail the community standards of notability, or that they say exclusively contain trivia or popular culture references, as well as of other types of articles deemed unencyclopedic" should be deleted. But just look at that list! Poor writing an excuse to delete the entire article? How is that anything but laziness coupled with editcountitis? Poor writing should be a reason to proofread, not delete! And the "short article" as an excuse to delete is a personal favorite example of deletionist absurdity. The crazy thing is they can't even see the stupidity inherent in taking an article and reducing its content to nil as a solution for it being "too short." The deletionist philosophy is a cop out in general; find a page with problems and erase the page so you don't have to commit to fixing the problems. "Look, Ma! I can make my edit count go up without doing any work!"

Not to mention the fallout inherent in a deletionist environment. One particularly grave sin of the deletionists is the way deletionism has a chilling effect on prospective new editors. Who wants to spend hours of time contributing to an article if your contributions are just going to be erased? New editors don't, and I don't think they should have to wage war with the deletionists to make contributions.

Notability

My philosophy regarding notability is that barring obvious self-promotion or impossible to document topics, if someone if willing to take time out of their busy lives to volunteer to write an encyclopedia article about it, then it's notable. If you don't think an article is interesting or important, that's a good sign that you shouldn't be reading it, not a go-ahead for you to delete it.

Paranoias

I find copyright paranoia disruptive. I think people need to chill out. I find spam paranoia to be even more disruptive than that. I think that links should be judged on their merits and not fears that *gasp* some business may get money or some webmaster page hits. Most of the time spam is garbage, but sometimes it can be useful. Being "spam" does not make a link useless to an article in and of itself.

Citation paranoia is pretty bad, too. The first day I resolved to contribute substantially to Wikipedia, I add content to articles on multiple dinosaur genera from a book. I intended to fill out a citation template once after I finished and copy it to each of the edited articles. After finishing the last edit, I stopped by my watchlist briefly and found that someone had already reverted all my edits. I almost left the project right there.

Red links

I am vehemently against redlinkophobia. Red links serve the useful purpose of alerting users to content that needs to be developed. They should never be de-linked just because they are red. The only valid reason, in my mind, to eliminate a red link is to turn it blue. Or, less likely, if the object never should have been a link in the beginning.

Undue weight

[edit] My stuff

http://en.wikichecker.com/user/?t=Abyssal&l=all http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/ec/Abyssal

[edit] Barnstars and Awards

		The Fauna Barnstar
		I just want to tell you that you are actually doing a good job making stubs about trilobites. Kannie \| talk 18:59, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

		The Original Barnstar
		For your difficult work adding in-line sources to Antarctosaurus, I hereby award you this barnstar. Thanks so much for taking the article under your wing and improving it significantly. If only we had a hundred more editors willing to work on articles like this. Thank you so much. Firsfron of Ronchester 06:33, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

		The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
		In tribute to your successful efforts in expanding the content and character of Wikipedia. Ecoleetage (talk) 15:34, 21 December 2008 (UTC)