User:El Sandifer: Difference between revisions

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There is not presently an effective way to work on this project. Too many people with too many senses of what it means to "write an encyclopedia" collide, and while the article space has means to regulate these differences (NPOV, V, etc) there is no effective means of ordering the creation of policy, and as a result no effective way, in the end, of continuing to order the article space. The failure, nearly two years after the Seigenthaler disaster, to come up with any effective way of writing articles on living people is emblematic of this. So is the continued failure to come up with useful standards for fiction articles that elevate them beyond fannish wankery, or the continued failure to figure out how to deal with the fact that Wikipedia is big enough to have real world consequences for things.

In short, there is no way left to think programmatically about how to improve the project. We are left hoping that Jimbo's increasingly distracted attention will provide a major push for something - as was needed to even fix the basic problems of BLPs. That's not a sustainable model, and given that my interests in Wikipedia have long been as much (if not more) in its meta and policy levels than in its individual articles, the lack of any sustainable model to make progress there leaves me feeling very much out in the cold.

I do not take this as a failure of the wiki model for writing articles. But I cannot find any persuasive evidence that the wiki/consensus model functions on this scale for organizing the project. Instead, article number grows dramatically without a corresponding increase in quality, the methods of improving articles clog up with process, mindless and automated thinking leads to articles getting dismantled in the name of improvement, and it is impossible to usefully have discussions about how to prevent any of this because people are utterly hung up on models of research that do not have any resemblance to anything that actually leads to writing good articles.

In the end, despite a fearsome number of edits in the Wikipedia namespace, I am hard pressed to identify anything substantive I have accomplished in that realm since 2005 when I wrote WP:DICK. And since I've never been a prolific article writer (less so since excessively arduous sourcing requirements got put into place) I can't really point to accomplishments elsewhere.

The project may not have failed, but I seem to have.

So I'm gone. I've changed my password to a random string, and I don't anticipate returning at this juncture.

Best of luck to you all - I still believe firmly in the principles underlying this project. But I don't believe that it's set up in such a way that my skills are useful to it. It seems mostly to drive me to distraction and to anger. And that's worse than unproductive. Phil Sandifer (talk) 20:50, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

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+There is not presently an effective way to work on this project. Too many people with too many senses of what it means to "write an encyclopedia" collide, and while the article space has means to regulate these differences (NPOV, V, etc) there is no effective means of ordering the creation of policy, and as a result no effective way, in the end, of continuing to order the article space. The failure, nearly two years after the Seigenthaler disaster, to come up with any effective way of writing articles on living people is emblematic of this. So is the continued failure to come up with useful standards for fiction articles that elevate them beyond fannish wankery, or the continued failure to figure out how to deal with the fact that Wikipedia is big enough to have real world consequences for things.
-[[Wikipedia:Trifecta principles]] makes it sound so easy...
+In short, there is no way left to think programmatically about how to improve the project. We are left hoping that Jimbo's increasingly distracted attention will provide a major push for something - as was needed to even fix the basic problems of BLPs. That's not a sustainable model, and given that my interests in Wikipedia have long been as much (if not more) in its meta and policy levels than in its individual articles, the lack of any sustainable model to make progress there leaves me feeling very much out in the cold.
-So I figured why not try it? After all, I've been here for two and a half years. I've got a pretty good idea of what we're doing here. Why not just stop worrying about what all the policy pages say today, and about what the process to list something on AfD is?
+I do not take this as a failure of the wiki model for writing articles. But I cannot find any persuasive evidence that the wiki/consensus model functions on this scale for organizing the project. Instead, article number grows dramatically without a corresponding increase in quality, the methods of improving articles clog up with process, mindless and automated thinking leads to articles getting dismantled in the name of improvement, and it is impossible to usefully have discussions about how to prevent any of this because people are utterly hung up on models of research that do not have any resemblance to anything that actually leads to writing good articles.
-So I'm not anymore. I understand [[WP:NPOV]], [[WP:DICK]], and I especially understand [[WP:IAR]]. I understand what an encyclopedia is. I understand how to do good research. (I'm a professional academic - I teach people how to do good research. I know this stuff.)
+In the end, despite a fearsome number of edits in the Wikipedia namespace, I am hard pressed to identify anything substantive I have accomplished in that realm since 2005 when I wrote [[WP:DICK]]. And since I've never been a prolific article writer (less so since excessively arduous sourcing requirements got put into place) I can't really point to accomplishments elsewhere.
-So as of today, I'm just going to go ahead and edit. Lord knows the rules are making me nervous and depressed. So I'll follow all the stuff I can remember, and not try too hard to learn the other stuff. If I can't remember how to list something for AfD today, I'll just use PROD. If I can't get it deleted via PROD, I just won't delete it. Someone who remembers how to use AfD can do it. If I can't remember how many warnings a vandal gets, I'll just zap 'em for 24 hours two warnings early, and call it a day. If I can't remember the status of blogs and personal websites as they apply to a specific topic, well, I'm a professional researcher. I teach people how to research. I'll trust my judgment.
+The project may not have failed, but I seem to have.
-Note that this means that if you cite a policy page to me and expect me to carefully divine the meaning of section 14, paragraph 3, clause 2 of it, odds are I'll just say "Yeah, but what's ''wrong'' with what I'm doing?" "It violates policy" isn't enough. If it's against policy, it must be bad for some reason, so just explain to me what it does that's bad.
+So I'm gone. I've changed my password to a random string, and I don't anticipate returning at this juncture.
-Otherwise... well, you might drive me off the page, but you sure ain't gonna convince me.
+Best of luck to you all - I still believe firmly in the principles underlying this project. But I don't believe that it's set up in such a way that my skills are useful to it. It seems mostly to drive me to distraction and to anger. And that's worse than unproductive. [[User:Phil Sandifer|Phil Sandifer]] ([[User talk:Phil Sandifer|talk]]) 20:50, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
-In the meantime, I'll be keeping [[User:Phil Sandifer/Process blog]] updated with anything I run into that's just impossible to handle without checking lots of policy pages. I'm doing this not so much because I'm trying to find the essential policies as because I'm trying to find the broken ones. I figure anything so complex an admin who's been editing for two and a half years can't do it is fundamentally broken.
-Not that I'll be the one to fix it. I've got an encyclopedia to write.