User:Sminthopsis84/List of pages removed from my watchlist
This is a personal experiment that ran from 15 September 2014 to 25 January 2015, to see whether taking a day off once a week has detectable deleterious effects on the quality of EN Wikipedia articles that I would otherwise have improved. I fondly wish that there could be a centralized day of rest for the wikiprojects, when, in order that the good editors don't burn out, editing in all the projects could be disabled for 24 hours. The current situation is that a wikibreak necessarily brings the subsequent pain of cleaning up after the vandals who remained active during one's break. Thank you ClueBot and other editors, but you don't catch all the problems on my watchlist! My plan is to remove pages from my watchlist that were vandalized during my weekly wikibreak.
Note to vandals[edit]
It is possible that a page you are interested in has been added back onto my watchlist after it was removed, because this happens if I edit the page for some reason, such as because I chased a vandal through Wikipedia. I trust that you won't be severely disappointed if that is the case because there are lots of other pages awaiting your attention.
Experiment rationale[edit]
Here I am using my own experience as a wikipedian to test which of two opposing views I should take to heart. On the one hand, is an essay that gives a jaundiced view, which I would summarize as "go jump in the lake, the WMF doesn't care about editor retention". On the other hand is the view that many of us started out with, that Wikipedia is a worthwhile project in educational outreach to the world, and that our contributions are worthy of some sort of editor-retention effort from the central foundation. Long-term editors are suffering (I've seen so much of that that I take it as an axiom) and making us happier than we currently are would be worth a bit of consideration. Has that view been written up in an essay anywhere? I haven't seen such an essay.
As far as I can see, the best that the intra-project editor retention scheme has come up with is to slap someone on the back occasionally with an Editor of the Week award. As a pseudonymous wikipedian I am not a fan of subverting the team spirit by setting up most valuable player awards. We work without credentials here; our work should stand on its own merits. Applauding someone for the quantity or the perceived quality of their edits is not helpful, I feel. As Jean-Paul Sartre said to explain his refusal of the Nobel Prize: "A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner." I feel that the same applies to scholarly writing in all fields. If good citations are provided, then the writing can be assessed on its own merits, whether it came from a much-applauded "expert" or from an anonymous IP address.
Materials and methods[edit]
I will list the pages that I have removed from my watchlist because they were vandalized on a Monday, the day of rest, and the problem wasn't corrected by anyone else before the end of Tuesday. My subsequent procedure is that whenever I am tempted to look for past vandalism on a page, if that page is on this list, I will proceed without checking the page history, thus ignoring the uncorrected vandalism. It is possible that the vandalism may be corrected by my subsequent work, but I generally fix only a small number of problems at one time, and only very rarely read an entire page, so I am not very likely to notice the vandalism without my watchlist bringing it to my attention. Coordinated Universal Time is used for all dates. The "advanced option" available from the preferences menu "recent changes" tab called "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" is used to evaluate whether Monday vandalism has been fixed.
I am using the term "vandalism" somewhat loosely to include malicious changes, probable test edits, and any changes that I consider reduce the quality of an article, without regard to whether the edit was made from an anonymous IP address, a novice, or an established editor. If an unexplained change would require discussion to understand whether it was justified, I am including it in the vandalism list. If I am able to discover by online research that a change was not justified, then I consider it vandalism. Simple typos or mistakes that are easily fixed are not included, I just fix them. Although tags such as "does not cite any references or sources" are ugly and distracting to the reader, I have decided not to list their addition.
As of 24 November 2014 I have changed procedure. I will fix the vandalism, but will still remove the affected pages from my watch list. I will also remove from my watch list those pages that were vandalized and fixed by a person rather than by Cluebot. The rationale for this is that dealing with vandalism is probably a waste of effort; when vandalism-reversion requires human effort the ship is sinking, and self-sacrifice to keep it appearing to be afloat is not appropriate.
Results[edit]
At the beginning of this experiment, on Tuesday 16 September 2014, there were 3,958 pages on my watch list. As of Monday 24 November 2014, there were 3,772 pages on my watch list. Two rounds of drastic trimming had occurred in the intervening time, and other pages had been added.
Monday 15 September 2014[edit]
Monday 22 September 2014[edit]
- Marginal cases, reverted
Monday 29 September 2014[edit]
- Marginal cases, reverted/fixed
Monday 6 October 2014[edit]
- Marginal cases, reverted/fixed
Monday 13 October 2014[edit]
- Marginal cases, reverted
Monday 20 October 2014[edit]
none
Monday 27 October 2014[edit]
- Marginal cases, reverted/fixed
- Unable to check near the end of the month because Banglapedia's bandwith is exceeded; removed from watch list
Monday 3 November 2014[edit]
- Vandalism inadvertently reverted, subsequently removed from watch list
- Exception made, vandalism reverted and ARV submitted
Monday 10 November 2014[edit]
- Change reverted, then removed from watch list
Monday 17 November 2014[edit]
Monday 24 November 2014; procedure change to fix vandalism/stupidity/spam but continue to remove the pages from watch list unless fixed by Cluebot or XLinkBot or fixed with page protection[edit]
Monday 1 December 2014[edit]
Monday 8 December 2014[edit]
- Holomorphic
- Badakhshan Province
- Aril
- Karyotype
- Heredity
- Leaf
- Women's suffrage
- Shrub
- Xylem
- Biological classification
Monday 15 December 2014[edit]
- Foreign relations of Bangladesh
- Binomial nomenclature
- Ministry of Finance (Bangladesh)
- Barley
- Speciation
Monday 22 December 2014[edit]
Monday 29 December 2014[edit]
Monday 5 January 2015[edit]
Monday 12 January 2015[edit]
None!
Monday 19th January 2015[edit]
Observations[edit]
At the end of the experiment there are 4,028 pages on my watchlist, a small gain from the original 3,958. A total of 72 pages were removed, and one (Xylem) was removed twice during the experiment. Taking Monday off has been personally helpful by encouraging me to push ahead with projects outside Wikipedia. After taking the day off, it has become steadily more difficult to come back to look at my watchlist.