As in real life, I'm a student on Wikipedia; I edit articles as I learn. (In particular, my interests vary, with small obsessive spurts.) Mostly I read Wikipedia, but sometimes I edit, whenever I see an obvious opportunity for improvement. Sometimes there's that other motivation.
Philosophy
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Wikipedia is meant to be a helpful resource for readers, not a playground or social network for editors. Our primary goal is (or ought to be) to create and improve articles. All other social-networking aspects — administrative bureaucracy, "Wikiprojects", rating articles, fiddling with categories and stubs, awarding barnstars, etc. — are secondary trivia. I recognize that some of them may sometimes be necessary to avoid disruption, or even have marginal utility to readers, but I hope not to waste much time on them myself. It is important to be welcoming to newcomers who take initiative. Please do not bite the newcomers. They write Wikipedia. For more thoughts on how the Wikipedia community has become a playground for entrenched editors who close ranks against newbies, see here, and (somewhat radical) follow-ups here and here:
Most of Wikipedia's actual content is written by people devoted to an article, happy to spend hours or even weeks polishing an article into something they can be proud of. Most of Wikipedia's edits are by the "bosses" who go around making mass edits to hundreds of articles, often bot-assisted, trying to impose their trivial preferences. Particularly obnoxious are messages left on articles that are directed at editors rather than readers. Effectively, these (from User:Fences and windows):
and these (from User:Jorge Stolfi/Templates that I sorely miss):
The number of readers on Wikipedia is far greater than the number of editors, and the readers (many of whom cannot edit Wikipedia because it is too confusing) are not helped in any way by these tags.
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This is a Wikipedia
user page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user in whose space this page is located may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shreevatsa/Userpage. |
Contributions
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It seems I like finding sources more than writing, so articles I write turn out looking as if the purpose of sentences in the article is to serve as excuses to link to sources. Edit count or pages created. Articles that are not too short are in bold.
Wrote the lead of Binary prefix at some point, now rewritten. Articles I would like to improve but never get around to: Indian English, Sanskrit in the West.
It's really pointless to keep track of these, but there seem to be about 200 of them (Feb 20111). |
As in real life, I'm a student on Wikipedia; I edit articles as I learn. (In particular, my interests vary, with small obsessive spurts.) Mostly I read Wikipedia, but sometimes I edit, whenever I see an obvious opportunity for improvement. Sometimes there's that other motivation.
Philosophy
| ||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Wikipedia is meant to be a helpful resource for readers, not a playground or social network for editors. Our primary goal is (or ought to be) to create and improve articles. All other social-networking aspects — administrative bureaucracy, "Wikiprojects", rating articles, fiddling with categories and stubs, awarding barnstars, etc. — are secondary trivia. I recognize that some of them may sometimes be necessary to avoid disruption, or even have marginal utility to readers, but I hope not to waste much time on them myself. It is important to be welcoming to newcomers who take initiative. Please do not bite the newcomers. They write Wikipedia. For more thoughts on how the Wikipedia community has become a playground for entrenched editors who close ranks against newbies, see here, and (somewhat radical) follow-ups here and here:
Most of Wikipedia's actual content is written by people devoted to an article, happy to spend hours or even weeks polishing an article into something they can be proud of. Most of Wikipedia's edits are by the "bosses" who go around making mass edits to hundreds of articles, often bot-assisted, trying to impose their trivial preferences. Particularly obnoxious are messages left on articles that are directed at editors rather than readers. Effectively, these (from User:Fences and windows):
and these (from User:Jorge Stolfi/Templates that I sorely miss):
The number of readers on Wikipedia is far greater than the number of editors, and the readers (many of whom cannot edit Wikipedia because it is too confusing) are not helped in any way by these tags.
|
This is a Wikipedia
user page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user in whose space this page is located may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shreevatsa/Userpage. |
Contributions
|
---|
It seems I like finding sources more than writing, so articles I write turn out looking as if the purpose of sentences in the article is to serve as excuses to link to sources. Edit count or pages created. Articles that are not too short are in bold.
Wrote the lead of Binary prefix at some point, now rewritten. Articles I would like to improve but never get around to: Indian English, Sanskrit in the West.
It's really pointless to keep track of these, but there seem to be about 200 of them (Feb 20111). |