Then again, I’m accused of similar zealotry, and those accusations probably justified; articles about businesses that are Global Leaders in Today’s Ever Changing World of Technology and similar horseshit are unlikely to last long once I spot them. I too am guilty of using semi automated processes to sniff them out. (No need to get fancy. Simply looking for “management solution” and using “leverage” as a verb is surprisingly accurate.)

We desperately need to improve and tighten up our coverage of mythology, folklore, and similar subjects. I’ve taken a bit of a break these past two weeks. I would like to be able to do more building rather than tearing down, but somebody’s got to watch out for all of those Global Leaders in Bombay and Madras. (Please, God, not “Mumbai” or “Chennai”.)

Unfortunately I think most of the potential solutions come down to trying to instill Clue, which is not too easy.

What I’ve learned from all this is: look like a noob, act like you want to improve the encyclopedia, and train yourself to enjoy the bites because they are honestly meant as attempts at the shared goal of improving the encyclopedia. Now I edit about half the time as IPs and the other half as various sockpuppets. If anyone questions my commitment to improving the encyclopedia, I can point them to a raft of accomplishments in some of the most contentious areas, such as my improvements to [[Mitigation of climate change]] during the arbcom’s climate change case when everyone else was on an editing moratorium, or the article I took to featured status while banned (plug-in hybrid) etc.

@Guy it’s interesting you bring up Abd and cold fusion. I first encountered Abd when he was trying to distort the reports of monte carlo simulations in [[IRV]] and it’s because of me that he became interested in cold fusion in the first place. How many more secondary sources in academic journals and military research labs before you stop using the term “cranks”? http://3.ly/coldFusion

What’s the solution to this? There are many ways that we could go, but the aforementioned structures are going to prevent this needed change coming from within. Basic policies like notability, blocking policy, and how to get appointed to various positions of trust within the community (which is presently generating a load of kid cops with itchy trigger fingers running around tagging anything that’s not perfect first go) need to be comprehensively examined and altered.

The WMF could always step in to make these changes, but any change they make are going to be resisted, vocally, by a large subsection of the community. Whether they’re willing to tinker with the cash cow that enwikipedia is for the foundation is also questionable.

David, I believe you very badly misquoted Tim. He didn’t say we should repel new editors. He said that it may be counterproductive to get a large number of new editors before we work out our social problems.

I think it was a permissible exaggeration.

He also specifically mentions technical ways that could possibly make Wikipedia friendlier to new editors.

I think that policy and enforcement also has a role to play, but I haven’t been involved with that recently, so I can’t say much about it. I never had any success in changing Wikipedia policies while I was an active editor; I’ve found writing software to be much easier and less frustrating.

Ideally, our article writing policy should allow two things.

1) Knowledgeable editors should have an easy time adding what they know to Wikipedia.
2) It should be easy to remove, eviscerate, or otherwise fix bad articles.

Right now, we have #2 down, and not #1. I would suggest that we have, however, always had #2 down about as well as we do now, and that we used to have #1 down much more. The problem has been a bunch of policy that tries to prevent bad articles from existing in the first place. Such policies have had next to no actual successes in preventing bad articles, and have had alarming success at preventing good ones.

I think that Wikipedia basically needs to accept that its solution to bad content is going to be reactive, and to abandon any preventative approaches that are in the least bit onerous. This has always been my objection to crap like Twinkle and the CVU – that they make the mistake of treating prevention as a viable priority.

And how do we deal with those who are superficially polite but drive away everybody else? Like Abd, who stepped up as the latest and most successful proxy for the cold fusion cranks, and now proclaims himself an “expert” in the field based on having drunk gallons of their Kool-Aid?

I think that anyone who seriously suggests that the breakdown in functionality of administrator discussions and the arbitration committee is worth some articles on arcane topics in historical architecture is being ridiculous. On the other hand, as I said, I think it’s likely that the complete failure of the community to deal with Giano effectively was far more harmful than anything Giano did as such.

I suspect the problem you’re running into is one that stemmed specifically from Wikipedia’s very bad handling of Siegenthaler – the excessive fetishization of sources. Sources matter. Articles should be well-sourced. But the idea that it is possible to take a bunch of secondary sources, transparently copy the information from them into an article, and arrange it to be an encyclopedia article that is useful to anyone is completely false. Knowledge and information are more complex than that, and actually require people engaging in careful thought on questions where there are no clear-cut right answers.

Wikipedia policy is, through and through, written to actively discourage that.

I wish we could have Badlydrawnjeff back. He was good at keeping us honest without being rude – a genuinely nice guy.

I have the opposite problem: the things I want to write about are so obscure as to defeat my attempts to source them to the minimum standards I demand of those attempting to write about their garage band.

I would love to be able to properly source articles on Vic Nees, JanJoost van Elburg, Bill Hunt, founder-member of Fretwork viol consort, and others, but I can’t. I had enough trouble with Charles Medlam who is properly famous and even that’s not really adequately sourced, I would not create it today.

I suppose I should subscribe to some print magazines.

Incidentally, what is your opinion of Giano? My personal test of a behaviour policy is that if it won’t work for Giano, it won’t work.