User:Marc Shepherd

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Unfortunately Marc Shepherd has retired as a Wikipedia editor and will not be returning. Best wishes and good luck!

[edit] Hail and farewell

I've decided to leave the Wikipedia community. I'll shortly be emptying out my 1,291-page watch list and logging out. I'll still use Wikipedia as a reference tool, but I no longer wish to contribute. I wish to thank all the editorial colleagues I met here for their contributions and suggestions.

Part of my reason for leaving is personal. I have other projects I want to work on. Since I started contributing to Wikipedia regularly, those projects have fallen by the wayside.

I have also become somewhat dismayed with Wikipedia's limitations. I do not expect anything to change, but I would make these observations:

  • Wikipedia has excellent processes for rooting out vandals, trolls, shills, and blatantly useless edits.
  • Wikipedia has very poor processes for rooting out good-faith mediocre edits.
  • A huge proportion of the edits are, in fact, mediocre. The relatively small number of excellent editors spend a disproportionate share of their time repairing the mediocre.
  • With the time remaining after rooting out bad-faith edits and mediocre good-faith edits, even excellent editors tend to spend a disproportionate share of their time on what is fun, rather than what is useful.
  • According to Wikipedia:Good article, just 0.1% of the articles in English Wikipedia are "good articles." This appalling statistic illustrates the magnitude of the problem.
  • According to Wikipedia:Featured article, just 0.1% of the articles in English Wikipedia have been "featured articles." This would seem to be a reasonable quantity, until you consider the extremely high percentage of low-importance topics that make it to Featured status. Recent examples include Jabba the Hutt, Rush (band), and Watchmen.
  • Wikipedia's structure of barely-controlled anarchy is an excellent way to generate a ton of mediocre content, and occasionally very good content. It is not a very good way to generate an excellent encyclopedia.

Best of luck to all! Marc Shepherd 18:26, 20 September 2006 (UTC)


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