User:Wasted Time R

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So named after The Eagles' striking "Wasted Time" and "Wasted Time (Reprise)" from Hotel California. And a metaphor for WP editing?

Starting in January 2005 I made around 1,000 edits as anons User: 68.197.107.71 and User: 67.108.122.62, never feeling committed to the idea that WP converges to quality or that anyone reads these articles. I'm still not sure on either account ... a page view count mechanism would be really helpful. In May 2005 I began using this account; within a little more than a month I had another 1,000 edits. Too much!?

The biggest problems in WP articles, especially those dealing with popular culture:

1. Excessive detail in the wrong places, such as an article's intro
2. Inconsistent levels of detail within an article or across a set of articles
3. Just plain too much detail

<time passes>

Regarding convergence to quality, I think it can happen for articles on subjects important enough to warrant attention but obscure enough to not get too much attention. Political subjects or contentious history, forget it. Popular culture that attracts a lot of people, forget it. Enough if you get these kinds of articles right, someone else will come along and mess it up. Even if you and a bunch of other editors hammer out differences and get it right, in a short while other people will come, ignore your agreements, and mess it all up. Even if you watchlist these articles and fix the mess ups as they happen, eventually you'll get tired, the hordes won't, and down it will all go.

Regarding if anyone is reading, one sanity check is to Google a subject and to see how high the WP article shows up. If it's not in the first two pages of results, chances are good no one's going to find it. I have a feeling a large subset of WP articles are only read by editors, not by "real" readers looking for information.

<time passes>

The first article I ever edited is also just about the worst article in Wikipedia, List of best-selling music artists. Missing or bogus data, pov agendas, pure vandalism, heavy churn, perpetually under VfD. The edit was this: [1]. I picked this article because I could tell it was pretty worthless, so if I blundered it totally, no harm done. The same still applies.

<time passes>

[edit] Proper usage in music articles

[edit] Quotes and italics

Popular music article writers, please memorize Wikipedia:Music#Albums, bands, and songs. Albums go in italics, songs go in double quotes, bands are just proper nouns, and only the first reference to the title subject of an article (and any alternate names of it) go in bold. How hard is this to understand? Yet there are jillions of music articles that get this wrong in every which way.

[edit] Tour names

It's not in a style guide (yet), but tour names are being done throughout Wikipedia as regular proper nouns, not italics or quotes. See Talk:Zoo TV Tour#Tour name conventions for the rationale.

[edit] Punctuation

Another common fault is placing punctuation inside the double quotes used for song titles, such as:

Her biggest hits were "Fool to Love," "Cry Every Day," and "Tears for Years."

Take a look at Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation marks. Song titles are clearly the case where the punctuation is not "part of the sense" of the thing being quoted, and therefore should be outside the double quotes. Thus the above should be:

Her biggest hits were "Fool to Love", "Cry Every Day", and "Tears for Years".

I've seen more than a few cases where people make the same mistake in their coding with italics:

Her most popular albums included ''No Love Supreme,'' ''Sorrow Tomorrow,'' and ''Love is Pain.''

which is really ridiculous – do the titles on the real album covers include commas and periods?

It is true that other publications (New York Times, Rolling Stone) put punctuation inside the double quotes in the first case, but Wikipedia standards are clear that you don't; see WP:MOS-T#Punctuation for another statement to this effect.

[edit] Why Trivia sections are bad

All sorts of articles, mostly popular culture ones but some other kinds as well, have picked up sections named Trivia. This is not a good idea!

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a catchbin for every factoid about a subject, as some non-Wikipedia popular culture web pages are. Wikipedia articles should have a cohesiveness of content. If a "Trivia" item is really important, it should be put into one of the mainline sections of text in the appropriate spot. If a "Trivia" item is somewhat important, it can often be pushed down into a subordinate article (such as an album or song article for a musical artist, rather than the main article). If a "Trivia" item isn't important, it should be left out of any article! It's that simple.

Trivia sections are the lazy way out; they represent no organisation, no structure, no cohesion. They should all be gotten rid off, something I've tried to do when I've encountered them in articles I've worked on.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Music/MUSTARD#Trivia for a guideline against Trivia sections in music articles.

And Wikipedia:Avoid trivia sections in articles for a guideline against Trivia sections in all articles.

[edit] Concert articles

Keep up the good job with the many concert articles. I'd award one of those stars, but there's some silly administrative debate on the appropriate star to hand out for WP:MUSIC contributions. --Madchester 21:20, 7 August 2006 (UTC)