Wikipedia:Editcountitis
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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it. |
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This page contains material which is kept because it is considered humorous. It is not intended, nor should it be used, for any remotely serious purpose. |
Editcountitis is a serious disease (see Internet addiction disorder) consisting of an unhealthy obsession with the number of edits you have made to Wikipedia. Thankfully, no fatalities or serious injuries have been recorded and, if caught early, resumption of normal life activities may be possible.
Classic symptoms:
- Using one of the tools listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject edit counters to check your edit count more often than you check your watchlist.
- Never using the preview button, so corrections to your own typos increase your count.
- Thinking of your position in The List as a competition.
- In extreme cases, making bad changes just so you can revert them.
- In really extreme cases, keeping a current manual count on your user page and frequently updating it.
- You vote support or oppose based on number of edits at Requests for adminship, and not checking the user's contributions.
- Editing the main sandbox or your own sandbox if you are a registered user, excessively.
If you find yourself exhibiting even one of these symptoms, you might want to consider seeking professional help. Remember:
- Unless you want to be an admin, nobody really cares how many edits you've made—and even then, it's really not quantity but quality.
- There is no prize for making 2,000, 3,000, 10,000, or even 216 (65,536) edits. Full disclosure: there are some privileges based on edit count, related to Wikipedia elections, image moves, and AutoWikiBrowser software, but these are granted on or before 1,000 edits.
- No matter how high you rank on The List of Wikipediholics, you'll never catch me!
[edit] Seriously, though...
Editcountitis is used humorously to suggest a belief that a Wikipedian's overall contribution level can be measured solely by their edit count. This is a phenomenon which some think may be harmful to processes such as requests for adminship, as well as to the Wikipedia community in itself. The problems with using edit counts to measure relative level of experience are that it does not take into account that users could have an extensive edit history prior to registering an account (posting anonymously), and that major and minor edits are counted equally, regardless of whether the edit is a typo fix, or the creation of a full article.
Furthermore, edit counts do not judge the quality of the edits, as insightful comments on talk pages and acts of vandalism are counted equally. Hence, it is not always a reliable way of telling how experienced or worthy a user truly is. Nevertheless, using the edit count tool is often useful for obtaining a very rough idea of how the editor interacts with the Wikipedia and how much experience he or she has.
All edits are perfectly welcome, including trivial edits like fixing typos. Each edit consumes disk space and other resources, so please do not edit in a manner intended to artificially increase your edit count, such as never using preview. Remember what we are all doing here is building an encyclopedia, not competing to see who makes the most edits.
[edit] External links
- Edit counting (at the Meta-Wiki)
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