User:Lumbercutter

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[edit] Talk

Click here to leave a message on my talk page.

[edit] Significance of my Wikipedia username

My Wikipedia username does not have much significance. It was a fairly arbitrary, not-already-taken name. I do not cut lumber on any regular basis.

[edit] My WP peeves

  • Anonymous edits with no edit summaries. Often they're good-faith edits (not necessarily good, but good-faith ). However, there is certainly often a correlation between quality of edit and whether the editor bothered to identify himself or bothered to provide a reason for the change.
  • Vandalism.
  • Criminality.
  • Other forms of failing to act properly and choosing to act improperly.
  • Established users who revert good-faith edits without bothering to explain why, politely, in the edit summary. That's not fair to the good-faith contributor. Plus, it produces blowback. It needlessly makes the person feel angry and insulted, which ends up decreasing the quality of this project in various ways. If you're too lazy to explain your reason, or if your reason isn't good enough (examples: (1) "No one is allowed to rephrase in any way a bit of WP that I wrote"; (2) "Let's not mention the negative or unpleasant aspects of the article's topic"), then cancel your edit and go rethink your attitude toward WP.
  • The fact that I have noticed a correlation among established users between having-many-thousands-of-edits and the-quality-of-any-one-edit-tends-toward-poor. People who find the time to make 15,000 WP edits often do not put much time into double-checking their own notions before making any one edit.
  • Celebrities who engage in specious reasoning when condemning the entire Wikipedia project. For example:
    • A celebrity musician says, "The Wikipedia article about me is full of false info contributed by idiots; therefore Wikipedia is useless and its concept is fatally flawed." That's specious reasoning. What can correctly be said is the following: The Wikipedia article about you is full of false info contributed by idiots; but the benefits of Wikipedia are not concentrated in the area of pop culture trivia. Such trivia on Wikipedia is just background noise that you have to ignore (and wade through) on your way to learning about stuff that actually matters.
    • A celebrity musician says, "The Wikipedia article on X [stupid subject] is five times longer than the Wikipedia article on Y [important subject]. Therefore Wikipedia's priorities are hopelessly flawed; therefore Wikipedia is useless." That's specious reasoning. What can correctly be said is the following: Wikipedia is not a unitary entity who has priorities. Only individual contributors have priorities. If the article on X is five times longer than the article on Y, then that is only because individual members of the public misuse their own time and potential by wasting it on paying attention to X and not learning about Y. The solution to that negative aspect of human nature is not to discontinue Wikipedia. There is no solution to that negative aspect of human nature. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is slowly building up a store of knowledge on topics that actually matter. There's no reason to stop. And as someone was quoted as saying at Criticism of Wikipedia, (paraphrasing): Since there is no limitation on the size of Wikipedia, bad articles do not take space away from good articles. In other words, good articles exist and grow independently of whatever giant waves of detritus are washing ashore elsewhere.

[edit] My WP joys

  • The fact that Wikipedia exists
  • The fact that in a few short years Wikipedia has gone from not even existing to being in some ways the best annotated dictionary of acronyms and abbreviations on earth. Now, yes, I know that conventional Wikipedian wisdom perversely insists that Wikipedia not be a dictionary. (See below for an argument in favor of a better way.) Nevertheless, what I am saying is that when you need to know the spell-out of any acronym or abbreviation (common or rare), plus find out incidentally every other thing it may possibly stand for, plus have a nice encyclopedic explication of each of those meanings just one click away, Wikipedia has become the best place to check first.
  • The fact that when on one particular day I needed to know what the "scroll lock" key does or does not do, why it ever came to be there, whether it is nowadays obsolete, and whether I need to care about it, all I had to do was type "scroll lock" into Wikipedia's search field and the answers were instantly right in front of me, in easy-to-digest form. Now, this information is available elsewhere. But I didn't have to bother to go looking for it, nor to spend time sifting through the chaff of a Google search to find the wheat. That is very important.

[edit] About WP:WINAD: What if we were to let utility drive WP's identity—even if that meant merging the two paradigms of dictionary and encyclopedia?

Warning: The following instance of thinking outside the box may be dangerous to tiny dogmatic heads that are predisposed to exploding.

We Wikipedians are familiar with the conventional Wikipedian wisdom that insists that Wikipedia not be a dictionary. However, consider this: Why is it necessary in the digital age to maintain and enforce this essentially arbitrary distinction, dictionary vs encyclopedia, that was inherited from the pre-digital era?

The main reason why dictionaries and encyclopedias needed to be kept separate in the "paper age" was the logistics of bound paper books—their size, weight, and expense. But in the digital age, the following things are true: (1) there is generally no reason to ever print a hardcopy version of an encyclopedia—it is an expensive waste of resources, precludes the linking and transclusive advantages of hypertext, and forces static form on an essentially dynamic collection of knowledge. (2) There is no reason why a resource like Wikipedia can't be hugely voluminous. It's digital, searchable, and transclusive; so who cares?

I advocate a merging of the paradigms of dictionary and encyclopedia. I admit that this would be an experiment; yet I say, why not give it a try and see if we like it?

Entries would start off with the dictionary-type content—definitions, pronunciation(s) (both transcriptions [IPA and AHD] and audio files), and etymology. Then they would go on to include any encyclopedic-type content that the entry warranted.

I notice that I am not alone in this reasoning.

[edit] Examples of edits where useful info was removed in order to fit the procrustean bed of WP:WINAD


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