Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is not a contest
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Shouldn't this be merged with WP:NOT instead? Johnleemk | Talk 07:53, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
- Not necessarily. I just posted a comment on Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not, which briefly stated I didn't necessarily see this as a "new WP:NOT". It's really more of a "Wikipeida essay", depending on how it evolves in the future. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Szyslak (talk • contribs) .
- Ah. But even so, I think the core idea of this page (that we aren't here to compete) would fit in very well at WP:NOT. Johnleemk | Talk 11:41, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
- I think this should be left as an essay and not policyfied. I'm not here to compete, but... if someone else was here to compete, and was desperate to get to the top of the all-time FA list, and to do that they needed to write loads of well-illustrated, stonkingly comprehensive, NPOV and well-referenced brilliant prose, in collaboration with others and building consensus where needed, wouldn't it be unhelpful to question their motives? They would be improving WP, indisputably. So long as they maintained civility and didn't go round telling everyone else how inferior we all are, wouldn't this hypothetical person's bizarrely competitive streak be A Good Thing? Just acting as Devil's Advocate, but basically I strongly dislike attempts to rule between Good Motivation and Bad Motivation. What matters is whether a person's involvement in the project is useful for the project. By contrast, a terribly well-intentioned and impeccably polite editor who can't write decent quality English and fails to understand basic policies may be a pain in the backside for other users to cleanup (those users who perform massive text-dumps of foreign language material, for instance, are presumably trying to help, in their own rather peculiar way). I think it's a big mistake to rule a person's motivations right or wrong. As far as I can see, if you can't tell an editor's motivations or biases from their edits, they're a very fine editor indeed. If it turned out to be competition, then so what? TheGrappler 01:19, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
- As one of the authors of this piece, I don't oppose competition in and of itself. This page arose from a discussion on Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship, about the astronomically high standards some RFA participants have for potential admins. szyslak (t, c, e) 06:14, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
- I think this should be left as an essay and not policyfied. I'm not here to compete, but... if someone else was here to compete, and was desperate to get to the top of the all-time FA list, and to do that they needed to write loads of well-illustrated, stonkingly comprehensive, NPOV and well-referenced brilliant prose, in collaboration with others and building consensus where needed, wouldn't it be unhelpful to question their motives? They would be improving WP, indisputably. So long as they maintained civility and didn't go round telling everyone else how inferior we all are, wouldn't this hypothetical person's bizarrely competitive streak be A Good Thing? Just acting as Devil's Advocate, but basically I strongly dislike attempts to rule between Good Motivation and Bad Motivation. What matters is whether a person's involvement in the project is useful for the project. By contrast, a terribly well-intentioned and impeccably polite editor who can't write decent quality English and fails to understand basic policies may be a pain in the backside for other users to cleanup (those users who perform massive text-dumps of foreign language material, for instance, are presumably trying to help, in their own rather peculiar way). I think it's a big mistake to rule a person's motivations right or wrong. As far as I can see, if you can't tell an editor's motivations or biases from their edits, they're a very fine editor indeed. If it turned out to be competition, then so what? TheGrappler 01:19, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
- Ah. But even so, I think the core idea of this page (that we aren't here to compete) would fit in very well at WP:NOT. Johnleemk | Talk 11:41, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
