As in real life, I'm a student on Wikipedia; I edit articles as I learn. (In particular, my interests vary, with small obsessive spurts.) Mostly I read Wikipedia, but sometimes I edit, whenever I see an obvious opportunity for improvement. Sometimes there's that other motivation.
Philosophy
My Wikipedia philosophy: Wikipedia is for readers, not editors
Wikipedia is meant to be a helpful resource for readers, not a playground or social network for editors. Our primary goal is (or ought to be) to create and improve articles. All other social-networking aspects — administrative bureaucracy, "Wikiprojects", rating articles, fiddling with categories and stubs, awarding barnstars, etc. — are secondary trivia. I recognize that some of them may sometimes be necessary to avoid disruption, or even have marginal utility to readers, but I hope not to waste much time on them myself.
For more thoughts on how the Wikipedia community has become a playground for entrenched editors who close ranks against newbies, see here, and (somewhat radical) follow-ups here and here:
…the "lust for power" of editors who are tired of being just "workers" and want to be "bosses". In academia, [where] I work, this sort of thing happens all the time: people get tired of being just ordinary professors or researchers, and try to move to a position where, insted of working, they direct and control the work of other people.
How can one rise to be a "boss" in Wikipedia? Certainly not by editing contents: even if you edit 10,000 articles over several years and create a handful of "featured" ones, you will be just a "worker" like any of the other 10,000 regular editors. The same applies to any work (such as sourcing) that requires reading each article and thinking about its contents: no one can do that on more that 50-100 articles per day, the same top rate as for contents editing. Moreover, in that sort of work you often have to justify your edits to other "workers", and that puts you in the same "social level" as them.
A "boss" must do something that affects hundreds of thousands of articles, and does not require interacting with "workers" at their same level. It must be something definitive that an ordinary "worker" cannot stop or undo. It must be something that clearly put the "boss" on a higher level than the "workers".
That is the only explanation I can find for why we got the editorial tags at the top of articles. Robot-assisted tagging does not require thinking, so one can easily tag 1000 articles a day. The tagger is clearly "boss" because the tags are not "work", but "comands": every editorial tag says "I want this to be done, so some worker had better do it". A tagger is clearly above ordinary editors, because (by definition) the only way these can remove a tag is by complying with the wish of the tagger. Article tags have also the "advantage" that they violate the basic rule, "all editorial comments must go in the talk page": that is an advantage because (as in real life) one's social status is measured by the rules one can violate impunely.
[…]
Five years ago, Wikipedia could be defined as "three milion encyclopedia articles which anyone can edit". I am afraid that today it has become "a decadent social networking site with 10,000 members who have three million articles to play with". One just has to look at the pages in the "User talk:", "Wikipedia talk:", and "Template talk:" to realize that most Wikipedia decisions are being made by a small minority of "bosses" who seem to derive more plasure out of social interaction (and, in particular, the sense of power that comes from "bossing" over other members) than on making real substantial contributions to Wikipedia.
Most of Wikipedia's actual content is written by people devoted to an article, happy to spend hours or even weeks polishing an article into something they can be proud of. Most of Wikipedia's edits are by the "bosses" who go around making mass edits to hundreds of articles, often bot-assisted, trying to impose their trivial preferences.
Defacing articles you don't like
Particularly obnoxious are messages left on articles that are directed at editors rather than readers. Effectively, these (from User:Fences and windows):
An editor who believes something is wrong with this page won't make any effort to fix it, but they've done some drive-by tagging. Please allow this tag to languish indefinitely at the top of the page.
This article contains too few editorial templates. Please help vandalize Wikipedia by adding as many obnoxious and useless editorial templates to this article as you can think of. Articles without such templates run the risk of being appreciated by readers. (August 2009)
This article contains no references. Any idiot can see that; but we are assuming that you, dear reader, is not just any ordinary idiot, but an especially incredibly amazingly stupid idiot who suffers from paranoid delusions, and we fear that you may see plenty of references where in fact there is not even a hint of them. That is why we felt necessary to put this warning here at the top of the article, rather than in the talk page. But, don't feel bad; any idiot, including yourself, can help Wikipedia by adding plenty of references to obscure, cranky, irrlevant, or unobtainable sources to this page, so that other idiots may mistake it for a peer-reviewed authoritative journal article. Chances are that it will be years before any editor will bother to check those sources. (November 2009)
This is an editorial template, and therefore the editor who inserted it here is God. Unlike ordinary text, that anyone can delete at will, an editorial template cannot absolutely be deleted except after an express written authorization by Jim Wales, the sacrifice of three goats and a young virgin maiden, and consensus approval by the Editorial Template Designers Syndicate. After all, editors who are unwilling to contribute to Wikipedia are entitled to have fun with it, too. (August 2009)
The template above is an editorial template which was inserted here by some editor in order to send a request or suggestion to other editors. You may wonder what that stuff is doing here in the article page, before the leading paragraph (which of course is not "leading" any more) — instead of being in the talk page, which was created precisely for the purpose of editor-to-editor communication. Frankly, I don't know either. Perhaps some guy put that template on an article by mistake, and other editors though it was a consensus Wikipedia policy and started enforcing it all over the place. I myself have been doing that for a few years; it makes me feel useful. It is better than sitting at the bar getting drunk, you must agree. But now that you mention it, it does seem a bit illogical. Say, a guy wants to know what a paramecium is, types "paramecium" into the search window — but instead of an article on that little critter, he gets a statement that some anonymous jerk did not quite like something or other about the way references are placed on some page, and expects someone else will do something about it; and that he has been waiting since november 2006, precisely, so it had better be done soon enough, or... or... or, well, maybe it will be done at some later time. Hmmm... Yeah, 'guess you are right, it is stupid. Totally. But it does not matter anyway, it is now a Rule and there is no arguing about it. So, you are hereby warned: do not move that template back to the talk page. If you do that again, I will tell Jimbo and he will ban you from Wikipedia for good. Actually Wikipedia has lots of stupid rules like this one, that no one knows how they came to be. Around here, we call that sort of thing "consensus". (december 2009)
The number of readers on Wikipedia is far greater than the number of editors, and the readers (many of whom cannot edit Wikipedia because it is too confusing) are not helped in any way by these tags.
Random observations on the editing process
Dangers
Editing Wikipedia is addictive. Taking a few months off helps break the habit.
Once you figure out how easy it is to improve articles, it is annoying when you encounter articles where this has not been done, and feel compelled to (e.g.) waste time tracking down references for "[citation needed]" tags.
It is tempting to add pages you edit to your watchlist; you want to know what happens to your contributions. My watchlist had grown to nearly 2000 pages before I realized my folly. It takes some optimism to believe in Wikipedia anyway; a little more optimism will help you let go.
Other things to keep in mind
Verifiability, not truth. This is a stupid policy, but unfortunately necessary to keep the project going. But though verifiability is good and useful, having footnotes is not a goal in itself:
All material in Wikipedia articles must be attributable to a reliable published source to show that it is not original research, but in practice not everything need actually be attributed. This policy requires that anything challenged or likely to be challenged, including all quotations, be attributed to a reliable source…
Neutral point of view. If you have a bias about an article, either lose it when editing, or, if this is hard, don't edit the article. (It's perfectly fine to have a point of view in real life.)
User:Ash improved my script here but also introduced a few bugs and crippled functionality. He has also taken the idea far and written many more useful scripts for all sorts of sources: here.
This is a Wikipediauser page. This is not an encyclopedia article or the talk page for an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user in whose space this page is located may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shreevatsa/Userpage.
It seems I like finding sources more than writing, so articles I write turn out looking as if the purpose of sentences in the article is to serve as excuses to link to sources.
James O. Clephane. I was reading The Design of Everyday Things and found a paragraph mentioning a certain "James Clephane" in passing. Although there was no mention of him on Wikipedia at all, digging further found a lot of history (Google's News Archive Search was most helpful) and I just couldn't stop, so at some point I gave up and created the article.
