Comment by calibas
4 years ago
> I probably would have been a "keep" on that AfD
Probably keep, so it sounds like you thinks it's a borderline case.
> I'm just saying it's not the borderline case you make it out to be.
Wait, what?
I stopped fighting for articles like these years ago because I grew to despise arguing over Wikipedia's policies. There's power users who seem to delight in bureaucracy, but for me it just sucks all the enjoyment out of participating in Wikipedia.
That being said, I still make edits to articles sometimes.
Yeah, the second "borderline" is a typo, and should read "open-and-shut" or something. Sorry, message board comments are the log(1.1)th draft of history.
I also stopped contributing to Wikipedia. The places I would have written in are all related to my work, and I found it intensely frustrating to be edited and incorrected by people who knew less about my field but more about Wikipedia's rules. I can see why it's so off-putting! But it later occurred to me that that's as it should be: it's what the project is getting at when it talks about "No Original Research". Wikipedia is a tertiary source; it's a directory of other sources, a map of the available literature. I can't just go into Wikipedia and write how macOS Seatbelt works, because I am not myself a reliable source; I'd be a guidemark on the map pointing to nowhere.
Instead, what I should be doing (to the extent I care about improving the encyclopedia) is writing secondary sources that the encyclopedia can eventually cite. I'm not supposed to be writing on Wikipedia (at least, not in my areas of expertise); I'm supposed to be writing elsewhere.
I've seen that happen a few times, an expert in a field will greatly improve an article, only to have their additions removed or butchered by someone who's far less educated on the subject. The resulting edit war is "won" by the person better versed in Wikipedia's policies, and that's usually not the expert.
The bureaucrat wins, the article gets neutered, and the expert gets so frustrated they never participate in Wikipedia again. To me, it seems like Wikipedia loses more than it gains in this.
And my point is: it's not. The phenomenon you're describing is in fact healthy. Subject matter experts should in fact not cite their own authority when writing in an encyclopedia. They're almost certainly right, whatever they're writing, but that's not the point.
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