User:WikiJoe

Who I am

My real name is Joy, and I would have used it from the beginning if I had understood Wikipedia better.

Wikipedia and the World

Every issue we discuss here has its real world counterparts. WP is a sort of laboratory, where we can explore the implications of issues which are not limited to our immediate needs. BLP is the obvious example, but also the nature of truth; The reliability of evidence; The degree to which we can trust our judgment and our senses; The extent our biases are perpetuated by the way we teach; The nature of social control; The liberty we allow to other people to do what we think wrong; The relative weights of individual freedom to be bizarre and responsibility to a social purpose; The role of personal feelings and trust as compared to abstract rules; Whether to obey social rules we think evil; Whether to respect social taboos; Whether to judge by motive or result. And the foundations and purposes of civil and criminal law, & the purposes of punishment. The specific WP issues related to all these will occur to you--I have specific things in mind for every one.

Many advocates of extreme free speech in the outside world are in favor of a restrictive POV at Wikipedia. Many who are libertarians of various sorts in the outside world are much less so here. Many who are proponents of radical change are much less so here. We justify our witch hunts by the need to appear squeaky-clean to a potentially unfriendly world.

Mostly, our examples are trivial. There are RW examples that are not the least trivial, besides the syphilis studies we all know about: The best atlas of human anatomy in the late 40s was prepared by a Nazi physician containing his drawings of what he knew were slides made from brain tissue of people killed in a concentration camp, and he is even recorded as having explained to the commandant the sort of specimen and method of preservation he wanted, so people were killed on purpose to make it. There has since been consensus to remove the atlas from libraries, though individuals have retained copies and argued for its continued value--there remains nothing of equal quality. (The slides themselves have been recovered, and buried properly, tho some of them are probably still in existence, because one brain can give thousands of thin sections.) In the USA in the 1950s, the question of what amino acids in proteins were essential for human growth was investigated by feeding human infants diets chemically prepared to be lacking in various amino acids, to see which ones stunted their growth. (The stunting from such starvation is permanent.) The compiler of the standard reference work in the late 50s decided to not cite these studies, even though there was no equivalent source of information, and no real prospect of another way to get it, and I don't think they have been cited since, As I said, our problems are not so consequential. They're self-protective, rather than immoral. Important as it is to protect WP, they do not rise to the same status.

What I believe about current issues at Wikipedia

The only 2 policies I see here that I have an uncompromising disagreement with are: consulting subject's preferences about whether to have an article (because I think it an invitation to writing to please the subject), and using arguments that would not be used for routine subjects in order to eliminate articles on unpopular subjects -- they are both questions of NPOV/Censorship & if we compromise about that we lose our purpose. There is a popular-liberal flattening of positions here, and I do not speak from any conceivably right-wing position. I am willing to compromise on NOT NEWS and NOT FICTION, because they just harm the scope of the encyclopedia, not the reliability.

There are also 2 patterns of interacting I unhesitatingly condemn: First, those who badger other contributors to the discussion: people should perhaps reach conclusions based both on the arguments and the degree of support for them, not the behavior of those supporting a particular position, but people in all contexts tend to discount the views of those who interfere with the proceedings. The other, often related, is the increasing and often successful attempt aided by discretionary sanctions to win arguments by maneuvering the opponents into poor behavior, even though this is often successful--people actually keep track of how many have been banned on their side vs. the enemy

How I work

I generally do not follow up on non-essential issues in individual articles. If the editors there do not like what I do, I usually go elsewhere. WP:OWN is a good policy, but hard to enforce. WP:BRD when used for major changes seems mainly designed to increase the work at the Arbitration Committee.

If anyone who knows less than me tries to lecture to me, I know and use a good many ways of responding, other than simply asserting authority. But when someone knows more, I want to be taught. If I'm wrong, I say so. If I've messed things up, I apologize. If someone even thinks I've messed things up, I also apologize, for I must have been unclear in what I did. I'd rather get things right, than get them my way & wrong. For most things, there are several alternative right ways, but there will also be several alternative wrong ways.
If I adopt too much of a lecturing tone myself, I hope people alert me, because it usually wasn't intended. I've taught (biology, and librarianship), and the manner stays with you.

I have never been able to spell, and I type very inaccurately. If I've made a typo, just fix it--don't lecture me about it, for it won't do any good. Other people make typos too, and if I notice them, I fix them quietly. I think I'm good at straightening out unclear sentences, and I do some of this sort of copyediting as I go.

My approach to spam

Wikipedia is always dealing with paid spammers, people who earn their living by putting links to their own sites into web pages elsewhere. It is a large and well paid profession, and their activities are a serious danger to the integrity of any good site like ours. We have our methods for detecting and dealing with them. The most effective way is to block access to their web sites, by preventing links to known spam sites from appearing in Wikipedia. This is a partially automated procedure, carried out at several different levels, both at enWP and cooperatively by the different WPs. The other method is denying access to known spammers; this is a never-ending battle, for they just switch to a new account. Detecting these accounts, which we call "sock-puppets", puppets made by stuffing one sock into another as done to amuse young children, needs to be very fast and very stringent to be effective. This has led to a practice of blocking on any reasonable suspicion. Alas, anyone who deals with this much of the time will soon become over-suspicious, banning well-intentioned people and blocking good links. It's an inevitable side-effect of policing work.

This applies equally to commercial and non-commercial sites. I find the commercial ones easier to deal with, because they tend to add even larger numbers, and get caught all the sooner. And the non-commercial spammers have a narrower line between them and the well-intentioned people.

As for paid editing, I think it is wrong, because it interferes with the normal way people work here, and interferes with the good faith we extend to all users. The effects of such editing as we know about has usually been very poor articles. That need not always be the case, but so far almost nobody who understands Wikipedia well enough to write good articles has been willing to do it for money.