User:Professor Penguino/subpage On Edits

Wikipedia is, when you get down to it, a meritocracy. The more edits you make... the more edits you can make. It's a pretty simple system. The goal is to reward people for adding to the encyclopedia. So naturally, someone with 4 edits isn't going to have the same privileges as someone with 10,000 edits. This is a user essay that addresses some key questions concerning edits, and just Wikipedia policy in general.

The edit count vs. edit quality question

There has been some debate on Wikipedia over whether this system dismisses people with a low edit count out of hand. Is the system uneven? Or is the system working?

Do the quantity of edits signify experience? In most cases, yes. An inexperienced editor is not going to have more edits than an experienced editor. But should the inexperienced editor's opinions be disregarded? Of course not! But that doesn't mean they aren't. Many in the Wikipedia community are quite welcoming to newcomers. But it can be quite apparent that some editors never read WP:Please don't bite the newcomers or WP:Assume good faith. Others say it doesn't actually matter how many edits a person has made to judge their experience. They could be a professional historian and only have 23 edits. In this Wikipedian's option, it is really a mix of both. You can't judge a single user from the edit count or a revision page. You need to look at both. It is not disputed that admins usually have more than 500 main space edits. But would it be so bad to have a low edit count administrator?

Who knows?

The Snowball clause

Ah, the Snowball clause... has there been a more contentious Wikipedia policy? Well, maybe the badly named WP:Ignore all rules. And some others... but I'm getting off-topic!

According to the Snowball clause,

"If an issue has a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted by a certain process, there's no need to run it through the entire process."

So basically, if there's a user requesting adminship, and there are 87 votes against him and 2 votes for him, you don't have to grind him through the long process if it's just going to fade anyway. Or if you're deciding on a contentious/outrageous policy that no one can agree on, you don't have to go through every single step of the process to just determine a forgone conclusion. Of course, if you are that person running for adminship, or you are the person supporting the contentious policy, the Snowball clause will probably seem very unfair to you. Plus, what makes a forgone conclusion?

In my opinion, the policy makes sense. I suppose if the chances of something passing par are slim to nil, the process can be halted prematurely, because why waste everybody's time to determine something that is pretty much inevitable.

Is WP:Ignore all rules a good idea?

Firstly, the name doesn't fully reflect the policy. The policy (only 12 word long) states that,

"If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it."

It means that, if a rule is preventing you from stopping vandalism, you can quickly break it, fix the problem, and then go back to your normal routine of editing.

But still, bad name.

Should humor be allowed?

Well, it depends. Wikipedia is one of the few encyclopedias that really needs to address this question, since literally anyone can edit (unless, of course, you're blocked). This is explained very well in WP:Humor. The thing is, it depends on the content.

It's as simple as this: If it's funny and obviously a joke, it can stay. If it's offensive and mean, it needs to go.

See also

I don't know... check out the Five Pillars if you haven't already, I guess? :)

If you want to make a proposal or do other stuff like that, go to the Village pump.