Cleaning up after Dr. Blofeld, ..he can do it himself (Yepp: I'm quitting wp) Options

[The Adversary]

Whaw: who would have guessed: after years of complaining and raging again "the cabal" on wp; the person to force me out of turns out to be...Dr. Blofeld (T-C-L-K-R-D) ,

May I introduce myself, I am Huldra (T-C-L-K-R-D) on wp (Btw; I have criticized SlimVirgin every way I could for these last few years....except for her silly user-name. As I am probably the only person on WP to have chosen an even sillier user-name (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) )

Now, about 3 years ago, utterly pissed off by Jayjg and Slim, I found my own quiet little corner of Israel/Palestine -articles: Palestinian Arab villages depopulated during the 1948 Palestine War

It was a strange little corner of Wikipedia; every now and then some newbie would start a horrible stub, often half in Arabic, with tons and tons of WP:OR. Typically they would only do a few edits (less that 20) and then disappear from WP totally......which then the "clean-up-task-force" (read: mostly me, Al Ameer son, Tiamut, Ashely (when he´s not blocked) ) would come along and clean up.

So we would turn this into Al-Muzayri'a . And this into Al-Nabi_Yusha' . And this into Saqiya.

Not superb any of them, but at least a decent start. This last one is typical: I think someone simply put the Khalidi-text (in Arabic) through some automatic translation ..so you get gems like "in recent years on the assignment," ...meaning: "in the last years of the (British) Mandate (of Palestine)" (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

Oh, and some we just never got around cleaning up: Al-Ja'una

So, slowly, steadfast during the last couple of years we have been progressing. The huge template has been invaluable...but I could only navigate around it because many of the links were red.

Until yesterday. Blofeld comes along and find he does not like red links, and decides that he will start all the red-linked villages...and turn the whole template into on huuuge green soup. And does just that.

Now, I cannot manage to navigate with it anymore.
Oh, well, Blofeld say he will work on the articles, and he does, but he does not have the sources (books). So far he has added nothing to the "public knowledge", he only copies from web-sites which were freely available, anyway. Re-inventing (or: re-writing) the wheel, so to speak. Now, if actually got hold of the books and educated himself on the topic: great. But I fear that in a short time he will be gone (he has a million other articles to attend too, as he has informed us.)

I liked this comment about reaching 3 mill articles on wp: "great, I've managed to poo in every room in the house"

Well, I leave it to Blofeld to clean up his own diarrhoea, eh, poo. I´m out.

[Dr. Blofeld]

The dilemna I always faced was balancing the sheer amount of missing notable content with quality. I found it was practically impossible to tackle many articles and spend a lot of time on each one, because as I was editing one article I knew we we were missing a huge amount on similar or other topics and I just couldn't accept it. In theory I think the articles that Blofeld created and other users have are typically articles about solid encyclopedia subjects and are done in good faith because they genuinely want to improve the encyclopedia in the long run. (Notice they don't create articles about Pokemon characters or 14 year eastern 24th league European footballers).The problem lies in that the sheer amount missing means that quality is often affected because of numbers. Potentially every article given the traffic of wikipedia could be expanded fully by whoever is willing to, the problem is that most editors tend to tackle maybe a handful that they can manage and the other stubs are left lying around. I do think we should have good articles about towns and rivers and wildlife, these are traditional encyclopedic subjects which we should be covering. The problem lies in the amount of editors actually needed to expand them. We have seen much evidence that actually a lot of stubs do get expanded but others don't, it is not always easy to tell. The Greek museums for instance I'd have thought would have generated much more interest. Might I also point out if there was something in place that could replace lacking human creation with much more information and pay a lot more attention to starting them with more content and more consistently and reliably then I am certain these sub stubs would not be created. Above all I think most of the guys who have created stubs enmasse on wikipedia is because they kind of see it as "planting seeds" into a project they genuinely want to see develop. I think a lot of people often assume bad faith. I am hoping that the new transwiki project can actually do something much more efficiently than Blofeld ever could.

I am BTW referring to a new editor called Tim somebody or other generating new self referenced stubs on creepy crawlies. At least if they were generated with a external reference or proper citation that others give.... I am sure he is doing it in good faith, but having seen his IP account when he forgot to sign in it makes me very concerned.... (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wtf.gif)