This user is a fan of Camel and is suggesting you give them a listen.
"If people would spend half the effort they wasted trying to delete content and instead use that time to improve content, wikipedia would be a whole lot better for it."
Who is this guy on wikipedia? I am an expert in the sport of Track and field athletics with over 50 years of experience on all levels and functions.
Early on in my editing experience, I edited an article about a subject I knew personally; Bruce Jenner, who I had competed against in my younger athletic days. I wrote the majority of the content of his pre-Kardashian career (since tweaked thousands of times by other editors). Who knew at that time he would make the transgender announcement that would light the internet on fire? During the last week in April 2015, that article was the second most read article on Wikipedia. A month and a half later, when she announced her new name was Caitlyn Jenner, this same article was the overwhelming most read article during the first week of June 2015, more than quadrupling the second most read.
Let me make this perfectly clear. I am not approaching this from the perspective of being a jurassic right winger, far from it. I wish Caitlyn the best future as a woman. But I am arguing firmly for the retention of history. It was Bruce Jenner who won the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics. To say it was Caitlyn, who was not named until 2015, is a rewriting of history in order to make a point. It disagrees with what was written at the time, which is not wikipedia's role. Caitlyn did not set women's world records while Bruce was performing as a man in 1976.
I have leapt off to create a few missing articles that have related to knowledge I have gained in working with the sport, sometimes the reference is oblique but there is still a tie in. For example, I spent time creating articles for and marking defunct schools who I am familiar with through their athletic results. I've also added to other subjects I have knowledge about such as my profession of Television, or the musicological knowledge I gained from my early days in radio. With a Masters in Mass Communications, I have an anal retentive streak for poorly written articles. As I find them, I have used my english and developing wiki/html skills to correct many poor articles. Red links--missing Wikipedia articles--frequently bother me and inspire me to create that article. I try to add to the chain of information, to complete that missing element. "Good Articles" usually don't need my attention.
And hey, you can do this too. When I want to know something, I look it up. If it is not already on wikipedia, I write it up. If you are here, you are looking something up . . . ME. So you've got the skill. When you find something that needs to be written up, do it. If you don't know how; write me a message.
As I roam through wikipedia and now its administrative hierarchy, I am getting increasingly more upset with those who attack articles they do not understand. There is too much of a movement to create articles for deletion and adding unnecessary BLP unsourced tags. I am fervently working against the "Information Police" who wish to remove knowledge from this database on flimsy excuses based on their personal prejudice. With the recent proposal that threatens to remove articles tagged as an "unreferenced BLP," I am making a serious effort to reference and remove those tags so valuable articles are not threatened.
I take my contributions here seriously. If I'm going to go through the effort to edit something into or out of an article, it is with the intent to improve the world's knowledge about something I know about and have researched. I take particular offense to the number of edits that have been deleted. Actually that number comes from the number of edits contained in articles that have been deleted. So far, well over of a hundred of my contributions to articles that I thought were important, have been deleted. Those are not because I was in error or have been subsequently corrected, I accept that as a condition of working on wikipedia; but because someone else, usually only a handful of self appointed patrollers of wikipedia, thought THE SUBJECT was not worthy for the world to know about. I read the AfDs. Many of the "delete" respondents didn't even know about the subject. If you are able to read the article and understand the subject, then you should be speaking about its content. If you don't, butt out. For the un-human bots who are placing improper references and the people who have no expertise in a subject denying an article's significance, you will attract my ire.
My wiki philosophy is simple (taken from the statue outside Faber College). Knowledge is good.
Unreferenced BLP backlog: 828 I am paying attention.
