[WikiEN-l] The twitch-game joy of vandal-fighting (was The whole point of wikipedia)

Mon Oct 24 09:11:25 UTC 2005

Tony Sidaway wrote:
>On 10/19/05, Martin Richards <Martin at velocitymanager.com> wrote:

>> The other problem that vandalism causes is that it wastes so much time of
>> editors who would otherwise being making articles better rather than
>> stopping them being destroyed.

>Is that really true, though?  How many editors do we have doing RC
>patrol?  I'm on #wikipedia-en-vandalism right now and there are about
>a dozen voiced users (ie regulars) on channel.  Most of them are
>idling.

Indeed. I discovered #wikipedia-en-vandalism just the last few days
and it's bloody hypnotic! Watching stuff come up and shooting it is
like playing a fast-twitch video game. Except it's real life. (Ender's
'Pedia?) I'm now planning not to look at it too closely so I can get
on with other things ...

(I was in bed sick with the laptop for a few days, so coherent thought
to a tightly-written encyclopedic standard was not going to happen;
but twitch games are *fun* and require very little higher thought. And
it beats playing cardgames.mozev.org.)

Vandal fighting is not only useful and important work, it's *fun* as
well as productive.

(May I add that I try to make a point of article editing as well as
the community yak-shaving [*]. I started one on the weekend and
extended another with two key references.)

- d.

[*] a geek term meaning "doing something in order to do something in
order to do something in order to do something." May be ultimately
productive or may be a sophisticated form of procrastination. Possibly
the greatest feat of yak-shaving in geek history is Don Knuth taking
several years off "The Art Of Computer Programming" to invent TeX. His
book needed better typesetting, you see, so he wrote a typesetting
system ...