[WikiEN-l] We need a policy against vote-stacking

Sat May 6 00:38:16 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:
> Zero. Now, if all the people who had put 20 hours into Pokemon
> articles had instead put 5 hours into Pokemon articles, and 15 hours
> into cleanup of random articles, don't you think Wikipedia would be
> better off?
>   
I doubt it, because I suspect most of them would put the 5 hours of 
Pokemon-writing in and then spend the next 15 hours somewhere other than 
Wikipedia. The fact that they spent 20 hours writing about Pokemon and 
no hours doing random cleanup is a strong indication that they really do 
like writing about Pokemon, and really _don't_ like doing random cleanup.

Myself, I love random cleanup. I spend some days on Wikipedia doing 
nothing but random-paging around, tidying categories for subjects I care 
nothing about, formatting references, etc. If I was told on one of those 
days that I had to write ten kilobytes of text about the movie "Barbie: 
Mermaidia" instead, I'd probably just go build new shelving for my room 
or something. So it's a good thing there are people on Wikipedia with a 
wide variety of interests, and provided the articles conform to our 
basic policies (NOR, NPOV, etc) I will never denigrate those interests 
even if they don't match my own.