Wikipedia talk:Editors matter but...
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[edit] Response from the author of WP:EM
Some points in defence of my essay.
First of all, I don't agree that it's being used as a trump card. WP:EM itself states that citing WP: acronyms should not be a trump card, nor used to stifle legitimate debate. EM is an essay, and has no authority of its own. The reason I created it was not in an attempt to create a personal trump card; it was simply to save me from typing out the same line of reasoning on virtually every MfD. If it has any strength of its own, this lies in the strength of its argument.
Secondly, the following part of this essay is simply untrue:
| “ | The essay seems to have created some sort of mythos based around the concept of "if we delete someone's inappropriate page, they'll leave", yet there is little-to-no evidence of this actually taking place. Rather, since the essay's creation, some have threatened to leave if their chosen page is deleted since the essay came along, WP:BEANS-style, trying to hold Wikipedia to ransom to disrupt deletion discussions. | ” |
There were plenty of examples of aggressive MfDs driving editors away long before I wrote WP:EM. User:Walter Humala, for instance, was driven away by a combination of aggressive userspace MfDs and unjustified punitive blocks (mostly from the same admin). I will find more examples; but I wrote the essay in response to an existing phenomenon. I didn't just make it up.
Editors are not paid to be here. They volunteer their time, and they spend it on whatever they want to spend it on. Deleting someone's superfluous userspace pages will not force them to spend more time working on the encyclopedia.
I do understand the argument that since Wikipedia is not a social networking site, genuine contributors who want to build the encyclopedia "should" continue editing even if their favourite userspace pages are deleted. But who are we to say what volunteers "should" and "shouldn't" do? If someone is making 10 constructive mainspace edits a month, and 100 edits to their own userspace, then they are still a net benefit to the encyclopedia, and we should do everything possible to avoid driving them away.
We should not be sacrificing our most precious resource - willing volunteers - on the altar of "stopping Wikipedia from becoming MySpace". This is an entirely mythical danger. Social networking-type pages do not prevent editors who wish to work on the encyclopedia from doing so. Wikipedia will not cease to be an encyclopedia even if more socialising takes place. I do not understand why people are so afraid of "myspacery". As another essay puts it, why do you care? Someone who is playing games in their own userspace is not stopping you from editing the encyclopedia. There is no danger that the site will be taken over by social networking, as long as there are still some people here who are interested in building an encyclopedia (and if there weren't, we would have much bigger problems than this). WaltonOne 14:01, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
