Wizardmanwiki

You're welcome. I'm sure you know of the workaround, citing the sources we cite rather than Wikipedia itself, which can make some papers easier.

The line between deletionism and inclusionism is a much tougher one nowadays. I lean towards deletionism, and here's why: there are over four million articles on the site, some of which are on topics that are next to impossible to verify. This means that many topics are fully comprehensive and there are not as many articles to create, which is a reason many editors joined Wikipedia (it's why I did). By that same measure, many articles on major subjects, while they may not be well-written or well-sourced, they are generally comprehensive, meaning that adding information is not as easy as it used to be because guidelines have gotten more strict.

The biggest problem for new users, I think, is that there are so many more policies than before. The first article I wrote was a couple paragraphs with a few interwiki links and that was it. Nowadays it would have been tagged with biography of living people (blp) issues and sourcing issues, which would have probably irked me, or even possibly deleted despite me knowing the subject was notable. The vested contributors you note, people who have been editing for so long, can be an issue as well since they are so used to their way of doing things that they've forgotten what it's like to be a new user, something all longtime users are guilty of at times.

In your particular case, I would have to look through the backstory and the article to see what exactly happened.

I just checked the Michael Jordan section for now, but after reading it I just deleted it. It's way too quote-heavy, the flow of sentences is poor, and it just bounces around, making it tough to realize it was just one event. That's not counting the only two sources being Youtube and "Theboombox.com", which I would not consider reliable.

Also that second half was just copied right from that source, so yeah, even if that was good writing it would still be gone.

As for people editing their own articles, it's a touchy subject. If they just want to make sure no one's making vandalism or libel, that's fine, but it's all too tempting for those people to want to whitewash their articles, keeping positive in while leaving out anything remotely negative. Improving an article is fine, but I have yet to see a famous person actually sit down and write a comprehensive, neutral, reliably sourced article on themselves.

Nope, everything on the site is voluntary. Working on the site has improved my writing ability greatly, but nothing in terms of money. Only people who are paid would be the Foundation staff, and they're usually busy with things outside of editing the encyclopedia.

Vandalism is a lot less rampant than it used to be, since there are bots that get rid of the obvious junk almost immediately. There is still sneakier vandalism that users remove by hand though. It's an area I used to tackle back in the day, but I'm not really needed there now. A guy replacing a page with gibberish that lasts 30 seconds is not a major issue, an attack on a person that slips in an article undetected for months is a much greater issue.

As for annoyance, yes and no. There are articles on significant people that are crap, and significant people that are great. For example, our article on William McKinley is a great piece of writing, while James Buchanan needs a lot of work. Most academics these says seem to adopt the idea of use the sources they cite rather than Wikipedia itself, which I am fine with. The only ones that bother me are the ones that completely write it off and act like it's less reliable than a history textbook from 1990.