User:LWG
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Missing Articles I Hope to Write Someday
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My areas of interest and expertise range from theoretical mathematics to linguistics to emergency medicine. I am an American. I primarily contribute to the wiki via source verification and facilitation of the resolution of POV discussions. I also watch articles on a variety of subjects that happen to interest me or that I have edited in the past.
On your right you can find some userboxes with basic information relevant to my wikipedia activities. If you want to know more about me, I invite you to look at my edit history and form your opinions from that
Inclusionism in the age of AI Over my many years of involvement on Wikipedia, I've generally taken the view that retaining content is better than removing it, even if it is poorly sourced, because Wikipedia is a long term project, and content that can be improved should be given the chance to improve. However, this philosophy needs to be tempered somewhat now that the internet is full of AI-generated content. Wikipedia is a key source of training data and input for AI tools, and as a result false information on Wikipedia will rapidly be incorporated into AI's knowledge base, mingled with more reliable information, and then repeated as true. This accelerates and exacerbates the process of Citogenesis, where unsourced and incorrect information originating on Wikipedia is repeated in other venues and eventually makes its way into the sources wiki editors use, thus locking false information in place in a circular citation loop that can be very hard to get rid of. In light of this, I encourage wiki editors to be more aggressive in removing dubious and unsourced content. As an alternative to total loss of content in cases where improvement may be possible, I recommend moving content to talk or user space while it is being worked on.
POV Processing One of my major contributions to the wiki has been going through backlogged POV dispute tags. The vast majority of these tags were either inappropriately added or the dispute in question ended a long time ago. The first step to focusing attention on the remaining serious POV issues on the wiki is the elimination of all the spurious or dead tags. If you want to help, there's a box at the top right of this user page with the backlog sorted by date. Some general guidelines:
- If talk contains no POV discussions, remove the tag.
- If talk page contains POV discussions, but they seem to have been resolved by consensus, remove the tag.
- If talk page contains unresolved POV discussions, but the discussions have not been updated for several years, remove the tag. If the article still has glaringly obvious problems, consider adding some other suitable tag.
- When in doubt, cut the tag! In the event that someone actually still disputes the article, they will simply replace it.
See this page for more guidance on tag removal.
If you feel that one of my tag removals was inappropriate, feel free to replace the tag. If you do, please also contribute to the article talk page explaining what still needs to be done before the tag may be removed. Otherwise expect a talk page message from me requesting clarification.
Why do this? If someone is complaining about the POV of an article, that means that article is important to someone. If things are important to someone, they are probably interesting. In the course of working through the POV backlog I have discovered all sorts of fascinating new bits of knowledge about obscure controversies and local geopolitical conflicts. This is fun! Articles that are important to someone also do more harm if they are of poor quality, so they are a good place to focus cleanup efforts. Unfortunately, such a large percentage of the outstanding POV tags have either already been resolved or were unexplained drive-by tags from the beginning that the important and interesting articles are buried in the noise. My hope is that if the backlog of noise can finally be cleared, future POV disputes can receive the attention they need to be promptly and appropriately addressed, which would be of great benefit to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and to the Wikipedia community in general.
Progress so far When I first took interest in this endeavor, there were tagged articles going back all the way to 2006. I have processed 1000s of articles over the years, but 1000s more have been tagged, so that as of today there are still 4357 articles in the backlog. Still, the fact that my extremely part-time efforts have more or less single-handedly prevented the backlog from increasing over the past 10 years suggests that if the backlog could ever be eliminated, the handling of incoming POV disputes would be a very manageable task for a handful of dedicated editors. Recently other editors have joined in the work and the reduction of the backlog is accelerating such that totally clearing the backlog of stagnant or resolved disputes before the end of 2025 might be feasible. My long-term vision would be to see the backlog cleared of inactive tags and the formation of a sort of Dispute Response Team consisting of editors who are experienced in mediating content disputes and are able to engage in disputes as they arise to guide the involved parties towards constructive consensus building and away from contentious edit warring. This would improve the quality of the wiki content as well as help with editor retention as fewer new editors would be immediately pushed away as soon as they step into a content dispute.
Please help!
Happy editing!