User:Vami IV/Completionism
This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This page in a nutshell: A philosophy focusing on the Completion of as much of a project that can never be complete as possible. |
There is an elephant in the room, however:
I think of Completionism as
Readers of this essay, I encourage you, if you fancy, to join the roster below if you believe the things I believe here, and to discuss this essay on its talk. You are also invited to look at the revision history of this essay to track when and where ideas were added to or removed from it.
Completion and completion
It must be repeated: Wikipedia can never be complete. So it must be understood, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that Completion and completion are different. Big-C Completion is the bringing of as many articles and list articles to as high a quality as possible. Ideally, every article should be Featured-class – this is little-c completion, and that is impossible. It is impossible because...
- ...history is made every day.
- ...quality articles deteriorate.
- ...the resources for getting an article to Featured may not exist or be accessible.
- ...even Completion may be beyond the grasp of our community.
Now, however, while the Encyclopedia will never be complete, we can achieve Completion, and there is much that can be Completed. And indeed, there is much that
To say that that is an awesome task is the understatement of the century. But I'm willing to try, and to wait.
In this essay, I hope to illuminate obstacles to Completion and the methods we may take to reach it.
Challenges to Completion
The first challenge to Completion that jumps out at me is the
The availability of those sources poses the next set of challenges to Completion. The one I spend the most time thinking about is editor location and interest. Here is an example: I live in West Texas, and I am interested in the history of the region, so I write about it. I am also interested in more regions and topics besides, though, and have also written about them. My living in West Texas puts me in close proximity to the history, locales, and people of the region and thus readily available resources about them, which has enabled me to Complete articles about West Texas. But that vanishes when I go to work on an article in, say, Poland. Now we're dealing with a language I probably don't know, with publishers I'm probably not familiar with, in a place I cannot easily go to and take photos of. Interest in something in a place in which an editor does not live or cannot easily access can still result in a Completed article, but it may result in more harm than good if an editor can't speak Polish.
Now consider that there are editors who aren't interested in editing about their locale and that there are locales devoid of interested foreigners or native editors. Wikipedia, even the English Wikipedia, suffers from a lack of an international community writing about their environs, either because editors just don't want to, or because we don't have many editors in for example North Africa or rural China. We can work across wikis or the larger internet, and grow as people; the mind is willing. But the flesh may be unable to access reliable sources; I have myself been stunted by the unavailability of PDFs for French-language books and journals, for instance, and I've spent a lot of time in the scrapyards of the academia of other languages. The importance of an international body of editors for Completion is thus underscored.
Lastly, there are also topics for which the best sources we have at the moment are news articles, or even primary sources. There are some topics, like the
Existential threats
I spend a lot of time thinking about existence; mine, existence in general, and because of my investment in Wikipedia, Wikipedia's existence. Any change in the existence of Wikipedia will affect Completion, and vice versa. So it is worth discussing. So long as there is an Encyclopedia and Editors to Edit it, Completionism will exist, described as here or not as it has existed before. But there is the crux of the matter, something I discussed above: interest and place. So long as are the operative words, and there are ways and possibilities for that if-then statement to break.
In the essay Death of Wikipedia, veteran editor, administrator, and Arbitrator Barkeep49 (talk) lays out three scenarios for the "death" of Wikipedia:
- AI-written content
- Internet fragmentation
- The Wikimedia Foundation doing something apocalyptically stupid
The first and second scenarios
But, barring those apocalyptic scenarios, I envision Wikipedia's end taking a long time to fully come about. Rather, I envisage that as more and more of the Encyclopedia is Completed, a lot of editors will find themselves out of work, as it were. They'll perhaps hang around to maintain their work or find more articles to work on, maybe feel out the possibilities of expansion in their area(s) of interest, but ultimately leave. This scenario I have termed the "Withering of the Encyclopedia", and I feel confident in this prediction because it has happened before. I'll quote this comment by Rusty Cashman (talk) on a 2011 article in The Signpost (emphasis mine):
The key turning point was the increase in emphasis on WP:VERIFY. It unquestionably improved the quality of the encyclopedia, but it just as unquestionably changed us from a large community of online users sharing everything they know to a much smaller community of scholars willing to put in a significant amount of effort researching and documenting their use of reliable sources. That was a good thing for producing a more informative and trustworthy reference work, but it was effectively the end of "the encyclopedia everyone can edit", since most people simply can't or won't make the effort to do the kind of research required to make significant edits when every such edit requires an inline citation to a reliable published source. That combined with the exhaustion of many of the easiest topics has inevitably lead to the community shrinking.
— Rusty Cashman (talk), Comment on the article Editor retention; Malayalam loves Wikimedia; Wikimedia reports; brief news April 2011 edition of The Signpost
As abandoned factories rust, so will Wikipedia begin a slow decline as editors leave or go over to maintenance against cruft. There will of course be updates as human history continues and humans continue to delve and study their history, but once, for instance, every article about Rembrandt gets to FA, there won't be much else for anyone but anti-vandals to do there. Any editors interested in Rembrandt must find something else to do, find a way to stuff their own work into the topic, or leave.
Path to Completion
So, considering the challenges to Completion, what is to be done? Well, what is to be done is to write new content, expand and curate existing content, research, collation of research and references, reviewing and copy editing, cleanup, deorphaning, and collaboration. In a word, work. The only way Completion can and will be reached is through a Herculean amount of work. Completion will also require Completionists to be bold, but civil and patient, and to some extent charismatic. This is a collaborative project! It shall also require Completionists to be discerning and travel to many places to acquire what the Encyclopedia needs. But most of all, it must be repeated, it shall require us to work. As is said of the Swabians, "Schaffe, schaffe Häusle baue" — Let's work and work, and build a house.
Idea: Completionists work from bricks baked long ago; Four Awards will be rare things to them.
There are some immediate, or short-term steps we can take towards Completion:
- Expansion of The Wikipedia Library
- Increased collaboration between editors
Longer-term steps for bringing about Completion
- [Wiki World Heritage UG]
100,000 Featured Articles
One goal, for me, stands above all others:
There is fertile soil for this crop; the things really limiting this goal are time and manpower. There are content writers, but how many reviewers are there? And do we even have enough content writers? I fear that we do not, and that all we can do is make do with what we have and devote all available energy to this goal.
Recruitment and outreach
While I was discussing Completionism before writing this essay, several users raised the issue of outreach and our small editorbase (small relative to our readership and clout). My feelings on those things are mixed. More editors would, on paper, mean more getting done, which would be nice. But the amount of editors that stick around year after year, and those who manage to avoid indefinite blocks (for sockpuppeting especially), are not many. I have yet observed no commonality between every one of these editors, from the ones that have never been blocked in ten years to the ones that are controversial but continue to edit, but an ideological interest in Wikipedia and/or an interest in pinning medals to themselves.
food for thought from Vati: There is a false belief among people who could possibly become Editors that everything is already written about.
Tenets and ideology
The end of an encyclopedia is to assemble the knowledge scattered over the earth, to expound it to contemporaries, and to transmit it to posterity, to the end that the labors of past centuries should not be useless to those who are to come, and that our successors, becoming better instructed, may become at the same time more virtuous and happy, and that we may not die without having deserved well of the human race.
These shall make up our credo:
- All that can be written has not been yet written. It is my aim to write all that can be written.
- When it is time for my time on Wikipedia to be judged, I shall be judged according to what I contributed.
read the Observations
Deletionism vs. Inclusionism
The classic war between the Deletionists and the Inclusionists is not for Completionists;
The Completionist roster
Now, if you've found your way here, and you agree with the philosophy described above, perhaps you, too, are a Completionist? In that case, why not sign below? The more of us the merrier, I say, and the better too for all the work that lies ahead of us.
- ♠Vami_IV†♠ 09:38, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
- Dracophyllum 09:34, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- 04:29, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
- CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 01:43, 16 September 2021 (UTC). Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles.
- JackFromWisconsin (talk | contribs) 16:09, 18 October 2022 (UTC)
- No hesitation — Aza24 (talk) 06:47, 19 October 2022 (UTC)
- I pray that I have something to offer. ‡ The Night Watch ω (talk) 14:01, 19 October 2022 (UTC)
- I agree with everything on this page. HadesTTW (he/him • talk) 17:22, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
- 93565 articles remaining. Harvici (talk) 11:47, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
- ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:50, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
- • she/they) 22:03, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
- Generalissima (talk) 01:40, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
- — That Coptic Guyping me! (talk) (contribs) 01:47, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
- Absolutely. Utopes (talk / cont) 05:57, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
- Hopefully I'll contribute at least a few articles. Spinixster (chat!) 06:59, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
- A great essay which so eloquently states what I have often thought about. Unexpectedlydian♯4talk‽ 22:10, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
- 6,450 down, 93,550 to go. Just keep toiling, we will get there, word by word, article by article. ZombiUwU ♥ (🌸~♥~ 📝) 20:31, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
- We will complete and we shall complete. Cheers, --The Lonely Pather (talk) 00:29, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
- Glad to find a group that fits my intents as an editor – always improving, always working toward Completion!
> Tesseractic: talk? ✎
02:50, 15 March 2024 (UTC) - re-stating my membership here, in honor of our friend and colleague. miss you, and truly value all of your amazing and amirable work here. --Sm8900 (talk) 16:08, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
- Our collective goal is the destruction of our collective purpose. Glad to join, in honor of Vami_IV. [[user:3.14159265459AAAs|3.14]]
- SweaTheSerg (talk) 17:49, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
- 48JCL (talk) 21:53, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
- I've waited to put my name down until I have completed something. I have completed a few things. Questions? four Olifanofmrtennant (she/her) 02:44, 25 May 2024 (UTC)
Notes
- ^ The fragmentation of the internet into tongue-spheres, such as the Anglosphere dominant here on the English Wikipedia, would be bad, but thankfully will not really be a problem so long as there is a lingua franca, be it English or Chinese.
Templates
Some users have made some userspace templates to indicate one's affiliation with the Completionist philosophy:
- {{User:Generalissima/Completionist topicon}} - a small icon that appears at the top of your page. Accepts the option
blue
to substitute the blue flower variant of the topicon. - {{User:Nathan Obral/Template:User completionism}} - a userbox
- {{The Completionist Barnstar}} - a barnstar that can be awarded to show appreciation for editors who work to Complete the encyclopedia