Martin IIIa

Below are explanations for a few of my editing practices.

Why I leave edit summaries

This has been prompted by the multiple times the following dialogue has taken place on my talk page:

Other editor: "Martin, please leave edit summaries for your edits."
Me: "What are you talking about? Of the last 50 edits to that article, the only ones which have edit summaries are mine."
Other editor: "Well, yes, but this one edit you did doesn't have an edit summary."
Me: "Why does it need one? It seems pretty self-explanatory from the diff."
Other editor: "Well yes, it is, but reviewing the diff takes almost ten seconds. You could save me a lot of time by just writing edit summaries for every single one of your edits."
Me: "Reading edit summaries isn't a substitute for reviewing the content of edits. If someone makes a mistake, or a bad faith edit, they're not going to point it out in the edit summary."
Other editor: "Well yes, that's true. But I still can't be bothered to review the content of edits, so please put edit summaries on all your edits."

Perhaps what's most curious about these dialogues is that even as these editors are prodding me to leave edit summaries, they seem to be operating under the belief that the sole motive for leaving them is to prevent your edits from being scrutinized. To me, that's not a motive. If I make a mistake in an edit, I want other editors to find and correct it, by reverting me if that's what is needed. Moreover, during the years when I left a summary on every single edit, I found that I was frequently reverted by editors who had no issue with the edit itself and were strictly objecting to my edit summary. So an "always edit summary" policy doesn't avert scrutiny; it just draws scrutiny disproportionately from editors who judge edits based on their summary rather than on their content.

I leave edit summaries for three reasons: (1)To describe edits whose nature may be unclear from the diff, (2)To explain edits in which I significantly change or remove sourced content, and (3)To provide justification for edits which I have reason to believe will be controversial, which includes all reverts except those undoing obvious vandalism. If none of those reasons apply, I don't leave an edit summary. Also, because I'm not perfect, there are times when one of those reasons applies and I neglect to leave a summary. Despite that, this means I leave edit summaries more often than 98% of Wikipedia editors. (I really wish more editors would leave an explanation when they're changing or removing sourced content.)

Why I use citations

A number of editors fall into one of two extreme positions with regard to citations:

1. End every sentence with a citation, even if the prose already makes it explicit that the info is all from the same source. For example: "John Smith had a negative opinion of the book. He criticized that the characters are flat and unsympathetic. He also considered the plot highly cliche. However, he did like the attention to detail in the setting. He concluded that fans of the author might like it, but others should not bother."
2. Never repeat citations, even when they support unrelated pieces of information. For example, if you see "Jane Doe's script for the film was inspired by a childhood encounter with a bear. Originally Harrison Ford was chosen for the lead, but when he voiced moral objections to the story Sean Connery was cast instead. A trained live bear was used for the film, but the shot where the bear rides in a plane was created with CGI.", delete all but the last citation.

The problem with position 1 is that, besides being obviously unnecessary, it can create confusion about the sourcing. Since published sources do not repeat citations in this way (at least, none that I've read do), the reader's natural first impression is that the paragraph represents a collage of tidbits from multiple sources, and only by reading carefully will they learn that it's a full summary of one source. This is particularly an issue with reviews; I've seen more than one article which made a broad claim about the subject's critical response and you had to carefully read through several hundred words of prose and footnotes to discover that this claim was based on just one or two reviews, not a dozen reviews as it seems at first glance. No, these are not catastrophic problems, but when an approach offers no advantages, even a tiny problem is reason enough not to use it.

Position 2 has much bigger problems. Following the initial deletion, the reader has no way of knowing whether the first two statements are sourced or unsourced, and may either add citation needed tags or remove the claims altogether with the justification that they are unsourced. And the confusion only increases when later editors make normal, uncontroversial edits. Say someone moves the first two statements to different paragraphs or even different sections of the article, since the statements are after all unrelated. Now it's no longer a question of "Is it sourced or not?"; those first two statements are unsourced, even though an editor got them from a reliable source. Or say someone finds an interview with the director where he reveals that the bear riding in the plane was in fact all done with practical effects. Naturally they're going to delete the one remaining citation before correcting the statement and adding the interview citation. Now it looks like those two statements are either unsourced or supported by the interview, when neither is true. And so on. Yet adherents of position 2 maintain that obstructing an article's sourcing to this extent is a minor issue against the benefit of cutting down on the article's length by a handful of tiny bracketed numbers.

So what's my policy? Simple: I place citations in order to make it clear where information came from. That's the whole reason citations exist. So if a claim needs a citation to make it clear where it came from, I put one there. If it's clearer without the citation, I don't put one there.

Why I don't bother with the GA/FA review process

For many years I had only one reason for this: I don't see the point. It seems like a lot of editor time spent on administering the Wikipedia equivalent of a thumbs up, time that could be spent on improving articles.

But in 2023 I stumbled upon something that made me realize the GA/FA review process is much worse than merely unproductive. I found a GA-class article which made a WP:Weasel word-loaded and very contentious claim about the authorship of the article subject, citing a source which didn't even mention said authorship. Baffled, I checked out the GA review process on the article's talk page. The part relevant to this claim went something like this:

Reviewer: "This claim needs a source."
Submitter: [adds the source which doesn't remotely support the claim] "Okay, here you go."
Reviewer: "Looks good!"

That by itself could have been just an aberration. But this incident stirred me to check the talk page whenever I find a claim with an attached source that doesn't support that claim, and a frighteningly high percentage of the time, it turns out that the source was added in order to meet the qualifications of a GA or FA review, and the reviewer approved. It seems that most reviewers don't care whether a statement was taken from a reliable source or was just made up by an editor. So long as they see those little bracketed numbers, they're satisfied. As a result, the GA/FA review process encourages editors to misrepresent reliable sources and provide an illusion of veracity to rumors, speculations, and outright falsehoods.

I've also started to notice that editors often revert improvements to articles with the sole justification that "This is an FA, so you can't make any major changes." So yeah, it increasingly seems like getting an article certified FA is one of the worst things you can do to it.