User talk:FastLizard4/Stereotypes

Certainly a case can be made that some users who make smaller numbers of great edits are treated unfairly compared to people who make a great number of trivial edits. However, said bluntly, it would make more sense to leave complaints about a bias towards "Quantity over Quality" to someone who has actually made some main namespace edits of substantial quality, rather than someone who has just done a small amount of vandalism reverting [1].

Making 250 edits, especially of the sort you've been making, take very little time... just a few days if you keep at it. Perhaps that seems like a lot of time to a newbie, but the rules you're complaining about exist precisely so that the tools aren't provided to people who have only a small amount of experience because the our experience is that new users will make foolish mistakes with them. Go make 30 edits each writing a complete good article in a single edit and I'll gladly go argue that you have experience despite the low edit count. But 100 vandalism reverts? Geesh. Have some patience.

Speaking of inexperience, the notices on this essay ("Please do not edit this page." and "This is a free speech essay") really betray your level of inexperience in this community. While some additional leeway is granted for User namespace pages, especially ones written in the first person, no page on this site is your property to execute sole control over. Please read Wikipedia:Free speech and WP:OWN. If you're going to be successful here, you should learn to trust the community and not put notices like that on any page you write.

Given that you have far more edits to your own userspace than the main NS, some 450 vs 95, I do wonder if perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of the user NS. This isn't a social networking site like MySpace: We're here to accomplish something and the user NS is provided to help us communicate so we can better achieve that mission, it's not provided for any other purpose. --Gmaxwell 13:08, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I happen to be very familiar with the policies you mentioned. That's why those tags are there. It just so happens that not everyone in the Wikipedia community know policy by heart. As to it taking a lot of time, I'm 14 years old! Do you really think I can spend every minute of the day on Wikipedia? I am just going in to high school! People consider 250 edits a drop in the pond, because they have the time in requires! I'm probably not even going to be able to go on the internet when school starts simply because the amount of work it is going to entail!

--FastLizard4 (Talk∫Other) 17:42, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Even at 19 edits per day (the number of main NS reverts you made on the 21st) it would only take 14 days to hit 250 edits. That really isn't much time at all. With some practice you should be able to make that many edits every couple of minutes if you're just doing something trivial like reverting. The reason we impose limits on some tools is because it's easier for someone who doesn't know what they are doing to cause harm with them. If you don't have the patience to work up 250 edits (at whatever your pace is) then you probably don't have the patience to make sure you know how to use the tools without error. It's not perfectly fair, but it's what we can do.

Just have some patience and spend whatever time you feel comfortable spending and you'll find you'll pass all edit count related limits in no time.

And, by the way, most of those 450 edits are from a little thing called the "status changer". You should take a look at it. You can find the description page here.

What an ugly contribs flooding thing... but it is not the source of 'most' of the 450. I see ~173 edits to User:FastLizard4/Status. I'd be willing to guess that an edit to a userbox takes at least as much time as a vandalism revert. Had you spent the time you used on userboxes and such on article editing you'd already have the 250. --Gmaxwell 21:19, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

It seems like you've mis-identified what you observed. If people with 20,000 edits were accorded lots more respect than people with 15,000 edits, that would certainly show a preference for numbers over anything else. But, AFAIK, that doesn't happen. What does happen is a set of (some pretty high) minimum edit counts before a few (hardly critical) things are available. You can do the most important work we have at Wikipedia without any edit count at all. That work is writing articles, and checking and citing what others have written. That's our most important work. And that you can do without even making an account. I know. I've done it, and continue to do so. Go thou and do likewise. JesseW, the juggling janitor 18:27, 2 August 2007 (UTC)