Scrample

July 2024

Hello, I'm CFA. I noticed that you recently removed content from Scigress without adequately explaining why. In the future, it would be helpful to others if you described your changes to Wikipedia with an accurate edit summary. If this was a mistake, don't worry; the removed content has been restored. If you would like to experiment, please use your sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks. C F A 💬 23:22, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Your huge removals of contents from many articles

Hi Scrample, I saw that you removed huge portions (kilobytes up to 70 kilobytes!) of contents from many articles. While some of your changes may be good (I did not check them in detail for they are too large to do this conveniently) this is way over the top for a new editor. If you want to make larger changes on articles, please discuss them on the talk page with previous editors of the articles first and only proceed when there is consent to do so. Also, please carry out changes in much smaller steps so that is possible for other editors to review your changes step by step instead of leaving them trying to find out what you changed in large chunks of diffs. If you ask me, I consider anything more than the removal of some 200 bytes or the addition of some 500 bytes in one step as potentially problematic for a new editor. Since it remains unclear what you changed, I will revert some of your edits to play it safe. Please don't feel discouraged, but please discuss with other editors editing an article first on the article's talk page. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:05, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

most of the content i remove is extreme verbosity or repetition. it's pretty clear, in all honesty, since my edits are largely making sections more succinct or removing large amounts of irrelevant information (the 70k kilobyte removal was on an article that was specifically flagged for verbosity, and consisted largely of removing such verbosity such that it would come in at below 15,000 words per wikipedia's style guidelines, and one other edit was removing antiquated content from 2005 that no longer even bears resemblance to the state of the internet). i'm not just out here removing stuff for fun and my edits take place on pages that have already been flagged Scrample (talk) 21:08, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

and yeah, it is actually extremely discouraging when you just up and undo hours upon hours of work that was done with style guidelines and quality in mind because my account is too new, without even reading it to understand why they were made. Scrample (talk) 21:20, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi Scrample, that's why I left my message on your talk page and asked you to carry out changes in much smaller steps. You might be the rare exception, but new editors changing large portions of text previously contributed by other editors are in almost all cases what we call vandals. So, in order to avoid been seen like this please discuss what you want to change on the corresponding article's talk page and see what other editors think of your proposed changes. Wikipedia is a collaborative project. It is possible that prior editors lacked knowledge or didn't care about the contents you care about, but it is also possible that prior editors deliberately added the information you do not consider important and want to delete. You cannot ignore other editors, because their opinion counts as much as yours - regardless if they or you are experts on a topic or not. Therefore, discuss things first, otherwise you will often been reverted regardless if your edit was good or bad. You cannot ask someone to go through the diffs when you deleted 70 KB(!) of contents as you did in the Helios article, contents that was added by other editors in hundreds or thousands of edits over the course of years. It is extremely unlikely that your personal judgement on what belongs in the article and what not, and what is good prose and what not, is already perfected. Realistically, developing this skill requires many ten-thousands of edits and several years of service - and some editors never get it. (I saw that you also added some stuff to articles and while it was a good contribution, it still required some clean-ups to fix errors introduced by you. That's fine, because, as I said, Wikipedia is a collaborative project and nobody expects you to do everything right from the beginning. However, do not assume that your edits are perfect and given the many, many rules we have, the learning curve is long. Either way, from this I deduct that your removals are also not perfect and need to be checked. And if you make it difficult to check them, they will likely be reverted.)

BTW, we have a process (for experienced editors) called BRD (bold-revert-discuss). I strongly advise against invoking this as a new editor, because it will almost always go wrong for new editors. I'm still mentioning this, because technically, you were bold, I reverted and asked you to discuss on the article's talk page. Reverting me (or any other editor reverting you) without getting a consensus on the talk page first is called edit-warring, and it will soon lead to being sanctioned (blocked). Please don't go this route.

In general, I think it is much better approach, in particular for new editors, trying to add information rather than to delete some, and thereby not only improve editing skills over time but also get a good feeling how difficult it is to add good contents in general. This will help to better value the contributions of other editors and how to build on them without destroying them.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:27, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Ah, and by the way, we do not have any hard rule for articles to match a 15,000 words count (not counting references). We have very good articles which are much longer, however, in many cases, longer articles could be reasonably split into sub-topics and then cross-linked. How to best organize this requires skills and experience and is also a matter of discussion and consensus. In no case is a word count larger 15,000 words a legitimation to simply delete contents which could be moved into other articles or sub-topics.

You might feel discouraged for being reverted but what do you think other editors feel when they see that what they researched and contributed over months and years gets destroyed by one new editor coming around the corner thinking s/he knows better how to do it than all the other editors? Respect your fellow editors and build on what they contributed instead of deleting what they found worthwhile to be mentioned in an article. Nobody knows everything and nobody has perfect judgement. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:56, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

it was over 15,000 words because it was extremely repetitive with lots of plagiarized and off-topic content. i removed very little in terms of actual substance because of how much could be summed up in shorter words or was simply not relevant at all. i used 15,000 words as a guideline because it was very reasonable to get it to that length just by making quality edits. i can't retroactively make it in smaller edits, so i've taken that advice going forward, and that's all i can do besides try to preserve the quality of the articles that i, frankly, did in fact make substantial improvements to, even in removing text. Scrample (talk) 18:13, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

You can "retroactively make it in smaller edits", though: look at the history, which still has your edits, and take a small piece of your edit and make that one change. Then take another; maybe a section, or a few paragraphs at a time. That makes it much easier to see what's going on with the changes to an article, so other editors can review it. - Parejkoj (talk) 17:38, 7 August 2024 (UTC)