User:LWG
Userboxes
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Endeavors I Hope to Return to 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 mostly contribute to the wiki via small factual corrections 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. Professional obligations have limited my time for Wikipedia in recent years, but I still pop in from time to time.
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 primary 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. Unfortunately, new tags are currently being added at a higher rate than old tags are removed. 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.
This task is not glamorous, but if the trend is not reversed the backlog will continue to grow indefinitely.
Update: every article that was tagged as a POV dispute when I began this endeavor 13 years ago has been addressed! Unfortunately, backlog has grown since then from 4 years to 12 years. The trend is not entirely bad, however - the amount of new unresolved disputes per month has fallen from 200-300 to 120 on average. If the backlog can be completely cleared, addressing new disputes will be a manageable task for a team of 2-3 moderately active editors.
Please help!
Happy editing!