Wikipedia:Don't take advantage of the volunteers

"Wikipedia:ADVANTAGE" redirects here. For the advantages of creating a Wikipedia account, see Wikipedia:Why create an account?

The common reaction of a page reviewer after noticing the pile consisting of approximately 51 Olympic athlete stubs and 43 Indian school stubs.

One thing to remember when contributing to Wikipedia is don't take advantage of the volunteers. While "volunteer" can refer to generally anyone who contributes to Wikipedia, the Wikipedia volunteers referred to in this essay are non-admin, general editors who intend to help with maintaining Wikipedia and cannot take instant action when they know you are doing something disruptive. These editors include page reviewers and pending changes reviewers, as well as those who do not have special rights but do notably help out in similar work such as at deletion discussions. Being a volunteer means not getting paid, but also not asking for anything of monetary value in return. The volunteers try their best to help maintain Wikipedia from vandals and disruptive editors and review and cleanup articles among other tasks. They tend to enjoy their work, but don't usually appreciate it when you ruin it by making it unnecessarily and inconsiderately more difficult than it generally has to be. Remember that volunteers are not your personal guards or butlers, they're here to assist everyone, not just you. They don't necessarily have the time to go through all 70 unincorporated community GNIS stubs you created.

You may want to do some inconsiderate things, such as mass-creating stubs to increase your edit/article count, or starting article deletion discussions with bad intentions, either knowingly or unknowingly at the expense of others. Try to avoid these, and the explanation is below.

Things to avoid doing

Taking advantage of the volunteers means gaming the system at their expense and bypassing Wikipedia guidelines. Essentially, you know that they can't do anything easy about it, so you do it, thinking they won't take the time to bother with it. Specific scenarios that can be done to abuse your rights include:

• Mass-creating stub articles about schools, communities, Olympic athletes, etc., knowing they can't easily be speedy deleted under CSD A7 since they do not qualify or are "automatically notable". You believe the page reviewer or other editor who found it will just add maintenance tags and move on, or start an AFD discussion which can take from a minimum of one week up to near a month depending how the discussion goes, and it clearly isn't worth 28 days of time to delete a stub which nobody will ever find. If you ever want to make a bunch of articles that you are aware will end up being stubs, consider putting more effort into them and adding more sources to improve the quality and verify notability and slow down your mass-creating.

• Recreating your article after it was moved to draftspace does not violate any particular guidelines and, similar to the above situation, cannot be easily deleted. Your article was likely moved to a draft because it was visibly incomplete or poorly referenced. Recreating it, especially after you're notified about it, is highly frustrating to the Wikipedia volunteers who have to civilly delete it to make way for the draft to be moved back whence it is finally completed by either you or another editor.

• Starting articles for deletion discussions because you can is a more minor and rare case of abusing you rights at volunteers' expense, however is still disruptive in a way. You are only asked - but not required - to include a descriptive rationale explaining your nomination and cite guidelines for why the article should be deleted. This is, in a similar way, how editors can make joke nominations for when the April Fools event comes around. You may find an article you disagree with or are offended by, so you vaguely nominate it and force a 7-day discussion which unsurprisingly has the majority vote of "speedy keep" or "strong keep". Though a scenario like this is unlikely, this is so that article, which is perfectly fine, doesn't get soft deleted, making someone have to get it un-deleted if the discussion does not have a broad consensus with little to no votes. Persisting with this can actually be considered disruptive editing in a way and can be a way to get you account blocked from editing.

Conclusion

In the end, nobody can really stop what you're doing. While inconsiderate, it is not necessarily disruptive in a way that it violates Wikipedia guidelines, except for in some cases where it sparks an ANI discussion and admins do actually have to get involved. It is just as bothering to editors as much as playing music aloud on a bus to passengers, because unless it is an enforced rule or they have the authority, they cannot stop you.