User:TheGrappler

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear

Here is the complete text of the article Gayness when created at 13:10, August 21, 2005 by the unregistered User:60.225.94.114.

“ Gayness is a frolicky term to describe the art of being gay and engaging in gay activities because some people love being gay. Gayness is an ambiguous term that does not necessarily denote actually being homosexual but can mean other things, such as administrative law for example, that is such gayness. ”

Nothing surprising, just typical Newpages nonsense. Within minutes it had been tagged for WP:CLEANUP. A few minutes later a whole new paragraph was added, the final act of User:60.225.94.114's brief career as a Wikipedian. This extra paragraph, presumably added to comply with the request for cleanup, read:

“ When used to decribe a particular circumstance, incident, or situation, Gayness does not necessarily connote negativity, it is simply a means of describing something when there is no other word available to express it. People such as myself who love being gay frequently employ the use of the word 'gayness' in describing events that are particularly gay. For example, the administrative law in-class test is absolute gayness because it is the gayest of the gay. Obviously administrative law is not homosexual because it isn't really very sexual at all, it is merely gay. ”

Knowing that the article still required some tender love and attention, the creator kindly left the cleanup tag. The Wikipedian community took pity on the article, cared for it, nurtured it, and helped it to grow... so that by the time it was nominated for deletion in November 2007, some time after the article's second birthday, it had been transformed into an encyclopedic classic:

“ Gayness is a frolicky term used to describe the art of being gay and engaging in gay activities because some people love being gay. Gayness is an ambiguous term that does not necessarily denote actually being homosexual but can mean other things, such as administrative law for example, that is such gayness.

When used to decribe a particular circumstance, incident, or situation, Gayness does not necessarily connote negativity, it is simply a means of describing something when there is no other word available to express it. People such as myself who love being gay frequently employ the use of the word 'gayness' in describing events that are particularly gay. For example, the administrative law in-class test is absolute gayness because it is the gayest of the gay. Obviously administrative law is not homosexual because it isn't really very sexual at all, it is merely gay.

Category:LGBT

”

The frightening thing isn't that this article was able to sit on Wikipedia for two years before anybody noticed it. The really frightening thing is that people did. Actually the edit history is quite long. It was tended to. The name of the article was bolded; the article was categorized; the categorization was changed (from Category:Homosexuality to Category:LGBT); passing bots descended to fix and date the cleanup tags. At one stage, a vandal attacked the page by adding Image:Example.jpg to it, but fortunately a dedicated vandal-fighter restored the page to its former glory within minutes, and admonished the vandal with a warning. It worked — the user never vandalized Gayness again. On several occasions, the page was reduced to a redirect to Gay, but vigilant IP users reverted this. Not all unregistered users were unproductive: one was thoughtful enough to leave the talk page comment "What the hell is this? Looks like vandalism to me"... but the article stood for several months before these words were heeded.

Fortunately, for most of the two years, the page only appeared as a redirect. However, there were considerable periods (days rather than minutes) of time for which the nonsense was displayed. What valuable conclusions can we draw from two years in the life of Gayness on Wikipedia?

• Although many articles created or edited by unregistered users are (or will evolve to be) useful, they also need special scrutiny. (For more recent editors: yes, in the past, unregistered users had the right to create articles, and did so at some rate. This project has become far more closed in recent years, so it's important to be more hospitable to new users to compensate for this.)
• Most edits add little value. Bearing in mind this page's extensive edit history, by the time of its deletion it should have been one of the most outstanding examples of literature on gayness available on the internet... but it wasn't. It's a good demonstration that many edits are either cosmetic or trivial. There is a theory that as the number of edits per page on Wikipedia grows, the encyclopedia will substantially increase in quality — some skepticism may be warranted.
• There's not much point performing minor cleanup tasks (like emboldening the article name) on an article that really requires deletion. Read before you tag.
• Orphaned and dead-end articles that have existed for some time (so don't appear on newpages lists) are hard to come across. Something rubbish may sit unnoticed for a long time, and may only be noticed if a user performs a (possibly unusual) search or reaches it via the random page feature.
• Tagging a page for cleanup may result in a long wait before anything gets done about it.
• If an article (including its previous revisions) lacks value or is harmful, changing the page to a redirect and leaving the rubbish version in the history makes it easy for vandals to revert back and such a reversion may go undetected. It might be worth deleting first, then creating a redirect as a new article.
• Administrative law is boring.

All of these things are well-known already, but the Gayness incident is a pretty scary example of how they can all come together...

Stuff I need to get round to doing at some point....

• List of lakes in Norway: do something about this at some point. Potential FLC?
• Want to write Echelsbach Bridge: once Germany's largest single-span reinforced concrete bridge... how interesting is that? :-)
• Hochtief: I got this to good article status a while back but the article is now rather out of date. I'd rather businesses did more editing of their own articles on Wikipedia; this is a major construction company who've done some very well-known projects (built the Führerbunker and moved Abu Simbel) yet their article is unprofessional and out of date.

Stuff that I somehow have already got round to

• Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in places and its subcategories: if you want to help make Wikipedia beautiful and give readers a sense of place, find the category for your locality, press a button, and you'll get a map of all the photo requests around where you live. Good stuff.
• {{harvnb}} has altered the way a lot of our larger and more complex articles are referenced - it's used in many featured articles now. I'm not sure if that is for the best or not, since it is something of a non-standard format, but it does encourage tighter referencing and also makes the citations easier to read through.
• Good article statistics: I've been around the good article project, loosely, pretty much since it began. Other people keep the stats page up to date now but it shows how far the project has come, and what its likely trajectory is for the future. I also created the handy {{WikiProjectGATasks}}.
• The CIA and September 11: an emergency AFD save on an area of fringe, conspiracy theory and sharply contrasting viewpoints, that ended up passing as a good article.
• Subcategories for Category:AfD debates: I helped select the scheme of categorization for an easier way to browse AFD. If you dislike the stress and toxicity, and would prefer to selectively expose yourself to only surreal or comical nominations, then I heartily recommend Category:AfD debates (Indiscernible or unclassifiable topic).

Thanks and awards

• 
  For your good humour and assistance with the Ina Garten article. Thank you! Air.dance
• 
  Thank you for making the open task template! It is now alot easier to navigate the GA related pages. Tarret
  (That was for this templatery)
• 
  I award these sweets (which hopefully don't make you hyper, like they do to me) to Grappler for calming everyone down in a hotheaded situation! Highway ^{Rainbow Sneakers}
  (That was for something now best forgotten :-))
• 
  This barnstar is for identifying the "pan-idiotic movement" in the Dominionist political parties debate. That was a riot. Thane
  (That was for this)
• 
  This barnstar is for taking the time to explain wiki policy without being a prick. Thanks for helpin a brother out, Cinco Ranch High School will be an FA someday. Andman8 03:12, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
• 
  I, Wim van Dorst, give you this Scouting barnstar for your excellent input to get Baden-Powell House to Featured Article

Multi-licensed into the public domain

I agree to multi-license my eligible text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and into the public domain. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions in the public domain, please check the multi-licensing guide.