Wikipedia:How to improve bad articles without ever editing them
 | This page is intended as humor. It is not, has never been, nor will ever be, a Wikipedia policy or guideline. Rather, it illustrates standards or conduct that are generally not accepted by the Wikipedia community. |
Improving articles on Wikipedia may seem like hard work. However, it really isn't that hard, if you know what you're doing. Here's how it's really done.
- Find an article that you think kind of sucks and could be improved, but that you don't feel like actually working on.
- Nominate it for deletion.
- Everyone who likes the article and wants to keep it will flock to the edit window and add new content and sources to it. They will then go to the deletion discussion to say, "Keep per WP:HEY."
The article will probably be kept, improved, and you won't have had to do anything!
Downsides of this strategy
[edit]- Creators of articles may not appreciate you nominating their hard work to be deleted. They may accuse you of not having performed WP:BEFORE (of course you didn't; that would take work!) or say that you should have discussed it on the talk page with them first (why would you? If they didn't want the article nominated for deletion, they should have made it good to begin with!)
- You may be told that you should have "been bold" and just "fixed the problems yourself". This is absurd, of course. It's their article! It's their responsibility to edit it! Don't they realize that if they can't create good articles to begin with, they shouldn't create them?
- They may consider your persistent deletion nominations irritating and counter-productive, and could take you to WP:ANI over it.
- You could get warned that you are being disruptive, or even blocked, for supposedly being "not here to build an encyclopedia". Such hogwash! Of course you're here to build an encyclopedia, you're telling everyone else to build it! Obviously they'd never do it if you weren't telling them!
Conclusion
[edit]If you see an article that you think sucks, don't bother trying to find sources or improve its quality. Just nominate it for deletion. Hell, don't even go that far, just PROD it. Just delete all the bad articles! If editors can't be bothered to fix the articles, they don't deserve to exist anyway!
No one will appreciate how hard you're working to improve the encyclopedia, but don't worry. Your path to perfection is flawless. The world will revere you as the ultimate harbinger of knowledge, the editor who didn't do anything and told everyone else to fix things, without which Wikipedia would never have been fixed! Huzzah!