![](https://web.archive.org/web/20211018163039im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/49/Pents08.jpg/220px-Pents08.jpg)
On 18 October 2018, I added these words, literally in purple prose, to my userpage: "As a Wikipedia editor, I understand that my goal is the destruction of my purpose." I thought of those words at random that October day and thought it poignant, if a bit silly-sounding. Indeed, if read literally, it might be cause for raising an eyebrow. But I left them there, as a mission statement, and others have since told me they, too, found them profound. Since writing them, though, I've come to understand that as not just my purpose, but our purpose – to write until we have nothing more left to write.
There is an elephant in the room, however: Wikipedia will never be finished. We'll never be finished! The only thing that could put the kibosh on our work is our obliteration. So if the completion of this Encyclopedia is impossible, what is this Completionism I speak of?
I think of Completionism as another Wikiphilosophy, somewhere in the canyon between the Inclusionists and Deletionists. However, Completionism, and Completionists by extension, shouldn't have a dog in that big, headline-grabbing chaoskampf. This is because Completionists are not watching the dog fight; they are pursuing the completion of as much of the Encyclopedia as possible, which I will term "Completion".
And now a potentially dumb question: Who is a Completionist? A Completionist is someone who writes quality content, organizes and supplies those content writers, and/or patrols and maintains our content. A lone wolf Featured Article writer, a WP:RX regular, or a member of the Guild of Copy Editors could be Completionists.
Readers of this essay, I encourage you, if you fancy, to join the roster below if you believe the things I believe here, and to discuss this essay on its talk. You are also invited to look at the revision history of this essay to track when and where ideas were added to or removed from it.
Completion and completion
It must be repeated: Wikipedia can never be complete. So it must be understood, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that Completion and completion are different. Big-C Completion is the bringing of as many articles and list articles to as high a quality as possible. Ideally, every article should be Featured-class – this is little-c completion, and that is impossible. It is impossible because...
- ...history is made every day.
- ...quality articles deteriorate.
- ...the resources for getting an article to Featured may not exist or be accessible.
- ...even Completion may beyond the grasp of our community.
Now, however, while the Encyclopedia will never be complete, we can achieve Completion, and there is much that can be Completed. And indeed, much that is Complete already, though you should read on. So we should define Completion, and be pragmatic. Big-C Completion is the raising and maintaining of as much of the Encyclopedia to as high a standard of quality as present resources allow.
To say that that is an awesome task is the understatement of the century. But I'm willing to try, and to wait. Isidore of Seville (pictured), a saint and doctor of the Church, worked for 25 years to write his 20-volume Etymologiae, which sought to compile all human knowledge. I can think of no better a precedent, aspiration, and comparison to Wikipedia than Saint Isidore and the Etymologiae. We have toiled now for 20 years, can fill more than 25 times 25 volumes, and have ourselves become the first, last, or both arbiters of truth, despite our warnings about trusting our content. Even naysayers heed us. But I doubt we could fill 25 volumes with Complete articles, despite there being more of us than Saint Isidore, with more time, more resources, and an even larger scope.
Challenges to Completion
The first challenge to Completion that jumps out at me is the size of Wikipedia. There is a lot of Mainspace to improve, and a lot that still needs creation. Or recreation. The goal of even 100,000 Featured Articles is an awesome task, one popularly considered impossible right back to when it was first devised. As the essay 100,000 feature-quality articles says, a lot of editors will have to put in a lot of time and effort, write thousands of words, read tens of thousands more words, all so there can be one Featured for roughly 1,065 articles in October 2021. According to the essay Wikipedia is failing, largely written in 2007, it would take 4,380 years for all the currently existing articles to meet FA criteria.
I am not personally worried about that rate, because something that takes millennia to elapse is beyond me, because there are articles that will remain C-class, or Start-class, or even stubs for a long, because getting articles to Featured is just half the battle anyway as Wikipedia is always changing, and because Wikipedia is one font of information - though by far the most accessible - out of thousands.
The availability of those sources poses the next set of challenges to Completion. The one I spend the most time thinking about, is editor location and interest. Here is an example: I live in West Texas, and I am interested in the history of the region, so I write about it. I am also interested in more regions and topics besides, though, and have also written about them. My living in West Texas puts me in close proximity to the history, locales, and people of the region and thus readily available resources about them, which has enabled me to Complete articles about West Texas. But that vanishes when I go to work on an article in, say, Poland. Now we're dealing with a language I probably don't know, with publishers I'm probably not familiar with, in a place I cannot easily go to and take photos of. Interest in something in a place in which an editor does not live or cannot easily access is can still result in a Completed article, but it is much easier, and may result in more harm than good if an editor can't speak Polish.
Now consider that there are editors who aren't interested in editing about their locale and that there are locales devoid of interested foreigners or native editors. Wikipedia, even the English Wikipedia, suffers from a lack of an international community writing about their environs, either because editors just don't want to, or because we don't have many editors in for example North Africa or rural China. We can work across wikis or the larger internet, and grow as people; the mind is willing. But the flesh is may be unable to access reliable sources; I have myself been stunted by the unavailability of PDFs for French-language books and journals, for instance, and I've been spent a lot of time in the scrapyards of the academia of other languages. The importance of an international body of editors for Completion is thus underscored.
Lastly, there are also topics for which the best sources we have at the moment are news articles, or even primary sources. There are some topics, like the Trump administration, that can be Completed but will require lots of maintenance and reworking as the years roll by, and others, like Virtual YouTubers, that we'll be spending a lot of time waiting for scholarly analysis for, if we ever get it. Unfortunately, the cultural perceptions and the interest of scholars a of topic may push back Completion of an article or even the coverage of an entire topic.
Existential threats
I spend a lot of time thinking about existence; mine, existence in general, and Wikipedia's. Any change in the existence of Wikipedia will affect Completion, and vice versa. So it is worth discussing. So long as there is an Encyclopedia and Editors to Edit it, Completionism will exist, described as here or not as it has existed before. But there is the crux of the matter, something I discussed above: interest and place. So long as are the operative words, and there are ways and possibilities for that if-then statement to break.
In the essay Death of Wikipedia, veteran editor, administrator, and Arbitrator Barkeep49 lays out three scenarios for the "death" of Wikipedia:
- AI-written content
- Internet fragmentation
- The Wikimedia Foundation doing something apocalyptically stupid
According to Barkeep, who writes, in reality it's more like "How Wikipedia loses its place as the preeminent English Language Encyclopedia".
, a better name for the essay might be Wikipedia Dethroned, but the first and second scenarios[1] very well could kill Wikipedia and thus halt Completion. I say "halt" and not "hinder" because I think Wikipedia has the best shot of any like project seen or to be seen of achieving Completion because of its unique placement in history and it's Editors, and that if Wikipedia were to die or be broken, those Editors would never again gather in one place. The danger of Barkeep's scenarios is that they erode the community, who if Wikipedia dies would not rally to one banner. The WMF screwing up cataclysmically is, in my opinion, the most likely and dangerous scenario. To give a historical example, dozens of admins resigned to protest WP:FRAM. What Barkeep describes as "WMF shenanigans" could also include, for instance, the WMF being sued for every last dime it possesses, or the bursting of their money bubble.
Withering of the Encyclopedia (Editor attrition as Completion looms)
Path to Completion
Idea: Completionists work from bricks baked long ago; Four Awards will be rare things to them.
So, considering the above challenges to Completion, what is to be done? Well, what is to be done is to write and/or to maintain articles, and to collect, organize, and make available the resources that will be used to achieve Completion
There are some immediate, or short-term steps we can take towards Completion:
- Expansion of The Wikipedia Library
- Increased collaboration between editors
Longer-term steps for bringing about Completion
- [Wiki World Heritage UG]
Recruitment and outreach
While I was discussing Completionism before writing this essay, several users
Tenets and methodology
The end of an encyclopedia is to assemble the knowledge scattered over the earth, to expound it to contemporaries, and to transmit it to posterity, to the end that the labors of past centuries should not be useless to those who are to come, and that our successors, becoming better instructed, may become at the same time more virtuous and happy, and that we may not die without having deserved well of the human race.
Here are the tenets of Completionism, based on my own beliefs:
100,000 Featured Articles
Civility
Our careless feet leaving trails
Neverminding the fragile dirt
We all end in.
Deteriorate, Demon Hunter
I have given WP:CIVIL it's own section here because it is very important. In the past, content writers have had a hard time being decent people. You need to be respectful and patient. It makes you a better person, or at least look better; being civil doesn't get you into stupid ANI threads that make everyone involved look bad. Being civil and speaking civilly also makes collaboration productive and enjoyable, which is crucial because you are going to have to collaborate with others at the least at GAN and FAC/FLC. Antisocial behavior Completion does not make, and you must remember that first, Wikipedia does not need you, and you aren't a god.
Deletionism vs. Inclusionism
The classic war between the Deletionists and the Inclusionists is not for Completionists; there are articles to write. But for that reason, the philosophy of Completionism swings Inclusionist. That said, a Completionist would gladly scoop up a free Four Award from Deletionist projects. Completionists will also not argue about the state a house should be left in, because articles that should genuinely not be here will probably already have been scrubbed before a Completionist lays eyes on it.
The Completionist roster
Now, if you've found your way here, and you agree with the philosophy described above, perhaps you, too, are a Completionist? In that case, why not sign below? The more of us the merrier, I say, and the better too for all the work that lies ahead of us.
- ♠Vami_IV†♠ 09:38, 25 July 2021 (UTC)
- Dracophyllum 09:34, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
- 🐶 EpicPupper (he/him | talk, FAQ, contribs 04:29, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
- CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 01:43, 16 September 2021 (UTC). Wikipedia:WikiProject Spaceflight/SpaceX working group.
Notes
- ^ The fragmentation of the internet into tongue-spheres, such as the Anglosphere dominant here on the English Wikipedia, would be bad, but thankfully will not really be a problem so long as there is a lingua franca, be it English or Chinese.