Wikipedia:Expect no thanks

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Shortcuts WP:NO THANKS WP:NO GRATITUDE WP:THANKLESS

This page in a nutshell: Editing Wikipedia can sometimes seem to be a thankless task. You may spend much of your free time creating articles and fixing them, and all you may hear back from other editors is criticism or reversion notifications. While we should edit Wikipedia for the love of the project, not primarily with the hope of being thanked, a little more thanks would go a long way.

Wikipedia has a wonderful, noble purpose: creating a high-quality, free, online encyclopedia that will contain all the sum of human knowledge (cue rapturous and inspirational symphonic and choral music and images of dramatic sunrises and pictures of the vast expanses of the cosmos)… However, the day-to-day and week-to-week experience of being a volunteer editor on a massive online project like Wikipedia can sometimes be less than inspiring.

Part of the challenge is not unique to Wikipedia. Indeed, a person working as a rank-and-file member in any large group, such as a junior staffer working in a cubicle in a huge government department or massive multinational corporation or an orchestra player in a large string section can get feelings of insignificance and they may feel that they are not being recognized for their contributions to the larger project. Mike Judge's movie Office Space captures many of these issues.

Because Wikipedia is edited online by editors, many anonymous, who come from all over the world, you may not even get that occasional encouraging "sounds good" comment that a string section player may get from time to time from her section leader, or the occasional "good work on the Smith file last week" that a junior staffer may get from a manager or supervisor in the hallway or via e-mail. In fact, since there are no managers or leaders on Wikipedia overseeing the work of editors, you might never hear these types of encouraging words. By clicking on "Page information" on the left of any page, you can see the number of times the page in question has been viewed. However, the only feedback you get is from fellow editors like yourself, who have not been tasked with the job of encouraging or developing other editors. Unfortunately, feedback from fellow editors tends to skew to the negative side of the continuum.

So you may devote much of your free time to creating articles, fixing errors and improving writing, but the only feedback you get from weeks or months of work may be curtly-worded edit summaries such as "Revert unnecessary text", "Rvt poor writing" or even "Revert junk" or "Revert crap" (the latter two edit summaries are arguably contrary to WP:CIVIL). Sometimes, you may get a longer, more detailed form of feedback via a Talk page message, but instead of beginning with thanks for all the good things you have added to articles from a certain topic, the editor launches into a critique of your non-standard reference citation parameters and your non-compliance with various formatting guidelines. Or worse, an editor may accuse you of being a "lazy" editor whose "sloppy writing" and "careless work" is bringing down the standard of the encyclopedia. Ouch!