5. "Shitty First Drafts"

Anne Lamott's article encourages us to buy into one particular construct when it comes to our writing.  She claims that writers only hurt themselves if they expect acceptable text to come out of a single sitting.  Her solution to this is to frame writing as a revisionary process.  The first step of this process is to just start writing.  What this comes down to is getting our ideas down on paper as they come to us.  She wants us to load up our text with as many thoughts as possible while understanding that the vast majority of what we write will be waste material.  This is alright though because we can always dispose of this waste material later.  What matters is that those little nuggets of applicable information, intriguing imagery, and enthralling wordplay will stand up to the test of revision to be expanded upon later.  Lamott's argument is that if you don't give yourself this opportunity to get all of this on the paper in a form just as saturated with shit as your prose is inclined to be, then you won't even be able to find those useful tidbits.  Writing with an endpoint in mind leads to way too much self criticism which, while it might succeed in doing away with unnecessary text, will result in the good text never even getting recorded.  Feeling like your writing will be permanent just makes it extremely difficult to commit to writing anything.

The approach to writing encouraged by Wikipedia involves a great deal of refinement and revision.  Lamott describes first drafts as a place to just jot things down without worrying about criticism from anyone but yourself.  This is the purpose that Wikipedia's "Sandbox" serves.  Its where you can draft all of your work without having to deal with the criticism of others because the moment something is published on Wikipedia it is subject to being revised by anyone who comes across it with a critical eye.  The post publishing stage revisions are also very much in line with Lamott's writing process, just with less emphasis on the idea of writing being something of a personal process.  Some people might not use the sandbox to it's full potential, and when that happens a lot of shitty text ends up tumbling through the pages of the heftiest compilation of human assumptions available.  This is just plain dangerous without good people like you and me hopping around from page to page shaping that shit up.