User:Thebiguglyalien/Philosophy

My philosophy on Wikipedia in 100 essays, more or less (a lot less). Essays in italics were written by me. Essays in bold are the ones I wish to emphasize.

Conduct and community

Conduct best practices

• Don't Balkanize Wikipedia – The same expectations apply everywhere on Wikipedia. No talk page, project page, or topic area gets to set its own rules.
• Don't be ashamed – Mistakes are good. Doing something wrong isn't a tragedy, it's how we all learned to edit.
• Don't demand that editors solve the problems they identify – Raising an issue or tagging an article is helpful in and of itself.
• Don't revert due solely to "no consensus" – Wikipedia is all about making changes. If you expect people to ask before editing, you're doing it wrong.
• Hate is disruptive – Discrimination makes groups of editors feel unwelcome, which is inherently harmful to Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia is a volunteer service – Don't tell anyone what they must edit or when they must edit.

Community-building and editor retention

• Anyone can cook – Not everyone can edit, but a good editor can come from anywhere.
• An uncivil environment is a poor environment – Being a jerk makes people leave. Imagine all the countless potential contributions lost because someone was scared away by an uncivil environment.
• Compliment before criticism – When giving advice, say what's good before saying what's bad.
• Encourage the newcomers – One new editor is worth a thousand contributions. Sometimes more.
• Newbies aren't always clueless – It's not suspicious on its own if a new user comes in and immediately knows their way around. That's what we want them to do!
• WikiLove – Take a moment and surprise someone with an act of kindness. It can make all the difference.
• Wikipedia is a community – Fun community-building things are productive, even if they don't improve articles.
• Zeroth law of Wikipedia – Good editors are Wikipedia's most valuable resource.

Discussions and consensus

• Catch Once and Leave – Don't hang around a discussion to argue with everyone after you've made your point.
• Consensus venue – Consensus doesn't mean anything when it's formed by a small group, such as a WikiProject.
• Hold the pepper – Instead of replying to everyone individually, leave one comment expressing all of your thoughts.
• Ignore all precedent – "This is how we always do it" is not helpful.

Responding to conduct violations

• Call a spade a spade – Beating around the bush with conduct violations only helps a problem user cause more problems.
• Friends don't let friends get sanctioned – If you want to keep someone out of trouble, you should be the first to call them out on inappropriate behavior.
• Our social policies are not a suicide pact – Stop assuming good faith when (and only when) someone continues causing the same problems after multiple warnings.
• You can't squeeze blood from a turnip – It's harmful when long-term editors are given extra chances after they've proven they're going to keep causing problems.

Administration

• Why admins should create content – You can't be an experienced editor if you don't understand the finer details of content creation.

Writing and editing

Content-writing pitfalls

• Avoid thread mode – Don't make an article argue back and forth with itself.
• Meaningful examples in pop culture – Don't namedrop examples, describe them in context.
• Proseline – Don't write articles like timelines.

Inclusion and due weight

• Aggregate data into lists rather than stubs – One long list is better than dozens of short articles.
• Recentism – Before writing something, consider whether it will still be a significant detail in ten years.
• The source, the whole source, and nothing but the source – Use overview sources to determine content and due weight.
• The Trump Horizon – A source connecting two things doesn't necessarily mean they're relevant to one another.

Navigation

• A navbox on every page – I just think they're neat.
• Navbox constellations – Organize large navboxes by creating sub-navboxes.

Neutrality

• A POV that draws a source. – Find the sources and let them decide. Don't start with an understanding of a topic and then find sources that verify it.
• Activist – If an editor predominantly contributes to bring awareness to a cause or to promote a belief, then they are not here to build an encyclopedia, no matter how long they've been editing.
• Be neutral in form – Neutrality is just as much about how info is organized.
• Beware of the tigers – People with strong emotional opinions on a subject will usually damage the project when they try to edit that subject.
• Let the facts speak for themselves – If you truly believe your POV reflects the facts, describing the facts neutrally is more convincing than slanting the article.
• Nationalist editing – Editing to make a country look bad should not be tolerated.
• Objective sources – Don't use opinionated sources if ones with a dispassionate tone are available.
• We shouldn't be able to figure out your opinions – It doesn't matter if their edits comply with the letter of policy. If they show a pattern of pushing for the same side, the editor should not be allowed in that topic area.
• Wikipedia is a mainstream encyclopedia – This isn't the place to promote your minority view on science, politics, society, medicine, etc. We write content based on mainstream sources.
• Writing for the opponent – If you're writing about an idea you dislike, work even harder to find strong sources about it and write the best treatment of it you can.

Notability and deletion

• Alternative outlets – Wikipedia is not the only place to put stuff online. Non-encyclopedic things shouldn't be kept if they're "useful", they should be useful somewhere else.
• Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions – These arguments should not be factors in what articles we keep or delete.
• Delete the junk – Unhelpful articles are often worse than no article at all.
• Don't cite GNG – Simply saying that someone meets GNG does not mean that the sourcing is adequate.
• Existence ≠ Notability – "Here are sources verifying it" isn't enough if they don't give some indication of significance.
• News articles – Wikipedia should not create stand-alone articles for news stories until after they're recognized as major historical events.
• Overreliance upon Google – If you want to confirm notability, look beyond a simple Google search. Consider the Wikipedia Library.
• Too soon – Things that just happened rarely warrant stand-alone articles.

Sources and verifiability

• Avoid contemporary sources – Retrospective sources give a better overview than contemporary sources.
• How to mine a source – Don't just take one fact from a source, add everything relevant.
• Are news-reporting media secondary or primary sources? – They're usually primary.
• Contort the citations – Better to arrange the citations awkwardly around the text than to arrange the text awkwardly around the citations.
• Party and person – Third party sources can still be primary.
• Verifiability, not truth – Sources come first. If it's not in the sources, we don't need or want it.
• You are not a reliable source – You don't get to decide what should go in the article. The sources do. If your understanding contradicts the sources, your understanding is irrelevant.
• You do need to cite that the sky is blue – It doesn't matter how obvious it is, the sources decide what content belongs in the article and confirms that it's accurate.

Misc. pet peeves

• Adjectives in your recommendations – Don't say "strong" support or oppose. It sounds like people shouting over each other to show who cares the most.
• Articlecountitis – Creating an article just means your name is the first one in the edit history. Adding substantial, well-cited content to an article is an accomplishment. Being first is not.
• Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"! – It's like abbreviating Central Park as "Park".
• Don't make a smarmy valediction part of your default signature – Don't add "cheers" or "yours truly" to your signature.
• Don't use a billboard signature – Obnoxious signatures are distracting.
• Pruning article revisions – Don't start a new edit for every typo you fix.

See also

• User:Thebiguglyalien/Stray thoughts – My thoughts on various matters that don't have applicable essays
• Wikipedia:WikiPuma – My general approach to editing