User:BDD/Opinions

My Wikipedia philosophies
My Wikipedia Motto: I formerly doubted the adage "You learn something new every day," when reflecting on some days before falling asleep. Then I found Wikipedia, and I have never had that problem since.

You know how sometimes people will ask you what musical album you would want to have with you if stranded on a desert island? If every single Internet page but one had to be annihilated, I would choose to save Wikipedia. Sure, we're not perfect. But Wikipedia is still a largely reliable and highly inclusive effort that any encyclopedia or online project should very much envy. To me, Wikipedia represents everything good about the internet.

I used to have a section called BDD's Five Pillars of Wikipedia, but I've removed it because most of the opinions expressed therein were dumb. Really, I'm just proud that I had five pillars before the official ones, and I'd like to maintain a personal delusion that this official establishment was inspired by me and not, say, Islam. If you really want to read them, dive into the history of this page.

Contrarian opinions

 * I will always say lede, not lead to refer to an article's introduction. "Lead" is an ambiguous term—"lede," while less familiar to some people, is not.
 * I will always say vote, not !vote, in AFDs and other functions of Wikipedia governance. For the confused: we do vote on Wikipedia. It's just that those votes don't work the way they do in a true democracy. (cf.)
 * Notability can absolutely be temporary. If Wikipedia had been around since 1900, we'd be bloated with trivialities and ephemera—the memes of yesteryear—which currently wouldn't meet notability guidelines due to a dearth of sources. Sure, it's WP:CRYSTAL to some extent to predict which little phenomena will have lasting significance, but I think considering future importance can be useful as one piece of the puzzle.
 * WP:USPLACE is a monstrosity. The AP Stylebook is a convenient yardstick, but not very useful for Wikipedia. An AP article with a Boise byline doesn't want to dedicate any prose space to explaining that the story is in Idaho, but state information is almost immediately given on any given city article, as it should be. WP:COMMONNAME and lack of ambiguity should lead many US city names to drop the state qualifiers. Note that our friendly neighbors to the north have a much more sensible naming convention in WP:CANSTYLE. That said, I recognize USPLACE as the product of consensus and begrudgingly accept in in that sense.