User:Encyclopedia Lu/Archive 1

(I will probably attempt to organize this page sometime in the future, but I doubt I have the diligence to do so now. And yes, I am aware that no one lists their userpage entries by date. Please don't point and laugh at me for that. Seriously.)

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My name is Laurence, a mention that, along with my unintentionally narcissistic username, narrows to | about a handful the number of households the childless single men of 4chan can send SWAT teams to after this goes public.

These words are written with absolute awareness of the. . . well, strange [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive897#Obsessive_cursing_on_Wikipedia? incident] that transpired almost precisely two years prior. (It has haunted me intermittently in the days since.) So I'd be naïve to assume that my reentry to the editing world of Wikipedia—itself an volatile uncertainty; I'll explain later—will be met with a warm welcome-back and a digital bear hug.

I can't pretend that I've shed all my misgivings about the occurrence (although discovering this unusually detailed "| summary" of it by folks on what I later realized to be the angrier Reddit incarnation of 'Wikipediocracy' just hours before this reintro allowed me to laugh about it, even if just a little). And while I was afraid to tell them at the time, far more so than those of any other participant in the thread, the words of a particular administrator—whom I will keep nameless, due to my residual fear of retribution—cut deeply. Yet from the very beginning I privately conceded that allowing me to edit with the admittedly puzzling manifestation of my OCD would at minimum be a difficulty for the part of the Wiki community interacting with me in future. Nonetheless, I had stuck with the discussion of my case to its conclusion hoping desperately that some solution, some workable compromise could be arranged. As the record will show, obviously, it was to no avail, and despite the | wonderful, gratuitous work done by the then-prolific editor Esquivalience, I departed.

However, from the very day I exited the gates of the editing community, I felt drawn back, perhaps almost immediately. As comprehensive as the wondrous monstrosity of an endeavor that is Wikipedia was, an encyclopedia with nearly five million articles (that was then, of course—the project's content articles now number as close to six million today as they do to five) necessarily bore many rough edges. Occasionally, I found those edges so rough it was all I could do to not forcefully attack the Edit button with my still-logged-in account and wade right back into the fray, likely against my far better judgment.

But I am in a rather extraordinary—and to the typical viewer of this page, downright surreal—situation at the moment.

The following is the "later" set of passages I was referring to. After a rather hefty amount of still-inexperienced Wikisearching (I better have coined this term), I finally managed to find the project  pages regarding the issue that could potentially arise with my including the following portion of my reintroduction. And so I will tread carefully.

If one has checked the links regarding what I've termed the "strange incident" or has thus far read closely through this dense block of text, they are probably aware of my obsessive-compulsive disorder (which is probably best characterized as typically mild-to-moderate and sporadically moderate-to-severe—the latter of which brings about incidences like the aforementioned). I included only what I thought was relevant to the AN/I discussion, however, and that didn't descrbe the entirety of the situation. Today, what I included wouldn't come close.

"The charger! Why did you mention it—what do you mean,'you didn't have the means'?" you may be (but probably aren't) demanding.

Well. . . that's quite it. While I had actively contemplated it for months prior, I. . . uh, attempted that the September of last year, and then a second time the following October. I'll spare all the (actually, the rather non-gory) details about both incidents, and those of the next six months spent in hopeful recovery, as I'm fairly certain that including them would send me beyond the boundaries of the userpage guidelines I'm already pushing, so I'll just pass that over.

The short, oversimplified version of the story from April to the present day is that my resumption of Junior Year in high school was initially promising, until it wasn't. As a result, the last six weeks or so have transpired in the more or less the same way as not long ago: While my memory is obviously hindered, I believe that I've been in a near-constant state of emotional flux; I could perhaps have been characterized a majority of the time as outwardly calm and rather collected and inwardly as harboring a so-to-speak vacant uncertainty about my future; the remaining as little more than raving, incoherent, screaming, and utterly bedridden. (If I wrote this in the latter state; well, words wouldn't quite have made it onto this page.)

I reckon that the previous two paragraphs, with an additional mention here that my mother was asleep at the time (in my room) and thus wouldn't have been able to watch me, is probably the best answer I can manage for the question about charging my tablet without a graphically "issue" at hand. (For the minority who haven't quite caught on as I write this portion of the sentence: wireless changing for the iPad, to my knowledge, has not been introduced widely to the public yet.)

Why have I mentioned all this? After all, the first of the two pages I linked to regarding the what constitutes inappropriate userpage information advises one rather explicitly to not include excessive biographical information of no relation to Wikipedia. Well, I'm not exactly sure that my answer will be that much more well-received, but it constitutes my second, and arguably more important, reason for joining the editorsphere once more:

I do not know when (it may no longer a question of "if", as early—relatively speaking—in my life as I am) I will succumb to the all-encompassing despair at the same time my family lets their guard crack, even a little.

In other words, editing Wikipedia is the endeavor I have once again taken up because I have no day-to-day responsibilities at present (other than, my family may argue, staying alive).

Frankly, I don’t even have to be "gone" to cease editing Wikipedia again; another hospitalization; another bedridden week followed by a collapse in perhaps the one substantive interest I can currently conceive of in my life: both are plausible scenarios that would be sufficient in stripping me of what may well be the sole means through which I can and will ever be capable of giving a little back to the world.

(Okay. I think that’s about enough. That I was capable of preventing a slip into the previously mentioned "latter state" for the past twenty hours while writing 1,200 words in [three? four? five?] sittings is probably about 80 percent of a minor miracle for me.

And frankly, I pray to God, | whose existence I doubt, that this return will be a successful one.) — finished on Day 214 Trump C.  E. August 21, 2017

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I've forgotten: I will see if I can (after all, I might actually need to look up "personal JavaScript page" after I publish this edit) use the script Esquivalience so graciously created for me. As I suggested before (I found it. The passage is in the fourth paragraph of this | diff), however, it will only be a partial solution; my OCD symptoms—as my psychiatrist(s), my family, and myself are so painfully aware—are a step (or two, or three) ahead of me much more often than the opposite. Nevertheless, I will accept unsolicited, benevolent assistance whenever I can. — August 22, 2017

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Okay, the first | article edit in two years is done. (I made the edit late the night before, but my tablet ran out of battery [and perhaps thirty seconds before I was to publish the previous version of this entry]. Again.) It's been reverted since, and I can't say I'm surprised: perhaps thousands have that page on their watchlists. I don't quite know why they did revert it, and the "good faith edit" portion of the summary stings a little due to—at least, based on my past witness of its use—the implicit mention of potential bad faith. In any case, if I can muster the bit of courage to do so, I’ll see if the disagreement can be resolved; I'm fairly certain that my edit was valid.

(And yes, I will eventually archive these "stream-of-consciousness" updates on my userpage before somebody points out—likely correctly—that my page just looks like a string of poorly formatted blog posts. They're only meant to give users who visited my page a bit of insight into who I am and my current "mental circumstances." I am in the period shortly following my return to editing; should this endeavor continue, I plan to decrease the frequency of these entries. In time, I’ll probably lower it to zero, or at minimum, very near zero.) — August 24, 2017