User:Eseymour

I'm a regular reader of Wikipedia and I occasionally edit when I find errors or have something to contribute to an article. I love learning about new topics and delving into the history behind people, places, and things. Generally, I'm a generalist, but I do have a few areas of expertise.

My Bookmarks

 * Wikipedia Message Templates
 * Citation Templates

Articles I created

 * Blackford High School (Indiana)
 * Dime Store Prophets
 * ME's Zoo

Articles I'm working on thinking of developing

 * Bob Weiland--Vietnam veteran who lost both legs and walked across America on his hands.

My Wikipedia pet peeves

 * Recentism (see below)
 * WikiLawyering
 * People who have a clear agenda, but then accuse others of promoting a biased POV when they try to edit "their" articles.

My editing philosophy
Wikipedia articles cannot contain every piece of information ever written about or related to the subject of the article. This is an encyclopedia, and while Wikipedia is not hampered by the space limitations of a paper encyclopedia, its articles should still follow the style of an encyclopedia. Articles should contain the information necessary to give the reader a general understanding of a topic and certain key facts about it.

There is a tendency by some editors when they come across any interesting new information in the media, to immediately seek to add this information to a corresponding Wikipedia article, without regard to its long-term relevance to the subject. Ultimately, this just makes articles bloated and less useful, and creates clean-up work for later editors. Before adding new information to an article, I think it would be good for editors to ask themselves "How important will this be in 5 or 10 years?"

This tendency is especially present with articles about current political figures. Because I'm interested in politics, I edit many such articles. Sadly, electoral politics is often conducted in a negative manner, with candidates and campaigns trading criticisms, barbs, and accusations. I often see other editors adding the criticism du jour to an article. When I remove or reduce the emphasis of these criticisms, I sometimes get accused of "violating WP:NPOV," when in fact I am trying to maintain the quality of the article as a neutral source of information and keep it from being cluttered up with political mudslinging.

Because I am politically conservative, I am most interested in articles describing conservative political figures. However, any editors who would like my assistance in keeping mudslinging out of biographies of liberal political figures are welcome to contact me through my talk page.