User:MechanicallySeparatedChicken

I've been contributing to Wikipedia anonymously for quite some time because I'm very uncomfortable having heated debates with strangers; I would rather they just edit my text and be done with it. However, I've decided to crawl out of my hole and try having a username again, if only for taking part in community discussions or to post my opinions on my talk page.

Then again, community discussions are where things get most heated, aren't they? Well, we'll see how things work out.

In the real world, I hold a BA in English writing, and a BS in Computer Science. So regardless of appearances, I'm actually quite competent in logical reasoning and the proper use of the English language. Ever since I found out that in the 1600s guys like Robert Lowth invented most of the nonsensical grammar rules I memorized in elementary school, I've been a whole-hearted descriptivist. But don't worry, I won't go around moving adverbs to the middle of infinitives when they've already been comfortably placed after the verb.

In high school, I made it to the National_Forensics_League national tournament twice; once for Student_Congress and once for Duo Interpretation, and I competed in nearly every other event at the local level. My experience performing and observing debates showed me how lousy a tool debate is for arriving at the truth. As a result, I prefer discussion rather than debate. As I use the words here, the primary difference between them is intent. In discussion, your goal is to get to the truth. In debate, your goal is to prove your opponent wrong. The main problem with this adversarial system is that debating is a skill like any other; a better debater will often win even if they're defending a weaker premise.

I don't have the time to write properly referenced articles, so I mostly fix broken windows and make minor improvements. I've got a few wikipeeves in particular that I like to fix, and they all revolve around making information more important than presentation:


 * Poorly titled wikilinks: The title of a wikilink should make it clear what clicking on it will take you to. Imperfect wikilink titles fall into several categories. I've seen a link where the title was a pun, and the link target was an article about what the pun meant. This is bad because a person clicking on the link wants to know about the pun, not the pun's target. Not to mention, a non-native speaker of English might be completely lost. The better thing to do in this case is to add a parenthetical explaining the pun, and put the link there. It ruins the joke, but people come to Wikipedia for information, not laughs. I've also seen link titles shortened to the point where they are one ambiguous word instead of several specific words, such as "set" as the link title for a link to "List of television shows set in Brazil". In this case, you can either reword the sentence so you can put in more explanatory words, you can again move the link to a parenthetical statement (like "see also List of television shows set in Brazil"), or you can move it down to the list of "see also" links at the bottom of the article.
 * Irony in articles: I love ironic humor in my daily life, both in the classical and the Alanis Morisette uses of the word "irony". But I don't think one should withhold information for the sake of irony in Wikipedia, since, again, people come here for information, not for irony. For instance, I've seen an article about a television show end with one of the lines from the opening monologue, just sitting right there in the text. This would have been funny to people familiar with the show, but meaningless to people who had come to the article to learn about the show. My solution was to put the line in quotes and explain that it was from the end of the opening monologue.
 * Withholding spoilers: Perhaps the majority of book and movie articles on Wikipedia withhold spoilers. The plot synopsis will end before getting to the final part of the story, often with some evocative cliffhanger sentence and sometimes even with a set of ellipses. However, people come to Wikipedia for information, not to be sold on a book or movie. Personally, I often come to Wikipedia to find out the ending of a book or movie without having to read it myself, and I think I'm not alone in this. So I try to fill in the ending on plot synopses when I get a chance, and I throw on a Spoiler tag. With the tag in place, people who want to know the premise of the book but not the end are duly warned and can just read the opening to the article instead of the plot synopsis. At the same time, people who want the full info on the book can get it. Everyone wins. Of course, it is debatable how much detail even a spoilered plot synopsis needs to go into. If you think I've been too lengthy, feel free to pare it down.

Of course, if you disagree with any edits I've made, please, revert them or change them as you see fit. I would prefer to see an explanatory comment; I go back and review my past edits from time to time so that I can learn from what others have done with them. I will never unrevert a change of mine which someone else has removed; instead, if I feel like they were in error, I'll post my reasoning on the talk page and let others decide if they want to put my changes back in place.