User:Ron Ritzman/Don't try to enter a chimpanzee in a beauty pageant

I'm sure some of you are familiar with the film Miss Congeniality where Sandra Bullock plays a tomboyish FBI agent who has to go under cover as a contestant in a beauty pageant in order to solve a crime. In the movie she undergoes an "extreme makeover" and eventually is able to pass as a believable contestant, the moral of that plot point being that almost any woman can undergo such a makeover and be a beauty pageant contestant. Some might argue that point but one thing is obvious, that will not work with a female chimpanzee. Yes chimps are closely related to humans and a female chimp might actually be quite attractive by whatever standards chimps judge such things but she's not human and no amount of extreme makeover will make her pass for a pageant contestant.

So how does this apply to Wikipedia? In theory, any "article", no matter how much of a mess it's in, can be fixed and perhaps even eventually bought up to good article or featured article status but first it actually has to start out as an "article". This is not true for much of the material copied from other websites that gets deleted under CSD G12 where the submitter later tries to release it under cc-by-sa. There are quite a few cases at WP:REFUND where someone goes through the trouble of getting OTRS clearance for a piece of adcopy just to see it re-deleted under CSD G11 as "spam". The problem here is that it wasn't an "article" to start with and to make it one you would have to all but blank the page and start from scratch. The same goes for essays, how-to/gaming guides or just about anything copied from other websites. There are some exceptions such as material from other online and print encyclopedias. A good example is the public domain Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition which was the starting point for some of our articles.

However, for most anything else you might find on the web, including material that you published yourself, trying to go through the trouble of jumping through a bunch of hoops to get it on Wikipedia is pointless. It's a lot easier to write a new NPOV article on the topic from scratch and use the original material that you wanted to copy to Wikipedia as a "source" if it would be appropriate to do so.