User:Thebiguglyalien/Philosophy

My philosophy on Wikipedia in 100 essays, more or less (a lot less). Essays in italics were written by me. Essays in bold are the ones I wish to emphasize.

Conduct best practices

 * Don't Balkanize Wikipedia – The same expectations apply everywhere on Wikipedia. No talk page, project page, or topic area gets to set its own rules.
 * Don't be ashamed – Mistakes are good. Doing something wrong isn't a tragedy, it's how we all learned to edit.
 * Don't demand that editors solve the problems they identify – Raising an issue or tagging an article is helpful in and of itself.
 * Don't revert due solely to "no consensus" – Wikipedia is all about making changes. If you expect people to ask before editing, you're doing it wrong.
 * Hate is disruptive – Discrimination makes groups of editors feel unwelcome, which is inherently harmful to Wikipedia.
 * Wikipedia is a volunteer service – Don't tell anyone what they must edit or when they must edit.

Community-building and editor retention

 * Anyone can cook – Not everyone can edit, but a good editor can come from anywhere.
 * An uncivil environment is a poor environment – Being a jerk makes people leave. Imagine all the countless potential contributions lost because someone was scared away by an uncivil environment.
 * Compliment before criticism – When giving advice, say what's good before saying what's bad.
 * Encourage the newcomers – One new editor is worth a thousand contributions. Sometimes more.
 * Newbies aren't always clueless – It's not suspicious on its own if a new user comes in and immediately knows their way around. That's what we want them to do!
 * WikiLove – Take a moment and surprise someone with an act of kindness. It can make all the difference.
 * Wikipedia is a community – Fun community-building things are productive, even if they don't improve articles.
 * Zeroth law of Wikipedia – Good editors are Wikipedia's most valuable resource.

Discussions and consensus

 * Catch Once and Leave – Don't hang around a discussion to argue with everyone after you've made your point.
 * Consensus venue – Consensus doesn't mean anything when it's formed by a small group, such as a WikiProject.
 * Hold the pepper – Instead of replying to everyone individually, leave one comment expressing all of your thoughts.
 * Ignore all precedent – "This is how we always do it" is not helpful.

Responding to conduct violations

 * Call a spade a spade – Beating around the bush with conduct violations only helps a problem user cause more problems.
 * Friends don't let friends get sanctioned – If you want to keep someone out of trouble, you should be the first to call them out on inappropriate behavior.
 * Our social policies are not a suicide pact – Stop assuming good faith when (and only when) someone continues causing the same problems after multiple warnings.
 * You can't squeeze blood from a turnip – It's harmful when long-term editors are given extra chances after they've proven they're going to keep causing problems.

Content-writing pitfalls

 * Avoid thread mode – Don't make an article argue back and forth with itself.
 * Meaningful examples in pop culture – Don't namedrop examples, describe them in context.
 * Proseline – Don't write articles like timelines.

Inclusion and due weight

 * Aggregate data into lists rather than stubs – One long list is better than dozens of short articles.
 * Recentism – Before writing something, consider whether it will still be a significant detail in ten years.
 * The source, the whole source, and nothing but the source – Use overview sources to determine content and due weight.
 * The Trump Horizon – A source connecting two things doesn't necessarily mean they're relevant to one another.

Navigation

 * A navbox on every page – I just think they're neat.
 * Navbox constellations – Organize large navboxes by creating sub-navboxes.

Neutrality

 * A POV that draws a source. – Find the sources and let them decide. Don't start with an understanding of a topic and then find sources that verify it.
 * Activist – If an editor predominantly contributes to bring awareness to a cause or to promote a belief, then they are not here to build an encyclopedia, no matter how long they've been editing.
 * Be neutral in form – Neutrality is just as much about how info is organized.
 * Beware of the tigers – People with strong emotional opinions on a subject will usually damage the project when they try to edit that subject.
 * Let the facts speak for themselves – If you truly believe your POV reflects the facts, describing the facts neutrally is more convincing than slanting the article.
 * Nationalist editing – Editing to make a country look bad should not be tolerated.
 * Objective sources – Don't use opinionated sources if ones with a dispassionate tone are available.
 * We shouldn't be able to figure out your opinions – It doesn't matter if their edits comply with the letter of policy. If they show a pattern of pushing for the same side, the editor should not be allowed in that topic area.
 * Wikipedia is a mainstream encyclopedia – This isn't the place to promote your minority view on science, politics, society, medicine, etc. We write content based on mainstream sources.
 * Writing for the opponent – If you're writing about an idea you dislike, work even harder to find strong sources about it and write the best treatment of it you can.

Notability and deletion

 * Alternative outlets – Wikipedia is not the only place to put stuff online. Non-encyclopedic things shouldn't be kept if they're "useful", they should be useful somewhere else.
 * Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions – These arguments should not be factors in what articles we keep or delete.
 * Delete the junk – Unhelpful articles are often worse than no article at all.
 * Don't cite GNG – Simply saying that someone meets GNG does not mean that the sourcing is adequate.
 * Existence ≠ Notability – "Here are sources verifying it" isn't enough if they don't give some indication of significance.
 * News articles – Wikipedia should not create stand-alone articles for news stories until after they're recognized as major historical events.
 * Overreliance upon Google – If you want to confirm notability, look beyond a simple Google search. Consider the Wikipedia Library.
 * Too soon – Things that just happened rarely warrant stand-alone articles.

Sources and verifiability

 * Avoid contemporary sources – Retrospective sources give a better overview than contemporary sources.
 * How to mine a source – Don't just take one fact from a source, add everything relevant.
 * Are news-reporting media secondary or primary sources? – They're usually primary.
 * Contort the citations – Better to arrange the citations awkwardly around the text than to arrange the text awkwardly around the citations.
 * Party and person – Third party sources can still be primary.
 * Verifiability, not truth – Sources come first. If it's not in the sources, we don't need or want it.
 * You are not a reliable source – You don't get to decide what should go in the article. The sources do. If your understanding contradicts the sources, your understanding is irrelevant.
 * You do need to cite that the sky is blue – It doesn't matter how obvious it is, the sources decide what content belongs in the article and confirms that it's accurate.

Misc. pet peeves

 * Adjectives in your recommendations – Don't say "strong" support or oppose. It sounds like people shouting over each other to show who cares the most.
 * Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"! – It's like abbreviating Central Park as "Park".
 * Don't make a smarmy valediction part of your default signature – Don't add "cheers" or "yours truly" to your signature.
 * Don't use a billboard signature – Obnoxious signatures are distracting.
 * Pruning article revisions – Don't start a new edit for every typo you fix.