User:Trystan

Editing philosophy
On WP:NOTCENSORED: To paraphrase Mary Jo Godwin, a truly great encyclopedia has something in it to offend everyone. While Wikipedia shouldn't include gratuitously offensive content, I try not to be too quick to conclude that material that offends my sensibilities must also be irrelevant or trivial.

On WP:NPOV: An editor who claims to always edit from a neutral point of view is almost certainly simply refusing to critically analyze their own cultural biases. Transcending our own views to obtain a view from nowhere is not a trivial or easy task, but rather an iterative, reflective process. Identifying our biases and stripping them from the articles we edit is never perfectly achieved, but we can make the best approximation of it by approaching topics dispassionately and carefully considering the input of editors with different views than our own.

On WP:V: Adding material and then finding a source that supports it does not generally result in an article that accurately reflects the available reliable sources. This is too often the approach taken, because it is the easiest and requires the least critical thinking. Often, editors with different views on the subject will subsequently add dueling sources, and the result tends to be paragraphs that argue with themselves and need to be rewritten from scratch. Canvassing the sources is crucial before adding material, which can then be written in a way that fairly and dispassionately reports on what the sources say.

On WP:NOR: Similar to what I said above, an editor who claims to never synthesize sources into something new is almost certainly simply refusing to critically analyze their approach to the source material. Combining various sources into a single, coherent article requires some level of synthesis. At some level, an article has to tell a story; it shouldn't be simply a jumble of random facts like a search result. Defining a subject, identifying relevant sources, analyzing their reliability, assigning them appropriate weight, and reconciling them into an organized, comprehensible article requires what we like to call "editorial judgement", but I think it falls somewhere on a spectrum of synthesis. The goal is to find the point of analytic analysis that is necessary to organize and convey information on a topic (sometimes in a novel way, or we would just be copying other sources verbatim) while avoiding advancing controversial new claims about it.

Some articles I have contributed to

 * Advertising mail
 * Chocolate bar
 * Egg in the basket
 * Et in Arcadia ego
 * Freedom of religion in Canada
 * King-in-Parliament
 * LGBT bullying
 * Omar Khadr
 * Prophecy of the Popes
 * Queer
 * Shipping Forecast