User:WhatamIdoing

Hello, World.

Article ideas

 * Diet culture, so we can talk about diet culture's language
 * Free play, what children naturally do when adults aren't telling them what to do
 * Menstrual magnification, perimenstrual changes in symptom severity (e.g., asthma, lupus)
 * Systemic problem, general category in which problems (e.g., racism, risk, violence) can't be solved through individual action
 * Near-miss effect, psychological component involved in gambling
 * War widow
 * Brief Fatigue Inventory, assuming sufficient sources exist

Policies and guidelines you can ask me about

 * The WP:AUD section of Notability (organizations and companies) – added by me after this discussion in 2008; see User:WhatamIdoing/Audience requirement or the shorter version at Notability (organizations and companies)/Audience requirement.
 * The WP:CITEVAR section of Citing sources – significantly expanded by me in 2011 after some early edits and discussion.
 * The WP:DEADREF section of Citing sources – re-written by me after discussion in 2011.
 * The WP:WHYN section of Notability – added by me after multiple discussions in 2011.
 * The WP:PROPOSAL section of Policies and guidelines – added by me after multiple and extensive discussions in 2008.
 * The WP:LOCALCONSENSUS (aka CONLEVEL) section of Consensus – although some of the language dates back to at least 2007, the separate section was boldly started by me in 2009, and the key example behind this and WP:ADVICEPAGE is Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Composers/Infoboxes RfC in 2010.
 * The WP:NOCON section of Consensus – started by me in 2011; see related discussions 1, 2
 * NB that the line about preferring the status quo in articles was not added by me, because I could not find evidence that it was true.
 * The WP:MINREF section of Inline citation –
 * Most of Independent sources, which I merged with Third-party sources.

Stories I tell on wiki

 * Bring me a rock
 * On demanding an endless parade of sources, especially when sourcing isn't the main problem
 * Hoyle's Law
 * Whatever the game, whatever the rules, the rules are the same on both sides.
 * User:WhatamIdoing/Subjectivity in Wikipedia articles
 * Articles that omit subjectivity usually violate the WP:YESPOV policy. An article about an international trade dispute, for example, should explain the situation from the viewpoint of both countries – not just one or the other, and not just universally agreed-upon information.
 * The three umpires, on the differences between reality, perception, and definition:
 * Three baseball umpires are talking about their profession and the difficulty of making accurate calls in borderline cases. One says:  "Some are strikes, and some are balls, and I call them as they are."  The next feels a little professional humility is in order and says:  "Some are strikes, and some are balls, and I call them as I see them."  The third thinks for a moment and says:  "Some are strikes, and some are balls, but they ain't nothing until I call them."
 * On the WP:BIASED source:
 * During a bout of library censorship ("Think of the children"), E. B. White recommended that schools "should strive for a well-balanced library, not a well-balanced book". The English Wikipedia agrees with this viewpoint and therefore does not ban sources based on their viewpoint or for "being biased".  If one wants to write neutrally about a subject, one usually wants a source that argues strongly for a particular side, and a source that argues equally well for the other side.  When you are trying to meet the policy requirements of WP:YESPOV, a source that says viewpoints differ is not nearly as useful as a pair of sources each arguing cogently and clearly that their side should have won the 1985 World Series.
 * On the definition of cure, which is different from feeling better:
 * We all hope for people with cancer to be cured, but most of us don't know how to tell when someone has been cured. The scientific definition involves plotting disease-free survival curves and figuring out when the slope goes flat.  For the more common kinds of breast cancer, you're usually cured if you have been disease-free for three years.  So this means that if you have breast cancer and have no detectable disease three years later, then you're cured.  And if breast cancer is detected in subsequent years, it's a new primary, not a recurrence of the old one.  The numbers vary by disease (e.g., 15 years for some lung cancers) and by the exact type, but it's fundamentally a calculus problem.  But normal people don't think that way.  More to the point, they don't feel that way.  They'll say that they were cured when they felt cured.  This might be when active treatment ended, or when the first test gave good news, or when a troublesome side effect wore off, or when a personally significant milestone passed (e.g., a birthday), or at any other time, for any reason that appeals to them.  Or they might that they're still not cured, even though their doctors say they are, because they just don't feel it.  Feeling it isn't everything, but where humans and their behaviors are concerned, the objective mathematical facts aren't everything, either.
 * Dave Barry's Bad Habits (1987, "College Admissions", pp. 202–203) has a beautiful description of how not to write a Wikipedia article:
 * "Sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you’ll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: 'Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or ‘crying’ behavior forms.' If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant."
 * On the belief that all publicity is good publicity:
 * Some editors want only "worthy" subjects to be mentioned on Wikipedia, because being mentioned in Wikipedia is (in their own personal, subjective opinions) more like a glorious prize to be earned by the meritorious than an enduring misfortune visited upon many subjects. It reminds me of a story that Molly Ivins told about a Texas politician she despised:  "I think the meanest thing I ever said about one of them was that he ran on all fours, sucked eggs and had no sense of humor," she said. "And I swear I saw him in the Capitol the next day and all he said was, 'Baby, you put my name in your paper!'"  If you start with a personal belief that all publicity benefits the subject, then of course you will be appalled to see "unworthy" subjects getting any coverage at all in Wikipedia, even if the coverage says that they run on all fours, suck eggs, and have no sense of humor.
 * User:WhatamIdoing/I am going to die
 * I am not expecting to die any time soon, and I hope you won't die soon, either, but what will Wikipedia look like when we're gone, and what can we do now to make its future better?
 * On the number of editors needed to make a decision
 * Google used to put prospective candidates through 12 interviews. However, the answer rarely changed after the fourth interview.  The opinion of just four interviewers was enough in 95% of cases.  Do we really think that we normally need more editors to answer a question about an article than a business needs to decide whether to hire a job seeker?
 * We've got to get the article content right.
 * And we need to stop worrying so much about how fancy the sources are. According to, readers don't use the sources nearly as often as experienced editors do.  For 99.7% of page views, the readers don't click through on a single ref.  About once out of every 300 page views, one reader will click through to one source.  If there are 10 refs in the article, you have to have more than 3,000 page views before anyone will try to read the ref you just added.  Once.
 * Another way to put this is: readers are at least 300 times as likely to read the sentence you wrote than to read the source you cited.  Make sure that sentence is right – fair, accurate, up-to-date, and representative of the whole body of the relevant literature – before you worry about polishing up the citations.  Citations to high-quality sources are the means to a good article, not an end goal.

Why Wikipedia doesn't standardize everything
Wikipedia doesn't standardize section headings for citations because the real world doesn't. There are four major style guides that are heavily used in universities, and articles using each one can be found on Wikipedia. Each requires a different name above the list of sources that were used to support content in an academic paper:


 * Chicago Manual of Style: "Center the title Bibliography about one inch from the top of the page" (used by fine arts and historians)
 * APA style: "In APA style, the alphabetical list of works cited, which appears at the end of the paper, is titled 'References.'" (used by sociologists and psychologists)
 * The MLA Style Manual: "Center the title Works Cited about one inch from the top of the page." (used in humanities)
 * Council of Science Editors: "Center the title References (or Cited References) and then list the works you have cited in the paper; do not include other works you may have read." (used by scientists)

Wikipedia hasn't chosen one over another because nobody wants to be stuck telling the English people that they have to follow scientific conventions, or the history folks that they're required to follow the English manual.

That, which, and who

 * The relative pronoun that is used for restrictive clauses: The car that is red is broken.  (The other cars are other colors, and whether they are broken is not stated.)
 * The relative pronoun which is used for non-restrictive clauses, such as a description: The car, which is red, is broken.  (There's only one car, and I thought you might like to know what color it was painted.)
 * The relative pronoun who is correctly used in either of these manners, so long as the antecedent is a person. In some situations, such as describing a marginalized group of people, some people may object to the "de-humanization" of the antecedent if that or which are chosen instead of the personhood-affirming who.  However, that and which are grammatically correct, and their use in older and formal English is well-established.  For example:
 * John 11:25 (KJV): "Jesus said unto her, 'I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.'"
 * Luke 16:10 (ERV): "He that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much."
 * Romeo and Juliet: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."
 * Poor Richard's Almanack: He that's content, hath enough; He that complains, has too much.
 * Thomas Paine: "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression."
 * John Bunyan: "He that is down needs fear no fall..."

Smiles

 * It's a guideline, not magic.
 * 
 * Journals and other publications that I have access to
 * Subpage of Shiny Goodness

Memory hole

 * What good-bye often means in Wikiland
 * on words like should, must, and may
 * What happened to Facebook when everyone got smartphones for Christmas
 * Wikipedia will fail before 2010, due to the inevitable editor burnout caused by spammers
 * Regulatory status of drugs in the United States
 * Regulatory status of drugs in Canada
 * EB White on cockroaches and dictators
 * Oil drop experiment
 * Civility builds up the civitas
 * Evidence that the Draft: namespace is where articles go to die: m:Research:Wikipedia article creation and m:Research:AfC processes and productivity
 * User:WhatamIdoing/Editors are people, about the minimum expected rate of mental illness among editors
 * Varying reasons for which journal articles get cited

Boring links

 * User:WhatamIdoing/Header frequency
 * User:WhatamIdoing/Med list
 * User:WhatamIdoing/Med redirects
 * User:WhatamIdoing/Spambox

Notice
From June 2013 until September 2023, I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation in the Community Relations team to answer questions and report problems about some wiki software, especially VisualEditor and DiscussionTools, but this is my personal account. Edits, statements, or other contributions made from this account are my own, and may not reflect the views of the Foundation. If you want to reach someone at the Wikimedia Foundation in an official capacity, then send e-mail to info@undefinedwikimedia.org

Wikipedia editors are unpaid volunteers. I do not write Wikipedia articles for pay.  If someone has asked you to pay for an article, or if you are trying to figure out how to get your article on Wikipedia, please see Articles for creation/Scam warning and FAQ/Organizations.

How to verify an editor's identity
Scammers will call you up and claim to be from your bank. If you want to be sure you're talking to your bank, you should hang up on them, pull out your bank card, and call the phone number on the back of your bank card – not the "special" number that the scammer gave you. That way, you know you're really talking to your bank.

We have the same problem with Wikipedia. Anyone can claim that they're a Wikipedia editor or admin – but how do you find out if they really are? If you receive an e-mail message, text message, or other off-wiki message in which someone claims to be a Wikipedia editor or admin, ask for their username. Then think up a specific 'password' and ask them to post it temporarily on their userpage from the account they claim to control. It doesn't really matter what the password is; maybe you'll pick something like "It really is me" or "Bananas" or "Test edit" or "Hi, friend", or maybe you'll pick something related to the reason they contacted you, like "I am posting this to prove to a potential client that I really am this Wikipedia editor".

After they've posted it, then (this is super important) look at the top of the page where they posted it for the tab marked "View history" (sometimes shortened to just "History"). Find their username in the list of changes made to that page, and at the start of the line, click the "prev" button to see what changes that particular line records. If you see something like:


 * (cur | prev) 02:19, 6 February 2024‎ Their_username_here (talk | contribs‎) 14,685 bytes +24 Test edit

with a recent date, and clicking on "prev" highlights the words you told them to post, then it's probably someone who actually has that account. But if they refuse to post anything, or if you see a different username in the middle (or just a series of numbers and letters, like "198.51.100.21" or "2001:db8:249b:13e:122e:2249:18:1397"), then you'll know that they're scammers who are lying about whether this is really their account.

Alternatively, if you create your own account and add an e-mail address in Special:Preferences, then you can use Special:EmailUser to send e-mail to most experienced editors. Send them a message like "Someone claiming to be you on is asking me to pay money for a Wikipedia article. Is that really you, or is this a scammer?"

When in doubt, especially if they are asking for money for anything related to Wikipedia, you can send e-mail to  and ask one of the volunteers. Remember: Real Wikipedia editors don't charge the subject of an article for creating it, editing it, reviewing it, or anything else!