User talk:LiliM1988

Special:Notifications Welcome!

Hello, LiliM1988, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome!Jytdog (talk) 10:30, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
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Hi LiliM1988

Again, welcome to Wikipedia! I am sorry but I reverted the additions you made to the Intensive animal farming article. They violated two of our policies - one of them is that no original research is allowed here - everything in Wikipedia must be based on reliable, secondary sources and verifiable. Additionally - and this one is a bit harder to wrap your head around - Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and our policy mostly defines that as the many things we are not! With regard to your post, Wikipedia is not a blog nor platform from which to change the world - it is not a soapbox.

Being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" means that over the years, Wikipedia has developed lots of policies and guidelines (PAG) to help provide a "body of law" as it were, that form a foundation for rational discussion. Without that foundation, this place would be a wild west - a truly ugly place. But with the foundation, there are ways to rationally work things out - if, and only if, all the parties involved accept that foundation and work within it. One of the hardest things for new people, is to understand not only that this foundation exists, but what its letter and spirit is. (I emphasize the spirit, because too often people fall prey to what we call "wikilawyering") The more I have learned about how things are set up here - not just the letter of PAG and the various drama boards and administrative tools, but their spirit - the more impressed I have become at how, well ... beautiful this place is. It takes time to learn both the spirit and the letter of PAG, and to really get aligned with Wikipedia's mission to crowdsource a reliable, neutral source of information for the public (as "reliable" and "NPOV" are defined in PAG!).

People come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead to tendentious editing, which is really destructive. Advocacy is one of our biggest bedevilments. And one of the hardest things that happens, is when simple disagreements over content and different understandings of policy, turn into accusations of bad faith editing (e.g. accusations of conflicts of interest). There are many ways to go wrong, and a narrow path to go right. the wrong paths lead to misery for those who take them, and misery for those around them too. I don't know if you can find a way to "reset" at this point, and choose a different path, but i hope you can. WP is a very very human place - very beautifully designed, sometimes beautiful in execution, and too often ugly too. much depends on how you carry yourself. anyway, good luck!Jytdog (talk)