User talk:Marcuscassius

Welcome! Hello, Marcuscassius, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. (these are perhaps yours as well?) 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) 14:48, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
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A word of advice...
Hi. I noticed the edit you made to the genetically modified food controversies article, and your sandbox.

Some advice, should you want to take it. If you do decide to stick around (and I hope you do!), please do know that Wikipedia is actually a pretty complicated place.

Being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" means that over the years, Wikipedia has developed lots of policies and guidelines (WP: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 inexperienced 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"). Another mistake that people fall prey to, is to question other editors personal motivations, rather than talking about how some bit of content, or a source, works in the context of PAG. We discuss content, not contributors, and unless there is something really glaringly obvious going on (please see WP:COI, WP:ADVOCACY, and WP:OUTING about that), we assume good faith about each other. Assuming good faith, and civility, are a pillar of Wikipedia. Without it this place becomes uninhabitable.

Content about health-related issues can be especially contentious here. There is LOTS of crap out there on the internet, and there are editors who want to come here and push it (real tinfoil hat stuff). Please think about that.. this is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. As a result, over the years Wikipedia has developed some very clear policies and guidelines about how we handle health-related information in particular. The relevant policies and guidelines are Neutral_point_of_view (policy), WP:FRINGE (guideline) and WP:MEDRS (guideline).

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 beautiful this place can be. 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, NPOV 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.

Anyway, I do hope you slow down a bit and understand how things work in Wikipedia before you start making accusations that other editors are working here in bad faith. This is unfortunately a common mistake that new editors make but there is no reason you have to continue down that road, which is going to lead to misery for you, and will probably lead you to burn out and leave. There are lots of people here who are happy to teach, if you open up and listen and ask authentic questions, not rhetorical ones. In any case, good luck! Jytdog (talk) 15:03, 13 May 2014 (UTC)