I often feel I have to explain certain things repeatedly. I'm going to create a glossary here, and then simply refer people to it, as needed. Please note: Nothing here whatsoever is official Wikipedia policy. I just want to save time. If anyone reading this who is more familiar with Wikipedia policies/guidelines/ettiquette than I am thinks this page is improper in any way, please let me know, and I'll remove it or change it as needed. -CF.
Terms
editTrans-article POV (an instance of a structural POV) -- Wikipedians often stress the importance of attempting to achieve NPOV (a neutral point of view) within an article. But in many cases, a non-neutral POV arises because of differences across articles. For example, as of early June, 2006, the articles "Human rights in Germany", "Human rights in the United Kingdom", and "Human rights in the United States" had radically different criteria for inclusion of subject matter. The first two articles mentioned essentially nothing about human rights before the 1970s, yet the last went back over two centuries. Because human rights have advanced in the world over the last two centuries, the United States ends up looking like a much worse violator of human rights than do Germany and the UK. (There was, for example, no mention of the Holocaust in the article about human rights in Germany.) Articles named "Human rights in X", where X is a country, should have the same criteria for inclusion of material. Not having the same criteria constitutes what I call a "trans-article POV problem". None of the three articles mentioned, taken by itself, is necessarily POV, but because the impression given to a reader who read more than one of them would be false, a POV problem exists.
One user, one indent level -- To avoid "indent creep" -- discussion entries moving to the right as each person continues to add a colon before his/her response -- I usually maintain the same indent level in all my responses, even though most users don't do this, for ex:
Me like. -A
- You like? -Cultural Freedom.
- Yes. -A
- But what does "me like" mean? -B
- I think it was a statement of general well-being. -Cultural Freedom
That way, one can scan for the same indent level to see the same persons contributions.
If this violates some guideline or other (of which I'm currently unaware), of if you think it's a bad idea, please click on the "talk" tab above and let me know!