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We Are Wrong When Treating Vandals
The once-perceived garbage can actually be vital, and we grinded them
If there is one thing that makes Wikipedia special, is that anyone can edit it. Now, let's not extract the bad side of people (i.e. paid editors), but extract that side of people out. What if we encourage them not to edit just because you're paid? What if we encourage vandals to do a nice edit to something they're interested in? Now we have a newbie coming in, folks.
But if there's anything that can be hard from that, it is this: our policies are like two New York Libraries to a kid. Newcomers often just wanna start editing, nothing else. So our policies and essays and supplements and MoSes will look like a demon to them, making it an obstacle to edit. Now you might think, "Ah, that's fine, they'll learn as they grow in Wikipedia, it's really not that hard; just be bold, but not reckless." Well that's... you. As an experienced editor, having being in Wikipedia for months, if not years, who sees all Wikipedia-prefixed pages as a grain of salt that's easy to learn.
In an ageist sense, I am a newcomer, having being here for just three months. But a week ago, I removed the "newcomer" template in my userpage, with the reason being I feel like I have been familiar with all the needed-to-learn guidelines and MoS, and I feel like I just can't describe myself as a newbie anymore. I learn things quickly, mostly due to my interest with Wikipedia and all the awesome editors who have been assisting me in a cool manner.
But there are one group of people we have been spitting on. And who else than vandals. I hope my this will give you more understanding to all spectrum of human personality, and how we can retain more valuable people.
Why some people love vandalizing?
editSome people just love to trash. It's what endorphins discharge. It's what makes some humane. There's that temptation of "What would the outcome be if I did [the thing]?" There's that great feeling on wanting to experiment something. I think we all have done that at some point in some way, shape, or form.
Now, that reason does not cover all vandals, i.e. those replacing "China" with "Ching chong," replacing the photo of Donald Trump with a penis, you know those people. Well guess what? They can be viable to the Wikipedia project too! Anyone who has good in some way can be a longterm Wikipedia editor, just as long as they try their best not pouring their unacceptable side. For example, if there is a vandal doing vandalism, we can advice the person to not edit pages he has a deep influential opinion on, and just edit casual pages he can edit in a good manner. I know this may sound unrealistic, and it does because not everyone has tried this method, based on my observations of vandals' talk pages, AfD nominations, etc.
We have made the assumption that a garbage will always be a garbage. And that's wrong.
This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}
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To put an image in your article, use the following template (link):  I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change
Placing (link) will instead create an inline image like below  The significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.
To create a gallery, use the following Each line inside the tags should be formatted like
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Quotes
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A caption
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If you keep the 'normal' preloaded draft and work from there, you will be using the two-column style. This is perfectly fine in most cases and you don't need to do anything. However, every time you have a However, you can also fine-tune which style is used at which point in an article. To switch from two-column → full width style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. To switch from full width → two-column style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. |
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By the way, the template that you're reading right now is {{Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue}} (edit). A list of the preload templates for Signpost articles can be found here. |
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