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 | This page in a nutshell: If you're reading this, please god help. Call the police or the National Guard. Tell my family I love them. |
Well hello there, boys and girls! It's such a gosh darned wonderful day, and I'm here to introduce to you my good friend Bee About.
Bee About is always such a busy little bee, and likes to do lots of fun activities. But his most favoritest thing in the whole world is bopping Wikipedia editors on the noggin and reminding them that sources in articles need to actually be about the subject of the article.
You might say "Golly-gee-fizzle, Mister Bee. That seems really simple." And Bee About would whack you hard across the knuckles and tell you that if it was really that fucking simple, we wouldn't have a mascot for it, now would we?
Say we're working on a super fundiferous article, like snow cones, Unethical human experimentation in the United States, or coloring books. Maybe we want to say something about how creative little children all across the world like to use crayons to color with. So we take our imagination, and we combine it with Google, and go and find a source about crayons.
"Not so fast!" Says Bee About, and then he bloodies your stupid little nose for being an insufferable little shit. "You're writing an article about coloring books" he reminds you, as you wipe away the metallic taste of fresh blood.
"So the source you use needs to be about coloring books specifically, and not just something related to coloring books. If you find a good source about coloring books in particular, and they decide to include a chapter on crayons, then that means the source determined that crayons were an important piece of context for understanding the subject you're writing about."
"But I need to orient readers to the broader context," you say recoiling slightly as Bee About starts to unscrew the broom handle, obviously to more effectively use it as a weapon.
"No you don't," he replies breaking the handle in half over his knee to make two small sharp sticks. "The sources are the ones who get to decide what context is important, and not us."
"When you're writing an article, you have to learn to turn your brain off a little. You have to play pretend that you actually don't know anything at all about the subject, and the sources you find about the subject in particular are your first introduction to it, like a cute little baby first learning about the wide funtastic world, or an insufferable child waking up from a mild concussion."
Imagine you were in some wacky scenario, like an anthropomorphic insect looking at you menacingly as he cracks his knuckles, who for some reason has a weapon even though he has a stinger the size of your foot that could immediately send you in the kind of anaphylactic shock that your epipen isn't going to help with. After you carefully fold your last prayers you've written down with a crayon, and leave it as a note to the few people who love you, Mister Bee asks you, "Why did you decide to include this bit of context?"
And your answer better damned well be, "I didn't decide this context was important. The sources did." But that means the sources you're using need to be about the thing you're writing about. Otherwise you are the one that decided which context is important, and what context to include, and that makes Bee About very cranky.
Having momentarily satisfied his blood lust, Bee About tucks you into sleep, gently kisses you on the forehead, and pulls your door closed with the words you will carry with you for the rest of your waking life.
"I got warrants and I ain't scared to go back to prison."