User:Jengod/Soapboxen

This page is written in California English and some grammar or vocabulary that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

AIRING OF GRIEVANCES, VENTING OF SPLEEN:

• My comfort TV show for rewatch is Detectorists. Godless is an iconic feminist western miniseries. (Into the West also holds a special place in my brain-heart.) My Family and Other Animals is wonderful book you might not have read. Betty MacDonald's non-fiction and Helen Forrester's Tuppence to Cross the Mersey quadrologies are underrated and exceptional.
• I stole this from the page of User:WolfmanSF: Wikipedia:Ignore all rules
  • "Don't follow written instructions mindlessly, but rather, consider how the encyclopedia is improved or damaged by each edit."
  • "The spirit of the rule trumps the letter of the rule. The common purpose of building a free encyclopedia trumps both. If this common purpose is better served by ignoring the letter of a particular rule, then that rule should be ignored."
  • "Editors who insist that rules must be followed for their own sake, without explaining how doing it will improve the encyclopedia, are themselves breaking the rules, as Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy."
• Wikipedia is not a timed test. You're OK, I'm OK, we're all OK.
• No article is improved by a photograph of the highway traffic caused by or derivative of the topic at hand. No article. Not a one. I said what I said!
• An unwritten Wikipedia rule may be that minimum viable product is three sentences, all cited, from three semi-distinct sources.
• Stubs are good. Stubs are fine. Is it one sentence but it's notable and it's cited? It is fine. Leave it alone. Someone will make it longer someday, or they won't, but there is nothing wrong with a <250-word article. If there is, I want to see it statutorily outlawed for the sake of clarity.

• The best Wikipedia pages have the most edits. The more hands on an article, the more robust and vital it becomes. Kicking crummy new articles in a closet dooms them to a pathetic early death and retards the progress of the project in our goal of organizing all human knowledge. It's been said that Wikipedia exists because it gamified nerds correcting each other. If everything is perfect on the first draft, the game is not fun anymore.
• Bad edits are good actually. All writing is rewriting. We are building a thing here. Not every edit, new section, new article, needs to be clean and perfect and finished. If you're volunteering here and you see people doing things differently than you would do or would prefer, your time is not being wasted by revising, reformatting, reframing their work. One of the most harmful things you can do to Wikipedia is scare away people who are contributing in good faith. Conversely, embracing your fellow users and teaching people how to do things in a way that might be more productive or accumulative for the project is heroic action.
• If you're a content creator, take a Claritin and get up to your eyeballs in those dusty, dry sources. That's the job.
• According to me, on rare, thoughtfully selected occasions, it's fine to use inline parathetical asides with question marks indicating uncertainty present in sources or existing facts. Questions are as important as answers. We don't have to know it all or pretend that everything is knowable or certain or certified, because it ain't and that's OK. This is a folk encyclopedia. We have to deal with the disadvantages of that, we might as well enjoy the advantages too.
• Don't forget to italicize titles of everything (except poems and articles), names of ships, and words and phrases not in English. English is a pretty flexible language but, for example, kompromat versus compromising information, and tarte à l'oignon versus onion tart. When in doubt, check a reputable dictionary. We have templates to automatically italicize words not in English and ship names, but you'll have to find the italics button for The New Yorker > The New Yorker all by yourself. (Cool thing: If you use the language templates, like so, {{lang|fr|tarte à l'oignon}}, screen readers will automatically read that phrase in a French-trained AI voice instead of trying to sound it out using English language rules!!)
• Notability is the worst reason to nominate an article for deletion, and sustained is the worst reason to reject a draft article. (seriously)
• Take more photos of boring infrastructure please: post office, library, fire station, police station, bus station, etc. Pretend you're a raccoon photographer in a Richard Scarry book.
• Cite women.
• Also, we need to definitively rule in machine translation as permissible. Just call me Auntie Chaos.
• Don't write for a middle-school reading level but do link for a middle-school reading level. Less-common words, and any archaic vocabulary should all be linked (to either en-wiki articles, Wiktionary entries, or a non-en-wiki article as appropriate). Write for the brilliant and the expert, but remember that nobody knows what they don't know, and nobody can learn unless someone is willing to teach them, either in person or in print. Also, background sections are clutch.
• Illustrate your articles as fully as you can. People are only human and will get most of their impression from images before they dig into the text, much less the footnotes and the references. Accommodating feels like enabling but IMHO it's simply good editorial practice.
• Horseshit is good. Horseshit is rich in nutrients and promotes flowering and fruiting of plants. If your intellectual ecosystem doesn't contain at least a modest quantity of horseshit, it's probably closer to desiccation and desertification than it is to thriving and flourishing.
• I am an excellent genealogist of close to 30 years experience and let me tell you: our wholesale dismissal of findagrave.com verges on insane. The photo of the gravestone? That's called cemetery reading, and it is a long-standing practice in genealogy but also like...archaeology! !!!!
• Pro tip: The most flexible fields in the cite templates are:
  • id=
  • type=
  • others=
  • series=
  • department=
• A broadly applicable statement on the biogeography (or human geography!) of drylands: "However, in a country where no larger places exist the smaller ones become of importance, and even ranches and arroyos are given a prominence which they would not attain in more settled countries. We must remember that in Baja California the traveller is happy if he can find water enough to satisfy his thirst, and, accordingly, water-holes even become of an usual importance and worthy of being marked down and correctly located on the map."
• The phrase "Union army" is Confederate propaganda. That was always just the United States Army.
• Redirects are cheap, and people's time is not.
• I think it is outright dereliction of duty that for {reasons} we don't have annotated tables explaining the We Didn't Start the Fire lyrics (both versions). Reeks of musical snobbery.
• American movies you might enjoy if you haven't seen them yet: Mississippi Masala, Love & Basketball, Sweet Land, A History of Violence (the last is Cronenberg, and extremely dark but not nihilistic). Also Gas Food Lodging and Mystic Pizza for small-town feminist verité.
• Alarm bells start ringing for me when I hear that because the Wikipedia is now Old, it is approaching completion. Never ever believe that we have done anything here. We are doing. Collectively. The work is now.
• Articles with fewer than four paragraphs do not need ledes and section headers!
• One of my favorite things on this website is reading the list on your user page of all the articles you created. Keep doing that!
• People that go around removing Wikipedia redlinks weird me out; that's like boxing up a fractal.
• Commons should solicit more creative illustrations for certain topics, I'm thinking biographies in particular. I would like to see DeviantArtists depict the likes of Toypurina, Boudicea, Sally Hemings, and Rachel Jackson when she was young. I would not be opposed to contests with a cash prize.
• Once I figure out rowspan and colspan attributes on Wikipedia tables, it's over for you bitches.
• Improving citations is an act of love (and respect).
• Also I know you know this but it took me a stupid long time to figure this out so...you only have to format that citation real nice *one time* and then you carry it off and save it on your "formatted citations" page and you're good for a loooooong time.
• Alt tags (for accessibility and continuity) and inline photo credits (another form of citation) are two things we should do more of. I usually manage the latter but fail almost uniformly on the former. If someone prints out a Wikipedia article, the text sources are findable, but the image sources go "bloop!" into the ether unless you credit your image sources inline in the captions. Photographers and archivists and librarians deserve inline credit for their valuable work. Photo credits are citations for pictures. Cite more. It's good for the soul.
• SPITE EDITING: The best way to fight on Wikipedia is to write many impeccably sourced articles on the topic in dispute.
• You are not being victimized by an IP user adding unsourced promo-cruft to a page on your watchlist. You are being given an opportunity to invest in the future of Wikipedia by welcoming a new user with love and respect.
• I highly recommend deleting your entire watchlist every so often. It is both liberating and clarifying.
• If you're part of the reason Wikipedia can't have a sense of humor, kindly reflect on the poor life choices that have brought you to this point. (I'm staying mad about cetacean needed until the sun dies.) Just because people are mean to us doesn't mean we have to be insecure. We is what we is. And we is good.
• Please, I am begging: Stop putting links in your bolded article titles. It looks horrible. Begging.
• PATRIARCHY NAMES: This seems regressive on first glance but I believe it's important to add married names such as Mrs. Elisha Foote and Miss Stebbins as redirects and as Wikidata aliases for women like Eunice Newton Foote and Fannie Stebbins. In their own time and sometimes in their own writing, these women were often known by what we would now consider patriarchial honorifics. Ignoring those names erases a necessary link in the historical record and/or breaks the network were trying to build here. The important thing is to make these women findable, by any names necessary.
• GRADE BOLDLY: I see a lot of anxiety and CYA in article grading. I urge you to give out more As and Bs. The worst thing that can happen is someone complains on talk or lowers the grade! But trust your instincts. If you, as reader, think something is excellent, it probably is.
• APES ARE PEOPLE, TOO: When writing about orangs/gorillas/chimps, I use "who" rather than "that" in violation of traditional language rules, because after reading Next of Kin by Roger Fouts and similiar works, I believe strongly in great ape personhood.
• DON'T BE A NARC: If you find a tidy, well-sourced article written in good faith by a non-paid, non-sock editor on a topic that is, in your opinion, non-notable or only borderline notable, you didn't see anything. You're blind. You've never heard of AfD. Mind your own business and go do literally anything else. More importantly, stop trying to impose your juvenile sense of "but the board game rule sheet says!!" onto a world that is not fair or just. Your anxiety about creating only 90*-angle square corners in a ragged world constructed from scrap lumber, fairy dust, and fear, is admirable, but also naive, immature, and harmful in its own right.
• POV OK: Many disambiguation pages should reorganized into an inverted pyramid format with the most important use cases at the top.
• Watch out for provincialism, human-centricity, anthropomorphism, classism, elitism, ableism, l-don't-like-it-ism, and, above all, recentism and the end-of-history illusion. Have some humility—we are a future generation's primitives.