User:Panini!/We All Make Mistakes

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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This page in a nutshell: Don't be discouraged if you have done something wrong! We are all human here, and it won't be held against you. Learn from the mistake and work with others to rectify it, and you will be forgiven.

I wrote this essay for the sake of the newbie, because we were all newbies at some point. If you're new to Wikipedia, welcome! You may be a little stressed out about all of these rules, and a little scared to be bold and start editing. In fact, you may have done something wrong already, and you're feeling a little down about it. Don't worry, we've all been there before. We're all human; we all make mistakes!

Trust me, there's a learning curve

Mistakes are inevitable; don't be discouraged if you make one! Early mistakes of mine include citing unreliable sources and failing to comply with the manual of style. These are two big books of rules that you luckily do not need to memorize in order to begin. Just begin editing! However, it's impossible to be perfect on the first try. Wether you're fresh out of high school or have a master degree in your field, you are still prone to make silly mistakes. Go to any user on this website and look through their oldest talk page entries, and you'll find messages from other users informing them about the do's and don'ts, guaranteed.

You may make many mistakes of a wide variety early on, but nobody will hold them against you if you learn and continue to be a net-positive for the encyclopedia. After all, everyone has made similar mistakes as well, just like you did. In fact, the only real users that are punished or banned are those who refuse to learn from mistakes (see Wikipedia:Disruptive editing), and trolls. The kind that erase an article and replace it with "poop". It's an unbelievably low bar. You're perfectly fine!

Everyone here is a person, just like you!

One of my earliest mistakes was on the article Super Mario Bros. 35. I was obsessing over this one article, pouring hundreds and hundreds of edits into it, watching the ones others put on there, finding new and better ways to say things. Then, all of a sudden, Rhain shows up. He does a general copyedit of the article to remove unreliable sources, video game jargon and puffery, and overall, my lame, 9th grade writing. To me, however, this was devastating. It looked to me like he just cut all of my work down to nothing, as if he was personally against my work.

Keep in mind what I didn't at the time: everyone who gives you a heads-up about rules is trying to help you out in the long run. If someone disagrees with what you are doing in some way, whether that be a rewrite of your sentence or a warning on your talk page, please do not take it personally! Behind every username is a real person who is trying to ensure you become the best editor you can be, and nudge you in the right direction. As scary as administrators may be, for example, they're not sending you a warning message with a smile on their face. Quite the opposite in fact; for every good editor (like you!) there's a dozen trolls that get the same warning treatment, so these warnings are more of a formality. So when a user lets you know about a mistake, they're confronting out of love; acknowledge the advice, apologize, and continue on with your work as if you've never made the mistake in the first place. This is the only way a person can grow.

Here's the good part; everyone who is on this website are all working towards the betterment of the encyclopedia. If they successfully assist you in achieving this goal, it's a win for the whole project. So don't be afraid to ask for help! If you have any questions at all about general editing practice, or just want some advice on what you can do different or better, you can reach out to any user by asking them on their talk page. You can also check out the WP:Teahouse, which specializes in answering questions from new users in a quick fashion. If you specialize in a certain topic or field, you should also check out any associated WP:Wikiprojects to find your tribe.

Oh, and about Rhain: discouraged, I went to his talk page and asked why he would do this to my poor article. He responded very humbly and gave me detailed and specific advice on how I can make my content even better for future reference, and even gave me some helpful resources and examples to check out. What a great guy!

My many, many mistakes (for you to laugh at, I don't mind)

My second, much chunkier cat. You may think she's perfect, but she made the mistake of sleeping on my keyboard while I was trying to work. Despite this, I still love her very much!

If you've come to this article feeling down, or just want to find security in knowing you're better off than someone else right now, here's a list of really stupid stuff I have done on this website. I hope you get a kick out of them!

Absolute no-nos

My very first contribution was an attempt to create an article about the minor fictional character Byte and Barq from the 2017 video game Arms. It's a cool robot guy, which was my basis for writing it. I was likely in middle school when I attempted to do this. I remember hitting publish, and not being able to find the article after that. No infobox, no formatting, probably like 2 sources that mention his name and nothing else. I can't find any log of this article, so let me know if you find any leads.

I used to run a subpage, I believe it was called "Funny Teahouse Questions and Responses", where I would archive Teahouse threads that I found humorous. While I do remember there being some interesting interactions between Teahouse hosts on there, a majority of the questions there were satirical towards new users who simply needed help. After a polite but necessarily stern message from Nick Moyes that this was a bad face for a user who was a Teahouse Host, I shamefully had the page deleted. I was comforted by Zindor, who sent me an image of a Bengal Kitten to make me feel better, which I kept on my talk page for a while. I still use the image for one of my talk page banners for old time's sake. The page got some positive feedback from new users, which probably kept it alive as long as it did.

While working on a rewrite of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a non-native English speaker made some additions to the article to help with expansion. I was probably in a bad mood that day, because rather than guiding the user on how to properly format their additions, I reverted them all entirely and assumed called the improper grammar "masked vandalism" in my edit summary. Looking back, I believe I was busy to the point of raising my temper level, and after checking my phone and seeing the additions, my anger got the best of me and I got rid of all of it. When ferret tried to tell me on the unofficial Wikipedia Discord server that my reverts did not assume good faith, I still persisted and immediately tried to defend my decision. I took that as a personal attack for some reason; ferret was just doing her job obviously. Not only was I wrong, but I was also debating against an administrator in a public server. I took a break from the article after that, but I did eventually return to bring it to good article status.

I was once requested by a user to do a copyedit for the SpaceX Starship article. I agreed, published my revisions in sets of two to three paragraphs at a time. My first edit summary included "grammar fixes", and every edit summary after that was nonsense ramblings. This was about 20 edit summaries long, and I touched on the subjects of coffee creamers, my coffee cup collection, and my two cats. While this was positively received by the users watching the article because they knew what I was doing, other unrelated administrators were trying to make sense of my edit summaries out of context. They thought I was hacked! TheresNoTime approached me on my talk page, and I emailed them to clarify what the heck I was talking about.

When I first designed my user page, I misinterpreted what the "What may I have in my user pages?" section of Wikipedia's user page policy and included some severely personal information on the page. It was quickly censored by Primefac.

During April Fool's Day 2021, on the nomination for Joy-Con, I copy-pasted the chorus from the song "Deja Vu" from Initial D as a reference to the fact that the controllers usually have a problem with drifting. This was a blatant copyright violation and was quickly censored.

Paper Mario: The Origami King had a large debate between editors early on, mostly centered around a specific user who persistently fought back against several editors in a demonstration of WP:NOTHERE. This engagement that I witnessed inspired me to write Wikipedia:Stop Trying, an essay about how you should eventually drop the stick for your own sake. "Why doesn't it exist anymore," you may ask. If you're not easily prone to secondhand embarrassment, read the MfD discussion. Painfully unfunny and very clearly a personal attack toward the user. I was in 9th grade, so all of these painfully unfunny remarks and comedic jabs at the expense of others seemed like comedy gold to me at the time. Yikes Panini...

This one took me the longest to openly declare for everyone to see. With me saying this one, I have nothing to hide.

Look before you do

My first cat from when I was really little; these are the only images of him. Throughout my lifetime (and his, he is no longer with us) he made the mistake of killing, like, a dozen birds and leaving them on our back porch. I still loved him very much, but if you do this you will most likely be blocked.

I once called out ProtoDrake for creating several good article nominations in a short period of time, assuming they would be low quality. ProtoDrake has a decade of experience and over 100 good articles. He's just a really good editor.

I tried to help an article about a video game developer by cropping the subject's infobox image down so he would appear more in focus. Without noticing (because I don't have a good eye for this sort of thing), I severely dropped the quality of the image down with it, and my change was reverted.

During my FAC for Paper Mario: The Origami King, I pasted 11,000kb of content from the article on the review page to give an example of a change I suggested making. Because WP:FAC transcludes every featured article review page, this drop of content (which included an image) practically destroyed its run-time temporarily.

...What?

Despite working exclusively on video game content, my first article was Edgenuity. I made it a day after I registered.

Many users tried to warn me that creating an article is a very difficult task for a newcomer, but I assumed I would be fine. It did eventually pass, but I needed a lot of help from Hillelfrei and North8000 to get there.

I once used the argument to justify a non-free image inclusion that "no other article uses it". Like, no crap Sherlock, it's a non-free image. That's the point of a non-free image.

In a review for an article written by ImaginesTigers, I told him he uses too many em dashes and should switch some to commas. Literally who cares?

My original username was Le Panini, despite the fact that I am not French and the panini originates from Italy.

WP:TROUT

I signed up to be an Articles for creation reviewer, and Primefac gave me temporary permissions so he can view how skillful I am at reviewing them. I had one month to do so and reviewed no articles. Shockingly, I was never given the permissions.

In March 2021, I accidentally used Twinkle to delete the main page.