User:64.81.243.120
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I avoid WikiStress by not having a Wikipedia account. I would much rather have someone just revert my changes if they think they're bad, than debate with them about why my changes aren't bad.
One of my pet peeves is the subtle problem of bad wikilinks. There's a few kinds of these. For one, there's "see also" links which only give the title of the linked article, but no explanation of how it is related to the current article. For another, there's links where the "|" character is used to change the name of the link to a non-descriptive term.
For example, in an article about a television show, I saw a wikilink to the word "set", in the sentence "The series was set in Los Angeles". I wondered, what could this be a link to? Is there an article about television filming sets? Or will it be an article about sets of things? It turned out it was a link to "List of television shows set in Los Angeles". Not what one would have expected from seeing just the word "set" as a wikilink, even in this context.
In situations like that, there are a couple of things you can do that make the article more readable. You can try to rephrase the sentence that the wikilink is in, to make it so a more descriptive word or phrase is there to be linked, such as "Like many other shows, the series was set in Los Angeles." Or, you can put the link at the end of the article, in a "See Also" section. Or if you don't feel like creating a "See Also" section, you can just put the link in parentheses, such as "The series was set in Los Angeles (see also List of television shows set in Los Angeles)."
While I'm at it, another wikipeeve of mine is articles that are not written with total newbs to the subject in mind. One of my recent corrections was in the article on the old soap opera parody, Soap. The intro to the article ended with the line, "Confused? You won't be..." As a fan of the series, I recognized this as the ending of the show's introductory sequence, and it was kinda funny there at the end of the article's intro, where it had just described all the convoluted storylines.
But if I was a person who was completely unfamiliar with the show, going to that article to find out about it, the line would have no meaning for me. I would take it to be some POV endorsement that I should watch the show and get less confused, or some person graffitizing the page with phony prophecies.
So I edited the article, and changed it so that it said that something along the lines of "After a description of the convoluted storyline, the introductory sequence ended with the line, 'Confused? You won't be...'". It ruined the joke, but the primary goal of Wikipedia is always to spread information.
On a related topic, another pet peeve of mine is movie and book articles that don't give spoilers. If I'm reading the article about a book in Wikipedia, it's because I want to know everything about it, not because I want a sales pitch that leaves me tantalized enough to read the book. Of course, one should always precede spoilers with the spoiler warning tag, but one should never just leave the spoilers out. People should have the choice to have the plot spoiled if they want it.
Looking over it, I can see that my wikipeeves all center around the same thing: ommitting information. Wikipedia is supposed to be a sum of all human knowledge. It is not appropriate to omit information for the sake of irony, suspense, or glibness.
For the sake of brevity and conciseness, well, that's okay. But don't leave something out just for kicks.
