User:Engleham
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An occasional Wikipedia contributor when boredom strikes. Here are some other observations.
1. Contributing to Wikipedia for any reason other than idle personal amusement (such as a belief in adding to the world's knowledge, or correcting errors of perceived truth), is an exercise in futility. This is because your words are written in shifting pixels, that can be kicked over by any moron, or bigot, at any time. Which is why you'll see at the end of hundreds of User Pages such gentle sentiments as "Goodbye Fucktards!" One anonymous blogger once wrote: "Simply appearing in the Encyclopedia Britannica confers authority on an article. Simply appearing in Wikipedia does not, because you might hit the 90 second stretch before some loon's rewriting of history or science is found and fixed." Or is possibly reverted to an earlier revision that's even worse.
2. While Wikipedia admins include some of the nicest and most scholarly people, authority is of course no guarantee of wisdom, or even basic ethics. (e.g. see recent U.S. Presidental office holders.) Wikipedia admins also include a smattering of some of the most loathsome hypocrites, bullies and ill-educated individuals it is possible to imagine. (Not to mention an alarming number of 19 year olds with startlingly limited intellectual horizons.) If one can't find comedy in their words or stance, it's best to give up contributing, but sometimes their User Page personal photos can provide sources of endless hilarity, and indeed, wonder.
3. Most Talk pages for contributors, however mild-mannered the individual, eventually become sandboxes of ratbaggery.
4. Take a leaf out of Debra Lipstadt's book: just as she refuses point blank to debate with Holocaust deniers, don't waste a moment debating with anything resembling a fundie or a freeper. It's pointless, because they operate on a policy of absolute denial. You will get absolutely nowhere, and it's impossible to please them. Besides, life is too short. So, why waste your time on morons? If I don't respond to you, this may well be the reason.
5. Most contributors at some time will be charged with having "An Agenda". This is employed as an accusation. The reality is, ALL contributors to Wikipedia bring a personal agenda. If they didn't have that catalyst to contribute, Wikipedia's pages would be blank. For example, it may be stated that the broad homosexual or bisexual agenda, in tandem with the tsunami of scholarly revision since the 1970s, is merely to bring a semblance of balance to the historical record, where previously there was ignorance, evasion, or active suppression of truth. For a broader and illuminating discussion of this, see sections 3 and 4 (Scholarship and Homophobia/Criticism and Homophobia) in the landmark essay The Homophobic Imagination, which appeared in the journal College English in 1974. Link here: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pubd/homophobicimagination.html. (If the link is down use Archive.org)
6. Don't pander to Cite Trolls: i.e. those who misuse 'citation needed' to spatter it on commonly accepted points they disagree with merely as a blocking action.
