User talk:Guycalledryan
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Welcome to my talk page, please create a new section at the bottom of the page for each issue. I've stuffed up my archives for now, but once I fix it I'll put them up.
[edit] Law and Order; Editing [second revision]
- Preface
Sorry to treat your User talk page like the sandbox but I'm rusty with my editing.
I changed my original post slightly so that it fits together better, the next paragraph was originally last.
- The Intent
The first thing to say while writing all this stuff on your talk page, stuff that probably mostly doesn't belong here, but again, I don't plan at this moment to be part of the Wikipedia community, and thus I just hope that one person reads this and maybe understands what may prompt some people to use this resource but not improve it. The statements below are no reflection on you; I don't know you, and they aren't meant to express any sort of ill will about your actions. I just got derailed from the editing experience before I could really get into it, and never said anything to any other editor about it, really. I hope that before you delete this, as it appears to be rather inappropriate for a talk page, according to what little I read in the talk page guidelines, that you maybe take something from it--hell, maybe not even what I intend you to take from it, but take something--and maybe do something to help the next newcomer who may become discouraged.
- The Logorrhea
I get that the editor should of the article should be more thoughtful in editing the article; failing to cite, especially with the use of so-called "weasel words", is somewhat lazy or the mark of a poor editor, but I think that simply making a 'citation needed' edit is also the hallmark of a poor or lazy editor: if you care about the article's integrity, and a somewhat easily cited claim like the specific claim we are talking about is made, then I feel one is no less duty-bound to doing a more useful job as an editor other than flagging another editor's failure.
While I understand that part of becoming a good editor is having one's revisions flagged and marked in such a manner to facilitate improvement in one's editing, I think some discretion should be used. If you flag for citation an item like the one that led to this conversation, which is probably likely to have a source or two that one could also easily find, then the act of basically telling the original editor to do what you could also easily do can seem rather petty to newcomers, who are usually the sorts of editors to be asked to cite their sources. I've seen edits that were purely of a technical nature, devoid of any actual content, and maybe useful editors put a note on that user's talk page, and maybe there's something to be said for attracting users whose ability to edit and receive positive or negative feedback on their editing is of a high standard, but I don't know. All I know is there's a few things that bother me about Wikipedia and one of them is the inability of a lot of editors to understand a newcomer's point of view; they end up seeming like the encyclopedic version of a 'grammar nazi' more than anything else.
Of course, there are tons of terrible articles on Wikipedia, and tons of good ones, and I don't know much about the inner workings or the site and what sort of approach works best for dealing with newcomers, so perhaps I'm off base here. All I'm saying is that it occasionally turns me off to see an article that is decently written filled with 'citation needed' notes over and over again; while I understand that such edits underscore the importance of a well-sourced article, sometimes it just comes across like... petty, and cold. It makes it seem like the editor who does that doesn't care about the article itself, or the topic, just that the newcomer conform to Wikipedia's standards, and for some reason I get the feeling that in the end, the vast majority of time a newcomer chooses to make their first edits, it's because they care about that article or that topic.
Anyway, I guess I'm a hypocrite because I haven't bothered to register (actually, I've registered twice--I don't bother to log in anymore. See below). So I too am guilty of lacking a full commitment to making Wikipedia better, both by ignoring many of the simple errors I see and by not choosing to add content on articles about topics in which I am familiar and interested. So, shame on me too, I guess.
- The Straw Man That Broke the Camel's Back
As for why I don't log in anymore, I originally registered with one username, some time ago, and after a while I decided I wanted to use another username; a username I use more often on other sites, and which was the same as a domain I owned for several years before I let it lapse recently because I was spending a few bucks a year to do nothing with it. My registration was as such:
Username: specificusername E-Mail: specificusername@specificusername.com
and at the time I owned specificusername.com.
I think by now you understand that 'specificusername' is an identical sequence of characters in all of those instances.
Anyway, shortly after registering my account was suspended or something by someone who said my account violated the username policy. After reading the username policy, I saw where it may be interpreted as a violation of that, however, given all the factors above I thought it was really a matter of discretion, and I responded to the person who suspended me and requested I change my username. They never really responded, and I didn't feel like reading 40 articles on how to resolve various disputes to be treated in a judicious manner. It felt petty and off-putting in the same way I've described above. So I didn't bother with the whole idea of trying to make Wikipedia better anymore. For the most part, Wikipedia exists in a read-only mode to me now.
69.124.205.76 (talk) 19:09, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
