User:The Red Hat of Pat Ferrick
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I'm mainly interested in the history of European empires, from the Portuguese capture of Ceuta in 1415, right up to the Portuguese handover of Macau to China in 1999. I've contributed a great deal to the British Empire article, I have cleaned up the language of the Portuguese Empire, and am presently contributing with others to build up the Dutch Empire and Italian Empire articles.
I can get a bit hot under the collar here at WP, but I try normally to make it for a good reason - usually because of violations of WP:NOR, WP:RSS or WP:NOT.
[edit] Misguided Arguments I've Come Across At Wikipedia
- Those that inhabit a nation, city etc are better qualified to edit articles relating to those places than those who do not - employed ad nauseam at the Gibraltar page. One only has to imagine experts about the Moon, Britain in the industrial revolution or Antarctica to see why this argument is flawed.
- Removal of "true" or "sourced" material from Wikipedia is unconstructive/vandalistic: one of the purposes of Editing is to ensure that the text being edited is of appropriate length. This may mean removing irrelevant information or a level of detail that is not required. The fact that the excised words may be "true" is neither here nor there. Furthermore, the whole point about encyclopaedias is that if you want more detail on something you can jump to the article on that topic. Someone reading about the British Empire may be interested to know that Britain recaptured them following an Argentine invasion, but would they care to know that 649 Argentines and 258 British lost their lives (as sad as that is)? Probably not, but if they do, that is what the Falklands War link is for - so they can read more.
- Deletions are "bad": a similar argument to the one above - if this was true, Wikipedia articles could never get smaller, only bigger.
