User:WhatamIdoing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hello, World.

Article ideas

These sound like interesting and notable subjects to me. Please feel free to start articles for one (or more!) of them. I'd love to read what you've written.

  • Menstrual magnification, perimenstrual changes in symptom severity (e.g., asthma, lupus)
  • Systemic problem, general category in which problems (e.g., racism, risk, violence) can't be solved through individual action
  • Brief Fatigue Inventory, assuming sufficient sources exist
  • Blue in food , distinguish from Blue food
  • Que no haya novedad or May no new thing arise, because change is bad
  • Neurotype, after figuring out whether it's a single trait ("the non-autistic neurotype") or an individual's combination of traits ("He has ADHD, anxiety, and autism"). See
  • Complaint box, because safety. Also bocche di leone in Venice.
  • Course sharing, online version of taking a class at a different school
  • Chicken Dinner (candy bar) by Sperry Candy Company
  • Epistemically unwarranted belief, a category of beliefs that include, but are not limited to, pseudoscience
  • Benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction
  • Editorial voice, because it doesn't mean "writes opinions" (See also Writer's voice; differentiate editorial style ["The paper adopted a playful editorial voice"] from editorial advocacy ["The paper was a strong editorial voice for democracy"])
  • Touch-a-truck event (and literacy/public health add-ons)
  • Iron-refractory iron deficiency anemia (IRIDA)
  • Rumpelstiltskin effect, because naming a diagnosis gives power, but can also bring helplessness

Essay idea:

  • On the Dunning–Kruger effect, and editors who are very confident that they are very accurate at figuring out who is an undisclosed paid editor

Things I do

and that you can, too:

Policies and guidelines you can ask me about

Stories I tell on wiki

  • Wikipedia:Bring me a rock
    • On demanding an endless parade of sources, especially when sourcing isn't the main problem
  • Hoyle's Law
    • Whatever the game, whatever the rules, the rules are the same on both sides.
  • User:WhatamIdoing/Subjectivity in Wikipedia articles
    • Articles that omit subjectivity usually violate the WP:YESPOV policy. An article about an international trade dispute, for example, should explain the situation from the viewpoint of both countries – not just one or the other, and not just universally agreed-upon information.
  • The three umpires, on the differences between reality, perception, and definition:
    • Three baseball umpires are talking about their profession and the difficulty of making accurate calls in borderline cases. One says: "Some are strikes, and some are balls, and I call them as they are." The next feels a little professional humility is in order and says: "Some are strikes, and some are balls, and I call them as I see them." The third thinks for a moment and says: "Some are strikes, and some are balls, but they ain't nothing until I call them."
  • On the WP:BIASED source:
    • During a bout of library censorship ("Think of the children"), E. B. White recommended that schools "should strive for a well-balanced library, not a well-balanced book". The English Wikipedia agrees with this viewpoint and therefore does not ban sources based on their viewpoint or for "being biased". If one wants to write neutrally about a subject, one usually wants a source that argues strongly for a particular side, and a source that argues equally well for the other side. When you are trying to meet the policy requirements of WP:YESPOV, a source that says viewpoints differ is not nearly as useful as a pair of sources each arguing cogently and clearly that their side should have won the 1985 World Series.
  • On the definition of cure, which is different from feeling better:
    • We all hope for people with cancer to be cured, but most of us don't know how to tell when someone has been cured. The scientific definition involves plotting disease-free survival curves and figuring out when the slope goes flat. For the more common kinds of breast cancer, you're usually cured if you have been disease-free for three years. So this means that if you have breast cancer and have no detectable disease three years later, then you're cured. And if breast cancer is detected in subsequent years, it's a new primary, not a recurrence of the old one. The numbers vary by disease (e.g., 15 years for some lung cancers) and by the exact type, but it's fundamentally a calculus problem. But normal people don't think that way. More to the point, they don't feel that way. They'll say that they were cured when they felt cured. This might be when active treatment ended, or when the first test gave good news, or when a troublesome side effect wore off, or when a personally significant milestone passed (e.g., a birthday), or at any other time, for any reason that appeals to them. Or they might that they're still not cured, even though their doctors say they are, because they just don't feel it. Feeling it isn't everything, but where humans and their behaviors are concerned, the objective mathematical facts aren't everything, either.
  • Dave Barry's Bad Habits (1987, "College Admissions", pp. 202–203) has a beautiful description of how not to write a Wikipedia article:
    • "Sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you’ll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: 'Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or ‘crying’ behavior forms.' If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant."
  • On the belief that all publicity is good publicity:
  • On the number of editors needed to make a decision
    • Google used to put prospective candidates through 12 interviews. However, the answer rarely changed after the fourth interview. The opinion of just four interviewers was enough in 95% of cases. Do we really think that we normally need more editors to answer a question about an article than a business needs to decide whether to hire a job seeker?
  • We've got to get the article content right.
    • And we need to stop worrying so much about how fancy the sources are. According to doi:10.1145/3366423.3380300, readers don't use the sources nearly as often as experienced editors do. For 99.7% of page views, the readers don't click through on a single ref. About once out of every 300 page views, one reader will click through to one source. If there are 10 refs in the article, you have to have more than 3,000 page views before anyone will try to read the ref you just added. Once.
    • Another way to put this is: readers are at least 300 times as likely to read the sentence you wrote than to read the source you cited. Make sure that sentence is right – fair, accurate, up-to-date, and representative of the whole body of the relevant literature – before you worry about polishing up the citations. Citations to high-quality sources are the means to a good article, not an end goal.
    • See User:Rjjiii/How do folks read Wikipedia? for more information about what readers will actually read.
  • If you want to understand Wikipedia's community: ISBN 9780060971656.
    • On the six usual responses: "In practical terms we have the usual six options. One: do nothing. Two: issue a statement deploring the speech. Three: lodge an official protest. Four: cut off aid. Five: break off diplomatic relations. And six: declare war." (p. 49)
    • On how to avoid doing things that you don't want to do: Claim that it's too soon. Agree that something should be done, but question whether this the right thing to do. Now is not the time. There are technical, political, or legal problems. And now it's too late. (p. 93)
    • On how to discredit a source: "Hint at security considerations... it might be misinterpreted... it's better to wait" for another, stronger source, especially if no such better source is likely to be forthcoming. (p. 258–259)
    • The five standard excuses: I can't tell you because WP:BEANS, but trust me. The problem is too few resources. "It was a worthwhile experiment", even if it turned out to be a disaster in practice. "It occurred before important facts were known, and cannot happen again". "It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual which has now been dealt with under internal disciplinary proceedings". (p. 338)
    • Dressing things up in incomprehensible jargon lets you tell people things while minimizing the risk that they will understand you. (p. 465–476)
  • "The King's Favorite" is a Chinese folk tale that I like. It runs something like this:
    • "The king's favorite mistress was a beautiful woman. One day, her mother fell ill, and when she heard about this, she immediately commandeered the king's carriage so she could rush to her mother's side. The law said that anyone who rode in the king's carriage without his permission would have a foot chopped off as punishment, but when the king heard of her actions, he praised her: 'What filial devotion! She has risked amputation to do her duty to her mother.' Another day, they were sitting together in the garden. She took a bite of her peach, and it tasted so good that she offered it to the king. He later said, 'What true love! She gave up her own pleasure for my sake!'
      Some years later, when her beauty began to fade, the king was less pleased with her. One day he said to his vizier, 'Why do I put up with that woman? Didn't she once run off in my carriage without permission? And another time, she gave me something to eat that she'd already taken a bite out of!'"
  • Wikipedia is a do-ocracy.
    • "In one sense, and that the eternal sense, the thing is plain. The answer to the question, 'What is Wrong?' is, or should be, 'I am wrong.' Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby."[1]
    • If you want something fixed, then fix it. Don't vote that it ought to be somebody else's problem instead of your own.
    • And if you do vote to boss around other editors, then don't whinge about how those other lazy volunteers didn't do the thing that you didn't choose to do yourself. If your ideal is a source for every article, then get busy adding sources. Wikipedia doesn't have 36,047 unreferenced articles because other editors are bad or lazy; it has 36,047 unreferenced articles because you haven't added any references to those unreferenced pages yet. If this problem isn't a high enough priority for you to fix yourself, then you shouldn't be complaining that other editors didn't think it was a high enough priority for them to fix it for you. There's a name for that kind of behavior, and it's not a nice one.
  • Using a telephone game as our primary way to to teach people how to edit is a bad idea. In the 1980s, when the internet was much smaller, we used to tell this story about communication:

In the beginning was The Plan, and the Assumptions;
And the Plan was without form, and the Assumptions were void;
And darkness was upon the faces of the implementers.

And they spake unto their manager, saying:
"it is a crock of $#@%, and it stinketh".

And the manager went to the department manager, and he spake unto him saying:
"It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof".

And the department manager went to the director, and he spake unto him saying:
"It is a container of manure, and it is so strong that none by abide before it".

And the director went to the Vice President, and he spake unto him saying:
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength".

And the Vice President went to the Senior Vice President, and he spake unto him saying:
"It contains that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong".

And the Senior Vice President went to the CEO, and he spake unto him saying:
"It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful".

And the CEO went to the Board of Directors, and he spake unto them, saying:
"This powerful new project will promote the growth of the organization".

And the Board of Directors looked upon The Plan, and they saw that it was good.

Why Wikipedia doesn't standardize everything

Wikipedia doesn't standardize section headings for citations because the real world doesn't. There are four major style guides that are heavily used in universities, and articles using each one can be found on Wikipedia. Each requires a different name above the list of sources that were used to support content in an academic paper:

  • Chicago Manual of Style: "Center the title Bibliography about one inch from the top of the page" (used by fine arts and historians)
  • APA style: "In APA style, the alphabetical list of works cited, which appears at the end of the paper, is titled 'References.'" (used by sociologists and psychologists)
  • The MLA Style Manual: "Center the title Works Cited about one inch from the top of the page." (used in humanities)
  • Council of Science Editors: "Center the title References (or Cited References) and then list the works you have cited in the paper; do not include other works you may have read." (used by scientists)

Wikipedia hasn't chosen one over another because nobody wants to be stuck telling the English people that they have to follow scientific conventions, or the history folks that they're required to follow the English manual.

That, which, and who

  • The relative pronoun that is used for restrictive clauses: The car that is red is broken. (The other cars are other colors, and whether they are broken is not stated.)
  • The relative pronoun which is used for non-restrictive clauses, such as a description: The car, which is red, is broken. (There's only one car, and I thought you might like to know what color it was painted.)
  • The relative pronoun who is correctly used in either of these manners, so long as the antecedent is a person. In some situations, such as describing a marginalized group of people, some people may object to the "de-humanization" of the antecedent if that or which are chosen instead of the personhood-affirming who. However, that and which are grammatically correct, and their use in older and formal English is well-established. For example:
    • John 11:25 (KJV): "Jesus said unto her, 'I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.'"
    • Luke 16:10 (ERV): "He that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much."
    • Romeo and Juliet: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."
    • Poor Richard's Almanack: He that's content, hath enough; He that complains, has too much.
    • Thomas Paine: "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression."
    • John Bunyan: "He that is down needs fear no fall..."

Smiles

Memory hole

Essays I've written

Boring links

Notice

Related Articles

Wikiwand AI