User:Very Polite Person/Every turd is entitled to be a rose

If you click on or bookmark "Special:Random" or "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random", you'll always land on a random article out of 7,159,968 possible pages. Do it a few times. Eventually, one will make you stop and think:

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

Shortcut WP:TURDWP:TURD

This page in a nutshell: Every article deserves to be made into the best version of itself. Build rather than destroy.

The why doesn't matter. If the subject is valid under policy, then it's here because somebody cared enough to make it. That's the only why. You saw their work because they made a deliberate choice to add something to history that they thought should—probably—survive longer than they will. The odds are many orders of magnitude nearer to 100% than 99% that these words you've just read will have outlasted the last person to edit them. They're dead. You're not.

They saved something for the future, that they thought people should know about.

Now ask yourself:

• Does the subject meet notability?

If the answer is no, you still have two choices:

• A: Do the work. Hunt down news, books, archives. Dig deep. Build it up. Maybe you don't care about the topic, but the words you write may still be read a hundred years from now. Someone once wrote a source you used from more than a century ago—pay it forward.

• B: Nominate for deletion. That's a valid path too. If the subject becomes notable someday, someone might recreate it. Or maybe not. Some articles exist only because one editor thought to write them once. If you choose B, that's okay.

If the answer is yes, then enjoy the article. And then read option A again—because you can always make it stronger.

Remember: you may never care about the topic. That doesn't matter. Lots of us write on subjects we don't care about, simply because it's fun, or because knowledge deserves to be preserved. What you build here may outlive you. Someone might read your work years after you're gone. Not many professional writers get to say that. So what will you write today? Maybe the article feels like junk to you. Fine. To someone else, it was worth creating. It brought them joy. Your crap is their flower. You just happened to step in it. But it still deserves to be polished.

We should remember the mission statement of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

If we didn't carry forward knowledge, we'd still be in caves, afraid of the stars. We don't know what today's odd little article will mean tomorrow. To quote J.R.R. Tolkien:

Every turd is entitled to be a rose.