User:Ritchie333/Wikipedia doesn't own you

Are you fed up with the drama, edit warring and BLP violations? Well, it's not your job so chill.

All Wikipedia content − articles, categories, templates, and other types of pages − is edited collaboratively. No one, no matter how browbeaten, or of how high frustration in the community, has the requirement to act as though he or she is obliged to edit a particular page. Also, a person or an organisation, which is the subject of an article, does not need to look at the article, and has every right to walk away from it.

We spend a lot of time throwing WP:OWN around as an insult. "Stop reverting. You don't WP:OWN this page" or "I'm deleting this badly sourced content. I don't care how much you hate the subject - you can't WP:OWN what happens to it" But the policy works the other way too. If you want somebody to do something on Wikipedia, you can suggest, advise what to do, and you can try and make them inclusive of your ideas, but you can't make them do it. Don't rise to bait like "this prose reads like an uneducated drunk wrote it, fix it" - the encyclopedia won't improve if people threaten things, and the average reader won't notice the threat anyway. After all, if the prose is so bad, why don't they fix it?

In fact, spending time away from Wikipedia can be a good thing. If you take time out, particularly over stressful conflict, you'll get a much better perspective on things and discover that what we often fight over is generally not the end of the world, after all.

Exceptions

Don't take this advice too far. You can walk away from things, but how is the encyclopaedia going to get better if you're away? It's unlikely you'll get an article to Featured article status if you decide things are too much and want a break.

And if you're an administrator, ignoring requests to justify your actions is generally fatal. So if you have the mop and bucket, I'm afraid this advice can't necessarily apply to you.