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With the neologism wikilosophy I try to formulate my ideas and vision on my contributions to Wikipedia.
I have a unique Manual of Style that for the most part follows the general MOS of Wikipedia and in some parts slightly deviates from that. The lay-out of my articles is using the various options in terms of templates, tables, images and styles that are available to us, the editors, to use. I intend to serve a broad audience; as individuals are never equal and everybody has his or her own preferences, my articles contain many images and tables for the visually focused and list-oriented readers. Not everybody likes to read large pieces of text and especially relevant images and the many beautiful photos made available on Commons are useful to illustrate the topics that are written about.
There seems to be a tendency on Wikipedia to avoid red links. Red links are the basis of Wikipedia; an interested reader may find the time and interest to start an article about a topic that is not yet present. A blue article without red links gives the false notion that "Wikipedia is complete", which it never will be. Red links are also useful to first describe major topics and later fill in those with new articles and not having to go back to all those other articles the new article should be linked to and edit those pages again; double and senseless work.
The use of see-alsos is especially for mobile readers, an ever increasing amount, useful as navboxes and sidebars are not (yet) shown in the mobile version of Wikipedia. The see alsos at the base of the article I intend to organise by quality, for two main reasons; to help the reader assess what is the best article to click on to read more about a topic or related topics and to praise the hard work that people have put in articles. Featured, good and C-to-A class content should be promoted, not hidden in between stubs and other short less-informative pieces of work. Linking to stubs can be useful to show there is a lot of work to be done still, so to show "this needs expansion".
Respect for knowledge, expertise and work[edit]Wikipedia is filled with all kinds of editors and different personalities. It is a community that not really is a community. What I've experienced is that there are quite some people around who seem to have no respect for the hard work of others and behave as autistic trolls, destroying the work of people who have donated their time and effort on this project. I like to compare Wikipedia to an open office space. In such a situation, the cleaning lady (m/f) would not dare to touch the desk of one of the experts and shuffle things around to the liking without showing respect for the expertise and choices of that expert. On Wikipedia it ought to work like that too. Great that cleaners or scavengers are going through articles, but on this huge project there is enough to do without needing to intervene with the choices of people who clearly demonstrated constructive editing.
I know that this is not an academic area, although quite some editors have an academic background, but it is what it should aspire to. This needs to be reflected in the articles written; well-referenced and organised in a professional manner. That is what I intend to do with all my articles.
Respect is reciprocal; people who show respect, will receive respect. And my attitude is like that equally to people who don't show respect; I don't respect them; they have called that upon themselves. Autistic trolls who refuse to discuss and dump ugly "RfD tags" on an article and then let others fight for weeks to maintain the hard work that destructive troll wanted to get removed do not deserve any respect. There are millions of ways to discuss on Wikipedia (the Talk page of the article should be the first location, alternatively there are User talk pages) and this behaviour should not be tolerated here. Same for revert wars; if you make a good case for a revert that is unwanted by the main author or other contributors to articles, templates and lists, then you can list your arguments on the talk page and people will be willing to listen to those. Primitive neanderthalism is not what a professional working environment should have.
Stubs are pretty useless. Stubs show behaviourial character of "I dump this piece here and maybe someone will do something about it". That is not a constructive, professional attitude in my opinion and stubs are ugly. What is categorised as stubs in many cases aren't stubs. The vast database of biological articles is an example of that; that moth found in some forest in Borneo is just that; there is not much more to write about. So that is not a stub. It may be categorised as a start, if you wish, but it is not a dumppiece that many real stubs are. Looking through the stubs it also is clear that most of them "never" get expanded. People want to write new articles or work on the expansion of others with more potential, so stubs stay stubs for ages, which is also not really helpful.
Every article that falls in the category "suitable for an infobox", and the majority of articles are like that, should have an infobox. It is a professional way to neatly organise information and when clicking through articles of the same kind, it gives a comfortable "feel".
Apart from the earlier mentioned autistic trolls with no knowledge about the subject or respect for the (work of) the author(s), an annoyance is the abuse of periods/dots in captions, lists and tables. A caption is in many cases not a sentence and even if it is, a period doesn't fit. Periods are placed at the end of full sentences, in running text, period. Also in lists and tables in many cases it looks ugly and is misplaced. Other annoyances which may be related to the non-native use of English, are the repetition of adjectives. Good texts don't have that and it is the responsibility of the editor to look for decent alternatives or synonyms. How many times does one read article texts like "Many people were attacked in the Battle of Bayonne where many soldiers on many horses ran through the city and attacked the many people with many swords." It is a fictional case but that should be rewritten to something that reads better.
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