User talk:Darkmanfan

Your edits to comics articles

Please stop adding information to suggest that WCCA awards are worthless. Your edits are misleading and you are completely misrepresenting the content of the article you cite; the article that you are citing in the reference actually says the very opposite of what you're trying to say in your edits. Stop being a dick. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 01:53, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're trying to say, or the position you were making at the AfD discussion...but if I am correct in understanding that you knowingly added that incorrectly interpreted quotation (about participation ribbons) to several articles just to prove a point and to get people to come to the AfD discussion, I recommend you read the essay Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 02:52, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

If there is a problem that's appearing in a wide number of articles, you can bring it up at the appropriate WikiProject (such as WikiProject Comics, where you can leave a message on the talk page. In theory this will bring attention to the issue, although in practice I think it varies depending on the project; WPComics, in my experience, is not very responsive.

If it's just a matter of someone making a bogus argument like what Dragonfiend was saying at AfD, you can respond to the argument at the place where it originated and point out why it's flawed.

I'm not sure in what other articles that ref has been used. My best advice is to clean the instances up on a case-by-case basis: i.e., if there is an article where that ref is used incorrectly, fix the instance in that article, with an edit summary saying what the problem was, and if people challenge it then start a discussion at that article's talk page about why the ref is being interpreted incorrectly. Then, in the future, if you see the same problem at other articles, you can fix the problem and point people to the earlier discussion you had at the first article where there was a problem.

Anyway, as a rule of thumb, when someone makes a ridiculous claim (as Dragonfiend did at AfD), it's always better to explain at the page why the claim is ridiculous, rather than to demonstrate by applying the ridiculous claim somewhere and seeing what happens. With what happened here, it probably gives you the opportunity to say "I told you so" to Dragonfiend when he sees how quickly people rejected the notion that a WCCA award is non-notable...but, on the flip side, you run the risk of getting yourself in serious trouble (I myself was on the verge of reporting you, until you left your message at my talk page) and you confuse editors who haven't been involved in the discussion (for example, the point you were making was totally lost on me because I wasn't aware of the context in which you were making those edits; I just assumed you were a vandal). And, of course, there is the more basic problem that in between your edits and someone else's reverting, a casual reader might go to the article and read misinformation that will stick with them in the future. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 03:21, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

No problem; I often felt the same way when I started. WikiProjects are definitely one good resource to deal with issues across articles (although, like I said, sometimes it's hard to get a response, as certain WikiProjects are less active than others and the people don't necessarily check the discussion pages regularly). The other good thing to do is get in touch directly with other editors who are heavily involved in those kinds of articles. One way to figure out who is involved in those articles is to go to the WikiProject and see the list of active members; another way is to look at the edit history for an article and see which couple names pop up over and over again. If you have a problem, people like that are often good to leave messages with because they may be well-aware of stuff that's going on in related articles. In general, though, the more you edit, the more you'll see that things are more interconnected than you would expect—I'm often surprised by how much is going on behind the scenes here, and how quickly people can descent on an article (seemingly out of nowhere) when there's an issue that needs to be addressed.

Don't worry too much about your edits before, it was mostly just a misunderstanding. Thanks for taking the time to ask me about these things. Let me know if you have any more questions in the future. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 03:48, 18 November 2008 (UTC)