User talk:Flipperbw

Hello, and a sincere welcome to Wikipedia. Also, I do believe you are making an effort to make Wikipedia better, and I know it is natural to be frustrated by my actions, which you think are making WP worse. I also do appreciate how long it took to write what you did, and that I erased that all with a click of the "undo" button.

There are many things to say, but I figure I'll start from an angle quite similar to yours. Let me begin by saying I am both a buffalo and a university student, so we're on the same page as far as that goes. I've also had to deal with people deleting content in this very article. I encourage you to look at the article's history. Not so long ago the article's entire content was deleted (see here: [1]). This infuriated me, but that did not make them wrong. As much as I knew that content should be on WP, he was absolutely correct that there were no reliable sources for the article. Reliable sources are hard to come by for drinking games, but that's life. It took me a long time to find good sources for even what's still in the article now.

There are a great number of reasons why I deleted what you wrote. The first thing to note is that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, see WP:INDISCRIMINATE. It is not, as you say, "to collect and quantify the sum of human knowledge". This is a common misconception. What does go in must be both notable and verifiable: see Wikipedia:Notability and Wikipedia:Verifiability. As for whether or not your source is reliable, see Wikipedia:RS. These policies might seem bureaucratic or arbitrary, but they are the reason Wikipedia is not just complete chaos and remains useful. That might not be obvious at first, but with time it becomes clear.

The problem with your source is first and foremost that it's plainly copied from Wikipedia, be it by you or someone else. And I think you'll agree that that can't possibly used as proof that what you wrote is true or notable. And I'm sorry, but the UPenn version is no more notable than all the other versions around the world, of which there are many, but none are reliably sourced, see here.

Wikipedia is run by volunteers, who edit in their free time. The other articles have their problems too, but I can't do everything so I try to deal with a bit at a time. Also, I happen to have played some of those games, so I'm not going to pedantically delete information which I know to be true, but I would be powerless to stop those who want to. Never Have I Ever, by the way, is well-sourced.

I hope I've addressed your questions, and if you have any more, please let me know. I hope the frustration I know this caused will not deter you from further contributing. Finding reliable sources for those other articles might be a start!

Sincerely, Oreo Priest ^talk 01:34, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And here's the boilerplate welcome message for good measure:

Welcome!

Hello, Flipperbw, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome!