User talk:Whodat2112

Welcome!

Hello, Whodat2112, 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! Jytdog (talk) 15:35, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Quick note

Hi, you are new here. I saw the note you left on Alexbrn's page, here. Just wanted to let you know that this comment was very out of line. We talk about content, not contributors - and we especially never talk about editor's personal motivations or their personal history. It is totally fine to ask someone "can you please explain why you made that change?", but not to try to dig into personal motiviations.

If you do decide to stick around (and I hope you do!), please do know that Wikipedia is actually a pretty complicated place.

Being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" means that over the years, Wikipedia has developed lots of policies and guidelines (WP:PAG) to help provide a "body of law" as it were, that form a foundation for rational discussion. Without that foundation, this place would be a wild west - a truly ugly place. But with the foundation, there are ways to rationally work things out - if, and only if, all the parties involved accept that foundation and work within it. One of the hardest things for inexperienced people, is to understand not only that this foundation exists, but what its letter and spirit is, (I emphasize the spirit, because too often people fall prey to what we call "wikilawyering"); another mistake that people fall prey to, is to question other editors personal motivations, rather than talking about how some bit of content, or a source, works in the context of PAG. We discuss content, not contributors, and unless there is something really glaringly obvious going on, we assume good faith about each other.

The more I have learned about how things are set up here - not just the letter of PAG and the various drama boards and administrative tools, but their spirit - the more impressed I have become at how beautiful this place can be. It takes time to learn both the spirit and the letter of PAG, and to really get aligned with Wikipedia's mission to crowdsource a reliable, NPOV source of information for the public (as "reliable" and "NPOV" are defined in PAG!).

People come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead to tendentious editing, which is really destructive. Advocacy is one of our biggest bedevilments. Anyway, I do hope you take your time and learn how things work. There are lots of people here who are happy to teach, if you open up and listen and ask authentic questions, not rhetorical ones. Good luck! Jytdog (talk) 15:45, 10 May 2014 (UTC)