Wikipedia:Don't be anal

Cleaning your toilet bowl regularly is a healthy practice. Cleaning it meticulously after every usage is "anal" and obsessive.

Wikipedia has a basic guideline that suggests you must not be anal(logical): "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it." This is not very good for anal people, who pay such obsessive attention to detail that the obsession becomes an annoyance to others. Anal editors often want to maintain control of their writing. If you are anal, though, here is some advice about how you can pretend not to be.

If someone reverts you, don't revert, at least not right away.

When reverted don't look up "right away," in the dictionary, and then set your highly accurate watch to alert you when the time is up. That's anal, and you need professional help.

Don't argue for a single word or phrase, unless it's really important. If everyone tells you it isn't important, and you think it is, either you're right or you are one anal "he or she'. Don't change "they" to "he or she." That's anal, because being anal just means being consistent, logical and philosophically inclined.

Anal people care about little things as if they were big things. While an anal(logical) person is trying to find exactly the right phrase, everyone else has gone on to bigger and better things. Still, it's not a sin to be anal. Anal people are also known as Wiki gnomes, and people like Wiki gnomes. Wiki gnomes are like snails who clean the fish tank of algae. For instance, there is serious debate as to whether it was an anal person or a Wiki gnome who put a {{refimprove}} tag on the Toilet paper article. What makes a person truly anal is a combination of attitude and the inability to let go of what everyone else thinks is "shit".

A truly anal person is one
Who knows by Jove the word
Should, in this case versus that case be
Ridiculous, not absurd.

By the way, don't analize [1] the links too carefully, for lots of reasons, including, that could be considered anal, too.

One good thing about being an anal person, is that if someone calls you an asshole, you can thank them, because as far as you are concerned, they are only referring to your wiki gnome activities.

What really turns a lot of anal(logical) people on is that Wikipedia might provide backsplatter for their personal issues, which is hard for them to get any other way. This is known as POV pushing. Besides being an acronym for point of view, POV could also be an acronym for Personally Ordered Version, of the Perfectly Obvious Verity, and the word "pushing" is used because, well, you know.

Anal people usually don't get on well together. Even though they speak similar languages, differences of race or culture tend to get in the way of communication, and conflict tends to arise stemming from their differing visions of syntax and whether the first or second definitions of particular words in the dictionary are best known to the public.

However, there are good things which can come of being anal, thoroughness being one of them. This is a difficult problem. Due to the fact that anal people never clean out their watchlists, not even the redlinks because the articles might get re-created, one anal person can't skulk around an article for a while till the other anal person leaves, hoping to put his own version in place. If you weren't so worried about giving out your email address you could form a gang to help out, but you are, so you can't.

Finally, don't link to this essay when trying to wikilawyer things into, or out of, an article. If you do, you're anal. And I am analizing your incoherent essay.