cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33178998

What's that I hear you say? I'm a hack fraud whose shower thoughts are stupid and have no evidence? I agree, so I did some digging in the literature and found the following:

• A graph of the nuclear arsenals of the USA and USSR from 1945–2019.

• A graph of the population of Greenland from 1780–2000.

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/22167250

The Mayor of Calgary, Canada, just received this warning letter

Context

Alberta is a conservative Canadian province that is rich because they extract a lot of oil.

The Alberta Government opposes all measures that could reduce oil-production or reduce oil-consumption. For instance, the Government of Alberta publically protested against the Canadian Government when Canada tried to take measures to reduce plastic pollution.

Calgary is the largest city in Alberta. The city is facing the worse traffic violence in Canada.

Jyoti Gondek, Mayor of Calgary, recently suggested building more safe bike lanes to reduce car dependency. A few days later, her office received this warning letter from the Alberta Government.

I give the Deltarune fandom three months at this rate before it implodes.

Hey everyone. I've been considering if I should add this clause since November when I rebooted this community, but a post yesterday whose user-created title resulted in needless fighting in the comments finally made me organize my thoughts around why it should be implemented.

Keep in mind that there are no ex post facto rules in this community; anything posted before this isn't subject to this amendment. (Although if you've posted something, going back and making sure it conforms would make me very happy.) Before getting to my rationale, the Rule 3 extension is bolded below while verbosity getting axed is struck through:

"Posts should use high-quality sources, and posts about an article should have the same headline as that article. You may edit your post if the source rewrites the headline. For a rough idea, check out this list. ~~If it’s marked in red, it probably isn’t allowed; if it’s yellow, exercise caution.~~"

1. User-created headlines are often far more ambiguous. As an example, "Trump voters are afraid that he would hold his promise to cut medicaid". Which Trump voters specifically? The real headline tells us: "4 in 10 Republicans worried Medicaid cuts would hurt their communities: Poll". As another example (of a screenshot of an article; I've considered for a long time if image posts are healthy for this community as it was the original intention to be articles-only, but I don't want to adjudicate that here): "Only thing worse than ICE agents..." The title is a joke instead of telling readers anything relevant unless they click on the image.

TL;DR: Weasel words and jokes obscuring the facts.

2. User-created headlines often introduce unsourced claims which the moderators have to meticulously check the article for. For example, "Michigan Arab community, a majority of who voted for Trump in 2024, are outraged that the man who instituted a Muslim travel ban in his first term, has done so again in his second". Refer back to (1) for "Who in the Michigan Arab community?", but more importantly, "a majority of who voted for Trump in 2024" is never once substantiated. This violates Rule 2, yes, because the OP doesn't use a high-quality source for this explanation of why their post fits the LAMF criteria, and hence this one was removed. But now a moderator has to read through the entire article just to see if this claim is substantiated there.

TL;DR: Unsourced information is much harder to prove and remove.

3. Original headlines usually have better grammar, spelling, and parseability. Refer to the example in (1), in which "are afraid that he would hold his promise to cut medicaid" is less parseable than "worried Medicaid cuts would hurt their communities". This is also a weird title on account of Trump already cutting Medicaid; this article is about them worrying about the effects of that.

TL;DR: Things written by professional writers are usually more readable.

4. Trying to establish rules around what headlines should and shouldn't include (jokes, unverified claims, etc.) is Sisyphean nonsense – not just so the mods don't have to meticulously arbitrate each one but so that users don't feel like they're playing the Password Game.

TL;DR: Moderating custom titles against (1), (2), and (3) is a nightmare.

5. The post body still exists for jokes, claims outside of the article for why this is relevant (provided you follow Rule 2 and source them), your thoughts on what's discussed, etc. We can let the people who want the color commentary go to the comments while letting people who want a useful link aggregator avoid interacting with them.

Because this removes the ability of the OP to explain relevance in the title, Rule 2 is rewritten slightly:

"If the reason your post meets Rule 1 isn't in the source, you must add a source in the post body (not the comments) to explain this."

Recently, I got a report about a post with the rationale: "[This story is] 15 years old". While the story's age didn't violate any established rules,* it was ironically removed anyway because it wasn't actually "leopards ate my face" (Rule 1).

With nearly unchecked power to fuck over his sadistic, servile voter base, a flood of Trump stories is unavoidable right now. However, unless there's a strong community consensus against it, from the day I reopened this community, I've wanted it to be a place for "leopards ate my face" stories about anyone anywhere on Earth at any point in history. The new Rule 6 enshrines this, even though it was always allowed because it wasn't against any rules. Shake things up with a story about a local government from the Yuan dynasty; see if I give a shit.

The only thing I'd ask (note: not a rule) is that if you post something that could be easily mistaken for a current event (e.g. a story from Trump's 2017–2021 term), please try to disclaim it in the title – maybe, for example, by putting the year at the end in brackets like '[2019]'. The sad reality is that many people haven't learned yet how important it is to look at an article before you comment about and share it around. This community has done a really good job so far of maintaining a healthy information ecosystem, so I trust your judgment.

* My promise as a moderator is that I'll do my best never to create any ex post facto rules. I have actually broken this: I've removed at least two posts for being reposts, but I didn't realize I'd never put a rule in place. In light of this, Rule 5 has been created, and Rule 0 has been moved to the top of the list of rules.

This post is here to soothe fears and give practical starting points, so there will be no sales pitch with reasons to edit. Skip around to whatever sections are relevant to you.

It's easier than it looks

Getting into Wikipedia looks like walking into a minefield: with 7 million articles, finding things to create is hard; a tangle of policies, guidelines, and cultures have developed over 25 years; and stories of experienced editors biting newcomers make it look like a fiefdom. "It takes a certain type, and I'm not that type" is how I used to look at it. What I didn't realize is that it doesn't take a type; it creates a type.

Everyone sucks at editing when they start. No one has ever started out knowing what they're doing. Even the project itself had to learn what it was doing. Here was our article on Guinea worm disease in 2004 plagiarized verbatim from the US CDC's website. Here's our article today. Teachers in 2005 used "Wikipedia" as a slur, and they were right: editors didn't know what they were doing. But somehow, they learned.

You might be right if you think editing wouldn't be worth your time or too boring. You might be right if you think you can't handle rejection from having your early edits changed or reverted (trust me: me too; it hurts). But if you've ever told yourself that you're not "competent enough" or wouldn't "fit in", then you're dead wrong; that humility is the kernel of a good editor. If you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you're prepared.

Prep work?

See what I said before: if you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you are prepared. If that satisfies you, skip this section. If you're not convinced, here's some material to make you feel more secure:

• Wikipedia operates on five fundamental principles called pillars; this is the most useful page you can read as a new editor.
• Too vague? "I need to grind to level 50 in the tutorial dungeon"? Fine. You asked for this. We have a page called "Contributing to Wikipedia" that gives you about a year of trial-and-error's worth of information if you can digest it.
• "Okay, fine, that's too much, but I still don't feel ready after reading the five pillars."
  • If you like reading, the 'Introduction' is for you.
  • If you like doing, The Wikipedia Adventure is for you.
• "But what if I get lost?" Experienced editors (especially admins) will probably help you out if you go to their talk page with a question, but for a 100% guaranteed answer, the Teahouse is always two clicks away. The two most prominent "hosts", Cullen328 and ColinFine, are both really nice and care a lot about the little guy.
• "But what if I don't fit in?" If you're not any of these things, you don't need to worry about fitting in.
• "But the markup looks too complicated." Thanks to the VisualEditor, you don't need to touch the markup for most edits. 99% of the time when experienced editors use markup, it's because it's faster, not because it's impossible in the VisualEditor.
• "I'm going to make mistakes." Literally everyone does. Here are some of the most common ones if you want to stay aware of them.

Everyone have their warm blankets on? Cool.

Getting started

Language

So you want to start but don't know where. The biggest consideration is what language you want. The English Wikipedia is only one of many, and an account on one lets you edit on all the others. Fundamental principles are the same between Wikipedias, but policies and guidelines might change, so beware if you want to straddle multiple languages. Just because it's the biggest, don't ever feel pressured to contribute in English; diversity is a strength, and Wikipedia needs more of it.

Registration

Before contributing anything, you should register an account. This gives you a face (a user page and user talk page), it gives you a track record that builds community trust, and it means your IP isn't publicly logged in the edit history. It also gives you access to the 'Preferences' tab, which becomes very useful when you start learning what its options mean.

Types of contributing

So what are the best kinds of edits to make to get into editing? (Disclaimer: Almost nobody stays on the same type of editing indefinitely, and all of these "types" are very, very broad categorizations of millions of types.) It really depends. We keep a task center classifying different types of contributions.

What I did

I started by fixing typos and grammatical errors on articles I was already reading, then when I got more comfortable, I started adding wikilinks to articles that didn't have enough. This continued for about a year until I made an article about a retro video game. In hindsight, it was really poor quality and a bad decision, but it evaded notice (I eventually cleaned it up some), and it was the point where I broke out into more intermediate and advanced types of contributing.

"Advanced" versus "non-advanced"

To be crystal clear: if you even just occasionally contribute with edits that don't require deep knowledge of Wikipedia or intensive effort, you're still an editor, you're still valued, and you're still helping. Wikipedia adheres to a hierarchy only when strictly necessary (even admins are not considered "above" other editors), and you aren't treated as disposable just because you haven't almost single-handedly made Wikipedia the best resource for US local television stations in human history (srsly gurl how the fuuuuuuuuck).

Other options

Other good options I didn't do early on are categorization (every page goes into different categories which you'll find at the bottom) and fact-checking. Categorization is the weirdest one out of all of these since it's a major part of what makes Wikipedia tick, but almost no reader realizes how important this is. Fact-checking, meanwhile, is the most difficult of these unless you're a subject matter expert. But it's also the most crucial one, and it teaches you a lot (it teaches you policies like verifiability and reliable sourcing, linked below). This involves adding citations where there aren't ones, improving citations where they're poor or malformed, and removing or editing statements which aren't verifiably true. Also consider looking at WikiProjects, which are informal groups working to improve some aspect of Wikipedia. (An example is Women in Red, which seeks to create more biographies on women.)

🚨 Actual warning fr fr on god 🚨

The only "here be dragons"-style warning I'll give is to not try creating a new article until you're really experienced. In 2025, no brand-new editor is ready for this: there's just too much to know. Creating an article involves policies and guidelines like notability, reliable sourcing, independent sources, article titles, verifiability, no original research, etc., and for brand-new editors, this goes through a heavily backlogged process called Articles for Creation. If you want to jump into the deep end, expanding out short articles is both way easier and often way more useful than creating new articles.

So what now?

Now just ask yourself "What's the worst that could happen?" If you somehow magically get in over your head, I'll step in and save you. But if you come in wanting to help build an encyclopedia, you're prepared.

Disclaimer: yes, the Wikipedia article mentions this possibility, but I had the shower thought before I went to look up if this was right. I was watching a Super Monkey Ball video where the narrator mentioned the Cleveland Browns but said it with a cadence that sounded like a first and last name. And then I realized.

It's baaaaack!