User:Engleham
An occasional Wikipedia contributor when boredom strikes. Here are some other observations.
1. Contributing to Wikipedia for any reason other than idle personal amusement (such as a belief in adding to the world's knowledge, or correcting errors of perceived truth), is an exercise in futility. This is because your words are written in shifting pixels, that can be kicked over by any troll, at any time.
2. While Wikipedia admins include some of the nicest and most scholarly people, authority is of course no guarantee of wisdom, or even basic ethics. Wikipedia admins also include a smattering of some of the most loathsome hypocrites, bullies and ill-educated individuals it is possible to imagine. Not to mention an alarming number of 19 year olds with startlingly limited intellectual horizons. If one can't find comedy in their words or stance, it's best to give up contributing, but sometimes their User Page personal photos can provide sources of endless hilarity, and indeed, wonder.
3. Most Talk pages for contributors, however mild-mannered the individual, eventually become sandboxes of ratbaggery.
4. Don't pander to Cite Trolls: i.e. those who misuse the 'citation needed' tag to spatter it on commonly accepted points they disagree with merely as a blocking action.
5. Give zero tolerance to Prod Trolls: individuals with the intellectual horizons and emotional development of newts who spatter proposed deletion tags over the hard work of sometimes dozens of others as a form of empowerment, but are too lazy to even Google to educate themselves on its contents, or improve upon it.
6. Take a leaf out of Debra Lipstadt's book: just as she refuses point blank to debate with Holocaust deniers, don't waste a moment debating with anything resembling a fundie, freeper, or any other form of bigot. It's pointless, because they operate on a policy of absolute denial. You will get nowhere, and it's impossible to please them, however many authoritative sources one may provide to back a point. Besides, life is too short. So, why waste your time on morons? If I don't respond to you, this may well be the reason.
7. Most contributors at some time will be charged with having "An Agenda". This is employed as an accusation. The reality is, ALL contributors to Wikipedia bring a personal agenda. If they didn't have that catalyst to contribute, Wikipedia's pages would be blank. For example, it may be stated that the broad homosexual or bisexual agenda, in tandem with the tsunami of scholarly revision since the 1970s, is merely to bring a semblance of balance to the historical record, where previously there was ignorance, evasion, or active suppression of truth. For a broader and illuminating discussion of this, see sections 3 and 4 (Scholarship and Homophobia/Criticism and Homophobia) in the landmark essay The Homophobic Imagination, which appeared in the journal College English in 1974. Link here: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pubd/homophobicimagination.html. (If the link is down use Archive.org) Although dated, its discussion of critical blindness in section 4 remains especially relevant.
8. Wikipedia Bigot Modus Operandi:
a) Demand an endless citing of sources
b) Endeavour to discount them when provided
c) If this fails, state they unbalance the article
d) If that fails, suggest the whole topic is trivial
e) When all else fails....suggest plagiarism.
f) Rinse and repeat.
9. Although this is point 9, No1 on my list of WikiCunts (a neologism?) are those who delete pages for lack of information, without actually going out and looking for information and references to add to them. So much easier to trash the work of others and just add a delete tag. Failed bookburners, one can only hope for their premature demise. Given the number of abandoned User Pages of such Delete Trolls, The Curse Of Engleham may indeed be happily remarkable in its lethal efficacy.
10. Lastly, it's important to appreciate that Wikipedia could have been invented for Little Napoleons and pedants. All those thwarted lives: suddenly they have meaning! Their deepest thrill is to spatter paragraphs on my Talk Page with Wikipedia shortcut links to its law and lore. Unfortunately, it is not in their comprehension to realise (a) how this makes them resemble a ridiculous bottle-lensed small town official in a balled cardigan and (b) how much of a fuck I do not give.
