Macrakis

Wikipedia has tremendous potential, but it is discouraging to see how much effort we have to spend to deal with mindless vandalism, puerile boosterism and nationalism, and crank POV-pushing. It is also time-consuming to correct well-meaning but ill-informed enthusiasts, and to try to educate people about good research practices, but at least there you feel you're acting in an educational role.

I guess my philosophy on participating in WP is to try to be reasonable with reasonable people, and even more reasonable with unreasonable people.

I'm interested in the history of food, and contribute to WikiProject Food and drink. There is a lot of folklore and invention around the history of food, so it's especially important to have reliable sources, not just cookbooks and certainly not random Web pages, which is why I started the page on sources for food history. It's also important to maintain a neutral point of view in food history articles, and not uncritically adopt such terms as "original", "authentic", "traditional", etc. to describe foods and recipes; see my essay "Original", "traditional", "authentic", and other distracting terminology for some further thoughts.

These are some articles where the amount and virulence of edit-warring and tendentious editing is just too much, so I've given up on editing them:

• Baklava
• Vlachs

These are articles I've created, articles I've contributed a lot to, or simply articles where I think I've made a difference.

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