First it started off small. The occasional tweak to the Hangul page. Then I started to edit related pages, like Korean language and Hanja. I mean, who would notice it? I was only doing it on weekends. And those occasional spelling/grammar fixes? No big deal, right? Fixing someone's grammar doesn't mean you have a problem, right? I mean, someone needs to do that!
But somewhere along the way, it started to consume me. I started to read policy pages, like WP:NPOV. I started talking to the people in the screen who called themselves "editors". And they talked back. They told me what a wonderful thing Wikipedia was, how it had changed their lives, how it was going to be -- already was -- a great tool that anybody could use. They invited me to become one of them. They told me that with great power came great responsibility. Soon I could no longer view Wikipedia the same way. Every article was flawed. Every article needed to be fixed. POV needed to be stripped. Extraneous info needed to be removed. Recategorized. The world needed to know about Assassin spiders, Gene C. McKinney, Heinrich Stölzel, and Chuck Daellenbach, and Wikipedia would be the medium through which they would learn. Before I knew what had hit me, I had September 11, 2001 attacks, Albania, Tuba, Tutsi, Opiliones, Homosexuality and Western Union on my watchlist alongside the original Korean-related articles, and a host of other equally random things.
Legend has it that once I finally get my user script page to a state where I can really do useful stuff with it, I will achieve Enlightenment and realize that editing Wikipedia is a complete waste of time. Until then, I'm having a lot of fun.
I had a hell of a time trying to create tables yesterday. I think this is because there are two possible ways to separate table cells: newline-plus-pipe and double-pipe. This isn't documented anywhere, however -- at least nowhere that I could find. And I failed to understand the distinction, so I was writing lines looking like:
|item1|item2|item3
and couldn't for the life of me figure out why they displayed exactly as I had typed them.
So, for my future reference, here's an example of a table:
Year
AGE
Team
LG
GP
RET
YDS
AVG
FC
1987
22
DET
NFL
9
0
0
0.0
0
1988
23
DET
NFL
16
0
0
0.0
0
1998
33
SEA
NFL
11
0
0
0.0
0
12
NFL
Season
Totals
177
0
0
0.0
0
And of course, after all my hard work, I finally figure out where to find the Table Help
Chalk one up for engagement (as opposed to confrontation/edit wars)! Discerning a potentially valid contributor who's done something way below par, and pointing out how he could do it better can lead to good results.
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