[WikiEN-l] What sparked your interest in Wikipedia? (was Googlethinks Wikipedia is a news source)

Jay Litwyn brewhaha at freenet.edmonton.ab.ca
Wed Jun 17 10:36:38 UTC 2009


"David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com> quoted 
news:fbad4e140906151058wc6f789dxaedcbfde40e782e1 at mail.gmail.com , citing
> 2009/6/15 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:
>
>> And then I ask what sparked other people's interests in Wikipedia, and
>> a really long thread results.

I was reading the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and [[prion]] came 
up, defined as a great mystery. I thot I understood it. I still think it is 
pesticide poisoning if it is not heavy metal poisoning. To my surprise, the 
topic was not in the wiki article. At first I did not bother getting an ID, 
because I thot that once the work of Brown, Purdey (and others!) took hold 
on some minds, it would become dominant theory, because it does not contrast 
with prevailing doctrine that life demands [[DNA]] to reproduce. When I went 
to the wiki article and put in a narrative with attitude, someone almost 
immediately put a POV tag into it, then toned down my text. Then I did some 
of what I do best and made it easier to read. Then I went meticulously 
through the entire talk page, adding headings where there was a change in 
topic -- and tried to answer everything. Much later, perhaps in 2008, I 
began a "Make your headings blue" crusade, which goes against a style 
guideline based on an undocumented browser bug (one that probably does not 
exist, and certainly *should* not exist), and that was the first time I got 
any direct feedback regarding my [[prion]] activities.

Two reasons are to make a heading that is a link, in my book:
1. The section is only started, perhaps with nothing but references.
2. The section started talking about something that does exist as though it 
was something that does not,
so I deleted the section's text and made the heading into a link.
_______
Line from Darth Vader in Star Wars to sanitize: (Exhale, Inhale) "Luke, you 
are my bastard!". 






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