 | This is an
essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Don't be discouraged if you have done something wrong or incorrectly! We are all human here, and it won't be held against you. |
I've made this page for the users that are discouraged by negative feedback or are warned for doing something incorrectly. We all make mistakes. Don't be ashamed when you do something wrong; take the advice given into account, learn from it, and press on. Every user experiences a learning curve or does something incorrect that they don't perceive as wrong the first time they do so. Don't beat yourself up over it!
If you feel discouraged or lost motivation over something, here's a list of really stupid things I've done on Wikipedia. I hope you get a kick out of them and it lightens your mood just a bit:
My many, many mistakes
Absolute no-nos
- I used to run a subpage, I believe it was called "Funny Teahouse Questions and Responses", where I would archive Teahouse threads that I found humorous. While I do remember there being some interesting interactions between Teahouse hosts on there, a majority of the questions there were satirical towards new users who simply needed help. After a polite but necessarily stern message from Nick Moyes that this was a bad face for a user who was a Teahouse Host, I shamefully had the page deleted. I was comforted by Zindor, who sent me an image of a Bengal Kitten "to make me feel better", which I kept on my talk page for a while. I still use the image for one of my talk page banners for old time's sake. The page got some positive feedback from new users, which probably kept it alive as long as it did.
- While working on a rewrite of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a non-native English speaker made some additions to the article to help with expansion. I was probably in a bad mood that day, because rather than guiding the user on how to properly format their additions, I reverted them all entirely and assumed called the improper grammar "masked vandalism" in my edit summary. Looking back, I believe I was busy to the point of raising my temper level, and after checking my phone and seeing the additions, my anger got the best of me and I got rid of all of it. When ferret tried to tell me on the unofficial Wikipedia Discord server that my reverts did not assume good faith, I still persisted and immediately tried to defend my decision. I took that as a personal attack for some reason; ferret was just doing her job obviously. Not only was I wrong, but I was also debating against an administrator in a public server. I took a break from the article after that, but I did eventually return to bring it to good article status.
- I was once requested by a user to do a copyedit for the SpaceX Starship article. I agreed, published my revisions in sets of two to three paragraphs at a time. My first edit summary included "grammar fixes", and every edit summary after that was nonsense ramblings. This was about 20 edit summaries long, and I touched on the subjects of coffee creamers, my coffee cup collection, and my two cats. While this was positively received by the users watching the article because they knew what I was doing, other unrelated administrators were trying to make sense of my edit summaries out of context. They thought I was hacked! TheresNoTime approached me on my talk page, and I emailed them to clarify what the heck I was talking about.
- When I first designed my user page, I misinterpreted what the "What may I have in my user pages?" section of Wikipedia's user page policy and included some severely personal information on the page. It was quickly censored by Primefac.
- During April Fool's Day 2021, on the nomination for Joy-Con, I copy-pasted the chorus from the song "Deja Vu" from Initial D as a reference to the fact that the controllers usually have a problem with drifting. This was a blatant copyright violation and was quickly censored.
Look before you do
My first cat from when I was really little; these are the only images of him. Throughout my lifetime (and his, he is no longer with us) he made the mistake of killing, like, a dozen birds and leaving them on our back porch. I still loved him very much, but
if you do this you will most likely be blocked.
- I once called out ProtoDrake for creating several good article nominations in a short period of time, assuming they were low quality. In reality, he has been editing for nearly a decade and has over 100 good articles, and simply works fast. I was contested by Alexandra IDV.
- I tried to help an article about a video game developer by cropping the subject's infobox image down so he would appear more in focus. Without noticing, I severely dropped the quality of the image down with it, and my change was reverted.
- During my FAC for Paper Mario: The Origami King, I pasted 11,000kb of content from the article on the review page to give an example of a change I suggested making. Because WP:FAC transcludes every featured article review page, this drop of content (which included an image) practically destroyed its run-time temporarily.
...What?
- Despite working exclusively on video game content, my first article was Edgenuity. I made it a day after I registered.
- Many users tried to warn me that creating an article is a very difficult task for a newcomer, but I assumed I would be fine. It did eventually pass, but I needed a lot of help from Hillelfrei and North8000 to get there.
- I once used the argument to justify a non-free image inclusion that "no other article uses it". Like, no crap Sherlock, it's a non-free image.
- In a review for an article written by ImaginesTigers, I told him he uses too many em dashes and should switch some to commas. He joked about my suggestion on Discord, which I agree he was in the right to do.
- My original username was Le Panini, despite the fact that I am not French and the panini originates from Italy.
WP:TROUT
- I signed up to be an Articles for creation reviewer, and Primefac gave me temporary permissions so he can view how skillful I am at reviewing them. I had one month to do so and reviewed no articles. Shockingly, I was never given the permissions.
- In March 2021, I accidentally used Twinkle to delete the main page.
See also
- The Teahouse, a forum full of the nicest editors you'll ever meet, where new users can ask questions about editing.
- User:Manishearth/Mistakes: A Fifteen Year Society and Precious editor, who has also made mistakes
- User:Eddie891/mistakes: An administrator and Editor of the Week with over 50,000 contributions, who has also made mistakes
- User:SoWhy/My mistakes: An administrator and former member of the Arbitration Committee with over 65,000 contributions, who has also made mistakes
| This is an
essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
| This page in a nutshell: Don't be discouraged if you have done something wrong or incorrectly! We are all human here, and it won't be held against you. |
I've made this page for the users that are discouraged by negative feedback or are warned for doing something incorrectly. We all make mistakes. Don't be ashamed when you do something wrong; take the advice given into account, learn from it, and press on. Every user experiences a learning curve or does something incorrect that they don't perceive as wrong the first time they do so. Don't beat yourself up over it!
If you feel discouraged or lost motivation over something, here's a list of really stupid things I've done on Wikipedia. I hope you get a kick out of them and it lightens your mood just a bit:
My many, many mistakes
Absolute no-nos
- I used to run a subpage, I believe it was called "Funny Teahouse Questions and Responses", where I would archive Teahouse threads that I found humorous. While I do remember there being some interesting interactions between Teahouse hosts on there, a majority of the questions there were satirical towards new users who simply needed help. After a polite but necessarily stern message from Nick Moyes that this was a bad face for a user who was a Teahouse Host, I shamefully had the page deleted. I was comforted by Zindor, who sent me an image of a Bengal Kitten "to make me feel better", which I kept on my talk page for a while. I still use the image for one of my talk page banners for old time's sake. The page got some positive feedback from new users, which probably kept it alive as long as it did.
- While working on a rewrite of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a non-native English speaker made some additions to the article to help with expansion. I was probably in a bad mood that day, because rather than guiding the user on how to properly format their additions, I reverted them all entirely and assumed called the improper grammar "masked vandalism" in my edit summary. Looking back, I believe I was busy to the point of raising my temper level, and after checking my phone and seeing the additions, my anger got the best of me and I got rid of all of it. When ferret tried to tell me on the unofficial Wikipedia Discord server that my reverts did not assume good faith, I still persisted and immediately tried to defend my decision. I took that as a personal attack for some reason; ferret was just doing her job obviously. Not only was I wrong, but I was also debating against an administrator in a public server. I took a break from the article after that, but I did eventually return to bring it to good article status.
- I was once requested by a user to do a copyedit for the SpaceX Starship article. I agreed, published my revisions in sets of two to three paragraphs at a time. My first edit summary included "grammar fixes", and every edit summary after that was nonsense ramblings. This was about 20 edit summaries long, and I touched on the subjects of coffee creamers, my coffee cup collection, and my two cats. While this was positively received by the users watching the article because they knew what I was doing, other unrelated administrators were trying to make sense of my edit summaries out of context. They thought I was hacked! TheresNoTime approached me on my talk page, and I emailed them to clarify what the heck I was talking about.
- When I first designed my user page, I misinterpreted what the "What may I have in my user pages?" section of Wikipedia's user page policy and included some severely personal information on the page. It was quickly censored by Primefac.
- During April Fool's Day 2021, on the nomination for Joy-Con, I copy-pasted the chorus from the song "Deja Vu" from Initial D as a reference to the fact that the controllers usually have a problem with drifting. This was a blatant copyright violation and was quickly censored.
Look before you do
My first cat from when I was really little; these are the only images of him. Throughout my lifetime (and his, he is no longer with us) he made the mistake of killing, like, a dozen birds and leaving them on our back porch. I still loved him very much, but
if you do this you will most likely be blocked.
- I once called out ProtoDrake for creating several good article nominations in a short period of time, assuming they were low quality. In reality, he has been editing for nearly a decade and has over 100 good articles, and simply works fast. I was contested by Alexandra IDV.
- I tried to help an article about a video game developer by cropping the subject's infobox image down so he would appear more in focus. Without noticing, I severely dropped the quality of the image down with it, and my change was reverted.
- During my FAC for Paper Mario: The Origami King, I pasted 11,000kb of content from the article on the review page to give an example of a change I suggested making. Because WP:FAC transcludes every featured article review page, this drop of content (which included an image) practically destroyed its run-time temporarily.
...What?
- Despite working exclusively on video game content, my first article was Edgenuity. I made it a day after I registered.
- Many users tried to warn me that creating an article is a very difficult task for a newcomer, but I assumed I would be fine. It did eventually pass, but I needed a lot of help from Hillelfrei and North8000 to get there.
- I once used the argument to justify a non-free image inclusion that "no other article uses it". Like, no crap Sherlock, it's a non-free image.
- In a review for an article written by ImaginesTigers, I told him he uses too many em dashes and should switch some to commas. He joked about my suggestion on Discord, which I agree he was in the right to do.
- My original username was Le Panini, despite the fact that I am not French and the panini originates from Italy.
WP:TROUT
- I signed up to be an Articles for creation reviewer, and Primefac gave me temporary permissions so he can view how skillful I am at reviewing them. I had one month to do so and reviewed no articles. Shockingly, I was never given the permissions.
- In March 2021, I accidentally used Twinkle to delete the main page.
See also
- The Teahouse, a forum full of the nicest editors you'll ever meet, where new users can ask questions about editing.
- User:Manishearth/Mistakes: A Fifteen Year Society and Precious editor, who has also made mistakes
- User:Eddie891/mistakes: An administrator and Editor of the Week with over 50,000 contributions, who has also made mistakes
- User:SoWhy/My mistakes: An administrator and former member of the Arbitration Committee with over 65,000 contributions, who has also made mistakes