View source for User:Dbabbitt

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== Why I Contribute ==
{{As of|2003}}, I am mildly concerned with the representation of the [[Reformed]] and [[Anarcho-capitalism|Libertarian]] understanding of things here, but mostly like to just add a contrarion twist to whatever I find of interest. I have an intense curiosity about how things work here and I find it exhilarating to watch some POV "gem" (that I just added) get edited into NPOV "smoky quartz".

== How to game the system ==
According to the [[Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles|Guide to Writing Better Articles]], if [[law|rules]] and guidance make you [[fear|nervous]] and [[clinical depression|depressed]], and not desirous of participating in the [[Wiki]], then '''ignore them''' and go about your [[anarchy|business]]. But I say if it makes you depressed, you are really looking for a [[contrarian]] set of rules, so here goes.

The "game" of Wikipedia is to get your [[Image talk:Political Ideologies.png|crackpot theories and daring new analyses]] to survive page edits long enough to become established as part of the conventional wisdom. (This is a lot easier to do with text than it is with images. It takes ''real'' work and lots of political maneuvering to get creative images to stick.) Here are some tips:
#'''Camouflage the visible''' - replace your arcane terminology with terminology already used on the page.
#'''Cut and run''' - sometimes it's important to [[Wikipedia:Be a man|lose the content battle]] in order to win the war. If you move a whole section (that contains your stuff) off the main page and onto an auxillary page just before a major rewrite, for example, you will probably be able to expand your explanations and will for a time have saved your section from permanent obliteration.
#'''Master the material''' - define the topic in your thesis or other academic paper, and cite that paper on your page.
#'''Go through proper channels''' - create your article via the [[Wikipedia:Article wizard]] and have it reviewed by members of the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation]]. Once through that gate, suspicion is completely taken off it.

'''NOTE:''' It is important to leave a comment in the Edit summary whenever you change the overall presentation (i.e., pedagogy, terminology, flow, spelling, and grammar), not just the content.

== Unfinished Work ==
I am playing in my [[User:Dbabbitt/Sandbox|Sandbox]] right now. I'm thinking about restructuring the [[User:Dbabbitt/Sandbox/Envy|Envy]] page based on the table of contents of Schoeck's ''Envy: A theory of social behavior'', but it doesn't follow any logical order and I'm having trouble reordering it in my mind.

== Finished Work ==
About half the pages that I have created have been deleted. These are the pages that still exist. I am no longer updating them regularly:
* ''[[Decentralized autonomous organization]]'' This took two years to stick - multiple deletes and moves to other wikis. I ended up having to do my masters thesis on it and go through the process of having another editor okay it before it could become its own page again.
* ''[[Counter-IED efforts]]'' This was based on a single UNCLASS NATO document.
* ''[[Counter-IED equipment]]'' CIED got so big that we teased out the photo section onto its own page.
* ''[[Orders of magnitude (energy flow density)]]'' This was somebody's crackpot theory.
* ''[[Rule of least power]]'' I thought this was an interesting concept so I clicked somewhere that linked to it and put a small definition in. It must be a real thing because it looks nothing like what I wrote.
* ''[[Orders of magnitude (specific energy)]]'' Here I was just playing around. I did some original research to find specific energies of random things like the heal strike generator. It caught on and someone else contributed real science.
* ''[[Babbitt (novel)]]'' I was trying to get my last name in Wikipedia. Nobody wants genealogies in there.
* ''[[Redwall]]'' My son was reading Redwall at the time and I wanted him to be able to read about it in Wikipedia.
I have heavily edited large sections of these pages and am no longer updating them regularly:
* ''[[Comparison of programming languages#General comparison]]'' I changed the table around so that the most repeated comments in the notes section were their own columns. This took a lot of regex work. I also added comments to every cell so that you could easily see where to put the content without having to memorize the column order.
* ''[[New Jerusalem]]'' I created an awesome table of all the gems of all the layers with pictures and everything. I also had a section about how many people could live in the New Jerusalem. All this has since been deleted - why?!?
* ''[[American exceptionalism]]'' I developed a table of all the similarities America has with other empires.
* ''[[Walter Block]]'' I added some important sections about some of his work.
* ''[[Ideology]]'' I created a really cool image that differentiated ideologies in two dimensions. All the fun stuff in that page is now missing.
* ''[[Feminism]]'' This was my first real contrarian battle. I would add my preconceptions, and they would be graciously turned into NPOV by someone else.
* ''[[United States]]'' Mostly worked on American exceptionalism here. It was later moved to its own page.
* ''[[Improvised explosive device]]'' Beautifully expanded on an explanation as to why defeating IEDs cannot be a step-by-step process. This part was written by an actual expert who happened to sit next to me.
* ''[[Homeschooling]]'' Very early work that has since been obliterated.
* ''[[Responsibility for the death of Jesus]]'' I was trying to get some Bible quotes in here.
* ''[[Human genome]]'' Very early work that has since been obliterated.
* ''[[Quotations about Jesus in the Talmud]]'' Ran into a snake pit of contentious editors here.

== Legal Stuff ==
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}