Why I Contribute

As of 2003^[update], I am mildly concerned with the representation of the Reformed and 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 Guide to Writing Better Articles, if rules and guidance make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the Wiki, then ignore them and go about your 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 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:

1. Camouflage the visible - replace your arcane terminology with terminology already used on the page.
2. Cut and run - sometimes it's important to 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.
3. Master the material - define the topic in your thesis or other academic paper, and cite that paper on your page.
4. 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 Sandbox right now. I'm thinking about restructuring the 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 multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below: