User:RJHall/SDS

The Seven Deadly Stereotypes

This is my satirical take on the archetypical Wikipedia editors I seem to run across on a regular basis. All in good fun, of course. I'm a bit of a Revert Warrior, so I'm poking a little fun at myself as well.

• Boxing Champion – The editor who thinks every article should have an infobox, two list boxes, at least three navboxes, four hat notes, and a sprawling mass of categories at the end. Each box, of course, should include every possible piece of esoteric data and at least one of the navboxes must be larger than remainder of the article combined. He especially loves those all-box articles that he leaves for somebody else to write. Who needs an article when you can fill a page with a working interface?

• Cruft Campaigner – regardless of how obtuse the subject, this editor takes joy in spreading the trivia. Whether it's solar transits by the moons of Neptune or the night sky as viewed from another star, he'll add it with reckless abandon. Trying to actually validate the information of this contributor with a citation is nearly impossible, of course. But that won't stop him.

• Dastardly Deletionist – This dweeb thrives on negativity. It's a power trip for him to see articles flushed from the system. Notability means importance, dammit, and he can't wait to slap a template on any topic that hasn't been mentioned in at least two national papers and the Encyclopedia Brittanica. He won't actually attempt to make the article meet the notability criteria; that would defeat the whole purpose.

• Format Freak – Here's an editor who knows just what pedantic change needs to be made for Wikipedia to be made as cookie-cutter as a journal article; style guidelines be damned. Don't even try to contradict him, because he has a revert button and he knows how to use it. He refuses to compromise and loves engaging in long, exhausting edit wars and shouting matches.

• Listomaniac – Why have an article when a list will do? We have books of lists and TV shows of lists; why not an encyclopedia full of lists? The more esoteric the combination, the better. He is relentless in adding all possible red links, regardless of ambiguity. Citations are not needed, of course, when you can just as easily build a link farm. A sub-category of this breed particularly enjoys adding bulleted lists to normal articles.

• Mystic Mangler – A gospel of the Truth, he understands the world is an incomprehensible place full of eerie wonders to boggle the mind. The mangler seeks to subvert that scientific rubbish, therefore propelling his own beliefs to the forefront. He lingers in chat rooms seeking to exploit vagaries in notability standards to his own advantage, or to baffle the lay reader with his brilliant nonsense. This git has a high likelihood of being anally probed on board the alien mothership.

• Revert Warrior – He's silent, he's deadly, he's like a traffic cop with a quota to fill. Every free moment is spent checking his watch list waiting to pounce on the slightest infraction. He's got an armload of Wikipedia policies and he knows how to use them. His watch list is hundreds of articles long, and he checks every one methodically and meticulously. His favorite page is the list of user talk page warning templates, but he's unhappy because the number of choices is too short. Hopelessly paranoid; he probably works in the security business.

Perhaps more to come...