User:Andrewa/How not to rant

One of the key aims of all Wikipedia talk pages is to build consensus. Of course, if you do work towards consensus, there's a danger that you may end up changing your own mind, rather than someone else's. As most people (sadly) tend to prefer to change other people's minds rather than their own, this is something we all tend to avoid. All of us.

So rather than discussing, it's tempting to pretend to discuss by ranting. And the better you are with words, the more tempting it is.

This is sad for two reasons:

• Ranting stunts your intellectual growth. In the extreme that you never change your mind, you remain an intellectual infant. Learning from your mistakes is a vital part of growing up.
• Ranting stunts Wikipedia.
  • It contributes almost nothing (often absolutely nothing) to the discussion. The valid points it typically makes are most often lost in the noise.
  • It is counterproductive. Other editors are discouraged from contributing constructive thoughts. Valid points made by the ranter are unfairly tainted by their inclusion in the rant.

How to rant

The techniques of good ranting are known as rantstyle. Some of the more important ones are listed below.

Firstly, a good rant is long. It contains few if any paragraph breaks, and the long paragraphs contain long sentences. They use long words where shorter ones would do perfectly well.

The best rants are illogical. But not completely so. Esoteric terms are used in ways that not even an expert in the field would understand. Non-sequitars are randomly sprinkled into the arguments, along with a few well-chosen errors of grammar. Combining the two is particularly effectve.

Wikilinks should be used carefully. The rule is, either none or many. If many, then most but not all should be irrelevant. But avoid obvious overlinking. The aim is to make the reader follow a few, scratch their head, and give up on following any links... yours or anyone else's. It's surprisingly easy to do once you get the hang of it.

Emotion is also useful. Here the main rule is randomness. Swap from what looks like coolheaded reason to passionate overstatement without warning, and back again. Do it often.

Disruption and personal attacks are most effective if they are kept just below the radar. Being offensive and intimidating without getting blocked is the aim, so you need to occasionally be all sweetness and light.

Ignoring the indenting convention is particularly popular and effective, either just randomly as if by accident, or systematically by using mixed indents. Some caution is advised to avoid too blatantly violating the talk page guidelines, but in practice these are rarely if ever enforced, and with any luck someone will cover your tracks by refactoring anyway, rendering the edit history practically useless too. And never use outdent, it just makes things easier to follow. On the other hand, if you can get your rant to go for several pages, and/or to crash mobile devices, then you may even manage to stifle discussion completely on some topics.

Replying logically to a good rant should be next to impossible, and at worst very time consuming. But you don't need to discourage all replies. Just the opposite. A ranting reply multiplies the effect of your rant, which is the ideal outcome. Encouraging such replies is a fine art learned only by long experience. The long paragraphs help, they mean that anyone replying must either insert their own paragraph breaks in your post or go to the trouble (and length) of quoting you at length. If they dare to molest your own carefully crafted text, revert them with threats of ANI, ARBCOM, etc. (you can do this twice, but beware the 3RR). A subtle and effective extension of this is, if you must have a paragraph break, use <p> rather than white space. This makes the indenting convention almost useless. It means that even if someone can logically, reasonably and constructively refute what you say, there's nowhere for them to logically, reasonably and constructively do so.

Edit summaries need careful consideration, as otherwise they can be quite useful. They should mostly be so short as to be meaningless (r for reply is the original and best), with a few longer but equally unhelpful ones sprinkled in. If editing a short section, it's good (and easy) to also overwrite the automatically generated section heading. Alternatively, just edit at the next level up. And again add a little randomness. Provided that most of your edit summaries are useless, nobody is likely to look at the useful ones, but they still provide a defence against charges that you never provide useful edit summaries.

Finally, pick your topic carefully. You need to know enough about it to confuse people and keep them confused, but not too much. It's a waste of time ranting if you could have made your point logically, and that produces poor rants in any case. The best rants are made by people who suspect they are quite wrong (and they probably are, but that is irrelevant) but have absolutely no idea why.

How not to rant

Get your thoughts in order. Use topic sentences to lead paragraphs and stick to that topic. And if you can't come up with one, then do you really understand what you're saying, yourself?

Always provide a good edit summary. Preview your change and if you're not happy with the summary, try to work out why not. Set your user preferences to remind you if you haven't provided one. If you use the common edit summary addon, use it with caution, it's a great start but most often not the best final result.

Use white space appropriately. And everything else. Make your stuff easy to read. You want it read, remember? Even better, you want it understood... ideally, at least.

Encourage intelligent replies. Make them possible. Especially, encourage those who disagree. Your opponents may have nothing to teach you, but they probably have at least a little, and that's probably significantly more than your supporters have. Learn. It may be less painful than you expect. And modeling is one of the most effective teaching techniques (arch: setting a good example).

Meditate, pray, or whatever works for you. The universe is bigger than your ideas, and ideally, so will Wikipedia be.

Explore Wikipedia, both the project pages and the articles. The best writers are good readers. Enjoy Wikipedia. Try to write things that others will enjoy reading, for all of the right reasons.

Respect the other guy. Who knows, they may just teach you something. It will also reduce the length and frequency of your blocks and bans.

Have a sugar hit, a proper meal, a stiff drink, a good glass of wine, a coffee, a puff, your medication, a fix... again, whatever works for you.

Give Wikipedia your best. It will be worth it.

Linking to this page

“ I've learned something - fun at someone else's expense isn't fun at all. - Scrooge McDuck ”

If in doubt, don't. Just because you enjoyed this page doesn't mean someone else will.

It might help to lighten an otherwise tense discussion but generally will not. The test of humour at someone else's expense is, does the victim find it funny? If they do, it's very funny, but if not, it's not really funny at all. Funny implies fun.

Don't abuse humour to spoil someone else's fun.

On the other hand, all the best humour contains more than a little truth. I hope you find some here. If so, enjoy.

See also

• The Wikipedia Creed (read this if nothing else)
• The parable of the ants
• Walls of text
• Gaming the system (an official Wikipedia guideline)
• Colons and asterisks