User:Manorainjan/Titles

Why would anybody
take the effort to think first and act than?

Because that person could be considerate.

Wiki is about two things:

 * Cooperation and
 * organizing information.

When it looks like this:


that information (if it is information at all) is not organized, it is simply stacked, piled up. There are 'titles' in the list like: Some of those talk page indexes are a nearly comprehensive list of cognitive shortcomings.
 * Hello!
 * Thanks :-)
 * eMail
 * Question
 * Reminder
 * Unseen
 * Translation
 * Info
 * Invitation
 * But it is never too late
 * New confirmation

Some amongst them are

 * Pure laziness: One does not actually create any title at all but rather splutters ones uttering in the title line and continues at any random point in the text body.
 * Greetings: Words or phrases that are fit to be greetings are used instead of titles. Therefore any title is missing also here.
 * Ignorance of context: People come from the context of any page in the NameSpace where they seem to have experienced some difficulty which made them upset so that they are unable to recognize that they have changed the context to a completely general topic but specific regarding the person, directly opposite to the NameSpace which is completely unspecific regarding the person, but absolutely specific regarding the topic. They ignore the change in context and therefore do not refer to it and refer only to (the activities of) the person like: "Your translation".
 * Focus on the person: Any mentioning directly or indirectly of the person whos talk page it is, mostly 'you', 'Your' which could fall into the 'Greetings'-mistake if not it was rather not polite like: "Your silly edits". Same for focusing on oneself with 'I', 'me', 'my' and the like. Of course, in few cases this could be a meaningful section title if the matter in question is an absolute personal one like: "I'm pissed of by Your repeated criticism of me!". But, as every half way experienced online editor knows, this is bound to worsen the situation. Any true attempt to settle a personal dispute is to be made via personal mail and not in the public space.

So what
will I do?

Of course one can always plaster ones concerns at the bottom of the talk page no matter what was written earlier, no matter if that was a personal talk page or at project space. Thoughtlessness is the rule of the century. Why deviate from it? Is it not even better to stack it upon the pile so that it is noticed immediately, because what could be more important than ones current sensitivities?

Unfortunately I got acquainted with the law of KARMA. That where robbing me of the comforting illusion that one can successfully dump ones work before the feet of others without ever bearing the consequences. But still I'm quite lazy! Therefore I got careful at least not to 'create' work, because all work 'created' by me will have to come back to me through all my future incarnations until I really worked it out.

So I'm applying a happy mix of lazy naivety and systematic house cleaning: I go through the index of topics to see if 'my' topic was addressed already. I take seemingly meaningful titles for real, read their content when they apply and ignore their content when not. And all pseudo-titles, which I encounter on my way down the index, until I find a fitting topic, I turn into true titles that serve at least the purpose of showing clearly if they match my topic or not. That means, as soon as I found a topic where I can jump in, I stop correcting any section titles below that, at least until my next visit of that page.

Now, should one act this way?
The Golden Rule applies as usual: I would appreciate if people would create meaningful titles on my talk page or even turn pseudo-titles into real ones if I hadn't done so already ;-)