User:CSGinger14

Hi all. Will only be making minor edits on occasion. Mostly to citations and grammar. Can assist in French and English editing, and would be interested in anyone hoping to expand the Swahili article base, as I'm currently at intermediate level and hoping to improve. Will mostly focus on articles related to history, theology, geography, demography, economics, politics, or current events. Thanks to everyone who's devoted their time to this project, its kept me curious and made my life far easier on a number of occasions.

To any admin that come along and view this page, likely after reversing one of my edits. Please help me. I have no idea how to use templates or transplant images from the original text to the translation. Nothing stays the same between language pages. I have no idea how to add references before publishing or creating a draft for the community at large. I am very confused and would greatly appreciate any help you could provide in understanding the many moving systems of this website. Believe me, I understand that the complexity of this site is one of its greatest strengths, but it might serve as a barrier to integrating new users into the more complex elements of Wikipedia. My thanks in advance, and best wishes to all amid a deeply challenging, painful, and nonetheless critical moment in the history of our species.

If there's anyone who's also on French language wikipedia, I'd appreciate them looking over several draft articles I've completed. The first article I translated was flagged for poor language, and I'd like to make sure that this one, of far greater length, is up to standard. Also noting that the draft article system desperately needs to be revamped. Templates as well. I'll make a note of changes I feel are most pertinent below. I doubt anyone will read it, but if they do, please take these points into consideration.

Though I'm not certain I'd be much help in teaching people about the mechanisms of this website, I've read a ton of sources over the course of my life, and will soon start categorizing them to make them available to those who are interested in researching or learning about a given topic, with some steps on how to properly contextualize what you'll see in sourcing and potentially in Wikipedia's projects. For the moment, I've compiled some of the books I've enjoyed / gotten the most out of thus far in life. This is not an endorsement of the views expressed in these books, simply a recognition that they provide a thought provoking view on the world or the people within it. I'll add more as time goes on, I remember the things I've read, or I finally go back and look through my library. I recommend that you only read the first paragraph or so of the linked articles. Don't spoil the endings, the context can wait, enjoy the content.

(15+)

• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
• The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
• Thirteen Moons - Charles Frazier
• Century Trilogy - Ken Follett
• 1984 - George Orwell
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid - Jeff Kinney | Yeah you heard me go back and read it again and tell me if he was a good friend
• The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding
• Their Eyes were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
• The Alchemyst series - Michael Scott
• Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
• The Princess Bride - William Goldman
• Human Acts - Han Kang
• The Fault in our Stars - John Green
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

(All Ages / K-12 Instructional Reading)

• The Cricket in Times Square - George Selden
• Camp Half-Blood Chronicles - Rick Riordan
• Dragon's Gate - Laurence Yep
• Tangerine - Edward Bloor
• A Long Walk to Water - Linda Sue Park
• Eragon series - Christopher Paolini
• Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
• Survivors series - Erin Hunter (pseud.)
• Because of Winn-Dixie - Kate DiCamillo
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Brian Selznick
• The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• The Magic Tree House Series - Mary Pope Osborne
• All Creatures Great and Small - James Herriot
• Stuart Little - E.B. White
• The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
• Shades of Gray - Carolyn Reeder
• The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

For anyone who comes along who is under the age of 16, I'd caution you that some of the topics discussed in these books can be quite upsetting and difficult to process and properly contextualize without the guidance or support of an adult. It is no less important that you learn about them, but I recommend taking it gradually alongside discussion with a parent or teacher. It's important to understand that these works raise questions that humans have grappled with for millennia. You are shared by billions in that struggle, and having care for those who were forced to suffer during their lifetimes, and more importantly those who still are, shows your capacity to love beyond yourself and that which pertains to yourself, which is an immeasurably important aspect of character to possess. No one person is expected to fix the world or the people in it on their own.

• Prisoners of Geography - Tim Marshall
• Hello Shadowlands - Patrick Winn
• We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families - Philip Gourevitch
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff
• The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth - Tom Burgis
• The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert
• The Sacred and the Profane - Mircea Eliade
• Columbine - Dave Cullen
• Wealth, Poverty, and Politics - Thomas Sowell
• The Question - Henri Alleg
• Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes - Tamim Ansary
• Politics and the English Language - George Orwell
• Them: Why We Hate Each-other and How to Heal - Ben Sasse
• The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
• Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America - John Charles Chasteen
• Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
• World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability - Amy Chua
• The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels
• Letter from Birmingham Jail - Martin Luther King Jr.
• Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Davis

1. Incredibly esoteric editing interface

1. Explanations of key concepts on instructional pages which are deeply complicated, or lacking in necessary context, or lacking in basic context, or any combination thereof.
2. Lack of template parity between different wikipedia language projects
3. If auto licensing exists, why doesn't it between en.wikipedia and wikipedia.fr.
4. Why can images not be attributed to the user of origin across sites
5. Could an integrated system not exist to edit template headers while working on translating pages which would necessarily need a version of that template. It's not surprising that a fair number of non-English wikipedia or wikimedia project pages of only reasonable importance or renown lack the characteristic templates that you'd see on the English language version.
6. Lack of template parity between different wikimedia projects, especially wiktionary.org.
7. The overwhelming lack of non-english translations between other languages speaks to how imposing the structure of the English language page is.
8. The lack of standardization, or, at the very least, proper marking of templates between languages makes new page creation nearly impossible.
9. Difficulty supporting multiple editors amid breaking news
10. A tendency among editors to simply remove content that they feel is problematic in the interest of reducing the rate at which that information is viewed, but simultaneously wiping referencing for such content that is nonetheless relevant to the topic at hand and may be pertinent later on, though we simply don't know right at this moment. If not open to the public, there should at the very least be some repository of citations that exists for editors to work through when making additions to various pages as major events surface.
11. An additional tendency among such editors to blanket wipe entire sections of text which are appropriate and relevant to the topic at hand. Frankly I think that some of the definitions of original research for the site are absurd.

19 April - Updated 27 April

To note, the criticism I've voiced thus far about this system is in no way meant to deride those that created or maintain it. What's been performed here, largely at the hands of volunteers, is an incredible act of service in the interests of equal access to education and Learning for All, and its stringency and rigorous standards have helped solidify this site's reputation. Nevertheless, the rate at which information is being produced globally has accelerated at such a rapid pace that this site can no longer rely on the dutiful maintenance of a small group of core editors and bots. Wikipedia seems to have gone quiet at the moment its needed most, at a moment when knowledge and the right of all to share and learn from it is under attack. We cannot allow Wikipedia to fall into decay at a time when an increasingly significant portion of official and journalistic reporting is sourced directly from it. Students rely on it as one of a scarce number of alternatives to AI simplification, and large language models like ChatGPT (for students that choose the simpler route) rely on it, for broader explanation as well as sourcing, when alternative sourcing is paywalled or does not exist.

We have lost untold sums of our history to a narrow-minded view of the world that considers profit and personal advancement as the only real and valuable facets of human experience. Encroachments on the rights, privileges, and funding of public media (PBS, NPR, VOA), Hachette v. Internet Archive, and other attacks are proof that our institutions are not, nor have ever been safe from the apathy of a compromised government authority that was assumed to always work to their interest. We cannot allow our own apathy to erase the progress that was made through the sacrifice of every previous generation, less than a tenth of whom we remember in any meaningful way, to ensure that the lives of those who came after them would be better. Who are you to wipe their faces from the history books for a lack of notability or perfectly technically appropriate sourcing? How many real and important stories or truths of the recent past are no longer known because the first or only time someone took time out of their day to write them down, you decided you needed a technical win?

I would like to be remembered when I die. I want my family to be remembered when they die. I want all those I loved and all those I didn't to be remembered, to serve as an example and guide to those who came after them. I want to show people that there is beauty and meaning that exists in the world and their lives, even when all it offers them is pain. This life is short, asks so much and yet only occasionally offers us something concrete and knowable in return. The only solution, then, is to find comfort in the abstract, the absurd, in the beautiful eccentricities of the exceptionally mundane.

Life is most livable when we laugh in the face of the horror and love and care in the face of everything that tells us that anger, derision, and cynicism are the only way. You teach yourself to learn from your mistakes not because it stops you from making them, but because it shows you the value and meaning inherent to the moments when you were wrong, and how much brighter the future might be if you choose to care. Caring forces you to look back on the truth of your experience and ask if that was really the best you had to offer to the world, or even yourself. The only thing shared by all life as we know it is our experience. When that's gone, the only thing left is what, of that experience, we've left for others.

I question God and the idea that there's anything that exists past death, but I am desperate for some assurance that the lives of pain led by so many souls weren't the only due paid to them by the universe. If it is the case, though, that this is the only life we get to lead, I'd hope that we'd choose the right path. Not one where we cynically swallow up the bounty of the earth in a nihilistic fervor, nor one where we allow our own fear and forlornness at our fate to exempt existence from its right to future generations who might be capable of attaining balance and harmony with our place in the universe. Its a middle path, a point where we choose to acknowledge our fallibility and the ultimate lack of meaning inherent to our existence while recognizing that there is nonetheless reason to care. It's difficult to imagine, believe me I know, but doesn't it sound like a better option than the one we've given ourselves? It would be hard to obtain surely, but wouldn't it be beautiful nonetheless?

- All my best,

CSGinger14

Am making a list of these to recommend to anyone writing a book companies that they might want to avoid if they're concerned about academic accessibility. Works published by these companies have been unnecessarily restricted from research databases that provide access to educational and philanthropic institutions.

• W.W. Norton & Company
• Heinemann Publishing (Importantly, a subsidiary of Pearson Education (bought-up, not created by))

Page contributions as of April 2025 (Reads Bottom to Top):

May 2025

1. Botatwe Languages - Added Origins. Will also return to this once I have more time. Would appreciate any sourcing anyone has for other groups in the region, feel free to leave it in my talk page. (Heading: Added [History & Culture])
2. 2025 - Added results of Romanian presidential election (5/4/2025) (Heading: May)

April

1. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories - Added references and pertinent info. In the next month or so I'll start making a lot more edits, including a ton of sourcing and additions to topics on Abrahamic religion and mysticism. I'll return to this and other works soon.
2. Pope Francis - Referencing and live update support (Headings: Death / Added [Legacy])
3. Sunrise Earth - Source maintenance. For anyone coming to inspect, I assume this probably was said, the source just isn't available anymore.
4. Slow television - Added info on Sunrise Earth. May need to be reformatted, but please don't remove, as I feel it's relevant (Heading: Earlier Examples)
5. Ångerman River - Added information on Great Moose Migration and sourced tributaries from Swedish language page (Headings: Elk Migration / Tributaries)
6. Belle da Costa Greene - Additions concerning family history and origins (Heading: Early Life)
7. Fur people - Additions concerning history of violence in the region (Heading: Political Situation)
8. Andres Reyes Jr. (Eng-Fr Translation)
9. Vernon R. Laning (Eng-Fr Translation)

You should never not be thankful that someone's gone and proven you wrong