User:Chaser/Make mistakes, then learn from them

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

Wikipedia, in many senses, can be a byzantine mess of policies, guidelines, style conventions, formatting tricks, and essays. It is essentially impossible for a new editor to know or anticipate most of them and even experienced editors accidentally run afoul of policies and guidelines occasionally. When this happens, it's not necessarily an indication that the editor is acting badly or has lost the community's trust. Usually, it just means they made a minor mistake and someone else corrected it. That's the way wikis like Wikipedia work: mistakes are constantly found and corrected. What is important to the functioning of any wiki, and especially large, complex ones like the English Wikipedia, is not that people become paranoid about avoiding mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable. What is important is that editors learn from errors, read the relevant policy, guideline, or whatever, and try to follow it in the future. Mistakes will happen; don't let them get you down.