Wikipedia:Shirt58's Law
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: If an article uses the first person, it probably isn't appropriate for Wikipedia. |
If a new article or draft article contains text like "we are (organisation/website/something else like that)" you can be pretty much be sure it was copied and pasted from that (organisation/website/something else like that) website, and is blatant advertising.
There once was an admin named Peter
Whose Lim'ricks most often kept meter.
There's a previous law
That his essay foresaw:
If a page uses "we" – we'll delete 'er!
Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is written in the third person and English passive voice, such as Poland is a country located in Central Europe
, or The uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which the values for certain pairs of physical quantities of a particle, such as position, x, and momentum, p, can be predicted from initial conditions
(and ... breathe ... and relax).
Articles don't use I, you or we, so if you see those, chances are the article's purpose was more to help its writer than to improve Wikipedia. For example, We often introduces promotional gibberish such as "We are committed to blue-sky thinking in order to maximise our throughput as we touch base with our clients, leverage the appropriate synergies, and actualise win-win positions". If an article looks like it's been copied and pasted from somewhere like that, it doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Massacre it.
Phrases such as "We have found" can also show undue reliance on WP:PRIMARY scientific sources.
- ^ Though there are exceptions: see Language of mathematics#The grammar of mathematics. If you're at the level of those, though, you probably don't need this essay.