A couple of times a week, I go to Halopedia and type “cleanup” into the search bar. With a sigh I look at the long list, some of which are already peopled with articles I’ve already tidied up for the benefit of nerdy gamers everywhere with too much spare time on their hands.

Every time I access an article to reclaim I am astounded at the phenomenon of linguistic impairment as a side effect of intensive gaming. You might be an uber-1337 pwner of n00bs, but honestly, please reconsider before sullying the pristine pages of a nice tidy wiki. From what I can tell, writing ability is inversely proprtional to gaming ability amongst humans.

For example, littering a wiki page with quotes and trivia is NOT contributing to an article. Of course we’ve heard the quotes; we’ve all played the game and the animatics are easily accessible on YouTube. You quoteaholics are like Monty Python fans at Comic Con, wandering between booths of die cast figures and spouting “It’s only a model” like you’ve got some kind of special variety of Geek Tourette’s.

The worst is when some horrifically bad wiki contributor decides that their third-rate drivel is worth defending, and they end up parking on the page like an eBay vulture, replacing all edits and corrections with the mess they’ve made. Locking can help prevent this, but for Zarquon’s sake. If your description of a Warthog contains more screen shots, inflated hyperbole, and passive constructions than complete sentences, swallow your pride and please go back to your XBox where you can’t do any more harm.

This has been a public service announcement from your friendly wiki Reclaimer.