Barbara Shack

From RationalWikiWiki

Stalk this inactive user! (It's a joke)
Joined:	10 December 2007[1]
Last edit	9 October 2008
Real name:	Barbara Shack
Age range:
Gender:	Female
Locale:	England, United Kingdom
Stance:	atheist (presumptuous zealot)
Archetype:
Articles created:
Misc.:
user page -- user talk -- contributions

Barbara Shack is one of the stranger members of that already strange group of users that make up RationalWiki. She is the bizarre and confusing combination of oblivious and paranoid. She is no longer active and has shifted to another account out of privacy concerns.

Her oddly-worded articles tend to focus on the Roman Catholic Church and their sexual prejudices. Initially, she worked in a sort of vacuum, with no one willing to touch her work, possibly because they didn't want to validate it by correcting it. However, with time, others have grown more comfortable with her, perhaps beginning with Human's drastic rewrite of her byzantine magnum opus "Magdalene laundries"^[2].

Barbara Shack initially refrained from interacting with the other users (much like Icewedge), possibly out of shyness. Later, however, she demonstrated a willingness to talk with others. Nonetheless, others' first impressions of her are harder to fade, and even the most radical atheists on the site, such as Bob M and SusanG, seem in no hurry to hang out with her. It is an established fact that she is Proxima Centauri.

[edit] Style guide

Barbara Shack has a most bizarre writing style. This gem, for instance, from our article on edit warring:

It happens all over the Internet where ever there are Wikis unless there are procedures to stop it.^[3]

Let's see, what's wrong with this sentence?

• First are the min or Errors: It happens all over the Internet where ever there are Wikis unless there are procedures to stop it.

• Second, she needs to pare down her redundant wording in her writing technique, because she fails to avoid redundancy^[4]: It happens all over the Internet where ever there are Wikis unless there are procedures to stop it.
  What's this? There are wikis not on the internet?

• Third, there is a lot of repetitive wording, and there is a lot of ways for her to avoid that, because there is a lot of stuff in the writing: It happens all over the Internet where ever there are Wikis unless there are procedures to stop it. Nothing is wrong with repetitive wording per se. Done well it can establish a rhythm and flow to a sentence, but the writing here is so flat that nothing distracts from the double use of "there are".

• Fourth are the factual errors: It happens all over the Internet where ever there are Wikis unless there are procedures to stop it. Find me one instance where having formal procedures has stopped an edit war, and I will remove this point. Say what? There are no examples? Oh, dear. It looks like this is staying.

• Fifth, Barbara needs to start using commas.

Possible rewrite for this sentence: Edit wars happen on all wikis, despite procedures made to stop them.

Overall, Barbara's writing style tends towards a series of short, declarative sentences. While clear in intent, the readability of her prose suffers. She also is prone to "overmaking" her point. The original version of her Magdalene Laundries article abounds with examples of this^[5], as does her tendency to paste the same piece of text into four or five articles, however poorly it might fit the rest of the text around it.

Here is a wonderful example of how the use of a comma, or at least the correct verb tense, would make all the difference:

"I'm running a campaign against Lulz which humiliates fellow freethinkers."^[6]

Surely, she does not mean a campaign which humiliates freethinkers?

[edit] Notes and references

1. ↑ User creation log for Barbara Shack.
2. ↑ Human pares down Barbara's article by a massive 12,593 bytes.
3. ↑ Written by Barbara here.
4. ↑ No one will get this one...
5. ↑ archived here
6. ↑ Said here