This was originally posted as a comment on the talk page of a fellow editor who was experiencing burnout. I'm duplicating it here, in the hopes that other editors find it useful.
Suggestions for staying sane edit
I realize you've probably heard most of this before, but I've found the following things help a lot for staying sane and not growing to hate editing here (most of the time):
- If you need a break, take a break. A nice, long break. My record was about 2 months, after the whole "Harmonics Theory" fiasco. More recently, I took a break of about a month in the spring of 2006. The encyclopedia won't self-destruct in the meantime, and it's usually no more stressful to clean up a month's accrued cruft than to clean it up day by day.
- Be willing to drop the losing battles. This is part of why I gave up on autodynamics. Yes, it still needs to be fixed, but I can contribute a _lot_ more usefully if I'm not bogged down arguing with people with immutable views and time on their hands.
- Remember that you're (presumably) here to have fun. Every now and then, forget about Guarding the Truth, and pick an interesting and non-controvertial side project. My last one was a partial rewrite of degenerate matter; my current one is event horizon. As a micro-project, I'll probably make placeholder figures showing spacetime curvature the Right Way for general relativity. Once I start having fun again, I'm willing to put up with a little more flack (though only a little).
- Remember that The System can work. This is part of one of my current requests on the WikiProject Physics talk page, and there are a few other users I'm watching as well. Sooner or later, the really harmful cranks and pov-pushers unambiguously demonstrate their aims, and then the wheels of policy can be set in motion. The flip side of it being possible for one person to cause a lot of stress, is that one person getting themselves banned can _save_ a lot of stress, so I feel that chasing individual blatant pov-pushers is a worthwhile activity. For the borderline cases, I find it less stressful to just ignore them, but your mileage may vary.
I hope at least some of this is useful to you. --Christopher Thomas 03:57, 28 June 2006 (UTC)