User:Ritchie333/Wikipedia doesn't own you

This is an explanatory essay about the Ownership of articles policy. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

This page in a nutshell: You're not required to edit anything on Wikipedia if you don't want to. Walking away and doing something else is fine.

All Wikipedia content − articles, categories, templates, and other types of pages − is edited collaboratively. No one, no matter how browbeaten, or of how high frustration in the community, has the requirement to act as though he or she is obliged to edit a particular page. Also, a person or an organisation, which is the subject of an article, does not need to look at the article, and has every right to walk away from it.

We spend a lot of time throwing WP:OWN around as an insult. "Stop reverting. You don't WP:OWN this page" or "I'm deleting this badly sourced content. I don't care how much you hate the subject - you can't WP:OWN what happens to it" But the policy works the other way too. If you want somebody to do something on Wikipedia, you can suggest, advise what to do, and you can try and make them inclusive of your ideas, but you can't make them do it. Don't rise to bait like "this prose reads like an uneducated drunk wrote it, fix it" - the encyclopedia won't improve if people threaten things, and the average reader won't notice the threat anyway. After all, if the prose is so bad, why don't they fix it?

In fact, spending time away from Wikipedia can be a good thing. If you take time out, particularly over stressful conflict, you'll get a much better perspective on things and discover that what we often fight over is generally not the end of the world, after all.