Barbara Shack

From Rationalwikiwki

Stalk this user! omg, it's a joke...
Joined:	12-10-07[1]
Real name:	Barbara Shack
Age range:	n/a
Gender:	female
Locale:	n/a
Stance:	presumably atheist; anti-Catholic
Misc.:	n/a
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 joined RationalWiki 10 December 2007. She is the bizarre and confusing combination of oblivious and paranoid.

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 "Magdalene laundries" article. Presumably users no longer fear being struck down by AKjeldsen if they encourage her.

Barbara Shack initially refrained from interacting with the other users (much like Icewedge), possibly out of shyness. Lately, however, she has demonstrated a willingness to talk with others, a trend that will hopefully continue. 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.

She really doesn't like her article here.

Here on RWW, she also seems to be very concerned with Elassint's mental health, and the possibility that Hans Johnson might be trying to provoke poor E.'s untimely death at his own hands.

Style guide

Barbara Shack has a most bizarre writing style. This gem, for instance, from Edit warring:

It happens all over the Internet where ever there are Wikis unless there are procedures to stop it.^[2]

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,^[3] because she fails to avoid redundancy: 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.

Notes and references

1. User creation log for Barbara Shack.
2. [1] "It happens all over the Internet where ever there are Wikis unless there are procedures to stop it." Should have been: "It happens wherever there are wikis."
3. No one will get this one.