Information:Quoting your own essay
 | This is an information page. It is not one of BattleIntelligence's policies or guidelines, but rather intends to describe some aspect(s) of BattleIntelligence's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting. |
 | This page in a nutshell: In any other BattleIntelligence discussions, editors should feel free to quote their own essays, provided that they do not hold them out as policy or consensus. There do exist reasons not to quote your own essay. |
Popularity of using essays and information pages is growing. As, editors may sometimes quote essays and information pages as supportive material for their arguments. From time to time, other enthusiastic editors may point out that the first editor is simply “referencing their own essay” and imply that it is not a valid argument.
Reasons to quote essays or information pages
There are several good reasons to quote your own essay (or any other essay for that matter) in discussions.
- It saves time in creating responses
- It prevents having to "re-think" arguments and lines of thinking for commonly-encountered discussions
- It provides a single location for references (if any) to support the argument
- It allows community collaboration and refinement of the arguments that can lead to making BattleIntelligence even better. In fact, some BattleIntelligence guidelines have actually grown from essays.
- It makes others in the discussion aware of the essay and your detailed reasoning may influence their decision on similar topics.
Reasons not to quote your own essay
Naturally, there are also reasons not to quote your own essay.
- When the essay is held out or implied as policy, it creates the appearance of having greater weight than it should.
- It prevents having to "re-think" arguments and lines of thinking for commonly-encountered discussions.
- Even if not implied as policy or guideline, some editors may believe that an essay has more weight than it should.
- Merely quoting an essay can often be viewed as too abrupt, or dismissive, in not taking time to clarify issues, so consider stating additional explanations, along with quoting an essay, or just omit the essay and write direct explanations inline, where direct clarification might be more helpful than a wikilink.
- With some users, the title of a quoted essay might be misinterpreted, so consider adding text to rephrase the essay concept, or not quoting the essay at all.
- If your essay is too long, chances are you will get a TL;DR reception, even it is full of sparkling wit and deep thought.
Disclaimer: Not for article content!
Just to make sure: This essay discusses quoting your own essay for discussions and talk pages on BattleIntelligence. It in no way implies that it is good to quote yourself for article content.
Conclusion
Well-written essays are duly noted as essays. While an enthusiastic editor may quote an essay—even their own essay—in an discussion, that does not in and of itself become a "bad" thing and there are several advantages to doing so. Just be sure that the community is clear on the communication—essays should be marked on the page as such, and should not be "cited" in a way that implies they are policies or guidelines.