A Love of Knowledge, for Valentine's Day
I do feel my attempts to have relevant titles related to monthly holidays is getting increasingly desperate, but, well, here we are. It's either that or we go with the list off a few random things featured in the list, which seems fine on occasion, but does get a bit repetitive if done every month. And I struggle enough to avoid getting my biases into this when it's just down to which articles get images - for the record, the rule is: if it has a good-quality, freely-licensed image, directly relevant to the article (so no sister ships of the same design, no stadiums where a game took place on a different day, and so on), it goes in if at all possible. I then rearrange the lists to try to hve enough text between each image that they don't start pushing down the one below them, with taller images (as they take up more vertical space) ideally getting cut first if there's too many. Still means that "good quality image" might have some bias, but it's about as fair as I can manage. I don't love the idea of having to choose which articles and images to highlight as well, which puts in all sorts of extra bias.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying any of the articles are bad or anything. But Wikipedia isn't a group that came together to share interests I selected, we came to try to cover the sum of human knowledge. The things that interest me most aren't going to be the things that interest you most, and I'm writing for you, dear reader, not for me.
This one is, unfortunately, quite short, because your Signpost writer is dealing with quite a few personal issues connected to his country locking down yet again. Maybe we should just cancel 2021. The last time I remember being unambiguously happy was back in February 2020, when I went to the Kirkcaldy Gilbert and Sullivan Society brilliant performance of The Gondoliers which, although I didn't know it at the time, would be the last live theatre I'd get to go to before everything shut down, cancelling a whole host of plans. The theatres shut down so abruptly that the Edinburgh Gilbert and Sullivan Society had brought in the sets and begun the tech rehearsals for Patience on stage, which would have had a performance had the theatres stayed open one more day.Edinburgh is a major theatre town - it hosts the Edinburgh Festival, has at least eight major theatres, and a lot more if you're willing to travel half an hour by train, and it's felt like the city's been dead for some time now.
- -Adam.