User:Fubar Obfusco

Dous a papa Shith in the voids? Is the Bera ka slick?

Professional interests
open source software - computer security (spam, viruses) - programming languages (Python, Lisp) - e-mail - voice over IP - Linux - Macintosh

Amateur & recreational interests
politics (libertarianism) - human sexuality - computer science - religion, mythology, occultism, and atheism - recreational drug use - beer - conspiracy theory - law - gardening - Internet culture - economics

Wikipedian views
I'm pro-wiki. The Wiki model of collaboration works very well. Attempts to restrict it -- for instance, to lock out anonymous contributors -- are misguided. Openness is how Wikipedia has become as successful as it is today, and there is no reason to throw away this openness now that Wikipedia is the #1 reference site in the world.

I'm neither inclusionist nor deletionist. I disapprove of the promulgation of substubs and vanity articles, but anything which can have an interesting article written about it should be in Wikipedia. Categorical statements such as "all schools are notable" or "all Pokémon are non-notable" are not very useful: inclusion should be on the basis of the potential for a high-quality article or group of articles.

I'm opposed to censorship. Wikipedia needs to be able to reflect all verifiable human knowledge. It can't afford to be censored to fit someone's expectations of what's appropriate for schoolchildren or any other audience.


 * Corollary: I oppose all censorship tagging schemes. There have been a number of proposals to tag Wikipedia articles or images so that people can filter out "offensive" ones. However, there's no way to do this without throwing away Wikipedia's neutrality principles. Wikipedia editors have roundly rejected even the most minimal tagging scheme, thus showing that censorship tagging is not the way Wikipedia should be run.


 * Corollary: Wikipedia does not blush. Articles about "offensive" topics such as sexual acts, violence, or fringe beliefs should be unblushing. They should provide the detail that is necessary to understand the subject. A "wink wink, nudge nudge" prurient attitude is unscholarly and more offensive than any topic itself.

The best response to most content disagreements is to cite sources. Most of the neutrality or accuracy conflicts I've seen here involve two or more people squabbling over a piece of text that has no cited sources at all. Since we're supposed to cite sources anyway, a productive response on the part of all sides to such a disagreement is to refer to, and cite, their sources. At minimum this allows the discussion to center around source criticism rather than epithets and personalities.

The neologism "POV" needs to go. This term has become an unfortunate piece of jargon -- a term derived from NPOV which has become nothing more than an accusatory epithet. There is nothing useful conveyed by it which is not conveyed by "bias" or "opinion" -- and it has become a piece of hateful talk that is all too frequently used to accuse or exclude.