User:Guerillero/Quotes

Interesting Quotes about wikipedia
There's an unresolved tension in wikipedia between those who believe that even the slightest of micro-stubs on any dot on any map, or any sportsman however minor, somehow adds to "the sum of all human knowledge", and those who believe that to add anything worthwhile takes more than an incoherently written sentence or two. There are large parts of wikipedia it's just best to avert your eyes from; pro-wrestling springs to mind.

It's in most users best interest to stay away from AN/ANI.

I am hard-pressed to find somebody willing to go through the chinese water torture that is RfA on english Wikipedia at the moment. Let alone somebody who'll actually pass the damn thing.

although in truth I suspect that asking MZMcBride to be a bit less snarky may be something like asking the Atlantic Ocean to be a bit less wet

I think it's funny that people are arguing over a dash versus a hyphen. Will this really affect our readers' learning about the subject or comprehension of the article? It's a single character; we're not five-year-olds, here.

On a more serious note, this whole furfurrah quite neatly epitomizes so many of the problems facing Wikipedia: small groups of overly-passionate editors intent on protecting their little fiefdoms; ignoring what readers (you know, those millions of people every day who use Wikipedia as a resource) need, and don't need. viz, they don't give a tinker's damn whether it's an endash, an emdash, a hyphen, or a squiggly line as long as the semantic meaning is clear; prizing form over function and style over substance

The people who write Wikipedia are usually focused on trying to do just that. They are not usually hovering around drama boards and RfAs. The admin corps and their retinues have these processes entirely in their control, and are as likely to reform themselves as the military in Myanmar are likely to reform themselves.

As the primary job of Wikipedians is to write the encyclopedia, any user whose principal activity is to interfere with the writing should be removed from the project, as painlessly as possible. The best way is to persuade them that they will be happier elsewhere, and to wish them well; the worst is to beat them up and make them angry: but however it happens, it must be done.

People who announce early in their Wiki careers that they want to be admins, probably shouldn't be. Adminship is not a trophy and beware those who want to pin it on like a shiny badge.

A high proportion of Wikipedians are people with issues with authority. That's why many people are attracted to Wikipedia in the first place. Keep this in mind if you become an administrator, for you may have just become, unwittingly, what these people most resent; and no matter how good a job you do, they'll find your one mistake and beat you up with it. It's best just to accept this demographic for the reality it is. They are often the best editors, and as long as Wikipedia remains open to all, this situation will remain.

Seven Words You Can Never Say on Wikipedia: Slander, Libel, Lawyer, Lawsuit, Sue, Court, Defamation. Try to avoid any language like that in a dispute with someone.

I think it's pretty obvious that AN/I has been taken over by some professional drama mongers. The ratio of legitimate complaints to pointless drama has quickly converged to zero. Anyway, the following suggestion is only one-fourth tongue in cheek: put Sandstein in charge of it and give him the powers to police it. It will be cold, impersonal, and detached but it will also be fair, judicious and impartial, with no nonsense tolerated. Like I said, I'm almost serious.

Speaking as a former Arbcom clerk, I think the rules and procedures that have been developed there would easily migrate to this proposed new AN/G. Clerking is very effective when it is (a) completely impartial and (b) ruthlessly intolerant of incivility (employing a system of warnings, page bans and at last resort blocks to enforce page bans). Once people know the ground rules, it is surprising how quickly/easily people adapt.

Again, that is why new editors need to bee steered towards editing existing articles rather than creating new ones. We can't blame them for creating crap if they have little to no feel for what type of article we want to retain in the project. How this project works now is like a big empty parking lot, a bunch of brand new cars being unloaded, and people who have never driven before are being given keys and told to go park without error.

This is an encyclopedia project, not a hand-holding therapy retreat. All this talk about alternatives to deletion to avoid hurt feelings is just ridiculous.

Perhaps this [the ability to see Special:UnwatchedPages] should be a new user-right which can be assigned to trusted non-admins using the same careful scrutiny and diligence used to assign rollback? Then we could make a cute little icon and userbox that editors could add to their collections.

People don't matter, however important they think they are. What matters is what they do with their time on here, that's what causes the problems. What people produce on wikipedia is of prime importance, not the people themselves. Yes, there is something very wrong about the way wikipedia is run in parts of the project. Too many pretend policemen who lack authority in the real world and try to be powerful on here. I'd have left long ago if I didn't care about what we are really here for. Personally for me the positive aspects of wikipedia and the chance to produce something never been seen in English before or to compound so much knowledge into one encyclopedia is exciting.

I'm not totally sure what diacritic usage has to do with User:Okeyes (WMF) qua his role as a Foundation employee. It's not up to Oliver or Maryana or any other Wikimedia Foundation employees to help English Wikipedia get their collective shit together regarding diacritic usage. I cannot promise to read the minds of Foundation employees, but if they are even the slightest bit observant of the Wikipedia community (which given they are also community members, I'd like to think they are), I'd suggest that they are both aware of and slightly embarrassed by the parade of pointless squabbling and would rather like the community to actually seriously try to find some reasoned, stable consensus and stop making overwrought comparisons between advocates of either diacritic usage or diacritic avoidance and characters from a novel that satirises Stalinism. It just makes the vast majority of people who don't care enough about the issue look at the warring factions like the aforementioned squabbling children. Oh wait, that might just be me.

Short version: Welcome to Wikipedia. If you are here for any other reason other than to edit a wiki-encyclopedia, please leave. If you are here to help build an encyclopedia, you are most welcome to stay.

Wikipedia isn't a debating society. Are you here to contribute? I mean, we have lots of articles needing references, lots of dead links that need fixing. Maybe write a WP:DYK...

The problem with your analogy is that on a sports team the two ides are equal, in that both take the field with the same opportunities to advance, score, and win. Here, the two sides are not equal. We have a word that is widely used to describe a particular prejudicial belief, and we have a tiny handful of people off to one side who don't like it. WP:NPOV doesn't mean "everyone gets a seat at the table", it means "everyone of significance gets a seat at the table". If you're so fond of analogies...we're at the main Thanksgiving table in the dining room, while you're at the kids' fold-out table next to the kitchen.

It's a difficult problem that has its roots much further back than most us can imagine - remember that early English Wikipedians were largely drawn from either the Usenet, the academic, or the open source/free speech communities, and none of them are particularly noted for their deep-rooted commitment to civil discourse. Newer users learned their "wiki-manners" from the old hands; certainly many of those who were in positions of authority when I joined in 2005 were not exactly paragons of civility. Back then, though, these behaviours were considered "quirky" or "off-beat", and the individuals considered to have "character" and "guts". To give many of them their due, they managed to get this crazy enterprise off the ground and keep it flying despite the many obstacles that existed.

At the same time, many of the processes that were established early on depended on genuine good faith and a touching degree of idealism. Requests for comment were intended to draw in users for additional considered opinions, who had little or no history with the topic (or person) involved. For some time, that worked; however, today's requests for comment almost always wind up with the editors whose opinions had already been expressed repeating the same arguments, few additional uninvolved voices, and often as not the same divergence that existed beforehand.

We have been, to some extent, the victims of our own success. We grew exponentially and not organically, and given the roots of our community, the usual group structural forms were eschewed. There was also practically no money for anything for a very long time (our fundraisers now raise as much in a day as they did in the entire year when I first joined up), and very few employees who kept the operation together with shoestrings and sealing wax, while everything else was left to the editorial communities (and the volunteer developer communities) to keep things going. This "flattened hierarchy" of leadership worked reasonably well with a smaller editorial community that had barely scratched the surface of content creation, but quickly showed itself to be impractical when editors joined in droves - many of them focusing on hand-to-hand combat with vandals. Those who loathed wasting their time cleaning up after vandals were glad to have this newer cadre join them; however, there was a palpable difference in their reason for becoming part of the community, and when the number of highly active contributors more than doubled over a short period of time, it was impossible to provide an effective process to help them learn the technical, policy, and cultural expectations. Efforts to try to remedy some of these issues have been largely unsuccessful, with an overwhelming proliferation of often-conflicting policies that are nearly incomprehensible to the uninitiated, an overabundance of badly written and poorly descriptive templates, and a dependence on automated tools for social interaction.

You're supposed to fight fire, not set yourself alight in the process many admins forget in the heat of the moment

Er, no, and I'm having a hard time believing that this was actually a serious question. Editors do not get to second-guess reliable sources...especially venerable ones with a history of editorial discretion and control. "The sources all say X, but we can't got get about Y just because not as many are talking about Y". Well guess what? YES WE DAMN WELL CAN. The predominant, mainstream point-of-view of; Once the heat dies down, Gamergate controversy will follow suit, where the primary narrative will be the misogynist harassment of women, and "but ethics" will be the conter-claim, though not given even remotely the same weight as the primary.
 * Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories: the birth certificate is real, the non-believers are fringe conspirators
 * Global warming: it does exist, human activity has caused it to increase over time
 * Apollo 11: they landed on the moon
 * September 11 attacks: 19 hijackers crashes 4 planes at the behest of bin Laden. Not Jews, not George W. Bush.

This was the inevitable ending of one of the saddest Arbcom cases I have been involved in, and that’s saying a lot given my 5 years as a member of the committee. Nobody won. Mr Shapps lost his seat at the Cabinet table. The British electorate lost about 4% of its election campaign because of the media’s inability to ignore silliness. The Guardian has come across as manipulative and the reporter is apparently under investigation. ChaseMe has lost a reputation he took years in building, and perhaps even more. Wikipedia’s reputation has taken another hit. I’m pretty sure I managed to lose a few friends over this too, for pursuing this matter (or pursuing it in the way that I did). Nobody won. Everybody lost. I wish I could say that there were some teaching moments here, but I'm having a hard time finding them. I wish I could say that checkusers have learned what boundaries are not to be crossed – but judging by the reaction of my checkuser colleagues to the SPI that started this ball rolling, they already knew that. I am certain that none of them would have ever made such a direct link to a public person based on the evidence that was available in this case, and none of them, I am certain, would ever have emailed their SPI statement to the media at all, let alone before actually publishing it on-wiki. I hope the community can feel somewhat reassured about that. As editors, we’ve seen that the mainstream media we depend on for sourcing of so many of our articles is only slightly more accurate than the National Enquirer, a depressing thought given how much we rely upon them; perhaps it is time to rethink whether tomorrow’s fishwrap is really that reliable, and whether the momentary excitation of the media, ever hungry for anything even mildly salacious, is really worthy of a thousand bytes of “column space”. I hope that longtime editors and administrators will go back and read the BLP policy and really start enforcing it to the fullest – all of it, including removing relative trivia from articles about people, treating accounts that might possibly be the subject of the article with decency rather than bullying, and insisting that others also meet those standards. I can hope, but I’ve been hoping this for a long time and I’m seeing increasing disregard for the BLP policy as time has gone on. It’s time for others to pick up this torch. Don’t leave it to our outside critics (or even our internal critics) – this is a responsibility that all of us share. I'm just not convinced that "the community" agrees. I'd love to be proved wrong.

This may be one of the most patronizing things I've ever had the displeasure of reading in my decade on Wikipedia. It should come with an animated GIF of you patting a little girl on the head.

Some of you may be absolutely convinced, after Breitbart and whatnot, that ArbCom is running death panels where innocent editors are just blindfolded and shot in the back of the head (cause a ban from some website is exactly like that); I can't help those editors. The bottom line is that we believe that in this case there was harassment and that no one (well, with maybe one exception) is served by our disclosing the details of this. Calling us Nazis or expressing "disgust" with the way we, human beings with all our flaws who have been given pretty serious responsibilities and no small amount of power, have handled a case of harassment, yeah, what shall I say. Your "frankly" is the kind of "frankly" I don't really care much for; it's the kind of frankness that a. is hardly original here, in a thread full of Righteous Anger and b. smacks of populism. You seem to forget, in all this frankness, that there was a real victim here, who would be only more victimized if we divulge the details (no matter to whom) some of you want us to divulge.

I guess the thinking in all of this discussion comes from the fact that, with a specified person banned and an unspecified person or people harassed, it's instinctively easier to identify with the specified person. "That could be me! What if someone lied and said I harassed them and I got banned without warning? What if they're just disappearing people they don't like?" Well, we did just have a democratic election less than two months ago with very high voter turnout to choose volunteer members of a group specifically expected to receive and act on private information about users and keep that information private. Yes, it's frustrating to hear "we can't tell you that" and "we're not going to do it that way". But we're here in part because we're willing to put up with being called fascists or whatever - over asking someone to find a hobby other than using certain interactive features of this website! - in the interest of protecting users from harassment. If anyone thinks these matters should be handled differently, through the WMF or through any other mechanism, they're welcome to advocate for that (though I suspect that energy would be better invested elsewhere). But as things stand, we're going to act within our scope to prioritize victims' privacy.

Prediction This episode will play out in the same way as all the other battles in the GMO Holy Wars, with the same people taking the same sides. Of course it might not work out this way, just as tomorrow morning could see end of all conflict in the Middle East.