User:Logical Premise/Links/working


 * 1) As in the dry season arsonists start fires, so when there is a contentious event on Wikipedia, certain editors will attempt to escalate conflicts, and so enjoy their destructive course. You may recognize the same names appearing again and again in such circumstances.  As I have said above, it has become harder to work on articles in the last few years, and it is much easier, and much more pleasurable, for some people to feel the rush and the pride in one's witty put-down of an opponent, than to write or cite or cleanup or reference an article that no one will immediately read.  Conflict is as addictive as cocaine, and unfortunately Wikipedia's civility policies only limit incivility among those who respect them in the first place, and who have the personal strength not to need to retaliate.  Anonymity is to cowardice what Viagra is to impotence.
 * 2) 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.
 * 3) A related point is that Wikipedia is often accused of "having a liberal bias". The only bias it has arises from the self-selection of its members:  people are here because they are the ones who want to contribute to an open-content project.  You're going to get a lot of "libertarian left" here by the project's very nature.
 * 4) When you are attacked by a troll, remember that their choice of insult says more about them than about you, and it's an opportunity for compassion. They just told you what hurts them, and obliquely what probably has, in the past.  Harper Lee put it well in To Kill a Mockingbird: "...it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you..."  My only quibble is this:  while it might indeed hurt, it does no harm.
 * 5) "Envy is more implacable than hatred." An often overlooked motivation for persistent harassment is that the troll wants something you have:  recognition, passion, education, skill, knowledge – something.  It's usually disguised by some claim of wrongdoing on your part, but the disguise often contains subtle hints that the troll wants acknowledgement as an equal.  The more persistent the trolling, the higher the level of insecurity that the troll is unwittingly showing.
 * 6) A useful two-question test, to apply to dodgy accounts that seem to be stirring up trouble: 1) Is this person helping to build the encyclopedia? 2) If not, is this person actively interfering with those of us who are?  If the answers are "no" and "yes", respectively, block immediately and move on.
 * 7) "And slime had they for mortar." Every place on earth has nationalists; they are the dupes of demagogues, the tools of conquerors, and a great pestilence upon Wikipedia.  Write a thousand good words on an important but neglected figure, and a nationalist will show up to argue over the spelling of his name, birthplace, ancestry, or category, in a tone of moral outrage.  Look at the "bright" side:  they keep our friends in the war industry employed.  When some day earth is hidden in its final radioactive dust-shroud, their ghosts will declare:  it's not so bad, they got what they deserved.  Let the sane among you ignore them, and be good citizens of all of mankind, rather than just an angry splinter of it.
 * 8) People who put lists of users they don't like on their user pages won't be around for long. See #18, as this is closely related.
 * 9) The highest compliment a troll can pay to you is to create an attack page about you elsewhere on the internet. It's as close to an admission of surrender as you will get, in addition to showing that you are doing something very right indeed.  As in on-wiki trolling, the insults they choose tell you more about them than about you.  Consider such pages to be monuments to your good work, but otherwise ignore them.
 * 10) Wikipedia is no more a place for people with control issues than mining is a career for claustrophobes. That such people are as common here as they are is a poignant reminder of the all-too-human tendency of the chronically disaffected to seek out environments that make them angry and miserable.
 * 11) Beware lest you begin to enjoy too much the blocking of vandals, the crushing of trolls, and the banning of troublemakers; spend too much time ridding the project of monsters, you risk taking on the characteristics of those you drive off. Too much troll-fighting can be destructive for one's attention span, sensitivity, and taste.  It should be no surprise that the most experienced at troll-fighting often have the shortest tempers.  The best way to counter this tendency is to do other things regularly, such as having a life outside Wikipedia.
 * 12) Trolls, banned editors, and mental defectives will try to annoy you, if you are an active contributor. Do good work anyway.  Revenge yourself on your enemies by not becoming like them.
 * 13) As sarcasm is the protest of the weak, so attack sites are the whining of the incompetent, who failed to succeed at editing Wikipedia. They are unimportant.  Continue creating useful and beautiful things, and spread good will in the world; if others are consumed by hate and vindictiveness, you may feel compassion for them, and be grateful you are not so afflicted.
 * 14) Nothing is harder to put up with than the annoyance of good example. If you want to be liked, screw up once in a while, and apologize.
 * 15) We all think it's a good idea to stand up to bullies. Not only is it harder to do than you sometimes think, other than under the influence of testosterone or your anger-enhancer of choice, but in doing so you risk becoming a bully yourself.  I quote from the Dalai Lama:  "...when encountering injustice, take a strong stand -- but with no ill intent."
 * 16) As Freud observed, we are most courageous when we feel most loved. Conversely, the lonely are often the most craven, and their anger is the most vindictive.  Wikipedia is filled with the lonely.
 * 17) "The cut worm forgives the plow." . Trolls and banned editors may harass you repeatedly, attempting to provoke a reaction.  Let it go; they'll get over it.  The plow already has.
 * 18) Beware of users so in love with their own virtue, that they are incapable of recognizing when it has become vice; and so in love with their own eloquence, that they can not see when it has become hypocrisy. The former are those who never admit to any wrong, but yet demand apologies from others for the lapses of judgement to which all human beings are prone; and the latter are the blindest and most intractable of POV-pushers.  Skill with words correlates neither with virtue nor wisdom.
 * 19) When an editor ceases to contribute to articles, but instead writes only in the Wikipedia space, on talk pages, and arbitration cases, and when more than half of that editor's contributions are in conflicts, either beginning or prolonging them: then that editor is very close to departure.  As with stars on the main sequence, some departures are shrinkings into dwarf states, with ever diminishing contributions, giving little light, and with a long decay; and other departures are violent supernova explosions, spewing waste matter and hot gas in all directions.
 * 20) It is easier to get a sincere "thank you" for reverting "you're a faggot" from someone's userpage, than it is for writing a researched, thorough, and referenced encyclopedia article on an encyclopedic topic. The best way to continue as a writing Wikipedian for many years is to be, as the Buddha recommends, "indifferent to both praise and blame."  Indifference to praise is a hard task for mere humans, but millions of potential anonymous readers demand it of you, for if you require praise you will burn out with one of the fates indicated in No. 59.  And remember this:  you are allowed to take your work seriously here, and think highly of your own efforts; but be advised, don't talk about it.
 * 21) When Wikipedians spend too much time on the noticeboards, in Arbcom cases, and on talk pages of contentious articles, they have a high probability of concluding that Wikipedia is dysfunctional, incompetent, and doomed to fail. Once a Wikipedian has reached this realization, expect that person's user page to boast an essay announcing the imminent failure of the project.  The best cure for this condition is to leave those places, and instead read a few articles on genuinely encyclopedic topics, noticing just how good they actually are.  Similarly, if you were to look at a table at a subatomic level, you would see that it consists mainly of empty space, with innumerable miniscule particles whizzing about angrily, each having an arbitrary and undefinable position; indeed, if you look at them too closely, they will change just to spite you: but back away, the whole becomes visibly a table again.  We're a pretty good encyclopedia, and you will notice it once you back away from the conflict zones.
 * 22) There will be world peace, and the lion will lie down with the lamb, before banned users realize that they have only themselves to blame for being banned. All campaigns referencing "corrupt admins" and "cabals" arise from this same inexhaustible source of folly:  I can't possibly be wrong:  all of them must be.
 * 23) That bad editors seem to be as large and troublesome a group as they are is a form of selection bias, and the more time you spend on noticeboards, the worse it seems. It's rather like the bad drivers you encounter on the roadways:  when you reach your destination, you may remember the two or three bad drivers you encountered, but not the hundreds of good ones who escaped your attention by doing everything right.  Thus there may be 99 good editors for every bad one, but you'd never notice, for their names do not appear in drama threads, and their angry messages never contaminate your talk page.
 * 24) Playing the victim makes you smaller. This is something that returning banned users, on making their shrill accusations of cabals and conspiracies and personal vendettas, do not realize:  it does not make them rise in importance:  it shrinks them, diminishes them, makes them even more insignificant and ridiculous on each iteration.  It's reminiscent of Richard Matheson's Incredible Shrinking Man, that great existential film into which so much can be read.  Instead of helping build the largest encyclopedia in the history of the human race, those trolls finish their Wiki lives battling imagined spiders, with toothpicks.
 * 25) The only one hundred percent certain way to get rid of a troll is to close the browser tab. Takes a mouse click.  Hard to do though, isn't it?
 * 26) Any edit that improves the encyclopedia is a good edit. Before clicking "save page", always run this through your final mental checker:  does what I just did in that edit box improve the encyclopedia?
 * 27) People still write new articles for the encyclopedia, but with all the sound and fury at the noticeboards, you have to go out of your way to notice. Even more important, you have to care.
 * 28) It's easier to burn down a dilapidated building than to fix it. The bigger the ego, the more arsenious the impulse.
 * 29) When you realize that editing an article on a current world conflict stresses you out more than the actual conflict does, it is time to take a break. Having your edits bombed to oblivion with an rvv is not as bad as losing your entire family to a paramilitary raid, and sometimes it is important to think about it.
 * 30) It is impossible to love again anything you have truly ceased to love. Editors who return after retirement, or after a wearied or bitter departure, may edit again, but never with the same passion they once brought to the project.  Each successive return will be with a diminished dedication and shorter duration.
 * 31) Beware of that moment when you think yourself wise, for you may have just become a fool.
 * 1) "The cut worm forgives the plow." . Trolls and banned editors may harass you repeatedly, attempting to provoke a reaction.  Let it go; they'll get over it.  The plow already has.
 * 2) Beware of users so in love with their own virtue, that they are incapable of recognizing when it has become vice; and so in love with their own eloquence, that they can not see when it has become hypocrisy. The former are those who never admit to any wrong, but yet demand apologies from others for the lapses of judgement to which all human beings are prone; and the latter are the blindest and most intractable of POV-pushers.  Skill with words correlates neither with virtue nor wisdom.
 * 3) When an editor ceases to contribute to articles, but instead writes only in the Wikipedia space, on talk pages, and arbitration cases, and when more than half of that editor's contributions are in conflicts, either beginning or prolonging them: then that editor is very close to departure.  As with stars on the main sequence, some departures are shrinkings into dwarf states, with ever diminishing contributions, giving little light, and with a long decay; and other departures are violent supernova explosions, spewing waste matter and hot gas in all directions.
 * 4) It is easier to get a sincere "thank you" for reverting "you're a faggot" from someone's userpage, than it is for writing a researched, thorough, and referenced encyclopedia article on an encyclopedic topic. The best way to continue as a writing Wikipedian for many years is to be, as the Buddha recommends, "indifferent to both praise and blame."  Indifference to praise is a hard task for mere humans, but millions of potential anonymous readers demand it of you, for if you require praise you will burn out with one of the fates indicated in No. 59.  And remember this:  you are allowed to take your work seriously here, and think highly of your own efforts; but be advised, don't talk about it.
 * 5) When Wikipedians spend too much time on the noticeboards, in Arbcom cases, and on talk pages of contentious articles, they have a high probability of concluding that Wikipedia is dysfunctional, incompetent, and doomed to fail. Once a Wikipedian has reached this realization, expect that person's user page to boast an essay announcing the imminent failure of the project.  The best cure for this condition is to leave those places, and instead read a few articles on genuinely encyclopedic topics, noticing just how good they actually are.  Similarly, if you were to look at a table at a subatomic level, you would see that it consists mainly of empty space, with innumerable miniscule particles whizzing about angrily, each having an arbitrary and undefinable position; indeed, if you look at them too closely, they will change just to spite you: but back away, the whole becomes visibly a table again.  We're a pretty good encyclopedia, and you will notice it once you back away from the conflict zones.
 * 6) There will be world peace, and the lion will lie down with the lamb, before banned users realize that they have only themselves to blame for being banned. All campaigns referencing "corrupt admins" and "cabals" arise from this same inexhaustible source of folly:  I can't possibly be wrong:  all of them must be.
 * 7) That bad editors seem to be as large and troublesome a group as they are is a form of selection bias, and the more time you spend on noticeboards, the worse it seems. It's rather like the bad drivers you encounter on the roadways:  when you reach your destination, you may remember the two or three bad drivers you encountered, but not the hundreds of good ones who escaped your attention by doing everything right.  Thus there may be 99 good editors for every bad one, but you'd never notice, for their names do not appear in drama threads, and their angry messages never contaminate your talk page.
 * 8) Playing the victim makes you smaller. This is something that returning banned users, on making their shrill accusations of cabals and conspiracies and personal vendettas, do not realize:  it does not make them rise in importance:  it shrinks them, diminishes them, makes them even more insignificant and ridiculous on each iteration.  It's reminiscent of Richard Matheson's Incredible Shrinking Man, that great existential film into which so much can be read.  Instead of helping build the largest encyclopedia in the history of the human race, those trolls finish their Wiki lives battling imagined spiders, with toothpicks.
 * 9) The only one hundred percent certain way to get rid of a troll is to close the browser tab. Takes a mouse click.  Hard to do though, isn't it?
 * 10) Any edit that improves the encyclopedia is a good edit. Before clicking "save page", always run this through your final mental checker:  does what I just did in that edit box improve the encyclopedia?
 * 11) People still write new articles for the encyclopedia, but with all the sound and fury at the noticeboards, you have to go out of your way to notice. Even more important, you have to care.
 * 12) It's easier to burn down a dilapidated building than to fix it. The bigger the ego, the more arsenious the impulse.
 * 13) When you realize that editing an article on a current world conflict stresses you out more than the actual conflict does, it is time to take a break. Having your edits bombed to oblivion with an rvv is not as bad as losing your entire family to a paramilitary raid, and sometimes it is important to think about it.
 * 14) It is impossible to love again anything you have truly ceased to love. Editors who return after retirement, or after a wearied or bitter departure, may edit again, but never with the same passion they once brought to the project.  Each successive return will be with a diminished dedication and shorter duration.
 * 15) Beware of that moment when you think yourself wise, for you may have just become a fool.
 * 1) Playing the victim makes you smaller. This is something that returning banned users, on making their shrill accusations of cabals and conspiracies and personal vendettas, do not realize:  it does not make them rise in importance:  it shrinks them, diminishes them, makes them even more insignificant and ridiculous on each iteration.  It's reminiscent of Richard Matheson's Incredible Shrinking Man, that great existential film into which so much can be read.  Instead of helping build the largest encyclopedia in the history of the human race, those trolls finish their Wiki lives battling imagined spiders, with toothpicks.
 * 2) The only one hundred percent certain way to get rid of a troll is to close the browser tab. Takes a mouse click.  Hard to do though, isn't it?
 * 3) Any edit that improves the encyclopedia is a good edit. Before clicking "save page", always run this through your final mental checker:  does what I just did in that edit box improve the encyclopedia?
 * 4) People still write new articles for the encyclopedia, but with all the sound and fury at the noticeboards, you have to go out of your way to notice. Even more important, you have to care.
 * 5) It's easier to burn down a dilapidated building than to fix it. The bigger the ego, the more arsenious the impulse.
 * 6) When you realize that editing an article on a current world conflict stresses you out more than the actual conflict does, it is time to take a break. Having your edits bombed to oblivion with an rvv is not as bad as losing your entire family to a paramilitary raid, and sometimes it is important to think about it.
 * 7) It is impossible to love again anything you have truly ceased to love. Editors who return after retirement, or after a wearied or bitter departure, may edit again, but never with the same passion they once brought to the project.  Each successive return will be with a diminished dedication and shorter duration.
 * 8) Beware of that moment when you think yourself wise, for you may have just become a fool.
 * 1) It's easier to burn down a dilapidated building than to fix it. The bigger the ego, the more arsenious the impulse.
 * 2) When you realize that editing an article on a current world conflict stresses you out more than the actual conflict does, it is time to take a break. Having your edits bombed to oblivion with an rvv is not as bad as losing your entire family to a paramilitary raid, and sometimes it is important to think about it.
 * 3) It is impossible to love again anything you have truly ceased to love. Editors who return after retirement, or after a wearied or bitter departure, may edit again, but never with the same passion they once brought to the project.  Each successive return will be with a diminished dedication and shorter duration.
 * 4) Beware of that moment when you think yourself wise, for you may have just become a fool.
 * 1) It is impossible to love again anything you have truly ceased to love. Editors who return after retirement, or after a wearied or bitter departure, may edit again, but never with the same passion they once brought to the project.  Each successive return will be with a diminished dedication and shorter duration.
 * 2) Beware of that moment when you think yourself wise, for you may have just become a fool.
 * 1) Beware of that moment when you think yourself wise, for you may have just become a fool.