User:Cyrius/Quotes

<Fuzheado> and in some strange way, looking too slick and professional is a drawback... because people really don't get the idea that this stuff is changeable!

Newbie thought process

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<alteregoisback> i showed a good friend of mine a wikipedia article today, and his first reaction was "why can i edit this page?"...his second reaction was "i'm going to erase everything in this article"...his third reaction was "i'm going to write an article on myself"...

<alteregoisback> i think we can consider this typical of average newbies...:P

Passwords

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<TimStarling> heh

<TimStarling> 309 users have the password "password"

<TimStarling> 812 have a blank password

<TimStarling> 47 use "12345"

Responsibility

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<Angela> it's not fair. I want to have a tantrum and blank my user page too

* Angela has to be all sensible these days

Rules

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<SethIlys> heh. Turns out Wikipedia is just a giant game of Nomic.

Sysop craziness level

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<Snowspinner> G: At the moment, RickK is the only user authorizeed to pull bans out of his ass.

<Raul654> Don't talk smack on Rickk

<Raul654> He's the first line of defense against 98% of the problem users on wikipedia

<Snowspinner> Raul: I like RickK. He's... a very good limit case.

<Snowspinner> Any sysop crazier than RickK is definitely too crazy.

<Snowspinner> RickK is the exact maximum amount of crazy that works.

Typing speed

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<JamesF> If you can't type at > 80 wpm after a few months of Wikipedia-editing, you're evidently not addicted enough :-)

From #Wikimedia

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Fixing the too-much-trust problem?

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<jwales> this is a funny sort of question I get from journalists a lot

<jwales> they say "Wikipedia looks very good, so people trust it. Is that a problem?"

<jwales> I am always tempted to say "yes, and to fix this, we are redesigning the website to look crappy."

From Wikipedia itself

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Article validation

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From m:Article validation

As I understand it, our central goal is to prevent someone from opening their WikiReader and seeing "GOATSE GOATSE ALL DAY LONG / GOATSE GOATSE THE GOATSE SONG". Grendelkhan 03:44, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Autobiographies

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From Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/RHNigl:

We are not in the habit of accepting someone's own word that they are important, as a rather large number of people hold such opinions. This particularly seems to afflict artists, musicians, and others whose careers would benefit from free publicity. An odd coincidence, don't you think? Isomorphic 12:01, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Best poll options ever

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From Wikipedia:Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense/Sysop Accountability Policy:

Support: Sysops must be held accountable.
Support: Sysops must be held accountable, but only on odd-numbered days and the Ides of March.
Support: Sysops must not not be held accountable, but not on days where the Ides of March falls on an even day.
Oppose: Sysops are an elite cabal. They are above the law.
Depends:
I haven't stopped beating my wife yet:
I have stopped beating my wife because Wikipedia uses up all my wife beating time
I have stopped beating my wife because I need to go on a diet to fit in my wife-beater
This poll is nonsense on stilts:
This poll is nonsense and is not on stilts because stilts would make it no longer a speedy deletion candidate #1:
Do not meddle in the ways of sysops, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
Sysops are already accountable
Keep: This is a valid surrealistic technique. Also, anyone who supports the German spelling of sysop is a Nazi.
Sysops fnord fnord must fnord never fnord fnord be accountable fnord or Wikipedia fnord fnord will go down in flames

Conspiracies #1

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"When you start accusing everyone of being in on a conspiracy, you shouldn't be surprised if they decide to confirm your paranoia by banding together against you." —khaosworks

Conspiracies #2 - Extreme Unction's first law

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Extreme Unction's first law: If enough people act independently towards the same goal, the end result is indistinguishable from a conspiracy.

How to avoid deletion

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From Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Paul Bunyan Trophy:

The other side of that coin is that if people would wait four minutes to write one decent paragraph before creating an article, they wouldn't be so apt to get listed on VfD. Posting something like the first version of this article is like walking out the front door naked, and then complaining that people didn't even give you a chance to get dressed. Maybe the neighbors shouldn't be so quick to call the cops, but if someone doesn't want that hassle it's pretty easy just to throw on a bathrobe first. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:58, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Idiocy

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From Template:VfD-Suncrest Washington:

I am not CoolDude, I just feel that there is no reason to keep the page, CoolDude will vandalise on --CoolDude 19:25, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Rumors

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From Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Halo 3:

Also, rumours should not be the bulk of the wikipedia's knowledge on a subject, whether that subject has its own article or is included in another. There's a difference between "Blah blah blah, blah, blah, may support MP3 playback" and "So the Chief may, it is conjectured, shoot walruses at space hippos with his ninja powers. Other conjecture supposes that they will be ninjas shot with walrus powers. But nobody's made an announcement yet so we're basing a potential subject on dust and echoes". Where was I? Yes, delete the rumours. Sockatume 08:39, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Sysopship

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From Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections July 2004/Candidate statements

I've been on Wikipedia since December 2003 and an administrator a bit over a month, something I view as the large and shiny keyring that you get with your mop and bucket. - David Gerard 15:18, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Too many polls

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From Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship

I swear to god if I see the word election or poll on wikipedia one more time, I'm going to vomit. There must be (easily) 150 of them going on right now. Polls are going out of control. NO MORE VOTING!!! →Raul654 06:29, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)

From the mailing lists

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Disbelief

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Hmm, "edit this page"? What? <click> edit box? That's weird.

"blah blah blah"

<click>

Whoaaaa!

Wikipedia is insane, so of course people don't believe it.

-- Jimbo on Wikipedia-l

NPOV

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Saying that they killed someone for not helping them put an anti-tank explosive outside the person's house ... does such an action really need a great big "AND PS IT WAS BAD!"? I maintain that it does not, and that it does the page discredit to do so.

-- David Gerard on WikiEN-l

Promise

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I hereby give my solemn promise to the community, that Wikimedia will never become an institution which wastes more money on photo shoots and consultants and looking good than in trying actually do something useful. This is really an outrageous situation when it happens, and I refuse to let us ever play that way. We're about people, people who care, people who can make a change. Let's never forget it.

-- Jimbo on Wikipedia-l

Using our rules against us

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We'll just change the rules. I'll just start blocking Nazis at whim if I have to. I'll initiate legal action if appropriate.

If they want to play games with us, fine. This is Calvinball -- we make up the rules, so we win. Easy.

-- Jimbo on WikiEN-l

From elsewhere

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The Cabal

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"On Wikipedia, there is a giant conspiracy attempting to have articles agree with reality."

-- Seen on the Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board [1]

The competition

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Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?

Jimmy Wales:

I would view them as a competitor, except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within 5 years.

-- From Jimbo's summer 2004 Slashdot interview

Conspiracies

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[Stone's Law] states:

Any evidence which opposes (or tends to oppose) a conspiracy theory was in fact fabricated by the conspirators, and shows just how pernicious the conspiracy really is.

-- Taken from PPR/Ward's Wiki page Stones Law

Deletion complaints

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Patient: You bet! I ranted and raved. I gave those no-good, insensitive, dirty, rotten, filthy, foul, corrupt, indecent, inhuman, bilge water, finks a piece of my mind.

DrWiki: Did it help?

Patient: (very quietly) They deleted it.

DrWiki: But did it help?

Patient: No.

DrWiki: Time's up, that will be $150. Cash only, please.

-- Taken from PPR/Ward's Wiki page GotDeleted

Everyone agrees that consensus is bad!

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What we see in Wiki is the ultimate in relativism - the 'consensus' decides what's truth, which I think we can all agree is patently absurd.

-- From a Slashdot comment by (arg!)Styopa

The Mission

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Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

-- From Jimbo's summer 2004 Slashdot interview

New pages

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Oh wow. Wait a minute, you can make your own Wikipedia pages? Wow.

From some Livejournal comment

Rule of Links

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The Rule of Links is that you link when it's appropriate to do so. Linking is an art. It's a choice. You don't link from every word or even every noun, or from the subject of every sentence. But when a reader reasonably would want to know more about the subject, the Rule of Links says you should link to it.

-- Dave Winer [2]