It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.
If you are interested in editing Wikipedia, this tutorial will help you to get your bearings, learn how to find what you are looking for, and introduce you to a few of the most important pages.
Avoid the following Logical fallacy: A occurred, then B occurred, therefore, A caused B.
When B is undesirable, this pattern is often extended in reverse: Avoiding A will prevent B.
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"Keep ... There's an article on x, and that's just as famous as this." –-- LetsKeepIt! "Delete ... We do not have an article on y, so we should not have an article on this." –-- GetRidOfIt!
"Although it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true (when) coming from a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people with the ability to comment and has survived."
According to William James, every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to hop on whatever logic-train seems to be already heading in his general direction. This creates, as James put it, a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions.
---> Something to keep in mind during Wiki mental-masturbatory talk page sessions.
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Bias Warning Signs
According to Robin Hanson, the following are some warning signs that your opinions may not function to estimate truth:
You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it.
You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.
You are uncomfortable taking a position near the middle of the opinion distribution.
You are uncomfortable taking a position of high uncertainty about who is right.
You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.
You are reluctant to change your publicly stated positions in response to new info.
You are reluctant to agree to a rival’s claim, even if you had no prior opinion on the topic.
You are reluctant to take a position that raises the status of rivals.
You care more about consistency between your beliefs than about belief accuracy.
You go easy on sloppy arguments by folks on "your side".
Your opinion doesn’t change much after talking with smart folks who know more.
You find it hard to list weak points and counter-arguments on your positions.
You feel passionately about a topic, but haven’t sought out much evidence.
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"If an editor is truly writing from a neutral point of view, it should be impossible to tell from that person's edits what their viewpoint is."
Everytime you click "save this page", be completely convinced that what you are adding will make Wikipedia a better, more friendly, and successful project - and if what you've typed won't do that, don't click save.
"Truth is a three-edged sword: your truth, my truth, and the truth." — Kosh Naranek
Vacuous Truth
A vacuous truth is a truth that is devoid of content because it asserts something about all members of a class that is empty or because it says "If A then B" when in fact A is inherently false. For example, the statement "all cell phones in the room are turned off" may be true simply because there are no cell phones in the room. In this case, the statement "all cell phones in the room are turned on" would also be considered true, and vacuously so.
The Good
"It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it."
"Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right ...
In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger ... The phenomenon known as 'backfire' is a natural defense mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance ...
It appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. Researcher James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois calls this the "I know I’m right" syndrome." Most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs, but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so ...
There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as 'motivated reasoning'. Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them. New research, published in the journal Political Behavior, suggests that once those facts — or 'facts' — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge."
A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.
If the sources reflect general opinion, and split 90/10, then our goal is for the article to also split 90/10. That is NPOV; treating opinions which have different levels of support as though they had equal levels of support is POV and, frankly, misinformative if not deceptive.
I'd like to strongly protest against the perpetuation of that deplorable myth that removal of cited content is automatically vandalism. There may be any number of perfectly legitimate reasons why an editor would want to remove cited content (lack of relevance, undue weight, redundancy, triviality, POV ...)
It's my belief that most productive Wikipedians first arrive at the site wanting to do something that is against WP policy - advance a point of view, cover something that doesn't meet the notability guideline, etc. We also often bring baggage from other Internet sites where the social norms or policies permit different kinds of behavior - social networking activity, attacks, canvassing, what have you. None of this makes us bad people, just people who have not yet fully absorbed the Wikipedia ethos.
It is easier to get a sincere 'thank you' for reverting 'ur 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 '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.
Wikipedia isn't about satisfying readers. It is about correctly reflecting the mainstream consensus in a field, documenting dissenting views as such so long as they are notable ... I am sure that some readers might prefer to read articles that were slanted to flatter their own viewpoints or social groupings but that isn't what an encyclopaedia does ... There is no malice in us reporting the existing historical consensus ... If you still disagree then your mission is not to persuade us here on Wikipedia because we don't put our own opinions in the articles anyway. Your mission is to persuade the serious academics and analysts who make the consensus on the subject to overturn their considered and expert opinions of many decades. If you succeed in this then we will modify the article accordingly, whether we personally agree or not.
Our social policies are not a suicide pact. They are in place to help us write the encyclopedia ... We need to take due process seriously, but we also need to remember: this is not a democracy, this is not an experiment in anarchy, it's a project to make the world a better place by giving away a free encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's articles are no place for strong views. Or rather, we feel about strong views the way that a natural history museum feels about tigers. We admire them and want our visitors to see how fierce and clever they are, so we stuff them and mount them for close inspection. We put up all sorts of carefully worded signs to get people to appreciate them as much as we do. But however much we adore tigers, a live tiger loose in the museum is seen as an urgent problem.
The key turning point was the increase in emphasis on WP:VERIFY. It unquestionably improved the quality of the encyclopedia, but it just as unquestionably changed us from a large community of online users sharing everything they know to a much smaller community of scholars willing to put in a significant amount of effort researching and documenting their use of reliable sources. That was a good thing for producing a more informative and trustworthy reference work, but it was effectively the end of "the encyclopedia everyone can edit", since most people simply can't or won't make the effort to do the kind of research required to make significant edits when every such edit requires an inline citation to a reliable published source. That combined with the exhaustion of many of the easiest topics has inevitably lead to the community shrinking.
"Nothing is original. Steal from anything that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do, your work and theft will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable, originality is non existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery; celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to."
"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
"Education would be much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every student should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it."
"If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange the apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea, and I have an idea, and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
"Tell a man that there are 300 billion stars in the universe, and he'll believe you ... Tell him that a bench has wet paint upon it and he'll have to touch it to be sure."
"A well-cultivated mind is, so to speak, made up of all the minds of preceding ages; it is only one single mind which has been educated during all this time."
"Americans aren't supposed to learn how the rest of the world does things, the rest of the world needs to learn how Americans do things. While we're at it, we should get rid of this Frenchy metric crap and restore intuitive Imperial units (U.S. version, of course). And abolish those funky Arabic 'ciphers' with their 'zeros' for good ol' Roman numerals."
Worldwide density of Wikipedia additions based on longitudinal and latitudinal estimates.
"How can we build on our success to overcome the challenges that lie ahead? Less than a fifth of the world's population has access to the Internet. While hundreds of thousands of volunteers have contributed to Wikimedia projects today, they are not fully representative of the diversity of the world. Many choices lie ahead as we work to build a world wide movement to create and share free knowledge."
Wikipedia suffers inevitable systemic bias that naturally grows from its contributors' demographic groups, manifesting an imbalanced coverage of a subject, thereby discriminating against the less represented demographic groups.
Access to the Internet is required to contribute to Wikipedia. Most of the world's population, including most of the people in developing nations, the poor in industrialized nations, the disabled, and the elderly, do not have such access and thus their views and experience are under-represented. In most countries, minority demographic groups also have disproportionately less access to information technology, schooling, and education than majority groups.
The English Wikipedia is dominated by native English-speaking editors from Anglophone countries. These Anglophone countries tend to be in the global North, thereby accentuating the encyclopedia's bias to contributions from First World countries.
Even among their general demographic groups, Wikipedians are more technically inclined. There is a barrier represented by the "edit this page" button and the complex Wiki code that many readers either do not recognize or choose not to use.
Wikipedia editors are people that have enough free time to participate in the project. The points of view of editors focused on other projects, e.g. earning a living or caring for others, will be under-represented.
Wikipedians, as a class, tend to over-represent intellectuals from academia. More university professors and computer programmers edit Wikipedia than do dental technicians, firefighters, flight attendants, plumbers etc.
Since Wikipedia editors are self-selecting for social class (only a relatively small proportion of the world's population has the necessary access to computers, the Internet, and enough leisure time to edit Wikipedia articles), articles about or involving issues of interest to the underclasses are unlikely to be created or, if created, are unlikely to survive a deletion review on grounds of notability.
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“
Wikipedia isn't governed by the thoughtful or the informed - it is governed by anyone who turns up. There are a small core of people who like playing wiki as an inhouse role-playing game and simply deny real-world consequences that might limit their freedom of action. There are a larger group who are too immature or lazy to think straight. And then there are all those who recognise "something must be done", but perpetually oppose the something that's being proposed in favour of a "better idea". The mechanism is rather like using a chatshow phone-in to manage the intricacies of a federal budget - it does not work for issues that need time, thought, responsibility and attention. I doubt this problem can be fixed - since it needs structural change to decision making - which is impossible for precisely the same reasons.
In short there are too many idiots and too few people prepared to tell them to fuck off. And yes, that is precisely what we should tell them, because anything less encourages endless debates and Wikilawyering. Want to tell the world that Lance Armstrong takes drugs? Fuck off. At least until he has stopped successfully suing the newspapers for saying it. Want to tell the world about the evil world Jewish conspiracy? Fuck off, forever, and never even think about coming back. Want to tell the world how the scientists are all wrong? Fuck off - until it's in Nature, anyway. Want to out someone as a paedophile? Not here. Want to explain how 9/11 is a conspiracy and no plane crashed into the pentagon? Web space is cheap, get some of your own.
The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: "Experts are scum." For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War -- and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge -- get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.
It makes no more sense to discuss with some users than it makes sense to speak things through with a dolphin. They may be intelligent, but there is no basis for communication.
Many Wikipedia contributors are out of their element. The foundation of the project is academic publishing, but very few people who are actively involved (or addicted, if you will) have the qualifications to be part of such an environment. The Wikipedia forums (AfD, RfA, FAC etc) are not populated with people who are focused on creating, maintaining and improving an academic publishing environment. They have no clue how to do that, so they make the site into something they can relate to – either a battlefield or a playground. The deletionists and the inclusionists take extreme sides, thus resulting in a constant war of attrition. Assorted clowns who are there for the laughs hang out at ANI and make fun of everyone. A bunch of kids run around in their own private remake of The Goonies. Marketing officers and egomaniacs try to sneak in self-promotional material without being spotted. Everyone else is caught in the crossfire. And those who complain are either harassed or blacklisted. And the stupidity goes all the way up.
Wikipedia, which looks like a reference work to the average viewer, is in fact a bureaucracy given over mainly to arguing. The articles are the residue of the argument, being the last thing anyone declined to disagree about.
Some non-lawyer wiki editors enforce copyright law with such strict interpretations and construe fair use so narrowly that they are harming the free exchange of ideas which Wikipedia stands for. Getting images deleted based on technicalities that you can help fix is not helping humankind or the project.
There are those who are about building an encyclopedia; that is our primary purpose, and we're only peripherally about displaying the power of collaborative development or the support of some general "free content community". These goals, however fervently held, are peripheral to the goal of building an encyclopedia. At least one "only free content" advocate compares the cause to other socially obnoxious cranks like vegans. The bulk of the editorship, busy with other tasks, is constantly being interrupted by lectures deploring the environmental cost of meat, nagging about fat and cholesterol, and weeping salt tears over the suffering chickens in their pens.
Like any human organization, Wikipedia is in constant danger of becoming ruled by those editors who enjoy ruling more than editing. Administrators need to be reminded that their powers are not earned rights or badges of superiority, but merely tools that will be lended only as long as they are properly used.
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.
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IP Edits
Widespread anonymity leads to a distinguishable problem, namely, the attractiveness of the project to people who merely want to cause trouble, or who want to undermine the project, or who want to change it into something that it is avowedly not – in other words, the troll problem.
Many an edit war may seem like a fight over nothing to the casual observer, but considering that according to its staff, the popular, multilingual Web site gets about 7 billion views per month, stakes can be high. An edit yields what millions of people read on the site on any particular topic.
Still, a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange — is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an on-line encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come ... There are some people on Wikipedia now who poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.
To be notable, a Wikipedia topic must be "the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other." Although I have written or been quoted in such works, I can't say I've ever been the subject of any. And wouldn't you know, some notability cop cruised past my bio and pulled me over. Unless I get notable in a hurry — win the Nobel Peace Prize? Prove I sired Anna Nicole Smith's baby daughter? — a "sysop" (volunteer techie) will wipe my Wikipedia page clean. It's straight out of Philip K. Dick.
Wikipedia's worst enemies are those whose vanity has been wounded. They may be moderately notable people who attempted to edit an article on themselves, and failed to control it; or they may be people who worked hard on an article on a subject about which they care, which was deleted by the community; or they may be people who attempted to push a POV which was rejected by the community. Usually they invoke a higher moral principle in support of their campaign against the project, such as censorship, free speech, conspiracy against them, or whatnot, as their own vanity prevents them from recognizing that vanity itself is the source of their displeasure.
It just seems to me like no editor should have to go through such verbal abuse in order to be awarded a "volunteer job". The RfA process to me encourages groupthink, stifles intellectual debate, and allows an open forum for any old former grudge to take pot shots at a nominee - who is expected to smile and turn the other cheek out of "civility". Toss in the fact that editors can apparently throw out political accusations with no proof, and impugn years worth of work with a flippant one-liner - and the whole process winds up as one large clusterfuck. Users keep throwing around this idea of a "hell week", as if it is benefit to make the projects seemingly most veteran contributors cap off years of effort with the equivalent of a public dunk tank / fraternal hazing ritual. The predictable result at this point is that only extremely milquetoast editors who haven’t taken any previous political positions and who give the same disingenuous crowd pleasing answers receive sweeping nomination.
The history of non-free content policy is a history of asshattery, which you have to have several years of experience with the project to get a panoramic view of. First came the demand that each such use, whether unique or of a type already recognized as apporpriate, must bear a fair use justification. Fair enough. Then the justification had to appear in a template. Then it had to appear in a separate template for each article. Each such change results in a drive for mass deletions of files, many of which were uploaded by editors who no longer stop by that often. Now comes a demand that articles themselves be rewritten around images, and another fair-use pogrom. A minority of editors have made removal of fair use material as a cause, and press for more numerous and subjective strictures. The majority of editors holds no such commitment to the cause, and notices only when articles they are interested in are effectively vandalized. I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that this policy has at least been partially highjacked by a minority, with a commitment to a cause that makes building an encyclopedia a secondary issue.
"We are blessed to be living in an age when we have a global communications network in which idiots, assholes, and total and complete wastes of fucking human life alike can come together to give instant feedback in an unfettered and unmonitored online environment." — The Onion, "Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet"
Wikimedia's 'Don't be a Dick' Guideline "Don't be a Dick" is the fundamental rule of all social spaces. Every other policy for getting along is a special case of it. Although nobody is empowered to ban or block somebody for dickery, it is still a bad idea to be a dick. So don't be one. If a significant number of reasonable people suggest, whether bluntly or politely, that you are being a dick, the odds are good that you are. Moreover, being right about an issue doesn't mean you're not being a dick! Dicks can be right — but they're still dicks; if there's something in what they say that is worth hearing, it goes unheard, because no one likes listening to dicks.
John Gabriel's "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory" deals with the unsociable tendencies exhibited by internet users as a result of the online disinhibition effect. In this hypothesis, Mike Krahulik suggests that, given both anonymity and an audience, an otherwise regular person can become a "total fuckwad". New York University professor Clay Shirky, who studies social and economic effects of Internet technologies, explains: "There’s a large crowd and you can act out in front of it without paying any personal price to your reputation," which "creates conditions most likely to draw out the typical Internet user’s worst impulses."
(a) Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill. (b) Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others. (c) Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy. (d) If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.
By contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than relatively more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
(1) Rational explanations are dismissed (Occam's razor) (2) Direct evidence is refuted as being part of the coverup (3) Hypothesis are offered as fact (4) Proof of a theory's invalidity is construed as proof of its existence (logical fallacy)
10. All the virtues and vices shown by humanity as a whole can be found on Wikipedia. Anyone who runs from the community because they cannot tolerate its vices, divisions, and politics, will have to face the same vices, divisions, and politics again elsewhere in life.
9. People who loudly accuse the community of some vice are almost invariably guilty of, but blind to, some variant of that vice themselves.
8. Some trolls and POV-pushers are best fought with a time delay. Let them make their edit; then change it an hour or two later, or even the next day. Trolls are easily bored, and are more likely to go away if you hold your fire for a bit.
7. The very existence of Wikipedia is a massive proof that there are more people in the world wanting to build than to tear down. Were that not true, vandals would have overwhelmed and destroyed us years ago.
6. Troublesome editors waste far more of the community's time than vandals. One who sometimes has good edits, but endlessly bickers, threatens, insults, whines, and is eventually banned, will have taken hundreds of hours from other users who would have better spent that time building the encyclopedia.
5. We're a pretty good encyclopedia, and you will notice it once you back away from the conflict zones.
4. One of the commonest kinds of vandalism is an assertion that something, someone, or somewhere is "gay". This is a reflection of the common, indeed unavoidable, sexual insecurity of male adolescents, who make up most of Wikipedia's vandals. It's as universal a part of maturing as acne; revert and ignore.
3. 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.
2. Vandalism in the form of trolling and nasty personal attacks spikes on Friday and Saturday nights, local time. Look at the bright side: at least they're not driving drunk.
1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The primary job of Wikipedians is to write it. Everything else is secondary.
Sarcasm is an unpleasant way of saying the truth ...
This article contains too few editorial templates. Please help vandalize Wikipedia by adding as many obnoxious and useless editorial templates to this article as you can think of. Articles without such templates run the risk of being appreciated by readers. (August 2009)
This article contains no references. Any idiot can see that; but we are assuming that you, dear reader, is not just any ordinary idiot, but an especially incredibly amazingly stupid idiot who suffers from paranoid delusions, and we fear that you may see plenty of references where in fact there is not even a hint of them. That is why we felt necessary to put this warning here at the top of the article, rather than in the talk page. But, don't feel bad; any idiot, including yourself, can help Wikipedia by adding plenty of references to obscure, cranky, irrlevant, or unobtainable sources to this page, so that other idiots may mistake it for a peer-reviewed authoritative journal article. Chances are that it will be years before any editor will bother to check those sources. (November 2009)
The editorial templates in this page are too small and discrete. Please help vandalize Wikipedia by designing really huge and ugly editorial templates for the most trivial nits you can think of.
Remember, a Wikipedia article without editorial templates is like a monument without graffiti.(August 2009)
The template above is an editorial template which was inserted here by some editor in order to send a request or suggestion to other editors. You may wonder what that stuff is doing here in the article page, before the leading paragraph (which of course is not "leading" any more) — instead of being in the talk page, which was created precisely for the purpose of editor-to-editor communication. Frankly, I don't know either. Perhaps some guy put that template on an article by mistake, and other editors though it was a consensus Wikipedia policy and started enforcing it all over the place. I myself have been doing that for a few years; it makes me feel useful. It is better than sitting at the bar getting drunk, you must agree. But now that you mention it, it does seem a bit illogical. Say, a guy wants to know what a paramecium is, types "paramecium" into the search window — but instead of an article on that little critter, he gets a statement that some anonymous jerk did not quite like something or other about the way references are placed on some page, and expects someone else will do something about it; and that he has been waiting since november 2006, precisely, so it had better be done soon enough, or... or... or, well, maybe it will be done at some later time. Hmmm... Yeah, 'guess you are right, it is stupid. Totally. But it does not matter anyway, it is now a Rule and there is no arguing about it. So, you are hereby warned: do not move that template back to the talk page. If you do that again, I will tell Jimbo and he will ban you from Wikipedia for good. Actually Wikipedia has lots of stupid rules like this one, that no one knows how they came to be. Around here, we call that sort of thing "consensus". (december 2009)
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NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each. Now an important qualification: Articles that compare views should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views, and will generally not include tiny-minority views at all.
We should not attempt to represent a dispute as if a view held by a small minority deserved as much attention as a majority view. Views that are held by a tiny minority should not be represented except in articles devoted to those views. To give undue weight to a significant-minority view, or to include a tiny-minority view, might be misleading as to the shape of the dispute. Wikipedia aims to present competing views in proportion to their representation among experts on the subject, or among the concerned parties. WP:UNDUEWEIGHT
Quotations are a fundamental attribute of Wikipedia. Quotes provide a direct source of information or insight. A brief excerpt can sometimes explain things better and less controversially than trying to do so ourselves.
WP:VERIFY ---> Certain red flags should prompt editors to examine the sources for a given claim:
Surprising or apparently important claims not covered by mainstream sources.
Claims that are contradicted by the prevailing view within the relevant community, or which would significantly alter mainstream assumptions. This is especially true when proponents consider that there is a conspiracy to silence them.
Exceptional claims in Wikipedia require high-quality reliable sources; if such sources are not available, the material should not be included. Also see WP:SOURCE & WP:FRINGE
WP:NOTSOAPBOX ---> Wikipedia is not a soapbox, a battleground, or a vehicle for propaganda, advocacy, or advertising. This applies to articles, categories, templates, talk page discussions, and user pages. You might wish to start a blog or visit a forum if you want to convince people of the merits of your favorite views
An editor thinks something might be wrong with this page. That editor won't actually make any effort to fix it, but can rest assured that they've done their encyclopedic duty by sticking on a tag. Please allow this tag to languish indefinitely at the top of the page, since nobody knows exactly what the tagging editor was worked up about.
"Drive-by tagging is strongly discouraged. The editor who adds the tag must address the issues on the talk page, pointing to specific issues that are actionable within the content policies, namely Neutral point of view, Verifiability, No original research and Biographies of living persons. Simply being of the opinion that a page is not neutral is not sufficient to justify the addition of the tag. Tags should be added as a last resort." [...] If your sole contribution to an article is to repeatedly add or remove the tag, chances are high that you are abusing your 'right' to use the tag." see ---> WP:DRIVEBY
Upset you didn't get your way in a talk page discussion? That doesn't mean it's time to stalk your "opponent" around to other articles. see ---> WP:WIKIHOUNDING
You may not like the dictionary definition, but if it is a reputable dictionary, it generally carries more weight than your personal opinion. You can't simply make it disappear from the article by claiming that "it is a bad definition" based on your (explicitly or implicitly asserted) status as an expert on dictionary formation. This is because you are probably not a lexicologist or a lexicographer. Sure you may have opinions about semantics or how you would have written the dictionary, but your opinion is irrelevant. see ---> WP:NOTLEX
The fight-or-flight response developed by our pre-human ancestors may have helped them escape from angry mastodons, but it isn't constructive in an online encyclopedia ... * Don't get stressed out while editing. * Defuse stress when possible. * Edit while you are at your best, not while angry, scared, or intoxicated. * Be considerate of others in the community. see ---> WP:MASTODONS
Some users thrive on arguments, and an admonition to stop arguing just gives them a new thing to argue against ("You can't silence me!"). The simplest approach toward these users is "do not feed the trolls". Such users are playing a game, and telling them to "just drop it" is just hitting the ball back to them. Instead of trying to get in the last word, ignore them and walk off the court.
The article has an extensive References section that contains reliable sources. The article uses inline citations for facts and controversial topics. Does not contain verifiability tags.
The article has a basic References section that contains sources of unknown reliability. The article uses inline citations but there are many "citation needed" inline tags. May contain verifiability tags.
The article does not have a References section and it fails to have any inline citations. May contain verifiability tags.
Wikipedia has a variety of systems for article review and improvement. Examples of the processes involved include:
Quality-based peer review - where editors who have not been involved in the article are invited to review and comment upon its quality, balance, readability, citation of sources, and other policy-compliance and content issues.
Wikipedia:Good articles - a system whereby articles can be rated and broadly established as being of reasonable quality, while being commented upon by independent review.
Wikipedia:Featured articles - a rigorous review of articles which are desired to meet the highest standards and showcase Wikipedia's capability to produce high quality work.
If your dispute is related to one of the following topics, you may wish to post about it in one of these locations, to get the opinions of other editors familiar with similar disputes:
"A common insult hurled at dedicated Wikipedia editors is that they 'have no life.' If you write extensively in an out-of-the-way area, you may well become the most widely-read writer in the world on your topic. There are worse ways of 'having no life', such as abusing the few actually useful people on the internet, but those who deliver such insults are invariably tone-deaf to irony." — Antandrus
Redthoreau's Nuggets of Wiki Wisdom 
Nutshell of Wisdom:
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= Are You A Certified Asshole ? --- a 24-Question Self-Exam by Bob Sutton
The first 2 signs that an individual no longer has anything intelligent to offer to the discussion ...
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