User:Writegeist

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THIS USER IS A PASTAFARIAN

Welcome to my user page. Warning: dry humour.

Some people offer advice on their user pages. Mine is mainly to join the Wikipedia Discourteous Editing Club, ignore all rules, note Don't-give-a-fuckism, and beware of advice from strangers.

Nothing in Wikipedia should be relied on as fact (and the passive voice should be avoided wherever avoidance is found to be possible). Wikipedia is a humorous parody of Uncyclopedia [1] and Conservapedia [2], the only online encyclopedias that are edited with high regard for accuracy, verifiability and neutral point of view. If you find content in Wikipedia that you can corroborate as factually correct it's just coinkidink and you should edit it boldly, satirically and immediately.

And please remember: Wikipedia is actually written by "three people in a toilet." — Eddie Izzard, Washington Post (Mr. Izzard grew up "in Europe, where the history comes from." For additional interesting facts about history, refer to its encyclopedia entry: History.)

Helping other editors to understand 'with whom they are working'

According to WP:UP, user pages are for "organizing the work that you are doing on the articles in Wikipedia." I'm just not that organized. But user pages are also, according to the UP article, “a way of helping other editors to understand with whom they are working” (to borrow a seriously injured phrase from another editor). So mine has these snippets about some of the stuff that amuses and/or interests me. They are not all pretty. But you may find one or two that prompt you to learn more.

Miscellaneous interests

• God

• The Devil

• The Hobbit

• The Tooth Fairy

• Father Christmas

• Young-earth creationism

• Mass hysteria

• Magical thinking

• Homeopathy

Names

• The CEO of the company that publishes the National Enquirer is called David Pecker. He has never worked for Vera Wang.

• Lee Ho Fook. Hard to beat in a peculiar name contest.

• FUK is a peculiar IATA name for a Japanese airport.

• Dick. Dick is a common name. But also a peculiar one. (Don't be a Dick. In England beware of the spotted Dick. And always beware of Dickheads.)

• Dave's another common name. Awfully common, come to think of it. But not peculiar. Which is why Dave's not here, man.

• You don't get many Ælfrics in the pub these days. Ælfric used to be common, but now it's just peculiar. Will the same happen to Dick?

• God is such a peculiar name that I don't know any parents who have bestowed it on any of their children.

Wikipedia is more fun when you stop thinking of it as a vast repository of unreliable information and start noticing that it is a vast repository of peculiar names. And that's a fact.

Monty Python

Seen at the Conservatism talk page: 'I came here from the NPOV board.' And at another: '...most PR professionals are humans who are not out to "bamboozle" at all.' And at another: 'Just because some character decided to name his own bodily fluid after a public figure doesn't actually connect that public figure to it.'

South Park

The more high-profile of the two Wikipedia co-founders goes all motherfuckyfucky at his talk page in a comment about South Park: "I fucking love motherfucking South Park." Then comments that it's a "really lame thing to put on the front page of Wikipedia" from time to time. When asked whether front-paging it "isn't a demonstration that Wikipedia (where appropriate) can educate and inform about popular culture in fact likely to attract new editors?" the co-founder replies: "I'm sure it will attract new editors. Not the kind we want, though."

I sincerely hope I'm not the kind he wants.

The Dung Beetle

[3]

Awesome

One WP contributor, conserving adjectives because of the global shortage, managed to use just one - "awesome" - to describe Led Zeppelin, Sonic the Hedgehog, the film of The Lord of the Rings and Hamlet. Shortly afterwards the Worldwide Conservation Organization for Meaningless Adjectives announced that the supply of awesomes had almost entirely dried up in California.

Consensus

WP:V, WP:RS and WP:NPOV trump WP:CON.

Canvassing

When you're involved in a discussion at an article's talk page and you want to recruit additional editors to participate, make sure that any invitation you post to other users' talk pages does not fall foul of the guideline WP:CANVASS. The simplest and safest solution is to post your invitation to the talk page of WP co-founder "Jimbo" Wales. He has decreed it exempt from the guideline. If you know he shares your opinion on the matter under discussion, feel free to say so in your post, and to cite that as the reason you're asking him to join in. On anyone else's talk page a non-neutral post like that would be "inappropriate" under the terms of the guideline, but it's OK at JW's. The page may be exempt from other guidelines and policies. I asked there, but nobody answered; so I don't know. As always, Caveat editor.

Knowing

There's knowing, and there's googling and pretending you knew all along.

Resuscitating

"Worst BLP not dominated by 'current political POV arguments' is likely Charles Lindbergh at this point..."  — posted at WP:Village pump. Lindbergh has not been a living person for 42 years.

Enforcing

• "...how cynical and opportunistic 'BLP enforcement' is. It's a 'BLP violation' to use an insufficiently flattering photo of Rush Limbaugh in his article. It's also a 'BLP violation' to describe a retired physicist as a 'retired physicist'. But when it comes to an unarmed teenager shot to death on his way home from the store, it's apparently just fine to include every school suspension and self-aggrandizing tweet in that person's history. I don't think one needs to be particularly sophisticated to postulate ideas about why these cases are handled so differently."  — User:MastCell

• "It doesn't matter how loudly you scream BLP, you also have to actually back it up with some reasoning."  — User:The Blade of the Northern Lights

• "It happens more and more that some loudmouth jackass causes enough trouble that it seems easier to accommodate him. This is short-sighted, and is why the fraction of jerks here is growing."  — User:Tom Harrison

• I have learned to have absolutely no respect for the "contributions" of wikilawyers who constantly run bleating to the noticeboards (e.g. WQA, ANI and BLP) and the Wales talk page to try to enforce their own versions in content disputes.

Annoying

"Both of them should at a minimum be topic banned for being annoying to the subject."  — User:Jimbo Wales

"I'd be interested to know the policy basis for topic baning someone because the subject of an article says they are "annoyed"; I'd imagine that would apply to a considerable number of editors. I find your stance here extremely annoying; will you be banned from making posts relating to me?"  — User:Pigsonthewing

Hope

• Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign slogan: "Hope we can believe in."

• "I frankly don't give a fuck how it all turns out in this country - or anywhere else, for that matter. I think the human game was up a long time ago (when the high priests and traders took over), and now we're just playing out the string. And that is, of course, precisely what I find so amusing: the slow circling of the drain by a once promising species, and the sappy, ever-more-desperate belief in this country that there is actually some sort of "American Dream," which has merely been misplaced. The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don't belong; it doesn't include me, and it never has. No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood, improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to. My interest in "issues" is merely to point out how badly we're doing, not to suggest a way we might do better. Don't confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they "ought to be." And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!" — George Carlin

History of violence by American forces on prisoners and civilians overseas

Wikipedia contains much information about the history of the American military’s abuse, torture and murder of prisoners and civilians, e.g. in Vietnam as well as at Korea, Chenogne, Dachau, Biscari, Mahmudiyah, Abu Ghraib and Haditha.

As a student of the conduct of American foreign policy I have also found these articles about American torture and war crimes usefully informative: [4] and [5]. Also this article about America’s human rights record and this article on allegations of American state terrorism.

There are some interesting notes on CIA Torture in Vietnam, Latin America, and Iraq here.

America’s history of violence against its own people

• In the course of the white settlement of America, the indigenous Indian people were slaughtered in their ancestral homelands and the survivors driven out. After the physical destruction came cultural genocide. Navajo children, for example, were forced into white-run schools. Top of the curriculum was educating the children — called "savages" by white Americans — not to speak Navajo. This was accomplished by savagely beating them when they did so.

• Democrats suppressed African American suffrage and civil rights to win the 1876 election. Militias informally affiliated to the party murdered political leaders, hunted down community members and intimidated voters.

• After the Democrats regained power throughout the South, between 1880 and 1951 the Tuskegee Institute recorded lynchings of 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites.

• Lynching was a popular photographic subject for Americans, who sent picture postcards of those they had witnessed. Time noted that even the Nazis "did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz, but lynching scenes became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers was so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned the cards from the mails." — Richard Lacayo, Time, April 02, 2000

• Between 1882 and 1968, at least 4,742 African Americans were murdered by lynching. — Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary

• "The world knows of Rosa Parks because of a single simple act of dignity and courage that struck a lethal blow to the foundations of legal bigotry." — William Jefferson Clinton, 2005

• Fortunately for the United States, the policies of cultural genocide that the white Americans enacted against the Indian nations were not entirely successful. In World War II, the Japanese easily broke American communication codes in the South Pacific. To avoid defeat the Americans needed an unbreakable code. They found it in the still-living Navajo language, spoken by specially-recruited Navajo marines.

• Iwo Jima is a Pacific island with an area of eight square miles. Thanks to Navajo code-talkers, the Americans were able to kill 20,000 of its 22,000 Japanese defenders.

Thomas Jefferson, George Monbiot and Edward Said

• "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." — Thomas Jefferson, 1809

• "Much of the rhetoric of the 'New World Order' promulgated by the American government since the end of the Cold War—with its redolent self-congratulation, its unconcealed triumphalism, its grave proclamations of responsibility—might have been scripted by Conrad's Holroyd: we are number one, we are bound to lead, we stand for freedom and order, and so on. No American has been immune from this structure of feeling...." — Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

• Conrad's Holroyd: "Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything—industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond it, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not."

• "The founding fathers were great thinkers. How did their project degenerate into George Bush and Sarah Palin?" — George Monbiot, "How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington", The Guardian October 28 2008.

The degeneration of the Founding Fathers' great project regained momentum postwar. By 1998, one in four Texas state school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs existed simultaneously.

Christian fundamentalism and creationism/intelligent design

• "One [American] adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map: two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD...Religion — in particular fundamentalist religion — makes you stupid.
  

  Self-declared non-believer: Congressman Pete Stark
  The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing." — George Monbiot

• "The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win – it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition." — Christopher Hitchens

• "One of the joys of living in a world filled with stupidity and hypocrisy was to see Hitch respond." — Sam Harris

• Almost two-thirds of Americans want creationism taught in school beside evolution.

• Creationists argue that their particular religiously-based origin belief is superior to those of other belief systems, in particular those made through secular or scientific rationale.

• Young Earth creationists believe the Earth was created by God within the last ten thousand years, literally as described in Genesis.

• An estimated 47% of Americans hold the Young Earth creationist view. Almost 10% of American Christian colleges teach it. American Christian organizations Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society both promote it. An Answers in Genesis Ministries Creation Museum promotes it.

• 45% of Americans believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.

• For Americans, belief in creationism is inversely correlated to education. 74% of Americans with postgraduate degrees accept evolution.

• 20 percent of U.S. doctors believe God can cure a fatally injured patient. – Lenworth Jacobs, Lenworth Hospital, Hartford, Conn.

• Only one member of Congress openly declares himself an atheist: Pete Stark ((D) California). Stark founded Security National Bank, which grew into a $100 million company in its first ten years.

• A 1975 study based on 234 US college undergraduates found that "Religious Believers as a group were found to be significantly less intelligent and more authoritarian than religious Skeptics."

IQ

"A recent USA study connecting political views and intelligence has shown that the mean adolescent intelligence of young adults who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106.4, while that of those who identify themselves as "very conservative" is 94.8. Two other studies conducted in the UK reached similar conclusions." Wikipedia Hey, if you're a very conservative adolescent you can safely disregard that. You read it in Wikipedia, right? Chances are, a very liberal adolescent editor made it up.

The Siege of Sarajevo

I love Sarajevo. I valued its multiculturalism and its culture, and admired Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović.

• "Choosing between Tudjman and Milošević is like having to choose between leukemia and a brain tumour." — Alija Izetbegović

If you had been in the right place at the right time when the Bosnian capital was under siege by the Serbs in the 1990s, you would have heard a cello amid the percussion of shells and sniper fire.

The cellist was Vedran Smailović. Sometimes he positioned himself in the ruined National Library (one of 35,000 buildings destroyed).

Positioned in the hills around Sarajevo was an array of tanks, artillery, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, machine-guns and sniper rifles, manned by a force of 18,000 Serbs.

On July 22, 1993, the day when 3,777 shells hit Sarajevo, New York Yankee Don Mattingly hit his 200th home run, Australian TV soap opera series Home and Away hit its 1,284th episode, and a flood hit the town of Kaskaskia, Illinois's original capital, when its Mississippi River levee burst. (Kaskaskia's inhabitants were evacuated without injury.)

The siege of Sarajevo lasted almost four years. 85% of the city's casualties were civilians. Of the 12,000 killed or missing, 1,500 were children. Children also accounted for 15,000 of the 56,000 wounded. Shelling destroyed a quarter of the city's buildings. 100,000 apartments were damaged; 10,000 destroyed.

Some photographs I took during the siege might be of interest to you. Click to enlarge:

• 

  Bitter cold winter of 1992-1993, at the height of the siege.

• 

  A man runs out from the cover of a destroyed building, its shattered glass lying in a frozen wave of glittering shards at its base.

• 

  One man gathers branches for firewood, another cradles precious loaves of bread.

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  Fetching water as a light snow falls.

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  Childen in the Baščaršija (old town) district delight in a fresh fall of show, in contrast to the anxiety visible on the faces of the adults walking behind.

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  Children pose with their dog outside their home in the Baščaršija (old town) district.

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  Children play with a wrecked car in the Baščaršija (old town) district.

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  UNPROFOR armoured personnel carrier passes the Presidency building.

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  Partially shielded from snipers by stacked shipping containers (left), pedestrians and a solitary car hurry across the lethal Skenderija junction on Maršala Tita (Marshal Tito Street), which becomes Vojvode Putnika, or ‘Sniper Alley’, the road to the airport. Ðure Ðakovića, the street at far right, soon climbs uphill, making it an easy sniper target above the containers.

• 

  Internationally renowned feature film director and screenwriter Mehmed Fehimović passes a concrete sniper screen whose Pink Floyd graffito reminds him "All in all, you're just another brick in the wall."

• 

  From downtown, Mehmed Fehimović slowly makes his way up steep, dangerous streets to his home in the Breka district, which is in the northern sector of Novo Sarajevo. The attempt at camouflaging the van appears to have been unsuccessful.

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  Mother and child walk a sniped street.

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  Garbage, too dangerous to collect and anyway impossible to dispose of, accumulates and rots in the streets – this pile is in Kralja Tomislava, a dangerous north-south street parallel to Ðure Ðakovića. Eventually UNPROFOR alleviated the problem.

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  Crossing the Miljacka River in Sarajevo's Baščaršija (old town) district.

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  Residents of Baščaršija wait to receive rations from a UNHCR humanitarian aid delivery, their first in 40 days: 1 K-ration meal per person, 1 kilo each of powdered milk, rice and flour, ½ kilo each of sugar, 2 200g cans of fish and meat, half a litre of rapeseed oil, 200g of detergent. Interval to next delivery: unknown.

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  Urbicide: one of 35,000 buildings destroyed by shells from Serb positions in the surrounding hills. By the end of 1993 most of the city's buildings had been hit.

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  Plastic sheeting trucked in by the UNHCR covers blown-out windows.

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  Typical street scene: garbage, shot-up cars, buildings pockmarked by bullets.

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  Gun holster makes an ironic fashion statement in the window display of an erstwhile shoe shop.

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  Memorial to people recently killed in the heavily shelled and mortared pedestrian street Ulica Vase Miskina (now known by its original name, Ulica Ferhadija), which connects Marshal Tito Street and Baščaršija.

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  Bosnian deputy prime minister Hakija Turajlić was murdered in an UNPROFOR armoured personnel carrier at a Serb roadblock on January 8, 1993. Photo shows Dutch journalist Robert Dulmers beside Turajlić's grave at the little Ali Pasha mosque located in central Sarajevo.

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  Crashed car, bullet holes in driver's door. Engine has been salvaged.

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  The Post Office on Obana Kulina, gutted by Serb incendiary shells.

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  John Jordan (right), a Bristol, Rhode Island firefighter, joined the Sarajevo fire brigade and organized shipments of equipment such as boots, helmets and even fire trucks from Europe and America. Here he waits at the airport for a flight out on a C130 at the start of another fund-raising trip.

Photo restoration

• Restoration of a Wounded Knee Massacre photograph yields a discovery
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  Unrestored version: mislabeled scattered debris of camp in Library of Congress bibliograhic notes.

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  Restored version: four human remains in foreground partially wrapped in blankets.

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  Detail from restored version: a face in profile, hand at right.

Tour de France

A collection of early Tour de France racing velocipedes from the Formule Libre era when there were no restrictions on the number of riders, or wheels, per bike. Of particular interest and historic significance is the unusually small example (bottom right) ridden in 1907 by Alphonse "Petit" Legrand, a midget. Confounding the pundits, Legrand won at record speed. However he was disqualified when an alert official discovered in post-race scrutineering that the accessory described by Legrand as a chain-driven refrigerator to cool his on-board refreshments was in fact an internal combustion engine to power the bicycle. Eight years later, soon after the outbreak of the Great War, Legrand masterminded the famous ill-fated attempt, using a Frot-Laffly tank disguised as a baby carriage, on the lives of the German Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen and other senior officers of the German High Command attending the christening of von Schlieffen's niece.

I collect

• Italian road-racing bicycles made by Masi and Pinarello from 1974 to 1994
• Vintage photographic postcards, signed by pioneer aviators, of early European aviation meets and air races from 1909 to 1912
• Early aviation books
• Pictorial and written material relating to Raymonde de Laroche and Bessie Coleman
• Signed first-edition books, particularly by Martin Amis
• Art
• Music
• Too much loose change
• Really bad jokes
• Examples of the more malevolent and asinine "contributions" to WP
• Examples of WP users' disillusionment - such as this one, a resignation statement from a disillusioned admin (who was soon, er, illusioned again and came skipping back as an admin under a new user name):

Wikipedia is no longer the Wikipedia I signed up for in 2005, nor is it the Wikipedia I decided to become an administrator for in 2008. I naively expected that Wikipedia would one day become a valuable, well-respected, very useful online encyclopedia, full of notable information. I thought that the articles would be edited by people with knowledge about the subjects and who could provide quality links and references. I expected that, as the project has a worldwide audience, neutrality would be one of the highest priorities. Well, I was wrong. The vast majority of the “information” on Wikipedia is either non-notable crap, fancruft, or other useless trivia that would never be accepted by a traditional encyclopedia. If I want to read about, for example, Star Trek, I can go to a wiki devoted to everything about the franchise, so why is that crap here?

Qui vive

• Wikipedia is open to all. That includes people with personality disorders, who are free to roam the articles and talk pages exhibiting behaviour that would be remedied in the real world by medication or a smack in the mouth. Fortunately there may be fewer than in 2007, as the number of active Wikipedia editors has steadily declined in the interim. Unfortunately they may constitute a steadily increasing percentage of the dwindling total if encounters with them play a part in the exodus of more collaboratively-minded editors. So if the trend continues, WP could end up being edited and administered solely by a collection of pompous, egotistical, wikilawyering asshats.

• You may cross paths with one who habitually talks down to others. If you also cross swords, his arguments may exhibit a persistent casuistry in distorting and misrepresentating policy to browbeat you into submission. This is a pompous, egotistical, wikilawyering, asshat bully. Bullies don't collaborate, they game the system. So a wikibully, thwarted in some piddling content dispute, tends to haul it to the nearest notice boards in the hope of getting his own way. Cyril Connolly observed that bullies have "a sense of inferiority deepened perhaps by sexual ignorance" (Enemies of Promise). So spare a little pity for the wikibully when you push back. And bear in mind that when you do, he may squeal self-pityingly about you bullying him. Bullies don't get irony.

• "In my many years on Wikipedia, there have been many people who have . . . abused the rules & process, ignored or talked over what other contributors add to a discussion, & resorted to all sorts of other objectionable tactics with the goal of simply getting their preferred version of an article accepted." WP editor Llyrwrch

• "See, it'd be so much simpler if we could block for simple douchebaggery." WP editor UltraExactZZ

• "The amount of verbal pomposity, elaboration of the obvious, repetition, trivia, low-grade statistics, tedious factification, drudging recapitulations of the half-comprehended, and generally inane and laborious junk that one encounters..." Dwight Macdonald

• 91% of Wikipedia editors are male. Which explains a lot.

• The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit.

• "I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it." George Bernard Shaw

• "Don't bother arguing the toss with a tosser." d'Artagnan Muldoon

• "Someone insults you - well, consider them an idiot (softly, to yourself) and move on." WP editor Drmies

Personal attack or ad hominem?

Borrowed from another editor's UTP:

Note that ad hominem and personal attack are logically distinct, because you can have a personal attack which is not an ad hominem, and you can have an ad hominem which is not a personal attack.

For an example of the first, suppose you say that your argument is not feeble, therefore you are not an idiot. I reply that you are an idiot, therefore your argument is feeble. This is not an ad hominem, because I have addressed your argument, by modus tollens. But it is clearly a personal attack on you. Conversely, if I reply 'you are a great guy, therefore what you say is correct', that is an ad hominem because it addresses your personal qualities rather than your argument itself. But it is a compliment, not an attack.

Arguments that someone is from Wikipedia Review therefore their arguments are unsound or invalid are clearly ad hominem. Even to say an argument is biased is ad hominem. Ad hominem is any form of words that fails to engage with the content of what the speaker is saying, and engages with personal qualities or motives or reasons or whatever. Hope that helps. 86.183.162.176 (talk) 14:02, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I think you are right. An ad hominem argument is not always a personal attack. Thank you. Cla68 (talk) 22:08, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

• I'd go even further and say that the permissibility of an ad hominem should be determined by the contribution to the discourse, by whether it raises or lowers the level of intellectual honesty. Pointing out e.g. a clearcut conflict of interest which the editor in question decided to keep out of the debate and which cannot reasonably be assumed to be common knowledge does technically constitute an ad hominem. But imho it is not only permissible, but mandatory for anyone to try and give everyone involved and particularly less-intimately-knowledgeable onlookers a chance to gauge the arguments by their actual merits. Which brings me to my current major pet peeve in WP policy: There's a widely-quoted policy called "Assume good faith", but there is no policy "Act in good faith". And the meaning of this status quo is that some of our policies are geared towards protecting some of the worst, longest-term and most well-established miscreants among WP editors. Cla, I admire your attempts at improving Wikipedia, but this crowd does not want change. They love their fallacies, they love this dysfunction, and that's why any intelligent person should give up on Wikipedia sooner rather than later. --87.79.225.165 (talk) 13:07, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

• I agree with the IP; ad hominem comments are not always illogical or a fallacy. The most obvious example is pointing out a conflict of interest, which the IP editor already outlined. If someone publishes an article claiming that secondhand smoke does not cause cancer, then it is entirely reasonable to point out that person's employment by a tobacco company. Far from being a logical fallacy, providing such information is considered essential in any ethical scholarly enterprise, even though it could be considered a form of ad hominem.

  A second situation in which ad hominem arguments are reasonable is in pointing out apparent hypocrisy. If you make a vigorous moral argument against behavior X, but in fact you routinely engage in behavior X, then it is reasonable to point out that your personal behavior calls into question the sincerity of your moral argument. Technically, that's an ad hominem approach, but it's neither illogical nor a fallacy. MastCell ^Talk 23:46, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Sound advice

• User A to User B: Your proclivity to circuitously argue points until the heat death of the universe and make serial assertions that amount to “black is white and up is down” does not make it incumbent on others to refute your assertions one by one. Furthermore, your quoting Wikipedia policy and highlighting key passages as if you wrote it, patented the concept, and teach it at Harvard does not impress. I suggest you take sufficient time off to give some thought to ‘cause & effect’ before still more things happen on Wikipedia that make you sad.

User C to User B: You would learn a lot by observing more, assuming you're right less, listening more, and saying a good deal less.

• Always show consideration for other users. For example, if all you need to communicate on a talk page or in an edit summary is a fatuous self-regard, be sure to use plenty of bellowing boldface and/or CRASS CAPITALS. They serve as a handy indicator to other editors that a post isn't worth reading.

Reason to be fearful

"Wikipedia...has become the internet's default research resource." The Guardian

The Cynic's Guide to Wikipedia

He who is attached to notability criteria and NPOV will suffer much. The man who expects only self-promotion and POV-pushing will never be disappointed. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

1. If you wrestle with a pig, both of you will get muddy. And the pig will enjoy it.

2. Ignorance is infinite, while patience is not. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is based on the premise that the opposite is true.

3. if $username =~ m/truth|justice|freedom|neutrality/i, then the account should probably be blocked preëmptively, because nothing constructive will ever come from it.

4. By the same token: if someone has "Scientist" or "Researcher" in their username, they are extremely unlikely to be a practicing scientist or researcher. However, they are highly likely to hold odd and idiosyncratic views about science and research.

5. If your edit sticks close to the original source, you will be accused of plagiarism. If your edit is paraphrased to avoid plagiarism, you will be accused of straying from the original source. Rinse and repeat.

6. "BLP enforcement" is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

7. Anyone who edits policy pages to favor their position in a specific dispute has no business editing policy pages. Corollary: these are the only people who edit policy pages.

8. The more abusive an editor is toward others, the more thin-skinned they are about "personal attacks" directed at themselves.

9. Some people never do anything without an ulterior wikipolitical motive. That motive may not be clear immediately, but it will be clear eventually.

10. The more a viewpoint is odious, ignorant, wrong-headed, or obscure, the more likely its adherents will perceive Wikipedia as their best opportunity to promote it.

11. Anyone who defends their edits by citing WP:NOTCENSORED doesn't have the first clue.

12. If you argue that Nature is a more useful source than the International Journal of Phrenology, someone will accuse you of an "appeal to authority". Count on it.

13. Being blocked has never made anyone more civil. On many occasions, it has made people less civil. Nonetheless, our default approach to increasing the general level of civility is to block people.

14. People who come to Wikipedia to promote their pet agenda run into trouble, because their goals are at odds with the goals of this website. They are generally incapable of perceiving this, however, and instead attribute their problems to a systemic bias of Wikipedia against their pet agenda. For example, to a committed flat-Earther, Wikipedia will appear to have a systemic round-Earth bias which stymies their efforts to contribute.

15. The more incapable an editor is of assuming good faith, the more prone they will be to cite WP:AGF at others.

16. Wikipedia's processes favor pathological obsessiveness over rationality. A reasonable person will, at some point, decide that they have better things to do than argue with a pathological obsessive. Wikipedia's content reflects this reality, most acutely in its coverage of topics favored by pathological obsessives.

17. If a person edits Wikipedia largely or solely to promote one side of a contentious issue, then the project is almost certainly better off without them.

18. If an editor compares an on-wiki situation to 1984, then they've probably never actually read Orwell, and they definitely lack all sense of perspective.

19. Anything truly insightful has been said better, and earlier, by someone else.

 — With acknowledgments and thanks to User:MastCell.

Long may conscientious editors...

... like these continue to protect political articles from POV-pushing, spin, and all assholery in general.

Hear, hear! B7

Ethics, transparency, disclosure, COI

From the talk page of Larry Sanger's Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales:

What's the extent of our ethical duty to our readers re. political articles?

This is addressed to you personally, Mr. Wales. It is a request for you to express your personal views in this public forum. I respectfully request others here to resist the urge to preëmpt your reply - even though it has been said that your talk page is the equivalent of the Village Pump - and to engage in discussion only after you have made your comments, if any. [Emphasis added.]

As you know, Joe DeSantis - paid by Newt Gingrich to direct communications on his behalf - has ceased editing Gingrich-related articles here directly and now posts his desired inclusions and deletions at the article talk pages and at the talk pages of editors he selects to act as his proxy. As you appreciate, this is entirely within policy and guidelines. Furthermore DeSantis voluntarily appends Communications Director, Gingrich 2012 to his WP signature. You have applauded him for the transparency of these practices and cited him as an example to other paid political operatives.

My concern now is more for our readers than our editors. Readers who don't check out the talk pages will be unaware that the Gingrich articles are edited (now indirectly) by a communications professional employed by Gingrich to help persuade Americans that he should be their next president. (Templated notices of DeSantis's engagement with the articles are confined to the articles' talk pages; and a warning of "increased risk of biased editing" during Gingrich's run for office is only displayed on his personal article's talk page.)

Information - its persuasive presentation, control, manipulation and interpretation - is arguably the most powerful weapon in the armory of a political campaign. It goes almost without saying that there will be other paid political operatives who, unlike DeSantis, assiduously attend to their paymasters' articles without disclosing their affiliation. We know you would like to see them emulate DeSantis's transparency. Do you think the ethical duty of transparency extends to informing our readers that all articles that have to do with politicians running for office, and with their campaigns, are very likely to be edited, both directly and indirectly (where editors act as proxies), by users who are employed to do so by the individuals and entities concerned?

Is your concern limited entirely to WP:COI? Or do you feel we have a duty of transparency and disclosure to our readers that goes beyond COI, and also beyond templated notices on articles talk pages (which many readers may never see)? If the latter, what do you think about including notices on the article pages? Or do you have any other suggestions? Writegeist (talk) 20:22, 20 February 2012 (UTC) Adding: So Messrs. Collect, Vecrumba and Maelefique (below) couldn't honour my simple request to wait for Mr. Wales's comments before they chimed in. Perhaps I was naive to hope for that modicum of consideration - willfully inconsiderate behaviour is widespread throughout the project. No less predictable, perhaps, is the ploy to shut down discussion before it's even begun by confounding the particular issue raised here with other issues in other discussions about paid operatives. Writegeist (talk) 05:43, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Um -- this how now been on this page quite a few times already - with the same result every time. I wonder if this time you will get a different answer than has been the prior result? Somehow I doubt it. See WP:DEADHORSE. Cheers. Collect (talk) 21:00, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I second that emotion. Moreover, if readers can't make out political propaganda, then they believe the propaganda, in which case any disclaimers or notices are a moot point. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 22:00, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

+1. -- Maelefique_{(and Charles!)}^(talk) 00:23, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

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The denigrating misrepresentation in the first response (dealt with in the addendum to the original post) may or may not be connected to the fact that Wales didn't see fit to reply.

Although not posted in direct relation to the very specific issue raised in the original post above, this January 2012 comment from Wales at Blog.philgomes.com is of interest for its take on what paid advocates are paid to do:

"[P]eople who are acting as paid advocates do not make good editors. They insert puffery and spin. That's what they do because that it is what paid advocates do."

So should articles (i.e. not just talk pages) that have to do with politicians running for office alert readers to the almost certain involvement of paid political operatives in their editing? The question remains unanswered. Writegeist (talk) 02:21, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you...

...for your interest in my user page. You may find this useful: WP:EIW.