User:AllGloryToTheHypnotoad
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Barnstar of Forgery | |
| For forging Barnstars. I mean, do these things really mean anything? AllGloryToTheHypnotoad (talk) 23:14, 14 May 2008 (UTC) |
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed.
Wikipedia:Verifiability is one of Wikipedia's core content policies. The others include Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. Jointly, these policies determine the type and quality of material that is acceptable in Wikipedia articles. They should not be interpreted in isolation from one another, and editors should try to familiarize themselves with all three.
The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material. All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged should be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation.[1] The source should be cited clearly and precisely to enable readers to find the text that supports the article content in question.
If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.
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[edit] IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
WP:NOR, WP:V, and WP:NPOV are the three core content principles of Wikipedia.
[edit] However
There are 409 episodes of The Simpsons, and every one of them has its own article.
[edit] Who am I?
I have been reading Wikipedia for years. I love Wikipedia. It's a major entertainment medium for me. I'm an information sponge, and I love reading here.
But also, I think Wikipedia might be the first great creation of humanity. There have been brilliant individual humans, like Nikola Tesla, Stephen Hawking, Friedrich Nietzsche and so on; but humanity, as a whole, has let everyone down. As a group, humans generally behave like stupid pack-animals, and as a group have only ever destroyed things.
As Agent Smith says, humans are a virus. A plague.
With Wikipedia, however, all the great minds of the world can come together and compile a free, publicly accessible, sum total of all human knowledge.
Or, it can become choked with piles of meaningless pop-culture trivia and hundreds of vanity articles on sad-sack indie bands.
As far as my contributions here, I've only ever really fixed punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure. Why? I'd rather read. I'm not one of the "editor class": I'm firmly in the "user class" and intend to stay there. There are guys here who seem to spend entire days researching articles, and I'm thankful to them - but I can never be like that. I have a full-time job, and several other hobbies that are important to me. I also have enough of a computer addiction, and want to avoid any chances to be stuck in front of the computer any more than I already am. I wish I could research articles, but it just takes too much time, and I don't think I can do it as well as others.
[edit] A dream of mine
I've been thinking about what size media it would take to store all of the essential information in Wikipedia. By "essential", I mean all the information in Wikipedia that would be nice to store away, somewhere safe, in case alien invaders bombed us back into the stone age, or in case a climate disaster reduced our population to a few scattered breeding pairs in the high arctic.
So, take the entire (English language, for me personally) Wikipedia database, and delete all the indie-rock band articles, all the Simpsons articles, and so on; everything to do with pop culture, meaningless crimes, trivia and everything else. Keep all the science, history, engineering, culture, and so on. As I said, only keep those parts that would be useful in the aftermath of a catastrophe.
How big would this database of essential information be? Could it all fit on a DVDR, or a maxi-sized USB key? Or would it require a raid array?
Even better - could you create this online, referencing the regular Wikipedia database to keep it updated?
[edit] If I were overlord
I like reading interesting Wikipedia articles. I wish I was overlord, because I'd dismantle the world's school system and replace it with something warped and strange, like this:
My "great minds" class would teach: Giorgio Agamben, Bob Black, Philip K. Dick, Leon Festinger, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Derrick Jensen, Ted Kaczynski, Ronald David Laing, Lewis Mumford, Netochka Nezvanova, Friedrich Nietzsche, Scott Nudds, Neil Postman, Boyd Rice, Thomas Szasz, John Titor, Robert Anton Wilson.
My "politics" class: Earth Liberation Front, Operation Condor, Order of Nine Angles, Red Army Faction, Strategy of tension, Waterboarding
My "primate psychology" class: 2007 Boston Mooninite scare, Banality of evil, Commodity fetishism, Conformity, Consensus reality, Deindividuation, Institutional fact, Learned helplessness, Little Eichmanns, Milgram experiment, Obedience, Pit of despair, Stanford prison experiment, The Third Wave.
My "sociology" class: Counter-economics, Economic secession, Imagined communities, Marx's theory of alienation, Samuel Edward Konkin III, Ship of Fools.
My "technology" class: Back Orifice, Backdoor, Botnet, Carnivore (FBI), Chaos Computer Club, Covert listening device, Crowds, Cryptovirology, ECHELON, Edward Felten, Hacker (computer security), Hacking Democracy, Hacktivism, Honeypot (computing), Hushmail, Information Awareness Office, Kismet (program), Kleptography, Magic Lantern, Nessus (software), Port scanner, Pretty Good Privacy, Script kiddie, Secure communication, Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks, Spamhole, Telephone tapping, Wardriving, Wireless LAN Security, Zombie computer, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.
[edit] Smart Quotes about Wikipedia
"To have a Wikipedia article, a fictional character should have been discussed in independent and reliable sources beyond the work of fiction itself. Edison, 2007."
After all, the point of an article shouldn't be to summarize a company's gaming manuals, should it? AllGloryToTheHypnotoad 02:55, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
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[edit] AfDs
I'm not usually the guy who nominates fancruft pages or that sort of thing for AfD. When I do nominate an article for AfD, it's almost always because I feel the article is either well-intended promo for completely non-notable projects, or blatant spam cynically intended to use Wikipedia as a free advertising site. The well-intended stuff is okay by me (except for the odd guy who takes it upon himself to add 500 unreferenced indie band articles); it's the blatant spam that really annoys me. Wikipedia shouldn't be used for cynical attempts at promo. Tens of thousands of articles on Wikipedia are spam or indiecruft, and I'd like to do my small part in trimming that down to a smaller set of well-referenced articles on notable topics.
Anyway, my "kill ratio" seems to prove me good at spotting spam. Out of 104 nominations, only 9 articles were kept, for a kill ratio of 91.3%. I'm happy for the 9 keeps - they prove I'm not 100% right. But I'm still over 90% right, according to the people at AfD, so they must feel I'm doing a great job at tracking down spam.
[edit] User Boxen
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I eventually teach John Titor everything he knows. |
| DGAF | This user does not give a fuck. |
