User:Thumperward/New user explains Wikipedia, resolves long-standing conflicts
New user explains Wikipedia, resolves long-standing conflicts
THE INTERNET—The community around Wikipedia, the project to create a free online encyclopedia, was stunned today when a user who registered as an editor three weeks ago revealed the true secrets of friendly and productive collaboration on one of the Web site's dispute resolution boards. Tom Smith, a college sophomore editing under the handle "the_wizard", explained that the Byzantine levels of procedure and oversight which had developed on the project since its inception twelve years ago were being wrongly applied due to a misunderstanding—held by all editors disagreeing with Smith—of the process of "consensus", the determination of community feeling used to guide development of pages and resolve disputes.
"It's pretty obvious, you know?", remarked Smith, a business major at Bovine University, MA. "I'm right. And those asshole administrators with their 'nobody agrees with you' and 'we need a citation for that'? Well, they're wrong. it says it right there: 'Ignore All Rules'. How much clearer could it be? How can you be on this site for eight years and not get that?"
According to onlookers, Smith's insights, which have resulted in his receiving two "barnstars"—small reward labels granted to editors for acts of good—from approving editors also new to the project, were granted the community during a dispute in which he was blocked from editing for a 24-hour period after conducting an "edit war" to reinsert into an article on a video game the favourite foods and colors, as specified on a series of collectible trading cards, of the protagonist, a cartoon squirrel. The witnesses reported that Smith disagreed with a number of other editors on the prominence of the facts in question, which he had inserted into the first sentence of the article and again in a "lifestyle" section consisting of five paragraphs of Smith's own insight into Stupendous Squirrel's fictional life, as derived from his knowledge that Stupendous Squirrel was fond of burgers and the colour black. Amongst other complaints, detractors insisted that the character could not be described as enjoying heavy metal even though Smith had plainly stated that it was "obvious" to anyone who, like himself, enjoyed burgers and the color black that "these things go together, and you need to show me where the rules say it's banned". Smith dismissed Wikipedia's "original research" policy, noting that it was "obviously meant for when someone makes something up out of thin air, and not for when you have facts and use logic to get more facts out of them".
The response from the community has been dramatic. "I'd always thought I knew what it meant to weigh up the strength of an argument to decide consensus. Why didn't I think of assigning more weight to comments made all in bold text and capital letters before?" remarked Jamie Blossombank, a site administrator using the handle "jamblossom21". "And it's so obvious now that if we just allow people to do anything that isn't explicitly and categorically banned by a page marked as official Wikipedia policy that things will go so much more smoothly. Precedent? Consistency? Total buzzkills, man. I feel liberated", he remarked, before uploading a series of MP3 recordings extracted from the latest Usher album to the site and adding links to them from the popular RnB artist's article.