"I am not exaggerating when I say it is the closest thing to Kafka's ''[[The Trial]]'' I have ever witnessed, with editors and administrators giving conflicting and confusing advice, complaints getting “boomeranged” onto complainants who then face disciplinary action for complaining, and very little consistency in the standards applied. In my short time there, I repeatedly observed editors lawyering an issue with acronyms, only to turn around and declare “Ignore all rules!” when faced with the same rules used against them. -- David Auerbach, [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_disputes_the_crowdsourced_encyclopedia_has_become_a_rancorous.single.html "Encyclopedia Frown"], ''Slate'', December 2014]]
* "I am not exaggerating when I say it is the closest thing to Kafka's ''[[The Trial]]'' I have ever witnessed, with editors and administrators giving conflicting and confusing advice, complaints getting “boomeranged” onto complainants who then face disciplinary action for complaining, and very little consistency in the standards applied. In my short time there, I repeatedly observed editors lawyering an issue with acronyms, only to turn around and declare “Ignore all rules!” when faced with the same rules used against them. -- David Auerbach, [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_disputes_the_crowdsourced_encyclopedia_has_become_a_rancorous.single.html "Encyclopedia Frown"], ''Slate'', December 2014
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* "The longer a person has lived the less he gains by reading, and the more likely he is to forget what he has read and learnt of old; and the only remedy that I know of is to write upon every subject that he wishes to understand, even if he burns what he has written." -- [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]], polymath, deciphered Rosetta Stone
* "The longer a person has lived the less he gains by reading, and the more likely he is to forget what he has read and learnt of old; and the only remedy that I know of is to write upon every subject that he wishes to understand, even if he burns what he has written." -- [[Thomas Young (scientist)|Thomas Young]], polymath, deciphered Rosetta Stone
- this section was taken from [[User:GreenC|GreenC]].
- this section was taken from [[User:GreenC|GreenC]].
== Toolbox & Satchel ==
== Toolbox & Satchel ==
Revision as of 16:16, 19 August 2022
La Motte cellars, Franschhoek, South Africa
Somebody thinks something is wrong with this page, but can't be bothered to fix it, or explain what. They like littering the place up with useless tags and probably think they are doing something useful. Unfortunately, no one can deal with it, as nobody knows what the problem, if any, might be. (February 1934)
In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” ― Alfred North Whitehead [1]
"In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality."
― Karl Popper
About this page
I intend to use this page for useful things that aid editing. For now, it has become a bit of a sandbox to learn the intricacies of Wikipedia beyond that of a mere repository of text.
"I am not exaggerating when I say it is the closest thing to Kafka's The Trial I have ever witnessed, with editors and administrators giving conflicting and confusing advice, complaints getting “boomeranged” onto complainants who then face disciplinary action for complaining, and very little consistency in the standards applied. In my short time there, I repeatedly observed editors lawyering an issue with acronyms, only to turn around and declare “Ignore all rules!” when faced with the same rules used against them. -- David Auerbach, "Encyclopedia Frown", Slate, December 2014
Iron Law of Oligarchy: An empirical study of 683 Wikia wikis found support for the claims that the iron law of oligarchy holds in wikis; i.e. that the wiki's transparent and egalitarian model does not prevent the most active contributors from obtaining significant and disproportionate control over those projects. In particular, the study found that as wiki communities grow 1) they are less likely to add new administrators; 2) the number of edits made by administrators to administrative “project” pages will increase and 3) the number of edits made by experienced contributors that are reverted by administrators also grows. The authors also note that while there are some interesting exceptions to this rule, proving that wikis can, on occasion, function as egalitarian, democratic public spaces, on average "as wikis become larger and more complex, a small group – present at the beginning – will restrict entry into positions of formal authority in the community and account for more administrative activity while using their authority to restrict contributions from experienced community members".[1]
From a book review of Dariusz Jemielniak's Common Knowledge: "Declaring the notion of an administrative cabal is laughable on the surface.. but there is a grain of truth to it – admins talk to one another, including privately, "secretly" and off wiki, and they act, more or less consciously, as a part of a group that holds power over regular editors. Jemielniak argues that the notion of editor equality is a subconscious, invisible and unrealistic pillar of Wikipedia, one that when confronted with the reality of editors not being equal leads to problems and growing divisions within the community. Thus the inequality between editors, which in the "ideal Wikipedia" would not exist, subconsciously annoys editors, and is significantly responsible for the problems with retention of editors, electing new administrators, and cohesion of the community, of whom a significant portion entertains some notions of the existence of a "real cabal" (see WP:CABAL). In this, his research fits into the wider paradigm of scholarly literature concerned with social inequality, and with its common conclusion that inequality is the major cause of the vast majority of problems in human society.[2]
The Unblockables, a class of elitist editors who get away with incivility because they make good contributions. As Wales said, "it's a shame that some in the community think that it's worthwhile putting up with nasty people if they make good contributions."
On different notes..
"Crowd Governance", a study finds that after the creation of a Wikipedia article about a publicly traded company, its stock price drops. Apparently, insiders and institutional investors see an article (ie. transparency) as signifying they no longer have an edge on investing information.
"Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet’s biggest flaws" (Washington Post) - a terribly encouraging article. Wikipedia is emerging as a model of what works for Internet discourse on controversial topics. Might our guidelines and policies be enshrined someday into a broader generic set that could be applied for any website who wished to adopt them in a Constitutional manner?
"The longer a person has lived the less he gains by reading, and the more likely he is to forget what he has read and learnt of old; and the only remedy that I know of is to write upon every subject that he wishes to understand, even if he burns what he has written." -- Thomas Young, polymath, deciphered Rosetta Stone
The lead section is an essential
summary of an article, located above the first heading.
In the source text (the text in the edit window), a heading looks like this:
== This is a heading ==
The lead section is a very important part of every article. The length should correspond to the overall length of the article: an article of 50,000 characters might well have a three paragraph lead, while one of 15,000 or less should limit itself to one or two paragraphs. The text should give a good overview of the article, but it should also get the reader hooked and interested in learning more. Take a look at some featured articles for inspiration.
It is often a good idea to align a representative image with the lead by placing [[File:Filename.jpg|thumb|caption]] just before the first heading. (Filename is the name of the desired file and caption is a description of the image).
Any of the following inline, comment-level templates can be converted into {{Resolved}}-style hatnotes by using {{Resbox}} to put a box around the icon and text.
Template:Resolved/See also, the smaller family of thread-level hatnote templates, similar to the above but with a box around them; any template above can be converted to one of those with {{Resbox}}
This is a Wikipediauser page. This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user whom this page is about may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JeanLaurentAudin.
Oracle for Deletion: a live dashboard of all open AfD discussions. You can click to instantly sort by age, subject, keep/delete ratio, number of comments, page size, et cetera. There are also detailed statistics and sortable month summaries for all 482,281 discussions going back to 2005 (including sick-ass graphs). You ever wonder what the biggest deletion discussion of all time was? Now you know.
PressPass: a collection of tools for using Newspapers.com, including enhanced search and configurable auto-citation in five different formats. This will automatically generate fully formatted {{cite news}} templates from n.com clippings (not that half-assed Citoid output), from the convenience of your own browser window.
CurrentSwitcher: this gives you links on your contribs page to hide duplicate entries, current revisions, rollbacks, huggles, twinkles, and redwarns. This allows you to use your contribs page as an easy way to check if people have responded to your comments/questions, or look at which discussions/pages have been active since your last post.
I've made a couple Solarized versions of Wikipedia skins, here and here (which look like this). Only the Vector (and legacy Vector) skin (here) is actively maintained.
The ones after this are pretty boring, and recommended only for extreme nerds.
TrackSum: this lets you automatically sum the lengths of tracks in templates like {{track listing}} and get total runtimes.
Unbreaker: this gives you a button to fix those messed-up <br /> tags (i.e. <br>) which cause the syntax highlighter to go bonkers.
CopyTitle: a fork of Novem Linguae's CopyTitle.js, which puts a small button next to the title of an article which copies it to your clipboard. Mine makes it a little smaller and shortens it from "copy" to "c".
Monthcounter: A very, very niche script: adds a button to the "more" tab at the top of the page which goes through the text in the edit box, counts the occurrences of "January", "February" [...] "December", and outputs a tab-delimited summary of each count in the edit box. I made this for the sole purpose of tallying up arb enforcement log entries for arbitration reports in the Signpost. Maybe it will be useful for something else.