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.
You do not need a {{fact}} tag to say that this bird has two legs and a head.
Always have sources to hand when creating and expanding articles. Don't write articles based upon your own personal hypotheses and inferences. Don't write articles based upon knowledge that you half-remember learning, but have no idea from where or from whom. Write articles based upon actual, concrete, sources[2], and ensure that the article cites those sources. If you half-remember something, go and hunt up a source that covers it first, then write.[3]If you don't do this, expect your articles to be speedy deleted, nominated for deletion or asking the AfC help desk why your article was declined.
Calculus is good for mathematicians, and it's good for Wikipedians too. Don't worry about how competent an editor is now – focus on the first derivative and worry about their rate of competence change. A good newbie can teach themselves to become more competent. A bad newbie never will.
"I think a good number of voices of compassion, balance and reason are probably closer to the Wiki community than most people realise. I don’t think the 91% male editors are all single with no female partners, sisters or daughters."[4]
On consensus : He who gets bored of the argument last, wins.
Every time you start a thread on WP:ANI, God[5] kills a kitten.
My own wikocratic oath is : 'First, cause no drama'.[6]
I really wish wikilawyering were against policy.[7]
"Mark you this, Bassanio. The devil can cite Wikipedia Policy for his purpose." (The Merchant of WP:VENICE)
Without the content, Wikipedia is just Facebook for ugly people[8]
"If I had a choice between trusting a compulsive liar locked in a straitjacket in a padded cell scrawling his inane ramblings about how the lizard people secretly run the world through an extensive mind control programme on the wall of said cell with his own faeces and trusting what is written in The Sun, I'd flip a coin because they truly are about equivalent in reliability."[9]
"... every time I have commented in general on infoboxes, I have criticized both advocates and opponents equally. I will continue to do so. I consider the whole matter to be one of the most useless wastes of time on Wikipedia, but a lot of editors feel passionate about this ongoing battle, for reasons that completely evade me."[10]
"It's important to remember that however set-apart and distinct we feel the project is, the point of contact with the real world is the user of the encyclopedia, the person who pops into Wikipedia to find some needed information or just to browse a bit, and couldn't care less what the Wiki-world experience is like to those inside of it" [11]
On consensus : "if everyone opposes every proposal that doesn't 100% match their idea of perfection, nothing will ever happen"[12]
"Being right and being a dick are not mutually exclusive."[13]
If somebody tells you to "get a life", they might have a point. Enjoy editing Wikipedia, but don't let it consume you, and make sure you experience the real world enough to get perspective on things. Especially if you have a wife and kids.
When people have problems with editing wiki markup, it's a problem with the software's poor interface, not the end user.
If you see an angry rant on a talk page about your revert to that article that talks about "the truth" but ends with — Preceding unsigned comment added by..., you can probably ignore it. If it's an IP, you probably can rest safe that your revert hasn't even been touched.
There is no race to be "first" to answer a question on WP:HD, WP:RD, WP:AFCHD and WP:ANI .... all you get is an edit conflict with SineBot for your troubles if you're lucky.
If you want to be an admin, find your best friend's car, take out the rotor arm, slash the tyres, then tell them to their face you did it. If you can survive the abuse you get back, you might have what it takes.
"You have a userbox saying you want to be an administrator some day. Remove that userbox and the overtly political ones as well. Then, stop bouncing around like a ping pong ball, and start conducting yourself in a more level headed fashion. Those steps will enhance your chances."[14]
Twinkle has a lot of magic buttons to automate tasks. None of them are for writing content and adding sources. The best content editors ignore twinkle, and vice versa.
Assume good faith can mean deleting an article or doing a blanket revert, then apologising to affected editors that you needed to do it.
Those that can, do. Those that can't, bicker about the manual of style or the citation guidelines. I mean, who cares that somebody's falsely accused of murder – just put that bloody full stop BEFORE the ref tag.
"I don't have an effing clue what a template with a doi parameter or an id parameter is and could not care less, I edit articles on MUSIC because readers come hear to learn about MUSIC not all that technical bollocks."[15]
If I see one more editor throw the term WP:RS at a newbie without explaining what it stands for and why it's relevant, I will scream.
"We can't do anything to change Wikipedia until the WMF crumbles. In the meantime we should all go write an article to console ourselves." (with apologies to Banksy)
As for gender itself, all we should be interested in here is what an editor has in their head, not in their pants.[17]
One of the most dangerous habits you can get into is to take Wikipedia too seriously. Dozens of editors have been indefinitely blocked at ANI and Arbcom because the encyclopedia is super-duper important and blocking them is soooooo unfair.
If you use personal attacks in a debate, you're wrong. Even if you think you're right, you're still wrong. That the other party is also wrong is irrelevant.
Any WP:CIVIL or WP:NPA based block of a user with at least 3 FAs will cause more problems than it solves. "Let's all move on guys and gals before this turns into another pantomime. I have an FAC[18] to write."[19]
The longer the edit summary, the more likely the edit will be reverted. Nobody ever reverts "ce" or "fmt"
On content disputes : "Often CS majors will just assume that everyone knows what Bates Theorem is or what O(log n) means. If they start doing this, stop them for a minute and say, “could you do me a favor, just for the sake of the exercise, could you please explain this in terms my grandmother could understand.” At this point many people will still continue to use jargon and will completely fail to make themselves understood. Gong! You don’t want to hire them, basically, because they are not smart enough to comprehend what it takes to make other people understand their ideas."[20]
In an argument involving twopeople, it's possible for both participants to be completely and utterly wrong, but good luck to anyone trying to convince them of this.
"Since such a high percentage of anonymous IP editors are vandals, they are all treated like shit. Trying to make serious edits to Wikipedia as an IP editor is like blindly blundering through the countryside on the first day of hunting season dressed like a moose."[21] Furthermore, Wikipedia has a surprising number of editors who think that openly declaring you are using an O24GIPv6 address is more "anonymous" than signing your posts "Dawnslayer666" which gives no clues to your identity or location whatsoever.
"I think all new editors should be reported on ANI immediately. This would reduce editor retention to zero, and as older editors die or drop out we'd eventually have no editors at all. At that point there would be no more edit warring, no more conduct or content disputes, and no need for Arbcom. Paradise."[22]
"No one should cheer after a block ... doing so trivializes the most powerful tool in our toolbox and celebrates a power that should be handled with care."[23]
"AIV is not insert nickel, get a block - admins are supposed to use discretion."[24]
Wikipedia is here to create, improve, and host good articles, not to spank bad boys in new improvised ways.[25]
Never pull rank or throw your weight around, lest it backfire on you. "Nothing is more satisfying than winning an argument on its technical merits even when you should have lost it on political merits"[26] and some long-standing non-admin editors love this, and a handful of IPs really love this.
"Wait until you get the bit. You will experience frustration on a level you've never seen. Having the tools doesn't mean you can always use them. Wait until someone gets in a personal argument with you and starts calling you names, and then technically it might look like you are "involved" so you can't act, and seemingly every other person with an admin bit is out back taking a smoke break leaving you twisting in the wind...then two of their friends jump in, and you are just standing there getting busted in the chops, being called an "abuse adminz!" at ANI, etc. It WILL happen, and you will run out of cheeks to turn, so you just have to take it for a while. Sucks to be an admin sometimes."[27]
On !voting "keep" at AfDs : "If you think the article has good sources, then f...ing add them. They won't add themselves, you know."[28]
"I'm not one of those cementheads who think that filing an AfD somehow puts a freeze on the article. If you improve it to the point where I change my mind on deletion, that's a win all around, right?" [29]
"If you are researching women in historical newspapers, for example Isophene Goodin Bailhache, and you search for 'Isophene Goodin Bailhache', or 'Isophene G. Bailhache' or 'Isophene Bailhache' and you find zero results and then said, 'oh well, this woman is not notable', you have just failed your entrance exam in Women History."[30]
"When such an editor is blocked, of course the pitchfork brigade turn up. And all too often they kind of have a point. ... Admins should always take time and care when blocking someone, but failing to do so when dealing with people who you know will have a pitchfork-bearing army behind them always strikes me as rather short-sighted"[31]
"Next time you think you're right and someone else is being a jerk, write whatever you were going to post on-wiki in a text file instead, or maybe in a vent email to a friend, or even, if you must, in an edit window, but wait till tomorrow to decide if it's really worth posting."[32]
"Blocking an IP for block evasion for nothing other than protesting their innocence should not happen . Ever. Blocking an established user for sharing an IP address with a troublesome user without supporting evidence should not happen. Ever. Blocking IP addresses that support a potentially maligned user, when there's no evidence they are a block evasion, as happened to the user at 77... on the Admin page, should not happen. Ever. ..... Most people, especially newbies, would have walked away from Wikipedia long before being vindicated. That is not a good thing. Lessons should be learned from this. People are so pissed off at the trolls and socks that they are forgetting to assume good faith."[33]
"I wouldn't bother looking at Jimmy's talk page expecting anything enlightening. It serves primarily as flypaper to trap problem users".[34]
"I always log in to have a discussion, because it's otherwise impossible to keep tabs on who you're talking to. I don't really care if you call yourself "Shark Infested Custard Monster, Volume III" as long as the handle is consistent."[35]
"No matter how carefully ArbCom might work to enforce policies, no matter how delicate they might try to be in addressing an issue like this, and no matter how much they might try to clarify what happened - they'll still always get shit thrown at them."[36]
"It's a sign of the times that the billionth edit was to add a {{authority control}} template to a non-notable stub using AWB. That was just busywork – gaming the system to boost edit count. Editors who enjoy grinding naturally like using tools to amplify their activity. Writing carefully researched and cited encyclopedia text is much harder to automate and so it's not done. Another typical symptom of the problem is using an automated tool like Twinkle to drop a tag on an article rather than actually fixing the issue. Such tools tend to bias activity towards brute-force fixes like deletion rather than activity that is difficult to automate such as writing and editing." [37]
"I think many editors would like to see Eric Corbett unblocked! But there has always been a huge problem here; on the one hand, some editors are highly productive and it could be argued that there many positive contributions vastly out-weigh their negative ones; but on the other hand, their editing has been significantly problematic to the community. I don't believe that this is dichotomy has ever been satisfactorily resolved."[38]
"I do 99% of my editing on Android smartphones, using the desktop site, which is 100% fully functional on modern mobile devices. The only time I sit down at a desktop computer is to work on large image files. We would all be better off if the WMF shut down all these poor quality smartphone/mobile apps, which are an impediment to collaborative editing. I cannot imagine the amount of money that has been wasted on these crappy apps over the years, but "small fortune" comes to mind."[39]
"If 1.5 years, 33k+ edits, content creation (including good and featured work), solid anti-vandalism work, and interacting politely with others isn't enough [to pass Requests for adminship], I don't really know what would be.[40]
"Legal threat blocks (for things with often aren't anything like a legal threat) are a very popular opportunity for people to play sheriff." [41]
"Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too."[42]
"I note that threats, however veiled, that were designed to intimidate other users, are still being excused by some as acceptable in hunting down undeclared paid editors. Wikipedia is not a shooting gallery. This kind of bullying, which is what it is, is not condoned via mention of laws and not condoned via misuse of the checkuser tool".[43]
"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".[2]
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.[3]
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
Wikipedia is part of the Wikimedia family. To explore other wikis, see Wikimedia's InterWiki map.
Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects:
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.
^Reliable sources are many and varied but are generally not : Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Soundcloud, blogs (that aren't written by notable journalists for the New York Times or something of that level) and the website you created yesterday
^Note the grammar, who pronounces the shorthand for a Featured Article Candidate as "an eff ay sea" or as in "don't add unsourced BLP violations to a FAC, you facking idiot"
.svg){kind=small}
...Support Open Access... 
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1.75x amplified ultimate quack of ultimate destiny
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The CheckUser Magic 8-Ball says:
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CheckUser is not magic pixie dust
