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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Wtshymanski (talk | contribs) at 21:26, 1 May 2012 (another one). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Whining, griping and blowing off steam

  • This page is where I express my frustration at the difference between high ideals and how Wikipedia actually works.
  • Only on the Internet can you be abused by reproductive appendages from all over the world.
  • And see also User:Wtshymanski

Warts

Burn off these warts where ever found. These are some of the signs of an article that needs copyediting.

  • and/or
  • "the fact that", "despite the fact that" (and see Pleonasm which has one of these in it!)
  • "Note that... and it's kin.
  • "prevents the possibility of using" --> "prevents using" nearly always what was wanted.
  • "There are..." is a weak way to start a sentence.
  • "comprised of"
  • "by means of"
  • "technically" (nearly always used vacuously)
  • "is used for signalling" --> "signals"
  • "in order to" --> "to" - empty word
  • "e.g.", "i.e" --> eliminate, often used incorrectly anyway, and a sign of turgid writing
  • "In other words" means it was written wrong to start with.
  • "have the advantage of", "have the disadvantage of" - elminate (nearly always), just padding
  • "utilze"--> "use", nearly always
  • "In practice" - nearly always delete unless contrasting "in theory"
  • "Of course" - kill it with fire.
  • "The scenario is a setup where" - nuke from orbit and rewrite.
  • "In short, Libya is a land of contrasts." Remove padding.
  • "The purpose is to..." - padding, rewrite.
  • "in essence" - rewrite
  • a foo is based on a type of...a foo is a

Meaningless milestones

And in the spirit of watching when all the numbers roll over on the odometer, WP:NOE has me at #997, after finding 188 more edits last week than I can account for. Used to be NOE tracked what "Preferences" says but this one is significantly different.

Observations on these AfDs

So far I've been accused of naivety, ignorance of the subject matter,lazyness, disruptive and pointy behavior, clogging the AfD system, and indiscriminate nominations, with a strong undercurrent that I'm also incompetent. Not just from one-shot IPs but by editors who've been here about as long as I. Imagine how I would be treated if courtesy wasn't one of Wikipedia: Five pillars. I've had fewer personal attacks for editing Tesla's nationality. --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:04, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

the Wikipedia editorial model

Wikipedia editors are experts on everything and puppies

Things I've noticed in the last 6 years...

Physics and puppies

  • We must distinguish "amorphous liquids" from all the other kinds. [[1]]
  • Power is related to force, but independent of speed. [2] and then [3] and especially [4]
  • Atmospheric pressure is 29.92 mm of mercury [5] (ok, he caught himself on that one)

Arithmetic and puppies

  • A thousand times 16 million is 160 billion. [6]

Geography and puppies

  • Alaska is in Asia. [[7]]
  • The Winnipeg River flows right through Downtown Winnipeg. [[8]]
  • Hamilton is in Toronto.
  • Flin Flon is in Thompson.
  • Newfoundland has always been part of Canada.
  • Toronto is in the USA. [[9]] (U. Windsor known for its computer science, not its geography department.)( Watson reads the Wikipedia...pity the poor AI that gets its knowledge of the world here.)

Technology and puppies

  • Ferrites are metal and conduct electricity. [[10]]
  • Adhesive and grease are the same thing. [[11]]
  • Vacuum-tube voltmeters were invented in the 1980's. [12] I feel so old, I remember that horse-drawn, gas-lit era.
  • Cold fusion is real. You can turn nickel into copper by rubbing it with Crisco and heating it. Really!
  • 40 = 49. [13]
  • 50 hz is used in Canada while 60 hz is used in the United States. Northern Quebec uses 50 Hz.
  • No matter how long it lasts, it's still a voltage spike.
  • A smart meter is supposed to be a lightning arrester.
  • It's terribly important to know if its Harvard or Von Neumann. Better mention that it's Turing-complete, too.
  • Test lights not in compliance with the latest edition of the regulations are instant death traps, except for my old test light, which is safe to use because I'm so smart.
  • Steam engines had nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution.[14]
  • Super hi tech nanotechnology solar panels work at night. [[15]]
  • 97 different editors to Portable Appliance Testing and not one of them knows what an Earth Yeading Test is. [16]
  • There's no such thing as an inverter.[17]
  • If you can fit it through the door, it's a home computer. Never mind that you must solder 3000 connections and spend double the money to get a screen, keyboard, and some kind of mass storage (let alone a printer). Talk:Heathkit H11
  • Induction motors have carbon brushes and commutators. And coal chutes. And whiffletrees. [18]
  • Nuclear ships are a great idea.[[19]]
  • 30,000 RPM isn't fast. [[20]]
  • Press "Play" on tape to load the heart-lung machine control program. [[21]]
  • 300 million people using the same plug isn't encyclopedia-worthy, but explain *dozens* of times over that what used to be 220V is now 230 V.
  • Diesel engines have ignition systems. [[22]]
  • Reclosers are used on transmission circuits.
  • They're called "high tension lines" because the wires are really tight. [[23]]
  • It doesn't matter what the wire is made of, legally it's got the same rating. aluminum wire
  • Capacitors don't store charge. [[24]]
  • Conventional memory is 640K because of a limitation of the 8088 processor [25].
  • Something that gets a 1-paragraph explanation in an engineering textbook, maybe 1 line in a physics text, and perhaps 2 pages in a TAB paperback, gets ten thousand words written about it by Wikipedia editors who don't know what they are talking about and a further quarter-million words rejoicing in our mutual ignorance.
  • Spacecraft are propelled by electric motors. It must be true, I read it on the Wikipedia.
  • The Soviet Union has the biggest mobile telephones in the world! Don't mention that there were probably more mobile phones registered in Wisconsin in 1964 than in the whole Warsaw Pact.
  • 140 MB/second cannot be compared to a hard disk drive speed.
  • "High-pressure mercury vapour lamp: This is the technically name for this type of lamp. " Technically name?
  • Some IBM computer science dude holds 6 of the 9 patents on the original IBM PC. This is *all over* the Internet but no-one says what they are!
  • Some Mormon dude invented the transistor radio but then got busted for drugs.
  • Tesla's Road Runner physics - wishing makes it so; or, why a lighting bolt will travel 4000 miles instead of 40 feet.
  • Fluorescent lamps have no filament.
  • An electric motor is an engine but not a machine. (just about the whole edit history of Electric motor)
  • Floppy disks are made of cardboard.[26]
  • Sheep are similar to fish, except that they give milk. Talk:Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter
  • You can screw a 27 mm diameter bulb base into a 26 mm diameter socket. [27]
  • Every central processing unit ever made has a microprocessor.
  • I Web surf on a server.
  • Some Swiss professor's theoretical AC converter is worth 3/4 of an article. Don't mention the millions of horsepower worth of cycloconverters installed in the real world.
  • The term "active power" has never been heard before and so has no meaning.
  • Wall plugs in Canada give out 125 Volts.
  • You can measure the hotness of chili peppers to 6 significant figures.
  • If only Apple Computer Corporation had dreamed up some kind of portable media player. They could have called it an "ePop" or something snazzy like that.
  • Tesla invented radio. The Supreme Court awarded Tesla with the invention of radio. The Supreme Court invented radio.
  • The dead Supreme Court ruled posthumously on the invention of radio. Taste Zombie Justice!
  • Tesla invented radio but kept it a secret.
  • Longitudinal electromagnetic waves exist.
  • 1 kW.h amounts to 3600 kW.
  • GWh = GW.
  • Nitrogen only displaces oxygen from the air selectively, leaving the original nitrogen alone.
  • Touch the rabbit ears and die.
  • Grounding has nothing to do with protection from electric shock.
  • Ground wires are put in cables only to protect firemen hacking through the walls with axes.
  • Speed droop rules all.
  • A lead-acid cell makes 12 volts.
  • Power factor is a measure of how much light comes out of a bulb.
  • Only 4000 steel ingots are made in the world each year.
  • LED traffic lights are always covered in snow.
  • CFLs kill.
  • Remember to use an AC meter when measuring AC. And they read in RMS, too.
  • Potassium hydroxide is sometimes an acid.
  • Power flow in a circuit branch is set by the governor droop.
  • Light bulbs cause cancer and deafness.
  • If it comes in a glass envelope and lights up, it's a cousin to a CRT.
  • CB radio = ham radio.
  • John Logie Baird was really Scottish (or possibly Serbian)
  • There are longitudinal electromagnetic waves.
  • Miles per gallon * a constant = lit[re|er]s per 100 km
  • The main difference between a DC machine and an alternator is that in alternator field rotates and armature is stationary but in dc machines field is stationary and armature rotates.
  • That press release that says some day LEDs will be 200 lumens per watt is proof that CFLs are no good.
  • Vacuum tubes come in DIP packages.
  • A five-year-old invented the vacuum tube. [[28]]
  • You can get a 20000 hour incandescent bulb for 50 cents with just as much light as a regular bulb.
  • Mercury emissions from electricity generation is an Econazi myth.
  • Tuning a guitar is nothing like a phase-locked loop.
  • There's no such thing as 42-volt electrical systems.
  • You must only use flow-chart-drawing-software to draw flow charts.
  • Got to give all the quantum-mechanical and relativistic limitations in the lead paragraph.
  • Plug your analog joystick into a USB port with this handy adapter.
  • 6LR61 is an Internet joke. Really a 9 volt battery just has 9 volts in it. Or possibly pixie dust.
  • Only TV sets designed this year matter. Don't talk about last year's design.
  • There are 20 different units called "ton" and you can't ever tell which was intended by context, so tag it as "ambiguous".
  • T-slot 5-15A receptacles aren't legal in Canada.
  • A 20-inch slide rule has only 1 binary bit more precision than a 10-inch slide rule.
  • Secondary batteries have two cells.
  • Compact fluorescent bulbs are a conspiracy by the EcoNazis.
  • Power factor = efficiency.
  • Power factor can be negative, because some outsourced software hacker couldn't be bothered to label an instrument properly.
  • Radios have oscillators right on their intermediate frequencies.
  • Dropping the plate voltage from 160 V to 125 V makes a huge difference in volume, but 160 V to 32 V is insignificant, because of the tetrode kink. And the heater voltage is the plate voltage, too.
  • If it's not vertical, it's still vertical.
  • You need a motor to start a light bulb.
  • SWER systems have neutral wires.
  • Wind turbines cause suicides.
  • Core memory is called Forrester memory.
  • Sodium lamps run on oxygen.
  • 455 Khz was chosen as the IF because 50 years later Japanese ceramic filter makers would stock it as a common part.
  • Hydraulic problems are just like electrical circuits, and the reverse.
  • Wind turbines are dispatchable.
  • HVDC is used for distribution.
  • You can run an internal combustion engine on liquid nitrogen.
  • Diesel engine-generators are spinning reserve, nay, even frequency control.
  • European standards are better than anything the Americans came up with...40 years before.
  • Radio waves travel by conduction through a vacuum.
  • Butterfly wings emit light like LEDs.
  • Got to have every SI prefix attached to ever SI unit, even if there's no physical meaning to them.

Canadian constitutional law and puppies

  • Manitoba is not officially bilingual. It must be true, an admin with 60,000 edits changed it in an infobox. Take THAT, Supreme Court!

Writing and puppies

  • A blue house is a residential dwelling that is painted or otherwise colored blue and/or given a bluish appearance. Not an actual sentence, but in the style of too many Wikipedia sentences. Belabor the obvious, use redundant synonyms, and convey no actual information. Oh, and put in an and/or every once in a while, it makes us look more scholarly.
  • If it's not long and rambling enough, splice any two or three consecutive sentences together with commas, the duct tape of composition.
  • Put it passive voice if you possibly can, that makes it sound so much more authoritative.
  • Never make a direct statement. Always use euphemisims, pseudo-politically correct terms, and elliptical evasions instead of making a simple statement of fact.
    • Electrons are "involved" in an electric current, for example.
  • Your old teaching notes, no matter how few students have ever been reckless enough to sign up for your course, need never die. Upload them here.
  • People have ISBN numbers. [29]
  • "Suitable sources of quartz became an important issue". An encyclopedia does not have to be written with a bunch of hackneyed phrases that, like dog turds in March, have been bleached and crumble to dust at the first touch. It's okay to use vivid live language, without being florid.
  • Bob is only a little bit unique. Harry is uniquer than John, but not as unique as Ted. And Philomena is the uniquest one of all. We'll all be reduced to pointing and grunting...
  • A and B are identical. IDENTICAL, D*N IT! Except of course for factors p,q,r,s,t, aleph, beth, gimel, and <Prince symbol>.
    • An X is only yin. X also includes yang.
Including the excluded case makes an encyclopedia article internally inconsistent.
  • Start your article with "The <adjective> <noun> is a <noun> that is <adjective>." There's no way the reader could have figured *that* out without millions of dollars worth of Internet hardware and the massed contributions of 400,000 editors.
  • People who read British English can't read American English, and vice versa.
    • Having given up on adding actual content to the encyclopedia, let's concentrate on adding extra Us and swapping around "er" and "re".
    • Spelling errors are invisible to Wiki editors, unless it's the missing/extra "i" in aluminum or the missing/extra "u" in color, or "z/s" in "polarize", which will inspire endless edit wars.
    • Change the order of "R" and "E", or insert or drop a "U", and it might as well be written in cuneiform - so fearless Wikieditors will at length explain the alternate spellings and where they are used
    • On the other hand, such syntactical treasures as "A heat sink, also written as heat-sink or heatsink, is a passive component or assembly to which heat generated by a heat source within a solid material is transferred (sinked), and removed by transferring it to a fluid medium, such as air or a liquid." can live forever.
  • Don't use a simple physical analogy to explain it. All the world can be explained in terms of IETF documents. RFC 1109, for example, is a perfect analogy to the effect that Luther's 39 Theses had on the Church. And RFC 2107 gives a pretty good cake recipe, if you were only smart enough to see it.
  • Editors all make speak gooder English than thou. Especially random IP editors who edit once and are never seen again.
  • "Technology" is a word that must be frequently used in an article.
  • 300 million people are spelling it wrong. The baroque French-influenced spellings chosen by some 19th century lexicographer are the only correct spellings.
  • Don't give a ballpark number on Wikipedia unless you're prepared to paint the bleachers and sweep up the hotdog wrappers.
  • It doesn't have a size, it has a "form factor".
  • Good writing means using lots and lots of unexplained acronyms.
  • Saying "vice versa" makes you sound smarter...just like saying "paradigm" or "proactive". Or "technology".

Encyclopedia-making and puppies

  • Anyone who disagrees with you is stupid, and likely evil. Canvass all over to get the evil stupid one removed. [[30]]
  • "For more information, see Google <topic name>." Thanks, losers, I would never have figured *that* out.
  • 20:05, 3 January 2012 (diff | hist) Battery (electricity) ‎ (another use; I don't know but I've suspected/ Dry cell has been re-directed ...)
  • Paint is a notable topic for an encyclopedia. Therefore we need articles on Blue paint, Yellow paint, Green paint, Red paint, Orange paint and so on.
  • A TV weathergirl is a notable journalist.
  • Have an article section titled "Facts", so we can clearly identify which parts of the article are all lies.
  • Send a bot to remove a valid link, screw up a measurement and carefully convert the wrong value to SI. [31] No-one noticed for months, but change color to colour and the reverts go on forever.
  • My Web link to a site that returns the next letter of the alphabet for *any* letter you type in, is a valuable resource to the reader.
  • Every video game walk-on character needs an article.
  • No-one on the Wikipedia can say "I don't know".
  • A has the same name as A', so must be named after him. I wonder if this guy is named after this guy [32] Or even better yet, this guy [33]? [34]
  • Every sentence is a paragraph and every paragraph needs a heading.
  • Wikipedia articles too frequently neglect the significant, interesting and useful in favor of the easily-documented.
  • If someone asks a relevant question about a topic not answered in the article,which points out a limitation of the article, template him for using a talk page as a discussion forum. [35]
  • Any random equation out of the textbook is an encyclopedia article. Don't explain who uses it or why, the reader can just Google for it and be struck by your awesomeness.
  • Last warnings get more credible the more of them you hand out.
  • All the best encyclopedia topics have "and" in the title - for example, "and puppies" appended to any topic lets us discuss these notable and important and adorable house pets. Hyphens (either kind) and obliques are also good ways to splice several unrelated topics into one Featured Article candidate.
  • Some semiconductors are more notable than others [[36]] and we need to have articles on the notablest ones of all.
  • Every article belongs to Project Physics. So says this guy, who has a working knowledge of everything in the universe.
  • Nag everyone to death about superfluous references; revert war if you have to but never register a username and never add anything to the encyclopedia.
  • It's not an "idiot light", it's a "Transient abnominality transducer" as per EC directive 314159.
  • "Adjective noun" is an encyclopedia topic for every combination of "adjective" and "noun" - and the first brilliant prose sentence is "An adjective noun is a noun that is adjective."
  • All you need to do is put an assessment tag on an article. Don't tell other editors what you assessed against or why the article got the grade it did, just rest easy in the knowledge that merely tagging the article has put it on the sure path to FA status and brilliant prose.
  • Smartass in-article edit comments usually reveal the anon commentator's lack of clue. I speculate that the more virulent the comment, the easier it is to prove the commentator wrong.
  • This article is about baking bread. All that stuff about mixing and kneading dough should be split off into another article. Really, how much of the reader's time do we want to spend on gathering increasingly tiny slivers of information out of the deep shag carpet of Wikipedia and trying to glue them together into the broken souvenir ashtray of knowledge?
  • You don't even need to be able to spell a subject to be a member of the sacred consensus. [37]
  • Admin bit makes consensus. (again) [38]
  • An Air Force table of organization, described in prose, with lots of acronyms, is encyclopedia content.
  • Featured? Sure. Correct? Don't bet on it. "Some of Wikipedia's finest work" is a useful warning.
  • Before changing one precious golden word in an article, make sure you get clearance from every single drive-by editor who's ever been there.
  • Ahh, just Google for it.
  • My parts catalog Web store is a vital educational resource for the world.
  • It must be right. Two anonymous editors agree on it. (And one of them has an IP address registered to an ISP that has some really big companies as clients, so he must be an authority.)
  • Link all the common words in the article, in case someone reading the article doesn't understand English.
  • If you can't refute the reason for an edit, get one of your sock puppets to do it for you.
  • There are hundreds, possibly thousands of people using this IP address and every one of them is an expert on <topic>.
  • An encyclopedia is a parts catalog.
  • An encyclopedia is a substitute for DNS or a phone book.
  • Retyping all the specs out of the back of the owner's manual is an encyclopedia article.
  • Good articles have lots of tags in them.
  • Name-calling builds the collaborative spirit of Wikipedia.
  • Anything you know about anything, no matter how peripheral, must go into the article - what if someone forgets to click a link?
  • Lists of patents are content for an article.
  • Readers of Wikipedia are morons and we editors must constantly remind them of how much smarter we are.
  • Your introduction must say "This article is about..." - this is the HALLMARK of BRILLIANT PROSE
  • Long rambling pot-smoking stories are encyclopedia content.
  • Patent language is encyclopedia language.
  • Pictures of cows cannot be tolerated.
  • Pictures of an item in use do not belong in the article about the item.
  • Common sense is not required.
  • One picture of a burnt bulb is not enough...must have more, including one with an ohmeter reading infinity.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is making sure all the umlauts,diareses, macrons, accents and other garbage that loser languages use are present on the article titles, making them impossible to search or type.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is removing the phrase it should be noted that.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is keeping the robot running that autosigns the talk page comments left by vandals (that get deleted by human editors).
  • The most important encyclopedia job is giving articles obscure names that have some theoretical justification.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is changing - to &endash; or possibly inserting <&nbsp> everywhere.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is robotically looking up images with no free use rationale and then hand-typing in deletion notices for them. Too important to be left to bots.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is converting articles to use units of measurement that baffle and confuse most people familiar with the topic.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is changing the case of initial words inside templates.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is deleting hyphens in adjectival phrases.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is changing capitalization on the left side of pipe symbols.
  • The most important encyclopedia job is importing old edit history from 2003.
  • The set of all Wikipedia articles, minus the set of all featured articles, is the set of all Wikipedia articles (to a few parts per million).
  • Policy saves thinking about things. It's like a macro for your head!
  • You can prevent errors in articles by putting in < !-- Please don't make any mistakes in this article--> as an editing comment.
  • Ad-speak makes for good encyclopedia articles. It's not a just a flashlight, it's a "weapon mounted tactical illumination system in a milspec anodized aircraft-grade aluminum case".
  • Every pin in every socket is a fit subject for an article.
  • Every "bis" revision of every sub-sub-part of an IEC standard is a fit subject for an article.
  • Tagging an article with Wikiproject:Physics is the HALLMARK of a future featured article. Long future, mind...deep time...protons decaying...
  • Never say "1978" when you can say something like "Nearly four-fifths of the way through the 20th Century".
  • Organization is linear. Just jot it down as it comes to you.
  • Be sure to give scales on photos like "Half life size" etc. - after all, everyone is using the same monitor, resolution, and full-screen browser as you.
  • Even more important that saying "Foo is..." in the article Foo, spend more time on "Foo is not...".
  • Be sure your article has a "conclusions" section, to make sure the reader knows what to think.
  • When discussing a content dispute on the talk page, the best strategy is to ying tong iddle i po frammish gronk. With subscripts and lots of Wikimarkup.
  • A member of <My paranoid ethic group> invented the telephone, BASIC, the electric motor, electric light, the alphabet, bathing...
  • Give all the train-spotting details, the printing history of the dining car menus...but never explain what a train is FOR.
  • Someone can be Scottish, or British, but not both.

Random thoughts

  • Sometimes you can blow away a third of an article and no-one says boo.[39] But take out a U or an I and you get a fight to the death. [40]
  • Between PAT testing and Voltage optimisation, you can make a good buck (pound) selling the British things they don't need and don't understand.
  • If it's "providing solutions", it's spam; tagged 3 today alone.
  • Every aluminum flashlight is a tactical flashlight, just like every radio with a shortwave band is a communications receiver.
  • Answers
What? - Sure, we've got lots of that, it's written right on the box.
When? - Sometimes, especially if its on the Web.
Where? - Always if its the UK, otherwise chancy.
Who? - Rarely, unless it's Tesla.
How? - Sometimes, and sometimes too much.
Why? - Hardly ever.
  • Comic book guy said "Children only want to know what, never why."
  • On the Wikipedia, everybody who brings his Maglite and a thermos of coffee gets to be a mall cop!
  • I'm in good company this week. User:Dicklyon's edits are clear, commonsensical, good English, and understandable...he hasn't got a hope.
  • Which is worse, I wonder? Editors with a half-baked notion of a field (evidently derived from watching TV), editors who are fully baked, or editors who are Cone 6 hard-fired crackpots?
  • This is an encyclopedia, not the Staples catalog. We should cover the whole topic of calculators at Calculator - a couple of paragraphs at least to cover the epic brawling saga of mechanical calculators ( the men who built them...the women who loved them...) before a pointer at Calculator (mechanical), then we can spend the rest of the article on the usual flabby Wikipedia minutia catalog of boring things found in a Staples catalog.
  • "and" is a bad word to find in an encyclopedia article title. You can put any two notions anyone has ever had together with "and", but the result is often doubtful as an encyclopedia topic.
  • Articles nominated for membership in a project should have more relevance to the project then does, say, putting "Food" into Project India because they eat food there.
    • Adding tags to talk pages is fun and easy. Put every article in every project! After all, they watch interlaced broadcast video in Paraguay, so shouldn't interlaced video be added to the Paraguay project?
  • No matter how many project banners you add to a talk page, no-one ever looks at the article.
  • SludgeContentOnDemand.com, the organization that provides answers to such search queries as "How can I get treated for VD in Seattle?" and "How can I get the blood off my surplice?", pays its "content creators" 3 cents a word - and eHuH?.com is full of crappy articles as a result. Wikipedia pays *nothing*. You get what you pay for. Depressing.
  • Nobody ever complains about alt text in image captions.
  • Where else but Wikipedia can someone on the island of Mauritius reach out and screw up something you're working on?
  • I heard on Quirks & Quarks that AI researchers are using Wikipedia to train their AIs. This makes me sad - think of all the AIs learning "Teacher Sucks!" and similar distilled human wisdom.
  • Reading Wikipedia is a bit like listening to electronica - every once in a while you can see where something really good has been sampled, then beaten to death.
  • Have you ever met so many humorless people with excess time on their hands in your life? Apart from 20 meters, of course.
  • "List of fictional X" is worthless for all X. Can't research fictional objects, all the description that ever was, comes out of the author's deadline-addled brain.
  • Tesla was either unhinged or a fraudster on an epic scale. The more I read about his later schemes, the less sense they make. He must have *known* things like Wardenclyffe couldn't work, why did he keep trying to chisel money out of Astor and Morgan?
  • ASCII '63 put men on the moon. All those pothooks and squiggles are persuasive enough to get people to blow themselves up, though.
  • There is an end to radioactivity, though it's not usually feasible to wait for Avogadro's number of half lives to pass away. Eventually the last atom of uranium in that ton will fiss...
  • A Mac is not a PC, just like Coke is not Pepsi. Both are bubbly brown sugary liquids that rot our teeth, but the difference is cosmically important from the marketing perspective. They are both "cola beverages", though. It shows the general soft-headedness around all things under the IBM PC cloud that they used a generic term as a brand name.
  • If vandals from India were as active as those from the US, the Wikipedia would be practically unusable.
  • British editors often care passionately about changing to *their* variety of spelling. American authors, being (I speculate) more secure, rarely change spelling back. Perhaps British schoolboys are beaten if they leave out the extra "i"s and "u"s ? Although really the majority dialect is Indian English, with UK being a tiny fraction of the speakers of either the American or Indian variety.
  • Be Bold. Share your confusion with the world.
  • Let's pool our ignorance.
  • If you're not merging or AfDing a few articles a week, you don't much care about this project.
  • Specific, informed, constructive criticism is what all (originally wrote the electrotechnology but it applies generally) articles need and don't get. They get written by hobbyists, who have incomplete and eccentric notions of the subject and generally treat it in the most superficial fashion. Rarely an article gets visited by someone knowledgeable, who gets scared off when he gets overwritten by some teenager with time on his hands. Or, worse yet, some curmudgeon overturns an article based on his vast experience and knowledge, except that he can't write three consecutive clear sentences without diving into jargon. People who can write *well* get paid for doing it, and don't come here. There's an upper limit to the quality level of any Wikipedia electrotechnology article that is very low indeed. Though I'm sure the articles on history, geography, mathematics, chemistry, etc. are in much better condition.... (from what I've read, the basics are, anyway.)
  • Maybe my prejudice above comes from the types of articles I look at. There's lots of electro-hobbyists with time on their hands, maybe it's not surprising that the electrotechnology articles are so low-grade. (Though some of the firearms hobby articles I've read are even worse.)
  • Editing a Wikipedia article is a very good way to discover your own ignorance, as I have repeatedly proven.
  • "The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.-- Napoleon Bonaparte"
  • Article quality deteriorate rapidly if the talk page length greatly exceeds the article length.
  • You don't really know something until you (try to) write an article about it.
  • We're going to solve the wars between races here on Wikipedia.
  • If I really was "sole arbiter" of what appeared on Wikipedia, the encyclopedia would be millions of articles shorter.
  • I have become considerably less tolerant in my few years here. Perhaps I've been reading too many controversies in talk pages and edit comments. Probably not a good idea to evaluate humanity based on on-line comments; after a few minutes reading You Tube comments, you'll be praying for the missiles to fly and sterilize the whole planet.
  • Nothing like being abused by some anon IP sock-puppet.
  • When is a Wikipedia editor bluffing? When his fingers are moving on the keyboard.
  • Some people seem to have the weird idea that a link to an external website is a substitute for writing an encyclopedia article. If this was true, all we'd need to do is add (See:Google) for every article. Read the "white paper", summarize it and put the contribution in here. Marketing material on web sites doesn't usually stand up to much of this before it vanishes away...once you knock the foam out of the beer glass, there's nothing left. If the paper you're summarizing doesn't have any bibliography attached, it's probably not worth adding.
  • Let's not bother with all that tedious research and writing, just put an external link to Britannica instead!
  • Google Translate thinks it can translate from German to English. Google Tranlate is wrong. ( But Google Translate is very very cool.)
  • If you're uploading a picture, maybe say when it was taken. Where it was taken would also be useful - at least what country it is in. While you're at it, explain what the picture is, too. 15 out of 20 Commons images (that aren't big slabs of German text) leave out most of these interesting details.
  • Why are so many people saying they feel "flattered and hono[u]red" that their names came up on a computer-generated list? It's like writing to "Reader's Digest" about how excited you are to participate in their singular offers.
  • Search out WP:NOTED a few times and realize just how plonkingly slack-jawed-eye-glazing-drool-running-down-the-chin bad is the writing style most favored by Wikipedia editors.
  • A first draft of an article should at least look something like a first draft of an encyclopedia article (this isn't Wikipedia 2004 where any random scribble was soon transformed into brilliant prose).
  • Are you pig ignorant? High? Illiterate? Undiagnosed crazy? Psychopathic? Learning English by reading billboards? Not to worry, you can be an editor too.
  • Are you a crank? Then come on in!
  • Are you more Catholic than the Pope? You, too, can know the righteous joy of using ISO standards that no-one not on a standards committee uses.
  • The single most important development in the distribution of human knowledge since the invention of written language is pretty much wasted on many schoolchildren.
  • Try not to write like a cat lady on a bad day. Focus. Overview first, then details. You know, it's not important to give the variant spellings anywhere in the article, let alone in the lead or the first clause of the first sentence of the lead. You can safely leave that awesomely important fact to somewhere else, and Wikipedia will be no poorer for it. Pick one variant of spelling for an article and stick with it - there's nothing sadder that someone dinking with the "u"s or swapping "-er" and "-re" endings. (Well, maybe someone fiddling with non-break spaces or hyphens to dashes...actually, there's no end to the sad things people do on Wikipedia now that I think about it.) ( sad: changing , to . for decimal points.)
  • Consider that your audience hasn't got a lifetime of experience with French poetry of the 12th century or whatever your happy little heart motivates you to burble on about here on the Wikipedia.
  • Consider that you're going to die some day and that no-one on his death bed ever wishes he'd won that edit war.[citation needed]
  • "You have new messages" is about like getting a telegram...it's never good news.
  • Never mind fixing the periods in "ie", "eg", "e.g.", "i.e."- take them out altogether.
  • *NORMAL* people don't write encyclopedias.
  • Any talk page discussion that goes on more than 2 complete cycles is a target for "spot the loony". No productive discussion takes more than 2 cycles to resolve.
  • If you see the formatting doing something wacky, somone has put a parameter into a template that he doesn't really understand.
  • Beware the carbon filament cartel!
  • "Expert needed" - the blaring car alarm of the Wikipedia.

Pompous editing

Given the exhaustive screening process required to become a Wikipedia editor (you must be able to type en.wikipedia.org in a browser address bar, or have someone type it for you, or find a computer that someone was using on the Wikipedia), it is not only pompous, but arrogant, to indulge in many of the writing cliches seen here.

  • Don't lie to the reader.
  • If you don't know, don't say, and don't go on about just becuase *you* couldn't find a citation, that the truth must ever be concealed from human ken (unless you can find a citatino for that, of course).
  • You can divide a number by 1000 by moving the decimal point three places to the left. Gee, I needed Wikipedia to tell me that? Thanks. Maybe now you can tell me what sound "R" makes. Or what does this "A" shape mean? If the reader doesn't know what "divide by 1000" means, suggesting various perverted acts with obscure symbols isn't going to help either. One could cite "Not how-to" and "Not universal, many places use commas" but really it's just Wikipedia padding itself with obvious trivia so that editors can feel good about "contributing". This is what passes for adding content, Jimbo help us.
  • Studies show.... Better have citations there; we would read your mind to find out which studies, but some of us don't like short stories.
  • Civilized countries - Ahh, yes, here comes Allan Quartermain with a Bible Wikipedia in one hand and a Webley in the other, to civilize the duskier races. Industrialized countries is nearly as bad.
A crack team of Wikipedia editors brings all the world's knowledge to some uncivilized part of the world.
  • It is also worth mentioning that ... - We write this way only because we can't underline the good bits. Save time and only read those parts that are worth mentioning.
  • Consumers spend extra money to buy radio clocks because they like the way the sales clerk smells - and they have no idea why it's called a "radio clock". And atomic clocks have radioactive material in them. [41]
  • It is believed that - if you don't know, guess; this magic formula makes it soound encyclopedia-like.
  • sun's electromagnetic radiation ---> sunlight
  • ...not to be confused with... - On the Wikipedia, this means the *contributor* is confused.
  • whilst...Prithee, Sir Knyghte, wherefor the castle?
  • The distinction between a voltage reference and a voltage source is, however, rather blurred If you don't know what it is, then should you be writing this article?
  • ...actually.... No, not actually.
  • ...works the same as a BDC. Useless undefined acronym.
  • Until the 21st century AC adapters comprised a transformer to convert the mains electricity voltage to an appropriate lower alternating voltage, a rectifier to convert it to pulsating DC, ... - from a version of AC adapter. Scholars will mark the 21st century as a turning point in the millenia-long evolution of wall warts.
  • Actually, anything with "comprise" in it.
    • ...or anything with "actually" in it.
  • As of 2010 rechargeable batteries are used for applications such as... - from Rechargeable battery You know, these uses aren't going away, and "applications" is redundant if you're giving the list.
  • Since traditionally the light output of individual light-emitting diodes .... - from LED lamp. Ahh, yes, gather round the flickering light of the 5 mm LED and I will tell thee a tale....
  • In computing, fdisk (for "fixed disk") is a commonly used name for a command-line utility that provides disk partitioning functions in an operating system. - from Fdisk - the whole of computer science revolves around the bitty boxes
  • Technically, CCDs are implemented as shift registers ... - yeah duh. Don't say "technically" unless you're contrasting technical and non-technical uses of the same term. Better yet, don't say "technically"
  • ...the output is, of course, tied to Vcc while pin 1 (Gnd) is grounded. - from 555 timer IC - Of course. It's so obvious, why are you even looking this up in the encyclopedia, you poor stupid reader, you. It's not even correct, because a few millseconds ago the output was "tied" to ground.
  • When device size is a spatial constraint (i.e. laptop computers), a mini-VGA port occasionally is in place of the full-sized VGA connector. - from VGA connector. O for the love o' Pete. "Spatial constraint", forsooth. And later on this brilliant prose goes on as Occasionally, this connector is incorrectly referred to as a “DB-15” or as an “HDB-15”. Incorrectly according to WHO?
  • A common misconception is that starting batteries should always be kept on float charge. In reality, this practice will encourage corrosion in the electrodes and result in premature failure.- From Lead-acid battery. Good thing I looked this up on Wikpedia before stupidly leaving my battery on float charge. Don't give the "common misconceptions" and never say "in reality" unless you're contrasting irreality.
  • Amongst the general public, the decibel is most widely known as a measure... - from an old edition of Decibel. Ahh, what are those vile commoners doing on my grouse moor? Away with them!
  • Late in the 20th century, Robert Carver designed and produced several high quality high powered audio amplifiers... -- from Magnetic amplifier. If we knew what we were writing about, we'd give you a year. But I'll just comb over these three hairs and no-one will notice I've gone bald.

Wordyness

  • this can be interpreted as . Rewrite.
  • The FM broadcast band in Japan is located from 76.0 to 90 MHz, and Japan is the only country to use this exact frequency span. -->The FM broadcast band in Japan uses 76.0 to 90 MHz. Repeating the noun is a cue for a rewrite.
  • This term can also be applied when... Wordy.
  • The following consume standby power if plugged into mains power; this power can be eliminated by disconnecting from mains power when not in use. The reader knows that unplugging something removes its power supply.
  • (usually made from silicon, but can be made from another semiconductor) -->(made from silicon or other semiconductor)
  • software, consisting of programs --> computer programs - redundant
  • Roughly half of the student body is from North Dakota with the remainder coming from around the nation and the world. --> As opposed to somewhere else?
  • and a zillion others.

Bitter comments not for use in edit summaries

Not for use in edit summaries. Besides, the people who leave the types of edits that would provoke these edit summaries are incorrigible.

  1. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys
  2. rv reality-challenged contribution
  3. All your base is belong to us after some particularly stunning examples of syntax
  4. WP:CIR
  5. There's good reasons why we have more than one article. Otherwise we'd just have The sum total of human knowledge to date.
  6. And so ends your entire Wikipedia contribution history.
  7. We kicked your * in '45, don't make us come over there and do it again.
  8. Better to place a thousand tags than look up a single reference. Geez, Google Books is just *sitting there* in cyberspace, waiting for you!
  9. I just love reverting spam from IPs where I don't even recognize the country code.
  10. ENglish, not INglish
  11. Yes, the Americans do it differently. Doesn't that blow your little inbred BSE-soaked brain?
  12. Automated spelling and grammar checkers exist. Use one, and save us all a lot of time.
  13. Your crazed conspiracy theories have no basis in consensual reality.
  14. You *can* see the fnords, can't you?
  15. We're not teaching all of [physics|mathematics|chemistry|history|English] here.
  16. Good thing you're so much smarter than the rest of us.
  17. Buy your own d*mn ads.
  18. Literacy is wasted on some people.
  19. The Internet is wasted on some people.
  20. This is the greatest contribution you thought you could make?
  21. Get a life. (And this coming from someone with 25000+ edits!)
  22. If you'd read the article, you can see that this is already there and written in English.
  23. Tripe trimmed.
  24. Fat flushed.
  25. BS removed.
  26. Cluelessness reverted.
  27. "Organization" is not just a 12 letter word but a real help to an article.
  28. If you knew what you were talking about, you could explain it to us. It might even be relevant to this article.
  29. Never mind the *ing tags, do the work instead!
  30. No, this isn't a suitable topic to add to Wikiproject:Physics.
  31. Quit dinking with the U's/ swapping ER and RE. Any Web user knows there's more than one right spelling.
  32. No-one is going to type a f*ing umlaut/macron/emdash/accent in a search for this article!
  33. ASCII '63 is good enough for me.
  34. Use the English alphabet, not those chicken scratches.
  35. Longer words are not better words.
  36. That was lovely, but what does it have to do with this topic?
  37. Your classmates' or teachers' habits and preferences are not encyclopediac topics.
  38. Spam, spam, spam, lovely spam.
  39. You're kidding, right?
  40. Crackpot theories not wanted.
  41. Your unique and idiosyncratic ideas challenge and refresh us all, so FOAD.
  42. You spell worse than I do.
  43. I told you this already - are you blind, or just stupid?
  44. Wikipedia...the encyclopedia that even stupid people can edit.
  45. If you scribble on the library books, Nurse is going to take your crayon away.
  46. If only AfD was as easy as reverts.
  47. Be fruitful and multiply...elsewhere.
  48. Your whole school is evidently a waste of the taxpayer's money and should be turned into a mini-mall instead.
  49. Go to your university and ask for a refund, they obviously have cheated you.
  50. You can't seriously believe that?
  51. Those are wonderful credentials. I, myself, am the lost Romanov and rightful King of Russia.
  52. Pretty cocky for someone who doesn't have the guts to even register a pseudonym.
  53. GeoIP consulted; coordinates downloaded, missiles on their way.
  54. If we were out to get you, we would have gotten you by now.
  55. Another waste of human lifespan.
  56. Please report for recycling at once. You contain nutrients and minerals that can be put to better use.
  57. Another Renaissance man with a Neanderthal mind.
  58. Have you no shame?
  59. Cat-like typing detected.
  60. Step away from the keyboard.
  61. You're in over your head, aren't you?
  62. No, what you saw on "Discovery Channel" last year is not a reference.
  63. That's just sad.
  64. The historical record is clear: Tesla did not invent the iPad.
  65. "Mad scientists doing secret undocumented experiments" are not the inventors.
  66. "That turns out not to be the case" = "you're dead wrong".
  67. Sure, Professor, you've got two Nobels in this field.
  68. This is the Wikipedia. You obviously are writing for the Wackypedia. Or the Wonkypedia.
  69. This is en.wikipedia. Speak English.
  70. I don't know where you learned English, I hope you didn't pay anything for the lessons.
  71. Yes, the Wikipedia is based in the US. If your country was so *-hot, where's the Internet *it* invented?
  72. I know your boss pays you to sanitize this article, but the facts are verifiable and relevant.
  73. You shouldn't take dictation from the voices in your head.
  74. Did you miss the last saucer?
  75. Oh for * sake, that's so bloody obvious, you don't really mean that needs a citation tag now do you?
  76. You'd better have better grammar than mine before you change that again.
  77. That was a nice story. I like stories. But what does it have to do with this topic?
  78. Merge 'em all; better one strong coherent article than a bunch of tweets.
  79. Welcome to Earth. Staying long?
  80. It was perfectly readable before you came along and "improved" it.
  81. Who?
  82. What?
  83. Why? For F's sake, WHY?
  84. If you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't be asking for a citation.
  85. Not a parts catalog.
  86. You hacked your way through the great firewall of china to tell us THAT?
  87. Who was your physics professor...Wile E. Coyote?
  88. Crackpottery removed.
  89. Just because they do/use <foo> in <bar> doesn't mean this article <foo> belongs in project <bar>.
  90. Changing the hyphen style has made this article so clear! Thanks, Wikipedia! Now I is smart like editor!
  91. (University IP) Got tenure yet, Professor?
  92. And they say humans have stopped evolving. Look what 200 years of negative selection pressure has done for your country alone!

not for use in edit summaries no matter how richly deserved Instead I usually just type "rv v".

Afd

40 fail, 56 success(58%), 0 pending

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