User talk:Imnotjoshpotter

Please stop. If you continue to vandalize pages, as you did to Giant Panda, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. -- The Anome (talk) 02:34, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

A reply, and an invitation

Hello. Thanks for replying on my talk page. I can see that your edit was intended as only a bit of fun. Unfortunately, thousands of people have the same idea every day. Although one humorous edit does very little damage, thousands of people doing the same for hundreds of days would lead to Wikipedia being riddled with rubbish. And once a place has been vandalized, people value it less, and people feel less and less bad about vandalizing it some more, and the whole place gets trashed. This isn't a hypothetical argument; we have had, and continue to have, the Wikipedia equivalent of people trying to kick in windows and set fires, because they find it fun, just as happens in the real world with buildings. And that's a mean-spirited thing to do.

To stop this happening, dedicated editors work 24/7 to try to clean up damage as it happens, monitoring every edit and proofreading it. All of this wastes the time of real people, people who are trying to write a free online resource for everyone. The only way that we can minimize this wasted effort is to try to stop it at its source, by letting people know that vandalism is not tolerated, and if they continue, to block them from editing. Unfortunately, this means we have to treat everyone the same way, including you.

Actually, we're quite nice about it. We just ask you politely to stop, and if you won't stop, we will temporarily block you from editing; and, unless you make a real nuisance of yourself, that's all we do.

You might ask: are we so nicey-nicey? It's because we believe that, once they know what's at stake, almost everyone wants to build, rather than destroy. And what's at stake here is the gift of a free encyclopedia for everyone on Earth. If you consider what several hundred printed volumes of useful information would cost otherwise (see Wikipedia:Size in volumes), you can think of it as a $1000 present to every man, woman and child on Earth; and, as inexpensive Internet access devices arrive in the developing world, that's six billion people who are, we hope, about to get a gift of useful and reliable knowledge. And we owe it to them to make that knowledge useful and correct, and to try to purge out nonsense and untruths, because that will hurt real people in real ways.

Wikipedia is not an Internet game: we're actually trying to pull people out of poverty and ignorance and bondage through free knowledge. Why would anyone want to damage that? Really, there aren't enough lulz in the world to compensate for the bad karma.

I'd like to believe that, in the long run, you don't want to be the kind of person who does mean-spirited things. Even if you just do five minutes of useful work to improve an article, or start a new one, you will become a new and valued contributor, and become part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. If you'd like to join us in the good work of building the encyclopedia, you're welcome to join: there are millions of useful things left to do. Please read WP:WELCOME: you can start any time you want. -- The Anome (talk) 12:04, 19 October 2008 (UTC)