Misplaced Pages

• God

• The Devil

• The Hobbit

• The Tooth Fairy

• Father Christmas

• Young-earth creationism

• Mass hysteria

• Magical thinking

• Homeopathy

• The CEO of the company that publishes the National Enquirer is called David Pecker. He has never worked for Vera Wang.

• Lee Ho Fook. Hard to beat in a peculiar name contest.

• FUK is a peculiar IATA name for a Japanese airport.

• Dick. Dick is a common name. But also a peculiar one. (Don't be a Dick. In England beware of the spotted Dick. And always beware of Dickheads.)

• Dave's another common name. Awfully common, come to think of it. But not peculiar. Which is why Dave's not here, man.

• You don't get many Ælfrics in the pub these days. Ælfric used to be common, but now it's just peculiar. Will the same happen to Dick?

• God is such a peculiar name that I don't know any parents who have bestowed it on any of their children.

Misplaced Pages is more fun when you stop thinking of it as a vast repository of unreliable information and start noticing that it is a vast repository of peculiar names. And that's a fact.

• "Let me tell you something...with the amount of time I spend making some of these car articles worthy of this site with no gratitude whatsoever, the last thing I need is to waste time reading your comments." Vegavairbob

• "I'm gonna tell you something mister. I can't wait to get to the conference. Hopefully there's gonna be some changes. YOU are hurting this site. Just wait." User:71.167.61.206

• "Learn to not be such a snot to other people. And one more thing ... Oops, I'm sorry, I farted in your general direction", and ". . . in the past day I will be honest that I have a profound dislike of you with your clearly patronizing remark to -, and in all honesty I think that you are behaving cynically and and being snotty, I mean you are just an average joe like me, we belch and fart and do stupid crap - don't pretend you are better than me To cut short my response, if I ever saw you in person I would let out my excess liquids from my kindneys onto your feet." R-41

Don't feed 'em.

Seen at the Conservatism talk page: 'I came here from the NPOV board.' And at another: '...most PR professionals are humans who are not out to "bamboozle" at all.' And at another: 'Just because some character decided to name his own bodily fluid after a public figure doesn't actually connect that public figure to it.'

The more high-profile of the two Misplaced Pages co-founders goes all motherfuckyfucky at his talk page in a comment about South Park: "I fucking love motherfucking South Park." Then comments that it's a "really lame thing to put on the front page of Misplaced Pages" from time to time. When asked whether front-paging it "isn't a demonstration that Misplaced Pages (where appropriate) can educate and inform about popular culture in fact likely to attract new editors?" the co-founder replies: "I'm sure it will attract new editors. Not the kind we want, though."

I sincerely hope I'm not the kind he wants.

One WP contributor, conserving adjectives because of the global shortage, managed to use just one - "awesome" - to describe Led Zeppelin, Sonic the Hedgehog, the film of The Lord of the Rings and Hamlet. Shortly afterwards the Worldwide Conservation Organization for Meaningless Adjectives announced that the supply of awesomes had almost entirely dried up in California.

And sometimes interesting.

Christopher Hitchens's Letters to a Young Wikipedian has dissuaded thousands of children from joining all the others who are already administrators. See, there IS a God. In Chapter III (note to American readers: no, not the one hundred and eleventh chapter) he observes that "there is something idiotic about those who believe that consensus (to give the hydra-headed beast just one of its names) is the highest good."

WP:V, WP:RS and WP:NPOV trump WP:CON.

"When all else fails, try Wales." -- Christopher Logue

When you're involved in a discussion at an article's talk page and you want to recruit additional editors to participate, make sure that any invitation you post to other users' talk pages does not fall foul of the guideline WP:CANVASS. The simplest and safest solution is to post your invitation to the talk page of WP co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales. He has decreed it exempt from the guideline. If you know he shares your opinion on the matter under discussion, feel free to say so in your post, and to cite that as the reason you're asking him to join in. On anyone else's talk page a non-neutral post like that would be "inappropriate" under the terms of the guideline, but it's OK at JW's. The page may be exempt from other guidelines and policies. I asked there, but nobody answered; so I don't know. As always, Caveat editor.

NEWS FLASH! July 2012: Co-founder declares Jimbotalk a forum-shopping-free zone! See next section

July 2012: In addition to its existing exemption from prohibitions on canvassing (see above), Jimbotalk is now also decreed exempt from prohibitions on forum shopping. So although there are wikipolice hiding behind almost every pillar there, they cannot arrest you for forum shopping: "It is never forum shopping to post on this page. Ever." -- Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales

• There's knowing, and there's googling and pretending you knew all along.

• Also let it be known that "the worst nastiness in Misplaced Pages is pursued while being "wp:civil" and is in fact conducted via mis-using (rather than violating) the letter of Misplaced Pages policies, guidelines and mechanisms." - User:North8000

"If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he'd be President today." Headline of spoof VW Beetle ad. (One of the famous Doyle Dane Bernbach ads said the car was so airtight that it would float.)

"Worst BLP not dominated by 'current political POV arguments' is likely Charles Lindbergh at this point..."  — posted at WP:Village pump. Lindbergh has not been a living person for 42 years.

• "...how cynical and opportunistic 'BLP enforcement' is. It's a 'BLP violation' to use an insufficiently flattering photo of Rush Limbaugh in his article. It's also a 'BLP violation' to describe a retired physicist as a 'retired physicist'. But when it comes to an unarmed teenager shot to death on his way home from the store, it's apparently just fine to include every school suspension and self-aggrandizing tweet in that person's history. I don't think one needs to be particularly sophisticated to postulate ideas about why these cases are handled so differently." — User:MastCell

• "It doesn't matter how loudly you scream BLP, you also have to actually back it up with some reasoning." — User:The Blade of the Northern Lights

• "It happens more and more that some loudmouth jackass causes enough trouble that it seems easier to accommodate him. This is short-sighted, and is why the fraction of jerks here is growing." — User:Tom Harrison

• I have learned to have absolutely no respect for the "contributions" of wikilawyers who constantly run bleating to the noticeboards (e.g. WQA, ANI and BLP) and the Wales talk page to try to enforce their own versions in content disputes.

Adding comments and edit summaries that stir shit-storms in teacups is routine for users whose history shows a marked tendency to misrepresent others' comments. As a strategy to discredit others it is doomed to failure (yet its practitioners endlessly repeat the same strategy in the hope of a different outcome). Rather, it tends to discredit the shit stirrer. For example: suppose user A comments at the talk page of a BLP on Dick Head, a notable member of the polygamous Church of MoreYoni, that Dick, his current wife and his ex-wife all appear to reside at the same address; and suppose user A comments further that "MoreYonis have such cosy domestic arrangements."

User B, who cannot see a wikiteacup without trying to stir a storm in it, deletes the comments and harrumphs about "blatant religious bigotry" in the edit summary. It's clearly a fatuous accusation, so why make it? Groundless accusations are often projections. If other users now check B's edit history and see that his contributions routinely convey an "obstinate or intolerant devotion to his own opinions and prejudices"--the very stuff of bigotry--the full extent of the irony will be evident to all.

Fucking, Austria

"Both of them should at a minimum be topic banned for being annoying to the subject." — User:Jimbo Wales

"I'd be interested to know the policy basis for topic baning someone because the subject of an article says they are "annoyed"; I'd imagine that would apply to a considerable number of editors. I find your stance here extremely annoying; will you be banned from making posts relating to me?" — User:Pigsonthewing

At WP:WQA User A alleged "combative and uncivil" conduct by User B against User C. He requested specific assistance as follows: "...I suggest that that third-party users take a more positive approach here by reviewing the issue and provide constructive advice to B and C on how to better respond to disagreements in order to help both of them avoid getting into uncivil entanglements."

I was the sole user to step up to the plate with the requested assistance: "Let's cut to the chase. You're at WQA because you want 'third-party users' to 'provide constructive advice to B and C on how to better respond to disagreements in order to help both of them avoid getting into uncivil entanglements.' May I? If B and C want to avoid getting into 'uncivil entanglements', my advice is to respond agreeably to disagreements. Advice duly dispensed, and B and C shown the smooth path to a future of blissfully congenial collaboration, would it be OK to put this to bed now?"

User A, having received from me, and me alone, the precise assistance he'd requested, later charged that I "cannot assist users at an assistance board"; and that I am "not serious . . . about assisting users".

The WQA was dragged into ANI, where User D posted: "...the only constructive input at The WP:WQA was provided by Editor:Writegeist." To which User A replied: "Sorry but that is total nonsense"; adding "you . . . have had long-term relations with Writegeist".

It's best to stay away from the dramaboards. They're awash with rather queer untruths and innuendos.

• Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign slogan: "Hope we can believe in."

• "I frankly don't give a fuck how it all turns out in this country - or anywhere else, for that matter. I think the human game was up a long time ago (when the high priests and traders took over), and now we're just playing out the string. And that is, of course, precisely what I find so amusing: the slow circling of the drain by a once promising species, and the sappy, ever-more-desperate belief in this country that there is actually some sort of "American Dream," which has merely been misplaced. The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don't belong; it doesn't include me, and it never has. No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood, improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to. My interest in "issues" is merely to point out how badly we're doing, not to suggest a way we might do better. Don't confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they "ought to be." And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!" — George Carlin

Misplaced Pages contains much information about the history of the American military’s abuse, torture and murder of prisoners and civilians, e.g. in Vietnam as well as at Korea, Chenogne, Dachau, Biscari, Mahmudiyah, Abu Ghraib and Haditha.

As a student of the conduct of American foreign policy I have also found these articles about American torture and war crimes usefully informative: and . Also this article about America’s human rights record and this article on allegations of American state terrorism.

There are some interesting notes on CIA Torture in Vietnam, Latin America, and Iraq here.

--Ron Ridenhour, the American serviceman who collected and exposed the evidence of his compatriots' massacre of villagers at My Lai in March, 1968, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1993.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that in 2004 a CIA rendition team tortured a German citizen in Macedonia. The torture included beating and sodomising him. The UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism characterized the ruling as "a key milestone in the long struggle to secure accountability of public officials implicated in human rights violations committed by the Bush administration CIA in its policy of secret detention, rendition and torture".

• In the course of the white settlement of America, the indigenous Indian people were slaughtered in their ancestral homelands and the survivors driven out. After the physical destruction came cultural genocide. Navajo children, for example, were forced into white-run schools. Top of the curriculum was educating the children — called "savages" by white Americans — not to speak Navajo. This was accomplished by savagely beating them when they did so.

• Democrats suppressed African American suffrage and civil rights to win the 1876 election. Militias informally affiliated to the party murdered political leaders, hunted down community members and intimidated voters.

• After the Democrats regained power throughout the South, between 1880 and 1951 the Tuskegee Institute recorded lynchings of 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites.

• Lynching was a popular photographic subject for Americans, who sent picture postcards of those they had witnessed. Time noted that even the Nazis "did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz, but lynching scenes became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers was so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned the cards from the mails." — Richard Lacayo, Time, April 02, 2000

• Between 1882 and 1968, at least 4,742 African Americans were murdered by lynching. — Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary

• "The world knows of Rosa Parks because of a single simple act of dignity and courage that struck a lethal blow to the foundations of legal bigotry." — William Jefferson Clinton, 2005

• Fortunately for the United States, the policies of cultural genocide that the white Americans enacted against the Indian nations were not entirely successful. In World War II, the Japanese easily broke American communication codes in the South Pacific. To avoid defeat the Americans needed an unbreakable code. They found it in the still-living Navajo language, spoken by specially-recruited Navajo marines.

• Iwo Jima is a Pacific island with an area of eight square miles. Thanks to Navajo code-talkers, the Americans were able to kill 20,000 of its 22,000 Japanese defenders.

• "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." — Thomas Jefferson, 1809

• "Much of the rhetoric of the 'New World Order' promulgated by the American government since the end of the Cold War—with its redolent self-congratulation, its unconcealed triumphalism, its grave proclamations of responsibility—might have been scripted by Conrad's Holroyd: we are number one, we are bound to lead, we stand for freedom and order, and so on. No American has been immune from this structure of feeling...." — Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

• Conrad's Holroyd: "Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything—industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond it, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not."

• "The founding fathers were great thinkers. How did their project degenerate into George Bush and Sarah Palin?" — George Monbiot, "How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington", The Guardian October 28 2008.

The degeneration of the Founding Fathers' great project regained momentum postwar. By 1998, one in four Texas state school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs existed simultaneously.

• "One adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map: two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD...Religion — in particular fundamentalist religion — makes you stupid.

  

  The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing." — George Monbiot

• "The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win – it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition." — Christopher Hitchens

• "One of the joys of living in a world filled with stupidity and hypocrisy was to see Hitch respond." — Sam Harris

• Almost two-thirds of Americans want creationism taught in school beside evolution.

• Creationists argue that their particular religiously-based origin belief is superior to those of other belief systems, in particular those made through secular or scientific rationale.

• Young Earth creationists believe the Earth was created by God within the last ten thousand years, literally as described in Genesis.

• An estimated 47% of Americans hold the Young Earth creationist view. Almost 10% of American Christian colleges teach it. American Christian organizations Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society both promote it. An Answers in Genesis Ministries Creation Museum promotes it.

• 45% of Americans believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.

• For Americans, belief in creationism is inversely correlated to education. 74% of Americans with postgraduate degrees accept evolution.

• 20 percent of U.S. doctors believe God can cure a fatally injured patient. – Lenworth Jacobs, Lenworth Hospital, Hartford, Conn.

• Only one member of Congress openly declares himself an atheist: Pete Stark ((D) California). Stark founded Security National Bank, which grew into a $100 million company in its first ten years.

• A 1975 study based on 234 US college undergraduates found that "Religious Believers as a group were found to be significantly less intelligent and more authoritarian than religious Skeptics."

"A recent USA study connecting political views and intelligence has shown that the mean adolescent intelligence of young adults who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106.4, while that of those who identify themselves as "very conservative" is 94.8. Two other studies conducted in the UK reached similar conclusions." Misplaced Pages Hey, if you're a very conservative adolescent you can safely disregard that. You read it in Misplaced Pages, right? Chances are, a very liberal adolescent editor made it up.

I love Sarajevo. I valued its multiculturalism and its culture, and admired Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović.

• "Choosing between Tudjman and Milošević is like having to choose between leukemia and a brain tumour." — Alija Izetbegović

If you had been in the right place at the right time when the Bosnian capital was under siege by the Serbs in the 1990s, you would have heard a cello amid the percussion of shells and sniper fire.

The cellist was Vedran Smailović. Sometimes he positioned himself in the ruined National Library (one of 35,000 buildings destroyed).

Positioned in the hills around Sarajevo was an array of tanks, artillery, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, machine-guns and sniper rifles, manned by a force of 18,000 Serbs.

On July 22, 1993, the day when 3,777 shells hit Sarajevo, New York Yankee Don Mattingly hit his 200th home run, Australian TV soap opera series Home and Away hit its 1,284th episode, and a flood hit the town of Kaskaskia, Illinois's original capital, when its Mississippi River levee burst. (Kaskaskia's inhabitants were evacuated without injury.)

The siege of Sarajevo lasted almost four years. 85% of the city's casualties were civilians. Of the 12,000 killed or missing, 1,500 were children. Children also accounted for 15,000 of the 56,000 wounded. Shelling destroyed a quarter of the city's buildings. 100,000 apartments were damaged; 10,000 destroyed.

Some photographs I took during the siege might be of interest to you. Click to enlarge:

A collection of early Tour de France racing velocipedes from the Formule Libre era when there were no restrictions on the number of riders, or wheels, per bike. Of particular interest and historic significance is the unusually small example (bottom right) ridden in 1907 by Alphonse "Petit" Legrand, a midget. Confounding the pundits, Legrand won at record speed. However he was disqualified when an alert official discovered in post-race scrutineering that the accessory described by Legrand as a chain-driven refrigerator to cool his on-board refreshments was in fact an internal combustion engine to power the bicycle. Eight years later, soon after the outbreak of the Great War, Legrand masterminded the famous ill-fated attempt, using a Frot-Laffly tank disguised as a baby carriage, on the lives of the German Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen and other senior officers of the German High Command attending the christening of von Schlieffen's niece.

• Italian road-racing bicycles made by Masi and Pinarello from 1974 to 1994
• Vintage photographic postcards, signed by pioneer aviators, of early European aviation meets and air races from 1909 to 1912
• Early aviation books
• Pictorial and written material relating to Raymonde de Laroche and Bessie Coleman
• Signed first-edition books, particularly by Martin Amis
• Art
• Music
• Too much loose change
• Really bad jokes
• Examples of the more malevolent and asinine "contributions" to WP
• Examples of WP users' disillusionment - such as this one, a resignation statement from a disillusioned admin (who was soon, er, illusioned again and came skipping back as an admin under a new user name):

Misplaced Pages is no longer the Misplaced Pages I signed up for in 2005, nor is it the Misplaced Pages I decided to become an administrator for in 2008. I naively expected that Misplaced Pages would one day become a valuable, well-respected, very useful online encyclopedia, full of notable information. I thought that the articles would be edited by people with knowledge about the subjects and who could provide quality links and references. I expected that, as the project has a worldwide audience, neutrality would be one of the highest priorities. Well, I was wrong. The vast majority of the “information” on Misplaced Pages is either non-notable crap, fancruft, or other useless trivia that would never be accepted by a traditional encyclopedia. If I want to read about, for example, Star Trek, I can go to a wiki devoted to everything about the franchise, so why is that crap here?

• Misplaced Pages is open to all. That includes people with personality disorders, who are free to roam the articles and talk pages exhibiting behaviour that would be remedied in the real world by medication or a smack in the mouth. Fortunately there may be fewer than in 2007, as the number of active Misplaced Pages editors has steadily declined in the interim. Unfortunately they may constitute a steadily increasing percentage of the dwindling total if encounters with them play a part in the exodus of more collaboratively-minded editors. So if the trend continues, WP could end up being edited and administered solely by a collection of pompous, egotistical, wikilawyering asshats.

• You may cross paths with one who habitually talks down to others. If you also cross swords, his arguments may exhibit a persistent casuistry in distorting and misrepresentating policy to browbeat you into submission. This is a pompous, egotistical, wikilawyering, asshat bully. Bullies don't collaborate, they game the system. So a wikibully, thwarted in some piddling content dispute, tends to haul it to the nearest notice boards in the hope of getting his own way. Cyril Connolly observed that bullies have "a sense of inferiority deepened perhaps by sexual ignorance" (Enemies of Promise). So spare a little pity for the wikibully when you push back. And bear in mind that when you do, he may squeal self-pityingly about you bullying him. Bullies don't get irony.

• "In my many years on Misplaced Pages, there have been many people who have . . . abused the rules & process, ignored or talked over what other contributors add to a discussion, & resorted to all sorts of other objectionable tactics with the goal of simply getting their preferred version of an article accepted." WP editor Llyrwrch

• "See, it'd be so much simpler if we could block for simple douchebaggery." WP editor UltraExactZZ

• "The amount of verbal pomposity, elaboration of the obvious, repetition, trivia, low-grade statistics, tedious factification, drudging recapitulations of the half-comprehended, and generally inane and laborious junk that one encounters..." Dwight Macdonald

• 91% of Misplaced Pages editors are male. Which explains a lot.

• The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit.

• "I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it." George Bernard Shaw

• "Don't bother arguing the toss with a tosser." d'Artagnan Muldoon

• "Someone insults you - well, consider them an idiot (softly, to yourself) and move on." WP editor Drmies

Borrowed from another editor's UTP:

Note that ad hominem and personal attack are logically distinct, because you can have a personal attack which is not an ad hominem, and you can have an ad hominem which is not a personal attack.

For an example of the first, suppose you say that your argument is not feeble, therefore you are not an idiot. I reply that you are an idiot, therefore your argument is feeble. This is not an ad hominem, because I have addressed your argument, by modus tollens. But it is clearly a personal attack on you. Conversely, if I reply 'you are a great guy, therefore what you say is correct', that is an ad hominem because it addresses your personal qualities rather than your argument itself. But it is a compliment, not an attack.

Arguments that someone is from Misplaced Pages Review therefore their arguments are unsound or invalid are clearly ad hominem. Even to say an argument is biased is ad hominem. Ad hominem is any form of words that fails to engage with the content of what the speaker is saying, and engages with personal qualities or motives or reasons or whatever. Hope that helps. 86.183.162.176 (talk) 14:02, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I think you are right. An ad hominem argument is not always a personal attack. Thank you. Cla68 (talk) 22:08, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

• I'd go even further and say that the permissibility of an ad hominem should be determined by the contribution to the discourse, by whether it raises or lowers the level of intellectual honesty. Pointing out e.g. a clearcut conflict of interest which the editor in question decided to keep out of the debate and which cannot reasonably be assumed to be common knowledge does technically constitute an ad hominem. But imho it is not only permissible, but mandatory for anyone to try and give everyone involved and particularly less-intimately-knowledgeable onlookers a chance to gauge the arguments by their actual merits. Which brings me to my current major pet peeve in WP policy: There's a widely-quoted policy called "Assume good faith", but there is no policy "Act in good faith". And the meaning of this status quo is that some of our policies are geared towards protecting some of the worst, longest-term and most well-established miscreants among WP editors. Cla, I admire your attempts at improving Misplaced Pages, but this crowd does not want change. They love their fallacies, they love this dysfunction, and that's why any intelligent person should give up on Misplaced Pages sooner rather than later. --87.79.225.165 (talk) 13:07, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

• I agree with the IP; ad hominem comments are not always illogical or a fallacy. The most obvious example is pointing out a conflict of interest, which the IP editor already outlined. If someone publishes an article claiming that secondhand smoke does not cause cancer, then it is entirely reasonable to point out that person's employment by a tobacco company. Far from being a logical fallacy, providing such information is considered essential in any ethical scholarly enterprise, even though it could be considered a form of ad hominem.

  A second situation in which ad hominem arguments are reasonable is in pointing out apparent hypocrisy. If you make a vigorous moral argument against behavior X, but in fact you routinely engage in behavior X, then it is reasonable to point out that your personal behavior calls into question the sincerity of your moral argument. Technically, that's an ad hominem approach, but it's neither illogical nor a fallacy. MastCell  23:46, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

• User A to User B: Your proclivity to circuitously argue points until the heat death of the universe and make serial assertions that amount to “black is white and up is down” does not make it incumbent on others to refute your assertions one by one. Furthermore, your quoting Misplaced Pages policy and highlighting key passages as if you wrote it, patented the concept, and teach it at Harvard does not impress. I suggest you take sufficient time off to give some thought to ‘cause & effect’ before still more things happen on Misplaced Pages that make you sad.

User C to User B: You would learn a lot by observing more, assuming you're right less, listening more, and saying a good deal less.

• Always show consideration for other users. For example, if all you need to communicate on a talk page or in an edit summary is a fatuous self-regard, be sure to use plenty of bellowing boldface and/or CRASS CAPITALS. They serve as a handy indicator to other editors that a post isn't worth reading.

User A: I am not surprised that you mis-posted the "rules" here, and happened upon this thread. Cheers.

User B: Thank you. Might the inanity of a comment be missed, shouting in boldface is an effective way to amplify it. Beers.

"Misplaced Pages...has become the internet's default research resource." The Guardian

He who is attached to notability criteria and NPOV will suffer much. The man who expects only self-promotion and POV-pushing will never be disappointed. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

1. If you wrestle with a pig, both of you will get muddy. And the pig will enjoy it.

2. Ignorance is infinite, while patience is not. Unfortunately, Misplaced Pages is based on the premise that the opposite is true.

3. if $username =~ m/truth|justice|freedom|neutrality/i, then the account should probably be blocked preëmptively, because nothing constructive will ever come from it.

4. By the same token: if someone has "Scientist" or "Researcher" in their username, they are extremely unlikely to be a practicing scientist or researcher. However, they are highly likely to hold odd and idiosyncratic views about science and research.

5. If your edit sticks close to the original source, you will be accused of plagiarism. If your edit is paraphrased to avoid plagiarism, you will be accused of straying from the original source. Rinse and repeat.

6. "BLP enforcement" is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

7. Anyone who edits policy pages to favor their position in a specific dispute has no business editing policy pages. Corollary: these are the only people who edit policy pages.

8. The more abusive an editor is toward others, the more thin-skinned they are about "personal attacks" directed at themselves.

9. Some people never do anything without an ulterior wikipolitical motive. That motive may not be clear immediately, but it will be clear eventually.

10. The more a viewpoint is odious, ignorant, wrong-headed, or obscure, the more likely its adherents will perceive Misplaced Pages as their best opportunity to promote it.

11. Anyone who defends their edits by citing WP:NOTCENSORED doesn't have the first clue.

12. If you argue that Nature is a more useful source than the International Journal of Phrenology, someone will accuse you of an "appeal to authority". Count on it.

13. Being blocked has never made anyone more civil. On many occasions, it has made people less civil. Nonetheless, our default approach to increasing the general level of civility is to block people.

14. People who come to Misplaced Pages to promote their pet agenda run into trouble, because their goals are at odds with the goals of this website. They are generally incapable of perceiving this, however, and instead attribute their problems to a systemic bias of Misplaced Pages against their pet agenda. For example, to a committed flat-Earther, Misplaced Pages will appear to have a systemic round-Earth bias which stymies their efforts to contribute.

15. The more incapable an editor is of assuming good faith, the more prone they will be to cite WP:AGF at others.

16. Misplaced Pages's processes favor pathological obsessiveness over rationality. A reasonable person will, at some point, decide that they have better things to do than argue with a pathological obsessive. Misplaced Pages's content reflects this reality, most acutely in its coverage of topics favored by pathological obsessives.

17. If a person edits Misplaced Pages largely or solely to promote one side of a contentious issue, then the project is almost certainly better off without them.

18. If an editor compares an on-wiki situation to 1984, then they've probably never actually read Orwell, and they definitely lack all sense of perspective.

19. Anything truly insightful has been said better, and earlier, by someone else.

— With acknowledgments and thanks to User:MastCell.

. . . like these continue to protect political articles from POV-pushing, spin, and all assholery in general.

Hear, hear! B7

From the talk page of Larry Sanger's Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales:

What's the extent of our ethical duty to our readers re. political articles?

This is addressed to you personally, Mr. Wales. It is a request for you to express your personal views in this public forum. I respectfully request others here to resist the urge to preëmpt your reply - even though it has been said that your talk page is the equivalent of the Village Pump - and to engage in discussion only after you have made your comments, if any.

As you know, Joe DeSantis - paid by Newt Gingrich to direct communications on his behalf - has ceased editing Gingrich-related articles here directly and now posts his desired inclusions and deletions at the article talk pages and at the talk pages of editors he selects to act as his proxy. As you appreciate, this is entirely within policy and guidelines. Furthermore DeSantis voluntarily appends Communications Director, Gingrich 2012 to his WP signature. You have applauded him for the transparency of these practices and cited him as an example to other paid political operatives.

My concern now is more for our readers than our editors. Readers who don't check out the talk pages will be unaware that the Gingrich articles are edited (now indirectly) by a communications professional employed by Gingrich to help persuade Americans that he should be their next president. (Templated notices of DeSantis's engagement with the articles are confined to the articles' talk pages; and a warning of "increased risk of biased editing" during Gingrich's run for office is only displayed on his personal article's talk page.)

Information - its persuasive presentation, control, manipulation and interpretation - is arguably the most powerful weapon in the armory of a political campaign. It goes almost without saying that there will be other paid political operatives who, unlike DeSantis, assiduously attend to their paymasters' articles without disclosing their affiliation. We know you would like to see them emulate DeSantis's transparency. Do you think the ethical duty of transparency extends to informing our readers that all articles that have to do with politicians running for office, and with their campaigns, are very likely to be edited, both directly and indirectly (where editors act as proxies), by users who are employed to do so by the individuals and entities concerned?

Is your concern limited entirely to WP:COI? Or do you feel we have a duty of transparency and disclosure to our readers that goes beyond COI, and also beyond templated notices on articles talk pages (which many readers may never see)? If the latter, what do you think about including notices on the article pages? Or do you have any other suggestions? Writegeist (talk) 20:22, 20 February 2012 (UTC) Adding: So Messrs. Collect, Vecrumba and Maelefique (below) couldn't honour my simple request to wait for Mr. Wales's comments before they chimed in. Perhaps I was naive to hope for that modicum of consideration - willfully inconsiderate behaviour is widespread throughout the project. No less predictable, perhaps, is the ploy to shut down discussion before it's even begun by confounding the particular issue raised here with other issues in other discussions about paid operatives. Writegeist (talk) 05:43, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Um -- this how now been on this page quite a few times already - with the same result every time. I wonder if this time you will get a different answer than has been the prior result? Somehow I doubt it. See WP:DEADHORSE. Cheers. Collect (talk) 21:00, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I second that emotion. Moreover, if readers can't make out political propaganda, then they believe the propaganda, in which case any disclaimers or notices are a moot point. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 22:00, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

+1. -- Maelefique_{(and Charles!)} 00:23, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

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The denigrating misrepresentation in the first response (dealt with in the addendum to the original post) may or may not be connected to the fact that Wales didn't see fit to reply.

Although not posted in direct relation to the very specific issue raised in the original post above, this January 2012 comment from Wales at Blog.philgomes.com is of interest for its take on what paid advocates are paid to do:

"eople who are acting as paid advocates do not make good editors. They insert puffery and spin. That's what they do because that it is what paid advocates do."

So should articles (i.e. not just talk pages) that have to do with politicians running for office alert readers to the almost certain involvement of paid political operatives in their editing? The question remains unanswered. Writegeist (talk) 02:21, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

• "That's a vicious dog over there."
• "Looks like just another dog, only kind of big, to me."
• The "Neapolitan Mastiff" in question is writing articles and trying to get them right.
• "It is vicious. Watch. I'll throw a rock."
• The mastiff looks over.
• "No, really! See? It's looking at me funny. I'll throw another rock"
• "I dunno, maybe."
• The mastiff growls and snaps at the rock thrower.
• "See?"
• "I don't know about before, but it's clearly being incivil now! I'd better throw something at it to calm it down."
• The mastiff continues to snap at the rock hurlers.
• "What the heck is that? I'll go get my gun and talk on my walkie talkie about this vicious dog."
• "It isn't responding well to being clubbed! Get on the walkie talkie and call in more artillery!"
• "We need to tase this creature, quick!"
• "Yes, yes, yes, officers! I always said it was a vicious dog."
• "What are you people doing? You're fools! You created this situation yourselves and want to punish someone for simply standing up against an attack!"
• "We are doing a great job protecting the public from such vicious and unscrupulous users."