Here.

The bit about how to become an admin is especially good.

E.g Wrong reasons [for writing FA]


Ooh!

The caption under the picture of Raul is priceless, too. Poor Giano -- so much talent, wasted on such an abysmally-managed project.

Clearly Giano has no interest in writing an encyclopedia. But he is brilliant at dry wit and parody of the process.

I can't work out how he has the time to do his son't chemistry homework as well.

Good grief! You mean to tell me (and this committee) that he's also an expert on stoichiometry and titration?

I strongly disagree with this. Many of his articles are quite remarkable, and his string of FAs attests to that I think.

I think you've been confused by Moulton's attempts at dry wit.

Among other confusing things about Moulton, to be sure. Just call me the straight man, I guess, as subtlety is often wasted on me (see my Pooh Policy where I allude to this)

You'd pick up the sarcasm/in-joke of that over time. It is well-understood that Giano is an ideal writer for Wikipedia (though some have queried other aspects of his approach at WP).

To be clear, Giano is on of WR's favourite examples of how the system fails, as it seeks to chastise and alienate one of their most prolific contributors rather than understand that some of his grievances might have been well-founded.

I didn't realize Giano had such strong deletionist tendencies, chopping what he writes back by a third or more. That's disturbing. I think it's dangerous to put an article through FAC that's been influenced by that kind of thinking, because FAs act as a model for other people's work.

more dry wit?

Beats dry heaves.

The mix of self-aggrandizing and self-deprecation is delightful :-)

Giano is such an eloquent writer and has a great sense of humor. He's like a poster child of talent wasted on WP.

Which reminds me, I'm still waiting for your book to come out, badlydrawnjeff :-)

Anyway, I wonder what Giano does for a living? If it doesn't have anything to do with writing or parody or any kind of "making sense for a living" job, he should reconsider his career.

Some people write that way. They put down as much information as possible, and then prune it back so that it takes less than a year to read. There's nothing dangerous about that method of writing, so long as he understands that not everyone writes that way.

I think it puts writing tidy essays ahead of building a comprehensive reference. There was a guy who used to do that, Worldtraveller; he wrote tons of FAs, but they were all based on his deletionist thinking and were very short by FA standards, deliberately leaving out lots of info. But they were great, well-written little pieces on astronomical subjects; any sixth grader needing help with his science report would be well-served. Someone seriously interested in those subjects would be quite disappointed, however. I thought his FAs, profilic as they were, were absolutely poisonous.

We always deliberately leave our lots of information. We can and should discriminate between encyclopedic content and Ashlee Simpson's shoe size. I agree that it's possible to overedit, but there's nothing wrong with tight, sharp prose. It's supposed to be an encyclopedia article, not a padded undergraduate paper.

Didn't Worldtraveller wig out over an unfair block and leave forever?

Three cheers for admins.

You have a very good point. But it is said that for every truism there's an equal and opposite truism. (even that one, presumably)

"Sorry for the length of this letter... I didn't have time to write you a shorter one" is a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson as I recall.

I'd venture that a fair bit of the stuff that Giano cuts is stuff that needs not to be in the the final article. I wish I were better at editing back my words for the sake of brevity. Heck, I bet there are redundant words that don't need to be there in this very sentence!

Mark Twain.

Oh I disagree too (or rather, I agree with Lar that Giano is indeed interested in writing an encyclopedia). In fact, he's one of the few people that really is more focused on the encyclopedia than the pure social networking aspects, and/or power politics, and/or glam of working on a well-known project. For him, it is content first, and friends he meets and fun he has during the encyclopedia work and collaborating run a close second, but he'd not be "hanging out' were it not for the writing (and people he likes and respects while writing). It's like anyone who is doing what they love. I'm sure he loves what he does for a real job too. He's someone who has to be engaged like that in 'whatever' he does.

The same clean approach to 'why he is here' prevents him from getting caught up in the 'oh, no, I better worry what people think' syndrome (which by the way, happens at work and IRL all the time), and is part of why he's less tolerant of bs or hedging (aka dishonesty).

I don't think his talent is wasted on Wikipedia at all. He's one of the few good people keeping it afloat. The waste (if you will) is that people like this (who really care about the content) are subjected to such silly bs as evidenced in recent weeks and months.

Yes, yes, the arguments always run "he can't just say whatever he wants because he's a prolific writer" (which is true, if that were the only issue). But such arguments obscure the main point: he's usually emoting about something quite cogent to what is 'really' disrupting the encyclopedia.

And in doing so, he gets called the disruptor.

(destiny, destiny...)

It is always so in any group of persons. Just that Wikipedia is so badly prepared to cope with human failures such as this - and even is prepared to exacerbate them.

It's one thing to tighten the prose, remove extraneous words, but with a third or more of an article being removed there must be a lot of facts coming out too. I find it disappointing that someone would feel they should remove a bunch of information so that an article will be tidy enough for FAC--if the detail is too heavy, pushing the length guidelines, just write a subarticle on the history or whatever of such and such English manor house, and if the community thinks that's too much detail they can vote to delete it (they've done it to me). Don't sacrifice comprehensiveness just so the article can look tidy and get the FAC sticker.

There's a lot of good in FAC, and I'm pretty consistently impressed by the stuff I see on the main page, but people tend to stress neatness and frills over comprehensiveness and accuracy far too much. I haven't nominated anything for FAC in almost three years; I don't have the patience to put up with people telling me I need to remove details that are perfectly valid under policy or that I've "overcited" an article. If I feel like I have to reduce the quality of an article to get it through FAC, that renders the whole process pointless to me.

I think one of the issues is that Wikipedia has not really expressed what it should be - people get confused by what is intended by summary style.

I think it hopes to be an onion of knowledge, where you can peel down through layers and find more and more detail, and eventually it would contain the sum of all human knowledge. However, there is a tendency to want to stack as much knowledge as high up as possible, and the argumentative approach, under the guise of NPOV leads to a pedantic attempt to ensure that the highest level covers 100% of the topic, albeit in a summary style. You can't do it, you have to accept that at the highest level you are presenting an overview, and an overview is bound to leave out detail. You have to trust your reader to peel another layer, if interested. Unfortunately, not everyone does that, and often people have to have their pet fact (trivia) in a subject.

My pet example of that is SlimVirgin being determined to keep BSE in the factory farming article, even in the lead, when it is not directly involved in the subject at all. This then leads to undue weight as the inclusion needed to be qualified from the summary "Factory farming caused BSE" which is simply untrue by the definition of the article.

An area where this shows up is in the lead vs. full article. This is especially important as the printed version 1.0 (would I pay money for that?) is supposed to be based on just the lead, but there is no validation process that has assessed whether the lead stands on its own, without the article.

Blaise Pascal, in fact (Lettres provinciales, 16, Dec.14,1656).



Yes. Can't remember the admin involved, but I remember he was one of those who write hundreds of articles on obscure video games. Indeed I complained about this and was promptly blocked by HighinBC.



No, the job of the encylopedia, or rather the 'top article' to give an overview of the subject, and the most important things you need to know about it. What is the most important fact about Aristotle? That his father was a doctor, or that he had a profound influence on Western thought? Both are important, but if you have the chance of saying one, it is the second. The introduction to the article says the most important and comprehensive things. The guts of the article explain less comprehensive things (such as his father being a doctor).

Finally, using linking we can have much more detailed articles underneath that go into the more intricate things such as how his father being a doctor influenced his thought in certain ways that led to his opposition to Platonism, and also how the opposition between Aristotle and Plato influenced Christian thought in ways that still affect us today, and so on.

But there's no need for the main article, and certainly not the introduction, to do this.

-----------------------------------------
[edit] Ah, more wit since yesterday.



How many barbed comments and hidden references can you fit in one paragraph? One cleverness missed by quoting it here is the red link for Bish's talk page.

Bishonen's talk page was distinguished only in being a complete waste of time, even by WP standards, and populated almost wholly by her hangers-on (e.g. Geogre, Bunchofgrapes) who would collectively pounce on anyone who confronted Bishonen.

Clearly those who frequented the salon discussions on Bishonen's talk page had no interest in writing an encyclopedia.

Easy enough to make it red: [ c o l o r = r e d ]text[ / c o l o r ] = text

The "Selecting One's Friends" section has been updated...



And the notes referenced are...


One gets the sense that Giano is very, very unhappy with the Featured Article process, doesn't one?

Veni, Viki, Valkie. (I came. I Wikied. I left.)

I don't know why you're telling me this. This is summary style, something I've always used and supported. In fact, minor early life details clogging up intros are a pet peeve of mine, something that I frequently correct.



I was actually banned by Bishonen from communicating with her on her talk page once. She just refused to hear another word from me. The Geogre-Bishonen-Giano group tends to be quite intolerant of criticism (of themselves).

I was sanctioned for allowing criticism on my talk page.

Or the Cultural Revolution perhaps.




Why was this? (Not a rhetorical question). I have to say Bish was always good on the unblocking front, so have no reason to complain. Also, dare I say it, SlimVirgin who helped a lot in dealing with trolls. Amazing how many different views there can be of the same person.

Well, that was the excuse given for your sanction. As you know, the actual reason is almost always "we don't like you".

Another good one:

Erm, Peter....you highlighted this. I am not sure why (though he has a great way with words). It was me that asked him to try and smoothe a way through WP:FAR and keep everyone happy.
Cas


I should add, the reason for making prose succinct as possible (as per Tony's excellent guide) is to jam as much good info in as possible, like i did with Lion - WP is a great opportunity to really upscale the detail internet browsers soak in info. The inline refs I feel serve as appetite whetters for folks to find and wander off in search of stuff they are interested in. I hated them at first but now find them fun.
Cas

Bishonen is one of the only administrators I can recall who would routinely ban people from her talk page. This practice is obviously not conducive to a collaborative project (conversely, if they're not needed, why have them) and should probably itself be grounds for desysoping. Scratch that, it should definitely be grounds for desysoping. Not retroactively, of course…I just don't understand how this practice came to be seen as acceptable.


Huh?

It became acceptable because in WikiThink, querying an admin is stalking, stalking is harrassment, harrassment is as near to damn it rape, therefore banning is a very lenient response when the proper action should be at least imprisonment, preferably with chemical castration.

Thank goodness Wikipedians are so open minded and liberal, think where we might be otherwise.

There was a troll named Baegis who registered on behalf of the Wikipedia Project on Intelligent Design specifically to harass and bait me. His mentors on the project (Dave Souza and KillerChihuahua) realized I was beating this dude's brains out. Rather than call out their allied troll and restrain him, they decided to erase my talk page and protect it instead.