Just when you thought the WMF'ers couldn't get more out of touch with reality, Ting Wing's board comes up with a resolution about Openness that concludes, "and repel trolls and stalkers".

Although I agree it will take years to sink, and even then, its hulk will remain sticking out of the water, it does rather sound like a speech the captains of a doomed ship would give.

If I cared more, I'd look for some quote from the Russian Revolution about exorcising the enemies within ... funny how they forget to mention bailing out the resident turds in the bilge water. It's unavoidable entropy where first the soft and reasonable shits dissipate and only the really hard and unreasonable ones remain.

The answer is pay only for the servers (if you cannot get them free by handing over management to Google or some university) and start diverting funds direct to the right sort of professional workers; editors at all levels. Preferably female ones in developing, or second tier nations.

On a revolutionary humorous note:

“Vanity made the Wikipedia; liberty of knowledge was only a pretext.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

“We need the real, site-wide terror which reinvigorates the Wikipedia and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.” - Vladimir Lenin

"Any policy which supposes the people good, and the Wikipedia admins and bureaucracy corruptible, is evil." - Maximilien Robespierre

"Wikipedia is a perpetual French Revolution. They keep eliminating their best people." - Arnaud de Borchgrave

“idiotic admins are replaced only to have new admins turn idiots!” - Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

Are you upset that they didn't mention you by name?

But he's right, you know. This sort of thing does show, quite conclusively, that the WMF board is completely out of touch with reality.

Then again, it's an organization that operates at cross-purposes with itself, and it has been for some time. It should be noted that the last bit about "repelling trolls and stalkers" actually begins with the words, "Working with colleagues to develop practices to discourage disruptive and hostile behavior." Clearly this is completely illogical - the only way to do that is to get rid of those "colleagues" entirely.

Attracting and retaining "editors" is only the WMF's goal because it has to justify continued funding. As we've noted already, they're thinking like a corporation - everything is based on "grow or die," when in fact there's little need for growth, and they should really consolidate their properties as much as possible and focus on quality control, since that's what the readers want. "Attract and retain" is also at odds with the natural, inherent tendencies of the WP user community - but presumably they know that, or they wouldn't be making these kinds of statements.

If they really want to attract and retain users, as opposed to consolidate and improve content, one simple thing they could do might be to figure out a way to red-link stub articles. In other words, they wouldn't have to actually delete the stubs (though that would be just as good, if not better), they would just have to change the link color. That would cause an increase in stub-expansion activity that could go on for a year - possibly two years, or even longer. And it's unlikely that anyone would seriously object to it. (Would they?)

Another simple thing would be to stop using the words "trolls" and "stalkers" completely, since they don't know what they mean, and regardless, each Wikipedian understands implicitly that it's just a matter of time before those words are used to refer to him.

Does anyone know any other organization that conducts official business on ... IRC?

Yes. It's called the "Association of People You Really, Really Shouldn't Take Seriously".

I couldn't stop myself.

Thats okay; we won't take you seriously.

In Special:Preferences, under the "Appearance" tab, there's an option called "Threshold for stub link formatting," and the following can be found in the CSS:

The Wikivessel rides low in the water due to the weight of Turds and rodents that fill the wiki-ship bilge and so far the bilge pumps still don't work.

Well then, they can do it, already even. But purple isn't going quite far enough - if they really want to get people expanding (and replacing) stubs, they should use pink.

I'm totally serious...


Ahh, so that's it. I thought it was snakes, cockroaches, and several metric tons of that stuff that accumulates around your crotch-area when you don't wash regularly, but your explanation makes more sense...