In many of the more relaxed civilizations, the Wikipedia has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Britannica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is free; and secondly it has the words Come as You Are inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. — with apologies to the D. A.


Welcome to the Land of Confusion[edit]

A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.

— the 4th By-Law of Time from Robert Anson Heinlein, "—All You Zombies—", 1958

The Literature[edit]

Fashioning articles is the goal. But this tends to overlook the fundamental value added by an encyclopedia through its encyclopedic research (ER (is) not OR). Collecting bibliographic information, and reviewing the quality of the sources establishes the factual basis from which articles derive their utility. The use or non-use of statements in the article is determined by the result of encyclopedic research. Consensus (other than that on WP:V) is secondary to that. NPOV is determined from the literature, anything else is madness. Notability is an arbitrary cutoff for pragmatical reasons. Many, if not most notability discussions are moot when viewed from WP:V.

What is the first step in writing an article about X? Finding the literature on X. This means that every article needs a comprehensive commented bibliography. The rest of the article should follow mechanically.

Random wikiquotes[edit]

Yeah, why free for workers?[edit]

Why free for workers?

I don't accept the Wikimedia/Wikipedia project as the educator's starvation. It has to be discussed, before anything. The knowledge free for everyone, ok. But must the price be no-pay teachers, professors, writers, educators, experts? Yesterday was the Worker day, and the Wikimedia gift for workers in EDUCATION should be payment. If not, the rising "knowledge society" or "information society" will promote a "Wealth of Educations", but also the "misery for educators".

The Wikifoundation has million and million dollars for too several things, but for users? Users support the Wikimedia, it's deeply reasonable to pay who MAKES the Wikifoundation projects, like Wikipedia.

This subject is also about License, that means also Copyrights. PAY AUTHORS NOW!!!

— Camillo Cavalcanti 23:29, 2 May 2009 (UTC), found on Meta

The World and Wikipedia by Andrew Dalby[edit]

With encyclopedic modesty Pliny has named his sources; but; with the insouciance of a second-rate Wikipedian, he provides no inline citations.

— Andrew Dalby, The World and Wikipedia, chapter 2 "Where it came from", page 20

Wikilulz[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Education.

Another fine mess

In arguments opposed to this, a primary one was of "code reuse". Our longstanding principle of not using templates for article content stands in stark contrast to this. We, as a wiki, have chosen to sacrifice the benefits of consistency and elimination of redundancy in exchange for ease of editing and the idea that hitting "edit" on an article actually allows you to edit the article, not just the meta-structure of the article. This is also somewhat a failing of our current editor UI, which doesn't have IDE type functionality that would be required if our articles were written more like computer source code.

— Template talk:Cite doi/Archive 1#RfC: Should Template:cite doi cease creating a separate subpage for each DOI?

Dinosaur droppings

The oldest edit I have reverted, so far. Timestamped 2002-07-25, almost 23 years ago.

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