Wikipedia Style Guide

If there was a style guide for Wikipedia (I didn't check) it would above all recommend 'the clinical tone of impartial record/sterile chronicle', which is an understandable and even commendable tone for a project that aims to encompass and provide the sum of human knowledge via the internet. However there are moments in which one can discern a personality beyond the dry Wikipedia tone ^{[citation needed]}. Sometimes it's a vandal or prankster, and those always lead to the greatest moments of Wikipedia, or the lowest, really. Most of the time it's just the earnest work of the tireless Wikipedian.

I wrote this because I don't believe there is a style guide for Wikipedia at all. There should be a set of loose recommendations and perhaps an editor. I can't blame a non-profit organization for not hiring a full time editor and I can't imagine anyone would particularly want the job (except hungry washed-out writers and editorial staff currently retraining out of Journalism into promising careers like banking, plumbing, or manual labor). Still, it would help a bit. I'm sure that individuals with a highly developed sense of grammar or the English language at large could find spelling and grammar errors at a ratio of .79 : 1 per Wikipedia page.

I know there's not a style guide because articles vary so wildly. Many are written in a serviceable and innocuous style. In the best articles there is no digression and very little error. In the worst, well, you find some surprising laziness. I don't know who exactly the wikipedia editors are – and I'm sure many of them are very well-intentioned,  knowledgeable, and capable people – but I get the sense they all have a musty internet smell about them ^{[citation needed]}. If they are the standard model for the librarians of the future, we may be doomed, for they will push the business of information right into the private market and/or entertainment industry. Maybe that prediction is a bit pessimistic, but we have no way of knowing whether it was something I wrote with an ironic smirk or caustic dismissal.

Unemployed university graduates, well-intentioned but 'eccentric' private citizens, and pedants make up probably 60% of Wikipedia editors, according to my highly amusing mental image of the average Wikipeditor. The other 40% is probably a remarkable melange of humanity, but I like to focus on the imaginary majority. They are all selflessly promoting the encapsulation and easy retrieval of verified, unbiased, correct information. It's a goal so lofty and impressive it makes me tender-hearted. I wish to offer my sincere thanks for the service, which has absorbed many of my spare hours and to which many more will doubtless be sacrificed, as long as the quality and tone do not spiral out of control.

Am I ridiculous? Allow me to demonstrate my point about Style and Usage, and a further point about the Illiteracy of the Internet Person. I will visit a prominent page of high stature (RoboCop, the 1985 Paul Verhoven movie) and traffic and look around innocently enough for some awkward constructions, grammar violations, and whatever else I deem fucked enough for notice.

Ah. These are the excerpts that inspired me. A pair of beauties. Shall I? I don't particularly want to, you understand: I get no pleasure from this, it's just part of the thing I'm writing a blog post about and nothing personal. I don't know if the RoboCop article gets the Wikipedia Writing A-Team, and if it doesn't, as stated above ^[where?] I understand that it's not professional copy or anything jesus christ leave an old man alone!

Anyways, 'having come off doing the special effects' as a construction is bad even for the 'first year University student's first hungover all-nighter' level. It's a special blend of missing prepositions and hazy colloquialism. I think it stinks, quite honestly. Shit. If this was written by a person with a post-secondary degree, any degree at all, they can fuck off and get schooled about how to write or leave their helpful insights out of the mix ^{[citation needed]}. Even done right ('Having come off of doing the special effects') the phrase is an inefficient abortion. The green line serves to indicate the thrust of the sentence, which asserts (via the erratic grammar of an illiterate) that the studio deciding about Bottin was itself coming off of doing the special effects for John Carpenter's The Thing. Where Bottin is even involved is impossible to discern, unless of course you're not a grammar machine and understand context. However, the lazy error stands, and goddamn it.

As for the inclusion of the second excerpt, I believe you know why I included the second excerpt. Redundancy is wasteful even at the level of the miniscule amount of bytes it takes to write a redundant element into a sentence. It also makes reading anything suck more than it has to, and in that way encourages illiteracy. Unacceptable. I'm not offended or outraged, I'm just having a bit of a laugh ^{[oh yeah?]} because 1) I want to have fun, and 2) I think that impeccable content is impossible in Wikipedia, which means the amount of awkward sentences and poorly disguised opinion (which I didn't even get into at all, but might at a later date) is potentially limitless! It's kind of fun, to me at least, and could be funny to others as well! Yeah, jokin' about Wikipedia. Good stuff.

That Time of Year, Pt. 1: Donate to Wikipedia Already

Apparently, seeing as the notices have disappeared, I am too late with this article. In my defense: at the time it seemed like a great idea. I was going to exhort in beautiful and compelling language everyone to donate. What could be more important, I would ask, than free information? Better yet: often factual free information that is peer edited, reviewed, and verified. Sure, now and then people get in and make stupid edits and ridiculous joke pages, but that is life.

It's the #5 website in the world, and probably one of the better and more neutral top-5 websites. They know they deserve it. Like PBS or NPR. The naysayers know not what they say, as is so often the case. In 2005 and beyond (and probably before) citing Wikipedia became a constant struggle. Professors would treat it like a cancerous lump: we all knew they were frightened because their death grip on knowledge might be broken. It was the dawn of collaborative knowledge. Myths would be dispelled, and the layman might know what lies within the mysteries of nature.

Or so we thought. Mostly, intelligent stoners spend hours drifting aimlessly down the infinite isles of Wikipedia, following insane paths. Students use it as a fateful start to research. The populace visits it to figure out what things are. Most uses are heavily similar. Yet, the stoners. It was not unheard of for an unfortunate, intoxicated in mind and feverish in pursuit of information, to start out with a mundane consumer product and end up in the Cretaceous or even Carboniferous era, trying to piece together the start of life. Caught, often, in mysteries far beyond their purview.

There is a moral somewhere in that story. Lazy students would straight-up cite Wikipedia. Snobs and profs would spit on it and declaim it. The masses didn't give a shit and were confirmed in their ignorance by the political and oligarch classes. Whatever. Business as usual. Wikileaks made a huge spash, by comparison, but then again, the crux of all of this was Wikipedia. The faithful, the peer-edited, the generally honest and neutral and balanced.

Yes, it was the start of everything, and possibly the only beautiful thing to come out of Web 2.0. I would sooner have something to read than a coffee. I was going to write in support for their cause. The upshot of my tardiness is that it is clear that Wikipedia has many supporters already. You have to see the value and comfort in that.

Fact Blackout Day

Fun fact: the internet is nebulous and strange and sometimes even in the space of a few hours it can change considerably. The use of the internet to distribute intellectual property freely, known colloquially as piracy, has attracted numerous smear campaigns, intimidation campaigns, and lobbying campaigns. Governments are full of boomers who don't know very much about the internet, so the lobbyists have an easy time because they represent moneyed interests and bellyache about the rampant theft of video, audio, and data property.

Today a number of internet entities, most notably Wikipedia, have opted to protest upcoming US legislation that vaguely confronts the threat of internet piracy, copyright infringement, and intellectual property theft. Full understanding of the legislation is available to nerds, lawyers, and people with too much time on their hands. So far as I can simplify it: another step down the road to internet nationalization, censorship, and the death of free information.

The anti-theft team is as powerful as the net-neutrality/free-internet movement is popular. Most people don't really care either way, as long as they can get to Facebook and/or email. Most people also don't really understand the internet, or care if it gets cut up into various national zones. Who in America wants to read a Finnish webcomic, or a Chilean blog? That's a waste of time. But Finns and Chileans want American entertainment, so it's best to cut the audiences away from each other and limit the odds of pirated material being available online.

In the past, powerful entertainment corporations have volleyed multimillion dollar lawsuits at 15 year old pirates, but that Napster-era policy is outdated because nobody liked it and there is no way a teenager is going to afford legal defense fees. The new approach is preventative and cautious and roughly as imperative as the old one, but instead of going after the users of the internet or even consulting them, it just pressures the gigantic blind beast known as national government into various overbearing measures that will change the internet for the worst.

Or so I am told. The internet is already somewhat nationalized, mildly censored, and it's so full of nonsense that even if 80% of it were deleted, banned, and forgotten, there would still be far too much of it to control or monitor. So the state of the internet is that all the bluster of the last decade regarding IP laws and censorship and nationalization is actually going to come to some kind of action. For my part I have serious doubts about the usefulness or fairness of the proposed measures, and I wish all opponents of a cut-up, abused internet a conclusive victory.

But the crowd is ignorant and the corporation is indignant. That is why awareness drives like today's are important, to ensure that any lies surrounding this sordid business are dispelled.

Two Unforgettable Images from Wikipedia

Feel free to forget the following filler text and skip to the second screenshot in this sequence...

I wasn't going to write anything but it's stupid to just have an empty space.

This joke is kind of ruined by actually writing anything about it just please,

Please pay attention to the context and I'll tell you that includes the 'labels'

AKA the meta search engine words, or why not call them magical. Anyway

The entire Blogger system as hosted here seems like a content mill to me 

Anyway.

Yes, that's right: content mill. For instance I have not found a front page or 

Index style of page, but I'm not savvy, so I am not disappointed or critical.

It just seems to me that my only shot at exposure is a canny manipulation

Of various other websites or keywords and I use them frivolously, not in

Any crazy attempt to gain followers but because I think it's funny to throw

Weird ones in. It's not me spamming for statistical advantage. If I wanted

Statistical advantage, though, how would I go about doing that? Is the

Lack of advertising sinister or uncanny? 

And this large, previously empty space is just

So the picture below displays properly. So I hope

It displays properly because sometimes writing is

Difficult and coherence impossible nonsense.