The next time you feel the urge to point out the truth where it is not welcome, I suggest listening to 3 or 4 '''ᗅᗺᗷᗅ''' albums. [[Image:Fleer Logo.svg|45px]]s ```[[User: Buster7|'''<em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:black">Buster Seven</em>''']]<small>[[User talk:Buster7|'''<em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:black"> Talk</em>''']]</small> 15:40, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
The next time you feel the urge to point out the truth where it is not welcome, I suggest listening to 3 or 4 '''ᗅᗺᗷᗅ''' albums. [[Image:Fleer Logo.svg|45px]]s ```[[User: Buster7|'''<em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:black">Buster Seven</em>''']]<small>[[User talk:Buster7|'''<em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:black"> Talk</em>''']]</small> 15:40, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
:Thank you for that welcome (and free!) contribution, dear Buster. As it happens, when I'm speaking the truth where it's not welcome I often listen to cheery ᗅᗺᗷᗅ tracks. Recently one such soundtrack was [[So Long (ABBA song)|So Long]] [[Dum Dum Diddle]]. And another was: [[I Let the Music Speak]]. [[Watch Out]]! [[When All Is Said and Done]], [[The Name of the Game]]: [[Money, Money, Money]]. [[Does Your Mother Know]]? [[User:Writegeist|Writegeist]] ([[User talk:Writegeist#top|talk]]) 22:21, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
==Hey==
==Hey==
Revision as of 22:21, 8 November 2013
* * * If I opened a new topic on your talk page, please reply there * * *
Anything posted here by pompous prats who shout at other users like this or LIKE THIS on talk pages or edit summaries will be summarily deleted.
Ditto anything by officious little transcription monkeys.
I find it interesting that a user defends a condescending comment to another user with the novel argument that a dead author has used the same words (probably before he died; and almost certainly not in addressing the same user). I think the idea that any words attributable to dead authors are wikipermissible because they have intrinsic literary merit is really rather witty. The purveyor of the literary gem in question promises to leave the project if this argument is not allowed to prevail. I fervently share the hope that it wins the day. Then we can all start condescending to each other with literary quotes of unimpeachable provenance and high merit. I'm thinking "You're an asshole" (from Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, for anyone who didn't instantly recognize the provenance). Not to mention Shakespeare's "Thou misshapen dick!" or "You are a tedious fool." Or Vonnegut's "If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off." Or Hemingway's "I misjudged you. You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.” Or... You get the idea. What fun if this glorious new frontier of literary wikidiscourse opens up!
Oh and—how could I forget?—there's Lewis Carroll's dear little Snark, of "intellect small", known for being "meager and hollow " and for its "slowness in taking a jest."
Wikištrajku
Ja sam u wikištrajku! Ne panic! Ja ću urediti, bez zaustavljanja, u ovom teškom trenutku. Smirite se i nastavite.
Various thoughts on retiring by famous dead people
When a man falls into anecdotage, it is time for him to retire...Benjamin Disraeli
Beguiled by the terrible incantations and your ambiguous undulations in the grip of eccentric propositions and distant miseries from afar, I beseech you to reconsider...Anonomous
Disraeli's dead? He hasn't been answering my letters so I thought he was on strike. Interesting coinkidink: my fourth wife's name was Lysistrata. Boy, did she know how to get her own way.Writegeist (talk) 00:17, 28 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This page clocked up a massive total of 19 views on September 27 and 28. An awesome level of interest, particularly in a living person, as I think you'll agree—the number is so high that not even the prodigious Stephen Hawking has enough fingers to calculate it. Yet it was exceeded by the gargantuan total of 21 at my user page on September 28. This easily tops the number of people (12) who paid their respects to the body of well-known dead person Vladimir Lenin (famous quote: "A lie told often enough becomes truth") between 10:15 a.m. and 10:16 a.m. on September 28 1970—the same day, incidentally, that Gamal Abdel Nasser (famous quote: "When I met Lenin I was struck by his remarkable, almost eerie, stillness") became another well-known dead person. Anyway I was immensely flattered by the attention, natch; particularly when Twitter lit up and the TV news led with the story of my sudden celebrity. Later when I recovered my composure—not that I had been decomposing, you understand—I began to wonder why the sudden surge in interest? And who exactly were these new fans? Then Lysistrata told me: zombies. Which would account for the lingering smell. Writegeist (talk) 17:41, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes! And accounts for the stray appendages littering your front yard. At first, I thought you had left one of the promised refrigerated mouse morsels, but then realized that the morsel was a digit finger. It had most likely been waved/wagged too vigorously in your direction by a visiting zombie and had fallen off. ```Buster Seven Talk18:52, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Police are combing the neighborhood for zombies with fingers missing (some index, some middle). Neighborhood is large, police-issue combs are small (budget cutbacks). Don't hold your breath. Writegeist (talk) 04:23, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Police are looking for this man, now believed to be missing the nose According to a document released to me by a friendly NSA contractor currently on vacation in Russia, visits to my user page spiked at 34 (the truly monstrous size of this number becomes apparent when you consider it's also the distance in miles to the outer reaches of the known universe) on September 10. Yours shot up to 19 on the same day. A contemporaneous report by an NSA analyst conjectured that a September 10 comment I posted to your talk page and deleted a few minutes later may have piqued the interest of a nosey parker who then made repeated intrusions. Which would explain the very large nose I found in the Acme Trap-a-Schnozz nose trap ($4.99 from Walmart, dependable, washable, reusable, and worth every cent) in my underwear drawer when I got home. I'm drying it, with a view to using it for nose art. Writegeist (talk) 18:03, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It will come as no surprise to you that as advisers to the First Lady on all matters relating to tea-time etiquette, Lysistrata and I are invited to tea by all kinds of people. We would of course decline an invitation from Mr. DeMint. We would offer a diplomatic excuse such as "We have a previous engagement with the Capitol Earl Grey Appreciation Society" or "We are on teastrike." But you never know when you might run into the gentleman at a tea party hosted by someone else. Tips: Do say: Mr. DeMint, would you please make a long arm for the fairy cakes? Don't say: Mr. DeMint, are you a closet teabagger? Writegeist (talk) 17:20, 8 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
My kind of bamboozle! Thank you my friend. I hereby drink to your health. Any time you'd care to join me, help yourself to the comfy chair by the fire and put your feet up on Santa Claws the stuffed cat. (Given my talk page's astronomical number of visitors, there's a chance that someone with nothing better to do than to snuffle around in its darker recesses will seize on "stuffed cat" as a reference to him- or herself. Oh well. I'm a hospitable fellow. Be my guest, I say. Carpe cattum!) Writegeist (talk) 21:35, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
First, I wanted to thank you, Jimbo, for your concerns with paid advocacy. I think you've taken a very helpful stance. I just wanted to follow with some thoughts; I'm sure others have written all this before, but anyway:
In academic publishing, if the author of a paper has received or will receive tangible benefits from someone who has a financial interest in the subject of the paper, this conflict of interest is supposed to be noted clearly within the paper. Not to do so is academic fraud. For encyclopedias this is not even an issue: Authors of entries are always supposed to be independent of conflict of interest for the subject of their entries. This is because encyclopedias are not supposed to be position or argumentative papers, but general, neutral accounts. Conflicts of interest have always been recognized in the academic world as undermining this neutrality to such an extent that it is rigorously avoided. For example, if it was discovered that Robert Duce accepted money from the aerosol industry in order to write the entry "Aerosols" in the Springer Encyclopedia of World Climatology, he would be rightly scandalized, and his department at Texas A&M would try to remove him as best as they could. We should keep this encyclopedia at the same high standard.
Paid advocacy editors have responded that Wikipedia already has policies to keep things neutral and that their edits— or those of the responsible ones among them at least —are kept within these policies. This response is a non-starter. Every academic encyclopedia has neutrality as an editorial standard, but their editors still do not accept authors with a conflict of interest. We should not fail to learn from the best practices of the academic world.
Paid advocacy editors cannot produce even a single example where an effective paid editor has produced an overall negative impression for the firm or a client of the firm which pays this editor. Of course this is the case: If such a paid editor is going to produce a negative impression of the benefactor, then the benefactor has no interest in paying out money for such a service. Overall unbiased editing from such paid editors is a contradiction. A necessary condition for the continued practice of paying editors to produce content about oneself or one's clients is that there be a systemic bias in the production of content. Neutral editors have no effective mechanism for dealing with this biased production apart from banning it: Neutral editors are volunteers who can only act in their free time, the paid editors have as much time as their pay can afford them.
Claims that the community here is divided on whether to maintain the high standards of academic publishing are suspicious. The community is that body of neutral editors who are here to write an encyclopedia collaboratively. The editors who are paid to produce content concerning a benefactor, insofar as they take that role, are not part of this community. As such they are not here to work collaboratively, but are rather here to benefit themselves. What percentage of those who want to allow, and indeed expand the number of, encyclopedia articles written with a conflict of interest are actually part of the community, and what percentage are themselves paid editors? That is hard to answer. Instead of counting votes on what practices to take up, we should look to the academic world, which has soundly rejected conflict-of-interest writing. Thanks for reading. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 18:59, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
Thank you Buster for bringing this to my (admittedly short-spanned) attention. A voice of reason that rather reminds me of yours. How very different from the dimwitted defenders of the bamboozlers. Writegeist (talk) 21:37, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This little guy knows better than to ferret through edit histories so please don't use his name as a verb in that context, lest he become irate. Try "rummage" or somesuch. :-)Anythingyouwant (talk) 07:23, 7 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Greetings Anythingyouwant, glad to see you're still around, and thank you for gracing my humble abode with a visit from that little cutie. Also for the link, because I learned a lot, e.g. that the collective noun is a "business", that ferrets make a funny smell with their anal glands (charming!), and that they make a soft clucking noise called "dooking". I've often heard it around Wikipedia and wondered what it was.
Yes, and I realized from reading about ferets that I am sexually dimorphic, not that there's anything wrong with that. Good to see you're around too. Hopefully we've both mellowed a bit. Your comment about ANI is bosh and nonsense, by the way, but appreciated nonetheless.Anythingyouwant (talk) 22:25, 7 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
By an extraordinary coincidence so am I. And I see from the article that I'm not alone in using my exaggerated dimorphic traits in the competition over mates. Incidentally I find that the passage of time, together with occasional judicious applications of Maker's Mark, act as effective mellowing agents, sadly to the detriment of my exaggerated dimorphic traits. The, ahem, dismissive comment "bosh and nonsense" is problematic on the face of it, as I'm sure you appreciate. I'll let it go this time because I'm pretty sure you mean "bosh and twaddle", which, having been said already by a famous dead person, is perfectly acceptable as you know. :-) Writegeist (talk) 00:11, 8 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]