user:The Cunctator

"a radical that ploughs up the roots of our social fabric."

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{{User Twenty Year Society}}

Before Wikipedia, The Cunctator [http://slashdot.org/articles/99/02/09/2234214.shtml promoted the spread] of the Hamster Dance.

The Cunctator [https://www.fastcompany.com/90674998/how-9-11-turned-a-new-site-called-wikipedia-into-historys-crowdsourced-front-page created or edited most of the articles] that got punted off into the [http://sep11.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Memoriam Sep. 11 wiki].

He created the second Wikipedia logo, which riffed on the Nupedia logo design. The design of the "Wikipedia" text below a sphere remains from that logo.

He helped spur the creation of [https://en.wikisource.org/ WikiSource] (then discussed as [https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource&oldid=745 Project Sourceberg]).

His policy debates with Larry Sanger drove Sanger to distraction and precipitated his exiting the project (see [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/09/the-hive/305118/ "The Hive"] by Marshall Poe).

He was a member-in-protest of the Arbitration Cabal, which came into being through discussion not on Wikipedia, but on the vile mailing list. He lost the seat in the elections of late 2004 most likely due to his being a big slacker.

The recent tendencies toward deletionism and agglomeration are troubling. Are the gigantic image-heavy "we look like Encarta" entries really better for the Wikipedia than more atomic Jargon-file-esque entries? There are some interesting backend search/sort/display technologies that could bridge the divide. For example, the default editing allows people to independently edit sections, instead of the whole page at once. Those sections act in a way as independent wiki-pages that just happen to be hierarchically linked. One can imagine giving these section-wikis more autonomy.

WikiData does an effective job of stripping copyleft from Wikipedia for the benefit of Big Tech.

This is nonsense: "Wikipedians should never interpret the content of primary sources for themselves."

Some modest proposals (which could be tried as experiments) to consider:

• Turn off Articles for Deletion.
• Make non-empty edit summaries mandatory for all edits not marked as minor
• Make admin rights automatic for all regular editors

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To be a good Wikipedian, be respectful, overly combative, self-critical, vulnerable, hortatory, ambitious, and analytical.

Above all, to be a good Wikipedian, edit and create entries.

To ensure the health of Wikipedia:

• Be in Charge and Be Humble
• Understand Bias
• Appreciate Idiosyncracy
• Redesign the Wikipedia Software as a Community
• Make Big Plans on Wikipedia
• Avoid Cabals
• Follow the Spirit of the GFDL
• Be Respectful but Firm

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• Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
• RickK Anti-Vandalism Barnstar
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion
• Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy
• Editing other people's userpages.
• [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AAdministrators%27_noticeboard&diff=134475769&oldid=134464799 Deleting BJAODN]
• Editing other people's comments.[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Bad_Jokes_and_Other_Deleted_Nonsense&diff=135102810&oldid=135098180]
• Association of Deletionist Wikipedians
• Template cruft like {{tl|Totally-disputed}} and {{tl|Dubious}}. What's this aversion to actually editing?
• Using the revert tool to "collaborate" with other editors.
• Subverting Wikipedia's copyleft (which requires derivative works also be copylefted) with the public-domain Wikidata project, which allows corporations like Google (which not coincidentally funds Wikimedia with a microscopic fraction of the benefits it receives from Wikimedia editors' labor) to convert Wikimedians work into Google IP.
• Deleting well-sourced, informative articles like Gabe Amo
• The jargonification of Wikipedia administration. This is not a sentence: "Per WP:XRVPURPOSE#1 subpoint 2, this should not come to XRV because WP:MRV is available."

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• Please help build 911 Attack memorial.
• Project Sourceberg.
• How to Destroy Wikipedia.
  
• How to Build Wikipedia
• WikipediAhimsa -- Avoid harm. A principle the Cunctator strives imperfectly towards.
• TMC's sysop request
• /Wikipedia Quality

The nearly immutable law of government is that while over the short term dangers to the health of society come from individual actors, over the long term the dangers come from the system.

It should be everyone's goal to figure out ways to eliminate potential problems before they can happen.

A good real world example of that is drugs; because it is a criminal act to use illegal drugs, millions of dollars and manhours and lives are spent in combatting drug use (the "war on drugs"). But if the drugs (such as marijuana) are decriminalized, a host of downstream costs to society disappear. There *are* different complications and needs (tobacco is a good example of the potential problems of having drugs be legal to use) but it's a lot easier to deal with drugs as a health issue than a crime issue.

As of 2006, Wikipedia has definitely become a place where it is frighteningly easy to get kicked out of the club. There's more worry about one's words upsetting other users than whether one does good work or whether people should be getting upset in the first place.

Jimmy Wales [http://blog.jimmywales.com/index.php/archives/2006/06/17/the-new-york-times-gets-it-exactly-backwards/ may argue] that the [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html NYT] got the situation "exactly backwards", but the reality is that this is a semantic game and in this case the contrarian position the NYT is arguing is, if not ultimately correct, an important one to have. Wikipedia benefits by having outsiders challenging Wikipedia to be and remain open and free. Institutions by their nature are conservative and self-protecting, and their commitment to their claimed ideals must face constant challenge for them to remain true to said ideals.

I would say that neither Wales nor the NYT is really right-- I would argue that Wikipedia, as it grows in size and prominence, is evolving rapidly and in ways that no one person could possibly understand fully. That Wikipedia will always be straddling the uncomfortable divide between reliability and editability, just as it embodies conflicts between universality and topicality, brevity and completeness, accessibility and accuracy, etc. It is neither the golden perfect lovely machine that Wales seems so insistent on portraying nor the decadent failure its critics decry.

I would be happier if we lived in a world where the New York Times was writing articles promoting the promise of Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales was its biggest critic, finding fault where others see none, but I don't get to choose the world I live in.

That said, I found it quite interesting how Larry Sanger is now lost from the official narrative of the creation of Wikipedia. [http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/27/messages/944.html History belongs to the victors], I suppose. Although I became one of his most active critics during his tenure, he does not deserve to become a footnote, or worse, forgotten.

How you know Wikipedia has jumped the shark: the great article on [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=W00t&oldid=95904758 w00t] has been deleted.

How on earth does deleting [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transmogrifier&oldid=232947937 Transmogrifier] improve Wikipedia? Wikipedia has not only jumped the shark, it's nuked the fridge.

Ah well, as we come to 2009, it's evident that Wikipedia has entered the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-01-03/Editing_stats end of its lifecycle]. Can't say I didn't warn you.

update 2018: [https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/edits/normal|bar|All~1980010100~2018080900|~total en.wikipedia] is in senescence but [https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects/contributing/edits/normal|bar|All~1980010100~2018080900|~total wikimedia] is doing okay.

==== August 2018 ====

Google, Facebook, and others are disrespecting Wikipedia's copyleft. This is not good.

Apologies to anyone whom my words have hurt. I should do a better job being explicit that I believe people who I disagree with are acting in good faith as well.

Check out the brilliant humor of Wikipedia's writers.

Wikipedians who have left:

ManningBartlett (returned), Piotr Wozniak, Corvus13, JHK, AndreEngels, Isis, KQ, User:Kat.

Kick-outs: Mathjis, 24, user:H.J., Lir, Clutch

Hi Cunc. For the record, I never actually left. I just refused to log in for several years and edited anonymously. Edit Count should not be a measure of significance. Manning (talk) 16:18, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• [http://09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com/ HD-DVD Controversy]

• /Advice for Lir
• /HomePage Vandalism
• /Questionable pages
• /SOU
• /ByTopic
• User:The Cunctator/NotHere
• User:The Cunctator/Scrap
• /Refs/
• /Engineeering Music Society/
• /Conversations with DreamGuy
• /ACES
• /ACES drafts
• /Billionaires in the 2020 presidential election

• Steve Gilliard
• WP:BJAODN
• Friedman (unit)
• AACS encryption key controversy
• Samuel Hook
• Billionaire supporters of Hillary Clinton et al
• Reduced gas (A reduced gas is a gas with a low oxidation number (or high reduction), and is usually hydrogen-rich. Strongly reduced gases include methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide.)
• Collective PAC
• Johnathan Davis (businessman)
• The Editors (novel)

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Category:Members of the Ten Year Society of Wikipedia editors