This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Bri (talk | contribs) at 06:06, 4 January 2023 (→The transformation of fun volunteerism into rules-based mandated work: link it). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 06:06, 4 January 2023 by Bri (talk | contribs) (→The transformation of fun volunteerism into rules-based mandated work: link it)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) Article display preview: TKTK – TKTKOpinionThe good old days, when lipograms roamed free in mainspaceLet me take you back, back, back, to when Wikifun was allowed. | This is a draft of a potential Signpost article, and should not be interpreted as a finished piece. Its content is subject to review by the editorial team and ultimately by JPxG, the editor in chief. Please do not link to this draft as it is unfinished and the URL will change upon publication. If you would like to contribute and are familiar with the requirements of a Signpost article, feel free to be bold in making improvements!
Last revised 06:06, 4 January 2023 (UTC) (2 years ago) by Bri (refresh) | ||||
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Opinion
The good old days, when lipograms roamed free in mainspace
Contribute — Share this By Bri
Optional: Give a short WP:LEAD-like introduction statement here.
Can you write an article lede intro without any Es?
Until its creation in the early wiki-days of 2003, until a point in November 2006, the article Gadsby (novel), about a work that is a lipogram, was itself a lipogram. In other words, both the novel, and the Misplaced Pages article about the novel, were written without the letter "E". There had been some attempts before 2006 to revert the article to standard English, but it looks like either the joke was too good to spoil, or the sense of fun and wonder in creating not just an incredible free contribution to human knowledge extended to the fun and wonder of trying out constrained writing.
What happened on that fateful day in November? Why did the forces of normality and mundanity win? Was it a sign of the future of a rigid, formalized, bureaucratized, and un-fun experience for contributors? Will another recursive word-experiment ever be possible again?
As for the original author, an anonymous editor, perhaps they joined us as a named account and are still around? The editor who broke the three-year E-less run is now an administrator.
The transformation of fun volunteerism into rules-based mandated work
Incomplete -- work on timelime -- back to lipograms in 2008? lipogram-izing the article was a Wikifun challenge in 2004 . Now Wikifun was not exactly a big deal but it wasn't outlandish at the time, nor attended by the officially irredeemable. Remember when Wikifun was allowed? Or any fun? We all knew it was too good to last.
The anti-anti-lipogrammers used edit summaries like "Deleted non lipogrammatical sentence" as late as 2008. The word "novel" appeared in the lede sporadically, apparently shoving aside "work of fiction" to come home to roost for good in late 2008 or early 2009.
In-article comments requested that well-meaning editors who were not in on the joke not to add the dreaded vowel... until they were removed in January 2009. Things went on like that with strictly under-the-radar fun allowed until, late in 2010, an official, very scary editnotice, with promises of "administrator action or warnings" for those who dare to restore the fun was added (by an administrator of course ).
References
Random coincidence, or portent?
What else happened in November ought-six, in what we now smugly call the oughts, safely distancing ourselves from a time of danger, risk and innovation?
- Google made its first billion-dollar purchase.
Coincidence, or are these both symptoms of the beginnings of the modern, corporatized, hyper-real, buttoned-down, no-fun-allowed (unless it's extremely profitable) World Wide Web? Or to use a more modern word "cyberspace" – whose usage has more often than not seemed to me to ironically miss the intent of the term's creator (or at least its popularizer), William Gibson, who was not praising a future digital Eden: quite the opposite, he was sharing his dystopian future visions with us as a warning.
This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}
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This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change
Placing {{Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/Templates/Inline image
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. A captionSide frames help put content in sidebar vignettes. For instance, this one (link): {{Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2
|1 = Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
|caption = A caption
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gives the frame on the right. This is useful when you want to insert non-standard images, quotes, graphs, and the like.
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|width=250|height=100|type=line
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in a frame, simple put the graph code in {{Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2
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at the end of an article to create
If you think a topic would make a good series, but you don't see a tag for it, or that all the articles in a series seem 'old', ask for help at the WT:NEWSROOM. Many more tags exist, but they haven't been documented yet. |
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Discuss this story
These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.- I'd never heard this story before, so thanks for the well-written rendition. It would have made a good example in my previous opinion piece about Misplaced Pages's missing sense of fun, 'A Little Fun Goes A Long Way'.
- Incredible story. This is the sort of thing I do think about a lot, and it's a balance impossible to hit. For some websites, oldfashioned jokes could've been grandfathered in, and on Misplaced Pages too we have some lovely old pages to look back on. But comedy doesn't scale, in a way. The more people there are, the more confusion and frustration is caused. It's a tragedy of the commons if every user can post their own jape. But there's still little tidbits of humor to be found even on Misplaced Pages (this was mine)! And I think more importantly, cyberspace still does have a million small nooks and crannies to have fun in. As long as people continue to create their own communities, the noosphere will be fine ^_^ ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 14:03, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
- I would also suggest that Misplaced Pages humour is still not completely gone. The beloved High five#Too slow image set is famous, and we've all run into similarly amusing items that happen to be correct and useful as well. If you can make a joke that also works as an effective way to explain a concept, then all the praise to you! Sometimes people just need to know whether Gadsby is a novel or not. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 14:40, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
- That remains the single most bull-headed level of obstinance I've ever seen, even dealing with longevity and caste issues never quite rose to that theater of the absurd. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:12, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
- This is my favorite olde-timey Misplaced Pages story. It was amazing to see live. ― biggins (talk) 05:07, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
- Oh my, I might've seen this when I was still a lurker. :) Double sharp (talk) 22:35, 21 January 2023 (UTC)