This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Die4Dixie (talk | contribs) at 23:05, 6 August 2009 (→Potential COI question: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Only when the last tree has withered, the last fish has been caught, and the last river has been poisoned, will you realize you cannot eat money. — Cree Proverb

WELCOME

Feel free to email me     RedThoreau@gmail.com

This user thinks that registration should be required to edit articles.

This user believes that articles are useless without images.

This user doesn't believe in the ownership of culture and knowledge.

This editor thinks Misplaced Pages should readily allow copyrighted images and supports fair use. We should teach and not let copyright stop learning.

This user believes in civility and assuming good faith.

Warning: If you're not a species that utilizes synapses and neural processing, you may not be able to understand this page in the same logical order that humans are capable of, nor manipulate its visual structure to relate to conceptual arrays. Actually... you wont be able to get here or comprehend this sentence, either. DOH

This user drinks GUINNESS

      

Stating that something doesn't work because it violates a basic law of physics is perfectly reasonable. I can run faster than the speed of light, and I have a video tape and some crayon drawings to prove it. But no one takes me seriously, so I'm forced to conclude that I'm a persecuted visionary with ideas ahead of my time, right?

This user knows that we can't stop here – this is bat country.

Words are loaded pistols. — Jean-Paul Sartre

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. — Albert Camus

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Personal Notations

Note I:

Undue weight ---

NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each. Now an important qualification: Articles that compare views should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views, and will generally not include tiny-minority views at all.

We should not attempt to represent a dispute as if a view held by a small minority deserved as much attention as a majority view. Views that are held by a tiny minority should not be represented except in articles devoted to those views. To give undue weight to a significant-minority view, or to include a tiny-minority view, might be misleading as to the shape of the dispute. Misplaced Pages aims to present competing views in proportion to their representation among experts on the subject, or among the concerned parties. WP:UNDUEWEIGHT

Note II:

Proper capitalization is the difference between ~ "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse" and "I helped my uncle jack off a horse".

Note III:

Nutshell of Wisdom:

If you are the only person left beating the horse after it has died, consider the possibility that you should stop.

Note IV:

State of the Wiki Nation

Note V:

The Misplaced Pages philosophy can be summed up thusly: "Experts are scum." For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War -- and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge -- get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.

— Lore Sjöberg

Note VI:

No Misplaced Pages editor may climb the Reichstag building dressed as Spider-Man in order to gain advantage in a content dispute. WP:NCR

Note VII:

Note VIII:

Misplaced Pages has a policy of not calling people or groups "terrorist". This is not an indication of condoning "terrorist" activities, but of neutrality, and avoidance of passing judgment, affirming or denying. Please debate the merit of this policy at WT:Words to avoid, not here.

Note IX:

Note X:

Brief quotations of copyrighted text may be used to illustrate a point, establish context, or attribute a point of view or idea.

— Wiki Quote Policy

Quotations are a fundamental attribute of Misplaced Pages. Quotes provide a direct source of information or insight. A brief excerpt can sometimes explain things better and less controversially than trying to do so ourselves.

— WP:QUOTE

Note XI:

= Don't Feed The Divas

Note XII:

                The future of Misplaced Pages ???

Note XIII:

WP:VERIFY ---> Certain red flags should prompt editors to examine the sources for a given claim:

• Surprising or apparently important claims not covered by mainstream sources.
• Claims that are contradicted by the prevailing view within the relevant community, or which would significantly alter mainstream assumptions. This is especially true when proponents consider that there is a conspiracy to silence them.
• Exceptional claims in Misplaced Pages require high-quality reliable sources; if such sources are not available, the material should not be included.
  Also see WP:SOURCE & WP:FRINGE

Note XIV:

WP:NOTSOAPBOX ---> Misplaced Pages is not a soapbox, a battleground, or a vehicle for propaganda, advocacy, or advertising. This applies to articles, categories, templates, talk page discussions, and user pages. You might wish to start a blog or visit a forum if you want to convince people of the merits of your favorite views

Note XV:

A troll is a troll.

Note XVI:

	Misplaced Pages, which looks like a reference work to the average viewer, is in fact a bureaucracy given over mainly to arguing. The articles are the residue of the argument, being the last thing anyone declined to disagree about.
	— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, p. 279

Note XVII:

Note XVIII: A few words on Wiki flaws

IP Edits

Widespread anonymity leads to a distinguishable problem, namely, the attractiveness of the project to people who merely want to cause trouble, or who want to undermine the project, or who want to change it into something that it is avowedly not – in other words, the troll problem.

— Larry Sanger, Misplaced Pages co-founder

3 RR

Many an edit war may seem like a fight over nothing to the casual observer, but considering that according to its staff, the popular, multilingual Web site gets about 7 billion views per month, stakes can be high. An edit yields what millions of people read on the site on any particular topic.

— San Francisco Weekly

Deletionists & "Taggers"

Still, a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange — is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an on-line encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come ... There are some people on Misplaced Pages now who poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.

— Nicholson Baker

Notability ?

To be notable, a Misplaced Pages topic must be "the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other." Although I have written or been quoted in such works, I can't say I've ever been the subject of any. And wouldn't you know, some notability cop cruised past my bio and pulled me over. Unless I get notable in a hurry — win the Nobel Peace Prize? Prove I sired Anna Nicole Smith's baby daughter? — a "sysop" (volunteer techie) will wipe my Misplaced Pages page clean. It's straight out of Philip K. Dick.

— Timothy Noah

Wiki Words of Wisdom

If the sources reflect general opinion, and split 90/10, then our goal is for the article to also split 90/10. That is NPOV; treating opinions which have different levels of support as though they had equal levels of support is POV and, frankly, misinformative if not deceptive.

— Nunh-huh, February 4 2009

I'd like to strongly protest against the perpetuation of that deplorable myth that removal of cited content is automatically vandalism. There may be any number of perfectly legitimate reasons why an editor would want to remove cited content (lack of relevance, undue weight, redundancy, triviality, POV ...)

— Fut.Perf., May 5 2009

Don't be a Giant Deutschbag

The first 2 signs that an individual no longer has anything intelligent to offer to the discussion ...

• (1.) - They prove Godwin's Law
• (2.) - They utilize a Reductio ad Hitlerum

"Oh I'll get that ^#@$%&!"

Originality ?

"Nothing is original. Steal from anything that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do, your work and theft will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable, originality is non existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery; celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them too."

— Jim Jarmusch

Infinite Monkey Theorem

This user is one of an infinite number of "monkeys" editing Misplaced Pages right now.

${\displaystyle \sum _{i=1}^{\infty }P(E_{k})=\sum _{i=1}^{\infty }p=\infty ,}$

In 2003, students from the University of Plymouth used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to leave a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month; not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.

Tip of the Day

Tip of the moment... Search and replace while editing an article Misplaced Pages user Cacycle has created a text editor that replaces Misplaced Pages's default text editing window. It has advanced search/replace features built-in, including regex (regular expression)‍—‌and many other features. It is called wikEd, and works with your Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome web browser. Simply select wikEd on the Gadgets panel of your wiki Preferences, in the "Editing" section. Prior tip – Tips library – Next tip Read more:wikEd   Become a Misplaced Pages tipster To add this auto-randomizing template to your user page, use {{totd-random}}

Your Wiki Paper

The World at Night

Wish upon a Barnstar

		RfA: Many thanks
		Many thanks for your participation in my recent request for adminship. I am impressed by the amount of thought that goes into people's contribution to the RfA process, and humbled that so many have chosen to trust me with this new responsibility. I step into this new role cautiously, but will do my very best to live up to your kind words and expectations, and to further the project of the encyclopedia. Again, thank you. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 06:13, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

		The Barnstar of Peace
		For being deeply kind, and reaching out to me! —Mattisse (Talk) 03:49, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Everyone Likes Praise

I admire the extraordinary work you have done

— Taifarious1, June 5 2008

I just wanted to give ya a quick shout out and thank you for all the hard work you've been putting in

— J.D., October 31 2008

Good going! Thanks for your extensive and valuable contributions to this encyclopedia

— Coppertwig, March 4 2009

and Thank You's

Thanks for responding in such a civil manner ... Thanks once more for being so reasonable about this.

— Chris Cunningham (not at work), December 18 & 19 2008

Thanks, I appreciate your willingness to respond to criticism.

— Coppertwig, January 11 2009

Thanks for providing me other perspectives from notable sources.

— Editor br, January 14 2009

Thanks for your understanding.

— CRETOG8, February 3 2009

Thank you for your very kind response.

— Mattisse, February 4 2009

Thank you so much for taking the time!

— Midnightdreary, March 20 2009

Thanks for participating. You did a great job at exposing all of the issues.

— Likeminas, May 13 2009

Thanks for your advice on my talk page. Much appreciated.

— If I were a carpenter, May 15 2009

Thanks. Its very much appreciated. I'll do all I can to help.

— Jacob Richardson, July 8 2009

Leave me a message below

Note:XVI (I do not archive discussions and delete them when they are no longer active or relevant - if a participating editor is not through with the conversation which I have removed, then please revert me until you feel it is completed.)

Note XVII: Trying to avoid "Lame Edit Wars"   

Please stay calm and civil while commenting or presenting evidence, and do not make personal attacks. Be patient when approaching solutions to any issues. If consensus is not reached, other solutions exist to draw attention and ensure that more editors mediate or comment on the dispute.

If I have left you a message: please answer on your talk page, as I am watching it. If you leave me a message: I will answer on my talk page, then place {{Talkback|Redthoreau}} on your talk. Please click here to leave me a new message.

NFCC and living persons

Usually, since they are still alive, non-free images of living persons just to show what they look like are deemed to run afoul of NFCC 1.

However, there are exceptions, such as:

• If they were particularly more famous for a specific appearance and there are no free images of that appearance (though it may be accompanied by other free portraits)
• If they were jailed, exiled, or are rare to meet in person, and there are no sufficient free images.

ViperSnake151  Talk  00:43, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Potential COI question

I have a concern that you might have a conflict of interest based on several of the previous editions of your user page. You could clear it up for me by telling me a little more about yourself. Are you a Marxist or a Communist or other form of revoluntionary? A Maoist? I have read serveral of Che Guevara´s writings ( most recently the Libro de olivo verde, in Spanish) . Would you use the project as a front for revolutionary activity or propaganda purposes? Any clarification would be appreciated. Feel free to respond by email.--Die4Dixie (talk) 23:05, 6 August 2009 (UTC)