Misplaced Pages

The answer is perfectly obvious: goven that ninjas and pirate are both good, it surely follows that pirate ninjas (such as Chris) are better mthan either. -- AJR | Talk 17:58, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Pirate's DUH!A7X 900 21:35, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Given that there are likely far more actual pirates than real ninjas in the world today, I'd say pirates are more popular, even though I personally find ninjas more interesting. But piracy a more popular occupation, judging by acquaintances I have who sail in tropical seas. I've met more people who have encountered real pirates than people who have encountered real ninjas. =Axlq 22:01, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

That's because nobody who meets a ninja lives to tell about it! Deco 09:51, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Ghost pirates!(i've posted too many time here >.<)--Kar_the_Everburning 14:59, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

• There is a need for more practice of piracy. Ninjitsu is a overrated and loathesome pasttime that need not be afflicted 'pon the peoples of the world. Someday the pirates wil be up in arms and all the Ninja will do is a pretty backflip onto some roof in the horizon, then prance about with flashy stars and I will be in my house laughing and consuming the maids latest affrontary on the consumable medium. May Satan save us all.--R.A Huston 08:30, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

• Dude! Ninjas all the way! Kyo cat 06:47, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

• Ninjas Clearly way cooler than pirates --Fittysix 03:54, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

• Ninjas...for obvious reasons... ;) --さくら木 11:11, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

• 20 legit reasons that pirates are better (from a Facebook group; I'm not responsible for any contraversial points as I didn't make them):

1. Ninjas don’t choose to be sneaky, they have to be. The only way that they can kill anyone is if they sneak up and stab them in the back and then run away. Pirates basically announce that they are coming because they know that no one can stop them.
2. Ninjas have poor social skills. That is why they are such loners. Do you ever see a loner pirate? No.
3. Pirates get all the booty.
4. Famous pirate movie: Pirates of the Caribbean (Johnny Depp is a pimp)... Famous ninja movie: 3 Ninjas (enough said) (What? Did you said "what about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?" Well see #10 below duh)
5. Pirates get pet monkeys and parrots. Ninjas get nothing.
6. Pirates eat meat off the bone. Ninjas eat low fat yogurt (it’s the only thing that is transportable enough for them to carry in their bathrobes or whatever the heck they wear).
7. Pirates get to use cool words such as “savvy,” “wench,” and “argh.” Ninjas don’t talk (poor social skills, remember?).
8. 84% of ninjas are homosexual. Look it up. It’s a fact.
9. Pirates speak English. People who speak English are BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE. Plus, they have cool accents.
10. One might say, “Well what about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?” Now, I will admit that the Ninja Turtles are awesome. Unfortunately, they are NOT ninjas. According to TheFreeDictionary.com, The definition of a ninja is “a person skilled in ninjitsu.” The definition of a person is “a living human.” Therefore, a ninja is “a living human skilled in ninjitsu.” Since they are turtles, they are not ninjas.
11. George Washington was a pirate.
12. Pirates have been known to eat up to 70 pancakes in one sitting. Can a ninja do that? No sir.
13. Pirates have a universal symbol: the Jolly Roger.
14. Ninjas have no famous Disney characters. Pirates have Captain Hook.
15. Pirates sing pirate songs. Ninjas just read Cosmo.
16. No one can make artificial limbs look cool like pirates can.
17. Pirates get to pillage. Pillage...what a freaking cool word.
18. Shakespeare prefers pirates. There are pirates in The Tempest. Are there ninjas in any of Shakespeare's works!? No!
19. In the song "That's Life", Frank Sinatra sings, "I've been a puppet, a pauper, A PIRATE, a poet, a pawn and a king." Frank Sinatra is a pirate, FRANK SINATRA. Beat that, ninjas.
20. Ninjas don't get to keep the stuff that they steal. They give it to their government. You know what that means? Ninjas work for the man. That's right, THE MAN. Nobody likes the man.

--Vic226 03:41, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Vic226 make's a great point.A7X 900 19:19, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

University students seek Misplaced Pages contributors for usage survey

I'm part of a team in a management & organizational analysis at the Stern School of Business at New York University. We selected Misplaced Pages as the subject of our final analysis, and are specifically interested in what drives people to participate in Misplaced Pages. To this end we've compiled an anonymous, 5-minute survey that we hoped the Misplaced Pages community would take part in, everyone from casual readers to editors to members of the Board.

It's available online at http://tramchase.com/wikipedia-survey

Please be as detailed as possible. Your participation is much appreciated!

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Jamiew (talk • contribs)

One might perhaps be able to make inferences about the degree of cluefulness of the survey's designers from the fact that they link back to Misplaced Pages using the address wikipedia.com, not the more correct wikipedia.org (it's run by a noncommercial organization). *Dan T.* 00:41, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Not to mention the facts that a) the contribution here was not signed and b) the student(s) did not bother to create a userpage, which they could use to manage the communications around this matter to some degree. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:54, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Summary style violation?

Curious to hear what other editors think of History of the Alaska Aces. Ignoring for a moment the article's cleanup issues, this strikes me as way too much detail for Misplaced Pages's coverage of a minor league hockey team. Before I rush to propose a pare-and-merge, I thought I'd solicit second opinions. Thanks. | Mr. Darcy talk 04:14, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Sitting here in the UK it looks like way too much information for a minor Hockey team on the west coast of the states. However, to people who live in Alaska this might be quite important and they would welcome the information. My point is that our view on what's important and how much information should be carried in an article depends on our own personal interests and where we live. So I'd be careful about removing too much information. Having said that there does seem to be too much detail and in the process of cleaning up the article I'd look to cut back the information. Once this article has been cleaned up then I decide if it should be merged. --MarkS (talk) 09:41, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

What is it with Misplaced Pages and Hurricane articles?

--Ideogram 04:16, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Context goes here. --tjstrf talk 04:20, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Ideogram, tjstrf was pointing out that your comment requires context. Please provide some. | Mr. Darcy talk 04:29, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Everything I meant to say was said in the header. --Ideogram 04:31, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I can't tell if you're saying we have too many, or not enough, or that we have the right number but they all suck, or that we're vehemently opposed to articles about hurricanes, or that they're are best group of articles and you can't figure out why, or... CONTEXT! --tjstrf talk 04:50, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not saying. I'm asking. Which of those statements do you believe? --Ideogram 05:00, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Har har, Socrates. --tjstrf talk 05:06, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

That's not quite my intent, but that's a philosophical issue impossible to discuss here. --Ideogram 05:13, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

...I'll be going somewhere else now... If you ever feel like actually asking your question, I'm sure someone else will be able to help you. --tjstrf talk 05:18, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages has 7 featured lists about hurricanes and tropical storms. Whatever it is about Misplaced Pages and hurricanes, I hope it affects more pages. Durova 05:20, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Hey, I'll second that! We have tens of thousands of articles that could benefit from that kind of quality and attention to detail. --Doc Tropics 05:29, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Count a third vote for the condition that has affected our hurricane articles to spread to the entire encyclopedia! ~ ONUnicorn 16:24, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I do wish someone would standardize the Hurricane article names. --Ideogram 18:31, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Take it up on WP:TROP then, an outside view would be valued. I think there is an issue in the article names of the older storms (pre-1950). With more recent storms there is as much consistency as there can be; I really don't think Hurricane Katrina should be at Hurricane Katrina (2005) for example. Which article names do you have a problem with? (disclaimer: I'm a wikiproject member)--Nilfanion (talk) 18:44, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I wasn't aware there was a good reason for this. It's not important enough to me to pursue. --Ideogram 19:23, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Um, they are standardized. Retired tropical cyclones have their name on the "main", disambiguated article page; the rest of the articles have a year disambiguator on them. If there's only one occurrence of a name ever used, then that page gets the main article page as well. Also, storms that reach hurricane or typhoon intensity get their name from the basin in which they first reach that intensity; for example, Hurricane Ioke formed in the North-central Pacific Ocean, so it receives the "hurricane" designation for our purposes, in spite of it being known as Typhoon Ioke while on the Northwestern Pacific. Titoxd 20:09, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Autogenerated edit summaries

Lately I've seen a lot of edit summaries by IPs and new users that say things like, "Replaced page with 'u r a turd'" or "Blanked page" or "Created page with 'blah blah blah'". This seems... odd. I know there had been some talk about autogenerating edit summaries and I'm wondering if that has now been implamented and if that's what I'm seeing. Especially since almost every thing on new pages now has an edit summary that reads like that... When did this happen? And if they are autogenerated, why don't all edits now have some sort of edit summary? ~ ONUnicorn 17:15, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Got an example diff you can show us? | Mr. Darcy talk 18:43, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Sure. Here are some pulled from recent changes and new pages in the last few minutes:

• • • a diff with an edit summary of "Blanked the page"
    • a link to the history of a new article with an edit summary of "(←Created page with 'Elsewhile (n) (EHLS-wyle) - 1. a rarely used coloquialism used to mean "some other time" or "another time". (Derived by the same linguistical logic in which "elsew...')"
    • link to history of new article created with no edit summary (go quick, it could be deleted at any time)
    • a diff with an edit summary of, "(←Replaced page with 'For other people named Andrew Johnson, see Andrew Johnson (disambiguation). {{Infobox_President | | name=Andrew Johnson FAG')"

~ ONUnicorn 19:30, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/2006-11-20/Technology report, second bullet item. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:39, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

So this is a new feature, but only for changes that affect 90% of the article or new articles of 500 words or more. That ought to make life easier for RC and NP patrollers, and anyone looking at their watchlist! Cool. :) ~ ONUnicorn 20:15, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Until the vandals figure it out and start circumventing it. :-) But anything that makes their work harder is good. Deco 17:47, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Update: they do seem to be figuring this out; I've already noticed a drop-off in the Edit Summaries. It sure was nice while it lasted : ) Doc Tropics 20:22, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Failed experiments: A method for gaining cooperation

An effort to update the Kennedy Assassination articles using records from PBS and the 1998 work product of the federal Assassination Records Review Board has landed this editor in hot water with a group of editors who like the status quo.

Presently, the group, who believes no new information is needed, has asked this editor be banned for "harassing" them with "Flat Earth" information.

During the course of this arbitration, one of the editors who opposes change, claims he has tried to edit cooperatively. That is good, but his methodology appears flawed. The editor states:

“I don't like you. I think you're an obnoxious jerk.”

Later he explains to the arbitration panel that this:

“s an attempt to find common ground between and myself and move forward with editing the article productively.”

Back to the drawing board. RPJ 21:45, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

What happened to Misplaced Pages?

It works right now, but it looks so ugly. There's no bars on the left and top of the screen. What happened? I hope this change isn't permanent. Robocracy 07:26, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

It appears the same as always to me. — Knowledge Seeker দ 07:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

You may need to adjust or reset your browser; I haven't noticed any differences. --Doc Tropics 09:12, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps you changed your skin, or the browser didn't load one of the stylesheets. The first issue can be fixed by Special:Preferences, the second by doing a hard reload, see Misplaced Pages:Bypass your cache. Hope that helps, Kusma (討論) 09:18, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

WP:NOTLEX

Misplaced Pages:You Are Probably Not a Lexicologist or a Lexicographer is a new essay... please help improve!!! MPS 17:16, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I would if I knew what a Lexicologist was...--SonicChao 17:25, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

a dictionary writer MPS 18:51, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

shamless self promotion: Created a new essay, want others to read and comment on it:

I created an essay titled: Orthodoxy and heresy at Misplaced Pages. It is supposed to be somewhat provocative. I am looking for comments and improvements. Please feel free to comment on the essay talk page or make any changes you see fit. Thank you. --Jayron32 21:34, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

A new wikipedia

just a suggestion...

why not create a site 'wikipedia people' dedicated to profiles of people? Firstly a great number of people would use it and secondly i think that it would stop a lot of vandalism on the general wikipedia site if people can write about themselves elsewhere...

cheers

A project like this has been considered before but the main problem is that if anyone could have a page about them put in, there would be problems with privacy breaches and a lack of acceptable sources for the information Tra (Talk) 17:56, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Why not just use user pages? -Elmer Clark 05:00, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

It would ease the pressure of vanity pages. Maybe call it Wikiography? Who's Wiki Who? Any good project needs a good name. Robovski 00:17, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Selling out?

Does anyone know of any articles or discussions (here, or at WP:AN) about the risks of WP "selling out" or being exploited (be it by Jimbo or others)? I've seen a project page against the answers.com deal, but there was no real discussion there. Thanks. yandman 17:17, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

This topic comes up occasionally, see for example the "Wikimedia vs Misplaced Pages" thread on this version of WP:VPP. I think the bottom line is that although the risk of this happening is not actually zero it's extremely close to zero (and, even if it were to happen, someone else could recreate all the existing content at another website). -- Rick Block (talk) 18:29, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. yandman 18:41, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Times Accessed

On the Ultimate Elder Scrolls Pages, I saw that there was a counter showing how many times a page has been accessed. Is this possible in anyway on wikipedia? Jabunga 08:42, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Nope. Zetawoof 08:50, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

There is, however, wikicharts which gives this information for the top 100 most-viewed pages. Tra (Talk) 17:59, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

One for the Road: Disambiguation

There are (at least) three separate articles titled "One for the Road" with different capitalizations:
One for the Road
One For The Road
One for The Road

That's a bit silly, but I have no idea how to fix it. Hopefully there is someone here that can change that.

KUTGW,
87.68.147.72 22:47, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

What to do about this is discussed at Misplaced Pages:Disambiguation. I've moved these to (respectively)

One for the Road (play)

One for the Road (short story)

One For The Road (album)

One for the Road is now a disambiguation page listing all of them, and the others redirect to the disambiguation page. I also fixed all the links to point to the right article. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:39, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Good job in creating the dab page. I reformatted the line items to more closely match prevailing style guidelines for dab pages, but that's a minor embellishment on your work. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:45, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

The vandal wars

Usually, I figure that (at least in high-traffic articles) we find and fix vandalism pretty quickly. However, I recently checked Uncle Tom's Cabin, certainly not an unimportant topic; no one had touched it in over 48 hours, but I found all of this to do just by way of fixing blatant vandalism: . - Jmabel | Talk 23:30, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Apart from the "30 books" line, most of that doesn't look like vandalism to me, just poor Wikiformatting. Lankiveil 05:57, 27 November 2006 (UTC).

Present tense

Just looking around a few articles and I notice that present tense is used far to often. For example looking at the page of Iffy Onuora, in one section it says he was the last Gillingham player to score a hat-trick. Problem being if the article isn't checked that statement will stay for year to come. In fact I'm not even sure it is true now. True or not I bet if a Gillingham player does score a hat trick this weekend that statement won't be revised. I think it's a big problem here in Misplaced Pages. Present tense shouldn't be used. The statement should read, up to (enter date) he was the last player to score a hot trick for Gillingham. Jimmmmmmmmm 23:49, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Not an uncommon problem, agreed. I was looking for template tags that specifically address this matter, as I thought they might exist, and the closest might be Template:update or Template:copyedit. Personally, I would be more concerned with the verifiability, notability and neutrality of content over grammatical rectitude, but that is coming from someone who is by no means a grammarian. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:40, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Mena, Arkansas

Somebody put a really long section into the Mena, Arkansas article regarding a local Yu-Gi-Oh tournament, including multiple external links to its website. Now, I'm not familiar enough with that local area or the Yu-Gi-Oh scene to know for sure if it's notable enough to deserve mention, but certainly this seems to be excessive prominence and detail for what seems to be a very minor event. I removed it but was reverted, and don't want to get into a revert war over it; perhaps somebody else should take a look. *Dan T.* 02:23, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

My opionion ... This is too much as included. A couple of sentences noting that a 'festival' like this exists is more than enough, but the remainder should be off-loaded to it's own article, thence to be judged for survival via standing notability guidelines. The extended passage reads not unlike an advertisement by one of the tourney's organizers. Out-right deletion will lead to a revert war, so work at reducing it to it's notable core and create an article for the rest ... which you might even put into the deletion stream if you feel that is warranted. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:33, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't look like the anonymous IP who has obviously written this is happy to see it reduced to a notable core, he is persisting in re-inflating the section with plainly unencyclopaedic detail. Any other ideas other than revert warring on how we can solve this? Lankiveil 12:09, 27 November 2006 (UTC).

Has anyone noticed that Misplaced Pages doesn't work any more?

I'm increasingly noticing that Misplaced Pages is loosing the battle against vandalism. When I started editing here a couple of years ago, there was a FAQ somewhere saying something like

• But if anyone can edit, isn't Misplaced Pages open to vandalism

to which the answer was

• Sure, Misplaced Pages is vandalised all the time, but it always gets reverted by the many other editors who want the encyclopedia to improve

This isn't really true anymore.

Last night I went over to look for a photograph that I had added to the Guy Fawkes article and was only mildly surprised to find that it had disappeared. Whilst checking to see whether someone had had a valid reason to remove it (they hadn't) I trawled through a large number of diffs and found that the article had steadily degraded over the last month. During that time there were still plenty of reverts, but when there were several bad edits in a row it was often only the last bad edit hat got reverted.

In the same article I noticed that a whole section on 'language' had disappeared, and a sentence in the opening paragraph which used to read 'a group of Roman Catholic conspirators' had been vandalised to 'a group of Roman Catholic' which was then just corrected for grammar to read 'a group of Roman Catholics'.

I think the problem isn't just a rise in anonymous users making random bad edits, but rather an attrition of top flight editors. As a result articles are left with nobody taking a full time active interest in them - some vandalism gets corrected but plenty gets overlooked. It is not feasible (or desireable) for an editor to take ownership of an article and maintain it for the next 20 years, so the system only works if there are enough new good editors coming along who can keep up with the flow of detritus and outweigh the influence of the bad editors. Unfortunately I think the tide started to turn about six months ago.

This isn't an isolated case. I've got several thousand articles on my watchlist that I don't watch avidly, but if I compare an article with its version a week ago, many of them show signs of creeping deteriation. Of course it is much harder to repair an article once bad edits begin to build up, you can't just revert to an earlier version.

The good news is that the Guy Fawkes article is still significantly better than it was a year ago. -- Solipsist 09:18, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

It's strictly anecdotal evidence at this point but I've been having the same feeling. Haukur 09:39, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Yep. Things that worked when we were small won't work as well when we get big. — Omegatron 15:11, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

IMHO, the most interesting thing about being involved in wikipedia over the years has been watching the change in its highest-level problems (from 'not enough articles' to 'too much crap' to 'increasingly bad incompetence-vs.-editing ratio') and seeing how (or whether) the system adjusts. I think it's possible it will stop being useful in a couple of years, in which case its Google ubiquity will become a serious liability to the Net; but then again, I've thought that for a couple of years, so what do I know? - DavidWBrooks 15:51, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

This is definitely a real problem. A similar thing had happened with the Network topology article last spring, with half-reverted section blanking vandalism resulting in the article steadily shrinking to less than a third of its original size over the course of about three months. (Since I reverted it in May, there have been over 150 edits to the article. What has changed? Not much.) The only positive side to this is that, once you do notice something like this happening, it's not that hard to go through the history and restore the article to its original glory. But still, there must be hundreds if not thousands of articles like this around, slowly eroding away because no-one is watching carefully enough. Ironically, it's the controversial articles with constant edit warring that never suffer from this problem, since those always have editors who are quick to spot any changes they dislike. What I feel we really need is some kind of a technical solution. Stable versions and/or patrolling might help. So would some way of hiding reverted edits from the edit history. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:10, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

The term for this problem is edit creep. One way to deal with edit creep is to check the page history for the last known reliable version and delete harmful changes that occurred during the interim. The German language Misplaced Pages is experimenting with a stable versions option that would help address edit creep. Durova 17:00, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

I can only add my own feelings of frustration to the mix. While it is annoying to discover, for example, that a few weeks ago, a count of the then last sixty edits to Cape Verde showed that all but two were either vandalism or reverting of such, what's worse is the editors who believe that they can add a contradictory statement to the end of an article with no context (and usually no grammar and no capital or space after the previous fulll stop). If I had a dollar for every time I've seen an article that read something like "Smith died of lung cancer in 1958, survived by his wife and two daughters.in 1933 he scored a century for England against austalia." (sic throughout)

Honestly, have people who add this type of edit ever read an encyclopaedia before? How difficult is it for them to add the piece of information in the right place in the article? If the answer is "too difficult", don't do it. The sooner wikipedia restricts the ability for anons to edit, the better. --Roisterer 23:57, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Isn't it all a part of the love/hate that is Wiki? I love that anyone can edit and contribute. I also absolutely hate that anyone can use that edit to misinform, pervert and vandalize. How can we have our cake and eat it too? Robovski 00:14, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

How do I delete pages

let me know pls. thx 24.16.19.181 21:50, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Deletion policy. What's the page in question? Also, if it's a page you created and no other editors have added content, put {{db-author}} at the top and an administrator will speedily delete it for you. | Mr. Darcy talk 22:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Lovingmelanie 24.16.19.181 22:34, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

is it acceptible

Is it acceptible to humorously vandalize pages that are gonna be marked speedy deletion anyway? For example lovingmelanie — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.16.19.181 (talk • contribs) 22:36, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

No. | Mr. Darcy talk 22:49, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

US Authorities on Misplaced Pages?

I posed the following question which began a thread on the help desk and someone suggested the village pump would be more appropriate venue for this discussion. So if there are any further thoughts or views on this, I'd appreciate hearing them. I've purposely avoided naming specific editors/administrators in this because it's more concern based on a pattern of practice. This sinking sense I got by starting with the linked article through to its talk page and then uncovering repeated administrative maneuvering and contemptuous and intimidating encounters with other editors and administrators it made me want to stay clear of this article. However, I was worried about the reputation of Misplaced Pages in general. --70.8.49.7 01:03, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I was wondering whether the US government is granted special permission to as editors and administrators on Misplaced Pages? I ask that because many of the articles associated with the September 11th attacks read like press releases from the Whitehouse instead of encyclopedia articles. Also reading through endless discussion pages reveals they look more like usenet newsgroup discussions than discussions about writing wikipedia articles. A core group of administrators and editors pretends to be ignorant of Misplaced Pages polices and uses they're administrative powers to be disruptive, and intimidate other editors and administrators. They seem to be immune from any disciplinary policies.

I thought about jumping into these discussion, but I do not want to get in any trouble with the authorities. From looking at the history any dispute reolution measures look futile. If these articles are only intended for US authorities to edit, why doesn't wikipedia simply place a notification on those articles to indicate such special treatment. I think we're losing good editors and admins who just don't know these articles are off limits. --68.30.94.147 22:38, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I think that a better place to discuss this would be the Admin's Noticeboard, the village pump, or even the mailing list. -Royalguard11(Talk·Desk·Review Me!) 22:42, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

No, no special rights are given to the US authorities. The reason many articles tend to agree with the official line on things is that, well, the official line on things often tends to agree with reality... Shimgray | talk | 22:45, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

No, they are not given those. It would compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia, and its Neutral-Point-of-View Policy. If you think an article too strongly leans toward one direction, you can change the article (explain why in the edit summary), but better yet, bring it up on the talk page, and cite specific examples. -Patstuart 22:52, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Shimgray, you raise a good point. However, I didn't realize Misplaced Pages had an official line that tends to match reality. These are the sme type of bizzarre arguments I see these privileged aditors and administrators make.

Royalguarfd11 I will try to take this to the village pump. Thanks for the suggestion. --68.30.94.147 23:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages doesn't have any kind of an "official line" on topics - what I mean by this is that when our articles tend to agree with what the White House says, or what Number 10 says, this is because what those people are saying happens to be vaguely right, not because we're letting them control the articles. Much to my astonishment, it does sometimes happen that government spokespeople make statements that describe the real world... Shimgray | talk | 23:23, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

That's true of every press release every issued. They always "make statements that describe the real world" Unfiltered press releases have no place on Misplaced Pages IMHO. --70.8.49.7 23:53, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

...I think you and I are completely talking at cross purposes here. Perhaps I ought to go back to the beginning -

Misplaced Pages does not give editorial control to government agencies.

Misplaced Pages does not give special rights to representatives of government agencies.

Misplaced Pages does not take its editorial line from government agencies.

Misplaced Pages does not place articles "off limits" on behalf of government agencies

Hope that clarifies things. Shimgray | talk | 00:04, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I'll butt in with a hypothetical question of my own here. What if a really high ranking official, say the President, demanded adminship on Misplaced Pages. Are you obligated to give it to him? DoomsDay349 00:39, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

...why on earth would we be obligated to give it to him? that's a bizzare concept. Shimgray | talk | 00:42, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Shimgray, I don't know how you or any editor could be so confident of what you're saying. I mean as a fairly new editor to Misplaced Pages I would say I would think Misplaced Pages doesn't grant special permission. However,

• when you look at the articles I'm talking about;

• when you follow through with the editors and administrators who maintain them; when you see the mockery they make of other editors other administrators and Misplaced Pages policies;

• when you see the selected topics of the articles they preside over;

• when you see the contempt they hold for every other editor they encounter (remember these are mostly administrators); and

• when you see how it seems to be a coordinated effort on 24-hour watch,

it really makes you wonder. I know I said I'd take this to the village pump and I will do that now and stop posting here. --70.8.49.7 01:03, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

end of Held Desk Thread

Given the articles that you're discussing,September 11th attacks, I suspect the answer is relatively straightforward...completely unrelated to any government activity at all, those articles are heavily edited by U.S. citizens. Americans may be a bit schizophrenic on some topics, but we can largely agree that blowing up our skyscrapers is not something we take kindly to. Any bias in the articles almost certainly relates to this, rather than a semi-conspiratorial government intervention. Doc Tropics 01:13, 27 November 2006 (UTC) PS - the cabal made me say that!