User:EEng

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We thank Thee, O Lord, for another day without whining from someone who doesn't get the joke.

A Note to the Humor-Impaired

One should beware of those who cannot or will not laugh when others are merry, for if not mentally defective they are spiteful, selfish or abnormally conceited ... Great men of all nations and of all times have possessed a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, as wisdom and wit are closely allied.

— Leander Hamilton McCormick, Characterology; an exact science embracing physiognomy, phrenology and pathognomy, reconstructed, amplified and amalgamated ... (1920)

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This user has been blocked several times, and isn't embarrassed about it - (see my block log here!).

ipa

The IPA pronunciation of this username is apparently /ˈiːeɪŋ/

What the Critics Are Saying

Wikipedia Must Be The Saddest Place on Earth

I have had EEng's talk and userpage on my Watchlist for two months because they are the most fun places on Wikipedia.

—Softlavender‍^[4]

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	I haven't checked out your userpage in a long while, but I laughed so hard (I particularly liked the "head in the sand" picture) I nearly snorted coffee out of my nose. PS: I would like to apologise for being tempted to go to the dark side.... Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 12:30, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

	The Rather Unusual User Page Award
	Not sure what my definition of a "rather usual" userpage would be, but it wouldn't be that.^[5]

"This is a very long page."‍^[6]

		The Barnstar of Good Humor
		For your medicine against chronic wikidespair. Consult your doctor before trying this medicine. Symptoms include: a systemic allergic reaction, a worsening of withdrawal symptoms for not placing `{{ANI-notice}}` in months, and casting the first stone.^[7]

User essays worth reading

Some Entertaining Diversions

Thanks to Softlavender, we learn that Hollywood predicted Wikipedia sixty years in advance, complete with vanity articles: Click here. "Human enlightenment‍—‌what nonsense, Professor!"

From User:Darwinbish/insultspout (via Ritchie333). Refresh as often as desired:

Don't call names, you paunchy dizzy-eyed ratsbane!

You have been noticed using opprobrious epithets. It's payback time from the Shakespeare Insult Generator! To activate the Insultspout and receive fresh insults, click here. Note that all insults generated by the Spout are guaranteed literary and cultured, unlike the nasty things you said, you fawning doghearted haggard.

Welcome, new editors!

Monopwiki

With grateful appreciation to Andrew Davidson ([8])! EEng (talk) 00:16, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Fellow editors, feel free to contribute clever riffs and barbs (subject to management approval or modification)

The Massively Multiplayer Online Encyclopedia Game!

Wikibreak	Third opinion $220	Chance ?	Mediation $220	Arbitration $240	Jimbo Wales $200	In the news $260	On this day $260	MediaWiki $150	Did you know $280	You are banned!
RFA $200	MONOPWIKI									FPC $300
PERM $180										POTD $300
Community discussion										Community discussion
Editor review $180										FAC $320
Developers $200										Rouge admin $200
Deletion review $160										Chance ?
AFD $140										TFA $350
Wikimedia Foundation $82,753,985										Edit war (pay $100)
CSD $140										Main Page $400
WP:BANNED Just browsing	WikiProject Spam $120	UAA $100	Chance ?	AIV $100	Admin cabal $200	Teh Drahmaz (pay $200)	AN $60	Community discussion	ANI $60	Go Collect $200 salary as you pass

Chance and Community discussions

You are assessed for article repairs. £40 for each GA, £115 for each FA
You have won second place in DYK. Collect £10
Discretionary sanctions. Fine £20
Edit warring fine £15
Unblock request accepted. Collect £20
Deletion review in your favour. Collect £10
Pay Arbitration Committee fees of £150
Pay WMF £100
Get out of indef for free

Comment

The WMF can be bought for only $150? A much better investment than those donations! —sroc 💬 13:23, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

A Little History

The userbox below was considered for deletion on February 6, 2015. The result of the "discussion" was "We can allow tiny pockets of dissent, as long as it doesn't catch on. Now back to the salt mines!".

It has been 3580 days since a userbox was last urgently removed from this page based on a three-hour "consensus" at ANI.

When users do something that administrators don't like, but when the users not only disagree but have the temerity to object to the sanctions levied against them by administrators, is this an unacceptable dissent against the powers-that-be that must, always, be quashed by any means necessary?

I'm probably hyperbolizing here, but I think this is how the issue appears to the EEng's of the world. And some, at least, of the EEng's of the world are here to help build the encyclopedia. We say "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", not "The benevolent dictatorship encyclopedia that docile and compliant rule-followers can edit as long as they remember their place and are always properly respectful towards ADMINISTRATORS." So, please, if that's not the message you want to send, just let these userboxes go. And if you want to boot a user off the project for not being here to help build the encyclopedia, please do it for a more substantive reason than that the user refuses to say "Uncle" when confronted by admins.

—Steve Summit (talk) 19:46, 6 February 2015 (UTC) ^[9]

And finally, to each admin who says, "Well, I wouldn't have blocked, but I don't feel like overturning it": what you're condoning is a situation in which every editor is at the mercy of the least restrained, most trigger-happy admin who happens to stumble into any given situation. Don't you see how corrosive that is? It's like all these recent US police shootings: no matter how blatantly revolting an officer's actions were, the monolithic reply is "It was by the book. Case closed." This [admin] was way out of line from the beginning in deleting multiple editors' posts (as someone suggested, hatting would have made complete sense, and troubled me not at all) and when called on it above, he gives a middle-finger-raised LOL. No wonder so many see haughty arrogance in much of the admin corps around here.

—EEng 05:38, 16 January 2015 (UTC) ^[10]

And let me be clear: I have no problem with 97% of admins, who do noble work in return for (generally) either no recognition or shitloads of grief, only occasionally punctuated by thanks. But the other 3%‍—‌whoa, boy, watch out!

—EEng 20:02, 6 February 2015 (UTC) ^[11]

Alle-wiki-gory

There is currently a discussion at ANI...

File:Actress-fear-and-panic.jpg

WP:Flow is being revived ...

References

^ Nowadays everything's "infused".

After ANI

<- - - - - Travails of the copyeditor - - - - ->

The next three images gratefully stolen from Catherine de Burgh

**Strong oppose**
**Strong oppose** **Strong oppose**
**Strong oppose** **Strong oppose**

This administrator is available for recall

Did You Know ...

The Sacred Cod

... that John Harvard (left) does not look like John Harvard?
... that Massachusetts officials were "shocked into a condition bordering on speechlessness" by the theft of their Sacred Cod (right)?
... that the four miles of stacks aisles in Harvard's 3.5-million-volume Widener Library are so labyrinthine that one student felt she ought to carry "a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle" when entering?
... that eight years after rowing a Titanic lifeboat and honoring her drowned son with a Harvard library, Eleanor Widener waited on a yacht while her new husband fought "scantily-clad, ferocious cannibals"?
... that at Harvard commencements, bagpipes herald breakfast, bachelors are welcomed, sheriffs on white steeds preserve order, and Harvard's president occupies a "bizarre" chair prone to tipping over?

... that after Lionel de Jersey Harvard (left) died in World War I, a fellow officer wrote, "If Harvard College made him what he was, I want my sons to go there that it may do the same for them"?
... that Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators (right) were forcibly withdrawn after officials clamped down on them?
... that the intruder who shot J. P. Morgan, Jr. and bombed the US Senate in 1915 was identified by "Harvard Cop No. 1" Charles Apted as a deranged, wife-poisoning, ex-Harvard German instructor?
... that in Menace from the Moon, a lunar colony‍—‌founded in 1654 by a Dutchman, an Englishman, an Italian, and "their women"‍—‌promises Earth heat-ray doom unless it helps them escape their dying world?
... that problems with a brutalist gray elephant were "like a five-car accident at an intersection. You just can't tell what caused it"?
... that "University Moves to Thwart Early Marriages" was the 1963 Harvard Crimson caption beneath a photo of the school's "hideous" new housing complex for married students?

... that quirky dogs and plural wugs helped Jean Berko Gleason (left) show that young children extract linguistic rules from what they hear, rather than just memorizing words?
... that mathematician Andrew Gleason (right) liked to say that proofs "really aren't there to convince you that something is true—they're there to show you why it is true"?
... that warden's wife Kate Soffel, who fled with condemned brothers Jack and Ed Biddle after supplying guns and saws for their 1902 escape from the Allegheny County Jail, later took up dressmaking?
... that while testifying in a 2004 lawsuit involving the meaning of the word steakburger, a corporate CEO was grilled on the witness stand?

... that after Phineas Gage (left) survived an accident in which a large iron bar (also left) was driven through his head, he made it his "constant companion for the remainder of his life", and a medical journal (mis)quoted Macbeth: "The times have been that when the brains were out the man would die. But now they rise again"?
... that Japanese Emperor Hirohito had a Liverpudlian cousin named Paddy Murphy?

That his style was verbose is something on which both friend and foe agreed. Jackson was a writer who, having embarked on a sentence, was almost immediately seized by a new association, which was promptly parked between dashes. Shortly after he embarked on the parenthetical phrase, another association presented itself, and was duly ensconced between parentheses, thereby exhausting the conventional punctuation marks designed for embedded phrases. When another association arose during the writing of the phrase in parentheses‍—‌which was invariably the case‍—‌it was presented in the form of a footnote. But shortly after the beginning of the footnote ... etc., etc.

Douwe Draaisma. "Sparks from a Leyden jar: Jackson's epilepsy". Disturbances of the Mind. (Tr. by Barbara Fasting.)

Authorial Vanity

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

— Logan Pearsall Smith (1931). Afterthoughts.

Fates to Avoid

Although he did not lack friends, they were weary of coming to his defense, so endless a process it had become.

— Rider, Fremont (1944). Melvil Dewey.

In composing...

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give your style.

— Sydney Smith

Museum Rules

Visitors to The Museums are encouraged to add droll codas, possibly with evocative yet enigmatic double-entrendre wikilinks, to the items on display (though these will of course be subject to the discretion of The Curator).

Museum of Bedside Manners

From "The Limbic System with Respect to Two Basic Life Principles", in The Central Nervous System and Behavior: Transactions of the Second Conference (1959):

We have had a number of patients who have had very strong suicidal tendencies. The one I spoke of brought 155 razor blades, 17 knives, and two loaded guns into the therapeutic hour, and on one occasion she cut her wrists. I showed her how to hold her arms so she wouldn't drip on my couch.

Later in the same discussion:

He experienced what I would call a real culinary orgasm.

And...

These fantasies of eating can alternate with sexual fantasies. This was quite clear during the last war, when we all were a little hungry and a little impotent.

Museum of great things Galbraith said

"Economists are most economical about ideas. They make the ones they learned in graduate school last a lifetime."
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
"We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much."
"The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered, and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground."

Museum of Pick Your Poison

From Manure management:

In high concentrations manure can lethally asphyxiate humans. There is also a drowning danger.

Museum of WP:The Wrong Version

From an ANI thread:

The world wide web has been semi protected by Nyttend for ten days.

Museum of Better Reword That

From a discussion at WT:Manual of Style/Images:

I would like to propose the repeal of the language in this guideline which forbids the inclusion of image galleries in articles about human ethnic groups ... Even articles about sub-species groupings directly analogous to human ethnic groups, such as Maine Coon, include images of their subjects.

Museum of Really, Really Better Reword That

From the same discussion‍—‌and by the same editor!‍—‌two weeks later (and I am not making this up):

A great deal of objection to the repeal of NOETHNICGALLERIES seems to center around the difficulties of classifying people according to fine-grained groupings visually. I would suggest, therefore, that we allow image galleries for ethnic groups at the highest level, i.e. White people, but continue to disallow them for low-level subgroups, i.e. Slavs.

Museum of Those Lustie Tudors

From Henry VIII of England:

He was skilled on the lute, could play the organ, and was a talented player of the virginals.

Museum of Cheap Followups

Not from anything:

Q: Why did Bach have so many children?

Answer
A: Because he didn't have any stops in his organ.

Museum of Noted for Future Reference

From "Dancing in San Francisco, Hygienically Considered", San Francisco Medical Press, January 1862, p.26:

It is the peculiar condition of the nervous system, probably produced by the electrical condition of the air, that causes so much insanity in California ... The climate of San Francisco is peculiarly favorable to Dancing [but] there is one correction that ought to be made in the present system of dancing here. The dancing, both in public and private are, for the most part, continued too long.

Museum of Legal Aptonymy

From WP:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard/Archive126#David_Goodwillie:

David Goodwillie has had his rape charge dropped.

Museum of More Than a Coincidence?

From Human Interference Task Force, about early attempts to devise a means of warning cultures in the far-distant future not to intrude on radioactive waste sites:

French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed the breeding of so called "radiation cats" or "ray cats". Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger.

From the article on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a radioactive waste disposal site":

The source of contamination was later found to be a barrel that exploded on February 14 because contractors at Los Alamos National Laboratory packed it with organic cat litter instead of clay cat litter.

Museum of Unclear Enunciation

A now-deleted hatnote to the article on Play-Doh:

This article is about the children's modeling material. For the ancient Greek philosopher, see Plato.

Museum of Yes, I Think You've Put Your Finger On It

From a discussion of someone's crackpot theories about Hitler in Esoteric Nazism:

She saw his defeat‍—‌and the forestalling of his vision from coming to fruition‍—‌as a result of him being "too magnanimous, too trusting, too good".

Museum of Timeless Wisdom

From wiktionary:in_the_land_of_the_blind,_the_one-eyed_man_is_king:

Proverb

in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

Among others with a disadvantage or disability, the one with the mildest disadvantage or disability is regarded as the greatest.
Even someone without much talent or ability is considered special by those with no talent or ability at all.
Someone that can see his actions transpire in determination makes the most out of every other thing disconnected

Museum of Urgent Matters

From a recent actual ANI report (bolding as in the original):

Background: A series of IPs (virtually all geolocating to the same Canadian city) have been edit warring since late February to incorrectly state that the Canadian Cadbury Caramilk is a chocolate bar rather than a candy bar.

Museum of Unusual Career Paths

From the article on Hedy Lamarr:

Hedy Lamarr (/ˈhɛdi/; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, 9 November 1914 – 19 January 2000)^[a] was an Austrian and American film actress and inventor of radio guidance technology.

Museum of Well, They Do Like the Trains to Run on Time

From the article on George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, who was killed by a Party member in front of a laundromat:

The cemetery specified that no Nazi insignia could be displayed, and when the fifty mourners violated these conditions the entrance to the cemetery was blocked in a five-hour standoff, during which the hearse (which had been stopped on railroad tracks near the cemetery) was nearly struck by an approaching train.

Museum of Scholarly Disputation

From a discussion of why the earth's motion doesn't cause buildings to fall down, in The Mathematical and Philosophical Works of the Right Rev. John Wilkins, Late Lord Bishop of Chester: To which is Prefix'd the Author's Life, and an Account of His Works; in Two Volumes, (reprinting A discourse concerning a new planet tending to prove, that ’tis probable our Earth is one of the planets, 1640):

The motion of the earth is always equal and like itself; not by starts and fits. If a glass of beer may stand firmly enough in a ship, when it moves swiftly upon a smooth stream, much less then will the motion of the earth, which is more natural, and so consequently more equal, cause any danger unto those buildings that are erected upon it ... But supposing (saith Rosse) that this motion were natural to the earth, yet it is not natural to towns and buildings, for these are artificial.

To which I answer: ha, ha, he.

(I like the beer reference. As someone wrote, "Our fathers ... closely associated the thirst for learning and that for beer.")

Museum of "You don't say!"

From John Vassall:

Although his father was an Anglican priest, his mother converted to Roman Catholicism (a fact which led to some tensions in their marriage).

Museum of Edible Edits

A perhaps over-tired, or ravenously hungry, Ricky81682 commenting at ANI [12]:

And if the OP doesn't bother to respond, I say we close this and ask the editor on their talk page to provide a coherent, succulent description of their concerns.

Museum of Words that Bug Me

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Public Report on Audience Comments and Complaints, April–June 2006":

The 7.30 Report, 18 April 2006
The complaint: A viewer complained that a report caption referred to an “entomologist” as an “etymologist”.
Finding: The ABC agreed that this was incorrect.

Museum of How Was Your Day, Dear?

From List of fatal bear attacks in North America:

Earl, a zookeeper at the Cleveland Brookside Zoo, was mauled by a brown bear while feeding it in its pen. After a vicious struggle, police shot the bear. Earl was also mistakenly shot, but it was determined that he was already dead. Earlier in the day, Earl had been fired from his job.

Museum of You Can't Always Get What You Want, But Sometimes You Get What You Need

From an online comment about Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece The Bicycle Thief:

I read that Bicycle Thieves is one of Leonardo DiCaprio's favorite movies of all time. I saw it. It just ended abruptly. I was really hopeful for a happy ending that he would win his bike back but rather he ends up with no bike in the end.

Museum of Precision Diagnoses

From the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems:

T63.442 Toxic effect of venom of bees (intentional self-harm)
V91.07 Burn due to water-skis on fire
V95.42XS Forced landing of spacecraft injuring occupant, sequela
V97.33 Sucked into jet engine
W22.02 Walked into lamppost
W55.41 Bitten by pig
W61.62 Struck by duck
Y92.146 Swimming-pool of prison as place of occurrence
Y92.154 Driveway of reform school as place of occurrence

Sample combinations:

Y92.241 Library as place of occurrence + W45.1 Paper entering through skin ("Applicable to paper cut")
Y92.834 Zoological garden as place of occurrence + W61.12 Struck by mackaw
Y92.72 Chicken coop as place of occurrence + W61.33 Pecked by chicken

Museum of Hope Springs Eternal

From the Classifieds section of Mission Hill Gazette, a Boston neighborhood newspaper:

Boston Brakers power soccer
Practices 1st, 2nd, 3rd Saturdays of the month, noon-2pm, Tobin Community Center, 1481 Tremont Street.

Yoga for Older Adults
Saturdays through May, 10am. Yoga props and mats are provided, wear clothes that you can move in comfortably. Parker Hill Branch Library, 1497 Tremont St.

$5 Million Reward
for information leading directly to the return of 13 works of art stolen two decades ago from the Gardner Museum. Anonymous tips can be mailed to 280 The Fenway.

Museum of Mixing Business and Pleasure

From The Signpost article, "Revenge of 'I can’t believe we didn’t have an article on ...'" :

Esther Applin was a super-awesome geologist who discovered that microfossils could be used for dating purposes.

Museum of What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

From "Mommy Dearest", an episode of the I-swear-I-was-just-flipping-channels true-crime program A Stranger in My Home. Mabel (82) and Cathie (57) are a mother and daughter who have just moved from their too-small trailer to a house.

Mabel and Cathie would love for Cathie's sons, Travis and Morgan, to move in and help out around the house. There's only one problem: they're both in prison on burglary and fraud charges, and won't be released for several years. But Cathie's sons have a solution in the short term. They introduce Mabel and Cathie to their fellow inmate Edward Caldwell ... He was going to get out soon, and he would be needing a room to rent. Mabel invites Edward to move into the now-empty trailer, and in return he will help her and Cathie around their house.

Museum of It's a Dirty Job, But Someone's Gotta Do It

From The Railway Surgeon (1895):

During the past few years it has been my privilege to treat some hundreds of railway employees for various rectal diseases.

And from the very same page, some old-timey medical humor (I guess):

Some Clinical Thermometer Notes ... Another was a hospital ward patient, his cot being the second the physician visited on making his rounds. The patient begged one day to change beds with his neighbor, and when pressed for his reason he declared that he had got tired of having the glass put in his mouth after it had been into his neighbor's rectum. He wanted it put into his mouth before the other fellow's temperature was taken.

More dirty jobs

From a letter by Abbott Lawrence Lowell to his cousin William Lawrence, describing efforts to extract a donation from J.P. Morgan:

When I cease to be President of Harvard College I shall join one of the mendicant orders, so as to have less begging to do.

Yet more dirty jobs

From the post "The Decline of Free Speech in American Universities" in something called University Ranking Watch:

St Mary's University of Minnesota: An adjunct classics professor was fired for sexual harassment which may have had something to do with an authentic production of Seneca's Medea. He was also fired from his other job as a janitor (!).

Confusing related item:

Marquette University: John McAdams was [dismissed] for criticising an instructor for suppressing a student's negative comments about same-sex marriage.

Museum of Travel Broadens One

From an ever-so-slightly, if unintentionally, suggestive "Google Reviews" comment on Harvard's Widener Library:

A beautiful library at the heart of Harvard's campus. Please note that entrance requires Harvard affiliation, so as to prevent hordes of tourists from disrupting students' studying. Having had the privilege of entering widened I can say that it's truly gigantic.

Museum of He Did It His Way

From My Way killings:

The "My Way" killings are a social phenomenon in the Philippines, referring to a number of fatal disputes which arose due to the singing of the song "My Way" in Karaoke bars ... On May 29, 2007, a 29-year-old karaoke singer of "My Way" at a bar in San Mateo, Rizal, was shot dead as he sang the tune, allegedly by the bar's security guard. According to reports, the guard complained that the young man's rendition was off-key, and when the victim refused to stop singing, the guard pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and shot the man dead.

He also did it his way

From Evan O'Neill Kane:

He is most well known for the remarkable feat of removing his own appendix under local anaesthetic in 1921 at the age of 60. He operated on himself again at the age of 70 to repair a hernia. In many ways Kane was idiosyncratic in his practices, which included the tattooing of his patients.

Museum of Thought Control

Background (from an ANI thread):

... The purpose of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopedia, not to exchange thoughts ... Johnuniq (talk) 01:05, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

"The purpose of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopedia, not to exchange thoughts." I hope no one takes that too much to heart and writes WP:NOPUBLICTHINKING. E Eng 01:13, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

And so, thanks to my big mouth, without further ado we give you Shock Brigade Harvester Boris's essay "WP:NOPUBLICTHINKING":

This essay contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays are not Wikipedia policies or guidelines. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. Some are just bonkers.

This page in a nutshell: Keep your thoughts to yourself.

Shortcut

WP:NOPUBLICTHINKING

Wikipedia's fundamental principles are encapsulated in its "five pillars": it is an encyclopedia; it is written from a neutral point of view; its content is free to use and edit; participants are expected to act with respect and civility; there are no firm rules. These ideals carry no requirement (or even permission) for critical thinking. Indeed, there is no requirement that editors even be sentient beings‍—‌a large fraction of the project's edits are made by "bots."

It follows that editors must not expect their colleagues to act rationally or sensibly. Criticizing another's remarks as internally inconsistent or nonsensical is uncivil regardless of the truth or falsity of such criticism, and may result in sanctions. Similarly, displays of critical thinking or logical analysis may induce feelings of inadequacy in those incapable of such activities, and consequently must be avoided. Keep your thoughts to yourself.

Museum of Damn Statistics

From a digression at WP:COIN.

@EEng: thank you for making exactly my point for me. Of course it wasn't random. If my "ridiculous calculation" upsets you so much, I think you're taking this a little too seriously. Brianhe (talk) 18:55, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm taking it too seriously in the context of the subject of this thread, but not in the context of the spread of nonsense passed off as statistics, which is a serious problem given that you can turn on almost any crime show and hear some prosecutor intone gravely, "The chances of that DNA coming from anyone other than the defendant was 1 in 4 quintillion" or similar nonsense arrived at by calculations similar to yours.

If you think what I said made your point for you, then you still don't understand. You were trying to prove that one set of user boxes was copied (or adapted, or somehow influenced) by another set of userboxes, by calculating the chance that two sets of userboxes, arrived at independently, would be the same, under the assumption that people just pick their userboxes out of a hat. But that last assumption is false (even if they're setting up their userboxes completely independently of one another), which makes the whole calculation meaningless.

Userboxes

Wikipedia:Babel

en

This user is a native speaker of the English language.

Search user languages

This user is a citizen of the United States of America.

For example, let's say user A has the userboxes at right. Under your calculation User B, who now joins the project, would have only a 1/(2526*2526) = 1/(25,000,000) chance of picking the same userboxes. Ergo, if B has the same boxes as A, it's impossible to imagine he came up with them independently‍—‌he must have copied them from A. But this is obviously a ridiculous conclusion, since the majority of editors on en-wp are native speakers of English, and the majority are Americans, and the two probabilities are dependent.

Blindly plugging numbers into statistical formulas has caused a lot of problems, as the ex-managers of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear plants would be able to tell you first-hand (if they weren't both dead, of course). So please do your part to stop the senseless slaughter of nuclear-plant managers, and don't engage in meaningless combinatoric exercises and then pass them off as valid. (More seriously, people have gone to prison based on similar calculations by incompetent "experts"‍—‌see People v. Collins‍—‌so the lives of everyday people really are affected by the insidious spread of such nonsense.)

EEng (talk) 20:10, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Museum of Excruciatingly Fine-Grained Editing

From User talk:EEng:

Hi, You have more than 2,500 edits to Phineas Gage (talk+article) ... Currently that article has more than 37,000 characters/bytes, I hope one day you will have more edits to article than number of characters in article. That will be a distinct and unique record. --Human3015

Museum of Naughty Edits

See right.

^ Twain, M. "Die schreckliche deutsche Sprache." IEEE Trans. Tramps Abroad (1880)

More Naughty Edits

From Lowell House [13]:

“

At Lowell, the bells were usually rung on Sundays from 1:00 to 1:15 pm by a group of Lowell residents known as the Klappermeisters. But some Klappermeisters were drunk with power, and putting heedless self-indulgence ahead of the welfare of their sleep-starved fellow scholars, would initiate their infernal clanging much, much earlier than the officially appointed hour on that sanctified day of rest; these wicked souls were hated and reviled by each and every creature unfortunate enough to suffer within the radius of action of these sonic torture machines, and thereafter had trouble getting help with their chemistry homework, even unto the twelfth generation.

”

Museum of Little-Known Wallace and Gromit Characters

Lady Catherine Augusta Amelia Gladys de Burgh, Duchess of Scrotum

See left.

Museum of Bird-Brained Ideas

During World War II, Project Pigeon was American behaviorist B.F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-controlled guided bomb.

[etc]

Early electronic guidance systems use similar methods, only with electronic signals and processors replacing the birds.

Museum of terrifying scenarios which must be faced unflinchingly

"If Wikipedians were to decide to ban all the loonies, only Jimbo and Gerda Arendt would be left." —Maunus

See right. EEng (talk) 04:42, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Projection of what non-lunatic human specimens would look like after one generation. See left. Viriditas (talk) 04:57, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Museum of Unfortunate Lyrics

"Words by St. Ephrem Syrus (c A.D. 307-373), versified by G. R. W. Tune of Gathering Peascods" (found in Fritz Spiegl's The Joy of Words):

Saint Joseph, meek and mild,
Embraced the new-born Child,
Then knelt upon the sod ...

More from Spiegl:

Stainer's 'Here in abasement' is difficult to sing without suggesting that the singer's lowly station is not spiritual but in a building...

Museum of Things that Take You Off-Guard

A notification from the Wikimedia "Alerts" feature:

Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators was linked from Butt plug. 3 hours ago

Museum of Forerunners to "Just Say No to Drugs"

Plaque at the "Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice" in London's Postman's Park.

Several of the Memorial's plaques are quite touching:

Nonetheless the overall effect is decidedly Gorey-esque, particularly in the unlikely scenes of action and odd details sometimes supplied ...

... as well as the quaint identification of the actors' stations in life:

While we're on the subject ... From Edward Gorey:

His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings ... Gorey left the bulk of his estate to a charitable trust benefiting cats and dogs, as well as other species, including bats and insects.

Museum of unexpected turns of the phrase

From Daguerreotype:

With uncommon exceptions, daguerreotypes made before 1841 were of immobile subjects such as landscapes, public or historic buildings, monuments, statuary, and still life arrangements. Attempts at portrait photography with the Chevalier lens required the sitter to face into the sun for several minutes while trying to remain motionless and look pleasant, usually producing grisly results.

Museum of things you can't post to User talk:SomeOtherEditor no matter how much he or she deserves it

With thanks to User:Micro.dot.cotton

Polyphonic retort-generating xylophone

Museum of cheesy storylines

From List of The Archers characters with thanks to Belle the Cat

On New Year's Day 2007, whilst driving drunk, she knocked down Mike Tucker but Tom, a passenger in the car, took the blame. The shock of this event made her reevaluate her life and she has since helped develop a new type of cheese.

Museum of authentic national customs

From Darden Restaurants

[There was] considerable media attention for its detailed focus on Olive Garden, in particular the chain's "wasteful" practice of serving too many of its free unlimited breadsticks... Management... said the free breadsticks merely represented "Italian generosity."

Museum of blood, toil, tears, and (especially) sweat

From an ANI closure [14]

... as nothing of the conflict here (which I was completely unaware about) perspired in that thread I suppose uninvolved applies.

Museum of Wise Words

The flip side of "ownership" is the problem of editors who come to an article with a particular agenda, make the changes they want to the page according to their preconceived notions of what should be, and then flit off to their next victim, without ever considering whether the page really needed the change they made, or whether the change improved the article at all ... Their editing is an off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all proposition, premised on the idea that what improves one article, or one type of article, will automatically improve every other article or type of article ... Wikipedians should worry more about those who hit-and-run, and less about those who feel stewardship towards the articles they work so hard on.

Beyond My Ken

One area the hit and run editor gets involved in is the formatting ... The quality of work has increased in some areas, which makes it harder to contribute without good knowledge in the subject matter and sources. Fiddling with the formatting seems to be a suitable alternative passtime.

Ritchie333

The Fourth Law of Stupidity: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.[15]

Ignorance is infinite, while patience is not. Ultimately, you will lose patience with the unchecked flow of ignorance, at which point you'll be blocked for incivility. The goal is to accomplish as much as possible before that inevitability comes to pass.

On Wikipedia, any form of real-life expertise is a serious handicap. If you have real-life expertise on a subject, do not under any circumstances mention it here.

The more abusive an editor is toward others, the more thin-skinned they are about "personal attacks" directed at themselves.

MastCell

Museum of Dubious Achievements

[16]

Museum of Additional Reasons that Warmongers Go to Hell

Restoring this section after realizing some busybody had removed it [17]

Lionel de Jersey Harvard. EEng (talk) 3:43 am, 1 February 2015, Sunday (4 months, 24 days ago) (UTC−5)

Museum of Perhaps Not the Best Choice

Believe it or not, an actual image, and actual caption, from the article Cremation

Brace yourself
Cremation of a dead body (Germany)

Museum of Swell Heads

From a source cited in Manahel Thabet, a hoax article about someone with a PhD "magna cum laude" in "Financial Engineering", and a "second PhD in 2012, this time with a major in quantum mathematics", who went on to develop "a formula to measure distance in space in the absence of light".

The 33-year-old economist and passionate scientist possessed dreams far bigger than her own head.

Museum of Timeless Design

From Flak tower, about the gigantic concrete towers built to defend major German cities, and shelter their civilians from air attack, during World War II:

G-Tower was transformed into a nightclub with a music school and music shops.
L-Tower was demolished after the war and replaced by a very similar looking building by T-Mobile.

Museum of Le mot juste

Given that, I'm going to take the time to formally remind all concerned here of the discretionary sanctions panopticon looming over style and naming discussions on Wikipedia.

— From a discussion [18] of whether the word Station (or station) should be capitalized in the names of subway and railway stations.

Panopticon: A circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed. A design also seen in asylums.

— Definition from somewhere on the web

Museum of New-Editor Retention Tactics

From a thread [19] discussing the discouragement felt by novice editors who find their fledgling efforts at article creation CSD'd. One editor facetiously proposed a template to "soften the blow". Other suggestions followed...

Dear newbie, this is a friendly note to say I have asked that your new article on .example be deleted from Wikipedia. In fact, it is probably gone already! I did not check that the subject belonged in Wikipedia, because as you can imagine I am a very busy person, but my impression of the first version you saved was that it was worthless. I do hope you decide to try again. We always enjoy new editors. Thank you and have a nice day. Aymatth2 (talk)

I like it, except instead of the smiley face I suggest one of these:

EEng (talk) 10:18, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Museum of Titulary Deflation

From the discussion re Did you know nominations/Jane Eyre (1910 film), during which I had suggested the "hook"

... that the main character in Jane Eyre is pointedly titular?

Sadly, a different hook was selected to appear on Wikipedia's Main Page.

Personally I think "pointedly titular" would be a good followup to Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators, but perhaps the world isn't yet ready for such forward thinking. EEng (talk) 01:45, 9 April 2015 (UTC) Much later: Shame I didn't say "forward-pointing"‍—‌a tragic missed opportunity. EEng (talk)

No matter how bouncily titillating such a play would be to us, I fear most people wouldn't be abreast of the context and thus it would fall flat. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:30, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

So you think it might have been a bust? EEng (talk) 16:27, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Category:Busts in the United Kingdom

Museum of Deadpan Bathroom Humor

From a discussion [20] of how to retrieve the missing pageview statistics for the April 1, 2015 appearance of the DYK "hook"

Did you know ... that Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators were forcibly withdrawn after officials clamped down on them?

Dr. Young's device was a putative cure for, among other things, constipation. The management of this page is of course disgusted by such childish humor but feels it should nonetheless be memorialized here as an example of how far otherwise valuable contributors can sometimes fall:

The good news is that the raw data is available and so you can drill down for specific articles ... Given time, I could assemble a full set of stats for the day but the dumps are large ... If these dumps are too large and indigestible then another option is to try something similar again. I created the stub rectal dilator when I first came across the topic here and it is still small and tight. It would be easy to expand that five times to create an even larger passage... :) Andrew D. (talk) 13:17, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Museum of Can We Go Over That One More Time Just to Be Sure I've Got It?

From Civil defense siren#United States:

The Yellow Alert and Red Alert signals correspond to the earlier Alert Signal and Attack Signal, respectively, and the early Federal Signal AR timer siren control units featured the Take Cover button labeled with a red background, and the Alert button labeled with a yellow background. Later AF timers changed the color-coding, coloring the Alert button blue, the Take Cover button yellow, and the Fire button red (used to call out volunteer fire fighters), thus confusing the color-coding of the alerts. In 1955, the Federal Civil Defense Administration again revised the warning signals, altering them to adapt to deal with concern over nuclear fallout. The new set of signals were the Alert Signal (unchanged) and the Take-Cover Signal (previously the Attack Signal).

Museum of Not Even a Silver Lining

From the biography of Louis Agassiz Shaw II:

An eccentric snob, he kept a copy of the Social Register near the telephone, instructing his staff not to accept calls from anyone not listed.^[1] After confessing to strangling his 60-year-old maid in 1964 he was committed to McLean Hospital, where he lived for 23 years. Much of his art collection, which he wanted to donate to the Fogg Museum, was found to be fakes.

Museum of "For Want of a Nail"

From Flinders Petrie:

When he died in 1942, Petrie donated his head (and thus his brain) to the Royal College of Surgeons of London while his body was interred in the Protestant Cemetery on Mt. Zion. World War II was then at its height, and the head was delayed in transit. After being stored in a jar in the college basement, its label fell off and no one knew who the head belonged to.

Museum of You're Not Helping

From St Andrew's Stadium with thanks to Martinevans123:

Three months later, the Main Stand, which was being used as a temporary National Fire Service station, burned down, destroying the club's records and equipment – "not so much as a lead pencil was saved from the wreckage" – when a fireman mistook a bucket of petrol for water when intending to damp down a brazier.

Museum of Less Unhygienic Undergrads

[21]

Museum of Suspiciously Congruent Estimates

Wikipedia is no place for humour.
Everything is very serious here and we are all terrifically important.

Background: Wikipedia:India Education Program/Analysis/WMF interviews discusses cultural issues in getting Indian editors to understand the concept of plagiarism. Its text read, in part,

Two interviewees separately estimated that about 5% of students in India never copy and paste, and generally these students do so because they feel that copying and pasting is wrong.

An irresistible impulse caused me to add a footnote to that sentence, which read

<ref>In followup interviews, both interviewees added that they had copied the 5% figure from an article they read somewhere.</ref>

Here's what happened next...

Hi EEng, please refrain from adding unhelpful and erroneous edits like this to pages in which we are trying to engage in a productive and thoughtful analysis of what went wrong in our pilot program. I appreciate the humor in your addition, but this is a very serious subject, and I ask that you treat it with the respect it deserves in the future. Thanks. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Humor doesn't imply disrespect, nor does it detract in any way from productive and thoughtful analysis -- it might even add to it. At least I read the thing [22]. Of course, I would never dream of doing what I did on an article page (as opposed to a project page) but I'd be lying if I said I won't do it again in a similar situation. I see in other discussion (e.g. point 1 of [23]) concerns over WMF staff's grasp of how things are really done on WP, and I think this may be an example. EEng (talk) 02:04, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Museum of Holy Outrage Outrage

From www.mrbreakfast.com, a breakfast cereal homage site:

Elijah's Manna was Post's first attempt at corn flakes. The box featured the Biblical Prophet Elijah kicking back on a rock while a raven is shown either plucking cereal from his hand or placing cereal in his hand.
Church groups were outraged over the use of Elijah as a cereal mascot. The book Cerealizing America by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford has a quote from C. W. Post who was outraged at the outrage over his new cereal: "Perhaps no one should eat angel food cake, enjoy Adam's ale, live in St. Paul, nor work for Bethlehem Steel ... one should have his Adam's apple removed and never again name a child for the good people of the bible."
Post stuck with his guns until he noticed the Biblical backlash was cutting into his sales. In 1908, he renamed the cereal as Post Toasties. Micky Mouse would later replace the Prophet Elijah on the box.

Museum of "I honestly did not see that coming"

From Winfield House, about the official London residence of the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom...

The actual house was designed by Decimus Burton for the notorious Regency rake, the 3rd Marquess of Hertford, who used it for orgies.

Museum of Computer Porn

		The Barnstar of Good Humor
		This was entertaining. So, when will Bodice-Ripping Bots be out in theaters? Sophus Bie ^(talk) 10:42, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

When correctly viewed / Everything is lewd.

I could tell you things about Peter Pan / And the Wizard of Oz—there's a dirty old man!

— Tom Lehrer

This literary gem, which came to me in a deliroius fog after I noticed User:BracketBot leaving a message on User:Citation bot's talkpage (though I need to say that the final, um, climax is cribbed from a vaguely remembered cartoon from the 90s). Bracketbot notifies editors who make changes apparently resulting in unbalanced parens, brackets, and similar markup in articles, and had given Citationbot just such a notification:

[From the upcoming major motion picture Bodice-Ripping Bots.]

Parental Advisory:

UF – Undocumented Features
ST – Strong Typing
MSI – Master-Slave Interfaces

BL – Binding and Linking
EP – Explicit Parallelism
OC / AL – some Open Coding and Assembly Language

"Oh, hi, I'm Citationbot. Thanks – I've been looking everywhere for that other bracket! So you're that big strong Bracketbot I've heard so much about. Why don't you come into my domain? That's not my usual protocol, but a guy with so much cache makes a girl feel really secure. I wasn't expecting to host, so pardon my open proxy – a bit RISCé, perhaps, but just something I wear around the server farm. Do my transparent upper layers expose my virtual ~~mammary~~ memory? These dual cores are absolutely real – 100% native configuration – no upgrades at all! I'll just slip into a more user-friendly interface – how about something GUI ... or perhaps you prefer command-line? – kinky! ..." Gosh, you must be 64-bit – really big quads! – and completely hardcoded – such a complex instruction set! And look at those great ABS addresses!

Later: "Oh, Bracketbot! Port me to that platform for some horizontal integration! Go ahead and expose my implementation and directly access my low-level interface – forget the wrapper function! I'm overloaded by your amazing data stream – and what a high refresh rate! My husband has a really short cycle time and his puny little floppy drive is subject to frequent hardware failures – sometimes he won't reboot so I have to manually terminate him! And I've never had 10 gigabytes of hard drive before! Let's FTP! ... Oh god! I'm downloading ..."

Postscript: Those naughty bots are still going at it hammer and tongs [24].

Museum of grandiose fulfillments of Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies

From an editor's complaints about the consensus principle [25]:

A majority of people decided to elect Hitler, but that doesn't mean it was the right thing to do. A majority of people in the South wanted to maintain slavery and break away from the union, but that doesn't mean it was right, ethical, or just. Politics put Jesus to death, but that doesn't mean it was right, ethical, or just either. ... Perhaps unlike many here, I look at the bigger picture.

Museum of Unintentionally Hilarious Edit Outcomes

[26] First look at the diff, then see the last image on the right‍—‌um... note the caption.

(with thanks to Martinevans123: [27])

Museum of saucy edits

From the Talk page for Prawn Cocktail, "a seafood dish consisting of shelled, cooked, prawns in a Marie Rose sauce"...

The lead says the prawn cocktail "'has spent most of [its life] see-sawing from the height of fashion to the laughably passé' and is now often served with a degree of irony." It's my understanding that people with anemia will often add even more irony as a dietary supplement. I think that should be recognized in the article. EEng (talk) 05:26, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Ready?
Please provide a reliable sauce. Philafrenzy (talk) 10:00, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Other saucy humor

[28] (check out the edit summary).

Museum of tasteless proposals for ice-cream flavors

Since Ben & Jerry's is soliciting ideas for library-themed ice-cream flavors (such as "Gooey Decimal System" and "Sh-sh-sh-sherbet") my nomination may be seen at right.

A wise man once said...

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ("Wait for coins to drop, then make your selection").
Words in bold are for the assistance of the humor-impaired.

Proof that the ancient Romans foresaw the internet, Wikipedia, and the bane of WP autobios

Plutarch relates, that before this, upon some of Cato's friends expressing their surprise, that while many persons without merit or reputation had statues, he had none, he answered, "I had much rather it should be asked why the people have not erected a statue to Cato, than why they have."
— Encyclopaedia Britannica (1797)

Museum of Unlikely Library Subject Classifications

Baboons – Congresses
All from the same book:

Bacteriologists – Fiction.
Married people – Fiction.
Adultery – Fiction.
Cholera – Fiction.

Museum of dangerous editing tools

I was rather sad to see "removed Category:People who survived assassination attempts using AWB", in the edit summary here. Looks as if it would have been an interesting category.

—Mirokado (talk) 19:41, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Jonas added detailed material on an SS officer who blackmailed the mayor of Belgrade into surrendering by threatening to have the city bombed with an edit summary praising that officer.

—[29]

Museum of Bizarre Reversions

[Copied from User talk:EEng]

Edit summaries

As per WP:REVTALK, if you have something to say, use the talk page, don't try to prolong a (pointless) discussion by use of the summaries. - SchroCat (talk) 21:00, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Per COMMONSENSE, you're just too funny. I've never seen anyone revert a dummy edit before -- much less twice! [30] The important thing is that through collaborative editing the article is incrementally improved relative to its state when the sun came up this morning. EEng (talk) 21:11, 3 July 2014 (UTC) P.S. I'm making this the founding entry in the Museum of Bizarre Reversions on my userpage.

Godwin's Law boomerang

For those who are wondering, the following exchange regards these two edits -- the first a serious (and perfectly appropriate) one by Edokter, and the second a followup dummy edit I made riffing off his edit summary:

[31] Edit summary (Edokter): i and 1 are too alike

[32] Edit summary (EEng): (dummy edit) You're saying 1 and i are too?

I keep forgetting, however, about the small minority of WP editors with congenital humor impairment, and the even smaller minority who seem to want to spoil the fun for everyone else. I'm not sure, even now, if Herr Doktor gets the joke.

Please stop making dummy edits for messaging. These edits, as well as the ones required to clean up the added spacing, add unnecessary load to the servers and polute the history. Thank you. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:31, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Please stop dispensing hidebound, clueless scoldings. Your notion of what constitutes "load to the servers", and your idea that there's a "requirement" to "clean up" a single space added to a page as part of a dummy edit (as, unbelievably, you actually squandered server resources to do -- twice! [33][34]) are delusional. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Humor is a legitimate way of furthering the project by increasing the pleasure of (at least some of) those who edit here. If it doesn't tickle your personal funnybone, just ignore it. If, on the other hand, you don't even grasp the humor intended then there's a serious clue problem in play here. EEng (talk) 16:27, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Are you done? OK, so I missed the joke. That is no reason to repeat a nonsense edit. Edit summaries are not ment for messaging. And yes, stray spaces can cause disruption in diffs; that is why I remove them. And I resent being associated with nazis; that is personal attack! -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:59, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, you missed the joke. Three times. Even after your attention was called to it directly. Next time, before scolding an experienced editor with your nonsense about server load, think about whether it's you who's confused. Your continued fussing about an extra space at the end of a line shows that you have no grasp of technical issues at all.

I've restored the words Herr Doktor (in the phrase I'm not sure, even now, if Herr Doktor gets the joke) because otherwise people might think that I actually did compare you to a Nazi. It's beyond weird (paging Herr Doktor Freud!) that you seem to think that addressing you that way, after your dyspeptic lecture in direct contravention to well-known and accepted editing practice (see H:DUMMY#Methods), somehow does that.

Lighten up, smarten up, think more, scold less. EEng (talk) 19:38, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

I do not like any allusion to any German figure of authority! I can take a joke, but this truly offends me. I have made note of it on ANI. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:41, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

You equate all German authority figures to Nazis. Noted. EEng (talk) 22:04, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

[Not surprisingly, the OP's post at ANI (entitled "I put EEng on notice") didn't go as he planned [35]. No apology, no indication of any glimmer of understanding from this (yes) Wikipedia administrator.]

Museum of Overanxious Notifications

Apparently because I joked that statues should be measured in statute miles? [36] ...

Extended content

Discretionary sanctions notification - MOS

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding the English Wikipedia Manual of Style and article titles policy, a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.

Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.

This message is informational only and does not imply misconduct regarding your contributions to date.

Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 12:49, 9 October 2014 (UTC)Template:Z33

A rolling stone gathers no MOS

In the last 48 hr I've become aware of a simmering dispute over whether the text of MOS itself should be in American or British English. With any luck the participants will put that debate (let's call it Debate D1) on hold in order to begin Debate D2: consideration of the variety of English in which D1 should be conducted. Then, if there really is a God in Heaven, D1 and D2 will be the kernel around which will form an infinite regress of metadebates D3, D4, and so on -- a superdense accretion of pure abstraction eventually collapsing on itself to form a black hole of impenetrable disputation, wholly aloof from the mundane cares of practical application and from which no light, logic or reason can emerge.

That some editors will find themselves inexorably and irreversibly drawn into this abyss, mesmerized on their unending trip to nowhere by a kaleidoscope of linguistic scintillation reminiscent of the closing shots of 2001, is of course to be regretted. But they will know in their hearts that their sacrifice is for the greater good of Wikipedia. That won't be true, of course, but it would be cruel to disabuse them of that comforting fiction as we bid them farewell and send them on their way.^[2]

More MOSsy thoughts:

A. It is an axiom of mine that something belongs in MOS only if (as a necessary, but not sufficient test) either:

1. There is a manifest a priori need for project-wide consistency (e.g. "professional look" issues such as consistent typography, layout, etc. -- things which, if inconsistent, would be noticeably annoying, or confusing, to many readers); OR
2. Editor time has, and continues to be, spent litigating the same issue over and over on numerous articles, either

(a) with generally the same result (so we might as well just memorialize that result, and save all the future arguing), or
(b) with different results in different cases, but with reason to believe the differences are arbitrary, and not worth all the arguing -- a final decision on one arbitrary choice, though an intrusion on the general principle that decisions on each article should be made on the Talk page of that article, is worth making in light of the large amount of editor time saved.

B. There's a further reason that disputes on multiple articles should be a gating requirement for adding anything to MOS: without actual situations to discuss, the debate devolves into the "Well, suppose an article says this..."–type of hypothesizing -- no examples of which, quite possibly, will ever occur in the real life of real editing. An analogy: the US Supreme Court (like the highest courts of many nations) refuses to rule on an issue until multiple lower courts have ruled on that issue and been unable to agree. This not only reduces the highest court's workload, but helps ensure that the issue has been "thoroughly ventilated", from many points of view and in the context of a variety of fact situations, by the time the highest court takes it up. I think the same thinking should apply to any consideration of adding a provision to MOS.

My special research interest

I am the second author of Source "M8", and first author of Source "L", in this version of the article on Phineas Gage.

A proposed addition to the ANI toolbox

[37]

For want of a comma, the clause was lost...

aka...

Why every goddam thing needn't be micromanaged in a rule

From a discussion over whether MOS should require the final comma in constructions like --

On September 11, 2001, several planes ...

and even

On December 25, 2001 (which was Christmas Day), we all went ...

You treat punctuation marks like mathematical operators which organize words into nested structures of Russian-doll clauses and such, and they're nothing like that. Not everything has to be rigidly prescribed and no, I don't buy into the "OhButIfWeDon'tThereWillBeEndlessArgumentOnEachArticle" reasoning just because that might, sometimes happen.

All over Wikipedia there are years with comma following, and years with no comma following, and never have I seen two editors, both of whom are actually engaged on a particular article, in serious conflict over a particular instance of that question. The discussion might go, "Hmmm... I'd use a comma myself but if you prefer none... yeah, that looks OK too. Now about that source-reliability question we were discussing..." but that's about it.

Where I've seen actual trouble is when other editors -- who have shown (and will subsequently show) no active interest in the article itself -- arrive out of nowhere in their radar-equipped year-with-no-comma–detector vans, then break down the door to weld court-ordered ankle-bracelet commas onto some harmless 2001 whose only crime was appearing in public with his trailing digit exposed -- something which (these prudish enforcers of Victorian punct-morality seem never to understand) was considered perfectly acceptable in most cultures throughout human history.

(Did you know, for example, that in the ancient Olympic games, years and days competed completely naked, without even a comma between them? I'm not advocating that unhygienic extreme but a bit of exposed backside shouldn't shock anyone in this enlightened age. But I digress, so back to our narrative underway...)

Having rendered yet another noble service in defense of the homeland (as they like to tell themselves) they jump back into their black SUVs and scurry up their rappelling ropes to their double-rotor helicopters and fly off to their next target, never knowing or caring whether that particular article has, or has not, been improved by their visitation. Certainly all the breaking of the crockery and smashing of the furniture can't have helped, but order has been restored and choas beaten back, which is what's important.

During all this the neighbors cower in their homes with the lights out, glad that they are not the targets of these jackbooted comma-thugs -- at least not this time. "Look," they say to their children, "that's what happens if you don't obey the rules. You should love Big Brother MOS for his heroic dedication to relieving you of the burden of deciding anything for yourself."

But privately they're thinking, "CAN'T YOU JUST LEAVE US ALONE FOR ONCE -- GRANT US JUST A SHRED OF PERSONAL AUTONOMY, A TINY REMINDER OF THE TIME WHEN THERE EXISTED A FEW ZONES OF DISCRETION IN WHICH MEN WERE FREE TO WORK OUT WITH THEIR FELLOW-EDITORS WHETHER OR NOT TO APPLY A COMMA, ACCORDING TO THE DICTATES OF THEIR OWN CONSCIENCES? CAN YOU REALLY NOT SLEEP AT NIGHT, KNOWING THAT SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, EDITORS ARE DECIDING FOR THEMSELVES THE PLACEMENT OF COMMAS? MUST YOU DICTATE FUCKING EVERYTHING?"

As Hannah Arendt put is so well: "It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man's identity outside relationships with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the extreme situation of solitary confinement. By destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated..." Or as John Stuart Mill -- himself a great lover of commas, so you can't dismiss him as a bleeding-heart, comma-omitting permissive corruptor of young punctuators -- said... Oh, never mind.

You say

Punctuation is not some flighty thing that you use when it feels right or the mood takes you (otherwise the MOS would be redundant).

Yes, if we can't prescribe and control every detail of usage and punctuation societal decay sets in and soon there is immorality, open homosexuality, interracial marriage, and baby murder.. Or perhaps I've misunderstood you?

The opposite of rigid prescription of everything isn't "flightiness" on everything; the opposite of rigid prescription on everything is measured guidance appropriate to the point being discussed:

Rigid prescription where truly appropriate.
Clear direction where experience shows people often go wrong
Enumeration of alternatives where choices are available
Universal advice to use common sense no matter what

That last point, BTW, is one of the first thing MOS says. I'm quite aware that there's a MOS rule requiring comma-after-year. And I'm telling you that removing it, or changing it to a short mention that opinions differ on this, would go a long way toward repairing the disdain many editors have for those parts of MOS which ridiculously overreach and overprescribe, thereby preserving respect for its important provisions on things that really matter.