So from the outside I got good: I stuck it. Dead.

[reddragdiva]

• This Wikipedia article makes me lose the will to live.

• This article, however, has the best diagram ever.

Not quite sick, but definitely splatted. A fluffy grey kitten with a habit of sleeping on my chest is not the best thing for clear breathing. Having the energy of someone who doesn't, I've spent the day making trouble on Wikipedia.

I spent some time tracking a troll too stupid to know when to quit and preparing quite the report to send to SBC abuse, and given the nature of the abuse they might even listen.

Someone else appears to be vandalising Wikipedia with a zombie botnet; I am surprised and pleased that most people aren't even noticing the effect. (Wikipedia can slashdot Slashdot.)

Someone did a stupid Mediawiki trick involving a horrible hack to make conditional templates. We actually managed to lock the database for a second getting rid of the fucking things. The perpetrators, having failed to make faith-based computer science stick, then crowed about the DOS possibilities ... to Wikimedia's DBA. Well done. Someone else has written code to implement conditionals as Mediawiki builtins and it's in serious discussion on #mediawiki as I write this; I just hope this isn't enough to make wikitext Turing-complete, as that's the day someone implements Emacs, Towers of Hanoi and a virus in it and all die. O the embarrassment.

I am told that, when I finish my time as a nerdy Judge Dredd, there are people afraid that I am going to go the hack on the Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and rewrite and tighten them. When I heard this, I decided that anyone afraid of such a thing probably deserved it and that that would be my project for the next year, per WP:BEANS. Call it helping Wikipedia to make a point. The Manual of Style is a prime target: no-one reads the whole thing, and its only audience is (1) the anal trying to set down rules for everything (2) the querulous looking for a stick to beat their wiki adversaries with. Fuck 'em: it's mid-cull as we speak.

Also, We-Fix Tech shat itself today when root filled. I killed my rather crappy mirror of Wikipedia trying to free up space so I could, e.g., sudo. New host should be a bit less sucky — cheers to hawkeviper. Thankfully all the websites stayed up through it.

Comments

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I understood 23% of this post.

[reddragdiva]

Most of the people who would understand all of it heard me ranting about it on IRC.

[razorjak.livejournal.com]

regarding the first part ...

"Gotta catch 'em all - Gotta catch 'em all!"

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Fledgling Wikipedia PITA seeks guidance, not knowing what portion of the vast reams of documentation to obey:

There is an entry on a topic dear to my heart. There is an egregious error in it. Is proper protocol to...

a) edit it

b) contest it

c) rant and rave in my LJ

?

[reddragdiva]

Edit it with a reference, mention it on the talk page, and be sweetness and light in dealing with all manner of fuckwits. You've been on an abuse desk, you can handle mere wikifuckwits.

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

Anything other than write an op-ed piece in a broadsheet of your choice.

[shadowdaddy.livejournal.com]

I was going to point out earlier this weekend that Wikipedia had been mocked by Penny Arcade, as you may or may not have seen, which is either like being named part of the Axis ofo Evil or an honor akin to getting a thanked onstage at the Oscars, depending on your sense of humor. ;)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

People who have linked to that have split on whether he's mocking or praising it. I personally think he's a pinhead and have no interest in what he has to say, but i'm a notorious crank.

[reddragdiva]

He wrote an article based on his own fictional universe and it got deleted, and he got pissy.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Was he sent to Uncyclopedia instead?

[reddragdiva]

You should suggest it. THEN WE CAN DELETE IT THERE TOO!

[reddragdiva]

The comic is good, the rant is stupid. Kernel Panic did the deletion rant much better.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

It's interesting in that I find the cartoon very amusing, but I think the associated rant is rather stupid.

Anyhow, I note that He-Man has been editing his own entry again. Comments such as "most powerful man in the universe" and "incredible magical power", along with words like "evildoers", are clearly not NPOV. No wonder Skeletor got so upset by the entry...

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

is $3.50 a month for Cpanel based hosting really a valid business model?!?!

[reddragdiva]

Who cares? %-D We certainly don't pay! Except in sweat, like yesterday ...

[usufructer.livejournal.com]

WP:BEANS is most excellent, I hadn't run into it before.

So are you taking bets on when mediawiki markup is a programming language, or are you just going to put a mark on Vibber's life when it happens?

[reddragdiva]

I think if it ever comes to pass, he'll have died long before. "Is my body dead? No?"

[dcarson.livejournal.com]

I followed a link from that article and found the best wrongtitle template (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27M) EVAR!

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

the manual of style is a bible for anal edit wars.

[reddragdiva]

Precisely. snowspinner's been having a damn good hack at it, I shall be continuing.

Entropy increases...

[kraant.livejournal.com]

If you can recurse templates, even if only indirectly, I'd suspect that wikitext already is Turing-complete.

Re: Entropy increases...

[reddragdiva]

OH NOES

Re: Entropy increases...

[kraant.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing this means that you don't want me writing a lambda template?

Re: Entropy increases...

[reddragdiva]

AIEEEEEE