Dsprc

The Teahouse An area where friendly Wikipedians will answer your questions.

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The Wikipedia Adventure

Learn to contribute by taking an interstellar journey through Wikipedia! Full of real skills, tips, tools, tricks, helpers, sources, rewards, and support. Start the Adventure!

Getting Help

• Meta:Support and Safety

• Suicide.org - List of international suicide hotlines.

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• The Teahouse: helpful and friendly environment to ask your first basic questions about contributing to Wikipedia.
• Help:Cheatsheet: examples of basic formatting that are used most often when editing.
• Help: Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
• Expectations and norms of the Wikipedia community
• wmf:Policy:Universal Code of Conduct
  • "Encyclopedia Frown". Auerbach, David (11 Dec. 2014). Slate.
  • "Wikipedia Editors Call Out the Site's Abuse Problems". Reader, Ruth (18 May 2016). Mic.
  • "Wikipedia Editor Says Site’s Toxic Community Has Him Contemplating Suicide". Koebler, Jason (17 May 2016). Vice.
  • "Handful of 'highly toxic' Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse on the site". Annalee Newitz (10 February 2017). Ars Technica.
  • "Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly.". Julia Jacobs (8 April 2019). The New York Times.
  • "Wikimedia is writing new policies to fight Wikipedia harassment". Adi Robertson (25 May 2020). The Verge.
  • "I quit Twitter and discovered Wikipedia’s righteous, opinionated, utterly absorbing battles over The Truth". Shaun Cammack (8 July, 2022). The Boston Globe.
  • "The Wikipedia elite who control the world's knowledge". Harry de Quetteville (28 April 2023). The Daily Telegraph.
• Wikipedia:Simplified ruleset

• Wikipedia:Trifecta

• Ignore all rules

• Wikipedia:Help desk: for technical questions about using Wikipedia (how to edit, images, categories etc.)
• WP:Village pump: for questions about Wikipedia policies, guidelines or operations
• WP:Reference desk: for questions about subjects other than Wikipedia (including topics covered in the articles contained therein)

• WP:The Wikipedia Library

• WP:Administrators' noticeboard: to report a problem (vandalism, etc.)
• Question help: to find out more about where to ask questions or make comments on Wikipedia
• Help:Contents/Directory: all of the help pages. Everything.

• (except the Wikipedia:List of cabals because They™ don't want you to know! Bwahaha!) ;-D
• Or if you are looking for a department, but don't know what it is called, try the Wikipedia:Department directory.

• WP:Dispute resolution: resolve disputes or potential conflicts
• Wikipedia:Starting an article: guide and tips for creating new articles

• Wikipedia:List of bad article ideas

• Sixty ways to help new editors - Wikimedia Blog (from discussion @ Wikimania 2014)
• Help:Using the Wayback Machine: to recover some lost, moved or deleted pages on the Web (helpful for dead links).
• Wikipedia:User page design center

Spam

Wikipedia Signpost

Volume 20, Issue 16

• News and notes: Open letter to WMF about court case breaks one thousand signatures, big arb case declined, U4C begins accepting cases

• In the media: Summons issued for Wikipedia editors by Indian court, "Gaza genocide" RfC close in news, old admin Gwern now big AI guy, and a "spectrum of reluctance" over Australian place names

• Recent research: SPINACH: AI help for asking Wikidata "challenging real-world questions"

• News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Endowment audit reports: FY 2023–2024

• Traffic report: Well, let us share with you our knowledge, about the electoral college

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• outreach:GLAM/Newsletter

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• WikiProject Women in Red

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This week's article for improvement is: Wikipedia:Today's articles for improvement/2024/49/1

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Motto of the day :

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

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Tip of the day...

Dates in Wikipedia articles

Two date formats are commonly used in Wikipedia articles: December 2, 2009 and 2 December 2009. These are referred to as alphanumeric dates. The first is used in articles with a connection to the United States, and the second in articles relating to most Commonwealth countries (although no preference is expressed for Canada). In articles with no particular national affiliation, to prevent needless edit warring, the established date format should not be changed. However any given article should use just one of the two formats consistently. Dates that are all numeric are highly discouraged to avoid confusion, however if used must be in the YYYY-MM-DD format and never in YYYY-DD-MM format.

Prior tip – Tips library – Next tip

Read more:

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers  

Watchlist insufficient?:

• Wikipedia:Syndication
• MediaWiki API
  • Above have hard limit on number of entries provided & thus may require frequent polling
• m:User:Hedonil/XTools

Other stuff

• User:Zhaofeng Li/reFill — incredibly helpful tool which automates the task of filling-out text for bare URLs used as references

This bucket of bolts

• $ telnet telnet.wmflabs.org — telnet to Wikipedia. (m:telnet gateway) Telnet bridge is currently offline. :(
• Server Admin Log (wikitech.wikimedia.org)
• Current status Wikimedia Foundation - Core services (status.wikimedia.org)
• WMF Status Dashboards - perf mon (gdash.wikimedia.org)
• Wikitech (wikitech.wikimedia.org)
• Special:Version: shows the version of the software the site is currently running, and a listing of extensions installed
• Wikimedia Code Review (gerrit.wikimedia.org)
• Wikimedia Phabricator (phabricator.wikimedia.org)

Propaganda

This user is a participant in WikiProject Accessibility. WikiProject Women in Red (redlinks→blue) This user contributes using Slackware Linux. This user hacks happily with Emacs. This user is a licensed amateur radio operator. Dsprc runs NetBSD. This user plays Pokémon Blue. This user is on a Wikipedia Adventure Lisp(lambda (user)     (setf (lisp-p user) t)) This Yeti is a member of the Church of the SubGenius. Praise "Bob"! !@..This user slashes through the ASCII dungeons of Dungeon Crawl.

Quotations related to J. R. "Bob" Dobbs at Wikiquote

Works related to Anarchism at Wikisource

Media related to Mass Surveillance at Wikimedia Commons

• Internet censorship and surveillance by country
• 2013 mass surveillance disclosures
• Aftermath of the global surveillance disclosure
• Electronic Frontier Foundation

• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Free software
• Citizen Lab

Vidya

NOTE: If viewing on a Wikimedia mobile client in portrait-mode, one may need to swipe left to see all entries in table below.

Eben Moglen sketches the history of copyright law as a form of industrial regulation, and analyses how the changes in technology have thrown the roles created by those laws into crisis.

Yochai Benkler discusses the growth of user autonomy, the possibility to be makers of our culture rather than remain merely passive recipients, as was the norm in the industrial system of information production.

Trailer for Laura Poitras documentary Citizenfour. (view or download from Commons here)

Edward Snowden speaks about the NSA leaks, in Hong Kong. First published in The Guardian. (view or download from Commons here)

Edward Snowden & Daniel Kahn Gillmor discuss free software, surveillance, power, and control of the future. Preceded by address from John Sullivan, FSF executive director.(view or download from Commons here)

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive explains their operations and demonstrates Scribe Machines.

Committed identity: 6ab7ba21bae79d7d00d75913c20ef03216547831f05497cb39b24c29db7b581581bdf8071b5dc11887b7b98a348c7aaf194d0bee9003b980288c69a2ac8663a5 is a SHA-512 commitment to this user's real-life identity.