A large, diverse, and thriving group of volunteers produces encyclopedia articles and administers Wikipedia. Over time, members of the Wikipedia community have developed conventions for interacting with each other, processes for managing content, and policies for minimizing disruptions and maximizing useful work.
In this chapter, we'll discuss where to find other contributors and how to ask for help with any topic. We'll also explain ways in which community members interact with each other. Though most discussion occurs on talk pages, Wikipedia has some central community forums for debate about the site's larger policies and more specific issues. We'll also talk about the make-up of the community. First, however, we'll outline aspects of Wikipedia's shared culture, from key philosophies about how contributors should interact with each other to some long-running points of debate to some friendly practices that have arisen over time. Although explicit site policies cover content guidelines and social norms, informal philosophies and practices help keep the Wikipedia community of contributors together.
Wikipedia's community has grown spontaneously and organically—a recipe for a baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references. But core tenets of the wiki way, like Assume Good Faith and Please Don't Bite the Newcomers, have been with the community since the beginning.
Wikipedians try to treat new editors well. Assume Good Faith (AGF) is a fundamental philosophy, as well as an official guideline (shortcut WP:AGF) on Wikipedia. It can be summarized as: Unless you have strong evidence to the contrary, you should always assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it.
Assuming good faith means that if someone doesn't seem to be following policy, assume that he or she simply made a mistake rather than deliberately disrupted the encyclopedia; always give an editor the benefit of the doubt. The assumption that everyone involved simply wants to make the encyclopedia better leads to more constructive debates and helps foster harmony on the site. As part of this attitude, a user's reputation on another Web forum or project should not be used against him or her.
Assume Good Faith is a good place to begin, but practicing it can be difficult. If an editor starts by apparently creating an article about him- or herself or his or her company, assuming this editor is primarily interested in general encyclopedia work is difficult; a tension exists between Assume Good Faith and Conflict of Interest. If an account is single purpose—that is, the editor only makes partisan edits in a small topic area—then assuming good faith is harder because promotional and activist editing is unwelcome. Vandalism is a fairly clear demonstration of bad faith and will usually result in short blocks. What Assume Good Faith means, however, is that you should first try to figure out an editor's intentions by engaging in discussion and informing him or her about policies. A single-purpose or disruptive editor might always broaden his or her contributions to the project.
Please Don't Bite the Newcomers is the name of another guideline (shortcut WP:BITE) that focuses on the importance of being welcoming to newcomers. Obviously this guideline is compatible with Assume Good Faith. It encourages you to be gentle with newbies if you see them making mistakes. Encourage newcomers—you want them to keep contributing—and teach them about Wikipedia. We were all new once! A new editor's ignorance of some policy details is not surprising—what would be surprising would be to find someone new who has already mastered them all.
Wikipedia has some friendly customs. One of these is welcoming new editors on their talk page. Simply saying, "Hello, good work!" when you notice a helpful edit from a new contributor is encouraging. Many welcomers leave a more involved initial message, with links to help pages and more information about Wikipedia. The {{welcome}} template, if left on a talk page, is one example of such a message; editors may also code their own welcome messages, as we did in Chapter 9. A personal greeting is irreplaceable. A welcoming committee works on coordinating messages for new editors, but everyone can help out with this task; see [[Wikipedia:Welcoming committee]] (shortcut WP:WC) for more.
Informal mentoring of new users happens all the time, but a formal mentoring program also exists, known as [[Wikipedia:Adopt-a-User]] (shortcut WP:ADOPT), involving hundreds of Wikipedians. To adopt a new user, you need an edit count of 500; to sign up for adoption, simply follow the directions on that page.
Wikipedians are also in the habit of giving each other awards for work well done. The original and most popular award is the Barnstar (Figure 12-1). The barnstar is a template you can add to any editor's user talk page if you feel he or she deserves the award; Wikipedia has many variations on this award, such as the Anti-Vandalism Barnstar, The Tireless Contributor Barnstar, or The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar. See [[Wikipedia:Barnstars]] (shortcut WP:BARN).
You can see other awards at [[Wikipedia:A nice cup of tea and a sit down]] (shortcut WP:TEA). In fact [[Wikipedia:Other awards]] runs to wiffle bats, a Zen garden (for Infinite Patience), a medal for Janitorial Services, and the Exceptional Newcomer Award. (Charles has also been given virtual jellybeans and a virtual bicycle as well as a Random Chocolate Chip Smiley—a cross between a cookie and a smiley face.)
Other aspects of recognition and motivation are not quite as well established. WikiMoney was a system of incentives operational in 2003–2004, but this system has fallen into disuse. Article writing competitions, such as [[Wikipedia:The Core Contest]], are sometimes held.
People come and go on Wikipedia all the time. As many as 10,000 new accounts are created every day, and over 7 million accounts have been registered. These numbers are a little misleading, however, since most accounts remain unused or are hardly used at all to edit. But this freedom to join up and participate casually helps ensure that Wikipedia is an open community. Now open editing is not quite the same as easy editing, even with a friendly wikitext editing system. Wikipedia itself has become much more complex, as a first encounter might convince you. And yet, beneath all the technical, social, and administrative complications that editors can sometimes run into, the site's radical and open nature is still recognizable.
Compared to other online communities, Wikipedia is unusual. Conventional wisdom holds that online communities tend to grow to a certain natural scale. They wax and wane, with people being closely involved for perhaps six months. They attract a nomadic populace, aside from a few hardcore supporters, and leave memories rather than marks. Wikipedia is an example that contradicts each one of these statements. It has grown much beyond village scale, and many people have been involved for years.
The drive to keep the community as open as possible (anyone online can edit) has shaped the whole debate about how Wikipedia should be operated. The 2001 statement [[User:Jimbo Wales/Statement of principles]], now perhaps rarely read, put forth eight points about the community and the project. The first three are:
Wikipedia's success to date is entirely a function of our open community.
Newcomers are always to be welcomed.
"You can edit this page right now" is a core guiding check on everything that we do.
Seven years later, this manifesto has largely been delivered. The autoconfirm restrictions introduced in late 2005 and described in "Registering an Account" on On Arrival have been the only big restrictions on accounts.
These principles have many continuing implications. For instance, although many people over the years have suggested restricting editing to registered users, this is still unlikely to happen. (What may happen instead is a version of stable versions, where some edited versions will only go live after review; this technical development is still being debated.)
You might not completely believe it, especially if you've had an early encounter with an administrator, but Wikipedia's security system—the measures taken to protect the site—mostly stays in the background. Wikipedia's security is soft, meaning security is largely reactionary. Bad contributions cannot be completely excluded from the site, so those cleaning up afterward rely instead on checking contributions and reverting bad changes.
One of the paradoxes of Wikipedia is that this system seems like it could never work. In a completely open system run by volunteers, why aren't more limits required? One answer is that Wikipedia uses the principle of soft security in the broadest way. Security is guided by the community, rather than by restricting community actions ahead of time. Everyone active on the site is responsible for security and quality. You, your watchlist, and your alertness to strange actions and odd defects in articles are part of the security system.
All of these core community principles rely in practice on editors making an effort to communicate with one another. Wikipedia has multiple channels for communication and more forums than any one person can sensibly track. Here we'll guide you through some of the complexities of where and how you can communicate with other editors to draw attention to a problem, get feedback, ask a question, or even just chat socially.
Wikipedia has several types of pages where editors communicate with one another:
Article talk pages for discussing article content
User talk pages for leaving another contributor personal messages
Project page and policy page talk pages, where individual policies or processes are discussed
Project-wide forums for discussing Wikipedia, asking questions, or offering general proposals
Noticeboards for raising alerts to problems or items of interest about a particular topic
Process pages for getting feedback or taking polls on a particular kind of issue (such as deletion debates)
Outside of Wikipedia itself, or off-wiki, discussions happen on IRC, via email lists, on the Meta site (described in Chapter 17), and during in-person meetups. Many Wikipedians also blog, adding to the hundreds of outside media stories that are published about Wikipedia every year. This is a big, ongoing conversation, and any contributor can join it at any time.
Faced with this full range of possibilities, the best thing is not to be daunted but to reach out steadily. Chat with those you have some contact with on the site. Don't jump from "steady" to "spam": Pasting similar messages to many pages at once is discouraged. Stay generally on-topic, maintain a pleasant and respectful tone, and assume good faith.
Talk pages for articles, introduced in Chapters Chapter 4 and Chapter 6, and user talk pages, introduced in Chapter 11, are the primary way that editors connect with one another. Talk page conventions have been developed over time; in other words, Wikipedia has plenty of experience with discussions, helpful and otherwise. When you are writing on a talk page, certain approaches are counterproductive, whereas others make for good editing and create a friendly atmosphere. Staying on topic is important. While on Wikipedia, you are addressing a sophisticated audience that appreciates focus and relevance. At all times, ask yourself whether your contributions are making the encyclopedia better (before you click Save, rather than after). If they're not, it might be time to take a break.
Note
Staying with these conventions in all types of discussions and debates, whether on talk pages or other forums, is a good idea. Remember that your Wikipedian persona is something you construct largely through communicating with others.
Notice the general structure of an article talk page (Figure 12-2). Templates and messages appear right at the top. Also somewhere near the top you'll find a list of any archives. Very long talk pages are archived as subpages of the original page (usually divided by date); ongoing, live discussions should not be archived. Then you'll find a list of discussion topics by section. These sections are not normally divided up into subsections; instead, each discussion within the section is threaded, as shown in "Reading and Contributing to Talk Pages" on Reading and Contributing to Talk Pages. Older topics are higher on the page, and new topics should be started with new sections at the bottom of the talk page. For existing topics, the order of postings within the threaded discussion should be chronological, and you should normally join an existing discussion by adding your comment or reply at the bottom of the section.
The prime values of talk pages are the three Cs: communicativeness, civility, and considered answers. These principles, after all, are likely what you yourself hope for in discussions. Be wary of the most contentious topics, such as religion and politics, where conversations are likely to be complex. For these topics, review past discussions and get a feel for the tone before joining the discussion. For most articles you can simply start participating.
Now for some detailed advice.
After a while you may conclude that the editor is a time-waster, someone who knows little about the subject, or an autodidact who has book knowledge but is mightily confused. Or worse: You might be dealing with a true crank, a malicious user (vandal), or a provocateur (troll)—and he or she may have more time on his or her hands than you do. The basic tips are to keep cool and be polite; don't outwardly assume bad faith, but do become more guarded; taper off your responses, and don't get dragged into escalating futile, repetitive debates.
To round off this discussion: At worst, the three Cs may have to turn into the three Ps—politeness, patience, and policy. Policy matters especially when dealing with hostility and aggressive, biased editing. Learn the appropriate policies and guidelines in sufficient detail, so you can fend off bad behavior without being drawn in yourself.
Having everybody vote on everything is cluelessocracy. (User:Eclecticology, April 10, 2007, wiki-en mailing list)
Wikipedia is not a democracy, though calling it undemocratic would also be rather misleading. Compared to many other online projects, Wikipedia has few majority votes, but instead uses discussions on talk pages and project pages to gather participant consensus. (Though the scale of Wikipedia seems to justify a move to representative democracy rather than direct one-person one-vote polling, this is not happening at all—individual participants are still expected to weigh in.)
The structure at [[Wikipedia:Requests for comment]] (shortcut WP:RfC) is typical. In Wikipedia terms, an RfC is a tightly defined but open forum discussion, addressing an issue in one of three areas: content, editor behavior, or policy. Other editors are invited to contribute to the discussion and offer their opinions on the right solution. In addition to being used on RfCs, polling occurs commonly during deletion debates and administrator promotion discussions.
These polls are not simple votes, however. In almost all discussions on Wikipedia, the reasoning behind each comment is taken into more consideration than the number of people indicating support for a particular position. To add to any discussion, support your comment with public facts. Suppose you participate in a debate on a binary decision: yes/no or keep/delete. Don't simply say, "I like it/hate it," but instead offer a reasoned opinion as to why you feel the way you do. Indicate clearly what site policies and other factors inform your opinion to arrive at your conclusions; if you agree with something already said by another contributor, make that clear.
Here's a full comment, logged in a deletion debate for a highly controversial article, [[Allegations of state terrorism committed by the United States]]. The debate here is whether to keep the article or delete it, and the comment is from someone who thinks the article should be kept:
Strong Keep - what has changed since the six previous Afds? Well, take a good look and you will find that the references are now vastly improved, and the content has been significantly expanded upon and improved since the last afd. The content references what is now a considerable body of academic and human rights literature consisting of either references to descriptions of U.S. state terrorism or in-depth examinations supporting the hypothesis. See the references section which includes contributions from professors from Yale, Princeton, MIT, Columbia and Hong Kong University, among others. If you require more evidence that this is a serious scholarly concern, constituting a significant alternative discourse, albeit not representative of the mainstream, then I would be happy to provide a long long long list of academic references. BernardL (talk) 00:13, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
Not everyone contributes at such length, naturally. But notice how the comment focuses, quite properly, on reliable referencing as a way to support notability and verifiability. The framework the commenter uses is basic content policy, not the topic the article discusses, and the points made are targeted, correctly, toward the existing material available to support such an article.
The Village Pump ([[Wikipedia:Village pump]], shortcut WP:PUMP) is the primary community discussion place on Wikipedia—water cooler and town meeting rolled into one. The postings are divided up into five sections: Policy, Technical, Proposals, Assistance, and Miscellaneous. Active discussion threads take place here; you'll also find pointers to pages such as [[Wikipedia:Department directory]] (shortcut WP:DEPT), which offers you a view of Wikipedia by Department.
The Community Portal is another entry point into the social life of Wikipedia. Found at [[Wikipedia:Community Portal]], it offers a Community Bulletin Board for announcements. This offers a different way to interface with Wikipedia activity; for example, it links directly to [[Template:RFCsci list]], an updated list of discussions on science articles that asks for community input (in other words, yours). This is a place to post new proposals, requests for help with a topic, and new project announcements.
Further discussion is widely distributed, attached to project talk pages in the Wikipedia Talk namespace and on talk pages (for instance, those for particular templates or categories). Forums about aspects of site management that are not dedicated to particular processes are, by custom, called noticeboards; the best known is the Administrators' noticeboard at [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard]] (shortcut WP:AN). You can post notices there about problems that administrators can help out with.
How do you get help? Here are a few pointers on where to ask questions or raise concerns.
First, go to the Help desk ([[Wikipedia:Help desk]], shortcut WP:HD), the perfect place to ask questions about using Wikipedia. The Help desk deals with a few dozen queries daily—anyone who is knowledgeable about the site can help out. You will need to check back to see if your question has been answered.
You might also find Wikipedia's Frequently Asked Questions page helpful; see [[Wikipedia:FAQ]] (shortcut WP:FAQ). You'll also find other helpful links there, for example, a link to a basic tutorial.
Wikipedia also has a Reference desk ([[Wikipedia:Reference desk]], shortcut WP:RD). This, as the name indicates, functions like a library reference desk. Here you can pose factual questions about any topic, and Wikipedians will try to respond. The service is broken down by broad subject area; for example, the Humanities desk answers about ten questions a day. Again, anyone can help out, and if you are knowledgeable about a topic, feel free to answer a question.
Finally, Wikipedia has a central page, [[Wikipedia:Questions]] (shortcut WP:Q), that links to these pages and a number of others dedicated to fielding questions. For example, from here you can link to [[Help:Contents]], which is the central portal for help pages and documentation.
Note
You can read about some of the unusual requests that have been made over the years at [[Wikipedia:Unusual requests]].
If you have a problem, rather than a question, consider starting at [[Wikipedia:Problems FAQ]]. Is your problem with reading or editing Wikipedia pages? [[Wikipedia:Troubleshooting]] may help. These pages deal with technical issues.
For problems in specific areas, Wikipedia has some specialized places where you can seek help. If your copyright has been infringed by something posted to Wikipedia, [[Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/Copyright]] lists your options. To make a formal complaint, go to [[Wikipedia:Designated agent]]. If you consider that a biography or other article on Wikipedia defames you, go to [[Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard]], where you can leave a comment for editors who will work to resolve the problem, and/or [[Wikipedia:Libel]], which has an email contact address.
For other content-related problems, join the discussion on the article's talk page, and contribute to the debate in a reasonable, non-adversarial tone. You have a perfect right to be there, but remember others will also have their own views.
Problems with another editor? Leave a civil note on his or her user talk page. In cases where the problem escalates, you can try the Administrators' noticeboard and chose the link that best fits the problem, like vandalism or page protection requests.
If you've been blocked, in particular, you should note that Wikipedia will think of the situation in terms of a block review, also called appealing a block, rather than being a problem about Wikipedia itself. Go to http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/unblock-en-l for unblock discussions if you feel that you've been incorrectly or unreasonably blocked by an administrator. You'll find more details on what to do (and what not to do, more importantly) in Chapter 14.
For more complex issues, or if you're uncertain whether what you've encountered is okay, you can post a comment on [[Wikipedia:Village pump (assistance)]] (shortcut WP:VPA), which is a general forum in which to ask for help. You can also use a mailing list or IRC channel, as described in "Mailing Lists and Internet Relay Chat" on Mailing Lists and Internet Relay Chat. Try to find a list or channel that matches the issue.
You may want to find out what is currently happening on Wikipedia. [[Category:Wikipedia news]] is your first source for Wikipedia pages with news content. For example [[Wikipedia:Announcements]] (shortcut WP:ANN) deals with milestones and Foundation matters.
Wikipedia has a few projects that bring a broader spectrum of news to the community. One of the established news services on the English-language Wikipedia is the Wikipedia Signpost (Figure 12-3). The Signpost is a weekly newsletter produced on-site at [[Wikipedia:Signpost]] (shortcut WP:POST).
Since 2005, the Signpost has carried stories of interest to the Wikipedia community. You can view all of the archives; this is a quick way to catch up on Wikipedia history. Each newsletter contains a few recurring sections, such as a review of that week's technical developments and a quick summary of current arbitration cases. The newsletter was started by User:Michael Snow and is now edited by User:Ral315, with contributions from a wide variety of editors. Anyone can participate by editing at WP:POST/TIPS, where you can also learn how to document media coverage of Wikipedia.
WikiProject WikipediaWeekly (shortcut WP:WEEKLY), active since late 2006, concentrates on producing a podcast about Wikipedia. As is also the case for the Signpost, you can have WikipediaWeekly delivered to your user page or user talk page. If you like RSS feeds, the Weekly has one. An alternative is the aptly named NotTheWikipediaWeekly ([[Wikipedia:NotTheWikipediaWeekly]]), which also produces a podcast show about Wikipedia.
Another such project is Wikizine, started in 2006 and edited by user:Walter from the Dutch and English-language Wikipedias. This newsletter is delivered by email to subscribers. It covers news about international projects and community, with a focus on technical issues and Foundation-level discussion. Sign up or read the current issue at http://en.wikizine.org/.
A wide variety of mailing lists are used to discuss Wikipedia projects. The wiki-en list, which is for general discussion about the English-language Wikipedia, is a very high-traffic list; if you have a specific query, a more specialized forum on-wiki is probably more appropriate. See [[Wikipedia:Mailing lists]] (shortcut WP:MAIL) for more complete information; the lists are generally archived in several places. Lists are typically lightly moderated and publicly archived, so anything you say on them will be accessible through an Internet search.
Wikipedia also uses a number of IRC channels. Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, is a type of real-time Internet chat, designed for group communication but also allowing for one-on-one chats or private messaging. To access IRC, you need an IRC client. These programs are available for virtually every PC platform. The Chatzilla client for the Mozilla Firefox browser, which runs as a browser extension and does not require additional software, is easy to use and install. [25]
See [[Wikipedia:IRC channels]] (shortcut WP:IRC) for more technical information, a complete list of Wikipedia-related channels, and a link to those classified under Wikimedia. The Wikimedia projects use the Freenode network, which is a network specifically for open-source projects.
The channels most relevant to the English-language Wikipedia include:
#wikipedia, the general Wikipedia discussion channel, is notoriously nearly always off-topic. This is a decent place to socialize but not for the faint of heart.
#wikipedia-en has fewer people and is more focused on the English-language Wikipedia.
#wikipedia-en-help is a help channel.
#wikimedia discusses issues related to the Wikimedia Foundation as a whole.
All it takes to have an offline meetup is to announce it on the wiki and then get a group of local editors together for coffee, drinks, or a meal. The first meetup was in London in 2004 when Jimmy Wales and an international group of editors got together for the afternoon. Remarkably, apart from Larry Sanger, Wales had not met any editors who worked on the site in person during the first three-and-a-half years of its existence. A true child of the Internet era, Wikipedia had been put together almost entirely by people who only knew each other through mailing lists, wiki talk pages, and IRC.
Since 2004, however, hundreds of meetups in dozens of cities from Shanghai to Seattle have taken place. They are usually informal but have ranged in format from picnics in New York's Central Park to formal talks. Meetups are a great way to meet other dedicated wiki editors in a personable forum.
The Meetups page (shortcut WP:MEET) lists current and past meetups; if one doesn't already exist in your area, you can create a subpage for your city from the Meetups page and then recruit others in your area by leaving notes on their user talk pages. Browsing [[Category:Wikipedians by location]] and its subcategories will help you find people who self-identify as being in a particular area. Jimmy Wales has continued to travel to meet Wikipedians; a documentary film, Truth In Numbers: The Wikipedia Story, will be released in 2009 and includes footage of his travels.
The first annual Wikimedia Foundation conference, called Wikimania, was organized by volunteers from several Wikimedia projects and held in 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany. This was a major international event, attracting over 300 people from over 50 countries, with a great deal of press coverage. Frankfurt set a trend, featuring research papers about wikis and Wikimedia projects, reports from various communities about the success of the different sister projects, and proposals and community discussions about future work.
Wikimania is now established as an annual event (Figure 12-4 shows the conference logo). Wikimania 2006 was held on the Harvard Law School campus, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. In 2007, the conference was in Taipei, Taiwan, where the local community hosted the conference at a youth center; both conferences again attracted hundreds of people from all around the world.
These conferences (2008 in Alexandria, Egypt, at the New Library of Alexandria and 2009 in Buenos Aires), like most things Wikimedia, are organized by a team of volunteers from all around the world. Local communities bid for the opportunity to host the conference, submitting a proposal including location and possible sponsorship to a Foundation-based judging team. Most of the organization work takes place online, on IRC and special wiki pages on the Meta site, and combines efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation and local volunteers who lead the planning process.
Search for wikiphilosophy and you'll get a couple hundred hits from individual users who have written about their personal Wikipedia approaches. Topics include how to work collaboratively on a wiki, how to work productively on Wikipedia, and why you should contribute. Some of these philosophies, like Assume Good Faith, have grown to become guidelines and core parts of the culture; others, like inclusionism versus deletionism, have become long-standing philosophical debates.
The most contentious issues on Wikipedia, in the longer term, have turned out to relate to content policy. This is fortunate because debating the principles of encyclopedic content relates directly to the site's mission. We have already seen two major aspects of this debate: Academic authority and the status of mainstream science was covered in Chapter 2, and conflict of interest in the deletion debate around [[Mzoli's Meats]] was discussed in Chapter 10. Although the core content policies have not been expanded by new major principles, avid discussion continues about how to apply those principles to individual articles, with debates that sometimes get picked up by the media. [26]
The debate on what articles should be included has proved to be one of the most basic and long-standing debates. Inclusionism is the philosophy that as much of the material submitted to the site should be kept as possible. The basic inclusionist position is this: Wikipedia is not paper, which implies that Wikipedia can afford to keep articles, even if, in their current state, they need to be improved or verified, so editors should strive to help the site grow as large as possible. The opposition to the inclusionists are labeled the deletionists, and they feel that an article should be in reasonable shape and about a clearly notable topic before being included; questionable material should be deleted more rigorously. Both sides agree, of course, that some new articles and content will need to be deleted; the question is over which articles and under what circumstances. As Chapter 7 showed, some deletion debates prove controversial, especially for new terms or ideas.
Closely related is a methodological question—eventualism versus immediatism. Eventualism, the idea that things will eventually improve if you leave them around long enough, seems most to encapsulate the wiki spirit, where things are done as people get around to doing them. Many have argued that this approach needs to be modified for certain topics, however, such as for biographies of living people, where any needed action should be regarded as urgent and carried out immediately as an ethical matter.
The debate between inclusionism and deletionism and eventualism and immediatism has flared up many times over the years in various forms. The debate has implications not only for what Wikipedia contains but also for how that content is created and worked on. Initially, the debate presented itself as the way in which Wikipedia differentiated itself from the older wiki tradition. Whereas wikis in general simply gathered opinions, Wikipedia aimed to build a factual reference resource, using notions of what was and wasn't encyclopedic. The concept of Verifiability became increasingly important, first as a criterion and then as a policy, and the community now accepts that unverifiable material may be deleted.
Attention then shifted for some years to the implications of Verifiability, such as the debate over the guideline on Reliable sources. Over time, the middle way of eventualism has won this debate, at least in practice—articles always need to be cleaned up, and deleting material that really cannot be verified is simply one aspect of the push for quality.
In 2007, attention turned back to deletionism because the net growth of articles seemed to have peaked (though outsiders were increasingly using Wikipedia for promotional ends by writing about themselves and their ventures). Although deletionism favors clear and relatively rigorous standards for accepting new articles, which are increasingly being adopted, inclusionism and the view that new articles should be given a chance have also continued to be major forces. Regardless, the inclusionist view that all processes are supposed to operate case by case rather than determining whether broad topic areas should be included continues to prevail, though this view is subject to great debate, especially in areas of popular culture.
Endless variants and positions have claimed the middle ground. See [[Category:Wikipedians by Wikipedia philosophy]] with around 30 such classes. Wikipedia has some significant hybrid positions, too. For instance, the eventualist-deletionist position is that deleting articles that really don't improve over time is not a great loss, and if a startup company or new idea prospers, an article on it will be accepted in due course. The immediatist-inclusionist position is that Wikipedia's coverage suffers if an article on a new topic is deleted when it didn't have to be. [27] As Wikipedia now tries to be both a reference site and a go-to place for current new information, the debate will continue.
Silliness, bad jokes, and shared humor have a place in Wikipedia culture. You'll find (allegedly) humorous material on many project pages, and some of these memes spill over into supposedly serious debates.
[[Category:Wikipedia humor]] (shortcut WP:HUMOR) is a collection of some of these funny ha-ha pages. The template {{humor}} is also used on funny project pages, so you can use the backlink trick of seeing what links to [[Template:Humor]] to find more pages, dating from all eras of Wikipedia's history. Many humorous project pages poke fun at Wikipedians going overboard. For instance, the collection of "Lamest edit wars" (shortcut WP:LAME) commemorates the epic battles that have occurred over what are often tiny details. Though humorous, this page also serves as an excellent introduction to Wikipedia history, cultural references, and the kinds of details that may provoke controversies.
Two of the classic funny memes are BJAODN, meaning "Bad Jokes & Other Deleted Nonsense," a collection of humorous vandalism that was finally deleted with much controversy in 2007 (and is now memorialized at WP:SILLY), and TINC. TINC stands for There Is No Cabal—a long-running joke carried over from UseNet culture. The joke really is on those who believe a secretive, small, dedicated group controls Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a diverse enough place that if a joke relies on a shared cultural reference or technical specialty, the witticism may fall flat. Most slang phrases and Internet dialects will confuse somebody. Many contributors are not native English speakers, and certainly, even among those who are, not everyone shares a similar background.
Irony, sarcasm, and deadpan humor are especially difficult to convey online and can cause offense. Although adding a smiley face can help people see that you're joking, you may want to consider how funny the joke really is if you have to flag humor with emoticons to get it across. By the same token, though, if you're confused by something that seems preposterous, ask yourself whether the other person is making a joke before getting indignant. The point of using humor is always to make working together more fun. The [[Wikipedia:Department of fun]] is a long-running Wikiproject to help do just that.
Other fun poked at Wikipedia from outside sources, including Stephen Colbert's not unfriendly joshing, can be tracked at [[Wikipedia in culture]], which also includes additional pop culture references to Wikipedia.
Although avowedly humorous material should only be found in the project namespaces, some articles are funny and factual: [[Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel]], for example, was the assumed name of a political candidate in a United Kingdom district election in 1981; he was registered with the [[Official Monster Raving Loony Party]]. Wikipedia has a collection of some of these more oddball (nay, eccentric) articles at [[Wikipedia:Unusual articles]] (shortcut WP:ODD).
The classic odd Wikipedia article is [[Exploding whale]]. Also check out [[Undecimber]], the thirteenth month of the year; [[ETAOIN SHRDLU]]; [[colors of noise]]; and many others. A few such articles are selected every year to appear on the main page for April Fool's Day. This is a carefully weighted joke, at the expense of those who assume Wikipedia would deliberately hoax them.
[25] If you already have Firefox, you can download and install Chatzilla at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16.
[26] For instance, novelist Nicholson Baker has come out as an inclusionist, interested in trying to save from deletion an article about an individual notable for his face turning blue from drinking colloidal silver. See "How I Fell in Love with Wikipedia," in The Guardian, April 10, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet.
[27] This was argued convincingly by Andrew Lih, a journalist and Wikipedian, who focused on the case of Pownce, an Internet startup whose article was deleted. See "Wikipedia: an Online Encyclopedia Torn Apart," in the Daily Telegraph, October 11, 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/10/11/dlwiki11.xml, which overstates Lih's position; see http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2007/10/10/telegraph-uk-on-wikipedia-inclusionismdeletionism/ for Lih's further comments.