Quotations corner

... I've gotta say, a civil pig is still a fookin' pig ... My take is, there's no WP:consensus as to "civility" on en.WP and adding more bureaucracy to deal with it ain't gonna fly

— User:Gwen Gale

Wikipedia is a nasty place because of the wiki-legal really nasty stuff that does NOT get reigned in, i.e. misusing policies , guidelines and wiki-mechanisms to insult, impugn and conduct warfare. Wp:civility does not cover these and THAT is the problem.

— User:North8000

Wikipedia is full of rules and policies, and they are mostly used as weapons.

— User:Stanistani

We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. Don’t let them explore you until they’ve explored the secret universes of books. Don’t let them connect with you until they’ve walked between the lines on the pages.

— John Waters

I believe that somewhere there is a cat in a box that is both alive and dead, but if they don't open it soon and give it some food then it will just be two kinds of dead.

— Neil Gaiman, American Gods

The whole point of this project, ostensibly, is the creation and codification of knowledge. It's not a social club. It's not a place to champion your nationalistic views, or your racist theories, or your stupid conspiracies. Making an encyclopedia requires research, and wanting to learn, and doing it right.

— Elaragirl

It needs to be pointed out … that low level insults, like implying another editor is deceptive, are personal attacks far more toxic than "Fuck off, troll"

Let us not forget why we disambiguate - to avoid conflicts

— says the biggest move-warrior on Wikipedia since Willy On Wheels

Enablers of socks and vandals expect established editors to cower before them rather than standing up to them. Maybe that's the European way. It's not the American way, nor the way of much of the world.

— ANI's Grand Supreme Troll, adding a touch of xenophobia to his usual cluster of unfunny, unhelpful bollocks. America ... fuck yeah!!!

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Give a man Wikipedia and he gets a list of appearances of fish on Family Guy.

— Krimpet, Sept 2009

What we really need is something that encourages editors to see the big picture and discourages them from trying to enforce their own interpretations of ambiguous rules merely for the sake of 'proving' they are right, or of pushing the grey zone between the generally accepted interpretations a little bit in one direction.

— Hans Adler, on editors who seem born to recycle old arguments, old grudges.

There are 43,051 articles on the Recipe Wiki. The wiki for the Twilight series has 934 pages.

— An experienced editor, explaining why there are comparatively few female Wikipedia editors–they're only interested in cooking and sparkly vampires, apparently.

I know the internet is the stuff a paranoiac's dreams are made of. I know it parcels up everything—Lee Harvey Oswald, Princess Diana, Al-Quaeda, Israel, MI6, crop circles—and with pretty blue ribbons of hyperlinks it ties them into a single grand conspiracy ...

— Robert Harris, The Ghost

...this is an encyclopedia, not a social networking site, so being "nice" should take a back seat to developing articles. On the other hand, this is a collaboration and anyone who can't cooperate with other people gets in the way of article development ...

— Atama, musing about civility

... I interfere in discussions ... and occasionally offer my worthless opinions to those who neither request nor appreciate them.

— Craftyminion, summing up the consensus-building process

Your cut-and-paste of policy is delightful, but your grasp of it seems lacking.

— User:TAnthony, waxing concisely elegant

My rationale for blocking is "you need to get your finger out of your arse and stop fucking around if you want to edit this encyclopedia."

— A Admin™, refreshingly avoiding the softly-softly approach

all the interesting stuff is taken out of Wikipedia ... I started over four years ago, and we made so much progress in those early days, but alas, things went sour, and we keep loosing^sic more ground, and more great editors are driven away, and no matter how many articles we save far more are destroyed ...

— an editor, implying that in a few years there will only be one article left in Wikipedia — and it will be a boring one

So be it, that a man of honor and a man of God ... can be called a liar (diretly or indirectly), and the insolent person doing so shall not be called to justice.

— A Wikipedia editor, claiming special dispensation for self-described honourable holy men (who are presumably uniquely qualified to detect insolence in others)

We aren't the Britannica. Wikipedia's articles are mostly popular culture.

— A Wikipedia editor, defining his own (personal) sixth pillar

I believe very strongly that users of Wikipedia coming to it the first time will perform 2-3 searches, if we are lucky, and will base their impressions of the site on those results. If those 2-3 searches yield nothing, it's bad, but if those searches yield junk, argumentation, inaccuracies, or blips of non-information, it's even worse. We are all aware that reference works have limits. If I do not find "polyphiloprogenitive" in an online dictionary, I know that there might just be a hole in that dictionary. On the other hand, imagine what reaction I would have if I did find it, and it said, "A word used in a poem." What would your reaction be? What if I found, "A new web company based in Tonga with cool products!" or "#redirect Words no one uses" or "A word often heard from Lord Viperskorpion on tel3D00dies?"

— Geogre, "When nothing is better than something"

Until we have AI, we need to use ours

— DGG, discussing how to use teh Google intelligently

I'm not too bright and all, but all of that editing you do on that page sure looks like editing

— Bali ultimate, assessing the level of involvement of an "uninvolved editor"

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