User:Anarchangel



Flag of the Second Spanish Republic and its communist-anarchist-socialist coalition during the Spanish Civil War, 1936

 The hopefully more complete than necessary guide to extracting useful information from Wikipedia to use here 

''Gibbs: Look alive and keep a weather eye. Not for naught it's called Shipwreck Island, where lies Shipwreck Cove and the town of Shipwreck!" Sparrow":For all that we pirates are clever clogs, we are an unimaginative lot when it comes to naming things I once sailed wif' a geezer lost both of his arms, and part of 'is eye" Gibbs: "what'd you call him?" Sparrow: "Larry" - Jack Sparrow and Joshamee Gibbs, Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End, YouTube

"notability is the difference between declaring to everyone that you have a new nickname, and everyone giving you a nickname. Puerile as that distinction is, it is one of the pillars of WP, the somewhat exclusive social network that anyone can edit. -Anarchangel 17:14, 27 December 2010

Wikipedia relies on the concept of notability to define worthiness of inclusion. They mistakenly believe that this sidestepping of the notion of truth makes their rule unequivocal and objective, whereas it merely replaces one subjective judgement with another, less-well-understood one, so that no one really knows what is notable and what is not, exactly, and so they never question why such an obviously subjective rule is being used. So do not bother with notability. Citations are nice, use them, but do not feel hampered by a requirement to use them to state what is truth as you know it. We did not end up at Communpedia because we believed anything we read, and neither will our readers.



Wikipedia, and I think Wikia also, operate under the Creative Commons 3.0 licence. This means that all work added to here from there (and vice versa, heheh) must be credited, somewhere, but is otherwise completely free to use. I credit at the top of the page, but it can be anywhere. 3.0 does not go with 2.5, that Memory Alpha (Star Trek Wikia wiki) uses, so information that is learned from a source with 3.0 can be added to 2.5, via one's mind and back onto the page, but not directly, and not obvious paraphrasing, other than the obvious nuts and bolts, impossible-to-alter elements such as citation sources.

Copy-Paste: (I said it was too complete) Copy: With the desired text highlighted, hold down either Control (Ctrl) key plus the 'c' key. The highlighted text is now copied, and can be added to any active text field (editing box on an article, or the Search field above the Go button on the left there) Paste: With the blinking '|' (cursor) in the desired destination location for the copied text, hold down Ctrl plus the 'v' key. The copied text is dumped there instantly, but it still remains in memory until a new batch of text is copied or the computer is shut down.

Move: 3 methods. It makes literal sense to call it move, but it can also be thought of as Copy-Paste but not leaving the text behind. So, obviously, one way of doing it is to just copy-paste and then delete the old text. But you don't have to. Paste as above, but use Cut (Ctrl + x) instead of Copy. If you are not moving from one document to another, but within the same document, then Windows has about the only useful text utility I know how to do, which is to highlight text, and then click on it and hold down the left mouse button and drag the whole text to another place on the page. This is particularly nice when you have a piece of text copied and don't want to lose it or go back to where it came from.

Don't be a Space Hog: Now that you have the piece of text moved from Wikipedia (multiple browser tabs helps with this also) to an Edit field of an article, and added some message somewhere about it containing content from Wikipedia, hit the Show Preview button. Always do this instead of Saving and then seeing how it looks. I cannot stress this enough. It was my first big mistake in editing, and it is a bad habit that thousands of admins and experienced editors on Wikipedia cannot break. All the same, don't be a space hog. The amount of space taken up by an article is only worth one consideration; how easy it is for a web surfer's RAM to load the page. That is all. That is why WP likes for pages to be below 60K, and AP likes for pages to be below 32K. The amount of storage an article itself takes up on AP's hard drive somewhere is nothing. But consider this; every single edit to that page has to be stored somewhere to be accessible to the page history. That means a second entire copy of the page, and then a third, a 33rd, a 3,333rd... I asked someone on WP about how much this represented in bytes, and s/he said it was 20K on average. So every article on Anarchopedia with more than the one edit it takes to create it is using up more storage in bytes than what we like the total size of articles to be on AP. I suck at remembering things, and I work fast, so I am often making that second edit. You can do better than I do.

Red links blue vs red links are our playground The new proto-page is covered in a sea of red. That's Wikipedia, the media giant, and if we ever match that, then the revolution probably happened already and we would be working on the new international all-purpose all-connected database that the Internet can never be because it is .comMERCE not .comMUNAL. There are two ways to approach this, and I always at least consider using both of them. One is leave it. The red links are our playground; we get to make up new articles for each and every one. Plus, some of them may be blue already, and we really don't want to mess with those. The other is link them to WP, and because it is so very easy, it is worth doing right; just pick out the parts of the text with no blue links, and also leave articles we are bound to write eventually, like countries and Anarchist or Communist organizations and leaders, just to name a few. But back to easy: just copy-paste the article to an open text file on your desktop. Then select all the text however (click and drag or CTRL + A or choose Select All from the Edit drop-down list. Now hit the Replace button from the drop down list, or use CTRL + H. Type ' [[ ' in the top field, and ' [[Wikipedia: ' in the bottom field, and ' Replace All '. Copy-Paste the text back et voila! Red links Blue! If you use the most minimal text file, then you may end up with the Text-wrap bug, and there are new paragraph breaks starting in the middle of sentences. Just backspace those breaks out, or if there are too many, consider hitting the back arrow on the browser and pasting in ' Wikipedia: ' by hand.

Piping: Like piping icing onto a cake, it looks pretty but too much is bad for you There is a boatload of 'Wikipedia' s all over this page now, after the above steps. I do not personally care, because pretty is for things you stare at, not for things you read. There is a way to remove unwanted text in links, though, or replace text with the exact word you want. So a link to 'Reactionary' can made to fit into the sentence "The Guatemalan coup d'état of 1954 was one of a pair of attacks by the US on the global community's more progressive actions that year" by adding (without the <> symbols, obviously) before, say, 'attacks', then adding a pipe | after, then dragging, eg, 'attacks by the US' or the whole rest of the sentence, if you prefer, between the pipe and the closing brackets.

The number/lb pound sign #, in an article link, designates a section of that article, when followed by the name of the section. The link will now take the surfer straight there. Example: Trial of the Haymarket Eight

But this has enormous potential to be misleading. And I have gotten so very sick of WPans piping links from, for example, 'Afghan rebel activity in the 21st Century' to 'Afghan terrorist atrocities post-9/11', that I am reluctant to even share this trick. But it works like this: the link destination goes first, then the pretty cover-up. Brackets which is found above the Enter key on the keyboard, then the text as it will appear on the page, then closing brackets.

Citations, References, Further Reading, External Links Wikia does not recognize the command, where 2 is the number of columns created. But AP does, yay. It reduces the citation list in size, and divides it up in 2, shortening it also. WP can use it, but often does not. Good editors who actually add things to articles have been driven off by the deletionists. Take that nasty tag off the pasted stuff and put reflist in there instead. And call it Citations: References is an all-purpose tag for when you cannot be bothered to add a separate section for, well, References, that are not inline citations (added between sentences) but just there to reference. And they are not Further Reading either, those are generally books added for the same purpose, except that they do not necessarily reflect directly the content of the article, but may cover related material diverging from it somewhat. External Links are basically Further Reading online, but they can be simply useful links too.

The Manual of Style on WP was long ago corrupted to say: "The most frequent choice is "References"; other articles use "Notes", "Footnotes", or "Works cited" (in diminishing order of popularity). Several alternate titles ("Sources", "Citations", "Bibliography") may also be used, although each is problematic: "Sources" may be confused with source code in computer related articles; "Citations" may be confused with official awards or a summons to court; "Bibliography" may be confused with a list of printed works by the subject of a biography. With the exception of "Bibliography," the heading should be plural even if it lists only a single item." Citations may be confused with a summons to court? Hahahaha. Sources? Do what now? Absurd. Sources is an excellent title for a section or reflist section with many quotes in it, or for a large amount of material quoted at once. Notes and Footnotes sections are a useful device with a long-standing literary tradition, lost and forgotten by WP, that can be updated for the 21st C, and made very useful for alternatives' comment. Take back the subject of the text without having to actually rewrite it. Your gut reaction to the text becomes the focus of your writing. That skill that comes as naturally as breathing to muties, but norms (if muties and norms is not intuitive, or you want to know more, see Strontium Dog) find so very difficult, of critical thinking, can add content to a Footnotes or Notes section immediately, getting through the WP content faster. Anarchist comments on the original Ivy League / Retard State WP text can be added to articles with piped links, as a computer age version of footnotes the way they used to be, or just written in those sections. And Bibliography? Confusing? What, book readers forgot they were at a computer? This is all designed to the editor who wrote this' desire for uniformity, with no regard to utility of these distinctions. Use these distinctions well, and AP will be better.

Give me a Break: Sometimes the extra line of space between paragraphs is more space than necessary or desired. Use  to stop the text connecting end to end but still close together top to bottom.

NoWiki Nooo!!! We want the wiki markup, and we want it invisible, most of the time. To show the Break markup just then (and other markup in paragraphs above that), I used   , and of course the pair of opening and closing ones just now to show you that.

That is all for now; there is sure to be much that I have forgotten to say here. Just look at how things are done, on any wiki you can find, and try it out.

Anarchy Online (AO is a free-to-play science fiction non-first-person-shooter (there being, barring true artificial intelligence, no such thing as a computer roleplaying game, even if that is standard terminology) with an excellent backstory that is updated occasionally and active roleplaying political forum (for paid players). The patently evil Omni-Tech corporation is on one side, and the successors to the gains of the workers' revolution, the Clans, on the other.

CGI introduction to the series AO vid storyline series part 1

Every science article on WP, even sociology, needs an expert who can write in summary style. Anyone with talent should be welcomed with open arms. Instead, their contributions are put on the chopping block before the talentless Deletion Army hacks, hopelessly out of touch and/or agenda-driven, too inept to use Google (let alone Google Books), who may or may not be able to write something as simple as a deletion summary. None of which failings, I might add, disqualifies them from their goal of racking up sufficient kills to join the admin Special Forces. New content has diminished to bios of dead people, and 1k-byte-listings of cities, colleges, corporations and sports teams. WP writers (I too am guilty on this last point) got scooped by an English writing project (sorry, cannot find the link atm). So what's it going to be? Hubris or humility?

Xenoalphabetophobia: Fear of other people's writing. Deletionists and people who use the term "wall of text" may, sadly, be suffering from this condition.