User:Benc/Words of wisdom

This is a loosely organized list of words of wisdom I've encountered when wiki'ing. If you see your Wikipedia username here, don't be too flattered (though I may be part of your fan club :-P). Obviously, if you've said something immensely wise and it's not listed here, don't take it as a snub — I either haven't seen it or I simply forgot to add it here. Also: I've tried to be careful about this, but if you feel I've taken you out of context, please let me know on my talk page. I can either clarify the context or remove the quotation, whichever you prefer.

Quotations

Civility

Plague on all your houses. Now, let me get that out of the way: VfD is not the place to argue. It is a place to vote... My hands are not clean. I know this. However, all of us are contaminated by passions and incivility. If Wikipedia is to continue, this cannot be.
—User:Geogre, VfD discussion [1]

I still think our argument here is over each others' behavior. [Context: which is a compelling reason to not list misused templates for deletion, but rather to reform those misusing it — though this quotation is applicable in many other situations]
—User:Geogre, VfD discussion [2]

I did not mean to insult my aunt when I was twelve, but the effect on my aunt was the same as if I had meant to... When I was about twelve years old, it was customary among me and my peers to use the word "stupid" as the very mildest of epithets that was understood among us to be a joke. I was (surprise, surprise) a bit of a nerd even then, and one day I was talking to my aunt about geometry and said "No, stupid, because a tangent only touches a circle at a single point." She assumed I was expressing a serious comparison of our relative intelligence. Her feelings were hurt. And, she formed an, um, unfavorable opinion of me. One that could not be undone simply by saying "I was just joking." Everyone has experienced the difficulty of communicating nuance, jokes, irony etc. in cyberspace. The use of words like "insane" is a setup for situations in which one person truly believes he is making an obvious joke and another person truly feels insulted. If people are stupid enough or insane enough to want to put a label like that in an article let them type it out in full, don't give them a handy shortcut. Personally I think putting something like that in an article is very, very close to vandalism.
—User:Dpbsmith, VfD discussion [3]

Merging

Short-short articles are useless when all the information can be easily put into another larger article in an annotated list or otherwise.
—User:Jallan, VfD discussion [4]

Why do we want to LOSE information? [Context: when it comes to merging minor articles into a single article]
—User:RickK, VfD discussion [5]

Deletion

That we aren't lacking in hard drive space has never meant that one should not excercise discretion in what is included in Wikipedia.
—User:Jallan, VfD discussion [6]

This is a community project, and if a large portion of the community finds it useful, that is their right. [Context: a valid argument for the (limited) inclusion of fancruft]
—User:Indrian, VfD discussion [7]

General

Wikipedia has always been an encyclopedia that happens to be on the Internet, not an Internet encyclopedia. While today it might be the "encyclopedia that Slashdot built" I don't see any reason to encourage that tendency. [Context: which is why we need to approach all topics neutrally, accessibly, and from a global perspective.]
—User:SimonP, article talk page [8]

Cleverness and humor

The quotations in these sections are humorous, but they generally do make genuine — and sometimes subtle — points. Rather than ruin the humor by dissecting the quotations, I'm omitted the context for the quotations in this section. Follow the links, Dorothy.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
—attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum or Grace Hopper

Articles aren't insane, people are.
—User:SS, VfD discussion [9]

Delete. This is =so= Duran Duran. Don't get my point? You just did.
—User:Denni, VfD discussion [10]

Meta-wiki musings

m:Instruction creep, originally authored by User:Raul654.
m:Substub disease, originally authored by User:Raul654.