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 22, Issue 7

• News and notes: Offline: Osama Khalid still in prison
  He has been imprisoned since 2020 for his Wikipedia edits. A fresh campaign is calling for his release.

• In the media: Indonesian editors, you shall return!
  And lawspam, may you be away.

• Disinformation report: Who is a typical paid editor? Who are their typical clients?
  Remember the golden rule!

• Recent research: WikiLambda the Ultimate
  Does Abstract Wikipedia help fight "One ring to rule them all" solutions for knowledge access - or does it implement one itself?

• Traffic report: This is where I'll be, so heavenly, so come and dance with me Michael!
  A real off the wall thriller, invincible, can't beat it, or is it dangerous and just bad?

• Forum: WikiAnnotate: help us build a dataset of article quality evaluations
  A research project to build better automated article assessment tools.

• In focus: Demystifying the 2026-27 Annual Plan
  A guide to WMF's Tech Annual Plan for the next year.

• Opinion: Wikipedia isn't a battleground. So why does it feel like one?
  Do we really have to fight?

• Serendipity: Wikinews: Into the Wikiverse
  The early suggestions for what the wiki could have been.

• Special report: Wikimedia Foundation closes Wikinews after 21 years
  Displaces 700 active editors among 31 language editions.

• Community view: Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness
  Which topics are dropping, and is the pattern the same everywhere?

• Gallery: Earth Day and Mother's Day
  Earth Day was on 22 April, and Mother's Day was on 10 May (in the US and many other countries).

• Comix: Brother, can you spare a page?
  What would you say?

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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/2026/23/1

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Motto of the day :

Waste not, want not.

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Tip of the day...

Look before you leap

Before you write a new article from scratch, please do a search to make sure you are not creating a duplicate of an article that already exists. Following the naming conventions can help avoid this problem.

Prior tip – Tips library – Next tip

Read more: Wikipedia:Your first article  

See also: Wikipedia:Content forking  

Untitled

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 participates 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 an SHA-512 commitment to this user's real-life identity.