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Orangemarlin( talk| new comment| contributions)

Account: created November 14 2004

( My very first edit | My 1,000th edit | My 5,000th edit | My 10,000th edit | My 15,000th edit) | My 20,000th edit

My World View

Favorite quotes from editing over the last few years

I'm just going to add some of my favorite quotes that I've seen on discussion pages, especially in the Evolution vs. Creationism area, but I'll include Hockey or anything else that's amusing.

1. "For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist—a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site—or who yells the loudest—wins. Connolley believes that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about,” a view that is echoed by many academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March, 2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an anti-authoritarian community. “Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule,” he told me. (Sanger is now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises that it will have “the lowest error rate in history.”) Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth."
2. "...one could argue that evolution is not "undirected", in that it is directed by processes like natural selection. It's just not willfully directed." - Silence
3. "Also, what is it with creationists and grammar? Do you think God is bitter over being represented by bad spellers?" - Random Replicator
4. "A POV pusher will always interpret any disagreement to constitute proof the editors in question are members of a cabal."- PhilKnight
5. 'This fictitious cabal will obviously possess views directly opposed to the accusing editor, who will be remarkably willing to overlook contrary evidence."- PhilKnight
6. 'In this manner nearly every good faith editor will be accused of being a member of entirely contradictory cabals."- PhilKnight
7. 'Similarly, good faith editors are frequently accused of being sock puppets, trolls or vandals, very often by user accounts that fulfill these definitions. "- PhilKnight
8. Intelligent design is not an evangelic Christian thing or a generally Christian thing or even a generically theistic thing...Intelligent design is an emerging scientific research program. Design theorists attempt to demonstrate its merits fair and square in the scientific world--without appealing to religious authority--William A. Dembski, 2004
9. Any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient...The conceptual soundness of a scientific theory cannot be maintained apart from Christ.--William A Dembski, 1999
10. From Jerry A. Coyne ( Brockman, John (editor) (2006). Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement. Vantage Books. ISBN  9780307277220. {{ cite book}}: |first= has generic name ( help)): Well, which is it? Is intelligent design merely a sophisticated form of biblical creationism, as most biologists claim, or is it science--an alternative to Darwinism that deserves discussion in the science classroom? ...you won't find the answers in the writings of the leading advocates of ID. The ambiguity is deliberate for ID is a theory that must appeal to two distinct constituencies. To the secular public, ID proponents present their theory as pure science. This, after all, is their justification for a slick public-relations campaign promoting the teaching of ID in public schools. But as is clear from the infamous "Wedge Document" of the Discovery Institute, a right-wing think tank in Seattle, and the center for ID propaganda, intelligent design is part of a cunning effort to dethrone materialism from society and science and replace it with theism. ID is simply biblical creationism updated and disguised to sneak evangelical Christianity past the First Amendment and open the classroom door to Jesus. The advocates of ID will admit this, but only to their second constituency, the sympathetic audience of evangelical Christians on whose support they rely.
11. And for the fact that "evolutionist" is considered a pejorative term, because it really is defined as a "belief" in evolution as much as there is a belief in G_d. I don't believe in Evolution, and I don't accept Evolution because of faith, opinion, conviction--I accept Evolution as a fact, because it has been subjected to rigorous scientific analysis, because of the substantial proof, and because a lot of people smarter than I have studied and accepted it. Evolution is not a doctrine, it is not a dogma, and it does not require faith to accept. Therefore, I am a scientist by trade, by education and by lifestyle. Evolutionist means nothing to me, and is not a word that any scientist would use to describe their understanding of that particular field of science. OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 14:00, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
12. We seem to have built a system that accommodates people whose net contribution is negative, while alienating some of our best volunteers...It happens more and more that some loudmouth jackass causes enough trouble that it seems easier to accommodate him. This is short-sighted, and is why the fraction of jerks here is growing. What should we do instead? Keep people who help the project, lose people who do not, and protect each other from harassment. We could do that if we only had to deal with opposition by trolls and vandals. We cannot do it against the opposition of established members of the community."- Tom Harrison
13. I am now officially an Evilutionist. Can't wait to sacrifice some virgins at the altar of Darwin. OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 16:42, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
14. Intelligent design is intended as a wedge to get materialism out of science and society. But in fact it is a wedge that, if used, will break apart Christian faith even more effectively. Genuine science, on the other hand, does indeed require that we rethink our beliefs, but its effects on faith are far less destructive than those of young-earth creationism and intelligent design. As Pascal famously said, "A little science distances one from God, but a lot brings one back." -- Dr. James F. McGrath, Assistant Professor of Religion, Butler University.
15. While we're at it, let's make the "creationism" article say that God created the world 6000 years ago, the "slavery" article say that slavery was good for black Americans, the "Jews" article be nothing but conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the media, and the "9/11 attacks" article be nothing but an allegation that George Bush (and the same Jews) took down the towers. Then, we'll put all the actual information about those things in separate articles called "scientific view of creationism," "criticism of slavery," "responses to Jewish conspiracy theories," and "historical perspective on 9/11 attacks," which will be shorter than the articles about fringe theories, harder to find, present themselves as less legitimate since they are sub-article forks, and used as bludgeons to keep rational, objective information off of the main pages for those topics. That's the kind of Wikipedia that the homeopathy people appear to want. Randy Blackamoor
16. Homeopathy reminds me of religion: an opiate for the masses and poison for the rest of us. User:Jim62sch

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