User talk:Trent Arms

You're here. Why? There's nothing to say. If you came here to tell me that something's being deleted, it's probably Anime Punch again; email me about it so I can actually join in the discussion of how retarded WP has become by instinctively segregating itself without regard to race, religion, political leaning, sexual preference, gender, socioeconomic status, sex, education level, or number of funny hats per family member. Do humans like being at one-anothers' throats that much? It's worth the ridicule it receives. "Deletionists?" "Inclusionists?" What kind of self-serving circle-jerk is that?

But really, to say that's the root of the problems on Wikipedia is incorrect, as well. The problems go much deeper than pointless sissy-fights about notability after someone went to the trouble of making an article about it (that there is an article is all the "notability" it needs, really. There's already a warning for unsourced statements, if that's the problem). More salient an issue, however, is the utter inability of the current guard (it really is much like a regime no matter how much you repeat, "There is no cabal.") to effectively deal with the propagation of the memetic unit is a crippling downfall. And don't think that, because kids on the internet learned the word and applied it to everything under the sun that more than five of them find titillating, it's just limited to that. That belies ignorance of the deeper implication.

As a personal anecdote, large swaths of the Eastern United States know of a devices called a "Shot Engine." It's a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine that fires only when it loses enough momentum to require firing, with a resounding bang (hence the "Shot" part). None of these people know that Wikipedia calls it a "Hit and Miss Engine" and would have no idea that it would ever be called that or, indeed, anything but "Shot Engine." Why not? "Well, a shot engine is a shot engine. I learned this from my Pa, and he learned it from his Pa, when they first got their five-horser back after such n' such." The people that call it that aren't the sort of people that write books or online articles anyway. But even so, the fringe of tech-illiterates is more and more coming into contact with "our world." And if it takes a linguist and programmer twenty minutes to find something like that, how would my grandfather find it at all? (For the record, "shot engine" in Google returns nothing in the way of relevant results.) All contextual cultural information, all oral tradition, all linguistic intuition, all network-borne viral amusements: Wikipedia, as it is, is ill-equipped to deal with any of them. Calling oneself a "deletionist" or "inclusionist" is a degrading pursuit, fitting only for inconsequential Luddites upon whom, nevertheless, the encyclopedic acumen of this institution rests.

Long Story Short: I don't watch my talk page or WP in general, because its behavior is abhorrent. If you actually care about my input, email me.

PS: Before you spend any time trying to direct me to WP:NOT, please, consider why this was written.