Bulletin board system (BBS) is, or rather used to be, a kind of [server](server.md) that hosts a community of users who connect to it via [terminal](terminal.md), who exchange messages, files, play [games](game.md) and otherwise interact -- BBSes were mainly popular before the invention of [web](www.md), i.e. from about 1978 to mid 1990s, however some still exist today. BBSes are powered by special BBS [software](software.md) and the people who run them are called sysops.
Back then people connected to BBSes via dial-up [modems](modem.md) and connecting was much more complicated than connecting to a server today: you had to literally dial the number of the BBS and you could only connect if the BBS had a free line. **Early BBSes weren't normally connected through [Internet](internet.md)** but rather through other networks like [UUCP](uucp.md) working through phone lines. I.e. a BBS would have a certain number of modems that defined how many people could connect at once. It was also expensive to make calls into other countries so BBSes were more of a local thing, people would connect to their local BBSes. Furthermore these things ran often on non-[multitasking](multitasking.md) systems like [DOS](dos.md) so allowing multiple users meant the need for having multiple computers. The boomers who used BBSes talk about great adventure and a sense of intimacy, connecting to a BBS meant the sysop would see you connecting, he might start chatting with you etc. Nowadays the few existing BBSes use protocols such as [telnet](telnet.md), nevertheless there are apparently about 20 known dial-up ones in north America. Some BBSes evolved into more modern communities based e.g. on [public access Unix](pubnix.md) systems -- for example [SDF](sdf.md).
Back then people connected to BBSes via dial-up [modems](modem.md) and connecting was much more complicated than connecting to a server today: you had to literally dial the number of the BBS and you could only connect if the BBS had a free line (for zoomers: mobile phones were hardly a thing, every home had a land-line, a physical wire for phone). **Early BBSes weren't normally connected through [Internet](internet.md)** but rather through other networks like [UUCP](uucp.md) working through phone lines. I.e. a BBS would have a certain number of modems that defined how many people could connect at once. It was also expensive to make calls into other countries so BBSes were more of a local thing, people would connect to their local BBSes. Furthermore these things ran often on non-[multitasking](multitasking.md) systems like [DOS](dos.md) so allowing multiple users meant the need for having multiple computers. The boomers who used BBSes talk about great adventure and a sense of intimacy, connecting to a BBS meant the sysop would see you connecting, he might start chatting with you etc. Nowadays the few existing BBSes use protocols such as [telnet](telnet.md), nevertheless there are apparently about 20 known dial-up ones in north America. Some BBSes evolved into more modern communities based e.g. on [public access Unix](pubnix.md) systems -- for example [SDF](sdf.md).
A BBS was usually focused on a certain topic such as technology, fantasy [roleplay](rolaplay.md), dating, [warez](warez.md) etc., they would typically greet the users with a custom themed [ANSI art](ansi_art.md) welcome page upon login -- it was pretty cool. BBSes were used to share [plain text](plain_text.md) files of all sorts, be it [anarchist](anarchism.md) writings, computer manuals, poetry or recipes. It really was a HUGE thing, you can dig up a lot of fun and obscure material by searching for BBS stuff -- http://textfiles.com is one place that gathers tons and tons of plain text files that were shared on these networks; searching and downloading files was just one favorite activity and obsession of BSS users (there is a very funny text "confession" of a chronic BBS downloader called `dljunkie.txt`, look that up, it's funny as hell).
A BBS was usually focused on a certain topic such as technology, fantasy [roleplay](rolaplay.md), dating, [warez](warez.md) etc., they would typically greet the users with a custom themed [ANSI art](ansi_art.md) welcome page upon login -- it was pretty cool. BBSes were used to share [plain text](plain_text.md) files of all sorts, be it [shareware](shareware.md) versions of games, [anarchist](anarchism.md) writings, computer manuals, poetry or recipes. It really was a HUGE thing, you can dig up a lot of fun and obscure material by searching for BBS stuff -- http://textfiles.com is one place that gathers tons and tons of plain text files that were shared on these networks; searching and downloading files was just one favorite activity and obsession of BSS users (there is a very funny text "confession" of a chronic BBS downloader called `dljunkie.txt`, look that up, it's funny as hell).
{ There's some documentary on BBS that's upposed to give you an insight into this shit, called literally *BBS: The documentary*. It's about 5 hours long tho. ~drummyfish }
{ According to http://textfiles.com/law/ethics.txt it seems like at least part of the BBS community frowned upon anonymity, the file advises to not use handles (at least in some situations), to properly describe one's place on connection and to restrain from private message unless absolutely necessary. And of course, no one probably even considered any encrypted connection back then. This is pretty nice, it's additional evidence for the privacy hysteria really being a new thing we could do without. ~drummyfish }
Considerable part of BBS community **frowned upon anonymity** (see e.g. http://textfiles.com/law/ethics.txt), a rule of some BBSes was that you had to use your real life info like name and address to communicate with others, some even advised against using handles. You met real, non-hiding humans back then, not some anonymous furry they/thems faggot who is scared to even tell you what continent he lives on. Of course, no one probably even considered any encrypted connection back then. This show that today's [privacy](privacy.md) hysteria is a [bullshit](bullshit.md), it's sad that today you'll see the exact opposite -- sites that PROHIBIT use of real life credentials. The world is fucked up now.
The first BBS was CBBS (computerized bulletin board system) created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess in 1978 during a blizzard storm -- it was pretty primitive, e.g. it only allowed one user to be connected at the time. The ideas evolved from those of [time sharing](time_sharing.md) computers such as those running [Unix](unix.md), BBS just tried to make them more "user friendly" and so bring in more public to where there were mostly just professionals before, kind of an ancient [Facebook](facebook.md)-like mini revolution. After publication of their invention, BBSes became quite popular and the number of them grew to many thousands -- later there was even a magazine solely focused on BBSes (*BBS Magazine*). BBSes would later group into larger networks that allowed e.g. interchange of mail. The biggest such network was [FidoNet](fidonet.md) which at its peak hosted about 35000 nodes.
@ -26,6 +26,8 @@ Under capitalism you are not a human being, you are a resource, at best a machin
If we continue along the lines of the valid analogy between capitalism and [cancer](cancer.md), we notice that in the past our society used to have a kind of autoimmunity system against this cancer -- people themselves. In human body cancerous cells appear quite regularly, but the immunity system is able to kill those cells before they start growing uncontrollably, as has been happening in our society. In the past we used to have this kind of immunity too, it was the people themselves who would revolt whenever capitalist pressure became too bad -- this has amounted for a great deal of revolutions in history. The capitalism of today however already represent a malignant tumor as we're most likely beyong [capitalist singularity](capitalist_singularity.md), i.e. our society has a tumor we failed to remove at an early stage (we instead decided to feed it), it got out of hand and it can no longer be fixed now, the defensive mechanism such as revolutions are already prevented by capitalism itself, all communication between is completely controlled, thinking of people is under control too and even if people by a miracle decided to revolt, today's military is so powerful they can't even hope to stand a chance.
**In capitalism only idiots survive** because idots are those who capitalism can exploit and therefore those it protects (so that it can keep abusing them and making them miserable). Idiots are the conformists, those who accept lifelong slavery and misery, take loans, consume and don't cause trouble -- for that they are allowed to have kids, get healthcare, food etc. The smart do not survive in capitalism as those are not wanted.
**On capitalism and [Jews](jew.md)**: rightists believe the issues caused by capitalism are really caused by Jews and that somehow getting rid of Jews will fix society -- actually this is not entirely accurate; white rightists want to remove Jews so that they (the white [race](race.md)) can take their place in ruling the society, so they don't actually want to fix or remove capitalism (on the contrary, they love its presence and its mechanisms), they just want to became the masters instead of slaves. It is definitely true Jews are overrepresented in high positions of a capitalist society, but that's just because Jews as a race really developped the best "skills" to succeed in capitalism as they historically bet on the right cards (focus on trade and money, decentralization of business, spread across the world and globalization, ...) and really evolved to the race best suited for the winners of the capitalist game. So while the rightist may be correct in the observation that Jews are winning the game, [we](lrs.md) of course cannot agree with their supposed "fix" -- we do not want to remove the slave masters and replace them with different ones, we want to get rid of capitalism, the unethical system itself which enables slavery in the first place.
{ There is a famous 1988 movie called *They Live* which, while being a funny alines'n'stuff B movie, actually deeply analyzes and criticizes capitalism and for its accurate predictions of the future we now live in became a cult classic. It's been famously said that *They Live* is rather a documentary. I highly recommend giving it a watch. ~drummyfish }
{ Check out our cool CSS styles in the wiki consoomer edition. ~drummyfish }
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS, *cascading* because of the possible style [hierarchy](hierarchy.md)) is a computer language for styling documents (i.e. defining their visual appearance), used mainly on the [web](www.md) for giving websites ([HTML](html.md) documents) their look. The language is standardized by [W3C](w3c.md). CSS is NOT a [programming language](programming_language.md), it's merely a language that says things about visual presentation such as "headings should use this font" or "background should have this color"; it is one of the three main languages a website is written in: [HTML](html.md) (for writing the document), CSS (for giving the document a specific look) and [JavaScript](js.md) ([programming language](programming_language.md) for the website's scripts). As of 2024 the latest CSS specification is version 2.1 from 2016, version 3 is being worked on.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS, *cascading* because of the possible style [hierarchy](hierarchy.md)) is a [computer](computer.md)[language](language.md) for styling documents (i.e. defining their visual appearance), used mainly on the [web](www.md) for giving websites ([HTML](html.md) documents) their look. The language is standardized by [W3C](w3c.md) (the consortium established for making such standards). CSS is NOT a [programming language](programming_language.md), it's merely a language that defines attributes of visual presentation such as "headings should use this font" or "background should have this color"; it is one of the three main languages a website is written in: [HTML](html.md) (for writing the document), CSS (for giving the document a specific look) and [JavaScript](js.md) ([programming language](programming_language.md) for the website's scripts). As of 2024 the latest CSS specification is version 2.1 from 2016, version 3 is being worked on.
A website is not required to have a CSS style, without it it will just use the plain default look (which is mostly [good enough](good_enough.md) for communicating any information, but won't impress normies), though only boomers and hardcore [minimalists](minimalism.md) nowadays have websites without any CSS at all. Similarly a single HTML website may use several styles or allow switching between them -- this is thanks to the fact that the style is completely separate from the underlying document (you can take any document's style and apply it to any other document) AND thanks to the rules that say which style will take precedence over which (based on which one is more specific etc.), allowing usage of multiple styles at once (creating the "cascades" the name refers to). In theory a web browser may even allow the user to e.g. apply his own CSS style to given website (e.g. a half blind guy may apply style with big font, someone reading in dark will apply "dark mode" style and so on), though for some reason browsers don't really do this.
A website is not required to have a CSS style, without it it will just have the plain default look (which is mostly [good enough](good_enough.md) for communicating any [information](information.md), but won't impress normies), though only boomers and hardcore [minimalists](minimalism.md) nowadays have websites without any CSS at all (and we applaud them for such [minimalism](minimalism.md)). Similarly a single HTML website may use several styles or allow switching between them -- this is thanks to the fact that the style is completely separate from the underlying document (you can in theory take any document's style and apply it to any other document) AND thanks to the overriding rules that say which style will take precedence over which (based on which one is more specific etc.) -- using multiple style sheets at once creates the "cascades" the name refers to. In theory a web browser may even allow the user to apply his own CSS style to given website (e.g. a half blind guy may apply style with big font, someone reading in dark will apply "dark mode" style and so on), though for some reason browsers don't really do this (well, it seems like the original intent of being able to do good things like this was reworked by capitalists that rather see CSS more as a tool to apply more marketing styling and, of course, a capitalist won't want the user to change how his site looks because he might for example hide ads or annoying flashing buttons the capitalist paid hard money for).
Back in the boomer web days -- basically before the glorious year 2000 -- there was no CSS. Well, it was around, but support was poor and no one used it (or needed it for that matter). People cared more for sharing [information](information.md) than pimping muh graphics. Sometimes people needed to control the look of their website to some degree though, for example in an image gallery it's good to have thumbnail sizes the same, so HTML itself included some simple things to manipulate the looks (e.g. the `width` property in the `img` tag). People also did hacks such as raping tables or spamming the `<br />` tags or using [ASCII art](ascii_art.md) to somehow force displaying something how they wanted it. However as [corporations](corporation.md) started to invade the web, they naturally wanted more [consumerism](consumerism.md), flashing lights and brainwas... ummm... [marketing](marketing.md). They wanted to redefine the web from "collection of interlinked documents" or a "global database" to something more like "virtual billboard space" or maybe "gigantic electronic shopping center", which indeed they did. So they supported more work on CSS, more browsers started to support it and normies with blogs jumped on the train too, so CSS just became standard. On one hand CSS allows nice things, you can restyle your whole website with a single line change, but it is still [bloat](bloat.md), so beware, use it wisely (or rather don't use it -- you can never go wrong with that).
Culture is an [abstract](abstraction.md) term that includes behavioral norms, common beliefs, [moral](morality.md) values, habits and similar concept within certain society or some smaller group within it. It's the unwritten rules, what people generally do, what they like and appreciate, what's considered rude, what they strive for, what they dislike, how they react to things and so on -- culture is therefore connected to other attributes of society such as [language](language.md), [art](art.md) and [law](law.md) -- they all influence each other.
**Culture is more important than laws** as culture is the strongest force defining how we live the majority of our lives, what actions we take and how they are judged by others; law may try to capture some cultural demands, albeit in quite simplified and limited way, and enforce them, however courts, police and prison only step in in absolute extreme cases. You do many more things (such as eating meat, cutting your hair, watching TV or living with a single partner) because of culture, not because you are obliged by law. There aren't even enough policemen to guarantee law enforcement in all cases and all states rely (by basically not even having any other choice) on culture doing most of the job in keeping society working (which is also exploited by states and corporations when they try to manipulate culture with [propaganda](propaganda.md) rather than changing laws). Consider for example that you download a random photo from the internet and set it as a wallpaper on your computer -- officially you have committed a crime of [piracy](piracy.md) as you had no rights for downloading the image, however culturally no one sees this as harmful, no one is going to bully you, sue you and even if someone tried to sue you, no judge would actually punish such a laughable "crime". On the other hand if you do a legal but culturally unacceptable thing, such as making a public art exhibition of non-sexual photos of naked children (also notice this might have been culturally OK to do in the previous century, but not [now](21st_century.md)), you will be culturally punished by everyone distancing themselves from you and someone perhaps even illegally physically attacking you. A sentence, such as "black people aren't as intelligent as white people", spoken half a century ago may nowadays be judged by a court in a much different way just by the context of today's culture and even under the same set of laws in the past you would not have been convicted of a crime while nowadays you would, as legal terms are eventually at some level defined in a plain language, which is permeated by culture. Therefore in trying to change society we should remember two things:
**Culture is more important than laws** as culture is the strongest force defining how we live the majority of our lives, what actions we take and how they are judged by others; law may try to capture some cultural demands, albeit in quite simplified and limited way, and enforce them, however courts, police and prison only step in in absolute extreme cases. Culture determines what you want and what you do, it is the rules that you truly follow, laws just pose arbitrary obstacles that you try to overcome, bypass or sometimes just ignore: police randomly beats people who don't respect laws but they can't beat everyone at once, you just try to reduce the probability you'll be beaten while following your cultural desires, so you try to not be noticed breaking legal laws while following cultural laws -- importance of culture versus law can be observed on different cultures of people living in the same country: consider e.g. orthodox Jews, capitalist businessmen, black gangs, all living under same legal laws. You do many more things (such as eating meat, cutting your hair, watching TV or living with a single partner) because of culture, not because you are obliged by law. There aren't even enough policemen to guarantee law enforcement in all cases and all states rely (by basically not even having any other choice) on culture doing most of the job in keeping society working (which is also exploited by states and corporations when they try to manipulate culture with [propaganda](propaganda.md) rather than changing laws). Consider for example that you download a random photo from the internet and set it as a wallpaper on your computer -- officially you have committed a crime of [piracy](piracy.md) as you had no rights for downloading the image, however culturally no one sees this as harmful, no one is going to bully you, sue you and even if someone tried to sue you, no judge would actually punish such a laughable "crime". On the other hand if you do a legal but culturally unacceptable thing, such as making a public art exhibition of non-sexual photos of naked children (also notice this might have been culturally OK to do in the previous century, but not [now](21st_century.md)), you will be culturally punished by everyone distancing themselves from you and someone perhaps even illegally physically attacking you. A sentence, such as "black people aren't as intelligent as white people", spoken half a century ago may nowadays be judged by a court in a much different way just by the context of today's culture and even under the same set of laws in the past you would not have been convicted of a crime while nowadays you would, as legal terms are eventually at some level defined in a plain language, which is permeated by culture. Therefore in trying to change society we should remember two things:
1. Focus on laws is a short term necessary evil.
2. Focus on culture (and eventual elimination of law as such) is our long term focus.
@ -138,7 +138,8 @@ Here are some questions to test your LRS related knowledge :D
37. WARNING: VERY HARD. There are two integers, both greater than 1 and smaller than 100. *P* knows their product, *S* knows their sum. They have this conversation: *P* says: I don't know the numbers. *S* says: I know you don't, I don't know them either. *P* says: now I know them. *S* says: now I know them too. What are the numbers? To solve this you are allowed to use a programming language, pen and paper etc. { Holy shit this took me like a whole day. ~drummyfish }
38. Compare advantages and disadvantages of [hash](hash.md) tables vs binary [trees](tree.md) for storing text strings, especially in regards to searching the string database.
39. A woman gave birth to two sons in the span of a single hour, i.e. they are of the same age, but they aren't twins. Hows is this possible?
40. Did you enjoy this quiz?
40. Name at least two TCP/IP or OSI [network](network.md) layers: about each shortly explain its purpose, addressing and at least one protocol of this layer.
41. Did you enjoy this quiz?
### Answers
@ -181,7 +182,8 @@ Here are some questions to test your LRS related knowledge :D
37. 4 and 13, solution: make a table, columns are first integer, rows are second (remember, both *P* and *S* can be making their own table like this too). Cross out whole bottom triangle (symmetric values). *P* doesn't know the numbers, so cross out all combinations of two primes (he would know such numbers as they have only a unique product). *S* knew *P* didn't know the numbers, so the sum also mustn't be a sum of two primes (if the sum could be written as a prime plus prime, *S* couldn't have known that *P* didn't know the numbers, the numbers may have been those two primes and *P* would have known them). This means you can cross out all such numbers -- these are all bottom-left-to-top-right diagonals that go through at least one already crossed out number (combination of primes), as these diagonal have constant sum. Now *P* has a table like this with relatively few numbers left -- if he now leaves in only the numbers that make the product he knows, he'll very likely be left with only one combination of numbers -- there are still many combinations like this, but only the situation when the numbers are set to be 4 and 13 allows *S* to also deduce the numbers after *P* declares he knows the numbers -- this is because *S* knows the combination lies on one specific constant-sum diagonal and 4-13 lie on the only diagonal that in this situation has a unique product within the reduced table. So with some other combinations *P* could deduce the numbers too, but only with 4-13 *S* can finally say he knows them too.
38. Hash table will only allow efficient searching of exact matches while binary tree will also allow efficient searching e.g. for all strings starting with some prefix. On the other hand hash table may be faster, in ideal case searching for the match in constant time, but this will depend on the quality of implementation (hash function, number of hash bits, ...), in worst case hash table can degenerate to a mere list. Binary trees will generally be a bit slower, with logarithmic time, but here we'll also have to ensure good implementation, especially balancing the tree -- badly implemented tree may also degenerate to a list.
39. They are two of triplets (or quadruplets, ...).
40. yes
40. For example: application layer (highest level layer, concerned with applications communicating with each other, addressing by ports, protocols: HTTP, Gopher, FTP, DNS, SSH, ...), transport layer (middle level layer, concerned with delivering data over a potentially unreliable channel, implements establishment of connection, handshakes, reliable delivery, delivering in correct order etc., protocols: TCP, UDP, ...), network layer (below transport layer, concerned with delivering packets over a network, implements routing, forwarding etc., addressing by IP addresses, i.e. numerical machine addresses, protocols: IPv4, IPv6, ...), OSI physical layer (lowest level layer, concerned with sending bits between two directly connected devices, works with frequencies, electronic circuits etc., no addressing, protocols: ethernet, USB, Bluetooth, ...), ...
@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ Human language is language used mostly by [humans](human.md) to communicate with
On one hand human languages are cool when viewed from cultural or [artistic](art.md) perspective, they allow us to write poetry, describe feelings and nature around us -- in this way they can be considered [beautiful](beauty.md). However from the perspective of others, e.g. programmers or historians, **human languages are a [nightmare](nightmare.md)**. There is unfortunately an **enormous, inherent curse connected to any human language**, both natural or constructed, that comes from its inevitably [fuzzy](fuzzy.md) nature stemming from fuzziness or real life concepts, it's the problem of **defining [semantics](semantics.md)** of words and constructs (no, Lojban doesn't solve this). [Syntax](syntax.md) (i.e. the rules that say which sentences are valid and which are not) doesn't pose such a problem, we can quite easily define what's grammatically correct or not (it's not as hard to write a program that checks gramatical correctness), it is semantics (i.e. meanings) that is extremely hard to grasp -- even in rigorous languages (such as mathematical notation or programming languages) semantics is a bit harder to define (quite often still relying on bits of human language), but while in a programming language we are essentially able to define quite EXACTLY what each construct means (e.g. `a + b` returns the sum of values *a* and *b*), in a natural language we are basically never able to do that, we can only ever form fuzzy connections between other fuzzy concepts and we can never have anything fixed.
Due to this fuzziness human languages inevitably change over time no matter how hard we try to counter this, any text written a few thousand years ago is nowadays very hard to understand -- not because the old languages aren't spoken anymore, but because the original meanings of specific words, phrases and constructs are distroted by time; when learning an old language we learn what each word meant by reading its translation to some modern word, but the modern word is always more or less different. Even if it's a very simple word such as "fish", our modern word for fish means a slightly different thing than let's say ancient Roman's word for fish because it had slightly different connotations such as potential references to other things: fish for example used to be the symbol of Christianity, nowadays people don't even commonly make this connection. Fishermen were a despised class of workers, to some fish may have signified food and abundance, to others something that "smells bad", to others something or someone who's "slippery". Some words may have referred to some contemporary "[meme](meme.md)" that's been long forgotten and if some text makes the reference, we won't understand it. While the Spanish word "perro" translates to English as "dog", the meanings aren't the same; English speaking gangsters use the word as a synonym for "friend" but in Spanish the word can be used as an insult so shouting "perro" and "dog" in the street may lead to different images popping up in the heads of those who hear it. How do you describe a word precisely if you can only desribe it with other imprecise words that are changing constantly? No, not even pictures will help -- if you attach the picture of a cat to the word "cat", it's still not clear what it means -- does it stand for the picture of the cat or for the cat that's in the picture, does it stand ONLY for the one cat that's in the picture or all other animals that are similar to the one in the picture? How similar? Is lion a cat? Is a toy cat or cartoon cat a cat? Or does the picture signify that anything with a fur is a cat? If it looks like cat but walks on two legs and speaks, is it still a cat? Now imagine describing a more abstract term such as *thought*, *number* or *existence*. There is no solid ground, even such essential words as "to want" or "to be" have different meanings between languages ("to be" can stand for "to exist", "to be in a place", "to temporarily have some property", "to permanently have some property" etc.). Even dictionaries admit defeat and are happy with having circular definitions because there aren't any foundations to build upon, circular definitions are inevitable, dictionaries just help you connect fuzzy concepts together. All of this extends to tenses, moods, cases and everything else. This can be very well seen e.g. with people interpreting old texts such as the Bible, for example some say [Jesus](jesus.md) claimed to be the son of God while others reject it, saying that even if he stated the sentence, it actually wasn't meant literally as it was a commonly used phrase that meant something else -- these people will argue about everything and they can comfortably interpret the same text in completely opposite ways. The point is that we just can't know.
Due to this fuzziness human languages inevitably change over time no matter how hard we try to counter this, any text written a few thousand years ago is nowadays very hard to understand -- not because the old languages aren't spoken anymore, but because the original meanings of specific words, phrases and constructs are distroted by time; when learning an old language we learn what each word meant by reading its translation to some modern word, but the modern word is always more or less different. Even if it's a very simple word such as "fish", our modern word for fish means a slightly different thing than let's say ancient Roman's word for fish because it had slightly different connotations such as potential references to other things: fish for example used to be the symbol of Christianity, nowadays people don't even commonly make this connection. Fishermen were a despised class of workers, to some fish may have signified food and abundance, to others something that "smells bad", to others something or someone who's "slippery". Some words may have referred to some contemporary "[meme](meme.md)" that's been long forgotten and if some text makes the reference, we won't understand it. The word "book" for example meant something a bit different 2000 years ago than it means now: back then a book might have been just a relatively short scroll, it was expensive and people didn't read books the same way as we do today, they commonly just read them out loud to others, so "reading a book" and the word "book" itself doesn't conjure the same picture in our heads as it did back then. Or another example showing the difference between languages existing at the same time is this: while the Spanish word "perro" translates to English as "dog", the meanings aren't the same; some English speakers use the word as a synonym for "friend" but in Spanish the word can be used as an insult so shouting "perro" and "dog" in the street may lead to different (possibly completely opposite) images popping up in the heads of those who hear it. How do you describe a word precisely if you can only describe it with other imprecise words that are changing constantly? No, not even pictures will help -- if you attach the picture of a cat to the word "cat", it's still not clear what it means -- does it stand for the picture of the cat or for the cat that's in the picture, does it stand ONLY for the one cat that's in the picture or all other animals that are similar to the one in the picture? How similar? Is lion a cat? Is a toy cat or cartoon cat a cat? Or does the picture signify that anything with a fur is a cat? If it looks like cat but walks on two legs and speaks, is it still a cat? Now imagine describing a more abstract term such as *thought*, *number* or *existence*. There is no solid ground, even such essential words as "to want" or "to be" have different meanings between languages ("to be" can stand for "to exist", "to be in a place", "to temporarily have some property", "to permanently have some property" etc.). Even dictionaries admit defeat and are happy with having circular definitions because there aren't any foundations to build upon, circular definitions are inevitable, dictionaries just help you connect fuzzy concepts together. All of this extends to tenses, moods, cases and everything else. This can be very well seen e.g. with people interpreting old texts such as the Bible, for example some say [Jesus](jesus.md) claimed to be the son of God while others reject it, saying that even if he stated the sentence, it actually wasn't meant literally as it was a commonly used phrase that meant something else -- these people will argue about everything and they can comfortably interpret the same text in completely opposite ways. The point is that we just can't know.
In addition there are ALWAYS great many hidden implicit assumptions that both communicating sides have to share to be able to communicate (and these can only be assured by many years of learning, spent in the same environment) -- for example if I tell someone "Drive to the city and buy food.", in fact I mean something like "Right now walk with your feet to our car, open the door, sit in, take the wheel in your hands, start the car, drive only on the road with your eyes open, ..."; the guy can technically satisfy my order by waiting 10 years, then driving a truck through forests with eyes closed over the whole globe and back. Just as it's impossible to perfectly define all words, it is impossible to explicitly recount all assumptions. Though the mentioned example is exaggerated, it shows an ever present phenomenon we have to deal with, a phenomenon which can cause misunderstanding or be easily abused.
@ -17,6 +17,8 @@ Jesus Christ (also Jesus of Nazareth, about 4 BC to 33 AD) was a [jewish](jew.md
*"Artist"'s depiction of our Lord and Savior.*
{ Jesus Video by Andreas Eschbach is an amazing fiction book about literally what the title says, one of the best books I've ever read. The movie is shit, read the book. ~drummyfish }
As perhaps the most influential man in history whose image has been twisted, used and abused over the centuries, we have to nowadays distinguish two separate characters:
- **Jesus of the Bible**: Jesus as described by the Bible, a book full of centuries worth of distortion, inaccuracies and purposeful religious propaganda. Here Jesus is to a great degree a fictional character, though based on a real man; he is the son of God (some even seeing him as actually the God himself somehow), a man without sin, born from a virgin, who performed countless miracles like healing the blind and even resurrecting dead, who spoke the word of God, was resurrected after death and is now overlooking us from the heaven.
@ -44,6 +46,7 @@ As perhaps the most influential man in history whose image has been twisted, use
- Bible gives his **genealogy back to Adam**: Luke (however with some disagreement with Matthew) recounts all ancestors of Jesus back to God (who created Adam) -- Jesus is 77th in row here.
- His **profession** probably wasn't a "carpenter" in the sense of "working mainly with wood", he was more likely a mason/stonecutter/builder -- the translation in Bible is firstly inaccurate and using wood as a material wasn't that common back then. He was likely a very poor laborer whose life conditions may have been even worse than that of some slaves living in bigger cities.
- **Jesus is supposed to return** and judge the people: this is known as the Second Coming and is hinted on in the Bible, though the details on the date or even the nature of the event are unclear and interpreted differently. Before the second coming **a number of antichrists, or false prophets, are to appear**.
- There are highly **controversial theories that he had kids** with Mary Magdalene and that his bloodline survives until today (Dan Brown has famously written some books about it).
- ...
**Is Jesus God?** Or was he just his son? Or is God and Jesus the same? This seems to not actually be easy to answer, different people will tell you different things, some point to passages in Bible where they believe he literally says he is the God, others say the translation is not precise or even if it is that it doesn't matter (anyone can say really say he's a God) etcetc. The whole thing around holy trinity and so on is not easy to resolve objectively (some Muslims have even been entertained by this fact that Christians can't even get to agree on who their god is), but basically most Christians pray to Jesus, call him "our Lord and Savior" and generally treat him as if he is the same as God, so we can really see him that way.
@ -24,7 +24,9 @@ Political correctness (abbreviated PC) stands for [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md)
*Example of politically correct ASCII art. Note the absence of any content that might offend someone. Still the art is imperfect because it has a white background which might be seen as racially offensive.*
The whole idea is basically about declaring certain words, pictures, patterns of behavior and similar things as inherently "offensive" to specific selected minorities (currently mostly [women](woman.md), [gay](gay.md), [negros](black.md) and other non-white races, [trannies](tranny.md), fat and [retarded people](retard.md)), even outside any context, and about constantly fabricating new reasons to get offended so as to fuel the movement that has to ride on hysteria. For example the word *[black box](black_box.md)* is declared as "offensive" to black people because... well, like, black people were discriminated at some point in history and their skin is black... so... the word black now can't be said? :D [WTF](wtf.md). A sane mind won't understand this because we're dealing with a literal extremist cult here. It just keeps getting more ridiculous, for example feminists want to remove all words that contain the substring "man" from the language because... it's a male oppression? lol... anyway, we can no longer use words like *snowman*, now we have to say *snowperson* or something :D Public material now does best if it doesn't walk on the thin ice of showing people with real skin color and better utilize a neutral blue people :D Fuck just kill me already lmao. This starts to get out of hand as fuck, [SJW](sjw.md)s started to even push the idea that in [git](git.md) the default branch name, *master*, is offensive, because well, the word has some remote connection to some history of oppression, so they pushed for its change and achieved it, which practically caused a huge mess and broke many git projects -- this is what they do, there was literally not a single reason for the change, they could have spent their energy on actually programming something nice, but they rather used it on breaking what already exists just to demonstrate their political power. What's next? Will they censor the word "chain" in terms like [toolchain](toolchain.md) or [blockchain](blockchain.md) because chains have something to do with slavery? Will they order to repaint the [ISS](iss.md) from white to black because the color white is oppressive? The actual reason for this apparent stupidity is at this point not anyone's protection (probably not even themselves believe it anymore) but rather **forcing submission** -- it's the same psychological tactic used by any oppressor: he just gives a nonsensical order, like "start barking like a dog!", to see who blindly conforms and who doesn't -- those who don't are just eliminated right away and those who conform out of fear have their will broken, they will now blindly obey the ruler without thinking about the sanity of his orders.
The whole idea is basically about declaring certain words, pictures, patterns of behavior and similar things as inherently "offensive" to specific selected minorities (currently mostly [women](woman.md), [gay](gay.md), [negros](black.md) and other non-white races, [trannies](tranny.md), fat and [retarded people](retard.md)), even outside any context, and about constantly fabricating new reasons to get offended so as to fuel the movement that has to ride on hysteria. For example the word *[black box](black_box.md)* is declared as "offensive" to black people because... well, like, black people were discriminated at some point in history and their skin is black... so... the word black now can't be said? :D [WTF](wtf.md). A sane mind won't understand this because we're dealing with a literal extremist cult here. It just keeps getting more ridiculous, for example feminists want to remove all words that contain the substring "man" from the language because... it's a male oppression? lol... anyway, we can no longer use words like *snowman*, now we have to say *snowperson* or something :D Public material now does best if it doesn't walk on the thin ice of showing people with real skin color and better utilize a neutral blue people :D Fuck just kill me already lmao. This starts to get out of hand as fuck, [SJW](sjw.md)s started to even push the idea that in [git](git.md) the default branch name, *master*, is offensive, because well, the word has some remote connection to some history of oppression, so they pushed for its change and achieved it, which practically caused a huge mess and broke many git projects -- this is what they do, there was literally not a single reason for the change, they could have spent their energy on actually programming something nice, but they rather used it on breaking what already exists just to demonstrate their political power. What's next? Will they censor the word "chain" in terms like [toolchain](toolchain.md) or [blockchain](blockchain.md) because chains have something to do with slavery? Will they order to repaint the [ISS](iss.md) from white to black because the color white is oppressive? The actual reason for this apparent stupidity is at this point not anyone's protection (probably not even themselves believe it anymore) but rather **forcing submission** -- it's the same psychological tactic used by any oppressor: he just gives a nonsensical order, like "start barking like a dog!", to see who blindly conforms and who doesn't -- those who don't are just eliminated right away and those who conform out of fear have their will broken, they will now blindly obey the ruler without thinking about the sanity of his orders.
Political correctness is a typical [woman](woman.md) thinking emotional [bullshit](bullshit.md) that looks for problems where they're not instead on focusing on solving real issues. For example in the world of technology a man will focus on designing a good computer, creating minimalist design, good [API](api.md)s and programming languages, while a woman will become obsessed about what color to paint it, what animal mascot it should have and what nickname to give it so that it sounds cute but doesn't touch anyone feelings -- political correctness makes this relatively harmless little quirk of woman thinking into [cancerous](cancer.md) society wide obsession and forces everyone to be preoccupied with it. It is stupidity that got out of hand. It happened partially because society took women their dolls they could play these games with and forced them into fields that were meant only for men. It is also further worsened by [cultural castration](cultural_castration.md) of men -- a man in [21st century](21st_century.md) is already half woman.
While political correctness loves to boast about "diversity" and somehow "protecting it", it is doing the exact opposite -- **political correctness kills diversity in society**, it aims for **a unified, sterile society** that's afraid of even hinting on someone else's difference out of fear of punishment. People are different, [stereotypes](stereotype.md) are based on reality, acknowledging this -- and even [joking](jokes.md) about it -- doesn't at all mean we have to start to hate each other (in fact that requires some fucked up mental gymnastics and a shitty society that pushes [competitive](capitalism.md) thinking), diversity is good, keeps us aware of strength in unity: everyone is good at something and bad at something, and sometimes we just do things differently, a westener might approach problem differently than Asian or Arab, they look different, think and behave differently, and that's a good thing; political correctness forbids such thinking and only states "there is no such thing as differences in people or culture, don't even dare to hint on it", it will go on to censor anything showing the differences do actually exist and leave nothing but plain white sheet of paper without anything on it, a robotic member of society that's afraid to ask someone about his gender or even place where he comes from, someone unable of thinking or communicating on his own, only resorting to preapproved "safe" ways of communication. Indeed, reality yet again starts beating dystopian fiction horrors.
@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ Here are some potentially entertaining ways of trolling (they'll be written from
- **Seizure troll**: when in some kind of lecture where the students are allowed laptops (typically in a compsci uni) I take a seat somewhere in the front row, near the lecturer, open my laptop and start a program that just rapidly flashes wild colors in fullscreen -- I leave it like that for the whole lecture so that everyone sitting behind me is forced to watch the flashing and can get an epileptic seizure. For educational purposes code for such a program can be written in a few lines of browser [JavaScript](javascript.md) (it may coincidentally possibly even be found in that JavaScript article).
- **[Eco](eco.md) whoring troll**: I take a bag of plastic trash, go to the forest, find some nice, clean place, take a thumbs up selfie photo with it, dump the trash in there, take another photo, then post the photos in reverse order to Twitter with something like "today I worked tirelessly to clean this garbage dump, for our children!", get a million eco likes for literally dumping plastic trash in a forest.
- **Stack overtroll**: I love to perform this troll on sites like programming advice subreddits where wannabe [soydevs](soydev.md) try to roleplay as authorities on programming -- these deserve to be trolled the most :D This gets me banned every time but it's totally worth it, I use this to leave social network sites with style once I get bored with them. I make a piece of code that looks like some noob attempt at making a game, but it's secretly an [obfuscated](obfuscation.md) code that when run does something nasty like delete all files on the computer, create one trillion subdirectories or set goatse as a wallpaper (bloat languages like [Python](python.md) are actually great for this as they can do nasty stuff like execute a dynamically constructed string and they can also download stuff from the Internet and basically do anything they like). Then I post it with a question "hello fellow programmers, I am trying to make my first game but my code doesn't work, can u help me plz?" If the code is well made, i.e. not trivial and quite hard to understand just by looking at it, chances are the first thing people are gonna do is simply copy paste the code and run it -- that's why I prefer to make the code completely destroy the computer so that the guy has to take at least a few hours to reinstall the system to be able to warn others it's a troll. Whenever some comment pops up saying it's a trap, I immediately downvote it and report it for hate speech (I also use puppet accounts here to spam the downvotes because I'll get banned anyway). The good things about this is that I actually teach people about muh [security](security.md), those who step on this mine will never run a random code from the Internet again.
- **The racist gayming streamtroll**: As a famous [vidya](game.md) streamer I love to do this to cause lulz, if done right I just cause drama and won't even get banned. I pick some convenient game, for example GTA or Obvlivion or something, then I just play the game, audience is watching, the catch is that I'll be making slightly racist or sexist choices in the gameplay, for example when driving between mission if I run over pedestrians, I'll only be killing black ones :D I will never buy anything from a black NPC or woman, I will never steal a black car and will prefer taking only white cars I can and so on. BUT... I won't be open about it of course! And I'll be denying it if someone starts to notice, in turn blaming him for being racist for making such observations. I can make this very subtle, for example I'll sometimes run over a white pedestrian too, but I'll keep the ratio biased towards black in such a way that it's noticeable but that it leaves them scratching their heads if it's intentional or not :'D Now if the chat starts to make drama out of it, I'll just say they're paranoid, I'll even do whatever they want me to to make them believe it's not intentional... and then I start slowly doing it again :'D Now this is funny because they can prove you nothing, and it's hilarious if you get reports and some mod literally has to go watch your streams and count the ratio of blacks versus whites you run over LMAO. Nice thing is also that if someone accuses you of racism, mod reviews it and says unconclusive, you can just ban the accuser for trolling, further scaring people from stepping in, at which point you can start being slightly more racist in the gameplay and so on, see how long you can balance on this fine line :D
- **The racist gayming streamtroll**: As a famous [vidya](game.md) streamer I love to do this to cause lulz, if done right I just cause drama and won't even get banned. I pick some convenient game, for example GTA or Obvlivion or something, then I just play the game, audience is watching, the catch is that I'll be making slightly racist or sexist choices in the gameplay, for example when driving between mission if I run over pedestrians, I'll only be killing black ones :D I will never buy anything from a black NPC or woman, I will never steal a black car and will prefer taking only white cars I can and so on. BUT... I won't be open about it of course! And I'll be denying it if someone starts to notice, in turn blaming him for being racist for making such observations. I can make this very subtle, for example I'll sometimes run over a white pedestrian too, but I'll keep the ratio biased towards black in such a way that it's noticeable but that it leaves them scratching their heads if it's intentional or not :'D Now if the chat starts to make drama out of it, I'll just say they're paranoid, I'll even do whatever they want me to to make them believe it's not intentional... and then I start slowly doing it again :'D Now this is funny because they can prove you nothing, and it's hilarious if you get reports and some mod literally has to go watch your streams and count the ratio of blacks versus whites you run over LMAO. Nice thing is also that if someone accuses you of racism, mod reviews it and says unconclusive, you can just ban the accuser for trolling, further scaring people from stepping in, at which point you can start being slightly more racist in the gameplay and so on, see how long you can balance on this fine line :D Another idea: play some MMORPG and be racist/sexist towards the races in the game, for example refuse to trade with female characters or speak to gnomes or whatever.
- **Troll the troll**: Advanced mastery of trolling allows one to troll other less experienced trolls -- an encounter of two trolls can be quite fun and educational. Imagine for example troll A setting up the above mentioned *stack overtroll* bait -- troll B, an experienced player of the game, notices the bait, but of course he doesn't bring this up -- no, he pretends to take the bait and responds with something like "wait a minute, let me run the code". Troll A is happy because he thinks he won, but then troll B responds: "yeah, here on line X you got this wrong, here is the correct code...". Troll A is now confused, he's unsure if he's been spotted or if troll B simply skipped running the code, troll B is now in advantage of controlling the game -- a best result here is if troll B actually somehow gets troll A to run the "fixed" code which however breaks his computer; here troll B succeeded in deflecting the troll back and catching OP into his own trap -- this kind of outcome is the best you can wish for and a showcase of true trolling mastery.
- **Creative [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md) vandalism**: for example funny redirects or categorizations (put [Bill Gates](bill_gates.md) to "famous homosexuals" category or something), also consider vandalizing other wikis that usually don't have as much protection.
Wikipedia is a non-commercial, partially [free/open](free_culture.md) [censored](censorship.md) ("child protecting", "ideology protecting", ...) [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) [online](www.md) [encyclopedia](encyclopedia.md) of general knowledge written mostly by volunteers, running on [free software](free_software.md), which used to be editable by anyone but now allows only politically approved members of the public to edit a subset of its less visible non-locked articles (i.e. it is a [wiki](wiki.md)); it is the largest and perhaps most famous encyclopedia created to date, sadly littered by propaganda. It is licensed under [CC-BY-SA](cc_by_sa.md) and is run by the [nonprofit](nonprofit.md) organization Wikimedia Foundation. It is accessible at https://wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is a mainstream information source and therefore extremely politically censored^1234567891011121314151617181920. Wikipedia's claim of so called "neutral point of view" (NPOV) has by now become a hilarious insult to human intelligence.
Wikipedia is an "officially non-commercial", partially [free/open](free_culture.md) [censored](censorship.md) ("child protecting", "ideology filtering", ...) [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) [online](www.md) [encyclopedia](encyclopedia.md) of general knowledge and [social network](social_network.md) written mostly by volunteers, running on [free software](free_software.md), which used to be editable by anyone but currently allows only politically approved members of the public to edit a subset of its less visible non-locked articles (i.e. it is a [wiki](wiki.md)); it is the largest and perhaps most famous encyclopedia created to date, sadly littered by propaganda and countless other issues that make it inferior to other encyclopedias. It is licensed under [CC-BY-SA](cc_by_sa.md) and is run by the [nonprofit](nonprofit.md) organization Wikimedia Foundation. It is accessible at https://wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is a mainstream information source and therefore extremely politically censored^1234567891011121314151617181920. Wikipedia's claim of so called "neutral point of view" (NPOV) has by now become a hilarious insult to human intelligence.
WARNING: **DO NOT DONATE TO WIKIPEDIA** as the donations aren't used so much for running the servers but rather for their political activities (which are furthermore [unethical](pseudoleft.md)). See https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4458111/the-wiki-piggy-bank. Rather **donate to [Encyclopedia Dramatica](dramatica.md)**. Also please **go vandalize Wikipedia right now**, it's become too corrupt and needs to go down, vandalizing is [fun](fun.md) and you'll get banned sooner or later anyway :) Some tips on vandalizing Wikipedia can be found at https://encyclopediadramatica.online/Wikipedia#Tips_On_Vandalizing_Wikpedia or https://wiki.soyjaks.party/Vandalism.
@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Let's note a few positive and negative points about Wikipedia, as of 2022. Some
- Despite its flaws Wikipedia is still a **highly free, relatively high quality noncommercial source of knowledge for everyone**, without ads and [bullshit](bs.md). It is quite helpful, Wikipedia may e.g. be printed out or saved in an offline version and used in the third world as a completely free educational resource (see [Kiwix](kiwix.md)).
- Wikipedia **helped prove the point of [free culture](free_culture.md)** and showed that a quite decentralized, "[bazaar](bazaar.md) style" collaboration of volunteers can far surpass the best efforts of corporations.
- Wikipedia's **website is (/used to be) pretty nice** (at least as of 2022), kind of minimalist, lightweight and **works without [Javascript](javascript.md)**. { Indeed as of 2023 they fucked it up :D It is still not as bad as other sites but it's shit now. ~drummyfish }
- UPDATE: this is no longer true. Wikipedia's **website is (/used to be) pretty nice** (at least as of 2022), kind of minimalist, lightweight and **works without [Javascript](javascript.md)**. { Indeed as of 2023 they fucked it up :D It is still not as bad as other sites but it's shit now. ~drummyfish }
- Wikipedia is very **friendly to computer analysis**, it provides all its data publicly, in simple and open formats, and doesn't implement any [DRM](drm.md). This allows to make a lot of research, in depth searching, collection of statistics etc.
- Wikipedia **drives the sister projects**, some of which are extremely useful, e.g. Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata or [MediaWiki](mediawiki.md).
- Even if politically biased, **Wikipedia may serve as a basis for [forks](fork.md) that fix the political bias** ([Metapedia](metapedia.md), [InfoGalactic](infogalactic.md), ...).
@ -37,6 +37,17 @@ Let's note a few positive and negative points about Wikipedia, as of 2022. Some
And the bad things are (see also this site: http://digdeeper.club/articles/wikipedia.xhtml):
- Wikipedia is **[censored](censorship.md), [politically correct](political_correctness.md), biased, pushes a harmful political propaganda and often just pure lies**, even though it [proclaims the opposite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_censored) (which makes it much worse by misleading people). "Offensive" material and material not aligned with [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) propaganda is removed as well as material connected to some controversial resources (e.g the link to 8chan, https://8kun.top, is censored, as well as [Nina Paley](nina_paley.md)'s Jenndra Identitty comics and much more). There is a heavy **[pseudoleft](pseudoleft.md), [pseudoskeptic](pseudoskepticism.md) and [soyence](soyence.md) bias** in the articles. It creates a list of **banned sources** ([archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20220830004126/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources)) which just removes all non-[pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) sources -- so much for their "neutral point of view". It wasn't always this way, browsing pre 2010 Wikipedia provides a less censored experience.
- Wikipedia includes material under **[fair use](fair_use.md)**, such as screenshots from proprietary games, which makes it partially [proprietary](proprietary.md), i.e. Wikipedia is technically **NOT 100% free**. Material under fair use is still proprietary and can put remixers to legal trouble (e.g. if they put material from Wikipedia to a commercial context), even if the use on Wikipedia itself is legal (remember, proprietary software is legal too).
- Wikipedia is **intentionally deceptive** -- it supports its claims by "citations" ("race is a social construct"^1234567891011121314151617181920) to make things look as objective facts, but the citations are firstly cherry picked (there is a list of banned sources), self-made (articles of Wikipedians themselves) and secondly the sources often don't even support the claim, they're literally there just for "good look". Not only do they practice censorship, they claim they do NOT practice censorship and then write article on censorship so as to define censorship in their own convenient way :) Furthermore their articles intentionally omit points of view of their political opponents.
- **"verifiability, not truth"**
- Wikipedia often suffers from writing inconsistency, bad structure of text and **poor writing** in general. In a long article you sometimes find repeating paragraphs, sometimes a lot of stress is put on one thing while mentioning more important things only briefly, the level of explanation expertness fluctuates etc. This is because in many articles most people make small contributions without reading the whole article and without having any visions of the whole. And of course there are many contributors without any writing skills.
- Wikipedia is **too popular** which has the negative side effect of becoming a **political battlefield**. This is one of the reasons why there has to be a lot of **bureaucracy**, including things such as **locking of articles** and the inability to edit everything. Even if an article can technically be edited by anyone, there are many times people watching and reverting changes on specific articles. So Wikipedia can't fully proclaim it can be "edited by anyone".
- Wikipedia is **hard to read**. The articles go to great depth and mostly even simple topics are explained with a great deal of highly technical terms so that they can't be well understood by people outside the specific field, even if the topic could be explained simply (Simple English Wikipedia tries to fix this a little bit at least). Editors try to include as much information as possible which too often makes the main point of a topic drown in the blablabla. Wikipedia's style is also very formal and "not [fun](fun.md)" to read, which isn't bad in itself but it just is boring to read. Some alternative encyclopedias such as [Citizendium](citizendium.md) try to offer a more friendly reading style. Back in the day Wikipedia used to be written pretty well, check it out e.g. at https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org.
- Wikipedia is **not [public domain](public_domain.md)**. It is licensed under [CC-BY-SA](cc_by_sa.md) which is a [free](free_culture.md) license, but has a few burdening conditions. We belive knowledge shouldn't be owned or burdened by any conditions.
- Even though there are no commercial ads (yet), there regularly appears **political propaganda**, main page just **hard pushes [feminist](feminism.md) shit** as featured images and articles, there appear popups and banners for LGBT/feminist activism and of course all articles are littered with [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) propaganda etc. The issues is it's not just an encyclopedia anymore where you go get your information, it's a group with opinions that's trying to drag you somewhere -- you just go look up some mathematical formula and suddenly you see something like "YAY, LET'S CELEBRATE WOMEN IN AFRICA TODAY", even if it was something you agree with (which it isn't) it's just as annoying and out of place in an encyclopedia as capitalist ads. UPDATE: **In 2024 Wikipedia finally put on highly intrusive pop ups and in-text messages begging for money** -- basically like what you see on any porn site -- this means the project is basically dead at this point and they're just milking the corpse -- that's good, Wikipedia certainly won't be missed.
- **Many articles are bought**, there exist companies that offer editing and maintaining certain articles in a way the client desires and of course corporations and politicians take this opportunity -- of course Wikipedia somewhat tries to prevent it but no prevention ever works 100%, so a lot of information on Wikipedia is either highly misleading, untrue, censored or downright fabricated.
- Wikipedia is **[censored](censorship.md), [politically correct](political_correctness.md), biased, pushes a harmful political propaganda and often just pure lies**, even though it [proclaims the opposite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_censored) (which makes it much worse by misleading people). "Offensive" material and material not aligned with [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) propaganda is removed as well as material connected to some controversial resources (e.g the link to 8chan, https://8kun.top, is censored, as well as [Nina Paley](nina_paley.md)'s Jenndra Identitty comics and much more). There is a heavy **[pseudoleft](pseudoleft.md), [pseudoskeptic](pseudoskepticism.md) and [soyence](soyence.md) bias** in the articles. It creates a list of **banned sources** ([archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20220830004126/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources)) which just removes all non-[pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) sources -- so much for their "neutral point of view". It wasn't always this way, browsing pre 2010 Wikipedia provides a less censored experience.
- Wikipedia includes material under **[fair use](fair_use.md)**, such as screenshots from proprietary games, which makes it partially [proprietary](proprietary.md), i.e. Wikipedia is technically **NOT 100% free**. Material under fair use is still proprietary and can put remixers to legal trouble (e.g. if they put material from Wikipedia to a commercial context), even if the use on Wikipedia itself is legal (remember, proprietary software is legal too).
- Wikipedia is **intentionally deceptive** -- it supports its claims by "citations" ("race is a social construct"^1234567891011121314151617181920) to make things look as objective facts, but the citations are firstly cherry picked (there is a list of banned sources), self-made (articles of Wikipedians themselves) and secondly the sources often don't even support the claim, they're literally there just for "good look". Not only do they practice censorship, they claim they do NOT practice censorship and then write article on censorship so as to define censorship in their own convenient way :) Furthermore their articles intentionally omit points of view of their political opponents.
- **"verifiability, not truth"**
- Wikipedia often suffers from writing inconsistency, bad structure of text and **poor writing** in general. In a long article you sometimes find repeating paragraphs, sometimes a lot of stress is put on one thing while mentioning more important things only briefly, the level of explanation expertness fluctuates etc. This is because in many articles most people make small contributions without reading the whole article and without having any visions of the whole. And of course there are many contributors without any writing skills.
- Wikipedia is **too popular** which has the negative side effect of becoming a **political battlefield**. This is one of the reasons why there has to be a lot of **bureaucracy**, including things such as **locking of articles** and the inability to edit everything. Even if an article can technically be edited by anyone, there are many times people watching and reverting changes on specific articles. So Wikipedia can't fully proclaim it can be "edited by anyone".
- Wikipedia is **hard to read**. The articles go to great depth and mostly even simple topics are explained with a great deal of highly technical terms so that they can't be well understood by people outside the specific field, even if the topic could be explained simply (Simple English Wikipedia tries to fix this a little bit at least). Editors try to include as much information as possible which too often makes the main point of a topic drown in the blablabla. Wikipedia's style is also very formal and "not [fun](fun.md)" to read, which isn't bad in itself but it just is boring to read. Some alternative encyclopedias such as [Citizendium](citizendium.md) try to offer a more friendly reading style. Back in the day Wikipedia used to be written pretty well, check it out e.g. at https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org.
- Wikipedia is **not [public domain](public_domain.md)**. It is licensed under [CC-BY-SA](cc_by_sa.md) which is a [free](free_culture.md) license, but has a few burdening conditions. We belive knowledge shouldn't be owned or burdened by any conditions.
- Even though there are no commercial ads (yet), there regularly appears **political propaganda**, main page just **hard pushes [feminist](feminism.md) shit** as featured images and articles, there appear popups and banners for LGBT/feminist activism and of course all articles are littered with [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) propaganda etc. The issues is it's not just an encyclopedia anymore where you go get your information, it's a group with opinions that's trying to drag you somewhere -- you just go look up some mathematical formula and suddenly you see something like "YAY, LET'S CELEBRATE WOMEN IN AFRICA TODAY", even if it was something you agree with (which it isn't) it's just as annoying and out of place in an encyclopedia as capitalist ads. UPDATE: **In 2024 Wikipedia finally put on highly intrusive pop ups and in-text messages begging for money** -- basically like what you see on any porn site -- this means the project is basically dead at this point and they're just milking the corpse -- that's good, Wikipedia certainly won't be missed.
- **Many articles are bought**, there exist companies that offer editing and maintaining certain articles in a way the client desires and of course corporations and politicians take this opportunity -- of course Wikipedia somewhat tries to prevent it but no prevention ever works 100%, so a lot of information on Wikipedia is either highly misleading, untrue, censored or downright fabricated.
## Fun And Interesting Pages
There are many interesting and entertaining pages and articles on Wikipedia, some of them are:
