less_retarded_wiki/wiki_style.md

# Wiki Style

This outlines the style and rules of this Wiki that should ensure "quality" and consistency. You should read this before contributing.

If you contribute, add yourself to [wiki authors](wiki_authors.md)! You can also join us on the [Island](island.md).

## Rules

1. **Everything is [public domain](public_domain.md)** under [CC0](cc0.md) to which all contributors agree. No one owns what we write here.
2. **No [fair use](fair_use.md)** or even unfair use. We want this Wiki to be as free as possible and don't thread the fine legal lines. That means you can't directly include anything on this Wiki if it's copyrighted, **even if it's under a free license**. So generally **avoid any copy pasting and rather try to write everything yourself**.
3. **No unnecessary [censorship](censorship.md)**. Necessary censorship basically only includes spam, shitty content, [IP](intellectual_property.md)-infected content (content that would make this wiki not be in public domain) and hardcore illegal stuff that would immediately put us in jail, though we would of course love to include it. However spreading truth mustn't be hurt by fear of jail. Controversial/incorrect/taboo content etc. is NOT to be censored.

## Style

- **Don't line-break paragraphs** (a pragraph is on a single line). The reasoning is that a text manually formatted to specific width is hard to edit. It's easier to switch to auto-line breaking in your editor.
- **Avoid [unicode](unicode.md), highly prefer [ASCII](ascii.md)**, for the sake of maximum compatibility and simplicity. Use of unicode has to be greatly justified.
- **Each page shall start with a heading** (which may or may not correspond to article file name).
- I've finally decided that with certain exceptions headings should be written like this: **Each Word Of A Heading Is Capitalized**. This is for simplicity, we don't deal with weird ass rules of when or when not to capitalize.
- **Filenames of articles shall use a lowercase snake_case**.
- **Article/file names are to be preferably singular nouns**. I.e. "animal" rather than "animals", "portability" rather than "portable" etc. But there may be exceptions, e.g. articles that are lists may use plural ("human" is about human as species, "people" is a list of existing humans), non-nous MAY be used if nouns would be too long/awkward (e.g. "weird" instead of "weirdness"). Use your brain.
- **This isn't [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md)**, memes, opinions and uncensored truths are allowed (and welcome). **References/citations are not needed**, we aren't a religion that relies on someone else's reputation to validate truth, we just spread information and leave it to others to either trust, test its usefulness and/or verify. Furthermore we don't limit ourselves to truths that can be or have been "proven" by whatever is currently called "approved science^TM", many valuable truths are just proven by experience etc. LRS advocates society in which deception doesn't happen and in which therefore there is no need for citations serving as a proof -- we practice this here. However references are still allowed and many times useful, e.g. as a further reading.
- The style of this wiki is inspired by the classic hacker culture works such as the [WikiWikiWeb](wikiwikiweb.md) and [Jargon File](jargon_file.md).
- **Writing style should be relaxed and in many parts informal**. Formality is used where it is useful (e.g. definitions), most of other text can benefit from being written as a tech conversation among friends.
- **Depth/complexity/level of articles**: Articles shouldn't try to go to unnecessary depth, but also shouldn't be shallow. This is written mainly for programmers of [less retarded society](less_retarded_society.md), the complexity should follow from that. Again, start simple and go more into depth later on in the article, very complex things should rather be explained intuitively, no need for complex proofs etc.
- **Scope**: don't write about literally everything, include only what's relevant from LRS point of view and only to relevant degree -- for example we could write many articles about OOP design patterns, however as that's a complete capitalist bullshit, this would just be noise from our point of view, it would drown useful content and also waste our effort, so we rather limit ourselves to some kind of tl;dr or OOP design patterns.
- **[Future proof](future_proof.md) articles, minimize need for [maintenance](maintenance.md), focus on long term**: unlike Wikipedia we can't (and don't want to) be a dynamic resource that's only ever valid for one day, we want stable articles that will stay relevant forever. Don't go too much into temporary irrelevant shit such as which distro is currently the most bestest or how many forks dwm currently has. I.e. for example lists of software are not very good articles as that's something that will change constantly. List of historical events may be better as those are more or less given and only once in a decade we need to add few new relevant events, possibly also update the view on older ones. An article on mathematical concept on the other hand is quite good as equations are something that just stands valid forever.
- **The wiki is kind of a dirty idea dump**, it may contain TODOs, WIPs, errors, ugliness etc., it is not a [finished](finished.md) beautiful and tidy encyclopedia. Remember this wiki is kind of a temporary (though long term) project that's meant to host, communicate and spread ideas that should direct us towards better society, it is a vehicle that should get us somewhere else and will potentially be replaced by something else once we are there. Therefore aims for perfection and beauty shouldn't stand in way of just communicating ideas (i.e. do not delete content for its ugliness if that content is still potentially useful).
- **Political incorrectness, slurs and "offensive speech" are highly encouraged**. Avoid the use of the word "person" (use "man", "guy", "human", "one" etc., possibly "individual" at worst). Of course this is not to "offend" anyone, this helps people unlearn being offended.
- **Images**: for now don't embed images. [ASCII art](ascii_art.md) can be used in many places instead of an image. Thousand words are worth a picture. Non-embedding links to images may be okay. 
- **You can leave comments right in the text of articles**, e.g. like this: { I disagree with this [shit](shit.md). ~drummyfish }.

Articles should be written to be somewhat readable and understandable to tech savvy people who already know something about technology, i.e. neither illiterates, nor experts only (as is sometimes the case e.g. on Wikipedia). **Each article should ideally start with a general dictionary [definition](definition.md)** and continue with a simple general explanation and overview of the topic. With more paragraphs the text can get more complex. The idea is that a noob will read the first paragraph, understand the basic idea and take something away. A more advanced reader will read further on and take away more things etc. I.e. we educate in a top-down approach. **Each article should be a nice mini resource in itself**, quality should be preferred over quantity: for example the article on chess should be a nice general page about chess with focus on its programming, but also containing general overview, history, fun and interesting facts, data, essay elements and so on, so as to be highly self-contained (as opposed to the "Wikipedia approach" of making many separate articles on chess history, chess players, chess rules etc.).

## Sources

These are some sources you can use for research and gathering information for articles:

- **paper [encyclopedias](encyclopedia.md)!** Consult these often, they are much better than any online resource, contain obscure, forgotten info and alternative points of view.
- **[Wikipedia](wikipedia.md)**: of course, but don't limit your search to it. Searching other language Wikipedias with machine translate can also help find extra info.
- **[Citizendium](citizendium.md)**: can offer a different angle of view from Wikipedia.
- **non-SJW forks of Wikipedia**: to get past SWJ censorship/propaganda on Wikipedia try e.g. **[infogalactic](infogalactic.md)** or **[metapedia](metapedia.md)**.
- **Britannica online**: proprietary, but articles are nicely written, facts are in the public domain so we can steal them.
- **Archives: [Internet Archive](internet_archive.md), [Archive Team Wiki](https://wiki.archiveteam.org/), [archive.li](https://archive.li/), ...**: Most information once available on the Internet is most likely no longer accessible nowadays (taken down, privatized, censored, no longer indexed, ...). Look in the archives!
- **[wikiwikiweb](wikiwikiweb.md)**
- **Ask people lol**: sometimes you can't find a piece of information anywhere (for example which rendering technique was used in an old proprietary game) but if you just send a short mail to someone (the game's programmer), he just gives you the information in a second. People often just forget this and spend countless hours digging for something when they can just write one email.
- **[Wiby](wiby.md), marginalia and other non-commercial search engines**: this will find nice small non-commercial sites of tech and other nerds that Google suffocates under bloatsites (or simply censors)
- **[Project Gutenberg](gutenberg.md)**: mostly older books but there are already some computer related books like [RMS's](rms.md) biography or [Jargon File](jargon_file.md)
- **University theses** (and scientific paper of course): many university theses are publicly accessible and usually nicely sum up topics, bachelor level theses may be better understandable than PhD/master theses.
- **Slides**: slides from various presentations are actually great resources as they condense the topic into its main points, they filter out the piles of noise.
- **Wikisource** and **Wikibooks**](infogalactic.md)** etc.
- **[books](book.md)**: Books are still of higher quality than online sources so you can [pirate](piracy.md) some and steal some facts from them. Check out libgen, torrents etc.
- **[installgentoowiki](https://wiki.installgentoo.com)**
- **[YouTube](youtube.md)**: Yes, sadly this is nowadays one of the biggest sources of information which is unfortunately hidden in videos full of ads and retarded zoomers, the information is unindexed. If you are brave enough, you can dig this information out and write it here as a proper text. 
- Try searching with different search engines than just Google (wiby, marginalia, Yandex, Bing, Yahoo, Internet Archive, ...).
- **old magazines**: If you can get your hands on old magazines somehow (physical, pdf, ...) about computers, cell phones, games etc., you may get a nice source of a lot of interesting, obscure and lost information. For example on the web it's impossible to find a good list of old games -- if you search for "top 50 old games", you get a list of complete shit games from 2015, which is now considered "old"; it's much better you get some old game magazine from say 2005 that lists top 50 games at the time. Furthermore these magazines are professionally made and actually [older](old.md), i.e. of better quality. You may also find nice gems, predictions of the future, politically incorrect articles etc.
- **Non-web**: When web fails, you can search the [darknet](darknet.md), [gopher](gopher.md), [gemini](gemini.md), [usenet](usenet.md), [tor](tor.md) etc.
- ...

## Purpose

Basically the purpose of this wiki is to have fun and also create a coherent and consistent philosophy of a truly good software, technology and also to a related degree society.

Additionally we want to create a nice, completely public domain, suckless educational resource, an encyclopedia that's written in a nicer style than e.g. Wikipedia.

Another goal is to serve as a historical account of our age. We suppose that people in the future may want to read first-hand accounts of how people saw the society and its technology, what they thought was important, what they predicted etc. We like to do this ourselves thanks to e.g. Project Gutenberg. Kids in the future will be like "haha those idiots couldn't see they would bloat themselves to death", this Wiki will show that indeed we foresaw it, we were just in a huge minority. Future kids: don't repeat the same mistakes we did.