Wikipedia:Discourteous editing club

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Discourteous Editing Club (DEC) is a Wikipedia organization to which the vast majority of Wikipedians belong. Those who are not members of the DEC are usually hippies or members of the Harmonious Editing Club, though hippie-hood and HEC membership are most certainly not mutually exclusive.

Members of the HEC believe in bold but not reckless editing. Members of the DEC believe just plain bold editing. The DEC's unofficial definition and popular conception of "bold editing" includes deleting large swaths of original brilliant prose by other Wikipedians, then justifying the action (which would otherwise be considered vandalism) on the article's talk page by saying that either the entirety of the material violated in some small way an editing guideline, or pointing out one bit of the material that for one reason or another should have been edited, and that therefore everything that the material's creator posts is suspect and all edits made by said user are considered guilty until proven innocent with the DEC member being the sole arbiter of whether any further edits made by said user are valid.

If the DEC and HEC are thought of as ethnic minorities and Wikipedia as the country which they are both struggling for control of, the HEC are playing the Tutsis to the DEC's Hutus.

The reason that an HEC member might post as an explanation for this genocide is as follows: The first is that human nature and the libertarian nature of Wikipedia will inevitably lead to a low-grade state of anarchy that is kept in check by the government, or, in Wikipedia's case, the admins.

However, the actual reason is that unless the war for Wikipedia is decided in a winner-take-all fingerpainting match, the DEC will continue its hegemony, and any scrawny vegetarian hippie who tries to take direct action will eventually get his comeuppance.