Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Reaches 100,000th Article
An anonymous reader writes "'Wikipedia, a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, is announcing that the English edition of the project has reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development. In addition, the project itself has celebrated its two-year anniversary on January 15. But not just the English version has grown impressively: More than 37,000 articles are now being worked on in the non-English editions of Wikipedia.' Read the press release for more information or visit the website to enlighten yourself! It's great to see that this interactive project works; at least I don't have to boot into Windows to use Encarta anymore!"
>at least I don't have to boot into Windows to use Encarta anymore!
;)
psst... if you want to use Encarta, you WILL need to boot into windows still...
I've spent hours browsing topics on that site, and remain constantly amazed at the depth and breadth of knowledge on it.
For amusement, look up "slashdot" on it. You will find more history and amusement than you remembered ever living through yourself.
It even covers the troll era, with entries on Natalie Portman, grits, whatnot (I dare not type too many examples lest I be lameness filtered).
fifth sigma, inc.
One would think that educational institutions would snatch something like this up in a heartbeat (same goes for the GPL version of education documents and reference material). Or is it that the maturity of the project isnt near what standard university requirements yet is the hold up?
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Thank God for free online reference.
If you've ever priced a full set of encyclopedia... whew... it's around 1200$
100,000 articles is great... The more the merrier.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Does anyone know how they make sure all the submissions are accurate?
...
from their FAQs
Since anyone can edit any page, why would I give any credence to anything I read here?
We operate on the idea that many eyeballs make all errors shallow. Wikipedia is, self-consciously, an experiment in public collaboration quite unlike any print or online encyclopedia, and therefore it will be difficult to project the results, in terms of their credibility, until the project is farther along. But even then, you'll have to judge the results based on the articles themselves, rather than the credentials of their writers (which is itself often an unreliable way to determine credibility).
Some people think Wikipedia will give Britannica a run for its money. m:Making fun of Britannica.
Some people have plans for peer review or article certification systems to work on top of Wikipedia. We'll be sure to point them out if and when any get up and running.
Is the quality as high as when they started? I went there when they were first mentioned on slashdot. The quality control process they described was very impressive but also daunting for anyone wanting to contribute. If they've reached the 100k article threshold with the same quality control it is world-class resource.
Jason
ProfQuotes
It may become usefull now that the site is mentioned at /.
It states things like "Infarct refers to the artery being plugged or clogged up", where it actually is the death of tissue cause by a lack of oxygen. Things like that restrict it's use severly. I think I'll stick with peer reviewed articles for the moment. Universities tend to have libraries full of them.
Try The 'Earth Edition' of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, it has a vast array of well-written articles.
The approach they take regarding peer review is interesting. There are two types of guide entry - edited and unedited. The edited guide is a collection of peer reviewed and edited articles, and likely to be more accurate and readable. The unedited guide entries are just anything, really. Could be total nonsense.
Anyway you should check it out, it is a good site and has a much better community aspect than Wikipedia or Everything2. In a sense it is more like Fark or Slashdot, only more friendly.
"In soviet russia", eh? Because of creative trolls like you the Slashdot trolling phenomena entry is yet again out of date.
How does 100,000 articles compare to 'old style' encyclopedias (e.g. Brittanica, World Book, etc)?
And when can I buy a nicely bound hard-copy for the cost of printing (plus a buck for the FSF)?
I've used wikipedia on several occasions and have even contributed a few articles relating to my university, city, and province. What an excellent project!
The breadth is pretty good. I've looked up things from world history to technical (modern day). I'd have to say the technical entries are stronger than the historical ones.
I worry a bit about historical inaccuracies, political leanings, bias etc. but then again all that stuff exists in any other published work out there. Maybe this thing we create together, with peer review and editing is no worse (bias-wise) than a collection of documents from a publisher?
Cool. I can relive the /. effect as a chronic hysteresis. Super. Just great. What are we supposed to do now?
Would you happen to have a key?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
According to dictionary.com, both meanings are accurate.
And who does check the articles? They could contain false information, right?
I think this is a great project, but I'm still using some other references to check the information , provided by sites like this.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
You're a peer, you reviewed it, you found a problem. Why didn't you correct it?
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
But the sheer simplicity of this solution, especially if you are starting from available documentation, should, as I have long advocated, make it useful for a lot more than a GPL Encyclopedia.
Espen
Wikipedia has been "slashdotted", July 26, 2001.
Oops, looks like that one will have to get updated.
[[sv:Slashdot]]
1 0/01/12312 50&mode=thread&tid=124 -- Slashdot Turns 5s las hdot.html -- A campaign to "Quit Slashdot"/ 0312258.sht ml -- The third (July 26, 2001) Slashdot article to mention [[Wikipedia]], and the first to focus in on itt ed_i ndex -- List of Slashdot's user-created discussionso rtman/nportma n_2.htm -- The definitive slashdot trolling 'how-to'.2 58226.sht ml?tid=149 -- A Slashdot article marking Wikipedia's 100,000th article
'''Slashdot''' is a popular technology oriented [[blog|weblog]]. Created in September [[1997]] by [[Rob Malda|Rob "Cocked In The Ass" Malda]], today it is owned by the [[Open Source Development Network]]. Most of Slashdot's content consists of short summaries of stories on other sites, with links to them, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. These summaries are generally provided by the Slashdot readers, with the editors accepting or rejecting these contributions. Also mixed in are movie and book reviews, as well as "Ask Slashdot" queries from users requesting information from the readership.
The name was chosen for its humorous [[URL]], "http://slashdot.org" (or "http-cock-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org").
Slashdot is run primarily by Malda, Jeff "Mastur" Bates (who posts stories, sells advertising, and handles the book reviews) and Robin "Roblimo" Miller (who came on board to help handle some of the more managerial sides of the site, as well as posting stories). The bandwidth is provided by Exodus.Net.
Slashdot's core audience consists of [[Linux]] enthusiasts and various other people within the [[Open Source]] software movement. Curiously, a poll on Slashdot suggests that almost half of all Slashdot users actually use [[Windows]] with only a third using some form of [[Linux]].
As anonymous posting is allowed on Slashdot (see [[AnonymousCoward|Anonymous Coward]]), [[Internet troll|trolling]] and [[spamming]] on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon. It is a bizarre and complex subculture involving attempts at the "[[first post]]", [[Naked and Petrified]] [[Natalie Portman]], hot [[grits]], the trolltalk forum and other user-created discussions, [[goatse.cx]], [[Beowulf cluster]]s, mock-[[homosexual]] erotica featuring an admixture of Slashdot celebrities and topics (e.g. [[Star Trek]], Linux, [[BSD]]), and other unusual juvenalia. Probably the most famous personalities to have come from Slashdot's '[[old school]]' trolling community are OSM, Trollaxor, Jon Eriksson, Streetlawyer, Gnarphlager, Dumb Marketing Guy, 70%, 80md, I Am Troll and The Lunchtime Troll. They are well-known for their creative writing. A newer breed of '[[blue collar]]' trolls set up [[Geekizoid]] - a site devoted to exploring and fostering 'crapflooding', whilst at the more upmarket end of the scale [[Adequacy.org]] experimented with other trolling techniques.
Since trolling is prevalent, a [[moderation system]] is implemented, whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) can be "moderated" up or down by randomly chosen moderators, changing its score likewise. A given comment can have any integer score between -1 and 5 inclusive, and a Slashdot user can set a personal threshold where no comments with a lesser score are displayed. (For example, a person with a score threshold of 1 will not see comments with a score of -1 or 0 but will see all others.) Moderators have been known to abuse the ability to increase or decrease the score of comments, and in some cases entire threads of comments have been marked down to -1.
The software that runs Slashdot is called [[Slashcode]] and is released under terms of the [[Free Software Foundation]]'s [[GNU General Public License]]. Many other websites use various customized versions of this software for their own web forums.
[[Nupedia]] and [[Wikipedia]] were Slashdotted (see [[Slashdot effect]]) on Thursday [[July 26]] [[2001]], @03:10AM.
'''Additional Resources:'''
[[Slashdot trolling phenomena]] -- more detail on some Slashdot trolls
*http://slashdot.org -- Slashdot
*http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/
*http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/
*http://slashdot.org/articles/01/07/26
*http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?op=user_crea
*http://www.brittanyspearsnue.com/np
*http://adequacy.org -- another site created by old school white collar slashdot trolls.
*http://slashdot.org/articles/03/01/22/0
How do you check how many writeups there are and other statistics? Can you give me a link to that page.
I used to know how to get there at everything.com but with everything2.com, I have no clue.
25 posts, and already 4 alternative online encyclopedias have been mentioned. Isn't this a gigantic waste of effort?
Well, it's chock full of the kind of people who think 'Metaphysics' is a bookshelf full of crappy paperbacks from Llewllyn Publishing.
So yes, it's sort of 'alternative' and all that, and bound to be crowded with cranks. It's sort of like 'The People's Almanac' from back in the 70s that way.
rap and scratching would go nowhere?
wiki wiki wiki!
apparently the wikipedia is a reference source no slashdotter should be without.
Their page on slashdotting already includes the following:
Wikipedia has been "slashdotted" on July 26, 2001 and January 22, 2003.
Talk about timely information!
What the Wikipedia doesn't have is an approval process, where credentialled people can approve a version of the article. There have been some proposals to add such a feature, but nobody's got around to coding one yet. If anybody knows PHP, a little SQL, and is prepared to help add such a thing I'm sure most of the developers and contributors would be delighted. I certainly would.
As for the actual quality of the Wikipedia, try a random article in an area you're reasonably knowledgable in, and see. And while you're there, fix anything that's wrong :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I don't think you can speak that generally of Wikipedia -- the quality of articles ranges dramatically, but tends to improve with time (even then rather dramatically).
/talk page more than once, but the product has been more balanced and inclusive than anything I've seen on the subject.
I've written a few articles, contributed to others, and even replace one. One I'm very impressed with is the Vietnam War article. It has had contributions from many people with many different perspectives and experiences with that war -- veterans and peace activists and others. Emotions have run high in the
But there are lots of annoying little problems -- duplicate articles that need to be merged, different models of organizing and presenting the same information that are going to be a bear to reconcile.
Vandalism is a problem, but not as much as you might thing. I contributed to the "polyhedron" article by resurrecting it (somebody had replaced the text with "concave lenses are cool"). While I had it in front of me, I created a html table for presenting some of the data there.
This is not a project for those with overly huge egos -- at least, not if they're going to try to do much outside the project -- because, over time, others will come by and change your articles, whether a little or a lot.
For those looking for peer-review, keep in mind that there are connections between Wikipedia (which is rather wide open) and Nupedia (which is peer reviewed) in both directions.
I would recommend that everybody look it over and contribute whatever they want to to make it better. But don't expect it to make any other encyclopedia obsolete -- at least, not quite yet.
The wiki does run on PHP.
Ha! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Wiki needs is a phrase or one-liner that helps people visualize what it is/does/and what benefits it has, so that they just get it.
How about "It's what the web should have been like, in a perfect world."
The GFDL license very much allows this. Whether you can paper-publish it profitably (or convince someone to underwrite it as charity or gov'mint work) is another matter, of course. :)
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
Derrida? Where's that?
How many edits is that?
Nupedia is also o free collaborative encyclopedia, but uses rigourous peer review. Comparing Wikipedia and Nupedia, one can see that Wikipedia has articles on much more topics, while the quality is certainly comparable.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
I don't know - I am not completely certain that slashdot editors actually care about this: I mean, action speaks louder than words.
Now, I have to admit, maybe they are making progress on it and it's just not public yet... but disabling asian character posting (i was encoding in UTF-8, btw) in comments seem like a backward thing if it was going the "internationalizing" direction.
I sincerely hope that slashdot will be completely UTF-8 someday (it's not that hard, really)... Here's to hoping...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I wonder why Japan, a country with so many people, has at most 100 articles, while Sweden has 4302 articles???
Neato concept.
How feasable would you think it be to burn the site to cd and offer it for sale? I think not only would it make an exellent research tool, but it would be a way to give money to the people who put it on as well.
For me it would be pretty cool to have a permanent copy if I made a contribution to the site, a nice way to brag about open software and online collaboration as well. Even if you have to bundle it with a tiny httpd server for windows users, it would still rock. That would be something I would happily throw a chunk of change at.
Yeah, those "angsy" white, pompous assholes really piss me off too, however, there is a shortage of dyslexic trolls over on e2 at the moment, interested? Twat.
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I know which I'd prefer
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No worries, product byproduct. I've got it covered!
I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds H2G2 intolerably nannyish in its editing, and filled with fans trying to write in a self-conscious Douglas Adams style.
As for the community aspect, there are few places that can top E2 for that. Noders (E2 users) meet in real life all the time, all around the world. There have been births, marriages and deaths. E2 may be unfriendly to new noders (and new order), but is certainly is a strong community.
> But there are lots of annoying little problems -- duplicate articles that need to be merged, different models of organizing and presenting the same information that are going to be a bear to reconcile
;-)
That's why we have WikiGnomes (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiGnome)
Nupedia and Wikipedia were Slashdotted (see Slashdot effect) on Thursday July 26 2001 and Wednesday January 22 2003.
No, you're not the only one. They have a ridiculous position on word censorship, choosing to st*r most of the letters out if someone might find it offensive. I mean, what the fuck? It's not as if you can't discern what the word actually is.
.. yeah, I know what you mean. Humour is best left to those who are funny, who have that style. But hey, it's no worse than Slashdot being overrun by Linux fanboys.
Also, if the BBC is maintaining media silence on a topic and you post on it, your post will be deleted. This happened recently on a "what music are you listening to?" thread - someone posted that they were listening to something by the Who. And because Pete Townsend was in the news recently as a suspected paedophile, the post got removed - it wasn't even talking about the case! Same with John Leslie a while ago for those rape allegations. *Everything* mentioning his name was removed.
It's totally ridiclous. How they expect to foster a balanced community in such repressive circumstances I have no idea.
Add to that the massive proliferation of IM-style smiley icons and it becomes this big AOL-style chat room type place. I agree with you, they are totally taking this down the pan. Which is a shame, 'cause it has (had?) so much potential.
As for the DNA writing style
On the other hand, it may well have been a deliberate mixture of the words "angry" and "angsty", you mealy-mouthed cock haven.
>The big problem with this is it's best feature. Accuarcy.
Ha!
Yeah but do they have anything on Everything 2?
Writing yet another encyclopedia won't change anything--the world is full of decent-to-excellent reference material. But the world desperately needs first-rate documentation for many free software projects. That's a major hurdle to the mainstream success of free software as an MS alternative.
You have an article that has nothing to do with Windows/Linux and what do we get.
"It's great to see that this interactive project works; at least I don't have to boot into Windows to use Encarta anymore!"
The maturity on this website is incredible. By the way, what ever happened to Jon Katz?
Lots of people can write articles. Drawing pictures is harder (particularly technical drawings), and getting copyright-cleared photographs of particular people is harder still.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
E2 tends to be pretty left-wing. About the only place farther-left I know of that's not explicitly political is K5.
I'd argue that maybe Wikipedia is better for straight facts, but you'll never see good, creditable writing on there, because the system discourages taking ownership of one's own writing. Knowing that someone else can come along and edit my writing at his/her whim doesn't encourage me to contribute. A Wiki encourages the lowest common denominator to come along and change things at will.
(Your complaint about E2's supposed unfriendliness for discussions also really doesn't hold water when you're comparing E2 to Wikipedia. Or do you like being edited in a discussion? Personally, I prefer that my comments remain mine until I change them.)
Wikipedia has several features to make it easy to figure out if something is broken. The first is that every article keeps a change log. So you can go and see exactly which words and paragraphs have been changed.
The second feature is watchlists. Basically, every editor can choose to watch any article they want. Then, when you go to wikipedia, you can check and see when the last time any of the articles on your watchlist were changed. If I see something that is wrong, I can revert the change, or I can modify their change so that the correct information is there.
In combination these abilities are powerful. I have seen at least two occasions where someone broke something and then another editor reverted it in less than 5 minutes. Things that are subtly wrong take more time to fix since someone has to figure out what really should go there but this usually only takes a week or so.
An alternative (and obviously more british) version of this is the Hitchikers Guide to the galaxy 2.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/
(although it appears to have been pre-slashdotted right now)
I love the fact that Wikipedia exists and shows the real strength of collaborative work on the internet. Project Gutenburg and the archives on Ibiblio also come to mind as great resources on the net.
We should try and have more of these sites mirrored on the Net, IMO. I live in Canada and I don't see why we can't have gov't sponsor mirrors of such information sources. as it would benefit everyone. I'm all for public libraries but this stuff is right at your fingertips and is handy for quick information and its cheaper to run.
You should actually use Wikipedia for a while and see how the problems you allege are solved in reality:
See also the Wikipedia article Our Replies to Our Critics. Really, all these problems are solved. What Wikipedia needs is a structured fact-checking and certification process to give it more authority and credibility.
Nupedia is absolutely dead and buried. I should know - I spent a year pushing a single article through the system. That article has *still* not been published (it jumped through all the hoops but the senior editorial guys haven't published it). The most likely reason for this is that there are, essentially, no senior editorial staff left...
I have a Nupedia t-shirt and mug and I expect them to become collectors items in the very near future!
Stick with Wiki - it's a world apart.
Isn't that up to the programmers? We're just a bunch of encyclopedists, Hari Seldon style ;-)
Veering off-topic some more, the major hurdle to the mainstream success of free software as an MS alternative is the lack of "double click to install" idiot-proof installation for software.
Try http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/ -- it's really not inspiring to the average Windows user who decides to try out free software.
> You're a peer, you reviewed it, you found a problem. Why didn't you correct it?
... enormous grain of salt.
He did not review it. He stumbled on something glaringly obvious that written by someone who didn't have any clue what they were talking about. It's not his job to fact-check things that could have been verified by looking them up in other sources, when he could have just gone to the other source.
I see wikipedia as a sort of free H2G2, and a great test to see how wiki scales -- not technically, since there's so many implementations (wikipedia uses usemod, which doesn't even use a db -- sql, bdb or otherwise), but in terms of being a commons and in finding the minimal mechanisms needed to avoid or at least ameliorate the tragedy of the commons.
As an information resource
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
How do you decide what accurate is?
There was a subject I wrote about in a number of articles, which some arrogant American woman who had no idea what she was talking about thought was incorrect, and altered all of what I wrote. All others agreed with her, although I know she is wrong.
I eventually rewrote the said area in a very indirect and obtuse way which they seemed to not take issue with in their ignorance of the subject.
How do you decide what is fact? With sheer force of editing numbers? This ends up with a bias.
Millions of published books in the last few centuries, and there's an enormous amount of overlap between titles. This is true for both fiction and non-fiction. For example, if I want a book on any of databases or Japan or photography, there are hundreds to choose from each. Isn't this a gigantic waste of effort?
No, it's not.
"HGTTG2"? "the Hitchikers Guide to the galaxy 2"?
Are you sure?
Here's how the real acronym works:
Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy
= Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
= Hitch Hikers Guide Galaxy
= H H G G
= H2 G2
= H2G2
I wouldn't trust Wiki's accuracy as much as I might trust other encyclopedias (though EB has its mistakes too!) But I would trust it as much or more than the typical "I consider myself an expert, let me stick some info on my web page" page that you come across when googling. This at least has review, and incorrect facts are regularly uncovered.
When Wiki reaches a certain level of maturity, snapshot articles will be lifted out of it and "frozen". Perhaps they'll be added to Nupedia, or some other non-editable encyclopedia with a dedicated fact-checking and copyediting system.
You could never do that with H2G2 or e2, of course, because of the copyright issues.
Experience doesn't always correspond to accuracy. A much better solution is to simply to address the facts in dispute, which is generally what happens on Wiki. If someone disputes a fact in an article (say, that the relapsing-fever tick has a soft outer shell), they should be prepared to provide evidence, either citing literature or some other reliable websites.
At worst, someone needs to go to the library or contact an expert. You'd be surprised how much information is available even to non-experts.
I do think there should be some paid volunteers and experts in particular subjects to check the authenticity of the work. Professors or researchers would be nice.
I agree that this would be nice. However, the great thing about professors is that they already have a source of income. What you really need to do is bring this project to their attention and try and get them to take it seriously.
Maybe Wiki's too young and rough for their taste. But I imagine that there are enough professors who would find the concept intriguing enough to contribute a few proofreads and edits here and there, just on principle.
Nupedia was the one with the rigorous proofreading system and quality-control process. It never went much of anywhere. There are a few articles up, but the project is pretty much in hiatus.
One of the biggest problems with Nupedia was that it required you to write an entire article yourself. Wikipedia, since it's completely wide-open and collaborative, is much easier to deal with. You can start an article with a paragraph or so; people will add information; someone will rearrange and rewrite so it looks better; people will copyedit it; etc.
At some point an article may reach a level of maturity that would be a good starting point for the formal copyedit/review process designed into Nupedia, thus the two projects might complement each other eventually.
Klasika! Mirindega! Ho, ve!
Is Microsoft being evil because I am running Opera or is that a genuine error message?:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I can't believe this hasn't been suggested before. I hope it is in the works.
Speaking of which: Dictionary.com says it has six entries found for review. The VERY FIRST DEFINITION which comes up: "To look over, study, or examine again." And the third: "To examine with an eye to criticism or correction: reviewed the research findings."
He is a peer, he did review it, he did find a problem, he should have corrected it, but he was too lazy. It is just that simple. It's okay to be lazy, he has no obligation to edit the wikipedia, but he's bitching about something he could have fixed in (I hope) less than a minute. It would have taken him little more effort to fix it there (assuming he needed to create an account) than it took him to bitch about it here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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1. Goatse.cx (3130 bytes)
1: '''Goatse.cx''' is an infamous site on the [[World Wide Web...
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1. Goatse.cx (3130 bytes)
1: '''Goatse.cx''' is an infamous site on the [[World Wide Web...
2. Communications in Christmas Island (572 bytes)
3. Slashdot trolling phenomena (5536 bytes)
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Just to correct your misinformation about the
Wikipedia software: We haven't used Usemod for
well over a year. It simply didn't scale, so
Magnus Manske wrote new software using MySql/PHP
which helped, but it too bogged down, so I
rewrote it again from scratch, also using MySql
and PHP, but with more attention paid to
performance. This third-generation software is
what we're running now.
--Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
Jes, nia kara lingvo ne jam mortas en la interreto. Bonvolu esti logita, kaj redaktu... redaktu... :)
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
I just checked, and the error has already been corrected.
No mercy.
By the way, wikipedia doesn't need account registration.
I actually began to edit it, but I looked through and the entire thing is glarinly innacurate. If I was going to do it, I wanted to do it right, and therefore wasn't prepared to do a brief change. There is an amount of work in fixing it, which I don't have time for at the moment.
It would be OK even if you correct a few things, and you are under no obligation to do so. :-)
Branko
In the Open Content and Open Source worlds, there is no real distinction between users and contributors. One can (and should) continuously shift between the two roles.
The quality of a project is determined by the quality of the contributions, not by the comments of those standing at the side-lines.
Nobody is forced to contribute: however, the comments of those who do not contribute are of limited worth. Some worth (even comments can be contributions, if they lead to improvement), but limited.
Branko
...I was the one who wrote the Slashdot trolling phenomena article. You see in the list of edits the IP address 212.229.115.84? That's me.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
yeah, good comeback Shakespeare.
"I got into an elevator at work and this man followed in after me... I
pushed '1' and he just stood there... I said 'Hi, where you going?' He
said, 'Phoenix.' So I pushed Phoenix. A few seconds later the doors
opened, two tumbleweeds blew in... we were in downtown Phoenix. I looked
at him and said 'You know, you're the kind of guy I want to hang around
with.' We got into his car and drove out to his shack in the desert.
Then the phone rang. He said 'You get it.' I picked it up and said
'Hello?'... the other side said 'Is this Steven Wright?'... I said 'Yes...'
The guy said 'Hi, I'm Mr. Jones, the student loan director from your bank...
It seems you have missed your last 17 payments, and the university you
attended said that they received none of the $17,000 we loaned you... we
would just like to know what happened to the money?' I said, 'Mr. Jones,
I'll give it to you straight. I gave all of the money to my friend Slick,
and with it he built a nuclear weapon... and I would appreciate it if you never
called me again."
-- Steven Wright
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