Forum:Syndrome's proposal on what to do with Undictionary

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When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the -- wait, no, that's the Declaration of Independence.

In regard to Undictionary, I think there's two things we can agree on. (1) It sucks, and (2) Nobody cares. So I'm suggesting a rather harsh deletion scheme, this likes of which have been proposed for articles in general instead of Undictionary entries, except this one will go unopposed and we'll actually do it. (If you're wondering why I'm so confident about this, consider fact (2)).

What you can do to help:

1. At your leisure, read one of the 27 Undictionary pages and choose the 10 (or less) best ones. Post your list on the talk page for the letter. One month from now, {{CURRENTMONTH|+1}}, October 7, I will clear out everything except the top 10 entries. That leaves 270 entries total. And that's terrible.
2. Buy war bonds.
3. Recycle scrap metal.

You have been warned. --Pleb SYNDROME _{CUN medicate (butt poop!!!!)} 23:55, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Dammit Syndrome! I was gonna go and remove 55% of the crap entries next week everyday after I finished my homework and cello practice! Dammit! Fine, I'll do it to the Timeline instead... --MegaPleb • Dexter111344 • Complain here 00:08, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I really don't think anyone would object if you went ahead and removed some blatantly stupid/vanity entries. That just means less the rest of us have to read. --Pleb SYNDROME _{CUN medicate (butt poop!!!!)} 00:19, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Woot! – Sir Skullthumper, MD (criticize • writings • critchat) 00:21 Sep 08, 2008

/me killed a bunch of the A entries. --MegaPleb • Dexter111344 • Complain here 00:57, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

monika's addendum:

• If there is a mainspace article that isn't crap, we don't need an undictionary entry.
• If the undictionary entry stays after all that cleaning up happening up there, there should probably be a redirect from mainspace.

The second part of this up for debate. Feel free to debate the first part if you disagree, but I'd be surprised if anyone did. Anyway, I was going to suggest that we each take a letter or so and check that the entries are not duplicates of mainspace articles, but then I realized I could probably automate this (at least, the finding duplicates part) later. So I'll leave this post here just for debate then. --monika 03:03, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. I think one of Dr. Skullthumper's sockpuppets can handle both of those. --Pleb SYNDROME _{CUN medicate (butt poop!!!!)} 03:09, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm... So 28/90ths of the As have articles. I was kind of hoping that number would be lower. --monika 03:19, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Actually I'm kind of iffy on that first point. If the Undictionary entry and the article have the same concept then the entry is just redundant (for example, RTFM and Undictionary:R#RTFM), but if they have different takes on the same subject (like Abacus and Undictionary:A#Abacus), maybe they're both worth keeping. --Pleb SYNDROME _{CUN medicate (butt poop!!!!)} 03:26, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

K, so a human would need to check redundancy, and then either elect to keep both, submit the article to VFD (and note that there is an undictionary entry), or delete the undictionary entry. We could still automate the creation of a candidate diplicate list. --monika 03:31, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

No no no no no no no no.

Take out the terrible ones, sure, but don't mass remove stuff if people don't specifically say they like it. And leaving 10 entries per page is an awful idea. And removing entries that have a mainspace article would also be unnecessary. It's possible fr something to have both a dictionary and encyclopaedia entry. Just use a main article: thing. • Spang • ☃ • talk • 10:56, 08 Sep 2008

For what Spang said. Yea, clean it up if you want, but go easy. It's easy when doing this sort of thing to go a bit mad and you end up removing good stuff. I'm not sure it's worth the bother of using a bot. It probably needs to be done by hand anyway as the title may not be an exact match and you would have to use search. If you want to use the main article: thing to link to mainspace articles, that's obviously a good idea. While you are there, sort of the formatting so that it's consistent. MrN 11:48, Sep 8

That's why I'm suggesting the 10 votes thing. So something good doesn't get deleted just because I overlook it or don't get it. Really, if just one person votes to keep it, I suppose that's reason enough to keep it. --Pleb SYNDROME _{CUN medicate (butt poop!!!!)} 12:41, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

What's wrong with being strict with Undictionary? You (maybe not you specifically, but someone) would revert "meh" edits to a featured article not because they're bad but because they might disrupt the continuity or bring down the quality of the article as a whole. I realize Undictionary has no continuity, but we still don't want the reader scratching his proverbial head and wondering "why is this entry even here?" I don't think 10 is unreasonable; I combed through A and only found 9 I liked before I had to circle back and consider the rest. --Pleb SYNDROME _{CUN medicate (butt poop!!!!)} 12:41, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Dude setting any sort of arbitrary limit is plain bonkers. Dexter and myself have both been through A through F now and we both decided that what was there was worth keeping. I did X,Y and Z just now also. You can tell who has looked at the page recently by looking at the history...

The thing to do is just go through cutting out the REALLY bad stuff. Different people have different a sense of humour, so will like different things. I think we can all spot the vanity/childish/penis jokes, and they are the ones to remove. The last thing we want is more voting. Just edit as you see fit, but be very cautious about removing stuff... MrN 12:51, Sep 8

I beg your pardon! Arbitrary limits are awesome. Incidentally, your chocolate ration has been deducted from 25 grams per month to 20 grams. Sorry. It's for the good of the nation, you understand.

What do we do about crap/nonsense entries that don't fall into the vanity/childish/penis category? Things like Undictionary:B#Baggage would be huffed or reverted on the mainspace. My caution about removing it amounts to waiting a month for the community to review it (or don't, as they see fit). And the truth is there seems to be a lot more interest in this than I had thought, so maybe some people will actually vote. I thought everyone had just abandoned Undictionary to the IPs. Thanks to you and Dexter for helping purge the bad stuff. --Pleb SYNDROME _{CUN medicate (butt poop!!!!)} 13:32, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

The problem with the voting thing is that like you said... Generally UN:N about Undictionary so chances are that not enough people would participate in your voting idea to make it workable. It's also a lot less effort just to edit, so do that... For your "What do we do about crap/nonsense entries that don't fall into the vanity/childish/penis category?" question... The tricky thing is being able to spot what is crap or nonsense. Dexter removed a few one liners which I though were brilliant so I added them back in. What I did was do a google and wiki search on the words I did not know. If after looking them up they were made up words or the joke made no sense whatsoever I removed them. If I was not sure I left them in. Regarding Undictionary:B#Baggage... Yea, maybe that particular one is cabbage, but I was not sure, so again I left it. If you really want that one out, remove it. Just air on the side of caution, that's all I'm saying... /me deletes Syndrome... MrN 13:46, Sep 8

I'd huff it all if I could bring myself to give a damn ^_^

I think you'll find it's Babbage, not baggage. You clearly didn't even read it properly! That's why you need an UnDictionary! And the whole point is that it wouldn't survive as an article on its own. And sometimes it's ok to have a nonsense entry. Nonsense is a part of Uncyclopedia's remit too.

And even if you don't like it, the beauty of having a page with lots of entries is that you can just randomly scroll about the list scanning for something that looks interesting/funny. This is why adding images to occasional entries would be a good idea. And why having a dictionary page with 10 entries on it would be bad. And as much as people don't care about undictionary, they care about voting less.

And I've always kinda liked undictionary. Sometimes a quick joke is all you need when you can't be bothered reading a whole article, which seem like they need an entire plot to survive these days. It might be a good idea for all the entries without a mainspace article to have a redirect from mainspace to the undictionary entry. That way people looking for something on that subject won't be disappointed, and if someone want to write an article on it, they can just overwrite the redirect with it. And I have every undictionary page on my watchlist, and used to occasionally check what was getting added, but haven't really been doing so lately. Maybe other people should do the same to keep an eye on it. • Spang • ☃ • talk • 14:04, 08 Sep 2008

/me wonders why MrN mentions me so much..

Do you have a crush or what?

Anyway, this is clearly bigger than just the Undictionary. Something drastic needs to be done. I have the ultimate plan to permanently (as in, in the near future) fix Uncyclopedia. We will delete all but the 7000 best articles. This will give Uncyclopedia a fresh start and allow for the 21 newly hired Jews to work day and night writing new articles. The deletion process should only take two days, and the, in the following five days, they shall have written 35,000 new articles and improved the other 7000 (even Euroipods). It will be perfect! Plus, it's all divisible by 7! Mwhahahahahaha!

Great idea, eh? --MegaPleb • Dexter111344 • Complain here 20:30, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, I just have to take Dexter outside for a second... three loud sound of gunshots are heard from the car park, and MrN wanders back in... Now where were we? Oh, yea, everyone was talking about doing stuff without actually doing anything. /me goes back to doing nothing... MrN 20:57, Sep 8