There is a type of creature worse than the clown who blanks pages or replaces words with obscenities or cute comments about their school mates: I am talking about the villain who subtly tries to change entries, to change information hoping no one will notice. This is not silliness. This is not goofing off. This is destructive malice for its own sake. There is no payoff for the villain except knowledge that he has deliberately deceived people, that he has deliberately sown chaos into a system whose only purpose is to make information more accessible to everyone. Some people argue that Wikipedia is "unreliable" because it can be edited by anyone. But the villain who pretends to claim he is helping people by increasing Wikipedia's unreliability is a moral cesspool. Many people think the person who disagrees with them about some issue or another is a "bad guy." But the true bad guys are those who hurt people just for the sake of hurting them, and--in the case of Wikipedia--those who deceive people just for the sake of deceiving them. --Janus Shadowsong 16:13, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
I wrote this to an editor who claimed to be trying to prove that Wikipedia is unreliable by adding false information:
I appreciate your desire to teach a lesson that information found on the Internet should be treated with caution. However, you are also teaching your class to treat Wikipedia with disrespect. Wikipedia is a collective effort by thousands of good people with the intent of making the vast store of human knowledge more easily acccessible to everyone, for the benefit of everyone. Please show it the kind of respect you would give to anything that makes better lives for you and the people you care about.
To mark a Dead Link: Place {{dead link}} after the dead URL and just before the </ref> tag if applicable, leaving the original link intact. Placing {{dead link}} auto-categorizes the article into Articles with dead external links project category, and into specific monthly date range category based on |date= parameter. Do not delete a URL just because it has been tagged with {{dead link}} for a long time.
