RationalWiki:DysLexicon

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Are the shibboleths of Rationalwiki confusing you? We provide you with the Dys Lexicon to make it worse. Starred items are old ones that we don't use anymore. Note: since the acceptance of civility is part of our Community Standards, one should avoid using terms that are considered pejoratives against fellow-editors.

A[edit]

AnCap — (noun) Anarcho-capitalist or Anarcho-capitalism.
Automagic — (adjective; adv. form automagically) — resulting from technical wizardry.

origin — BizMarkie. See also the Jargon File.^[1]

Autistic — (adjective; adv. form) Actually another way of saying a person has autism but commonly used to mindlessly bash Rationalwikians for being sciencey. Points for stupidity and ableism.
AFD — (n) the articles for deletion page/system, or a particular entry. Not Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Incidence — many wikis, including RW and TOW

B[edit]

A banhammer card

Banhammer: The most dreaded form of punishment on Conservapedia, aside from having them sic the FBI on you. Is most often used by Karajou, as a result of his extreme paranoia and insecurity.
BoN — (n) An editor who has not joined or is not logged in, identified only by their IP address — a bunch of numbers. Usually just here to make a few sporadic edits, never to return. A blend of lurkers, grammar Nazis, and trolls. Often found on the saloon bar and talk pages.

Alternatives — if the grammar works better, "abunchofnumbers". (other random versions that occur: bunchofnumbers, bunchanumbers, buncho'numbers , BON, Bon, bon, bon-bon, buncho).

Bork — (v)* Synonymous with the verb "break". Hence "it's borked", "you borked it you daft ****" and so on.

Origin — Probably somewhere around Urban Dictionary; possible link to Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court; or a typo for "broken".^[2]

Incidence — Whenever Trent (User:Tmtoulouse) spilt coffee on the server.

Alternative — Doggos say this.

Bunchofnumbers — (n) see BoN above.
Butthurt — (adj) pejorative term for offended, implying that one's butt hurts from having been properly spanked

Incidence — RationalWiki:Pissed at us, and more generally all over the interwebz.

C[edit]

Cabal* — there is no cabal.

Coop — (v) taking someone to the RationalWiki:Chicken coop, i.e. trying to get the community to impose sanctions on them. Alternately (n) the chicken coop itself.
Cretinist* — (n) — a creationist, usually a young Earth creationist.

D[edit]

Deceit* — (n) — a catch-all refutation and condemnation of any statistic, argument, subtlety or humour. Often prefixed by 'liberal'.
Origin — Andrew Schlafly.
DFTT — (imp.) — Don't Feed The Troll. Ideally, presented as a link to Don't feed the Troll.

E[edit]

EC — short for "edit conflict" (see below) — indicates that someone else posted before one could finish writing their post. It usually means that the new post may repeat some of the points of the slightly-older one. Often lowercase (ec).

Incidence — within parentheses or sometimes square brackets preceding a post whose making entailed an edit conflict.

Edit conflict — (n) what happens when someone else has saved a change to the page after you started editing and their changes are incompatible with yours. As a result, when you try to save your version, MediaWiki displays an "edit conflict" page that is theoretically supposed to help you reconcile the two changes. Remarkably annoying, especially when occurring multiple times in the making of one edit.

Incidence — Most frequently high-traffic discussion pages such as the saloon bar, but possible on any page which draws the attention of two editors at about the same time. Likelihood notably decreased when everyone uses section edit links instead of hitting the edit tab up top. Do it.^[3]

Evilutionist* — (n) The opposite of Cretinist; another hilarious term invented by those wacky YEC guys to describe someone who thinks that the Book of Genesis is just a fairy story (although there are no faeries in the aforementioned), or at least interprets it in a manner requiring reading skills beyond those of a kindergartner.

F[edit]

fnord — if you can see this, you already know.
FUD — Fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

G[edit]

Goat — (n) — the RW mascot. Pioneered by User:DocSock, goats are ubiquitous on RW. For example, when asked which Deathly Hallow one would have, the vast majority of respondents replied 'goat'. When someone says a page "needs goat" they mean it lacks something but are unable to articulate exactly what.

Incidence — Rationalwiki

Godspeed!!!* — (v. imp.) — either a cheery "see you later" or a devious way to say "go fuck yourself".

Incidence — Conservapedia

Origin — Andrew Schlafly's talk page, infected a few other sysops. And us.

Occasionally perverted as: God's peed (God has urinated — geddit?).

Goatspeed!!!* (v. imp.) lulz — It had to happen.

Incidence — RationalWiki

Origin — Human, but ownership immediately transferred to Docsock/PalMD.

H[edit]

Mike the Headless Chicken, the remarkable case of a chicken that lived without a head for 18 months, demonstrating the capacity for headless homeostasis in chickens

Headless Chicken Mode — (n) — A state of internal confusion and destruction.

Origin — Pioneered by "False Flag." on RationalWikiWiki.

I[edit]

I thought this was supposed to be RATIONALWiki! — a variant of phrases used by critics of RationalWiki who question of the rationality of the site's stances and content. See Essay:I thought this was supposed to be RATIONALWiki. The phrase has become something of a RW meme, and the {{RATIONALWiki}} template is a cheap and popular alternative to constructive dialogue.

J[edit]

Long-eared jerboa* — (n) — ~~superior~~ rodent competitor to the Holy Goat.

Incidence — RationalWiki.

K[edit]

Ken — (v)* — to edit in the manner of Ken Demyer (Conservapedia:Conservative); i.e. to make an inordinate number of small edits to do what should have been achieved in one, using 'preview' — or to rely excessively on the direct quotations of other people almost to the exclusion of original text. On RationalWiki, such practices are frowned upon (as it clogs up the page's fossil record),^[dubious] and if it inadvertently happens it is usually apologised for in the edit comment.

Kenpost — (n) — a trollpost made by a certain Ken, usually on the talkpage of, or as a "message" to, some gentleman on a certain atheist website starting with R whom he has a grudge against. Such posts are usually so similar to each other, that we've even been able to make a depressingly-realistic random generator compiled from things the Kenster has actually said.

Origin — Coined by User:CircularReasoning in a saloon bar comment.^[4]

L[edit]

LANCB — Leaving and never coming back — people who do this usually come back anyway
Lulz — Amusement, usually in the form of trolling.
Lurker — Someone who reads a wiki without ever actually joining.

M[edit]

The standard-issue mop

Machismo* — (n. pronounced: ma-cheese-moh) — a state of extreme manliness found only in creationist nerds.

Origin — User Conservative of Conservapedia.

Incidence — Shockofgod's YouTube videos.

Missional — (adj) Relating to or furthering RationalWiki's mission. Not to be confused with missionary (as in the, erm, position).

Incidence — RationalWiki, usually in the midst of either an assertion that x is not missional or an argument that x is more missional than y, where y is almost invariably the subject of a five-sentence stub which, due to inaction, has not yet been deleted. As RationalWiki lacks a formal notability criterion, a subject's missionality or lack thereof is central to determining whether or not it should have an article.

Mission drift — (n) the perceived tendency for RationalWiki to cover an ever-growing (or, as some argue, ever-shifting) set of topics, in spite of the lack of official, codified change to its mission.

Incidence — the words of the old guard, wistfully longing for the old days.

Moonbat — (adj; n) — a left-winger, often with environmental connotations. Compare — 'moonraker', and hence connotations of head-in-the-sky thinking. It's also reminiscent of Governor Moonbeam.

Origin — mangling the surname of the noted environmentalist George Monbiot (now, kids, repeat after me: MON-BEE-OH)

Incidence — Blogs 4 Brownback

Mop and bucket — (n phrase) tools issued to sysops for cleaning up after wandals. Commonly shortened to mop.
MRA — (n) Men's Rights Activist.

N[edit]

95% — (adj; n)* — an invented statistic (often by Andrew Schlafly) that links two otherwise seemingly unrelated phenomena. See Conservapedia:Schlafly Statistics.

Origin — "I do know, with 95% certainty, what your positions are on classroom prayer and evolution. The 95% confidence level is all that science requires."

— Andrew Schlafly^[5]

Incidence — Conservapedia, Rationalwiki

O[edit]

ONOZ meets OMG!

Oh noes! — (exclamation) — wail of person who has just discovered an unfortunate event. Sometimes spelled onoz! or ono! instead.

Incidence — bold text (bonus points for bold italic text), often between the imaginary tags <sarcasm> and </sarcasm>, as in the message displayed to blocked users.

Old guard — (n) RationalWikians who have been around a long time and/or are resistant to change. Depending on context (and on who utters the phrase), it may mean the few remaining members from the site's founding period in 2007, or just anybody who's been onsite for more than a year or so, or one of several in-between meanings which will only grow in number as RW grows in age.

Incidence — complaints about resistance to rather goofy yet sweeping changes, or sometimes (with decreasing frequency) greetings issued by old guardsmen to old guardsmen.

P[edit]

PIDOOMA — Pulled It Directly Out Of My Ass. or argumentum ex culo
Poe — (n) — a persona or statement subject to Poe's Law. Also "to pull a Poe".

Mr. Poot (or some other variant that includes "Poot") — (n) — A humorous moniker that some ~~totalitarian unelected hackers who have the power to alter the site's interface to their heart's desire, erasing a few much-loved block reasons from existence~~ techs and ~~Orwellian thoughtpolice~~ mods like to change obviously bad-faith new accounts' vulgar usernames to. See also Fart.

Origin- This log entry by Cosmikdebris:

Pootie — (n) — A spurious account created by Mr. Poot.^[6]^[7]

Q[edit]

R[edit]

Ratwiki — (n) mocking corruption of "RationalWiki"

incidence — One of the dozen or so blogs Denyse O'Leary pretends is "journalism".

RMF — (n) abbreviation for the name of the RationalMedia Foundation

origin: Hojimachong's Parthian shot to Andrew Schlafly.

RW 1.0 (n, fabled) — the semi-private precursor to RationalWiki 2.0/2.1, ca. 2/07-5/07.

origin: RationalWiki 2.0

incidence: RationalWiki 2.0, 2.1

RW 2.0 — (n) RationalWiki 2.0, the version of RW which succeeded RW 1.0. If the current version is considered 2.0, the term simply indicates RW once it became an actual quasi-encyclopedic wiki; if the current version is considered 3.0 or later, the term indicates RW after said transition but prior to either some supposed massive shift in site goals, culture, etc. or some (actually demonstrable and documented, unlike the former) process of old users leaving/new users joining.
RWF — abbreviation for RationalWiki Foundation, the old name of the entity which is now the RationalMedia Foundation.

S[edit]

A sockpuppet

Seekrit — (adj.) — bastardization of "secret", to imply that something is "secret", but really not that cool at all.

Origin — intarweb history

Incidence — Discount accusations of cabalism

SJW — (n) Social Justice Warrior.
SLAPP suit — (n) Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
Snark — (v , n) — a sarcastic or snide remark inserted into an article. Generally used in place of logic.

Origin: Portmanteau of snide and sarcasm or "snide remark", but possibly with reference to Lewis Carroll (Hunting of the…)

Incidence — Rationalwiki, Blogs 4 Brownback, Republican Faith (blog), Television Without Pity.

T[edit]

The trout of whacking

Technical support — (n) short form of RationalWiki:Technical support; generally used as a euphemistic way of telling other editors to start drinking their technical sorrows away.
tldr — too long, didn't read
TOW — (n) the other wiki: Wikipedia. Also sometimes phrased teh wikipeds.

Incidence — RationalWiki, along with many other wikis, excluding Wikipedia itself, of course.

Troll — (n) like a vandal, another class of user who does not have the best interest of the site he is attacking at heart. Makes comments (or asks questions) designed to inflame or irritate other users, attempts to start arguments, or presents insincere arguments designed to be a nuisance for the site's more benevolent users. More sophisticated trolls may make posts of a harmless or even beneficial nature in order to lull the moderators/sysops into a false sense of security before starting a divisive & negative campaign. See TK.
Trollance — (n) the spoor of a troll. See "wandalism"

Origin — invented by User:SusanG, 06:55, 12 December 2007 (EST)

Trout — (v) To whack someone with a wet trout using this template. This is a reference to the Monty Python fish-slapping dance.^[10]

Origin — Wikipedia

Turdblossom — (n) defined by RationalWiki:Turdblossoms as a page meant specifically to address conflicts, one of which is created every time we have a [major] conflict on the wiki. Characterized fairly accurately by Template:Turdblossom as a discussion which has descended into petty sniping and trolling idiocy. Not to be confused with the other turdblossom.

Incidence — semi-nostalgic recollections of such arguments, warnings about the direction of ongoing discussions.

See also Karl Rove, the quintessential example.

U[edit]

User 188 — (n)* A bizarre reference to Conservapedia sysop Ed Poor.

Origin — Wikipedia where he claims (accurately) to be the 188^th editor: as if that made his views more pertinent.

Incidence — User 188 asks a creepy question about young girls. (using the creepy sig "Uncle Ed")

V[edit]

W[edit]

Wandalism — (n)* Can mean funny vandalism or even a good edit.

Pioneered by "Somewhere on the Net" but popularized here by user Human.

(from wiki vandalism)