User:Bicycle Wheel/RationalWikiWiki F

False signing

False signing is the act of faking the signature of another editor when commenting on a wiki. (Example)

For some reason, nobody ever seems bothered by it on RationalWiki, although it has been called to the Chicken coop on occasion . This is probably because it is typically only done on high-lulz threads, rather for outright deception on "important" issues.

Over the years, it has happened less and less, and seemed to no longer happen at all now, unless a user-name clone shows up. In February 2012 Fallacy set up a randomized false signing sig.

Faking ASchlafly's signature is also done on Conservapedia-related threads on occasion.

Felidae

Felidae, despite its apolitical and nonreligious content, has been one of RationalWiki's most argued-about articles. Seriously, check the talk page archives. 120 juicy kilobytes of ludicrous arguments about whether to keep an article about the cat family, and what should be in it. Even the logs are full of drama. It doesn't really need saying who wrote most of the article, and defended it (and everything in it), but, well, it was CUR again.

History

The whole thing started when CUR wrote an article about the Rusty-spotted cat, his favourite cat species. It was redirected to Felids and then Felidae, and after a while the article expanded into a massive coatrack for him to write about every cat species. And there was a gallery, with asinine captions that were meant to be entertaining. The bits about lions and cheetahs became articles of their own, which still survive (in funspace for some reason). Long after CUR left, it was nuked (for the ninth time) by Dog-lover Pacodog A redirect to CUR's userspace version was created by Zeiber to "clear up 21 redlinks". There are still versions in CUR's userspace. It now redirects to cat.

Fibonacci sequence

The Fibonacci sequence is a simple numerical sequence theoretically used to calculate the length of blocks.

In reality, it is an utter waste of time as it has never once been used properly in the entire history of the known universe.

As a result, there are no real standards for block lengths. Some RW sysops have, in an effort to substitue some other mathematically interesting pattern, blocked for intervals of pi * 10ⁿ seconds, with n being fairly arbitrary.

Bizarrely, and for reasons which will never be clear to man or beast, both Edgerunner76 and Linus edited TK's block length in a really futile attempt to maintain the pretense that this blocking system is understood and used. Perhaps they wanted to give some veneer of respectability to the Great TK banning Incident which in every other respect was a prime example of Headless Chicken Mode. Even then, they got the numbers wrong.

Thanks to the vandal bin, blocking is no longer used against vandals, and the sequence has been abandoned. The block length dropdown now contains entries based on the digits of pi. Including, oddly, 0*pi.

After a particularly dedicated edit warrior kept warring over the Free will page, it appears to be making a small comeback.

Friendly Block

A friendly block is a block applied to a user for humorous purposes. It is the opposite of the malicious block, and by far the more common of the two.

On RationalWiki, friendly blocks are when sysops slap each other —and sometimes non-sysops — with short blocks. They often utilize strange block comments. One notable example is the time Kels set about (and succeeded at) blocking every sysop — in alphabetical order.

On occasion, just-registered users are handed a "welcome block" as a sort of initiation rite. It typically lasts less than a minute. Recipients of such blocks usually don’t notice unless they happen to be editing while the block is in effect. Once traditional, this practice has largely lapsed as RationalWiki learns to absorb new editors. An early tradition was encouraging freshly "demoted" sysops to block a few established editors for practice, often Bohdan. Instead, editors are often blocked for moderate durations upon being demoted, as a form of initiation block. Another new tradition is blocking for negative lengths of time, such as 4 days ago.

Friendly blocks were once considered a tradition unique to RationalWiki, however, similar blocks are called "joke bans" on Uncyclopedia.

Gooniepunk2010 (So)Nutty Roux (me) Tyrannis (peo) Blue(ple) communicate via the block log. This makes their conversations quite difficult to track.

Fun

The "Fun" section of RationalWiki contains articles of humorous interest that may not otherwise be worthy of the main article space. Some of these articles, like the "Fun:Andrew Schlafly" article may run parallel to mainspace articles, while others, like the "Fun:Whiskey" article, may not have otherwise been on-mission. Still, others are there simply because, well, they are meant to be funny and not real articles.

No fun anymore?

Main article:The Great Funspace Purge of 2011

On April 3rd 2011, Bob M proposed a renaming of funspace. Within minutes Mei proposed the deletion of funspace, on the grounds that the vast majority of it is shit not funny. Ty and ADK pointed out that some of it is rather funny. Totnesmartin proposed moving it here. He then proposed an alternative measure, moving some of the articles into user-space, and purging/keeping the rest. Mei's deletion reasons and holding category names were more fun than the articles they were about.