User:Tom Morris/WikiHate extension

Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation decided to make available a new extension on English Wikipedia to enable the quick and easy spreading of WikiHate. Many in the community have expressed their enthusiasm for the development. WikiHate makes it easy and more fun to stir up drama, edit war, be a complete dick, stalk users and generally cause pain and agony for all involved. More cynical observers have noted that this is just a front to mollify drama queens into accepting ruthless Facebookisation of their precious Wikipedia. This, they allege, will reduce the truly masterful pieces of drama by enabling any two-bit troll to stir up shit without even having to learn wiki markup.

A new user right

While the basic features of WikiHate are available for all users, advanced WikiHate functionality is only available to cabal-certified rogue admins and experienced non-admin drama board participants. The latter must apply for and be granted the "civility-override" permission which will be made available through the new "Confirmed Dick" user right. In exceptional cases, rogue admins are welcome to grant the Confirmed Dick privileges without a formal request and are reminded that doing so to bait the user into being a complete dick is magnificent fun and will only go to show how much of a complete badass they are.

Diff marking

WikiHate users with the advanced privileges will be able to tag certain revisions with a variety of pre-defined criteria (community to determine exact subset). Once other WikiHate users have confirmed that there is indeed a potential drama source, a sophisticated artificial intelligence bot will generate a post to WP:ANI with links to the relevant diffs and industrial strength snark. It will also start replacing images randomly on the target's user page with randomly selected images from commons:Category:Smegma as a form of pre-emptive psychological warfare. If successful, the Foundation plan to extend this to also cover "concerned" postings to Wikiquette Assistance, the edit warring noticeboard (only for legitimate vandalism reversion, obviously) and the BLP noticeboard.

Fun for all the family

The features listed above only affect experienced users and rogue admins, but as the Foundation and community are on a mission to be more inclusive and welcoming to new editors so WikiHate will also provide functionality for all users to encourage their participation in drama-causing activity. To this end, the MoodBar and FeedbackDashboard will be extended to allow new users to locate and participate in dramas and be tutored in the way of hate from the earliest days at the site. For those who don't want to register, a new "hate-en" queue will be introduced at OTRS to enable members of the public to make suggestions to OTRS volunteers who will implement the drama on their behalf. A new template will be created that vaguely hints that the drama may or may not have been started in response to an OTRS ticket.

Gender gap?

WikiHate is trying very hard to determine common patterns of female editing, not so that the community can welcome and encourage female editors in an effort to fight systemic bias in the encyclopedia. No, it simply enables the more lecherous members of the community to stalk female users on- and off-wiki easier, which will only serve to help promote the inherent distrust and sexism which allows the best values of WikiHate to thrive.

Any objections to the gendered features of WikiHate will be met with emails containing hundreds of badly-photographed penises from Commons and a long, badly-worded rant about how Wikipedia isn't censored.

Future plans

The Foundation are committed to increasing the quantity and quality of Wikipedia's hate. To that end, WikiHate developers will be working on the following features:

• A counter to measure how many times you've won
• For admins, a new mode to make wheel warring easier

Feedback wanted

While WikiHate is promising, it is still at early stages. The developers invite community feedback. They have, of course, set up multiple channels of feedback including Bugzilla, MediaWiki.org, Foundation-L, Meta, Outreach, Strategy, IRC and the Village Pump and are waiting for you to just go on ANI and shout about how you weren't consulted and this will just ruin everything.

See also

• Wikipedia:WikiHate