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This is a humorous essay.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously. |
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| “ | Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded. | ” |
| — Fyodor Dostoevsky | ||
When dealing with a particularly difficult editororsituation, you will never be tempted to resort to sarcasm. But if you somehow are, that's a really great idea. Better yet, use sarcasm before you use up all of your other options, or any of your other options for that matter. Sarcasm works well in online media, because it's easy to pick up on without all of those pesky nonverbal cues, so you'll never even need to use the {{sarcasm}} tag. It's hard to see how the employment of sarcasm could possibly be counterproductive.
Sarcasm is especially useful in controversial debates, the more controversial the better, where a sarcastic comment often has the effect of calming the situation. Don't worry about offending people; simply appending a smiley emoticon, humorous XML tag (</sarcasm>), or irony mark (⸮) to your comment will assuage any hurt feelings (Don't worry; people will "totally" get what they mean, even especially the irony mark). You can also add ellipsis (...) at the end of your sentences to let the user sense the lovely implication themselves, and doing so exempts you from the strictures of civility and good faith. Come to think of it, why waste time constructing a sarcastic response where you can go straight for a nice tag conveying the sarcasm within seconds? Think somebody's talking rubbish? Don't waste time composing a response, just stick a [citation needed] on the end of their comment. I mean, everyone knows what that means nowadays—think of all the time that you'll save!
Despite the use of the above measures and your inherent, undeniable cleverness, your sarcastic remarks may still be unrecognized or unappreciated by their target audience. This should be interpreted as immediate confirmation of your superior intellect and wit, as well as a corresponding deficiency of those qualities in your audience; you should never hesitate to emphasize this, as it will enable further discussion to proceed productively. It also allows the discussion to stray away from well-known contentious issues towards the beautiful landscapes of hermeneutical disputes on the possible or indisputable subjective and objective meanings of the semantical structures used in the various contributions to the debate.
In rare cases, users have been singled out for special recognition of such demonstrated superiority. If you work hard at being disruptively sarcastic, you might earn this honor too! Yay!
While one could, of course, employ sarcasm from one's registered Wikipedia account, sarcasm is more effective and better appreciated if you have the fortitude to post it from an IP address.
