Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010 (Warning: 750kB page, 774 quotes)
The year's last Rationality Quotes thread has calmed down, so now it is a good time to update my Best of Rationality Quotes page, and write a top post about it. (The original version was introduced in the June 2010 Open Thread.)
The page was built by a short script (source code here) from all the LW Rationality Quotes threads so far. (We had such a thread each month since April 2009.) The script collects all comments with karma score 4 or more, and sorts them by score.
There is a minor complication: The obvious idea is to consider only top-level comments, that is, comments that are not replies to other comments. Unfortunately, good quotes are sometimes replies to other quotes. Of course, even more often, replies are not quotes. This is a precision-recall trade-off. Originally I went for recall, because I liked many replied quotes such as this. But as JGWeissman noted in a comment below, to build the precise version, only a trivial modification of my script is needed. So I built it, and I preferred it to the noisy version after all. So now at the top of this post we have the filtered version, and here is the original version with even more good quotes, but also with many non-quotes:
Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010, including replied comments (Warning: 1.3MB page, 1358 quotes)
UPDATE: I changed the links and rewrote the above when I decided to filter replied comments.
UPDATE 2: Added a comment listing the personal quote collection pages of top quote contributors.
UPDATE 3: Responding to various requests by commenters, added several top-lists:
Is Wikiquote worth working on? I work on Wikipedia articles because I know that they are incredibly popular and will be read by hundreds of thousands in the long run, but Wikiquote has always been a backwater. (And it's not like quotes need much updating.)
Look at their statistics: http://wikistics.falsikon.de/latest/wikiquote/en/
Their most popular article is 1,994 hits a day. I can get that many hits in a month with an article on an anime: http://stats.grok.se/en/201011/Neon_Genesis_Evangelion_%28TV%29 Or I can get 1k hits a day sometimes with a relatively obscure programming language: http://stats.grok.se/en/201011/Haskell%20%28programming%20language%29
Some not especially prominent Wikipedia articles are within a factor or order of magnitude with Wikiquote's most popular article. That's really really sad. (And if you ever search for quotes, you will rarely see Wikiquote come up, too.)