Don't call names, you mewling clapper-clawed codpiece!
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The userbox below was considered for deletion on February 6, 2015. The result of the "discussion" was "We can allow tiny pockets of dissent, as long as it doesn't catch on. Now back to the salt mines!".
The ANI pileon juggernaut rolls on, heedlessHa - ha! Blocked!The beatings will continue until morale improves.ANI on a quiet night
When users do something that administrators don't like, but when the users not only disagree but have the temerity to object to the sanctions levied against them by administrators, is this an unacceptable dissent against the powers-that-be that must, always, be quashed by any means necessary?
I'm probably hyperbolizing here, but I think this is how the issue appears to the EEng's of the world. And some, at least, of the EEng's of the world are here to help build the encyclopedia. We say "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", not "The benevolent dictatorship encyclopedia that docile and compliant rule-followers can edit as long as they remember their place and are always properly respectful towards ADMINISTRATORS." So, please, if that's not the message you want to send, just let these userboxes go. And if you want to boot a user off the project for not being here to help build the encyclopedia, please do it for a more substantive reason than that the user refuses to say "Uncle" when confronted by admins.
And finally, to each admin who says, "Well, I wouldn't have blocked, but I don't feel like overturning it": what you're condoning is a situation in which every editor is at the mercy of the least restrained, most trigger-happy admin who happens to stumble into any given situation. Don't you see how corrosive that is? It's like all these recent US police shootings: no matter how blatantly revolting an officer's actions were, the monolithic reply is "It was by the book. Case closed." This [admin] was way out of line from the beginning in deleting multiple editors' posts (as someone suggested, hatting would have made complete sense, and troubled me not at all) and when called on it above, he gives a middle-finger-raised LOL. No wonder so many see haughty arrogance in much of the admin corps around here.
And let me be clear: I have no problem with 97% of admins, who do noble work in return for (generally) either no recognition or shitloads of grief, only occasionally punctuated by thanks. But the other 3%—whoa, boy, watch out!
... that mathematician Andrew Gleason liked to say that proofs "really aren't there to convince you that something is true—they're there to show you why it is true"?
... that at Harvard commencements, bagpipes herald breakfast, bachelors are welcomed, sheriffs on white steeds preserve order, and Harvard's president occupies a "bizarre" chair prone to tipping over?
... that the four miles of stacks aisles in Harvard's 3.5-million-volume Widener Library are so labyrinthine that one student felt she ought to carry "a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle" when entering?
... that warden's wife Kate Soffel, who fled with condemned brothers Jack and Ed Biddle after supplying guns and saws for their 1902 escape from the Allegheny County Jail, later took up dressmaking?
... that quirky dogs and plural wugs helped Jean Berko Gleason show that young children extract linguistic rules from what they hear, rather than just memorizing words?
... that in Menace from the Moon, a lunar colony—founded in 1654 by a Dutchman, an Englishman, an Italian, and "their women"—promises Earth heat-ray doom unless it helps them escape their dying world?
... that problems with a brutalist gray elephant were "like a five-car accident at an intersection. You just can't tell what caused it"?
... that "University Moves to Thwart Early Marriages" was the 1963 Harvard Crimson caption beneath a photo of the school's "hideous" new housing complex for married students?
... that after Lionel de Jersey Harvard(pictured) died in World WarI, a fellow officer wrote, "If Harvard College made him what he was, I want my sons to go there that it may do the same for them"?
Museum of Prosaic Preludes: Strike order for atomic bombing of Nagasaki. "BOMBS:Special. RELIGIOUS SERVICES: Catholic1830, Protestant2300." Nagasaki was the alternate target.
Museum of Can We Go Over That One More Time Just to Be Sure I've Got It?
The Yellow Alert and Red Alert signals correspond to the earlier Alert Signal and Attack Signal, respectively, and the early Federal Signal AR timer siren control units featured the Take Cover button labeled with a red background, and the Alert button labeled with a yellow background. Later AF timers changed the color-coding, coloring the Alert button blue, the Take Cover button yellow, and the Fire button red (used to call out volunteer fire fighters), thus confusing the color-coding of the alerts. In 1955, the Federal Civil Defense Administration again revised the warning signals, altering them to adapt to deal with concern over nuclear fallout. The new set of signals were the Alert Signal (unchanged) and the Take-Cover Signal (previously the Attack Signal).
An eccentric snob, he kept a copy of the Social Register near the telephone, instructing his staff not to accept calls from anyone not listed.[1]
After confessing to strangling his 60-year-old maid in 1964 he was committed to McLean Hospital, where he lived for 23 years. Much of his art collection, which he wanted to donate to the Fogg Museum, was found to be fakes.
When he died in 1942, Petrie donated his head (and thus his brain) to the Royal College of Surgeons of London while his body was interred in the Protestant Cemetery on Mt. Zion. World War II was then at its height, and the head was delayed in transit. After being stored in a jar in the college basement, its label fell off and no one knew who the head belonged to.
Three months later, the Main Stand, which was being used as a temporary National Fire Service station, burned down, destroying the club's records and equipment – "not so much as a lead pencil was saved from the wreckage" – when a fireman mistook a bucket of petrol for water when intending to damp down a brazier.
Two interviewees separately estimated that about 5% of students in India never copy and paste, and generally these students do so because they feel that copying and pasting is wrong.
An irresistible impulse caused me to add a footnote to that sentence, which read
<ref>In followup interviews, both interviewees added that they had copied the 5% figure from an article they read somewhere.</ref>
Here's what happened next...
Hi EEng, please refrain from adding unhelpful and erroneous edits like this to pages in which we are trying to engage in a productive and thoughtful analysis of what went wrong in our pilot program. I appreciate the humor in your addition, but this is a very serious subject, and I ask that you treat it with the respect it deserves in the future. Thanks. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
Humor doesn't imply disrespect, nor does it detract in any way from productive and thoughtful analysis -- it might even add to it. At least I read the thing [7]. Of course, I would never dream of doing what I did on an article page (as opposed to a project page) but I'd be lying if I said I won't do it again in a similar situation. I see in other discussion (e.g. point 1 of [8]) concerns over WMF staff's grasp of how things are really done on WP, and I think this may be an example. EEng (talk) 02:04, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
Elijah's Manna was Post's first attempt at corn flakes. The box featured the Biblical Prophet Elijah kicking back on a rock while a raven is shown either plucking cereal from his hand or placing cereal in his hand.
Church groups were outraged over the use of Elijah as a cereal mascot. The book Cerealizing America by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford has a quote from C. W. Post who was outraged at the outrage over his new cereal: "Perhaps no one should eat angel food cake, enjoy Adam's ale, live in St. Paul, nor work for Bethlehem Steel... one should have his Adam's apple removed and never again name a child for the good people of the bible."
Post stuck with his guns until he noticed the Biblical backlash was cutting into his sales. In 1908, he renamed the cereal as Post Toasties. Micky Mouse would later replace the Prophet Elijah on the box.
Museum of Fates To Avoid
Although he did not lack friends, they were weary of coming to his defense, so endless a process it had become.
For those who are wondering we're talking about this literary gem, which came to me in some deliroius fog after I noticed User:BracketBot leaving a message on User:Citation bot's talkpage (though I need to say that the final, um, climax is cribbed from a vaguely remembered cartoon from the 90s). Bracketbot notifies editors who make changes apparently resulting in unbalanced parens, brackets, and similar markup in articles, and had given Citationbot just such a notification:
"Oh, hi, I'm Citationbot. Thanks – I've been looking everywhere for that other bracket! So you're that big strong Bracketbot I've heard so much about. Why don't you come into my domain? That's not my usual protocol, but a guy with so much cache makes a girl feel really secure. I wasn't expecting to host, so pardon my open proxy – a bit RISCé, perhaps, but just something I wear around the server farm. Do my transparent upper layers expose my virtual mammary memory? These dual cores are absolutely real – 100% native configuration – no upgrades at all! I'll just slip into a more user-friendly interface – how about something GUI... or perhaps you prefer command-line? – kinky!..." Gosh, you must be 64-bit – really big quads! – and completely hardcoded – such a complex instruction set! And look at those great ABS addresses!
Later: "Oh, Bracketbot! Port me to that platform for some horizontal integration! Go ahead and expose my implementation and directly access my low-level interface – forget the wrapper function! I'm overloaded by your amazing data stream – and what a high refresh rate! My husband has a really short cycle time and his puny little floppy drive is subject to frequent hardware failures – sometimes he won't reboot so I have to manually terminate him! And I've never had 10 gigabytes of hard drive before! Let'sFTP!... Oh god! I'm downloading..."
From an editor's complaints about the consensus principle [9]:
A majority of people decided to elect Hitler, but that doesn't mean it was the right thing to do. A majority of people in the South wanted to maintain slavery and break away from the union, but that doesn't mean it was right, ethical, or just. Politics put Jesus to death, but that doesn't mean it was right, ethical, or just either. ... Perhaps unlike many here, I look at the bigger picture.
Museum of Unintentionally Hilarious Edit Outcomes
[10] First look at the diff, then see the last image on the right—um... note the caption.
The lead says the prawn cocktail "'has spent most of [its life] see-sawing from the height of fashion to the laughably passé' and is now often served with a degree of irony." It's my understanding that people with anemia will often add even more irony as a dietary supplement. I think that should be recognized in the article. EEng (talk) 05:26, 28 June 2014 (UTC)
Ready?
Please provide a reliable sauce. Philafrenzy (talk) 10:00, 28 June 2014 (UTC)
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ("Wait for coins to drop, then make your selection").
Words in bold are for the assistance of the humor-impaired.
Another wise man once said...
Authorial Vanity
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Proof that the ancient Romans foresaw the internet, Wikipedia, and the bane of WP autobios
Plutarch relates, that before this, upon some of Cato's friends expressing their surprise, that while many persons without merit or reputation had statues, he had none, he answered, "I had much rather it should be asked why the people have not erected a statue to Cato, than why they have."
— Encyclopaedia Britannica (1797)
Museum of Unlikely Library Subject Classifications
I was rather sad to see "removed Category:People who survived assassination attempts using AWB", in the edit summary here. Looks as if it would have been an interesting category.
As per WP:REVTALK, if you have something to say, use the talk page, don't try to prolong a (pointless) discussion by use of the summaries. - SchroCat (talk) 21:00, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
Per COMMONSENSE, you're just too funny. I've never seen anyone revert a dummy edit before -- much less twice![13] The important thing is that through collaborative editing the article is incrementally improved relative to its state when the sun came up this morning. EEng (talk) 21:11, 3 July 2014 (UTC) P.S. I'm making this the founding entry in the Museum of Bizarre Reversions on my userpage.
For those who are wondering, the following exchange regards these two edits -- the first a serious (and perfectly appropriate) one by Edokter, and the second a followup dummy edit I made riffing off his edit summary:
[14] Edit summary (Edokter): i and 1 are too alike
[15] Edit summary (EEng): (dummy edit) You're saying 1 and i are too?
I keep forgetting, however, about the small minority of WP editors with congenital humor impairment, and the even smaller minority who seem to want to spoil the fun for everyone else. I'm not sure, even now, if Herr Doktor gets the joke.
Please stop making dummy edits for messaging. These edits, as well as the ones required to clean up the added spacing, add unnecessary load to the servers and polute the history. Thank you. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:31, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Please stop dispensing hidebound, clueless scoldings. Your notion of what constitutes "load to the servers", and your idea that there's a "requirement" to "clean up" a single space added to a page as part of a dummy edit (as, unbelievably, you actually squandered server resources to do -- twice! [16][17]) are delusional. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Humor is a legitimate way of furthering the project by increasing the pleasure of (at least some of) those who edit here. If it doesn't tickle your personal funnybone, just ignore it. If, on the other hand, you don't even grasp the humor intended then there's a serious clue problem in play here. EEng (talk) 16:27, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Are you done? OK, so I missed the joke. That is no reason to repeat a nonsense edit. Edit summaries are not ment for messaging. And yes, stray spaces can cause disruption in diffs; that is why I remove them. And I resent being associated with nazis; that is personal attack! -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:59, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Yeah, you missed the joke. Three times. Even after your attention was called to it directly. Next time, before scolding an experienced editor with your nonsense about server load, think about whether it's you who's confused. Your continued fussing about an extra space at the end of a line shows that you have no grasp of technical issues at all.
I've restored the words Herr Doktor (in the phrase I'm not sure, even now, if Herr Doktor gets the joke) because otherwise people might think that I actually did compare you to a Nazi. It's beyond weird (paging Herr Doktor Freud!) that you seem to think that addressing you that way, after your dyspeptic lecture in direct contravention to well-known and accepted editing practice (see H:DUMMY#Methods), somehow does that.
I do not like any allusion to any German figure of authority! I can take a joke, but this truly offends me. I have made note of it on ANI. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:41, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
You equate all German authority figures to Nazis. Noted. EEng (talk) 22:04, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
[Not surprisingly, the OP's post at ANI (entitled "I put EEng on notice") didn't go as he planned [18]. No apology, no indication of any glimmer of understanding from this (yes) Wikipedia administrator.]
Museum of Overanxious Notifications
Apparently because I joked that statues should be measured in statute miles? [19] ...
Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.
This message is informational only and does not imply misconduct regarding your contributions to date.
In the last 48 hr I've become aware of a simmering dispute over whether the text of MOSitself should be in American or British English. With any luck the participants will put that debate (let's call it Debate D1) on hold in order to begin Debate D2: consideration of the variety of English in which D1 should be conducted. Then, if there really is a God in Heaven, D1 and D2 will be the kernel around which will form an infinite regress of metadebates D3, D4, and so on -- a superdense accrection of pure abstraction eventually collapsing on itself to form a black hole of impenetrable disputation, wholly aloof from the mundane cares of practical application and from which no light, logic or reason can emerge.
That some editors will find themselves inexorably and irreversibly drawn into this abyss, mesmerized on their unending trip to nowhere by a kaleidoscope of linguistic scintillation reminiscent of the closing shots of 2001, is of course to be regretted. But they will know in their hearts that their sacrifice is for greater good of Wikipedia. That won't be true, of course, but it would be cruel to disabuse them of that comforting fiction as we bid them farewell and send them on their way.[2]
More MOSsy thoughts:
It is an axiom of mine that something belongs in MOS only if (as a necessary, but not sufficient test) either:
1. There is a manifest a priori need for project-wide consistency (e.g. "professional look" issues such as consistent typography, layout, etc. -- things which, if inconsistent, would be noticeably annoying, or confusing, to many readers reader); OR
2. Editor time has, and continues to be, spent litigating the same issue over and over on numerous articles, either
(a) with generally the same result (so we might as well just memorialize that result, and save all the future arguing), or
(b) with different results in different cases, but with reason to believe the differences are arbitrary, and not worth all the arguing -- a final decision on one arbitrary choice, though an intrusion on the general principle that decisions on each article should be made on the Talk page of that article, is worth making in light of the large amount of editor time saved.
There's a further reason that disputes on multiple articles should be a gating requirement for adding anything to MOS: without actual situations to discuss, the debate devolves into the "Well, suppose an article says this..."–type of hypothesizing -- no examples of which, quite possibly, will ever occur in the real life of real editing. An analogy: the US Supreme Court (like the highest courts of many nations) refuses to rule on an issue until multiple lower courts have ruled on that issue and been unable to agree. This not only reduces the highest court's workload, but helps ensure that the issue has been "thoroughly ventilated", from many points of view and in the context of a variety of fact situations, by the time the highest court takes it up. I think the same thinking should apply to any consideration of adding a provision to MOS.
My special research interest
I am the second author of Reference #20, and first author mentioned in Note Z, of this version of the article on Phineas Gage.
Why every goddam thing needn't be micromanaged in a rule
From a discussion over whether MOS should require the final comma in constructions like --
On September 11, 2001, several planes ...
and even
On December 25, 2001 (which was Christmas Day), we all went ...
You treat punctuation marks like mathematical operators which organize words into nested structures of Russian-doll clauses and such, and they're nothing like that.
Not everything has to be rigidly prescribed and no, I don't buy into the "OhButIfWeDon'tThereWillBeEndlessArgumentOnEachArticle" reasoning just because that might, sometimes happen.
All over Wikipedia there are years with comma following, and years with no comma following, and never have I seen two editors, both of whom are actually engaged on a particular article, in serious conflict over a particular instance of that question. The discussion might go, "Hmmm... I'd use a comma myself but if you prefer none... yeah, that looks OK too. Now about that source-reliability question we were discussing..." but that's about it.
Where I've seen actual trouble is when other editors -- who have shown (and will subsequently show) no active interest in the article itself -- arrive out of nowhere in their radar-equipped year-with-no-comma–detector vans, then break down the door to weld court-ordered ankle-bracelet commas onto some harmless 2001 whose only crime was appearing in public with his trailing digit exposed -- something which (these prudish enforcers of Victorian punct-morality seem never to understand) was considered perfectly acceptable in most cultures throughout human history.
(Did you know, for example, that in the ancient Olympic games, years and days competed completely naked, without even a comma between them? I'm not advocating that unhygienic extreme but a bit of exposed backside shouldn't shock anyone in this enlightened age. But I digress, so back to our narrative underway...)
Unhide for continuation of coffee-fueled parody
Having rendered yet another noble service in defense of the homeland (as they like to tell themselves) they jump back into their black SUVs and scurry up their rappelling ropes to their double-rotor helicopters and fly off to their next target, never knowing or caring whether that particular article has, or has not, been improved by their visitation. Certainly all the breaking of the crockery and smashing of the furniture can't have helped, but order has been restored and choas beaten back, which is what's important.
During all this the neighbors cower in their homes with the lights out, glad that they are not the targets of these jackbooted comma-thugs -- at least not this time. "Look," they say to their children, "that's what happens if you don't obey the rules. You should love Big Brother MOS for his heroic decication to relieving your of the burden of deciding anything for yourself."
But privately they're thinking, "CAN'T YOU JUST LEAVE US ALONE FOR ONCE -- GRANT US JUST A SHRED OF PERSONAL AUTONOMY, A TINY REMINDER OF THE TIME WHEN THERE EXISTED A FEW ZONES OF DISCRETION IN WHICH MEN WERE FREE TO WORK OUT WITH THEIR FELLOW-EDITORS WHETHER OR NOT TO APPLY A COMMA, ACCORDING TO THE DICTATES OF THEIR OWN CONSCIENCES? CAN YOU REALLY NOT SLEEP AT NIGHT, KNOWING THAT SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, EDITORS ARE DECIDING FOR THEMSELVES THE PLACEMENT OF COMMAS? MUST YOU DICTATE FUCKING EVERYTHING?"
As Hannah Arendt put is so well: "It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man's identity outside relationships with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in extreme situation of solitary confinement. By destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated..." Or as John Stuart Mill -- himself a great lover of commas, so you can't dismiss him as a bleeding-heart, comma-omitting permissive corruptor of young punctuators -- said... Oh, never mind.
You say
Punctuation is not some flighty thing that you use when it feels right or the mood takes you (otherwise the MOS would be redundant).
Yes, if we can't prescribe and control every detail of usage and punctuation societal decay sets in and soon there is immorality, open homosexuality, interracial marriage, and baby murder.. Or perhaps I've misunderstood you?
The opposite of rigid prescription of everything isn't "flightiness" on everything; the opposite of rigid prescription on everything is measured guidance appropriate to the point being discussed:
Rigid prescription where truly appropriate.
Clear direction where experience shows people often go wrong
Enumeration of alternatives where choices are available
Universal advice to use common sense no matter what
That last point, BTW, is one of the first thing MOS says. I'm quite aware that there's a MOS rule requiring comma-after-year. And I'm telling you that removing it, or changing it to a short mention that opinions differ on this, would go a long way toward repairing the disdain many editors have for those parts of MOS which ridiculously overreach and overprescribe, thereby preserving respect for its important provisions on things that really matter.
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