User:ToBeFree/Controversial edit log

This page is discontinued; see Special:PermanentLink/913608707 for the last revision.

I'm always learning; everyone is. The approach to learning, and the ability to learn from mistakes, is what makes the difference. I'm quite okay in this regard; there is no need for me to publicly beat myself up for every mistake.

This list had one major weakness: inevitable incompleteness. What are the inclusion criteria? Does a bad Huggle revert need to be listed, or perhaps only if it was not undone by myself before someone complained?

My three edits to Template:Empires have caused me to discontinue this list: It has been a wonderful learning experience, and after all the years, for the first time, I noticed that the "undo" button in a multidiff surprisingly undoes the whole multidiff. It has been a nice IRC help session too. There is nothing "bad", in hindsight, about having learned to be more careful and suddenly knowing a new MediaWiki feature.

The log was originally created with RfA in mind, and I have openly disclosed this from the very beginning. For the same reason, today, I am discontinuing this page: It is useless at RfA. If something is missing, people will loudly complain about "manipulation". If something trivial is added to the otherwise-important list, people will complain about "dilution", hiding bad links in a wall of harmless links.

This log has always been a stressful experience after every mistake: Do I need to include it? Will I look bad if I don't? Will I look bad if I do? Won't it look horrible that my last "bad edit" was a week before an RfA? Or a month? Do I need to behave differently shortly before an RfA happens? All criticism about video surveillance, especially the Hawthorne effect, applies to this log. It hurts, permanently, and it needs to stop.

If you want to see a list of my really bad edits, just look for valid complaints in my talk page archive. Hint: There are almost none. I'm not perfect; I need to stop unnecessarily criticizing myself for not being perfect.

If you disagree with this decision, please create such a log yourself and maintain it for at least one year.

~ ToBeFree (talk) 02:06, 1 October 2019 (UTC)