User talk:Kephir/archive/2015/07

Hi

(In response to Special:Diff/670666567, soon after deleted from the talk page.)

Your message is noted. I just wanted to make it clear as the day is bright that I just made it very clear to the user about my position. He contact me again after a year even though he was told not to do so . Both at an AfD an at my talk page [1],[2] . Did I overreact, yes, am I sorry, no. He needed to be told to lay off with the never ending confrontations. This is the 4-5 time he does the same contact provocation. I hope he will from now on respect the previous agreement. --BabbaQ (talk) 14:48, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

I have no idea what your previous disputes were, and frankly, I am not that interested. Asking for sources to support the claim of meeting WP:GNG seems like a legitimate request to me; it certainly does not warrant inflammatory replies like calling your opponents kindergarteners and "feeling insecure and knowing that your skills as a Wikipedia editor is below par". This adds nothing to the discussion and just wastes everyone's energy. I am not impressed with either of you; but I do find your behaviour less excusable. "I am not sorry" — does that mean you are going to continue doing it? There are means of rectifying that, you know. — Keφr 15:39, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

It does not change the fact that Libstar contacted me. I had moved way beyond it when he started the crap again. No, I will not "continue it", but I am frankly not interested in having anything more to do with the person. Secondly, your opinion about a matter that you as you yourself put it doesnt interest you, weighs lightly. So lets move on and hope that we both can behave from now on. I am frankly not interested in anyone who defends Libstars behaviour.. It is a history going back several years of contacting me and wanting to argue. I clean my hands of the situation. And no, I am not sorry at all to be frank. Regards, --BabbaQ (talk) 19:41, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

• Kephir, I disagree with what you say above. I think LibStar's behaviour was less excusable. I think that BabbaQ was essentially provoked until he 'snapped', whereas LibStar intended from the outset to wind people up as much as possible. He was certainly doing much more than asking for sources to support the claim of meeting WP:GNG, including making all sorts of comments about other editors personally. And I infer from comments like this and this that he is still determined to be as annoying as possible. James500 (talk) 04:30, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Your comments

(response to Special:Diff/671611170, removed from his talk page and dragged here despite an explicit request not to do so; oh well)

Actually I remove all threads eventually, not just critical ones. Removing active/critical threads, and any others, is expressly allowed by talk page guidelines, and with good reason. This is necessary to prevent user talk pages from becoming attack pages. User talk pages exist for the purpose of communicating with that user. They are not for publicising your opinions to third parties and are certainly not a place for hostile users to have a "mother's meeting" about someone they don't like, serving as a cork board for all the rude things they want to say about that user (they have their own user pages and various notice boards for that). The AfD counter serves no useful purpose that I can see, but it could be used for a number of exceptionally disruptive purposes, including wikihounding and its converse, meatpuppetry (ie supporting the editor whose !voting is listed), editcountitis (using stats as a substitute for examining actual edits), intimidating !voters at AfD into not expressing unpopular opinions. It certainly isn't a neutral edit counter. The statistics it collects (aside from being offensive) are designed to push a particular POV that admins should be people who always !vote with the majority, and never say what they really think, like sheep. Many functions of the main edit counter are "opt in", and don't see why this one should be different. And of course it was designed to be "opt in". Therefore, it should continue to be. In my frank opinion it should be shut down if the features I've criticised are not removed.

I have asked LibStar to stop editing my user talk page, I would be grateful if you would do the same. I don't believe that anyone concerned really cares about these trivialities. What I do see is people whom I have encountered before posting absurd and pointless messages that I find exceptionally annoying, after being asked to stop. James500 (talk) 21:15, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

• I would also be grateful if you would absolutely refrain from accusing any user of being vain, under any circumstances, as it is a personal attack. James500 (talk) 21:27, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

• Another fault of that edit counter is that it tries to equate deletion and redirection, by saying that someone's !vote matched consensus when it did not.
• If either of you don't like the rules that clearly authorise me to act as I do, I think your course of action is clear. You should begin an RfC proposing that the relevant talk page guidelines be modified to say more or less the exact opposite of what they say right now. My user talk page is not an appropriate place to attempt to overturn those rules. If you do such RfCs, I am certain you will fail to get the changes you seek, but it is your prerogative to try anyway. James500 (talk) 00:54, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
• Another problem with that type formatting of !votes is the amount of typing involved. 6 characters in each AfD is about equivalent to a word. Then, every time I want to type the character ' I have to press the alt button first. That is another word. Typing the equivalent to two words per AfD, over the course of, say, 2000 AfDs (an entirely plausible figure that some users have already achieved) is the equivalent of 4000 words (about the length of a novella). Over the course of a lifetime's participation at AfD, I think the formatting could quite easily result in extra typing equivalent to the length of a entire novel. That is a massive, not to mention unacceptable, waste of time and effort. So I am of the opinion that all editors should be positively advised not to do that, on "time and motion" grounds, as it is spectacularly inefficient. James500 (talk) 07:59, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

@James500: I do care about these things. They are small, but they matter sometimes.

These statistics are based on publicly available data and can be collected by anyone who has access to your contributions list. Your obstructionism does not accomplish much here, apart from annoying a few people. I can generate those statistics with a custom script right now if I so wish. The only reason the edit counter was opt-in in the first place is because it used to be hosted in Germany, whose laws so required; in a recent RFC agreement was found to lift this requirement. Are you offended by numbers? I find them among the least offensive things in the world.

Maybe you are going to eschew proper grammar and punctuation if typing an apostrophe is such an inconvenience for you. Seriously, if your keyboard makes typing apostrophes such a pain, switch to a better keyboard. Or you can use the edit toolbar. Thousands of AFD participants do not find typing an apostrophe much of a burden; I see no reason why you should.

Are you just as certain about the inevitable failure of this hypothetical RFC as you were that Wikipedia talk:Notability (history)#Should this become a guideline? and Wikipedia talk:Notability (publishing)#Should this become a guideline? would pass? —Keφr 08:53, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

• I am afraid that I do not believe that either of you genuinely care about this. LibStar has followed me from an AfD, to an MfD, to two RfCs, seemingly to DSLAW (this is, as far as I am aware, the first time he has ever shown 'interest' in judges or law journals), and now to my user talk page, constantly objecting to what I say and do on increasingly unrelated (except by virtue of my presence) issues. The frivolous and absurd nature of what he put on my talk page (in addition to the deliberately provocative comments made at AfD, etc: see the examples above) causes me to think that he is just racking his brains to come up with any excuse he can think of to keep following me. I think that what I do and say is being opposed because I am the one doing and saying it, and that the purpose of this is to annoy me as much as possible. If you help him, and especially if you have followed me from that MfD, I will draw the same conclusion about you. I think that if I did everything asked here, the following would continue anyway and he and you would come back over and over again with ever more frivolous demands.
• Purchasing a better keyboard would be prohibitively expensive for me. The edit toolbar is not available on the mobile site, and would still involve a tiresome click fest even if it was. Even if the amount of typing in each individual AfD could be reduced slightly, the overall burden in large numbers of AfDs would still be enormous (typing equivalent to 2000 words is not much better than typing equivalent to 4000 words). Too enormous.
• Another problem with that type of formatting is that it encourages admins to count !votes instead of reading them (which admins are not supposed to do because consensus is not a vote).
• Thousands of participants at AfD do not use that formatting. Possibly the majority do not, when you take into account that some people !vote more than others. Perhaps many users have even stopped participating because of that burden. The fact that lots of people do something does not indicate that it is a good idea, as human beings have a tendency to behave like sheep. And where did you get the number "thousands" from? Is that an actual statistic or just a guess? There are plenty of reasons why I might find it more burdensome than others: I may have less physical and/or mental stamina than them, less time to spare, more things to do on this website and elsewhere, less aptitude for fiddly formatting, a device that is much more difficult to edit with than a PC or laptop, and so forth. At the moment, I can barely get my words out at AfD even without using that formatting. I am in fact finding it very difficult to !vote at all.
• The formatting is not analogous to proper grammar and punctuation, so you are comparing apples and oranges. I will not, but many !voters do, eschew proper grammar and punctuation. LibStar himself often does not begin his sentences with capital letters. Should I reciprocate by making an equally pointless fuss about that?
• If the laws of a country like Germany say that something like this is undesirable, that indicates that it probably is undesirable. And this counter is more objectionable than the other one.
• I am offended by numbers that are selectively chosen in a way clearly intended to promote a particular opinion, and pressurise people into !voting a particular way. The AfD counter even goes so far as to place !votes its creator does not like in a field that is coloured red, in order to suggest that there is something somehow 'wrong' with them. (In fact, a !vote could be perfectly reasonable and justifiable without matching the result). And you have not explained why these numbers are positively useful. Because they are not. The only purpose to which they could be put is a bad one.
• If the statistics are based on publicly available data, can be collected by anyone who has access to my contributions list (in other words, anyone who has access to the internet) and generate those statistics with a custom script which you yourself can write and publish in your userspace for everyone to use: the AfD counter is redundant and therefore useless. It would also be child's play to produce an AfD counter that does not rely on formatting, so there is no reason for us to do something massively burdensome just because one existing counter, which has no official recognition, is broken and does not work properly.
• There is nothing obstructive in not doing something pointless, but asking me to do something pointless and an onerous burden is really obstructive. I can see no evidence that anyone is annoyed here except me, and I am massively annoyed now. (And I would be grateful if you don't ask me to waste any more of my time discussing this on your talk page, as I have more important things to do). In any event, BabbaQ appears to agree with me, because he thanked me for the edit summary where I said that what LibStar asked for served no useful purpose, and also for three of my edits on this talk page. And "a few people" are not a consensus, even if they exist, which I don't believe they do. And if someone was annoyed by that, which I don't believe, they would be massively hypersensitive, and ought to be ignored.
• If I had predicted the failure of those RfCs, it would have been likely to make it happen. Those RfCs also did not take place under satisfactory circumstances, since, for example, a number of participants followed me to them from an MfD where they should not have been mentioned. And a lot of the participants in the second one evidently simply did not understand what it was proposing. I am absolutely certain that an RfC to force people to do something useless in order be a nuisance, and especially to annoy me in particular, will fail. I am supremely confident of that result. I can predict that failure with the assurance of a prophet. (Unless, perhaps, something untoward takes place, like canvassing). I think you would find that, for example, creating the missing articles listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography/Tracking (click on the externally linked letters) would be a more productive way to spend your time. It would certainly be far more useful to our readers. James500 (talk) 01:09, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
  • James500: I think someone up there was complaining about personal attacks. The comparison is valid, as obeying each is ultimately required by custom, and not by a central official body enforcing that by punishment. And yet the custom is common enough to have made it into how-to guides. And yes, if you collect all the deletion discussions in this project's entire history, I think you can count up at least two thousand people who have never found it a problem. The counter is not broken; it just assumes that AFD participants will not obnoxiously obstruct its operation. Given the lack of (guaranteed) structure in discussions, counting votes on Wikipedia is an ultimately AI-complete problem. The last point reads as if you said something you did not actually believe; if you look up "dishonesty" in a dictionary, you might find a definition encompassing behaviour quite similar to that. —Keφr 09:29, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
• (1) I don't understand your first sentence. (2) I see no valid comparison at all. Moreover, I don't see a custom, as this formatting is not regarded as obligatory and would be spectacularly unreasonable if it was. (3) The expression "obnoxiously obstruct" is nonsense in that context. But requiring me to do massive amounts of pointless extra typing would be obnoxious and obstructive. (4) Is documentation for this statistic about the number of participants available, including a copy of the program that was used to produce it? (I'm not asking for the entire code: a link to a tool in the WMF Tool Labs, or elsewhere, or the name of the software, that does the count, or a link or citation to a scholarly paper or other source produced by someone who claims to have done it will suffice). (5) The counter is definitely broken. I'll even tell you (roughly) how to fix it. If you see a bullet point (ie an asterisk) followed by the word "keep" followed in turn by a full stop, you know that is a !vote to keep the article. In fact, you probably know that even without the full stop. So you don't need the apostrophes, because you can program the counter to look for that. And simply compiling a list of AfDs a person has participated in doesn't require formatting, or any particular sequence of symbols, either. (You will notice that the counter is also broken in that it does not compile a complete list of AfDs). If you must have a counter (not that you have any need or use for one) you should fix it so that it does not require that formatting, instead of asking me to do huge amounts of completely pointless extra typing, just to compensate for a useless, utterly broken counter that doesn't work properly and is, in all respects, a gigantic, monumental, epic disaster. (7) If the problem is AI-complete, that strongly suggests it should not be attempted. (8) I did not say anything I did not actually believe. (I never said that there would be no opposition at all. And I was entirely correct in predicting that there would be some support for both proposals, I just over estimated it). The difference is that this time, I am predicting a massive snowball. It really would be more productive to forget the entire thing. There are other things to do on this website. I suggested one above. (9) I have given your request the most careful consideration for some time and upon due reflection, I find it to be manifestly unreasonable and incompatible with policy. I think that is the bottom line. Moreover, I have also concluded that the continuation of this conversation would serve no useful purpose. (10) I would be grateful if you would indefinitely refrain from sending me any further echo notifications (ie linking to my userpage) from this talk page regarding this subject. I really do not want to reply here again either. James500 (talk) 01:29, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Morph all the Mark and Jay MfD's into a single group MfD?

Given that all the TehPlaneFreak subpages are about the same thing (this Mike and Jay story he's created), would you be up for morphing them into a single MfD nom to make them more easy to manage/discuss? Thanks Brustopher (talk) 12:51, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

Done. (Boy, was that tedious.) —Keφr 13:13, 25 July 2015 (UTC)