Today, he's just been doing his usual.
The "..." was of course a ton of words by a new member, a rather significant Wikipedian, and reading it naturally showed the gimp to be wrong in his post, therefore most likely just trolling.AndyTheGimp wrote:SMcCandlish wrote:
...just give it a rest.
You dug up a thread which had been dead for two and a half years to say that?
As is normal, the other resident cowards just let him do it, even joining in.
Presumably after some reflection, an oddity for him, the gimp decided he had better say something of substance in the topic. As is normal however, it was vacuous garbage.
In this post, he displayed several basic and obvious errors in logic and understanding of Wikipedia. Get used to it, since that's basically his thing.I'd say that in an encyclopaedia, consistency is generally a good thing, so there is nothing wrong in principle with a Style Guide. In the case of Wikipedia however, there are far more fundamental issues to worry about (like a significant proportion of articles being utter dross, for a start), and the endless arguments over stylistic minutiae are not only a monumental time-sink for those involved, but a net negative to the project as a whole. That is assuming that participants actually consider encyclopaedic content to be the end goal, rather than treating it as a MMORPG, where the objective is to concoct 'rules', 'policies' and 'guidelines' of ever-increasing complexity, with the sole purpose of catching ones opponents out for failing to conform to them.
Bad content conforming to the MoS is far worse than good content with the odd stylistic error.
The time sink comes from bad Administration, arguably a systemically broken one, but that is hardly the relevant point. It is not unique to MoS issues, it holds them back right across the board. And there is no conflict between working toward content that conforms to a style guide, and good content at the same time, because by and large, the two types of work appeals to two different types of people.
His conclusion was of course just nonsense, since it is not an either or situation, and wrongly implied Wikipedia has a hope in hell of achieving even one of those things as an objective.
What this new member was arguing for, was for the fighting to stop. Which is why he concluded his post as follows......
It's a shame Wikipediocracy has a policy to protect and encourage dickheads, while banning critics. Because this is the end result.Either make a case, for the community to examine, why WP should depart from book publishing norms and make up our own "some exceptions" rule, or should go with the journalistic four-letter style. Otherwise, just give it a rest.
