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New York Brad says fuck you, style wonks

Posted: Thu May 13, 2021 11:24 am
by Jake Is A Sellout
Only on Wikipedia.

1. Wikipedia has an agreed Manual of Style. It is a guideline, "a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow".

2. Part of said Manual, is MOSCAPS. It says, Wikipedia should avoid capitalising specific terms unless a preponderance of sources do it.

3. Brad recently claimed "without naming names", that those who are forcing lower case even where the sources say uppercase is the norm, are demoralising their fellow editors.

4. The people referred to are not doing what Brad claimed, they are making the argument that the sources in the main, use lower case. Oh, and by the way. They won the argument....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Batt ... ons_pocket

This is the problem with having untouchable life president type people on Wikipedia. They can get away with utter bullshit.

Brad presented this as a "contrary view". I guess that is lawyer speak for, warning, bullshit incoming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... arian_view

There is a dispute looming here soon, and if Wikipedia were a functioning exercise in self governance, this one statement would mean Brad would have to recuse, having shown his bias. He will not. He will look to give effect to his opinions on who is demoralising who.

Brad has a long record of minimising the concerns of people who take a broad view of Wikipedia, instead focusing on what matters to people with narrower interests.

Wikipediocracy of course, also let's him get away with it. And what would you expect, from a forum operated for senior Wikipedia editors? Brad is as senior as they come. And editors with narrow interests have always loved Wikipediocracy, giving them as it does, a second front from which to be whiny little bitches.

Re: New York Brad says fuck you, style wonks

Posted: Thu May 13, 2021 9:27 pm
by ericbarbour
Jake Is A Sellout wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 11:24 am
There is a dispute looming here soon
You really need to read up on the past "Manual Of Style" squabbles. This has been a routine occurrence since 2004.
Wikipedia does have a Manual of Style. However, unlike virtually every other publisher of information, Wikipedia cannot agree upon, and follow, its own Manual of Style. Ever since it was created on 6 October 2001, Wikipedians have argued over, fought over, editwarred, and mangled their own Manual of Style -- and turned it into a massive and incoherent mess. Any editor trying to write an article for Wikipedia would likely be discouraged after examining the MoS and its vast number of "rules".
....leaving out a LARGE quantity of shit.....
RFCs and arbitrations

The 2008 proposal on date linking led to an official RFC. 419k bytes of jabbering and "voting". They hated the "standard" then in use, but could not agree on an alternative.

Ireland article names, December 2008. This relates to British Isles naming dispute, of course. "This dispute has been a festering boil on the neck of the Wikipedia for four years now. A hornet's nest of passive-aggressivity, good faith, bad faith, veiled hatred, not-so-veiled hatred, honest attempts at compromise, wilful stonewalling, filibustering, backing and forthing, to-ing and fro-ing, and endless bickering. The frustration level of everyone involved is high, so high that a number of editors—good editors—have threatened to withdraw from editing these articles, and some have retired already." Domer48 was blocked and unblocked. Big deal.

Date delinking, started January 2009, endlessly revisited and amended. Minor restrictions are handed out, the war continues.

A 2010 attempt to "review" the MoS led to spluttering, and a closed discussion.

July 2011: An RFC about the use of diacritical marks led to "no consensus".

"Article titles and capitalisation", January-March 2012. "2) This dispute concerns contentious edits to the MoS and article naming pages that have been occurring sporadically for years. The incident that precipitated this arbitration case was a rapid series of edits at WP:TITLE." Which is grossly misleading. Pmanderson was banned from editing the MoS, but the arguing continued. A warning was placed on the MoS talkpage.

Re: New York Brad says fuck you, style wonks

Posted: Thu May 13, 2021 9:31 pm
by ericbarbour
And just btw: the MOS talkpage is up to 221 archives. Megabytes of fighting over utter trivia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... l_of_Style