User:ActivelyDisinterested/Duck

A page for thoughts to go and die:

Should is not Must. There seems to be far to many arguments that stem from editors taking "Should" in a policy or guideline to mean "Must". If you want a policy to be without exception you need to change the language it uses. Of course that's not to say the opposite isn't also true. All editors are editors, the false separation of certain editors from others is nothing more than the biases of those advancing the separation.

MOS:LABEL. Just because a duck is a bird that swims around on water and is similar in form to a goose, doesn't mean you can call it a waterfowl. Must remember to say that a duck is a member of the Anatidae family, as to avoid the label.

One day a professor from is going to realise they can publish a paper about referencing and behaviour in the area, and that there are many disgruntled banned socks who will help them. And this website will burn because swallowed the poison pill.

We really need to stop calling crap like ChatGPT artificial intelligence, it's just an expert system for words. It has less consciousness or understanding than a bacterial.

url-status isn't for URL status, and postscript isn't for postscript.

Never let anyone tell you that page views are a problem, they've been solid at about |bar|2016-01-01~2023-08-17|~total|monthly 10bn views per month for nearly a decade. Neither are total edits an issue, in fact not only are total edits nearly as good as they have ever been but the total content edits are at an |bar|2001-01-01~2023-08-17|page_type~content*non-content|monthly all time high, and other collaborative projects would be extremely jealous of Wikipedia's |line|all|(page_type)~content*non-content|monthly active user figures. The real problem is the slow down in |bar|2006-05-16~2023-08-17|~total|monthly new registered users, which has nothing to do with driving established editors away as shown by all the other metrics but rather an environment created by many long-term user that is openly hostile to new users and changing ideas. A large part of the problem is editors who think themselves authors and so are better than others, an arrogant and stupid idea that drums new users away.

"Thanks for saying the thing I didn't want to say, because I wanted to go back to doing something useful".

The problem with COMMONSENSE or BLUESKY is that the line between that and NPOV is less than paper thin. Rather than letting reliable sources decide what is DUE or NOTABLE you're instead using whatever values your socio-culture background has decide.

Using autotranslation and pressing publish is no better than «redacted».

Sometimes while later thinking about a thread or discussion I realise that one of the editors involved is a sock, but generally the effort to investigate and make a case against them is just to high. And it generally doesn't matter as they will likely end up blocked for the same behaviour as their original account.

"How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off."

A new editor who will argue their point well past any reasonable limit, against multiple editor, without listening to any advice or calls for understanding, who ultimately ends up blocked, and then never makes another edit, not one, not even to reiterate their case on their talk page, was, in all likelihood, a sock.x2

Why when I see a naive post from a new editor about a minor detail that relates to MOS do I start hearing Duel of the Fates in my head?

"Well did you hear, there's a natural order. Those most deserving will end up with the most. That the cream cannot help but always rise up to the top. Well I say, 'Shit floats'."

Time to Picard - The amount of time left until an editor finds a hill to quote Star Trek: First Contact on and end up CBAN'd.

If someone says they have "rebutted your argument" what they mean is that they have bludgeoned the same flawed arguement repeatedly without engaging with the points you raised in anyway. Simple state they haven't because their argument is flawed, and move on.

Service guarantees citizenship, but verification doesn't guarantee inclusion.

Don't edit war over details in a Wikipedia article, use the new way with new improvements like being outside the purview of Wikipedia's policies on disruptive editing and NPOV!

I really wanted to encapsulate this with a warning that it contained an EEng 'joke', but I thought I might get shouted at.