User:Wikimedes/sandbox/Soapbox/alts and drafts

Puppy run amok (bowdlerized and anonymized)
There once was an editor who went around making dozens of name changes to articles, many of them controversial. It’s true that Wikipedia has redirects and the articles have plenty of space to mention alternate names, so the name of an article may not be very important. However, renaming the articles had other consequences. The editor was like a puppy that went around peeing on trees to mark its territory. It did little harm or good to the tree itself, but it did make the tree less pleasant for the some of the other dogs. The real harm to the project came from the howls of protest from the other dogs and the ensuing turf battles. These wasted everyone’s time, including the puppy’s, who would rather have been peeing on more trees. It took several editors to babysit this puppy, which they did by repeatedly having to remind him that it’s not nice to pee on community-owned trees without the community’s prior approval. One editor took on the task of cleaning up the messes, and an administrator had to take care of some of the more difficult jobs. This task was made harder by the puppy’s repeated protests that the messes smelled fine to him. Of course they smelled fine to him, they were his mark.