Wikipedia:You spat in my soup!



Wikipedia is home to many disruptive editors. Some engage on talk pages, and often make use of distraction fallacies, falling into a pattern which has been characterised as:

Sometimes this is trolling, other times they are pushing a barrow; sometimes they genuinely think that spitting in your soup was fine, because it was their spit and your soup.

Whatever the precise intention, WP:SOUP is a common feature of disruptive and tendentious editing as well as Civil POV pushing, and is often an early warning sign. Beware when a new editor with an anti-consensus view joins discussion, and an article Talk page rapidly becomes a confusing morass of policy-related digressions and sub-threads responding to minor points in a style like that in the quotation. Related to political filibustering, the aim of WP:SOUP is to win not by rational argument, but by making the discussion so labyrinthine that other participants are exhausted/bored to the point of giving up.