Wikipedia talk:Sockpuppet investigations/Dicklyon/Archive

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 * Comment. This is very regrettable, and Dicklyon's adversaries, chief among them User:RGloucester, must be crowing now he has a scalp. What I now know is that Dicklyon committed user-suicide, as it were, by creating the sock, since he recognised a cyclical situation he couldn't get himself out of. All very silly, unwise, and dysfunctional. We've lost a very skilled editor, although in its own frame this was the right decision. Tony   (talk)  3:02 pm, Yesterday (UTC+10)

(or anyone who knows), why was it an indefinite block? I thought sock blocks on master accounts were 1 week or so; I assume I'm missing some piece of the puzzle. ekips39 &#x2766; talk 4:13 pm, Yesterday (UTC+10)

To checkusers, other editors are seeing this archive being modified and getting the idea they can do this as well to other cases. It may be best to open a new report for the CU review. Would you like me to do that? — Berean Hunter   (talk)  8:50 pm, Yesterday (UTC+10)
 * There are aspects of the block that need to be discussed before an unblock is considered. DoRD left him a note that he can contact the functionaries if he wants to discuss an appeal. We haven't heard anything from him yet, so the ball is in his court as to whether he will do so. As for editing cases after they're archived, I would strongly discourage others from doing so as they're not really the place to continue a discussion of the case. I have reverted instances in the past. I don't think opening a new report is necessary here. Further inquiries can be addressed to the functionary team or individual checkusers, though not much can be said beyond what has already been mentioned. Mike V • Talk 02:57, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

This blows
This is quite unfortunate. So is the emboldening effect it's had on Dicklyon's principle antagonist. All I'll say is that this doesn't make him look good either, and noticeboards have a long memory, and penchant for detecting patterns. As for Dicklyon, yes, he intentionally wiki-suicided (told me so in off-WP e-mail); it's his way of taking a very long wikibreak he can't change his mind about. Dealing with a horde of people who seemingly cannot understand basics of grammar and style can be extremely frustrating, especially when certain admins are among them and favor anti-WP:MOS/anti-WP:AT views in RM closes and at noticeboards. "Punking" RGloucester from some additional IPs on his way out was just a parting shot. He's clearly not still editing in evasion of the block any longer.

He a very productive editor, and will be missed. I was on a near-total wikibreak during all of this (for closely related reasons – getting away from what I saw as tag-teaming harassment by a few who just could not get past the idea someone might disagree with them on some style and naming issue, who started mass-reverting virtually ever edit I ever made to anything on their watchlists), so I missed the Dicklyon ANI and move ban. I've read it since then, including Dicklyon's statement/explanation. I tend to sympathize with it strongly, but having been through a move ban myself for similar actions, it's clear that the community doesn't agree. Dicklyon's motivations for just moving a bunch of articles, after questionable no-consensus close that did in fact more clearly favor the option he chose, don't appear to me to be suspect (and I didn't always agree with what Dicklyon proposed or wrote). The WP:IAR approach simply rubs too many people the wrong way when it's done with WP:RMs. Live and learn. Still, a 6-month move ban was excessive. Even mine was only 3 months, and was at least three times more than long enough to get the point across.

Anyway, the real, underlying problem we have here is that some people feel strongly about MOS and some relevant aspects of AT, and some do not, but only one side want to pretend the other is wrong to care. Both camps will argue firmly and repeatedly for their position, but only one pretends the matter is trivial to them. See, e.g., WP:NOPETPEEVES for one of their manifestoes, an excoriation of others for pushing what the author denigrates as "pet peeves", but which just illustrates that its author is pushing his own pet peeves in restating WP:EDITWAR as he wants to see it used to stop people from making style changes he doesn't like. Let's be realistic: The bulk of WP's regular readership are bunch of obsessive-compulsives (and plenty of us are somewhere on the Asperger's or high-functioning autism spectrum). We all know this; no one would do what we do for this long if we weren't at least verging on OCD. This inevitably leads to a certain level of intractability and irascibility and issue myopia, that ebb and flow without WP falling apart. Yet, somehow, it's perfectly fine for the anti-MOS camp to label regular MOS editors, en masse, in grossly uncivil ways, e.g. "on a holy war", "crusading", etc., with impunity. Meanwhile, virtually no criticism in the other direction is ever seen as acceptable.

Well,. All of the MOS-haters are "crusading holy warriors" if anyone is, and I've already clearly shown why their position and the reasons behind it are rationally bankrupt. Over the last couple of years we've lost at least three MOS regulars, who were major WP contributors, because of this bullshit. Several (actually, IIRC, also three) in the anti-MOS camp have also resigned editing after losing a style debate they were over-invested in. Yet MOS regular are obsessive and over-focused? I don't think so. If style, grammar, punctuation, natural disambiguation, and other related matters are "trivial" and "don't matter" and "not a good use of editorial time", then shut up and drop the rank hypocrisy, then go do something you think important. It's not like anyone is going to chase you down and make you participate in title or style discussions. No one sane can possibly believe that editors who will fight half to death to capitalize something that shouldn't be capitalized, delete a hyphen from something that grammatically needs it, force parenthetic disambiguation against WP:NATURAL policy, remove a comma all style guides agree is necessary, or any other such idiosyncratic campaign, aren't themselves "obsessed" and "over-focused" on "crusading" about style matters. They're just obsessed and over-focused on ensuring the crusade goes way. Cf. WP:WINNING and WP:WRONGVERSION. You say it doesn't matter to you? Then prove it.

This stuff matter. Wikipedia is in the top 5 search results for damned near everything at this point, often #1. Bad style/naming on WP is noticeably spreading off WP and affecting other writers, including secondary sources – you know, the ones we're categorically favoring as the most likely to be reliable. It's a negative feedback loop. You all really, need to stop trying to force, into a general-purpose/audience encyclopedia, your personal usage quirks, or specialist-publication-only style divergences from mainstream grammar. And get it into your heads that MOS is an in-house style guide for writing this encyclopedia, not a place for your to righteously set forth the one true way to write. I mean, really. Just get over yourself. MOS regulars are not causing these sorts of disputes; are. MOS and AT already say what they say. It's all you anti-MOS pundits who keep trying to carve out "because I said so" or "because a publication I like says so" exceptions, and using wikiprojects to try to force WP:LOCALCONSENSUS crap on "your" articles whether or not any other editors (much less the readership) think it makes sense. You're making the external world a subtly worse place, as well as driving off good editors internally, and confusing our readers. At least stop the holier-than-thou act in the interim, while you review your own obsessions and motivations, and decide wisely to knock it the hell off. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  07:09, 3 June 2015 (UTC)