User talk:Anoted

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See also

As you'll likely have noted from edit summaries, please don't use "see also" sections. They're lazy. Either link through natural language in the text or {{you may}} or a navigation template — or don't link at all. Also, if you were the one to add these sections, you appear to have been using title case, not sentence case. Not that such sections should exist in the name namespace, but if they did, they'd need to be capped as I've done with this section.

Also, I think by your categorisation of cupcake into category:sweets from the real world that you're not using that category as intended. By sweets basically we're talking about hard candy and other highly processed confections. Baked goods aren't sweets. Perhaps it would add clarity to change the category name to "candy". Maybe that'd word on both sides of the Atlantic. Dunno. But cupcakes are definitely baked goods from the real world. Anyway, keep on truckin'.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:58: Thu 02 May 2013

see also and other questions

diff of post on CzechOut's talk page

I thought that see also was a good way of letting the reader know that there were other articles on a similar topic that might contain additional information that isn't in the article. A good way to link to things that we might not be able to link to in the text of the article. At the mo' we only have one entry in the cupcake article. It's something that was entirely visual, we don't have the choice of words that who used, because who didn't use words. In the beginning of the episode the Doctor is reminiscing about cakes with edible ball bearings and in the end Rose brings him that. The only text that we have to apply is "cake" and "edible ball bearing". Everything else is visual (well, there are yummy sounds). That's what my reasoning was. I was also taking note from some of the alcohol related pages I'd been recently working on.

So what is the appropriate way to use see also? Is there ever a reason to use it for in-universe articles or should those lists be stripped from the other pages?

The capitalisation and category--I wasn't confused, just moving super fast. Too fast apparently. I try to watch for that, but it sometimes happens.

Also, what's the precise difference between {{Demonym}} and {{conjecture}}? Is demonym new? Do we have other versions of this for other article types? For something like Tiaanamat?

Also, I was thinking about doing some work on real-world animals? Can I create a real-world animal category as long as I don't take animals from mammals per GOR? Thanks. Anoted ☎ 02:53, May 3, 2013 (UTC)

Is there any way I can get you not to quote the entirety of your posts on my page back here? This practice is just creating a massively long page. From my perspective, I've just read your message on my talk page; I don't need to read it again on yours. I think pretty much all admin are in the habit of having multiple windows open while talking to users — one to their own talk page and one to their correspondent's page. Your odd and utterly unique habit of making both windows look the same is thus confusing in that circumstance. It's easier if you let your correspondents choose what section titles they want to use. Remember, your talk page is actually there to be edited by other people, not you. But on to your questions:

• {{demonym}} isn't that new; I just got around to illustrating the template today. It's a specialised form of {{conjecture}}, necessary because there's nothing really wrong with a demonym. We are Earthlings, even if Earthling is not as precise as it could be. Ice Warriors are Martians, even if other things are, too. {{conjecture}} is for wen you're making up the name outta whole cloth. No part of the PAGENAME is actually within a narrative at all, or it's very clear that the name isn't the name of the species. Stingray is the classic example of a fully conjectural title. That name is based wholly on what they look like, and doesn't at all come from the story. Also, there's a difference between an article that would take {{demonym}} and one that would take category:demonyms. The former is usually a species; the latter is usually more than one species. Another way of looking at it is that category:demonyms os under category:linguistics, and thus pages there are talking about a term more than a species.

• Nah, "see also" is pretty much always a bad idea in the main namespace. There are one or two exceptions, as there are to any rule, but you should just immediately wean yourself of them. (I kinda thought all my edit summaries were pretty clear on this point.) Linking must always be meaningfully contextual. A simple list of "see also" links has no context whatsoever. Why should people "also see" these links? We don't know, so don't do it. Either find a way to include the links in text, create some kind of navigation template (like {{hospitals}}, or don't include the links at all. Looking at cupcake you had cake as a see also, which was redundant, since cake was in the lead. You also had chocolate cake, but it's not at all clear why that's relevant to cupcake. And obviously you didn't know because you couldn't integrate it into the text. So if you can't figure out how to put it into the body of the article, maybe the truth is that it's not a truly meaningful link. I mean, why chocolate cake and not fruitcake or wedding cake? It's just an arbitrary link at the end of the day.

• Instead of creating new categories in another branch of the category tree, shouldn't you maybe stick with foods for a while? And anyway, I'm not going to give you blanket permission to do "some work" on real world animals. Specifics, please.
  czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  03:33: Fri 03 May 2013

diff of the following reply on CzechOut's talk page

Thanks for that clarification, it was very helpful. The reason I copy-paste to my talk page is because I like to be able to look back at old conversations. That's really hard when they span multiple places. The problem isn't so much during a conversation--I can have two talk pages open at once and generally do. But if a conversation goes on for a while, or if I'm looking back at an old conversation, then it's just sooo easy to get lost. Would it help if I only copy my half after you've posted? Thread my comments inbetween yours? Because I don't want to compromise the ability of others to use my talk page.

What I was trying to ask about animals was about the exact way that game of rassilon categories works. All years are in the top cat years for GOR even though they wouldn't normally be, right? So if a category for real world mammals was added (a subcat of earth mammals) then Guinea pig would be in both Category:Real world mammals and Category:Earth mammals for the duration of Earth mammals involvement in GOR. The same way that bear is in Category:Bears and Category:Earth mammals, right? Bear is only in the earth mammal category because of GOR, right?

And yeah, I'm planning on maintaining my focus on foods, but I like being able to do grunt work that can't be assigned to a bot when my brain needs a break. Un-orphaning pages, copy-editing, wikilinking, putting things in categories all take varying amounts of brain power and it's nice to be able to switch things around and do other types of editing. I made some edits in the past week that I had to undo to maintain the GOR and I just wanted to be super clear about how GOR worked. If there's still something I don't understand about it I'd like to know now, not after an edit of mine screws things up. I like to think that I pick up pretty quickly on most guidelines and rules simply from watching my edits and reading edit summaries when they are reverted but not everything is obvious and things that I thought were obvious sometimes end up being a little more complicated. So I figured that it didn't hurt to touch base. Anoted ☎ 04:50, May 3, 2013 (UTC)

Categories

diff of the following post on CzecOut's talk page

species v. creatures v. animals

Category:Species, per our current definition is supposed to be used for intelligent lifeforms.

Category:Creatures, per our current definition is supposed to be used for non-intelligent lifeforms--animals that do not exist in the real world (RW).

But that's not how things are working right now. While most of the articles under Category:Creatures are not intelligent, they are also often categorised as species. And there are lots of non-intelligent lifeforms currently only categorised as species.

I'm guessing that a large part of this is because Category:Creatures has no subcategories. So if you want to categorise something as a mutant, or silicon-based, you put them in the species category tree.

This is also highly complicated by the way we treat the animal categories, primarily Category:Animals by zoologic class. The animal categories seem to be set up with the intention of handling only real world, non-intelligent lifeforms. But we have intelligent lifeforms being categorised as both species and animal (see Cei) and unintelligent lifeforms being categorised as creature and animal (see Stingray). Intelligent or not, none of these are real world lifeforms, so I'm not sure why they are considered animals. But this is a widespread practice, and leads to articles like Giant Clam being categorised as creature (Category:Skaro creatures), animal (Category:Molluscs) and species (Category:Mutants), which is confusing as hell and makes zero sense.

It seems like this system was set-up with a couple clear divisions in mind. Intelligent and not intelligent. And then each of those was supposed to be divided into RW and non-RW.

Or is the actual intent of the current system to have a set-up that has intelligent, un-intelligent, RW and non-RW lifeforms all co-existing in same categories? Are we supposed to have category called "aquatic species" where we can find every water based lifeform whether or not they are intelligent and whether or not they really exist?

The way the categories currently function I don't know what the intent is--there's just too much contradiction.

If RW lifeforms are not supposed to overlap with non-RW lifeforms, and intelligent lifeforms are not supposed to overlap with non-intelligent lifeforms, then I think it should be fairly easy to set-up subcategories for Category:Creatures and go through the articles in Category:Species and Category:Creatures and put them in the proper category trees. And then go through the animal categories and strip away the non-RW articles and categories.

If these are supposed to overlap then there's quite a bit more work to be done creating an category system for all lifeforms that includes divisions by real world existence and intelligence, but also includes subcategories for appearance and function that contain all types of lifeforms.

I don't want to touch anything until I know which way these categories are really supposed to work, so I'm coming to you hoping that you can clear this up for me. Anoted ☎ 12:05, May 3, 2013 (UTC)

I will of course be interested in hearing your continued opinions abut the animal categories. Your suggestions will be deeply considered. But for the moment, I just need you to continue to opine about them on my talk page. Please take no action with respect to them.

You know, there is a difference, if only a marginal one, between "Earth <whatever>" and "<whatever> from the real world", since there are things which are from Earth but not from the real world. So it's not like once the GOR is over, I'm just going to move "Earth mammals" to "Mammals from the real world". It will be taken off of individual pages, as the note atop category:Earth mammals makes clear. So, yes, you are right to say that bear is in "Earth mammals" only because of GOR, but I can't really support your proposed structure of creating a real world variant of "Earth mammals".

First of all, there would never be a category "Real world mammals", per T:FTRW. It could only be at "Mammals from the real world", but I just don't see the need for it, on reflection. I mean we don't have "American states from the real world", only Category:American states, which includes wholly fictional states. The difference between the two is so marginal that I"m not sure it's worth making the distinction.

We don't have to have a "from the real world" variant of everything. I think it's especially hard to justify when you already have a category that's "Earth <whatever>", because some users just won't get the immediate distinction between those two things. Now, there are of course exceptions. There's kind of a need for category:earth technology and category:technology from the real world, since the DWU Earth has at least one more sapient species than our Earth. But most location-based categories don't also need a FTRW cat.

Furthermore, Creatures is an awful, lazy category that we've been lumbered with since 2006. It should be destroyed, not expanded, as you seem to want to do. I'm not at all confident that it even contains what it says it contains. As the original definition made clear, it was a "subjective" category, and these sort of categories are specifically barred by T:CAT NAMES. Basically, the category might as well be called "miscellaneous" for as much good as "creatures" does us.

As for how to work with categories and the Game of Rassilon, you should find that all categories involved in the game are clearly marked. Basic rule of thumb: stay far away from any category that is currently involved in the game. You can add the category to any new entries that deserve to be in the cat, but you shouldn't subtract. If a page seems questionable, flag it with me and I'll investigate. Don't remove on your own. Not all categorical patterns are obvious.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:31: Fri 03 May 2013

diff of the following reply at CzechOut's talk page

I understand the different between Earth ___ and _____ from the real world, don't worry. And I know that it's "from the real world" and that "real world ____" actually means something here and it's very different, and that's a dangerous place to get informal. I just super hate typing all of those "from the real world"s. So annoying! I wasn't planning on creating a "Mammals from the real world" category--it would have almost 100% overlap with the Earth mammals category so it seems silly. I was just using it as an example per GOR. Creating a "from the real world" category wouldn't screw up GOR as long as I only added pages to it, not moved pages from their current category to a new subcategory. That's all I was trying to clarify.

The thing I'm still confused about in terms of the lifeform categories is are they supposed to be divided up be real world/not and intelligent/not or is there supposed to be a tree that encompasses all of those things. Because if it's supposed to encompass everything, that's going to be one hell of tree.

In regards to the talk page thing, is your issue with my adding the other half of the conversation in terms of handling ongoing discussions, or...? If I put the other half of the conversations in only right before archiving, would that bother you? If while a conversation was ongoing I put in links to the diffs of what I said, would that be ok? I don't want to negatively affect other people's ability to communicate with me, but being able to easily find other parts of the conversation and archive full conversations is important to me. Also, this is something totally different but are there scripts for auto-archiving? That is archiving things that are x days old? I tried looking, but wasn't sure where to look on wikia and wikipedia takes up the first bajillion google results. Anoted ☎ 16:07, May 3, 2013 (UTC)

Your talk page

I would strongly urge you just to learn how to read conversations from two windows. It's a time-honoured practice that people have been doing in MediaWiki installations for over a decade. It's not that hard once you get used to it.

Your suggestion of posting your bits only after I've replied won't help me the next time I visit the page. See, I, as the respondent, also want to be able to see what I've posted. Especially with someone like you who's asking a series of highly complicated and detailed questions, I want to see that I've actually answered everything. If you interject a huge wedge of text between my posts, it makes it harder for me to follow myself. If your stuff is on one page, and my stuff is on another, I know where to look to find particular information, and I don't have to scroll endlessly. Remember that scrolling is a much bigger deal on mobile devices than it is in desktop browsers. Trying to follow my own thoughts on your page while using wikiamobile is a nightmare of scrolling. I have to use my finger so often on this page, it actually burns calories.

Seriously, please just stop doing this. It's counter-productive, and it goes against community intent. If this wiki had wanted to have conversations all in one place, we would have enabled the Message Wall, so that talk pages worked like the forum. I understand the arguments against this kind of discussion, but this community has considered those negatives and nevertheless chosen to go old school. We chose, through forum debate, to stick with this kind of dual-windowed discussion. So please just use this type of discussion area in its traditional manner.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:31: Fri 03 May 2013

Speedy rename

When using {{speedy rename}} please make sure that you:

• assign a value to the {{{user}}} variable
• don't apply to categories, as the template applies to every page within the category. Categories aren't speedy renames anyway because the change applies to multiple pages.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:31: Fri 03 May 2013

The two possible values for {{{links}}} are yes and no. That's it. Don't need a song and dance about "they never were" or "the talk page is but the real page isn't". The question is, "Are the links to this page under consideration moved?"

Here's an example so you don't even have to go back to the template page:

{{speedy rename|new=New page name|links=No|user=Anoted}}

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  17:43: Fri 03 May 2013

czechbot requests

diff of the following message left on CzechOut's talk page I have a couple requests for czechbot:

• Move everything from Category:Fruit from the real world to Category:Fruits from the real world (fruit is grammatically wrong)
• Move Category:Drink stubs to Category:Beverage stubs so it uses the same name as Category:Beverages, and Category:Beverages from the real world. Anoted ☎ 16:16, May 3, 2013 (UTC)

deleted sandbox

permalink of the following conversation on Doug86's talk page

Is there a particular reason that you deleted my Sandbox? Anoted ☎ 05:04, May 2, 2013 (UTC)

It's been two days since I left this message and I have NOT received a reply (and you have been editing during this time). You deleted a personal userpage of mine and you did not leave me a message on my talk page or even provide an explanatory edit summary. I'm assuming that the page was causing a serious problem of some kind and had to be deleted, because I can't see why my userpage would have been deleted otherwise. I can't figure out why you didn't just blank the page and leave me a message, but that's why I came here. I suspended judgement and asked. Ignoring me is seriously not cool. Anoted ☎ 17:31, May 4, 2013 (UTC)

Sorry about the lateness of my reply. The reason I deleted your page is because userpages are supposed to have the prefix User: and without it they seem to be regular article pages. I will try to be more careful in the future. Doug86 ☎ 20:21, May 4, 2013 (UTC)

I didn't notice that--somehow it got created without a user prefix...not sure what happened, adding a /Sandbox1 to the url of my userpage should have created it with a user prefix. Fortunately the text of the page was short enough that I was able to rescue it and add it to another sandbox. Anoted ☎ 03:11, May 5, 2013 (UTC)

TitleSort, NameSort

I've tried for several days to explain the functionality of these two templates. But if your latest post's first line is, "Now I'm even more confused", I have clearly failed. So at this point I simply must apologise at my inability to communicate the points to you. If a thread at The Time Lord Academy is creating this level of confusion, it's not doing its job and must be deleted. I think future readers of the thread will not benefit from the back and forth in that thread, so I will instead revise the instructions on these two templates to include the points I was trying to make.

The Time Lord Academy is meant to offer a tiny snippet of advice about a specific editing situation, and is not really meant to generate much discussion. Yes, some clarifying questions are allowed in these threads. But, in future, if you find that you're really not understanding the post at a fundamental level, please bring those issues to the talk page of the admin who posted the thread. We have to remember that these threads will be read months and years down the line, that short-lived personal confusion won't benefit future readers too much.

For your own personal understanding, let's just reduce things to this: please just use {{NameSort}} for all names and {{TitleSort}} for all titles of stories. They absolutely do different things. {{TitleSort}} will not work at all on pages including an ordinary name (like Harry Sullivan), and {{NameSort}} will not work properly on pages including an ordinary title (like The Crimson Horror (TV story)).

If your editing runs into one of the very unlikely edge cases with which the thread was concerned, maybe I'll change it, maybe you'll notice it, and maybe you'll then understand. Honestly, the points the thread was trying to make apply to less than 1% of pages, so ordinary cost/benefit analysis dictates that it's best to just delete the thread, clear our minds and walk away.

I again apologise for any hurt feelings or bafflement that I caused.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  19:01: Tue 07 May 2013

diff of the following reply on CzechOut's talk page

I don't do much editing on name pages so it's not a really big deal. My confusion came from the idea that "The John Smith" would, under title sort be rendered as Smith, John The, and not John Smith, The. Did I misunderstand the original example? Anoted ☎ 19:20, May 7, 2013 (UTC)

Alien/unnamed individual

Please stop adding {{you may}} to pages that are dabbed in the unnamed alien style. Not only is this title nomenclature in the process of being ripped out of the wiki, it's not at all necessary, since auto-suggest makes it very clear which article one is selecting. {{you may}} is really only for those cases where you'll arrive at a page by virtue of a redirect and need to be alerted to the existence of other such pages. Examples: red, Victoria, Brian Williams.

Unnamed alien is the dab page, so therefore a {{you may}} on the specific pages isn't appropriate. The appropriate template for pointing to a dab page is, unsurprisingly, {{dab page}}. But it's not necessary in this case because people wouldn't likely end up at Unnamed alien (The Iron Circle) looking for Unnamed alien (The Night After Hallowe'en). Auto suggestion would have weeded out that kind of error.

Note that I'm not saying, "just change your {{you may}}s to {{dab page}}s" in this case. I am firmly saying don't even bother with anything on these pages that start with unnamed/unknown <whatever> (story title).
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  14:05: Wed 08 May 2013

Dishes from the real world?

Please define the difference between category:dishes from the real world and category:meals from the real world.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  01:23: Mon 13 May 2013

If I may jump in here, what's the difference between category:condiments from the real world and category:condiments and preserves from the real world? Or category:seasonings from the real world and category:spices from the real world? --SOTO ☎ 01:30, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

A meal is an instance of eating whereas a dish is a specific food preparation. Meals can include multiple dishes and they almost always include a dish and a beverage of some type. This also always for subcats like "meat dishes" and "egg dishes". If you substitute the word meal there it doesn't make a whole ton of sense.

There's a lot of overlap in condiments and preserves, but specifically, things like jam and pickled onions which are not really considered condiments.

Seasonings includes herbs and spices but not condiments. Mint is an example of an article that would be considered an herb but not a spice. If you think it's not the best name, renaming it to Category:Herbs and spices from the real world would mean the same thing while including more obvious search terms. Anoted ☎ 02:11, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

I can't think of a single article that could go within category:meals from the real world, by your definitions. Unless we start making articles like breakfast, lunch and dinner. But, until we have such articles, I think we should delete the category. --SOTO ☎ 02:21, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, that's why I replaced it with category:Dishes from the real world and added a delete tag to the now empty cat. Even if we wrote all of the meal articles we could, I doubt we could acquire more than a handful. And I'd imagine that we'd want them in the top food category anyway. Anoted ☎ 02:26, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

Please remember to add a ':' before 'category' so that the cat doesn't disappear from the text and get added. Anyway, three articles is enough for a category. Anyway, what about spices and seasonings? What do you plan to do with those? --SOTO ☎ 02:32, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

I put a delete tag on the now empty spices. Seasonings is in use, but if someone thinks that herbs and spices would be a better name, I can make the change and put a delete tag on seasonings as well. Though it would be easier for a bot to do. There's a growing number of food categories up for deletion, not to mention a couple requests pending with CzechBot, so I'm trying to be mindful of that. Anoted ☎ 02:43, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

No, never mind. I remember why I didn't go with an "herbs and spices" category. Using the name seasonings allows use to include things like honey. Anoted ☎ 04:06, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

And now, the seasonings category has a subcat Category:Sugars from the real world Anoted ☎ 04:25, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

Please do not add any more categories to this wiki at the present time. You adding a {{delete}} tag to categories necessitates an admin respond in some way, and we've got more important things to do this week. Between the premature release of the series finale and active vandals, the admin staff is busy right now. At this juncture, I'm going to have to rule that you seem to be making unhelpfully fine distinctions between virtual synonyms in your category names, and you don't really seem to be working to any sort of well-thought-out plan. I apologise if this message seems terse, but I hope it is not seen as wholly impolite. Nevertheless, I must insist you put your categorical interests on hold unit further notice. And that is not a way of stopping you forever. You will indeed be notified when it's okay to continue. But for now, please just cool it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  04:49: Mon 13 May 2013

Additionally, you may not depopulate a category you don't like or don't understand in order to put a delete tag on it. We talked before about non-alcoholic drinks, for instance, and I told you then that non-alcoholic/alcoholic was a reasonable organising principle for drinks. So now I have to take the time to put it all back together again. People do not think of beverages as automatically non-alcoholic. Beverages are both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. You have to specify which for clarity. Here is the only definition the OED gives for beverage: "a drink other than water". That's it.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  05:03: Mon 13 May 2013

User talk pages

Hi! This is just a reminder that when you are having a conversation with another user, you reply on their talk page, not your own. Thanks! Shambala108 ☎ 04:19, May 13, 2013 (UTC)

Using ref tags/Thread:131242

I've rolled back your edits to Tea, Coffee and Wine. It's fine to put examples into the discussion, but major changes like that need to wait until after the discussion. Until then if you want to illustrate how they'll look create a sub-page of your user page and make a copy of the article there. We can't have two different systems of citation operating on the wiki while a discussion is in progress. --Tangerineduel / talk 14:25, May 19, 2013 (UTC)

Dorium

Opps... removed the wrong one. I have corrected it now. Thanks for catching that! MM/Want to talk? 23:22, May 19, 2013 (UTC)

Year pages

I'm not Doug, but this was decided upon in thread:121256. Not only do we not want these pages to show up on the WLH for those characters and stories, but this is a wiki. If someone wants to know who [example actor] played, they can just click on example actor and find out. We want them to go to example actor, because example actor will lead them to example story, which would lead them to example character in story or example element in story, and so on and so on. --SOTO ☎ 03:21, May 20, 2013 (UTC)

Be fair

According to you at Talk:Clara Oswin Oswald#Reordering of Clara page I have behaved in a way that is like "the antithesis of a wiki". That's totally, outrageously unfair.

Had you bothered to read the entirety of the precedent discussion, you would have found that I'm the one who started the forum-level discussion about the character in the first place. You would have also found many lengthy opinions on the subject, which would have more than adequately explained the rationale. I have spent literally hours replying about this subject. More broadly, Special:Editcount/CzechOut will reveal what a ridiculously high percentage of my edits are in discussion namespaces. Please try to see the stone-cold fact that I am probably the most pro-community and pro-discussion admin on this wiki. Moreover, very few admin on Wikia, period, are as inclined to discuss things with their community members as I am. To put precisely the finest point on it: I have three times as many edits in discussion namespaces alone as your total edit count.

You have, in short, gone and said The Wrong Thing.

The fact that I'm unwilling to reiterate to you personally what I've already said before does not mean that I am some sort of Great Dictator. Just because you don't think I've explained myself to your immediate satisfaction, it does not necessarily follow that such explanations have not already been given. I'm literally beggin' ya to stop being — and I know you'll hate this word, but I can't think of one that's more apt but less negative — lazy. Rummage through an archive or two. Use the Special:Contributions and/or search facility to do a little research on my past comments about a subject before you let fly with one of your "you suck as an admin" comments.

Most importantly, know that you are obliged to read the whole of a discussion. Don't think that you can "hand wave" huge chunks of the conversation and then get to re-litigate it.

Let me come to the point. It is completely unfair of you to come into a discussion and say, "Eh, I've stopped trying to catch up on this discussion, so I'm now just going to start commenting." This is almost exactly what you said in the Clara discussion at the forum. It's fine to honestly miss a part of a discussion. But to announce to a discussion's participants that you're not going to bother reading the discussion? That's clearly destructive to the discussion process.

For this reason you are forbidden from continuing to post about the Clara situation. You are also forbidden to contribute at the continuity/reference section discussion. If you do, I will ban you. It's as simple as that. You have forfeited your right to participate because you dissed the community by saying their comments weren't worthy of your attention.

Failing to read and understand previous discussions almost inevitably leads to a violation of T:FORUM — or T:POINT, take your pick — which forbids people from "disrupting the wiki by making the same point in several different places — particularly one that has been defeated by the community". Because you're coming into these threads and saying "Eh, there's rather too much here for me to read, so I'm not going to bother", you're essentially condemning the rest of us to a kind of Groundhog Day of reiteration.

That's gotta stop.

Hopefully this micro-targeted "punishment" will allow you to participate more meaningfully in future discussions without inconveniencing your general editing.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  07:40: Tue 21 May 2013

I really wish you wouldn't fly off the handle. It makes communicating with you much more difficult. This is such a mild "punishment" that it's hard to call it that without putting it into quotation marks.

As I very clearly said, it was in no way an attempt to ban you. I don't know why you keep bringing up this notion that I'm out to do that. I have no interest in banning you. Come to that, I have no interest in almost everything of which you accuse me in your latest message.

Do I speak forcefully in discussions? Obviously. What's the point of having a discussion unless one has an opinion? But you are so convinced that I am dictatorial that you're not really doing your research. My view doesn't always carry the day in discussions. In fact, my batting average is no better than .500.

As a practical concern, we cannot discuss every little thing. The issues you mention at the days of the year discussion are trivial, and they didn't require discussion because they were already covered by T:FULL SENT. (You are somewhat misrepresenting the original syntax of these birth and death statements; they had no verbs at the time of that discussion. The prime issue in the discussion was to formulate the briefest possible full sentence.) I think you sometimes look at the flat declarations I make in discussions and think I'm just pulling them out of thin air. Most of the time, my contributions to any discussions come in one of two flavours:

1. According to a previously-extant rule, we should do x.
2. Because of a technical limitation of the MediaWiki software, we can't do y.

I was definitely applying the first of these in the days of the year thing. And also, at the time, I knew that if the proposal went through, we were going to need the most concise phrasing possible in order to transclude the contents successfully into a 250px or 300px box on a Transmat. So it was a little bit of flavour #2, as well.

Your criticism of my handling of that thread is otherwise invalid because you keep saying "why not bring this up on the forum and let editors weigh in on the best way to handle the issue". This of course ignores the obvious fact that we were already on the forum. Anyone could have interjected. No one did.

And I notice you're also unfair about the reference tag thing. It's interesting that you find me guilty of offence in the thread, when all I did was confirm, with pretty much the same language, what our senior bureaucrat, Tangerineduel had already said. Why aren't you sharing the vitriol equally? I think you've gotten yourself locked into a belief that all the woes of the wiki are as a result of my actions, so therefore when you sharpen your knives you mean to aim them at me even when all I do is back up a fellow admin.

Although you spent the bulk of your latest message complaining that it had been six weeks since you made your comment in the precedent forum discussion about Clara, the length of time since the statement is wholly irrelevant. If you had, in that thread, gone on to significantly rehash earlier statements, I probably would have stepped in and DQd you. Certainly in the past, when someone enters a discussion by saying, "I haven't read the above, but this is what I think," I have immediately said, "If you haven't read the above, then I haven't read you," or words to that effect. In this particular instance, you appeared late in that thread, and I wasn't the closing administrator anyway. It didn't really matter to the flow of that discussion that you were being so rude, because the discussion was drawing to a close. Your comments in the current talk page discussion are, however, largely dismissing the original objections to the split, and do sail too close to T:POINT for my liking. Put another way, it is your most recent statements which triggered a reappraisal of your earlier ones.

But I'm still only giving you here what amounts to a tiny tap on the wrist. You're not blocked. You simply can't participate in the continuation of a conversation you admitted that you gave up following. That's completely fair.

I vigourously dispute the last section of your message. There is a clear difference between my having a forceful rhetorical style and my being "in control" of this wiki. If I were, I wouldn't have to engage in unbelievably time-consuming discussions about what this wiki will cover under T:VS. If I were, I wouldn't spend so much time consulting with others over what our little wordmark will look like during 2013. If I were actually in control, there are any number of discussions still active in the forums after months of being open that would be settled. And if I were even interested in control I would have quietly blocked you the first time you blew up at me. But, trust me, I've put up with far worse than your level of character assassination. As long as a person doesn't clearly violate the rules of the wiki, I'll never significantly block them.

Of course, this means that I must now formally warn you that you are getting very close to violating T:ATTACKS, since your latest message is all but calling me a liar. You haven't gone over the line, but it is, I fear, right under the tip of your boot.

Discussion is vital to a wiki. But someone who admits to giving up on a thread really has no business lecturing on the merits of discussion. If you're not going to respect the participants to a discussion enough to read what they have to say, in full, then why in the world should the community listen to you on that subject?

It is important for the admin of this wiki to know about and defend the work of editors who helped form previous consensuses. It's also important to remember that discussion is not the primary work of the wiki. If we spend so much time in discussion that our basic page editing suffers, the wiki will not grow. So it's vital to know when to pick your battles.

Final thoughts:

• It is not wrong for the admin of the wiki to act like "editors-in-chief" and sometimes make arbitrary decisions, particularly as they concern formatting. Not everything is up for discussion.
• It is not an insult to you that, during the single busiest vandalism protection/spoiler watch week this wiki has ever faced, you might not get an answer to your queries on my talk page.
• Even in slack times, you might not always get an answer to a question posed on an admin's page. There are any number of reasons for this, few of them malevolent.
• You've got to remember that we are a fairly small wiki, especially in terms of the number of people who actually come to the forums. We can't possibly discuss everything. Interest in the forums goes through cycles. There will be weeks where people are furiously posting there, but then nothing will happen for days. People get "discussion fatigue". So it is not a recommended practice to throw everything up for discussion. For pure technical reasons, "Forum Activity" only holds five threads. If, as is your particular wont, you start that many threads in a day, no one will see them. So I will close threads quickly if they can be settled through an interpretation of existing policy, or if they cannot be achieved technically, or if it's asking exactly what's been asked and settled before. This allows the forum to work better, because it allows our most active editors to focus their "discussion energy" on things that truly do need to be discussed.
• We do allow old decisions to be reviewed. Obviously. But you've got to understand the past decisions to figure out whether there's a point to bringing them up again. If the previous decision involves participants who are still active on the wiki, there's really no point to bringing it up again, because you're unlikely to get a different result out of the same people. As a rule of thumb, bringing up an old subject is very like going to appellate court. You shouldn't even attempt it unless you've got new, contradictory evidence. And even then, the appellate court doesn't have to hear the case.
  czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  15:49: Wed 22 May 2013

Christmas cheer

Happy holidays!

As this fiftieth anniversary year comes to a close, we here at Tardis just want to thank you for being a part of our community — even if you haven't edited here in a while. If you have edited with us this year, then thanks for all your hard work.

This year has seen an impressive amount of growth. We've added about 11,000 pages this year, which is frankly incredible for a wiki this big. November was predictably one of the busiest months we've ever had: over 500 unique editors pitched in. It was the highest number of editors in wiki history for a year in which only one programme in the DWU was active. And our viewing stats have been through the roof. We've averaged well over 2 million page views each week for the last two months, with some weeks seeing over 4 million views!

We've received an unprecedented level of support from Wikia Staff, resulting in all sorts of new goodies and productive new relationships. And we've recently decided to lift almost every block we've ever made so as to allow most everyone a second chance to be part of our community.

2014 promises to build on this year's foundations, especially since we've got a full, unbroken series coming up — something that hasn't happened since 2011. We hope you'll stick with us — or return to the Tardis — so that you can be a part of the fun!

Hello!

I hope you realise you're perfectly welcome to come back, and grace us with your editing. :)
Consider this an invite to edit with us again, if you so choose.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 06:45, December 20, 2015 (UTC)