User talk:CzechOut

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Whatever happened to DiSoRiEnTeD1?

Hello!

I know you have bigger fish to fry at present, and I am also sorry to begin your new talk page on such a glum note, but — User:Najawin has just alerted me, on a talk page, to your recent blocking of User:DiSoRiEnTeD1 for sockpuppetry.

DiSoRiEnTeD1 and I agreed on few things, and a mere glance at his talk page will show that he was sometimes unruly or even disruptive. Nevertheless, I never had cause to ascribe any malice to him until today; he merely came across as rash and inexperienced. DiSoRiEnTeD1 had, a little while ago, come to believe there was some sort of admin conspiracy against hims, and User:OncomingStorm12th, User:SOTO and myself had agreed that it was best to give him strong warnings, but not block him, so as to prove him wrong on this point and show him we were not some cabal itching for an excuse to ban him.

He had scarcely shown his face (well, his default user avatar) since then, however. And if he has now left us so definitively… well, I think I and several other users (from OS12th to his frequent talk-page sparring partner User:Najawin) may be owed some closure on the subject of DiSoRiEnTeD1. Najawin, for example, had scruples on the talk page I mentioned earlier, because, for all that he often went overboard in defense of it, DiSoRiEnTeD1 was the main and most steadfast supports of positions opposite to Najawin's (or to mine) in many discussions. Which puts us all in the somewhat awkward position of "winning" by default, without the opposition getting to have a say at the conclusion.

So, after all that, and because your blocking-summary was rather vague (and you did not, or at least have not yet, posted a more fully written-out rationale on his talk page)… my question is just — what happened? What precisely did he do? When? Where?

To be clear, I am not asking for any kind of reduction to his ban, or questioning your decision; if he did indeed break T:SOCK, there is nothing more to be said on the matter in terms of his actual punishment. My questions are just that — curiosity. And perhaps a hint of sadness that it came to this, after all the tiresome drama and the accusations and the reassurances. DiSoRiEnTeD1, at least until this sockpuppetry business, was never a troll, and is owed, perhaps, a little respect as he goes.

…But as I led with, all these rather nebulous feelings of mine are nothing urgent, and I know you have other things on your plate. Get to this when it's convenient for you, and don't hurry yourself on my account! The UCP, home page and so on are clearly more pressing uses of your limited time. Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:28, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls

Hello. I know you've been busy but this looks possibly important so I wanted to let you know. After seeing Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls, I created the page with an explanation as to what it was, as there was some confusion. When the edit completed a big message appeared about "change propagation" and the "job queue". I don't know enough about the code of MediaWiki to know what this really means, or if it will affect anything, but seeing as it appears important and you control the technical aspects of the wiki, I thought you should know. I hope it didn't mess up anything... Chubby Potato ☎ 09:39, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Something odd

I have been noticing a recent surge of either multiple IP users or one user with a fluctuating IP creating some truly bizarre spam pages consisting of pure nonsense and usually being horribly garbled copies of existing valid maintenance pages. Also exhibiting some similar behaviour and overlap of interests to some earlier vandals coming over here from some truly strange wiki apparently about old people of all things to insert ageist remarks into pages about Peter Capaldi and sexist one into pages about Jodie Whittaker. Yeah, I don't know either. NightmareofEden ☎ 12:52, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Re: Master discussion

Good to know. I did just make another post on the matter just before I received your message, so feel free to delete that. I would like to ask you politely to unlock the initial discussion though, as you did ask for ideas. Regards,

Epsilon📯 📂

21:20, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Re: Discussions use

Right right, I see!

Well, honestly — I agree with you, on the usefulness of not holding policy-making threads in Discussions! It's just that your own quite detailed post seemed to me like a Forum post, and so I thought you had changed your mind about this. I have no particular wish that we do this now, so long as it is agreed that we do it later; I genuinely thought you were the one who wanted it handled in Discussions, there.

But thanks for the explanation, all the same! Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 22:02, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Re: DWM

Just saw your message at User talk:LegoK9: …what's going on, here? Since when do copyright-holders ring us up and ask us not to include an image on the Wiki? What about fair use and all that? So long as we are reproducing the images for a documentary purpose, there isn't supposed to be much they can say — is there?

To be clear I assume you have a good reason, but I'm wondering about what kind of a weird precedent this is setting, and how it should be applied in future. Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:38, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Well, yes — but here I can't see how we could possibly be talking about questions of privacy. These are not candid images of private individuals, found in a derelict corner of the web and unfairly signal-booted. These are images that are even now widely reproduced in Doctor Who Magazine. DWM is widely sold among Who fans — and more widely read, perhaps, than our own Wiki.

Furthermore they are not images of a real person, but publicity shots of the Doctor. If DWM asked us not to reproduce a particular publicity shot of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor, would we be forced to delete it to "protect Capaldi's privacy"? Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:06, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Hm. I suppose I see what you mean — and I certainly see the sense in maintaining good relations with DWM. I do have to question the wisdom of such a hard rule as "wishes of the copyright holder always trump fair use": what if Big Finish came out and asked us not to host any images of their covers at all, or something of the kind? I could see a publisher of DWU fiction making that kind of pronouncement, albeit not necessarily the Beeb themselves. I can't imagine we could comply with that kind of blanket ban, and still remain a halfway useful Wiki. If they threaten legal action that is another thing, but a mere wish should not paralyse a whole fandom so.

I am speaking in general terms, though. The point is well-taken that in this case we have other publicity shots of that Doctor, from that year, in that outfit. It is not at all essential that we retain this particular one on the Wiki, so we might as well keep DWM happy.

(For the record I have seen a comparable case on another Wiki on which I am an admin; but that case involved a picture of a real person, not a 50-year-old publicity shot of a character; and furthermore it was not a picture readily available to the whole of the fandom in a magazine.) Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:51, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Invite

Incidentally, this is unrelated to the above matter, but I am still waiting on you for that Slack invite, unless you already sent it and my spam folder ate it up. (If you've misplaced my email address, it's still one of my most recent messages to you on Discord.) Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:57, 17 May 2021 (UTC)