User talk:Anoted/Archive 3

	This page is an archive. Please do not make any edits here. Edit the active conversation only.

Archive page

diff of the following post on CzechOut's talk page

Why aren't the discussions I archived showing up in User talk:Anoted/Archive 1?? Anoted ☎ 02:57, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

Fixed. Should work normally from here on out. Just make sure that you actually select something to archive in future. You appear not to have done so in the creation of your first archive, which had a knock-on effect for later attempts at archive creation. But /Archive 2 created normally after manual population of /Archive 1.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  03:16: Sun 28 Apr 2013

diff of the following reply on CzechOut's talk page

Ummm...I'm confused. I did select a few sections to archive the first time. See this diff. It did delete them from my talk page, but it didn't put them anywhere. If I didn't select then why did those conversation disappear from my talk page? And also, while I like that it's fixed (thank you!), a lot of the stuff in archive 2 I wasn't prepared to archive yet. And I probably would have added it to archive 1, not create a second archive. Can you help with any of this? Anoted ☎ 03:24, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

Well, my goal is just to make the feature work for you. I leave it up to you to decide what bits you want to keep where. As your correspondent, though, I don't really need the previous conversation on this page to keep up. I can just summon a diff if I really want to read previous posts. Or I can hop over to /Archive 2.

I did see the diff of your first attempt at the archive and, well, it just didn't take. You could have hit a very temporary internet outage that screwed ya. The Wikia network could have temporarily gone down, so maybe we weren't able, in that moment, to establish contact with the remote wiki providing the archiving javascript. It's hard to say. What's pretty clear, though, is that diffs on /Archive 1 establish you only successfully brought over enough characters to establish the {{ArchPage}} note, which is typically read as an "error" by later attempts to create new archive pages. The important bit, I'd say, is that /Archive 2 created without a hitch after /Archive 1 was fixed, so you look good to go for the future.

If it helps, this kind of error is rare, and has only happened to one other user in the entire time the archiving script has been active. I really don't expect it to affect you again.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  04:46: Sun 28 Apr 2013

diff of the following reply on CzechOut's talk page

I'm fine with adjusting the archives manually if I can auto-archive in the future. I'd do it, but I don't want to mess things up again, or worse. I really don't understand what went wrong the first time. Heck, for all I know I really don't understand how auto-archiving works period. The help pages don't really go into detail. It just says that it's really easy and to follow the instructions after clicking the archive button. Only, there are no instructions. I figured out the whole selecting thing, but it didn't work, or I did something wrong, or...I don't know. Also, it's probably irrelevant but why the edit summaries "Shouting"? Anoted ☎ 03:52, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

"What's pretty clear, though, is that diffs on /Archive 1 establish you only successfully brought over enough characters to establish the {{ArchPage}} note".

Um, no, I had to add the {{ArchPage}} myself. Manually. Sections disappeared off of my talk page, but Archive 1 didn't exist. I thought I had to manually add {{ArchPage}} to get things going.

Everytime I archive in the future it will create a new archive? Is there a way to archive sections every x number of days to the same archive? Anoted ☎ 05:00, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

Food cats

I'm very troubled by your statement at #8. Of course we wait around for the DWU to define things for us. That's the point of the wiki. We absolutely do not go forward with real world classification unless there's absolutely no other choice. I think there's plenty of choice with food stuff. Consequently, I'm not bothered at all by anything you've said in #7. They don't have botanical classification because their culinary classification is much easier to establish within DWU sources. No biggie.

I think your comments at #4 are where your whole theory of separation (which you still haven't explained, really) falls apart. Fine Jellied eels are one culinary use of eels, so in that case maybe you can think of eel as the animal and jellied eel as the food. But fish? Nah. Fish is the zoological and culinary. So is shellfish. If i'm understanding your separation theory, it falls down at the water's edge. It also falls down with lasagna. Lasagna is both the type of pasta and the meal. I've got a package of lasagna in my pantry right now. The label says lasagna. The noodles are lasagna. It's a word with dual meanings. I mean, if we wanted to be really pernickety, I guess we could go lasagna noodles and baked lasagna, or something' like that. But why? It's easier to have one article defining the two meanings, especially if that's what DWU texts tell us to do. And I'm really not understanding your Fruit thing. Is there a culinary word for fruit that's different? If not, you're going to end up with category:fruit under both botany and food. So how is that "separation"?

Overall, that's one of the big flaws in your proposal. You've made a special emphasis of your desire for "total separation", but you've provided little evidence that it's possible. You also originally said you were going to simplify and reduce the number of categories, but you're proposing a ton of new ones. (I don't oppose the notion of creating new categories — it's necessary — but I don't understand where the simplification claim fits in.)

But the biggest thing that's still worrying me is that you seem so cavalier about whether valid sources allow for category names. And you seem to have a misapprehension about the text that should be on a category page. You refer to them as "category articles" and that scares me. They're not articles. They're merely descriptions. They're only there to help editors find their way. They're not supposed to be elaborate affairs. Think of them as signposts only. And the thing is, most users don't read 'em anyway. I mean, it's important that they're there, but the far more important thing is clarity in the category name. That's what gets used. That's what 13-year-old kids using the site find through the category module. One of my category failures that I've not yet corrected is that I started using proper taxonomic names for some of the zoology categories, and it led to confusion. Category names need to be simple, direct, and as unambiguous as possible. Because of oddities like tomatoes, I really think the way forward is just to create category:fruits and vegetables from the real world. Combine the two; don't split them apart. It's just easier than fighting the "is it a fruit or a vegetable? battle". I'm with David Mitchell on this one: botanists' turf battles to justify their grant funding mean nothing to me. As I've said before, this isn't Wikipedia. This is a wiki about Doctor Who, where exact categorisation ins't as important.

Finally a technical note. Could you do the grunt work? Maybe. But it's gonna be faster for us to just keep talking about this for a while and then for me integrate what you're saying into a plan and knock it out in an hour or so. Then you can finish off with writing category descriptions and suggesting follow-up actions. I may have said no about a lot of your proposals, but I do basically agree with you that this area of the tree needs a bit of a spring cleaning, as it's grown considerably since the category structure was first laid down.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  04:33: Sun 28 Apr 2013

I know I've gone out of order, with your points, so let me just quickly give a yay or nay to your stuff by point number:

1. I assume you're talking about T:CAT NOT here. If not, please provide link where you encountered vague language. I really don't see it as vague, but I'll try to give it another pass soon.
2. Answered above
3. Answered above
4. When you roast a whole pig it's called a pig, not pork. And I'm sure there is a DWU story that has roast pig in it. So even pig is another thing that flummoxes your separation theory. Also, I think a "foods by meal" approach is a non-starter, as it's far too subjective. Way too many cultures and times in the DWU to definitively call anything a food for a specific meal. Where you gonna put bacon or spam or eggs, just for a start? Those are "every meal of the day" foods.
5. Answered above
6. Addressed above (should just be category:fruits and vegetables for simplicity
7. Answered above
8. Answered above
9. Hmmm, I think that by adding categories that have no real DWU support, we'd be adding meaning to an article, too. If we only add the culinary cat then what we're saying is that in the DWU, only the culinary meaning is known. We can only add the botanical cat if we know that meaning is given in a DWU story. (Except when there's no other possible category it could go into. Again, articles have to have at least one category, and if the mention of a thing is so brief that we have no in-universe identification of a category, then, yes, we can use common sense there and only there to attach to the category tree. But that's a relatively rare case.)
10. Well, strictly, fungi aren't even part of botany at all, are they? Fungi are their own kingdom, as I understand it. The error is probably with fungi, not fruits.
11. I'm not super happy here. Flowers seems a non-starter to me. The common sense of flower is that you're just talking about the bloom. I can't see us having articles just about the rose bloom. I know that's not properly botanic, but I think we could just as easily go "plants and flowers" here to avoid this false distinction. Roots, okay, fine. But seeds? Nah, that's a little too precious. We'll start another border war with that. We should just add it to existing cat, making it Category:Seeds, nuts and Legumes, maybe. Finally, I don't think we need a new category to keep fruit trees and tree fruit separate. I really doubt that we have a lot of instances of fruit trees specified in the DWU. Remember, we need a specific reference to an apple tree; we can't say, "Because apples are grown on trees in the real world, apple trees must therefore exist in the DWU because there are apples in the DWU." We need at least a picture of an apple tree to start an article called apple tree. So I honestly think category:Trees from the real world will be able to handle the load without adding anything new.

Needing sources

of the following reply left at CzechOut's talk page

Your response to #8 has me really confused. Should I be removing the category Mineral from the page Salt? And changing the first sentence which defines salt as a mineral? Because Four to Doomsday never defines salt as a mineral, we do. Doctor Who never tells us that water is an inorganic substance. It's not like we need the category, we have it a food category and a currency category and could easily add a weapon category. The way I see things we add things all the time that are never outright said, based on our understanding of what we're seeing and hearing. When we see potatoes on the planet Earth in our time we assume that they are the same as what's in our pantry unless we're told otherwise. When Jackie Tyler talks about dishes she cooks we assume that they are the dishes we know. You said somewhere on the forum that "for a wiki to be useful, words must have meaning." We assume as little as possible and try not to draw conclusions but we do assume. Otherwise real-world perspective pages would be all that we had. Following the source carefully is incredibly important, but if we can say nothing that we aren't directly told we then we have to get rid of most of the wiki. You might not be bothered at all by #7, but it's a problem for me is because of #6 (our current organisational structure). You say we don't so this stuff unless it's absolutely necessary and that it's not necessary for foods that are plants. So then why have we categorised Anchovy as Earth fish? We're never told that they are Earth fish. We don't see them swimming around. The answer that seems obvious to me is that even though Doctor Who doesn't tell us that Anchovy is a fish we know that Anchovy is a fish. Doctor Who doesn't tell us that tea or garlic are plants, but they're plants. The opening sentence of the tea page says "Tea was a drink made from the dried leaves of the tea plant, created by brewing the leaves in hot water." Doctor Who never tells us that. At most, we see tea being steeped. We're the ones who ascribe the words "dried leaves" to describe the little floaty things. We're probably also are ascribing the words "brew" and "hot water." Maybe we see water being heated for tea or maybe someone mentions that their tea is too hot. But if those things never happen do we not mention that tea is a hot drink? You're response just has me beyond lost. Are we currently over-categorising by applying terms that we haven't been outright told? When an article says that tea is made "with the dried leaves of a tea plant" are we assuming too much? Should that be changed? If not, why would putting cabbage in a botanical category be a problem? I'm putting the rest of my reply in another section because it seems to me that this conversation about the extent to which we rely on Who as a source should be discussed on it's own. I either need a massive education or there's a lot of confusion happening and I think it's the later and I think it's happening because we're discussing to much at once. Anoted ☎ 08:01, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

My theory and other things

of the following reply left at CzechOut's talk page I think you are misunderstanding my "separation theory". I was simply trying to say that I wanted foods to be organised both in terms of their culinary usage and in terms of their scientific origin. Imagine dumping every food that was a plant into the plant category. Then going through creating subcategories that make sense scientifically. Then do that with animals. Then dump all food articles into the food category and make subcategories that make culinary sense. Once that's done every article that can would have a science category and a food category. Now there is currently one category overlap, Fruits. The process of going through and categorising these things separately makes it obvious that not everything that is fruit by botanical classification is fruit by culinary classification. We can deal with this by creating two sets of fruit categories Category:Fruit (food) and Category:Fruit (plant). But that is complicated and confusing and we'd have to put a lot of articles in both categories. We can handle this by coming up with alternate categories but there aren't ones that are as good. The best solution is taking the couple of articles that are technically fruits (walnut, cocoa bean) and putting them in the general plant category. The separation theory is really just a way of thinking about it, approaching the problem. Approach science and food separately and see what we get. See if there is any overlap or problems and come up with a solution where all edible plants and animals are categorised in terms of science and food in whatever way is functionally best. Separation was really just referring to how I was planning to look at the situation. My theory was really just that I thought that we should categorise edible plants both as plants and as food. That we should categorise edible animals both as animals and as food. I think my using the word separate implied something I didn't mean. Other points:

1. I was referring to T:SPELL. It says that policy doesn't apply to (amoung other things) pages with a category prefix. Which should have been clear enough but I was stuck wondering, "then what does apply? what spelling should I use?".
2. Why combine fruits and vegetables into one category? Because of tomato? That doesn't make sense. We already say on the page that while it's technically a fruit it's perceived by many to be a vegetable. Isn't that enough? I'm not sure it really matters what category it's in, and besides it's one article. We could easily put it in both-that wouldn't cause recursion issues. We have other foods that are in more than one food category. This seems to be a case of 6 of one to half a dozen of the other--hardly worth combining two categories over.
3. I think you misunderstood what I meant about in regards to pig. I was suggested that one possibility was a subcategory of Meat be Pig. It would have the pages bacon, sausage, spam, AND pig, boar, wild boar. My point was simply that we have a lot of pages for edible animals that are considered pigs as well as food products made from pigs. More than enough for their own category. It's not necessary, they can all be a part of the category Meat, no subcat required. I was just trying to point out one way that we could create a meat subcategory.
4. No, I don't think we should split foods up by meal. But breakfast is a meal that's referred to a lot in Doctor Who. It certainly needs a page. Depending on how much I found, I thought I might create a category to go with it. Yes, it's subjective, which is why I wouldn't be using my judgment. If something is referred to as a breakfast food in Doctor Who it would go in the Breakfast foods category. It's not a necessary category, all of the foods in it would be in another food category, but I thought it might be interesting. There's been a fair amount of discussion in Doctor Who about breakfast foods. The article breakfast (when I get around to writing it) should suffice and I wouldn't even consider making a category until the page was written. I thought once the categories were properly sorted and the page was written it might be an interesting category to have. But I was never considering sorting all foods by meal and I'm several steps away from even thinking about the category or what might go in it. Completely a question for another day.
5. Botany is the study of plants, fungi, algae and viruses. So fungi is exactly where it should be, a sub-cat of botany not of plants. Trees, fruits, etc should be a sub-cat of plants.
6. I know that the text on category pages isn't an article but a description. I was searching for something better and ended up using the work article because it seemed to me to obviously refer to the text on the page. The words text and description seem obvious but at the time I was massively blanking!
7. I'm not really hung up on precise botanical categories or precise science categories. Botanically speaking root has a much narrower definition than how I was proposing it be used. I'm thinking in terms of functionality here, that's really all.
8. I see your point about the flower category, which is why I originally proposed flowering plants. The downside of flowering plants is that it's really broad. It includes all of our fruits and other things as well. In re seeds, too precious? What do you mean? Not that it's a great suggestion--it's really diminishing marginal utility. We can just as easily stick articles like rice in the overarching plant category:

• Category:Botany

• Category:Botany from the real world
• Category:Plants

• Category:Plants from the real world

• Category:Fruits

• Category:Fruits from the real world

• Category:Roots

• Category:Roots from the real world

• Category:Trees from the real world

• Category:Fungi

We could probably come up with more subcategories but I don't see it as necessary. This creates a new subcategory for plants and moves fruit and trees into their proper places. Which really should be done soon I think. Trees not being a subcat of plants has led to both categories being using on a lot of pages. In this category scenario would you have any trouble putting lime into the fruit category instead of the tree category? I've been spending a fair amount of time sorting things out in Sandboxes. Things that we've agreed on or that seem commonsense are in this to-do list. If there's anything on that list that you think needs to be discussed, let me know. Otherwise it can be put into action.

I also have a related question about precisely what is real world. The article meat covers all meat. Most meats are real world foods, but meat from a Cash Cow isn't real world. It's an article about both real-world and non real-world things. And then there's seaweed which is about a non-real world thing that is basically just a living version of the real-world thing. Category wise, are these real world or not? Do we add a "behind the scenes" section to seaweed with a bit about real world seaweed? Anoted ☎ 08:01, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

inappropriate stuff on article talk page

diff of the following post on CzechOut's talk page

Not sure how to handle this but Talk:Trenzalore is a mess. There's a section on Men in Black, which makes no sense. Almost everything on the talk page is speculation, theory, and worst, 50th anniversary spoilers/rumors. A large portion of the page was deleted before (not sure why). The talk page is a clear problem but I'm not sure what to do. I don't want to archive the discussion so far because most of it is vastly inappropriate but I wasn't sure if it was ok to just delete it so...

Also, is there a place in the forum to ask for help. If something isn't working, or there's a problem (like this), or something else? The board descriptions don't seem to include this and I haven't seen any threads like this. Anoted ☎ 12:36, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

Semantic mediawiki parameters

diff of the following post on CzechOut's talk page

Does this wiki not have the parameters name or surname? I was playing around trying to see if I could use SMW to create lists by name. I was doing some disambig work and thought this could be of use. So I whipped this up, but name and surname parameters seem to be being ignored. It occurred to me that we might not have them. Oh, here's the code I was playing with, in case it makes a difference:

{{#ask:[[Category:Individuals]]OR[[Category:Real world people]]
 [[name::>Joh]][[name::<Jon]]
 |format = ul
}}

Thanks. Anoted ☎ 09:57, April 29, 2013 (UTC)

At this point, under T:SOCK, I need to ask if you have ever edited this wiki, or any part of Wikia, under another name. It is simply not credible that someone who's been here for less than a month would even know what SMW was, much less be able to compose something of that relative sophistication. If you have any other user names on the Wikia network, you must declare them.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  11:32: Mon 29 Apr 2013

diff of the following reply at CzechOut's talk page

Yeah that's totally me. I'm a sock puppet. I know all the ins and outs of Wikia and spent all that time trying to understand Redlinking policy as a way to throw everyone off. And just so no one would catch on, I spent the majority of a day typing and wikilinking category names into a sandbox. I could have totally used DPL or SMW but figured it was worth the hours I wasted doing it the long way just so no one would notice my wiki prowess.

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and assume that this is just a really bad joke. That the intonation got lost online. Because it's really just too insulting. Maybe I'm a programmer. Maybe I have a wikia account for each wiki I belong to because I hate telling people what my other interests are. Maybe I've been editing this wiki for years with various IPs and only recently created an account.

I don't know how you came to the conclusion that I must have a hidden wiki past because I asked for help with SMW. Is the idea of my spending some time reading help pages so out of this world? Is the concept of my understanding the fair majority of what I read that shocking? Should I announce to the world that I'm the brightest mind of my generation because I found SMW after only a month?

I've tried to tone down my anger here, but I may not have done the best job. It's not just that you asked, the way you asked sucked about as much as it could without obviously attacking me. I learned my lesson, I'll refrain from asking you for help in the future. Anoted ☎ 12:20, April 29, 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry that my phrasing allowed for perceived insult. Here's the skinny.

We have an occasional, actual, active problem with sock puppets, so I do ask this question of users when it seems likely that they have experience which belies their apparent join date, or when their editing pattern closely matches another user's. You are not the only person of whom I've asked this question, and so I am not picking on you. It's just that your editing interests are not consistent with those of someone who arrived here a month ago. Is it possible that someone might have been able to compose a little SMW based upon our local help file? Sure. But not everything present in your code is present in our local help file, or used by our templates, so you've gone a little bit beyond what's available on this wiki. Combined with your atypical interest in categorical structure, your immediate, day one knowledge of revision histories and the word diff, it is entirely reasonable to consider the possibility that you might have gained experience under another Wikia account or IP addy, since you have previously denied being a Wikipedian. These are all things that most users don't know for months. These are also things that, yes, an IT-minded person, or a mildly proficient Googler, could have picked up very quickly.

Obviously, none of this is necessarily a problem. I myself edit under multiple accounts. And, no, it doesn't take forever to pick up SMW. Indeed, I'm glad that, finally, someone is asking an SMW question!

But —

— we do live in a world where users do the kind of things you suggest. People do find it amusing to "Trojan horse" us. They will create accounts, appear to be reasonable users, then, months later, go rogue. Completely for the hell of it. We've been besieged by one repeat sock for over two years now. And we've certainly had people who were bad actors on other wikis come here to try to establish credibility, so that they can return to their home wikis, under a different name, with a raft of good faith edits behind them, so that they can launch surprise attacks. We also have some users who've had "evil twin" accounts: one account for good faith edits, and another for vandalism.

I am not saying you're attempting any of this. I am simply saying that sock puppetry happens, and this is me in "due diligence" mode. When I see patterns that indicate sock puppetry, I have to ask the question and get an answer. Of course there are other, innocent explanations. But all I care about is ruling out the one that threatens this wiki and the wider Wikia network.

So I ask again: What are the names of any other accounts you have at Wikia, and is User:Anoted being used to, in any way, subvert a block upon another account or an IP address?

If you say that the answer is "nope, I'm a first-time Wikia user", that'll be an end to it. If you say "I've never been blocked before, but I've edited Wikia before and here are my accounts", you'll just note those accounts at User:Anoted, and that'll be an end to it, too. If you say "Yes, I have been blocked somewhere on the Wikia network, but here's the deal", we might be able to work something out. But I must insist that you put your anger to one side and deliver a straightforward answer.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  14:46: Mon 29 Apr 2013

diff of the following reply left on CzechOut's talk page

a reply: multiple accounts and other such stuff

• The local help file links to the wiki for SMW, which has some great help pages.
• One of the reasons I like categories is precisely because I'm a new user. To me, categories are one of the primary ways of organising knowledge. Doctor Who is complicated and twisty and categories are how I keep things straight. Writing new articles is easier if it's easy to access all of the related knowledge is easy to find. They're also really important because the search function on wikia sucks. Massively sucks.

Now for the big issue:

      I get why you want users to announce multiple accounts. They may not be intending to use the accounts to edit on the same wiki. They may not intend to use multiple accounts to push an agenda. But if they have them and no one knows, and a situation arises, then what's the harm? No one will know. It's easy, perhaps too easy. Telling users that this is an issue and asking them to take the proactive step of linking accounts does make sense. It enforces the idea that there's someone to catch you if you screw up, whether it's on accident or not. But that's the only part of this policy that makes sense. This policy doesn't let people start with a clean slate. And the due diligence of demanding an answer from a user who has been informed that they should link accounts and hasn't, seems like a particularly bad move.

      If I was a bad editor in the past, or just got into some pretty bad disagreements and want to start over then I want to start over. Having to announce who I was doesn't let me do that. This policy makes wiping the slate clean impossible, because users either have to announce their past, or their first action on this wiki is a lie. And when you start out by lying you start out by going downhill and that's a terrible way to start.

      Now I get the motivation behind this. We don't have clean slates IRL, not really, and we want things to work the same way online. If someone screws up with me IRL and wants to start over I'm still aware of how they screwed up. But trying to apply this principal to the internet makes no freaking sense. We want to be able to judge people based on their histories, but really, we, can't. Because here's the thing: my next edit will good or bad regardless of how many edits I've made. If you think that the way I want to reshape the categories is bad, then judge me on that. If it's good, it doesn't make any difference whether it's coming from someone new, or who's been a long-time good editor, or who's been banned for years.

      For all of the focus on intentions, they're really irrelevant in terms of end product. They matter for interpersonal dealings but not at all in terms of the quality of topside edits. If I am making good edits, then those edits are good, whether I've been banned before or not. And they are good whether or not I'm trying for a clean slate or just want lots of good edits under my belt for a future evil plan. How does demanding an answer make this situation better? It doesn't, and it could make things worse.

      Say I had been banned in a past life and was coming here and making good, well-intentioned edits. If I'm here to start over and make positive edits then you're forcing me to lie. But what if I'm not? Say that my good edits are all a part of a dark plan so that 6 months from now I can strike fear into the heart of my enemies. How does asking me to lie help things? Because that's what you're doing. It's not like I'm going to give up my evil plan just because asked for the truth. So I'm stick to my evil plan all the way. What's a lie but a drop in the bucket. But why bother to make me lie?

      I mentioned this one but it's worth restating. Intentions do not equal outcome. Maybe I came here to make good edits for that future evil plan and I end up getting engaged, enjoying editing. So I decide to abandon my evil plan and just keep on editing the way I have been. Isn't this a more likely scenario if I've been welcomed without suspicion, without hostility? If I can can mention my past without reprisal? I might come to this with hostile intentions masked, but if I'm treated to a start free from any suspicion or hostility, then maybe I never act hostile. Maybe those bad intentions slip away as I find myself enjoying the wiki and the other editors.

      Intentions aside, if you just focus on the reality of the situation, the whole asking bit never makes sense. If you ask someone to let you know if they have more than one account by adding this information to their userpage and they don't, there are two options: they don't have another account or they do and they're hiding it. Demanding an answer doesn't really get you anything. And at the very least you run the serious risk of alienating new users. You're also not setting up the most conducive environment. I seriously considered just walking away because who the hell wants to deal with this crap? I'm giving my time; working to make this wiki better.

      If you think I'm hurting the wiki, then that's one thing. Go ahead and stop me. Ban me and when I start over with a new account ban that one too. But if I'm not hurting things then what's the problem? It just makes infinitely more sense not to push this issue. You act like banning someone actually kicks them off the wiki. That's not what happens. This is an open system. You ban someone and they can get right back on two seconds later. The real affect of banning someone is the loss of identity. They start over, brand spanking new. New name. No connections. No history. They have nothing to show for the time that they've spent. They don't have a full edit log, or kudos on their talk page. They don't have badges or a ranking. They can't point to something they are proud of and say "I did that". Well they can, but the people to whom that matters and means something, the people who recognise the effort involved, are no longer listening. They've said "we don't want to hear from you". That doesn't actually prevent someone from speaking, but it does prevent them from using that voice, that identity. If they want to speak they have to shed their old identity completely. That's the real affect of what banning someone does.

      I get that sock puppetry is a real problem and that none of this is personal, but there has to be a better way. It's not just the approach, though it is that. It's also that I don't like giving personal information out. Any personal information out. Part of this is because I hate the way that the internet makes it super easy to stalk anyone, but part of it is that I'm an intensely private person, particularly in areas where I just don't see how my personal life relates. When there isn't a reason to provide personal information then it's done purely for the purposes of sharing. And I don't like sharing over the internet and frankly, I don't really want to share with you. I know nothing about you other your editing of this wiki. So I'd like to just stick to that and leave it there. I don't even like telling you that I'm a private person. Because to me, it's so unnecessary. I get that it is for you. That you need to ask questions and get answers, but I don't see any logical benefit to this whole exercise.

      All that being said, my opinions of this exercise aren't what you're looking for and probably won't make a difference to anyone. People seem super entrenched in this whole SOCK mindset. And you have demanded answers from me, so here they are, take them as you will. I don't think I have another wikia account. I've certainly used wikia for much longer than I've been editing (as a reader). I'm certain that I've posted somewhere on wikia in the past. But I don't know if I ever bothered to make an account. Could I have? Yeah, I could have had more than one, it wouldn't be terribly surprising. Might I have edited with it? Well if I had an account and if I stayed logged into it long enough then I almost certainly did. I find misspellings and blatant errors very distracting and I have the bad habit of editing as I read. Can I give you a wikia account name? No. I'd probably have saved the information somewhere, but there's no guarantee that I'd still have it. And I'm going to go looking for an account I may have had at some point in the past for the sole purpose of linking to it on here.

      I'll will tell you here and now that I am not ok with this whole listing other wikia accounts requirement that seems to materialised out of thin air. I have no plans to create another account and edit with it, and I'd certainly never create another account and edit the same wiki with it. If I got into another topic like...idk, wine, I would probably create a second account and maintain two separate accounts. Both for privacy and in order to help compartmentalise. Aliens and alcohol aren't the best combination. Certainly the Doctor and wine is a terrible one.

      I have been seriously considering creating another wikia account not for editing, but because I don't like having to share my interests with people. I'd like to be able to read, maybe comment in some forums and have that be separate. That's how reading and forums work outside of wikia. If I read a book on my shelf the book doesn't know the last book I read; and the author certainly doesn't know the last book I read. Neither are aware of the conversation I had talking about how another book is better. And I take that philosophy into the interwebs. If I post on a Doctor Who forum talking about how it's my favourite show, no one on the forum has any way to know that I just posted the exact same thing on a forum for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And I like that. Conversations should really only be privy to the people in the conversation. Having a conversation online means that you need to be aware that people can hear you and they may not be in visible earshot. That's the effect of storing a conversation, and it's a sacrifice that I'm aware of and ok with. The problem I have is with this concept of storing every conversation and then linking them all together. That's really creepy when you think about it. And creating another wikia account in order to keep my other interests private would be kinda pointless if I then went and linked it. And while I tend not to reuse usernames I do occasionally, so I would never link a wikia account that I did not create and name with the intention of linking to this one. If you want to ban me because of this then that's fine, I'm ok with that. I'm not planning on breaking the spirit of this rule, but I'm not committed to following the letter of it either. I should note here that T:SOCK currently only requires people to divulge alternative editing accounts. It also doesn't make mention of wikia accounts not in use on the TARDIS wiki. You asked for a lot more than the policy requires, and you're treating it as though it's policy.

      This whole thing has just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The lack of proper logic baffles me. I don't like being put on the spot and having things demanded of me, and I really don't like having to reveal details about myself for a judgment from up high. Never mind that they are little details or that I haven't done anything wrong or that just replying with the answer "none" would have only taken a word; I don't like the process. This is a very ugly side of wiki and I wasn't thrilled with the your attitude to begin with. I tried to ignore how very uncomfortable I was with some of the things you said to people on the forums and move past it and work productively with you but I guess some things have a way of coming back up. If you hadn't demanded an answer I would have probably done the smart thing and gone to work on an article and deal with other things for a while and only replied to you once I was less bothered by this whole thing. Anoted ☎ 19:43, April 29, 2013 (UTC)

Look, I'm just a workin' guy tryin' to do a job here. I'm not Big Brother. I don't have some desire to create some kinda all-seeing eye, able to hunt you to deepest, darkest corners of Wikia. It's my job to defend the wiki against attack. And it is not an invasion of your privacy to ask whether you're blocked under a different name. It's just a pro-forma, due-diligence question. Wikia ask you the question when you want to adopt a wiki, for instance.

If T:SOCK — a rule that didn't "just materialise out of thin air" and is merely a copy of something that routinely exists on most big wikis, including Wikipedia — didn't exist, people could just get blocked, switch accounts, and keep on truckin'. It's obviously necessary and fundamental to the administration of the wiki. If we don't have the ability to block people, and for that block to stick, then we simply wouldn't have discipline on the wiki at all.

I'm not going to rebut every one of your assertions, but I do think it's important to counter your interpretation of T:SOCK. I am asking for nothing more than the policy states. Editing is editing is editing, regardless of namespace. You seem to have in your mind that posting to a forum is not editing, but of course it is. You use a piece of software called the "mini-editor". You click a button that says "edit". When you publish, it goes to the same list of contributions as you edits anywhere else on the wiki. It's allllll editing. This is why T:FORUM, for instance, uses the word "edit" in its very first sentence, and three times thereafter.

You also assert a general preference that "what happens on one wiki stays on that wiki". It's a nice theory, and I wish it could work that way. But the nature of Wikia means that any account is accessible from any Wikia wiki. All accounts are local, because all are global. That's why Special:Statistics shows our registered users to be 7,682,969. That's the registered user base of Wikia, but it's also, in a very practical sense, the number of registered users of this wiki. So, yes, we do have an interest in specifying "anywhere on Wikia", because there's really no practical difference between global and local when it comes to users. You will indeed find people in our ban list that are banned because of activity elsewhere. Not only do we local admin do it, but the VSTF people and Wikia Staff breeze in from time to time to do it. We don't do it all the time or anything; our block list is much less than 250 registered users — tiny for a wiki that's been open for 8 years. That's only about 30 registered users a year. Or, statistically nothing. But if there's a threat at w:c:es:doctorwho, Doctor Who Answers or Doctor Who Collectors even Memory Alpha or Wookieepedia, we'll take it seriously here, because it's reasonable, out of an abundance of caution, to assume that we're vulnerable due to a similarity of subject.

So please stop reading everything I say as an attack upon you or some kinda mad power grab on my part. It's a waste of your time, because it's simply not true. My interests are only in making the wiki better, and in ensuring the wiki is as invulnerable to attack as possible. That is a completely reasonable and justifiable attitude. If occasionally I say things in a way you don't like, or appear to take more power than policy allows, the only thing I can do is apologise and explain. Which I have done in this case.

But yanno, you're bound by policy as it exists, not as you'd wish it to be. And I have a duty to enforce it. I'm not interested in banning you, pissing you off, burrowing into your private life or feeding your particular paranoias. But neither can I just let you pick and choose what parts of policy you want to follow. You were asked a simple yes/no question. All you had to do was say "no" and we would have been done with this in as long as it took you to publish those two characters.

So let's move on. On the actual subject of this section, no, we don't have Property:Name or Property:Surname or really any kind of name property, so therefore your SMW wouldn't work. And we likely won't be installing such a property without very good cause. What you're trying to accomplish can actually be done with DPL, like so:

<dpl>
category=Doctor Who producers
title>=Joh
title<=Jon
</dpl>

which would produce

• John Nathan-Turner
• John Wiles

The difficulty is that DPL has no direct facility for burrowing into sub cats like SMW. In SMW, when you say [[Category::Whatever]], you, in theory, get all the sub cats of Whatever. In DPL, the category command means just that category. Now there are lots of ways to trick it out. You can just keep listing categories separated by a pipe, and it'll read that as OR. Or you can do a categoryregexp line and come up with some time-saving regex.

Either way, though, using SMW or DPL just to get a list of everyone named "Joh(nny) but not Jon(a than)" is kinda overkill. Also, your logic doesn't work completely. This being the DWU, you'd get unexpected results like Joinson Dastari and Jolyon Booth with your stated logic.

I can't really see a need for a permanent list of that kind, so the best solution is just to have me run a bot report, or to have you go to Special:AllPages and generate this list: http://tardis.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special%3AAllPages&from=Joh&to=Jon&namespace=0
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  23:53: Mon 29 Apr 2013

Varmint

diff of the following message at Revanvolatrelundar's talk page

I noticed an admin was working so I thought I'd bring this to you. User:Varmint99 just created Hath Peble, which is not a real character. I've tagged it for deletion, but I'm a little concerned. This User previously created this page at Hath Peble, twice, and I spent some time yesterday cleaning up this users other pages. I'd like to stop by the user talk page and help them somehow so they stop wasting time making the same mistakes over and over again (adding links to photobockut in infoboxes, creating the same pages over and over again, duplicating categories) but I'm not sure what to say. Varmint99 has been here longer than I have, but has only edit that hasn't been immediately reverted, and only one new page (out of several) that hasn't been instantly deleted. I haven't been here very long and as you're an admin, I thought I'd ask you for help with this. Anoted ☎ 10:57, April 29, 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. I've had a look at the user's contributions for the last few days, and it seems like most of his edits are in good faith, despite their flaws. I'll leave a message on the user's wall about the Hath page, and if the message is ignored and if anymore -what I pretty much see as- fan pages being made then further action will be taken. Thanks for letting me know, and if you see anything else you think needs solving then just drop me a message. Thanks! --Revan\Talk 11:26, April 29, 2013 (UTC)

diff of the following reply at Revanvolatrelundar's talk page

Thanks for your help! Is there any chance you could assist with a bit of SMW? Also, is there a reason behind the v instead of the m in your username? Anoted ☎ 12:27, April 29, 2013 (UTC)

SMW

diff of the following message at CzechOut's talk page

The real thing I needed it for was lastname. I spent some time editing John and it's a mess. There are over half a dozen spellings and easily hundreds of them. I spent a fair amount of time on the page and it's still severely lacking and a mess. I was thinking about about using SMW to create lists of the appropriate pages so that these disambig pages would work well even before fully finished. I was also considering a concept page, but I haven't really seen them in use of this wiki. My basic goal was to capture first and last names that started with Joh or Jon. All pages works well enough--I'm missing the last name articles of course, but while there are probably dozens of those I don't think that there are hundreds. And if I set the parameters to Johb and Joi I don't get a single non-John name-the b is all that's needed to keep out the Johanns. So that gets me much further than before. Property last name seems like just an endlessly useful property to me, but that might just be me. Is there a list somewhere of properties that this wiki does support? I don't know how much I'll actually do in SMW, but it would be helpful to know what's supported so I don't play around trying to make things work that never will. Also, is there a large disambiguation page like John that's kept up better--all properly organised with the right amount of description? It would help to have something to model after and aspire to. Anoted ☎ 00:49, April 30, 2013 (UTC)

Try Peter.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  00:55: Tue 30 Apr 2013

Try Special:Properties.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  01:00: Tue 30 Apr 2013

Cocktail

I'm rolling back most of your edits to cocktail. Please don't take personal offence at this. You were just improving the article along the lines that it existed before you got to it, which is reasonable enough. It's not your fault that it had a simply awful structure that, principally, did not obey the simple T:WHAT'S A CITATION rule of making sure that your source actually says the thing your'e alleging it does. The word cocktail is in almost none of the sources on the article.

The main misstep that you personally introduced was that you linked cola in a section head. Please don't put links in section heads at all. This mistake is periodically corrected by bot, so there's no point in wasting your time with such links.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  13:14: Tue 30 Apr 2013

Drax board "bug"

Well, you're tripping the anti-shouting protection, which is somewhat ironic, given the text of your message. While in other namespaces, you get a warning but can press on, at the forums, you absolutely can't do it. It just aborts you. Which is preferred over the crazy shouting that was going on there before, I think, you joined us. I'm tweaking it from time to time, so you might see some improvements, but it will always be that, in the forum, shouts just can't be published. At all. Now, does that mean that sometimes you won't be able to report some technical problems in the forums? Maybe. One workaround is to convert PAGENAME into

{{uc:pagename}}

. But that might not work in all circumstances. Technical questions containing a lot of code are best asked my talk page.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  16:20: Tue 30 Apr 2013

Oh, by the way, could you please not use PAGENAME when the page has a dab term? We don't want the dab term visible in article text, save for disambiguation pages.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  16:21: Tue 30 Apr 2013

Please come into chat

The only way to solve a problem involving time is for us to talk together live and to establish that we are seeing the same thing, at the same time. Screenshots and continued message board posts won't do it. This can be cleared up in probably a minute if we talk to gather live. So please click Special:Chat. It is not a security threat. It is just instant messaging that is in no way recorded. It is wholly ephemeral.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  16:34: Tue 30 Apr 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!