A Diamond and Three Bits of Glass

Why is it that the best stuff seems to happen when I'm not around?

Anyway. To prove that I'm not just negative, today's post will be saying nice things about ^CEshe^V. Of course, there will still be the usual bile about the three morons of the apocalypse, Elliot the Thick, Rawtwat the Vicious and Elliot's Bitch.

As I pointed out earlier, EtT broke several pages when he (for no reason at all) added categories to the sub-templates used by the Chart template. EtT evidently reads the site (one word at a time, carefully sounding out each letter as it appears, no doubt) because he finally decided to do something about it. Undo his changes? Err... no. Fix his changes so the spacing worked? Err... no. He changed each affected page instead (that's not all of them but I can't be bothered doing the lot).

There's a fairly obvious problem with this approach. As the Chart Template says, it was copied from Wikipedia and differs from WP's version in two specific ways. Now there's a third, undocumented difference that will, I guarantee it, come back to annoy people later on.

What happens next? An anon pops up on Elliot's talkpage namechecking this blog (thanks! - how about a link next time?) and suggesting, perfectly reasonably, that EtT fix the problem rather than papering over the cracks. In typical EtT style, he simply deletes the post, with the rather odd edit summary "I have already told you once, please leave it alone". Where did he tell anybody about this? Who knows.

After that it's a pretty standard edit war. The anon reverts, saying "You haven't "told" me anything. Please can you tell me why you are not fixing the template?" and then adds a followup pointing out that not fixing the underlying problem could damage things. EtT deletes both comments ("it's nice to see you really like playing this game" - an ironic edit summary for the site's biggest edit-warrer) and back comes the anon ("Failure to debate shows a failure of intellect. Please respond constructively").

At this point, Elliot's Bitch RobinHood70 steps in and removes the comments ("rv trolling"). How many times do I have to tell you, EB, that politely pointing out a problem and asking a question is not trolling. EB defines trolling as "anything I don't like", which illustrates why he isn't suitable as a patroller. The anon reverts ("Please learn to distinguish between trolling and people TRYING to be HELPFUL") and tries to explain further what the problem is, while also posting on EB's page asking what he thinks he's doing. Now we get TWO edit wars!

EB reverts both posts, yet again moaning about TOR users. Anon comes back on both ("FIX THE PROBLEM! Don't BURY it!" and "Answer, please"). EB reverts one, EtT reverts on EB's page ("you are way out of line") and we have a series of other reverts with helpful edit comments from EtT like "adorable", "sigh" and "eventually you will comprehend it" and foot-stamping from the anon ("you broke the pages - please explain why. Stop deleting this.")

Finally, ^CEshe^V steps in. She tells the anon, EtT and EB to grow up and stop warring. The anon agrees and requests an answer once more... to the sound of silence. Later on, Rawtwat the Vicious steps in and blocks all the IPs used by the anon. So much for debate.

Eshe stopped the edit war and did so by telling all the participants off, which is the fair and proper thing to do. She also scolded EtT for the sarcastic edit summaries. Marks to Eshe for that one.

Notice, though, that nobody has fixed the actual problem or bothered to respond to the anon. That's one of the problems with UESP these days - the staff are almost all convinced of their infallibility. The template is broken. If one type of valid wiki syntax works with a template and another breaks it, it's a problem with the template. It needs fixing.

Wow. Long post. Before anybody wittily posts that I need to get a life, I should point out that I've been away for three days doing just that or I'd have posted this earlier.