One and the Same

I'm sure you all thought I wasn't going to bother with this any more but a couple of emails have reached UESP Watch Central and I thought I should respond.

Two emails pointed out that Elliot the Obnoxiously Thick is unblocked once again. This seems to be true. His last block expired at the start of March 2011, so it seems he is now free to post his particular brand of idiocy once more.

One email had something more interesting, however. A page called "#uespwiki @ chatspike by roddie" suggests that EtOT made his last edit there 215 days ago and that Rawtwat the Vicious last vomited up his half baked opinions 217 days ago. My correspondent suggests that these dates are too close together to be more than a coincidence.

If Elliot = Ratwar, a great many things would be explained, like how RtV stopped editing just as EtOT came along, but it seems too convenient to be true. Surely the two biggest anchors holding back UESP can't have been the same person? Can they?

Rpeh for Admin?

Wow, I didn't see this one coming! A user by the name of Shianni asked TGD if he'd be interested in becoming an admin. The reply was a little evasive, and seems to be a way of making sure he has enough support before committing himself, but it appears that we may be seeing a second RfA from rpeh sometime soon.

It's worth taking a look back at his previous RfA. To be fair, he did most of the things he said he would, and continues to do them. "Beyond that I intend to keep doing what I've been doing; edits, patrolling, answering questions and uploading unfeasibly large numbers of images" - done. "This may be a touch pessimistic but I think the biggest challenge will be keeping the site active with the enthusiastic community we currently have" - accurate, and I think it's fair to say that rpeh has done his fair share of keeping good editors with cookies, compliments and help. "[T]his may be an opportunity to look at making large-scale improvements in the site; enhancing the navigation and adopting a more consistent look, perhaps through increased use of templates" - also done. Only Nephele and RobinHood70 can say they've done as much template work as rpeh.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. A proper RfA might bring Nephele and Ratwar back out of the woodwork to vote "Oppose", and one or two others might vote the same way because of what happened in August 2009. If I had to call it now, I would say that there will be a majority in favour by about 7-5, which might not be enough to declare consensus. If people don't come back only to vote no, the majority would be larger.

Rpeh... the vicious?

It's true that The Great Deceiver has a habit of being a bit of a dick, but in the absence of anything else worth reporting, let's look at a couple of his latest talk page comments.

I had to flick back through a few pages for this, but it seems this edit was the one that raised TGD's hackles. I can't see why... it added something new to a page that didn't have much info. TGD's response was "learn what phonetic means", which it has to be said is a fair comment. Undoing the text was a bit stupid, though, since it served to show the link between the runes of the Dragon Language and the Latin letters. If you wanted to delete anything, it would have made more sense to delete the translation then link to the Dragon Language page for it.

The discussion moved to TGD's talk page, where Debatra made the point that it might be useful to include the trans-literation as well as the translation (Debatra didn't use the long words - that is just me proving my superiority). The Albino Idiot added its view, before the expected put-down from TGD, reply from Debatra, and final response from TGD.

There's nothing particularly notable about this except that TGD got so defensive. What's the big deal? Surely it makes sense to include the interim form as well as the translation? Why get so upset?

UESAFP?

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls and Fallout Pages? That's what Pengepi would rename UESP to if he had his way. I mentioned this briefly in my last post, but I think it's worth devoting a little time to this since it's such a monumentally stupid idea.

UESP isn't about Bethesda. It's about the Elder Scrolls. I'd have thought the site's name was a bit of a hint on this. Daveh was asked about the possibility of setting up a Fallout 3 wiki over 2 years ago and said no. Note one key phrase in his reply - that if he ever set one up "it would be completely seperate from this ES wiki".

We're only in January but I think Pengepi is an early leader in the race for "most stupid post of 2011". (Now there's an idea!)

Krusty... the Vicious?

I hope this is a one off problem, but it seems UESP's newest admin, Herschel Shmoikel Pinchas Yerucham Krustofski, has picked up something of the Rawtwat.

It started when the user "Lucil Hellsing", who joined in October 2010, annoyed some people, then disappeared again after 7 November, popped back up again. In response to a particularly idiotic suggestion from Pengepi that UESP should cover Fallout 3, Lucil popped in to tell him off, then kept on and on about it in a series of several posts too boring to link to.

Serial irritant Rigas Papadopoulos was involved too, and there was a huge argument ranging over the talk pages of all three users that's almost impossible to track.

The result was that Krusty blocked Lucil (and must have come damn close to blocking Rigas too). All fine so far, but then he went and posted this. That is far too close for comfort to the smug sort of messages Rawtwat the Vicious used to post when he was at his most revolting.

Lucil had made one or two useful contributions during her brief return. For instance she spotted that there were mistakes on a Tamriel Rebuilt page. I don't play that mod so I can't judge myself, but since The Great Deceiver reinstated her edits along with some other stuff, it seems as if she was right. (Incidentally, if that poem is representative of the standard of writing in Tamriel Rebuilt I'm quite glad I've never downloaded it).

My point in straying off topic is that there was no need for such a sarcastic post-block comment. All I can say is that I hope this was an aberration on Krusty's part and not the start of a descent into Rawtwatism.

Big Announcement!

Wow! TES V: Skyrim has been announced! UESP is abuzz with what this means, but my thoughts are with whom we shall see crawling out of the woodwork. Will we see Rawtwat the Vicious and ^CEshe^V back? What about the three antediluvian admins, Wrye, Endareth and Garrett? Then there's the Legion of Departed Patrollers... how many of them will come back? As I post, it's 12/12/10. The game is due out on 11/11/11. So there's less than one year until the new release.

May you live in interesting times.

A New Project

Having recently dismissed two projects for being silly ideas, The Great Deceiver has... created a new project. This seems to go back to an ancient argument between TheRealLurlock and TGD that partially concerned how the Quest Header template should be used. I can't find that discussion now so if anyone can supply a link, that would be great.

There's a relationship to be drawn between the age of a game and the quality of the UESP pages related to it. Mark game age on the X axis and quality on the Y, and then starting from a low base, the line rises to a peak with Morrowind and then trails off towards the Oblivion/SI end. There's an obvious reason for this, which is that the old games have nobody playing them and their content dates back to the pre-wiki days of UESP, while the Oblivion pages are infested by 12 year olds adding their favourite tips, however pointless they may be.

Morrowind is at the top of the quality scale because most of the content for the game was added after the site went wiki, but before all the children got involved. This tends to mean that most of the content is just as it should be - sparse, but accurate. People can find what they want without being drowned out by trivia. The only problem is that it's all been so sparse that useful information hasn't been added. It looks like this project might be a good way to fill in the major gaps.

Compare this to the silly "Add Far Too Much Fucking Information To The Oblivion NPC Pages Project" or OBNPCRP as its disciples call it. There's a line to be drawn between too much and too little information, but I would rather see things fall on the Morrowind side of that line.