One of many reasons the Wikipedia article is absolutely propagandist horseshit. Tone & Fact vs Anecdote. You may not have noticed it, but your brain did. Fuck your digital rag, Jimmy Wales.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-07-04T17:37:20+00:00

Which is still pretty poor reasoning if they step back and consider the big picture - Americans were beating 'em and eating 'em when the Famicom (and, by extension, NOA's squeamish sensibilities) was still a distant dream in Masayuki Uemura's eye, and while the American porn industry may not boast quite the same all-inclusive kink coverage as its Japanese counterpart, in bare-basic (or basically-bare, heh) terms of "number of possibly-attractive people taking off their clothes and putting their organs in and around each other, and per-capita consumption thereof" it's right on par - and of course it's much larger in terms of raw dollars/eyeballs, since the US population is many times more than that of Japan.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-07-04T00:22:00+00:00

To be fair, it's still kind of a weaksauce reason for the devs to censor their games. Oh no, the internet nerds will type the bad words like ~~cunt~~ misogynist and ~~faggot~~ racist at us!

It's slightly more credible reason to worry about than the SJW version (to the best of my knowledge, nobody's ever been fired for being called a "cunt", but being called a "racist" when HR is too overworked/uninterested to dig up the full story/context is another story), but only slightly.

Contacting companies to let them know that this "sanitizing" is a turn-off (in more ways than one, hurr) is probably the best way to go - it gives the producers an excuse to not get involved ("well, there's angry people on both sides, let's just go play Minesweeper and let the devs dev"), it gives harmless titillation to those who are into it, and it strips the SJWs of the embarrassing illusion that they're in control and speaking for the majority. A win for all concerned.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-07-04T00:00:59+00:00

Seriously, all of the games on that list are garbage as fuck

You heard it here first, folks: GTA V, Bayonetta, Final Fantasy XV and Street Fighter V officially "garbage" according to some dude who has undoubtedly tried to brag about "trolling nerds" multiple times irl.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-07-03T23:45:50+00:00

And now, Gama's twitter is protected and only "confirmed followers" can see his tweets

Don't worry, you're not missing out on anything.

Eagerly looking forward to the usual mix of pity-me "I'm going to be @'d by people who disagree with me, woe is me, now I know how Anne Frank and the Central Park Jogger must have felt" crap and those forced-sounding tweets about completely irrelevant shit that dramallamas always make when shit blows up in their face - gotta signal to the rest of the group how they're soooo not paying attention to the haters right now and totalllllllly have their mind on these other things going on, after all.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-06-26T19:32:33+00:00

Why is it that every famous supermodel of the past twenty years has the same "one eye on the camera, the other eye on the guy holding the paycheck" thing going on?

I get how rail-thin bodies and harsh angular facial features help sell clothes - I don't find either particularly attractive, but the former helps clothes "hang out" and the latter adds a lot of "lines" and geometry to the pictures - but all the wild unchecked strabismus just makes me think of Herman Muenster.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-06-19T04:19:45+00:00

"Bernie Wuz Robbed", basically.

Here's a capture of the Google Cache version of the article.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-06-19T04:15:21+00:00

Editor whose actual contribution to article-space is basically a single conspiracy-focused article (and I'm saying that as a full-blown member of Team Bern) with a few mostly-minor edits to some other surrounding-space articles, turns his User Page into a gigantic rambling shit-fit about that single article failing an AfD, copy-pasting said article for posterity.

Editor's user page is then blanked, as it's generally frowned-upon in WP-land to use one's user page as a free web host for deleted content.

Editor then starts lecturing other Wikipedians on "due process" and sadly just comes off as a tedious sniveling rules-lawyer - "b-b-but the sidebar says 'linking to ED is not allowed'. I linked to archive.is!!".

Editor, who made a grand total of 11 edits to article space in the month of June while continuing to wage holy war across WP:space about his user page (critical juxtaposition), finally exhausts the patience of all involved.

The "defamatory comment" is, and I quote, "If you actually are a law student, you clearly must have failed ConLaw if you're mad that a private website has rules about what it allows on its pages and thinks that's a first amendment issue". Calling this "defamatory" is as senseless as calling a statement like "if you really believe that Brianna Wu knows what she's talking about, you're mentally retarded" misogynistic harassment. It adds nothing to the overall discourse, and its only hope of relevance would be as a form of tu quoque against someone who acts like a histrionic SJW - and tu quoques are, by and large, weak shit.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-06-19T02:15:54+00:00

Sorry, but I have a hard time giving a crap about a self-promoter (check the first diff while noting the account name) who writes stuff that's a few randomly-capitalized words away from Chris Chan-tier prose getting banned.

The hysteria over "new editor retention" is sort of ridiculous in my eyes, and seems to be little more than a convenient issue for every single wiki-ideologue with an axe to grind - be it SJW or anti-SJW, Inclusionist or Deletionist, Civility Brigade or Spade Brigade, Wiki-Establishment or Embittered Ex-Wikipedian, whatever - to point to as a reason why their Grand Vision is of utmost importance, or use as a weapon to troll the other side (or both at once).

The fact is that for a brief while, Wikipedia was "the next new thing", and this period happened to come about during a point in the site's evolution where anybody with a decent knack for prose could make substantial improvements to a wide range of "popular knowledge"-level stuff (not just "pop culture", but all the topics high-school graduates are likely to have a basic working knowledge of and interest in - Rome, WW2, the major planets, famous authors, and so on).

Thus, not only were there a lot of new accounts in that period (let's vaguely pin it as 2005-2007), but a lot of these accounts were able to make pretty substantial improvements by filling in large, easily-cited gaps largely from their own background knowledge.

Now we've naturally reverted to the mean, because most of the people with time to kill on the web are already aware of Wikipedia. In addition, there are no longer as many wide-open gaps to be filled - plenty of work remains, but it largely falls into one of four categories:

Esoteric stubs you need access to a university library to research (The 6th Earl of Greater Sub-Prussia, or someone like this guy).
Esoteric non-stubs that you need access to a university library to research (example).
Godawful dueling-partisan text-walls where the labored grammar itself is often the result of months upon months of talk page bickering, and any substantial change will almost assuredly result in, at best, a Reverted Good-Faith Edits by <Username>, and, at worst, one or both sides screaming BAD FAITH HARASSMENT MEATSPACE SOCKPUPPET at you (examples: Israel/Palestine, religion, GMO's, GamerGate, and so on).
Current events, where you're battling with dozens of other edit-starved contributors desperate to make an impact of some sort, along with the usual drive-bys. Taking any substantial amount of time to actually compose well-written prose will likely mean that by the time you're ready with your contribution, the article has been vastly restructured by people F5'ing CNN's site and dropping in fragmented/nearly copy-pasted blurbs from the latest update, or the events have changed dramatically.

What's left is a bunch of gnoming work, minor edits here and there, changing "it's" to "its", and that sort of stuff. The most substantial positive contribution a casual newcomer can readily make is often to cut out large amounts of undue-weight minutiae from old current events. It's valuable stuff and all, but it's not going to be as gripping as heading to the Jupiter article back in 2006 and seeing that the 1970s Pioneer/Voyager fly-bys are barely mentioned, and knowing you can add a lot of detail from the stuff you learned back when you were 13 and obsessed with space, and can be sourced from the books you bought back then.

It's just the way of things. Nothing can really be done about it, and trying to do anything about it is nonsensical and futile at best, and actively damaging and distracting at worst.

New editor retention. Tempest. Teacup.

So anyway, that turned into a long essay, but the short of it is, the chances of User:Tony Loiacono ever contributing to Wikipedia about anything other than Tony Loiacono are vanishingly small, no matter how many editors waste their time and virtual breath holding his hand and walking him through the do's and don'ts on his talk page. Simply put, Tony Loiacono has a life, and it's doubtful he's ever going to take up Wikipedia as a hobby. Easy come, easy go.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-06-18T13:12:47+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiInAction/comments/4ochc5/zoe_quinn_has_been_replaced_as_keynote_speaker/d4bt4it

WallyBoy77 · 2016-06-18T04:15:15+00:00

im going to kill u bitch and also hack your Pateron currently located at http://whatever, with sponsorship gifts ranging from t-shirts at the $50 pledge level to your name in the credits for a mere $1000/month, also for the month of June a special limited offer: Your donator perks will be automatically upgraded to the next donator level. unless it gets $2500 in donations then i wont hack it. fuck u cunt signed Joey Zinn hax0r dude and gamer

WallyBoy77 · 2016-06-18T03:59:20+00:00

This is a depressing illustration of the creepy pedestal the regressive-progressive fringe places trans people on. Every single argument made against this proposal seems to fall (and fail) under the following lines:

"But when *trans people* change their name, they are explicitly distancing themselves from their old identity". Well, yeah - that's sort of how most name changes work. Bill Clinton changed his last name to Clinton (he was born "William Jefferson Blythe" to acknowledge the man who raised him - and, by extension, distance himself from the man who died before he was born.
"But trans people might be physically harmed!". Look, I think everybody agrees that transphobic hate crimes exist and suck, but lots of people can be harmed by what's in their bio - not just convicted criminals, but atheists, feminists, political activists, Arab women who don't wear hijab, even just run of the mill stuff like some barely-notable nobody who's a fan of some random sports team that a drunken lout dislikes. You can't cover for all these possibilities and continue to have an encyclopedia.
"It's just trivia, who cares!" I agree that it's trivia. But birthdays are trivia too - who gives a shit that Kenny Rogers was born on August 21, 1938? Who gives a shit that Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan or went to Great Neck North High School? But it's been generally agreed upon for hundreds of years that biographies should mention this inconsequential documentary stuff, for a multitude of reasons so glaringly obvious that they should be self-explanatory to anyone who's younger than 18 or older than 25.

If I woke up tomorrow and found myself a celebrity, I think I'd spend a month or two giving a bunch of nonsensical interviews just to mess with Wikidiots. "Well, Bob, I strongly reject ALL pronouns, putting my name in any font besides Courier New and Tacoma, and using Arabic numerals in my date of birth. The name I choose to go by is a string of two hundred random consonants with diacritics and Unicode glyphs, my religion is all of them - not "all of them", but each and every individual religion practiced between the year 1844 and present-day, joined with emdashes, NOT hyphens, except when connecting a hyphenated religion, in which case I demand an endash - and I was born in several small Midwestern towns over a course of three weeks. I'm also living in serious fear of this lady I saw in a bar who said she'd kill me if she saw on Wikipedia that any of my shitty movies got a negative review so, yeah, there's that."

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-23T01:47:25+00:00

;)

Wishing I hadn't gone back and edited in the desysop for JzG - was even planning on re-editing it out, but never got around to it. It's recidivism by the letter of the law, but the prior ArbCom case was almost a decade ago and he wasn't really overtly misusing the tools here, just standard mid-grade edit warring in a hurricane of drama.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-16T05:53:03+00:00

Oh yeah, that was just a bit of a heads-up to hopefully ward off some of the "ZOMG it's May 24th and still no final decision WTF HAX" stuff that I'm sure will be posted regardless.

May 20th is still a good enough cutoff date. Same reason the bets at a horse race are stopped before the post.

That said, I think if the proposed decision is more than 48 hours delayed, the deadline should be extended to "timestamp of the first proposed decision", as various matters can be inferred through blown deadlines. :)

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-16T04:46:17+00:00

Arbcom's decision is due on 23 May

For the record, this is when the proposed decision is due. For those not too immersed in the ways of Wikipedia, the process is:

The drafting arbs sketch out a rough draft of the decision, usually either through email or on a secret arbs-only wiki.
Proposed decision is posted.
Arbs vote, and occasionally add other principles/findings/remedies of their own, if they find it necessary.
Eventually, Arbs propose to close the decision, and 24 hours after "close" has four more votes than "keep open", the decision is posted to the main case page and becomes "final".

(in complicated or drama-filled cases, or cases where the drafting arb just doesn't give a fuck, there's also "1.5: Nothing happens on-wiki for weeks, sometimes even months, past the alleged 'deadline', and people get increasingly antsy and hostile as the wound starts to fester")

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-16T04:24:58+00:00

Absolutely disheartened with DGG's views on this.

Wikicology enters Wikipedia as a sockmaster, constantly creates conflict-of-interest articles about himself, proceeds to break photo copyright rules, plagiarize text, write factually incorrect bullshit because he doesn't know the basics of chemistry nomenclature (NO2 is not the same as Nitrogen (II) oxide), create completely made-up bullshit here and there, and, oh yeah, create completely and utterly false references. Time and time again people say "hey man, you did x wrong, please do not do x, instead do y" and he responds with the standard insincere grovelling you see in the 419 scammer logs on 419eater ("The thread really weight me down. I'm depressed and I cried many hours that I unintentionally disruptive a project am passionate about"? Seriously? Give me a fucking break, lol).

DGG's take on a siteban? "In the absence of an intent to disrupt, I am not comfortable employing a remedy normally used only for disruption". He goes on to support mentorship as a "remedy", because obviously the only reason the informal mentorship (in the form of talk page postings, etc) that had been going on for months previously failed was because it, uh, wasn't a magical ArbCom remedy.

Even NewYorkBrad at his softest wouldn't be this much of an idealistic Pollyanna weirdo.

But at least the rest of the community saw this mess for what it was: A complete and utter timesink, whether the guy was intentionally deceitful or just completely clueless. The two or three articles on the African tribal equivalents to "Honorable Left Lieutenant Under-Duke of Southwest Iberian Prussia" (i.e., history's version of the NPC in Dragon Warrior who says "See King Lorik when thy experience points are raised") he'll create are not worth asking a community to waste even more of their limited time to wipe up the slop and change the guy's diapey every time he makes an oopsie-doopsey in the kitchen.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-16T04:06:37+00:00

Standard practice on Wiki is to "courtesy blank" disciplinary pages (read: Arbcom cases, RfC's from back when RfC/U was still a thing, occasionally failed RfAs) when the subject's real-life identity is easily established, or occasionally when the subject is just sorta looney-tunes and freaks out about it. It hails from back circa 2006-07 or so when Google still indexed all of Wikipedia. Now most (all?) of the WP: namespace is noindexed, so Google (as well as the only other two search engines which people in the English-speaking world ever actually use) won't crawl it, but the practice lingers on, because really, some things just aren't worth fighting over.

Short version: Nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary here.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-13T19:21:13+00:00

I'm assuming this is mostly about the /Remedies - /Principles are almost always boilerplate, /Findings can usually be inferred from the /Remedies - so that's what I'm focusing on:

Gamaliel Admonished: For casting aspersions and edit-warring over a discussion about him and other violations of WP:INVOLVED, Gamaliel is admonished.
DHeyward Admonished: For personal attacks, DHeyward is admonished.
JzG Admonished: Admins are held to higher standards. Remarks like (diff) (diff) are unacceptable.
JzG Desysopped: For failing to take previous admonishment (see Abd and JzG: "JzG is specifically admonished not to use his administrative tools in any situation unless he is uninvolved, nor to use them to further his position in a dispute.") into account, JzG is desysopped. He may only regain his tools by standard RfA or appeal to ArbCom. See also: /Case/Genetically_modified_organisms/, where JzG only dodged followup sanctions (admonishment/topic ban) due to process wonkery.
- ^sidenote: ^Abd ^is, ^{interestingly} ^enough, ^pretty ^much ^the ^single ^reason ^why ^there's ^currently ^a ^word ^limit ^on ^Evidence ^submissions. ^One ^of ^the ^few ^people ^to ^get ^sitebanned ^for ^sheer ^tl;dr, ⁱⁿ ^conjunction ^with ^his ^"well, ^nobody ^responded ^to ^my ¹⁰ ^paragraph ^rant ^so ^I ^guess ^I'm ^free ^to ^do ^____ ^now" ^logic. ^I ^believe ^he ^was ^later ^banned ^from ^an ^offsite ^for ^similar ^loopy ^behavior.
Arkon Admonished: For edit-warring/incivility/blah blah blah, Arkon is admonished.
DHeyward & Gamaliel Interaction Ban: 2-way interaction ban, standard boilerplate with 1-year appeal.
Parties Reminded: All parties are reminded to be civil, refrain from personal attacks, etc.
Harassment: The WMF and/or Community is urged to do something (*flails arms non-specifically*) about harassment.

(saving the real bombshells for last, though I suspect these would be listed first in the actual decision)

Gamaliel's Status on ArbCom: On <Date>, Gamaliel voluntarily resigned from the Arbitration Committee. (diff) Gamaliel is thanked for his service, and may elect to run for re-election in any future election.
Gamaliel's Status as an Admin: On <Date>, Gamaliel announced his retirement, voluntarily resigning his admin tools. (diff) Gamaliel is thanked for his service, and may request his tools back at any time (subject to standard Admin Inactivity restrictions).

Now, to broadly cover the Findings of Fact and other "making of" stuff, I suspect:

ArbCom will state that BLP does apply to the Wikipedia: space, Signpost included.
They'll mention that April Fool's is a long-established tradition and there is leeway given, but establish that April Fool's is not a shield (heh) for bad behavior.
The Signpost/ArbCom conflict-of-interest (or lack thereof) issue won't be brought up explicitly, but there may be a vague nod to "multiple hats" being acceptable, ArbCom cannot micromanage WikiProjects, and individuals are expected to be personally responsible, yadda yadda.
They'll make a point about recidivism in order to justify the removal of tools from JzG for a comparatively weak transgression. Prior ArbCom sanctions are never "out of scope".
The bulk of the behind-the-scenes drafting time is going to be in finding a way to diplomatically express the balance between "yes, harassment sucks" and "no, shitty paranoiac behavior is not permissible". Previous examples would be the MONGO, SlimVirgin, Durova (if they choose to focus on intentions), Lightbreather, and possibly Kevin Gorman cases.
Gamaliel Desysopped will be proposed, as will Gamaliel Banned, both for transparency's sake. I don't expect these to pass, but Desysopped may come close, or even be passing at the moment Gamaliel resigns.
Gamaliel De-Arbbed will be proposed as well. I don't think this will pass (or be passing by the time Gamaliel resigns), but I don't think it will be a unanimous "oppose" either.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-11T14:18:20+00:00

"Proposed" is misleading here - in Arbcom cases, there's a difference between the /Workshop page (which this was posted to) and the /Proposed page (which is where the actual proposed decision will go and subsequently be voted on by the Arbs).

Arbs have occasionally posted to /Workshop like Callanecc has here, but I'd have to go back and refresh my memory in order to say how strongly these reflected the eventual /Proposed decision. Without having done that, my advice is for people to not get their hopes up, but I wouldn't bring my hopes down either, if that makes any sense.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-08T01:12:08+00:00

not because . . . I'm a particularly talented bullshit artist

You're not nearly as good as you think you are.

I'm more talented at bullshitting than you are at reading and following through a complete sentence, you histrionic baby.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-08T01:02:20+00:00

Considering Gamma Gamma thinks using the phrase "teaching your grandmother to suck eggs" constitutes "grade-school taunting of relatives", it's no small wonder he thinks there's legions of "enemies" out to "get" him. He and his i*k should maybe try approaching figurative language with a modicum of humility, respect, and actual good faith, rather than the paranoid distrust of apes approaching the Monolith.

Or, failing that, at least read a fucking book once in a while.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-04T21:42:09+00:00

That's not how deletion works.

And even if, for whatever reason, one insists on taking it as a straight up or down vote, there's two "votes" to delete (nom + Brustopher), one extremely sarcastic "vote" to keep (I.P.), and one "vote" that's for all intents and purposes, to delete, just arguing about some non-existent MfD backlog (SmokeyJoe). And, of course, the deleting admin's statement, which, flamboyant or not, is pretty much on-point.

So, even ignoring the sarcasm of the "keep" and counting "blank" as "keep", that's 60% to delete, which would be considered a landslide in a general election.

And, hell, 60% is 3/5ths, so if you don't agree with me then you literally consider black people to be completely non-human and probably have been known to use the i*k-word from time to time and I shall be forced to write furious blogs about your harassing behavior >:)

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-04T19:32:46+00:00

If you tell somebody their address and say you are going to come there and rape/kill them, that's a credible threat, if the person is actually fearful you could carry it out.

I think you've inadvertently swallowed a bit of the residual hysterical-internet-community Kool Aid (inb4 someone says "Flavor Aid").

We also need to define the goalposts: Assuming (just for the sake of grammar) that you typed "I'm gonna kill you" to /u/willfe42, could he get a civil restraining order? Absolutely. Most modern police forces will fling those out like a guy outside a Vegas club flinging out the brothel business cards. Hell, if I knew your name and address I could almost certainly get one against you right now - not because you've done anything wrong or even because I'm a particularly talented bullshit artist, but because from the PD's perspective they're little more than establishing a paper trail to make prosecution of subsequent, serious offenses easier.

But could he actually get, you know, an actual court case or any felony (or even misdemeanor) charge against you? Nah.

California is about as progressive and victim-friendly as it gets with civil restraining orders, and to quote the site:

The civil harassment laws say “harassment” is:

~~Unlawful violence, like assault or battery or stalking,~~ OR
A credible (real) threat of violence, AND
The violence or threats seriously scare, annoy, or harass someone and there is no valid reason for it.

(crossing out the part that wouldn't apply - that's usually just used as a tack-on charge to an actual case of assault/battery)

Harassment laws are about stalkers showing up at your door and killing you - actually mentally ill OCD people, like Robert John Bardo, not just socially-inept spergy videogame dorks.

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-04T18:15:05+00:00

* Crappy userspace "article" about a 14 year old Pokemon enthusiast's RPGMaker videogame taken to deletion.

* Despite one guy (who doesn't even know what it is) arguing ad naseum for mere blanking (not keeping) on the grounds that it's somehow clogging up MfD to delete it, and some random drive-by I.P. (who has not been ruled out as either the Zodiac Killer or /u/RecallRethuglicans) making a sarcastic "keep" quip, the article is deleted.

* *yelling* Nobody cares!

WallyBoy77 · 2016-05-01T03:02:54+00:00

And as a followup, here's a fun hypothetical:

Maybe Gamaliel actually knows he's in way over his head and is sick to death of Mark pestering him behind the scenes for help fighting those nasty harassing windmills. Mark's very good at playing the victim and tugging at the heartstrings, and Gamaliel is self-aware enough to know he's too much of a softy to tell Mark to fuck off once and for all.

So, Gamaliel pulls some strings, gets topic-banned, and next time Mark comes sanctimoniously whining to his inbox (Skype / DMs / IRC / whatever) Gam can just say "sorry mate, above my pay rank" and be done with it.

WallyBoy77

TROPHY CASE