Plato's Stepchild

On the inexplicable mess of trying to correct a typographical error

Sorry I'm late for starting this. I'll try to make a point of keeping up with this as my schedule allows and I appreciate your patience.

Before I begin I'd like to point out something that is not readily apparent. I've been editing on Wikipedia for many years (almost since it began) so I'm not a beginner who doesn't know Wikipedia's policies (although there's bound to be a couple I haven't encountered yet). So please don't assume you have to “talk down” to me, on the assumption that I don't understand how Wikipedia works. Also please understand that I'm being respectful to everyone, but in order to avoid confusion and make myself clear I may be pointed and pedantic in my writing, so please don't take offense at anything I might say.

I think this problem basically devolves into three points:

1. The use of hidden comments.

A. Whether its use is proper or not;

B. If proper to use, appropriate wording;

2.2. User:Basilosauridae's proper conduct.

Response to Oshwah

I'll respond to what Oshwah said in his note to me on 9 Oct at IP address User talk:173.235.84.234:

First, your statement is rather generic in nature, something you might write for almost any situation, and doesn't really apply to the situation here. Second, some of the specific points you make don't seem to hold water. For example, when you wrote:

... such comments aren't just redundant... - Redundant? How in the world are they redundant??

... take up unnecessary space ...... - Take up what space? They're hidden from view!

... make things harder to change in the future. - Well, that could be true for anything found anywhere in Wikipedia. Should we not ever add anything to Wikipedia? Besides, it takes no time at all. You could remove all of them collectively in less than a minute. It's simple.

Things can change in the future as far as formatting, organization, table format, and many things that don't involve the data itself, and we don't want those comments to confuse editors ... - Things are always changing – is that any reason to simply do nothing for fear that a future change will cause a problem? And I can't believe it would confuse any editor.

“I assure you that such comments are not needed ... - Really? How will YOU assure that? Will you personally watch this page every day to make sure that are no improper changes? What happens when you are away from Wikipedia? What then? And think about this: How long did the original incorrect info exist? Who was watching out for it then?

“... can be safely removed. - Again, by whom? There are about three people on this planet who know about this, and if none of them happen to catch it (or more likely, care to take the time to correct it), then it won't be removed. Which is the very problem the hidden text is designed to prevent.

If other editors change something and you believe it to be incorrect, simply follow Wikipedia's dispute resolution protocol and discuss it to the user to work things out. - You mean like what we're doing here? Wouldn't it just be easier for everybody to avoid all of the needless rigamarole and simply place a warning to some well meaning future editor (which could be 20 years from now) to avoid making a good faith error? Isn't that exactly the reason hidden text was created?

Last, and certainly not least, I can't resist taking issue with these statements: ““... but they discourage other users to follow Wikipedia's underlying principles to be bold and improve the article if they see that something should be improved. We don't want to do this; ... this is how Wikipedia operates.... - Oh my, I think that this statement is the very exemplification of irony, since that is exactly what I tried to do (be bold and make changes) and I have been the subject of obstacle after obstacle trying to block me. Believe me I know full well what that sentiment is like and I haven't enjoyed any of it. If I had not suffered so much pointless aggravation I would have said that was very, very funny.

In a nutshell: The whole reason they created hidden text was for this very reason, to provide a simple way to prevent an unsuspecting person from making a mistake. It's one thing to ovbject to the content of a hidden message, but it's a completely different thing to say they can't be used. In short, your excuses (they don't actually qualify as reasons) do not present any real justifiable objection to my use of them in this context.

Don't you agree? Please let me know if I have misunderstood any of your points.

Response to Basilosauridae

As for misunderstanding something, that was the very meat of the issue with Basilosauridae. In a way I would have never imagined she read so much into what I did I was left utterly flabbergasted. I know what I wrote, and more importantly, I know what I meant, and I did not mean any of what she imagined. I use the word imagined deliberately, as that is actually what she did.

For one thing, she failed to take into account the amount of grief I had suffered, and I was particularity interested in preventing some other well-meaning person from making an honest mistake. I was not directing any malicious comment at anyone, and I resent her accusation that that was what I was doing.

In hindsight I will admit that what I wrote was a bit dramatic, but I did for two reasons. One, because of all of trouble I had gone through I was trying to prevent it from happening again, which is a reasonable position on my part. Second, it never occurred to me that anybody would ever see it, except some potential future editor about to make a mistake. I never dreamed that Basilosauridae would exceed her authority and decide to block it.

‘’’I also want to point out’’’ something that is not only important to this discussion, but is also critical to Wikipedia as a whole. The question is that is it always right to just revert something, without correcting it yourself. For that I thought of an analogy which (hopefully) makes it easier:

Suppose I had happened to be going down some hallway and I noticed there was a room where the books had somehow fallen off the book shelves and they lay in a messy pile on the floor. I took it upon myself to re-shelve the books and thereby clean up the mess. After I left someone else came along, and not liking the order I had put the books in, pressed the Undo button, and restored it the original mess on the floor. (We'll further assume he left some message on the book pile with something like, “The books should be arranged in Library of Congress order instead of Dewey Decimal.”) This second person would then go on, patting himself on the back while telling himself what a good job he had done. But did he do the right thing? If he didn't like the order of books, instead of restoring the original mess and leave it to someone else to fix it, shouldn't he have instead just put the books in the order he thought they should be in? I would certainly think so.

So that's where we find ourselves here. Basilosauridae says she didn't like the content of the hidden text so she reverted my edit. As a result of her action, she has restored the errors that had existed before my corrections. And as every Wikipedia editor should know that every editor is obligated to build a better encyclopedia, and by reverting it the way she did, she has now left the article riddled with errors. Shouldn't she instead have simply taken just a minute to delete the hidden text, and leave my corrections, and thereby satisfy both of us? This is a critically important issue, and I would definitely appreciate an answer to this question (from both Oshwah and especially Basilosauridae).

In a nutshell: I have shown that my use of the hidden text was justified. In fact, it was for this very type of reason that the hidden text feature was created in the first place, to place a warning to any future editor. If what you said made sense, there would have been no need to create it in the first place. If, as you claim, hidden text potentially confuses editors, and risks creating future problems with formatting and such, why was it created in the first place?

And in hindsight, I'm willing to modify the first words I wrote in the hidden message. I have no objection to changing DO NOT CHANGE THIS!!! to simply " This should not be changed " and omit the capitalization and exclamation marks. As I said earlier, I only wrote it that way due to the excessive amount of frustration I had dealt with, and also to the fact I didn't expect anyone to actually read it, except for some well-intentioned person in the future about to make an honest mistake. __Plato's Stepchild (talk) 21:38, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

April 2019

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. This is a message letting you know that one or more of your recent edits to M*A*S*H (season 10) has been undone by an automated computer program called ClueBot NG.

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Thank you. ClueBot NG (talk) 19:52, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Oh Good Grief -- what does it take to get a simple formatting correction done??? I realize bots aren't intelligent (yet) but this is still ridiculous. ( Or, ClueBot, please get a clue! ) __Plato's Stepchild (talk) 20:05, 6 April 2019 (UTC)