I recently returned to this, making a series of changes to the intro that were purely technical in nature, explaining them in detailed edit summaries. Again, BoldGnome
reverted everything to their preferred version, claiming my version was "unsupported by consensus" and that I needed to get it here (conflating, as far too many problematic editors do, one person's opinion with "consensus" ... if my version doesn't have consensus, neither does theirs, since the two of us have been the only people to discuss it in any detail).
What we seem to be disagreeing about here is not, as BoldGnome would have it based on discussions above, the structure of the intro ... I still disagree with it but I am accepting their structure. It is rather the technical aspects of the language used, things like grammar, style (particularly the MOS), and mechanics. Once again, as they often have here and in other articles, BoldGnome has (as BugGhost
complained here earlier), declined to explain their reasons for reverting in detail.
Apparently, Gnome believes their version, as imperfectly written as it is, is absolute perfection and cannot possibly be improved. This is rather against both the collaborative spirit of Wikipedia and the cumulative experience of centuries of writing. I don't believe my own prose is so perfect as to be beyond improvement by others, and indeed I have thanked many other editors, even IPs, who have made improvements to things I've written. I have had the experience of other people improving my prose in other areas as well.
Yet, apparently, BoldGnome thinks that at least I cannot make any improvements to their prose. I can't fathom why. Perhaps they want me to be able to make a stronger case for
ownership whenever I feel that the time has come that I have to. Or, per
Hanlon's razor,
there may just be a competence issue.
Or perhaps they want the reason for the change explicitly spelled out on the talk page. To that end, I offer a bulleted list and breakdown for anyone who finds my edit summaries insufficient:
- "Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard (née Pitre; born May 3, 1967, in Chackbay, Louisiana) was a 48-year-old woman who was found stabbed to death in her Springfield house."
- What country did this occur in? How are we supposed to know? Without "United States" somewhere in the lede, a non-American reader might not have any idea.
Not every reader outside the U.S. knows that Louisiana is a U.S. state.
And then "Springfield"? Is this
Springfield, Louisiana? Leaving out the state is usually seen as a signal the reader should assume that ... but nooooooo, this actually took place in
Springfield, Missouri. I can think of no editorial reason why we would want to omit this crucial information. I also, as I indicated in my edit summary, can think of no reason why we really need to have Dee Dee's age in the lede ... it's not really relevant to how or why she was killed, and we don't seem to do it for victims mentioned in the lede . Even if it was, simply putting it in commas (as it's an appositive) after her name would suffice rather than this journalistic "48-year-old" ... I'm pretty sure there's something in the MOS to that effect. On top of all this it's superfluous to have it right after her birth date for people who can't do the math. And we should remember, this is an article about her murder, not about her. That needs to be made clear from the opening sentence.
- "She was murdered by her daughter, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard and her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn on June 10 2015"
- First off, most any reader who's finished U.S. freshman high school English or its equivalent in other countries will have to look away quickly from this sentence due to its improper punctuation. It should at the very least read:
She was murdered by her daughter, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, and her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, on June 10, 2015.
- I have since BoldGnome's last revert restored that last comma as
it is in accordance with the MOS. But still ... the sentence easily admits of other improvements. The "her" is ambiguous given that the sentence starts with "she" ... a reader could be forgiven for thinking that Godejohn was Dee Dee's boyfriend. I duly replaced it with "Gypsy's", a change I should not think in any way controversial, but apparently BoldGnome thinks it was better the way it was before because they included it among their reverts. Along with the DATECOMMA.
- Also, I changed the verb to "had been", the
past perfect tense, as the murder was an event that occurred prior to her body being found. It is correct English grammar to use the past perfect to distinguish the earlier of two events in the past.
- "Blanchard and Godejohn were arrested in Godejohn's native Big Bend, Wisconsin and both confessed to the murder."
- First, we need the
GEOCOMMA, after "Wisconsin"; for whatever reason they have not yet deigned to explain BoldGnome seems to feel otherwise. Second, I find the "and" a rather cumbersome way of joining these two clauses, so I changed it to "where they", consistent with the article body, which establishes that they did indeed both confess to the crime shortly after being arrested in Wisconsin. Again, Gnome objects to this but has not explained why.
- We've already established that "Blanchard" is Gypsy-Rose's last name. We do not need to repeat it in the rest of the intro. Also, as per the article the police learned the truth about Gypsy's health and then revealed it to the media. The media did not reveal it themselves. It would be better to say "the police revealed to the media that".
I would also have the link to
factitious disorder imposed on another cover the text "forced Gypsy-Rose Blanchard to pretend to have" since that's more to the point of the link (And really, maybe since we're going to be discussing FDIA so much in the article anyway, it's probably a better idea to just explicitly mention and link it in the text, along with the acronym, rather than make it sort of an
Easter egg. But other than that, this is at least grammatical and properly punctuated (as if that latter were really a challenge, to be honest!).
- "Shortly before trial in 2018, Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to ten years.".
- Maybe we could say "Gypsy" again here so that no one thinks we're talking about Dee Dee (especially given that we use her name again later in the paragraph and, indeed,
MOS:SAMESURNAME prescribes this (as I pointed out above)?
- "Blanchard was released from prison on parole on December 28, 2023."
- I admit this is more of a personal peccadillo, but per
WP:SS ... is the exact date here really important? Is there going to be a holiday declared for the next year? If it is important, is it important enough to include in the intro? We can easily put it in the body text, where I think it already is.
Also, she should probably still be referred to as Gypsy.
- "She became subject to media attention, including several films and television series."
- As worded, it implies that the media attention began only after her release. As the article shows, those films and TV series (and began not long after the crime, while Gypsy was still in jail and/or prison. And it's more accurate to describe them as being about the case, not Gypsy.
The "became subject to" phrasing is not the smoothest English, either (it reads sort of non-native speaker, actually). People with a decent command of English prose would see no problem amending it to "became the subject of".
BoldGnome, I have, as you have I think in the past asked me to, laid out a specific, literally point-by-point explanation for why I made the recent edits I made, edits that are purely technical in nature, which you again summarily reverted without any explanation except that I didn't have consensus and that I should get it on the talk page. So ... here's that effort.
I look forward to an involved discussion with you about the issues raised above—there is plenty of space between the bullet points for you . The issues are severable ... I am open to any efforts you might make to convince me as to why your exact wording is, in a particular instance, preferable. Only after that sort of discussion can we truly say that there is consensus between the two of us (at least). If you now or at any time feel that such a discussion would not or is not working, I am amenable to going to
WP:3O or even opening an RfC.
That said, I would remind you that my detailed critique here means, per
WEAKSILENCE, that you can no longer claim consensus for your exact wording of the text. Failure to respond in any meaningful way to this critique (i.e., by simply pithily dismissing it as what I've already said) on your part will be taken as a sign of bad faith; not responding at all will be taken as assenting to it.
Daniel Case (
talk)
03:37, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- "Not every reader outside the U.S. knows that Louisiana is a U.S. state" Then they will clink on the link to that article. I find the constant mentions of the United States on articles about local events to be rather annoying. We do not need to mention the country after the name of every location.
Dimadick (
talk)
04:02, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- That's sort of
Easter egg thinking IMO ...
Daniel Case (
talk)
05:05, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- Daniel, you can't shout everyone off this article and then claim their silence is consent. I give up. You win. The article is yours and will be yours for as long as you monitor it and have the energy and time to engage in the above behaviour. Just note that your style of editing is so antithetical to Wikipedia's encyclopaedic style that when you are unable to exert this level of control over an article, other people will change it from this idiosyncratic style you've spent so much time and energy defending.
BoldGnome (
talk)
23:28, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- @
Daniel Case in my previous comment that you quoted, you're correct that I did suggest to @
BoldGnome that they should have given you more precise feedback. I also included feedback for you suggesting you were being unnecessarily disparaging towards them - something I think has significantly worsened in this topic by implying
WP:CIR and
Hanlon's razor are relevant. While I understand you are frustrated with the reverts, please don't say things like that to other editors, it's not helpful, especially in article talk pages as it makes for an unhealthy editing environment. The heading for this talk page section has also broken three out of four of the
WP:TALKHEADPOV guidelines.
WP:CIV is a policy, and a good one.
- @
BoldGnome - I don't think Daniel's changes warranted a revert, the changes in question are pretty minor compared to the version you reverted to. Whether it says "She had been murdered by her daughter" or "She was murdered by her daughter" is not something worth doing reverts over. Don't let previous disagreements cloud your judgement - I'm not sure what in DC's changes you saw as particularly incorrect.
- Please can you both give each other more breathing room, you are fighting over anthills, still. Neither of you have to reply to this message, because I don't want to reignite this argument seeing as its a few days old, but please read it and internalise it.
BugGhost
🪲👻
17:44, 17 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- I was going to respond to BG's
PRAM moment above anyway; your response does have a slight impact on mine hence the delay.
- I consider it unfortunate that BG believes I have "won". I don't see things that way; none of us should. But some editors still do, alas and perhaps comments like that, projecting that desire on others, tell us that. I would have been delighted, and indeed pleasantly surprised, if they'd responded to my post as I would have expected a Wikipedian to: with equally informed, collegial discussion, perhaps accepting something here, rejecting something else there ... working toward a consensus version of the intro.
- I salute you for imploring us to step up and work together, Bug; it speaks very well of you. But I am not sure you know the history here which led me to frame this post the way I did.
- For one thing, I have not been able to completely assume good faith in BG since
this comment of theirs, to me, a few months ago. That came from, as I have noted in the past, completely out of the blue. They have not taken the time to apologize for it despite repeated suggestions from me that they do. There is just no justification for any editor saying something like that, especially in response to what I had just said.
- This ultimately led me to look into their history, seeing as they had changed their name in the interim. I found, unfortunately, that what I had experienced in my dealings with them—a tendency to make hasty, overbroad reverts to address one small issue that often reintroduced earlier defects to the prose in question—had occurred on several other occasions since they began editing in earnest over the last few years. When called on it, sometimes by more than one editor, they did the same thing they have done here: sidestep the issue, put up a friendly, polite facade while not really discussing the issues raised much, and position themselves, often misleadingly, as either the aggrieved party or the one upholding policy.
- Sometimes, of course, they were partially right, and other times the other party didn't have
clean hands either. Except for one occasion when they did get blocked, the disputes petered away before anything came of them. But nevertheless this kind of long-term behavior, less than it in fact, has gotten people taken to AN/I and, sometimes, sanctioned in some way.
- So, after the incident last month above, where they reverted my amendments to their proposed text along with my explanations for it below, which he considered impermissible refactoring (I still believe that was an attempt to provoke me into some sort of ignominious action they could use against me) but,
as has been pointed out on my talk page, is entirely permissible) when
I reported them to ANEW (where I am often a reviewer of reports, and BG's behavior ranks with what is often reported there), I included, both in my original post and my response, a narrative with links to the previous occasions where BG/Cj had engaged in exactly the same behavior largely without consequence.
- That was (probably appropriately) pointed out by the closing admin as being more suited for AN/I. I didn't feel like going there at the time as I rarely feel the need to initiate a report there and I've never enjoyed the experience too much. Instead, I decided to wait and see, out of what good faith I had left, how BG would proceed.
- When they again insisted I "get consensus on the talk page", I decided it was time to see if they were bluffing just to try to make me go somewhere else and forget about this, so I created this section, going into detail about what grammatical and stylistic mistakes BG was insisting on keeping in the article, for no other apparent reason than that they wrote them, and giving them a chance to either defend their choices or accede, on just about every single one. If they truly meant what they said about getting consensus on the talk page, they would have approached it that way.
- Instead they reacted in this "
Screw you guys; I'm going home!!" way. I admit I was not entirely surprised by that as I had expected it as a possibility. For I have increasingly come to see BG as explained by either of two possibilities: 1) they're on spectrum, in which case BG would do well to disclose that fact and avail themselves of
the support we have for those many members of the community or 2) they are by nature as duplicitous and disingenuous as I have come to believe, essentially
gaming our policies and procedures to get their way, and counting on the other people involved to just give up rather than deal with them.
- And people of that latter category, as we have seen more publicly over the past few months in the examples of
Donald Trump and
George Santos, get exposed as what they are, get backed into a corner from which they cannot be rescued or save themselves, they without fail lash out at whoever's seeing right through them and calling them out. BG's last post above is, of course, yet another example.
- I am actually sort of bemused by this: "when you are unable to exert this level of control over an article, other people will change it from this idiosyncratic style you've spent so much time and energy defending." Um, eventually this will happen to all of us. We either give up editing for good for whatever reason at some point, or
we die. And I think Wikipedia or some successor/descendant of it will be around for quite some time after we're all feeding worms, or whatever they will do with our bodies then. And I accept it as inevitable (as we all should) that when we are no longer around to edit, prose we have poured a great deal of time and energy into writing and editing will be rewritten by whoever or whatever is doing the editing at the time to suit the dictates of its/their age, quite possibly to the point that little or no trace of our hand will be discernible. I have no problem with that. None of us should.
- Sorry for the
wall o' text but that's my response to all this.
Daniel Case (
talk)
02:35, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- This is genuinely disgusting. @
Acroterion, would you "find reason to take umbrage" if this was said about you on an article's talk page?
BoldGnome (
talk)
03:59, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- Sorting this ot will take some time, but this whole exchange is deeply disappointing, and far too personalized. It's wandered well into forum territory as well. I'll review and offer suggestions when I get some time to do it properly, but my first reaction is to just hat the whole mess and tell everybody to start over from scratch, this time without digressions or personalization, or better yet to open a
WP:DR discussion with a moderator.
Acroterion
(talk)
12:20, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- I have no problem with this ... I was content to let things just cool down here, but I felt I had to explain to Bugghost how deep this goes (beyond me) before I did. I purposely did not tag BG on this because I didn't want to seem like I was provoking them. They have been willing to leave this dispute alone for long stretches of time as well. I had enough good faith left to think they might do the same again.
Daniel Case (
talk)
21:04, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- I thought you were done here.
Daniel Case (
talk)
04:36, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- I was and am, but you cannot expect to call someone either autistic or a bad faith actor and expect that person not to respond. Shame on you.
BoldGnome (
talk)
04:45, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- Actions—or, rather, inactions—would have spoken louder than words.
Daniel Case (
talk)
06:09, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- Please stop. My suggestion of being more civil led to you assigning them a neurological diagnosis, calling them "duplicitous and disingenuous", comparing them to disgraced politicians, bringing up old usernames (which there are plenty of legitimate reasons to change), and accusing them of "counting on the other people involved to just give up rather than deal with them" (while simultaneously leaving comments yourself that are goading them to leave the article, such as the one I am replying to). You have more years on your account than I have weeks. @
BoldGnome I'm sorry for my part in causing this latest barrage of attacks.
BugGhost
🪲👻
06:44, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- Don't be. You have been nothing but their complete opposite. And while I admire your willingness to defend them, past efforts on my part to be civil have led BG to be even more intransigent, accusing me (as I've linked several times; see above) of
ownership with little proof even when I said I was willing to reconsider the structure of the intro to something more or less what it is now. Civility is a two-way street—you really should ask BG to apologize to me for that, as I have done several times without them even acknowledging the request.
- Civility also comes hand in hand with collegiality. BG has, as you've noted more than once, never gotten specific about what exactly they object to in my wording of the intro. Collaborative editing cannot work any other way. If, instead of throwing toys out of the pram when I posted this originally in response to their admonition to "get consensus on the talk page", they had (as I have said) responded point by point, civilly, I would have not only responded in kind but been amenable to retitling this section, maybe even gone to the point of publicly reassessing them and retracting some of my earlier remarks.
- "Civility" does not mean we refrain from bringing up any long-term issues with other editors' editing (not least when the other editor has stated without retraction that they do not believe I should be editing this page at all and made it abundantly clear through their actions that they are utterly uninterested in compromise). It does mean we try to do it without sounding as if we are doing it just to insult the other person (and while of course there will be editors who will say that they find such accusations insulting,
that in no way means those accusations should not be made—there'd be no point in having core conduct policies if we feared the consequences of accusing others of violating them). And of course we share diffs that we believe support those allegations, as I did in my ANEW report.
- If you haven't already (and I admit it's not the sort of thing we log on to Wikipedia looking forward to doing), please do give my ANEW report a look over. It's pretty clear to me by now that BG has a pattern of doing exactly what they did here, to the detriment of the common editing experience, and has until now not really been called to account for it.
- So why, you implore, should I not just let it go myself? Well, having "more years than [you] have months" here, is precisely the reason why. Yes, we'd all like to think that growing old and sage will make us more forgiving. But these years here also come with memories of times when one of the community's biggest self-inflicted wounds was the tolerance shown to certain "toxic users" because they contributed, or had at some point, in significant ways to the project.
- We ignored or minimized this until we had no choice, until Jimbo himself said at Wikimania one year that we no longer could. Because whatever good these users might have been doing for the project was more than outweighed by the amount of editors who'd left because they didn't want to deal with some of these toxic users anymore.
- It was noted at Wikimania last year that this is not something people complain about much anymore. We have reached the age where we no longer can justify this, and part of the reason is because we are better at nipping the problem in the bud. It is because of my years and community status that I must take this stand. Because if a longtime admin and former oversighter lets themselves be intimidated by the sort of bullying BG has done here and elsewhere, the whole editing environment isn't safe for any user and we shall shortly be faced with the same toxic-user problem again.
- In that vein, my speculation that BG might be on-spectrum was—yes—meant to offer them a graceful way out of this. It comes from my own extensive experience with not only on-spectrum editors here, some of whom I am acquainted with in real life, but my own son. I should say that more and more I doubt this is the case with BG, as most people in that situation will later apologize for their outbursts. I also, in this context, find it rather unfortunately telling that BG characterizes this as an "accusation" ... apparently, in their universe it's a crime to be autistic.
- I should also address your concern about my having brought up
WP:CIR earlier as also "incivil". But that's a perfectly valid concern to bring up about users; we have in fact blocked many people over that
- TL;DR: While it speaks well of you that you have implored us to be civil and discuss this, I find it to be impossible when BG has demonstrated both in argument and action a complete lack of good faith in me to the point that they are uninterested in offering any sort of sufficient explanation as to why they are wholesale reverting my edit which consisted of purely grammatical, stylistic and technical corrections. Since you have primarily focused your civility critique on me (understandable; I've said more), I have felt it at least necessary to explain why I feel BG is unlikely to respond as I am prepared to do myself to any exhortation to civility and why I have said some of the things I have said as a necessary element of that response.
Daniel Case (
talk)
22:12, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
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