User talk:Darklocq

RETIRED

In 2017, I said that if I didn't stop receiving treatment I consider uncivil, by people who seemed to me more concerned with their own watchlist convenience than the quality of the wiki content, that I would jump ship entirely to ElderScrolls.Fandom.com, where I also contribute but without any such problems.

Despite my attempts to seek compromise and to assure others I would not disregard policies, the behavior actually escalated (including false accusations that I consider to be personal attacks, and block threats that were not based in blocking policy), so I left in December 2018. I was punitively blocked for a year, after the fact, then wrongly accused of block violation after following clear instructions to use my own talk page to appeal the block, and was then investigated on another wiki under another username all the way back to 2007 just to ad hominem criticize me here for unrelated matters.

It's rather appalling. I really do wish this site well, but I come here to be helpful and have a pleasant time being helpful, not to be nit-picked, wrongly accused, then hounded. I've attempted to resolve this through discussion (an offer that still stands in 2020 – isn't three years enough?), but cannot in good conscience devote any more volunteer time to this project until the matter is properly addressed. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 17:07, 25 December 2018 (UTC); revised 08:38, 16 February 2020 (GMT)

Archives
Feb.–Apr. 2017

OpenMW

Hey there! Could you give me a quick overview of how OpenMW works? I've had a quick read through OpenMW already, so I understand the basics of what the project does, but I'm still wondering about the technical and legal standing of an open source implementation of Bethesda's proprietary game engine, and how it fits with the ZeniMax Media Terms of Service. Thanks! --Enodoc (talk) 16:31, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

It's a complete reverse engineering. They figured out the file formats (which were poorly documented but not totally undocumented, or no one could have written any of the game-editing and -tweaking tools to begin with, other than Bethesda's own people). Effectively, it works just like a game-editing application at the basic level - its reads in and parses the content files and takes action based on the information it finds in them. In this case, it presents the game to the player, by rendering models, applying game mechanics rules, etc. While you could get an all-new game that third parties had created from scratch using the same data file formats (e.g. some sci-fi game about hunting aliens or whatever), the intent of the project is to run Morrowind in particular and its official add-ons with exactly the same game mechanics and other aspects of game play and appearance (aside from being able to render better graphics, including better, TrueType-based, fonts) as Bethesda's original, and to support its modding architecture. OpenMW doesn't come with a copy of the game; one has to obtain that separately, and OpenMW doesn't itself include any of Bethesda's materials. It's basically just an alternative to Bethesda's EXE and DLL files. It's not "an open source implementation of Bethesda's proprietary game engine", it's an implementation of an all-new, non-proprietary game engine with no Bethesda code. A close analogy would be PDF-reading and -editing applications not created by Adobe. They do exactly the same thing: take a file format, parse it, and do something with it, with results that closely match how Adobe intended it and did it. A perhaps closer analogy would be all the applications that are not Adobe's which can support Photoshop and Illustrator plugins. They're not only capable of reading and outputting Adobe's (among other) data formats, they support the original Adobe apps' "modding" framework as well. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 18:12, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

That's great, thanks! And this is all okay with the Terms of Service? I'm thinking specifically "You may not modify, adapt, reverse engineer or decompile the Software, or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Software". --Enodoc (talk) 23:26, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Certainly, or the project could not have continued publicly since 2008. They have not reverse engineered Bethesda's software, they just built new software that reads the same data file formats, like all the mod editing tools do. (I probably shouldn't have described even that as any form of reverse engineering, since the formats aren't secret, otherwise there would be no editing tools other than Bethesda's original; that was imprecise wording on my part). It really is exactly the same process as creating your own .PDF or .PSD editing and viewing app that works with files produced by Adobe's Acrobat and Photoshop tools. Some of these game file formats aren't even Bethesda's to begin with, but created by others and chosen by Bethesda. (I read a write-up of the original sources once, but forget the details. I'm pretty sure .NIF and .BSA were someone else's work, while .ESP/.ESP is Bethesda's, but I may be getting that backwards). But this isn't a reverse-engineered Morrowind.exe, to begin with; it's an all-new rendering engine, using 0.0% of Bethesda's old source code.

Anyway, there are no legal issues that have been raised against OpenMW, or the project would have collapsed instantly; it's all-volunteer, and has no budget for attorneys. UESP itself is in more risk than OpenMW, since it includes Bethesda's "Elder Scrolls" trademark in the long version of its name. Heh. But Bethesda/Zenimax has gone out of its way to encourage fan-built resources for its games, and never rattles any intellectual-property sabers, other than about outright software piracy (and other companies trying to launch competing games with too-similar names [1], and some other business-to-business suits, e.g. against Interplay for not upholding their end of a licensing agreement, unrelated to TES). It has a huge, valuable user community as a result of this hands-off approach (there are over 10,000 released mods for MW alone). I'm sure Zenimax/Bethesda realize OpenMW is a surprise cash cow for them, since the new market of players all need a copy of their original game to use OpenMW. Game companies in general mostly know better than to give their fanbase trouble over things like this, per the Streisand effect (Nintendo/Pokémon Company Intl. seem to be the exception and are pissing a lot of people off [2]).
— Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 01:14, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Brilliant, thanks for all the details! Don't forget to add a link to the project page on Morrowind Mod:Mods! (I know it's not technically a mod, but I'm not sure where else you could put it.) --Enodoc (talk) 09:36, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Right. That was my thinking, too. I did create a Category:Tes3Mod-Engines for that, for TES3MP (no article yet), and for the couple of articles we have about the original Bethesda engine as such. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 10:02, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

I'd forgotten, but finally to around to adding it to Morrowind Mod:Mods [3]. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 20:53, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

TES3MP

Morrowind Mod:TES3MP article is now created. Thank you for making a good category for it. --Testman (talk) 04:21, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

Testman, schweet. I'd thought of working on it myself, but it would have just be a tiny stub rehashing their own "about" page; I haven't actually used TES3MP, though I really hope it does more and more. I've been working through Oblivion and while I like a few "new" (since MW) features of it and the improved graphics, the gameplay, the plot, the interface, the rather cliché, unicultural Western milieu, and so much else is such a step backward. I really want to get back into MW, which is like another home to me. It would be really cool as a multi-player thing, if it wasn't just a constant murder-fest, LOL. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 00:31, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Semantic Markup

[Refactor: Out-dented and split off from previous thread, now archived.]

In truth, I think your points about using semantic markup are perfectly reasonable, and we should be making more use of the appropriate tags in many cases. But, at the same time, I don't think it's necessary to supplant wiki markup with semantic markup as a preferred style just because it's somewhat more appropriate in some instances. In cases like our technical and template documentation, on the other hand, I think it makes a significant amount of sense, and I've spoken with others who agree with that idea. It's not that we intended to reject your ideas out of hand, just that they needed some more discussion, and to find a middle ground where we're keeping the easy/familiarity of wiki editing for many cases, but acknowledging those cases where semantic markup makes a lot of sense. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:41, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for addressing this in particular. It's nice to get past some of this he-said-she-said stuff. I don't draw the distinction you draw; if anything, I would suggest that it's more important to use semantic markup in the public-facing material than in internal documentation that few will see or care about. But any progress on this is a step forward. The major hurdle is probably simply that the average person doesn't know the <em></em> element exists, and is convinced that <i></i> is for emphasis, and will not read the specs which say otherwise. I suspect I should not get involved further in the discussion, at least not for a long time, because toes have been stepped on, on both sides, and it's probably better to wait until they're not sore any longer.

PS: I don't think anyone is "bad" here. Rather, I think a well-known effect is in play, that of topical forums, wikis, and other groups with narrow interests and a small number of regulars becoming increasingly hidebound as their active participant pool shrinks and they all become intimately familiar with each other while resistant to newcomers and their influence. The exact same effect is observable in work groups, political coalitions, AA meetings, specific MMORPG servers, military units, Facebook discussion boards, etc., etc. It's something that has to be recognized and worked against, or it just inexorably happens as part of human small-group dynamics. Wikis in particular, like open source development projects, are usually a bit more resistant to this effect because of their "we want everyone to volunteer and help out" nature, but the more narrow the focus and pool of people, the less resistant it will be. At least without prodding, which is why I've prodded. Wikis are worth prodding in this regard, because their long-term viability depends on suppression of this trend. There's also a certain level of "FIFO" to most small groups, and I'll eventually FO to go do something else if I don't seem to FI, even if I grumble about it.
— Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 03:11, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

This being a wiki, I doubt if most people think in terms of <i> (or <b> or <table> or whatever else) at all. Wiki markup is assumed to be the default, and tends to be, even if it's largely just an alternate choice of markup for essentially the same underlying HTML code. Yes, technically, <em> is the semantically better choice for emphasis in dialogue, but what purpose would semantic markup serve here for that particular element? I don't see how most (if any) of the traditional benefits would apply to our gamespaces. It's unlikely we have a great many users who are using screen-readers, after all, and I think most search software is well aware that semantic markup isn't in widespread use on a lot of sites.

Using things like <kbd> and <var>, on the other hand, makes a lot more sense in our technically oriented namespaces, since you're often referring to very specific things, and using tags consistently for the same types of elements makes it easier to identify those elements visually (and format them to your liking). Of course, that's not without its own set of issues. For instance, should a template parameter be inside a variable tag, since it acts sort of like a variable, or should it be in a keyboard tag, since it's something you type in? HTML lacks a <param> tag (at least in this context...it actually does have one for other purposes), which would be ideal here, though CSS classes can readily perform a comparable function. But that's a whole other set of issues that are really more for those involved in documenting in the relevant namespaces to figure out for themselves. My larger point here is just that there's more reason to use proper semantic markup in our technical writing.

I would also note that, despite your efforts on WP, neither {{em}} nor {{strong}} have gained much acceptance there, so we're hardly alone in using traditional wiki markup in preference to semantic HTML markup. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 08:05, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

"This being a wiki ...": Yes; that's why to do it with templates, which are part of "native" wiki markup style, instead of with bare HTML. The principal argument for semantic markup on a site like this (which, I agree, won't have many visually impaired readers) is user stylesheets, either the MediaWiki local kind, or the in-browser kind, the main approach to which these days seems to be scripting addons like GreaseMonkey. For example, you can switch to a different font for semantic emphasis if you want, to highlight it as definitely intended emphasis, not typographic italics for some other purpose (like book titles, phrases in another language, heading decoration, or mistaken italicization of quotations for no apparent reason, a style virtually unknown in professional print publications but common on blogs, mysteriously). A more general purpose is content reuse; the content can be parsed differently by tools depending on the markup, e.g. use a script to build a list of all pages with semantically emphasized content as likely to contain important tips. Keep in mind also that use of <i></i> and <b></b> (and everyone's un-favorite, <u></u>) for emphasis has been sharply deprecated, even to the point that it took a lot of fighting for these elements to be retained in HTML5 at all, rather that thrown out in favor of CSS applied to <span></span>. Semantic markup is more future-proof. The semantic markup stuff is in Wikpedia's MoS; as on this wiki, the average editor does not actually read much less memorize and assiduously abide by the style guide there. Wiki style guides exist almost entirely for consistent post hoc cleanup efforts by "gnomes", and for resolution/prevention of annoying style bickering.

On the markup tags (it may help to view source on the following):

• <code></code> is generally used to wrap entire blocks of code, and inline snippets thereof, including wiki template parameters, and the other "computerese" semantic markup tags can be used within or without <code></code>. Technically, a large block of code marked up with <pre></pre> for formatting reasons should actually be done as <code><pre></pre></code> but people often forget (and on a few sites where <code></code> has been "over-styled" with CSS, that doesn't work well; en.Wikipedia is among them). Should always be monospaced.
• <var></var> is for markup of actual variables, in sentences (as in "Given x Enchantment points, the casting cost to price ratio ..."), in formulae not already marked up with MathML or the like, and in code samples for variables or examples not meant to be taken as literal strings (as in "|text=Your message here"). Most browsers render it in an italic font (inherited from mathematics practice, I think), but as with <em></em>, that's determined by site CSS and ultimately by user stylesheets. It should inherit the CSS font-family of the parent element, so it will not lose the monospacing if used inside <code></code>, nor force monospacing if used in running text. The two below should always be monospaced, except for special applications; see later reply.
• <kbd></kbd> is used for representing keystrokes, as in "press the Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination to get to the Task Manager in Windows." It can technically also be used for parameter values ("user input", even if from a fixed list of valid values) that are literal and not variable examples, e.g. "The |game=Morrowind parameter and value will produce different output than |game=Oblivion". I rarely see people bother with that, since the visual display of <code></code> and <kbd></kbd> is the same on many sites. People have also argued without resolution for years about what the distinctions between "code" and "input" are.
• <samp></samp> is used for output, as in the second monospaced part of "Typing make love on a Unix command line produces the amusing response Don't know how to make love. Stop." It's also convenient to use it for filenames and extensions (i.e. partial output of a directory listing, so it's semantically correct markup), especially on a wiki that puts a background shade on <code></code>, which looks poor in running text, but does not do this to <samp></samp>: "There's one practical difference between .esp and .esm files ...."

The exact range of intents for these elements has never been entirely clear or agreed upon, from what I know (and I've been doing Web development since around 1993). As with most style matters, the useful approach is to set a house style, for well-thought-out reasons, and stick to it, because some aspects of this sort of thing are simply arbitrary, especially the exact definition of what is "input" or "output" versus "code", an interpretation matter that often varies widely by context (e.g. scripting versus programming, commandline versus in a file, etc., etc.).
— Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 11:30, 15 April 2017 (UTC)  [Updated. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 23:06, 15 April 2017 (UTC)]

I'd forgotten about the <samp> tag. It's not something we'd use often here, but now that I'm reminded of it, I'll probably find uses for it. And yes, to the other point in that paragraph, I've long been of two minds about our styling of <code> tags. On the one hand, the coloured background stands out, which makes it easy to spot and differentiate code samples visually; on the other hand, it sticks out. But hey, that's what User CSS is for, if people feel the need; being of two minds, I've never changed it for myself.

Touching briefly on some of your other points, we've also chosen an italicized style for dialogue, at least in the later games—I honestly don't remember if we applied that same styling consistently to earlier games. We should probably make that into a template with a CSS style in it at some point, though it would be a massive project to switch it all over. While my bot could potentially do a lot to help out, I can see where it might end up converting things it shouldn't, too, or get confused about where to start and end such a template. We'd probably be better off doing that kind of conversion by hand. Either that or let the bot convert it all and accept that it might generate a few undesirable conversions, not to mention undoubtedly missing a bunch due to incorrect formatting or abnormal situations that required different formatting. That would probably make it easier to see if there were enough remaining instances of '', and the rare <i> to warrant any additional handling or conversion to <em> (whether by direct code or a template). I suspect not, though. Oh and yes, the semantic markup is in Wikipedia's style manual, but only because you put it there and I suspect nobody really noticed or cared enough to debate the issue. Clearly, it's not seeing widespread use on Wikipedia, and your complaint on the Em talk page there that a bot was converting <em> to '' just goes to show that not everyone agrees with the idea. That said, I don't disagree that it's the direction HTML5 is going, but I think part of the point of wiki markup is that, even if it's applied against HTML5 recommendations, it isolates users from needing to worry about that sort of thing.

While I see your point about possibly using JavaScript add-ons (be they fully external or based on User JS), I'm not sure the wiki at large would agree. There are precious few here who get into scripting and CSS changes at all, much less scripting/CSS that would actually target <em> and ''/<i> separately.

Side-tracking, I also want to convert our use of <pre> for template examples to use a template and CSS at some point as well, for much the same reasons you mention for semantic markup, not to mention the possibility of just changing the style site-wide...<pre> is a pretty ugly format, after all. That would be a project in its own right, though. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 18:04, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

In no particular order (and sorry this is dense, but a lot of topics were raised): It just occurred to me that a potential special use, on a game site, for a template with <samp> and CSS to make it look different than the default monospacing, would be to use it for marking up game-provided text, including NPC dialogue and book material. That technically is output of a computer game, but is not something we'd want to treat as code in a monospaced font. So, a special-styled version of this element (to be italic for Book material, for NPC dialogue, but not quoted signs, or for everything quoted, or this way for Oblivion and that way for Morrowind, yadda yadda – whatever rules are desired, for whichever namespaces, in however many templates), plus the <q> element as a wrapper for inline quotes and <blockquote> for block ones, and if a |source= parameter is used, the {{tag|cite|open)} element for that. Actually, thinking this all through more, one would apply most of this style stuff to the <q> or <blockquote>, and force the wrapped <samp> to inherit the font-related stuff from that.

One annoying WHATWG quirk to remove with CSS is the default forced italicization of everything marked up by <cite>. I've reported this to WHATWG as a bug, but they've not fixed it yet, so browsers are still doing it by default. They're going by the ancient HTML3–4 definition of the element, which was only for titles (not all of which should be italicized anyway), while it can be used for all citation information in HTML5 as long as it contains title and/or author info in it somewhere.

A simpler variant of the above CSS-on-samp stuff could also be done with a template to mark up in-game typos so they don't get "fixed" by well-meaning editors or bots later, though really just about any template, even an empty one, that looks something like {{in-game spelling|Bound_Helm}} will do the trick. It's less intrusive than {{sic}}, which probably should only be used on first ocurrence.

Greasemonkey: Sorry, I didn't mean UESP should have anything to do with that or anything like it, only that the most common means today of users applying local stylesheets in the browser is with such add-ons, since many browsers don't have an easy (or even any) means of creating and editing local stylesheets, despite that always being an intended use of CSS since version 1. I didn't have anything in mind with regard to Mediawiki's user JS, either, since it only affects logged-in users who opt to install a script.

"Isolates users from needing to worry about that sort of thing" – I think that was already addressed by "use templates, which are wiki" and "style guides are for gnomes and bots, not everyday editors".  :-)

Ugly <pre> – That'll be at least partially a matter of the site-wide stylesheets in the Mediawiki namespace, which is also where to fix things like forced italics in <cite>. Agreed that templates are the best approach for blocks of code markup. WP has a Mediawiki plug-in for syntax highlighting, but I'm not sure it would be useful on this site since it's language-specific and won't have anything special for TES-related scripting.

I am seeing italicized quotation blocks in Morrowind-related articles (haven't checked for even older TES games, nor have I checked to see how consistent it is in MW articles). It seems to be the prescribed style for block quotes and pull quotes here. Unfortunately, I'm also seeing italicization of all kinds of things that are inside quotation marks, inline in running text, and I remove that when I encounter it. An inevitable consequence of an "italicize big quotation blocks" rule (which I would advocate against were I ever to get involved in UESP style policy matters again, because the style is weird, unhelpful, amateur-bloggish, and visually excessive) is that people who have not memorized every detail of the style guide (i.e., almost everyone) will assume "italicize anything in quotation marks" is the house style. This compounding "unintended style spread" effect happens to other things, too, and needs to be monitored. Here, I've noticed excessive capitalization of nouns and of generic game-related adjectives and adverbs, as a side effect of the actually very specific capitalization rules here, which people mostly don't absorb. Almost every article (on MW, at least) has multiple errors of this sort, because a drive-by editor doesn't intuit that "Golden Saint Soulgem" should be capitalized, as a specific item/resource, while "soulgem" should not, as a generic item-type reference. "Major Skill" is capitalized as something special, "skills" is not. A specific skill is named "Enchant" and a specific NPC class is the "Enchanter", but magical (not "Magickal") items are "enchanted" with "enchantments". And so on. Sometimes a style rule is worth maintaining despite the creeping spread problem (I would argue that it is for caps on a site like this, because the distinction is meaningful), and sometimes it's not (as with italicized quotes, which do nothing useful and impede the effectiveness of intentional emphasis; see the Style Guide's own statement about avoiding unnecessary emphasis and remember that it also does not distinguish, presently, between semantic emphasis and typographic italics, thus these rules are in direct conflict, and it is not the only such conflict). I'm not likely to make either argument outside this user talk page, though, unless summoned [not Summoned!] to do so.

The <code> styling: One approach would be to make the background color more subtle. I really wish Pickyweedia would do this, since so many other wikis take their style cues from it. Another would be to have an {{inline code}} template that removed the background with local CSS, for use in mid-sentence instead of code blocks.

"Only because you put it there" – Everything in every wiki was put there by some specific individual (given the nature of the work, often one who is still involved, and doing similar work at other projects). In this case, it naturally stands to reason that one of WP's main MoS editors put something in its MoS. And, yes, we did discuss it, and it was retained by consensus, because the wiki cares about the HTML specs, usability, accessibility (not a concern at UESP except for colorblindness issues, probably, but WP has a whole multi-page MoS section about accessibility and WCAG compliance), reuse, automated content processing, and user configurability. We started implementing all the semantic markup elements as templates way back in 2010–2011. That's six+ years of stability and incremental implementation by gnomes and bots. Yes, it is impossible to get random and often anon-IP editors to do it consistently, but this is true of every single facet of the MoS and WP's house style, and the same will hold on any publicly edited site with a style guide. Just the nature of the beast. The Template_talk:Em post was made shortly after creation of the template back in 2010, the bot was fixed, and there hasn't been a bots-and-emphasis problem since then. I'm not sure where you get the idea that it's evidence of dispute; it was a bug report that was quickly resolved, and is ancient history in WP time. Nothing added to en.WP's MoS goes unnoticed (it's highly watchlisted), and changes to it are quite difficult to get to stick, aside from clarity copyedits that don't substantively change any rule. Anything in it for years has general consensus to be in it, though virtually every line-item in it has its little camp of opponents. (It's another nature-of-the-beast issue, since almost every style point has divergent advice about it in different paper style guides, often with a nationalistic bent, and people are often irrationally convinced that one is "right" and all others "wrong". This prescriptivist and anti-linguistic viewpoint is reinforced since childhood by teachers who insisted on a simplistic set of "rules", often incomplete and decades behind actual practice, that students must follow exactly or be punished with poor grades.)

Now, I have a whole mess of daedra to go slaughter on an island off the coast of Tel Branora, and can't put it off any longer. >;-)
— Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 23:06, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Capitalization cleanup

Refactored out as a sub-thread again. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 16:34, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Just a couple of quick comments—I'll have to go through this in more detail later. First, I'm very familiar with changing the CSS styles in MediaWiki space. :Þ Second, I'm not surprised you're seeing a lot of miscapitalization in Morrowind's namespaces. The games are highly variable, but the older games, especially, often miscapitalized things so, naturally, we followed suit. I think it was only sometime in the Skyrim era that we decided to abandon that philosphy and we started switching things to lower-case as linguistically appropriate. The problem with a large wiki is that you can't readily retcon previous choices across thousands of pages, so by and large, the older spaces are still following the older philosophy. By all means, though, change them wherever you see things that need it. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 23:47, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Some months-later followup: I've been normalizing the case conventions, at least in Morrowind-related articles, to the extent I can. In-game "things" get the caps per the style guide, but I've been removing them otherwise. There are a lot of overcapitalizations remaining. E.g., I keep running into things like "The Adamantium Helm of Tohan is ... This Helm has a higher enchantability than other Adamantium Helms ...", where the stand-alone word "helm" should not be capitalized. I also often encounter stuff like "He is equipped with an ebony shortword and a daedric cuirass" where those item names should be capitalized. So, I fix 'em. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 21:06, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Great! Sometimes, it can be a bit of a challenge to decide if something is a title or not. Is Shack for Sale a shack for sale, for instance? Or is Reeking Cave a reeking cave, or do people actually call it "Reeking Cave"? I remember there being some debate on one of the Oblivion caves as to whether it was a proper name or not, and the simple fact is that there's sometimes really no way to tell. I tend to err on the side of proper titles, personally, but I'm not going to fix something where it's a debatable call and someone picked the opposite choice than I would have. Glad to hear that they're getting fixed, though. Morrowind space, especially, could use a bit of attention. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 18:58, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Same here. I generally see what the game itself does. E.g., "A Carved Ebony Dart" is done that way because that's what the game calls it; in the Journal, it's referred to with something like "I found a strange dart ...", so we wouldn't capitalize "Strange Dart", but the inventory name of thing literally is "A Carved Ebony Dart", capital-A and all. In running prose, the capital-A looks like a typo when it appears mid-sentence, so I created a Tribunal:Carved Ebony Dart redirect; most users would not think to include the leading "A " when looking for it anyway. This site is unusually redirect-averse (to the point of user-unfriendliness), but I hope that one sticks. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 16:32, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Good Work

Hi Darklocq! I don't have anything to add concerning your edits to the style guide, so I thought it would be better to recognize some of the other edits you have made to the wiki thus far. Although I have not patrolled many of your edits (due to lack of Morrowind knowledge), I have reviewed most of them and you are doing a great job revising and adding content. The older games have received little attention in recent years, which makes your contributions all the more valuable. Keep up the good work! I also highly recommend joining UESP's Discord server, which is where a lot of wiki discussion happens. —Dillonn241 (talk) 05:35, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks much.  :-) For many OpenMW users on Macs and Linux like me, Morrowind is a new game. Which somehow arrived with thousands of mods already written for it, hundreds of walkthroughs, dozens of forums and wikis, and multiple code patching projects. LOL. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 09:59, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Terminology

Hi Darklocq. Thought I should let you know thay Tribunal and Bloodmoon are termed "expansions", rather than add-ons. —Legoless (talk) 14:44, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Hokey-dokey! I've been running into "mod", "plugin", "plug-in", and various other terms, as well as "add-on", and had just picked the latter kind of at random, as something to normalize to, but will use "expansion" henceforth. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 15:46, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

PS: It might make sense to refer to DLCs with new quests and such as "expansions" (Tribunal, Bloodmoon, Siege at Firemoth, Adamantium Helm of Tohan, Master Index, maybe Entertainers – I've never played that one), and the ones that just add items or effects as "add-ons" (Adamantium Armor, Area Effect Arrows, Bitter Coast Sounds, LeFemm Armor). It's not really typical gamer terminology to label an add-on as an "expansion" if it doesn't actually expand the game in a meaningful way. I've been using this terminology split in the material I'm writing at the OpenMW wiki. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 13:53, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Morrowind only has two official "Expansion Packs": Tribunal and Bloodmoon (source). There is no distinction to be made between add-ons based on whether they add a quest or not, and they are certainly not "expansions" in the sense used by Bethesda, or most video games for that matter. What you contribute to the OpenMW wiki is your business, but I would not recommend making such an arbitrary and incorrect distinction. If you're looking for official terminology, you should look at the old official site; the term used by Bethesda for the eight free downloads is actually "plugins", an entirely different thing from the expansion packs. —Legoless (talk) 20:25, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Wasn't talking about "correct" according to Bethesda's marketing. I don't think we want to call them "plugins", either. No one seems to call mods that, whether official or third-party. It's kinda early-2000s talk, which fits for the era of the game but not present-day reader understanding. LOL. Anyway, I'll stick with "expansions" if that's an actual official decision here. I've not seen any consistency on the matter in the actual articles. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 01:12, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

We decided on "add-ons" for consistency across all three modern entries in the series. I believe this is the relevant discussion, if you're interested. —Legoless (talk) 01:35, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Now I'm confused. You started this thread by telling me I should be using "expansions", which is what I've been doing since then. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 22:09, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) Legoless means to say use the word "add-on" for the eight minor DLCs listed on Morrowind:Official Add-Ons, and the term "expansion" for Tribunal and Bloodmoon. —Dillonn241 (talk) 06:09, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Ah! Ok. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 03:24, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Creeper owning Ghorak Manor?

I have observed that you a month ago added on the Creeper page that Creeper claimed the Ghorak Manor, but the orcs were squatters who had recently invaded the house. I could not remember having found this in the game myself, but as it is a while since I played Morrowind I put a couple of verification needed tag on those. No-one seem to be able to verify it, so that is why I would like to ask where you found it? —MortenOSlash (talk) 08:29, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Saw it in there somewhere, but that was months ago. It's not in Creeper's greeting 1 variations, so I dunno at this point. Was it in one of the book resources? Probably safe to remove it. The claim that Creeper is the Orcs' pet should not be reinstated; there's no evidence for that, either. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 22:36, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Ok. Done! —MortenOSlash (talk) 18:23, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

PS: I tracked it down; it was in an NPC dialogue mod. While I was not running the mod at the time, that bit had stuck in my memory. I'm now CS-checking any dialogue-related edits I make here. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 15:49, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

acefile

Hi Darklocq, I stumbled across your comments about acefile on OpenMW's User:Darklocq/Mod_testing_notes page. Feel free to open new issue tickets for anything that does not work for you or is missing. For instance, I am not sure what you mean by acefile "does not like complicated paths". Note that you can instruct acefile to extract into a base directory instead of CWD using -d; the default behaviour matches that of other Unix command line archiving utilities. Thanks! Daniel Roethlisberger — Unsigned comment by 212.51.147.3 (talk) at 20:06 on 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I don't recall at this point what the error was, and can't duplicate it (four revisions later), so I'll remove the note about that (which is at a different wiki. ;-) — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 10:19, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

For any "talk-page stalkers": I can confirm that acefile is now working with every .ACE file I've obtained from Morrowind Modding History/Great House Fliggerty and from NexusMods. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 20:07, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Dark Brotherhood Assassins

I've just spotted another 4 assassins that may have eluded you so far, Dark Brotherhood Journeyman (db_assassin1a), Dark Brotherhood Apprentice (db_assassin1c), Dark Brotherhood Operator (db_assassin2a), Dark Brotherhood Punisher (db_assassin3a). They can all go on the one page with redirects. The choice of page would be open given the number of names (ie, you could use Dark Brotherhood Assassin), though TR:Assassin would at least need to be a disambig from its current assumed status of being for Morrowind's class. The LEVC list db_assassins contains a list of levels that each of those NPCs should appear. dbattackScript contains the levels that the number of Assassins changes, as well as the scripting for their appearance. PS The faction template should not be applied to bugged factions, as it incorrectly places them in the categories; plain linking is preferred. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 20:01, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

¡More assassins! At first I thought "am I losing my mind?", but now realize I didn't see them because I did a keyword search on "Assassin" in the text and got right to work when I found these guys, and didn't do a followup search on db_assassin in IDs. Good catch! Someone else added the Template:Faction around the faction ranks; I'd originally had it as just text. After seeing the change I had been meaning to ask if we really wanted to create new categories for DB faction ranks with nothing in them but redirects to this article [presently section]; I guess that answers that question. Anyway, I'll fire up OpenMW-CS and get the deets out. This actually highlights another reason to have a |notes= parameter for the NPC template; the level at which each appears could be added as a per-infobox note. It would be easier to parse the info on an assassinID-by-assassinID basis, rather than reading a bunch of prose, and then trying to relate it after the fact to the tabular data. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 14:21, 15 August 2017‎ (UTC)

Article done, at Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassins. Redirected Tribunal:Assassins and Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassin there. Not sure what to do about Tribunal:Assassin. Was thinking make it a disambig page. Not sure what to do about the Category:Tribunal-NPC Classes categorization. Do we put that on the disambig page, or create a Tribunal:Assassin (class) redirect to hold the category link? PS: I note that we're wildly inconsistent with plural vs. singular for things like this, e.g. Morrowind:Guards and Morrowind:Followers versus Tribunal:High Ordinator and Bloodmoon:Reaver. I know this site doesn't like plural redirects as a general rule, but this inconsistency is a reason to use them when it comes to articles on groups of NPCs (as done with the Morrowind:Enchanters redir to Morrowind:Enchanter. I guess I can raise this at UESPWiki talk:Morrowind Overhaul Project. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 19:06, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Because of its required use in the NPC template, a redirect will need to exist for the class. Class and faction redirects do not hold the same "weight" as other redirects, so it would not be beyond reasonable to create a redirect for the class and change the links, then hijack the Assassin redirect to point at the DBA page, and not create a disambiguation page, nor have a hatnote on the DBA page. This is further helped by the fact that the class is from the base game and not a new class introduced by Tribunal. In this case the "TR:Assassins" redirect would seem to be redundant. An easy difference in understanding what is (or has been) pluralised and what is not, is if a thing is in the game. For example, as every NPC gets a page, it is easy to use the High Ordinator page to accumulate knowledge on all High Ordinators without creating an additional page, whereas Followers is an artificial grouping where a page must be created anyway because there is no Follower page to use. In the case of a like Guards, because there are so many different names, there needed to be a single overarching grouping, so Guards was used despite the existence/use of the Guard page (for both named NPCs (who do not appear to be listed on the page) and the class (which has a redirect not noted on the Guards page, though the class is displayed there)). Changing/introducing a proper grouping structure is overdue, and though it will take time to fix this inconsistency site-wide, if there is acceptance for it it can begin, and if done properly and with care there should be zero problems. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 21:28, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Okay, I'll proceed on that basis. "Dark Brotherhood Assassins" is also an artificial grouping ("Dark Brotherhood Assassin" is technically one NPC (db_assassin4a), and a faction rank, both covered at the same article. I guess redirs need to exist for the other named-but-generic DBAs, e.g. Dark Brotherhood Apprentice, etc., and properly categorized, with some categories being removed from the main DBA article. I ran out of time to do that earlier; had to go pick someone up from the airport. The second part of "create a redirect for the class and change the links" is going to be the tricky part; I can probably track down the extant usage easily enough with "What Links Here". Just hope none of the templates that use it are full-protected, or I'll have to ask for admin help to finish it up. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 00:00, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Looks like this cannot be done until the character class is changed in mt_save_data (where ever that lives) to point to Tribunal:Assassin (class) instead of Tribunal:Assassin for all NPCs that need this done. That appears to be: Tribunal:Fedris Hler, Tribunal:Dravil Indrano, Tribunal:Ahnia, and Tribunal:Dandras Vules, and the redirects Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Apprentice, Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Journeyman, Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Operator, Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Punisher, and Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassin, plus Tribunal:Assassin itself, about to become an NPC-name redirect when the database is updated. I would do this myself, but where mt_save_data is and how to update it don't seem to be documented anywhere. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 00:36, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure I followed the entire discussion, but I believe all you need to do to fix the Assassin links is change them to actual links, as I did here. I didn't do more than just the one, in case I'm misunderstanding what's needed.

I'm curious where you got the name mt_save_data from, though. That's the database table name, and shouldn't normally be visible anywhere (apart from the documentation). – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 04:33, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

I did get it from the documentation (at UESPWiki:MetaTemplate#.23load, cross-referenced in the docs of Template:NPC Data). That template (unlike Template:NPC Summary) appears to be pulling the class directly from mt_save_data and auto-linking the class and other values, via {{#load:{{{pagename|}}}|titlename|race|class|gender|level|health|magicka|alarm|fight|faction|factionRank|loc|pageexists}} and subsequent code; it's receiving the class value as Assassin in a hard-coded way. I'll take a look at the page you just linked to and see if that elucidates. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 05:03, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

A light may be dawning: Is Template:NPC Summary actually auto-populating mt_save_data? If so, how does one set the class for NPC redirects, e.g. Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Punisher? — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 05:09, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Maybe this is sufficient if the base page name of the redir and the name as given in the template agree? Now I wonder what happens in mt_save_data when two NPCs have the same name .... — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 05:18, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

If there's a question here, the answer is that the category uses the displayed class. Robin showed the way we do it by making the class a manual link, rather than having the parameter in the template strip any "disambiguation" parts because some classes do use brackets. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 16:41, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I kept answering my own questions with experimentation before getting a second-party answer. :-) — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 21:17, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

NPC Data test

Dandras Vules		Dark Elf	Assassin	Dark Brotherhood Dark Brother(Dark Brother)	55	402	200	0	90
Dark Brotherhood Punisher		Dark Elf	Assassin	Dark Brotherhood Assassin(Assassin)	30	{{{autocalc}}}	{{{autocalc}}}	0	100
Assassin		Dark Elf	Assassin	Dark Brotherhood Assassin(Assassin)	30	{{{autocalc}}}	{{{autocalc}}}	0	100
Guard		Dark Elf	Guard		20	210	122	100	30
Hlaalu Sharpshooter	{{ }}	[[Morrowind:|{{{race}}}]]	[[Morrowind:|{{{class}}}]]
Ordinator		Dark Elf	Guard	Tribunal Temple Disciple(Disciple)	20	210	122	100	30

For now, the Tribunal:Assassin doesn't work at all because it still redirs to Morrowind:Assassin.

Others, like Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Punisher are partially working, but the Faction (Rank) material isn't showing up, despite the Template:NPC Summary blocks in Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassins being coded with this info. Note that this data doesn't show up in the Guard line from the Morrowind:Guards page, but it does show up for the Morrowind:Ordinator one which has its own article. This seems to be a bug in the templates. Some of the Guard NPC types also apparently don't have NPC-name redirects but should, e.g. Morrowind:Hlaalu Sharpshooter. From what I can gather, Template:NPC Data only works if a) Namespace:NPC_Name exists, and b) whatever it resolves to includes a Template:NPC_Summary with a matching NPC_Name in the |titlename parameter. It also won't correctly handle multiple NPCs with the same name (e.g. all Guard show up in Template:NPC_Data as Dunmer, when many are Imperials and at least one is a Nord; needs to be an array).

Also, I tried noincluding the * footnotes, and they are still showing up the NPC Data output anyway, so either that needs to change or we really do need a |notes parameter for Template:NPC_Summary, as I proposed last week.

Not sure whether to report the issues at Template talk:NPC Data or Template talk:NPC Summary; out of time for tonight, and will look into it tomorrow or so.
— Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 05:52, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

The NPC Data template isn't able to display multi-NPC data properly. The DB Punisher is not working just like the Guard page because neither has the {{Non-Relevant NPC}} template holding data and both are trying to pull from multiple templates on the generic page. The NPC Data template wasn't designed for displaying generic NPC data, only specific data from one page, so you would need to create both "Guard (Imperial)" and "Guard (Dunmer)" pages with the Non-Relevant NPC template on each, and then display them separately in order to make it work, though that wouldn't be desirable. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 16:41, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't understand yet why its not desirable; it seems to be what Template:Non-Relevant_NPC was made for (i.e. get the data inserted so Template:NPC_Data can use it, but only have the templates on redir pages. It's seeming to me that the redir commands could be noincluded, and that the actual templates could be inserted visibly into pages like Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassins by transcluding them from the redirs. We're already using extensive transclusion to insert specific-something details in to more-general pages; this would just be another variant. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 21:09, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

They aren't desirable because they don't need to exist. Creating a page purely to transclude the information to another makes little or no sense whatever way you look at it. Redirects would need to be made for every variant, which makes a whole lot of clutter for no benefit whatsoever. For example, you would need to create 5 redirects for the Assassin due to the 5 different levels and faction levels. Those potential redirects aren't and won't be needed on any pages for linkage purposes either. The Non-Relevant template was designed to be used on uniquely named individual redirects, not generic multiple-entity redirects. Writing them out manually is much simpler, as well as allowing the opportunity to simply state "Assassins" multiple exist in a location, rather than label every generic variant that may or may not even be there. As below, a Generic NPCs template variant would allow the transclusion of any shared data (eg race and gender), simply filling in the missing parts manually. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 22:14, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Got it (finally!) — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 22:18, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

PS: I dig the approach taken at Skyrim:Bandit. Getting it template-compatible might be some work though; I'm guessing multiple values (race, gender, ID) would need to be put into arrays, or at least output templates like {{NPC Data}} changed to not auto-link anything in that format and just accept a literal value, which might be multi-line. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 22:22, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Eventual content for Tribunal:Assassin

This will be the content of the eventual generic-NPC-name redir to Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassins:

#REDIRECT [[Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassins]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Level 1 NPCs]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Level 3 NPCs]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Level 10 NPCs]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Level 20 NPCs]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Level 30 NPCs]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Assassin]]
[[Category:Tribunal-NPCs]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Dunmer]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Dunmer-Male]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Male NPCs]]
[[Category:Tribunal-Factions-Dark Brotherhood]]

All these categories except the last one can be removed from Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassins as the final step. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 00:45, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

PS: All these generic-NPC-name redirs should also have Category:Tribunal-Leveled NPCs, if we want that category to exist. It will not contain anything but these NPC redirs. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 00:48, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

I was thinking we could make a version of the {{Non-Relevant NPC}} template for generic NPCs. This would be useful in all namespaces. Any of the more recent generic NPC pages and their redirected NPC pages can serve as examples for what parameters are needed elsewhere (eg SR:Bandit, SR:Vampire). Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 16:41, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

That sounds like a good approach. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 13:15, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

The redir conversion and categorization above is done, aside from the Category:Tribunal-Leveled NPCs matter. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 22:26, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Update articles

Also need to update articles to point to the new Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Assassins article where appropriate. Starting list to check:

• Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood (faction) — Done 04:22, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
• Morrowind:Dark Brotherhood (faction) — Done 23:09, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
• Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Attacks (quest) — Done (overhauled entire article) 01:04, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
• Tribunal:Hunt the Dark Brotherhood (quest) — Done (overhauled entire article) 11:42, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
• Tribunal:Dandras Vules (NPC) — Done (needs further work unrelated to this cleanup) 13:31, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
• Tribunal:Manor District (place)
• Tribunal:Old Mournhold (place)
• Tribunal:Bazaar Sewers (place)
• Tribunal:Mournhold (place)
• Tribunal:Great Bazaar (place)
• Also look through "What Links Here" results for several of these pages.
• Track down remaining links to Tribunal:Assassin that need to be changed to Tribunal:Assassin (class).

— Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 01:05, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Update: Still need to double-check this, and also make sure it's consistent with DB lore in Oblivion, etc. I already fixed some issues in that regard. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 17:46, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

Bug Template Spacing Issues

The problem you were running into in the Bug template with needing to use   instead of a space is caused by being inside <cleanspace> tags. That's a custom tag added by one of our extensions. The idea behind it is to allow you to format #locals, #defines, and other commands that don't emit any text. For example:

<cleanspace>
{{#local:var1|abc}}
{{#local:var2|def}}
</cleanspace>Text goes here.

...instead of...

{{#local:var1|abc}}{{#local:var2|def}}Text goes here.

...or...

{{#local:var1|abc}}<!--
-->{{#local:var2|def}}Text goes here.

Obviously, with only two commands in the example, it's not quite as obvious what the benefit is, but when it gets to be dozens, you start really appreciating it. Indenting is also possible.

The customary solutions to the issue you ran into are the one you found, temporarily closing the <cleanspace>, and I believe either <nowiki/> or the paired tags will work as well, but I'm not 100% sure of that last. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 18:08, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Ah so! Aside from minor "gotchas" like that, I really, really like the additional functionality that stuff provides, though I'm still examining how it all works. I badly wish Wikipedia itself had these extensions, though I'm not sure which ones they are. The ability to define variables, in particular, is priceless. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 18:17, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

There are two custom extensions we have here that were both designed by a now-retired bureaucrat: UespCustomCode and MetaTemplate. I know I've seen other extensions that allow variables, though I don't know if any are in use on any Wikimedia wikis at this point. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 21:48, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Too bad that didn't get pushed back up into the MediaWiki pipe. All wikis could benefit from that stuff. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 22:57, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Vertical Alignment

Just a quick tip: for the table where you have vertical-align:top all over the place, try using class=vtop at the table level. Then you can remove all the alignment statements. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 07:02, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Which article? I did this per-cell thing recently in a user page, but I've probably done it in an article somewhere as well. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 07:30, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant to say on your user page—the "Pages and Major Sections Overhauled" section. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 07:37, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Coolio, and thanks for the tip. Just implemented that. I may need to do a code search; I'm pretty sure I've done it the long-winded way in one or more articles. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 07:51, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Jeebus, there's the long version in exactly 1.37 gazillion pages. Also, the class only appears to work at the {| level. It failed at the |- and |- levels, though the longer vertical-align:top syntax worked at the |- level, at least. So the replacement will not work in all circumstances, e.g. where particular rows or cells need particular treatment. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 01:07, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, it's currently tagged as being a table-level-only class in MediaWiki:Common.css. That's easy enough to change if desired, though. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 04:53, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Should probably apply to any table content element like td and th and col and, wrappers for several like tr, colgroup, thead, etc. Many of these use middle alignment by default. MIght even be non-table elements for which it would be useful; not sure. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 10:58, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Last I heard, col/colgroup isn't supported in any way on MediaWiki, though I don't really keep up to date on stuff like that. I'll add it for the other table elements later today. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 21:00, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

And done...at least as far as my CSS knowledge extends. :) I just added .vtop and .vmid options, so they can be applied to anything that supports vertical alignment. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 03:24, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Schweet. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 22:05, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Necroscripting

Hi. In case it's fallen off your watch list, I got interested in Tribunal's Dark Brotherhood attack script today, found your post, and replied to it. Tribunal_talk:Dark_Brotherhood_Attacks#.2F.2A_Max_number_of_attacks_.2A.2F Shmoot (talk) 00:42, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

Great work! PS: I wouldn't consider it necroposting at all; it's an open issue from just last year. If it was some "I think I found a bug, cuz a rock moves when you go into this dungeon while wielding a two-handed sword" post from 2012 and no one able to confirm it since then, then probably too old to bother responding to. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 18:39, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

Warning

You seem to have been making multiple edits to a page by not using the show preview button, clogging up the Recent Changes in the process. We appreciate your enthusiasm, but keep in mind that each edit needs to be patrolled, so multiple consecutive edits create an unnecessary hassle on those who patrol. So please utilize this feature! You may also want to look over our style guide and Getting Started guide. Feel free to ask if you have any questions. --AKB Talk Cont Mail 23:25, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

I've been here long enough I should be auto-patrolled by now. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 05:30, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Auto-patrolling isn't about how long you've been here, but about the accuracy and style of your edits, and the confidence the patrollers have that those edits won't need further touch-ups. While many of your edits are fine, and you have a stronger grasp of HTML than many on the site, I personally have changed two of your recent edits, either for accuracy or style, and I know others have made changes as well. That inherently suggests that you're not yet ready for auto-patrolled status. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 07:14, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Fair enough, on the copy-paste error (accidentally changed some spider stats). The other bits were your subjective preferences, not errors on my part. Anyway, Alpha Kenny Buddy should review my talk page's editnotice. Summary: I do use preview, I just don't always catch everything, being fallible like everyone else. I also fix problems as I encounter them, like pretty much everyone else. If someone would rather have errors, missing information, impenetrable pseudo-English, and other problems in the pages than have them fixed, just because my fixing it adds to their watchlist, they should reduce their watchlist. This is a wiki, not the Ten Commandments – the entire point is to incrementally improve it. I'm not sure everyone is temperamentally suited to change-patrolling. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 10:19, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

This doesn't qualify as a "warning". See UESPWiki:Blocking Policy: nothing in there relates to copyediting so perfectly that multiple passes are never needed. And Dillonn241, go find something other to do that pester me. Every time you do things like this, you make this more and more of a hostile editorial environment. See also UESPWiki:Assume Good Faith and other relevant policies. There are reasons that the other TES wiki is more popular than this one (despite this one generally having more solid and more complete information). The hostile clique who think they own this place are clearly chief among those reasons. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 14:48, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

This is not about copyediting or "never" needing to do multiple edits in a row. This is about doing borderline disruptive edits. Doing a ton of minor edits in a row instead of a bigger one, and having been doing so for a long time is disruptive. There is no excuse for you to not having improved by now. By continuing to argue about this you really just show that you are not interested in doing better work. With other words, you already know by now that you are being disruptive. Also, you keep changing the topic all the time. The question you should focus on is not "Is this warning justified?" but "Can I change the way I edit?"

The arguments about other TESWiki "being better", are poor and irrelevant to the topic at hand. This is not a popularity contest. This is you having to change your way to edit, or accept modifications, reverts, and ultimately warnings. The choice is yours. Want a less hostile environment? Make better edits, admit your mistakes and stop being rude to admins who are trying to do their job. Tib (talk) 15:18, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Not agreeing with you is not being "rude". We're all volunteers here, and you trying to interpret your position of relative trust among the editing community as a "job" (more like a "holy duty", given your tone) that lets you be rude to other editors is a mistake. Rude like suggesting that incrementally improving an article is "borderline disruptive" because it's not maximally convenient for you personally. Rude like suggesting I'm "not interested in doing better work" when (barring an actual error) I'm doing good work and it's you trying to prevent me from improving articles unless I do it all in one pass, i.e., unless I ignore any problems I see later just to save you the trouble of looking at two edits. Rude like accusing me of being unwilling to admit mistakes when I clearly do admit them, with no fuss, e.g. the spider stats copy-paste, an error I freely admitted above. Of course I'm sure your own editing history is completely free of mistakes and completely free of you ever disagreeing with anyone about them, including admins before you became an admin. Or maybe not.

Me not editing the exact same way you do is not a "mistake", it's just being a different person. Again, please go find something other to do that pester me, and stop giving bogus "warnings", that have nothing to do with policym to people who aren't exactly the same as you in all their preferences and habits. I'll repeat also that changes-patrolling doesn't suit everyone (at this site or anywhere). If you find the workload you've signed up for stressy, try a different one.

PS: "By continuing to argue about this you really just show that you [insert something condemnatory here]" is one of the oldest logic fallacies in existence, a variant of argument to authority in which the opposing side is claiming to be the authority and to be unquestionable (and in this case it's also mired in argument to ridicule, argumentum ad baculum , and the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, all at once). It's the same as "You questioned the archbishop, but the archbishop has the ear of God, therefore you are a heretic, so your tongue will be cut out and you'll burn." Go witch-hunt somewhere else please. Especially on Christmas, sheesh. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 15:54, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

PPS: You're also reacting rather than reading. I didn't say the competing wiki was better, I said this one was but that the other is more popular. You took away from that the exact opposite of what I actually said. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 15:56, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Blocked

This user has been blocked from editing UESPWiki for one year due to argumentative behaviour, borderline personal attacks, and refusing to conform with wiki standards despite repeated requests to do so. If you wish to appeal the block, you may make your request on your talk page, which you can still edit even while being blocked. (Talk page access was blocked the next day by AKB.) – Robin Hood  (talk) 01:14, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

---

This, in particular, seems excessive and unreasonable. I find rather more rigour in Darklocq's rebuttals than in the dubious accusations of those holding the title of ‘admin’. Feels more like an admin going rogue over a disagreement (personality-dispute?) concerning revision-committing style, considering said admin did not have any notable (constructive) criticisms of Darklocq's contributions. The complaints against Darklocq do, indeed, seem to be riddled with fallacies, to say the very least; especially since the justifications cited for the ‘warning’ (if it actually qualifies as one) and block readily apply to the conduct of the admin presuming to issue said penalties as if he, himself is beyond question (which is at odds with what constitutes good, respectable leadership characteristics). However, if those in opposition to Darklocq would care to cite clear examples of objectively disruptive editing on the part of Darklocq, then that would be of interest. I can quite imagine the source of Darklocq's frustration at being seemingly nagged not over what he contributes, but how he does so. Edit-patrolling is an internal, managerial(™?) problem, since it's not (user|reader)-facing; is it not the hallmark of a good admin to have well-developed ‘people-skills’ in their handling of a diverse population of editors? For all any of us know, perhaps Darklocq has a disability of some sort which makes one-shot edits difficult for him, yet he persists in his efforts to contribute constructively. I notice that none of the substance of Darklocq's counter-points had been addressed, nor his self-evident frustration (in what might be considered a non-dismissive fashion). Is this site for the benefit of readers, or the convenience of administrators? How on earth will the few admins of this site cope during the next flood of activity, such as when Bethesda release TES6? Some perspective is called for, methinks. I wonder if those who've had their feelings hurt will be willing to actually discuss the matter, or if they'll simply resort to further threats for dissension. — Lee Carré (talk) 04:16, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

I believe this is much more about his behavior and borderline personal attacks than his editing practices. Personally, I don't think anyone should be blocked for the sole reason of repeated edits unless it's a major problem, and it should generally not result in a warning unless it's been unofficially warned about multiple times with no change. In this case, while Darklocq tends to make repeat edits frequently, they aren't at the level of spamming Recent Changes needlessly. So long as the edits are improving pages, then there's more good to keeping the person around than to not allow editing at all.

I also think the official warning was too early and could have triggered an emotional response. While it's over and done with now, had the original warning not been an "official" one, then this is where I think it should have been done, assuming the response was the same. Of course, I didn't block Darklocq nor did I give the warning, so I'm not going to undo either and instead let Robin Hood or AKB decide if the block should be lifted. —Dillonn241 (talk) 05:05, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

This block was actually discussed among staff beforehand, though I was not personally part of the discussion until after I'd issued the block. We are a small team, however, so even group-based decisions aren't entirely infallible, nor are our communications about the issues necessarily perfect every single time either. It being Christmas Day, and Darklocq having retired, I didn't spend a lot of time on the block message. Perhaps I should have.

That all said, however, I'd like to reiterate that we're a small team, even when you include the patrollers, so unlike Wikipedia, sometimes we encourage people to do things that save everyone time. We certainly don't expect perfection, nor is a one-off series of edits necessarily an issue. Many people, myself included, tend to notice mistakes only after hitting save, and we go back to edit them. Sometimes, we fail to notice them at all, just as happened with Darklocq's spider edit that he mentioned. Imperfection is not the concern here. The concern that I believe prompted AKB's warning was the series of 16 consecutive edits to Skyrim:Technical Support, most of which could have been done as a few larger edits. It's also quite clear from his previous editing history here and on Wikipedia that he's capable of larger edits if needed. Heck, even if not, there's always the option to save a page or section offline and come back to it as needed until you're sure it's right. You can also combine that with Show Preview as needed.

The fact that Darklocq has this as his edit notice indicates to me that he's well aware that making large amounts of small edits is a concern on this wiki, and that others have spoken to him about it before. At least to my eyes, that whole thing reads as a giant "f*** you" to anyone who has any objections. If his dyslexia were the major issue in it, I would expect that to be mentioned more prominently, but instead, it's only mentioned near the bottom as a reason some of his edits might be an issue. I'll come back to this issue in a bit. On the issue of the edit notice itself, never mind that he's outright ignoring anyone's concerns, the entire thing also falls afoul of our etiquette policy, since it's anything but polite and courteous. Leaving that aside, however, site staff are in no way obligated to respect his requests. Our primary obligation is running the site efficiently, so if a warning is required, it will be issued, regardless of the user's preferences, though we do of course try to respect requests in most other situations.

Our list of official warnings and notices is here, and the text that AKB used is among them, give or take some customization. Granted, it's normally used as a notice, but understandably, AKB chose to escalate that to an official warning, given that Darklocq was clearly already aware of the issue. You'll also notice that at the bottom, we have a catch-all "custom" message for unforeseen situations. We can't always predict what we'll need a warning for, so it's up to admins to decide when a warning is warranted. We differ from Wikipedia when it comes to altering or removing warnings. That can only be done by another admin (with the exception of link maintenance and other clearly desirable fixes). Admittedly, that's not a policy that a lot of people are familiar with (and it's admittedly poorly located to boot), so we usually simply revert any changes with an explanation that it's not allowed, which is what was done here. Darklocq's response to Dillon was to tell him to "find something other to do", which obviously didn't sit well with many of us, given that he was an administrator following proper wiki procedure.

Then there Darklocq's apparent attitude of entitlement that he "should" be autopatrolled, mentioned both in the edit notice and in the discussion above, just because he's been here for some time. The fact that he admits to being dyslexic and has been corrected by myself and others would naturally make us hesitant to have him as autopatrolled without a much more clear history of minimal-error editing. Again, nobody's perfect, nor do we expect that, but several people spoke against the idea in Discord when Darklocq brought up the idea that he should be autopatrolled. There are at least a couple of other people here who have some form of cognitive disability, so we're very respectful of that issue, but we also have to keep in mind what will benefit the wiki the most, and so it was decided that autopatrolled status wasn't appropriate yet. In any event, as it says on the Autopatrolled Users page, being autopatrolled is typically something that the community at large will notice and discuss with the editor in question when they feel it's appropriate, not something one should ever expect to have handed to them.

Finally, there were his generally snarky responses and his snarky retired message. This community is about working with others, not telling them what to go do with themselves. So, naturally, Darklocq was raising red flags all over the place.

When I came in the afternoon of the day this all happened, there was already some discussion on Discord about blocking Darklocq. I reviewed everything and decided that a block was indeed warranted, as had been suggested. I admit, I did give it some thought first, since he'd already decided to retire by the time I got here, and I didn't want to add insult to injury. In the end, though, I decided that blocking him made sense, regardless of his departure, so that there would be a record of our concerns should he ever decide to return. If others feel that blocking was an excessive reaction, I'm quite willing to discuss it. Similarly, if people feel a block was deserved, but that a year is too long, I'd be happy to change the block length if Darklocq intends to return. Since he had stated that he was retiring anyway, I thought the time period was fairly irrelevant. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 07:14, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Tried to address this material in detail, and to appeal the block (in the good faith of having sat out almost all of it already), but I can't: "This action has been automatically identified as harmful, and therefore disallowed. If you believe your action was constructive, please inform an administrator of what you were trying to do. A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: Bulk Spamming Filter". So, oh well. Even did it again when I reduced the material to a single paragraph. Maybe this tiny post will work. Whatever. I says here I should use this talk page to appeal, and I also see a log entry that talk page access is revoked, which is contradictory. Not sure I want to come back anyway, until some of the above can be discussed substantively. — 66.63.177.130 (Darklocq via VPN)
Well, at least I was finally able to save that much. 66.63.177.130 11:58, 29 November 2019 (GMT)

Since you went to so much effort, I've restored the text of your edit below, changing only the indentation level. I have not gone through the text in detail, nor do I intend to; I have other, more pressing things that need to be done today and I have difficulty reading large blocks of text in any event. If others believe this justifies ending your block early, I have no objections, but using a proxy to evade your block does not speak well of your understanding of what a block is about. Similarly, if anyone wants to unblock your talk page access to facilitate this discussion, I'm fine with that as well. That said, the proxy you posted from will be blocked, as we have a long-standing policy of blocking open proxies as we find them. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 17:26, 29 November 2019 (GMT)

As this year is nearly up, I dropped back by to review all this stuff and see whether I felt like returning. I'm a bit skeptical, but we'll see. I initially responded to the block in anger, though actually in a reasoned (if not entirely reasonable) manner here, only to have Alpha Kenny Buddy revert it and change Robin Hood's block notice to something patently false on its face ("Intimidating behaviour/harassment", which I actually take as a personal attack, though I'm willing to let it slide this long after the fact). I'll use a calmer tone this time, and get more into the substance of this, having had a long time to mull it over. Robin's still-extant block message includes "your talk page, which you can still edit even while being blocked" appears to sanction this post.

• The content of the message above is laced with a lot of rationalization and finger-pointing; but at least Robin Hood was polite and measured in writing it, even if not addressing the concerns. The earlier post (thread above this) by Tib verbally attacked me in numerous ways (as detailed in the censored post) and was rather offensive. I'm not taking it personally against the editors. (It's not a "personality conflict" thing; I recall getting along fine with Robin, and don't recall any issues with Tib or Alpha). But I can't relate well to someone wearing a "defend our administrative decisions at all costs" mask. Let's have a real discussion, please.) Robin's post avoids anything substantive in what I've said, or that Lee Carré said, or that Dillonn241 said. In parts, it's off-topic, and in others it's a misleading characterization (though short of demonization, I suppose), commingled with wagon-circling excuses, and some obvious cognitive dissonance. Example: "we also have to keep in mind what will benefit the wiki the most" – that's editor retention and a collaborative environment, BTW. Here's another: "Our primary obligation is running the site efficiently" – no, it's not. How "efficiently" the site operates verges on irrelevant. The quality of the content is what matters most, and the ability of the community to be at very least self-sustaining in numbers of competent editors, if not outright growing, is second – same as at all wikis that are not just going to turn into another dead website. This will be more true than ever soon, since more TES releases are coming. More dissonance: "This community is about working with others, not telling them what to go do with themselves." Not a majority but wa-a-ay too much of my interaction experience here has been others, who seem (subjectively – I don't read minds) to feel that they're vested editors in comfortable roles and I'm a second-class, interloping participant, going out of their way to do exactly that to me. While I appreciate being shown where policies are and what they say, which templates to use, why a particular style is preferred for this or that, the niceties of the categorization quirks, etc., being badgered to write/edit exactly like someone else does (for their convenience not for the betterment of the content) is the opposite of working with me, and is telling me to do as I'm told or to get lost. And then you [plural] blocked me to make sure I'd stay out after I got lost, then covered up my objections by deleting them and falsely accusing me of harassment and intimidation. (Robin said "I didn't want to add insult to injury", but Alpha Kenny Buddy sure did.) What about any of that is collaborative or temperate?

  Unless something was learned from this on all sides not just mine, I'm not not sure how I'm supposed to find it in me to contribute to this project again (other than I fixed a typo a couple of times as an anon – my OCD won't allow me not to! – when I came back here looking for something that the Fandom [ex-Wikia] site didn't have). I'm not sure I have high hopes that anything has changed or is going to change in this quasi-community's sometimes unnecessarily poisonous atmosphere. I took a look at the Community Portal page today, just to get a rede on things, and I see the exact same names, though fewer than I remember, all arguing vociferously about pretty much the same and mostly non-reader-facing, non-community-building things. Note that it's just fine to be argumentative (even repetitively, insistently argumentative about issues other people consider closed or too sensitive or too questioning of administrative judgement) – as long as you're part of the In-Crowd. The portal is still mired in the same sorts of internecine drama-mongering that stems from reactionary over-policing and treating fellow editors like crazy people or criminals. Nothing seems to have been learned. All of that Aristeo and ShakenMike squabbling and circular argumentation (so much of it that it has its own dedicated subpage!) is as bad as the worst dramatics at Wikipedia's ArbCom, but worse because it lacks any sort of established guiding principles or resolution-steering process. It's basically a bunch of omphaloskepsis and racket-making, aimed at making questionable decisions and "scarlet letter" branding seem righteous and inevitable, no matter the costs. But there is light at the end of the tunnel maybe, since it did finally conclude to remove the scarlet letter from Aristeo's user page and move it to the talk page. How it took that level of recurrent argument to just arrive at obvious common sense is kind of baffling, and symptomatic of both bureaucraticization and Parkinson's law of triviality (the bike-shed effect).

  Look at the aforementioned costs. How much better would this site be if productive editors were not hounded away over trivial differences of opinion, communication style, patience level, and writing process? Why is administrative log-reviewing convenience more important than working on the content? Robin wants "to reiterate that we're a small team"? Well, see if you can guess why it's small, in a project devoted to the most popular gaming franchise in history. This site looks less and less built by a user community than by a shrinking and increasingly exclusive club who are into hazing and conformity for its own sake. I didn't join a frat house in college, and I don't want to be forced to join one here before I can help write gaming walkthroughs. The culture here has become pretty much the opposite of what one expects from the gamer community. I've encountered nothing like it in other gaming- and F&SF-oriented wikis and forums.

• No one with any wiki experience would buy the idea that lengthy punishment blocks and huge warning banners on a long-term basis are "so that there would be a record of our concerns". Page history exists for a reason and we all know how to use it. The behavior at this wiki is aberrant in the wiki world; it's editor-hostile and community-suppressing by design. I'm amazed it's even lasted this long, especially since it has competition. My hypothesis is that it could not have been this way until just a few years ago.Perhaps against my better judgment, I will finally get around to addressing various line items in the material above, since a lot of it is unjustifiable character-assassination (i.e., violations of the very policy that the admins claim to be enforcing). This will be long, due to the sheer number of disparate claims and disjointed statements that were made:

• "There are at least a couple of other people here who have some form of cognitive disability, so we're very respectful of that issue". Or not. I've been rudely and intolerantly driven out the back door specifically because of "that issue" and the effect it has on my proofreading and corrections, all because it costs a couple of admins a few extra seconds. So, nope, not buying it. UESP is perhaps "very respectful of that issue" when it comes to In-Crowd people, but not at all for "new" editors (I'd already been here almost two years, BTW).

• "Many people, myself included, tend to notice mistakes only after hitting save, and we go back to edit them." Yes, exactly. (If you have dyslexia or related conditions this is inevitable and is more frequent. I can sometimes proofread something five times and it will still have a typo in it that I can't see until characters and word formations "swim" differently or stop, which might be in 30 seconds or in 5 days.) So, it's perfectly fine for Robin to do this, and to say he does this, but I'm to be hassled again and again, then blocked out of the blue for exactly the same thing. It's the same double-standard that I keep illustrating.

• "This block was actually discussed among staff beforehand ... there was already some discussion on Discord about blocking Darklocq" = a Star Chamber. Wikis that work well have noticeboards where alleged disruption and other issues with an editor are discussed openly. Given what Robin has said in here, it's clear that this group of staff just made whatever negative assumptions and accusations they felt like, decided that was Truth, and ran with it without any chance at a defense or at input from other editors, who have objected after-the-fact to no avail (and in my case had the objection censored and falsely described as harassing). Also, there's a another fundamental cognitive dissonance in here. This is either a community, that collectively makes decisions, or it's a Web content company with staff making the decisions. It can't be both at once. If you want it to be the former, then decisions need to be made openly by the community, not behind closed doors autocratically. Even founder and former "super-admin" Jimbo Wales at Wikipedia had to learn that the hard and slow way, but he did eventually learn it. Time for some of that to happen here.

• Robin wrote "If others feel that blocking was an excessive reaction, I'm quite willing to discuss it" – after two people (besides me) already had objected, and that was the end of the discussion (my attempt to continue it got nuked). Hell, it's taken me almost a year to wade through Robin's evasive response and really parse it all. It actually seems almost engineered to terminate further discussion, by raising every imaginable smokescreen all at once. (Given that Robin says he hemmed and hawed about the block, and I get the impression it was imposed to keep Robin's peers happy, maybe this is all Robin could really come up with? I know I would not have enjoyed trying to rationalize that block!) Robin also suggested that the one-year term would be negotiable and might be excessive, but another admin has tried to make sure I couldn't negotiate it by revoking talk-page access for bogus reasons and with a disingenuous summary. Yes, a year was excessive, though I suppose Robin was right that if I were not going to return it wouldn't matter. I might, after all, so I am inclined to ask for the lifting of the block or at very least of the unjustified extension of it (to confusingly revoke talk page access while it still says I should post on this talk page during the block to appeal).

• "[S]ometimes we encourage people to do things that save everyone time"? Blocking me for not editing exactly the way you like isn't "encouragement", it's ruthless enforcement. "Everyone" isn't saved any time by editing a particular way. Being forced to edit your way costs me time and peace of mind by its very nature. Editing my way costs seemingly two or three admin-editors some very tiny bit of time, rarely, and only because of how they've chosen to do change-review and to be notified of changes (and who react as if they think of changes as some tedious hassle rather than the content being worked on – missing the forest for the trees). Nevertheless, I started shifting my editing patters (long after AKB's warning which Robin et al. seem to have treated as if ignored and want to drag up again as if it was "news" at the time of the block). What was ignored was my effort to shift toward AKB's and Robin's writing habits. "Comply or else! Nah, let's just get to 'or else' right now, since we had a secret In-Crowd meeting and decided we just don't like you" is what this all comes off as.

• My editnotice "reads as a giant 'f*** you' to anyone who has any objections"? Then you didn't actually read it, you're just knee-jerk reacting to the fact that someone dares to disagree with some vaguely defined dogma. My edit notice is a plea to stop obsessing about one's personal convenience at the cost of better content and of a community that invites editors instead of drives them off. The edit notice is not "ignoring anyone's concerns", it's directly addressing them and whether they are appropriate concerns to be bringing (and there's that "anyone" stuff again; two or so admins out of our entire editorial base isn't what "anyone"/"everyone" implies, and we all know that). Look at it this way: If you're a bus driver and you just hate it that you have to stop every four blocks and pick up various dawdling and annoying individuals, because it's just such a time sink and it'd be way more efficient just to go from one end point to the other, having made people go to one of them and then filling the bus up there ... then, well, you need to find another job. There are other admins who can patrol new changes. And there are other admin things to do for people who are temperamentally unsuited to patrolling new changes. It's not a "f*** you", it's a "please reconsider why you are here, what this site is for, what community it serves and will build, all of the editors' and readers' needs not just yours, and whether your administrative behavior is helping the project grow and shine, or just making you feel important or satisfying an urge to impose order and rules where they are not actually needed." Humans do have a tendency to do that, and it's a tendency that, when not suppressed, is often the death of projects over the long run. (Entire books have been written on the organizational life-cycle, and the subject is a good thing to get familiar with.) The edit notice is not "anything but polite and courteous"; it's studiously logical and grounded in purpose, human behavior, time-management, community-building, organizational process, etc. If you or anyone just can't stand being disagreed with and are offended that someone doesn't consider your administrivia to be earth-shaking, you're simply a member of the wrong species. Humans don't like being ordered around for unimportant reasons, and they especially don't like being brow-beaten to comply after they've raised objections that have been completely ignored.

• All that said, I'd've been happy to just delete the editnotice, but no one asked me to, nor did an admin just do it for alleged policy reasons. (Why? Oh yeah, because it doesn't actually transgress any policies!) Several editors just kept personally pestering me, refusing to substantively respond to anything, and then blocking me for no legit reason. It just comes off as hostile, in an especially officious and dismissive vein. If you think I'm being unreasonably argumentative or grumpy about all this, consider how you'd feel in my shoes, especially given all the bogus and projective and exaggeratory accusations up there. You don't have some magical right to receive smiles and hugs when you ad hominem at people over process-wonky micromanagement of their participation. It pisses people off, and well all know that.

• Side points: Of course the edit notice isn't some kind of proof against an admin leaving a notice they feel policy justifies, and I never suggested it could be. Do I seem like I've had a lobotomy? LOL. The point of it is to discourage hassling other editors over trivial, momentary personal peeves when the actual content was improved. And I have no idea why there's an entire paragraph up there about admin templates and templating procedure. Does anyone care what template I was delivered? The issue is whether it makes sense to treat editing and writing processes that differ from one's own as transgressions to try to stop and punish. So, yes, "find something other to do", I.e., make better decisions than user-harassment over bureaucracy and some extra seconds spent reviewing three changes instead of one when they resolve to exactly the same content. The fact that a policy technically empowers you to leave some kind of annoying warning box doesn't mean it's always the best good idea, especially if you're not hearing a thing that editor is saying. "Can" and "must" are not synonyms, and the admins at this site claim much more individual-judgement leeway than average, so they can't have it both ways. Policies are not forcing your hand. The fact that a cabal of staff on Discord want to issue a block which doesn't actually comply with the blocking policy doesn't mean it's a good idea for admins to issue one, then double-down on it with blatant falsehoods about that editor's objection to this treatment. Look, this is not elementary school and we do not need to be behaviorally indoctrinated, nor to get our butts paddled for sassing the teacher. No one at this site signed up for that kind of in loco parentis treatment. Moving on, there isn't any reason for any of that material up there to dwell on me having archived a notice after receiving it. It has nothing at all to do with any of this (I wasn't aware of the strange "scarlet letter" policy, and when the notice was restored, I left it there for the requisite time as instructed. It's entirely a non-issue – yet another hand-waving distraction from the things that actually matter here.)

• I have an "apparent attitude of entitlement that [I] 'should' be autopatrolled"? Where the hell is this coming from? I requested autopatrolled because it's the no. 1 most common MediaWiki solution to keeping established editors' minor changes from being flagged for tedious review. You're spinning this, in a very misleading way, as if I were campaigning for user rights I'm not entitled to, to grab for power and evade scrutiny. Balderdash. I simply suggested it in passing as an obvious and entirely wiki-normal solution (of which it certainly can be one, or other wikis wouldn't do it) to certain admins feeling regular, competent editors hit their review logs too often for their personal taste. It's certainly more practical than trying to get someone to change their entire way they go about editing and writing, but I tried to comply with your demands anyway, just to make you all happy, and got slapped around for it instead. Aside from Alpha Kenny Buddy's nonsense comments in changing my block, I think this "apparent attitude of entitlement" crap is the most offensive part of this pile of straw men and arguments to authority and ridicule. In actual reality, I was told that autopatrolled works differently here and generally isn't used as it is on Wikipedia, etc., and I accepted that at face value. It's really inappropriate to dress that up in a fake bogey-man costume to try to make me look bad.

• "[G]enerally snarky responses"? Since when is anyone here the Personality, Mood, and Communications Style Police? Have you actually read any of Community Portal? This is just more double-standard stuff. If you're part of a select group of old-timers here, anything goes, but if you're not then you'd better write exactly like how someone else wants you to, or you'll be shot out of this site with an ejector seat. My responses are actually always grounded in logic, even if I can be pressed into also being a bit emotional. I find that too often all of the substance of them is ignored by particular parties here who seemingly want to dwell on what they imagine the tone and motivation is, as if they're psychics. Well, they're not, and this medium lacks things like voice tone and facial expression, so they're basically just mistaking no-evidence assumptions in their own head for objective reality. Finally, "his snarky retired message" is another case of "terriblizing", i.e., reading into it exactly what someone want to read into it to feel justified about coming to a comment-on-the-editor-not-the-content negative conclusion. It's a simple and clear message. It wishes the project well, and makes it clear that I left because I felt hounded for reasons that appear petty and unrelated to making the site better, and which is behavior I somehow don't encounter at the other TES wiki. If you nit-pick at editors, you chase them away. This is important, and I don't get any sense that any of that is sinking in, with anyone here who has the admin bit. I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

In closing, I am appealing the block, and doing so in the good faith of having sat out almost all of it. I was already shifting my editing patterns to comply with the demands, and would continue to do so despite strongly disagreeing with the validity of the rationale for them. I'll also take steps to moderate my tone. I've had a lot to say in this but believe I've done so without crossing a single policy line, and my intent is working through these matters to better mutual understanding. As several of you will hopefully remember, my editing pattern here was just showing up and doing the work, with very little interest in talk page argumentation and other "treat this like a debate forum" activity. I very early on tried to get the style guide to shift, and did not meet with success, and have generally avoided policy discussion since then (I get enough of that at Wikipedia!), other than proposing some clarifications, including to some categories and to some of the namespacing of DLCs. Really, I just care about the content. I'm not certain yet I want to resume regular editing here, not without some further discussion. I'm not fishing for apologies from people or seeking to have a protracted debate; I'm interested in attitudes and awareness and actions shifting (including mine where necessary, as long as I get heard, too); I'm not into platitudes or gestures. I'm also not actually angry with Robin for that post with its various dodges and mischaracterizations, nor even with Alpha Kenny Buddy and Tib for their unjustifiable slights. That offended, but I don't hold grudges, even if I will analyze and refute the accusations and try to get back to substantive matters. People aren't robots, and we do react emotionally sometimes; I understand that as much as I exhibit it. :-) I just haven't received much in the way of understanding in return. I have over 15 years of frequent experience on wikis, including in highly contentious topic areas, and am fine with re-opening lines of communication and letting bygones be bygones, or I would not be able to do that work. It's really difficult, however, to work through such disagreements when I'm effectively locked in a basement where no one can hear me. If no one wants to substantively address any of this, then I guess I'll take that as a sign to continue working on other sites instead of this one. I would appreciate not being blatantly censored again, however. It sends a terrible message to other editors about whether their treatment by admins will be fair or even has any form of recourse. (Darklocq via VPN) 17:26, 29 November 2019 (GMT)

Since nobody else has chosen to respond to this yet, I will. I would suggest that if you ever need to appeal a block in the future, you go through Wikipedia's Guide to appealing blocks before posting. Going through the main points on that page, you failed nearly all of them. In particular, you show no evidence in this response that you understand why you were blocked, despite several people above having tried to tell you and to help you; instead of taking that on board, you label them personal attacks. You do not provide a good reason as to why you should be unblocked before your time is up. You most definitely did not stick to the point—specifically, sub-point #1 in that section of the page: be brief. As for "talk about yourself, not others", you failed on that count completely. "Agree to follow Community Customs" is something you have demonstrated in the past, but very often only after vociferous objections and lengthy, argumentative posts that cover minutiae in so much depth that nobody is willing to go through it all. You use that process to, in effect, edit disruptively, as Tib suggested and tried to encourage you not to do. I notice that many of these issues have also been covered in your RfAs on Wikipedia, and yet you have clearly failed to incorporate them into your wiki editing, even after 12 and 9 more years of working on wikis. I consider this quite concerning.

What's more, you did all of this by evading your block, despite numerous guidelines telling you very specifically that that's never a good idea, and not to do it. While we may not have an e-mail ticket system in place here on UESP, every active staff member has their e-mail enabled (or, since I see now that your e-mail privileges are disabled, you could have contacted administrators on Discord or contacted the site owner). It would not have been difficult to ask an administrator to unblock your talk page access so you could post. I don't guarantee that an admin would necessarily have granted that request, but very likely, they would at least have talked about it with other admins, and perhaps even given you some tips about things you could focus on rather than lambasting everyone else and ignoring your own actions.

So, having said all that, I can't see any reason to unblock your account early. Some staff suggested that your block should be re-started for your evasion. I'm personally neither here nor there on that issue, so I won't change the length of your block, but neither will I object to it if someone else believes it's appropriate. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 05:15, 1 December 2019 (GMT)

The block appears to have expired without further incident. I don't use Discord, and wasn't aware of this site using it much less it being some kind of appeal venue. This page said to appeal here; changing the block notice after the fact to finally say I shouldn't've seems disingenuous, but I guess it's a moot point. I don't know what to make of being browbeaten for over a year with "you better learn this place doesn't work like Wikipedia, or else" badgering, followed by you repeatedly trying to rely on WP policies and procedures when it suits you. It has that WP:WINNING feel to it, and I'm really not interested. I might have considered coming back, but it's just creepy as hell that you've been doxxing me at WP just to try to win an argument here, trying to bait me into responding against your smears again before the block ran out, to justify the block being extended. I have better things to do that play silly games like this. I had some faintly reviving interest in working on content here again, but you've killed it off for good now. If you really want to treat WP policies as binding on this site, see WP:OUTING, a policy under which you'd be indefinitely blocked and certainly desysopped. But they're not binding here, and we all know that. PS: For the record, I've had no interest in adminship at WP since 2012 (I've seen what it usually does to the editorial productivity and often the temperament of those who take the role on), and have repeatedly turned down others' offers to nominate me. But that has nothing to do with this site, and never did. 107.161.81.66 (Darklocq via VPN) 05:40, 29 December 2019 (GMT)

Also for the record, there was no outing involved here. First off, I have posted no personal information about you as outlined in the outing section on WP (nor, in fact, any personal information at all, since I don't name your WP account). But, more to the point, you outed your WP identity yourself in point #4 of this discussion, where you said "I wrote those WP templates in the first place". I'm fairly certain this is not the first time I've made reference to your WP account during a discussion, though at this point, I couldn't tell you which discussion(s) it was mentioned in, as it was quite some time ago. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 07:48, 29 December 2019 (GMT)

Arbitrary break

(←) I revised both my edit-notice and "retirement" message per earlier complaints about them being "sarky", not that there's any policy against sarcasm. I've finally gotten around to installing Discord again (I'd thrown out all IM apps a long time ago for productivity reasons), so if that's the place to air this matter out, I'm game for that, though I'm unlikely to make another attempt. I've been trying to reach some common ground on some of these matters since 2017! I quoted you, RobinHood70, in my revised edit-notice, since it gets right to the heart of the entire matter: basic understanding and decency extended to you in your adminhood is not being extended to me as a random peon.

Anyway, I absolutely did not identify myself in the edit you refer to. I mentioned having done specific work at another site, and you went there and dug up the username history over there, then used it against me (after trawling through years of it, looking for "dirt" all the way back to at least 2007! WTF?!) on this site, in completely unrelated discussions like the one above. It's pure ad hominem character-assassination, and a weirdly prodigious effort to avoid taking an editor at good-faith face value and to instead try to relate their participation here in a really personal way to whatever you can find off-site. This exact behavior pattern (tying an on-wiki user ID to an off-wiki one to cast aspersions about on-wiki behavior or viewpoint) is half the reason WP:OUTING policy was created, and is the more common-problem half. (The other was outright doxxing – the releasing of actual personally-identifiable information like real names and contact info. You seem to be under the impression that OUTING is only about the real-names half, but that impression is simply incorrect, as plenty of people blocked for outing on WP would warn you.) If you're going to treat en.Wikipedia behavioral policies as applicable here, then understand them. Or don't try to cite them as applying here, then dodge and say they don't apply here or don't mean what they mean when someone tries to apply one to you. You can't have it both ways. And yes, I did notice you attempting to use my editing history at the other site as a weapon against me here in a previous discussion; I let it slide that time as a momentary gaffe. But it wasn't one, was it? This is not stuff we expect out of an admin, at any wiki.

It especially pains me because I was getting along better and more productively with you than with a couple of other people here, before this drama conflagration. It feels like you just turned on me out of tribal territoriality or something. I had already rebutted what I needed to (whether anyone cared to respond or not), and repeatedly indicated an intent to comply with the demands made on me about my editing rate; that could have been the end of it. So why escalate? Declining the unblock request could have been done in a single sentence. And the block was silly in the first place; I had already left, wasn't actually violating any policies, and there thus was no preventative rationale. It's actually weird to me, because you came into this seemingly without a strong opinion, and at the behest of other admins. It's as if you're going through these contortions not out of principle (go ahead – show us how I violated which policies and when), but out of a "defend admins' and other old-hands' judgement at all costs" thing. I got verbally attacked with demonstrable falsehoods by several people in the thread above, before my departure and that silly "burn him in effigy while he's gone" block, and you've simply joined the dogpile instead of retaining the detachment you began with. Other editors above have even taken my side on the general matter. It's a mostly admins vs. non-admins split. That's "interesting".

To anyone, not just RobinHood70 in particular: Without some resolution – which I've been seeking since 2017 on some matters and since 2018 on others – this environment just feels too abusive and evasively defensive of that abuse for me to work here. I've already covered exactly why in sufficient detail in previous posts.) A year off has not made it better; I don't even like coming here as an anonymous reader any more because of the stuff above this post (this reaction is actually the reason I'm trying one last time to get to some understanding, some reason to not consider myself successfully hounded away). I have participated and still participate in all sorts of online volunteer-built projects, and every single one of them has been at least an order of magnitude more pleasant than UESP (even open-source projects with a single "benevolent dictator" gatekeeper, believe it or not). There's obviously a subjective personality thing going on here. I'm not refusing to abide by any policies; some of you simply don't like me nor my questioning the rationale for some rules and the sometimes pointedly selective enforcement of them. From my perspective it looks like office politics at its worst: power, control, obedience, enforcement, and brown-nosing for their own sake. I don't play those games. If you all want to pull FIFO on me, I'm fine with the FO part, since it's the project that needs the editors, not the other way around. Lose enough of us, and those of you who remain will figure that out eventually. Or, you know, some effort could be made to understand my concerns, recognize that I've already repeatedly conceded your own, and treat me like the constructive editor I have been instead of like some vandal. Give me a reason to come back and some assurance that the incivility toward me will not resume. No more false accusations, threats for things that don't actually violate policies, digging up info about my history at other projects to try to demean me here, etc. You all already know such things aren't right, so I don't need to list out more of them.
— Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 08:38, 16 February 2020 (GMT)

thanks for the critique and useful summary of the morrowind levelling page in talk. sorry that staff seem to be overly-concerned with busywork. 76.20.50.22 19:32, 15 December 2023 (UTC)