• 54 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2024

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  • Actually: I changed my mind. I’m going to give this a real response.

    I didn’t treat you like a child. I explained what was going on, and you seem to have a mentality where someone who’s explaining something to you that you don’t know is “treating you like a child” or “being a pedantic asshole.”

    That’s entirely on you. Most people, once they reach adulthood, are able to listen to something even if they don’t already know it, able to learn from the world. I was a little bit snarky talking to you initially, but then I felt bad when I realized you just didn’t know how Wikipedia worked, and were operating on some bad assumptions, but what you were thinking made actually perfect logical sense. Go back and read my “Got it, that does make sense” message. I read your message, I got where you were coming from, and like I said, I realized you just didn’t know something, and I tried to help you understand it.

    You have to let go of that mentality where someone who’s telling you something you didn’t already know is offensive, and you have to try to seize the upper hand and try to explain something back to them, or decide they’re being a jerk or something or it needs to be a hostile interaction. That’s going to make it impossible for you to learn. It also makes a lot of interactions more stressful than they need to be.

    I realize that this whole message is explaining more stuff to you, which you probably won’t react well to. But like I said, that’s on you. If you were willing to absorb this, it would help you.



  • Yes! That is an extremely productive attitude when someone tries to explain to you how Wikipedia works, and then when you seem to miss the point, gets a little more pointed about it in hopes that you will pick it up and realize that you missed something, and learn a useful nugget of information relevant to our current discussion.

    It seems you’re happy with how much you already know, in life, because you are committed to not learning anything else beyond your present level of achievement. Congratulations! I hope this approach serves you well, and I look forward to seeing how much and how far you can get with it.




  • Got it, that does make sense. You should know, though, that Wikipedia on the content side is a different thing from Wikipedia on the talk page side.

    People can have nice things to say about a source in their Wikipedia page about the source, on the content side, while there’s still a consensus on the talk page side that the source is unreliable and shouldn’t be used for sourcing claims about other matters on other Wikipedia pages. The big table that I and someone else linked to are good summaries of the consensus on the talk page side, which is what’s most relevant here.










  • Interestingly enough, Wikipedia’s sourcing list counts Wikipedia as unreliable. It says you need to find information somewhere else so as not to create a self-referential loop. You have to justify it from a solid source that’s outside the system.

    MBFC says that MBFC is incredibly reliable, and incidentally also tends to mark sources down if their biases don’t agree with MBFC’s existing biases, which are significant. It needs no outside sources, because it’s already reliable.

    Good stuff.