Topic on User talk:Jason taylor

In which a simple request once more to improve the quality of his contributions led to the rediscovery of just how recalcitrant he's been for three years, and turned into a warning before a permanent ban. Jason chose not to reply to our final attempts to reach out to him, and thus was permanently blocked from editing the wiki.

...but I've frequently been distracted before I get around to it.

First, thank you for your many contributions to the wiki over the past few years. Seriously.

However... your contributions almost always need a great deal of fixing. Punctuation, usage, grammar, word choice, sometimes spelling, generally ignoring our Style Guide... your contributions can be terribly opaque and unintelligible at times.

I have personally gotten into a bad habit of simply cleaning up after you and not bringing it to your attention; if it were possible to search the change log on edit summary I'd suggest you go look just how many edits are labeled "Post-Jason cleanup", but sadly you can't search on the summary. I started doing so in the hopes that you would actually notice that there's someone following behind you and fixing all your errors, and that it would shame you into improving your contributions. After well over a year of this, though, it doesn't seem to have worked. So I've decided to address you directly.

Please improve the quality of your contributions. Learn how punctuation can eliminate ambiguity from a sentence or improve its readability. Read our Style Guide; italicize work names, use proper markup, and please stop dropping new examples at random wherever you happen to think of them instead of at the end of the section as we request.

Please consider this something of an official heads-up. While we're not going to jump on you for your next edit, if we don't see some kind of progress in your contributions in the near future, we may be forced to take more drastic action than just bringing the matter to your attention. Per our page How We Do Bans Around Here, one of the grounds for a tempban after a warning is "Refusing to learn from honest mistakes, or repeatedly making the same honest mistake after it's been pointed out." This is not a warning, not yet. But I am pointing out a series of honest mistakes that need addressing. Do please look into addressing them sooner rather than later.

-- Looney Toons, admin

CC: @Labster, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative, @SelfCloak, @GethN7

@Jason taylor: Okay, you've edited since I wrote the above, and the passage you added suffered from the same issues as so many of your other edits. I'm going to have to request that you reply to this thread and acknowledge our attempt to communicate with you. Failure to respond will result in a short non-punitive "attention-getter" block, the length of which will be set to inconvenience you enough that you will reply, but which will be lifted as soon as you do reply.

-- Looney Toons, admin

CC: @Labster, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative, @SelfCloak, @GethN7

A "Thank" is not a response. Please reply in words in this thread.

-- Looney Toons, admin

MOD

@Jason taylor, I see that you have edited the wiki after the moderator request above, but you have again failed to acknowledge this issue in public. Repeatedly ignoring a mod is grounds for a temporary ban from editing All The Tropes. Disagreeing with a mod is okay; ignoring the mods altogether isn't. Since you have not replied in this thread where we can see the reply, I can only assume that you are ignoring @Looney Toons.

I have no choice but to give you a temporary block to editing. Judging by your edit history, a one-week block should be sufficient to get your attention. You will not be blocked from editing this page - once you reply in this thread to Looney Toons' satisfaction, the block will be lifted.

-robkelk, admin

cc: @Labster @GethN7 @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak

The reason I did not reply is that I did not understand and definitely did not know what to say back. As for banning, that is your choice.

I also as it happens do not spend all my time logged into this place and cannot see every message by which someone wishes to complain.

If you wish me to do something specifically tell me. Because this is a large site and a lot of entries. In the meantime I have a whole internet to deal with and intend to get back when I feel like it. Or not as the case may be.

@Jason taylor:

I'm sorry, but that is simply not a believable response.

"I did not understand and definitely did not know what to say back." How hard is "I'm going to have to request that you reply to this thread and acknowledge our attempt to communicate with you" to understand? What parts of it give you difficulty? You open up a new reply and you type in, "I've read what you've sent me. I understand what you're requesting. I'll try to do better."

"I cannot see every message." This is bogus. The wiki has an alert system -- when someone on the wiki mentions or directly contacts you, the bell and inbox icons on the top line of every page will turn red and blue respectively and display the number of alerts (bell) and direct messages (inbox) you have -- and they will stay lit up and displayed until you go and review them. If you "cannot see" all the messages addressed to you here it is because you are deliberately ignoring them. And ignoring a wiki mod when they are trying to discuss a matter with you is a ticket to a permanent ban.

"If you wish me to do something specifically tell me." This tells me you didn't even bother to read my initial message in this thread, because it lays out exactly what we wish you to do. Because you've shown we can't exactly trust you to scroll up half a page and read it now, I'll just reiterate: We're tired of cleaning up anywhere from two to ten basic grammar, punctuation and usage errors (not to mention the random violation of our style guidelines) in almost every contribution you make, and we want you to raise the general quality of your contributions to something that would be acceptable in a tenth-grade English classroom. If that is beyond your abilities, let us know.

Regardless, write a message in a new reply to this thread and use actual words to say that you have read this entire message (and the other messages in this thread) and you understand what we're saying to you.

-- Looney Toons, admin

CC: @Labster, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative, @SelfCloak, @GethN7

"The wiki has an alert system -- when someone on the wiki mentions or directly contacts you, the bell and inbox icons on the top line of every page will turn red and blue respectively and display the number of alerts (bell) and direct messages (inbox) you have -- and they will stay lit up and displayed until you go and review them."

On the off-chance that you are not aware of what they look like, here are two screenshots. Obviously, your screen will display your UserID, not mine. Unread alerts and no unread alerts

Those are what is shown when I am logged on. I regularly log off.

As for not understanding, if all you desire is a reply I have replied. If you desire urgently that I correct something specifically I need to have that pointed out. "You need to improve" does not tell me of any specific action to do until I am making another entry. When someone calls attention to me I wish for something more than "everything" which besides being quite rude tells me very little. How hard is that for you to understand? Why do you think somehow replying to you is going to satisfy your desires.

As for whether you wish to raise me up to something I was not aware that this was the purpose of this forum. And if you wish to raise me up to the level of a tenth grade English classroom, I am not aware that such words habitually used in this forum are normally used in tenth grade English classrooms and I somehow tolerate it. 

If what you want me to do is say I will try to improve, that is imbecilic. I can try but replying to you will not help me to do so. If you want me to defend myself I need to know what was attacked. Why do you think you are insulted by getting no more than a thank for what are frankly nagging and continually insulting messages?

@Jason taylor, @Looney Toons wrote six paragraphs in his original post in this thread. I see a clear, concise, and specific list of requests in the fifth paragraph.

I do not see the word "urgently" or any of its synonyms used until you used it just now.

I echo Looney Toons' request that you read the messages in this thread. The wording of your posts imply that you have not yet done that - or, if you have done that, that you do not understand what you have read.

(As for not seeing the icons when you are logged off, I point out that you need to be logged on in order to edit.)

Rob added his comment above while I was composing this reply, and despite his very concise response, I didn't want to waste the work of the hour and some. Because you apparently want everything spelled out for you, I've gone through your contribution history and catalogued the kinds of things I routinely have had to fix while playing janitor behind you. In just the last two months or so, I found the following:

Grammar, usage and other basic communication errors:

• Run-on and excessively complex sentences, exacerbated by a lack of internal punctuation.
  • Ironically, you are also prone to the occasional sentence fragment.
• When you do punctuate it is often insufficient or incorrectly used.
  • Related to that, poorly-formed and/or poorly set off parenthetical phrases.
• Frequent word choice errors. You are especially prone to a confusion between "to", "too" and "two".
  • A good example from about a month ago: you used "sapience" (the state or quality of being sapient) where you meant "sapients" (thinking beings)
• Occasional but baffling spelling errors, such as "Holloween" for "Halloween".
  • You also have repeatedly misspelled "manual" (a book) as "manuel" (a Spanish guy).
• Misuse of an apostrophe in forming plurals (the classic Greengrocer's Apostrophe).
• You exclusively misuse "it's" as a possessive; it's not, it's a contraction meaning "it is", "it has" or the like. I have also come across you making the exact opposite mistake, using the possessive "its" where the contraction should be.
• You have a tendency to reference historical figures by simply mentioning their last name, without providing a link (internal or external), as if you expect people to know who they are automatically.

Wiki style errors:

• You consistently ignore the requirement that new examples be added to the end of their relevant sections. As far as we can determine you simply drop them in wherever your cursor happens to be.
• You routinely fail to italicize work names; conversely, you italicize things that should not be italicized, particularly episode names for TV shows.
• In the few cases where you have added new sections to trope pages, you have simply added them at the end of the page rather than insert them in their proper position alphabetically.
• Inexplicable choices for linking. Leaving aside using redirects instead of actual trope names, you've done things like potholing The Odyssey to Homer instead of linking to its page. You also apparently pick links at random when more than one work share a name.
• You have used ALL-CAPS where you should have used italics.

I expect that if I were to spend another hour or two digging through your history I could expand this list substantially. The point here is that you have a lot of room for improvement, and you should realize asking you to improve means I think that you are capable of it. But if you think that asking you to improve your ability to write and communicate while you're contributing to a wiki about writing and communication is insulting, then you've got a fundamental conflict with our core mission.

You have a tendency to reference historical figures by simply mentioning their last name, without providing a link (internal or external), as if you expect people to know who they are automatically.

I was not aware of this. Congratulations; you've caused a new wiki cleanup template to be created.

In a general note to the other mods as well as Jason himself, I have for the first time in quite a while (re)read the entirety of his talk page, on which this thread resides. I had quite forgotten that we have been asking Jason to address these issues for nearly three years now, and initially had to deal with him ban evading multiple times while he was temporary blocked for refusing to engage with us. (During which he used the exact same excuses -- and a few even lamer ones -- as he employed earlier in this thread.)

I had also forgotten that I had given him an even longer list of very specific requests for improvement over two years ago, a list that includes almost every item above and more. Looking over this history, I see that he has only addressed those issues that were necessary to escape a permanent ban. And we were so grateful for that crumb tossed us that we stopped pressuring him over the rest.

I'm forced, after reviewing this history, to suggest to the other administrative staff that perhaps we've wasted too much time trying to coax Jason into improvement. If he hasn't been willing to up his game over the past two years, it's unlikely he's going to now. And he has proven all too willing to play games with moderation staff in the past. I move that this is his last chance. If he wants to play games and maintain his god-given right to be as sloppy and ungrammatic as he wants in the face of our requests, I say we write him off entirely. It will be a shame -- we have such a small user base that losing any regularly-contributing member (even one most of whose contributions need fixing) is a loss we can ill afford, but Jason has demonstrated more than adequately that he is not willing to cooperate. I'm moving for a permanent ban if he refuses to make any further effort to improve.

-- Looney Toons, admin

CC: @Jason taylor, @Labster, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative, @SelfCloak, @GethN7

"Refusing to learn from honest mistakes, or repeatedly making the same honest mistake after it's been pointed out" is specifically listed on All The Tropes:How We Do Bans Around Here as grounds for a warning on the first occurrence and a tempban on a repeated occurrence. He has had this warning and this temporary ban, as of 2018-05-25T12:23:04.

"Repeating an action that previously warranted a tempban" is specifically listed on All The Tropes:How We Do Bans Around Here as grounds for a permanent ban without warning on the first occurrence.

By repeatedly making the same mistakes after it's been pointed out and after having had a tempban, he is forcing a moderator to take up time that could be spent on something more important, such as cleaning up existing links to disambiguation pages or identifying the licenses that the wiki's images are used under.

I second the motion for a permanent ban.

cc @Jason taylor @Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak

As I presume Jason is lurking in the hopes that we forget about this once more, I'm going to just note that failure to engage us further on this thread will basically be seen as evidence that you plan to ignore our requests and continue as before. Which, as Rob has noted above, is grounds for a permanent ban.

If you actually enjoy editing here, Jason, this is your last chance. We'll be generous -- there's an American holiday coming up and at least half our admin staff is American, and there's a good chance you are, too. So rather than drop the hammer before Thursday, we'll give you until the end of the weekend (call it the evening of 29 November 2020) to reply in some manner and convince us that you don't deserve a permanent block. If you don't respond at all, you will be permanently banned from the wiki on Sunday night.

This is a courtesy posting.

As I post this, it is 17:04 UTC on 29 November 2020. There are less than five hours remaining for Jason - or anyone else - to make a case why his account should not be banned permanently.

It is now 00:19 UTC the day after the deadline given to jason taylor. No response has been made.

We now have no other option but to permanently block this account.

Thank you, Rob. I do fully expect him to ban evade again, by or at least try, if only so he can whine that we didn't give him chance or some other pathetic drivel intended to absolve himself of any responsibility.