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.

After nearly three years, he still couldn't be bothered to do things the right way.

I was surprised that I had to bring this to your attention given how long you've been editing the wiki, but I checked your contribution history and discovered that you'd never actually created a work page before. Churchill's Secret Agents: The New Recruits is missing just about every bit of markup that is used to make an ATT page look and function correctly.

Don't worry, I've gone in and added everything the page should have had from the start that it was missing. I've also broken out some material into a subpage to cut down the Wall of Text thing it had going there.

In the future, please use the Page Creator (which can be found in the "Troping Utilities" section of the menu that runs along the left edge of every page. This will set you up with a skeleton page with all the necessary markup for a proper ATT page.

An example with insufficient context.

When you said "Marshall Ney", did you mean Marshall Michel Ney, from 18th century France?

Yes

Yes, thank you.

You probably want to fix the spelling, then. "Marshall Ney" (two Ls) is a lawyer in Arkansas. "Marshal Ney" (one L) was the French military commander.

And add the link I provided above, if you haven't already.

Tried to direct his obsessions to a Trope Workshop page that could make use of them.

There's a trope candidate in the Workshop -- Preparing for the Last War -- that it seems to me could profit from your focus on military topics. If you haven't already checked it out, could you take a look and see if there's anything you could add?

Thanks!

Notice that a change was reverted for being irrelevant to the page.

I just reverted your addition to "Christianity Is Catholic". The text that you added has nothing to do with the trope as it is described on "Christianity Is Catholic".

This is not the first time that I have had to do this in the last three months. Please note that "Inserting nonsense/gibberish into pages" is grounds for a tempban.

Please acknowledge that you have read this by replying here.

@jason taylor @Labster @GethN7 @Looney Toons @QuestionableSanity @DocColress @LulzKiller @SelfCloak

You have edited the wiki since I posted the above. You did not respond here, despite my sending you a ping to bring the post to your attention.

Your account is blocked for one day in order to get your attention.

I read over the deleted content, and I concur with Rob. If it has NOTHING to do with the trope page in question, don't post it where it is not relevant.

What it says in the subject.

I see you used the term "RoF" on Cool Guns/Sniper Rifles without explaining it. I think I selected the meaning yuo wanted from the disambiguation page for RoF - but if you meant the WWI fighter aircraft game, please correct it.

In the future, please do not use abbreviations at all without defining them.

@Jason taylor @Looney Toons

Notice that a change was reverted for being irrelevant to the page.

I just reverted your addition to "Meaningful Name/Real Life‎‎". The text that you added has nothing to do with the trope as it is described on "Meaningful Name".

It was also filled with spelling and grammar errors.

Also, you used at least one word incorrectly. You said that three different countries had a genealogical claim to the English Channel. Since genealogy is the study of ancestry, that would require the Channel to have had a parent. Bodies of water do not have relatives.

And it wasn't a subversion. "English Channel" is a possessive name, which does not subvert the meaning of the name.

Jason defends his god-given right to respond instead of repair, and thus demonstrate his intellectual superiority to someone on TV Tropes who wouldn't ever see his cleverness.

I've just deleted your recent addition to this page, because it was a response to the point under which it was placed rather than an expansion/correction. Please see our policy page Repair, Don't Respond. If you're going to put a kilobyte of text into the page, use it to make the example correct, rather than tell the original writer why he's wrong.

The original entry was wrong and the only way to repair it is to delete the whole thing.

That's still different from what you did, which was basically start a discussion in the page. If it's wrong, delete/correct it. Don't debate it.

How about, "These were different Turks" and be done with it?

Jason, you did it again. Please read ATT:REPAIR. Fix the example, don't add a sub-bullet point.

You're being deliberately obtuse, aren't you, Jason? Do we really need to start bringing up tempbans again when the solution is simple?

Do you wish to endorse information that can be confirmed to be erroneous?

Your question is answered in the text at ATT:REPAIR. Please read that page.

Very well, though it is only fair that the Tropper knows what happened. But then that is typical.

Even if this weren't against the rules, it's still an ineffective way to notify the troper who originally made the edit. If you have something you'd like to discuss with the troper, start a thread on their Talk page. And try to keep it civil.

I also suggest you take a look at the latest revision of Media Research Failure/Film, and observe how it corrects the erroneous information without resorting to calling out the original contributor. Please try to model your future edits off of this example.

For future reference, here is a link to QuestionableSanity's edit.

This is an excellent example of Repair, Don't Respond. Jason, this is what you should have done to begin with.

The point is making the entry correct, not demonstrating that you know better than the original writer of the passage. Correct the text. Do not wave a flag and shout "hey, I'm smarter than you."

EDIT: And if you delete the passage again after I've just restored it, you will get a week's tempban for edit-warring with an admin.

In a related matter (in that it relates to both the wiki's Style Guide - which Looney Toons brought to your attention nine months ago - and the suggestions against Natter), I see that you added both a second-level point and a third-level point at the same time as a Justifying Edit in this revision of the page that Looney Toons reverted - in short, you were arguing with yourself. This looks extremely sloppy.

Please consider yourself to be On Notice. Despite the workload we have, the moderators will be reviewing all of your edits for the foreseeable future.

@Labster @GethN7 @Looney Toons @QuestionableSanity @DocColress @LulzKiller @SelfCloak

What it says on the tin. He never did get it 100% right.

Jason --

Since I just dinged someone else earlier with a threat of a tempban for this, to be fair I have to share the pain. Your recent edit on Even Evil Has Loved Ones included improper markup for a work name -- no link, no italics -- and had an episode name in italics when it should have been in double quotes. This is not the first time I've had to clean up after you on something like this. In this particular case, we have a page for Magnum, P.I. that you could have very easily linked to simply by letting the autocomplete find it for you. With or without a link it should have been in italics -- a common omission in your recent contributions. Also, in this particular case, while we don't yet have a page for the work, we do have an established title/link for the page to be used when it is created: [[Magnum P.I. (2018 series)]] (The new series doesn't have a comma in the title, interestingly enough.)

In any case, you've been very sloppy in this regard, and as I said, to be fair to the other user whom I warned about this very issue, I need to warn you that future markup issues like this will merit an "attention getting" tempban. As Geth noted elsewhere today, we don't have a very large admin team, and we can't be spending all our time cleaning up after contributors. We require user contributions to adhere to our minimum style requirements.

-- Looney Toons, Admin

CC: @Labster, @GethN7, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @DocColress, @LulzKiller, @SelfCloak

This episode was on the Magnum reboot not on the old one. Has a new thread for the reboot been made yet?

Furthermore that episode was not the pilot. The reboot has been going on almost a complete season already and that particular episode is several episodes in. I do not know what I could have done to lead you to believe it was the pilot.

...I do not recall how I ended up thinking it was the pilot episode; I have corrected that.

As I noted above, we do not have a page for the reboot series yet, but we do have a proper syntax for the link (and thus the page title), which is [[Magnum P.I. (2018 series)]]. This was used in the markup I inserted.

Sorry about all the confusion. And sorry that I messed it up. The fact is I did not know the proper syntax for a show which did not yet have a page, and was simply guessing.

Pointing out two of his most common mistakes: to/too and then/than confusion.

Two things, one of which was in my big list of things to watch for, below. From your recent changes to Fair for Its Day (bolding mine):

The instinct for that is to fundamental to eradicate without a brutal purge everywhere, and China makes a big deal of clannishness, and Confucianism. Moreover the examinations sometimes had a weakness for what might be termed "cultural studies" courses rather then things like law or statecraft...

The bolded "to" is another place where you need to use "too" instead. In these places, "too" means "to a higher degree than is desirable, permissible, or possible; excessively."

"Then" is only used to reference relative times. If you're not referring to anything related to time, you're using the wrong word. For a comparison like you've written above, you use "than". Think of the old line from the Cold War:

Better dead than Red -- Expresses a political preference, one rather than the other.
Better dead then Red -- Indicates the order in which you'd like to be both.

Did I spell it that way? Thank's for the correction.

Bringing the "then/than" issue back to your attention, Jason -- your recent addition to One Riot, One Ranger had three of these errors all in the same 33-word stretch. Nor is it alone; then/than is still one of your more common errors that we have to correct.