Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-24894325-20190110140355

I was planning to switch back to serious things, but my points are being made/reinforced by others (thanks Imamadmad, I couldn't have put it better myself) and, if an editor who is older than me applies my admittedly harsh evaluation of one user onto them, clearly I have to apologise to this long-time editor and explain myself better.

Everyone is welcome on the wiki in general and on the forums in particular. In fact, the very existence of this thread is a testament to how seriously we treat questions and opinions of even the most novice of editors. The OP to this day has only 69 edits, of which only 14 are in the main namespace. No one has ever disregarded their concerns because of that, nor should we. While much of the discussion, unfortunately, does repeat points thoroughly discussed in preceding two threads on this topic, it is not the fault of the OP, and much new material has been provided regardless.

The above-mentioned passage from T:DISCUSS has never been intended for regular use. In fact, there are very few circumstances where its use is warranted. Certainly not for a user in their 8th year on the wiki. In fact, I will go as far as to say that as long as a user is ready to engage in the discussion and provides thoughtful output, their ideas should not be ignored.

Unfortunately, this was not the case with DW114. They came into the discussion late on, said nothing new and decided to leave in their 3rd post on the wiki, ending with something that might be a personal attack against me or disparaging remark towards the whole wiki (the context for "ranging insanity" is not clear enough). To be absolutely clear, if this remark was issued towards any user other than me, a ban for violating Tardis:No personal attacks would have been immediate. Both Shambala108 and I have blocked people for much milder expressions.

There is, therefore, no reason to take posts of this user into consideration as they've taken themselves out of consideration and as they have shown disrespect to opinions of the whole community, by calling the community decision currently in force "randomly switching to plural". Operating on "my way or highway"-paradigm, they've taken the highway voluntarily after 2 posts.

Ans still, were there anything new in their posts, I would not have invoked T:DISCUSS. As it is, they did not bring a single new argument to the table (despite claiming to have read through this and preceding discussions). The "prevalent" gender has been brought up upthread as "dominant/predominant/natural" gender. And claims that it is confusing to use "they" have both been issued multiple times before in all three threads and are useless without specific examples. Now that Shambala108 provided such an example, the discussion immediately moved on.

Closing a thread of 100+ posts as this one is soon to become is hard, and distractions like this make it only harder. Since DW114 had nothing new to say and slammed the door on saying anything ever again, the most reasonable course of actions is to ignore them, which is allowable under T:DISCUSS. And the closing admin would benefit from knowing this.

To summarise, none of the admin (including me) proposes or intends to ignore users based on their number of posts. But it can be done, when the situation warrants it, and this was one of such rare cases.