Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-09-04/Humour
Local man halfway through rude reply no longer able to recall why he hates other editor
VILLAGE PUMP — Lamenting his lack of diligence, longtime Wikipedia editor Hubert Glockenspiel, 42, told reporters that halfway through writing a response to a comment, he has completely forgotten why he hated the guy whose signature he recognized.
"Originally I had been planning to oppose whatever stupid proposal he was making, or support his siteban, or whatever," said Glockenspiel. "You know, on account of the fact that he's repeatedly demonstrated himself to be an arrogant incompetent moron, or an incorrigible POV warrior, or a disingenuous cheat who routinely misrepresents both sources and policy. But then I couldn't remember which of these things he was, or what he had done, or why. You know, now that I think of it, maybe he was one of those damn deletionists. Or worse, one of those damn anti-deletionists."
Glockenspiel's attempts to jog his memory proved fruitless, as neither the guy's userpage nor the guy's top hundred or so contributions turned up anything obvious. Even external tools were no help; an Xtools list of his most-edited pages, a Startist list of all the discussion threads he had opened, and an afdstats analysis of his deletion votes all depicted a completely normal editor with no visible agenda or obsession.
"I cannot for the life of me remember why I hate this guy," Glockenspiel said. "I can't open a proposal for a siteban, because someone might ask me to give actual evidence, but I'm sure as heck going to support it if someone else does." He added that he had consulted WP:CONFUSED to make sure he hadn't mixed him up with anyone else having a similar name.
Despite a failure to recall anything about the circumstances that gave rise to his seething disdain, Glockenspiel reiterated a commitment to keep hating.
"Well, I don't decide to hate somebody's guts for no reason. It had to have been something."
At press time, Glockenspiel was trying to find the hard drive with his old IRC logs from during the Esperanza MfD, in the hopes that he might discover a long-forgotten flamewar.
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