UC Bill Gianoed, Down goes a developer? Options

[Hipocrite]

UC_Bill (T-C-L-K-R-D) has a short temper. He's also, I believe, a developer.

He was just blocked indef, email blocked cannot edit own talk page for venting on his talk page after getting in a fight with Bart Simpson fans.

A must read.

[Somey]

Interesting case...

From what I can determine, UC Bill (T-C-L-K-R-D) hadn't really been involved in any serious "incivility" incidents until he entered into a dispute with Tony1 (T-C-L-K-R-D) on this Bugzilla ticket. The nastiness begins about halfway down, and to be frank, Tony1 actually starts it by referring to the idea of "normalizing" the appearance of auto-formatted dates as "hair brained" (i.e., not only does he not like the idea, he doesn't even know that the phrase is actually "hare-brained").

Tony1 doesn't like Date Autoformatting, and even has a section of his user page devoted to the subject (diff link). If I understand this correctly, his objection is that the automatic blue-links are "distracting" and that they "dilute" the impact of "high-value" links elsewhere in the articles in which they appear.

UC Bill apparently wrote a MediaWiki patch that would...

...cause linked dates to be rendered without the link, and in the same format as they appear in the wikicode (although it will add missing commas where appropriate) -- in other words, this patch completely nullifies date autoformatting. It is only intended for testing purposes, pending community approval of a proposal to temporarily disable date autoformatting to gauge editor response.

In other words, UC Bill offered a technical compromise that completely addressed Tony1's stated concerns, and did not assume it would be adopted without a test/trial period.

But Tony1 wasn't having it - this was when he responded on the Bugzilla page with the "hair brained" remark. UC Bill's compromise solution would have, essentially, threatened to put an end to Tony1's crusade to completely remove autoformatted dates from Wikipedia altogether. But interestingly, there was no further comment (or action on the ticket) for nearly a month after that. It was only when someone later asked if there had been any action on the ticket that things started to heat up.

When Tony1 tried to export the dispute onto Wikipedia itself, UC Bill tried to stop him, calling it "wikistalking."

Evidently, this experience soured things for UC Bill on Wikipedia to a considerable extent!

The Nancy Cartwright business started here, but that was actually one of numerous edits he'd made that day that were related to an attempt to clean up the "Philosophers" category. He probably didn't think it would be such a big deal, meaning he'd probably never really dealt with fans of The Simpsons prior to this incident.

Finally, just to clarify, UC Bill seems to be a MediaWiki developer, but not a WikiMedia (i.e., paid by WMF) Developer, i.e., his account does not have the "developer bit." Otherwise he would have been able to delete his user page himself, instead of having to threaten automated vandalism in order to get the page deleted.

[Kato]

Tony1 doesn't like Date Autoformatting, and even has a section of his user page devoted to the subject (diff link). If I understand this correctly, his objection is that the automatic blue-links are "distracting" and that they "dilute" the impact of "high-value" links elsewhere in the articles in which they appear.

Linking all those dates is one of the most cringe worthy elements of Wikipedia articles. It is utterly pointless, and usually means me clicking on a link by mistake and coming to some unhelpful article about a Year - then having to go back to the article.