Here’s the key:

• The first source I use is just a scientific article. That’s it.
• The third source is just a scientific article. That’s it.
• The second source that I use to cite “dozens of extinctions” is quite emotionally charged, but here’s where that’s different: I could find a billion sources more credible than that NYT article about the dozens upon dozens of species who’ve met their end thanks to the domestic cat. These sources would give it an unemotional, academic treatment, yet I like how the NYT piece is narratively engaging rather than dry-ass “X et al. reported…”

I used scientific sources for (1) and (3) because those are claims people might actually think to contest. Moreover, the NYT doesn’t let itself slip into using garbage sources for the sake of its narrative. I could replace this source in two minutes, and then your argument about emotionally charged imagery would dissolve.

The reason I care so much about King’s massive bias in that article is because that bias is reflected in how absolutely egregious her sources are. She seems to genuinely not care how factual what she’s saying is as long as it conforms to her personal feelings, and so she turns it into assembling literally every source she can possibly find no matter how obscenely flimsy. She’s grasping at straws the entire article.

“It was terrible. He would spend hours telling me about how NFTs are the future and I need to get in on the ground floor.”

What you’ve presented is a deeply biased opinion piece, and it wears this immense bias on its sleeve. It fearmongers that thinking about cats as killing wildlife could cause “extremism” (it then cites as its lone example a man who suggested banning cats in New Zealand; soooo scary). It cites some organization called “Alley Cat Allies” who call it extremely biased with ostensibly zero credentials. They cite lobbyist and serial sexual harasser Wayne Pacelle formerly of the Humane Society who questions the methodology but even concedes: “We don’t quarrel with the conclusion that the impact is big.” And lastly, King herself does her own analysis on this meta-analysis’ methodology despite being – I emphasize – a professor of anthropology with no background in this field.

So your article has no one familiar with this field who could challenge if these statistical assumptions are actually reasonable. And here, given the authors are experts (and absent some published literature rebutting this in the 12 years since), I have no reason to believe their methodology would be so off as to meaningfully change the idea that “outdoor cats” are severely problematic.

Did Australia recently sink into the ocean and I just missed it?

We’re going through the biggest disinformation crisis in human history thanks exclusively to the Internet’s profound ability to change minds by spreading and normalizing bullshit, but “it’s just not gonna work” when it’s something you specifically don’t want to hear.

Edit: ironically, my mind was changed after hearing someone bring this up on the Internet and then reading the scientific literature.

• It is categorically not ever “impossible to avoid”. Not only is your cat statistically healthier indoors, but any excuse for why it’s not possible is complete bullshit unless you can offer one up that isn’t. Owning a pet is a responsibility, not a right; just because it’s “harder” to take proper care of your pet doesn’t absolve you of that responsibility.
• Anecdotes are not data. This is “I have a grandma who’s 106 and she smokes 26 packs a day and drinks a pint of leaded gasoline before bed.”

• I don’t think most people’s backyard is some kind of wildlife exclusion zone, and the problem isn’t specifically that cats are killing animals in other backyards that the neighbors called “dibs” on first.
• The cat obviously isn’t being attended to while it’s outside.
• The owners clearly imply that their other two cats have done the same thing and brought them dead animals before.

“Outdoor cats” are an invasive species that kill billions of animals every year, are a significant contributor to dozens of species’ extinction, and live shorter lives than cats properly cared for (i.e. kept indoors) including nearly 3x the risk for infections.

It’s a plague. We can’t keep normalizing this.

The judge also said the officers were entitled under the circumstances to qualified immunity — special legal protections that prevent people from suing over claims that police or government workers violated their constitutional rights.

And there it fucking is.

This hypothetical misunderstanding already assumes too much geographical knowledge on the part of Trump – namely “the Sahara exists”, “the Sahara is in Africa”, and “the Sahara is specifically in northern Africa”.

That’s mainly why I’m curious to see specific examples: I’ve fixed hundreds if not thousands of typos and can’t remember this happening, even long before I had much experience editing. I’m long past the point where I’d be considered a new editor, so any results I’d get now would be bullshit anyway short of violating the rules and starting a smurf account.

Regarding “in the clique”, people give a shit about who’s who a lot less than you’d think. Despite having 25,000 edits over 8 years, I’ve interacted with maybe three people in the top 100 by number of contributions (let alone even know who they are). I’m not a social butterfly on there, but I’ve interacted in hundreds of discussions when needed. Not only am I almost never checking who an editor is when I check their edit, but I maybe know 100 people total (orders of magnitude less than the pool of very active editors); even among the few people I’d consider acquaintances, I’ve had my edits reverted and reverted theirs.

The only instance I’ve seen of someone trying to play king shit of fuck mountain and not immediately failing is in our article for San Francisco, where they were insistent that there was a strong consensus for using only one image in the infobox instead of the usual collage we do in 99.9% of major cities. The image used was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in front of the San Francisco skyline – neither of which were represented well. They’d been shutting down ideas for a collage for years, and when other editors found out about this, it turned into a request for comment (RfC). Despite their now having 500,000 edits in about 18 years (this ought to put them in the alleged “clique” even though I’d never heard of them before) this swung wildly against them to the point of the RfC being closed early, and the article now has a (I think really nice) collage.

(TL;DR: the policy against trying to dictate the contents of an article isn’t just there so we can say “but c it’s agenst da rulez so it dusnt happin!!”; it’s there because the wider editing community fucking hates that shit and doesn’t put up with it.)

If you don’t mind, I’d be interested to take a look and see what the reason edits got reverted. Obviously it’s stale enough now that I can’t ask anyone involved to not bite the newcomers or tell them why reversions they made may not be correct, but I’m still curious to see what kinds of edits by new editors commonly get reverted.

A good feature if you ever decide to edit again (on desktop, probably mobile too) is that in the source editor, there’s a Show Preview button. This renders out the page as if you’d committed the change. I said in another comment that almost 2% of my edits have been reverted in some way, and many of those are self-reverts. The only reason there are fewer immediate self-reverts these days isn’t because I’m making fewer mistakes; it’s because I’ve mostly replaced the “oh fuck go back” button with being able to quickly identify how I broke something (unless what I’ve done is unsalvageable).

The other day during a discussion, a few editors started joking about how many mistakes we make. Cullen328 (yes, the admin mentioned in this post) said: “One of my most common edit summaries is “Fixed typo”, which usually means that I fixed my own typo.” The Bushranger, another admin, replied: "I always spot mine just after hitting ‘Publish changes’… " And finally I said: “It feels like 50% of the edits I publish have the same energy as Peter watching Gwen Stacy fall to her death in slow-motion in TASM 2.” Between the three of us is about 300,000 edits, two little icons with a mop, and over 30 years of experience editing. Not only will you fuck up at first, but you’ll continue to fuck up over and over again forever. It’s how you deal with it that counts, and you dealt with it well.

Inject whatever weird, obscure fucking drama this is into my veins, please. I know Bloodborne has an indie wiki; do the Souls games not have one?

There’s fortunately no such thing as control of the page. Like I explained above, reversion is considered a normal but uncommon part of the editing process. It’s more common at the outset for new editors to have their initial edit reverted on policy/guideline grounds but then have a modified version of the edit let through with no issue. In order not to not bite newcomers, experienced editors will often bite the bullet and take the time to fix policy/guideline violations themselves while telling the newcomer what they did wrong.

If you go to discuss the reversion with the other editor on the talk page and it becomes clear this isn’t about policy or guideline violations (or they’re couching it in policy/guidelines through wikilawyering nonsense) but instead that they think they’re king shit of fuck mountain and own the article, ask an administrator. Administrators hate that shit.

That makes sense. “Probably over 20 years ago now” probably means that there weren’t any solid guidelines or policies to revert based on, since it was only around 2006 that the community rapidly began developing formal standards. I’m betting a lot more reverts were “nuh uh”, “yuh huh” than they are today. If you still remember the account name, I’m curious to see what bullshit transpired. If the watchlist even existed back then, someone probably saw a new edit, didn’t like it for whatever reason (I have no capacity to judge), and hit the “nuh uh” button. (Edit: I bet it was ‘Recent changes’, actually; probably more viable in an era of sub-100 edits per minute.)

Something new editors get confused about (me especially; I was so pissed the first time) is that edits can be reverted by anyone for any reason. (By “can”, I don’t mean “may”; a pattern of bad-faith reversions will quickly get you blocked). Almost 2% of my edits have been reverted in some way, and plenty of those have been by people with 1/100th the experience I have (some rightly so, some not so much). Reversion is actually considered a very normal if uncommon part of the editing process, and it’s used to generate a healthy consensus on the talk page when done in good faith. But the pertinent point is that reversions can be done by anybody just like additions can be done by anybody; it’s just another edit in “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit™”. I remember reverting an admin’s edit before (normal editing, not administrative work), and we just had a normal conversation whose outcome I can’t remember. It happens to everyone.

This is no longer true thanks to a ruling by the European Data Protection Board. Hang on, I was misreading. I believe there’s been a recent ruling, but this one ain’t it.

EDIT: See pages 39 and 40. Here, it seems as though no “equivalent alternative” is provided under these criteria. It seems to me like consent-or-pay is heading toward an eventual ban, but Heise makes it clear on their website you can consent, pay, or leave – i.e. not an “equivalent alternative” to my mind.

EDIT 2: Okay, upon reading these criteria further, it seems like this isn’t a violation of EU law but that it’s reaaaally close and that the EDPB really hates consent-or-pay as a loophole and wants it to die as soon as possible. If not breaking the law, it’s still an ethical nightmare, so the first line of my comment stands: “Heise Group, you greedy cocks.”

Heise Group, you greedy cocks.

Here’s a version of that article that doesn’t deliberately break skirt as far as legally possible EU privacy law: https://archive.ph/ZTt3K

The quote only came from searching for luxchat on DDG, and even then it led to a login-only page of lux.chat. So unfortunately, I can’t. And even then, I’m doubting luxchat and lux.chat are by the same people.

I know what community this is, Blaze, but it baffles me to recommend this over Element.

• The Matrix Foundation is a UK-based CIC.
• IIRC the for-profit company which develops the Element app which is commercial FOSS is UK-based – therefore it’s European.
• Luxchat, however, lacks support for Linux, the obvious choice for removing oneself from US-based software.
• Luxchat, however, isn’t made by the people behind the protocol like Element.
• Unlike Element’s company, which exists to make money to fund Matrix’s development, Luxchat is full-stop a for-profit company ostensibly supporting nothing. Edit: I was mistaken; a GIE is a company (they’re registered C8 with the Commercial and Companies Register in Luxembourg), but the type of company’s: “aim is not to make a profit, but it can do so simply as an accessory, as the profit resulting from the joint action must also go directly to its members.” That said, I can’t see anything about any money going back to the development of Matrix, which is still a major red flag to me compared to Element.
• The tiny-ass website doesn’t do a thing to estsblish what license Luxchat is under. Element, by contrast, is squarely FOSS.
• While desperately, fruitlessly searching for any sort of license, one of the few pages that turned up from their website just read “Create stunning AI chatbots with our 21st.dev-inspired Glassmorphic UI.” as one of their premium services. 🤮 This may(?) be something different. See below.
• I can find effectively fuck-all about this company that I’m supposed to be trusting with my privacy.

Edit: So to be clear, they say it’s a fork of Element, but that doesn’t tell me the license or give me the source code. Trying to find the source code for the messaging app just returns this crap about their an AI service which is just ChatGPT wrapper number 486 billion.

Edit 2: Okay, I think the confusion over this AI BS is that there’s lux.chat – ChatGPT wrapper garbage – and luxchat – an Element fork. I have no idea if these are related. If they are, this information is too hard to find. If they aren’t… I mean maybe if you had more information on your website, luxchat, I wouldn’t have to scour the Internet to find that information and run into lux.chat.

Edit 3: The FAQ clears literally none of my questions up. Cool.