Uživatel:Dan Polansky/User Ben Wing

Ben Wing (user accounts Benwing and Benwing2) blocked me indefinitely in the English Wiktionary. I see legitimate doubt about whether his intentions are pure, and whether he is a genuinely impartial and objective party in that block. For one thing, I stood in the way of his unhindered salami method of proceeding without genuine consensus, as per the below.

Potential problems

1) Implied there existed a requirement to create Russian entries with inflection and pronunciation as a minimum: [[:en:User talk:Dan Polansky/2019#Creating incomplete entries redux]]. Implied there was a consensus for his view: "Plenty of Wiktionary editors, including many admins, have commented at various points on problems with entries you've created; please listen to them." To my knowledge, his statement was untrue. I resolved the matter by creating en:Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2019/February#Stub entries and minimum required content, which did not reveal anything like consensus for inflection being required as a minimum. He then issued an apology about the "tone", but the problem was not the tone but rather the misrepresentation.

Should this behavior continue against other editors, this would reduce the contribution rate in the English Wiktionary, as editors would be forced to do relatively trivial low-value additional work in addition to the substantive work they are interested in.

2) Deleted templates en:T:cs-decl-noun, en:T:cs-decl-noun-auto, etc. without RFDO process. Is a process violation. More importantly, the result are bad-looking historical revisions of Czech entries. At a minimum, the templates should have been deprecated.

3) Renamed R:PSJC to R:cs:PSJC without RFD process, despite en:Wiktionary:Votes/2019-06/Language code into reference template names resulting in fail of 8-10-3, and did so for some other languages as well, including Slovak. Used the "salami method" of pushing his own preference one unopposed step at a time. When challenged, produced a most peculiar response with reduced plausibility: "I have no idea what this paragraph you just wrote means. But in any case it makes no sense to try to read the tea leaves of a three-year old inconclusive vote to get an idea of whether to rename a given template. It always comes down to what the community of editors for a particular language prefers.", per en:User talk:PUC/2022#rename Template:R:TLFi -> Template:R:fr:TLFi, etc.. There, he also said "Quite rich coming from someone who disregards all consensus regarding RFD's and continues to tilt at windmills", bizarre misrepresentation; later, in en:Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2022-09/Meaning of consensus for discussions other than formal votes created at Wiktionary:Votes, my option 3 passed. Furthermore, the template name convention should ideally be unified across the English Wiktionary project rather than vary per language. Moreover, for Czech, he did not ask me and other Czech contributors such as Droighean and Jan.Kamenicek whether we wanted to have "cs:" added and went ahead anyway, contradicting his professed deferrence to language-specific contributors. Rather, he knew that the largest Czech contributor--me--was opposed.

4) Inexplicably blocked changes to RFD header, curiously claiming they were "tendentious". The changes were accurate. Reference: en:Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/September#RFD header - the consensus is determined primarily based on tallies. My thesis that "'The consensus is determined primarily by tallying the posts in support for various outcomes", contested by him, was confirmed in en:Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2022-09/Meaning of consensus for discussions other than formal votes created at Wiktionary:Votes, in which he did not participate.

5) Changed thesaurus template en:T:ws to require the first parameter to be language name, making revision histories entirely illegible. Since the thesaurus is no longer called Wikisaurus (whence "ws") but rather Wiktionary Thesaurus, a much better procedure would be to leave template "ws" well alone to ensure legibility of revision histories and introduce e.g. template "thi" (thesaurus item) with the new functionality. (No rocket science, really.)

Closing words

The above suggests to me desysopping would be in order, as it would prevent out-of-process template deletions; editing modules and templates would not be impacted. Some of the behaviors not directly related to use of tools seem unworthy of an administrator as well.