Editing User talk:Lackadaisical

==Major deletions from explanation==
I just noticed that you had deleted a major chunk of the explanation in [[1644: Stargazing]]. I have now reinserted this. See my comment there to your "reason for edit" comment. But I now see that you seem to be deleting lots of info you find irrelevant (have just looked over your contributions, not into them). I think you should not delete info, just because you think it is not necessary for you. At least it could be left as a sub section or trivia. People should be able to come here for a full explanation, it should not be up to anyone to decide which part of the comic is self-explanatory. Also we use the names Ponytail etc. when they happen to appear. There is a category for them, but people who just come by for a quick explanation may not notice or know about categories, and should be directed to the characters pages from the main explanation. Actually you seem to deleting a lot of the work I have been using lots of time to put into this wiki. Will probably go through your deletions to see if I also disagree on those. [[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 13:14, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

:I didn't intend to be targeting you and I hope you don't think that I was. While I was editing I saw how much effort you put into this wiki and I was very impressed. Please don't take my edits as a personal offence and if we have disagreements let's discuss them, publicly for the records. Some of the stuff I deleted may have been important to include, if you can please review them and if you feel it is important re-include it and I will edit if it needs it, I try to edit for clarity, tone and style. When I say something is irrelevant I mean to say that it does little to assist in understanding the comic, perhaps some irrelevant information is important to include in places other than the explanation. If you have questions on my edits please let me know.
:Also, while I was editing I thought about this which is why I added a proposal to the community portal to include some sort of new section where such information has a place in the articles other than the discussion section. Because while the discussion section was originally a place for all that information it is cluttered and lacks any consistency or editing. I think some new sort of section would better serve to make our explanations of the comic complete. Here's the full link to the proposal topic: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Proposals#New_Speculation_Sections[[User:Lackadaisical|Lackadaisical]] ([[User talk:Lackadaisical|talk]]) 13:47, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
::Hi Lackadaisical. I did not think you targeted me intentionally. So no personal offence taken. But to remove a whole section that explains each statement in the comic is a bit much, which is why I reverted it. If it had not had it's own section I would agree that it should not be part of the main explanation. I have now read your proposal and although I do understand your idea, Davidy has given clear answer, and given that he is the main moderator I guess that case is closed. The only issue with the discussion is that you are not allowed to edit other users input, and can thus not make the more easily viewed section you are talking about. But you can make subsections in the discussion, either as you did, but also by setting in a new heading, like for instance in [[1663: Garden]]. I think it is great that you go through and make changes, just be careful not to delete interesting information. But try to move it into another section or trivia if you think it clutters up the main explanation. In my opinion people who do not wish to try to understand the comic by them selves, should be able to find any piece of information on these pages, and we are not able to say which part they did not understand. And if you or me or someone else has already bothered to find the relevant wiki links etc. then by all means let these links stay here, and also a few lines about it, so you do not need to go to the wiki page to understand the overall meaning. Like for Rainbow where a few lines about what a sun dog is, is relevant in the explanation so you do not have to go to the wiki to read on. But please keep improving explanations, that is how this site becomes great ;-) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:53, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

== wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww ==

Just why all of my contributions involve not one but numerous misconceptions by other people.

>The point Dgbrt is making is that this edit to the transcript does not follow set standards on the site. The transcript is meant so people can do searches based on the body of the comic. And the edit is more difficult to read.

# No, was not the point Dgbrt was making or trying to make, at most it was one he was supposed to make by the admins (I can't say 'should have made' as it is incorrect, see below.)
# If this is the purpose of the 'transcript', and not that of opening of otherwise inaccessible image data, then it is being an inadmissibly narrow subset of what you (this site) should be doing.
# With respect to the purpose of user searching specifically, this, which is really just ordering/chaining data, should be done with separate markers, such as order:seq_id=1, 2, 3... (possibly using a namespace mechanism, like, here, XML namespaces), ordering the data into a user-agent-searchable string in ua memory, so that <nowiki><td order:seq_id='2'>world!</td> <td order:seq_id='1'>Hello,</td></nowiki> properly localizes ua ctrl+F searching for 'llo, wor'.
# Until there is support for that, redundancy is the provisional way to go, as I've provided using a table <nowiki><caption/></nowiki> tag.

(In fact, as for 'being difficult to read', you are literally misrepresenting Randall's work by counteracting it. A transcript is a 1:1 conversion of the source material; if the original is being hard in any way whatsoever (or rather mixed, as this is what objectively happens here without the judgement of difficulty), there must be a way to signify that hardness in the output too. Of course, you are doing that, to a degree, in human prose in the 'transcription' block, but human prose is the second most closed data format, after images.) 

wWwW{{unsigned ip|172.68.11.71}}

:I'm only answering your first sentence, there are two possibilities: Either "numerous other people" are dumb or your "contributions" are not really helpful. Think about your title "wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww" here.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 10:54, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
:: 'Either "numerous other people" are dumb or your "contributions" are not really helpful.' What do we have here. A person alluding to my illusory superiority while openly admitting that they ignore 3/4 of another person's points. wWwW{{unsigned ip|‎162.158.91.29}}
:I had no interest in fully explaining defending my reversion, but I will. The transcript was originally taken directly from the source page on xkcd. Randall included the information so the someone could type something like "xkcd black hat submarine" and https://xkcd.com/405/ would show up in the search results. We include it here because it is useful for the same reasons and it can resolve debates over the content of the comic. However, Randall has recently stopped including transcripts accessible in the source, so we've worked to create our own. If we were to follow your edits we'd also have to change the transcripts of similar comics such as [[1767: US State Names]], [[850: World According to Americans]], and [[1509: Scenery Cheat Sheet]]. It is also worth noting that the format you've proposed is more difficult to read than the comic itself.--[[User:Lackadaisical|Lackadaisical]] ([[User talk:Lackadaisical|talk]]) 16:43, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
:: Look at that, after having read numerous accusations of vandalhood and disruption on my part, ending with claims of necessity of page protection from me by Dgbrt, I finally for the first time see someone actually *try to talk* with me.
:: Point by point then.
:: As for searching: as I said, I addressed it immediately after it was pointed out, by providing a only slightly redundant <nowiki><caption/></nowiki> in my code in which sentences can be searched continuously too.
:: '''Interesting point:''' the format to which you adhere, where you prefer to describe the format of the comic in prose ('in subpart B of part A, thing X happens') rather than using markup (in silly pseudocode, <nowiki><part id='A'><subpart id='B'>X</subpart></part></nowiki>) such as I suggest, results in false positives, in which results from description are indistinguishable from results in direct comic content. (I hinted at this in one of my edit descriptions.)  For instance, searching for 'sub' (...marine) wrongly returns 'sub' (...part). As far as you mark up, this is not a problem.
:: As for consistency: yes, of course. When a solution is better, it obviously has to be adopted consistently. I actually thought of making a template out of my map-table right away, precisely for the purpose of generalizing all US-describing comics.
:: As for ease of comprehension, well, effing obviously. Markup is not tracing state shapes as they are and as they are effortlessly recognized by US citizens. I mean, it could using say SVG, but in itself, that would actually not be an improvement with respect to utilization of the comic's meaning over raster graphics at all. Marking up is always going to be simplification/assimilation to a general concept and thus require varying degrees of imagination/recognition, which is demanding. Except the very point is that while assimilation results in slight data loss ('''with respect to the original comic; compared to your original transcription, my markup contained *a lot* more data'''), it returns in terms of operability. As I said here as well, prose is highly inoperable. You can hardly traverse prose, while table markup easily allows moving back and forth, various jumps etc. You can hardly compare transcriptions consisting of two blocks of prose, while you can, as I hinted as well, easily retrieve and compare various data (eg. on frequency and location of various types of subdata) between transcriptions that are both realized as HTML tables or HTML lists. And so on and so on.
:: Regards,
:: wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwvvvvvvvvandal according to Dgbrt
@@ Line 31: / Line 31: @@
 :: As for ease of comprehension, well, effing obviously. Markup is not tracing state shapes as they are and as they are effortlessly recognized by US citizens. I mean, it could using say SVG, but in itself, that would actually not be an improvement with respect to utilization of the comic's meaning over raster graphics at all. Marking up is always going to be simplification/assimilation to a general concept and thus require varying degrees of imagination/recognition, which is demanding. Except the very point is that while assimilation results in slight data loss ('''with respect to the original comic; compared to your original transcription, my markup contained *a lot* more data'''), it returns in terms of operability. As I said here as well, prose is highly inoperable. You can hardly traverse prose, while table markup easily allows moving back and forth, various jumps etc. You can hardly compare transcriptions consisting of two blocks of prose, while you can, as I hinted as well, easily retrieve and compare various data (eg. on frequency and location of various types of subdata) between transcriptions that are both realized as HTML tables or HTML lists. And so on and so on.
 :: Regards,
-:: wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwvvvvvvvvandal according to Dgbrt {{unsigned ip|162.158.91.23}}
+:: wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwvvvvvvvvandal according to Dgbrt
-:: Also, I wouldn't say the table format is as appropriate for the world political map. US states are quite same-sized; tabularizing them results in less distortion than would happen from tabularizing the globe (not to mention that the latter is not continuous owing to oceans). The administrative division-table analogy is not appropriate universally. wW
-::: As long as users can search and it isn't unreadable and, for older ones, it doesn't conflict with the official transcript I don't much care what happens in the transcript. You and Dgbrt may discuss this somewhere other than my talk page, the talk page of the comic for example, or perhaps one of the community pages. A warning to you wW, I'm not very particular but some of the users on here won't like you making larger revisions unless you have a profile.--[[User:Lackadaisical|Lackadaisical]] ([[User talk:Lackadaisical|talk]]) 12:13, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
-:::: Right. I've read a bit of other people's talk pages today and I've seen some talk about introducing new article sections. I imagine it could be along the lines of distinction between data-based (table, list, graph, map...) and conventional background-and-figures visual comics. The former ones could have a (roughly speaking; this is just shooting ideas) Content section, which would be dedicated to using the most appropriate markup, while Transcript, much in its present format, would remain only for the latter. Plus there could be a Keywords section, possibly even minimized, for broad searchable descriptors like 'conversation', 'table' or 'technology', although that much overlaps with categories. (Randall-provided transcripts, as original xkcd content, would of course remain permanently accessible regardless.)
-:::: As for unspoken discrimination against guests, I am aware of it. But I have made an account based on your recommendation. It's called 'Only Stupid People Use This Account' and the password is 'password'. wWwW