User talk:DiscreetParrot

Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia. However, discussion pages are meant to be a record of a discussion; deleting or editing legitimate comments is considered bad practice, even if you meant well. Even making spelling and grammatical corrections in others' comments is generally frowned upon, as it tends to irritate the users whose comments you are correcting. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. DMacks (talk) 04:01, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hi. The text you link to instructs to avoid editing other's posts, with the intention of not changing their meaning. This is something I never do because I agree that this would be wrong and unhelpful. It also mentions the concept of deleting comments and advises to do so cautiously. It does not instruct not to do it or even so much as state that it's bad practice. I don't quite agree with your suggestion that talk pages are meant to be a record of discussion. In some cases preserving old discussions can absolutely have value, but the fundamental purpose of talk pages is to discuss making improvements to their respective articles. Some discussion points loose all value over time, and of course there are some discussions that are simply off topic (not about improving the article or pointing out issues with article content) which naturally deserve deletion. Talk pages cluttered with a ton of old discussions is a real problem; value time can be wasted trawling through them to get a picture of what the current situation is. I've been frustrated by this many times before. I've never previously dared to delete comments before, but what I've done tonight is to review certain discussion pages of articles I care about and carefully prune out a bunch of discussions that I feel no longer hold any value at all. I see this as an entirely good thing and I'm quite surprised to find my work being mass reverted. DiscreetParrot (talk) 05:41, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

In your mass reversion I see you've even gotten rid of new discussion points I'd added, replies I added, and missing section headings I'd added (some people seem to dump their discussion points just anywhere). DiscreetParrot (talk) 05:49, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Feel free to re-add, without removing. You might be interested in activating WP:ARCHIVENOTDELETE as a way of keeping the main talkpage less cluttered by very old content. DMacks (talk) 06:23, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Archiving huh. I wasn't aware of that concept. I've just done some reading up on it and it seems like a good and indeed better concept for what I'd wanted to achieve. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll get archives created, move stuff to it as appropriate, and restrict deletions to only off-topic ones that have no value. I was a little annoyed at having all that work undone and having to spend extra time restoring certain bits, but I'm glad to have learned about a much better solution out of it.

Thank you DiscreetParrot (talk) 07:34, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Sounds like a good plan! I did manage to get at least one of them "just undo the deletions, revive/retain your additions" while I was working on the situation. DMacks (talk) 14:11, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Letting Cluebot III setup an auto-archive works well. It often takes a few days before you see any action. Also, it is good to leave a few threads (maybe four), even if they are very old. It shows us just how long ago there was any interest. Constant314 (talk) 17:33, 22 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate your contributions, but in one of your recent edits to Circuit breaker, it appears that you have added original research, which is against Wikipedia's policies. Original research refers to material—such as facts, allegations, ideas, and personal experiences—for which no reliable, published sources exist; it also encompasses combining published sources in a way to imply something that none of them explicitly say. Please be prepared to cite a reliable source for all of your contributions. You can have a look at the tutorial on citing sources. I agree with @MrOllie: that your recent edit was synthesis. Constant314 (talk) 02:54, 27 January 2025 (UTC)Reply

Nice. You made a lot of edits on the Solar System page, and since good page watchers usually check all of them, I could have sent thanks for all of them. The lead flows much better. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:45, 25 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for your contributions to Resvg. Unfortunately, I do not think it is ready for publishing as a live article at this time because it needs more sources to establish notability. I have converted it to a draft which you can improve, undisturbed for a while.

Please see more information at Help:Unreviewed new page. When the article is ready for publication, please click on the "Submit the draft for review!" button at the top of the page OR move the page back. Ednabrenze (talk) 08:05, 8 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hello, DiscreetParrot. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Resvg, a page you created, has not been edited in at least five months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.

If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia. FireflyBot (talk) 09:07, 10 June 2026 (UTC)Reply

About this revision, well I get your point...Thanks for correcting me; I will be more careful going forward.

Also, I would appreciate if you could soften your tone a bit in future to this high schooler. Best, MSincccc (talk) 05:54, 2 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

@MSincccc No problem. The comment was meant to be much friendlier than you interpreted it, and in hindsight I can appreciate that. I've seen you make a bunch of good edits to this article before. You'd clearly just made a goof, as we do from time to time. I didn't want to just revert without comment, causing potential confusion, it was intended to give you a nudge to re-read what it had said, knowing you'd then realise the mistake and why it needed reverting. DiscreetParrot (talk) 14:56, 2 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

This is not an "obsolete feature". Presumably you do not have the Rollback user right, otherwise you would see that link on any diff where the right-hand side is the current revision. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:43, 6 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for the clarification. I did lean into an assumption there in the moment in what I wrote for the edit summary, but I also felt comfortable removing it anyway, even if it were not actually obsolete, since as an extended-confirmed user I'd never seen it, and so were it not obsolete, I reasoned that it was something likely only a very small subset of users had access to, and thus the presentation did not reflect what the vast majority of users see in a diff, as I feel it should. I didn't express this additional reasoning in the summary. Perhaps it would have been better to have done so, but I was pretty tired after hours of editing and just didn't. After hitting publish I did actually feel a tinge of regret at not putting in the extra effort to research the facts. I then went back to the previous revision, clicked the link, took a glance at the page, and saw no sign of a mention of it being obsolete, but it was then too late to change the summary to re-express my justification. Taking another look at the page now, I see that there's nearly 8,000 users total who have it, so indeed a relatively small subset of users, albeit it larger than I expected, compared to the ~82,000 extended confirmed users, 2.6-million auto-confirmed, and god-knows how many unregistered. DiscreetParrot (talk) 18:16, 6 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

Just FYI, when you change section titles like in Help:Purge, redirects such as WP:NULL need to be changed as well. Otherwise they will point to an inexistent anchor. PetraMagna (talk) 03:49, 14 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

Right, good catch! I am rather tired and other matters took away my focus so I overlooked it. :) DiscreetParrot (talk) 06:19, 14 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

I've undone your notice to his article. Many publications use parenthetical referencing. It is only Wikipedia which has stopped using it. StarryGrandma (talk) 03:26, 20 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

@StarryGrandma Huh? Oooh, I was editing various help/policy pages, followed a 'main' hatnote link from one to this, and somehow failed to notice that this page was actually in article space. 🤦🏻‍♂️ Thanks for correcting my mistake! DiscreetParrot (talk) 20:16, 20 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

I appreciate you making the citation articles read more clearly. You may have thought you were adding the tags to Wikipedia:Parenthetical referencing which was turned into a redirect in 2020 when the method was made obsolete. StarryGrandma (talk) 20:32, 20 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

No problem. Still more improvements I'd like to make. Ah, yes, the hatnote displaying "Wikipedia:Parenthetical referencing" but then redirecting makes perfect sense. DiscreetParrot (talk) 21:35, 20 September 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hi, DiscreetParrot, and thanks for all your Wikipedia:Glossary contributions, in particular, WP:G#Inline citation. Can't understand how we didn't have that one before! A couple of points:

• A § Citation situated directly adjacent to, or close to, the material that it supports.

  adjacent means directly after, *or* before; but citations only go after (close, or far; but after). I think we need better wording here. (The term close to has the same objection.) How 'bout, "...usually located after the sentence or paragraph containing the content it supports" ?

• (note that the parenthetical referencing style is deprecated)

  Do you think it's necessary to mention a deprecated style here, like parenthetical referencing? I don't. If you think it needs mentioning at all, how 'bout pushing it all the way to the end, so that at least the stuff that is still active and not deprecated is what the readers see first? Although I really don't know why we'd even want to mention it at all anywhere in the glossary.

• a § footnote marker which links to a citation stated elsewhere in the page

  I find this phrasing awkward, and I'm not quite sure I understand the intended meaning. If you are talking about short citations, then say that. If you really mean the footnote marker, i.e., the superscript bracketed number, then say that, but note that a footnote marker is not a citation, so doesn't belong in a definition of what a citation is. If you want to say that the wikimedia software automatically turns a correctly formatted inline citation into a footnote marker inline and then places the citation content at the bottom of the page, then say that, but only after defining what a citation actually is, so at the bottom, somewhere, or even better, just a section link to WP:G#Footnote marker where it is already explained. I can't offer possibly improved wording, because I honestly don't know what this is about.

• which links to a citation stated elsewhere in the page (as per current best practice)

  Huh?? What is current best practice? If you are talking about WP:Short citations here, they are one of several, equivalently valid and accepted methods; sfn's are by no means considered "best practice". If you are talking about WP:LDRs, ditto, but few people or nobody thinks of them as best practice (some even want to deprecate them; I happen to like them). If you are talking about footnote markers, they are not "best practice", they are simply provided automatically by the software; they are the only practice. So I really don't get this "best practice" comment, and I would just remove it. Unless you meant something else?

Can you take another look at the Inline citation entry and adjust as needed? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:41, 11 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

I suggest properly reading WP:OR. Your removals and talk-page comments at David Walliams are original research. When you wrote "I haven't seen any clear evidence of wrong doing on his part deserving criticism", we can all see what you are trying to do. We can only report what sources say, we do not do our own research. Carrot juice (talk) 14:46, 13 November 2026 (UTC)Reply

I've responded to you in the article's talk page. You're making an utter fool out of yourself. It is you who does not understand basic policy. Be gone with you. DiscreetParrot (talk) 05:51, 14 November 2026 (UTC)Reply