Talk:Brian Prentice

Bprentice, why do you keep removing contents in this article? At its current state there is only a hint about your forums username (and real-life residence, but it is not very useful), which is next to the page not existing at all and is not consistent with other people pages. Do you not want the potential LifeWiki readers to know about your custom cellular automata programs and rulespaces? GUYTU6J (talk) 03:55, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Please don't change this article again! It is currently accurate and needs no further attention.

Brian Prentice

But why? There seems to be no benefits to hide your own work from others and say it is "accurate". GUYTU6J (talk) 04:26, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

You removed the DEFAULTSORT magic word. When present, it sorts the page under the last name in categories, Special:AllPages, etc. It does not change the displayed text of the page at all. HotdogPi (talk) 13:38, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

GUYTU6J The only reason this article exists is because Dave Greene asked me not to delete it. In its current state it directs the reader to my posts which is the only place where they can get accurate information about my personality, interests and accomplishments. Adding links to other pages in the LifeWiki typically result in a bias of omission at best or rubbish at worst.

HotdogPi Look at other articles in the People section. Several of them have no DEFAULTSORT entry.

Book You are the one responsible for this controversy. You created the first version of the article and in it said that I was a Life Enthusiast. I have never worked with the Life rule. Since you clearly did not know anything about me you should have contacted me before publishing such drivel. — Preceding unsigned comment added by bprentice (talk • contribs) 20:36, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

No intention to offend you. I apologize for the Life Enthusiast characterization. Book (talk) 21:01, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

@Brian, in discussions like this one, if you add four tildes to the end of your comments, your signature will be automatically added. Without signatures, it quickly becomes very difficult to figure out who said what.

Most of what Book and I added to your page seems like information that it would be nice to have available to people if they look up "Brian Prentice". It makes sense that the "Life Enthusiast" label should be removed, but that was an honest mistake and an extremely minor one, easy to fix in a few seconds. LifeWiki articles are like that -- they get better when people look them over and improve them. The common convention is that nobody does much writing in their own page... maybe fix a factual error if one shows up, but otherwise let other people determine what the content of the page should be.

The current page, unfortunately, has been cut down to the point where it's pretty much useless. It might as well not be here, because it doesn't give anyone any useful pointers to Java Cell or BSFKL or anything else. Now, clearly nobody is going to read through 900-odd posts and spend several weeks figuring out how to write a perfectly complete and accurate "Brian Prentice" article -- but every edit so far has been an honest attempt to be helpful and to give some credit where credit is due.

All of the "people pages" are necessarily fragmentary -- there are omissions in everyone's pages. To me this doesn't seem like a problem. But ... nobody wants you to be angry about what the LifeWiki says about you, so if we can't convince you to let other people work on your article, then maybe the best thing to do is delete it (and deal with the resulting redlinks some other way).

As a final side note: @Book, thank you for all the work you've done on redlink removal. I definitely appreciate your "bias toward action" -- if everyone ended up being afraid to make improvements for fear of offending somebody, the LifeWiki wouldn't be anywhere near the resource that is today. Dvgrn (talk) 21:47, 9 May 2022 (UTC)