Talk:Prickly City

Neutrality Dispute

The addition of a smear site to this article is proof enough to me that the individuals primarily responsible for editing this page recently are not interested in facts but rather in presenting the comic in the most negative light possible. If you want to add factual errors that the strip has made, a new, cited section for that should be added rather than adding a link to a smear site to the article and trying to present it as neutral commentary. --Pellucid 18:31, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Three revert rule, homes. Stop ignoring it. 76.224.39.65 21:27, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

I didn't revert again, I just added a POV tag. --Pellucid 21:52, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

You do realize that there's a "History" section where people can see and verify that you're not telling the truth, right? 76.197.202.107 01:52, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Might wanna recheck those edits, buddy. The two that I did in a row were actually a single revert, I didn't notice that the link had also been added in the links page. --Pellucid 08:36, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

You're now at five reverts. The rule is three. You have deliberately disregarded the rules of Wikipedia and you have lied about doing so. (You have also erased complaints from your talk page wherein other people have noted your abuse of that rule.) How, then, are any other views you have on Wikipedia procedure relevant? 76.197.206.131 02:35, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

You don't understand the 3RR. It's "no more than 3 reverts in a 24 hour period on a single article." I have not broken that rule. --Pellucid 11:14, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Removing a NPOV tag without a discussion is really against everything Wikipedia is about, regardless of how strongly you believe the link should be included. Also, funnelling people here via the Shrubville blog doesn't help the situation either. This isn't a matter of voting or numbers, this is a matter of addressing all perspectives. I really have very little tolerance for the neocon perspective myself, but that doesn't mean we don't have to reason with it.

So, aside from being a well visited blog is there anything that makes this Shrubville site notable for inclusion? We can't just link to every blog. Maybe a more appropriate approach would be to create a Wikipedia article for Shrubville first, and then a link to that will really be uncontestable.Yeago 14:22, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

It's notable because it is a site specifically dedicated to discussion, analysis and archive of the subject of the article, and is the only site on the internet to be such. 76.197.206.131 02:35, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

You can say that and it sounds all in well, but some of the things Pellucid has brought up in the below comments are unmasked contempt and invective. While links which do contain 'discussion, analysis, and archive of subject' are certainly good contenders, unbalanced screed is not. Pellucid suggested that some more useful quotables be dredged from the article for use as source. If those pass the NPOV test, I really see no problem with including them. However, someone is going to have to address some of Pellucid's issues if we're going to keep that link here, as some of his quotes are damning.

There is a controversy section, it seems like it would be very easy to pull some quotes from that website for inclusion. Whether they will pass NPOV is another matter, but I definitely encourage whoever to pull some quotes and cite that link as a source.Yeago 09:28, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia drives me nuts for exactly these reasons. It's thousands of people quoting half-understood policy statements at each other and falling to the level of the most pedantic among them. Quotations and external links do not have to be NPOV. They can be written by people who like or dislike the subject matter. The article itself should not advance or advocate a single viewpoint, but there is no reason Wikipedia has to pretend that nobody in the world has a positive or negative viewpoint on the subject. Pellucid thinks all criticism is equivalent to unbalanced screed. He's still operating in the red/blue dichotomy from a few years ago. Note how he criticizes "the Shrubville guy" for not knowing "his own party's platforms". Now try to find where "the Shrubville guy" has identified which party he belongs to. He hasn't. Pellucid fallaciously assumes that anyone who criticizes A Republican is A Democrat. 1 or 2, Red or Blue, With Us or Against Us. It is Pellucid who is engaged in unbalanced screed and it is his analysis is useless. 76.16.55.100 17:19, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for joining the discussion. I don't think Pellucid is being unreasonable by asking that the link be used as a source instead of a direct link. I agree with this mostly because I'm not sure that blog is notable, and based on what Pellucid quotes below I'm not sure that the link simply provides "analysis", it seems to resort to outright condescending attack. Not the same thing.

I am also wondering if you could tell me how that blog passes the Notability test. Has it been referenced by the original site or any other more prominent outlet? Is there some way we can know whether it is more than a one-man-show of glib responses to Prickly City?

Please forgive me, as I am quite ignorant of this whole topic. Still, I'm intervening here because nobody was taking Pellucid seriously (removing his NPOV flags without so much as a response is really unacceptable)Yeago 21:29, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Frankly, I don't understand why you are so eager to weigh in on a subject about which you acknowledging being completely ignorant. But if you truly question the neutrality, relevance, or notability of the article, why don't you try asking your questions without vandalizing the page first? --Orat Perman 00:59, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I find its best to remove the questionable content to give people an incentive to respond to the issues raised. Pellucid attempted to begin a NPOV discussion but was ignored and reverted. Had there been some cooperation I would behave differently. Regardless, you haven't addressed anything I've said above, you've just quipped about the tail end of it. Please review.Yeago 01:43, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

It is beyond me why you would repeatedly delete a link which you already acknowledged on your talk page is perfectly appropriate. And yes, it is indeed the nature of syndicated comic strips that they are produced with a lead time of a couple of weeks. But you have not established that this lead time presents a problem for other strips in the way that it has for Prickly City, as evidenced by the examples cited.

Re: the notability question, my reading of Wikipedia guidelines is that notability determines whether a subject deserves its own article, but not whether it can be mentioned in another article. --Orat Perman 06:25, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I repeat that there is no such section on any other article about a political strip. If you would like to add one to each of those strips and see how long such edits stay up, be my guest, but Wikipedia needs to be consistent in order to be taken seriously. --Pellucid 12:24, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Quotes from Shrubville that indicate that it's not legitimate analysis. Here's some "monumental bias" for you:

"As has been noted for the past 2 and 3/4 years, however, clever doesn't live in Prickly City. No forwarding address."

"not to mention believing that someone's humor is wearing thin" "In case you're reading this, Mr. Stantis, that's me laughing AT you, not with." "The only difference now is that the majority of Americans have figured out that the Republican leadership is a failure and a joke." "Mr. Stantis, my diagnosis is that you're an unfunny hack."

"I've just about had it with Scott Stantis and Prickly City. It's as if he's trying to produce the absolute worst comic strip in the land. Someone needs to tell him to stop trying - the title is all his."

He also presents unproven things as facts:

"We know where the Republicans stand. They support illegal wiretapping" (still in appeals process) "knowing you somehow still have a comic strip BECAUSE you're a Bush Republican" (despite the fact that a UCLA study showed that newspapers lean heavily leftward: http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664 )

Here's some evidence of him not even knowing the terminology he's mocking. This is in relation to Winslow, the liberal character, selling carbon credits:

"Winslow's bright idea is to steal Lucy's psychiatry stand and charge people for...carbon indulgence? So they're going to pay Winslow, the smelly stupid stinky hippy green liberal, to actually use up more carbons? And he'll happily do it, because he's a greedy ne'er do well who could care less about saving the environment?"

I advise him to read this wiki article: indulgences. "Carbon credits" (or as Stantis refers to them "indulgences," which seems like a clever enough parallel and observation to me) are actually a liberal invention; rich Hollywood liberals and Al Gore purchase them from people with small carbon footprints to offset their massive carbon footprint. The logic is that they're "buying" the right to pollute from someone who isn't using up their allotment of pollution. I mean, it's really kind of pathetic how little the guy at Shrubville really understands about his own party's platforms. Read on:

"Let's put aside the idiocy of having the liberal in the strip want to destroy the environment. Why would anyone pay Winslow - who doesn't own a car, or a house, or anything as far as I can tell - to burn fossil fuels? Why not just do it themselves? Or does Stantis have a secret desire to burn even more oil than he already does? It's yet ANOTHER case of Stantis coming up with what he thinks is a clever idea, scratching it out on a napkin at lunch, then slapping it together by the Friday deadline without actually reasoning out what the heck it's supposed to mean."

And this stuff is all from the first three or four entires. This is not legitimate commentary. This is not thoughtful analysis. This is a smear-job, pure and simple. --Pellucid 16:25, 17 June 2007 (UTC)