Parking Ticket

In many parts of England, a ParkingTicket is issued by a TrafficWarden for violation of parking rules. It is put onto the car windscreen, with instructions to pay up. There is no easy appeal.

In the wiki context, I have encountered some examples where someone edits a page and makes an anonymous disparaging comment such as

That is a useless waste of time why do it at all?

and then does not respond to an invitation to discuss it.

This is I think a good example of one of the problems discussed on ConversationalChaff viz. Induce feelings of shame or incompetence.

{I don't see how the parking ticket example relates to this description. What is "useless", the parking ticket or challenging it?}

My apologies for not being clear. The ParkingTicket is the comment which is posted as a disparagement, a put down of something on the page where it is posted. The above is an example, and others can be found in the backlinks to this page. The analogy is to the way in which the person giving the ParkingTicket walks away and the person posting the comment is contributing and walking away also. The key things about this are the anonymity and the walking away, so that there can be no reply. What I have experienced over a period of time is a number of such comments against FunctionalProgramming in general and people using it in particular. When I created this page I broke my own self imposed rule not to be ironic as it runs the risk of confusing people. I have known that happen on some (to me) memorable occasions. The idea of the page was to give a way to respond to the person being put down, to be able to say I see what you say and invite you to respond instead of being rude. When there is (as has been the case) no response, then it stands as a marker that this is not a significant contribution to the discussion. -- JohnFletcher

I have another example where someone has made disparaging remarks on a number of pages relating to CategoryWikiReflection. I challenged the remarks and gave a different view a day or so later. There was no response about a week after my reply. I was expecting there would be. It felt as though someone with a ClosedMind view assumed that what was put could not and would not be challenged. I was wrong on this one - there was a message agreeing to differ. -- JohnFletcher

Example

Aargh! The goggles! They do nothing!

Seriously, this is a most striking example of GreenSpunning. Would it really have hurt that much to use a language from the *ML family in the first place?

This appeared some time ago on FunctoidsInCpp, now located in FunctoidsInCppDiscussion. The originator has not as far as is known responded to this comment.

I have now found out the particular meaning of the phrase about goggles:

From http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The+goggles!+They+do+nothing!&defid=1037170

A phrase to express disgust over something you see. Originated from a Simpsons episode and turned into a fad on www.gamefaqs.com.

Words fail me.

I suggest ParkingTicket as a WikiBadge to ask for a response or explanation for the initial comment. The implication is that without some factual explanation it is not GoodStyle. -- JohnFletcher

CategoryWiki CategoryCriticism