Talk:McShittles

RFD discussion: July 2018

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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McShittles

This is vandalism. This seems to be the work of a long term Wikipedia vandal and sockpuppeteer (See: 1, 2) who is obsessed with this alleged word. Whether this is merely juvenile vandalism or motivated by malice it clearly derogatory to McDonalds and specifically to their product, McGriddles. We should not be helping in this sordid endeavour. Besides, a neologism sourced entirely to Usenet with one of the citations being flat out racist is clearly illegitimate and disruptive. — This unsigned comment was added by DanielRigal (talk • contribs).

Tagged by User:DanielRigal but not listed. Unlike it may seem, the article is actually created by User:PseudoSkull, not by the vandal themselves (but I believe it was inspired by them). SURJECTION _{·talk·contr·log·} 18:59, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

@DanielRigal, @PseudoSkull. SURJECTION _{·talk·contr·log·} 18:59, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. I eventually found the little "+" to add an entry here. --DanielRigal (talk) 19:07, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Tagger's rationale appears to be that (i) the term is derogatory, (ii) it's a word that a certain vandal is obsessed with. Since it's already cited, I don't think those are reasons to delete. Compare Micro$oft, Shitcago. Equinox ◑ 19:02, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Are those citations considered valid? If they are then pretty much any entry in Urban Dictionary could be added here. Is this what we want? If three citations to usenet are sufficient then what is to stop me making up a word, posting it to usenet under three pseudonyms and then adding it to Wiktionary claiming that citations support it. --DanielRigal (talk) 19:07, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

This is not a valid rationale for deletion. There are 3 citations that show that the term is clearly in enough usage to be included here with the definition given (derogatory term for McDonald's). That a vandal is obsessed with the entry name is irrelevant to the entry's actual inclusion here (and the vandal's obsession actually has to do with McGriddle being morphed into McShittle, which is not an attested definition). The current entry is not vandalism and is semi-protected to prevent the vandal. If a vandal was obsessed with the entry for fire that would not be a valid rationale for deleting the page fire. PseudoSkull (talk) 19:12, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Usenet newsgroups are valid. Web sites, Twitter, Facebook etc. are not; see WT:CFI. Equinox ◑ 19:16, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Is it really Wiktionary policy to accept a neologism as valid if it has been used three times on usenet without any further citations? I am not feigning my incredulity here. I am not seeing any obvious qualitative difference between usenet and the more contemporary social networks and blogs. If it really is Wiktionary policy then I'm sorry to say that I can't see any line between that policy and just importing everything in Urban Dictionary. It does seem like a system that is trivially easy to game by people adding their own made up words. Pretty much the only effective defence is that the policy requires a year's separation in time. There are no shortage of people willing to wait that out. --DanielRigal (talk) 19:25, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

That hasn't really happened yet, though there was the case of Talk:Bibhorr formula, which relied on a vanity-published book. BTW, the world-famous OED is less conservative than we are, being quite happy to cite Twitter posts. Equinox ◑ 19:31, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

OK. I must admit to being very surprised that it is not abused to at least a some extent. I'm not here to argue for the OED but I'll wager that their use of Twitter is very selective and typically only applies to words that started on Twitter but then made it to other sources. (I'm thinking of things like "covfefe" here. I can imagine them wanting to cite its first use, which was on Twitter.) I'm also not here to bang my head against a brick wall. If policy and precedent are against me, and for "McShittles", then McShittles it is. I'll just say that I think that this is storing up trouble for the future. --DanielRigal (talk) 19:44, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

I think the main reason you're having trouble is that we don't censor anything that's actually in use, no matter how vile or offensive (or lame/silly) it may be. We don't allow entries for names of individuals, and we're describing usage from a neutral point of view rather than expressing an opinion or making assertions of fact about the subjects referred to by the terms, so I have doubts that these entries could be considered libelous by any legal definition- though IANAL. As for Urban Dictionary, there are large numbers of terms and definitions that they have and we don't- and we definitely want to keep it that way- so there's no danger of our becoming an Urban Dictionary clone. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:26, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

I must explain to you that the way things work at Wiktionary is drastically different in many ways than how they work at Wikipedia. While deleting an article about a similar topic at Wikipedia might suffice, deleting the article there is done for entirely different reasons than here. For instance, we do not decide which entries do not belong based on notability as Wikipedia does. We decide if they belong based on durably archived usage, and nothing more. We consider Usenet to be durably archived. As long as there are at least 3 separate citations used, from different authors spanning from at least 1 year apart, and the word can be classified as what we would call a lexical unit (which would take far more than just one sentence to describe), then it can be included here. This entry does indeed meet all the criteria I stated; at the bare minimum, yes, but the fact that the bare minimum exists still suffices. So, as you can probably tell by now by reading up to this point in my post, Wiktionary's inclusion criteria are very technical and straightforward, while Wikipedia's inclusion criteria are a lot less-so in my understanding.

Furthermore, Wiktionary is not censored to prevent vandalism, nor does it censor terms based on their derogatory nature, and rare derogatory terms are no exception to this. Instead, protecting pages, blocking vandals, hiding edits, creating editing or account creation filters, etc. can be used to prevent the vandal. Think about it from this point of view: if we censor our content based on who vandalizes which articles, then the vandal is sort of "winning", don't you think? Imagine if in early 2017 a vandal who was obsessed with fidget spinners repeatedly created the entry for fidget spinner as blatant vandalism (before I created it in the universe we live in), so we deleted any content related to fidget spinners, even if it wasn't vandalism. That could extend to the whole dictionary; why not just delete the whole dictionary, since people could and probably will vandalize just about every lemma entry on the site?

As far as the derogatory nature of entries such as this one, Wiktionary describes how words are used. Describing usage is not an insult or an attack on anyone. The entry McShittles describes what people mean when they say "McShittles" in these three Usenet posts; as in, they're belittling or showing their distaste for McDonald's. That's what the speakers in these contexts are doing, not Wiktionarians who made the entry. Furthermore, we intend to remain neutral in our definitions' points of view. It doesn't matter what I, or Equinox, or Chuck Entz, or Surjection, or you, or the McShittles vandal believe about the quality of McDonald's or their food; we're not going to let those opinions corrupt our entries about the restaurant. And Wikipedia has an identical philosophy.

I hope this long explanation helps you understand why this needs to be kept. I admit this is a rather complex case, and I can see why a newcomer would not initially understand its need for inclusion. @DanielRigal PseudoSkull (talk) 04:52, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

As such, snow kept. PseudoSkull (talk) 01:11, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

• I have no view on this particular case, but, as I have argued before, three "durably archived" instances is an extremely low bar. It would potentially require us to include all manner of random crap. As I have argued before, editorial judgement from educated native speakers is also necessary. Mihia (talk) 00:01, 29 July 2018 (UTC)