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Wikipedia is home to many disruptive editors. Some engage on talk pages, and often make use of distraction fallacies, falling into a pattern which has been characterised as:
Like someone who spits in your soup in a restaurant, then when you complain says: “Thank you for your comment. What do we mean by spit? What do we mean by soup? The 473 differing recipes for soup in Larousse Gastronomique show that there is no agreed definition of soup. Your complaint fails to address specifically how the supposed soup might be improved. I welcome constructive discussion to reach an amicable solution.”
Sometimes this is trolling, other times they are pushing a barrow; sometimes they genuinely think that spitting in your soup was fine, because it was their spit and your soup.
Whatever the precise intention, WP:SOUP is a common feature of disruptive and tendentious editing as well as Civil POV pushing, and is often an early warning sign. Beware when a new editor with an anti-consensus view joins discussion, and an article Talk page rapidly becomes a confusing morass of policy-related digressions and sub-threads responding to minor points in a style like that in the quotation. Related to political filibustering, the aim of WP:SOUP is to win not by rational argument, but by making the discussion so labyrinthine that other participants are exhausted/bored to the point of giving up.
External links
edit- Sea lioning, from the original Wondermark comic