Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-11-06/Humour

PLANO, TEXAS — Hoping that nobody would notice, electrical engineer and Wikipedia editor Randall Pickenplace deleted his half-written comment and removed Talk:Miffeplatz-Helmkraupft interference from his watchlist Thursday, following the crushing realization that his argument was both incorrect and stupid.

"I really thought I had something there", said Pickenplace, 35, of his aborted attempt to add several paragraphs on turboencabulator leakage to the "Causes" section of the article.

For the previous six days, Pickenplace had been engaged in a vigorous back-and-forth with the article's creator, Gretchen Fairchild, on both the sourcing for the passage and its dueness in the article. Pickenplace provided citations to IEEE publications about turboencabulation-induced interference, and cited several textbooks that mentioned the effect. Fairchild responded by pointing out retractions and errata that cast doubt on the phenomenon.

"At first, I got the revert notification, and I was like 'how could someone be such a dumb jackass?' and undid the edit", Pickenplace said. "But now I'm thinking that someone might actually be me."

Pickenplace began to have doubts around the third day of the argument, when he noticed several journal articles had Fairchild listed as a coauthor. A subsequent attempt to find more publications about Miffeplatz-Helmkraupft interference turned up nothing relevant to winning the argument, although it did turn up https://prestigiousham.ac.uk/faculty/~gqfairchild/index.html (last updated in 2005). "That was when I kind of started to see the writing was on the wall," said Pickenplace. "Next to the PhD in digital signal processing."