User:Rocoauco

Greetings!

For reasons of Wikipedia culture, I must begin with a negative.

This is not my primary account on Wikipedia.

My primary account has an enormous contribution history. I don't wish to say much more than that.

The purpose of this account is to create separation between my public life and my private life. I view my long history of contribution here as (mostly) part of my private life. Anything more I say here about my other context will only serve to dox myself with respect to this context.

Finally doxing myself is perhaps inevitable. My future public sphere will necessarily overlap with my past pursuits in ways that increasingly form a unique fingerprint. Nevertheless, for now, I prefer later rather than sooner. Eventually, if someone out there wishes to be rude in this manner, my rather feeble wall will come tumbling down.

I'm mindful here of David Hume and the book Just Mercy, authored by Bryan Stevenson, law professor at NYU's School of Law; founder and ED of the Equal Justice Initiative. In his book, he poses the question: Are we the worst thing we have ever done? The context there is whether black men who commit serious crimes are beyond redemption. Long ago, Hume made a remark that hasn't aged well. One could pose the same question on his behalf, too, but asymmetry has now become the new symmetry. Welcome to life on The Third Rail.

On a more practical note, I intend to publish content on YouTube where I narrate over top of my desktop, and my desktop is likely to show portions of Wikipedia article leads on a regular basis.

I tried to do this today without logging in. Big mistake. I'm going to share my picayune travails rather fulsomely, so you can feel my pain exactly as I did. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but it is certainly not the soul of empathy with another person's uphill battle.

It almost began well, but as soon as I scrolled down, there was suddenly a floating TOC that I didn't want. By default it floats in the top left corner, right over top of the where I would optimally scroll the opening phrase of a paragraph of interest. This must die. Simple, I thought, I'll just use the

?printable=yes

view mode. Nope. Deprecated.

Next, I asked my chatbot, which suggested:

?withJS=MediaWiki:NoSidebar.js

I got a small error message in a pop-up that disappeared again faster than I could select and copy the text of the error, to paste it into my chatbot for further assistance. The pop-up was disappearing so quickly that I could barely get my mouse in there to begin selection before it was gone again. After several repeated attempts, I stabbed it fast enough to actually begin a text selection. It turns out the pop-up does not disappear while your selection drag continues. If you don't release the drag, you can still press CTRL-C to copy the text to your clipboard. It was a futile battle anyway, as the text of the message did not help my chatbot further assist me.

Moving on once again, this time I tried the printable page mode, but in the default format the lines are too long. I couldn't increase my zoom to make the text visible at a resolution compatible with YouTube without making most of the document disappear outside my view port. I didn't see an obvious button to override this, which suggest that even if I hunted such a button down, it would remain an uphill battle.

At this point, bag-of-tricks mode activated. You know what, I can just go into page edit mode, slap a _NOTOC_ directive at the top of the page, and then preview the page as desired without the hovering TOC box. This almost worked, but for two things.

First, for some reason, preview defaults to smaller text size than normal view. Okay, I can zoom this. Nope, I couldn't zoom this, because zoom also applied to the other Firefox window I had open beside it, also with Wikipedia content, not generated by preview, and now this text was gargantuan. Too much coupling, not going there.

Second, preview isn't actually preview. It inserts a bunch of giant coloured boxes—warning me that this is a preview, warning me that my IP address might be exposed—in between the page title and the rest of the page. Because it's in between the previewed page title and the previewed page content, it's functionally like having a production assistant on stage during a dress rehearsal, pinning production notes to the costumes as the actors deliver their lines. Rather intrusive, if you ask me.

Sigh. Of course, I could configure a custom skin if I was actually logged on. I could even associate custom CSS to render the page as best suits my YouTube channel, by techniques I already know. But no, it's not going to be my long-established account which immediately doxes a decade of my past life. So here we are, my new not-a-sock-puppet user ID which I didn't want in the first place.

I expect I will be making some edits with this account.

These are likely to be small MOS facelifts, editorial flagging (clarify, deadlink), and maybe shoehorning in an appropriate citation into improperly sourced material. If I use my other context to edit my concerns in this context, always on the same days, that would amount to running around in public wearing nothing but a lampshade.

I'm not here on this account to engage the community in any way. If by accident any of my edits are the least bit controversial, please instantly revert my contribution and let's forget it ever happened. I have a thick skin about being reverted.

I certainly won't be voting or weighing in on talk page resolutions on my not-a-sock-puppet account.

If this ever happens, feel free to ban this account indefinitely.

Trust me, I would do the same in return, if some wayward Blue Fairy came along and turned your not-a-sock-puppet into a real boy.

Those are my terms for now, at least, until declared otherwise.