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Hello,<br>
<br>
An interesting anecdote that has been brought to my attention -<br>
<br>
A friend's friend of mine tried to write a comment on the Talk Page
of the English WP's article about the Golan Heights. The comment was
detailed and referred to fallacies in comments of another user. The
discussion is interesting for itself, but a technical issue that
happened when he tried to post the comment was much more
interesting.<br>
<br>
He is not someone who regularly writes on WP, and registering for
one comment seemed to him inappropriate (his intuition worked well,
he could have been accused of being a "sock puppet" for such
registration). So he wrote whatever he wrote, pressed "save page",
and received the following error message: "<b>An automated filter
has identified this edit as potentially unconstructive, and it has
been disallowed. If this edit is constructive, please <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_filter/False_positives"
title="Wikipedia:Edit filter/False positives">report this error</a></b>".
He thought something was wrong with his Internet connection, so he
reconnected. The error message was still there. He then clicked the
"report this error" link. This link led him to a page, in which he
had to search for another link (I think this is the page:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_filter/False_positives">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_filter/False_positives</a>).
Luckily, the link was on the top of that page, so he found it
quickly and clicked it. An edit box with all kinds of strange
markings and explanations appeared. He eventually found where to
write the name of the page on which he tried to post his comment.
Below it he pasted the comment that triggered the error message.
When pressing "save page" he received an error message: "<b>An
automated filter has identified this edit as potentially
unconstructive, and it has been disallowed. If this edit is
constructive, please <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_filter/False_positives"
title="Wikipedia:Edit filter/False positives">report this error</a></b>".<br>
<br>
Had I been cruel, I'd say it is a combination of Kafka and Orwell -
the encyclopedia that anyone can edit gets you in an indefinite loop
in order to prevent you from editing. I'm not that cruel, so instead
I had a good laugh and decided to share it with you. <br>
<br>
Dror K<br>
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