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I would just like to ask anyone responding to this thread to be mindful of spoilers as some of us haven't seen the film in question yet.

Many of Gess's entries are complaints — particularly vitriolic complaints. Headscratchers is not for complaining. And when his questions/complaints are answered with evidence from the movie, he responds with long paragraphs filled with more vitriol and complaints, which often ignore or brush aside the aforementioned answers and evidence.

I admit I have gotten heated. I try to respond with facts and evidence from the work itself, and it is frustrating to see that constantly brushed aside and dismissed for the sake of continuous, vitriolic complaining.

A lot of headscratchers are about things that dont make sense. Borderline complaining and generally we don't erase them otherwise headscratchers would be very bare. Unless they were blatantly wrong then it usually stays.

Oh, yay, more problems with Headscratchers pages that leave me wondering why we haven't created a cleanup yet...

^ I'm all for joining in on the effort

I haven't read the entire page history, but other than some spelling errors and bits and pieces of phrasing here and there that are a little too opinionated and could be toned down, I don't see any reason why Gess's questions should generally be considered invalid. Mr Death's disagreements with him seem to be more about interpretations than facts. From what I can tell, Gess is reasoning within the logic of the film, examining why various plot developments or character actions don't seem to make sense in Watsonian terms, and sometimes even proposing in-universe solutions (e.g., when talking about how the Jedi ghosts work, an issue that has annoyed a lot of people otherwise). He does go on at some length at times, but exhaustive analysis of nerd minutiae is hardly uncommon around here, and (AFAIK) not frowned upon as long as it stays on these more analytical subpages. Overall, his contributions seem well within the spirit of what Headscratchers is supposed to be about.

Questioning what happens in the film is one thing.

Gess's questions have a vitriolic tone that go well beyond "reasoning within the logic of the film," to the point of flat out complaining, particularly in the responses to any answers his questions are given.

Take, for instance, the question about what Kylo Ren planned to do when he first confronts Rey in the film, particularly what his contingency was for if she used force lightning on him. Despite the answer clearly pointing out that there are in-universe, established counters that Kylo Ren would know about (one of which happens later in the same film), Gess's response is to insist that nobody could have conceived of a way for Kylo Ren to account for that possibility, in a tone that suggests the writers are all complete idiots for writing the entire situation to begin with.

That's what the issue is — not that Gess has questions about the film, but that his questions and how they're asked are unnecessarily vitriolic, if not outright hostile, toward the film.

If it helps we do have a cleanup thread for this: Removing complaining in Star Wars subpages

So in regards to the straight up removal of Gess examples for not liking their "tone". Is that reason enough to erase their examples. Objectively speaking if that is a valid objectively speaking that could lead to edit wars (and erases) if we summary decided to erase examples for perceived virtol. Should we readd it back until resolved in clean up thread.

In my opinion, Gess's questions were generally valid and shouldn't have been deleted. Even the piece Mr Death cites here as an example of mindless vitriol honestly seems like a legitimate question to me (re: Kylo Ren's actions and motives, how (and whether) they make sense or not). The language is a little opinionated and could perhaps use some editing to tone it down, but the argument itself is not unreasonable.

I think Mr Death may perhaps have misunderstood Gess—the way I read it, his main question there isn't whether Kylo Ren can defend himself against this particular mode of attack, but what purpose the fight with Rey serves in the first place. (From his POV in character, that is, as opposed to dramaturgically.) Since he indeed seems to risk much and gain little from it, that would seem a fair question to ask.

In any case, if this exchange is moved to a forum thread or something, I think Gess should also be invited to give his own view on the subject. He may not be aware of this discussion right now (not everyone follows ATT), and he seems to be editing in good faith, even if (like Mr Death for his part) he is obviously passionate about the film.

Yes, the core of the question is fair — which is why I and others answered it, using context clues and information from the film. And if it was just a simple case of that scene being confusing and needing clarification, it would have ended there. But it didn't — Gess proceeds to respond to the answers by rejecting them in a heated, angry tone. That is unnecessary and combative, and appears less about finding an answer to his question and more about "proving" that there is not a good answer.

Not everyone will always agree on whether or not a question has been answered in a satisfactory way. By itself, I think it's fair enough for Gess to disagree with your interpretations, and note it if he does. Where his rebuttals are too strongly phrased, they should perhaps be edited, but not deleted wholesale.

Or at least, that's my take.

Yeah. I concur total erasure was seems a bit much considering it's a Headscratcher. Should we readd until an agreed apoun course of action. I mean if they were valid even if aggressive we usually don't remove wholesale

The issue is that a lot of Headscratchers in this case and other ones blur the line between pure bashing and general question-asking. Removing things like this could fall in line with our effort to stop complaining on the wiki, but it could also fall under deleting people's valid questions.

Headscratchers is weird like that.

WarJay, there are more important things to address on this wiki than to create a cleanup for a Q&A. It's informal for a reason; once questions are answered they should be left alone since other people might have the same question.

^ Actually, there are a ton of issues with Headscratchers that need to be fixed, such as:

• Duplicate Questions
• "Questions" that are actually just bashing the work or the creators, harking back to IJBM
• First person language, which despite common usage actually isn't supposed to be on these pages
• Natter and side-conversation after the question has already been answered, including long debates

I certainly wouldn't be proposing this idea if I hadn't seen Headscratchers brought up multiple times as a part of the site in need of a little scrubbing, even just to make it easier for people to actually read it. Conflicts like this is another reason why we need it; so that if we have a conflict like this again, there's an actual place to take it beyond ATT.

This is speaking for myself only, but I honestly don't see why any of those is a serious problem. In fact, I think trying to "solve" them with more and harsher rules will cause far worse problems than just leaving things as they are.

• Duplicate questions—well, what exactly is a duplicate question? If someone starts a zero tolerance against those, we'll have zealots purging every question that looks even slightly like another, and then people being angry about that.
• Bashing—we already have policies against that, and many times it's actually overzealous anti-bashing that causes a lot of the conflicts (like in this case). Blatant bashing is one thing, but it's very hard to discuss plot holes in a work at all without it looking like "bashing" to the work's most devout supporters. To remove all "bashing" in this exaggerated sense of the word, we'd have to delete Headscratchers completely. Which I at least feel would be throwing out the baby with the bath water.
• First person language—I'm sure there's a lot of that, but does it actually harm anyone (when it's limited to these more discussion-like pages)? Most readers probably don't care much either way, whether it's technically policy or not. Certainly it's not worth inaugurating a huge upheaval over it.
• Side conversations "after the question has already been answered"—well, when has it been? As we can see from this very case, not everyone will always agree with a given answer. Saying a topic is off limits once someone has put in one answer (regardless of whether it's any good or not) will again, cause far more negativity than allowing free discussion. Also, incidentally, those long debates that sometimes result are often the most interesting parts of the page.

Please don't take any of this as a personal attack, if these are issues that are important to you. That's not at all my intention. I'm just worried that this sort of legalism, whatever the good intentions behind it, will actually serve make the wiki less enjoyable and less friendly to casual users. Which surely isn't what we want.

^ To answer:

• A "duplicate question" wouldn't be questions that just seem to be similar, but ones that are legit just the exact same question. For example, there's a duplicate question on Headscratchers.Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (2005 folder).
• While you have a point, Headscratchers was so filled with bashing that it literally had to get renamed. There's going to be tons of relics from it's past that were never zapped. There's a difference between asking a legit question about something that happened in the work, and posting just to complain about the work (which is what happened when it was called It Just Bugs Me). Obviously a cleanup effort would have to differentiate between negative-but-valid-questions and outright bashing disguised as a question.
• First person language isn't a huge deal to me when it's on Headscratchers, but there has been an effort lately to try and fix the issue, and the entire point is to be more like a Q+A about the work, not a conversation between tropers.
• I agree that sometimes the long debates can be interesting, but they still technically constitute natter and aren't supposed to happen. Like I said, it's supposed to be a Q+A type thing, not a forum thread for people to chit chat about the work. Half of the time these debates end up just obscuring the actual question, getting into WMG territory, or similar.

In any case, other people have reacted supportively to the idea of a Headscratchers cleanup effort, so it's definitely not just me that would get behind fixing these issues. There's definitely ways to make the area of the site less chaotic while still preserving the casual tone; I'm definitely not suggesting we just go and cut away anything that isn't just a dry answer to the question asked, just that we try and remove some of the more noticable problems.

IDK, it just feels to me like the current state of Headscratchers is a relic from an older period of the site's history, but it had never caught up to modern standards because people weren't interested in cleaning it up. It is a more casual area and that should be respected, but it can still stand to be spruced up a little bit.

To keep my reply relatively brief: I'm obviously not opposed to any and all changes in principle, and I agree with you that there is potential for improvement. I only fear that trying to crack down on the issues you describe would cause much more trouble than just leaving things as is. I can foresee, for example, extended arguments over what exactly "bashing disguised as a question" constitutes, or at just what point a question has been properly answered and is closed and off limits to further replies.

To some extent, of course, we already have these or similar problems, but harsher rules would only make them worse. Many fans who are passionate about a work or franchise are likely to react negatively to such new impositions, and it will be very difficult to set up objective criteria that everyone can agree with. A great number of borderline cases will require intricate discussions to adjudicate, and quite probably moderator action in many instances. Thus, such a crackdown will result in significantly increased stress for wiki regulars, and be even more likely to scare away new or casual users. In return, the expected gains would (as I see it, at any rate) be fairly slight.

This being the case, it seems better to me if we err on the side of generosity, and continue to allow greater freedom in the exchange of ideas on these pages. If the pages get untidy or unwieldy, a good solution to that might be to folderize each question separately under its own headline, as is already done (for example) on the presently concerned Rise of Skywalker page.

Of course, this is all still just my opinion.

In any case, this is off topic. If people think this is a discussion worth having, I might make a wiki-talk thread to continue debating the potential merit of a cleanup effort.

V Hey, I'm just as responsible too, lol.

Right. Sorry for clogging up the discussion!

I've added Headscratchers.The Rise Of Skywalker to the Star Wars Cleanup to-do list. Someday... someday...