Newbies who are WRONG.....
 

Warning: Rant ahead

I can deal with vandals or spammers or foul mouthed idiots. They're easy. We ban them. But well meaning, industrious and generally nice members .... who are idiots .... are becoming a problem. They mean well, but their information is wrong and so many of us veteran users and mods spend a lot of our time FIXING or RESTORING lines on pages that they change.

No one wants to be rude or mean to a new member, and we've all made mistakes ourselves in the past, but the sheer number of new guys making tons (and i mean TONS) of updates and changes is exhausting.

One member swept in here about a few months ago, made about 50 or so changes (nearly all of which were wrong) and then got bored and stopped visiting. But now someone has to go to all the pages and change BACK what he did. Arghhhhh. I figure I will kill an entire day trying to fix what he screwed up (and no, I can't undo the work because there have been interim edits made by other members since then that are correct and would take longer to re-create in their entirety).

This is the curse of becoming popular (IMFDB that is) . I've also been reading OTHER websites that mention IMFDB. They all mention the 'wiki' aspect of it and that they invite ANYONE to come on over and "start editing" to 'make us better" .... I hear over and over again from posters on other websites how they're gonna check out IMFDB and 'correct all of OUR errors' when THEY'RE the ones who don't know what they're talking about.

One problem is that GUN STORE or GUN DEALERS or even the manufacturers don't know what they're talking about when it comes to what was used in the MOVIES. Which is why I trust info from armorers far more than any random guy "in the firearms world". Those guys don't even realize that you have to blank adapt auto loading weapons. But we collide over and over and over again with guys who have weapons knowledge, but not MOVIE weapons knowledge.

Don't even get me started on 12 year olds whose only firearms experience is video games. :mad:

Anyway, we must be vigilant against erroneous information. And there will always be members who make honest mistakes. And we must constantly try to correct them.

I understand you totally. When I found this site I was one of those people who the majority of their firearm knowledge comes from literally shooting anything that is put in front of them. Still I also do alot of firearms research for the various fiction that I write for fun. Since starting to work on this site i have learned alot and have learned things about firearms that is simply not common knowlege.

As far as newbies go I have bitched about new people pulling things out of their arse and posting on pages that didn't need correcting. let alone the 50+ modifications done to the Armsel Striker page that turned it from something that i could be proud to say that I helped maintain to total garbage with next to no information and bad information at that.

Yeah, some people are getting that impression> example:

http://www.hkpro.com/forum/showthread.php?t=84669

Oh, god, no... Last thing we need is this place flooded with HK fanboys. :(

I do know what you mean...I've had several of my pages messed with by anonymous users who didn't know what they were talking about. What's funny is how some of them can't even read. I remember one user who changed "Heat" to say that the M16A1 was an M16A2, and he said, "That's an M16A2...check the front grip!" And this is in spite of the fact that the page specifically SAID that it was an A1 with A2 hand guards. Some people's reading comprehension just sucks... :mad:

They're not all bad, even though Larry Correia was right about many of them (and certainly, about H&K as a company).

There are some mistakes, i´m a newbie but i can fix them, but (for all the new members) don´t delete anything.

For example, in the BF Vietnam page:

I should have delete those lines, but i left that and put this note:

Another example (In Hellsing page):
plus my note:

There should be a banner in the page, intended for visitors to NOT delete anything (unless some visitor is a troll).

No, the legitimate fans of HK are fine. It's just the fanboys who preach and praise everything HK whether good or bad as the greatest thing on this earth no matter what are the ones I can't stand.

That is why I like to screen-cap movies with older firearms such as The Ghost and the Darkness and Crossfire Trail. I find that most fan boys aren't interested in older firearms so they stay away.

But we all make mistakes. MPM2008 corrected an error I made on The Stand when I screen-capped it. I identified a Mossberg 590 Mariner as a Winchester Model 1300 Marine. Whoops. But he stepped in and fixed it. Quietly and without being an ass about it. Gracias.

If I see something that isn't correct I always try to include some info explaining why I changed something. I'm big into firearms and I also own many many books about firearms. That helps when I make a correction.

But i have come across some "corrections" that are just amazingly moronic.

I corrected your error WITHOUT rubbing your face in it? Whoops, missed that one LOL ;) I must admit that everyone gets a little 'punchy' when we've corrected a lot of errors. At least you've seen some of the "Corrections" that 'drive by" members do that are either sloppy or misinformed.

I recently got irritated when some new unknown member changed a bunch of pages by renaming the gun, but the manufacturer didn't make that name change until a certain year, so he is wrong by renaming all the entries for that weapon before the year of the name change. Arghhhh. I can see where he 'got his information' (he looked it up on the mfg website, which of course only lists CURRENT models, not older ones).

Anyway, anyone can make ANY change to any page, but that person MUST be right. People only get mad when the change is wrong. Seriously. Anyone can correct any info I put out as long as it's correct. I've been corrected in the past and we all build on our body of knowledge by absorbing new and correct data.

I totally agree with you MPM. I know that you have corrected me from time to time and frankly I'd love to put my Remington M-700P next to one of your M-700PSS models so that we can visually show the differance as I know that there are some 700P entries that look funny to me.