This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Was pondering why some language-editions of Wikipedia seem to have much better articles than en-Wikipedia in unexpected areas. Example 1: Roland Philipps - see the Spanish-language version at es:Roland Philipps. There is even a mention on the talk page over there of Tower Hamlets and Stepney Green. Ah, I see what happened. The en-Wikipedia article in passing says "A Scout Group in Mexico is named after him, and has recorded his biography in detail." And then (maybe thankfully) leaves the way clear for the detail over there. I am sure you and others can come other with similar examples. Carcharoth (talk) 21:29, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Yes, one might wonder, for example, why there's a dewp article on this guy [1] but none in enwp. EEng 21:39, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
It is certainly noticeable that some other Wikipedias have better coverage of certain topics, artworks for example, even ones by English or American artists, although the articles are not necessarily fully developed.
That article was almost entirely written by a Scouts2012. Many articles such as the ones I edit are almost entirely written by one editor, and if that editor only edits in one language only one Wikipedia will have a high quality article on the topic. And it won't necessarily make sense to outsiders why it has to be in that specific language. Check out es:Coropuna and en:Coropuna for an example - that topic is certainly more important for Spanish speakers than English speakers but since the editor who wrote most of the volcanology sections is English speaking the enwiki article covers it better. Which is a pity, really. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:55, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
Sadly Scouts2012 seems to have gone away. Or chosen a new name, perhaps. There is certainly something to be said for encouraging people with sufficient language skills to translate articles from other Wikipedias. I suspect more are translated from the English Wikipedia into other languages than come back the other way. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.205.251.169 (talk • contribs)
At least part of the reason topics are sometimes represented on other Wikipedias when they aren't represented here is that—while it may not sometimes seem apparent when watching the crapflood—English Wikipedia actually has quite a high definition of "notability" compared to the other language wikis. While we require "significant coverage", the notability standard for most of the other wikis is just "coverage in reliable sources"—consequently, we don't allow the creation of an article on every entry in a directory while other wikis do, and it's a lot more difficult to demonstrate significant coverage in reliable sources. (Thus, to take a pertinent example, there are around 800 extant William Etty paintings, but only about 40 would make viable en-wiki articles because they've actually been discussed in detail in their own right, but many of the other wikis would happily host a one-line permastub on each. Likewise, cy-wikipedia considers every book published in the Welsh language to be automatically notable by virtue of existing, even if it's just a self-published directory of garden sheds or autobiography of a completely insignificant figure which the author has self-translated into Welsh, whereas we'd expect to see evidence that significant reviewers considered the book notable or that it had some kind of impact.) There's also the Hasselhoff Factor; some topics which are considered niche in their home countries are for one reason or another mainstream elsewhere.
Incidentally, 213.205.251.169, I've undone this edit. While it's correct, the four Tate Galleries are something of a special case. Because they're so restricted for space and—particularly in the case of Tate Britain—unable to expand, their permanent collections massively outweigh available display space and they're only able to display about 5-10% of the collection at any time. This is particularly true of their 19th-century British collection, where they have a grand total of two rooms (one pre- and one post-1848) at Millbank to display not only everything they inherited from the National Gallery but everything acquired by Henry Tate, everything bequeathed by George Frederic Watts, and everything they've acquired or been bequeathed in the meantime. Consequently, they operate a policy of rehanging displays at high frequency, of rotating items between the four sites, and of taking every opportunity to loan things out. Other than the Turners (which are safe in their dedicated room), pretty much the only 19th-century works that one can safely assume will be on display are Millais's Ophelia, Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott, Constable's Flatford Mill and Rossetti's Beata Beatrix because they're the ones that drive poster sales—even world-famous works like Carnation Lily Lily Rose and Hope regularly get exiled to the store cupboard or loaned out to other galleries. (In general, they always have one Etty on display at Millbank—generally Youth and Pleasure although at the time of writing it's a rather nondescript nude study.) Unless it could somehow be automated, for Wikipedia to try to keep track of what is and isn't on display at any one time is a recipe for constantly going out of date, as well as for annoying readers if we don't keep what's on display and where up to date, since it's perfectly possible that someone reading about a particular work will decide they want to see it and get annoyed when they turn up at Millbank to discover that the work in question is currently in Tate Liverpool, on tour in Tokyo, or languishing in a climate-controlled bunker off Goodge Street. ‑ Iridescent 16:59, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
WP:VAMOS cautions against "currently (not) on display" for these reasons, except for works that are really core in a collection, or very static collections. The Royal Collection is another that likes to keep its artworks on their toes. At the least, a date should be given. Johnbod (talk) 15:36, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Even "works that are really core in a collection, or very static collections" is risky. With the possible exception of Michelangelo's David and the Mona Lisa—and a few special cases like frescos that physically can't be moved without dismantling the building around them—pretty much everything has the potential to go on loan or into storage at some point. Ponce lets Flaming June travel reasonably frequently despite it being the only piece in their collection that anyone's actually heard of, the National Gallery of Scotland has unceremoniously shoved a huge stack of their most famous works in the storeroom while they rebuild the lower levels, and even the Bayeux Tapestry looks set to go on holiday. (On the subject of works being put in storage, this desperate publicity stunt raised an eyebrow; I don't know if you're familiar with the internal layout of MAG, but to reach the empty spot formerly occupied by this "depiction of women as either a passive decorative form or a femme fatale" which was so offensive it had to be removed, the visitors will have to pass an entire wall occupied by a fifteen-foot mural of naked women luring men to their deaths and feasting on their half-rotted corpses.) ‑ Iridescent 15:43, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Arbitration and other history
I was musing on what you said above about the new ArbCom, and I realised that things have got to the stage where I don't really know or recognise half of them. OK, that's not entirely true. I recognise about 10 of them. But I can no longer divine where the committee is likely to come down on certain issues. Maybe that is a good thing.
In passing (and probably more interesting), it is gratifying to see articles being created in recent years that I wouldn't have thought would have been possible when I first wrote articles mentioning the topics (people in this case). Two examples: Gordon Alchin (created January 2016) and William G. S. Cadogan (created November 2014). I somehow missed the creation of the latter article, but I see the creator ended up blocked as a sockpuppet, which is a bit disconcerting.
Still more in passing, would you have any advice on George Harold Baker? I could work on the article some more, but am not quite sure what the right balance would be. And that brings me full circle to a discussion we had on these pages about grave inscriptions (see More on memorials from September 2016 for a refresher). I have done a couple of these now that the CWGC put the grave inscriptions up more prominently: [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]. The interesting thing about some of these is looking at the CWGC scans of their records, you see which relative requested the inscription (the next-of-kin entry and address) - that is not included for Prince Maurice, so no clue there as to who from the Royal Family came up with that epitaph. Maybe it is recorded somewhere else, maybe not (secondary sources sometimes comment on this, but quite rarely).
Small addendum, on something that popped up on a search: this discussion from nearly three years ago featured Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. The triforium got mentioned there. And the Westminster Abbey website has improved still further over the last few years. On my recent readings, I found that the plans to open up the triforium to create a new exhibition space are far advanced. Read all about it here! (is it bad that I find that quite exciting?). :-) Carcharoth (talk) 02:40, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
My comment isn't necessarily a criticism of the individuals—there's always a tendency in January for newly-elected arbs to slip into a "we shall now proceed to construct the new world order" mentality and want to immediately set about acting as an Instrument Of Justice, and consequently to take on tasks that more experienced people would reject. Looking at the new names, I can fairly confidently predict that this committee will be far more keen to micromanage and interfere than any since the bad old days, but I can't predict which way they'll jump on any given issue. There's the additional factor that there's now one person on the committee whom I'd consider actively crazy, and while they'll always be outnumbered 14–1 so won't actually have much impact, they'll potentially steer discussions in directions they wouldn't normally have followed.
I no longer have access to the relevant archives and logs so don't know the full story, but that SPI looks like a very odd situation. As 213.205.251.169 might be able to testify it's not impossible for someone to be operating multiple good-hand accounts simultaneously, but it's something that would take a lot of effort with no obvious benefit—there's no "I don't want to link my real name to controversial edits" or "I have a high profile but want to edit in uncontroversial obscurity" argument in this particular case. We just went through the same thing with another long-term user here—maybe this is more of a trend than I thought.
George Harold Baker might be quite difficult, as I imagine a lot of the sources will be print-only and not widely available outside Canada, and if he was from Quebec there's a decent chance that sources will be in French. A quick-and-dirty way to flesh it out will be to check the Parliamentary records for the period in question and just list which way he voted in each division, and some quotes from his speeches if he made any, as that's an easy way to give readers an idea of his views on various issues without slipping over the line into the dreaded Original Research.
It's now been a hundred years, so the relevant royal archives for Prince Maurice should be opening, although material pertaining to the Royal Family has a tendency to be "lost in the floods of 1957". In his case I'd be shocked if his epitaph were chosen by anyone other than his mother.
If they're planning on using the triforium to divert the flood of tourists away from the main body of the church all well and good, but I don't hold out much hope. To my mind Westminster Abbey now has the feel of an English Heritage Disneyland, and they should probably be putting more of it off limits rather than opening it up further; I can totally see why the latest batch of royals are choosing to have their weddings at St George's Chapel rather than Westminster Abbey or St Paul's. (Speaking of places that are overrun by tourists, I haven't forgotten the Natural History Museum and am just being lazy.) ‑ Iridescent 10:00, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the advice. There is quite a bit more in the 1917 memorial booklet (available online), but that will begin to overwhelm the article unless used carefully. The article also needs to mention Samuel Simpson Sharpe. I read up on that, and am wondering what has happened here? More here. Quite a contrast in the stories and the playing out of the public memory there. Carcharoth (talk) 12:59, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
At a guess, there were probably complaints that Sharpe was being honoured while other shell-shock and shot-at-dawn cases haven't received official pardons. Or, it may be something as simple as the delays to the Nigel Gresley statue at King's Cross, because the man's descendants complained about the design. ‑ Iridescent 17:20, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
While you're here, do you (or anyone else) have any idea what this is all about? It's in Nunhead Cemetery, immediately next to the WW1 graveyard - there's no explanatory sign, and neither it, nor the Scott memorial mentioned, is something I've ever heard of, not is there any mention why something designed by Scott - which would presumably have been listed - has been replaced with this plain tablet. ‑ Iridescent 15:31, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
We have HMS Arethusa (1849) - presumably the ship mentioned. But nothing on the disaster. But Prof. google knows all about it - rather interesting [8]Johnbod (talk) 15:41, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) According to this site, "In 1969, during the time the cemetery was badly neglected and the target of vandalism, the life size bronze scout was stolen and probably sold for scrap." One of those niche topics perhaps, Iridescent...? >SerialNumber54129...speculates 15:48, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Lots of blogs, but aside from this brief BBC report on the centenary there doesn't seem to be anything online other than the contemporary press coverage, and I'm not particularly inclined to go wading through old books looking for the occasional mention. Baden-Powell House might know if anything's ever been published on it. ‑ Iridescent 17:09, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
"Leysdown disaster"; that's what the BBC use so you have a Reliable Source for the term being used to describe it. ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
This book (Kids From Over the Water: An Edwardian Working-class Childhood in South-East London) has what looks like a good account of what happened. Statue sculpted by a Miss Lillie Reed apparently (designed by Scott). Carcharoth (talk) 17:40, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, Carcharoth; yes, I saw that, and it would be bloody useful- but I wondered if it was actually RS? I mean it's not Angela's Ashes, but it doesn't seem to source itself much? >SerialNumber54129...speculates 17:56, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Most of the facts can probably be additionally sourced to contemporary newspaper reports. Is anyone intending to write an article on this - I might at some point. Carcharoth (talk) 11:58, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
Well, Carcharoth, I was thnking of it, partly as a way of dragging me out of my comfort zone. The problem with doing so, of course, is that I may (almost certainly will!) not have access to the sources, like you perhaps. >SerialNumber54129...speculates 12:25, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
If you're in Britain, sign up for City of London Libraries—you don't need to live or work there, just be prepared to visit either the Barbican or Artizan Street (round the corner from Liverpool Street station) to bring proof that you reside in the UK and to collect your card, after registering online. It opens a huge swathe of normally paywalled archives, and also allows you to virtually borrow books (the book will appear on your e-reader, then self-delete after three weeks unless you renew it). If you sign up for the CoL and Westminster—who offer an overlapping but different range of archives, between the two you have access to pretty much every digital archive you'll ever need for anything pertaining to English history. ‑ Iridescent 14:51, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
There was a bronze statue of a scout, stolen in 1969 apparently. Google "Walworth Scouts and Leysdown Tragedy". Lots of sources, including a picture on the cover of a book about it on Amazon. Apparently David Beckham's great-grandfather and one brother surivived; another brother drowned. No article on Leysdown tragedy ... yet. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.73.172.168 (talk)
Georgina "Georgie" Robinson, killed in a road accident in France while returning from her honeymoon
While we're talking about cemetery oddities, I nominate this, which rivals Liliana Crociati de Szaszak as a combination of "genuinely moving" and "genuinely disturbing" (zoom in to read the inscription), and is in the decidedly prosaic surroundings of Willesden rather than some exotic clime. I assume the sculptor had a spare Shaun Ryder head knocking about the studio. ‑ Iridescent 15:00, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
I presume the 'G' and the 'M' stand for Georgie and Maurice (the husband's name)? The inscription isn't particularly disturbing, unless I'm missing something? (The tragedy itself is disturbing enough.) It is rather strange to come across sculptures like that suddenly in a graveyard. Carcharoth (talk) 18:26, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
Grave of John Renie, Monmouth; start at the big H in the centre and work outwards in any direction you choose.
It's the sculpture that's disturbing, not the inscription—my comment about zooming in was just to see the back-story. This one is still the oddest statue I've ever seen—it's on a corner at the end of a sombre row of tombs in the ultra-respectable La Recoleta Cemetery, and you can literally see strollers do a double-take as they see it. (If you're interested in grave monuments and ever get the opportunity, I can't recommend Recoleta highly enough—the Porteños picked up the Victorian style of funerary architecture from the British but unlike the British never lost it and continued building elaborate tombs and weeping angels up to the present day, all in whatever the prevailing style happened to be at the time, and the net result is an extraordinary mashup of designs. The surrounding area is also lovely, and gives the general impression that someone has somehow sawn off a chunk of central Barcelona and towed it across the Atlantic.) In terms of general oddness, I find it hard to believe anyone will ever find a more peculiar grave than that of John Renie. ‑ Iridescent 22:17, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
Aside about checkuser
Please accept my apologies IP. An unfortunate proximity to elsewhere on the ~31 range in the city :) happy editing! >SerialNumber54129...speculates 16:56, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
The perils of mobile broadband; because the IP address gets reallocated every time you drive under a bridge, overenthusiastic admins—especially those from places like the US where IP addresses are far less dynamic—apply rangeblocks or write LTA cases in good faith, without realising that the ranges in question can knock out entire countries. (See User talk:Oshwah#Range block for a recent example.) If you're in the UK—and not on one of the specialist providers like Hyperoptic where the IP address is genuinely stable—go to whatismyipaddress.com every so often and check yourself against the block logs and LTA cases. You'll be shocked at how often you're flagged as a vandal address. ‑ Iridescent 17:03, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
True :D -I'm sure I saw her editeng from a library in my nec of the woods, and that was wierd. I should know better in any case. Cheers, >SerialNumber54129...speculates 17:14, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Remember, geolocation in the UK is meaningless; as a case in point, 31.73.172.168 is currently simultaneously geolocating to Cannon Street station and the suburbs of Bristol. Trying to pin down a BT IP—as is the case at Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Vote (X) for Change—is particularly pointless, since the whole "every house is a hotspot" way BT is set up means your IP address can literally change ten times in a minute if you're using a laptop in a moving vehicle. ‑ Iridescent 17:27, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
That's brilliant; also bizarre :) Per beans, etc, but CU bases itself on that or similar information, surely...?! >SerialNumber54129...speculates 17:34, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Checkuser results on an IPCheckuser results on a username with "get edits" checkedCheckuser results on a username with "get IPs" checked
I don't know why Checkuser is surrounded with such "oh, we can't disclose how it works!" mystique. MediaWiki is open-source software and anyone who so desires can either install it on their own computer and play around with all its functions, or read the user manual for themselves. Checkuser on a username outputs the IP addresses they've used in the last 3 months and (optionally) each edit they've made and what the useragent was, and CU on the IP address will show the usernames that have used it in the last 3 months and their respective useragents. There really isn't any secret information that it discloses; when we say "Checkuser is not magic pixie dust", we mean it. ‑ Iridescent 18:06, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Not a secret, just not advertised ;) the only place on en.wp these images are is this page... I guess I just wondered how much actual use the information is when one can be in both the city of London and bristol! >SerialNumber54129...speculates 18:20, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Those particular images aren't, but File:CheckUser log.png is in WP:CheckUser, along with a link to Technical:mw:CheckUser; more detailed description of how the feature works and how to install the extension on one's own wiki.; this really isn't a secret. ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
I was going to set up a personal wiki once, but it was so mind-numbingly Byzantine in everything that had to precede it, or bolt on to it, etc., that it became proper tedious. Cool notion though, one's own 'private collection', as it were. >SerialNumber54129...speculates 12:27, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
I did it, it took an afternoon. Its not difficult as such but it does require following certain steps. Add an extra few days if you want to care about external network access as opposed to have a closed internal wiki. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:43, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
Cheers Only in death; I thought, when you write a lot about separate but all interlinked subjects, it would be a useful storage system with built-in cross-referencing. I discovered that I would have to learn a new lingo, though ;) °«»° >SerialNumber54129...speculates 12:33, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
Where private wikis shine is when you have multiple people all working on different aspects of the same thing, and you want to be able to link everyone's work without everyone getting in each other's way. For personal use, I find it hard to think of a use-case where the benefit would outweigh the time and space it takes up; if you want to cross-reference documents internally, just set up a quick-and-nasty Access or Base table. ‑ Iridescent 15:44, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata (redux)
No-one has mentioned wikidata here for a while. I noticed the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#RfC: Linking to wikidata and the uses of {{Wikidata icon}} (mentioned at the TfD) in List of public art by Oldenburg and van Bruggen and The Offerings of Peace and The Offerings of War (permalinks: [9], [10]) are interesting. Links to wikidata can be useful. Hopefully a range of options will be provided, rather than a straitjacket. I happen to think that in a tabulated list, a column explicitly naming (e.g.) Wikidata entry Q24641121 might work. It feels a bit like people are arguing over whether to carefully curate certain forms of article-related data here on Wikipedia in the form of a carefully constructed article that fits together, or whether to do the data curation on a separate page (i.e. on Wikidata). And how to get the interaction working between the two. It is in some ways interesting seeing this all play out. But in other ways distressing at the amount of time spent hand-wringing.
I might raise this later in the context of an idea I have to in some way include somewhere in (or connected to) an article, the data point that an illustration or photograph of something exists (in this case two photographs in The Illustrated London News from 1924 and 1925 that I can't quite work out the copyright status of) and in some way including that information so that readers/researchers/editors are aware of it, and can go look at the photograph themselves if so inclined. It is kind of like an image version of 'further reading'. Pointing people towards image resources even if they can't be included in the articles directly. Does that make sense? (On the most basic level, a sentence along the lines of "An illustration of x event/object was published in the ILN on abc date", could be referenced to that ILN issue. Similar to how you sometimes get "Portrait of XYZ held at the NPG", with accompanying reference. But these are often best included as footnotes.) I should give the actual example later, as that will make more sense. Carcharoth (talk) 12:52, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
Until Wikidata matures and gets its act together, we should not be linking to it. Just one example of why: it is user-generated content with little or no editorial oversight and thus inherently fails WP:RS, just as WP:CIRCULAR applies. The icon should be a bargepole. - Sitush (talk) 13:45, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
What Sitush said. Unless and until the WMF implement a mechanism by which changes on Wikidata show up in the watchlists of people on the various Wikipedias who have the article in question watchlisted and (crucially) can be reverted without having to navigate to Wikidata and perform the edit there, we shouldn't even be linking to Wikidata let alone transcluding anything from there. Yes, we link to other language versions of the article in the sidebar but readers understand that articles in different languages are written by different people; because Wikidata results appear in English, readers will reasonably assume that they have the en-wiki imprimatur and (crucially) that any quality-control review that's taken place on en-wiki has also covered the information on Wikidata.
Since your initial post has raised the topic of visual arts articles as a field in which Wikidata links would purportedly be useful, let's take a look at one. Here is the corresponding Wikidata page for the non-randomly-chosen Candaules. This is a relatively simple topic—a straightforward illustration of a single incident from a single chapter of a single book—which is a current FA on two different Wikipedias so the information and (crucially) the sources are easily available, and the WD page has had over 50 separate edits so someone there has obviously put some time into it and not just quickly created a stub as a drive-by edit. The page has not a single referenced claim, includes obviously nonsensical original research ("depicts=overweight" when two of the three figures are positively emaciated by the standards of 19th-century art and the third is a heavily-muscled Commander of the Royal Guard and by definition at the peak of fitness), and also contains outright errors ("inception=1820", "depicts=walking", etc). Multiply that by 5,552,448 to get an idea of the scale of the problem cleaning out the Augean Stables at Wikidata would entail even if it were locked down and no further information was added to it in the meantime—and bear in mind that this is an article that in its FA review has gone through source checking so the cited statements in the article can be presumed accurate and don't need to be researched from scratch, which is decidedly not going to be the case for the overwhelming majority of WD entries.
Google has multi-billion-dollar budgets and 70,000 staff and still doesn't manage to get the "integrating data and content" thing working correctly (just ask Greggs)—it's the height of both arrogance and stupidity for the WMF to think they can accomplish with a shoestring budget and a handful of volunteers what a global multinational which has providing accurate search results as its core business fails to do. While I was initially agnostic about Wikidata, and while I didn't think it had much to offer to the big Wikipedias could see a potential value in allowing ready access to the data for people writing in smaller languages without them having to try to translate English, French etc sources, I'm now swinging firmly to the anti side. Wikidata is now more than five years old, and as far as I'm concerned they no longer have the right to play the "we just need a little more time and it will all be working properly" card.
Personally, I think we've by now reached the point at which we should concede that the Wikidata experiment as originally envisaged has failed and that the best discussions to be having are on how a formal breaking of ties can be arranged with minimum acrimony and on what a post-Wikidata en-wiki will look like, but given the level of "I'm going to ignore anyone who disagrees with the party line" that came from the WMF even on the relatively minor matter of short descriptions (TL;DR summary: an RFC was held which produced a consensus to remove Wikidata-generated summaries from mobile view; the WMF response was to redefine "mobile" to exclude iOS and Android and carry on as before), I hold out no hope at all of any progress until the half-a-dozen Wikidata enthusiasts who stonewall and disrupt any discussion that looks set to conclude that Wikidata isn't perfect are shown the door. ‑ Iridescent 18:37, 17 January 2018 (UTC) (Paging Fram and RexxS, since if I'm going to have the luxury of having my talkpage turn into an informal RFC on Wikidata yet again they probably both ought to be aware.)
A quick follow-up to Iridescent's example regarding Google. Spend a moment Googling Jean Alexander. It is nearly a year since I told Google that their infobox thing is confusing her with an author of aeronautical books, hence showing her as the writer of Russian aircraft since 1940. It still shows that as of today. I've no idea where they are scraping their information from or what algorithms there are using to pull it all together but clearly it has the potential for big BLP problems here if Wikidata is essentially following a similar path and we're pulling information off it. As if we don't have enough problems already. - Sitush (talk) 19:45, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
While Bing is also a culprit, I'm sure most of them are just using the same algorithms... either way, I answer probably a dozen or two OTRS tickets a week with "We have no control over what search engines show in their Knowledge Boxes. Please let them know, since it has nothing to do with us." Primefac (talk) 19:47, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
And it doesn't have anything to do with us. But if we have information in en-WP that has been drawn from Wikidata then that does have something to do with us. - Sitush (talk) 19:52, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
That isn't a problem with Wikidata. The Google box of Lake Manix gives "Bristol Lake, Mojave River" as outflow and "Newberry Springs, Yermo" as cities. Wikidata only gives "Mojave River" as outflow and the infobox for some reason gives "Yermo, California, Newberry Springs, California, Yermo, California" as settlements and "Mojave River through Afton Canyon, Baxter Wash or Bristol Lake less likely" for the outflow. So I suspect it's a problem with Google in general. 'course it's a prehistoric lake not a litigious real life person, but if that is the standard for Googleboxen I wonder what a BLP will say. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:58, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
My point re Google results isn't claiming that Wikidata is corrupting them. It's that if even a global multinational whose entire business model is predicated on them convincing people that their data is trustworthy, and whose customer service department alone probably outnumbers the entire Wikipedia active editor base, can't get these things right, it's not reasonable to assume that a volunteer project that only has a few dozen active editors many of whom are—um—'differently competent' is able to handle the issues arising from mass hosting of potentially sensitive data. (Re the editor numbers, they claim to have almost 20,000 active editors but that claim is bullshit; any time an admin on any WMF project deletes a page with a corresponding Wikidata item they attribute a Wikidata edit to that admin, which means people who've never had the slightest involvement with Wikidata get credited as "highly active editors". They pull the same stunt with any editor who's ever performed a page-move, too.) ‑ Iridescent 20:25, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
That was my point by example, too. They've known about the Alexander issue for ages, it is a no-brainer to check and they have a massive staff. Yet still it persists and, as Iridescent has shown below, is being persisted. - Sitush (talk) 20:33, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) And the errors in turn get picked up by sites whose algorithms work off the assumption that Google, Wikidata et al are accurate, and other sites copy those sites, and eventually a single sloppy journalist reads one of them and doesn't check the facts for themselves, and hey presto we have a honest-to-Hilda Reliable Source so the information becomes verified and never gets removed from Wikipedia and Wikidata… Welcome to the wonderful world of citogenesis (google "Hairy bush fruit" for a good example of just how far citogenesis can spread—that particular one came from a single vandal edit in 2007).; Iridescent 20:02, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
I'm seriously starting to lose my rag on this. At this point I have not gone nuclear but it's not going to be too long. Only in death does duty end (talk) 01:30, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
Before you lose your rag, wait and see how the oncoming storm pans out. While infoboxes and Wikidata are two different things, the topics—and, crucially, the people—have such a close overlap that whoever's left standing at the end will have a drastic impact on how Wikipedia/Wikidata integration proceeds in future. ‑ Iridescent 15:45, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Architect notability
Prompted by seeing Ptolemy Dean in a BBC documentary (a repeat from 2012), I created the list article Surveyor of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey. Am now wondering if the three red-linked people in that list are notable. I think Foster is. A stub could be created on Horne. Not sure about Burton. It would be a stub, and might scrape past. What do you think? Carcharoth (talk) 14:56, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
<tps>I'll have a look through some of my dead-tree references to see what might be done. Acroterion(talk) 14:59, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. Am asking at WikiProject Architecture as well (the proper place to ask!). Carcharoth (talk) 15:29, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
My inclination would be that anyone who's ever held the post is inherently notable in Wikipedia terms since pretty much by definition not only will the appointment will have been written about in detail, but they must have been considered significant to have got the job in the first place. That doesn't necessarily mean they need an article; if there are genuinely no usable sources then there's no point creating more William Garrat permastubs. ‑ Iridescent 16:26, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
Foster has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture with enough for a reasonable start. Horne is not mentioned in the ODA or the 1901 Sturgis Dictionary of Architecture and Building, but I find references to him here and there on the Internet and we might piece together a paragraph or so. Burton might sustain a stub - he was recognized with an MBE for what that's worth, but he doesn't seem to have gotten much independent coverage and is not in the ODA. I think the post lends notability, but as Iridescent notes, it would be best if we can find enough sources to get past a two-sentence stub. Acroterion(talk) 16:53, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
Both Horne and Keene are discussed in Architectural Outsiders, which seems a fair enough description. When you have posts like this that are sustained over centuries without being famous and really top-level posts, then you do seem to get periods where, um, less notable people come along and do the job. Burton's main claim to fame seems to have been to hold both this post and the post of Surveyor of the Fabric at Canterbury Cathedral at the same time. I am not going to attempt a list of the holders of that post, though I see the successor appears a bit shy (a case of photo cropping failure). There has been a continuous line of architects tending to St Paul's Cathedral, with the latest being Stancliffe and Caroe (Martin Stancliffe and Oliver Caroe). It is tempting to try and do that list as well. It includes Henry Flitcroft, Somers Clarke, C. R. Cockerell and Bernard Feilden apparently. Carcharoth (talk) 18:18, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
My gut instinct is that St Pauls will be fairly easy to do, as the CoL are obsessive hoarders of documents so all it would take would be a trip to the Guildhall Reference Library and a willingness to wade through microfiches and to annoy the librarian by asking for books in the dusty recesses of the archives. Whether it's worthwhile would be another matter; there's no point writing something unless either there's an obvious chance that people will want to read it, or you can feel reasonably confident that you can make the topic interesting enough that people who don't know they want to read it will stick around to take a look when they stumble across it accidentally (such as the half-hour I've just spent reading Etchmiadzin Cathedral); I suspect there's a decent chance that this may be one of those topics where it's more of a service to the reader to direct them to the subject's own website. ‑ Iridescent 18:38, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
Oh, it's all out there already. But you would be surprised at how neither Westminster Abbey nor St Paul's feel they need to maintain such a list (I looked). Dropping the library/archive/collections team at such places a note can result in a list being pulled together by someone tasked to do that. I have 15 so far. But will probably be stopping soon and turning to other things. Carcharoth (talk) 18:52, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
I did end up doing Surveyor of the Fabric of St Paul's Cathedral, and it is nice to see the articles we have and the one's we don't. Some may quibble over the inclusion of Wren there, and the post of Surveyor goes back further (to John Denham and Inigo Jones). Some sources variously use the constructions 'Surveyor of the Fabric of', 'Surveyor to the Fabric of', and 'Surveyor of the Fabric at'. If I create enough redirects, I may head off a move request... I am not going to do a list for Canterbury Cathedral. I suppose I should link to Cathedral Architect and architectural conservation. Carcharoth (talk) 23:50, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
No reasonable person will quibble about Wren. Any list of architects responsible for St Paul's that didn't include Wren would be being wilfully perverse. Westminster Abbey must have a list somewhere, even if it's not online—they surely must get "who ws responsible for the building of foo?" questions fairly frequently. ‑ Iridescent 15:45, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Famous Wikipedians
I had no idea that Peter Hitchens edited Wikipedia, though a quick look at the numerous warnings for edit-warring on his talk page suggests that it's him alright. At least he's open about it. I have not been a fan of Hitchens for some years, ever since I saw him rip The Prodigy a new one over "Smack My Bitch Up" in the Daily Express about 20 years ago and got the title of the song wrong. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 11:15, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
I'm sure that the number of famous people who are open about editing Wikipedia is only the tip of the iceberg since the overwhelming majority won't bother to create an account; likewise, I'm equally in no doubt that most of the time when you see someone claiming to be a celebrity, it's not actually them. There's a (neglected and out-of-date) list of notable people with Wikipedia accounts where there's a reasonable degree of certainty that they're who they claim to be at Wikipedia:Wikipedians with articles.
FWIW, I find the "keep" arguments on WP:Articles for deletion/List of Wikipedia people completely spurious. Even if one doesn't just go with the vague "has a Wikipedia account" and go with a stricter "reliable sources have mentioned them in connection with Wikipedia", that still doesn't make them a "Wikipedia person". There have probably been thousands of "Foo caught editing her own biography on Wikipedia!", "Bar criticizes Wikipedia errors in his biography!" and "Baz complains about the poor quality of the photo on his article!" stories over the years, but it doesn't make them "Wikipedia people" or Grant Shapps,* Toby Young and James Blunt would all be on the list. ‑ Iridescent 11:52, 8 February 2018 (UTC) *Before either the Defenders of the Wiki or the Wikipedia Review crowd scent BLP-violation blood, Shapps explicitly admitted to "editing his Wikipedia entry to make it accurate"; the issue was that he denied a connection to Contribsx, not that he denied editing Wikipedia altogether.
Talking of James Blunt, this is one of the most convincing arguments I've seen that if you take an article to GA / FA, you need to stick it on your watchlist and make sure the quality doesn't go backwards, even if you have to be blunt (pun not intended) about it. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 12:01, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
(ec) I didn't find Iridescent's arguments convincing either but please could they say how and whether they would apply them to:
Regarding List of Harvard University people, the very first sentence of it answers your question: The list of Harvard University people includes notable graduates, professors, and administrators affiliated with Harvard University. It has strict inclusion criteria; the people listed not only have to be notable in Wikipedia terms, but need to have graduated from or have worked for Harvard. As I said at the AfD, I'd have no issue with List of Wikipedia people if it were repurposed to something similar and had similar criteria (notable enough to have their own Wikipedia article and a demonstrable strong connection to Wikipedia), but as it stands this is just an indiscriminate list of "people who have been mentioned somewhere, at some point, in connection to Wikipedia".
Regarding Category:Wikipedia people, if you look at the CFD discussion that led to its creation, it was intended for people where significant fame comes from being associated with wikipedia—i.e. Jimmy and Larry, the early devs who wrote MediaWiki, the managers and staff who created the WMF, steered it onto the rocks and back off again, people like Awadewit who for one reason or another became the public faces of Wikipedia—not as a general catch-all for people who are notable for something unrelated but happen to be associated with Wikipedia in some way. The category still sticks to that fairly rigidly; other than a couple of exceptions that have crept in every person listed is someone who's noteworthy enough in Wikipedia's terms to have their own article, and whose notability derives primarily from their association with Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 12:39, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiSpeak
Since it was mentioned (a long time ago) on this talk and said that you were a major contributor I did find this German Wikipedia page about the same. Amazing how similar the wiki speak is between languages. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:28, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
Block review: We'll fabricate a block rationale; if it doesn't fit we'll make it fit, Madness: A requirement for partaking on a project such as this., Admin: Depending on the case either a hyperintelligent saint (if he agrees with you) or a braindamaged Hitler (if he for unidentifiable reason disagrees with you), but either way superhuman: He knows everything, can do everything, is allowed to do everything, always online, always available and can do any amount of work with faster than light speed so that everything's done yesterday., Semiprotection: The rabble stays outside, Personal attack: Every criticism of you and Penis: The most important article topic, to the point that at least one needs to be in each article. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 23:14, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
I wrote quite a bit of it (and all of the RFA Decoder), but WP:WikiSpeak was very much Eric Corbett's baby. It doesn't surprise me if the issues on de-wiki match those here, since there are such close ties between en-wiki and de-wiki that the cultures are solidly intermeshed. What would be interesting is whether there are equivalent pages on those Wikipedias like Russian or Welsh which have a very different internal culture, and if so whether they treat things differently. If you want some free money, you could probably persuade the WMF to fund a research proposal into the matter; "community building" is one of their pet topics. ‑ Iridescent 15:45, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
I've written a few bits of WikiSpeak (IIRC I did AfC - "a place where articles don't get created", using {{sfn}} to pretend you know what you're talking about, "This article is shit, piss off" for CSD is definitely what I'd say) but the main inspiration does indeed come from Eric. Like all good pieces of humour, everything about it is close enough to what really goes on around here. I wouldn't hold out much hope in it fostering "community building" though, for everyone who likes it there's probably another who thinks it's totally unacceptable. Indeed, I think Eric has said it was a good way of getting his real views on WP out in the open without fear of being blocked for it. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 17:17, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
A place to write a lengthy article about a notable 19th-century mechanical engineer, only to have it rejected by a 17-year-old Pokémon fan six weeks later because the formatting was a bit wonky. might be the best summation of my issues with AfC I've even seen (I'd also add who just accepted a ref bombed brochure because the company's marketing director gave him a barnstar.) TonyBallioni (talk) 17:35, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
My personal favourite out of that list is ANI: Plural of ANUS. See also IANAL.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:23, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Or a collection of anuses. EEng 20:28, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
I still have a soft spot for The name is derived from the Hawaiian wiki, "edited at high speed", and the Greek παῖdh, "by children", which is actually kind of plausible. And I'm not sure I've ever made a truer comment than [Wikipedia is] evidence that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards may not produce the complete works of Shakespeare, but will certainly produce an ever-growing pile of monkey shit. ‑ Iridescent 11:34, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
hell, no
Thank you for your comment beginning like this, where I have commanded myself to not even apply any thank-you click, and your promise. ----Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:44, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
:(This comment, for the curious.) I'll stick to it, in both directions; if Arbcom takes any decision this rash, as far as I'm concerned it's lost the right to authority, any decisions it makes can be disregarded, I'm more than willing to be a martyr if necessary, and the wikilawyers can get busy digging around in the archives for exactly where to find the arbitrator impeachment procedures. I very much doubt they will, although given that this is the committee that was stupid enough to take on a case with no scope and in which every editor on Wikipedia is a party, nothing would surprise me. If nothing else, this proposal reaffirms to me that my comments here weren't unduly harsh. ‑ Iridescent 15:58, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
Thank you, again. (No click, again.) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:28, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
Article merge
I proposed and added tags to three articles that I feel could be merged into the page Panel van. I haven't proposed a merge in a long time and I wanted you to take a look and see if I missed any steps. Thanks! Shinerunner(talk) 15:27, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
I humbly suggest this is patronising, and incorrect. Even a cursory review of my contributions in the last few months would show this to not be the case. I would appreciate a retraction. Fish+Karate 04:34, 11 February 2018 (UTC) Fish+Karate 04:34, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) Heartily agree. Suggest immediate re-wording to "legacy admin who made ~150 edits to the entire project between January 2012 and Oct last year." Vivre accuracy! :) >SerialNumber54129...speculates 06:41, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
Just gonna put this here
What SN54129 said. If "legacy admin who made ~150 edits to the entire project between January 2012 and Oct last year" doesn't suit, I can change it to "legacy admin whose last thousand mainspace edits stretch back to the Virgin Killer controversy" or "legacy admin who, aside from a flurry of page moves in October 2011, never reached a monthly edit count of three digits and rarely reached a monthly edit count of two digits between 2008 and October last year" if you'd prefer either of those. ‑ Iridescent 09:03, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
It’s not Oct last year. But you’re right. For my opinion to matter clearly I need to make a few thousand mindless AWB-assisted typo corrections to get my edit count up. Fish+Karate 17:20, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I think Iridescent's comment was directed more toward the argument from authority aspect of Billhpike's comment, rather than Fish and karate. Anyway, I think my contribution history ([12]) fits this section header far better. Alex Shih (talk) 17:48, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
I draft in sandboxes; a single mainspace edit like [13] or [14] can represent hundreds of edits to the draft to reach that point, none of which show on the edit counter. While raw edit counts are clear for determining "active or inactive?" or "is there in inappropriately high number of edits to drama boards?", raw edit counts are a slippery beast to try to quantify. ‑ Iridescent 09:21, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Let me just say this one thing and then I’ll withdraw from this wholly unproductive little bout of snippery. Yes, there is a big gap in my editing history. But I came back in November, and since then have been doing my best to improve the encyclopaedia. I’ve created a number of new articles, including a DYK, I’ve been active on WP:ERRORS and WP:RFPP, as well as clearing a bunch of the backlogged RFCs requiring closure. I appreciate that this is only 4 months and to some that means nothing, but to me it has been fun participating again, and having the time and health and personal circumstances in real life to allow me to do so has been a joy. And I hope I’ve been adding value to Wikipedia. What I don’t need - nobody would - is Iridescent dismissing me as semi-inactive, and not worthy of being called respected. Purely to make a point in an argument with someone else. That was rude, it was cruel, it was belittling, and it was wholly unnecessary. And I didn’t even ask for an apology, just a retraction. And instead of that, I get both Iridescent and a friend further cherry-picking and denigrating my contributions. An opinion of both of you has been formed. Fish+Karate 05:33, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Form whatever opinions you like; the fact will remain that "Disregard every argument to oppose because F&K supports" will continue to be a spurious attempt to override community consensus based on the notion that a support from someone who's been absent from Wikipedia for a decade-minus-four-months somehow outweighs as overwhelming a community consensus as I've ever seen on a Wikipedia discussion (by my count, the proposal currently has 1 support & 15 opposes), purely because that user happens to have a legacy admin flag. You can form your opinion of anyone else; likewise, anyone else can form an opinion of someone who only avoided being flagged as inactive because they made thesetwo edits in response to the suspension notification. ‑ Iridescent 09:21, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
[15] - So help me god will have have an article soon. Great vid in the mean time; like a female, cranky version of Q-Tip; warm voice, earthy beats. Ceoil (talk) 03:49, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
That one does nothing for me, I'm afraid; to me it just sounds like generic pre-Roxanne Wars east coast hip-hop at a lower tempo. If you want a good recent example of "female vocal over a beat" try [16]. (I hate to climb aboard a hype bubble, but I'm getting steadily more impressed by Superorganism, too.) ‑ Iridescent 14:42, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, it appeared near the top of may of the end of year things, and I like it, but wouldn't be super excited. There are elements of [17] to it that I like, especially the opening beat. In other news I only discovered the Residents a week or so ago. My god. Ceoil (talk) 11:51, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
That Sink Ya Teeth vid is amazing. Myself and Martinevans finally agreed on something yesterday [18] (we have been bickering over the finer points of Nick Drake's catalogue for years). Ceoil (talk) 11:53, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
Some baklava for you!
I was not offended by the words used by you because I know tha you did not mean any bad. It just triggered to me that there is another issue on Wikipedia that may needs attention, Please do not consider my comments as a way to change the disccusion from my initial request and the subsequent discussion. Magioladitis (talk) 16:57, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
I know you don't want to hear it from me, but be careful. The "remove everything that might possibly cause offence to anyone" crusade you appear to have currently embarked on is never going to end well—Wikipedia is a global project and what's offensive to you might not be offensive to many or most others. When you pop up at ANI demanding that the term "pussy cat" not just be removed but revdeleted, it's the kind of thing that's going to annoy a lot of people very quickly. ‑ Iridescent 17:50, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps I'm missing something, since you reverted this edit. The use of "disillusioned" here doesn't make much sense to me, since Hindley was attracted to Brady, making fascinated entries about him in her diary and wanting to go out with him. How is that the correct word here? It seems the exact opposite of her feelings. Grandpallama (talk) 17:15, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
If you're going to completely reverse the meaning of something in one of Wikipedia's most-visited Featured Articles—an article that's been reviewed and assessed pretty much continuously for the past decade—the onus is on you to provide a source for the change, not to unilaterally rewrite it because you do not think that word means what you think it means. Hindley initially found Brady interesting when she met him in July 1961; she became disillusioned and began to find him unpleasant, although she still considered herself in love with him, as time went on (I've given up with Ian, he goes out of his way to annoy me if you want Hindley's own words); he asked her out on 22 December and she decided to give him a chance. This is one of the most documented relationships of all time, and if you want to make a change that goes against what every source says—including the subject herself—then it needs a spectacularly good source, not just your personal speculation. (Even with a spectacularly good source, since it would disagree with every other source we'd need to just give it as an alternative view and not change the main narrative unless you could demonstrate that mainstream thinking on the relationship had shifted.) ‑ Iridescent 17:37, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
So, first, you're responding with an unneeded degree of belligerence here to a good-faith editor who obviously isn't being unilateral since he brought this to you for discussion. I would've thought my initial question revealed that I'm not trying to change any overall meanings, but that there's a clearly confusing moment in the paragraph the way it is written. Right now, the way those two sentences are phrased, we go directly from "entries detail her fascination" with Brady to "she continued to make [the presumably fascinated] entries and grew increasingly disillusioned". There's no explanation for where that second part comes from. If there was a dip in her feelings (which your extra verbiage here explains really well), then I'd like to strongly suggest adding that as a qualifying phrase. Your language "she became disillusioned and began to find him unpleasant, although she still considered herself in love with him" would make a lot more sense in this spot, which has a weird, unexplained break as it mentions this disillusionment that's never alluded to beforehand and isn't addressed again. I was fixing what looked to me like a typical longstanding, long-overlooked minor typo, hence my light-hearted edit summary. I wasn't out to change any overall meaning, so my apologies if that's how it was perceived, but perhaps a bit more clarity in that spot to smooth the current disconnect between infatuation and disillusionment would help. I really, really like the additional verbiage you provide here, and something like "Over the next few months she continued to make entries, but she became increasingly disillusioned with him and began to find him unpleasant; however, on 22 December when Brady asked her on a date to the cinema,[126] she decided to give him a chance and they watched the biblical epic King of Kings" would absolutely make more sense to readers who aren't already exceedingly familiar with the evolution of their relationship. Any objections to my changing the sentence to reflect that clarification? Grandpallama (talk) 18:01, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
Railway station sources
Hi, I am aware that you've written some of our best articles on English railway stations; a while back I set about trying to improve articles related to Sleaford, a town in Lincolnshire, and I recently remembered that I never got the railway station's article out of the awful state it's in. I did write the early history sub-sections using a good book on the town's Victorian history. However, I will admit that I know very little about railways, this station's later history or what's needed to get this article up to GA standards for coverage (as they're meant to be anyway). Do you know or any talk page followers know of any good sources I could use to beef up the article? I'd love to get it to GA-quality (though my faith in the GA system is rather lacking, it'd be nice to improve the article nonetheless). Cheers, —Noswall59 (talk) 16:48, 19 February 2018 (UTC).
I don't really know much about LNER other than some very niche stuff about their early map designs. If you can get across to Stamford, Robert Humm is very good for this kind of thing. I'm unaware of anything specifically about the railway station, but as a junction station there's almost certainly something; Redrose64 or Ritchie333 might know where to look. This book, assuming it's like every other Middleton Press book, will be great for pictures and just about adequate as a source, but will be a bit short on detail. ‑ Iridescent 17:47, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for that – I'll take a look next time I'm in Stamford, and I'll see if I can find a library copy of the Middleton Press book. I now remember coming across some book titles which might be of interest a few years ago; I dug out some old notes and seemed to think these might help at the time: John Allan Patmore (1984), A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain vol. on East Midlands (David & Charles, 1984); Arthur John Francis Wrottesley, The Midlands & Great Northern Joint Railway (David & Charles, 1981); R. V. J. Butt, The Directory of Railway Stations (Yeovil: Patrick Stephens Ltd., 1995); and G. Body, PSL Field Guides – Railways of the Eastern Region, vol. 1. (Wellingborough: Patrick Stephens Ltd, 1986). Thanks again, —Noswall59 (talk) 20:57, 20 February 2018 (UTC).
Random stuff from CWGC trawl
From a recent trawl of pages using links to the CWGC to reference war dead (some really push the boundaries and take an idiosyncratic approach):
Manitoba memorial lakes ("There are more than 4,200 lakes, islands, bays and other geographical features named after Manitoba's war dead.")
There is more, but that is just a selection. The 'lists of' annoy me a bit, as can be seen here (my half-started attempt to make sense of a long list). There really are lists of people from everywhere? And endless permutations of lists? Feels like just scratching the surface. Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
As regards lists of names on memorials, "determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article" is the only rational answer. While it would make no sense to list every name on the Vietnam Memorial, the Norwich Breweries War Memorial or anything in between, there are some memorials where it makes perfect sense to list all the names included on it along with a brief explanation of what the person in question did to warrant a listing. (The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice and the Kremlin Wall are obvious ones that spring to mind, but I could also make a case for doing the same if anyone ever writes an article on the Brookwood Memorial, at least for the section listing executed SOE agents.) If anyone is actually bored enough to do it—I do not volunteer—I wouldn't object if the full listing of names on war memorials were added to Wikisource and linked from the parent article (or from the article on the village/cemetery if the memorial doesn't have its own article); "is this useful to readers?" should always be the primary question when debating any addition or removal, and "who is named on the war memorial on the Edmonton Green roundabout?" is a fairly obvious question a reader might want to know. I do like the idea of Memorial Lakes, although it would only work somewhere like Manitoba with a lot of lakes and relatively few war dead; trying it in France, Britain or Germany would exhaust the lake supply fairly quickly. (Still, given that this is the country that can name every road in a town after minor Lord of the Rings characters, I'm sure they could find something to rename if they wanted to take this approach.) ‑ Iridescent 17:09, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
Yes, I do remember that discussion, and I do wonder sometimes what happened to him (me)! :-) ('derail' is a bit unfair, but re-reading old discussions that I took part in does worryingly often find me scratching my head as to what on Earth I was talking about...). Need to ponder on memorials and tighten the focus a bit. Carcharoth (talk) 20:30, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
Ah, we were all obnoxiously sure of ourselves back in 2007. Those were different times. ‑ Iridescent 08:48, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
Trying to impose sense on Commons's ever-proliferating categories and the obsession of some of its regulars with micro-categorising is a waste of time; Neelix was a symptom, not the disease. See the category list at c:Category:The Sirens and Ulysses by William Etty, 1837—a category which itself shouldn't even exist in the first place—to put "should Brookwood be treated as one, two or three separate entities?" in perspective. The categories on Commons long since ceased to be useful—I nowadays just search for a couple of keywords if I'm looking for a particular image. ‑ Iridescent 20:34, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
That does work well, though obviously only if the image is keyworded correctly. I have in the past looked at a category and found images of gravestones that the uploader hadn't included the name of the deceased. Some articles that jumped out of the latest trawl, or were of more than moderate interest: (1) Eugène Goossens, fils had a son who died in the war. The other three children went on to continue their careers as celebrated musicians. The sister's article mentions the brother who died (she lived to 105). The articles on the other two brothers don't yet mention him. (2) Leone Sextus Tollemache - normally not notable enough, but, well, see for yourself why he has an article (another brother also died). (3) Prince Antônio Gastão of Orléans-Braganza - I had not come across this story before: Brazilian princes, heirs to the French throne, serving in the British Army. This one is commemorated by the CWGC. A brother (Prince Luís) looks like he should also be commemorated as he died from disease contracted while on service, and is within the cut-off dates. Might have to look into that a bit more. Carcharoth (talk) 18:42, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
What works quite often is a Google Image search with tools/Usage rights/Reuse with modification checked. Google's algorithm is clever enough to pick up mislabeled images by similarity to other, non-free images which are labelled correctly, and doing it this way also picks up usable images from places like Flickr. I increasingly find Flickr is more use as an image source than Commons, and one doesn't have to negotiate Commons's moral cesspit; even if a Flickr image isn't tagged as CC BY-SA most of their users (even the professional studios) are more than happy to change the license on an image when you point out that appearance on Wikipedia will generally increase the view count for that image by multiple orders of magnitude and at least some of those readers will click through to the Flickr photostream. About half the free-use images on Droxford railway station came from Flickr rather than Commons, for instance. (Importing Flickr images looks daunting but is very easy; just open this tool, and you can automatically hoover up either an individual image, all members of a particular set of images, or every upload by a particular user provided it has a Wikipedia-compatible licence.) ‑ Iridescent 17:17, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
Such a shame the article on Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache was moved from its gloriously long title to its truncated form. And poor old Prince Antônio Gastão seems to have become "Captain Antoine Gaston Philippe, Prince of Orleans and Braganza" at the hands of the CWGC. As the Brazilian Royal Family had been living in exile at the Château d'Eu for some time, he was probably more French than Brazilian anyway. Perhaps a Frenchified article name would be more fitting than the Portuguese one? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.74.12.209 (talk • contribs) 16:03, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Probably true about the article name. Am impressed by the Chapelle royale de Dreux, and also the photographic coverage of the tombs at the Commons category for the burials there. Compare that with the photographs we have of the interior of St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. I suppose that is one of the advantages of deposing your royal family... Going back to Prince Antônio, I hope someone transcribes the inscription here (I might at some point). It ends with a biblical quote from the Vulgate: "Bonum certamen certavi, cursum consummavi, fidem servavi. In reliquo reposita est mihi corona justitiae, quam reddet mihi Dominus in illa die, justus judex" ('I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. As to the rest, there is laid up for me a crown of justice, which the Lord the just judge will render to me in that day'). Carcharoth (talk) 13:45, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
ODNB
I saw your contribution to the informal peer review of John de Mowbray, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, and was interested, not to say worried, by your comment on the ODNB. I've always believed it pretty reliable, and have often cited it, sometimes quite extensively. But if it has a reputation for inaccuracy I'd better rethink for future input. Grateful for any pointers on this. Tim riley talk 18:41, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
I'm possibly unfairly jaundiced by the fact that William Huskisson falls at the intersection of three of my interests (early 19th century England, civil engineering, and the planning processes by which railway routes were selected), and their article on Huskisson is AFAIK the source of the canard that He was the first fatality of the railway age which one now finds repeated ad nauseam by people who should know better but can't be bothered to check the sources for themselves. (It's true to say that he was the first high-profile railway casualty, and that the reporting of his death perversely pushed the experimental steam technology into the public eye and caused the industrial revolution to happen more quickly than it otherwise would have—if I do say so myself Wikipedia's article on the matter is as good a summary of the topic as you'll find anywhere—but he wasn't even the first person to be killed by a train at Eccles, let alone "the first fatality of the railway age".) I know other people have had similar issues with the ODNB in the past. Because the ODNB just summarises other sources, they're basically a posher version of Citizendium; my general feeling towards them is that they're a good source for basic biographical details like birth dates, and good for a general sweep of someone's life, but for anything specific you're almost always going to be better off looking at the "sources" section at the end of the entry and using whatever the authors of the ODNB entry have cribbed it from. ‑ Iridescent 18:56, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
That's most interesting. I'll make sure to be on the alert in future. Thank you. Tim riley talk 19:42, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Like all massive reference works (hem, hem), it has great difficulty keeping a consistent quality, sometimes using just the right specialist (if they feel like writing a comprehensive treatment for little money or renown) and sometimes using people only specializing in one aspect of the subject's life, or in something else entirely. I think the date an entry was written can have a large bearing also. Have you pointed this out to them? I've pointed out various mistakes to the OED & usually got a nice email from a junior lexicographer, more or less putting hands up straight away, and suggesting that the matter would be corrected at some point in the next 2-4 decades (depending on the first letter). But they have (or had) an easily page encouraging such suggestions (unlike the ODNB, they really do have a history of crowdsourcing). The ODNB doesn't do this that I can see: "No results matching your search request were found. Try one of the following tips to search again: Did you mean correction? ...". Johnbod (talk) 15:04, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
I think "coyly" is a bit unfair—I could hardly abandon an entire citation system—or change a template used on >50K pages! But did chuckle though :) >SerialNumber54129...speculates 18:55, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Course you can, without needing to change the citation system or redesign the template. See the aforementioned Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway for an example of ODNB entries used within the {{sfn}} setup; you need to think of ODNB pages as websites rather than books, and to use the {{cite ODNB}} template rather than put it in the bibliography. ‑ Iridescent 19:00, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
I see what you mean; apologies. A shame though, because I do like a lean citation column! >SerialNumber54129...speculates 19:06, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Oh, no need to apologise. While I'm coming squarely around to the view that Wikipedia should enforce a uniform citation style, at the moment Wikipedia attitude is still "let a hundred flowers bloom" when it comes to citation styles provided the article is internally consistent. ‑ Iridescent 19:25, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Hullo, me again—You were kind enough to comment at this article's (somewhat informal!) peer review, and I thought I'd let you know it's now a featured article candidate. The discussion is here, and any further comments you may wishto make would be naturally very welcome. Thanks again! ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 11:17, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
Obviously you are rather more than well aware of this :) but your myriad of brainy tps' may not be. ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 11:21, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
Commented there (briefly, as I'd got everything out of my system on the talkpage already). ‑ Iridescent 12:00, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
style guide?
Hi! Hope you've been well. Definitely filed away as something I knew when I was more active, but besides wading through WP:MOS, is there an easy reference style guide so I know things like this when writing? Thanks either way! StarM 02:59, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi, nice to see you back. There's no brief one-page summary of the MOS that I'm aware of other than WP:MOS itself, but it's not something to which I pay much attention—my attitude is to just do what looks right and if something is genuinely problematically non-compliant, a bot or script will wander along at some point to fix it. When you see me doing a big stack of minor standardization edits like that, it generally means that I'm watching a game in which I'm interested enough to watch, but not so engrossed in that I need to give it my full attention. ‑ Iridescent 20:11, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
There is WP:SMOS, but it is something more like super-short MOS. --Izno (talk) 00:35, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Huh, you learn something every day. My general feeling is that it really doesn't matter much how you format things, provided you're internally consistent and whatever you do isn't going to confuse readers. It's easy to forget (and some of the MOS's more enthusiastic enforcers can be a little reticent about reminding people of the fact) that the MOS is a set of non-binding suggestions, not holy writ brought down from Mount Nupedia by the Apostle Tony. ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Thank you both! SMOS is definitely a good refresher. The image of a bot wandering along is forever shades of Batteries Not Included to me, and I'm so grateful for all of their (& their programmers) clean up work. It's good to be dabbling back again. StarM 00:53, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
This message contains important information about an administrative situation on Wikipedia. It does not imply any misconduct regarding your own contributions to date.
Please carefully read this information:
The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding living or recently deceased people, and edits relating to the subject (living or recently deceased) of such biographical articles, a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.
Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you that sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.
For the curious, this is because MPS1992 doesn't like the fact that I said it wasn't a BLP violation to describe as "homophobic" someone who said Homosexuality is an ungodly spirit of self-gratification, Is Aids a judgment of God? I could not say for sure, but I think so., Homosexuality is a sinister form of perversion, Let me say this loud and clear, we traffic in homosexuality at the peril of our spiritual welfare and Your affection for another of your own sex is misdirected and will be judged by God’s holy standards. FWIW, this is what his website has to say on the topic today; his views didn't mellow with age. (In addition to his well-documented views on sexuality, he was also responsible for such charmers as The Jews swarm around me and are friendly to me. They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country. and—famously—This [Jewish] stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain.)
Whoops, I made an edit relating to the controversial views of a recently deceased person again. Take this to AE, ask them to "impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks" (if it saves you wasting your time, your next move will presumably be to accuse me of personal commentary; here's NBC News and The Independent, one source from each side of the pond and both squarely in the mainstream, explicitly describing him as a homophobe) and see how far you get before you get to add WP:BOOMERANG and WP:TE to your set of scary-looking links to WP:-space pages above. (Why do we still persist with these discretionary sanctions templates? I've been around the block long enough to know that this isn't a genuine warning to be taken seriously and is just MPS being a posturing blowhard, but to a new editor who's unfamiliar with Wikipedia's back-channel culture, a big yellow box plastered with references to "not adhering to our standards of behavior" and to "sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks" must feel genuinely intimidating.) ‑ Iridescent 11:06, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Because being templated is a prerequisite to being hit by a discretionary sanction. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 11:25, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
and is as much the fact that there are no checks and balances ensuring that the templates are only placed when a genuine need exists, and concomitantly by editors who genuinely understand what they're for and when to use them...venient dies. ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 11:28, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
I'd like to think even the most clodhoppingly literally-minded of the AE admins wouldn't be silly enough to try to impose sanctions for pointing out that one of the 20th century's most high-profile homophobes was homophobic, although nothing would surprise me. (Note that I didn't make the statement myself; I just reverted MPS's attempt to add a prissy little {{redacted}} template when someone else said it on a talkpage.) The intention of these DS templates was to serve as a neutral notification to ensure that someone was aware that they were editing in an area in which Wikipedia's normal rules have potentially been suspended, not as a bludgeon with which self-appointed Defenders of the Truth can try to shut down editors who disagree with them. ‑ Iridescent 11:34, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
That rather highlights that MPS hasn't quite got the hang of this templating thing yet—they alert the editor who undoes the redaction, but doesn't alert the editor who supposdly committed the original BLPvio. Brilliant... ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 13:28, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
"The poor victim"? WTF?! Is that acceptable language now? Can MPS fucking spell collaborate / collegiate / community? Battlegrounding or what. ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 13:54, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Mind you, I hadn't seen your TP history for a while, so at least I got to feast on such gems as this and this :) heh ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 13:54, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, it's been an interesting week. Primefac (talk) 14:18, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Pretty much. Primefac (talk) 14:31, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Given that I pointed out that MPS was being a posturing blowhard a couple of paragraphs up, I believe I can survive being described as "a poor victim". (While MPS's stats make them look very active, they don't seem to have had much actual involvement with Wikipedia. Just going to put this here. That isn't a criticism—we all had to start somewhere—but they likely genuinely don't understand just why arguing in support of an indefensible position, spamming pompous template warnings on a high-traffic talkpage like mine, or engaging in that kind of "I'm a power user!" posturing, is never going to be a good idea unless one can actually justify the edits one's making. Cut some slack; a lot of people go through that "I'm the cop of the internet!" Defender of the Wiki phase and later go on to be productive editors.) ‑ Iridescent 00:30, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
AN discussion
Hi Iridescent, I shouldn't have said "I couldn't give a flying fuck about how I come across." in reply to your statement, but it was just the straw (and from a rather unexpected corner) that broke the camel's back, after the many direct or sneaky attacks from others in that discussion, where apparently the fact that a website copied the 2016 version of an enwiki page is enough as evidence that I must have copied the text in 2006 somehow, and where some people seem to entertain the idea that if they could prove, nay, saw some doubt about whether I was a copyright violator, it would somehow invalidated the claims against Dr. Blofeld (which were dismissed or downplayed by people who should know better at the same time) and make that problem go away. I have calmed down since :-) Fram (talk) 13:19, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
Apology accepted, but the problem is that this isn't a one-off but part of a pattern. You know as well as I do that on numerous disputes—including many such as Wikidata where we've been in agreement—your consistent pattern of lashing out at anyone who isn't in agreement with you has repeatedly caused disputes which could have been resolved with a friendly chat to escalate into full-blown conflicts, and to my mind your approach here has been more of the same. Had you privately approached Dr B (pinging to let him know he's under discussion) and said "I've noticed some concerns, could you let me know if this was just a one-off before you understood sourcing and if not, when you stopped doing it?", this could all have been resolved relatively quickly; instead, you started with threats, went straight to AN, and have now gone straight to Arbcom. (While Ritchie333's examples may not have been good ones, if you look through the early contributions of anyone you'll find copyright violations, close paraphrasing or copying within Wikipedia without correct attribution; such as this.) ‑ Iridescent 13:35, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
You'll find no copyvios in mine, no machine translations either. The example you give may not have crossed all the T's, but the edit summary clearly says "merge and redirect from Andy, Olaf, Spike, and Belle", so it's not as if I tried to pass off the work as my own or forgot to mention that I took the text from elsewhere. And no, this wouldn't have been solved with a chat with Dr. Blofeld. He is in utter denial about the problem, and his tendency to do this and attack the reporter instead has been obvious way too often (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Geographic.org is a prime example (this was preceded by Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dara-I-Pech). Plus, I genuinely wanted a wider discussion on how to deal with an issue like this, as we haven't really encountered anything of this scale yet (not the number of copyvio's, but the number of articles that need to be checked). I don't think I "started with threats" actually, please reread the discussions involved. Fram (talk) 13:48, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
RAN issue was as/almost as bad. And that still has not been closed. So to be honest, what's going to happen? Its clear from past experience that people even when they agree there is a problem and enact quite heavy restrictions - it does not go anywhere if the editor is not interested in complying. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:14, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
Iridescent, as the editor who originally suggested I spam around ;) for would be reviewers, perhaps I could you too to look in at JdeM and critique it? You've already been extremely helpful, though, so no worries if you think not...Cheers, >SerialNumber54129...speculates 11:18, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Iridecsent, on an unrelated matter, could you G6#Housekeeping this page, as it's no longer going to do anything (I pulled it from the GA queue a few days ago) and (I think) the transclusion won't archive until it's gone. That make sense? >SerialNumber54129...speculates 20:47, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Iridescent, still on this; any chance you cast an eye over it and see if you thikn it's ready for nominating? Ceoil thinks so, but noobs always need a second opinion I think :) of course, there's no rush, but I've got a few days off coming up so it would suit. Any thoughts? Thanks for all your help with this, I appreciate it. ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 18:29, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Sure, checking now. ‑ Iridescent 18:50, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
It looks ready to me. Personally, I'd lose the Google Books links—I think the confusion they cause overwhelmingly outweighs whatever benefit they bring. (They behave differently in different territories depending on what contracts Google has in place with the copyright holders, so to someone in a territory where they point to a blank page or "this book is not available" message it makes it look like you're faking your sources. Plus, I have an issue with the free-source Wikipedia intentionally directing traffic to one of the most morally questionable corporations on the planet.) If you do take it to FAC, don't panic if you get a bunch of criticisms to start with; some of the people there can be quite unpleasant to deal with, but they're all trying to help, and they will strike those criticisms if they're addressed. If someone is opposing on the grounds of something that seems to you really stupid, don't be afraid to disregard the opposition provided you can explain why you're disregarding it; it's a common myth that FAC is where articles go to be nitpicked to death, but the delegates have enough sense to disregard groundless opposes. ‑ Iridescent 19:21, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks very very much. I've done that; I suppose if enough people mention them, it can be reverted and discussed elsewhere. In the meantime: here we go. Is canvassing to ping the peer reviewers by the way, or leave TP messages? If so—to whom, without spamming? Hope you have a good weekend, ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 20:10, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
It won't be canvassing provided the notification is neutral. I'd recommend poking Eric Corbett and Choess as well; the former because there's nobody better at spotting mistakes everyone else missed, and the latter because there's nobody who knows more about obscure English nobles. (At least in the case of Eric it can't possibly be considered canvassing, since even his harshest critics would concede that he's scrupulously neutral when it comes to reviewing and will happily quickfail articles by his friends if he thinks it's warranted.) As an obvious point but one that's frequently overlooked, go through WP:FAC and comment wherever you feel you have something useful to say, even if you don't feel you know enough about any given topic to formally support or oppose; people are much more likely to spend a couple of hours reading an article in which they likely have little interest if they feel you're engaged in the process rather than free-riding. ‑ Iridescent 22:58, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the endorsement! You're quite right of course, it matters not one wit to me who the nominator is, friend or foe. All that matters is the quality of the end product. EricCorbett 02:14, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
Actually, one other piece of advice that occurs to me, that trips a lot of people up; don't get annoyed or dispirited if your entry seems to sit at FAC for a long time without much being done. A lot of the reviewers work from the bottom up, and don't pay much attention to anything until it slips below the "old nominations" line. (There are practical reasons for this; it means that you're concentrating your time on those nominations that actually need more comments, and also avoids wasting time reviewing something that's got major issues and gets pulled or quick-failed.) ‑ Iridescent 13:03, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
And indeed, they like (if lazy) to let others do the spadework of the obvious stuff before reviewing - with some nominators this saves a lot of time. Johnbod (talk) 13:17, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks both, I'll try not to throw my toys out of my pram just because other people actually have a life :) I was wondering about the process though— how long It's up for (168 hours? Four weeks?), how many reviews are required, etc.? There doesn't seem to be an info page. ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 13:28, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
They can last months, but that tends to be huge topics like Jesus. For something like this, I'd allow between two to four weeks. ‑ Iridescent 13:37, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
That reminds me that I was dallying with a FAC on one of my articles but gave up after the source usage problem on Lake Tauca. Maybe I shall try again on a volcano article such as La Pacana again...JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 22:47, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
The X1 criterion is only applicable if the reviewing administrator reasonably believes that the redirect would not survive a full deletion discussion under the snowball clause, and not for more general "created by Neelix"; while Neelix did flood us with crap, he also made a lot of valid redirects. These certainly aren't clear-cut cases; you'll be hard-pressed to find an instance of "Point of Use" anywhere (with that capitalisation) that isn't discussing water filters, while "Non historical hypothesis" (in various permutations of hyphenation and capitalisation) is such a commonly-used term to describe the "there never was someone called Jesus" school of thought that at one point we were seriously considering moving Christ myth theory to that title. ‑ Iridescent 20:52, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
Right, I know that X1 =/= "made by Neelix". At first glance, those redirects looked completely random, but you have a point about those four. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 21:11, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Catherine Lynch (2nd nomination) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Centibyte(talk) 16:54, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
... and not a peep from the "delete, I've never heard of it so nobody else has the right to find it of interest" clique. Empirical proof that trains are more important than women. ‑ Iridescent 2 13:33, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
dons flameproof garb* Anyone who has heard of it probably owns at least 3 identical anoraks and has little knowledge of a woman... Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:41, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
How about trains and women? I remember rescuing a female bus driver once, but that's as close as I can get. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 13:49, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
FWIW, the definitive book on Droxford station (A History of Droxford Station by Pam Buttrey) was written by a woman. Despite the anorak stereotype, the history of civil engineering isn't as male-dominated as cliche would have it. ‑ Iridescent 08:37, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
It's trainspotters that are anoraks, and presumably most women are too sensible. Civil engineering was just hairy arsed. —SerialNumber54129...speculates 10:57, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
Sorry to bother
But where is the data on monthly users over time, etc. that you usually pull out whenever someone repeats the trope about the death of the editor base? I tried to find it myself and can't for the life of me. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:35, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
That's the one. This is why they pay you the big bucks. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:11, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
Catherine Lynch notability
Hi!
I just read the article you created that got featured on DYK about Catherine Lynch, and was curious as to why it was notable? The article itself contains no information about it, but it'd be interesting to know :) Hentheden (talk) 01:41, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
Hentheden I too think the article subject is not notable in any way. The article itself is well written, so I encourage the author to write further articles, but the idea that she represents some segment of social history, while correct, essentially applies to anybody and so cannot be a refutal to the proposed deletion.Iry-Hor (talk) 09:09, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) The speedy was, correctly, declined immediately; if anyone wants to lose their shirt over it at AfD they're welcome :) Not a bad rule of thumb with historical figures is that if people are still writing about you >100 years after your death...you're probably notable to them. Notability on Wikipedia doesn't require one to have been notable in life, just that one be considered notable by reliable sources. Anyway, if you want a resource devoted to the ruling class alone, I recommend Who's Who. —SerialNumber54129...speculates 09:32, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
Serial Number 54129 Again this argument is non-sense, you are trying to cast me under the light of elitism, a sort of ad hominem. The fact is that plenty of non-ruling class people are notable and deserve an article. You will notice that by implying that I oppose this view, you are using a straw man argument. My sole point is that this Catherine Lynch is not notable in any way, furthermore you seem to believe that she is "considered notable by reliable sources" but as far as I can tell, this is far from proven : the source use her and others as examples of a certain stratum of early 20th century British society just as they could have used someone else. If she is notable for the source, then you should have no problem explaining us why she is notable for the source. But none of the people supporting this article have done that so far!Iry-Hor (talk) 09:42, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
It's a very well written article. Well done. Secretlondon (talk) 12:12, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
I encourage the author to write further articles Well that’s nice. I believe Iridescent has written one or two others already. Pawnkingthree (talk) 13:52, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
Pawnkingthree Yes I feel stupid now, when I wrote this I had not realised Iridescent was Iridescent and misread his/her edit count as 23... I still encourage him/her to continue though :-) Iry-Hor (talk) 13:57, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
This AFD—about which you (Iry-Hor) didn't even do the basic courtesy of notifying me—seems to be based on some kind of misapprehension that this is some kind of arcane topic that would result in the creation of millions of articles. Wales was (and is) a tiny country (its population at the time was about 2,000,000; even now its population is only about 3,000,000), and in this period had been undergoing full-scale co-ordinated cultural destruction for over 50 years; it was also desperately poor and largely illiterate, and unlike Scotland and Ireland didn't have a cultural elite dedicated to preserving and recording its society (the descendants of the English aristocrats who ran the place saw themselves as English masters dominating a lesser race, not as a part of Welsh society). Among the lower classes, virtually anyone of whom records survive is likely to be inherently notable through rarity value; among women, virtually all so. Some numbers to put this in perspective:
Some numbers
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Every woman in Category:19th-century Welsh people and its subcategories who wasn't part of the English or Anglo-Welsh upper class, and who didn't leave Wales as a child:
(To save people reading the whole collapsed list above, of Wikipedia's 6,818,613 articles we currently have a grand total of 14 that are biographies of 19th-century Welsh women who lived in Wales and weren't members of the aristocracy; most of those are of middle-class women, and the number of genuine working-class biographies could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and arguably the fingers of one finger.) For the above I've used Category:19th-century Welsh people and its subcategories, as the corresponding 20th-century categories include the second half of the 20th century when Wales ceased to be run as a de facto colony and Welsh culture in general and women and the lower classes in particular began to be documented in greater detail, but if you confine yourself to pre-WWII you'll find the same pattern.
You say used as examples of a certain stratum of early 20th century British society. We'll overlook the offensiveness of "British society" for the moment; if you genuinely feel that there are more than a tiny handful of 19th-century working-class Welsh women for whom it's possible to construct a birth-to-death biography, then I challenge you to give me some examples. (If, as you say, this topic is so common, you should have no difficulty.) If you can't find any example, you may want to consider that your reasoning is flawed; that even within the Anglosphere, you can't extrapolate from large countries like England, Australia or the US to small countries like Wales, New Zealand or Ireland; and that these women aren't being randomly selected as "examples of a certain stratum of early 20th century British society" but have been selected because they're the only lower-class 19th-century Welsh women for whom records survive. (An irony of society since the advent of newspapers is that records of criminals sometimes survive, while the records of people who led blameless lives are forgotten.) Bluntly, you appear to be working on a definition of "notability" based on "I personally consider it important", and sneering at the notion that anyone else might find something important that you don't consider so. ‑ Iridescent 18:06, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
Undeniably, we have only a few articles on 19th century working class Welsh women. That is probably true for 19th century working class women of any nationality. But that is not enough to make this subject notable, or the sources reliable.
Can you explain what is notable about Catherine Lynch herself? (You appear to be saying above that she is notable, because some biographical details about her life exist. Is that right?)
And why is Belcham's book a reliable source? The author and the publisher appear to be relatively obscure, save for a few self-published books on local history, as this book appears to be.
(For what it is worth, almost all of the articles on the dozen or so other Welsh women you identify in the third list above - musicians, authors, preachers, doctors, heroines, etc. - have several independent reliable sources for their content, and the subject is clearly notable. A few such as Jane Williams (Ysgafell) are not well sourced at the moment, but the subject looks notable enough for sources to exist.) 31.75.77.137 (talk) 00:07, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
stats - Iridescent, thank you for telling her story, and 37k+ viewers didn't question her "notability" whatever that is. Congrats also to 2 pictured hooks in a row, - and I thought 2 in 3 days (planned, 14 and 16 March) was exceptional ;) - The 16 pic also shows a female prisoner. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:06, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Heh. I thought that an AfD nomination might happen, as my eyebrows were raised somewhat when I saw those articles. It is a pity it was speedily closed, as a proper AfD debate might have been useful there. (I agree with some of the arguments of those who had concerns.) At the risk of getting on soapbox, It would be more useful to have articles on the general social history of the time, rather than individual biographies such as these (which are necessarily limited by the available sources). Some reading on the topic (found by randomly Googling 'the perils of history by biography'): Antonia Fraser on writing biographies and The pleasures and perils of writing biography (seems to be available online here). Also: The Biographical Turn: Lives in History (including articles such as 'The Biographical Turn: Biography as Critical Method in the Humanities and in Society'). Huge amount written about it (a great example of an 'alternative' approach to biography mentioned at one of the links above was: Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan). Anyway, quoting from Louis Menand:
You are almost completely cut off, by a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent. You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance – even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.
Catherine Lynch, Selina Rushbrook and Lily Argent (or rather the newspaper reports on them) are the bits that have floated to the surface. In some ways the reports give an insight into the life and times (and society) they lived in. In other ways, it risks giving a distorted view. Carcharoth (talk) 13:42, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
FWIW, as the person who did the speedy close, I knew there would be disadvantages to it, but I suspected 8 more hours of edit warring over whether or not to have an AfD banner would not be constructive to the project, and none of the other options there seemed great (plus, there was no way it was getting deleted at that point: no consensus at worst, and letting a main page AfD run under those circumstances seemed non-ideal). TonyBallioni (talk) 13:54, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
I am greatly enjoying reading these articles. Thank you. This is a potentially interesting source you might have access to: Lesley Hulonce,‘“A Social Frankenstein in our Midst”: Inciting Interpretations of Prostitution in Late Nineteenth-Century Swansea’, Llafur, Journal of Welsh People’s History, vol. 9, no. 4 (2007), 47-60. Regards. 24.151.116.12 (talk) 22:02, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
That is an interesting connection. See here for the background on Hulonce, and the note on traditional academic publishing. The acknowledgements section includes a mention of Elizabeth Belcham. Getting these sorts of materials published outside of journals or expensive academic books is difficult nowadays. Carcharoth (talk) 12:48, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
In some ways the reports give an insight into the life and times (and society) they lived in. In other ways, it risks giving a distorted view isn't a negative, it's Wikipedia policy; unless we're going to conduct direct archaeological research, then all we're ever going to do is reflect the distorted view presented by what the sources choose to mention. Even on the most core of historical topics we're constrained by what was recorded at the time, since we don't have the luxury of original research or speculation.
@24.151, there's a reasonable amount of material out there; as well as 'A Social Frankenstein', Llafur also published '"Drunk & Riotous in Pontypridd": Women, The Police, Courts and the Press and South Wales Coalfield Society' (volume 8 issue 3) there's "Seven Days Hard Labour: Swansea Prison's Women Inmates" in the West Glamorgan Annual Report of the County Archivist for 2006–07 (although obviously the latter was by Elizabeth Belcham so presumably the mob would reject that one as well), there are all the books listed in the bibliography to Belcham, and if one's willing to go the primary source route then the WGAS's Nominal Registers for Women survived the Swansea Blitz. What the "delete, I haven't heard of it" angry mob don't appear to grasp is that when something appears at DYK then (aside from the rare cases when something qualifies through the route of passing GAN without having previously appeared on the main page) then by definition it's a brand-new and incomplete article, not the final product.
I don't see any particular point in expanding and completing these articles beyond their current newly-created-and-incomplete regardless of which way the AfD goes. Given the barrage of lies and distortions and outright personal attacks being thrown around—which at the moment range from accusing me of copyright violation (without evidence, unsurprisingly), to claiming I'm "presenting a term paper", to complaining that the newspapers used are local (the cultural, linguistic and geographical faultlines mean that even today there are no national newspapers in Wales and all newspapers are regional/local)—this is a culture war about whether Wikipedia should follow the Great Man school or total history. As such, no matter how many AfDs it takes the "delete because woman" folks will keep on shooting until they win (one of the quirks of Wikipedia is that "keep" can always be re-litigated but "delete" is permanent), so there's not a great deal of point in finishing these off. ‑ Iridescent 08:34, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
I think it is unfair to say that "delete because woman" is the overall tone of that AfD. Compare with Afghan Girl, which is a good example of an article about a woman that is about a similarly obscure subject, with the difference that the article is about the photo, with the biographical details subordinate to that. If you have not completely gone off the subject, could you give some examples of the books listed in the bibliography to Belcham? For a bit of light relief, this has all been thrashed out in 'Why does this woman have a Wiki bio? ' (discussion board at The Straight Dope). Carcharoth (talk) 11:28, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
Isn't there an irony in responding to the lies and distortions and outright personal attacks, which they are I agree, with the same? In this case I'd say distortion bordering on personal attack. On a separate note, I'm not rejecting Belcham because Belcham, her qualifications aren't outstanding, but they are good enough all things considered. I'm rejecting Belcham because Heritage Add-Ventures. If it was Belcham published by Brill or Penguin, or some known publisher, I'd have fewer issues with the source. Right now, and with your responses, what I'm receiving is "I found a book and used it". :( You remain the only person who can convince me otherwise, but you don't really need it. The article will be kept, and I've refrained from !voting delete, precisely because you'll (or somebody else will) accuse me (not directly, just by association of "delete") of hating on women. I don't measure articles against genitalia, I measure them against policy. I extend at least that my AGF to assume everybody else is doing the same, unless I receive an indication that they are not. Usually in the form of attacks on character, and not argument. Mr rnddude (talk) 11:44, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
I picked somebody I thought you'd be familiar with. As I recall, some of the articles you've written were about English people from around the same era? I must admit, I am unfamiliar with medieval Europe, so much so that I only learned of Bad King John today... Mr rnddude (talk) 12:02, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
I waded in. I'll point out that the examples I found of worse-sourced male biography stubs are just from hitting random article for a few minutes. I'm sure there are plenty more. I'm not one to scream about the bias against women's articles on WP often, but this stinks, folks. If you don't want to be seen as having a double standard on female articles ... perhaps you might work as hard to eliminate the crappy male articles as they are for getting rid of these three women's articles. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:53, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
I wrote Margaret Sandbach yesterday - not Welsh but a 19th-century woman living in Wales. I know there are sources available to expand it a little but I am loathe to use Mark Baker because he is such a self-publicist and a lot of the other stuff is in Welsh, which I struggle to read nowadays and never was particularly good in the first place. I've just got to hope that someone will take it on. - Sitush (talk) 16:51, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
Incidentally, assuming User:Carcharoth/Contributions is an accurate reflection, then as far as I can tell you've never once written or edited an article that mentions a woman other than in passing as the family member of a Great Man (or in a couple of cases, as a one-line entry on a list of winners of an award named after a Great Man). You are possibly not the best-qualified person to be mansplaining that there isn't a systemic bias issue here. ‑ Iridescent 18:32, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
That is not a quick dip-sample, it appears to be you trying to deflect attention from the actual topic of discussion and misrepresenting the sourcing used on those articles (some could do with a fair amount of improving and attention, but I hope others reading this will actually look at the articles and not just believe what you are saying). (Explain to me again why the topic of conversation has switched from what you have written to what I have written?) And no, that log in my userspace is not a full record. I've now added Frink Medal and Vera Fretter to the list of articles worked on. If I remember other examples, I'll add them. Carcharoth (talk) 13:08, 15 March 2018 (UTC) To further dispel the offensive mansplaining comment made above, see User talk:Keilana/Archive22#Vera Fretter and what I wrote here on 'Historical perspective and recentism': I will repeat what I said there: "IMO it [is] better to focus on people where substantive articles are possible (i.e. where published obituaries detailing an entire career are available), rather than dilute the message by including borderline cases." Carcharoth (talk) 13:33, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
Not sure what you mean by "substantive" in this context, but why is it better? EricCorbett 13:50, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
That's a good point. Sometimes it is not better. If there is enough material for a substantive and comprehensive biography (that does justice to the subject and doesn't just highlight the parts of their lives that were played out in public), good. If there is only enough for a stub (a 'footnote'), then keep it short and sweet. Carcharoth (talk) 14:07, 15 March 2018 (UTC) i.e. Full article based on full obituaries/biographies, or a short stub that provides nothing more than basic information, or simply nothing. Carcharoth (talk) 14:08, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for an excellent and informative article which I've just !voted to keep, largely (tho not entirely) due to your arguments here, but partly also for other reasons, including that it improves Wikipedia and should thus be kept (regardless of any Wikilawyering arguments to the contrary), per WP:IAR and thus also per the related 5th Pillar of Wikipedia (WP:5P5). Of course what I didn't mention was that anything that really improves Wikipedia could arguably also be deleted per the 1st Pillar of Wikipedia (WP:5P1) as being 'unencyclopedic', on the basis that one of the real if unstated purposes of any encyclopedia is arguably to help brainwash people into accepting the versions of the actual or alleged truth that suit various powerful vested interests, as brought about by rules largely created or preserved by them, etc, and thus that anything that genuinely improves Wikipedia (such as your article) should be banned (citing any number of suitably-selected Wikilawyering rules) as being contrary to such purposes and thus unencyclopedic . Tlhslobus (talk) 05:48, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
So, now all three AfDs has been closed as No Consensus leading to the articles being kept. BabbaQ (talk) 19:04, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
I dislike "all"-sentences. My English ... - all I meant to say is that here you seem to get nervous about April 1, while I have 4 women that should better come in March, + 3 hymns that won't fit after Easter. Have fun, I'll travel. - "Pleading" reminded me of me pleading like Abraham with God in 2013, - the last time I did that ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:19, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
Sorry, got diverted. I promise I'll start tonight. EEng 14:33, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
Oops, someone got there before me. Do you have another, maybe one with the sources not in German? EEng 04:55, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Update: two hymns got their place, I gave up on the third, but it will be too late for all (now 5 and more to come) women, same procedure as every year. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:51, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Review request
I don't know whether you still review articles, but if you do, would you consider commenting on the Guy Burgess peer review? The review has attracted some comments but I am hoping for something perhaps a little more analytical. If however the subject bores you to death, I won't be offended if you decline. Brianboulton (talk) 15:17, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
Will do but won't be until Friday at the earliest and likely later. If the PR is archived before I comment I'll comment on your or the article's talkpage. ‑ Iridescent 2 14:46, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
✓Done. Appropriately enough, Burgess's ashes are interred only a few minutes walk from Droxford. ‑ Iridescent 09:54, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Jimfbleak, I've trimmed the blurb to below the recommended length, to allow for a larger image. Normally with a painting like this I'd crop it down to a detail to give readers a fighting chance of figuring out what it actually shows at 100px width, but in this case we need to show the whole thing as the description makes no sense if you can't see all three characters. Because the title is so long—and because I really want to keep it was condemned as an immoral piece of the type one would expect from a foreign, not a British, artist as it sums both Etty and 19th-century English attitudes up so well—there's a severe limit to how much it can be trimmed. To pre-empt a likely complaint on the day, that we're deliberately choosing an unwieldy title for comic effect, here's the thing's entry in the Tate catalogue to demonstrate that the 102-character title, using the archaic shew rather than "show", genuinely is the WP:COMMONNAME. ‑ Iridescent 14:33, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll ping Dank on this, since he normally polishes the blurb and needs to see your comments regarding the image Jimfbleak - talk to me? 16:07, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
Thanks all. Iri, I think this is perfect for TFA. - Dank (push to talk) 16:30, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
Although you do realise this presumably knocks The Dawn of Love out of contention for Valentine's Day and you must be running low on love-themed potential TFA… I believe you know my opinions on the "if this is Halloween, it must be a horror film" liturgical calendar approach to TFA, but it looks like it's here to stay. Although all credit to whoever scheduled Jinnah for 25 December this year despite knowing the whininess from assorted alt-right types "you're not running something Christian!" will generate. ‑ Iridescent 16:40, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
Alt righters are such a significant demographic that they can not be ignored on Wikipedia? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:47, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
The extremists (on both the left and the right) catalyze more mainstream people, so when alt-righters, Justice Democrats, UKIPpers, Momentum, and insert race here supremacists canvass their followers to wade into any given debate, it emboldens non-crazies who happen to sympathize with whatever point's being made to pile in as well when ordinarily they'd have remained silent. Search Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion and its archives for "China's Four Most Handsome Men" to see a current example of the phenomenon in action. ‑ Iridescent 16:57, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
I'm sure I left my ring of invisibility here somewhere. Under that sheep? Or inside the horse?
And there was I hoping to see Etty's visualisation of the Ring of Gyges. I suppose it is the wrong account of the events, but it is probably the one thing for which Gyges is most remembered (if at all). Not even a "see also"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.205.194.198 (talk) 20:48, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
Not even a see also; there are lots of different and contradictory legends regarding how Gyges usurped Candaules, but Etty was working from Herodotus (Clio 8–13) which doesn't include any mention of magic (other than the Oracle). There's no need for a see also section, as there are already prominent links to Gyges of Lydia which acts as a de facto dab page to Herodotus's, Plato's, Nicolaus's and Plutarch's versions of the story; besides, owing to The English Patient Herodotus's version is now overwhelmingly going to be the commonly accepted version of the Gyges/Candaules story inasmuch as something so obscure can be 'common'. (Candaules itself could do with some serious attention, but that's not a topic on which I have the knowledge or the sources to clean up so it's someone else's problem.)
In my opinion, if an article includes a "See also" section at all, it's generally an indication that the article is incomplete. Either something's directly relevant and thus should be mentioned in the text, or it's not directly relevant and it's giving undue weight to feature a stand-alone link to it. IMO in the two examples MOS:SEEALSO gives of FAs that nonetheless still have a "See also" section (1740 Batavia massacre#See also and Mary, Queen of Scots#See also), none of the entries are actually appropriate. I suppose Candaulism could theoretically go into a "See also" section, but that article is absolutely fucking awful and I don't want to be drawing attention to it—anyone who's really interested in exploring further will end up there anyway through following the link at Candaules. Cynically, when you see a "see also" section in my experience it's generally because someone's written an article on an obscure topic and is frantically trying to shoehorn links to it to avoid the {{orphan}} tag, not because a link to it is a genuinely useful service to the reader. ‑ Iridescent 15:22, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
Congrats on the Main page appearance. What a beautiful article! ---Another Believer(Talk) 01:46, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for the monster of a title and subject, well summarized "It was intended to inspire in viewers a belief in women's rights, a rejection of the then-prevalent notion that it was the duty of women to obey their husbands in all things, and an understanding of the then-radical concept that women had a right to use violence to defend themselves against an abusive husband. Unfortunately none of the audience actually realised this, and it was almost universally considered an attempt to slip a piece of creepy and violent pornography into the mainstream." - I am happy to have something English with a short title on the same page, In Exile. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:04, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks both, although main page appearances are an honour I could happily live without; this just reminds me why I no longer have anything to do with FAC. At 90,000 pageviews this has a decent shot at yet again being the most-viewed TFA of the year, and yet again has attracted the usual mix of vandals and busybodies both to the main article and to assorted pages linked from it, all of which will at some point need to be cleaned up. (The pageviews of related pages spiked—I suppose at least that indicates that people are reading the things.) ‑ Iridescent 15:47, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
And it indicates that the topic is interesting. For comparison, my own DYKs Arago hotspot and 1257 Samalas eruption also drove traffic to related articles but only about a 10th of the viewers clicked through. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:58, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Well… in this case I suspect less "interesting" and more "very long title so the link dominates the box, and illustrated with a picture of a naked woman". The only one of Wikipedia's "writing guides" that's actually worth the pixels on which it's printed advises to always assume you're writing for a fourteen-year-old, which is the single best piece of advice I've ever received regarding Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 20:08, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
Agree. Today, I have a title that literally translates to friendly vision, is a bit longer in German, Freundliche Vision, but nothing compared to the monster. Why are all trasnlations different (welcome, pleasing, but not friendly)? - Written as sort of a program on 2 January, the day my grandparents married ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:55, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
Thank you, I had no idea. The label would be one of the milder kind, though. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:36, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
I found this, with even a more dreamlike quality. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:43, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
Looks good to me (although without actually knowing anything about the work, I can't say whether it's relevant or not; I'm aware that Strauss is highly regarded but he does nothing for me). ‑ Iridescent 23:47, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
Thank you. I didn't write for the love of Strauss, but the title ;) - Next good one: Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, or "dissipate, sorrowful shadows", for which I also found an image with a dreamlike quality (in 2016). Some OR: the music goes from complex to simple, just as the wording of a certain Faust, beginning "Vom Eise befreit" (s. image) to "Hier bin ich Mensch ..." (Here I am a human, and permitted to be one.) - I keep dreaming. You characterized the new arbs well. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:57, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
At least this thankfully looks certain to fail, which will hopefully put a stop to any of the new arbs who see the looming case-from-hell as an opportunity to impose their own personal style preferences by force. Why is it that so many people—on both sides of that particular debate—are incapable of grasping the concepts of "what works on one article isn't necessarily going to work on another" and "civility is based on mutual respect and can't be enforced at the point of a gun"? ‑ Iridescent 15:44, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
"I have experience only on one type of article" and "'But the other guy started it!' is only an invitation for an escalation sequence", maybe? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:22, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Yes, but these people are on the arbitration committee, not a couple of good-faith users who've only ever edited List of non-marine molluscs of El Hatillo Municipality, Miranda, Venezuela and consequently don't understand that not every article on Wikipedia should necessarily follow the "explain where the place in question is, then list all the local slugs" format. If you look at the "arb comments" section, it's patently clear that they're voting to accept a case without even knowing what they're accepting, as it's very clear that some of them think they've voting to give themselves the right to rewrite the MOS by fiat and to make it enforceable (which it never has been up to now), some of them think they're voting to examine the interpersonal interactions of a limited and defined group of people, and some of them think they're voting to establish a death-squad empowered to break up arguments by arbitrarily blocking the participants on one side or the other. ‑ Iridescent 16:53, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, the comments in that section have really solidified three of my past Arbcom votes (two in favour and one against). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:06, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Argh. Don't remind me of the Spanish Translations. I've written or expanded over 200 articles[1] but most of them would be far more useful when translated to the Spanish (and Romanian/Bahasa Indonesia in twoinstances) Wikipedias, since they concern topics in Spanish-language countries. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:32, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
Ta—this one survived relatively unscathed. These Etty ones always seem to do well in terms of views—I suspect the appeal is three parts nudity to one part intriguing article names. The better measure of whether something on the main page is actually interesting the readers—as opposed to them clicking the link out of curiosity and then wandering off after skimming the first paragraph and deciding it sounds boring—is how much of a spike it creates in "that was interesting, I'd like to know more" related articles, rather than in the raw pageviews on their own. ‑ Iridescent 16:24, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
It will be interesting to see if naked men being whipped by demons trumps bare bottoms with readers. My money is on Destroying Angel. ‑ Iridescent 10:09, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
References
^Sometimes I expand an already existing article in an user sandbox, add the new content to the already existing article and then ask for a history merge; XTools treats an article that received a history merge as if the article was created by me when that isn't the case, such as Antofalla.
People murdered in British Columbia
Hi, I was wondering if I should write articles about people who were murdered in BC, and if would they be kept. For example this article that I wrote
The Murder of Melanie Carpenter is on two category pages Category:People murdered in British Columbia and Category:Violence against women in Canada, but most would say it does not belong on the List of people who disappeared mysteriously, since it doesn't have enough coverage, so I have removed it from that list, but I think it should be kept as murder cases are notable aren't they? So again I ask if should I write some more cases about people who were murdered in BC, and if would they be kept? Davidgoodheart (talk) 03:09, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
You answered your own question with "it doesn't have enough coverage". No, murder cases are not automatically notable; the exact figure varies according to which definition one uses, but by the UNODC's figures there are between 400,000 and 500,000 homicides every year. Will you please actually readWikipedia:Notability (events)#Inclusion criteria, to which you keep being pointed; I'll reproduce the most pertinent part here for you:
Events are also very likely to be notable if they have widespread (national or international) impact and were very widely covered in diverse sources, especially if also re-analyzed afterwards (as described below).
Events having lesser coverage or more limited scope may or may not be notable; the descriptions below provide guidance to assess the event.
Routine kinds of news events (including most crimes, accidents, deaths, celebrity or political news, "shock" news, stories lacking lasting value such as "water cooler stories," and viral phenomena) – whether or not tragic or widely reported at the time – are usually not notable unless something further gives them additional enduring significance.
Number 4 is the one to pay particular attention to. Some crimes are notable because they had a lasting impact or had significant ongoing coverage, but the presumption is that a criminal act is not notable in Wikipedia terms. (A very rough rule of thumb is "has a non-vanity publisher published a book about the crime?".)
As with the missing persons cases, I strongly recommend you stay well away from articles on criminal cases; not only do you not understand Wikipedia's rules on notability, but more importantly you don't understand the law on libel. As SMcCandlish and I have already explained to you, the WMF is not going to protect you if you unintentionally libel someone, which is very easy to do in an article on a criminal case. (On Murder of Melanie Carpenter it's not quite as problematic, as the person you're accusing of murder despite their never having been convicted is themselves dead and can't sue, but sooner or later someone will take exception to your throwing accusations around. Please read and absorb what SMcCandlish told you here; Wikipedia is really not a good place to be writing about current criminal cases.) ‑ Iridescent 08:25, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi, thank you for the info, as you have now given me some new insight on this subject, but I think that I really DO know the laws on libel, as I know that it is only libel if it is untrue, and if it causes the person who I wrote about damage. Regarding what I wrote about Murder of Melanie Carpenter (which has now been upgraded by an editor and me, and looks a lot better!) I am just quoting what the newspapers are saying so I don't understand how that could seen as libel, as I think the newspapers themselves would be in danger of libel wouldn't they? (please tell me how I could be wrong if I am). Do you think that if I created a single private Wikipedia article about a murdered person and posted it online, and their killer was in fact tried and found guilty in court and I cited that in the article that I wrote about if I would be in any danger of libel? Davidgoodheart (talk) 00:07, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
IANAL but just to say you are seriously misunderstanding what 'libel' means. Canada follows English law, and as such intent is presumed (i.e. whether or not you intended to be defamatory has no bearing), and justification (i.e., "the claim is true") is only a defence if you can prove beyond doubt that what you're writing is true. As you've been repeatedly told, while Wikipedia is well placed for covering historic cases that would otherwise have slipped into obscurity and we welcome articles of that nature, it is not the appropriate site to host a current missing persons database. ‑ Iridescent 10:15, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Greatest edit summary to date
You in general have some of the best edit summaries, but this takes the cake. Also, yes, it does look like a monkey taking a shit. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:55, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
It's incredible :) but what the **** were they thinking of‼️⁉️ I mean, How does the ability to write a small essay (colourfully, even!) actually help the reader...or the writer for that matter. ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 19:00, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Protection logs are the only positive I see. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:04, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Agree; but ~"unlimited"? —ever played a no-limit poker game?! They clearly haven't!!! ...SerialNumber54129...speculates 19:08, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
1000 char limit
I see edit summary conversations being quite annoying to keep track off Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:12, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Someone, somewhere, presumably thought this was a good idea. ‑ Iridescent 19:26, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Request from de.wiki in 2006 and I think part of the 2016 community wishlist. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:29, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Well that was for mainly for non-latin characters which have half or a third of the limit of 255 as two bytes per character; not for expanding it so much so IIRC Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:35, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes—That was the Russians requesting 255 characters, not a request to allow browser-crashing edit summaries. ‑ Iridescent 19:40, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Plenty of scope for copyvios in edit summaries, then. - Sitush (talk) 20:59, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
@TonyBallioni, you do realize that if the WMF now change their mind and hide these extended edit summaries, you're just posting at random about monkeys taking a shit? ‑ Iridescent 19:33, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
If you listen to some of my detractors, that'd be one of the more productive things I've done on this project. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:43, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
I thought my iPad had gone beserk then! Think I might support removal... Aiken D 19:36, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Commenting here purely to try out this new feature Gurch (talk) 19:40, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
The request is meta:Community Tech/Edit summary length for non-Latin languages, which became a task to lengthen edit summaries because apparently Unicode cannot be squeezed. I notice that We don't want to encourage Latin languages to post 3x longer edit summaries, because edit summaries aren't intended to be a primary communication method. So we'll put a limit on the size -- probably 250 characters, rather than 250 bytes, which in Latin languages would mean no change at all. This will put non-Latin and Latin languages on par for edit summary length. is apparently an outcome of the internal discussions, so maybe there was a slip-up somewhere? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:40, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Interesting; hope they acquisece Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:46, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Also, I didn't know that hurricanes have their own 🌀 Unicode symbol. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:41, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
I hate you all... Primefac (talk) 19:41, 2 March 2018 (UTC) Except Jo-Jo, who taught me something new. Hurricane! Primefac (talk) 19:43, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
the last 11 years were a bit of a blur Gurch (talk) 19:45, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Not to hijack the thread, but... Holy cow! Gurch is still around! /(checks contribs)/ Oh, it isn't the miracle I thought it was. But still, yay. --Floquenbeam (talk) 19:49, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Gurch, you really haven't missed much. Anyone want to go find Keeper76 and complete the set? ‑ Iridescent 19:51, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Have I missed much? Majorlytalk 19:57, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Good grief, is every BRC-era admin watching this page? If we can get Lara and Betacommand I think we have a full house. ‑ Iridescent 19:59, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
It's raining OG's! Hi Majorly! One of my RFA noms... --Floquenbeam (talk) 20:01, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi! Just thought I’d freak you all out. And now, back to real life... Majorlytalk 20:04, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Nooooo, don't goooo! We miss you!!!! PS: Most of those symbols show up as blank squares for me, so I am somewhat missing the fun part oO SoWhy 20:08, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
As long as we're blowing (the mind of) Iridescent, I suppose I can say hi too. Hi. Keeper | 76 04:42, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
Very important parenthetical ;) Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:14, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
Hah, this was a fun read. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:24, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
Everyone got it out of their systems now? Because I'd like to be able to see my watchlist without killing my elderly eyes... Ealdgyth - Talk 19:48, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Fifty Wikipedia Points and the unblock for the vandal of your choice to whoever can slip
998 characters
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
in as the default edit summary for any bot or script. ‑ Iridescent 19:51, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Oh my... I already have four good candidates in mind, mostly user scripts for things like auto-sign... would end up hitting everyone that used it rather than one "culprit". Bloody good thing only admins can edit .js Primefac (talk) 19:54, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Gurch, do you still have write access to the Huggle source code? ‑ Iridescent 19:55, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Oh my, imagine that - carnage Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:56, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
It would certainly get the WMF's attention. Primefac (talk) 19:57, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Life's too short; have you ever known the WMF devs revert a change once it's been made, other than in two specific cases where Wikipedia was on the brink of open civil war and full-scale content forking? (The cynic in me says that the way to get this change reversed is to leave a shedload of good-faith but lengthy edit-summary essays on arbitration cases, highish-level policy discussions on Meta, pages you know will be on Jimmy's watchlist, and pages that you know will be on the watchlists of board members, but it would need to be done entirely in good faith so as not to constitute disrupting Wikipedia to make a point.) ‑ Iridescent 20:18, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
While we're on the topic of blowing up watch lists, I've decided to join in using Iridescent's suggested edit summary.
In retrospect, that may not have been a good idea.—CYBERPOWER(Chat) 21:15, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Iridiscent, FWIW, the "Does anyone have any idea" icons included in the summary linked by Tony at the top of the thread are mostly Japanese culture emojis: the first is a post office ("〒" just means post) I see an onigiri, a yukata, ...
Anyway, on a more serious note, I wish so many people weren't satyrically abusing the new system, as the odds are overwhelmingly high that, rather than the community blocking/banning editors who problematically abusing the new edit summary length rules, it's more likely that massive abuses, even good-faith jokes by established contributors, will lead to the WMF withdrawing the change, and I honestly have never liked the short character limit as I often find myself wanting to include long URLs (as a substitute for links to stuff) and would like to see the new system stay in place, perhaps in an "opt-in" fashion or in the form of a new editor permission for established contributors who would prefer to link to talk page diffs rather than vaguely say "see talk".
The obvious practical solution (which I see a few people have already suggested) is to automatically truncate edit summaries after the first 200 or so characters, with a "show all" button. Consequently, it would remove the issue of crapflooding watchlists, but still allow the (rare) cases where it's genuinely useful to post a wall of text in the edit summary rather than on the talkpage. I make no apologies at all for using intentionally disruptive edit summaries to illustrate the issue; people can engage in hypothetical "net positive" discussions all they like, but when they see a wall of emojis or Zalgo text clogging their watchlist it drives the point home that this isn't just opposition-for-opposition's-sake but that I'm demonstrating that this raises genuine potential problems. (An immediate one that springs to mind, that I don't think has been raised, is that presumably scripts like WP:AWB will now list every change they've made in their edit summaries, rather than truncating at 255 characters as they currently do.) In over a decade as a Wikipedia admin and with 300,000 edits, I can probably count the number of times I've thought "Damn, I wish the edit summaries were longer" on the fingers of one hand, and I can think of no legitimate circumstance ever when someone would genuinely need to have a thousand character story as an edit summary. ‑ Iridescent 13:01, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
Hmm...The edit-history of Iri's t/p seems to be gradually metamorphosing into a piece of art-work.Any more contributors?! ~ Winged BladesGodric 05:09, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
And so the copyvios in edit summaries begins - a trout to Natureium for [19] violating copyvio from [20] and/or disney Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:40, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
Is an emoji representation of a song a copyvio? Is a foreign language translation of a song a copyvio? Emojis represent ideas rather than words. Is it then a summary or interpretation of a song rather than a translation? Natureium (talk) 19:33, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes x2; not only does direct translation still count as copyright violation, but cut-and-pasting from another website undoubtedly constitutes copyright violation. The big corporations aren't going to go after most websites—it's good publicity for them if people are talking about your movies—but Wikipedia is a different kettle of fish. That you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL applies just as much to talkpages as it does to article mainspace, and Disney's lawyers aren't about to let you release Let It Go into the public domain. (I assure you this definitely isn't just an academic point with no impact on the real world; to their credit WMF legal tend to bat away the takedown notices and demands for identifying information of the editors who posted things, but they receive a steady stream of them.) ‑ Iridescent 23:43, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
I came for the edit summaries and left imagining an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards for an infinite number of infinities accidently creating all of the edit summaries ever written. Except for these. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:03, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
To be a true 2007 reunion, we need WP:AN/K back. I've always had you watchlisted, but when I first looked at my watchlist after this festival of fun I was wondering what I broke. Hi all StarM 00:58, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Please chill with the disruptive edit summaries, guys. I appreciate that this feature was poorly thought out, but pissing everyone off who has this user talk watchlisted isn't going to fix it. Intentionally disruptive edit summaries aren't helping things. File a Phab task. ~ Rob13Talk 03:04, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
To repeat what I said above but which has probably been lost in the wall-of-text, I make no apologies at all for using intentionally disruptive edit summaries to illustrate the issue; people can engage in hypothetical "net positive" discussions all they like, but when they see a wall of emojis or Zalgo text clogging their watchlist it drives the point home that this isn't just opposition-for-opposition's-sake but that I'm demonstrating that this raises genuine potential problems. If just half-a-dozen people posting on a page with fewer than 500 watchers (most of whom are sleepers or long-retired socks) is enough to piss off large numbers of people, what is going to happen when the penny drops on /b/ or Reddit that they can now summary-bomb high-traffic pages with Ⓐ ⓣⓗⓞⓤⓢⓐⓝⓓ ⓒⓗⓐⓡⓐⓒⓣⓔⓡⓢ ⓞⓕ ⓑⓤⓑⓑⓛⓔⓣⓔⓧⓣ, with m̲͓̦͇̰͇̫͔͉̩͊̄̒̿̀̈̑̀ų̺̹͙̩̩̮̲̮̐͊̌̋͘͢l͎̳̘͇̪̫̼̀́̿͒̋́̆́̐t̵̰̟͎͓̩̘̩̀͂̈̍̌̅̚͢͠i̶͉̭̜̳̅̌͑̓́̀̊͟͡p̢̟͉̭̥̤̫̔͆͆̔̀̍̀̏̎͠ͅͅl̡͙̻̯͇̥̱̩̔̀̓̒̽̍̽̇̈͢͢e͕̞̣̩̠̼̅̓̾̄͊̍̚͘͟͡͞ b̡̹̺͎́͑̀̈̉̚͟i̩̱̬̯̎̄̓͊̆͢ḡ̵̢̛̬̤͓̭̤͓̭̞̈́̈́̓̈̓́̽͝ c̸̹̻͍̻̖̲̝̃̎̈̔͒̎͒̉̕̕͟ͅḩ̶͈̦̹̜̤̯̼̤̠̈͌̐̀̑͆̋̋͗̕u̷̟̼̮̱̟͖̩͈̣͒̊̃̽̆̈͢n̛͓̼͈̮̟̔̂̄̽͗̕͢ͅk̶͖̼̲̙̻̉͋́̍̍̀̍͜͠s̴̞̖̘̻̤̘̞͇͗̑̐́͒̃ ȯ̴͇̹̫͐̓̆̐͑̈̕͟͜͞f̵̢̡̛͔̖̳̪̫͈͌̓̒̉̉͛̚̕ Z̨̗̦̦̩̀̅̊̏̂̂͝ą̵̩̞̪̙̹̈̂̆͆̓l̸̡̡̧̡̺̘̮͎̱̾͒͛͂̊g̷̢͚͓̜̺̤͊̊͌̌͆ò̴̡̙̤̫̥͈͈͎͐͌͂̐͒̾̓͜ͅ t͙̱͇͎̱͇́̆͋̽͘͟͜ë̴̖̰͕͔̫̦̹̻͚́̅͂̀̇̆̚̚͜͝x̨̝̱͕̥̹͙̏̋́̑͞ͅt̟̻̰̼̉̽̾̓̂͗͘͜͢͠ͅ or with 😺 😺 😺 🎑 🏞 🎆("multiple cat pictures") which will not only be exceptionally annoying in its own right, but will distract from other potentially problematic edits?
Wikipedia is already being flooded with over-long edit summaries from people acting in entirely good faith. Aside from anything else, as I predicted somewhere when this particular shit began to head towards the fan the bots are no longer truncating their edit summaries, which means that when at some point someone in entirely good faith uses AWB to perform a bunch of multiple fixes to multiple articles, Special:RecentChanges is going to end up looking like a pipe roll. ("File a phab task" would be pointless; since this has been imposed from above by the devs on the basis of what they sincerely believed was a community request, the only way to get it reverted is to demonstrate that it's causing problems.) ‑ Iridescent 13:29, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Did someone say AN/K? Believe it or not, that was my creation, if memory serves! Enigmamsg 00:26, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Wow, @Enigmaman:, that's a blast from the past. Iridescent's milk shakes bring 2007 admins to the yard. Hope you've been well StarM 02:15, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
On 11 March 2018, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Catherine Lynch, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that at the inquest into the death of Catherine Lynch(pictured), the presiding coroner described her as "one of a class who were a nuisance to themselves, their husbands and everybody else"? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Catherine Lynch. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Catherine Lynch), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
When I added her to the stats, you called me too modest (rightly so). I am loosing modesty over my #996, also a woman, and my first ever with 25k+ (actually, 10k was the highest so far), and I am even prouder that the hook gave 3k+ views to "supporting" Brigitte Fassbaender and almost 2k to Occupied France. Another female prisoner to be pictured tomorrow. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:39, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
I was afraid the prisoner would not be as attractive as the woman showing skin, but perhaps our readers are better than I thought. All three women nicely together now. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:43, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
Images can draw people in, but its only if there's an interesting story that those readers go on to share the link with their friends and you get a real spike in readers. If you look at Wikipedia:Did you know/Statistics#All-time DYK page view leaders and Wikipedia:Today's featured article/Most viewed, then aside from articles about current events that would have had high page views regardless, the one thing they all have in common is that the underlying story is actually of potential interest to people who aren't necessarily interested in the topic. ‑ Iridescent 10:25, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi Iridescent. You kindly reviewed Razing of Friesoythe for DYK a month ago. As a newcomer to this aspect of Wikipedia I was wondering if there was anything further I should or could be doing in this regard? If there is, a pointer towards an instruction page would be appreciated. If there isn't, apologies for bothering you. Gog the Mild (talk) 16:03, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) @Gog the Mild: No, nothing you (Iridescent hasn't been around for a few days) need to do now ; it's in the approved queue. Did you want it to appear on the main page on 14 April for the anniversary? It will have to be moved, I believe, but I'm not sure what noble (or ignoble!) personages attend to that: pinging @BlueMoonset and Cwmhiraeth: for their assistance, as they deal with such arcane lore on a daily basis :) —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap shit room 16:59, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for that. I shall ping the powers that be. I am hoping that it may feature as an On This Day article, and I assume that it is preferred to avoid duplication. Gog the Mild (talk) 17:09, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
@Gog the Mild: Ah! Interesting. But they're two different things, and I doubt they can appear twice (at least, a DYK can't ever have appeared bold linked elsewhere on the man page, and I assume that the exclusion is mutual with OTD). No need to go through the DYK process if you wanted it for "On this day," surely...? —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap shit room 17:37, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
No guarantee that it will get OTD. My first GA and I got an invite to nominate as a DYK, so I did. Iridescent approved it a month ago, so I just wanted to check if I was missing something. Gog the Mild (talk) 17:47, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
Gog the Mild, I don't believe that a DYK appearance will interfere with a later OTD appearance (and articles sometimes appear many times at OTD ove the years), but OTD and ITN appearances (bold links) will pre-empt any subsequent DYK appearance. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:15, 25 March 2018 (UTC)
@BlueMoonset: Thank you for the explanation. I shall await developments. Gog the Mild (talk) 09:03, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
That's interesting; I wonder why the differering standards? Because there are less datable, anniversary-friendly articles produced as there are run-of-the-mill dyks perhaps? —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap shit room 10:01, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
It's entirely intentional; DYK's purported purpose is to demonstrate that Wikipedia is expanding. OTD on the other hand suffers a severe paucity of adequate material as its quality standards are much higher, and there generally isn't actually much to work with on most dates. See the date in question (you need to click on "show" next to "staging area" to unhide the full list); given that we need to maintain at least a vague semblance of geographical, topical and chronological variety, not allowing OTDs to re-run would literally deplete the entire stock in a single pass. Howcheng and The Rambling Man can fill you in with more detail on exactly how these things are chosen and what quality criteria are applied, if you care. ‑ Iridescent 10:33, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Thank you. Heh :) I don't think I need drag such stalwarts away from their heavy lifting (Sisyphean though it may be!)...do you fancy turning the nit-picking up to eleven for my latest effort? No worries if you're busy. I was going to say, a bit tied up...but considering the images^^^up there, that could be misconstrued :) —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap shit room 10:51, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
@Gog the Mild: If you're being shown for DYK you won't be eligible for OTD in the same calendar year. But please feel free to add the listing in the staging area for consideration in future years. Thanks. —howcheng {chat} 15:45, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
The arcane lore of Wikipedia. :) I have no idea if I am likely to appear in OTD. Nor DYK. No doubt time will tell. Gog the Mild (talk) 18:58, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
Is the real problem not too many main page articles connected with User:Iridescent? ;) On the bright side, Friesoythe is in the queue for DYK in 4 days and I am optimistic that it may make OTD on 14 April. No doubt sparking a rash of "Why is Wikipedia being cruel to Canadians?" complaints. Gog the Mild (talk) 10:53, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
I think it's a niche genre of "main page articles connected with User:Iridescent"; "main page articles connected with User:Iridescent which require the reader to purchase a new screen to be able to read the title" perhaps :D ;) —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap shit room 11:07, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
The unwieldy titles are only really an issue with Etty—everything else I do tends to be from later when titling conventions had become more settled. At the time Etty was working, the concept of "paintings having names" had only just been invented (all the titles one thinks of as set in stone, like Mona Lisa, The Creation of Adam, The Birth of Venus etc, are actually the names given by 19th century curators), but the "keep the title short and memorable" convention hadn't yet come into being and the titles of artworks were more akin to an alt-text description for cataloguers and reviewers. (Illustrated newspapers didn't exist until 1842, remember; unless one happened to live in the town where a given artwork was exhibited or was in a position to make a long journey by stagecoach or the newfangled steam trains, even someone with an obsessive interest in a particular artist would never see the majority of their work and relied on descriptions and engraved prints to form their opinion of a given work.) Consequently, Etty paintings tended to get names like Joan of Arc, on finding the sword she had dreamt of, in the church of St. Catherine de Fierbois, devotes herself and it to the service of God and her country and A Composition, taken from the Eleventh Book of Milton's Paradise Lost. (In a particularly extreme example, Youth and Pleasure was originally exhibited under the title Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, while proudly riding o'er the azure realm, in gallant trim, the gilded vessel goes, Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the helm, unmindful of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, that, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey.) With most artists, the paintings were given more suitable names when the modern museum collections were formed and curated in the late 19th century—e.g. Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq became The Night Watch—but Etty's fall from fashion was so complete by then that nobody ever bothered, so they now exist as something of an 1830s time capsule. ‑ Iridescent 20:40, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
On a scale of 1-10, how much trouble would I get in if I renamed Youth and Pleasure to its former title? Still 25 mins of april fools day left... Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:35, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
You wouldn't get in trouble as it's a genuine alternative title, although it would promptly be redirected to The Bard, the poem from which that comes and for which anyone searching would almost certainly be looking. Unless someone's conducting their searches based on the 1832 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition catalogue, it's not a plausible search term for the painting. ‑ Iridescent 18:34, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
Origins of CSD G5
You'll know the answer to this, if anyone will. I'm sure there was some specific reason that G5 was implemented, and it probably wasn't "nuke any article, regardless of its merits, if somebody outsmarts our ability to kick them out". The context to this is that I declined such a tag on The Railway Detective simply because the article looked like a perfectly innocuous stub / start class effort, that deleting would be a bit of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 23:32, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
For my overlong thoughts on this issue, please see my essay here. The other thing I'd like to know is why we always describe CSD categories via alphanumeric codes instead of words or even initialisms. We don't do that anywhere else on Wikipedia that I can think of. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:52, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Running it down now. This is the first diff where it appears and is marked controversial even then. Previously only articles created and edited only by a banned user were speedyable. So there is clearly some trigger around Feb 2005 that required a change. User:Netoholic is still actively editing so might know. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:04, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Relevant talkpage here. Although amusingly enough the main complaint was that the numbering was changed. Which probably means the referring to numbers as NYB says above, pre-dates a lot of the other conventions we have on ENWP. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:08, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Also the index as a result is not terrible, given the nature of people to refer to the various criteria by their codes. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:10, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
In your case, the article that you declined probably would have been allowed to be deleted under the original criteria (here) as it only had like 3/4 edits of no substance by someone other than the creator. Apparantly this is Jimbo's fault. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:15, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
A long time ago I proposed the CSD crieria were simplified and consolidated as there are far too many of them and the numbers confusing and arbitrary to newcomers, but the idea was opposed. Aiken D 00:14, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Just done a bit of spelunking myself - what is now G5 was written into policy on 26 July 2003, and comes directly from something added to the blocking / banning policy on 3 June 2003. This is much older than I thought! Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 00:25, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) It almost certainly originated—or at least was popularized—by the war of words between Jimmy Wales and Greg Kohs. (See MyWikiBiz for a brief and rather unsatisfactory summary.) Basically, as Jimmy saw it Greg was thumbing his nose by using socks to create obviously valid articles and daring Wikipedia to delete them (Arch Coal is one that springs to mind), and as Greg saw it he was improving Wikipedia by creating neutral articles on noteworthy topics and Jimmy and his supporters were deleting them out of spite and a misguided adherence to policy at the expense of quality. To a lesser extent the Poetlister saga probably had something to do with its migration from custom to practice. Enough Wikipedia Review people watch this page that someone can probably winkle Greg and PL out to give their side of the story (Defenders Of The Wiki, if IPs from either Philadelphia or East London pop up in this thread don't blindly revert them). As regards the official Banned Means Banned line that eventually congealed into G5, there are quite a few people still about from that fight (JzG and SlimVirgin are a couple of obvious ones, or just look through the history of User talk:Thekohser for names you recognize.) Why CSD criteria have those opaque codes rather than simple names I have no idea; the only other place I can think of where that happens is the Featured Article criteria, but in that case it's legitimate to assume that anyone seeing something like "oppose, fails 1C" is already familiar with what the codes mean. ‑ Iridescent 00:24, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
I do think Guy's deletion rationale of Arch Coal on 20:06, 2 January 2008 is .... somewhat original (though I suspect it's more "I made a mistake" than "I don't like this topic"). Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 00:33, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Ah, Kohs. I am very confident that he never thought he was "improving Wikipedia", he was exploiting Wikipedia for personal profit, and never understood why anybody would have a problem with that. Everything he ever did here after he was banned, was done in order to "prove" that his abuse of Wikipedia for personal profit was so self-evidently a good thing that only a sociopath could possibly oppose it. Naturally he didn't create obvious spam, or at least not when using obvious socks, because he was making a WP:POINT. I found his worldview hard to understand - prior to Jan 20 2017 I had never really seen anyone behave that way. The 20:06, January 2, my summary was "bollocks" because, if you look, I was trying to restore only the post-rewrite content, but fumbled it. We didn't have revdel back then. Guy (Help!) 13:47, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
I assumed that was the case, I doubt you would have really deleted an article with WP:CB as the rationale! Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 13:57, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Well, sort of. Greg undeniably turned into something of an asshole constantly trying to refight the same battle in the hope of a different result (not exactly a unique situation on Wikipedia, and many worse offenders than him are still very much with us), but I do believe that when he started he not only thought that he'd worked out a legitimate way to reconcile "neutral point of view" and "conflict of interest", but that he genuinely believed that he had the WMF's blessing to proceed, and was hurt and confused when Jimmy suddenly changed his mind. As I've pointed out before, his original proposal—a noindexed dedicated spamspace where articles written by people with a potential conflict of interest could be parked awaiting assessment by a neutral third party, and only moved to mainspace when they'd been thoroughly vetted for spam, puffery and bias-by-omission—is pretty much exactly the solution that the WMF itself came up with a decade later when the present-day "create it as a draft and then submit it to Articles for Creation" process was set up. To draw a somewhat forced analogy, the difference between someone like Grawp and Greg was the difference between a dog that's mean from the get-go and keeps attacking the neighbors' kids, and a dog whose owner constantly beats it until eventually it snaps, flies off the leash and attacks the family; in both cases, the net result is a mad dog that shouldn't be kept around the house any more, but who's responsible for the dog reaching that point—and whether it's ethical to devote time and effort to trying to find the dog a new home or just to take it to the woods and shoot it—is different in each case. ‑ Iridescent 02:57, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
To editor Ritchie333: That line predated my work on the page, I was only reordering/organizing the items. The line I think originates here when a list of exceptions to the normal 7-day deletion discussion process was added by MartinHarper. He later coined the phrase "Candidates for speedy deletion" at this edit. -- Netoholic@ 00:34, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that what Ritchie is asking isn't when G5 was created, but when it metamorphosed in common application from "articles written by a banned user can be unilaterally deleted by an admin if they feel it necessary" to "articles written by a banned user should be unilaterally deleted unless someone demonstrates a reason not to". This is a fairly recent development; there are dozens of perfectly good quality articles written in the not-so-distant past which technically violated G5 but which nobody seriously considered deleting, but which nowadays would be routinely deleted as a matter of course "because banned" regardless of whether they suffered from any issues or not (one obvious example that springs to mind). SoWhy, you probably follow this more closely than me; have you any idea? ‑ Iridescent 02:57, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
Gotcha. Even if G5 is worded somewhat stoically (along with any other CSD criteria), the policy still includes the phrase at the top of the page "at their discretion" so that adds an implied "can" to all the criteria. I can understand most admins not wanting to reward bad behavior of a banned or sanctioned user by making sure that user's defiance doesn't enshrine them as the creator of a new article. Likewise, if another admin objects to a specific deletion after checking it out and would like to restore it, they can work it out with the deleting admin. -- Netoholic@ 04:02, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
I've always understood G5 as "can" rather than "should". If I'm reviewing something, I will almost always delete it if it meets the G5 criteria, but with two exceptions, I'll always tag for G5 rather than directly delete if I come across it first: it recognizes that there is a diversity of opinion in the admin corps about the use of G5, and that someone else should review to see if they think it justified. The exceptions to that rule being an ar.wiki sockmaster who will create dozens of footballer stubs to the point where twinkle tagging would take me me a good 30 minutes and the other being any of the incarnations of A Den Jentyl Ettien Avel Dysklyver, who at this point would only use the tagging process to launch more protests with new socks or with IPs. Given, I'm "fresh blood" if you will, but this is the way I've always explained it to people who ask my thoughts on it. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:25, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
(pinged) Sorry, I cannot contribute more to this. I know that a couple of editors in recent years have emphasized the WP:DENY aspect of G5 but I cannot tell you when this started. Judging from the WT:CSD archives, this discussion from 2010 might have been one of the key moments but there have been discussions in 2013 and in 2015 about the same question. Regards SoWhy 19:35, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
Dragonfly67 has an allegory regarding G5 pages that I've always found reasonable, and also falls in agreement with the Greg case mentioned above. Primefac (talk) 14:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
I tend to stay out of the way of G5 deletions in the grand scheme of things, but my general view is that if there's a reasonable chance anybody else could improve and maintain the article, we should leave it. Block the creator by all means, but if we don't leave their good work, maybe they'll just come back and write it again, and this time be even more aggravating. This reminds me of a situation a while back where a sock of Kumioko made his way onto my talk page, and since I don't know him from Adam and he was being civil and polite (if forthright and uncomplimentary about admins), I listened to what he had to say and gave a sympathetic ear and a reasonable reply - and then got jumped on by 2-3 admins for having the complete and utter chutzpah to do so. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 12:45, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata Infobox RfC, Portals, and Wikipedia and Politics research project
I should start with an apology for the imbroglio over the recent AfD and the overspill here. I feel partially responsible in that I asked for the AfD to be kept open, thinking that it would help to have some of the community views out in the open. I had forgotten how polarising that can be at times. Talking of which... the VP infobox RfC is still open, and I somehow managed to miss that the much-trailed Wikidata/2018 Infobox RfC went live on 6 April. A bit of a monster to read through already. Another VP RfC that caught my attention was the proposal to end the system of portals. I must confess, my first reaction on seeing that (if it goes through as looks likely) was to wonder how the fight over the prime real-estate at top-right on the Main Page will pan out, and whether there will be a renewed impetus for a 'Main Page Redesign' (tm)? It makes the spam I got on my talk page look boring by comparison. A link to a page on meta and it looks genuine enough, but I wonder why they think I edit pages on politics? ("We aim to survey a set of 200-300 people who have edited Wikipedia pages related to politics"). The message even went so far as to say that I am a frequent editor of pages on Wikipedia that are of political interest. Hmm. Carcharoth (talk) 11:47, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
I wouldn't consider the "portal corner" of the main page prime real estate by any stretch—hardly anyone even notices it, and those that do tend to assume Arts Biography Geography History Mathematics Science Society Technology All portals is just another Wikipedia slogan, not a set of clickable links. 2000 page views a day is pathetic by mainpage standards; this is the first link on the second most viewed page on the internet (other than the Wikipedia link), and gets the kind of page views that would be considered poor for even the dullest space-filler of a DYK. (Portal:Arts got less than half the pageviews of Did you know ... that the mycotoxinphomoxanthone A causes fragmentation of mitochondria within minutes?.) The number of portals probably ought to be drastically slimmed down, as quite a few of them were the pet project of one or two people and are now moribund, but I wouldn't consider that a reason to get rid of the concept. That said, since the "we need to make a change, this is a proposed change, therefore this is the change we need to make" echo-chamber is in full voice the writing is clearly on the wall. I'd imagine the active ones like Portal:Trains and Portal:War will just quietly rebrand and carry on as before. (I'd argue that even the completely defunct ones like Portal:London Transport still serve a useful purpose as a collection of useful links aimed at readers, as opposed to the more editor-focused Wikiprojects, but I know which way that argument would go; Wikipedia is in one of its intermittent bouts of "delete anything I haven't heard of" "refine our focus on core content" tail-chasing. As with all the previous "we're losing focus on the core content!!!" moral panics, the best thing to do is shelter as much as possible until the crusaders get bored, rather than try to stand against the tide.)
You're getting that Politics message (I imagine) because of your recent stuff about the Parliamentary War Memorials. The software only sees you're editing articles about politicians; it isn't smart enough to see that you're writing about their military rather than their political careers. I regularly got medicine-related notifications when I was writing things like Biddenden Maids, for the same reason. ‑ Iridescent 14:01, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
Heh. I clearly need to focus more (and really try and attend to some content issues), and post less here (your talk page) and at the 'attack site' (I disagree with that characterisation for the record, but know better than to try and dissuade you of your views on that). Your views have always (to me) been a mix of really hitting the nail on the head (your comments about echo chambers and moral panics are great examples of this), contrasting with (to a lesser extent) leaving me sometimes feeling like you've completely missed the point. But then I suppose we all do that at times (I know I certainly do, and I really struggle sometimes to see when that has happened). What is the difference between being flexible enough to admit when getting something wrong, and standing your ground when you think you are right? Anyway, time to shelter from the incoming tide! Carcharoth (talk) 14:31, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
If everyone agreed all the time it would be a dull place… (I'm fairly confident I didn't miss the overall point—even if it wasn't your point—regarding Lynch. That AFD was as clear a case of "This article isn't on a topic I personally consider important, so let's throw as much mud as possible and hope that at least some of it sticks" as I've ever seen.) With regards to WP:BADSITES, I'll admit that I'm not that familiar with its recent incarnation, but from what I've seen of it it's considerably worse in its new clothes. The old Wikipedia Review was sometimes too tolerant of weirdos, but Somey in general did a decent job at keeping it as a neutral zone in which people of different opinions could all say their piece and in which people with complaints were expected to be prepared to answer "well, how would you do it better?", and at being willing to show the door to the obsessive cranks. In its Wikipediocracy incarnation it just gives me the impression of being a mutual support group for a bunch of malcontents whining at each other about how they didn't get their way in some dispute or another; on the occasions I've visited it recently it feels a little like taking a vacation inside Ottava's head. ‑ Iridescent 16:43, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
A question about wikipedia religion
This is only semi- serious, but who are "The wikipedia gods"? Do they need to be appeased through sacrafices? Or is it a cult?💵Money💵emoji💵Talk 23:55, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
That knowledge can only be gained by a Level 7 WikiWizard. Primefac (talk) 00:04, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
I refuse to erect an altar to Jimbo. Ealdgyth - Talk 00:50, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
Would refusal to erect an altar to Jimbo cause Lares Anger? ‑ Iridescent 2 08:30, 24 April 2018 (UTC)
I can't say much, but the closest we get is a somewhat-misshapen bust in the entryway... Primefac (talk) 01:08, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
Ah, I get it. The admins are actually a cult around Jimbo- rouge admins are actually ones who are opposed to the cult. The admins consider Jimbo a god, and the "gods" Iridescent was referring to are Jimbo and the admins who have a ascended from worship of Jimbo- they are known as check users and stewards. Thank you @Primefac: and @Ealdgyth: for helping me understand Wikipedias hierarchy. 💵Money💵emoji💵Talk 01:17, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
The fact of the matter, and this is not a joke, is that Jimmy Wales is almost completely irrelevant to the day-to-day operation of this encyclopedia, and almost nobody actively involved with administrating this project thinks much or cares much about Jimbo at this point. Cullen328Let's discuss it 01:31, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
That is true. @Ealdgyth: So what will it be if a question will be either erecting an altar or being indef blocked? I need to assume you would chose erecting an altar. :)--Biografer (talk) 01:35, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
Indef block = path to eternal happiness, Wikivana, where one has surmounted the tribulous word-salads and Byzantine acronym-soups... —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 09:30, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
Yes, we all hope for a day when we're far enough from this to stop dropping Wikipedia Essays into normal/real life conversation. Primefac (talk) 11:23, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
Really? I thought that indef blocks = go hang yourself. Some Wikipedians who are deeply in love with this project might do just that. :(--Biografer (talk) 17:26, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
x
WikiProject Western Governors University
As a current or past contributor to a related article, I thought I'd let you know that I've started WikiProject Western Governors University, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of WGU. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks and related articles. Thanks! Paul Smith111977 (talk) 08:51, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
Lord-a-mercy. I am especially amused by the fact that your article about the specific instance has half-a-dozen paragraphs, a quotation, and three illustrations, while the generic case is one sentence long and that with a grammatical error. --GRuban (talk) 22:34, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
I forgot to call your attention to the DYK. How neglectful of me. EEng 23:08, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
Because this is a very cluttered painting and it's impossible to discern what it's about at standard TFA size (see right), I've taken a slightly drastic approach here; I've replaced the image with a crop of a small part and an "expand" link to view the whole thing, and slashed the blurb down to absolute bare bones (919 characters) to allow the image to be resized larger than is usual, to give readers at least a fighting chance of seeing what it's actually a picture of. Paging Dank to confirm this is OK, as this is something of a departure from usual practice (although we took the same "crop the image, enlarge what remains, and reduce the text" approach when the equally-cluttered Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm was TFA). I'm unlikely to be around on the day; anyone who is, had probably better watchlist this as unless you run Pig-faced women it will almost certainly be the most-viewed TFA of the year thanks to that goofy title, and will consequently get the usual flood of vandals and good-faith 'improvements'. (To pre-empt an obvious 'improvement', the absence of an infobox here is entirely intentional; when I've written in the past about "very elaborate artworks where the importance of having the lead image at a large enough size for detail to be visible is more important than repeating information which is already in the first paragraph of the article anyway", this is one of the two articles—the other being Beaune Altarpiece—I had in mind.) ‑ Iridescent 10:06, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks Iri, David gets all image requests. Pinging David Levy. - Dank (push to talk) 13:04, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
I agree that this is the most suitable approach (and the custom code appears to have been applied correctly). —David Levy 17:21, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for another work by William Etty who "had acquired a (deserved) reputation for thinly-disguised pornography masquerading as art, and tried to address this with The Destroying Angel…, in which assorted loose-moralled types receive a thorough smiting. The "Reception" section is slightly longer than is usual on painting articles; because it was painted specifically with how it would be received by critics in mind, the critical response on its initial unveiling is more significant than for most visual arts articles"! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:19, 23 April 2018 (UTC)
Roughly twice as popular as Earth. If anybody feels like cleaning up the assorted stupidity it's accreted on the day feel free, although it probably makes sense to wait until it's dropped off the main page altogether rather than try to hold back the tide. ‑ Iridescent 2 08:22, 24 April 2018 (UTC)
Thanks very much for helping to review Mowbray—thanks to your helpful suggestions, it passed. I appreciate you taking the time and trouble to look in. Cheers! —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap shit room 14:50, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
Religion in infoboxes
Hi, do you have any idea if this RfC has been superseded? I know time seems to speed up as I get older but I thought the consensus to remove religion from bio infoboxes was much more recent! - Sitush (talk) 16:24, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
Not that I know of...is there an issue? Ealdgyth - Talk 16:43, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
Just to add, the consensus was to remove religion from that specific generic infobox (which hasn't been superseded) there may have been subsequent rfcs to remove it from other more specialist infoboxs. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:50, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, folks. No issue as such - it is just something I mentioned in this thread and I want to make sure I'm not imagining things etc. - Sitush (talk) 16:53, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
My close specifically and explicitly only applied to the vanilla {{infobox person}} as that was what was being discussed in the RFC. Expanding it to cover other infoboxes would require a fresh RFC, as it's reasonable to assume that at least some of those who supported removing it as an included-by-default field for general biographies would have felt that on at least some infoboxes (clergy, politicians in places like Lebanon where there are parliamentary quotas for members of different religious groups, the leaders of the German states during the Thirty Years War…) it would still be appropriate to include the subject's religion as a key fact, and consequently would have voted differently had the RFC been understood to apply to all biographical infoboxes. ‑ Iridescent 14:51, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
Should wrestling promotions that wrestlers competed in be listed in their infobox
Looking at the articles in question, it appears that the information is in fact there, but that the {{infobox wrestling team}} template doesn't support a "promotions" field and consequently it doesn't display. This is a discussion for Template talk:Infobox wrestling team or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Professional wrestling, not for my talkpage, as changing the template will affect the appearance of 539 pages (at the time of writing). I imagine the question you need to consider is whether you treat professional wrestling teams as sports teams (for which the infobox generally only includes the competition/league in which they're currently active, not those in which they've historically participated); as actors (for which the infobox typically doesn't include a "notable works" section at all), or as performance artists (for which infoboxes can—but by no means must—include a brief no-more-than-five-at-most list of their most notable works). Wrestling isn't something in which I have the slightest interest, so I have no opinion on what the most appropriate way to handle this is. I'd caution that anything relating to infoboxes is almost certain to lead to arguments, as whether infoboxes are appropriate for any given page and if so what should be included in the infobox is one of the most contentious areas on Wikipedia, so don't make any changes to the infobox coding unilaterally without establishing that there's consensus to make the change. ‑ Iridescent 14:52, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
hanged, drawn and quartered
hey, i checked before i made my changes to the Hanged, drawn and quartered article... undoing my revision with "British topic, British spellings" is an extremely poor excuse... even other wiki articles linked do not have the double "l"... check your dictionaries, too... the Cambridge, Oxford, Collins and Miriam-Webster dictionaries all show one "l"... none of them other than Collins even mention two ells for a British form of the words...
(talk page watcher) @Wkitty42: Not "an extremely poor excuse"; WP:ENGVAR is well-established within the manual of style; specifically, see WP:TIES: An article on a topic that has strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation should use the (formal, not colloquial) English of that nation, and various examples are given. So, the article about the electric chair uses American English, whilst HDQ uses British English. hope this clarifies, —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 12:01, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) Um, yes, @Wkitty42: The issue is that those are inflected forms, not the simple verb. See the article Ealdgyth pointed to, under "Doubled consonants". Yngvadottir (talk) 21:19, 29 April 2018 (UTC)
What they said; this is an article on a British topic and as such is written in British English. A couple of links to specifically US English dictionaries have no relevance when it comes to BrEng spelling (what did you think the /us/ in the URLs meant?). Incidentally, if you're going to tell lies at least tell lies that take more than two seconds to fact-check; the relevant entry in the OED lists only the double-l version of "disembowelled" and doesn't even give "disemboweled" as a variant. ‑ Iridescent 14:53, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
Re the Kishinev riot entry, your removal of my comment indicates you didn't get the point: Even in 1903, riots causing the deaths of 50 people, in this case Jews, would certainly not have attracted worldwide 'positive' attention (except perhaps from racist lunatics). Thus the word "positive" was redundant, particularly since the blurb refers to "persecution of Jews." Embarrassing. Sca (talk) 20:51, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Iridescent didn't remove your comment. I did. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:54, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
Ah, so it was TRM. Look, my brief language comment re "negative" was not a big issue and I wasn't trying to make it one, but I really think you should have left it to see if others would comment. Sca (talk) 16:58, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
As The Rambling Man is too polite to say in as many words, if you're going to adopt a "righteous indignation" posture you might want to perform the most basic fact-checking before you start throwing around accusations. The nature of Wikipedia means it's not difficult to see exactly who has edited what and when, and when it takes all of two mouse clicks to see who removed your comment but you just pick someone apparently at random and accuse them of removing your comments it just makes you look either incompetent or lazy.
As regards your other point, the late 1880s and early 1900s were the zenith (or nadir) of scientific racism and colonialism, and both overt racism and more subtle notions of cultural superiority were the mainstream consensus, not the preserve of "racist lunatics". (As an obvious example, even in bastion-of-liberty cradle-of-democracy mother-of-parliaments etc-etc-etc England Jews were only permitted to enter Parliament in 1858, to become fellows at universities in 1871, and the response of the British government to the pogroms of the 1900s wasn't to threaten Russia or impose sanctions but was to ban Jewish refugees from entering British territory; the reason the US and Argentina have such a high population of Russian Jewish descent isn't because East European Jews had any particular desire to live in culturally alien countries thousands of kilometres from their homes and families, but because similar restrictions on Jewish immigration were imposed by almost every European country.) The significance of the Kishinev pogrom was that it did attract significant negative coverage in other countries when other pogroms had been ignored or in some cases tacitly or even overtly supported. (If you want a modern analogy, consider the overwhelmingly negative coverage—outside some Israeli and pro-Israel US media—of the 30+ and rising Palestinian deaths in the 2018 Gaza border protests, compared to the more usual "well, it looks bad but it's their own internal affairs and we shouldn't take sides" or "they were probably all terrorists and had it coming" attitude towards I/P violence.) If you seriously don't understand that not only have there have been periods in relatively recent European history in which the deaths of 50 Jews would have been positively received by many, but that the Russian pogroms and other Tsarist atrocities in the Pale of Settlement were—along with Ottoman atrocities in the Balkans, Japanese imperialism in Asia and Leopold II's outright lunacies in central Africa—seen at the time by many in the west as the necessary imposition of order in territories which the German–Austrian bloc and the Anglo–French alliance each feared would break away from crumbling imperial control and fall into the other's sphere of influence, then I would respectfully suggest that you're not competent to be commenting on 19th- and early 20th-century European history.
This is hardly the first time that you've waded in all-guns-blazing based on your own misreading of something rather than any actual error by anyone other than yourself, and I'd urge you to stop commenting on topics you don't understand or throwing around unsubstantiated accusations against other editors without evidence. I have no doubt you're acting in good faith, but eventually you'll waste the time of enough people that you'll end up becoming the sequel to this. Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors is a page To report an error on today's or tomorrow's Main Page, not your blog or a forum for you to offer your personal opinions of and commentary on whatever happens to be on the Main Page. ‑ Iridescent 15:30, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
Many thanks, Iridescent, for your 583 words of righteous indignation regarding my eight-word comment. You could have said everything you had to say much more succinctly without stooping to snide personal comments about my degree of understanding or cultural literacy. Good bye. Sca (talk) 16:58, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) Tbh, if one does insist on referring to other editors and/or their edits as "embarassing," then one should probably expect one's position to be forensically dissected, since one has staked so much upon it. —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 17:23, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
What? Serial Number 54129, it was the WORD "negative" that was, IN CONTEXT, embarrassing. It was used by whoever wrote the OTD blurb, not by Iridescent. – Sca (talk) 17:36, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
PS: Charming image on your page. – Sca (talk) 17:46, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
I think the integer's point was that when you go around to another person's user talk page, make an accusation that they did something they didn't, and end it with Embarrassing. you can generally expect a negative response. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:52, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
I believe "can dish it out but can't take it" is the phrase you're looking for. ‑ Iridescent 18:53, 20 April 2018 (UTC)
Sca I suggest you read all of this seriously; your repeatedly pointed failures at ERRORS added to the concerns above really mean you're in danger of becoming a persona non gratia in these parts. After all, I should know. The Rambling Man (talk) 03:34, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Again, this was a minor issue, and the fallout seems out of proportion. But I do apologize for mistakenly addressing my concerns to the wrong person. Sca (talk) 14:27, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
At least you got something right here, perhaps that's some positive outcome from the whole debacle. The Rambling Man (talk) 18:39, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Q regarding Jews being allowed into parliment: would a lack of repeal affected Disraeli? Our article says he was rased Anglican from the age of 12, would this be enough or int he eyes of the "law" was he Jewish? Conversion to Christianity enabled Disraeli to contemplate a career in politics. Britain in the early-nineteenth century was not a greatly anti-Semitic society, and there had been Members of Parliament (MPs) from Jewish families since Samson Gideon in 1770. But until 1858, MPs were required to take the oath of allegiance "on the true faith of a Christian", necessitating at least nominal conversion. Thanks, L3X1◊distænt write◊ 03:25, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
Disraeli wouldn't have had any issue; in all four of the then constituent countries of the UK the notion of religion-by-descent didn't exist and religion was always based on practice not ethnicity, and thus a Jewish convert to any other religion immediately ceased to be Jewish. The issue was that admission to Parliament required an oath "upon the true faith of a Christian", an oath that Disraeli as a convert was able to make but Lionel de Rothschild wasn't. There's a list of the relevant dates for each country which previously had specific anti-Jewish laws at Jewish emancipation#Dates of emancipation; many of the repeals are much later than you'd think.
In recent years things are more complicated than the traditional "a Jew is a member of the Jewish religion and ethnicity doesn't come into it". The 1983 case of Mandla v Dowell-Lee set case law that a group meeting both "a long shared history, of which the group is conscious as distinguishing it from other groups, and the memory of which it keeps alive" and "a cultural tradition of its own, including family and social customs and manners, often but not necessarily associated with religious observance" as meeting the definition of an ethnicity as well as of a religious group, thus bringing Jews and Sikhs under the umbrella of racial discrimination legislation (the significance was that at the time religious discrimination was legal but racial discrimination wasn't; thus, post Mandla one could legally say "sorry, no Catholics" but not "sorry, no Jews"). The Equality Act 2006 outlawed religious discrimination and meant that discrimination on the grounds of religion and ethnicity were treated the same under UK law, rendering the distinction largely irrelevant; the 2009 Supreme Court case of R (E) v Governing Body of JFS (the first case ever tried before the Supreme Court, and consequently quite high-profile) established that it was down to the courts and government and not the Jewish community(ies) to determine who was a Jew, and that membership of a religion depended on whether the person in question was observant in that religion rather than their ethnicity.* Well, you asked. ‑ Iridescent 05:58, 21 April 2018 (UTC) *E v JFS was a complicated case, revolving on whether a Jewish school had the right to deny admission to a child of Italian Catholic descent who was an observant Jew but who wasn't Jewish in Talmudic terms as neither the child nor his mother had formally converted; it split the Supreme Court 5–4. The text is here if you're interested in such things and have too much time on your hands.
Fascinating, especially when you factor in some of the current scholarly views of religion as a form of race (as an overly simple example, someone named Kennedy in the United States will be assumed to be Catholic by many, regardless of if they are or the time the last entered a Church. You could substitute it for something such as Qureshi in Islam in some regions, etc.) TonyBallioni (talk) 22:33, 21 April 2018 (UTC)
@TonyBallioni, you have to consider the unusual status and history of Britain. It's a country that for all practical purposes was populated entirely by mass migration (while there are probably still some genetic vestiges of the Beaker People, they'll to all practical purposes have been bred out of the population); the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all invaders from Continental Europe, and the national culture is and always has been one of assimilation and absorption of waves of mass migration from Europe, with multiple mass conversions (of varying degrees of brutality) taking the national culture from Druidism, to Roman paganism, to Roman Christianity, to Anglo-Saxon/Norse paganism, to Celtic Christianity, to Roman Catholicism, to Lutheranism, to Catholicism again, to Anglicanism, to Puritanism, to Anglicanism again. Consequently, the dominant religion has for the last few centuries been Anglicanism in various forms in England, Methodism in Wales and Presbyterianism in Scotland, all of whose adherents are all by definition converts or the descendant of converts. When one takes that into account, it's easy to see why "your religion is what you personally believe (or profess to believe), and has nothing to do with descent" pretty much by definition had to become both official orthodoxy and the general popular attitude; the whole "follow the faith of your forefathers" mentality that's so central to American culture (and most Continental European cultures) would in the English context be legitimising the Roman Catholic culture to which the country has spent 500 years defining itself as the superior alternative. (For anyone wondering what British culture would look like if it did have the "religion as ethnic identity" culture one sees in the US and the Middle East grafted onto it, those shouty people across the water have helpfully volunteered to demonstrate and it's not a pretty sight.) ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
Actually the fashion in genetic studies at the moment is to show considerable continuity in the genetics of the British (often going even back before the Beaker culture - and they tend not to be seen as a large-scale migration today), and in any case the British have been very good at entirely forgetting such immigrant status as they may actually have. The CofE doesn't accept that switching to Anglicanism involved conversion, and seems now busily to be forgetting that it was ever anything to do with Protestantism. And indeed, the religious changes you mention really mostly only affected professionals and some lay enthusiasts - the Vicar of Bray's congregation took little notice most of the time. Johnbod (talk) 15:13, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
Regarding the British have been very good at entirely forgetting such immigrant status as they may actually have, well sort of; even the most knuckle-dragging I-have-the-cross-of-St-George-tattooed-on-my-genitals members of the Tommy Robinson tendency are generally at least dimly aware both that the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans came from somewhere else originally. Whether the CofE formally considered the religious swings and roundabouts of the Tudor and Stuart eras as mass conversions or as repeated redraftings of the course of the One True Path isn't really relevant; there certainly was (and is) a strong tendency, particularly in the Low Church, that sees the RCC as continuity, albeit continuity on the wrong path, with Henry and Edwards goons and the inhabitants of the Book of Martyrs as revolutionaries. (If you happen to be in Liverpool, there's a distinctly creepy display currently in the Derby Transept of the Anglican cathedral explaining in great detail why all those not following every word of Luther are destined for the Pit.)
My main point, that British culture and religion were and are an ever-shifting (and often internally contradictory) syncretic highlights package of Western European, Mediterranean, Celtic, Nordic and more recently Asian traditions, rather than a coherent and continuous narrative in their own right, and that as a consequence "this is how we've always done things" carries less weight than in otherwise comparable countries like Spain or France, I think is sound. (Try the experiment of asking some of your friends to name a family tradition. In the (white) US you'll get regaled with stories of obscure cultural practices, recipes and religious observances brought over from the Old Country and cherished for generations; in Britain, unless your social circle consists of either super-posh old money, or a tiny backwoods village where the same families have resided since the ice shelf receded, you'd be lucky to get anything more than "Nan says 'pull my finger' when she farts".) ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps the most beloved Christmas tradition in my family when they first moved to the States was taking pictures in shorts and t-shirts and sending it back to the Old Country to make snowed in relatives jealous. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:36, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
Since you seem to have an expertise on the locus of paintings et al, can you please let me know about whether a biography at British Museum like this, this et al or mentions over Royal Academy like this automatically guarantees the passage of our notability guidelines? Thanks,~ Winged BladesGodric 08:57, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
Certainly not; those are just generic bibliographical entries (and the Barenger one explicitly states "information provided via email", to boot). If you have specific examples in mind, Johnbod is probably better qualified than me to speak as to the notability of individuals. (As a rough rule of thumb, when it comes to figures in the 19th-century arts in England the easiest way to gauge viability in Wikipedia terms is to drop the name into Google Books. Because they have most of the arts/culture periodicals of the period digitized, if nothing substantive comes up it's usually a fairly safe indication that nobody cared enough at the time to write about them.)
In the three specific cases you link, Charles Pyearguably scrapes notability in Wikipedia terms because he's mentioned in the ODNB, albeit only as a footnote to the entry on his far more successful brother. Samuel Barenger doesn't seem to have left any trace other than the occasional one-line entry on lists of engravers, and almost certainly is non-notable. Frederick Rudolph Hay probably scrapes notability in Wikipedia terms as he was one of the founders of the Artists' Benevolent Fund, and seems to have been very successful in his business, but he would be a nightmare to source; engravers, typesetters, bookbinders etc were never documented anywhere near as well as the painters, authors etc themselves. ‑ Iridescent 09:17, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
Yes, none are listed on the Union List of Artist Names (bizarrely at AFD btw), which is pretty conclusive evidence of notability for historical artists. John Pye is there. So probably not notable (as artists). But refs like these can be used on the list at Draft:Britannia Depicta, which seems harmless. Since people have gone through the dreaded Bryan's Dictionary in the past, I think early 19th-century British printmakers is one area where we already have pretty much the right articles, & all we need (but nearly all just sourced from Bryan). Johnbod (talk) 13:53, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
Even if one considers a Benezit entry to be proof of notability (questionable; we don't even consider an ODNB entry as automatic notability, and the ODNB is far more selective), most engravers other than the high-profile ones who bought the rights to renowned artists would fail the "500 word test", of "if not enough information exists that it would ever be possible to write 500 words on any given topic, it almost certainly should be an entry on a broader list rather than a permanent microstub". This may not be Wikipedia policy, but it's certainly good practice (and, as the cricket project is finding out, The Wikipedia Community is starting to lose patience with vast swathes of microstubs). At some point someone probably ought to trim the worst of the weeds at Category:English engravers, much of which appears to be verbatim cut-and-pastes from assorted 19th-century directories. ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
Even though Britain hardly features in the history of the Old Master print, what with the once highly-collected 18th-century mezzotinters, the caricaturists, the stamp-designers, the book illustrators, not to mention lots of painters who dabbled in etching etc ("engraver" of course here means "printmaker") ... and so on, I expect most deserve articles, but better ones. I'd imagine the notability of Britannia Depicta actually depends on the road-map element rather than the extra pictures added in the 19th century. The early editions certainly don't come cheap, even in an Oxfam shop! Johnbod (talk) 21:15, 5 June 2018 (UTC)
About the Benezit Dictionary of British Graphic Artists and Illustrators ... I don't know the status of that one either, and would want to round up at least two additional RSs. Ewulp (talk) 01:44, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
Many thanks to the t/p owner and everybody else who participated in the thread, for their help as to the relative betterment of my understanding of the issues of notability.
@Iridescent:-You were absolutely correct as to the locus of my question.~ Winged BladesGodric 10:58, 7 June 2018 (UTC)
While I have no problem with taking part in surveys etc, I'm not really comfortable putting my name to anything that's going to be included in the Signpost. While it used to serve a useful function in documenting Wikipedia's internal debates and serving as a neutral discussion venue, IMO in its post-Tony incarnation the Signpost is a thoroughly unpleasant project, comprising an unhealthy mess of sub-Wikipedia Review sneering and backbiting on the one hand, painfully unfunny and often actively & needlessly offensive attempts at comedy on the other hand, and the in-crowd of friends of the management slapping each other on the back and congratulating each other about how clever they are on the third hand. It's not something with which I really want to be associated. Besides, I do very little admin work these days; I tend only to dust off the admin bits when a neutral admin-of-last-resort is needed to perform difficult closes (or closes of debates involving Wikipedia's more colorful personalities) which nobody else wants to touch. ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
Re: Possible Wikipedia-integrated publication
Note: replying here to an email from User:Evolution and evolvability inviting me to submit a Wikipedia article through external, academic peer review for publication in the WikiJournal of Humanities, to save anyone else who has received this invitation from having to type up the same reply. As a general note to E&E, sending Wikipedia-related correspondence by private email rather than on talkpage posts, unless there's a specific reason it can't be discussed publicly, is irritating to the recipient (who ends up getting Wikipedia-related notifications when they're 'off duty'), diametrically opposed to Wikipedia's culture (as you're implying that you're only interested in that person's opinion and not of anyone else who may want to comment) and about the quickest way there is to get a reputation as a troublemaker short of openly vandalizing and disrupting.
I don't really feel such an approach would be appropriate for Wikipedia articles. The primary principle of Wikipedia is that it's constantly evolving, and the existence of "approved versions" of articles would drastically change the internal dynamic. Aside from anything else, it would lead to interminable arguments over whether the public-facing page should be the most recent (and thus most up to date) version or the approved (but potentially dated) version. While obviously en-wikipedia is unique owing to its scale, to the best of my knowledge every publicly-editable wiki project (whether WMF or not) that's attempted to implement flagged revisions has collapsed soon afterwards; even the hyper-watered-down Pending Changes creates a huge maintenance backlog on any page where it's used.
I also don't feel peer review really works with the wiki model. In the arts and humanities, it's an obvious non-starter; academic peer review in the "is this article accurate?" sense doesn't really exist in the humanities, and when journals do operate a peer review model it's on the basis of "is this paper worthy of discussion?", not of accuracy. A formal peer review in the sense you describe for an article in arts and humanities would essentially be "does this article agree with the personal prejudices and theories of whoever you happened to select to do the peer review?". In these cases, Wikipedia's model of open and continuing peer review makes considerably more sense than formal peer review in the academic sense. In the hard sciences it would be workable in the ultra-short-term, but unworkable over a timescale of more than a year or so; the only scientific articles where facts are likely to be in dispute are those dealing with recent discoveries or innovations, and those by definition are the ones where the articles will change rapidly and consequently peer review would be meaningless. (I'm aware that User:Anthonyhcole has been trying to do something of this nature for medical articles, but if that does work it will be because WP:MED watch the articles in their remit like hawks—e.g. the reason it will work will be the crowdsourcing aspect, not the invited individual expert's input.)
Having the project hosted on Wikiversity doesn't exactly fill me with confidence either; I understand why you've done it, to allow people to insert their own opinions and OR without falling foul of the rules governing every other WMF site, but Wikiversity is a joke of a site whose primary function is to serve as en-wiki's penal colony now Commons and Simple English Wikipedia are losing patience with being the fallback sites for en-wiki's banned users, and any association with it will be meaningless to anyone who isn't familiar with the WMF, but have you automatically pegged as cranks by those who are.
That said, Wikipedia articles are all free to re-use under CC By-SA 3.0 and GFDL. If you genuinely feel such an effort is worthwhile, nobody's stopping you from using whatever Wikipedia articles you like, provided you attribute them appropriately. ‑ Iridescent 16:46, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
(adding) Now I've seen you have a self-appointed Editorial Board, you've lost me for good. A self-appointed elite declaring themselves the arbiters of what is and isn't allowed is about as far from what Wikipedia is about as one could get. ‑ Iridescent 16:52, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
I guess Sarah M. Vital is in charge of the vital articles. EEng 21:04, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
I'm more intrigued by what a "coordinator of Wikipedia initiatives at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University" could possibly do. ‑ Iridescent 23:02, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
So we're spending donor funds on embedding a WiR within a cult that teaches that God is an alien from the planet Kolob; wonderful. Maybe we can sign up Applied Scholastics next. Regarding the editorial board, since clicking on the highlighted usernames (e.g., where one would expect on any WMF project—or any wiki-based project for that matter—to go to find out more about any given editor) is in most cases taking me to a form inviting me to hand over my personal details to Microsoft if I want to see the information in question, I'm not particularly inclined to investigate whether these are legitimate respected academics or just a bunch of random Wikipedians. As EEng points out, there's nothing stopping any of these people creating accounts and following the processes every other editor already manages to follow if they want to point out errors or omissions in any of our articles. ‑ Iridescent 10:03, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
So we're spending donor funds on embedding a WiR within a cult that teaches that God is an alien from the planet Kolob; wonderful. That's extremely offensive and I suggest you strike that. Natureium (talk) 17:16, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
I very much doubt any WMF donor funds are being spent on the co-ordinating- no doubt one could find out. Ah, yes "I am the Coordinator of Wikipedia Initiatives at the Harold B. Lee Library. I am employed by Brigham Young University to improve Wikipedia" - from her user page, linked from the edit bd page. Most of the links I tried went to faculty pages (but not the art historian - easily googled). Johnbod (talk) 10:09, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
I have had a lot of problems with BYU-employed and -sponsored people in the past here, pushing the LDS POV. It often seemed unduly promotional but I've got enough problems handling the effects of Hinduism without getting involved too deeply with Mormonism also. - Sitush (talk) 11:52, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
FWIW, Rachel is actually one of the better WiRs/education people we have, and I've been plenty critical of that part of the Wikimedia movement (I find the idea that people who have not once edited should be made exempt from all local policies simply because they have some external affiliation bizarre to say the least.) I'm not familiar with the religious POV bit (similar to Sitush, I have enough problem cleaning up Catholic articles that were created in the early days of the project), but personally I'd rather have someone who is actually engaged with the on-wiki community and is trying to help than someone who [Insert national Wikimedia Chapter here] has hired to yell at me about how I don't get their job. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:07, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for your comments! Maintaining a neutral POV is definitely one of my concerns. I consciously try to find sources for Mormon history that are independent of the LDS church, but I'm aware that sometimes I or my sources are just plain biased or overly detailed. Nominating articles for DYK and GA helps me get another perspective on my writing. Some of the pages I work on are unrelated to Mormonism. I'm so grateful for Wikipedia's collaborative process. Please feel free to contact me if you have specific concerns. In regard to the WikiJournal of Humanities, a peer-reviewed publication can attract contributions from academics, who could potentially be excellent Wikipedia contributors. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 16:05, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
A couple of comments, since I had an article (radiocarbon dating) in the recently published WikiJournal of Science. The sequence was that I wrote the article for Wikipedia first and took it through FAC, then submitted it to WikiJSci and got a very useful academic peer review. At least a couple of the reviewers are prominent in the field, and really helped to improve the article. I’d tried to get some academic review a year or two ago before WikiJSci existed but had had much less success. Just the other day I took the revised text from the paper in WikiJSci and pasted it back in over the article, with a note to that effect on the talk page. To me this seems like a win-win. The article is now much improved, but I’ve no expectation it will stay a copy of the paper — no doubt it will continue to be improved. The paper can be improved too, if anyone wants to, but I see much less value in that. Wikipedia has a better article, and WikiJSci has helped it become that way. I knew nothing about Wikiversity before I was invited to submit the article, and very little now; I gather they do other things than publish the WikiJournals but I haven’t looked to see what that might be. Is there some problem with this model that I’m not seeing? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:13, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
Radiocarbon dating is a natural science topic where "is this accurate" is a much more clear-cut matter than humanities. There is also a practical point - made by Iridescent a while ago, if memory serves - that unfinished articles signal to potential editors that one does not need to be an expert to contribute to Wikipedia. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:35, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
Why don't your experts come to Wikipedia and participate in the normal process? At some point they can pick a permalink they like and "publish" that. EEng 21:09, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
That attitude does exist to some extent, but that is the end result of a number of problems, the main 3 being: 1) Academic 'experts' wanting to work on wikipedia how they work in academia, and being unwilling to change. 2) Academics wanting to push their pet theory which hasnt been accepted by the general consensus but is obviously right, 3) Academics attitude often come across as arrogant, mainly due to an expectation on their part that their opinion should be valued more. Since no editor is required to show deference due to their position (unlike their usual venues for discussion), the lack of it being automatically given eventually results in conflict. These 3 ultimately mean that academic experts get treated on a similar level as other editors (which they dont like) or more harshly compared to normal editors depending on their behaviour (which they really dont like). There is a marked difference compared to experts from trade, industry or other 'working' specialists, in that they acclimatise to the wikipedia environment much better. Probably as a result of having to work in a more antagonistic environment on a daily basis, they have more experience in dealing with conflict. But ultimately the key is in the word 'anti-elitism'. The average academic 'expert' considers themselves the elite (rightly or not). In a project that is based around collaboration and everyone being equal, there really is no place for someone who considers themselves above others. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:43, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
This matches the inside-Wikipedia view pretty well, and I'm sure there is some truth to it, but it feels like there's a little bit of "blaming normal humans for being normal humans" here. I think we probably agree on what you said pretty closely, except about which attitude "exists to some extent" and which attitude is more prevalent. After some time away from the place, it's pretty jarring to me (a non-academic) when I poke my nose in, how unwelcoming the place feels to people who don't love fighting with other people. It doesn't feel like conflict in the service of improving an encyclopedia, it feel like conflict for the sake of conflict. Collaboration exists, but I don't think it's the most likely condition.
Of course, part of the problem is that when I periodically check in to see what's been going on, I often look in on WP:ANI. I should probably stop doing that. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:56, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
@Floquenbeam: But in the humanities, and especially in the arts, "the war of all against all" is the academic model. There's no empirical way to measure whether the late-19th-century increased use of bright colors in European painting was primarily (a) a reaction against an increasingly gray external environment owing to industrial smog, (b) the increasing influence of Asian culture which traditionally used a brighter color palette, (c) the gradual abandonment of traditional religious iconography giving artists more freedom to depart from traditional schemes, or (d) just an artefact of an improved chemical industry meaning artists no longer needed to mess about with mumia, crushed beetles and ground rocks to make bright paints. Thus, "academic consensus" on the matter doesn't consist of theory, experiment and verification; it consists of academics all pushing their point of view and seeing who can shout the loudest. Consequently, if I ever got around to finishing Victorian painting any academic peer review wouldn't be checking whether the article is accurate; all it would do it test whether the article conformed to whichever hypothesis the chosen reviewer happened to subscribe to. The same issue exists, albeit to a lesser extent, in the hard sciences as well. The example given above of Radiocarbon dating is atypical, because that's a field where little is disputed, but get the same physicist to review Causal dynamical triangulation, String theory and Loop quantum gravity and they'll explode in disgust, since no physicist will accept the evidence for more than one of the three, but Wikipedia neutrally describes all three models without passing judgement on which is correct.
It's worth remembering that one of the reasons academics have so much trouble fitting in on Wikipedia is that when there's doubt regarding something, Wikipedia gives all the schools of thought and doesn't pass judgement on which is correct. This is diametrically opposed to the way academia works, in which one is expected to research to a conclusion, defend it against all comers, and either see off all challengers or conclude that your opponents are correct and embrace the new paradigm as the One True Path. If you want a concrete example of this, as I write a highly respected academic (and inventor of the optical mouse) is going absolutely batshit crazy on Talk:Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine because Wikipedia won't accept his theory that the computer in question isn't called that, even though there's a large sign attached to it saying "Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine" and both the museum where it's on display and the institution that built it call it that. I've always maintained that Wikipedia's outreach programs to universities are misguided because of the fundamental opposition between the way academia operates and the way Wikipedia operates, and that if the WMF really want to spend money reaching out externally they'd do much better trying to recruit the people who write children's books and the people who write museum labels, as it's the ability to summarize material for people with little prior knowledge of the topic, not the ability to defend a point logically, that Wikipedia needs. (The ideal Wikipedia editor would be the authors of Cliff's Notes and the For Dummies books.)
Plus, aside from anything else there's the very obvious point that 99%+ of Wikipedia's articles don't fall into traditional academic disciplines. Who would be the appropriate authority to conduct a peer review on Pig-faced women, Tukwila International Boulevard station or Taylor Swift? ‑ Iridescent 23:02, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
I don’t see the relevance of some of the points made above. For example, there are plenty of academics who work on Wikipedia; I’ve met several and know of others, and there must be many more I don’t know of. They presumably edit for the same reasons we all do. Asking “why don’t the experts come here and edit normally, and they can pick a permalink to publish” mixes up two processes; straightforward editing, which they often do participate in, and academic review, for which the question is, why should they? Well, if you were an academic, would you respond to a request for academic review from a random Wikipedia editor? I would, if I knew the editor’s work and knew my time would not be wasted. But that’s not going to be the case for most academic peer reviews. Making the forum a peer reviewed journal means that it’s something that an academic can put on their resume, and the evidence so far is that they are indeed willing to contribute. But that doesn’t have anything to do with Wikipedia directly; WikiJSci is just another journal, up to that point. However, the publishing terms mean that the article can be used to update Wikipedia, which means that material submitted there is available to be pasted into Wikipedia if we want it. That’s our choice as editors as it is with any other free source.
Personally I think that the model fits with encyclopedic review articles such as radiocarbon dating, and ice drilling, which I plan to submit next. I also hope to find a collaborator for history of ice drilling, which is missing secondary sources for a big chunk of key events. If I can get that published in WikiJSci I will be able to put the article in Wikipedia, which was my original goal. Somewhere in an essay here someone says “if you have original research or synthesis, get it published first, then we can use it”. For history of ice drilling, at least, I would like to follow that advice.
As for the editorial board and the overall process not fitting the Wikipedia model: quite right, it doesn’t. I don’t see why that matters to us as editors, though. Wikiversity and WikiJSci can do what they want, and then editors here can do what they want with the results. If WikiJSci is determined not to be a reliable source then that’s another issue of course, but there seems no reason to assert it is not reliable.
The whole "experts are scum" chant is bullshit. Only in death's points (1,2,3) are bang on. I'm a recognized expert on a highly specialized academic topic, and with patience I've worked with other editors – varying from other real researchers to a few fools worthy of a Galilean dialogue – to produce a first-class article on the subject, even if I do say so myself. And it's definitely a better article for the participation of the fools. EEng 23:42, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
Clearly I'm not as adept at wringing value out of Randy from Boise. At Talk:Manhattan Project I keep getting requests from people who not only haven't read the article, they haven't even read the FAQ. Hawkeye7(discuss) 00:17, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
Well, I didn't say the fools' participation was worth it from a cost-benefit perspective, but when life hands you lemons you make lemonade. The participation of the not-fools was definitely worth it (IMHO), and unfortunately there's no process for keeping the not-fools and sending the fools on their way. EEng 01:04, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
Even the fools can add value in Wikipedia terms. We write from the perspective of experts (or at minimum, from the perspective of people who've read a few books about the topic) and most of the people commenting on talkpages are by definition people who know enough about the topic to be expressing an opinion—but the readers are Giano's hypothetical intelligent fourteen year olds with no prior knowledge of the topic. Sometimes it can be valuable to see what the readers aren't understanding even though it seems perfectly clear to us, or even just to see what isn't engaging the readers.
On the broader point, I agree that the "experts are scum" mantra doesn't have much basis in fact. It's a meme propagated by the old Wikipedia Review, egged on by a couple of disaffected former employees, and based on the experiences of a handful of academics who were shown the door for persistently refusing to follow the rules. Wikipedia has many problems, but "clamps down on people who try to insert their original research or push a particular POV" isn't one of them. If anything, Wikipedia goes too far the other way when it comes to trying to accommodate blatantly problematic characters on the grounds that they have specialist knowledge to bring (how many times did we unblock Ottava?); the entire sprawling bureaucratic melange of individual-specific restrictions only exists because Wikipedia bends over backwards to find ways to accommodate problem editors when it's thought they have something useful to add. ‑ Iridescent 07:20, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
I agree with this point. It is true that academics working in the humanities will, in their usual 'line of work', have to construct narratives and argue to a conclusion often to participate non-neutrally in a scholarly debate. But it is also true that a good academic has to be self-aware enough to acknowledge that debate and broader academic significance; many academics will not just author books or articles, they'll also contribute to encyclopedias, textbooks or literature reviews which typically take a much more neutral stance and are often aimed at non-experts looking for an overview of academic debates around the subject. While there may be some academics who cannot comprehend the neutrality issue (and it says something about a person's character when they try to use their job to claim superiority over others in a volunteer encyclopedia), I think our core policies are fairly straightforward: our articles are meant to be a neutral summary of reliable secondary sources which provide our summaries with verifiability and confer notability on them. I'd be surprised if most academics could not get their head around that or see the ultimate point of these policies.
I actually think the reason so few academics edit here is that the academy doesn't encourage it. In the UK at least, academics are supposed to generate 'research outputs' which are now assessed for the Research Excellence Framework; the 'quality' of research is used to allocate funding, so academics are incentivised to publish frequently, on internationally significant topics and in the best journal they can muster (and journals are becoming the norm over books for this reason). Most of these journals in the humanities are not open access, and there is little movement that way (which is odd for a profession often considered 'left-wing'). Most academics wouldn't want to jeopardise the opportunity to write an article, encyclopedia entry or review because they posted their best work on Wikipedia. And that assumes they even have enough time; I won't pretend academics are hard-done-by compared to many people, but especially at the junior end, fixed contracts, poor pay, long teaching hours and the aforementioned pressure to research in a non-open-access way all conspire to mean that for most academics, even if they wanted to join in, Wikipedia is not a priority outlet for their time, effort and intelligence, especially when considering the conflict mentality of this place discussed above and public and professional concerns about Wikipedia's reliability. It's a real shame and contributes in part to the many, often overlapping, systemic biases we have here. But I don't see it changing anytime soon. Anyway, my 'two cents' as the Americans say. Cheers, --Noswall59 (talk) 09:07, 13 June 2018 (UTC).
Hello Iridescent (and the others in this thread), sorry about being a bit late to this discussion. Firstly, I didn't mean anything untoward by emailing you. I've mostly been emailing non-Wikipedians, so I was continuing to use the same email templates where possible so as to not be treating Wikipedians differently. It might just be me, but I get talk page messages and emails about Wikipedia in about a 1:3 ratio, so perhaps I've a skewed view as to how common it is! Either way, I'm happy to explain why I think that WikiJournals are in line with Wikipedia's ethos (and the abundant guidelines codifying that ethos). Thank you for yourt thoughts - I'm genuinely interested in your opinions and feedback, since the journals genuinely want to improve Wikipedia. I'll address some of the points below.
Approved versions: After peer reviewer comments are addressed, the journal article is integrated into Wikipedia so that it is not a particularly forked version. It is treated as an approved version in the same way that there is an approved version of Featured articles. The Wikipedia page continues to evolve after the journal-organised peer review just as any GAs and FAs do. The public facing version in Wikipedia should 100% be the most recent and up to date version. The stable version of record can be used for citation. I absolutely oppose any special protectionism of Wikipedia pages (also embedded in the journals' ethical statement).
The value of peer review in this scenario: Obviously, I come from a sciences background so can't comment hugely on the humanities. If the community feels that a peer review has been mishandled (all reviewer comments are are publicly recorded), the Wikipedia article can still be updated. If nothing else, it is a way of getting input and recommendations from beyond the established Wikipedian community which, though large, is still limited.
Medical review: I'm a big fan of the work that Anthonyhcole did getting the BMJ to help organise peer review of Parkinsons disease (organisation page). One constraint on that is that, the reviewer comments took a long time to implement (to my limited knowledge), and BMJ halted its collaboration for subsequent articles. Peer reviews by Open Medicine, PLOS, Gene, RNA Biology and WikiJournals WikiJMed and WikiJSci have proceeded more smoothly and I think that, in part, that is because of the external dual-publication (examples). Perhaps it will turn out that the norms of the humanities differ so greatly that WikiJHum fails due to personal prejudices, but that remains to be seen. I do not expect that content will be of lower overall quality than that contributed by e.g. editathons, GLAM collaborations, AfC, new editors, or even many experienced editors.
Editorial board: The editorial board bylaws are based on those of the WikiProject Med Foundation, again with public votes that are open to anyone that wishes to cast an opinion. Having a specific editorial board is standard practice for journals, and necessary to also comply with recommendations of COPE, OASPA and to be indexed by services like DOAJ, Scopus, PubMed and Web of Science. I hope that editors don't feel that they were approached on bended knees. The aim has so far been to get a mixture of expertise across Wikipedians, scholars, open-access advocates, librarians, teachers and other professionals to encompass a range of perspectives and experience and so far they seem to have been keen on the format.
Wikiversity's reputation: This is certainly a limitation. The original WikiJournal (WikiJMed) was set up within Wikiversity as the most logical location at the time. Indeed, the journals have an application to be a sister project. Nevertheless, the external peer review is intended to address the risk of fringe theory or crackpot-ism. Any content integrated into Wikipedia can be challenged and updated by the community just as any other content. Indeed, it my hope that WikiJournals will generate a reputation for careful peer review that can counter the common (though markedly decreasing) view of academics that only fools contribute to Wikipedia.
Original research: Although the journal articles can contain research/perspectives/opinion/conclusions, those sections are not integrated into Wikipedia (example). We encourage authors to favour secondary sources where possible, comply with relevant Wikipedia guidelines for any content to be integrated into Wikipedia. I am less pessimistic about academics abilities to take a step back and provide an NPOV when asked to. Often manuscripts, books and treties are specifically intending to propose a hypothesis, however I think that when requested, many academics can write a balanced overview of a topic (for example, there is a section in this article on disputed roles where uncertainly still exists). Any pet theories would have to pass review by external experts and material copied over to Wikipedia will be just as editable as any other material.
Why don't experts come to Wikipedia: Much has been written about this. For the part of WikiJournals, there is no wish to supplant or compete against normal Wikipedia systems. The journals will always be an adjunct; an alternative route in for new information, and a way to review the accuracy of existing information. Although anyone can edit Wikipedia, many don't. Reasons for academics/researchers/scholars/doctors include that the format is unfamiliar and that contributions are citable or indexed. The journals provide a format that can be a bridge for any experts that want to work how they work in academia and are unwilling to change. Having editors able to advise contributors with no Wikipedia experience can be valuable to new users who can otherwise end up bitten by AfC. Producing a citablble version can be an incentive to contribute (just as much as barnstars, FA badges, cash prizes, or the GA cup). It is both an academic output, as well as a quantifiable unit of outreach that can be used to justify the time spent on it as opposed to other competing academic duties.
I've tried to be succinct (you can judge how successful I've been!). I'm happy to discuss further, I should be able to provide references for some of the statements above, but I'm trying not to spam! T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 13:12, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
Hi, T.Shafee(Evo&Evo). For the record, I suspended the BMJ collaboration - for a number of reasons but mainly because it's not worth proceeding unless two elements are in place - the simple diff (that may be technically possible soon) and permission from the community for a prominent link. (I think I can take this current Village Pump discussion as permission to prominently link.) The last time I spoke with BMJ, six weeks ago, they seemed receptive to further collaboration and I'll propose that once I can offer the reader a simple diff.
Above, Mike says, Somewhere in an essay here someone says “if you have original research or synthesis, get it published first, then we can use it”. For history of ice drilling, at least, I would like to follow that advice. Mike, that advice relates to publication by a reliable publisher. WikiJournal isn't a reliable publisher. I outline why that is so in the above-linked VP discussion, so I won't repeat myself here. T.Shafee, do you share Mike's view that one can publish original research or synthesis in WikiJournal and then use that article to support claims in Wikipedia? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 17:48, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
I believe I speak for everyone here assembled when I say that the answer to that is not just "No" but "Hell, no!" EEng 18:17, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
That might be the majority view, but it's not universal. I used the WikiSciJ article on radiocarbon dating as a citation in this edit, and left a note on the talk page to that effect, for transparency. The citation was to support a phrase added to the article during peer review -- the reviewer was A.J. Timothy Jull, a prominent expert in the field. I didn't add a separate citation to the WikiSciJ version to support it -- it didn't seem necessary -- but I wanted to include that phrase in the article, and the WikiSciJ version seemed the appropriate citation.
I asked about it at WT:FAC; see here for the reponses. I believe the question has come up at WP:RSN or perhaps WP:VPP, though I can't now find the discussion. It's clearly not as high-quality a source as a well-established journal, but the peer reviewers, for the article I'm citing at least, included respected scholars in the field, and I don't see how it would fail the definition of an RS. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library)
Please link the RSN discussion and any other discussions you know of bearing on this. EEng 20:05, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
I can't find the one I'm thinking of, and don't recall where it was. If I remember correctly, it wasn't well enough attended to stand as a community consensus on the question; and I don't even remember whether it came to a consensus. If you start a discussion at RSN, let me know. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:44, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
I'm embarking on some travel so I'll let others comment here. To be blunt, the idea is preposterous. The two respondents at the discussion you linked said (in essence) "It's an RS if it qualifies as an RS" (in the case of a modestly experienced editor) and "Definitely yes" (in the case of an editor with essentially no experience). EEng 21:00, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
No one' saying "just because material also appears in Wikipedia that it invalidates subsequent external peer review". I'm saying that WikiJournals doesn't have anything like the "external peer review" or other editorial oversight we rely on for RS. I don't understand what your citation counts have to do with anything. EEng 07:06, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
Ah, I'd thought that one of the criticisms was wp:citogenesis. I think that the external peer review is actually quite comparable to other journals. By editorial oversight, is the worry that the editors are insufficiently knowledgeable to organise peer review, or is there a different aspect you mean? A more reasonable criticise for WP:RS would be that WikiJournals are not yet PubMed or Scopus indexed (which would provide an independent audit of editorial processes). I think it's also worth clarifying whether the case is that a WikiJournal is currently not WP:RS, or` whether it could never be WP:RS. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 07:43, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
The editorial boards appear to be random volunteers. I just published a paper in [Prestigious and Highly Selective Journal] after six rounds of revision and proofing and I sure wish I'd known I could have just submitted it to a volunteer group knowing nothing of the subject to see if it seemed OK to them. What's a radiologist doing editing a humanities "journal" anyway? EEng 08:12, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
EEng, seeing you are referring to my role for the humanities journal; I created WikiJournal of Medicine, the first journal, whose system has been adapted to apply for the humanities journal as well. I've clarified that my relevant expertise for my board membership in the humanities journal lies in wiki organization rather than my radiology work. Now, regarding your doubts about the boards, what system for forming editorial boards do you regard as acceptable? Taking "reliable" journals as example, what makes their editorial boards less "random" than WikiJournal? Mikael Häggström (talk) 04:02, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
Well, it certainly wouldn't be this process [21][22], in which apparently anyone who wants becomes an editor. But hey, let's get down to brass tacks. WP:SOURCES requires that sources have "a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". When WikiJournals has built such a reputation, we can talk more. EEng 04:52, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
Ealdgyth, what's your opinion? You've spent more time thinking about what makes a reliable source than most editors. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:20, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
Given the two links given by EEng about how new members of the editorial board are selected, I'd have to say that no, I would not consider this a reliable source. Generally, academic peer review is centered around specialization ... and I'm not seeing that here. There is no focus on the journal, except for being part of the wiki movement, which is not enough to make it reliable. There is also no history of being cited and used by other academics or similar. I'm all for breaking the academic journalism stranglehold but ... so far I'm not seeing how this could possibly come close to being a RS, much less an RS suitable for FAC. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:26, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
To quote the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, we should "assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published". Whether WikiJournal or any other journal is an RS is not a particularly meaningful question: at best, a journal's reputation only gives a weak hint about the reliability of a given article. In particular, for a journal that practises open peer review (with reviews and sometimes reviewers' identities made public), there is no excuse for relying solely on the journal's reputation. (Disclosure: I am involved in WikiJSci.) Sylvain Ribault (talk) 20:10, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
Whether WikiJournal or any other journal is an RS is not a particularly meaningful question – here at Wikipedia, it's not only a meaningful question, it's the only question. EEng 21:59, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
Just a quick note on the editorial board composition (mostly relevant to Ealdgyth's comment above): The editorial board are not the ones doing the peer review, they merely are in charge of inviting suitably qualified peer reviewers. e.g. for v:WikiJournal_of_Science/Radiocarbon_dating, the three external peer reviewers were specialists in the subject. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 23:38, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
In most journals (at least the ones that I publish in), the editorial board also are experts. They have to be able to recognize suitable (and unsuitable) reviewers, know the field well enough to arbitrate split decisions between reviews, and so on. All of these duties require a high level of expertise in the journal's topic. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 16:00, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
We're separating the wheat from the chaff. EEng 21:47, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
How is Wiki*Journal independent? (Or, how is a particular article in such a journal independent?) Does it have a reputation [for fact-checking]? I don't think we can answer either question in the affirmative--certainly not the latter at this time, and probably not the former for any number of subjects touching on the topic on which an article was written (because the author of an article in the journal ostensibly, and likely significantly, contributed to the article on Wikipedia). --Izno (talk) 11:55, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
I can see why the links EEng posted are a concern, and I follow Ealdgyth's line of thought. I don't think I've seen this particular argument used before to dismiss a source as not reliable. The usual assessment in source reviews at FAC and elsewhere is: is editorial control exerted over the contents? Are the authors people known to have expertise in the field? And for journal articles: is there credible peer review? The article on radiocarbon, for example, meets the first and last of those two criteria; I'm not someone "known to have expertise in the field", so it fails that criterion, but the expert peer review, I would think, makes the article reliable, if not the author. That is, if I wrote a blog post about radiocarbon dating, it would not be a reliable source despite the existence of this article, but if Tim Jull wrote one, it would be citable (within the limits of what blogs can be used to cite).
To be specific, I added the bolded text in this sentence to the radiocarbon dating article, cited to WikiJSci: Soil contains organic material, but because of the likelihood of contamination by humic acid of more recent origin, and the fact that the organic components can be of different ages, it is very difficult to get satisfactory radiocarbon dates. You can see the comment by Jull that led to this in the peer review, at point 12 under "Second peer review", here. To me that phrase is reliable because Jull supported it, not because it's published in WikiJSci. Should I cut that citation and that phrase? Or is that a reliable source for that phrase? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:27, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
Meta-aside about Wikijournals and en-wiki culture
On the reliability (or not) I've commented at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Reliability of WikiJournal of Science, since it's a more sensible place to have the discussion than here. On the more general point of relations between Wikipedia and WikiJournals, it's worth looking at the history of Wikipedia to understand just why so many people are so sceptical. (Apologies in advance for those who already know this, but I'm seeing a lot of unfamiliar names here who may not be aware of all the background. Wikipedia has changed so much, so quickly, that the existential crises of the 2000s are now semi-mythical to many editors.)
The concept of "scrape the best Wikipedia articles, submit them to external peer review, and then re-insert the reviewed articles" isn't a new idea; it's been tried in the past by Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger and Danny Wool, and all three crashed and burned, but not without creating a good deal of conflict and bad blood in the meantime. Inasmuch as English Wikipedia has a creation myth regarding how a bolt-on accessory to a porn site became the world's fifth most visited website, it's a story of opposition to the top-down approach; the people who supported the vet-and-review approach in general went off to Citizendium, and the ones who became Wikipedia's main writers and admins remained, and consequently shaped the project during the 2005–07 growth spurt. (It's worth mentioning inter alia that Nupedia wasn't some kind of lost paradise—their much vaunted peer reviewed articles were in general complete garbage. New Zealand, Irish Traditional Music and Genotype and Phenotype are typical examples of articles after they'd been through all Nupedia's vetting, peer-review and copy-editing processes.) Additionally, during those formative years, we had high-profile (one very high profile) cases of people claiming to be experts and bringing the site into disrepute when their credentials were found lacking, and we had too many examples to count of admins who felt the admin bit gave them some kind of super-user status and tried to throw their weight around.
Thus, the principles of "be sceptical of anyone who claims to be an expert", "go with what printed sources say not with what people say no matter how much of an expert they are" (commonly, if inaccurately, summarised as "verifiability not truth"), "while a particular user may earn respect or disrespect through their actions, no user should be considered more or less important than any other user by way of which permissions or jobs they hold", and "how much you know about the subject doesn't matter provided you know enough to give due weight to sources and attribute them correctly" are all—for better or worse—baked into English Wikipedia's DNA. It's a self-reinforcing set of values since people who don't subscribe to them to at least some extent, and try to play the "do you know who I am?" card (either in terms of "I'm the world's leading expert in Foo-ography, you should rewrite the article to reflect my views" or "lots of the checkboxes on my Special:UserRights page are ticked, you should do what I say") tend either to develop a reputation as troublemakers, or find the environment unpleasant and leave of their own accord.
This doesn't necessarily mean those are good values to have—Wikipedia has serious difficulties reconciling "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs", "everybody should be considered as of equal ability in the absence of evidence to the contrary" and "competence is required", and in reconciling "no conflicts of interest" with "anonymity should be respected"—but they're unlikely to change, and as a result English Wikipedia—to a far greater extent than the other-language Wikipedias and the other WMF projects—has a collective knee-jerk antipathy to anything resembling editorial boards. (Specifically at the WikiJournal people: if you're unfamiliar with the ACPD and Esperanza debacles I'd recommend reading Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Advisory Council on Project Development and Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Esperanza to get a feeling for how anything resembling editorial boards or management committees is likely to be received by the broader en-wiki community.) ‑ Iridescent 11:44, 18 June 2018 (UTC) Also at this point pinging @SlimVirgin, Tony1, Newyorkbrad, and Alison:, all of whom were there through the events in question but all of whom will presumably have very different perspectives to mine.
Thanks for the ping but I don't have much to add here. The Esperanza debates were taking place right around the time I became active and I wasn't part of them. I never had a strong feeling about Esperanza one way or the other, and the main thing I remember thinking at the time of the last debate was that "miscellany for deletion" seemed like a fairly odd place to be having the discussion.
I was on the ArbCom at the time of the "Advisory Council" announcement but was not one of the arbitrators who pushed the initiative. I didn't oppose it either; it struck me at the time as a well-intentioned effort, and I certainly didn't anticipate, let alone agree with, the level of outrage it generated. (For example, it certainly wasn't meant to reflect "ArbCom's expansion ... into the Wikipedia Politburo," as someone familiar to the readers of this page put it at the time.) When the idea proved unpopular, it was dropped, and in nine years no one's come up with a better one, so make of that what you will. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:24, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
I really should re-read the emails from back then at some point. To refresh my memory and maybe to vainly try and set the record straight as to the intentions, as a lot of what has been said subsequently has been by people with strong views on the subject. The actual public starting point is here. It did kind of snowball after that. I don't remember why I abstained. I agree with NYB's point that no one's come up with a better idea. Bit like the main page (re)design discussions, really, or RFA reform... I suppose it does beg the question: what have been the most radical proposals ever proposed for en-Wikipedia (or even the entire WMF), both those that failed and those that went ahead? I suppose the answer to that would be a potted history of Wikipedia. That will take a while. Carcharoth (talk) 17:03, 18 June 2018 (UTC) Actually, re-reading those discussions is a bit depressing. Too many people are no longer with us. Three in just a few minutes of reading. Carcharoth (talk) 17:06, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
@Carcharoth: While that's the first public appearance under the ACPD name, it had a long gestation—Kirill's original proposal (then calling it "The Wikipedia Assembly") was here. Unless it's been deleted in a pre-emptive body-burying exercise, there's a lengthy discussion on Arbwiki prior to the announcement of ACPD, in which its supporters debate the pros and cons of who deserved to be raptured into the ruling council and who would remain a mere mortal, which makes entertaining reading with the benefit of hindsight. (IIRC—and I may not RC after all these years—someone nominated me and someone else blackballed me, but I can't remember who or why.). @NYB, the RFC was mostly sound-and-fury and the real action was at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard/Archive 5#Advisory Council on Project Development convened and Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Advisory Council on Project Development. I'd say ArbCom's expansion ... into the Wikipedia Politburo, is pretty much exactly what Kirill intended ACPD to be, protests to the contrary once the committee realised how unpopular the land-grab was notwithstanding; how else does one interpret ideas that the Committee might choose to pursue (Kirill), a way that will help the Community find better ways to develop solution to broad issues (FloNight), or a body of experienced users helping to generate ideas, consider the ideas of others, and fast-track proposals on crucial issues (Carcharoth)? (As you presumably know, I don't necessarily see a Wikipedia Politburo as a bad thing—I've long argued that at the very least we need a formal RFC Closing Committee with the authority to make binding rulings, to replace the current "closures reflect the opinions of whoever happens to be active at the time the 30 days expires" model, but don't try to pretend that the arbcom circa 2010 wasn't actively considering how a transition from Arbcom to Govcom could be managed.) ‑ Iridescent 16:57, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
Digging around a bit... I had forgotten how many failed proposals there are around. Some people can just get on with things (living in 'the present'). Some get drawn to the past and, well, spend time there and maybe (rarely) find things of use. Maybe you had to have been there at the time. Carcharoth (talk) 22:30, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
Esperanza died not long after I became active. It had a heavily bureaucratic feel to it from reading the talk pages. The ACPD had a lot more personal issues going on that I really don't want to put into print that contributed to its demise (I have to go read it again sometime when I have free time...which is seldom...) Cas Liber (talk·contribs) 03:53, 19 June 2018 (UTC)
I've been around since 2006, so in theory I should remember both Esperanza and the Advisory Council, but in fact I only vaguely remember the former and had never heard of the latter. Perhaps if I had paid more attention then I would be more sceptical about the WikiJournals now, but as it is I see them a little differently to the way you characterize them. The peer review radiocarbon dating went through, which included at least two reviewers who are well-known figures in the field, led to multiple improvements. The Wikipedia article now reflects those improvements, all cited to an RS, with no need to cite the WikiJournal directly. I haven't looked at the relationship between each WSJ article and its corresponding WP article, but I hope something similar is going on with them. If that's the normal experience the WikiJournals should be a real benefit to us. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:31, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
Please note that a short time ago Modernist was warned by User:NeilN about using invective like this to characterize ongoing content disputes [23], a warning Modernist has repeatedly disregarded. This comes out of a longrunning content dispute regarding the use of nonfree images of visual art, where Modernist is among those who strongly reject NFCC policy (see, for example, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Visual arts#Under attack, and the related deletion discussions at Wikipedia:Files for discussion/2018 June 18 (where many of the disputed uses that Modernist advocated for have already been removed). The underlying issue is whether certain articles on the visual arts are exempt from (or subject to much more relaxed application of) basic WP:NFCC, WP:V, and WP:RS policies. With his side not prevailing in the dispute, he is again personalizing the issues rather than substantively addressing serious policy concerns. The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo). Treated like dirt by many administrators since 2006. (talk) 16:03, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
There is a good deal more to it than this: HW has been removing large amounts of text from various articles, and making provocative talk comments. Johnbod (talk) 16:15, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Poor Modernist has been stalked and baited (and indeed "under attack") with increasing intensity for the best part of three weeks over fair use image of modern artworks being used
on the articles about the artist themselves, or the article on the museum that holds the work (apparently having a separate article on an artwork means there is no scope to include an image of it in the article on the artist themselves or the museum: that is, improving our content on artworks damages our content on artists or museums)
as examples of periods or styles in articles on art history (even when the rather simple and binding parts of the fair use policy - already stricter than law would allow - are complied with, so-called "violation" of a secondary layer of byzantine non-binding guidance with alarming initials seemingly strikes out almost everything; because, you know, a notable work by a leading artist such as Picasso or Rauschenberg or Bacon etc can be replaced by some daub by a third rank artist without any loss; in much the same way as we delete album covers and screen captures from soap operas without a second thought, right?)
So Modernist has cried out, and been blocked for his pains. How the blocking, or the removal of the images, or indeed the snarky commentary or tendentious edit warring, improves our enyclopedia is not so clear, but no doubt being an admin helps one to see such ineffable facts more clearly :-/ 213.205.251.58 (talk) 18:06, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Oh god, this shit is here too. Modernist knows perfectly well how wikipedia's Non-free content criteria works. They have known for at least 8 years. They do not care about the NFCC policy, a policy with legal considerations. What Modernist wants to do is upload whatever visual arts they like, without worrying about copyright, or wikipedia's stated goals of being a free content encyclopedia. Unfortunately this is against policy and something they have continued to fail to abide by. Had they actually read WP:Harrassment they would have seen the bit that says that looking through an editor's contributions is not stalking when it is to correct violations of policy. Modernist has continuously been violating policy. They dont have to like the policy, but it is not a policy that can be hand-waved away. Like it or not, the current policy means that many modern visual arts cannot be reproduced at will all over ENWP. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:44, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
Oh good grief. Modernist, you're not being ATTACKED - WP:STALKING and WP:HARASSMENT by this person, you're seeing someone enforce policy as currently written; if you don't like the policy then persuade WMF Legal to change the policy, don't bitch and whine about the people doing a thankless job trying to enforce it. Since changing the policy would fundamentally alter the nature of Wikipedia—for which reusability is a key principle—I don't hold out much hope, but you can always try. ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 8 July 2018 (UTC)
Sex act picture
Hey mate. You sure it's a good idea to have a stick figure sex at this page? it's a bit of a surprise when coming here. The picture keeps changing now, so maybe it was an error? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.172.226.60 (talk) 03:28, 6 July 2018 (UTC)
This is my personal talk page, not a public-facing or project page. Given that the main topics of discussion on this page are (1) changing attitudes to the depiction of and symbolism of nudity in the visual arts and (2) the volume of images available on WMF projects and the ways in which they're used and catalogued, I find it unlikely anyone who would be offended by any of the images in the rotation—none of which are remotely graphic in terms of either sex or violence—would be likely to have anything to say for which this would be the appropriate page to be saying it. I find it especially unlikely that an anonymous coward logging out to engage in virtue-signalling posturing (hint for future reference, Evolution and evolvability, if you're going to engage in IP socking you might want to use an IP that doesn't belong to your current employer) would be likely to have anything to say for which this would be the appropriate page to be saying it. ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 8 July 2018 (UTC)
Fun
Because most of this looks awfully serious [24]. I’m certain you already know this, but whatever. Kafka Liz (talk) 11:41, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
Half Man Half Biscuit are a national treasure, and their ability to satirise all manner of popular culture is just brilliant. I particularly like "Vatican Broadside". Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 21:26, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
What he said. You (both) might want to check out Simon Love as well, who in recent years is establishing himself as the natural heir to HMHB and the TV Personalities. ‑ Iridescent 16:16, 8 July 2018 (UTC)
MPS1992 (talk) 05:04, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Catherine Lynch is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
Gatoclass (talk) 00:02, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
. Tlhslobus (talk) 05:48, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
_2.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg)
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
You are invited to join the discussion at User:Kudpung/What do admins do?. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:26, 19 June 2018 (UTC)