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Not really related to the WP:FOOTY discussions elsewhere, but I have been assured that Streatham Rovers F.C. is a genuine football club. It is even mentioned on the page for Streatham in an addition made 2 years ago, so it 'must' be true... I am very sceptical (see the parody Twitter account and various articles), but then I realised I could ask here and you or others watching your talk page would be sure to know what is going on here. :-) Courtesy ping to User:Crookesmoor who added that information to the Streatham article. Carcharoth (talk) 14:52, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
Hoax; the local teams for Streatham are Crystal Palace and Dulwich Hamlet. If you look at their alleged address on Google Maps it's clearly someone's house. Even if it did exist, it would be so obscure we wouldn't mention it; there are 20,000 pro and semi-pro teams in the English pyramid, 19,500 of which have no more notability than the local branch of Greggs. These plausible looking parody websites are a pain in the arse—Southend News Network is a particular problem as they look so convincing. (If you have a very long memory, you might remember the editor who insisted that Cooper Brownmust be a genuine person because otherwise, why would he be writing in the newspaper?) ‑ Iridescent 16:50, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
I like Southend News Network, but then I know it's taking the piss. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 13:16, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Regarding your appraisals of proposals at the village pump
This reply
an absolutely batshit crazy notion of how Wikipedia operates, founded on the fundamental misconception that "the more dispute resolution is taking place regarding a topic, the healthier that topic is
Made me feel alienated and a little down for at least ten or fifteen minutes. After the fifteen minutes were up, I felt sort of dirty, as if I'd committed a crime for which I'd been begrudgingly let off the hook by a sullen policeman. As active Wikipedians we all know the well tested method of avoiding/veiling personal comments by prefixing derogatory phrases with, "Your contribution on this page is a complete butt wipe; with short legs... and a squint". Unfortunately for the recipient of such comments, they aren't significantly different from just being insulted.
Furthermore you've slightly misconstrued the purpose of collecting marketing data, which is to gauge the effects of ongoing initiatives, i.e. if we are collecting lots of data (d) while doing this thing (a) and we changed (a) slightly to this thing (a.1) did that have an effect on (d)and if not/so should we keep going with it or can it for something else.
Yes it would allow for intervention or for people to take notice of problematic areas, but the main thing would be to simply have the data and compare its change over time with the introduction of new initiatives to improve community experience. Essentially, if we are going to have experience focused initiatives, it would be good to have some way to gauge their effect. My idea was a shot at addressing that.
Thanks nevertheless for chiming in. It's always good to get feed back even if it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
That will be your proposal which has managed to generate a rarer-than-hen's-teath unanimous consensus that it's a terrible idea, from a group of people who normally never agree on anything? If you don't want people accusing you of being an outsider trying to parachute in to impose your own views of how Wikipedia should operate, without the slightest consideration for how Wikipedia actually operates, then the onus is on you to:
Explain what it is that you consider a problem (looking at the background to your proposal, it seems you may have been misled by the existence of the official-looking "Community health initiative on English Wikipedia"; this is an small clique at the WMF—not Wikipedia—that exists to push a particular agenda, not any kind of official part of Wikipedia and certainly not a group whose views enjoy a significant degree of support on en-wiki);
Explain what you mean by "unhealthy talk page", since as per the comments of damn near everyone at VPP, you've announced a solution to a problem without even suggesting what the problem might be. If there's a lot of debate and argument on a talk page, that's not a sign of "ill health", it's a sign of Wikipedia functioning as it's supposed to function, as people are thrashing out their differences on talk rather than by edit-warring. If a talk page hasn't received a single edit for five years, is that a sign that the talk page is "unhealthy" or a sign that the article is so well written that everyone agrees there's not a problem? If the article has 35 talk archives and is under DS, is that a sign that the talk page is "unhealthy" or that the regular editors of the page are talking through the issues in detail and are working within Wikipedia's agreed processes to deal with those people who do cause problems?;[1]
Provided you can demonstrate that there are such things as 'unhealthy talk pages' (doubtful) and that such things are causing problems (very doubtful), explain why this is a problem about which the rest of us should give a shit? (I guarantee that if I were to poll any group on en-wiki as to what they considered the major problems confronting the project, "unhealthy talk pages" wouldn't make the list; I equally guarantee that if I polled non-Wikipedia-editors and asked "what do you think are the main problems with Wikipedia?" the same would be the case);
Assuming you can convince people that "unhealthy talk pages" are an issue, explain why you think anonymous upvoting/downvoting of the page with the results visible only to admins—which as I understand it is your proposal—would solve the problem. As Wnt has explained to you, both aspects of this—allowing truly anonymous action without a publicly visible log of who said what, and having results visible only to a tiny elite rather than to anyone who has an interest—are fundamentally incompatible with Wikipedia's basic values of accountability and equality; consequently the burden is on you to explain why this proposal is so important it would be worth abandoning some of our most fundamental ethical values for;
Explain how and why this differs from the Article Feedback Tool, and what safeguards you envisage to prevent a repetition of what may not have been the biggest fiasco deriving from an attempt by the WMF to impose their ideologies on Wikipedia, but was certainly in the top ten.
Ultimately, the reason we have the Village pump (idea lab) → Village pump (proposals) → Requests for comment progression isn't purely a love of bureaucracy on our part, but a mechanism for allowing ideas to be drafted reasonably fully before formal discussion starts, while preventing half-formed ideas from wasting the time of the community and of their proposers. Especially in your case, as an editor with only ≈1000 mainspace edits and a list of interests which raises an immediate red flag[2] then when you come to us effectively saying "Hey, I know I have less experience with Wikipedia than any one of you, but I'm here to tell you that you've been doing it wrong for eighteen years!" the onus is going to be on you to make the answers to 1–5 above crystal clear from the start.
There's a wrong and a right way to do these things, and the right way is definitely not to bypass the Idea lab phase completely, jump straight in to the formal proposals phase with a proposal that doesn't specify what problem you're trying to solve or how you propose to solve it, reply with sneeringobnoxiousness when your proposal is challenged and then try to dismiss it as banter. If you don't like being accused of promoting a batshit crazy idea, demonstrate to us that it's not a batshit crazy idea; some examples of these mythical "unhealthy talk pages" you claim exist, and an explanation of why these pages are so problematic that a "flag this page to a moderator as inappropriate" button (which is what you're proposing however you dress it up) would do such a good job of fixing these problems that it would justify jettisoning two of Wikipedia's core values to put it in place. ‑ Iridescent 13:21, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
^If you could give a dozen examples of "unhealthy talk pages" I—and Wikipedia in general—might be convinced that such things exist. While there's the occasional internal page that's become a toxic environment—Jimbotalk and ANI being the canonical examples—in twelve years and ≈300,000 edits I don't think I've ever come across something I'd describe as an unhealthy article talk page, and I was around for some of the legendary disputes like "name of Ireland", "composer infoboxes" and "tree shaping" that shaped our dispute resolution processes in the first place. The whole "community health" thing is predicated on the notion that Wikipedia is a den of sexism/racism/homophobia, but they base this on the complaints of people who've lost arguments and are lashing out; when asked to provide actual examples of inappropriate comments they tend to go very quiet.
^I'm not saying you are a problematic editor—I haven't looked at any of the actual edits, and am perfectly willing to believe you've done nothing but minor cleanup—but when your list of interests correlates so closely with the hobby-horses of the lunatic fringe you're going to be under the microscope. (At the time of writing, your ten most-edited pages, excluding your own user and talk pages, the Teahouse and ANI, were Talk:Jared Taylor, Talk:Alt-left, Talk:Richard B. Spencer, Talk:Milo Yiannopoulos, User talk:Jimbo Wales, Talk:White pride, Talk:Alternative for Germany, Talk:Acupuncture, Talk:Rachel Dolezal and Talk:David Duke.) When you couple this with the fact that your own userpage boasts that you create biographies of living people without verification (and you appear to be telling the truth, not just making idle anti-Wikipedia comments to provoke a reaction or start a debate), then all the more reason for people to be sceptical about how closely your motivations align with Wikipedia's.
I did say that about limiting visibility of the results, but I didn't complain about "truly anonymous action", which isn't something I was thinking of as a problem there. My concern was that it was low-commitment action where casual first impressions and prejudices count much more than careful evaluations, simply because people can submit them so much faster. My vote was "unlikely" rather than "no" because in theory there is some use for the idea of just having a wish-someone-would-take-a-look-at-this button, but in a case like that there's no need for statistics or votes; you just want one person to have had a look sometime at the talk page to see if it's 500k of racist diatribe on somebody's ethnic background. But that is bound to happen anyway, or else the page is truly not read at all in which case it truly shouldn't matter; we're just talking about making it easier to tell somebody at the cost of making it harder for the somebody told to know what the problem is. Unlikely, not impossible though -- just don't lock up the results of whatever the tool is! Wnt (talk) 13:56, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
Yeah—if the results were visible to everyone and it were possible to see who had participated (if not everyone's actual vote) it would be less problematic. Without at minimum the ability to see who had participated, there's no way to tell if the dozen people all downvoting Talk:White pride are the usual rabble of white supremacists or people with genuine concerns; with the results restricted to admins, we'd be creating an de facto batsignal for a self-selecting elite of power users. However, without anonymity and with the result publicly visible, I don't see how this tool would serve a purpose at all, since it would just replicate "I see this as problematic" on the talk page. ‑ Iridescent 14:08, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
I don't really see what this tool would do on Talk:white pride - on one hand, the page has every appearance of civility; on the other, it is made up of a FAQ and a bunch of people asking the FAQ questions over again because the article lays it on a bit thicker than necessary. I mean, it's one thing to say that the "white pride" slogan or idea is tarred by association with the historical abuses of white racism, without trying to argue that it is absolutely and fundamentally different in essence than other "race pride movements", or to ignore their own potential for abuses under the wrong circumstances. But how do you measure that in a survey? Is it unhealthiness whenever a talk page has a "FAQ" imposed on it, simply because you'd think on a healthy talk page you don't need one? Even if you do measure "unhealthiness", the opinion and reaction will be all over the map. And I imagine whoever tries to put their hand in any hive like that one is going to get multiply stung. Wnt (talk) 02:10, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
I read your reply briefly and am reading it again in detail while checking the links you included.
Quick questions: Is there a problem with habitually reverting POV pushers on fringe articles, which is what I often do here when I log on and check my watchlist. The articles in question are subject to quite a lot of good faith edits, which aren't really needed and when one ends up on my watch list, I usually end up checking the contributions of an IP user trying to whitewash the "alt right" article, for example, then check their contributions and find out that they've also done the same thing to another similar bunch of articles. I then go across and revert changes on those articles and they end up on my watch list too. The same thing happens with things like reiki and acupuncture. Am I harming my reputation here by doing this?
I don't think any of the (stub) biographies I've created (mostly when I was just learning to put articles up) are unverified but I will go back and check them all. I went back and checked: The phrase "created without verification" there refers to the fact that I didn't submit them via AfC. I was a new user at the time and didn't understand that verification would be understood as something else. The purpose of the notice was to let a page reviewer know that a new user had published an article without putting it through the submission process
Thank you for telling me about the relationship between WMF and Wikipedia. You are right that I looked at a banner, which was displayed on Wikipedia and went off and spent a lunch break sitting down and scratching the head a bit and my idea is what I came up with. It isn't telling people what to do when a relatively inexperienced user answers a call for ideas in answer to a banner plastered over the front page of the encyclopedia. Maybe you can talk to them about this case, because it seems to have generated the type of issue you are talking about. I honestly don't think I'm sneering or obnoxious, and am slightly taken aback that that's how I was received. I do tend to get nervous when rebuked and try to deal with that by making what I believe to be comical remarks. It's more out of fear than anything and I do it without thinking. I'd like you to at least consider the possibility that people of a certain disposition might find it unnerving and difficult to objectively continue the conversation, having received your initial reply. I understand that you have probably had previous experiences which justify a certain amount of brusqueness, and I also don't want to double down on what you have pointed out as unwelcome behavior on my part, but I would like to be treated fairly, I am a person and I can be a bit erratic (as many people can) when put under pressure. An apology is forthcoming on my part.
I think you deserve a bit of feedback about how the experience rolled out, because while you might not think it (or me) very important, there's lots of people knocking about who feel the same way (I've been contributing over at editor retention recently). I'll give you an analogy in the hope that it will maintain a bit of light warmheartedness, but also because the analogy is a snug fit for what I experienced here.
Possibly based on personal experience: imagine if you will a young man, having been told to help out with some household chores, makes the mistake of attempting to fold a duvet while his wife is watching. Of course he gets it wrong, that's not how duvets are folded, is it? The duvet is then grumpily unraveled by his wife while he forlornly chews on his thumb and is berated not only on the subject of duvets, but also on a reasonably long list of household related infractions he has committed in the past. I'm not a story teller, so take a moment to flesh out the details, add some background music and perhaps a cat looking on smugly from a corner (we had a cat). It's not a soul crushing experience, but it wasn't pleasant really to be honest.
I owe you a debt of gratitude for taking it time to talk about the situation in such detail. The effort you went to to explain your point is about the only thing, allowing me to differentiate the experience from being summarily sacked. My aims on Wikipedia are long term. Right now I don't have much to write about on the article space, but one day I might. I'm quite interested in the editor retention page at the moment and have been having a bit of success there in a discussion about welcoming people. In the future I might want to write articles regularly. Do you think it's OK to maintain a presence here in the meantime and contribute where possible?
@Wnt, I wouldn't really consider it unhealthy that a talk page has a FAQ imposed on it, unless the FAQ is being abused to mean "questions we refuse to answer"; there are some topics where the same question is inevitably going to be asked repeatedly in good faith. The canonical one would be Muhammad; no matter how we approach the matter of images, there will either be a steady stream of people asking "why are you including images purporting to be of him even though they add little encyclopedic value (since they all date from centuries after his death so give no indication of what he actually looked like) and potentially offend significant numbers of readers?" or "why are you not including images purporting to be of him, since there's at least a slight utility to readers of knowing how he's been represented in art and WP:NOTCENSORED means even the slightest utility should outweigh any potential offense caused?", and it's not a good use of anyone's time to constantly repeat the same arguments for and against.
There are plenty of other examples of genuinely frequently asked questions where the waste of time involved means it would be actively damaging to Wikipedia to relitigate the debate each time the question is asked, ranging from political hot potatoes like: "Does Ireland refer to the island or the country?", "Is the capital of Ukraine Kiev or Kyiv?" or "Should China point to the PRC, the RoC or a disambiguation page?", to the benign but repeatedly time-wasting discussions like "Should Heavy metal music mention Led Zeppelin?" or "I read in (insert newspaper/website with poor fact checking) that glass is technically a high-viscosity liquid and the slow flow explains why some windows are thicker at the bottom than the top / that the word 'Easter' derives from 'Ishtar' / that the monarch needs to sign every British Act of Parliament before it becomes law (or its corollary, that lesbianism and/or prostitution were never banned in England because insert name of monarch didn't believe that such things happened and nobody dared contradict them) / that bees are essential to the food chain and civilization will collapse without them / that Vikings wore horned helmets, why is Wikipedia not mentioning this fact?".
While I initially thought that while upvoting/downvoting is contrary to fundamental principles, there's still a good case for a one-click "this page is problematic!" button, the more I think about it the less convinced I am by that, either. Without context, anyone investigating the reports generated by such a button would need to read the entire talkpage to see what was and wasn't problematic. Consequently, what we'd actually need is a new noticeboard so people reporting potentially problematic pages could explain what it was they considered a problem. Such a noticeboard would probably grow like Topsy—we have only c. 3500 active editors, and those who have both the experience and the inclination to moderate such things form a very limited subset of that number—and would also mean the creation of yet another bureaucracy. Improbable as it is to use the terms 'WP:ANI' and 'efficient' in the same sentence, the present "if there's a serious issue post a notification at ANI asking admins and experienced editors to assess the situation, if the issue isn't serious enough to justify that it's almost certainly best to let it work itself out" setup is actually probably the most efficient way to address this.
@Edaham, regarding Is there a problem with habitually reverting POV pushers on fringe articles?, it all depends on what you mean by "habitually" and "fringe". If you're making more than three reverts to a page in any 24 hour period (regardless of whether it's three unrelated edits you're reverting) and the material being reverted isn't blatant vandalism, then you're automatically a problem editor by definition. If you're not hitting the three-revert limit, but nonetheless find yourself regularly reverting material from the same page, particularly if you're reverting material added by multiple editors, then there's a reasonable likelihood that you're part of the problem rather than part of the solution. If you're reverting material on the grounds of being 'fringe' and you're unable to point to the discussion on Wikipedia in which it was decided that the material you're reverting is inappropriate for Wikipedia, then there's an extremely high probability that you're the POV-pusher. NPOV doesn't mean we don't include fringe viewpoints, it means we don't give undue weight to fringe viewpoints, and what constitutes "undue weight" is something that generally needs to be discussed.
The relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia is a complicated and troubled one. They ultimately own the servers and retain the technical ability to overturn Wikipedia consensus; they also do a lot of valuable work in terms of maintaining the MediaWiki software on which Wikipedia runs, of acting as a central mediatory body between Wikipedia and the sister projects, and of lobbying and fundraising for Wikipedia. However, their goals and methods are often wildly out of sync with those of English Wikipedia; in particular, they have a long history of accusing the Wikipedia community of being unduly aggressive or discriminatory and then failing to provide evidence when asked to justify these claims (I repeat my earlier challenge to provide a few actual examples of "unhealthy talk pages"; here's the list of the most active pages on Wikipedia which is usually a good indicator of pages with a lot of back-and-forth, to get you started), and of trying to enforce ideologically-driven changes on Wikipedia against the will of the community. Consequently, when something like Wikipedia:Community health initiative on English Wikipedia appears, throwing around accusations against the current Wikipedia community while providing very little evidence to back up any of their claims, we're going to ask for them to actually provide some evidence that the problems they claim to have identified actually exist before we start expending our limited time and energy trying to fix them.
Community Engagement Insights/2018 Report/Support & Safety—the survey on which they're basing these particular claims—is worth reading in full. Their claims are based on a sample of just 251 people—one assumes a largely self-selecting sample as those who feel they had a complaint to make were presumably more likely to respond—and there's what appears to be some very selective cherry-picking going on in order to back up their "we need to get rid of the Wikipedia community and recruit a new one that's more amenable to our agenda" position.
All of the above is obviously just my personal view (albeit one I know is widely shared on English Wikipedia). User:Whatamidoing (WMF) is the WMF's de facto ambassador to Wikipedia, and can give you their side of the coin if you're interested.
Regarding Do you think it's OK to maintain a presence here in the meantime and contribute where possible?, the answer is "a qualified yes". While obviously everyone's who's willing to help is welcome, ultimately Wikipedia exists solely as a delivery mechanism for its content. Every namespace other than articles and files exists solely as a support mechanism for those two namespaces. "Anyone can edit" is a core principle (we all had to start somewhere) and applies to the back-office functions just as much as to the articles, but someone with little experience of working with Wikipedia content is likely to get themselves into trouble if they involve themselves in complicated discussions about the organization of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is almost 20 years old now, and many of the contentious decisions regarding its administration have already been discussed repeatedly for years; when someone with relatively little experience in the actual business of creating or curating Wikipedia content is telling experienced editors that they've been doing it wrong for years, it can come across as armchair-quarterbacking. WP:Skin in the game is a redlink, but it probably shouldn't be, as "if you don't like what we're doing, show me how you could do it better" is latterly becoming something of a core concept in Wikipedia's internal dynamics.
(TL;DR summary; yes, by all means stick around and we're glad to have you, but always bear in mind that Wikipedia is an educational project, not a social network, and the 'health' of the articles, files and data always takes precedence over the 'health' of the community.) ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
I’ve generally found myself being thanked for my edits by consensus forming editors on talk pages for having reverted fringe content and right-wing nonsense. I’ve been doing that long before I had a registered account (for as you say, over a decade). My concern is that you or others might speculate that I’m one of the people who supports those notions. I have absolutely never exceeded 3rr (to a fault sometimes) even when reverting obvious (to me) vandalism, preferring to take things to the talk page. It usually takes me a button push to revert things and then twenty edits on a talk page (per comment), correcting typos, comments and phrases, which I want to say more clearly, which explains the discrepancy.
I don’t know what a quarter back is or what the redlinked reference means. I’ve been in Shanghai for sixteen years and came from the UK so if those are references to America’s sports or recent pop culture I won’t get them.
I’ve been very carefully reading what you told me about the wmf. It stands to reason that en-wiki should have a degree of autonomy and that there might be a bit of push from either side. Can you visualize that through correctly polling, and then presenting those results to correlate them with various initiatives, you could actually compile the evidence necessary to demonstrate that en-wiki is doing what it needs to do to address discriminatory issues and problems with aggression. Forgetting for a moment my entire proposal, anything to do with “health”, I can see several areas where market research might give a better impression of how things are progressing here. 1) you have the number of users to make research data valid 2) implementation is easy 3) There’s lots of things with which the data can be meaningfully correlated.
I’ll give you an example. At the moment I’m making some suggestions at editor retention. My suggestion is to add a question to the welcome temple, “Can you tell me a bit about your interests and the areas you want to edit?”. My reason for suggesting this is 1) its nice to invite conversation 2) if answered the editor can then pass on the new editor to relevant wiki projects. Supposing you were to poll a group of editors on their user experience, before during and after the introduction of such an initiative. A positive change over time would be quite a useful bar of soap in a sock to anyone who claims people aren’t doing enough to increase hospitality, for a start. Having made the proposal, and thought about your responses, these are the lines along which I’m now thinking. Therefore, seeking out and identifying “unhealthy” pages, or defining what that means might not be a useful exercise. What I think is probably more useful is to hypothesize areas where data might correlate if you took a problem and addressed it with some initiative. From a long term point of view article content and community satisfaction aren’t really separable in terms of importance. They’re mutually supportive in many ways. I can see why wmf might be concerned about “health”, I can also see how as outsiders, they might be likely to come up with some heavy handed or less than helpful ideas. FYI I wrote this in a hurry, I might come back and edit it if you haven’t replied. Edaham (talk) 06:19, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
If you genuinely don't know what an Armchair quarterback does or what Skin in the game means, you'll be glad to know there's a website where you can look these things up… If you'd prefer them in BrEng, substitute "backseat driver" and "stakeholder".
I think you're vastly overestimating the size of the Wikipedia community if you think polling a self-selecting sample would give meaningful data. The headline 47,328,643 figure for the number of accounts represents everyone who's ever registered an account, even though most of those accounts have either never edited or not edited for years; the actual size of the active Wikipedia community is c. 3500. (The raw data on editor participation and activity is here, if you want to verify this; the column labeled ">100" is the one you want to be looking at as those are the editors who are actually active, rather than just poking their noses in occasionally to keep an eye on their particular topic of interest.) A sample would by necessity be self-selecting; we have no means to compel people to participate in surveys. It's well documented that self-selecting participants give the answer they think the questioner wants to hear, and the people who'd choose to participate in surveys would naturally over-represent people with strong opinions (either the "Wikipedia is the greatest force for good of modern times!" fanbois or the "Wikipedia is an irredeemably malignant force and it's a duty of all good-thinking people to disrupt it by any means necessary!" Hasten the Day hardliners). In addition, because of the limited size of the community small shifts in editor participation can have relatively significant effects on Wikipedia (I can rattle off any number of instances where the comings or goings of just a single editor has had a drastic impact on Wikipedia's coverage of a given field; not just niche topics, but core fields like "paintings" or "England").
Ultimately, market research techniques intended for analysis of broad trends by teams of professional researchers, or of a professional workforce whose employees work full time and can be compelled to answer the questions, are at best going to be of limited value, and at worst actively disruptive, when applied to a small community of enthusiasts. (If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, start at Wikipedia:Research and follow links; remember that we've been one of the highest-profile websites in the world for well over a decade now, and almost everything one can think of in terms of research has already been thought of.)
Take your example of adding questions to the {{welcome}} template. We have roughly 5000 account registrations each month; assuming one in ten of those replies to the questions, that makes 500 replies. Every one of those 500 editors will then get offended if they go to the trouble of answering the questions and nobody follows up with them; assuming there are at most ten active editors at WikiProject Editor Retention who actually have the inclination to do the heavy lifting,* that commits each of those editors to engaging in-depth with 50 editors each month; even in the first month that will be a huge time-sink, and assuming the editor-retention aspect is successful it will create a compound-interest situation in which after six months, each of those ten editors will be de facto mentors to 500 editors apiece. To put that in perspective, this talk page is one of the most active pages on the entire project and it takes a significant chunk of my time just responding to comments on it, but even I have only 500 watchers and most of those are passive; to engage simultaneously with 500—or even 50—editors would be a full-time job, and anyone trying to actually do so would burn out within days. *A big "if"; in my experience, WP:ER consists less of people with a genuine interest in why editors come and go, and more of people who've lost arguments kvetching about how it's Just So Unfair that nobody on Wikipedia appreciates their genius and threatening to leave unless we immediately accede to their demands.
Likewise, I think you're working under a misapprehension regarding WikiProjects, if you feel passing on the new editor to relevant wiki projects would be a good thing. There are perhaps a dozen Wikiprojects that are actually active; what you're actually proposing is that unless the new editor's interests are military history, trains, medicine, videogames or a few other topics that have active projects, new editors be directed to dead talkpages where their questions will go unanswered, and consequently frustrate them even further. The existing system—in which new editors edit an article in which they're interested, and consequently come to the attention of other editors with an interest in that topic who engage with them as to what they're doing right and wrong, all the while being nudged towards The Wikipedia Adventure to get a feel for how the technical aspects of Wikipedia work without causing a nuisance by experimenting in the mainspace—isn't some arbitrary system we've made up from whole cloth, but the project of two decades of evolution and experimentation regarding what works and what doesn't. ‑ Iridescent 08:01, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
I think introducing new people to wiki projects isn’t a great idea. Introducing new people to experienced people is a good idea. Sending someone to a project is pot luck. Taking the time to introduce them to a person who made the most recent few edits to their area of interest (or the closest fit possible) is probably better, and that’s what I’ve been suggesting. I agree with you about some of the passers-by at ER. I’ve seen some grumbles in the short time I’ve been there. I however, think its quite a good idea to think in the direction of strengthening new users - so at least there’s one new person there to join those who take it seriously. Regarding your thoughts on marketing data, you’ve certainly highlighted some pitfalls. In a project with no deadline however, I think its worth exploring further, if perhaps more tentatively. Edaham (talk) 15:30, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
As the "caretaker" at WP:WER I like to roam around and search out comments that may be helpful to discussions that are ongoing at WER. As an off-shoot to one of those discussions, User:Edaham presented an idea that may have potential. He briefly mentions it above and it is in the very genesis stage. I wonder if I might "cherrypick" some of the discussion above as they relate to Edaham's idea and incorporate them at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Editor Retention#Discussion about a New WER Welcome. Also, mostly all of the kvetching done at WER is not by members since most members are no longer active participants in the project. The remaining few do what we can to steer discussions toward a purpose beyond complaining. ―Buster7☎ 17:26, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
Slightly adjacently, you going to run out of Eddies sooner rather than later :) although that does somewhat tie in with Iridescent's point about a dislocation between the number of editors / and the number actually participating I suppose. ——SerialNumber54129 17:52, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
Yes, of course. I don't mean to denigrate people like you and Dennis, who are genuinely trying to help, but I think it's reasonable to say that the drive-by attention-seekers posting variations of "if Wikipedia continues claiming that there's no evidence to support my crank theory I'm going to resign, you're the Editor Retention project so if you don't force everyone else to do what I say you'll have failed in your duty" gives a false impression that the project's much more active than it is.
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[1]
The number, and viciousness, of internal squabbles is a fraction of what it once was, and the decline in editor numbers has ended (see right). Despite the WMF's sky-is-falling hyperbole—which is based more on Jimmy Wales's crackpot Civilination project and his determination to 'prove' that Wikipedia is a hostile environment so he can justify spending donor funds trying to solve the alleged problem, than on any objective evidence of problems—Wikipedia is fairly calm compared to the Sue Gardner/Lila Tretikov era when there was a genuine possibility of open civil war and forking.
The primary driver of editor retention problems nowadays isn't the nature of community interactions, but that improved writing standards and more complicated formatting have made the learning curve much steeper than it used to be. VisualEditor was supposed to address this, but the disastrous mess the WMF made of the launch alienated most of the existing editor base who consequently refused to adopt it, and as a consequence we now have a two-tier community of pre-VE editors who see Wikipedia in terms of markup, and post-VE editors who see Wikipedia in terms of text, talking past each other and getting annoyed with each other because neither group understands the other; in addition, because VE editors find the back-office areas (which still function in wikitext) hard to engage with other than by means of automated tools, they're de facto ineligible for adminship as they find it hard to demonstrate experience in admin areas, cementing the gerontocracy of the 2006–08 intake. (The WMF is aware of all these issues, but after the Flow, MediaViewer, Superprotect and VE debacles they're not likely to attempt to impose another cultural change by technical means without community consensus, and whenever the community are given the opportunity to state their priorities they remain stubbornly wedded to bikeshedding and deckchair-arranging, probably because the WMF's "everyone is equal" mantra gives equal weight to the views of people from tiny moribund projects as it does to people from the big Wikipedias and from Commons.) ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
Don't worry; those of us still trying to shepherd the formation of new ideas are well aware the project is essentially moribund. I have to take care not to be overly pessimistic and quash newcomers, while at the same time trying to prepare them to not be disappointed if their proposals don't progress the way they had hoped. Although I'd state the underlying problem differently than you—I'd say that continued growth in the number of new editors is more likely to come from those who aren't interested in using wiki text—the net conclusion is the same as you stated: the wiki text editor is a barrier. And supposed consensus-based decision-making traditions stalemate change, since a small number of vocal editors can dissipate focus and prevent agreement. The editor retention project can't address the real systemic issues, but I hope it may be able to find some small ways to encourage editors. isaacl (talk) 19:31, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
And the upset editors are fun, as we get upset editors complaining that the project isn't stopping other upset editors from making their invalid complaints on the project talk page. isaacl (talk) 19:36, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
I think we're on the same page; I'd agree that the wikitext editor is a huge barrier, and in an ideal world it wouldn't exist. Unfortunately, even when VE is working perfectly—which will probably be some time around the year 2168—it will still be fundamentally incompatible with wikitext, as even when it's outputting material that looks fine the underlying code it generates looks like a soup of markup codes. (Moving files from a WYSIWYG word processor like MS Word into a code-based application like the old WordPerfect had exactly the same issue.) In the very long term, we should probably be thinking about the feasibility of getting rid of wikitext markup entirely, but I can't imagine there ever being a consensus for that. In my experience, the other huge barrier is that the minimum standards are higher; back when this was a "good article" new and newish editors could start writing and not worry about getting the formatting and referencing right provided they weren't completely screwing up, but nowadays we jump on editors for not including references or for getting the formatting wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't be doing that—making sure editors learn early on that verifiability is non-negotiable is important—but it must be fairly dispiriting for someone who's always prided themselves on their writing skills to be slapped down by an anonymous stranger on the internet for failing to comply with some arbitrary rule in WP:MOS. ‑ Iridescent 20:08, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
As most of you must know, Dennis is retired. He makes a visit every now and then but we can't convince him to stay. isaacl and I do what we can to keep the doors open and the place relatively tidy. All are welcome. Drop in. Nominate someone for an Editor of the Week award. ―Buster7☎ 23:41, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
If you want a serious albeit possibly contentious proposal, monitor WP:RFA for people who are being shot down in flames but aren't obvious NOTNOW cases. Assuming most of these people go into the process assuming they'll pass, it must be a fairly rude awakening to discover that the majority of your peers consider you either untrustworthy or incompetent. The same could also be said for people who are having their work ripped to shreds at WP:GAN/WP:FAC. "You know that thing you're really proud of and worked really hard on? We think it's crap" is always going to hurt, regardless of how many polite words it's dressed up with, and some of the regular reviewers aren't known for sugar-coating at the best of times. ‑ Iridescent 00:38, 13 January 2019 (UTC)
I agree that the referencing in wiki markup is a problem. My articles use the {{sfn}} system - save for some older creations such as Coropuna - and I don't recall a single newby or inexperienced user getting it right when they try to edit them. Not one. Even an admin had recently difficulties on one of my articles. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:54, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
See #VE and referencing in the megathread above. Because VisualEditor can't handle {{sfn}}, and we (probably correctly) push new editors towards VE rather than inflict wikitext on them from the outset, new editors can't get it right when they try to edit them, even if they wanted to. As I may have mentioned once or twice, I strongly believe the benefits of introducing a single citation format would be worth the significant hassle its introduction would cause; whatever system we came up with we'd get used to it fairly quickly, and we'd no longer need to have the "oh don't be put off by our having 2000 citation styles, you're only expected to be familiar with the twenty or so that are in common usage" discussion, which invariably makes Wikipedia look ridiculous. ‑ Iridescent 21:05, 12 January 2019 (UTC)
I don't see the community ever having a consensus to deprecate Harvard-style referencing. When you have lots of references to a few books and want to attribute page numbers to your citations, it's clearly better. When most of the references are to web pages, it's clearly worse. It might be possible to get down to those two options, though. Of course, even doing that would piss off a lot of editors who have maintained their sacred cows of reference styles for years. power~enwiki (π, ν) 21:28, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
AIUI, the WMF's position is that, on a scale of decades, we cannot have healthy content in the absence of a community to maintain it. "Threats to community health" should be understood as "Things that might result in Wikipedia being useless or worse once all of us are listed at WP:OBIT" (or permabanned, because a third of us will eventually develop dementia, which is ultimately incompatible with editing).
In re "a sample of just 251 people", I believe that this work is largely being overseen by someone whose election to ArbCom is listed in the subpages at WP:200 – a page that appears to exist because this community thinks that having 200 self-selected editors support anything is significant.
As for the opinions they expressed, it doesn't necessarily matter whether biographies of women are scrutinized more thoroughly than biographies of men. In some respects, it only matters that some editors believe that they are. People who believe that, in practice, a BLP about a businessman requires three decent sources to avoid deletion, and that the same article about a businesswoman requires five to avoid deletion, will not submit articles about women for whom only three decent sources can be located. I believe that this has been the experience of many of the regular participants at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:02, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
Regarding it doesn't necessarily matter whether biographies of women are scrutinized more thoroughly than biographies of men. In some respects, it only matters that some editors believe that they are, I don't believe this and to be honest I don't believe you believe it either. People make up all kind of shit, and people believe all kinds of shit, but we go by data not speculation. There's an equally if not more prevalent opinion that Wikipedia is dominated by a left-wing elite; it doesn't mean we explicitly go out of our way to loosen the standards for people writing about right-wing perspectives. People can believe that, in practice, a BLP about a businessman requires three decent sources to avoid deletion, and that the same article about a businesswoman requires five to avoid deletion all they like, but if they can't provide any examples of this actually happening we shouldn't be taking them any more seriously than the people who complain that we deleted the autobiography of their garage band but haven't deleted The Skids. ‑ Iridescent 20:11, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
Well, Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Women explains why one of them has more participation than the other. It's probably the most closely watched deletion list. FWIW, I'd like to see the statistics, but because of projects like WiR and the delsort list, I my gut instinct is that it is actually harder to delete an article on a female biographical subject than a male biographical subject because there is a conscious effort to try to fix the problem of underrepresentation (not saying that is a bad thing.)The larger issue is that there are less articles being created on notable female subjects than there should be. On that front, you can also go into things such as the fact that our authors write on what interests them.For example, my main space work is largely 19th century Canadian educators and things related to dead Catholic clerics. The latter are all male by definition, and the former is overwhelmingly male. Even if I were to make a conscious effort to try to increase coverage in these areas, it would be extraordinarily difficult. When you're dealing with a volunteer worker population, these are problems that you are going to have, and solving them is difficult. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:20, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
No, Tony, it isn't a problem. The project is supposed to reflect reality and the reality is that there are vastly more notable men than women, for reasons related to history. That is why a recent proposal was made to relax the notability requirements for women, fundamentally in an attempt to rewrite history and falsify a balance. I'm sorry but it isn't a bandwagon I am prepared to jump on because it is social engineering. - Sitush (talk) 21:26, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
I agree with a lot of what you said, and you’d never find me supporting lowering the notability criteria. What I was trying to convey was that there likely are a significant number of women who meet our guidelines for inclusion but haven’t been written on, in part because sources are often harder to find if they do exist and in part because the generic Wikipedia editor tends to focus on subjects or eras that are male dominated. I think recognizing that we have a blind spot there is fine, but I also don’t think we should overreact by changing notability guidelines, etc. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:44, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I've seen the other way, that (excluding sports, where borderline cases tend to follow SNGs) biographies of women generally get less scrutiny. It's possible that WP:NFOOTY impacts enough biographies to sway the overall stats. The arguments to keep for Clarice Phelps are egregiously WP:ILIKEIT - if She's exactly the sort of STEM role model we need and notability ... is not a policy are the best arguments to keep the article, perhaps it should be deleted. There doesn't seem to be any claim that she had an important or well-documented role in the "discovery of element 117". power~enwiki (π, ν) 21:28, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
@power~enwiki, I'd argue that even when it comes to the notorious WP:NFOOTY—probably the poster child for a problematic notability guideline—the whole "if they played in a professional league, they're inherently notable" thing actually causes systemic bias towards female biographies. The argument for the guideline is that football is so high-profile a sport, that anyone who's had any kind of pro career, even for lower league teams, can reasonably be assumed to have been the subject of significant media coverage, even if we don't currently have those sources. This is a defensible position when it comes to the men's game—even benchwarmers who rarely actually play tend to have been written about somewhere, and one can reasonably say that the occasional edge case who slips through is a price worth paying to avoid litigating the notability of 100,000+ biographies of minor figures separately each time. It's not one can say about the women's game; for whatever reason, no matter how much publicity gets thrown at the women's game it's stubbornly failed to capture the public imagination, and the media tends not to even recognise its existence. (In England—the country where the footballing authorities have arguable done the most to try to promote the women's game—the winners of the men's FA Cup pocket £3.6 million; the winners of the women's FA Cup get £25,000; as with all sporting contests, the prize money is a direct reflection of TV revenue and as such a direct reflection of public interest.) However, we stubbornly apply WP:NFOOTY, meaning we continue to host biographies such as Bonnie Horwood and Emily Simpkins where the most the sources do is demonstrate that the people in question exist. ‑ Iridescent 20:17, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
I think in the context of football biographies. NFOOTY may not be biased against female biographies, but what it allows people to do is rapdily and semi-automatedly create sub-stubs on footballers - 95% or more of whom are men - which when the overall proportion of male biographies is ~83% is going to bias all of Wikipedia to have more male biographies, simply because it is easier to create a biography on someone who played one match for Micronesia than a more notable woman for which one has to actually find the coverage for the article to survive AfD. Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:48, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
That's an interesting point. The imbalance in the notability guidelines does seem to contribute to the article gender gap because so many male athletes (hundreds of thousands apparently) have a stub. I got a kick out of Oak Ridge tweeting Phelps's profile a few hours after the AfD was closed. Levivich 20:25, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
The imbalance is probably more an artefact of the systemic imbalance of history. Given that for most of history in most cultures, many professions were completely closed to women—most importantly from Wikipedia's point of view politics, visual arts, sports, the military and engineering/architecture, as those are all fields with a high churn rate at the top of the profession and consequently a higher rate of people being notable in Wikipedia terms—complaining that the historical record in Europe, China, the Islamic world and the Americas—which between them constitute the bulk of Wikipedia—overrepresents men is like complaining that History of France overrepresents the French. Even the ODNB—which does explicitly have lower notability standards for women in an effort to address the gender gap—has a lower percentage of female biographies than do we. ‑ Iridescent 11:11, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
"I don't believe this and to be honest I don't believe you believe it either."
If it weren't true, then Bess Adams wouldn't be a redlink. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:42, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
Give me a clue who Bess Adams is or I can't judge whether your point is valid; Wikipedia has never had an article by that title, and Googling "bess adams" doesn't throw up anything obvious. If the sources don't exist, then by definition the name on Wikipedia will be a redlink since we exist only to reflect the sources. ‑ Iridescent 10:54, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
That's a windmill it's not worth your while tilting at. Any attempt to rein in the wilder excesses of the Special Notability Guidelines will inevitably fail, since the "but my pet topic is so damn important the usual notability rules shouldn't apply" block votes, combined with the surviving "anything that can be proven to exist should have an article" ARS-holes canvassing each other, means the best you can ever hope for is "no consensus" in which case the status quo remains. It will take the ever-rising article-to-patroller ratio leading to another Siegenthaler incident, and the WMF overreacting and enforcing stricter inclusion criteria as an office action, before you'll be able to get anything significant changed when it comes to the topic of Wikipedia's bloat.* Witness how many people who should know better are automatically assuming that when it comes to the gender gap, the only question is "how do we get more biographies of marginally notable women?", not "why do we need all these biographies on marginally notable men?". ‑ Iridescent 12:13, 15 February 2019 (UTC) *Or the much considered but never actually happening formal split of Wikipedia into separate "quality over quantity" and "every grain of sand on the beach" sites. Don't hold your breath for that; Wikipedians have been trying that literally since before Wikipedia existed—the Nupedia/Wikipedia schism happened before Wikipedia went live—and the "enforce minimum standards" site is inevitably the one that fails, as the learning curve for new editors is steeper and the broader scope of Wikipedia's "occasional flowers growing in the sewer" model means it's always larger and consequently appears at the top of the search results. ‑ Iridescent 12:19, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Of course everyone is free to do as they please, but I cling to the hope that all the editors who !voted to delete Phelps will now express their !support for tightening these loose SNGs. Would you say it's also tilting at windmills to pursue a "more scientists" notability expansion (as opposed to tightening other SNGs)? What do you think about modifying NPROF to allow for a form of inherited notability for scientists in certain very specialized and very small fields (like astronauts, maybe nuclear or quantum physics). So, for example, if NASA says one of their astronauts is notable, or CERN says one of their scientists is notable, we accept it even though it's not independent? I assume this has been raised before? Levivich 21:21, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Sigh. After the Phelps AfD (which I closed for stalkers who didn't follow it) there is this misconception that PROF is a hard guideline to pass. I'd really encourage people who view it that way to read the previous proposal at WT:PROF to see that they're probably in the extreme minority of views when it comes to people who feel that way (pinging DGG since he and I are people whose arguments at the most recent RfC on PROF were the ones most cited as keeping it independent from the GNG.)People who work AfC and its way too close for comfort cousin that may as well be official #wikipedia-en-helpconnect on IRC hate PROF and consider it to be one of the laxest notability guidelines, and AfC participants/IRC helpers were basically the ones leading the charge to make it so that PROF basically was subject to the GNG thinking it would make it more difficult for no-name academics to be accepted. The GLAM/WiR crowd also want to change PROF to make it under the GNG, thinking it would make it easier to get academics who they want in Wikipedia in Wikipedia, but they also miss the fact that if that were to happen, the people who actually look at new articles and participate in AfDs would use the change to delete a ton of notable professors as that is the reason the last PROF RfC was proposed.What we have with PROF now is a pretty good compromise between the two positions: it realizes that academics who have made zero actual impact to academia but are great at promoting themselves probably shouldn't be in here, and makes crap such as PhD candidates talking about their conference posters to one another not matter. It also realizes that academia is a field where finding the type of sources we have for most other articles may be more difficult, but we can likely find enough sources to provide details about the research, etc. of significant academics. In order to determine whether or not we should provide such coverage, it essentially imposes a standard of "Do this person's peers think that they are important?" If the answer is "yes", we cover them, if the answer is "no", we don't.Proposals to reform PROF to move away from the peer judgement standard that we currently have and let people in are bad ideas. Most of us on this website are not academics, and even those who are don't know every field. Just because we think someone's research is cool doesn't mean it is actually important, and we are not qualified to judge if it is. Liberalizing PROF would force the community to make decisions that most community members are unable to make or would make it so we have a bunch of mediocre researchers who are good at promoting themselves while the actually significant ones get deleted. Everything can be improved, but PROF is actually half-decent at what it is designed to do. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:46, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
@TonyBallioni: What is your opinion about the notability of astronauts? They probably wouldn't meet NPROF or GNG. Are all astronauts notable? What do you think are the problems with our notability guidelines (if any), and the best solutions to pursue? Or are you in the "nothing can be done" camp? Levivich 21:57, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
I don't really have an opinion on astronauts, but I think there's an argument to be made that private persons who haven't seen the light of the media in over a decade and are living happily in Florida with their spouse, 2.5 kids, and golden retriever really shouldn't have their privacy violated because someone on Wikipedia wants to right great wrongs by writing them a biography. The presumption of privacy is very strong, and we need a good reason to think there is something to be gained by violating it.I'm fairly firmly in the camp that practice is policy and that our notability guidelines are written at AfD, not in RfCs. Wikipedia is a highly decentralized environment, and every attempt to ever update a notability guideline without years of work in AfDs will fail.WP:NCORP is probably the best recent example of this: in 2016 it was fairly normal to still see regulars citing interviews with corporate officers and Forbes contributor pieces as evidence of notability. It took about 18 months of people arguing at AfD over the concepts that eventually became the rewritten guideline for a consensus to form that allowed an RfC to be successful. Attempts to reform notability via RfC will always fail unless there is a stable pre-existing consensus at AfD that is different than the written guidelines. Obviously, that is very hard to do. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:17, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Astronauts are probably quite a good edge case, as they're right on the verge of becoming routine. When only <100 people in history have ever done a particular thing the rest of the world considers significant, then those people are notable whether they like it or not; at present, when there are ≈600 people who've flown in space, it confers vague notability but it's not particularly exceptional; as the number continues to rise we'll soon be in WP:INDISCRIMINATE territory. It goes the other way as records are lost, as well; absent the invention of a time machine we will never be able to expand Naked fugitive or Malchus beyond their present state, but I doubt anyone would seriously consider deleting either of these 'biographies'. ‑ Iridescent 14:41, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
He doesn't interfere in the BLPs of his minor-celebrity cronies as often as he used to since the Rachel Marsden farce, but it still happens more often than it should. (IMO, this is mainly because he's finally developed the self-awareness that any other editor who displayed his level of incompetence would have long since been site-banned, so he tends to stay out of article space altogether.) The most notorious recent case was probably his unilateral over-ruling of this RFC because he "thought it would be fun", although in terms of disregard for policy this was probably even more blatant. In my experience the problem with his editing isn't so much him trying to push a POV, as that he meets people at showbiz parties and makes rash promises to clean up the articles on them. ‑ Iridescent 2 00:41, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
I'm glad it isn't just me who thinks Jimmy lacks the necessary level of competence to be editing BLPs (or indeed, Wikipedia in general). Nick (talk) 14:16, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
I hate you, TonyBallioni. I came to this page purely for the purpose of posting exactly that quote. Bishonen | talk 15:41, 1 February 2019 (UTC).
We're all picking up on the same words. As I've recently intimated on the Dice talk page, he needs at least a ban from BLPs. I'm not sure that voluntary would work, and I'm not sure what effect it would have on his own talk page activities because I don't look there, but this arrogant, incompetent bullying and even editing has to stop. That he dresses it up in nice words and has slavish followers here calling him "Mr Wales" makes no difference: fine words butter no parsnips (explanation [here for those unfamiliar with the phrase). - Sitush (talk) 16:46, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
Thinking about it, sending Jimmy off to spend more time with his money would be more trouble than it's worth unless he does something so egregious that the board steps in to stop him bringing Wikipedia into disrepute. (Since this didn't do it for them, I'm not sure if anything would.) It's probably reasonable to assume that he's too arrogant to accept any kind of voluntary restriction. (Yes, I know he accepted a voluntary restriction on the use of admin tools, but that was very much a last-ditch effort to avoid being defenestrated altogether, and the present-day community is far less bolshy.) Given that he can rely on a clique of sycophants and a payroll vote of WMF staffers and high-profile editors who've been bribed to support the WMF position no matter how perverse it is recipients of "research grants", any community based process is going to result in "no consensus".
Consequently, the only mechanism by which he can be removed is WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Role of Jimmy Wales. However, that puts the decision in the hands of a few people who are susceptible to pressure; if such a case were ever filed, you can expect the arbs and parties would all receive midnight phone calls pointing out that Jimmy being banned from the website of which he's the public face would be news, that while the WMF has firm rules about doxxing external media aren't bound by them, and that such is the love of the WMF staff for the Great Helmsman that they can't guarantee that their staff won't be so seized by righteous anger that they leak the names and addresses of anyone who posts or votes against Jimmy. (When it comes to apostates, the WMF has a long history of this kind of back-channel nudging, winking, offers-you-can't-refuse and suggestions that jumping is better than being pushed; I'll take the opportunity to add another plug for GorillaWarfare's Wikimedia timeline of events, 2014–2016 as a case study of how the foundation operates when it turns on its own.) Given that the committee buckled when push came to shove on the matter of the relatively obscure PotW, I think that when it came to sanctioning the highest-profile editor in Wikipedia's history the committee would almost certainly blink first. ‑ Iridescent 2 09:18, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Yes. A site ban is out of the question, (though, if the media ever cared enough to look through Jimmy’s contributions, that Larson edit might make headlines and force board action... white washing the lede of a white-supremicist who made a threat on the life of the POTUS and who wants to decriminalize child sex abuse based on the request from an IP on his talk page is beyond “questionable”)A BLP ban would be somewhat easier than the case you laid out WP:AC/DS exist and while it would be a mess of a controversy, getting it overturned would be fairly hard at a noticeboard, and I doubt the Ordinary Editor with Great Influence would want a case request because all of his mistakes would be on display for the media. It’d still be a hot mess, though. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:01, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
(unlurks) Discretionary sanctions would be the way to go if you want a low-drama way of solving an immediate problem. A community discussion would never come to a consensus, because it's not necessry for participants to know what they're talking about or to do anything other than toe the party line of adherents and detractors. An arbitration caase would be less of a shitsshow, but you haven't got a good enough casus belli to get ArbCom to accept the case. But DS, by design, are easy to impose (one uninvolved admin noticing a problem and deciding to act on it) and not easy to overturn. Of course, if you actually want to force the issue with a constitutional crisis, an RfC or arbitration request would certainly accomplish that, if nothing else. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 17:26, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
@HJ Mitchell: I agree. That's why I gave him the DS alerts. Bishonen | talk 17:33, 2 February 2019 (UTC).
When I think "admin imposes sanction against Jimmy" I certainly don't think of "low-drama" - I think of a 20 heading sprawling ANI thread from hell (where people propose everything from repealing AC/DS (irregardless of the fact that doing so is, of course, only up to the committee) to desyopping the admin imposing the sanction to banning Jimmy), finally ending when someone files an WP:ARC request against the admin imposing the sanction (because remember, even if the Ordinary Editor with Great Influence doesn't want a case request, other people can file one), plus discussion on meta regarding it, and probably some media coverage which would occur even if Mr. Ordinary Editor doesn't contest the sanction in any way. I actually don't think that's exaggerated in any way, because even if no media picks it up, there's twitter, and just it being the talk of the 'pedia/wikimedia would be enough to cause a massive amount of drama.
There would basically be no way to impose a sanction against Jimmy without a case request being filed at the very least (because anyone can file a case request, there will always be at-least one person who will do so). Though I agree that a DS sanction actually could stick if done properly and with a careful reasoning (I imagine the committee being very reluctant to overturn the sanction - they may be able to get away somewhat with boilerplate "admin discretion" comments - unless it was poorly done), but not without accompanying drama. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:27, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Anyone up for enacting that Nike slogan? - Sitush (talk) 18:31, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
If an admin had good cause and enacted a fairly narrowly scoped ban, I don't think there would be be quite that much drama, as long as procedure was properly followed and the admin properly explained themselves (and assuming of course that they have diffs, post-dating Bish's notificaation). It's the same with any enforcement action: if you can show poor conduct, preferably a pattern of it, preferably followin warnings, and the sanction is procedurally correct and proportional to the problem it seeks to address, the sanctionee really has nowhere to go. Somebody could start a broader discussion about the role of the founder or discretionary sanctions, but there are only three ways to overturn a discretionary sanction (other than the enforcing admin changing their mind): consensus of uninvolved admins at AE, clear consensus of uninvolved editors at AN, or successful appeal to ArbCom. If the admin had cause and followed procedure correctly, ArbCom won't touch it (for better or worse, they only consider whether it's a reasonable use of admin discretion); AE will side with the admin (because they wouldn't want sanctions they'd imposed overturned just because the editor is a VIP™); and AN will turn into an almighty shitstorm 20 pages long and so dense that no clear consensus could possibly emerge from it). Meanwhile there'll be the usual pitched battles between the sycophants and detractors on his talk page, with people calling for Jimmy to give up his postion and others calling for the admin's head but nothing ever comes from discussions there anyway. That's assuming he decides to appeal it; he has sensible people whispering in his ear—whether he listens to them is a different matter. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:55, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Jimmy may well have sensible people whispering in one ear, sadly it's the people who are whispering in his other ear that are the root cause of this smallish clusterfuck (and pretty much all the other clusterfucks Jimmy has managed to generate). If a DS based ban was to be enacted, it would need to explicitly ban Jimmy from editing the biographies of anybody he has had prior contact with, either online or in person. That would actually benefit Jimmy and should be begrudgingly appreciated by his sycophantic followers, as it could prevent 'famous' people from making contact with and using Jimmy solely to get the co-founder of Wikipedia to beautify their biographies. Nick (talk) 20:21, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Those of us who are privileged to volunteer at OTRS and #wikipedia-en-help are counseled not to make edits on supplicants' behalf, but instead to give them advice on how to contribute productively to the encyclopedia. In my experience this has been helpful advice, and I expect it would be better for the project if Jimmy followed the same. Bradv🍁 20:34, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
@Galobtter and HJ Mitchell: I agree with Harry’s analysis here, the next time Jimmy makes an mistake with regards to BLPs (which he will within the next year) because of the over a decade of examples of him abusing his position to let his friends and/or assorted nutjobs with larger Twitter followings than him write their own biographies in violation of NPOV and a host of other policies, a full BLP ban would never be overturned at AE or AN.It would also never go to ArbCom because Jimmy would realize that when the Washington Post realized he was whitewashing the biography of Nathan Larson, someone in their backyard, it would result in at least two headlines (one when they became aware of the case, and one when it inevitably ended with him agreeing to an arb enforced BLP ban.) This diff would be present in any case as it’s pronably the most significant recent diff. Then you’d have all the other assorted diffs of him doing crazy stuff on BLP articles that would be on display for the entire media to analyze in their articles. He’d realize that his cocktail party circles are more valuable to him than his ability to edit BLPs but having no minor-celebrity friend-BLPs to edit. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:58, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
I think the only way to know is if it happens, but I feel like both you and HJ are assuming too much rationality and sanity (from everyone) than can be safely assumed. Does he even realize how the edit to Nathan Larson would be viewed as "whitewashing" and not "enforcing BLP"? I feel like if he did, he wouldn't have made that edit. Then again, self-interest can make everyone see clarity, and Jimbo does subscribe to the the "rational self-interest" philosophy.Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:39, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
That. Never underestimate how worked up Wikipedians can get about even the most trivial things; if someone did try to impose sanctions on Jimmy and he contested them—or just announced he was going to ignore them—it would more than likely lead to a full scale crisis. Within his next half-dozen mainspace edits he'll almost certainly breach the discretionary sanctions of which he's now been notified. The pool of admins who relish being pilloried in the media as Wikipedia's regicide is limited at best, and even if he is blocked the chances of him just unblocking himself—or of one of his sycophants unblocking him—is very high, and that would force everyone to take sides and usher in a week of chaos and wheel-warring between royalists and republicans. ‑ Iridescent 2 16:28, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
That outcome could be seen as somewhat ironic, given the latest issue (Dice) is arguably about someone who is a "disruptor". - Sitush (talk) 16:42, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Fwiw, I can think of a certain German admin who would have no problem applying escalating AE blocks for every mention of a BLP on his talk page if there was a TBAN... TonyBallioni (talk) 17:41, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Ha, I had the exact same thought re enforcement - I was thinking, if there is a TBAN, who exactly would be willing to enforce it and block Jimbo .. ah. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:57, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Really shows that he thinks "ordinary editing" is puffing up biographies based on twitter requests. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:49, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
Just gonna put Jimmy's full contribution history here, and see if anyone else can spot the "power-dressing uptight young women who are attractive if you like that kind of thing in a Lydia from Breaking Bad kind of way", "washed up minor celebrities, particularly those with some kind of connection to the moral cesspit that is Tony Blair" and "settling decade-old scores" triple themes. (Since it's well-established that deliberately editing articles likely to be of interest to other editors in an effort to unsettle them and to send the message that they're being watched constitutes blockable harassment, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a plausible good-faith explanation for Jimmy's apparent interest in the ultra-obscure local Utah radio station KOHS.) ‑ Iridescent 2 20:27, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
Wow, I must add your talk page to my watchlist, I never realised it was so interesting. Funny but true story about Ayn Rand. In what feels like a previous lifetime I was an undergraduate at Yale. This was probably my 2nd year so I was 18. I was in an odd freshman/sophomore stream based around integrating courses and my philosophy course had invited Rand to lecture in a large lecture hall. I was sitting beside our the tutor for our tutorial group, a grad student. I was bored out of my mind and took what might have been a leaflet about the talk, made a paper airplane and tossed it. My tutor just grinned at me. Anyone who takes Rand seriously is not to be trusted. Doug Wellertalk 13:58, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
I recall reading Atlas Shrugged, which was a fairly hellish experience but it's always beneficial to read widely as well as deeply. On completion, it was less of a shrug then a shaking of the head from me. She's very influential among whacko libertarian circles, though - past long-running edit wars here on subjects such as the Mises Institute have often had her at their heart. I've always struggled to see what the attraction is, but perhaps that is because I am one of those people who would probably not even exist if its ruled the world (it's not a philosophy that is particularly helpful to disabled people - nightmarish, in fact). - Sitush (talk) 14:42, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Something that sometimes gets lost in general coverage of Wikipedia, which tends to treat Wikimedia in general and en-wiki in particular as some kind of well-intentioned giant hippie commune, is just how loopy its founders were. Nupedia (and consequently Wikipedia) were created not as some kind of idealism about shared knowledge but as an attempt to boost traffic to Jimmy's low-quality porn site. (ThisiswhatBomislookedlike, for anyone who's not aware, and if you think I'm cherry-picking here's their front page on the day Wikipedia was launched to the public.) The "all work together for the common good" ethos ultimately came not from some kind of "from each according to his ability" idealism, but squarely from Jimmy's "the gubmint's a comin' to tek mah guns" Randroid/ultralibertarian dingbattery—his earliest edits are eye-opening.
Incidentally this page on Nostalgiawiki, written before Jimmy and his supporters started to rewrite history, is well worth a read. ‑ Iridescent 2 16:20, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Wow:
...it would be astounding to discover that NRA members murder people with guns more often than non-NRA members. The demographics of murders (the vast majority of which have prior criminal records) and NRA members are wildly different. The vast majority of serious criminological research supports exactly the opposite conclusion from your other hypothesis, too: having guns easily available in a community has no correlation with crime in that community, and in fact, laws which have liberalized concealed carry have been shown to significantly reduce crime...One big difference between pro-gun people and anti-gun people is that pro-gun people tend to be much more involved with the issue, and to therefore have all the facts and figures at their quick disposal.
I'll see you that, and raise you this, which manages to combine spamming his own website, questionable notability (her notability derives from a 2002 appearance on Howard Stern, which at the time was yet to happen) and an unsourced BLP. ‑ Iridescent 2 16:58, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
Hands up everyone who has been banned from Jimbos talk page? Oh just me then.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:00, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
#MeToo. His command of the English language wasn't good enough to appreciate that saying someone is hysterical is not necessarily a gendered attack. But it was going to happen sooner or later anyway because I'm from Manchester and therefore must be bad. - Sitush (talk) 20:11, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
I have a lot to answer for in turning Manchester into some kind of den of the iniquitous, but I'll answer to a higher authority than Jimbo, that's for sure. Someone like the guy who empties my bins for instance. EricCorbett 19:52, 9 February 2019 (UTC)
"Toxic personality" is a phrase I've only ever seen on Wikipedia. Strange how someone who doesn't know the first thing about me feels confident about analysing my personality and encouraging others to share in his analysis. EricCorbett 00:58, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
Jimmy can't really be blamed for that one; "toxic personalities" (and their spin-off, toxic workplaces) are staples of the American "anything bad that happens is someone else's fault, anything good that happens is because I deserve it" movement. Remember, among the California techies and English minor-public-school types who constitute Jimmy's social circle, all that New Age crap isn't as discredited as it is among the rest of us. ‑ Iridescent 09:28, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
I've definitively seen "toxic personality" on 2010 TV Tropes, so yeah.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:19, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
Leviv and Iri... those diffs do not inspire much confidence... ceranthor 14:08, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
In slight defense of the man, those diffs date from the time when Wikipedia was basically a glorified chat-room, and before it started appearing at the top of search results (and consequently, what was and wasn't appropriate wasn't so much of an issue); when he made his "more guns means fewer shootings" and "visit my porn site!" comments, Wikipedia had 202 registered accounts and 12,000 articles. What I certainly do feel is relevant is that his comments in the early days—before he knew people were watching him—show his true nature instead of the Saint Jimmy, Saviour of the Internet and Leader of the Civility Crusade persona he's been trying to project since c. 2005. (There were some very strange ultralibertarian cranks at the highest levels in Wikipedia's early days. I can't directly link as it would violate our policies on linking to inappropriate sites, but I can suggest you google the phrase If the child doesn’t want it, is neutral or ambiguous, it’s inappropriate.) ‑ Iridescent 12:44, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
Hey, I wrote some stupid shit 20 years ago, too. The stuff I did was even worse. Levivich 09:26, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
Well yes, almost everyone did or believed something stupid when they were young, but you and I aren't publicly describing ourselves as being the public face of freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them (direct quote), or consistently avowing that we still hold true to the nutty positions we once toyed with (as Jimmy does with Rand), and trying to present ourselves as the last line of defense in the battle for free speech whilst simultaneously being the public face of this censor-anything-that-might-trigger-anyone bunch of whackadoodles. ‑ Iridescent 22:00, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Am I the only admin who has never even set eyes on Jimbo's talk page? -Ad Orientem (talk) 01:54, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
I avoid it as much as possible... Not on my watchlist, but poke around there on occasion. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:59, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
interesting thread. Are there scripts to parse and compile lists of Jimbo’s or other users posts by category? Edaham (talk) 05:30, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
I don't know how one would even start going about that, since individual threads don't have any kind of metadata attached that would allow a bot to sort by categories. This bot will generate an index for talk page archives, but that's not very useful as the thread titles are rarely informative. If you genuinely have a "I wish I could find out every time cheese has been discussed on Jimmy's talk" query, your best bet is a straightforward prefix/keyword search (or just enter your search term in the "search talk archives" button in the archive-index box at the top of talk pages, which will construct the search query for you). Searching an editor's contribution history for mentions of a particular topic wherever that mention may be—as opposed to searching their talk page—is theoretically possible but would overwhelm the servers and probably get your IP banned by the Foundation as an emergency measure; if you wanted to do this routinely you'd need to query a database dump rather than the live wiki. (You can obviously do a keyword search for every time topic and username appear on the same page, but that will throw up a lot of false positives.)
I wouldn't bother looking at Jimmy's talk page expecting anything enlightening. It serves primarily as flypaper to trap problem users—one of the side-effects of Jimmy's "I invented Wikipedia!" lies is that those who are unfamiliar with Wikipedia take him seriously, and consequently hang around at his talkpage delighted to be conversing with such a genius, while those who are actually familiar with Jimmy tend to see him at best as Wikipedia's creepy drunken uncle at the christmas party who only escapes being thrown out into the cold through a sense of family obligation. (It's been said many times before but it's worth repeating; if any other editor were to display the levels of incompetence and arrogance as Jimmy, they'd have long since been banned as a textbook WP:NOTHERE case.) ‑ Iridescent 10:11, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
I was thinking about article space eg: all posts BY USER / in MAIN SPACE / CONTAINING category:BLP for example
also when you write the word lies you can link it to this essay. I actually didn’t know that there was a code conduct, which covers general lying, but it’s my habit to select keywords from posts and prefix them with wp: just to see if there’s something written on it (there usually is) Edaham (talk) 13:20, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
That would definitely crash the servers, and wouldn't be allowed on the live wiki; as a concrete example I have 219,070 non-deleted mainspace edits, and I'm by no means among Wikipedia's most active editors. If you wanted to do such a thing you'd need to download the all-revisions database dump and work from that, but be aware that it takes up around 40 terabytes of disk space and you're looking at days, or even weeks, just to download the file. ‑ Iridescent 13:33, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Why would I want to link to an ancient personal essay? Don't treat the WP: prefix as some kind of totem; unless it has a "policy" or "guideline" box at the top, the stuff you find there has no more authority than any given editor's userpage. ‑ Iridescent 13:35, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
The whole policy-v-guideline-v-essay thing is super confusing. If you go to WP:V (a major policy), click on "policy" (WP:PG) and the second heading on that page is "Role", and the {main} hatnote there points to Wikipedia:The difference between policies, guidelines and essays (an "explanatory supplement" which, as a {main} spin-off from a policy, falsely suggests it is, itself, a policy), which says: "Misconception #7: Policy pages outrank guidelines, which in turn outrank essays. This is actually true in some cases, but not always." It strikes me that that's true, because some essays are followed as if they were commandments (WP:DUCK, WP:DENY, and frankly many others). But how can it be after 18 years there still isn't clarity on whether a policy trumps an essay or not? Levivich 16:24, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Why wouldn't an explanatory supplement to a policy page also be policy? I note you reference DENY and DUCK...of recent interest, perhaps?! :p :D ——SerialNumber54129 16:32, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Why wouldn't the explanatory supplement WP:PGE be considered a policy? Because at the top it says: This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. WP:PGE basically says the opposite of what WP:PG says. And you're right, SN, my little adventure is where I learned that the essay WP:DUCK trumps the policies WP:AGF and WP:NPA (and also that the fourth pillar is a joke). Levivich 16:45, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
LOL. I've wondered how many times I've been CU checked (daily?). It's also occurred to me that all I'd have to do is imitate somebody's edits for a while and I'd probably get myself and the editor I was imitating blocked. "Suicide sock bombing"?. Better be careful ;-) Levivich 17:13, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
@Levivich: you've only been CU checked twice, and as they were within 3 minutes of each other I'd call that once. Doug Wellertalk 14:43, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Never edit another editor's post as you did, even to correct a spelling. ——SerialNumber54129 11:06, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
So don't do this? (My poor thin space!) Levivich 14:19, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Ah, that edit-conflict. Yes, clearly that happens. ——SerialNumber54129 14:30, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
That tool exists. See Jimmy's edits to BLPs. A link to someone's BLP edits is actually included in every PERM request (and RfA). (there's also a second tool specifically for BLPs that allows ignoring semi-automated edits). Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:03, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
I thought it might! Many thanks. Re the essay link, I thought the irony was obvious Edaham (talk) 15:36, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
I've actually been very (veeeeeeeery) slowly working on an offline took that would allow searching of the text of a user's contributions. I figured I could make it an online tool when I'm done. Sorting edits by categories (including arbitrary defined-at-runtime categories) was one of the intended uses. But to be honest; I'm kinda lazy when it comes to this stuff, and forgetful to boot. So if anyone here really wants that tool, all you gotta do is ride my ass about it for a couple weeks. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPantsTell me all about it. 15:52, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
That's checking categories, which isn't the same thing—and even that tool becomes very unhappy when you try to run it on an editor who's more active than Jimmy. If one were to try to adapt it to 'show me every time I have made an edit that introduced the term "steam locomotive"' or 'show me every time TonyBallioni has removed the birth_date= parameter from an infobox', the server kittens would cry. ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
The answer to that last question being “zero, because TonyBallioni is confused by infobox parameters.” No need for server kitties to cry for that one. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:20, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
I tuned out from anything Jimbo said a long time ago, but I have seriously stuck him on mute since he said something really unpleasant to Cullen328 that was completely unwarranted, and which would have resulted in a bollocking if had been pretty much any other user. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 17:22, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Ritchie333 me too. I still remember the debacle with Meghan Markles article. When she was getting married, we were having a discussion on what the article should now be called - it hadn't been agreed by her wedding day. So discussion still ongoing, I don't think she'd closed her mouth from saying "I do" and he moves the article! It was move protected so only admins could do it. So the rest of us mere admins were waiting for the outcome of this discussion before doing anything and he completely ignored that. If anyone else had done that they'd probably have been desysopped. 5 albert square (talk) 22:43, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
I am replying here because I was mentioned above. I have commented from time to time on Jimbo's talk page over the years but I certainly don't think that I have a record of disruptive behavior there. For years, I always assumed the best of Jimbo and did not like the obsessives who harassed him. I still don't. I did get upset about how Jimbo and the WMF board treated James Heilman in 2015 and shortly thereafter, I wrote a critical essay about the ill-fated appointment of Arnnon Geshuri to the WMF board, which seems to have had some effect. So, when I summarized User:Michael Hardy's behavior succinctly as "pursuing a crank agenda", Jimbo blew his stack and tried to ban me from his talk page. Of course, untold thousands of words were expended analyzing Hardy's behavior in the weeks that followed, he was indefinitely blocked for it, and a very lengthy debate and negotiation took place before he was finally unblocked. Now, I am not a mind-reader but it seems to me that his explosive reaction to my four word assessment of Hardy's behavior was at least partially because of my criticisms of WMF screw-ups back in 2015. Also because Hardy has been an administrator since 2002 when this project was Jimbo's little club. To Jimbo's credit, he relented a while later and left a nice message for me, and did not object when I indefinitely blocked his neo-Confederate pal, User: Wikid77. So, I hold no grudge against Jimbo, but on the other hand, I do not think he should be editing BLPs based on social connections or social media lobbying. His input regarding Mark Dice has been highly counterproductive, and his dismissive tone toward TonyBallioni is really out of line. If I was running things, Jimbo would lose his WMF board seat for life, and would have to run for re-election like everyone else, and should have to undergo a reconfirmation RFA. But that's just me. Cullen328Let's discuss it 07:57, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
@Cullen: I was not blocked because words were expended on analyzing me, nor for pursuing a crank agenda. I was blocked for declining to recant an accusation bullying that I had made, when my decision not to recant was called "doubling down on an insult." I have more than 200,000 edits while logged in and I have created hundreds of new articles. My agenda may be judged accordingly. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:38, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Yes, I did. There are issues with subtitling such programmes but, assuming they got it right, he seemed to be suggesting that HS2 should stop at Aylesbury. Someone pointed out that if HS2 stopped at various intermediate points then it would defeat the "high speed" aspect of it. He then said, well, have a few of them stop then. D'uh: if a few stop then either the gap between trains has to be massive or the slower ones will impede the faster ones. Of course, back in the day lines were doubled-up for fast and slow trains, and passing points were provided, but I really don't think he had a clue, bearing in mind that the entire question was revolving around cost/benefit. - Sitush (talk) 11:21, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
That's not a totally crazy idea; it's not uncommon for a high-speed rail line to have intermediate stops served by skip-stop operation, with a bypassing track through the middle to prevent stopped trains obstructing the route. (Peterborough and Grantham on the East Coast Main Line, Ebbsfleet, Ashford and Calais-Fréthun on HS1, Rugby and Nuneaton on the West Coast Main Line…) There's no technical—as opposed to financial—reason why Aylesbury couldn't have the same sort of status as Retford, with the occasional high speed train stopping there to provide onward connections and a service to locals but most trains passing straight through. One could certainly make the argument that since the project is publicly funded, as many of the public as possible should be served by it—for most of the route, the public benefit to those not directly served by it comes from HS2 taking traffic away from local road and rail services and consequently freeing up capacity, but because Aylesbury isn't on any existing north-south route they won't feel the same benefit. However, given that this is Jimmy we're talking about I'm sure it's not based on considerations of the economics of transit service patterns, but on trying to pander to the audience. ‑ Iridescent 13:53, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, I was aware of that but he wasn't saying it. He did say that he had googled Aylesbury and HS2 beforehand (which constituted his "research") but seemed completely to miss the major arguments being put forward by other panellists and the audience (effects of NIMBYism, cost, whether the funding should have been diverted to other projects around the country, and environment). I got the impression throughout the programme that he was out of his depth. The comedian seemed to know more, and say things better, than he did - and it is the comedians who are usually the "lightweight" extra on QT panels. It's not about whether I agree or disagree with a panellist, just whether they can make a coherent and rational point. On the other hand, Jimbo was kind, so that's alright then. - Sitush (talk) 14:02, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Two things stick in my craw about this. Firstly, Jimmy Wales being described again as the "founder" of Wikipedia (Larry who?) Actually, I've got no idea if Larry could talk a better argument on QT than Jimbo, but it would be interesting to give it a go. Secondly, Jimbo banging on about "oh I should be treated like any normal editor" on the Mark Dice brouhaha - normal editors don't get invited on the panel of QT do they? So he shouldn't be going anywhere near BLPs as he has a massive conflict of interest simply because he can say "jump" and all the yes-men editors say "how high?" He's wrong about support for Brexit evaporating, perhaps where he lives in London and the social circles he moves in, it is, but there are plenty of people now saying "I voted remain but I'm now voting leave because the government needs to get on with it!" Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 12:03, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, I noticed the founder thing and he didn't even have the good grace to correct it. As for the Brexit issue, well, I think the London areas generally were against it from the outset, with perhaps a few exceptions. Certainly the likes of Bliar, with whom he has been a mate, would be opposed to it if only because a UK out of the EU = less people listening to him there = less spondoolies to feather his already overstuffed nest. And I really can't see Jimmy travelling anywhere north of, say, Ealing, for more than an hour or two to test the waters. Didn't he allegedly buy some dystopian photograph of Manchester a couple of years ago? - Sitush (talk) 13:29, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
It was a 21C photo, IIRC. Slightly worse than the one on Commons showing ne'er-do-wells at a Wikimeet there. - Sitush (talk) 14:05, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
Maybe (with the right infrastructure investment), we could get him as far as Aylesbury? I'd agree that his QT performance wasn't the best but, just like last time, he seemed to be at the bottom of the pecking order hoping that Fiona "Abbott-basher" Bruce would throw him a few crumbs. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:03, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
Well, yeah, he got to Aylesbury for the programme, so that's a couple of hours at least. Ration used for the year and it is only February. No wonder he looked a bit shifty and, surely, very warm wearing that pullover under the lights. I think the pecking order is always politicians 1 & 2 as hammer vs tong, politician 3/think tanker as "heavy" makeweights and then the rest as "light" makeweights. He perhaps deserves an Abbot-style pecking but, alas, didn't get one. - Sitush (talk) 14:14, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
Personally I think his blue glasses frames complimented Fiona's outfit quite nicely. But yes, I guess perhaps a "true Brit" like Geoff Norcott ("the thinking Tory's Pub Landlord") is more used to playing an audience. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:20, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure exactly what Jimbo's purpose was, it was basically a waste of a seat. One guy in the audience talked more than he did. He had the opportunity to smack down Jacob Rees-Mogg's pontificating after a woman had said that Brexit was causing her to drop business (and implied laying people off though I don't think she actually said that). Having come out as a Remainer he had nothing to lose by doing so - but he didn't. I wonder if he hopes Mogg might be able to slip him a gong by the back door if he "improves" his article? Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 20:20, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
I must admit I often find some of the audience members more lucid than the members of the panel. As for his hopes of getting a gong, I guess Jimbo might have been better sticking to just "yes" and "no" answers? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:28, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
True, Martin. Ritchie, I think JW and JRM are quite similar, despite the Brexit differences. They're both fundamentally libertarian in outlook, or at least that's how I read it. As for the comedian, I'd never heard of him before and the bio article here is very thin. - Sitush (talk) 20:50, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
(Belatedly) Anecdotally, I agree that he's wrong about support for Brexit evaporating, and I'd be willing to stick my neck out and say that if there were a second referendum Leave would win with an increased majority. For every one of Jimmy's circle worried that it will adversely affect their share portfolios, ability to take skiing holidays without buying visas, and the prospects for little Barnaby and Jemima to take their PPE courses at the Sorbonne, there are two more who grudgingly voted Remain because they believed the apocalyptic scaremongering but are now disgusted with the EU's and the Blair/Cameron axis's "you're wayward children who must be punished" stance. ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
There are pluses and minuses with respect to skiing holidays. I've not been skiing in Switzerland for a while, but last time I went you could take duty frees, as it's obviously not in the EU. And there was no visa requirement that I recall. I don't think I agree with your assessment of the likely outcome of a second referendum; I think it would still be tight, but with the percentages reversed in favour of remain. But clearly the powers that be have decided that we're going to leave, by hook or by crook, so that's that. EricCorbett 20:50, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Brits have never needed visas for Switzerland, nor the Western EU countries, nor Ireland. The old Warsaw Pact was of course different, though eg for Bulgaria you could buy a 3-day transit visa on the border for a very modest price. Johnbod (talk) 23:32, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Duty free in Enniskillen? Wow, and then if Scotland leaves the UK and joins the EU...think of all the duty free stores in Gretna and Berwick etc. Cas Liber (talk·contribs) 02:10, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
If you'll forgive the pedantry, duty-free shops at the border is a uniquely American phenomenon; the way tax free shopping works in Europe (outside of airports) is the more prosaic "keep the receipts for what you spend and claim the tax back when you leave". Assuming customs checks and tariffs make a return, the shops along the Irish border and in Calais and Dover will be devastated, as there will be no more "buy it on one side of the border at the lower rate and bring back as much as you can cram into the back of your car without having to pay any import duties, provided you claim it's for personal use" in either direction. ‑ Iridescent 09:27, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Australian airports are choc-full of duty free. There already is a big shop near Jedburgh that has all the woollen jumpers, so I reckon it'll be a fertile market..... Cas Liber (talk·contribs) 10:37, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Chock-full of duty-free chocolate? - Sitush (talk) 10:57, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Brexit polling over last few years (well, one sort of polling at least), is here. That corroborates Eric's prediction. Difficult to judge. I support another referendum, to the extent of having been on the People's Vote march on 20 October 2018 and planning to go on the one being held on 23 March 2019 - maybe Jimmy would join in with that? :-) The experience of being in a crowd of people like that, all passionate about the issues, was quite something. Though I do get that another referendum might just make things even more divided and even worse. The drama of the politics is fascinating to watch unfold, partly because it is so unpredictable. I don't think the economic predictions are turning out to be scaremongering. The predictions of those who campaigned for Remain are turning out to be more reliable than the predictions of those who campaigned to Leave (though staying in the news bubble of BBC News and the Evening Standard and Metro, with a sprinkling of City A.M., may skew the perspective somewhat). The difficult question is how much of this is due to general global economics, and how much due to a specific Brexit effect. Best not to even bring up the whole Irish border thing, but couldn't any fool have seen a mile off that it would be central to the whole negotiation? Let's set up a carefully negotiated border situation between two members of the EU and then raise the prospect of one of those members leaving the EU, and see how that pans out... Genius. Carcharoth (talk) 10:52, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
As someone who has the luxury off being able to get out when the shit hits the fan, my anecdotal feeling is that former remainers who are now leavers strongly outnumber leavers who have switched to remain. With the Conservatives dedicated to leaving and Saint Jez having enough true believers trusting his view that a failed Brexit will lay the groundwork for the Great Uprising and the subsequent worker's paradise, the point is moot as it's going to happen regardless. 94.117.103.0 (talk) 14:16, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I was on two People's Vote marches last year, and I'll probably be on the 23 March one too. I'm not totally comfortable about a second referendum simply because if the result comes back as "leave", that really is it, and it also gives the hardcore Brexiteers an opportunity to rub everyone's face in it. However, turning up and doing something is better than sitting at home doing nothing. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 10:57, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Again with my "outsider on the inside" hat on, as someone watching it happen but with the luxury of having both the passport and the skills to get out of the kitchen if the heat becomes unbearable, there are only four courses of action that can realistically still happen: (1) enough one-nation Tories and New Labour leave their respective parties to unite with the nats to delay Article 50 (possible) and then win the subsequent election and cancel Brexit altogether (very unlikely), (2) Brexit goes ahead, the Union collapses, Scotland, NI and possibly Wales rejoin the EU, and England descends into open chaos as individual regions start toying with UDI (unlikely), (3) Either May or Juncker blinks, a free-trade deal is signed, and both sides spend the next 50 years arguing about whether the relationship should be closer or more separated (likely) or (4) No-deal goes ahead and Britain shortly afterwards joins the CPTPP (very likely, as it would provide the benefits of international trade without all that pesky free movement, and the presence of Canada and Australia would reassure the Moggies that it isn't all some plot of Johnny Foreigner). ‑ Iridescent 21:50, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Wiring
Since most here have probably not seen it .... I'm rather enjoying this discussion. Johnbod (talk) 22:39, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Argh, that's RTG. By their standards, it is actually reasonably coherent. - Sitush (talk) 22:47, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
↑What he said. RTG appears to have selflessly stepped in to take up the role of "crank who hangs round high-traffic pages spouting incoherent verbiage"[6][7][8] following Wikid77's defenestration, and can be safely ignored; I've not sure I've ever seen him make a coherent comment on any topic. In my experience it's generally best not to reply to these people no matter how much nonsense they're spouting, provided they're not actually disrupting articles or sensitive talk pages, as thinking they have an audience just encourages them. ‑ Iridescent 23:25, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Religion_in_biographical_infoboxes
The RfC decided to remove it from Template:Infobox person - why only that template and not all the others that are used in BLP articles? Doug Wellertalk 14:26, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
My reading of the consensus at the RFC (courtesy link for TPWs) was that while there was a clear consensus to deprecate the religion= parameter from the main {{infobox person}}, the close was explicitly only applicable to {{infobox person}}, as the RFC was framed only in terms of that one box. (The exact wording of the question asked was Should we remove from {{Infobox person}} the |religion= parameter (and the associated |denomination= one)?.)
I didn't see any consensus there for deprecating the parameter across the board in all biographical infoboxes, and IMO such a decision would require a fresh RFC; had it been an RFC about removing the parameter from all infoboxes, including such cases as {{infobox clergy}}, the result would likely have been different. ‑ Iridescent 15:05, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
As for {{Infobox Christian leader}}, If it wasn't in the infobox, readers would truly have to ask "Is the Pope a Catholic" :) ——SerialNumber54129 15:13, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Well, Pope would still start The pope, also known as the supreme pontiff, is the Bishop of Rome and ex officio leader of the worldwide Catholic Church. The underlying issue to all these infobox conflicts is ultimately "does the need to formally categorize in as many ways as possible for the benefit of Wikidata and commercial data mining operations outweigh disruption caused to 'old-school' non-machine readers and editors of Wikipedia by including fields that have the potential to be contentious and have no obvious benefit to readers?". As there's a small but extremely vocal minority whose livelihoods depend on data-mining Wikipedia—and a larger but still small and even more vocal minority who are heavily invested in Wikidata and see Wikipedia primarily as a support mechanism for funnelling data into it—infobox discussions tend to get very noisy very quickly. ‑ Iridescent 15:30, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Indeed, though often the "potential to be contentious" in boxes arises only when complex matters are summarized into a word or two and shoved in as a key fact.
Thanks. That makes sense and I guess explains why at least some of the templates that are shown as a subset also lack the parameter. Of course I still think it shouldn't be in templates for atheletes, academics, and so forth, but that's for a future RfC. Doug Wellertalk 17:24, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Advice on activity levels
Having read through this resysop request and vaguely looking through Wikipedia:Administrators/2019 request for comment on inactivity standards (bit long to look through fully right now), could I ask for some advice on the best approach to take with regards to (in)activity levels? I've never been the most active user of the admin tools (this is somewhat of an understatement), but have always managed to avoid going completely inactive as an editor. I may over the next few years (if certain plans come to fruition) be even less active as an editor, and am unlikely to become more active as an administrator. The question I have is whether it would be better to give up the tools voluntarily, and then see how things are later, or to keep the tools and to keep checking periodically to see what has changed with regards to what the minimum activity levels are? My reading of the current policy is that giving up the tools voluntarily before going on a long break might make it harder to request a resysop later (depending on the period of time away), but I might have that wrong. (Specifically, I can't work out whether the policy wording for the 5-year clause and the discussion linked in the citation here is saying that someone who requests voluntary removal and has had no logged admin actions for five years at that point, is also immediately giving up the right to subsequently request restoration of the bit, and has to go back to RfA.) It might need someone to work out what logged admin actions I've taken and how long the period has been between them. I did note with some amusement your comment about CU and OS rights. It is not terribly important to get this right, but I wouldn't want to become a test or edge case - am trying to work out the simplest way to (if needed) go more inactive and then become more active later (including with the admin tools) without stirring up too much debate. Carcharoth (talk) 13:03, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
You're an atypical case as a former arb, as you'll attract the hardline loonies trying to make a name for themselves. The easiest thing to do is periodically create a page in your user space and promptly delete it; that way you're meeting the minimum standards for both edits and admin actions. Our fine crats have already established that this kind of gaming is both acceptable and encouraged. 94.118.2.143 (talk) 13:33, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Hello Carcharoth. Why not close some WP:RM/TR requests or handle some expired WP:PRODs and do this at least a few times every year. Neither of these activities are controversial. This would save you from having an empty admin log in any particular year. EdJohnston (talk) 04:07, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Admin swarming
Thanks for that comment at BN. I wonder if you will be accused of being a conspiracy theorist now. - Sitush (talk) 20:52, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) ::There's at least two whose most recent 50 edits go back to last October, and one whose go back to August 2016. I think the word might be chutzpah...?And as for we shouldn't be evaluating quantity or quality of edits...! ——SerialNumber54129 21:06, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Three or four times already in the last few months I see admins whom I've never seen before, to discover that they've been made admin in 2006 or whatever. I am glad for their help, of course, but I do find it odd. Drmies (talk) 23:28, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
What I'm noticing increasingly since I came back isn't the visible rise in people I've never seen around but who nonetheless still have admin status—that isn't really surprising, as it's now a decade since the 2005–09 admin spike so there will be more people who've had time to go through the "too busy, now I have time again" cycle—but an extremely visible rise in admins who have absolutely no recent history in actually contributing to Wikipedia in any useful way (either in terms of writing or in meta-areas like dispute resolution) but who still pull the "I am an admin and am consequently Very Important and you must obey my authority" routine. At least the abusive admins in the old days may have been abusive, but they'd at least have put in sufficient efforts that you could understand why they felt invested and sometimes got overly defensive. Some of the legacy admins nowadays seem to see themselves as the Wikipedia Fire Brigade, only appearing after the shit has already hit the fan but not willing to put in the requisite hours keeping the fan and the shit from ever meeting in the first place. ‑ Iridescent 23:39, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Sid Vicious was hit by a beer bottle thrown from the crowd at a gig. The news headline was When the fan hit the shit. - Sitush (talk) 23:59, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Meh, I’m an oppose there, but it’s not because I fear going inactive any time soon, but because I’m of the view that raising the edit requirements while not having a logged action requirement is somewhat pointless, especially if restoration is still allowed. Put up a proposal where less than 10 actions in the last 3 years or something like that means you have to go through RfA again, I’d support a 10 edit threshold in a heartbeat. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:04, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Short of actively canvassing for the discussion amongst non-admins, any RFC to limit or remove admin tools is doomed to fail due to admin activity levels and the inherant conflict in their resistance to having their tools removed for any reason. Start an RFC where any admin who hasnt made 10 admin actions in the last 12 months is barred from *participating* and you might have a chance. Not a big one mind. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:53, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Assuming that such a RFC won't be dismissed as manipulated already out of the gate. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:55, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Meh. I've never really had a problem with making the admin permission retention guidelines stronger to some reasonable extent - although I suppose the discussion would revolve around what "reasonable" is. But I entirely get where Iri is coming from on the "people who descend from the great beyond" notion. And I really have problems with anyone claiming that any of this has to do with the security of admin accounts, because it doesn't. I'd done some serious work on an RFC that would have focused on admin account security, but it's pointless to run that when people keep focusing on how many edits someone has made. I know my focus hasn't been on content creation for a long time, but I'm still working on a lot of things that require ongoing familiarity with policies and processes, so I'm certainly not as stale as folks who've barely surpassed minimum activity for years on end. Risker (talk) 02:12, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
I am tempted to take the advice given here. Though what was said here and here really struck home with me. Carcharoth (talk) 10:52, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
@Risker As I've always said—and been sneered at by the more paranoid element who—IMO admin security is a complete red herring. Yes. there are theoretical things someone could do to badly disrupt Wikipedia with a compromised admin account, but nobody has ever actually done any of these things on any of the occasions an account has been compromised. Besides, the serious disruption is far more likely to be done by a disaffected admin as a parting shot, as they're the ones with the experience to know what actions would genuinely hit Wikipedia where it hurts rather than just causing a minor temporary nuisance. (For CU/OS, it's slightly different, as they have access to genuinely sensitive information and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone could successfully take legal action should it be demonstrable the WMF didn't take reasonable steps to keep that information secure.)
@Carcharoth, maybe it's just me but this does absolutely nothing for me. We're talking someone who's been doing the periodic-token-edit thing for eight years and whose last 500 mainspace edits go back more than twelve years, not someone who suffered a long-term illness or was posted to Iraq for thirteen months and consequently slipped over the inactivity line through no fault of their own, or someone who's active on multiple language projects and happens not to have worked in English for a while because they've been busy writing a series of French-language articles. If someone seriously can't tell the difference between "this is something that isn't explicitly forbidden" and "this is something that should be done", or can't understand why the Wikipedia community looks askance at someone whose last non-minor edit was in 2007 but nonetheless requests the right to sit in judgement on other editors and other editors' work, then that's a WP:CIR issue right there. (I am entirely unsurprised that since the resysopping, this editor who plans on participating again earnestly has made not a single edit other than to his own talk page and performed not a single admin action.) The more I think about this, the nastier the taste in my mouth it leaves. While I appreciate Dweller's argument that the crats are instruments of the community and don't have the authority to refuse to perform actions they consider distasteful—and it was me who made the argument that we can't sanction someone for acting within the rules even when they're blatantly and knowingly violating the spirit of those rules—something really needs to be done about the steadily rising number of legacy admins from the days when standards were lower, who would have their RFAs snow-closed were they to run nowadays. If that means invoking the taboo R word, so be it. It will never happen—we have 656 current legacy admins who've performed fewer than 30 edits in the past two months, and if even 5% of those emerge from their hibernation to oppose it will torpedo any RFC, as is happening with even the extremely mild proposals at Wikipedia:Administrators/2019 request for comment on inactivity standards—but that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. ‑ Iridescent 18:11, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
You make some good points. Though I agree with Tony below that the "50 edit a year crowd that comes back for 3-4 months every 2-3 years is actually pretty helpful". Carcharoth (talk) 09:32, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
I maintain that most of these discussions are seeking to fix the wrong problem. What we should be doing is expending our time and energy on making people want to stick about/return from Wikibreaks. Someone who was trusted with the tools in 2006 is a potentially valuable editor today. Let's treat each other well, encourage one another, edit collaboratively, welcome people, express regret that people need to take time off, thank them for their input, expertise, time. and efforts, even when they're wrong. People are such a precious resource. Why can't we hold onto the good ones better? --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 18:55, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
In that case, you might as well give pretty much everyone the tools who has put in 2 years and 3500 edits without being blocked. That's roughly the standard that applied to the person in question, although the RfA did have some opposers etc. Doesn't matter whether they need or use the tools, nor even if they're active, just so long as they make that pretty basic grade. - Sitush (talk) 19:00, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
I think you've missed my point, Sitush. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 21:00, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
I fear that I must have done because I don't see what possession of the admin flag has to do with editor retention. And in situations such as the one in question, it actually dismays me that they're considered suitably qualified to retain the flag itself. Is there really much gain from it when, for example, it pisses me off so much that WP could lose me instead? Perhaps I should be granted the flag before I decide to walk away? The thing isn't meant to be some sort of prize but, meanwhile, we're actually losing useful admins, such as SpacemanSpiff, at least in part because they despair of the lack of support from their colleagues. - Sitush (talk) 04:17, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I don't really buy that. RFA isn't like a driving test, where it's reasonable to assume that the basics haven't changed significantly even if one hasn't set foot in a car for ten years. The Wikipedia of today (a sprawling network of mostly occasional editors governed by a complex network of rules and precedents) doesn't really have much in common with the Wikipedia of 2006 (a loose network of people who mostly knew and trusted each other), and it's demonstrable that we have an issue with returning legacy admins (including the one in question) who don't appreciate the difference and think that "I don't care what policy says, this seems like a good idea to me" is grounds for using the admin tools. (I was only away for four years, and the difference between 2011 and 2015 shocked me.) Sure, someone who was trusted with the tools in 2006 may well be trustworthy today, but it's also possible that they're disgruntled and back to re-fight the battles that led them to leave in the first place, or even that they're a straightforward compromised or sold account. By all means we'd like to get former editors back, but why do they need the admin tools to do that? ‑ Iridescent 19:06, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
I don't think taking away the toolset encourages people to return. I don't think any returning inactive admin would do damage that's remotely significant. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 21:01, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Possibly most people currently not admins but who meet the standards judged acceptable at said person's RfA also would not do damage that is remotely significant. The difference is, those that are active and meet those legacy standards are likely more au fait with the present workings of the community than someone who has done nothing much for many years and who was last significantly active when the project was a mere slip of a thing. So, why not give them all the flag and then remove it if in fact they do something untoward, which is de facto what is going on in this case. - Sitush (talk) 04:35, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
To be clear, I would support any measure that helps looks after our good faith contributors, regardless what hats, or none that they wear. There's too much them and us about adminship. The demands of certain people are RfA are madly over the top. There's too much conspiracy talk about cabals. Too much discourtesy. Too much arguing in Project space. Not enough editing of content. Not enough discussing in Talk and User talk space. Not enough encouraging and thanking. And not enough good editors standing for RfA and that's because too many of them worry with justification that they'll be treated poorly there and/or rejected. Let's focus on the positive stuff. We haven't got enough people to spend so much energy on reducing the pool further. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 21:06, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Regarding the "RFA is hell" meme, I'll repeat what I always say when someone raises it and ask you to provide some examples of deserving candidates failing at RFA in the last five years. The whole idea that RFA is some kind of hazing ritual seems to me to be a fiction cooked up by a couple of former writers at the Signpost, and I've yet to see any solid evidence to back it up; if you actually look at the RFAs the candidates in the last few years tend to sail through with levels of support that would have been considered astonishing back in our day, and all the opposition—even on RFAs from obvious no-hopers—tends to be thoughtful and based on legitimate concerns. (Yes, there are people who oppose based on unrealistic standards, but even they they'll usually explain why they hold that view when pressed.) Remember, when we passed RFA Wikipedia was a relatively obscure hobbyist site that was gradually becoming better known but which few people took seriously—it was only a couple of years since this was classed as "exemplifying Wikipedia's very best work"—but it's now one of the world's most significant information resources; it's quite understandable that some people feel the standards should be higher nowadays. ‑ Iridescent 21:28, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Regarding I'll repeat what I always say when someone raises it and ask you to provide some examples of deserving candidates failing at RFA in the last five years. "hazing" and "successful" do not exclude each other at all. So perhaps there is a false contradiction going on here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:45, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
OK, let me rephrase it: "give me an example from the last five years of an RFA with significant (say, at least five votes) unjustifiable opposition". ‑ Iridescent 21:52, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Speaking personally, Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Yash!. In general, though, I think RfA gets the right result; it's more the perception that things could go to hell in a handcart that puts people off. I've also said (to little response) on the RfC that this is why there is so much hand-wringing over what counts as "inactive"; if RfA wasn't seen as a big deal, people wouldn't bother arguing the toss over edit counts and logged actions, they'd just go there. I don't think I'd pass RfA if I ran today; I have disagreed with too many admins (and hangers on like Nihlus) who would all crawl out of the woodwork to oppose. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 14:24, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
There was certainly one unjustifiable oppose in Yash!'s RfA; but I think the concerns expressed as to the—curious?—x-account communication, and all that that entailed, were pretty legitimate. It was just odd. ——SerialNumber54129 14:42, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Others may disagree, but I think opposing for something the candidate did nearly 5 years before the RfA is taking the piss. I note that the editor who led the opposition, Soham321, was indefinitely blocked soon afterwards. I also thought a significant amount of opposition at GoldenRing and Galobtter's RfAs was off base, as did numerous other people; however the RfAs passed so that's not a valid argument here. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 14:52, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
I don't think I'd pass RfA A non-binding reconfirmation RfA would tell you; although admittedly, if you said before hand it was non-binding that would probably skew the result, and if you said it was, then... ;) ——SerialNumber54129 15:04, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Most of the opposition at both of those looks legitimate to me. "Legitimate opposition" doesn't mean "opposition I agree with" but "opposition where I can see their point", and they were (almost) all raising legitimate concerns and explaining their position when challenged. Ultimately, most of the opposition in both of those cases was variations on "not enough skin in the game", and that's an entirely legitimate concern—indeed, I'm the one originally responsible for the I don't think a candidate needs to have "audited content" provided they've done demonstrably useful collaborative content work, but you don't seem to me to have demonstrated a reasonable amount of content contribution. I don't think editors who haven't had the experience of putting large amounts of work into an article, and/or defending their work against well-intentioned but wrong "improvements" or especially AFD, are in a position to empathise with quite why editors get so angry when their work's deleted and/or The Wrong Version gets protected, and I don't support users who don't add content to the mainspace being given powers to overrule those who do boilerplate oppose at RFA back in the days when RFAs were commonplace enough that it was time-consuming to write a fresh rationale each time. ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Let me put this one and this one in here. Both made me sad, although I hadn't made up my mind how to !vote at the former, or was away, or something. Yngvadottir (talk) 22:10, 26 February 2019 (UTC)s
@Yngvadottir, as per my somewhat hesitant support on it I'd consider Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Montanabw pretty much a perfect case study of what I mean when I differentiate "opposition" and "unjustified opposition". MBW is a fine editor, but she's also had a long history of running point for some of Wikipedia's most disruptive assholes (she was the fifth name—or the third if you don't count socks—to openly declare herself as part of the infobox-pushing tag team, for instance), and I certainly wouldn't consider it unreasonable that some participants in the RFA took the position that if you run with the wolves, you get treated like a wolf. Regarding Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Thomas.W I'm totally unfamiliar with the editor in question, but all the opposition looks based on legitimate concerns rather than the "every minor mistake from five years ago" that the RFA-is-hell advocates claim. ‑ Iridescent 18:32, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
OK, thanks for the sanity check. Looking at that list of names, and their comments on signing up, I'm thinking many if not most didn't realize it was supposed to be about infoboxes rather than what it said on the tin. I've avoided looking at the list for that reason. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:38, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Oh I know, along with some genuinely wonderful editors and people, like Crisco1492, Giano, Sharktopus, Hafspajen, Floquenbeam ... not all infobox-pushers by any means. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:11, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Funnily enough, I was musing on the number of blocked editors on that list; your pretty much be a subpage of WP:LTA was very apt. ——SerialNumber54129 19:41, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
WP:QAI's attitude is rather like that of al-Quaeda c. 2005 or the present-day supporters of Corbyn or Trump. In their eyes, since the purpose of The System is to suppress The People, anyone who gets themselves in trouble is by definition an opponent of The System and consequently a supporter of the cause. That the blocked users listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Quality Article Improvement/missed users aren't, by-and-large, your common or garden blocked users but the inner core of genuine crazies (e.g. this guy, who's duly listed as one of those whose return would be a reason for joy and hope) doesn't even matter; if Wikipedia has banned them, then by definition they're martyrs. ‑ Iridescent 20:15, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
As an aside, my Facebook feed at the moment is showing an interesting contrast between people who are generally centre-left leaning like me, who think Brexit is a utter financial disaster and want to do whatever is practical to avert it, and Corbyn fruitcakes who are now showing their true colours. Fortunately, the former group drown out the latter. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 10:58, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
You obviously have a better class of hardline lefties than do I. My Facebook feed in the past week has been a torrent of variations on "for the many not the Jew" (given that they think Luciana Berger is an evil baby-killing reptilian, they seem awfully keen on fantasizing about raping her) and gloating that now the effete centrists have left the party it leaves the way open for a Great Purge of all those pesky wogs brought in by the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy during "the wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions". I think the last time I unfriended so many people in such a short time was the 2011 riots. ‑ Iridescent 16:37, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
This a fun thread, Iri, and the QAI baloney led me to this little gem. The Montanabw RFA restored faith in humanity-- it wasn't even necessary for me to weigh in about the swarming tribalism (also in evidence in the diff I give). Sheesh, that crowd could lob all the grenades they wanted at me, even though I was practically their full-time employee, promoting <stuff> to FA. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:05, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Whatever that page name is, it should be a redirect from WP:EditorsWhoAreAmongUsButWeWhoPostHereDontEvenKnowIt! A few Mattisse socks ago, she was part of a discussion discussing if another sock was her! And admins were opining while I was cracking up that she was right there under their noses ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:39, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Yeah. I am on the list of missing/returned but have no idea why and am generally not a fan of infoboxes. It is a confusing mess of often meaningless notes that seems to have hints of WP:WER and WP:Missing Wikipedians and to serve no purpose. But presumably is intended to legitimise something or another. Is there any reason why I should not remove my name? - Sitush (talk) 04:51, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
If you look at the early incarnations, it was created at User:Ched Davis/missed users following Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2012 April 1#Category:Wikipedians who wish Bish and Giano would come back (in which it was suggested that it was more appropriate that users write such lists in their userspace), which was entirely reasonable; Ched was completely within his rights to say that he personally missed someone even if the person in question was a full-on whackadoodle like Mattisse or Betacommand. The page was then hijacked by the Mabbettistas and moved out of Ched's userspace and into a subpage of their project, and expanded into the current shrine to the former socks of the QAI clique's members. I removed my name from it and the world didn't come to an end. ‑ Iridescent 08:52, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for the history and link. That page is a good example of the saying "Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt". Not all missing are missing! Yes, Sitush, get your name outta there (with respect to the half a dozen good editors who are mentioned on that page, and really are gone). Now if someone could tell me how to stop stupid recognition and awards from being posted on my talk page from adherents of the sockmaster fan club. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:33, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Meh—it was a long time ago and while I still have zero AGF for some of those involved like POTW and Rlevse, I think some others like Gerda have come to realize just how disruptive the whole QAI exercise was, and the various awards are a clumsy effort to build bridges rather than any kind of intentional baiting. If this one a couple of threads up is anything to go by, they've also finally stopped using the intentionally inflammatory File:Cornflower blue Yogo sapphire.jpg for their awards, which is certainly progress. ‑ Iridescent 16:31, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
I can't usually decipher anything Gerda says; best I can tell, she lives in alternate universe than the Wikipedia I know. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:37, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Heard my name was being taken in vain over here. Wow, Sandy, just wow. So why is this little shitstorm being stirred up again? Sandy, your above comments about "restored my faith in humanity" is probably the second most toxic example of a public WP:GRAVEDANCE about my failed RfA that I've seen. (Speaking of which, this was just one example of the toxic stuff I was dealing with that whole time, more stuff was oversighted, and that's not counting the shit that was going on off-wiki.) QAI was created a long time ago, many good users had good intentions of improving articles, which was the original intent, and some of these issues are so far dead and gone that I sometimes wonder if a WP statute of limitations should be created, after which the dead horse simply can not be beaten any longer. In painting QAI with a broad brush you seem to conveniently ignore that along with some socks and banned users, the list also includes two past Wikipedians of the year, one of WPs most prolific creators of featured articles, along with a number of other very decent folks. Not sure what any of this has to do with the discussion of inactive admins above, but truly — we don't always know the people behind the wall of anonymity on WP and in some cases things go south and one has to just walk away. Other times, people make honest mistakes that are remedied. Yet in other situations, there may be things going on behind the scenes that are not in the public record (like being harassed off-wiki or knowing that other users have some really significant — but private — things going on) If people wonder about the toxic culture of WP, well, this thread is a good example. Montanabw(talk) 22:24, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
I didn't start this fire, I didn't opine on your RFA (you're welcome), I am relieved not to know what or who a "Wikipedian of the Year" is 'cuz it can't be a good thing, and "prolific FA writer" no longer has any meaning. It's like being a "prolific DYK writer". Sorry you were dealing with nasty crap during your RFA, but as Iri said above, that comes from "long history of running point for some of Wikipedia's most disruptive assholes", all of whom aimed their assholery at me for many years. Have a nice day! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:38, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Um, Sandy, what part of "the Montanabw RFA restored faith in humanity" is not an "opine"? You really need to go down to the hardware store and trade in that broad brush for something a bit more refined. Also, while you're there, maybe buy some paint that isn't just black or white... I recommend some nice pastels, perhaps. Montanabw(talk) 22:50, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Sandy, if you want to fight do it on someone else's talkpage. MBW, you said it yourself with there may be things going on behind the scenes that are not in the public record (like being harassed off-wiki or knowing that other users have some really significant — but private — things going on); with the possible exception of Serial Number who is new enough not to have come to the attention of the lunatic fringe, I believe you're the only name currently on this talkpage who hasn't at some point been the subject of a sustained harassment campaign both on- and off-wiki by at least one of your missed editors whose return would be a reason for joy and hope. (Regarding QAI's membership, the "it's about general article improvement, not an obsession with infoboxes" argument might be more convincing if the member list didn't have a big blue box at the top explicitly stating that it was about infoboxes.) ‑ Iridescent 08:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
No coincidence, and I had a dream last night how to place it where I wanted, just was too stupid to find the easy solution. The QAI missed users' page (or: Letting go of the past) has a talk, recommended reading. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:49, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
As you were…
I never understood why the bit is a lifetime appointment. Why don't we have admin term limits? As in, every admin has to re-RfA every two or three years? Inactive admins would expire out (or not get re-confirmed due to inactivity if they tried). Folks might ease up at RfA if they knew it was only a two-year appointment. Efforts to de-bit might also decrease if people knew they could oppose at the admin's next re-confirmation RfA. I imagine this idea has been discussed before–what's the community's thinking on it? Levivich 16:23, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
I think SarekOfVulcan calculates the exact figure a while back, but even if you went with 5 year terms it’d be something like one RfA every other day. That assumes everyone goes, and many wouldn’t. It’s trite, but we really are short-handed on active sysops and you already have a core group of 50-100 doing most of the work with the others providing much needed help when they can. Yes, I don’t like that we have the one edit a year crowd with no actions, but the 50 edit a year crowd that comes back for 3-4 months every 2-3 years is actually pretty helpful, and a confirm proposal would just get rid of them. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:41, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
It'd be approximately RfA's a day or an RfA every days. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:08, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Hi, Iri. Hope all is well. I was recently at a Wiki edit-a-thon (my first, finally got around to it), looking into the history of the Miss Tony page and saw that it's been previously deleted through AfD and then by speedy deletion. Was curious if you think a better rewrite and coverage in some recent sources would make it notable enough for inclusion at this point. I was thinking of a rewrite using the Baltimore Sun obituary, this article in FACT magazine, this feature from Vice, and this mention in an article from SPIN. Let me know what you think; figured I'd post here since you have a large number of talk page stalkers, who are likely well versed in these sort of articles with potentially questionable notability. ceranthor 18:40, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
@Ceranthor: There was me thinking you were requesting a loan of Iridescent's I-nut again :) ——SerialNumber54129 19:48, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
The Baltimore Sun website is blocked here so I can't view that. Going by the other links, I'd say there's enough coverage that there can be an article, but not necessarily enough that there should. That is, there's enough non-trivial coverage in independent reliable sources to pass GNG, but there's not enough to create a biography that would be much use to readers, since all you'd effectively be doing us summarizing the FACT article. Hip-hop has always been one of the hardest topics to cover on Wikipedia; the underground nature of the scene meant that it didn't get the same degree of media coverage as the other genres, and what coverage there was tended to be in relatively specialist magazines which are long-since defunct and haven't necessarily been archived, and which were often glorified fanzines rather than published by the big media companies, and consequently less likely to be considered reliable by Wikipedia; plus as with most other music articles what coverage there is tends to be written by fans and is very uncritical. The problem certainly isn't unique to hip-hop—try writing a half-decent biography of an acid house, rave or bashment act. (For the other big underground scene, punk, it's not such a problem, as former punks and no-wavers now run a lot of the media so there's an endless supply of "Were the Jam punk even though they didn't have the look?" and "Ari Up once shared my burrito" filler-pieces by ageing men with ponytails.)
TL;DR summary; he passes GNG but there's not necessarily enough out there to make an article worth writing. ‑ Iridescent 13:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
For the benefit of those without magic goggles, the deleted article read in its entirety Miss Tony (May 6, 1966 - April 11, 2003), real name Anthony M. Boston, was a Baltimore radio personality who was a pioneer in the genre of Baltimore Club music. Miss Tony released several of the most popular Baltimore Club songs, such as "What's Up What's Up", "Tony's Bitch track", "Pull ya Guns out", "EA - EA" and worked with Baltimore Club pioneers Frank Ski, Diamond K & Scottie B. Miss Tony often sang live over radio broadcasts on Baltimore radio station 92Q (WERQ 92.3) and in clubs such as The Paradox. Miss Tony was a popular drag queen in Baltimore and was discovered by Frank Ski in the late '80s. Later in his career, Miss Tony became the co-host of the "Big fat morning show" on 92Q. Tony also worked alongside Frank Ski on the Frank Ski morning Show. Miss Tony changed his on-air personality to "Big Tony" in 1998, and returned to church life but still remained part of the club scene. He released the CD "Master of Ceremonies" on High Rolla Records which contains all of his hits in Jan 2003. He died from kidney failure due to a lengthy illness on April 11, 2003. and didn't include a single reference. ‑ Iridescent 13:37, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
(Regarding "blocked here", I usually check archive.org, which hasn't been blocked yet from archiving. Even here in the states, the Sun only allows 5/10 articles a month for free, so when I hit my limit from casual browsing, I check there first and then submit it into archive.org if it isn't present. [I could pay for it for $2 a month or something silly cheap, but I don't have enough interest in consuming my news from a classical outlet.] --Izno (talk) 13:44, 6 March 2019 (UTC))
Thanks, Iri. If anyone else has thoughts to the contrary, please let me know. Otherwise I'll probably just leave this article as is; there's a bit of coverage in the Baltimore club article already. ceranthor 13:59, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
IPads
%&$#@, Sorry for the touchscreen misclick adventure. I ‘m at an airport killing time on an iPad. Acroterion(talk) 15:13, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
No worries, happens to all of us ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
Just a note
Iridescent. If my comments [9] seem insulting I apologize. They were not in anyway meant be personal but rather responses to your comments as a viewpoint. I probably should not yet be editing Wikipedia since real life issues may be underpinning my tone. Best Littleolive oil (talk) 23:54, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
No problem at all. The disconnect between how Arbcom works on paper, how Arbcom works in practice and how Arbcom ought to work is a topic that could fill a book, and because so much of it necessarily happens behind the curtain it's largely a mystery to most editors. ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
I just wanted to give a short link to readers who are looking for him, do you want to make it harder? What's wrong with adding the for template? It feels like you're chasing me and reverting every edit I do now. Dolfinz1972 (talk) 23:43, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
That's great news. Going by my own block log, I've just lost 20 years... ——SerialNumber54129 17:20, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure two mistaken identities and one Chillum playing wikicop really constitutes a block log. ‑ Iridescent 17:25, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
Ha, thanks. I forgot HighinBC was Chillum though... ——SerialNumber54129 10:40, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Okay, I admit I was incivil, let's just move on because I really would like to get rollback rights back soon. I just thought you were chasing me and denying my right to edit. Dolfinz1972 (talk) 03:20, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
because this is the way to make sure that happens super fast valereee (talk) 12:52, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
In other news, I'm starting to see where TPH point of view, following this and this bollocks. My hearing's not what it was, but can anyone hear a clock ticking? ——SerialNumber54129 16:42, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
If they think MelanieN's talk page is long, they'd better not visit User talk:EEng, otherwise their head might explode..... Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 16:49, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Ironically, Wikipedia talk:Talk page guidelines has its bot archive limit set at 250 kb, or more than three times the "maximum page size" arbitrary number it recommends. (On a quick back-of-envelope calculation, if I were to comply with the limit Jax 0677 is trying to impose on everyone else, this page would currently be up to archive #150, and this is hardly the busiest page on the wiki.)
The problem—and the reason that guideline is universally ignored—is that the guideline was written by people who don't understand how browsers work, and think that "amount of text" is what causes issues, and because of the way Wikipedia operates we're obliged to take the opinions of people who don't know what they're talking about as seriously as the opinions of those who do. In reality it's images and javascript that use up bandwidth, and an entire novel takes up an order of magnitude less bandwidth to download than a single photo (the entire text of the Old and New Testaments takes up 5 mb, and the text of every one of my talk archives combined takes up roughly the same bandwidth as File:Noel Park plans.jpg). Here's the load time breakdown for this talk page, which is hardly overloaded with images, but people see the "page size" number and think that the size of the raw wikitext is somehow significant. ‑ Iridescent 11:24, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
The Barnstar of Integrity
For this exceptionally intelligent perspective on the use of humour in serious editorial and personal disputes, I award you this Barnstar of Integrity. May we all consider how our words and actions affect the public perception of Wikipedia's internal culture. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 12:52, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
Thanks - I'm aware that I come across as a surly puritan, but that "being an Established Editor entitles me to treat public-facing areas as my personal comedy stage" mentality is one of my pet hates. There are many reasons Wikipedia has a reputation for being dominated by a clique of assholes who invariably circle the wagons should an outsider try to join, but that kind of "I'm so important the rules don't apply to me" attitude is IMO near the top of the list. ‑ Iridescent 14:36, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Foundation has invited the various Wikimedia communities, including the English Wikipedia, to participate in a consultation on improving communication methods within the Wikimedia projects. As such, a request for comment has been created at Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019. You are invited to express your views and/or to add new topics in the discussion. ∯WBGconverse 06:39, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
Oh for fuck's sake, they're not going to stop trying to resurrect the rotting corpse of Flow, are they? Everyone, don't participate in this, as they'll take participation as tacit acknowledgement of the "everyone agrees there's a problem" lie they always use when they're trying to push these pet schemes. Fram, are you aware of this latest nonsense? ‑ Iridescent 07:40, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
Just noting that they have explicitly stated that status quo ain't an acceptable option for them (mw:Talk_pages_consultation_2019#Non-goals#6). Re-designed Flow/Integration of VE into t/p/Improvisaton of the current wikitext-based-version; something will necessarily happen.
FWIW, I have alerted Fram, Johuniq, BethNaught (and all those who significantly contributed at WT:FLOW) to this discussion. ∯WBGconverse 07:49, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
These conversations remind me of interface debates on TVTropes. There, a common issue from the developer's POV is that users have little understanding on the difficulties of software production and demand opt outs and other non-trivial/large-opportunity-cost measures all the time. Vice versa, a common issue from the user's perspective is that developers make interface changes that appear to serve no purpose and are poorly explained. Often, it's not clear if the community that responds to tech discussions is representative; most people do not partake in such discussions and they are by default editors now; readers or hypothetical future editors do not get a say. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 12:47, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
So, a "consultation" which they open by saying that the opinions of anyone who disagrees with their pre-determined "consensus" will be disregarded and they're going to force their preferred outcome through come what may. And then the WMF wonder why, despite the huge cultural differences between them on every other issue, the one thing the editor communities on all the big projects has in common is a total distrust of Product Management.
I note that buried in the meta discussion is an open admission from the "Director of Product Management, Contributors" that the previous strategy for Flow was to leave the communities where people objected to the concept, go find someone else to work with, and then use that progress to make Flow "inevitable" on the wikis that don't want it. In any other supposedly user-facing service, that kind of contempt would be grounds for dismissal, not grounds to be given an attaboy and given another big pile of donor money to try again. ‑ Iridescent 14:42, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
I have stated privately that what they need to do is make reply-link a preference enabled gadget and add some minor non-change to it so they can claim they did something without having to completely rework the way the project communivates. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:12, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
@TonyBallioni: That's missing the point. The object of this pseudo-exercise, and all the other initiatives like it, isn't to improve Wikipedia; it's to deal with the fact that the WMF's fundraising exercises are too successful. As a consequence of that they have a pot of cash that needs to be spent.[1] As a consequence of that they need to burn it off by hiring a small army of employees, consultants and contractors. (How many of these members of the Job Creation Scheme for Admins Who Haven't Pissed Off Jimmy do you think are actually necessary?) And as a consequence of that they need to operate in this state of permanent revolution in order to give all those staff something to do. Guy Macon wrote an essay on the topic a couple of years ago, and I don't disagree with a single word of it. If anything I think he understates the issue by not appreciating the way the cash surplus is being weaponized by the WMF by their using the funds as a tool to try to retain those they think will toe their party line by funnelling cash into their pet projects and paying for free vacations to Wikimania. ‑ Iridescent 08:11, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
^As an aside, the ever-growing pile of cash is probably the main reason the WMF will never relocate outside the US despite the occasional grumblings. US charity law is notoriously lax compared to the rest of the developed world; if a charity in the UK, Netherlands, Ireland or any of the other places that would be plausible alternative bases were to operate in this way the local regulators would seize their stockpile of cash under cy-près doctrine and forcibly transfer it to another charity with a similar purpose who was willing to actually spend it on the purposes for which it had been donated.
I personally think that it would be best to take advantage of the exercise, since it's obviously not going away, and the WMF are actually putting funds towards improving something relatively important (not that they don't ever do that, but I digress). Helpfully, the statements on the local RFC basically eliminate most of the options that would involve Flow (or they should, if the WMF handles the exercise in good faith and listens to feedback), and the staff do seem to realize that the handling of Flow wasn't very good.
As I understand it, eliminating any proposal involving complete replacement of the system means that in order to improve semantic validity (so that developers actually have something to work with, because the current system is based on list formatting) and in order to improve accessibility and ease the learning curve, either discussions have to use a new character for indenting and everyone has to adjust to using it (hard), or discussions have to handle list items differently to other pages but also have to be able to handle list items as list items (exceptionally difficult). Hopefully the straw poll is useful. Jc86035 (talk) 10:25, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
That's not what's happening here. The devs have already made up their mind what they're going to do; what they want as a fake mass-participation exercise so they can say "see, we had 100 different people participate so they must all agree that there's a problem". I'd maybe not be so cynical if we hadn't gone through the exact same charade every single time someone at the WMF has ever had a pet project they insist needs to be foisted on everyone else. ‑ Iridescent 15:28, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
I wonder how many articles one could pay with this money. I know I sacrificed all my Christmas holidays in order to pen up the African humid period article, about 19 days with little breaks for 210kb of text - how expensive would that be if it was part of a full time job? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:07, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
@Iridescent: Well, for what it's worth, a few WMF staff – DannyH (the project lead) and Whatamidoing – have now commented on the local page, so they're not ignoring the actual feedback. Optimistically, they probably don't want another Flow, and I think that probably won't happen, but I really can't know. Jc86035 (talk) 09:47, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Oddly enough, US charity law re: private foundations vs. public charities is probably why they have to keep fundraising. The public charity bit means less strict spend-down rules apply, and to be a public charity, most of your support needs to come from the public or Uncle Sam. Also, dash, as I’ve pissed off Jimmy I guess there goes my unemployment insurance policy. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:08, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
This note point is not at all true as regards the UK; WMF is (isn't it?) still some way short of the 2-years-of-spend level of reserves which until recently was officially recommended by the Charity Commission (that seemed to drop off their guidance literature a couple of years ago). I think it's at about 15-20 years of spend that they start threatening to take action (guide dogs & other animal charities, lifeboats etc), at which point the charity looks around for another one compatible with their objects & sends them a big cheque. Johnbod (talk) 13:35, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Even in the UK although the CC isn't as strict as its equivalents on the continent—it's not just about reserve levels but about income consistently being over expenditure, and a chart like File:Wikimedia Foundation financial development multilanguage.svg would easily be enough to have the CC making noises about amending the purposes. The kind of nest-feathering into an endowment fund which the WMF board is up to would need to have a specific clause in the governing document permitting the trustees to convert income into capital, otherwise the statutory duty to spend funds for the purposes of the charity within a reasonable time of receipt comes into play. (Even in the unlikely event that the governing document does allow funds not specifically donated as endowment to be shifted from income to endowment, the return on that endowment would still need to be spent within a reasonable time of receipt.)
Given how high-profile Wikipedia is, and the relatively contentious nature of its activities (the guide dogs and lifeboats don't have the Big Data corporations and their expensive lobbyists complaining that their own efforts to launch competing guide dogs and lifeboats are being unfairly disadvantaged by the charitable tax breaks enjoyed by the existing providers, or disgruntled former dogs and sailors regularly whistleblowing that in their view the existing providers don't actually perform their claimed purposes beneficial to the community), I'd imagine an England-based WMF would be the next Kids Company within a year. ‑ Iridescent 15:15, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
I could never understand these notions that the WMF should change its location. Bottom line, about 60% of all funds donated to the WMF come from the United States. (Technically, from North America, but Canada and Mexico would only account for well under a million dollars.) There's a very strong financial incentive to remain in the US, both as a registered charity and physically. More than half of the WMF staff work remotely in the cities of their choice; the majority still work somewhere in the US, but when you look at the staff list and see "contractor" after the name, that person is working remotely outside of the US. Yes, there seem to be some legislative initiatives in the US that could potentially impact the WMF adversely, but there's not a country on the globe where that wouldn't be true. The US also has a long history of endowments worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars (see any US university article, which spends in a week what UK university endowments get in a year), and their tax system favours such endeavours. I mean...what possible reason would the WMF consider moving everything to another country? I genuinely have never understood this. In any case, this is a long way from talking about "discussion" pages. I suspect highly engaged users like the readers of this page can think of ways to improve discussion pages (and by that, I mean pages where discussions happen, not just talk pages), even if the projects were to continue to use exactly the same underlying software and make only small tweaks such as "be able to watchlist individual sections" or "have a big button beside 'publish changes' to remind people to sign" or something like that. It's interesting to read the corresponding page on French Wikipedia, where many pages use Flow - which was getting massively negative reviews. I suppose that wouldn't be a surprise to anyone here. Risker (talk) 16:11, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Agree with that, and don't agree re the UK legal situation above. For "endowment" read "reserves" in the UK - these & the policy governing them are generally purely matters for the trustees/members to decide, unrestricted by anything in the governing document, or anything much in legislation. Restricted funds are what UK charity treasurers & FDs worry about. It is possible to have restricted endowment funds, but if the WMF were in the UK I'm sure their advisers would have argued forcefully against setting one up, & the talk would be of "reserves". Johnbod (talk) 16:49, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
@Risker, I can't imagine any circumstances in which the WMF would leave the US. (Although I could certainly make a case that being in California is an expensive vanity exercise and they could operate just as well and at half the price if they relocated to somewhere like Detroit or Baltimore. Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Groupon et al get along just fine without being anywhere near the Bay Area.) Aside from anything else, we'd be wiped out by lawyers within about a month if we were based in any country with either strong human rights laws or government censorship, which covers pretty much anywhere else with the requisite infrastructure to support a top-ten website.
@Johnbod, I think you're misunderstanding what the WMF is actually doing with its surplus and consequently we're talking at cross purposes. We're not talking about building a cushion of reserves in case the fundraising hits the rocks or they need to buy a high-ticket item in future; they're diverting money into an untouchable endowment fund ($100 million is the figure being mooted), with Guess Who parked at the top of the board. (Those in the UK will hopefully appreciate the unintentional hilarity of the "founder of the Kia Ora foundation". For those not in the UK, Kia-Ora is a vile-looking fluorescent orange drink, best known for an 1980s advert which appeared to be aiming for the record for the most number of racist tropes crammed into a 30-second spot.) For those who worry about Wikipedia being inappropriately close to some of the most corrupt names in Big Data, the list of big-money donors makes interesting reading, incidentally. Unless they have an express power in the governing document to convert charitable income into capital of an endowment fund, and they're making it clear to donors that the cash raised is going to be banked in perpetuity rather than spent—which they obviously aren't, as there's no mention of any of this in the "give us your money NOW or we'll have to shut down Wikipedia!" annual scaremongering banner—this would be very shaky ground in England and Wales. (CC19 5.1, "By their nature, reserves tend to be resources that may be needed in the short to medium term. Trustees therefore should ensure that reserves are invested in a way can be readily realised as cash, when needed." if you want chapter-and-verse.) ‑ Iridescent 18:31, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Maybe, but the untouchability of the fund would rest on documents we presumably can't see - the site doesn't actually say that, afaik. Johnbod (talk) 20:16, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
If you scroll to the small print at the bottom it explicitly states The purpose of the Wikimedia Endowment is to act as a permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to support the operations and activities of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity and that in the event that the principal is transferred to any other body, following any transfer, the Endowment would continue to act for the purpose of being a permanent, income-generating fund to support the Wikimedia projects. I have no idea what California law is in these circumstances, but certainly in E&W—or anywhere else whose charity legislation and practice is based on Pemsel and the Statute of Elizabeth—that would be enough that anyone who'd donated directly to it would need at minimum to be consulted and possibly refunded before they could spend it. ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
I think Um Bongo can give Kia Ora a run for its money in "how many racial stereotypes can you cram into a prime-time TV advert". The name and tagline sound like something Boris Johnson would say off-mic. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 10:38, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
I'll see your Um Bongo and raise you Moonshine. ("Hey, kids, let's play drunk driver and personal injury car accident!") ‑ Iridescent 20:39, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Although it doesn't change your point that high-tech companies can succeed in other cities, Microsoft and IBM both have R&D campuses in the Bay Area, and Groupon has engineering offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto. And as the biggest companies in the world, Amazon and Microsoft can entice prospective employees to move anywhere. But of course there are other companies that can be used as examples... isaacl (talk) 04:56, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
As a thorough East Coast born and bred type who will never move to California to save his life, I can see there being some advantage to California: as it is where both Hollywood and Silicon Valley are, both the California state court system and the 9th circuit have some of the most clear precedents on tech stuff as well as free speech, etc. which is a helpful confluence for an org like the WMF.That being said even if they wanted to go for a big name city another cheaper big name springs to mind where the legal precedents are also fairly clear (Boston also wouldn't be a bad choice, and is cheaper.) TonyBallioni (talk) 05:06, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
"Be able to watchlist individual sections" has been on phab:T2738 phab for a long time, the hang-up is that sections are simply a form of - unstable - markup and don't have a consistent identity. Regarding the frwiki discussion, I am thinking that Tortliena's and Jules78120's opinions sort lf match mine. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 09:02, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
There is a format problem above. The link should be phab:T2738. EdJohnston (talk) 04:35, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
I went to leave a comment on the discussion area advertised on my watchlist and wasn't sure where to go. My recommendation is to publicise reply-link, and build new tools that work on the existing talk page format. Might be harder to develop, but cry me a f***ing river, this is what you pay software developers for. This is a fundamental principle of design - where you have an established structure that is widely used, understood and reliable for real world use, you keep it as a base and put on a new interface. Then anyone who can't use the interface has a backwards compatibility mode, rather than being completely hosed. Metric time is a great example of something that will never work because of existing standards. The problem that the qwerty keyboard solved has long since disappeared, but we all still use that format. And this is why reply-link has done more for discussions than anything else; it's quick and easy to use, it's led by a small team who fix bugs quickly, and if it doesn't work you just drop down to "old school" mode. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 10:31, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Indeed—in fact it's more than that, as an issue facing Wikipedia/media that doesn't affect the Facebooks and Twitters of the world is that the format and functionality of talk pages has to duplicate the format and functionality of article pages, as so many discussions on talkpages are variations on "here are two blocks of wikicode, let's have a discussion on which we use". Make reply-link into an enabled-by-default gadget and allow VE editing on talkpages so genuine newcomers can put their comment in the right place without worrying about getting the markup right; simples. Of course, that won't happen, as it's too simple; what you need to bear in mind is that whenever there's something like this, the WMF want something complicated so as to justify employing so many people in Tech (which has 107 employees at the time of writing, who I'm sure are all doing a sterling job but I'm equally sure the wheels didn't fall off when Tech consisted of Magnus writing bits of code in his spare time). ‑ Iridescent 16:47, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
The best way to interview a software developer is to sit them down at a laptop with a bunch of IDEs and programming languages, and say "Right, I'd like a program to simulate a game of Fizz buzz and print out the results from 1 to 100". Anyone who's in any way competent will whip this up in about five minutes. I just tried it : #include <stdio.h> int main() { for( int i = 1; i <= 100; i++ ) { if( ( i % 5 ) == 0 ) printf( "fizz" ); if( ( i % 3 ) == 0 ) printf( "buzz" ); if( ( ( i % 5 ) != 0 ) && ( ( i % 3 ) != 0 ) ) printf( "%d", i ); printf( "," ); } } ... and even then I'm thinking I should really have done that in Python but still haven't got the syntax memorised like C... I do follow-up programming exercises that take 20-30 minutes on top of that, but you'll be amazed at the so-called "software engineers" who get that task and clam up. Jeff Atwood discusses it here Now, I wonder how many of those "developers who clam up" are working for the WMF? I'll tell you how many of them are working for Google, Apple and Microsoft - zero. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 17:27, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Looking at the staff list, I'm more taken by the fact that we have a Travel Manager, a Travel Assistantand a Group Travel Project Manager. I currently work for an employer with a workforce in the tens of thousands and we still manage to cope with the concept of "check Trainline or Skyscanner as appropriate, check Trivago, book whatever's cheapest, submit the receipt and prepare to be occasionally spot-checked to make sure you're getting best value". ‑ Iridescent 19:21, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Yes indeed. A few years ago I think the WMF offices did the bookings as they had group discount deals with airlines & hotel chains. Don't know if that still applies. In my experience many US employers, perhaps rightly, don't trust their employees to book stuff abroad. Or that's how it used to be. But this does seem absurdly overstaffed. Johnbod (talk) 20:08, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Well, the reality is that the wheels *were* falling off back in the days when the WMF had fewer than 10 staff, and they fell off on a near-daily basis. We tend to forget how really awful it was back in the day. Downtime was measured in hours and even days per month, rather than seconds or minutes. Connections were dropped frequently - frenetic edit-saving is a tell of a longtime editor who knew their session could be dropped without notice at any time. There was no such thing as security. Research and understanding of activities across projects was a very basic set of statistics produced by a volunteer. Fundraising was horrible in every way that it could have been. Technical debt piled up faster than it could even be identified. Features that we take for granted today hadn't even been imagined. It wasn't unusual to take minutes to save changes to a large article. A lot of the improvements that came as a result of a beefed-up tech team have been incremental back-end stuff and thus not particularly obvious to even longterm users; but as an example, just think when the last time was that your editing session was suddenly discontinued or you were unexpectedly logged out of the system - which used to be daily occurrences as recently as about 2012, and not uncommon even in 2015. Even on this page, there are regular readers and participants who have never experienced the pre-revdelete era, which was a major technical change that really had a huge cultural impact - and was something the editing community had requested for years. I'm well aware there have been some pretty awful tech projects over the years - many of which didn't survive any longer than they would have if they'd been "tried out" on a big commercial tech site; and I am pretty certain that a major reason for the lack of adoption of VisualEditor was the terrible way that it was forced onto an unwilling community, so we're still paying for really poor socialization of what is now mostly-okay-for-newbies software. And we forget one key fact - our "volunteer" developers were dropping like flies because they were no longer students and needed to work and get paid for it. (There are, to this day, quite a few "volunteer" developers who are actually paid by someone else to work on the MediaWiki software.) When it comes to travel stuff, I know for a fact that the key reasons behind the existence of that department were (a)to make sure the bookings actually got made in a timely way instead of tickets being purchased day-of-travel (b) because a huge percentage of volunteers going to events such as Wikimania or the Hackathon simply can't front up that kind of money and wait months for reimbursement - and for that matter, neither can a lot of staff whose job involves a lot of travel (c) they *do* get significant discounts and have better control over factors such as making sure an entire department doesn't wind up on the same flight and they're able to block-book hotel rooms and (d) one of their major activities is assisting volunteers and staff in getting visas - not to be sneezed at, when we have seen events where they weren't directly involved and a huge percentage of visa seekers were denied. I'm far from saying that the WMF is perfect; there are still lots of places where they could get better, and I question regularly whether more useful programs are starved while tech appears to get almost everything it asks for. The WMF continues to try to apply academic Western philosophies and principles when actively seeking engagement in emerging countries where many of those philosophies are foreign and inconsistent with lived experience and cultural reality. But without a lot of the investment made in staff over the last 10 years, I'm pretty sure that Wikipedia would have had far less reach, impact, and accessibility than it has today. In 2007, nobody was shocked to find that a popular website was "down" for a couple of hours or even a day. In 2019, it's unacceptable to almost any user. The WMF couldn't have done that with just a bunch of volunteers and no financing for hard infrastructure. Risker (talk) 20:52, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not advocating for a return to Sue days when the decision making process consisted of what you could persuade a developer to do, Sue and Jimmy would divert funds to pet projects on a whim, and "trust and safety" was a dark joke; that the WMF has a professional and stable management structure is something to be welcomed. Equally, I don't believe that we actually need 107 people in tech (plus a further 47 de facto tech staff allocated to Audiences). Nor do I believe that any community input will actually be listened to when it this particular exercise, or that it is anything other than someone trying to find a pretext to get their pet project greenlit regardless of whether there's any community desire for it; just looking at the responses on the 'consultation' it's clear that this is going to be another Wikidata or Mediaviewer where the devs are going to explain that everyone who doesn't agree with them is Just Plain Wrong rather than actually listening to the concerns people are raising. ‑ Iridescent 21:06, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
And for the record, a proper structured discussion system such as Discourse would be better, all things being equal, and it's unfortunate that we're stuck with the talk page format which was never designed for people used to Facebook and Twitter. How could it - they didn't exist when MediaWiki was first developed. However, we are stuck with it, and any project that assumes otherwise is as doomed to failure as metricating time. While server stability has got better, too much of Wikipedia is still dependent on volunteer-run closed source bots such as SineBot and externally run bots such as ClueBot NG. These should all be made open source and brought under the operation of the WMF development, in my opinion. If SineBot dies, a staff member should be able to revive it. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 21:23, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
To be fair, talk pages themselves didn't exist when MediaWiki was first developed—look at a very early article and you'll see the fudge of the comments being below a line on the main article. The issue isn't that Wikipedia talk pages weren't designed for those used to social media—as was tried briefly on the Teahouse, "new posts at top" only needs a snippet of code to enact—but that they were designed for people used to academic papers, where commentary is invariably oldest first. ‑ Iridescent 21:32, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Facebook has managed to bring in new developments to its software which alter the way conversations are carried out, but without breaking what went before. For example, in the early days, all status updates had to be of the form "XYZ is....." which means you couldn't say your ears were ringing. And you certainly couldn't make general posts that weren't about what you were doing at that moment. But it evolved, they added replies and likes, and replies to replies etc. Wikimedia could probably do the same to our software without actually compromising what's already in place. — Amakuru (talk) 22:49, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
It stifles the creativity of developers and I think that such a development approach tends to cause an undue maintenance burden as these increments often behave like layers of an onion bulb, each one requiring more upkeep. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 22:55, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Iridescent, I don't think that talk pages were designed for people used to academic papers. I think that they were designed by and for people used to WikiWikiWeb conventions. Also, I invite you all over to mw:Talk pages consultation 2019/Discussion tools in the past to tell me just how much is still wrong, or even if you just want to pick up a few tidbits about how things were done Back in the Olden Days. (I've got a few notes on additions to make already, but feel free to jump in.)
Ritchie333, have you tried out http://discourse.wmflabs.org ? I think it's primarily used by devs, but if you've got a group that would like to try it out, then please ping me. I'm sure I could find an extremely enthusiastic adopter someone who could help you with that. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
"People used to early wiki software" and "people used to academic conventions" were pretty much synonymous back then. I don't know what the numbers were—and I don't know how one would go about finding out—but I'd be willing to bet that upwards of 90% of usage of pre-Wikipedia wiki software, and close to 100% of usage of Wiki itself pre-Wikipedia, was within academic environments—either in the direct sense of being used for academic collaboration, or in the secondary sense of being used by student societies—while the other 10% was TV obsessives posting plot summaries of TV episodes and hardcore boardgamers using it as a way to store records. Bear in mind that back in the very early days, from Wikipedia's point of view the lack of talk pages wasn't an issue; the whole point was that Nupedia was for public consumption and Wikipedia was for "Nupedians who are having fun with a neat side project that moves faster, but has no quality controls", and consequently Larry wanted the workings on display to encourage people to join in. ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
My glance through about two dozen pages among the "A's" listed at http://c2.com/cgi/fullSearch?search=CategoryHomepage turned up a lot of devs, a few comp sci students, and not much else. I found a lot more homepages that identified software employers (like Microsoft) than universities. Perhaps you'd get different results with a different sample, though. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
I want to Wikipedia
When did Wikipedia attain verb status similar to Google. Is this a new thing, a typo or am I just hopelessly out of touch? As far as I know, no-one says "to Twitter", "to Bing" or "to Yahoo" etc, so the Google example is a bit of a one-off in my world. - Sitush (talk) 13:08, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
I think this is a quirk of the English language, nouns can easily be turned into neologism-verbs. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 13:19, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
”adding to Wikipedia other ways to learn” is what was meant. Pawnkingthree (talk) 13:23, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Short answer: because the person saying it is a board member and the board all get marinated in techie culture until they talk like SF neckbeard hipsters. Long answer: it's a linguistic quirk in some parts of the US and Canada (and even, albeit to a lesser extent, in modern UK/IE English) to drop the verb in sentences ("I'll bus to the store"), and since one of those parts of the US is southern California the tendency is propagating outwards through film and TV. Some linguistics type can probably explain why; I'd imagine it's something to do with Germanic/Scandi influences. (People may not say "to twitter"as a verb, presumably because the verb "tweet" already exists, but they'll certainly say "I'll Facebook him". I imagine the reason you don't hear "to Bing" as a verb is because no sane person would use Bing which is one of the sorriest pieces of software ever written.) ‑ Iridescent 16:56, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Oh, Gossip Girl (non-coincidentally sponsored by Microsoft) tried to make "to Bing" a verb all the time starting in the third or fourth season. I think this basically proves Iridescent's point (and I'm such a GG apologist I have a cat named Lillian van der Woodsen). - Julietdeltalima(talk) 18:28, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
Just think, if folks verbed the acronym 'WP', it'd be like WiP or "whip", then this song would have new meaning....Cas Liber (talk·contribs) 06:01, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
The amount of people who read Wikipedia articles
Hi, I remember that at one time you had told me the number of people who had read one of my wiki articles that I had created. I was wondering how do you obtain this kind of information? Davidgoodheart (talk) 03:02, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
a) go to the article b) go to the "page information" link on the sidebar c) scroll down to the line "page view statistics" and click on it and d) you should get a page like this one. That link is for African humid period, just as an illustration. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:34, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
Or the "page views" tab on the page history. Johnbod (talk) 16:39, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
In the distant future
In the distant future, if I am remembered for just one thing, I hope it will be for coining the phrase urgent incidents and chronic, intractable behavioral problems. Not that it's doing any good. EEng 22:03, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
I think you'll find that you've done admins a great service, by allowing them to cut-and-paste "this page is for urgent incidents and chronic, intractable behavioral problems" rather than being tempted to say "fuck off and stop wasting our time with your petty squabbles". (If we ever need a definition of "oversensitive", we could do worse than "people who think I live with my mom and dad and my beautiful 1 year old Boston Terrier, Poppy. She is my baby. I make a lot of important and highly useful edits which always get removed so if you are one of them I WILL COME FOR YOU!!!!!! is a credible threat".)
As I've said before, I firmly believe that when the scholars of the year 2101 come to write the Compleat History of Wikipedia, the sole mention of me will be as the one who coined the terms "civility police", "without the content we're just Facebook for ugly people" and "Bradspeak". ‑ Iridescent 22:10, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
Hmmm. According to that search the term was in use as early as 1865. EEng 00:27, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
e wrflnch W I th one pat t o r J a w s l i d l ll g' in the o th er , ani! flu rrounded by a nut, as s uc h . But 1 c l ai m the Dlli . ��, fl u r ro isn't really a great advert for OCR, is it?
I wonder if Scientific American are aware that Commons are using a bot to scrape their entire archive, or if this is another National Portrait Gallery situation? I'm going to guess the latter, given that trying to read the article on the website from which Commons have scraped it brings up a request to pay a subscription fee. And then the WMF wonders why so few commercial publishers are willing to cooperate with the Wikipedia Library initiative to allow Wikipedia editors access to their archives. (Yes, I'm aware that the USA doesn't recognize sweat-of-the-brow, and consequently Commons running this kind of panty raid on other people's archives is legal provided both the person doing the scraping and the site being scraped are in the US, but something being legal doesn't make it ethical. Plus, one would think Springer Nature is a singularly ill-advised firm to piss off.) ‑ Iridescent 07:46, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
Why's that, iridescent? Are they particularly litigious? ——SerialNumber54129 08:34, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
No (or at least not as far as I know; they were only formed in 2015 so haven't had time to develop a reputation); they wouldn't win any kind of lawsuit as US law doesn't recognize sweat of the brow, so provided the individual operating the bot is in the US this kind of thing is legal under Bridgeman Corel. It's because they operate the archives of numerous publishers (Macmillan Education, Nature, Humana, Vieweg Verlag, Apress, Palgrave, Scitable…) which are exactly the kind of archive we want the publishers to make available to Wikipedia editors, something they're unlikely to do if they think we're just going to rip off the content and republish it under our own imprint. ‑ Iridescent 08:46, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
I don't see this as a problem myself - so far only front pages from the 1850s have been taken. After 1923 would be an issue. Sweat of the brow is not the issue here - that relates to "compilation rights" & so on, not actual journal articles. It would cover the layout possibly. Johnbod (talk) 15:20, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
Legally it might not be a problem, but ethically & morally? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:44, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
I'd say it's a clear sweat of the brow issue; they're expending effort (i.e. SOTB) in digitizing the content, despite not contributing anything original to it, which would give them either database rights or rights under SOTB in those jurisdictions that recognize it. (The US doesn't, and the UK was recently overruled by a European Court of Justice ruling that copyright can only exist if there's an element of original intellectual creation so SOTB currently doesn't apply here either, at least until April 13.)
It's a question of ethics rather than law. I see it as yet another example of where the fetishization of "information wants to be free" among the dwindling but still influential clique of Free Culture hardliners is actively counter-productive. Sure, they're only importing material which has passed into the public domain so there's no legal issue, but much of Wikipedia relies on the goodwill of private companies and academic institutions which scan historic works and charge a small subscription to cover their costs. If, for instance, Loeb Classical Library or newspaperarchive.com get the impression that Wikipedia sees it as fair game to bot-import pre-1923 content, how likely are they to continue offering free access to their archives to our contributors? (The NPG lost their fight with the WMF, but the net result wasn't them welcoming us with open arms or agreeing to work with the WMF to discuss a way forward, it was their taking down their high-res images altogether to prevent Commons from filching any more, something that could have been avoided to everyone's mutual benefit had we only agreed to take only what we need.) Paging Nikkimaria who knows more about this stuff than me. ‑ Iridescent 15:46, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
(adding) FWIW, it's also an absolutely unambiguous violation of their terms of use, which explicitly include you agree that you will not make any other use of the material on the site, including but not limited to the copying, modification, distribution, transmission, performance, broadcast, publication, licensing, reverse engineering, transfer or sale of, or the creation of derivative works from, any of the contents of the site, systematically download any content to your own or any third-party server. ‑ Iridescent 16:00, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
It'd be the TOU rather than copyright that would potentially bring that kind of thing into a legal rather than ethical realm. Wikipedia Library users agree to not mass-download materials as part of applying and AFAIK that hasn't yet been an issue. In an academic library setting activity that even looks like a potential mass-download gets the whole institution cut off (sometimes overzealously so - eg. a grad student downloading 30 papers at once for their thesis). Nikkimaria (talk) 16:23, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
A7s
Hello,
I see you've been through the A7s I did today and accepted about half and declined the other half. The guitar one I'm not PROD-ing because on second thoughts I agree with you. All the others are notability failures (I know that there's a difference between CCS and notability), so I've PROD-ed them. My only question is on Apogee Components - why was it ineligible for A7?
It has received the Howard Gallaway Service Award from the National Association of Rocketry is a claim of significance/importance. Things that make claims of significance/importance are not eligible for A7 as it says on the policy page. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:06, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
As JJE says, It has received the Howard Gallaway Service Award from the National Association of Rocketry is an absolutely clear-cut assertion of significance and invalidates it from speedy deletion on the spot.
A7 doesn't have anything to do with notability; if something makes a claim of significance, it's automatically ineligible for A7 unless the claim is obviously bogus. Speedy deletion is only for unambiguous cases, and as such is one of the few areas of Wikipedia in which the usual "be bold" and "ignore all rules" don't apply; with the exception of deletions relating to libel or copyright issues, if there's any doubt as to whether a speedy deletion criterion applies then it doesn't. (Yes, there are some cowboy admins whom I have a strong suspicion run a "delete all" script over CAT:CSD and CAT:EX to delete everything, but they'll eventually be caught and desysopped.) SoWhy's essay sums it up pretty well; only if there's no reason whatsoever to assume that a certain subject might warrant inclusion in Wikipedia should an admin ever delete anything under A7. ‑ Iridescent 15:10, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
Fair enough, thanks both, I'll give it a read. SITH(talk) 15:34, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
Also, bear in mind that unless something falls into that rare group of articles which aren't eligible for speedy deletion but nonetheless have no realistic potential for becoming a viable Wikipedia article, tagging them as WP:PROD is just going to be a waste of time, as Andrew Davidson generally goes through Category:All articles proposed for deletion and removes the prod from all but the most obvious no-hopers. (I used to consider this quite presumptive and annoying, but latterly WP:PROD is being misused so regularly by people who consider "I haven't heard of it" to be a valid reason for deletion—to stick with the example of Apogee Components, two seconds of basic searching suggests that they're a major player in their field—and consequently I now think he's providing a necessary service. Yes, the deleting admin is supposed to check the validity of the prod for themselves, but too many operate on the assumption that if nobody's challenged it for a week, the tagging must be valid.) In general, unless you're fairly sure nobody is going to object to the prod and you've done the WP:BEFORE work yourself and found nothing, it saves the time of all concerned to take it to AfD from the outset. ‑ Iridescent 15:57, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
I'd be inclined to agree with Adam there, unless the team played for very obviously has no notability (e.g. the local widget factory's works team). Much as they like to pretend they have the power to make up their own rules, the sports project—and in particular WP:FOOTY—can't actually overrule our notability rules, and it's entirely possible that someone playing sports in nations with few professional athletes gets regular media coverage despite having limited ability by virtue of being the biggest fish in a small pond. Given that the sports projects have spent the better part of two decades demanding that we loosen the notability guidelines because we need to keep drivel like Francis Dunham as he's been demonstrated to exist even though there's nothing to be said about him, the occasional appearance of articles on New York–Penn League ballplayers or Isthmian League footballers is the price they have to pay. I wouldn't necessarily consider playing in the minors as a credible claim of significance, but I'd certainly consider any sort of achievement—even something as relatively trivial as scoring the winning goal/run/point in a competitive fixture—to satisfy it, since it would likely mean at least some degree of coverage in those magical Multiple Independent Nontrivial Reliable Sources. Given the existence of The Non League Paper, baseball-reference.com et al, and the fact that even the tiniest outpost now has its own media, I'd be willing to bet a sizeable sum that even players towards the lower ends of the modern-day European or North American pyramids or playing Korfball in the Micronesian League have more coverage in Wikipedia-acceptable sources than most of those 19th-century cricketers and footballers. ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
What do you think about tweaking WP:BLPPROD to require a secondary source, instead of either no source for placement, or a reliable source for removal? I don't see it on the list of perennials and the most recent discussion I can find is this three-year-old mention, coincidentally, also by Adam9007. Levivich 06:38, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Thatv would be a very bad idea considering that everybody defines "secondary source" differently and our statement on it is questionable in itself. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:42, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Thanks all for the input. Will review. Regarding WP:FOOTY, the permastubs which fail WP:GNG but meet such subject-specific guidelines do annoy me, yes. Especially cricketers that I come across when doing deorphaning. SITH(talk) 16:34, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
Relating to arbitration
Please note that I have apologized to relevant parties for taking the issue to arbitration and moved to support procedural decline after I became aware of facts I was not aware of. --Leugen9001 (talk) 21:03, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
Would those facts have been the very first line at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests where it explicitly states that RFAR should only ever be used as the last resort when all other attempts at resolution have failed, or that you realized that at RFAR people actually do examine the evidence and would quickly notice that almost every part of your evidence was stuff you'd just made up rather than anything that had actually happened? I appreciate that you're new, but please, don't ever try a stunt like that again. ‑ Iridescent 21:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
The claims I made were made based on actual diffs, and I wrote my filing in a neutral way in an attempt to comply with the rules. The inaccuracies were minor (e.g. sexuality legitimately is a subset of all health issues) I saw that somebody suggested Arbitration at ANI and that's why I did it. I did not see evidence of resolution because the attempts at resolving it were done privately via email. I apologize, but I feel that you have not sufficiently assumed good faith. Leugen9001 (talk) 21:18, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
I hope my close did not encourage you to file a case. I only intended to note that ArbComm was a better venue than the mudslinging free for all at AN. Anyway maybe you headed off an ArbComm case with the filing so there might be a silver lining but generally, like filing a Real life court case, there is rarely much good that comes from filing an ArbComm case Legacypac (talk) 21:23, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
Unfortunately, your close gave me that idea. Ever since I was notified of private attempts at solving the problem that I was not aware of, I have completely supported closing the ArbCom case. I believe that accusations that I am engaging in bad faith fail to assume good faith and are beating a WP:DEADHORSE. I legitimately feel very bad right now. Leugen9001 (talk) 21:29, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) What Legacypac said. In the 15 years Arbcom has been in operation, I can think of a handful of cases that were unavoidably necessary; I can't think of a single case that could be said to have ended well. Because RFAR is the last resort and there's literally nowhere to go from there, by definition if they can't resolve the issue then the only solution is to block someone. As with real life lawsuits, filing an RFAR is a de facto admission that all other means of potentially resolving the situation have broken down; this dispute can be—and will be—resolved with "Now I look at it I can see my words were potentially offensive even though I didn't mean them to be, I'll try to be more careful in future", "Next time I see something potentially offensive I'll try to talk it through with the person who said it first to clarify their intent", shake hands. ‑ Iridescent 21:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
I've disagreed with you there, specifically on the issue of the off-wiki bullshit. I saw pretty much the same thing Guy Macon (probably at the same time). The community is capable of deciding if an essay needs to stay or go. But this is far from being the first time such knee-jerk activism has caused problems. And frankly their behaviour has been entirely chilling, from the threats to involve the WMF's trust and safety team (regardless of how unlikely that is to do anything) to the deliberate attempts to adversely affect Smc's and Barb's project-related activities. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
I've looked at all Guy Macon's links, and I'm not seeing it. WVS and Tech Ambassador are both meaningless titles—WVS just means that a library has allowed you to use their logon to access paywalled content, while Tech Ambassador means you volunteer to speak to the WMF on behalf of users who are too intimidated to speak to them directly. People seem to be under the impression that Fae was trying to cost them real jobs, rather than just raising a concern with the WMF as to whether they wanted people involved in a potential controversy to be publicly using the Wikipedia/Wikimedia name. I personally think Fae was wrong here—the page in question was singularly unfunny, but it was fairly clearly a lame attempt at a joke rather than an attempt to be deliberately hurtful and if we sanctioned people for failed attempts to be funny EEng, NYB and at least 1⁄4 of the participants at ANI would be roasting in Wikipedia Hell—but as far as I can see other than potentially canvassing people to the deletion discussion, in this case what he did was well within the bounds of an acceptable response to "I have concerns about another editor's behaviour but I'm not comfortable raising it directly with them, what should I do?". (If I had my way that mailing list would be shut down—as far as I can see it serves no useful purpose and just creates a them-and-us rift between editors who read it and those who don't—but as long as we have it we can't really blame people for using it. I've ignored it completely for 13 years and the world has not come to an end.) ‑ Iridescent 22:07, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
I wonder if it would be possible for 30 days to pass in the life of this page without my being held up as a bad example of something or other. EEng 21:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
You're seriously contesting that you're Wikipedia's exemplar of bad jokes? ‑ Iridescent 21:46, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
(a) I wasn't commenting on the accuracy of the evaluations, just their frequency, but since you mention it, (b) I have no objection with the characterization if painful is substituted for bad. EEng 21:59, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
I just happened to notice that I've been mentioned as naughty twice here in the last month. That's all. EEng 23:05, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
A ctrl-f here and on the last few archives (because I'm bored waiting for this pizza to arrive) suggests that the only times you've ever been mentioned on this page—certainly the only times in 2019—are immediately above, and Ritchie333suggesting that you have a long talk page which I presume you're not disputing. #JustSaying #MistakenIdentity #ByTheStandardsOfThesePeopleThisAccusationConstitutesSevereIncivilityAndWarrantsBlocking ‑ Iridescent 19:30, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
That's what I said, Arid Desiccant: "twice". Two times. A time and then one other time. EEng 19:42, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Frankly I think anyone who still thinks using mailing lists for *anything* should be in a retirement home (its amazing how in light of the EU's data protection laws CU's still use one), but the problem I have is that its part of the usual pattern of 'escalate this shit as much as possible while insinuating everyone else is bigoted' behaviour. Its completely toxic. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:13, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
For the back office has-to-be-kept-private stuff like Arbcom or CU, there's no obvious alternative to the mailing lists. For all their faults, the WMF is a major tech company with A-list contacts, and nobody has managed to find a workable alternative that allows people to communicate with each other privately and as a group, allows third parties to submit comments and be responded to while simultaneously allowing those non-member comments to be premoderated so as few people as possible see them if they don't need to all see them, and allow some content to be preserved while other content is deleted. I assure you, alternatives have been being investigated for a long time but it's not as simple as you'd think; even getting off the dilapidated and antiquated Mailman was a challenge.
If you see a usual pattern of 'escalate this shit as much as possible while insinuating everyone else is bigoted' behaviour, post evidence of it. Arbcom can only work with what they're given; I'm going with what's been said on this case request, and all I'm seeing is two editors having a relatively minor tiff while a bunch of third parties make assorted allegations without providing any evidence to back those allegations up. ‑ Iridescent 22:25, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
"For the back office has-to-be-kept-private stuff like Arbcom or CU, there's no obvious alternative to the mailing lists." Respectfully bull :) Plenty of commercial solutions for secure communications, with the added bonus it would keep it all on a central server under the WMF's control and not leave archives of sensitive material across the planet. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:31, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
I watched them trying and failing to come up with a workable alternative to the mailing lists that didn't cause more problems than it solved; it's not as simple as you'd think. If Risker or Whatamidoing are watching, one or the other can probably give you a program-by-program list of everything that was suggested and why it was rejected. Remember, whatever's used needs to be able to both send and receive information from people using any operating system, be fully usable by people on antiquated computers with extremely limited data allowances and very slow connections, and has as an absolute prerequisite that nobody using it needs to install any additional software of any kind, and doesn't affect the users' computers in any way, even something as trivial as installing a cookie. ‑ Iridescent 22:37, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
Even though you filed the case I suggest taking it off your watchlist. It is way above my or your paygrade. Legacypac (talk) 21:55, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
Deletion
Your deletion of 2019 Kashmir airstrikes citing A10 suggests WP:BIAS within this highly controversial topic area. How about deleting 2019 Balakot airstrike for the same reason to make it even? Or better still restore the former and let the AfD decide if someone has issue with its existence. --110.93.250.2 (talk) 13:11, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
If any other admin feels the deletion of 2019 Kashmir airstrikes was in error, feel free to overturn the deletion without going through the usual steps of notifying and consulting with me. ‑ Iridescent 14:41, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
Ah, so the clerks have made up their own procedure and are demanding the rest of us follow it. I believe my opinion of arbcom clerks is firmly on the record, and I've yet to see anything to suggest I'm wrong. ‑ Iridescent 19:43, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
I don't honestly know who wrote that procedure; it was like that when I got here. And I'm not familiar with your opinion of arbclerks - I hope it's positive. :) Bradv🍁 19:46, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
(cracks open the popcorn bucket) This should be good. Ealdgyth - Talk 20:01, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
That's a fair perspective, and not one I take issue with. I would love to see us adopt a simpler arbitration system that would eliminate the need for clerks and off-wiki mailing lists. But that would be a massive change from the system we currently have, and at this point I have no idea how we would even get there. Until we figure that out I'm happy to help in this area, and I hope that you won't hold that against me. Bradv🍁 21:20, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
I don't want to tar everyone with the same brush, some individual arbs have been very helpful, but in general I think the system is set up to adhere to the Peter principle - anyone who could do a good job there knows what an utter shit-fest it really is, with more unpleasant unpaid work than anyone could possibly imagine, so the sane editors steer clear of it. At least with adminship you can consciously decide to not use your tools or go anywhere near maintenance for a bit, and you won't be taken to task for it. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 21:24, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
Ritchie333, it certainly is not the most rewarding job, but I wouldn't necessarily call it unpleasant either. But I'd be cautious of dividing Wikipedians into sane/insane categories - from some perspectives we're all a little nuts. (And to your second point, clerks have more ability to walk away from things than arbs do, which I like). Bradv🍁 21:35, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
Isn't the way to get there: Step 1: eliminate clerks, Step 2: have arbs clerk the pages themselves, and Step 3: discuss any additions/changes to procedures (like statement headings) on-wiki rather than off-wiki? I felt the same way about the clerks' recent decision to restrict a filer's contributions to email: why couldn't that discussion have been had on-wiki instead of over a mailing list? Levivich 21:49, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
↑That. As you may have guessed clerks are a particular bugbear of mine and I'd do away with them in an instant; there may well be arbs who consider themselves Too Damn Important to wash their own laundry, but if that's the case I'd consider it prima facie evidence of unsuitability for the post and it would be a benefit to Wikipedia to expose them as soon as possible so we can get rid of them and replace them with people who are at least vaguely in line with Wikipedia's goals. I don't discount off-wiki communication entirely—a lot of what arbs, CUs and OSers deal with does need to be discussed in private—but the idea of passing rules in camera is totally antithetical to Wikipedia. (I have no issue with drafting off-wiki—sometimes it's good to get a framework in place before every Tom, Dick and Harry piles in—but there needs to be some point in any significant change in which Tom, Dick and Harry can have input if they want it.) ‑ Iridescent 21:59, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
I can see an argument that arbs may not want to spend time fiddling around with some formatting of a template that they can't figure out and ask a technically minded person to help out, but there's no reason this can't happen on an ad-hoc as and when basis, and after a few trips round the template, they should be able to figure things out. We don't have RfA clerks, and yet people seem to manage to transclude nominations without too much difficulty. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 22:05, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
If you ever feel like an entertaining bit of wiki-archaeology, have a look at the original discussions from the creation of the clerks (you can't see the discussion that led to the creation of the clerks because that took place in secret off-wiki, natch) and count how many of the participants were with the benefit of hindsight absolutely batshit crazy. ‑ Iridescent 22:08, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
The current clerks should all be removed from their positions. They are self important pompous jerks who decided in a star chamber to restrict me in a case I filed while allowing Admins to post similar material with no restrictions. Then when I was allowed to post on another page, they ignored my posts and then claimed they would copy it over after everything closed, meaning others would not see it until too late to comment. I'm not at all impressed with the clerking. Legacypac (talk) 22:15, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
Doing away with clerks would mean the arbs doing all this stuff themselves; while I obviously support that (see the two threads linked in my initial reply), you're liable to be disappointed if you think bypassing the clerks and dealing direct with the arbs will reduce your chance of encountering self important pompous jerks. ‑ Iridescent 22:22, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
Ouch. As an aside, the procedure dates back to 2015 long before I was a clerk and I think during my self imposed inactivity form editing. I apologize if I've ruffled any feathers or caused some sort of offense. I'd be more than happy to talk about the issue. In the mean time I'll leave your header as you've restored it. I'm generally fairly open to discussion when approached about an issue. Have a pleasant day. --Cameron11598(Talk) 22:37, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
As one further aside, I agree in an ideal world the arbitration committee would function without the need for clerks, and I would be more than willing to help in any such efforts to implement these sort of changes. If you do consider moving forward with steps to suggest that reform let me know how I can be of help. Regards, --Cameron11598(Talk) 22:50, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
To clear some things up, I don't believe any arbitrator thinks we have clerks because we're "better" than performing clerking duties. Most of us do clerk stuff from time to time, though admittedly not often. The clerks exist to make the arbitration process easier for everyone involved, and they do a fantastic job of that. To a lesser extent, they're also there to provide institutional knowledge of the arbitration process and procedures. Arbitrators rotate in and out of the role relatively quickly. Clerks are there much longer, and I find it incredibly valuable to be able to ask someone like L235 if he recalls a case where we did X so I can check if it worked or didn't work. They are our partners in the arbitration process, nothing less. It would be extremely difficult for ArbCom to operate without clerks simply from a time-management perspective. I received 54 emails over 21 threads today in my Wikipedia-only inbox, not counting quite a few more emails I deleted as things I didn't need to read (e.g. list admin spam, things related to ACC, CU discussions that are global in nature but don't involve enwiki, etc). Most were fairly involved and required a non-trivial amount of time to review and respond to. I'm only writing to you at this particular hour because I'm staying up several hours later than I usually would to attend a phone call with the WMF. This has been a slow day. Adding clerking on top of all that we do in a typical day would make the role that little bit harder. Keep in mind that this still is a volunteer position, and the "mandatory" workload needs to be kept as manageable as possible. And as a final note, personally attacking the clerks for doing what the Committee asks them to is a very bad look. It bears a resemblance to the disgruntled customer that screams into the telephone at a customer service representative about a decision made by someone in the C-suite. Those "self important pompous jerks" did exactly what the Committee asked them to do in that situation, after repeated warnings were ignored. If you want to attack someone, attack me or another arbitrator. We were elected partially to be the community's punching bag, and we know it. Do not attack the clerks, who have done nothing but try to ease tensions and maintain order in a venue intended to deal with disputes that have the most tension and the least order. Bullying them for performing these thankless tasks is shameful. ~ Rob13Talk 03:38, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Wouldn't time be saved if we stopped caring about things like whether a header was called "Statement" or "Drive by statement"? Is regulating that, issuing repeated warnings, or asking the clerks to change it, a good use of their time, or Iri's time, or your time? Levivich 04:05, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
In my opinion, the time sink was caused by Iri's desire to be different than everyone else, not the clerks' faithful execution of our procedures. We keep the headers uniform based mostly on a slippery-slope argument, I believe. Is "Drive by statement" the worst thing in the world? No. Could it lead to someone else thinking it's okay to make their header something less-okay like "Statement about X" where X is one of the parties? In my opinion, yes, and bad headers like that could lead to unnecessary slap-fights at the case requests page. Arbitration is a lot more rigid in process than other venues of Wikipedia due to the types of disputes it has historically handled. In the past, presumably, non-uniform headers caused some problem such that someone deemed it necessary to write down that we'd make them uniform. There's really no reason to change that, because it could conceivably prevent disruption. Given the worst disputes with the highest tendency to kick-off over nothing come to us, we want to minimize the "surface area" over which a silly slip-fight could ignite. ~ Rob13Talk 04:28, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
The problem I see is that this sounds more like a solution to a rare issue and that the clerks are not exempt from the normal consensus policy regarding offwiki discussions. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:00, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
It's not a rare issue and nor is it a "desire to be different", it's a desire to have my comment treated as a "comment" not as a "statement" (with all the implications in terms of subsequent talk-page spamming when the case opens). This non-existent rule that Cameron and Joe Roe have made up and are edit-warring to enforce has, as far as I'm aware, never been recognised by any previous iteration of the committee; as a concrete example, five of the seven cases accepted by the committee in 2018 (Mister Wiki, Civility & infoboxes, British political BLPs, German war effort, Fred Bauder)—and the GiantSnowman case this year, come to that—contain submissions violating your standard-header "rule", and neither the drafting arbs nor the clerks at the time (which in two of those cases included some guy called "BU Rob13") appear to have had the slightest issue with this. ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
@Jo-Jo Eumerus: The Arbitration Committee retains jurisdiction over our own procedures per WP:ARBPOL. By WP:CONEXCEPT, these are not subject to consensus. Those are both community policies. ~ Rob13Talk 14:59, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure that changing Iri's header decreased, rather than increased, the surface area of conflict. Everyone else had standard section headings: did that stop them from sniping at each other in the case request statements? Nothing was done/said about the sniping, but if the statement lengths are 600 words instead of 500 words, or a section header says "comment" instead of "statement"... Generally, I think "slippery slope" arguments are weak because they require one to not only defend X, but also some hypothetical exaggeration of X. They are logical fallacies ("If we license driving, soon we'll have to license walking, too.", "If we put a traffic light in one intersection, soon we'll have to put a traffic light in all intersections."), and can be applied to any argument ("If we allow clerks to decide off-wiki to change statement headers, soon they'll be deciding off-wiki who can participate at Arbcom and how.", "If we allow Arbcom to establish procedures, soon they'll be establishing procedures to delete content."). That said, hats off to Rob for consistently being open to discussion about these issues (even when they are not his personal doing). Levivich 14:45, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Is this a general attitude towards all clerking, like SPI clerks, or arbitration clerks in particular? LizRead!Talk! 05:07, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Arbitration clerking in particular; SPI and CCI clerking, I see as a subset of routine maintenance. AFAIK Arbcom is the only part of Wikipedia where the members treat the clerks as their private army of servants, and is certainly the only part of Wikipedia where "we discussed this off-wiki and reached a private decision to make this an enforcable rule regardless of a total lack of community input" wouldn't be laughed out. ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Hate to correct you User:BU Rob13 but it eventually came out the clerks held a behind the curtain meeting to restrict me. When an Arb overruled them they refused/failed to comply with the Arb's direction to transfer my posts over from the clerks page in a timely manner. User:Fram actually did the work the clerks failed to do. I remain the only editor really sanctioned in the GiantSnowman case because when GiantSnowman went back to blocking random accounts he thinks are his favourite sockmaster there was no enforcement because no one noticed for two days. Legacypac (talk) 16:19, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
The lack of action at AE can be appealed to ARCA. No-one chose to do so. And I’m one of the arbitrators who personally signed off on the original restriction, so telling me it was all the clerks doesn’t exactly work. ~ Rob13Talk 16:23, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Which places you in the secret meeting, undisclosed by the clerk that said the clerks met. Lovely. Maybe the Arbs will learn for the next AdminAcct case. Legacypac (talk) 00:51, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
"Secret meeting"? There's a publicly-disclosed clerks-l mailing list that is used by the clerk team to coordinate clerking. See Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/Clerks#Mailing_list. I'm bewildered why you think it's some sort of scandal that the clerks would discuss there the difficult situation you placed them into by disregarding the basic requirements of evidence in an arbitration case and their instructions trying to help you participate in the case. ~ Rob13Talk 01:06, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
No one else can see the discussion on a mailing list. I did not put the clerks in any difficult situation, you and the clerks created a difficult situation for yourselves. You/They applied one standard of participation to me and another to two Admins in the same case. Other editors noted this - I'm not making this up. Pretty rich behavior in an AdminAcct case. Then they did not follow the instructions from another Arb to post over my comments from the clerk page. I'm a very respectful of authority person but I have no respect for people who make up rules for one class of person and not another class of person. Legacypac (talk) 01:21, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
Your sanction was the result of your behavior, not the fact you are a non-admin. You were asked to only post evidence with diffs if they directly accused someone of wrongdoing. The editors who were not sanctioned, if I recall, did not post diffs but also did not make accusations of wrong behavior. Per WP:NPA, accusations of wrongdoing must be evidenced or are personal attacks. This is true even on the arb pages, where we try to give considerable leeway. We can't override community policies or guidelines on the minimum standards of conduct expected on Wikipedia, however. You're welcome to take this to my talk if you have any questions about it, to avoid blowing up Iridescent's notifications. ~ Rob13Talk 04:39, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
I see the key role of the clerks as enabling the arbs to stand back a little from the inevitable minor disputes among the parties and their supporters that arise during a case. If arbs got involved in this, it tends to influence our views of the parties based on other things than the matter at issue. DGG ( talk ) 19:59, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
Fair point DGG. That can be a useful function. Legacypac (talk) 01:21, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
Rockstone isn't the first and won't be the last; every so often we get someone who misunderstands "banned mean banned" and WP:G5 to mean "once someone is blocked, every trace of them must be expunged" and thinks that working through the block log applying damnatio memoriae will put them on the fast-track to adminship. I'm not going to be too harsh provided he stops; the banning policy is a fiendishly complex mix of statute and precedent which even quite a few admins find difficult to understand. ‑ Iridescent 09:40, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm not going to blank userpages or talk pages anymore -- I did it because that seemed to be the pattern of most banned users, I'm sorry again! Rockstonetalk to me! 16:14, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
Quick question -- Can we blank user talkpages for users who do not have editing writes to their own talkpages? Rockstonetalk to me! 17:57, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
I would say in general no. Remember that (a) blocked/banned isn't necessarily permanent, so we shouldn't try to erase their history; (b) even when someone is banned they're quite often still occasionally looking in on Wikipedia, and an overtly hostile act like blanking their user or talk page can push someone over the edge from "I'll behave myself and wait patiently for the standard offer" to "fuck the lot of them then" and turn someone from a good editor who's had a few problems and is temporarily absent while they calm down, into a full-blown vandal; and most importantly (c) that there's often a need to post messages to the talk pages of even the most problematic users as there are certain circumstances in which notifications are mandatory, so there's a decent chance that even a blanked talkpage is just going to fill up again, particularly if the editor in question has had talk page access revoked so can't remove the notifications themselves. (Even if the editor can't respond to the notifications, chances are that whatever their topic of interest the other people who are interested in that topic still have their talk page watchlisted, and consequently will see and act on AFD notices or whatever.)
There's rarely if ever a need to remove anything from anyone's talkpage unless it's grossly defamatory or constitutes doxxing—in either of which cases you should notify the oversighters and let them deal with it. The only people who are ever going to look at the talk page of a blocked user are that user or people who are interested in that user, and in either case blanking the talk page doesn't serve either any useful purpose, and just causes a general nuisance as people looking for the history—in particular, people looking at the circumstances that led to the block to see if it should be lifted—need to go digging through the page history. ‑ Iridescent 18:24, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
Ok, understood. The reason I'm asking is because it does mean that banned users are sometimes listed twice (since we usually mark them as banned both on the talk page and the user page), but that makes sense. I didn't think about the fact that blanking the talkpage both might upset users and also just makes things harder for those interested in the reason for the ban (or just interested in the user's history). Thanks! Rockstonetalk to me! 19:29, 6 April 2019 (UTC)
You also have to look at the circumstances of the ban, as in the case of editors banned by Arbcom—as opposed to being blocked or banned by community consensus—the ban template is intentionally invisible other than to logged-in users with "show hidden categories" enabled. (This is explicitly spelled out in detail in the documentation of the {{banned user}} template; it's not some obscure rule nobody could be expected to know about.) Consequently, edits like this, in which you intentionally broke the coding to force the ban template to become visible to all users, are a definite no-no. (As a general rule, assume that in the case of any given ban, the admin enacting the ban set things up the way they did for a reason; by definition bans can't be unilaterally enacted so if there were an issue with the way the ban template was written, one of the people involved in the ban discussion would have spotted it.) ‑ Iridescent 07:34, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
regarding CSD:G11
I looked over the page briefly and it seemed promotional to me, thus I added the CSD tag. I guess maybe the article might just need some slight tweaking? Either way, that's why I put the CSD tag on it. Thanks, Jeb3Talk at me here 15:40, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
There is no earthly way Centre for Investigative Journalism could possibly be considered a page that is exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to conform with Wikipedia:NOTFORPROMOTION, and if you can't see that then I urge you to stay away from speedy tagging, as misplaced speedy tags are a very good way to upset good-faith editors. Speedy deletion is for unambiguous cases, not for articles you don't like the look of. I can't even see what "slight tweaking" you feel is necessary, as this just looks like an utterly generic and NPOV "this is what this organisation does" article. Which part of it do you consider "unambiguous advertising or promotion"? ‑ Iridescent 15:46, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
I see now that it isn't quite CSD worthy, but lines like "It has provided training to thousands of journalists, researchers and students from over 35 countries","The CIJ offers particular assistance to those working in difficult environments where free speech and freedom of the press are under threat and where truthful reporting can be a dangerous occupation", and "The CIJ's training programmes are designed to encourage in-depth reporting on injustice, corruption, the integrity and transparency of institutional power and to hold the powerful to account.", while not blatantly promotional, don't seem very neutral to me. Jeb3Talk at me here 15:51, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) The thing is, Jebcubed, if—just to take your example—an organisation has trained thousands of journalists, researchers and students from over 35 countries...how many other ways are there of phrasing it? :) ——SerialNumber54129 16:20, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Indeed. Given that there's an obligation on the writers of new articles to explicitly include a "credible claim of significance or importance", it's not inappropriate, let alone spam, for an article to explain why the subject is significant. Spam would be "The Centre for Investigative Journalism is the world leader in training journalists, we offer competitive rates, call 01 811 8055 to join our exciting programme", particularly if there were no source provided to indicate that a third party considered it a world leader. (There's also a need to apply basic common sense; how likely do you really think it that a journalism unit based at Goldsmiths—whose Media & Communications school is currently ranked the seventh best in the world—is so desperate that it needs to spam on Wikipedia?) ‑ Iridescent 17:44, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
I use the following standard, applicable both to content and wording:
A promotional articles is one that says what the subject wants to have said about itself and its activities; an encyclopedia article is one that says what the general reader would like to know.
This can also be restated as
A promotional article is one addressed primarily to potential staff, participants, customers, students, clients, donors, or sympathizers;
Using these criteria, I consider at least the second of examples Jebcubed's examples as blatantly promotional. The key faactor is the extensive use of value-laden or emotionally laden words. This is how one talks when one wants to arouse sympathy with an organisations goals.
Even the best and most conscientious organizations have PR departments that work the same as other PR departments. In my experience educational organizations can be among the worst. DGG ( talk ) 22:10, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
password guidelines
Regarding this edit: I believe the instances of WP:PSP were typos. isaacl (talk) 16:39, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
Yes, thanks—I started out (correctly) linking WP:PSR, I have no idea what kind of brainfart made me change to WP:PSP halfway through. ‑ Iridescent 16:50, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
Parliamentary arcanery
Arcanery is apparently not a word. Anyway, some things I tried to look up on Wikipedia and failed, indicating that maybe these are too obscure even here.
I expect more will emerge over the next few weeks (well, its only 8 days now apparently). Carcharoth (talk) 16:29, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
@Carcharoth, Standing Order foo would IMO be very bad titles for an article series, given that probably every legislature, every local authority and every military body in the world has a set of standing orders so you'd end up with a family of enormous indiscriminate lists. (I'm mildly surprised there isn't an article for Emergency debate, though, as that's a significant concept in its own right.) On the subject of Speaker's Conference, I'm not inclined to go wading through books but on a quick skim of Google it doesn't look like there's very much other than a few press releases and some minimal background on the Parliament website. (As I understand it, aside from a single brief revival at the fag-end of New Labour, the process has been moribund for decades as Royal Commissions now handle matters relating to voting ages, constituency boundaries and electoral process.) Given the timing of the most recent one (convened just as the shit hit the fan in the 2008 financial crisis, concluding immediately before the abolition of the Central Office of Information and the advent of the Coalition and their slash-and-burn approach to anything deemed non-essential, and with the Speaker who convened and chaired it sacked before it reported) I'm not surprised it passed under the radar. BrownHairedGirl is usually quite good at ferreting out Parliamentary obscurities if you want to go further, but to be honest I'd consider this kind of procedural wonkery the kind of thing where Wikipedia shouldn't have an article as the stuff on the official website is going to be more informative and more up-to-date than anything we can realistically provide. ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping and the wonkette prize, @Iridescent <grin>. So here's my tuppenceworth.
I agree that this is fairly arcane technical stuff. However, in the last 15 years the UK Parliament has done quite a lot of good work in publishing details of proceedings online, and of extending that coverage well into its internal workings. So researching the primary sources no longer involves potholing in the dusty box-file section of specialist libraries. But the secondary coverage in reliable sources on which en.wp relies tends to be in scholarly books and academic journals, so writing a half-decent article on most of these topics requires either access to an academic library, or a healthy credit card to buy expensive academic books and journal access.
I dissent a bit from Iridescent's caution about this subject area. Yes, it does need some skill and commitment to research, and yes it will be a niche topic area. But given that en.wp can accommodate copious detail on every blade of grass in Tolkien's works, every iteration of every video game and every footballer who set one boot fleetingly on the pitch in a professional game, I'm sure we could find space on the server for a few dozen more articles on trivia like how laws are made and millions of lives governed.
I agree that in fast-moving areas of procedure, en.wp is unlikely to be able to keep fully up to date. But in reality, most of this stuff is fairly stable: no change for decades, then a period of controversy and revision, followed by prolonged stability. So someone as conscientious as Carcharoth could, if they had the time and commitment, produce a decent set of articles on this sort of topic. I don't think it would require anything remotely like the sort of frequent revision seen for example in footy bios, where the hordes are daily updating the latest tallies of matches and goals and the latest transfers. The more that such articles are written as overviews of the historical developments of parliamentary procedure rater than as news items on the latest dramas, the more stable they will be.--BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 10:34, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Well, the "every blade of grass" approach to coverage has led to serious problems in the past given Wikipedia's inability to maintain large numbers of pages that keep going out of date—click here, here or here half a dozen times and see how useful you find the result. We were at Arbcom only a couple of months ago for a case which, while on paper about the actions of a single editor, was in reality an attempt to formulate how Wikipedia will deal in future with the issues caused by the ever-increasing article-to-active editor ratio (as of December 2018 when the WMF stopped publishing these statistics in a form a non-programmer can understand, the article/active editor ratio was 1650:1; for comparison, when I passed RFA in September 2007 it was 430:1).
To bang a drum I've banged many times before, it serves no useful purpose for most of these niche topics about which there's little to say to have stand-alone Wikipedia articles, and it would serve readers far better to have vastly expanded Members of the 14th Dáil, List of stations on the Formartine and Buchan Railway or List of Barnet F.C. goalkeepers with a summary of each entry and a link to the stand-alone articles of those about which enough has been written to justify a stand-alone page. That way, given that readers interested in one entry on the list are quite likely to be interested in the others it avoids readers having to flip through a dozen different pages, but it doesn't inconvenience those who are only interested in a single topic as they can still just jump to the relevant part of the list; it also allows people to compare and contrast the entries at a glance, and makes it far more likely that vandalism or errors will be spotted as anyone interested in one item on the list will also see changes to anything else in the list on their watchlist. (You can see my proof-of-concept experimental page of how such a list-comprised-of-stub-articles-and-summaries-of-longer-articles would look at Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway. See this very long thread for more of my thoughts on the disconnect between "sum of all human knowledge" and "3500 active editors".) The videogame articles aren't really a fair comparison; I see them as no different to books or paintings, in that once created they don't change so even if the articles are never improved, they're also unlikely to deteriorate or go out of date other than relatively trivial things like total sales figures.
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
I don't underestimate just how much the existence of a Wikipedia article can impact on reader interest in a topic. Provided you can make the article interesting enough, even the most obscure topic can take off; all it takes is a celebrity to take an interest in it and tweet a link, or it to be picked up by QI, and you start seeing spikes in readership. (See the viewspike detectors to the right on three of the nichest topics imaginable over the past two years.)
In this particular case, while I think Standing Order 24 would be of little use to anyone since those people who are interested would go direct to the Parliament website to read about it, I can certainly see how List of Standing Orders of the Parliament of the United Kingdom would not only fly, but would potentially have a rabbit hole effect as people who came solely because they were interested in one of the entries stayed to read the other entries. ‑ Iridescent 16:58, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Forgot to add we also have Standing Order 66 (go on, try and guess what that is for). Must confess I find this sort of update (by someone else to an article I started) more pleasing than following the current Brexit debates {there are 16 uses of this source so far on Wikipedia]}. Another vote today (in about 15 mins). After that, who knows? Carcharoth (talk) 14:14, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
It looks like that's all we have, though. As I think I've said before, never have I been more glad to be a foreign national; I can't imagine what must be going through the minds of people seeing this out-of-control train heading for them and knowing they're unable to jump out of its path. ‑ Iridescent 14:20, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
The lower case search finds a couple more. The vote was lost. May went from losing by 230 to losing by 149 to putting half the deal up for a vote and losing by 58. Back to Letwin on Monday. And more feverish politics over the weekend. I suppose we (the UK) could avoid holding European elections by having a general election on that date instead... Carcharoth (talk) 14:48, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
If I had to guess—which I realise is a fool's game in the current state of chaos—my money would be on a snap general election on 2 May to coincide with the local elections. If it has to happen, I'd imagine May would want it to happen as soon as possible, before either Farage or the TIGgers can get their party machines up and running. The announcement has been somewhat overshadowed by events, but by naming Heidi Allen as leader the TIG rebels have positioned themselves to peel away centrist Tories who can't support a Boris-run party but might have felt reluctant to support a Blairite reboot; with TIG peeling away moderates, the UKIP/EDL alliance leeching away the right wing lunatic fringe, and Farage poaching whatever remains of the Thatcherite true believers, if they leave it until 23 May it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Conservatives would suffer a collapse of Canadian proportions. Plus, if she calls a 2 May election that way it gets called before cliff-edge day. ‑ Iridescent 15:55, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
Isn't the deadline for calling an election 25 working days? So given that there are two Easter bank holidays, that date has been missed already. There is also the 6 May bank holiday. So even if a general election was agreed on and parliament dissolved on Monday (not going to happen as Letwin's indicative vote process still going), then 9 May is earliest. The reason for 12 April deadline is that this is 25 working days before the European elections on 23 May. There is also the small matter of the Tories wanting time for a leadership election. Bit of a mess, really. Carcharoth (talk) 16:54, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
If they really wanted an early election, they could have one; the actions of a former parliament can't bind the current one, and they could amend the relevant part of ERAA 2013 if they really wanted (they've just spent 1000 days banging on about Parliamentary sovereignty, after all); hell, there are explicit precedents that Parliament has the power to reschedule Easter if they really want to cause maximum chaos. (It's not as if Labour would oppose the government if they moved for an accelerated timescale.) Because the polling apparatus will already be in place for the locals, the lack of time wouldn't be the issue it would normally be. Of course, dissolving Parliament for a month just at the point when crisis decisions need to be made would be an issue whenever they chose to call an election; especially if May resigns, I'm not sure there's been a precedent for treaties being signed in the absence of either a parliament or a leader to approve them since the days of King Billy. There's a strange fascination through watching first-hand something that you know historians in 500 years time will call something like "The Great Disaster"; this must be what living in Berlin in the 1920s or Washington in early 1861 felt like. All we need now is the death of a high-raking royal with the subsequent need to suspend all state functions for the duration, and we'd have a perfect storm of chaos. (Speaking of King Billy, as I type this the DUP have just come out for Remain. Interesting times indeed.) ‑ Iridescent 17:24, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
Interesting is an understatement. It has all gone very Alice through the Looking Glass today. May-Corbyn unity government? Hmm. The newspaper headline writers had a field day. Carcharoth (talk) 09:13, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
I still don't see how that's going to work, since presumably the 170 no-deal Conservatives will refuse to work with Corbyn and the hard-left activists who keep Corbyn at the top of Labour will refuse to work with May, so what will be left is a unity government with even less support than either of the two main parties had to start with; plus, I can't imagine either the big corporate Tory donors or Labour's trade union backers are happy at the prospect of continuing to fund this rabble. ‑ Iridescent 09:31, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
EU arcanery now. The phrase "duty of sincere co-operation" has been used. Apparently this is a key constitutional principle of EU law, as explained here, here, here and here. This phrase is from Article 4(3) of the Lisbon Treaty. Hmm. Treaties of the European Union is quite impressive. Maybe the UK should become an outermost region of the EU... (no, not really). Carcharoth (talk) 15:38, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
I'd imagine it's because, being de jure just an international non-governmental body with more than the usual share of influence as opposed to a government in its own right, the EU by definition doesn't have any kind of enforceable constitution or an oath of office for its members. Bear in mind that the civil servants and ministers drawing Maastricht and Lisbon up had grown up during (and in many cases participated in) the cold war, and were explicitly trying to avoid creating another UN in which no controversial decision could ever be taken because somebody would always object, while simultaneously trying to avoid the mistakes made by the US in creating an overly-powerful court system and in concentrating too much authority in the central government. They also had De Gaulle well within living memory and Thatcher in very fresh memory, so had understandable concerns that individual member governments might try to hold the system to ransom to extract concessions.
You say outermost region as a joke, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if when the dust settles the net result is that the UK ends up with a similar status to French Guiana or Bermuda, simultaneously in and out of all the EU treaties, as a kind of mega-Guernsey; I can totally imagine May & Corbyn agreeing on it as a compromise for a five or ten year period in order to kick the can down the road and the 27 agreeing to it in the hope that the UK nations will peel away and rejoin piecemeal, and it eventually becoming the status quo because nobody wants to reopen the debate. Assuming the extension is granted, May 23 is now when things get interesting; single-issue elections run under a PR system at a time when all four major parties are in an advanced state of disintegration and at such short notice that no party has had time to draw up and vet a list of candidates or prepare campaigns are going to be the trainwreck to end all trainwrecks. ‑ Iridescent 17:09, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
"Another six months of this" is optimistic. Assuming A50 doesn't get revoked (unlikely given that neither May, any of her likely successors, nor Saint Jeremy and his acolytes have shown any appetite for it), there are only two alternatives. Either Brexit happens in which case the whole thing starts up again with the trade negotiations which will run for at least a decade; or, can-kicking continues, and eventually the annual ceremony of The Extension of the Deadline will become a Brussels equivalent of the Presidential Turkey Pardon, slamming the door in Black Rod's face, or Swan Upping, as a quaint tradition the origins of which are half-forgotten. ‑ Iridescent 09:41, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
(adding) Wooferendum is about as obviously non-notable a topic as I can imagine, if the best they can find to say about it is Several famous people spoke in the march, including actor Peter Egan, Labour MP Stella Creasy, and former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell; Egan is a virtual unknown, Creasy is an obscure backbencher and Campbell is an inveterate self-publicist who'd turn up to the opening of an envelope. However, in the current climate nominating anything Brexit-related for deletion is a fairly surefire way to invite a rabble of extremists to choose your talkpage as the venue for their next battle, and life's too short. ‑ Iridescent 10:34, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
Good grief, just had a look at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/UK telephone code misconceptions. Yes, different times and all that but I'm not sure I've ever seen an AfD debate with more stupid comments. The article itself is a solid chunk of inaccurate and unsourced original research, and if it weren't for the certainty that its defenders would stonewall it into "no consensus" I'd nominate it again on the spot. (I have nominated the blatant copyright violation that illustrates it for deletion at Commons, however.) ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
Degradation of article histories
Should really take this grumble elsewhere (probably someone already raised it, though have asked here and it got fixed), but was annoyed to recently find that my links to previous versions of articles that I have worked on don't really work because the rendering is now broken. An example is at Talk:Frink Medal where I link to this version of an article, to be told "The unnamed parameter 2= is no longer supported. Please see the documentation for {{columns-list}}." That's really useful. Will article histories eventually degrade completely (the issue with deleted images and changed templates transcluding as they are now rather than as they were is already known, but this looks slightly different)? Having said that, am trying to think where it is essential that article histories are not messed up. Carcharoth (talk) 11:44, 17 April 2019 (UTC) The irony is that it is difficult to now see, without a screenshot, what the problem was! Carcharoth (talk) 11:58, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
I assume this is something to do with the templates being changed, so when the old version of the page tries to transclude the templates the paramaters on that version are no longer valid. Short of substing every template, I'm not sure what could be done to address it. (Where it does become an issue is with the main page, where it sometimes is necessary to know exactly what it looked at on a particular occasion.) The Internet Archive versions of the page might be able to show you exactly what the page looked at at any given time. ‑ Iridescent 15:33, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
The Internet Archive would show how the page looked as it stores the rendered html, not the wikitext, so subsequent changes to templates won't affect that. The only problem is that there are some gaps in the daily coverage of the Main Page that's stored there, although it's only patchy pre-2010. --RexxS (talk) 16:25, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
Hammersmith High Line
Briefly, would you have any thoughts on the proposed Hammersmith High Line? See also here. Plenty of sources out there on the architectural competition (which is aimed at the general public it seems). Would have been tempted (if more time) to express interest just for the opportunity to visit the site before it is developed (I go past there on the bus every day). If it is developed. Hopefully not a Garden Bridge! Carcharoth (talk) 11:44, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
I've got assorted books on the Hammersmith railways from when I was writing about the origins of the Metropolitan Line, but not sure where one would get anything on the proposed redevelopment as it will all be PR fluff and press releases at the moment. IMO both High Line proposals are ridiculous, and I very much doubt either will happen. The NYC High Line is an oasis of greenery in an area with few public parks, but the proposed Camden High Line would virtually parallel the towpath of the Regent's Canal, while the Hammersmith proposal will be within a 5 minute walk of Ravenscourt Park, Brook Green, Margravine Cemetery, Shepherd's Bush Common, Lillie Road Rec and all the open spaces along the Thames, all of which (particularly Ravenscourt Park) offer just as many opportunities for picnicking, jogging, feeding ducks etc without being sandwiched between office blocks and an active railway line. Plus, while the Camden proposal would run (more or less) between Google's head office and the forthcoming huge redevelopment of Camden Town and consequently they'd have a fighting chance of suckling some money from Google's corporate teats if the developers can sell Google on a privately-run park with its own security guards being somewhere their employees can drink their soy lattes in peace without being troubled by the peasants below, there's nothing equivalent in Hammersmith, so it would need to be privately-run along the lines of the NYC High Line, and I really can't imagine the Corbynite H&F ever voting to allow a privatised park. (The cynic in me says that this is an intentional blocking move by the road lobby to prevent the West London Tram using it for a spur to Hammersmith station.) ‑ Iridescent 12:14, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for the thoughts on this. Kind of made me lose interest! :-) On more topical news, I wonder how easy it will be to find out what happened to this? I suppose an inventory (a long one!) of what was lost will be published at some point? Carcharoth (talk) 12:55, 16 April 2019 (UTC) Apparently, lots was saved, as the roof burnt but the vault mostly remained intact. Carcharoth (talk) 15:12, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
My guess is that as with other similar situations (Reims Cathedral, York Minster, Berliner Dom, Malbork, Hampton Court, Versailles…) the damage will look bad from outside but will actually not be as bad as it looks. It takes a lot to bring down a stone building—witness how much of Elgin Cathedral has survived despite being roofless and abandoned for literally five centuries—and even if the vault does collapse it will fall into the empty space of the nave. (The new Coventry Cathedral was a political act by the CoE positioning themselves as facing the future, rather than a matter of necessity; enough of the old cathedral still stands even today that they could have it repaired in a couple of years.) While it's obviously too soon to say, I'll guess that other than the windows and some smoke damage any damage to the interior will be superficial. In terms of art and architecture, France has been lucky in that Notre Dame's significance derived primarily from its location rather than any great architectural, artistic or religious importance; the real action in Paris is the Sainte-Chapelle, and that was untouched (although I imagine they're double-checking their sprinklers today). ‑ Iridescent 15:29, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
From interior shots that have been shared, the big rose windows look to have escaped catastrophic damage, and the statuary around the high altar looks at least mostly intact. Several pulpits and other interior fixtures are visible also - also intact. Virgin of Paris, contrary to the "sourced" statement in our article, is not yet confirmed to have survived. (that source is a twitter tweet that says "Interior of the Notre Dame Cathedral still pretty much in tact. Pulpit, part of the Alter still in tact. Cross still standing" ... heh. Go go sourcing strictness!) The Guardian here has a good map lower in the article showing locations of things ... the Virgin statue and the statue of St Denis are unfortunatly close to the transept crossing where the steeple collapsed. Depending on where that memorial is located... it has a good chance of minimal damage.. looks like the worst is going to be in the nave where the transepts crossed. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:40, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
For some reason, when it comes to this topic the usual rules of quality and sourcing appear to have been suspended; a long-standing admin who should know better not only considered this to be of sufficient quality to put on the Main Page (complete with a blatant copyvio as the accompanying image), but is still arguing the case to defend his supervoting and complaining that his action was reversed. Sometimes I think The Rambling Man has a point; the Main Page has gone beyond merely being a laughing stock and has passed the point where we can even try to redeem it. ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
In the words of Sir Humphrey, "when you clean up a dunghill you're left with nothing, and the person who cleans it up usually finds themselves covered in dung". Trying to clean up ITN and DYK would be a Forth Bridge job, since as soon as you resolve one issue or get rid of one problem editor, another has appeared within minutes. ‑ Iridescent 16:28, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
I remember that statue! There is a reason everyone was looking at it... (well, maybe they were paying attention to their guide books). Not actually too bothered about the tablet memorial I linked to a photo of, as they (or similar ones) have been damaged before and replaced/repaired. It's not an irreplaceable work of art. As an aside, I was pleased to see the tablets in Amiens Cathedral featured in the commemorative service they held there in August 2018, and mentioned in the official commemorative programme. I must use some of these sources I've been accumulating. Carcharoth (talk) 16:07, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
So... from the lead photo here it shows part of the Virgin of Paris statue on the very right hand edge... the statue is used quite often in medievalist works - it's a common cover image or interior image, not just in art books, but in a lot of French subjects. So it's rather well known outside of religious veneration. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:42, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Unfortunately, I think you're overestimating the public; as with pretty much everything in Paris that has a crowd gathered around it, they're not interested in it as an emblem of medieval Gothic sculpture, they're interested in it because it's mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. ‑ Iridescent 18:04, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
And there I thought it was because of The Hunchback of Notre-DameJoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 14:31, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
I still have a vivid memory of trying to explain to my family why wearing "Fighting Irish" sweatshirts in England in the early 1990s would mean every waitress spitting in their food. ‑ Iridescent 18:40, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
Well, if you would insist on eating posh :p the Spider Eggs Cafe on Well St would have seen you alright... ——SerialNumber54129 18:48, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
Fwiw, I’m relatively knowledgeable on these sort of things, have been to the cathedral multiple times, and couldn’t recognize it if it wasn’t pointed out to me (then again, I’ve always preferred Sacré-Cœur, and rushed through Notre Dame because it wasn’t ever high on my “nice churches to visit” list.) TonyBallioni (talk) 18:10, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Art history minor. And medievalist. To be quite honest, NDdP is mainly important as a symbol - it's not hugely innovative as far as gothicness goes. Gardner's Art through the Ages (8th ed.), which was standard when I did my minor, only highlights the north transept rose window, and the west facade. It notes that much of NDdP's interest derives from its combination of various elements of Gothic architecture over the years, rather than being innovative. The Virgin of Paris gets a prominent mention as an example of late Gothic sculpture. You rather get the impression that the author isn't that excited by NDdP.. they get much more gushing about Laon Cathedral...Ealdgyth - Talk 18:25, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
If you're doing a cathedral bucket list include Gloucester, Aachen, Cordoba, Norwich, Regensburg, Marseille, Tours and Liverpool, with Aberdeen, Milan, Barcelona (the old one, not Gaudi's monstrosity) and Southwell worth visiting if you're nearby but not worth the detour. The Rome/Vatican complex, St Paul's, Cologne and Canterbury are so overrun they're just Christian Disneylands IMO. As I may have mentioned once or twice I've never understood the appeal of Paris, which IMO is filthy, overpriced, and has a size-to-things-actually-worth-seeing ratio roughly on a par with Indianapolis. ‑ Iridescent 18:26, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Never been to Paris. I figure it's a three-day trip max for me - Eiffel, NDdP, and Arch for the "get it off the list of things folks will continually ask me about" and then the remaining two days in the Louvre. A quick trip to Versailles and I'm done. I LIKED Canterbury, but to me, it's a giant playground of history - every medieval tomb is someone interesting to me, and I spent ages getting tomb photos. I will admit I was more impressed with Lincoln, Ely, Winchester as far as the Gothics. Of course, Durham is a special place for me-Norman Romanesque is something I actually prefer to Gothic. I need to hit Normandy for a few weeks, but that's about it for my interest in France. I'd rather do the UK and Germany. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:34, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
If you're only doing one museum in Paris, make it the Orsay rather than the Louvre, as it's ten times nicer and fifty times less crowded. If you're going to the trouble of schlepping up to Durham, then on the way back do the five big Yorkshire gothic piles (Ripon, York, Leeds, Beverley, Hull); York is a tourist trap but is a beautiful town to visit, Leeds Minster isn't up to much but is across the river from the Royal Armouries which is a must-see if you're interested in medieval paraphernalia, while to riff on something I said one thread up I think Hull is one of the most underrated cities in the world; as well as Hull Minster itself, you also have Wilberforce House, the Ferens Art Gallery, Streetlife Museum of Transport and Hull Maritime Museum all within a two minute walk of each other. (If you're only going to visit one Gothic cathedral in England, it should be either Gloucester or Norwich.) ‑ Iridescent 18:44, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Get E. to come back via Cheshire with her camera ;) I think Musée Rodin was my favourite, but I was still at school so probably rather impressionable! ——SerialNumber54129 18:49, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Should I start a GoFundMe for "send Wikipedia editor to England so she can improve medieval articles"? Ealdgyth - Talk 19:31, 17 April 2019 (UTC)
We did Canterbury, Winchester, Worcester (for the remains of William II), Salisbury, Chichester, Lincoln, York, Ely, and Durham when we were there in 2010. Oh, and Hastings/Battle Abbey, several Roman ruins, a bit of Hadrian's Wall, and oodles of stuff in London. Oh, and Stonehenge, Avebury, several chalk figures, and some poking around in the Downs for Watership Down-fan-me. Oh, and the Rufus stone, of course. Corfe, Dover ... Next trip will not be taking elderly mother so ... will get abroad more. I did the jewels in the Tower for the "I did it" statement. I kinda felt like them the same way I feel about the Grand Canyon... I don't see the interest. There are tons more interesting canyons out west ... Black Canyon of the Gunnison for one, Zion/Canyonlands/Arches are much more interesting than the big hole in the ground. I was underwhelmed with the Norweigian fjords too - thought the ones in Chile were more spectatular. Don't get Hawaii as a destination either... talk about tourist traps! I like Berlin as a town... it's fun and exciting. Didn't like Prague that much, liked Krakow, was ... eh... on Warsaw. St Petersburg was ... interesting. I found much of the far east to be overcrowded, but liked South Korea. Japan .. yikes. I worried that I'd breathe wrong and offend someone... that place is too orderly. I've still got a bucket list a mile long, but a lot of the places are for the "history" rather than the "see it because I should" value - when we go back to England, I'm going to work harder on being able to get into places for wikipedia work - we've still got lots of places that need decent photos... wasn't able to try to wrangle credentials because mom was along. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:57, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Prague was great in 1990 1991 (oops). Hardly any tourists, even at St Vitus. :-) Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:01, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Most things in England are still free (although a lot of the cathedrals have a new moneyraising wheeze of charging for photography permits). Given your interests I'd have thought Waltham Abbey, Winchester and Exeter are the obvious omissions from your list, while Reading is worth a visit for the exact replica of the Bayeux Tapestry which gets no publicity so you can actually study it in peace (it also has one of the world's only notable lamp-posts), and Newmarket for the horsey things. ‑ Iridescent 19:07, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Elderly mother had input on things too. We did 15 days - five days each based in Winchester, Canterbury, and London, before taking a cruise of Norway and the Baltic. We had a two day layover on the cruise in London where hubby and I rented a car and drove hell for leather to the north - that's where we did York, Durham, Lincoln, Ely, and Hadrian's Wall. But we couldn't drag mom too far, she wasn't up to long car trips and her idea of a vacation was to get a hotel room (or cruise ship cabin) and do a lot of room service. We did have the indescribable experience of listening to a children's choir from soemwhere in Yorkshire sing "Swing Low, Sweet Charriot" at York Minster... in that Yorkshire accent and sung entirely too fast (at least three times as fast as it should be sung... having spent enough time in the south ... I know what a good Negro spiritual should sound like and Yorkshire children's choirs do not come close.) Of course, the 50's twangy bluegrass/country on the Norwegian bird boating expedition was also a bit jarring... Ealdgyth - Talk 19:18, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" has a different significance in England, as the de facto English national anthem at sporting events. ‑ Iridescent 19:20, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Dunno if it's still there, but Liverpool Street Station used to have the "Sweet Chariot" opposite the east-side help point; rather amusing I thought :) god knows how many Cola bottles he had to sell each week to pay the ground rent though. ——SerialNumber54129 20:10, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
This conversation has reminded me to get around to transferring a big stack of photos from the wreckage of Flickr over to Commons, including one of my favourite bizarre Renaissance graves, that of Elizabeth, daughter of Miles Smith (bishop). The Latin doggerel inscription translates as "A husband carved a marble statue of his wife / in the hope of gaining her immortality / but Christ was all she wanted in her life / so God decreed that she would mortal be". ‑ Iridescent 21:24, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
What has happened to Flickr? Is it going down soon? — Amakuru (talk) 21:41, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
@Amakuru It's already happened. Any account with more than 1000 uploads has been locked and the oldest photos deleted to bring the total down to 1000; the existing photos can still be viewed, but can't be edited and nothing more can be added unless you're willing to pony up $5.99 a month. At the moment you do still have the power to delete your uploads and if the number falls below 1000 the account is unlocked again, so what I've been doing is annoying Commons by batch-uploading anything I think might conceivably have some encyclopedic value and deleting it from Flickr, so as to bring the total below the magic number. (Flickr is invaluable for when you've taken 100+ photos of the same thing, as Commons's interface is a piece of garbage for anything other than uploading one photo at a time, but you can get round it by batch-uploading to Flickr and then using Flickr2Commons to import the whole album.) Because everyone else is also deleting their uploads to get their account below the 1000 mark or having Flickr delete it for them, almost everything that hasn't already been imported to Commons is either already lost or is going to be lost very soon. ‑ Iridescent 22:00, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Re: Rome, I prefer the Lateran Basilica to St. Peter’s (as I’m sure you know but for the benefit of readers who may not, the Lateran is the actual cathedral of Rome, not St. Peter’s)Re: Ealdgyth, yeah, in undergrad I did a minor that was basically my taking one professor’s medieval/early Spanish mysticism PhD seminar series. There was a fair amount of medieval art/architecture, but the focus was less on the artistic merits as much as the ideas that were trying to be described and the focus on human suffering. All of which reminded me: I’m actually looking forward to getting back into content work here once the program I’m in is done... non-existent for the last 12 months because of RL reasons, but I’ll likely actually enjoy writing in my spare time again soon... TonyBallioni (talk) 18:36, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Amazing - not even any obvious smoke damage, presumably it was all carried upwards. Strangely, Commons seems only to have one photo of it, and that not very hi-res. Johnbod (talk) 17:55, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Not that surprising—France doesn't have FoP, and the French authorities are notorious for hassling the WMF over anything they see as showing anything that could possibly be considered still in copyright, such as a recent building in the background (and woe betide anyone who takes a photo in which the Eiffel Tower illuminations are visible). Our own Freedom of panorama article specifically mentions that our articles on French architecture are woefully illustrated because of this. ‑ Iridescent 18:02, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
Double notification
I got two notifications about [10] because I was linked in both edit and edit summary. One of them is sufficient. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:26, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
Oh for heaven's sake, I thought the WMF had fixed that bug months ago. Can some TPW with phab access poke the devs? ‑ Iridescent 08:28, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
Forgive my ignorance but can you tell if it would be disruptive to take a list like this, go through it one by one, assess the pages (mostly as stubs), and tag them with appropriate WikiProject templates on their talk pages? I think I hit upon some of the most orphaned pages on WP, pages that have little to no connections to any other page or even a WikiProject. They are basically lost in the ether.
If I ignore all hard & soft redirects, disambiguations, set index pages, and unsynchronized redirects, would it not be beneficial to the project to create the rest of the talk pages that corresponds to a stub article.
Should I start a discussion about this before I try to do that? --- Coffeeandcrumbs 05:18, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
(talk page stalker)That's a long list. I'm not clear on your point, if there is no connection between an article to a WikiProject, what template will you tag their talk pages with? I'm not sure who you should discuss this with if it's not a WikiProject. Think you could focus on one area? It's usually easier to start with something very specific and focused. LizRead!Talk! 05:37, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
There is a connection to a WikiProject but it has not been tagged with a template. I meant to say not linked/templated. Here is an example: Keezha Manakudy. I created a talk page as an example. --- Coffeeandcrumbs 06:12, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
@Liz: Just for some context my question was meant to understand a comment here. I just want to know if Iridescent's objection was just to the category or the creation of talk pages altogether. --- Coffeeandcrumbs 06:39, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
Judging by your would it not be beneficial to the project to create the rest of the talk pages query, you seem to be under the misapprehension that it's desirable that every article has a corresponding talk page. In general, consensus is that it's bad practice to create the talk page unless there's a specific reason to create the talkpage. To quote Template:Talk header/doc, it changes the "discussion" tab at the top of the page from a "redlink" into a "bluelink", which may mislead people into thinking there is discussion.
If there's direct relevance to a WikiProject and you're not just trying to shoehorn it in to give yourself a pretext for creating talk pages, then it's fine to create a talk page with just a WikiProject banner. Bear in mind that the remits of many projects are narrower than you think (e.g. most articles on British topics don't fall into the remit of Wikipedia:WikiProject United Kingdom), and overenthusiastic WikiProject tagging is just going to annoy people as it will mean a whole batch of irrelevant content popping up in that project's article alerts.
In these circumstances you certainly shouldn't ever be using the {{talk header}} template, as you just did on your example of Talk:Keezha Manakudy. As per that template's instructions, that template is only to be used for talk pages that are frequently misused, that attract frequent or perpetual debate, articles often subject to controversy, and highly-visible or popular topics. If there's never been a previous comment on the talk page then by definition it can't fall into any of those categories.
As per WP:TALK#Create, creating blank talkpages just to turn the red "Talk" link blue, or creating talkpages with just the {{talk header}} template, would just be treated as straightforward disruptive editing. ‑ Iridescent 07:27, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
Thank you. Sorry for wasting your time. I will move on to something else that is productive. --- Coffeeandcrumbs 07:32, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
Don't feel you're wasting time tagging talk pages with relevant wikiproject tags; that can be very helpful as it gives the projects a better idea of which projects fall into their scope, and also (at least in theory—I don't think it ever actually happens in practice) directs readers to a place they can go to ask queries and consequently prevents them asking questions on talk pages that will never be read or answered. It's only creating pages for the sake of creating pages that's disruptive. ‑ Iridescent 07:56, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
I am less discouraged by this. I am still going to relegate it to the back of my mind for more consideration and heed your caution.--- Coffeeandcrumbs 22:11, 19 April 2019 (UTC) Here is a much more finetuned version of my list.--- Coffeeandcrumbs 22:11, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
Thank you, especially for giving me a reason (not only a feeling of inappropriateness) to remove a talk page header (which I have done already). I give "my" articles a talk page, often needed when attributing a translation, and otherwise wanted to alert projects, such as Biography, Germany and Opera. Project Biography often does it when I forget. I also include projects that want to count success, such as {{WPEUR10k}} and {{WIR 2019}}, to make some happy ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:47, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
Whenever you see a template that doesn't seem appropriate, it's always worth checking that template's instructions. Whatever the template, there's a very good chance that (1) the reason it looks inappropriate is that it's being used for a purpose for which it was never intended, and (2) in the 18 years of Wikipedia's existence, there's been a discussion at some point to determine what the appropriate use of the template is. ‑ Iridescent 07:56, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
I was going to point out that WP:WikiProject Biography talk page tags are something that gets added fairly often, sometimes because that helps flag it up as a BLP or not. That got me looking back many years, and I found: User:Kingbotk/Plugin and that the bot was blocked in 2017 having last edited in 2008. Glad to see Kingboyk is still around and editing. Carcharoth (talk) 14:22, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
I suspect that adding stub ratings and a project, although unobjectionable, will have no effect on anything - few project stub categories get examined these days I think. I rather doubt that "overenthusiastic WikiProject tagging is just going to annoy people" - it's more likely to go completely unseen. Johnbod (talk) 14:39, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm possibly sourer than most when it comes to the topic as I have first-hand experience—if you look at my edit count, the huge spike in talk-page edits in 2009 is my using AWB to go through every single talkpage that was tagged as falling under Wikiproject London and cleaning them up. Even script-assisted—where it's just a case of clicking "save" or "skip"—the experience was painful, and this was back in the day when Wikipedia was a third of the size it is now.
Although it's true that few project stub categories get examined in detail per se these days, that doesn't mean they don't have an impact, as the raw totals in each category are used to generate the "how many articles do we have on this topic?" figures, which in turn drive all the "Wikipedia has more coverage of Pokemon than it does of Belgium!" scare stories. ‑ Iridescent 15:07, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
Well as you probably know, the Visual Arts one is the one I look at, when I look at any, and it is not at all hard to find artworks that are tagged for WProj London or a national project, but not for the VA project - many, if not most, heavy taggers seem to have a complete blind spot for the VA project. And archaeology editors have a long tradition of refusing to see their stuff as ever having anything to do with art, or indeeed anything outside archaeology. I'd guess the VA figures are only about 60-75% of what they should be. Johnbod (talk) 15:16, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
Membership of UK rail
Hi - re [11] - it wasn't a request, just a suggestion I made that we should clear up members who are no longer active on Wikipedia at all. Obviously this doesn't apply to you. — O Still SmallVoice of Clam 14:09, 24 April 2019 (UTC)
Your post prodded me into removing myself, but regardless of whether there's an agreement to perform a mass cull I don't see any point in keeping myself listed as a member. With the exception of Droxford railway station—which is sui generis—I haven't written anything railway related since Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway eight years ago. To be honest, while the talk page occasionally still serves a useful purpose for people to ask questions and agree on standards, other than that the project is moribund. ‑ Iridescent 15:51, 24 April 2019 (UTC)
Apostrophe in Duke's Meadows
I noticed you just removed the apostrophe and I wondered why. I looked at current and older Ordnance Survey Maps and also the Geographia A-Z maps and they all include the apostrophe. I assume you must have some reason for deciding to remove the apostrophe, so rather than simply undoing your edit I thought I would ask here. Dubmill (talk) 22:15, 24 April 2019 (UTC)
Entrance to the park. Note the lack of apostrophes.
Indeed, our own Dukes Meadows article is at the correct title, and only had that apostrophe in the text because someone added it to the text (without changing the title) in 2014, ironically in the same edit in which they added a photo of a sign that clearly reads "Dukes Meadows", and nobody noticed until I did yesterday (both the sources used in that article, needless to say, use the correct name "Dukes Meadows"). Ordnance Survey maps, as with all other big mapping projects, are riddled with errors (some genuine mistakes, some archaisms which have never been updated, and some copyright traps), and don't necessarily reflect reality. ‑ Iridescent 05:24, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
OK, fair enough. I think it used to have an apostrophe, and the Ordnance Survey and other maps still reflect this (rather than it being an error), but clearly it has fallen out of use and it is too late to turn back the tide. I should have checked the sources you mention before bringing this up, sorry. Dubmill (talk) 09:34, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
No problem. I'd be surprised if it used to have an apostrophe, and the Ordnance Survey and other maps still reflect this were true; it's named in honour of the Dukes of Devonshire, it's not a set of meadows that used to belong to someone named Duke. Because it contains the finishing post for the Boat Race, it gets more coverage than your typical West London park, even if that coverage is concentrated on a single day each year. Commons has an absolute shedload of photos—including the signs at allthreeentrances—at c:Category:Dukes Meadows.
Don't treat the Ordnance Survey as a reliable source for human geography, unless it's for something utterly uncontentious like "the A12 ends in Lowestoft". They're fine for physical geography such as the height of hills, but when it comes to place names—let alone such things as house numbering—they can be woefully inaccurate, and any square that covers a densely-populated area can be pretty much guaranteed to contain at least one mislabelled place, building that was actually demolished in 1953, or field of trees shown where a housing estate has stood for the past 20 years. ‑ Iridescent 15:40, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
Well, I searched for "Duke's Meadows" (incl. apostrophe) on Google Books and found a lot of older results (e.g. A. G. Linney's Lure and Lore of London's River) that include the apostrophe. I've seen some sources as well referring to 'the Duke's Meadows' (e.g. The Builder, 1923, The Electrical Journal, 1927 ), where it would seem to mean the current Duke at any given time. As the WP article states, he owned them until 1923. I agree that the OS maps contain many errors but still believe that in this case they wrote it with an apostrophe because that was how it was more usually written in those days. (I say more usually, because the version with no apostrophe does appear in some sources from that time, but not so many.) Dubmill (talk) 17:27, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
please see - WP:AFTERDELETE Depending on the reason why the page was deleted, there are also several ways you can try to have it undeleted by administrators. In every case, you should first make sure that the page is appropriate for inclusion (c.f. Manner of death) in Wikipedia and, if it is an article, that its content is based on reliable source (c.f. User:Sederecarinae/_human_made_cause_of_death#Sources) Sederecarinae (talk) 19:07, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
I deleted it because it's the job of the closing admin to assess consensus, and with the exception of your incoherent ramblings like I am a ignoramus mouse in a hole, and will not bother any of you again > . < that is my hole and if you look closely you will see my small mouse like face within that hole looking out., every single person commenting at that discussion supported deletion. If you want to challenge my closure go to WP:DRV and follow the instructions there, but I'll warn you there's zero chance that your page will be restored; it was clearly an indiscriminate mess of random facts with no obvious inclusion criteria and some ridiculous howlers like R. J. Rummel, a professor at University of Hawaii, has identified nine separate periods of killing in the Soviet history producing a total of 143,822,000 deaths within the populace of the USSR, the claim that only one person has been decapitated by helicopter blades, the apparent belief that only the US and Saudi Arabia conduct executions… ‑ Iridescent 19:15, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
List of causes of death by rate contains too many causes to include statistical information for all years, there is a recognised difference between causes "natural and unnatural". List of causes of death by rate includes information of natural and unnatural causes; looking at G Intentional injuries (suicide, violence, war, etc.) the information on Intentional injuries, these articles Homicide#Global_statistics, List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate, contain information on the specific subject homicide - all these articles belong to the general subject "Non-natural death", Death by natural causes exists, why "Non-natural causes" shouldn't exist. What is the reason. Because you must have simply forgot to look at my discussion of the article to have simply deleted. I'm sure non-natural death is not a childish snowball fight, do you think it is fun? why you think the analogy is appropriate to this particular deletion discussion? You can handle cold things, but you can't discern the nature of the argument on the subject of death, that is what I feel about my detractors and yourself I want you to understand that. Sederecarinae (talk) 19:27, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
You are actually stating that my personal failings with respect to my inclusion of a jokey addition to the debate, expressing my frustration with the debate, is the same as a legitimate reason for deletion. The article exists, I am the creator and contributor, I made a stupid and irrelevant contribution to the discussion, therefore you deleted the article, that is your logic, am I correct in thinking this is true of you or I'm infact just imaging you deleted the article because I must be stupid, so therefore thousands of others cannot contribute the article instead is that all - given the sources and the existence of Death by natural causes my behaviour and R. J. Rummel (and why you haven't nominated this article to deletion if he is so ridiculous that the article shouldn't exist?) Sederecarinae (talk) 19:32, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
you don't like what I'm writing now so therefore there is no reason to like the article is that all? Sederecarinae (talk) 19:35, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
Enough. Sorry to be blunt, and I know it's annoying to put work into something and have it rejected, but Wikipedia operates on consensus, not on what you personally want. Your page was utterly indiscriminate and riddled with errors. In the (impossible, but for the sake of argument) event that you had managed to tabulate a full table of death other than by means of natural causes for all 195 countries in the world it would again be inappropriate as hopelessly large. Despite appearances Wikipedia actually has a fairly tight remit and is not a directory of everything, and some topics just aren't appropriate to be hosted here.
Hectoring me is not going to get your page undeleted, since given the unanimous consensus it would be supervoting for it to be closed as anything other than delete. If you genuinely feel my closure was in error then I'll repeat that going to Wikipedia:Deletion review and following the instructions there is the way to go, but be warned that there's only one way a review of my closure will end. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
https://crvsgateway.info/External-causes-of-death~340 "A common problem in many countries is that deaths due to external or unnatural causes" c.f. "Death by natural causes is death resulting of an illness or an internal malfunction of the body not directly caused by external forces, in contrast to non-natural death"
compared to:
an indiscriminate mess of random facts with no obvious inclusion criteria
you understand what I'm trying to indicate to you ?
no obvious inclusion criteria > "deaths due to external or unnatural causes" i.e. non-natural causes c.f. "Death by natural causes is death resulting of an illness or an internal malfunction of the body not directly caused by external forces"
natural death = internal causes, non-natural death = external causes, therefore external causes is the criteriaSederecarinae (talk) 19:44, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
Consensus yes, but WP:CON "Decisions on Wikipedia are primarily made by consensus, which is accepted as the best method to achieve Wikipedia's goals, i.e., the five pillars." is the purpose of consensus, consensus is the slave of the goal of achieving the five pillars.
it was clearly an indiscriminate mess of random facts (i) with no obvious inclusion criteria(ii) and some ridiculous howlers(iii) R. J. Rummel, a professor at University of Hawaii, has identified nine separate periods of killing in the Soviet history producing a total of 143,822,000 deaths within the populace of the USSR, the claim that(iiii) only one person has been decapitated by helicopter blades, the apparent belief that(v) only the US and Saudi Arabia conduct executions
(i) - the headings were in alphabetical order; is not random - the article was still developing, and I hadn't included all the possible sources, it appeared random, but I hadn't drafted the article to the extent that all possible sources might be included before publishing, it would therefore appear random - the headings were chosen from the criteria (ii) - non-natural death is death caused by external forces, using a reliable source, (iii) if you look at vthe source you see the numbers in the chapter page for deaths, I understanjd the number seems ridiculous, but are you actually in a position, as a wikipedia editor, to disagree with the published work of a university professor?, (iiii) the wording of that entry to accidental deaths was not meant to indicate there has only been one death, the sentence begins examples of include, was meant to indicate there is such a thing as, not this is the only example of. (v) I hadn't included all information on this aspect of the article, I don't believe that these countries have an execution policy - you could simply have removed the parts that were unacceptable and maintained the article, why delete? The consensus to delete > the original nomination criteria was based on a different version than the version that was deleted - the version at the time of nomination was worthy of criticism, but I made changes to the article, so the criticisms were not applicable, and the nominating editor didn';t even understand the article look at the nomination "a bucket list" hasn't actually understand what a bucket list is, the nominator included non-valid reason. Sederecarinae (talk) 20:08, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
Consensus is Wikipedia's fundamental model for editorial decision making as the best method to achieve Wikipedia's goals, that 13 editors decided deletion does not indicate any of the editors were correct. If there were 100 people somewhere in the world today who would choose to keep the article, but were unable to contribute to the discussion, then there would be 100 opinions to the contrary of deletion; that 13 editors decided the same thing could indicate they all shared the same flaw, or error of judgement, or failing to understand - I want to try and create a better version in draft and have it subject to review, but this isn't possible because by deletion you have outright denied the possibility of re-inclusion (please see Wikipedia:RADP and the reliableness of the source(s), irrespective of the criticisms of the content, that the title might exist, is now impossible, this seems unacceptable. Sederecarinae (talk) 20:17, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
Er, have you considered the possibility that you are wrong? The books of that university professor do not seem to mention the number the article gave at all, for one thing. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:20, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
@Jo-Jo Eumerus:The chapter title shows different numbers I added them together Sederecarinae (talk) 20:23, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
@Iridescent: Your decision is not by policy Wikipedia:Snowball clause > "This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Is not thoroughly vetted by the community a principle of consensus?" Sederecarinae (talk) 20:23, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
For the third time enough; if you want to challenge this take it to WP:DRV as you've been repeatedly told. Being banned from French Wikipedia doesn't mean you just hop over to another project and pick up where you left off. If you want to participate here, follow our rules. ‑ Iridescent 20:30, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
Just as a mention to Iridescent, I would prefer you to not respond to my comments if you arrive at an answer to my queries and challenges, because I see a different position and you do not see my position, I would prefer if we both disengaged from the discussion for a day or two perhaps for you to think to the reasons, simply because the extra time allows more time for cognitive processing, instead of attempting to force perhaps an answer, which might cause error of judgement, because you think I expect you to respond ASAP, just as a precaution, that the time is made available to you. If you don't respond in the 24 hours, I'll go to a different process of review or appeal, or perhaps to work on the draft and if possible to make a version which is more acceptable to yourself, since it is you who is now the editor who must assent to re-creation. Thanks Sederecarinae (talk) 20:38, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
For the fourth time, if you want to complain about my closure then go to WP:DRV and follow the instructions there. Now get off my talkpage; any further posts from you here will be reverted. ‑ Iridescent 20:39, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Not that Iridescent needs much help, but maybe hearing it from two people will help: he doesn't want to discuss this here with you anymore, and if you disagree with him, take it to WP:DRV, though the outcome there is going to be endorsing his deletion as the obviously correct outcome.Also, Iri, as an aside, I really like the new checkuser cat in the photo lineup. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:42, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
I imagine you can guess what prompted it. ‑ Iridescent 21:37, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
@Jo-Jo Eumerus that one went up back in WP:OBOD days when someone leaving a message on your talkpage resulted in your having an enormous orange bar across your screen until you did something about it, and expressed my opinion at being unable to do anything for more than five minutes without
annoying me. Traditionally in iconography of the Annunciation Mary looks ecstatic at the presence of Gabriel, but in Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini she has a (considerably more plausible) "who are you and what are you doing in my house?" expression. ‑ Iridescent 20:57, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
Look what Sederecarinae is up to now. -_-. You're an admin, can you stop this display of oblivious ineptitude? Cheers, ReykYO! 10:03, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
Oh for heaven's sake. I won't take action myself as given the above thread I'd be WP:INVOLVED, but any passing admin do feel free (or raise it at ANI). Given the history—not just the siteban from fr-wiki but the goofing around on Meta as well as the drivel like this here—AGF is in extremely short supply. ‑ Iridescent 15:05, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
No problem, I can completely understand why you don't want to get involved. Thanks for your attention. ReykYO! 18:14, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
Thank you
I wasn't sure anyone would see this plea before it archived and that needed to be put out to pasture. StarM 02:08, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
I hadn't actually seen that; I noticed the AfD owing to the creator's mass canvassing, and it was obvious it needed to be closed despite technically having two more days to run. ‑ Iridescent 06:29, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
Whee accidental alignment then. Looks like Sandstein spared all of us in general as s/he is now blocked. StarM 01:34, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
Contemporaries with articles
Today I discovered that two contemporaries (from university) now have articles (articles created in 2018). I am not sure if this is a good thing or not... :-) Interestingly, given the current debates, one is a man and one is a woman. I am sure there will be others if I look hard enough, but these two are ones that I knew personally (at the time). There is one other, who is rather more famous (Demis Hassabis - have a look at the start of the article in 2005!). It got me wondering whether this is a natural progression as people achieve things in their careers, or whether there is a bit of expanding of coverage further than might have been expected. Maybe a bit of both. FWIW, at the time, if you had asked I would have said that all three were clearly going to go far, but obviously in different ways (Wikipedia was still a few years away at the time). Maybe looking for people you know on Wikipedia is not a good rabbit hole to go down! FWIW, I came across one of the articles with this update, so now have even more of an excuse to try and go to one of those lectures. Carcharoth (talk) 17:15, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
Well over a dozen in my case, probably more like 30 or 40. Just remember that it isn't who you know, nor what you know, but rather what you know about who you know that gives you leverage! - Sitush (talk) 17:38, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
Going by the "their phone number is in my phone" measure of closeness, I have two family members and two non-family members with articles. By "know me well enough that we'd immediately recognise each other", there are probably a couple of dozen. When we get out into casual acquaintances, it numbers in the hundreds, but I have the advantage of knowing quite a lot of people in music and politics, which gives a lot of scope to meet people who are notable in Wikipedia terms. ‑ Iridescent 18:42, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
(adding) If we include "knowing" people we haven't actually met but have interacted with extensively, then obviously you and I both "know" quite a few of these fine specimens. ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
I believe just one person I know has an article - Kim Chizevsky-Nicholls, who was a year ahead of me in high school and who is probably enough of a "oh, yeah, that person" from both of us to be able to say we know each other. (I think she dated someone I knew at one point, maybe?) Kevin Roberson went to my high school about the time I did (probably two years behind), but I was never a person who hung out with the jocks, so... the name doesn't even ring a bell. The only other "know of" is Stan Musial, who I was introduced to several times and attended various events with as well as "borrowing" his Cardinals' box occasionally when I was in high school (his niece was my mother's best friend). I live a boring life. Oh, I lie, I know Elonka too... vaguely. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:52, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
Having grown up in a town with only one high school, I was probably at school with Spencer Tunick and Cage (rapper), but if I was then neither of them left an impression. One of the cats is the son of Clive Sinclair's cat, if that counts as a connection. ‑ Iridescent 19:06, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
On the other end of the spectrum: as far as I'm aware, I only personally know one person with an article. He thinks I'm a moron. Well, to be fair, he thinks everyone is a moron, and by comparison, I guess I am... --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:59, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
Your name isn't Gordon, perchance? - Sitush (talk) 18:02, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
I don't get it. I guess he is right. --Floquenbeam (talk) 18:06, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
Ah. Thanks. Well this is bizarrely deja vu. I'm sure I haven't heard that before, but I could swear I've seen a reference to the lyrics "I was so upset I cried all the way to the chip shop" very, very recently. I assumed it was in someone's response to your link here on this page, but it isn't here anywhere. Then I thought it was at least on WP, but can't find it no matter how I search. The only thing I can think of is maybe Sitush saw the same link I saw somewhere recently and that's why it was in his brain? Otherwise, that's pretty eerie. --Floquenbeam (talk) 14:30, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
The only mention of chips that I have seen recently is further up this page, by Boing! I'm hungry now, though. - Sitush (talk) 14:38, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
Not that anyone cares, but puzzle solved. When I first followed the link yesterday, I was somewhere where I couldn't watch the video. But the very first comment on the youtube page was "`I was so upset that i cried all the way to the chip shop`-aint that the greatest ever line written in Rock`n`Roll." Seeing that comment apparently stuck in my subconscious. Whew. That was driving me nuts. --Floquenbeam (talk) 14:47, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
I can think of three people I know through work who have articles here, and a friend had an article but it was deleted for notability failure. And though I don't have an article myself, my name does appear in one two. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:57, 16 May 2019 (UTC)
Many people I know have an article, and many of those because I wrote it. I am so happy that I wrote Werner Bardenhewer in time for his 90th birthday, - much better than with death as a reason, such as Jörg Streli. Bardenhewer died shortly afterwards, and we'll sing tomorrow in his memory. (Btw, a picture with him is up for deletion because there's art hanging on the wall, in the public space of a church.) I fondly remember having written about Walter Fink on the occasion on his 80th birthday, and am happy that he lived for some more years. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:07, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
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