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I figure by now you've seen the discussion surrounding Jackmcbarn's resysop request. I wanted to make a comment there, but it's a bit off-topic and the BN thread is closed, so I figure I might ask you instead. One thing I was intrigued by was that all of the crats who were in favor of resysopping are based in the UK, while the declines are all US-based (barring any misclassified Canadians), and Xeno, the lone no consensus, is in Canada. Wondering if this is indicative of cultural differences between Eastern/Western Hemisphere Wikipedians, or if I'm reading too much into things? bibliomaniac15 02:50, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
(watching) Seems unlikely, unless UK-based editors are generally more soft-hearted than their US counterparts? (Yes, know—I nearly choked with incredulity at the idea too!) But seriously, isn't it just too small a pool of evidenec to draw conclusions from? ——Serial 12:38, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
There's maybe a difference in approach based on the different nations' attitudes towards authority; the English and Scottish legal systems are based on a philosophy of natural justice in which police, prosecutors and judges are expected not to enforce laws if they consider it unfair to do so, whereas the legal systems of the US and most of the states are based on a philosophy of equality of enforcement in which laws are there to be enforced and for the police & courts to use their discretion would itself be a breach of trust. Without a much larger sample it would be impossible to draw any firm conclusion, though. ‑ Iridescent 12:53, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
Well its a bit more complicated when it comes to the police. They have some leeway in English/Welsh law for not enforcing the law as written/already laid via previous cases, but often only when they get a specific instruction from their superiors to do so (the enforcement/use of stop and search being one example). They, in general, leave it up to the judges and magistrates, which as you say, are expected to exercise their judgement when interpreting the law. Granted on an individual level the various police forces and officers can turn a blind eye but its highly variable and depends on a number of factors including, race, culture, geographical location, economic factors etc. With the crime commissioners and forces now providing relatively clear statistics on their arrests etc, there are numerous examples if you want to look about how one force uses the laws available to it compared to another. I could however easily find twice as many examples where they have rigidly enforced the rules rather than looked the other way - granted bad news speaks louder and we hate a jobsworth in the UK. But personally I wouldnt count on it being related to the concept of natural justice, as at least one of the crats participated in WP:FRAMGATE in one of the most egregious abuses of natural justice there has been on-wiki, despite allegedly being British. There are multiple examples of hypocrisy in that discussion where various admins have previously taken opposing positions (and we are not talking years ago and their feelings might have changed etc) on the principles involved. I find citing 'fairness' in that situation both insulting to the intelligence of other editors and bordering on disengenous. If you are going to take a moral stance, you need to actually have a track record of moral solidity. I actively avoided coming here to talk about it since I didnt think it needed more oil on the fire when the discussion was still running. (I actually showed up here today for a different reason - new section below) Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:34, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
And yes, I know I was far more annoyed by this incident than I really should have been. Blame it on the 5 month of lockdown due to a combination of furlough and shielding. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:41, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
You'd be surprised at how much of that intentional blind-eye turning goes on in the UK compared to the US. As an obvious example, assuming you live anywhere larger than a small village, go outside and stand in your street for five minutes and count how many electric scooters, motorised skateboards and other self-propelled vehicles whizz past you. Except for a very few which are genuine disability vehicles, these are all flat-out illegal on the pavement under any circumstances and on the roads without MOTs, licence plates or road tax (which none of them have)—and under recent legislation, not some archaic law from the days of horses-and-carts which has never been repealed—but the police are intentionally not enforcing the law to reduce pressure on socially-distanced public transport, and you can buy obviously-illegal contraptions in your local high street and use them without worry. That kind of thing just wouldn't happen in North America, where for a police chief to unilaterally decide to refuse to enforce a law because they personally disagreed with it would be seen as a gross overstepping of authority.
I stand by "fairness" in this case. I've always been a hardliner when it comes to resysopping, and have been consistent in believing that the only circumstances when resysop-without-RFA should ever be performed are either when the desysop was an unambiguous error or when the desysop was a completely uncontroversial temporary measure and the admin requesting resysop has clearly remained engaged to the extent they can be reasonably assumed to still be familiar with policy and practice; otherwise, "I want this but not so much I'm willing to see if other people agree that I should have it" is a bullshit excuse. (Assuming Ymblanter is still watching this page, he can testify that I put my money where my mouth is when it comes to complaining about resysop-without-reRFA.) However, much as I think that's how we should do things, it's not how we currently do things, and to me it seems clearly unfair to explicitly tell people they should follow one particular rule, and then change the rule without notifying them and penalise them for trying to follow what they were told was the correct protocol.
(I don't in the least buy the "Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter is a paper of record and it should be assumed that everyone should be considered aware of anything that appears in it" argument which I see made in that discussion. That newsletter is explicitly opt-on only, and only a very small number actually opt in and I very much doubt most of them do any more than skim it at most. Given the number of spurious MassMessages that are sent out all the time, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to expect that a significant change to a rule be notified to those who will be affected by that change.) ‑ Iridescent 13:10, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
I have to disagree with your comment that it would be unheard of in the U.S. for the police or other officials to decide not to enforce a given law or regulation. This actually happens constantly, sometimes as the result of a directive from leadership, other times from decision-making on the ground. It might be felt that a given law or rule is too trivial to worry about, or that there are higher priorities elsewhere, or sometimes a consensus that there are special circumstances that make enforcing the rule undesirable or impractical. A high-profile example recently is the refusal by the sheriffs in various counties throughout the country to enforce social-distancing or mask-wearing orders—and on the other side of the political spectrum, some of the recent protest activity breached local emergency orders on the permissible sizes of public gatherings but they were allowed to proceed. Those instances arose in especially fraught circumstances, but there are plenty of others. Newyorkbrad (talk) 17:59, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
But when it happens in the US it's controversial and potentially open to challenge as unconstitutional; the principle that government can compel local agencies to enforce a law was literally tested at gunpoint in the 1860s and 1960s. In all four UK legal systems, although under a general duty to uphold the law, chief officers of police retain discretion as to the degree of effort they will attach to enforcing any particular law at any particular time is a legally-tested part of the unwritten constutution (recent Parliamentary briefing paper on the topic). ‑ Iridescent 05:40, 2 August 2020 (UTC) (Adding) On reflection, if there is a cultural difference having an impact—something I'm very unconvinced by—it's not so much going to be that UK editors are more used to a culture where police have more discretion to ignore laws, but that UK editors are used to a culture where preventing a breach of the peace is still very much a thing, and where police and courts can and do take action against people on the grounds that they're being a dick, even if there's no element of disorderly conduct and no actual statute law is being broken. ‑ Iridescent 13:15, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I love breach of the peace. In practice if the person wants to make a case a BotP was unfair, they have to convince a JP that no, they were not being a dick. You can imagine how well and successful that goes. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:39, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
In about 99% of cases (figuratively; I have no idea of the exact statistics), someone arrested for BotP will be de-arrested as soon as they've been driven a safe distance away. Its primary purpose is to get protestors and football hooligans away from whoever they were hoping to fight and to prevent creepy old men hanging around playgrounds, with a secondary purpose of making spoiled rich kids realise that in the real world daddy's money can't buy them out of everything; the act of arrest serves both purposes admirably, without the need for taking up a custody space or all the accompanying paperwork. ‑ Iridescent 16:59, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Its a bit less than that depending on where you are but yeah its easily over 80%. I was talking about the cases where it wasnt. One of the joys of doing a law degree was sitting in all the various courts. But I have been arrested and de-arressted numerous times in my youth. It was fairly common in the 90's for the Met when they get called out to a polite argument (read: semi-riot) at a pub (Rat'n'Parrot in Bexleyheath) in SE London to arrest everyone too drunk to scarper, drive a couple of miles away, then push them out the van. I wouldnt lay money all of those arrest/dearrests were by the book either to avoid paperwork. Made for an interesting interview question when I joined a law firm "Have you ever been arrested?" "Yup" "???". Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:09, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
There are apocryphal stories of people who managed to annoy the arresting officer sufficently, being de-arrested onto the the middle of busy roundabouts or in the middle of the countryside. I'm not convinced—even the dumbest small-town cop would I imagine appreciate that it would be impossible to do without witnesses, that such a thing would have a high possibility of killing the prisoner and that killing prisoners means people asking awkward questions—but it says something about society that people believe it. ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
I mean, in London I was certainly dropped off a significant distance from my pickup location. But 5 miles from a shit part of London is just another shit part of London. I have no problem believing in smaller cities or towns someone was dropped off in the country. Busy roundabouts? Not in the 90s. But 80s and earlier certainly possible. Have you ever read any of Harry Cole's "Policeman's ..." series of books? Anecdote/memoirs of his time on the force over the decades. Obviously a bit biased given his position, but still remarkably candid sometimes about his experiences. The sections on the Brixton riots were interesting if only for his perspective on it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 07:52, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
[tpw] This horrifying practice actually has a name in Canada: starlight tour.
As to the original question, I'd would have preferred to see grandfathering applied (since the question wasn't covered at the RfC, and notifications weren't made in advance of the RfC closing to advise those for whom we were changing the rules midstream); however, given the early polling results at the grandfathering RfC, the general feeling seemed to lean heavily in the other direction. Incidentally, "cultural differences" (or, at least letting all timezones provide input) is why I was uncomfortable with the RfC being withdrawn/closed after only 12 hours). –xenotalk 12:04, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
I should have guessed that not only does it happen, but Wikipedia would have an article about it. (As OID doesn't quite say, there's a qualitative difference between the police in a big city dropping you off a few blocks away, and the police dumping you in a field to freeze. One is at least arguably a reasonable albeit dubiously legal approach to calming down fights without prosecuting the participants and giving them records that will potentially follow them for years; one is at best gross negligence.)
On the original question, I'd have preferred to see grandfathering, or at minimum a one-off "the rules are about to change, you have a month to let us know if you still want to retain the admin permission for some reason otherwise you'll no longer be eligible" grace period. I don't like restoration-by-request—if I were in charge the only times we'd do it is in the case of variations on "I am going to be on a submarine for six months and won't have internet access, please disable permissions temporarily in case my account is compromised", "I will be working in Russia for three months and am concerned that intelligence agencies may intercept my password while I'm there and abuse my checkuser rights" or "I'm deliberately not going to use any admin rights for the next year to concentrate temporarily on content work, please remove the admin bit so I'm not listed as an active admin". However, this isn't how we do things much as I'd like it to be, and it seems inherently unfair to change the rules without notifying those affected. (To take WSC's driving test example below, it would be the equivalent of the government deciding to introduce periodic re-testing of drivers to ensure they're still competent to drive, but neglecting to notify anyone affected, so the first any driver knew about it was when they were pulled over for driving on an expired licence. The change in process would be perfectly defensible and reasonable, but the lack of notification would make enforcement inherently unfair and open to constant challenge.) Obviously those who made the original decision to change the rules couldn't have known, but this is a particularly problematic time to be doing it, since Recent Events mean some people have a lot more free time on their hands than they expected and are coming back to Wikipedia to be greeted with what looks to the uninitiated like "get lost old-timer, the new guys are in charge now and don't want you". ‑ Iridescent 15:15, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Maybe it is more about a default cultural assumption of grandfathering, transitional arrangements, retrospective legislation and integrity. I'm sufficiently British that one of my grandfathers never had to sit a driving test. He was grandfathered in to driving licenses when they first introduced the test for new drivers (and according to my Mum a much worse driver than my grandmother, who started driving just a bit later and had to take a test). To me it was a genuine surprise that there were people who thought it OK to change the rules on people and not honour what was said to those who were desysopped for inactivity between Nov 2017 and Nov 2019. But I'm not sure it is simply a cultural thing between the two sides of the pond. There have been several similar things come up re Brexit, with some people assuming that people who'd moved between the EU and UK pre Brexit would be protected from the effect of Brexit, others thinking that they should be protected and worrying that they wouldn't be, and a third group who see no need to protect either British retirees on the shores of the Mediterranean or the Polish plumbers and other Europeans who had moved to the UK during the freedom of movement era. ϢereSpielChequers 16:52, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Looking for a biography
Do you are the talkpage stalkers have a good example of a short biography, preferably female, where the subject is clearly and obviously notable, but the usual availability of sources are limited. I am looking to improve a specific bio and looking for something similar. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:34, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
There is quite a lot of stuff like this one--Ymblanter (talk) 10:08, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
Johanna Alida Coetzee? A researcher whose pollen research transformed the knowledge of Africa's past vegetation but which is not very well documented. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:37, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
Damaris is one of my usual examples of an unexpandable but undoubtedly notable biography. As a saint in a major Christian denomination she's undoubtably a notable figure in Wikipedia's terms, but unless someone builds a time machine, all we know and all we ever will know about her is a single passing mention in a single sentence in a single book (albeit the most-read book of all time). ‑ Iridescent 13:17, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
Not clear how your countess matches my Roman matron, if we're considering length: your article is about 8 kb, where mine is 4 kb & covers two different women. About the only way I can see of expanding coverage of Vistilia the Elder (short of adding a discussion of how ancient Roman views on marriage & family would lead to serial polyandry) would require archeological discovery of more information about her, e.g. a new inscription. -- llywrch (talk) 15:08, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm assuming that OID is looking for examples of people with interesting biographies but where there aren't significant sources to draw on (I appreciate Damaris is maybe a bit unfair), in which case Katherine Stanhope is an exemplar—her career reads like it was invented by Walter Scott. If you're after people who have unquestioned notability in Wikipedia's terms but have no biography at all to speak of, I'll see everything else and raise you Alice Ayres, whose biography could be summed up in two sentences* and whose notability is entirely derived from the fact that virtually nothing was recorded about her life so every cause going—from equal rights campaigners to woman's-place-is-in-the-home advocates and outright racists, from communists to High Tories—could claim her as their own. ‑ Iridescent 19:08, 6 August 2020 (UTC) *Not counting sources, image captions etc, Ayres's ODNB biography comes in at 959 words or 5804 characters. Of that, 140 words/868 characters are her actual biography (and that includes a long list of her relatives), 188 words/1105 characters are about her death, while 631 words/3831 characters are about various public celebrations of and tributes to her.
For one of Blofeld's competitions, I improved the leads of a whole lot of Frankish/Merovingian queens. The lower text, which I didn't add to, was mostly from rather elderly sources, and most life-stories would easily make a two series drama on Netflix, or four series in the case of Brunhilda of Austrasia. Johnbod (talk) 20:53, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
In a nutshell, that's the main problem with notable women for much of history, the secondary problem being that what we typically relegate to the often mocked "Personal life" section (New Yorker humour that I find unfunny even for the New Yorker, via the unnameable site) in women's biographies either is interwoven with their career (I can't find where to insert the suggestions that Coco Chanel was bisexual, because the entire article mixes her entrepreneurial career with her purported liaisons) or constitutes all or most of their notability. It could be argued that the separate Personal life section derives from the stereotype that men have "private lives" on the side, but since it is our main tool for maintaining the privacy of non-notable individuals, I wouldn't want to push that. So we disproportionally cover women in fields like sport and science where there are more survey studies and databases, and performing arts where they reflect the general recentism (I wrote Barbara Weldens; if she'd died 50 years before, I doubt she'd have an article), and of the biographies I've written, Teresa Cornelys had an interesting career but was rescued from obscurity by an enthusiast biography (and is known partly for her liaisons), and Sofka Skipwith was known mainly for her liaisons, and did many political things, but in the Wikipedia sense her notability is secured by two awards for helping Jews during the Second World War, which is a small part of her story. (She was also somebody's mother.) The Alice Ayres article sent me looking up the Southwark Red Cross Hall. Turns out it's now called Bishops Hall, the interior has been mucked up despite much admiration of the adjacent Redcross cottages (I believe we call them the Gable cottages), and it is or was for sale. I am so far unable to find out the other topics of the Walter Crane frescoes—the drawing of the interior shows only the Ayres one discernibly—or when they were removed. Maybe they're still there under something. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:41, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Drawing of the Alice Ayres fresco
The Crane frescoes were abandoned after the first three had been completed. (Depending on who you read, either the money ran out, or the gas-lamps damaged the walls.) There's a brief summary of the ones that were completed at Walter Crane#Mature work. To judge by the Alice Ayres fresco design, if they have been whitewashed over nothing of value has been lost. ‑ Iridescent 06:43, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Template editor rights
Oh, Iri, font of all wisdom ... What became of template editor rights ??? [1]SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
They never applied to that template; not all templates are protected and that one isn't so even someone who isn't a template editor can edit it. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 21:26, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
(edit conflict) "Requires template editor" is a protection level in its own right, not blanket-applied to all templates, otherwise nobody except the 180-ish of the Chosen Few and the admins would be able to edit any template, and for a template like {{Vincent van Gogh}} we want everyone to be able to edit it so they can add new entries as they write new articles; template-editor protection is more for vandal-magnets like things that are used on the main page, or things like citation templates where well-intentioned cluelessness could break 10,000 pages. ‑ Iridescent 21:30, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks ...the things I do not know about adminly things is frightful! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:03, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Often the administrative side of things is like a sausage machine - you're best off focusing on the end product, not what goes on inside. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 09:05, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
Oh yeah, and non-templates (and non-modules) can be template-protected too. Example: Timeline of the history of the region of Palestine (at least until the protecting admin fixes what I assume to be their mistake) is template-protected. —Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 22:46, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
31 hours
Hi. I was curious: why on earth is the standard edit-warring block 31 hours? It's such a weird number. (I didn't know where to ask this, hence, WP:VP/IRI) —Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 18:08, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
It's described here - essentially because 31 is a prime number and 24 isn't, and as Galobtter notes, sometimes we do things around here just because we always have done. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 18:14, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
I always heard it as #2: blocked vandals will want to roar back the next day to vandalize again, 31 hours puts them out just enough to lose interest or not have an accessible PC at that time. –xenotalk 18:19, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
What Xeno said. As I understand it, the idea is that it's 24 hours plus the length of a typical school/work day in most English-speaking countries, and if someone's editing from home after work it puts the expiry time at a time when they're likely to be asleep—thus, it's the shortest block time that ensures that disruptive editors don't immediately come back and pick up where they left off. ‑ Iridescent 19:17, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
Iridescent, I've stumbled across your work (especially with the Arts) and your particularly active talk page with plenty of experienced editors and thought this might be a good place to ask. I'm at a loss with List of works by Leonardo da Vinci I'm afraid that I'm sneaking in OR when I'm not sure how to organize it without potentially doing so. Since Leonardo made so few paintings there is a lot to say about the attribution of each one: With 8 of them it's pretty easy (you can see the 8 if you sort the farthest right column and look at the "universally accepted" works) but the others are tricker. (This might be a good time to add that I haven't gotten around at all to working on the lead of the article that is pretty much completely unsourced.) Normally the issue could be solved by having "Universally accepted" and "Generally accepted" but the problem I'm running into is that there are works like The Annunciation and Ginevra de' Benci that are virtually accepted by all modern scholars to the point that having them in the same category as Salvator Mundi wouldn't make sense and lack of historical records as well as controversy in the past wouldn't make sense for them to be classified as "Universally accepted" either. To fix this I have come up with a "Widely accepted" middle category (the definition for it is in the key above the table) but I feel like this is something of OR, yet I don't know how else to solve the problem. Even with my two go to sources on attribution (Zollner 2019 and Marani 2000 – which attempt to display the scholarly consensus) they subtly interject their own opinions and often slightly contradict each other, especially on the supposably Generally Accepted and Widely Accepted paintings. Another issue I'm facing is that sometimes Zollner and Marani use the words "Generally accepted" for a different meaning then what I've defined them as in the key. Basically I guess this can all be summed up by the fact that I'm not sure if I should be using what I gather from Marani and Zollner to place the paintings in "Widely" or "Generally" accepted categories when the authors themselves don't use such phrases (not in the same way at least). I feel like I'm rambling here but any thoughts would be appreciated, I want to make sure I get this list right so I can use it as a base to build of the articles of the various paintings themselves. Aza24 (talk) 09:24, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
I personally {emphasise that this is in a personal capacity, not Wikipedia policy) see no particular issue with separating into synonyms of "unambiguous", "generally accepted but a few people disagree" and "some people say it but it's not widely accepted", providing you can back the reasoning in each case up if its challenged—it might be worth having a lengthy footnote for each of the disputed entries, explaining who disputes it (along the lines of List of states with limited recognition, but in footnotes to avoid cluttering the text).
This kind of blurred line between "summary of the existing sources and explanation of where they disagree" and "synthesis of published material" is fairly common. Some of the best people to speak to may not be arts editors but instead be the people who work on the history of religion, as they'll be well aware of how best to handle "different sources come to different conclusions about the historicity/authenticity of xxxxx" situations. ‑ Iridescent 14:09, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the comments, I was considering having lengthy footnotes, some of which had already been started by a previous editor – I think that route makes the most sense. Btw, your work on William Etty and his paintings showed me how much a single editor can contribute to the coverage of an artist, and is part of what motivated me to work on Leonardo and his paintings! Best - Aza24 (talk) 21:54, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, and good luck with it1! (Etty is by no means complete, but I lost motivation to finish the series. Some of his works are genuinely works of genius, but he suffers—along with van Gogh—from the fact that almost everything has survived, so there's a lot of really dull will-this-do? hackwork on display. The renaissance artists have the luxury that everything that wasn't deemed worth keeping has had five centuries to be thrown out or overpainted, so there are no Leonardo or Titian equivalents to Half-Figure of a Female Nude Reclining or Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs and they consequently have an "everything they did was highly accomplished" reputation.) If nothing else I've learned something; it never even occurres to me that the atribution of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder was disputed. ‑ Iridescent 07:16, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
With Titian, and many other old masters, there's ample space in the categories of "and workshop", "with workshop participation", "workshop of", "circle of", "follower of" to shunt away anything that doesn't meet the grade. See for example the many versions covered in my omnibus articles on Venus and Adonis (Titian) and Venus and Musician. Johnbod (talk) 14:07, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I always had a sneaking suspicion that when you see "workshop of" etc on a museum label, it actually translates half the time as "there's nothing to suggest it wasn't by him but we don't want to sully his reputation" and the other half as "we have no idea but we need to put a name on it so we can catalogue it". (As far as I'm concerned, a work created in the workshop of the Great Master Scoreggia under the direction of the Great Master Scoreggia, is a Scoreggia for all practical purposes given that Scoreggia would have been responsible for the composition and have approved each part of the work. I'm sure Christopher Wren wasn't hauling stone blocks up scaffolding himself but we don't attribute St Paul's to "team of stonemasons under the direction of Wren".) ‑ Iridescent 14:37, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
"Follower of" is often "we have no idea (except we're sure it wasn't the master) but we need to put a name on it so we can catalogue it". "Manner of" is the outer circle, generally used by the art trade rather than museums, meaning "incompetent imitation a century or three later". I've copied my example from Style (visual arts). The identification of the degree of workshop involvement is "essentially assigned to a group of specialists in the field known as connoisseurs", grumbles Svetlana Alpers - the process nowadays popular as reality tv in formats like Fake or Fortune?, with much talk of brushwork. 15:18, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Tips for a first-time FAC nominator?
Hello Iridescent -- you've been referred to me as an Excellent Person To Talk To regarding the FA nomination process. I'm hoping to nominate Frances Gertrude McGill later this month, but it'll be my first FAC, and I'm feeling a little daunted by the prospect. I brought this article up to GA a couple of years ago, and I've put it through peer review/further expansion since then. Do you have any last-minute tips for me before I take the plunge? Much appreciated, Alanna the Brave (talk) 14:36, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Prose-wise it looks fine to me. In terms of writing a nomination, you want to briefly explain not just why you think the article is ready for FAC, but why you think it's interesting—we always have a lot more nominations than we do reviewers, so you need to convince them that yours is the article on which they should spend their time.
A few things that jump out at me:
Assuming this is in Canadian English, "First World War" and "Second World War", not "World War I" and "World War II". It may seem trivial, but trust me the only group on Wikipedia with more ability to overreact than Brits who feel an article on a British topic is being Americanized, are Canadians who feel an article on a Canadian topic is being Americanized.
Is the photo of the old Scotland Yard building really serving any useful purpose? As far as I can tell this is just somewhere she once visited, not a place with which she had any connection.
What does McGill often named the more unusual cases she encountered in her forensic work mean? Always work on the assumption that your reader is reading an offline printout or a copy of the article scraped by a reuser, and isn't in a position to click through to the source to confirm that If the case were particularly intriguing or unusual, she gave it a name — such as the Deserted Shack Murder, the Bran Muffin Case, or the Straw Stack Murders is what's meant. (Unless these were actually official designations, I personally wouldn't consider it particularly significant. I assume that even if she hadn't been there, the officers who dealt with the murder in the deserted shack would have called it "the deserted shack murder".)
Regarding In 1945, McGill had been offered a job as pathologist at an English university, which she considered but ultimately turned down, what was the university? It makes a big difference whether it was a leading institution like Cambridge trying to recruit a leading expert, or a provincial outpost like the University College of the South West of England hoping a Canadian woman would be cheaper to hire.
Where did she actually live after retirement? We have her working in Regina, but the infobox has her dying in Winnipeg—had she moved there, or did she just happen to die while living there?
I'd drop—or at least, drastically reword—McGill never married, choosing to invest her time and efforts in a career she loved. It unintentionally reads like it's either something from a 1950s Good Housekeeping "working women aren't real women" piece (if this were about a male scientist, would we be saying the same thing?) or a coded reference to lesbianism.
The "Legacy" section seems a little sparse. If she really had "a measure of immortality surpassed by few other Canadians", where are the police buildings named after her, the plaque on her birthplace etc? If these things don't exist it's obviously difficult to discuss a negative, but in that case I'd be surprised if there isn't a "women in science" campaign lobbying for more recognition of her. (One of the sources is Saskatchewan's Frances Gertrude McGill on Canadian money? but it's only used as a source for other things, not as a source for the possibility of her being on money—a campaign to put her on the banknotes is exactly the kind of thing you want to include. At FA you're not writing for people who've looked the topic up, you're writing for bright 14-year-olds with no prior interest in the topic whom you need to convince why they should care when the WMF twitter account posts a link to the article, or it appears on the main page.)
These are all relatively trivial, but now for the big one where if there is opposition, will be what gets it opposed (for which Ealdgyth or Nikkimaria are probably the reviewers you'll need to convince):
What makes The Pathological Casebook of Dr. Frances McGill by Myrna Pederson—which is cited roughly as often as everything else combined—a reliable source? Judging by first impressions is sometimes unfair, but Ideation Entertainment looks pretty much to be the Platonic ideal of "self-publisher". While we don't have a blanket ban on self-published sources, their main utility is in cases where someone's an undoubted authority on the topic (e.g. the author of A Guide to Feline Anatomy self-publishing Congenital Birth Defects in Tortoiseshell Cats), and the "about the author" doesn't mention anything about either pathology or Canadian history. (The policy chapter-and-verse is at Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published sources.)
The only one I can see being an issue is 8, as all the others are the kind of minor quibble that people will probably fix as a matter of routine at the FAC. I've pinged the two people most likely to have concerns about it (and a lot of the others watch this page), so if either or both of them show up and say they don't see an issue with The Pathological Casebook, assume there's not an issue. On a more general note, if you haven't already I highly recommend reading Giano's essay; it's more than a decade out of date, but is still in my opinion not only the single best advice page not just on the FA process but on article-writing in general, but probably the only user essay on the whole of Wikipedia that's actually worth reading. ‑ Iridescent 18:03, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Thank you Iridescent -- that's given me lots of good stuff to chew on (and I'll check out that essay!). Regarding Petersen: it's the only biography of McGill available, and it cites plenty of strong research sources, but I'm not sure what other arguments I might be able to make. While I wait to see what Ealdgyth and/or Nikkimaria might have to say, I'll start trying to replace some Petersen citations with other sources (I can, at the very least, reduce my heavy reliance on that one book). Alanna the Brave (talk) 19:31, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Alanna the Brave I haven't time to look at your article, but can give you some general FAC tips. The first (as pointed out by Iri) is that FAC is seriously short on reviewers so you have to "pitch" your FAC in an interesting way. Second, and more importantly, you should spend a long time actively engaged at WP:FAC and WP:FAR to get your face known and to get to know the ropes. You don't have to Support or Oppose if you don't feel ready, but you should get engaged. Entering comments is fine. Third, never disrespect reviewers; they are volunteers, and without them, we don't have FAs. It's OK to disagree, but don't get into a battle; think carefully about hills worth dying on, and try to take tricky discussions to talk to avoid overwhelming the FAC. And finally, before approaching FAC you should have had: a) an expert in your content area look at the article, and check prose and sources, but b) also get someone who knows nothing of your content area to look at the article (to make sure it is digestible and accessible and understandable to someone not versed in the topic), and c) get a MOS-y type look at it to make sure your citations are consistent and other technical issues are up to snuff. If all nominators would do those few things, FAC would sail much smoother !! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:57, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgia: That's interesting that the initial pitch has so much importance -- I'll make an effort to check out more FAC nominations and pitches (and I'll see if I can contribute any useful comments). Thanks! Alanna the Brave (talk) 00:00, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Ealdgyth has a userspace page about how to convincingly argue that a particular questionable source should be considered high-quality. Unfortunately "it's the only biography" isn't a strong argument in that respect.
If you're interested there's some more detail about the family in Basswood.
I'd second Sandy's suggestion that you'll want to take a look at cleaning up citation formatting before nominating. Nikkimaria (talk) 20:56, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
@Nikkimaria: It's definitely looking like I'll have to let go of Petersen (I guess it's better to learn that now rather than later!). I appreciate the tips. And thank you for pointing me in the direction of that Basswood book -- it should help me a lot with the sourcing for McGill's early history. Alanna the Brave (talk) 00:00, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Even if you're not using Petersen as a source, provided they're footnoted self-published-sources are still valuable as a source of other sources. If every claim Petersen makes correctly tells you where she got it, you can take it as a jumping-off point to check the same sources for yourself. I may be being completely unfair—I haven't read the book—but knowing the way local historians operate, I have a strong suspicion that you'll be able to recreate at least 90% of Petersen from this archive alone and the remaining 10% from "Frances+Gertrude+McGill"&source=lnms&tbm=bks this Google search. ‑ Iridescent 06:13, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I've located some of Petersen's sources through my own research, but she does actually use quite a few items I can't access: personal papers/correspondence, interviews with McGill family, trial transcripts, RCMP papers and other archival materials. However, I did find something last night that might help justify limited use of Petersen: she authored the entry on Frances McGill in the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan (University of Regina), which could be used to argue that Petersen is considered a "subject-matter expert", right? Alanna the Brave (talk) 13:02, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I'd say yes, but check with Ealdgyth, as if there's any "not a reliable source" opposition it will most likely be from her (and conversely, if she's satisfied with a source nobody else is likely to challenge it); per my previous comment I'm wary of anything from a publisher that only publishes a single author, particularly when one of that author's published works are on a related topic, but if reputable publishers are commissioning from her that goes a long way. ‑ Iridescent 13:18, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Having had a couple of gos at FAC and given up, the problem I've got is I personally don't have the sustained level of interest or the stamina to see it through. For example, I was contemplating nominating Marshlink line this year, then decided I couldn't be bothered. Some of the problems I face are:
By the time I've nominated an article, I've been working on it for months and it says pretty much everything I want to and cites all the appropriate sources. Somebody suggesting anything more than minor changes is not going to get me to change my mind easily - it's not a question of respecting other people's views, it's more that I probably flat out don't agree with them and need convincing. The argument usually goes something like "I think we need 'x'." "I'm not sure we need 'x' because of 'y' and 'z'" "But [insert FA here] has 'x'" "Yes, but because of [reasons] I don't think it's appropriate in this instance" "Oh, well oppose per lack of 'x' then"
I can't get excited about dashes, alt text, image placement and citation formatting. I see gnomes tinkering about with this on other article I've improved all the time and I usually just leave them to their own devices
I don't have the attention span to pay sustained interest to an article for the 2-3 months it sits at FAC. By week two, I'm probably thinking, "aww jeez, I'm bored of this, can't I write about something else". In the case of The Who, I took the article off my watchlist for about four months after the FA review because I was so utterly sick and tired of it.
Many of our articles are nowhere near C class, let alone anything else. As a basic back-of-the-envelope calculation, I could spend two months writing 1 FA, or writing 3 GAs, or removing problems on 25 C class articles. Where's the "bang for the buck"?
However, I must emphasise that's just my personal preference. I certainly wouldn't begrudge anyone else giving FAC a go, and think it's a worthwhile exercise if you're up for it. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 08:35, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Certainly fair! :-) I think an article has to be a passion project if you're going to spend this much time on it. However, I do think it's important to diversify the articles appearing on the front page of Wikipedia, and that's part of my motivation too (I figure women in science could use a boost). Alanna the Brave (talk) 13:02, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I'll disagree with Ritchie333 to some extent here. If your motivation is just to ensure that a reader looking up a particular topic gets good quality information, then whether or not it's been through any assessment process makes no difference to its quality (other than the fact that the multiple reviewers at FAC are good at spotting errors, something that happens even to the most experienced writers surprisingly often). If your motivation is to encourage other people to take an interest in something in which you think they ought to be interested, it's a different case. If done well, FAs have a reach that nothing else on Wikipedia compares to, both because of the "More featured articles" link's permanent spot on the main page, and the fact that they're the articles most likely to be translated into other languages. The increase in readership is small but it's consistent and it adds up quickly over time—to stick with Ritchie's railway example, these are the comparative pageview figures this year for the (FA) Droxford railway station and all the (non-FA) articles for every other station on this particular disused railway line. (This is the same chart for the six months before it passed FAC, to prove that the increase in readership comes from FA status and not because this is a more interesting article than the others, although it is.) Plus, FAs are eligible for TFA and if you're willing to put up with the hassle that comes from TFA and you can write a catchy blurb, there's no faster way to engage readers. (200,000 people read about a single obscure and rather ugly painting when it was TFA, and I'd guess at least 199,900 had never heard of it before.) ‑ Iridescent 15:40, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I had never actually considered this angle before. I just added my very first FA, Maraba coffee, to your comparison of station page views, and found it actually has slightly more views than any of the stations. I guess this is because of the FA status, even though its TFA was 14 years ago. I actually really like the FA process, it can be slow at times, and you have to keep engaged with the feedback, but the warm fuzzy feeling from getting it promoted far exceeds that of a mere GA. My main limitation (I only have four FAs to my name currently) is that I haven't written enough detailed articles to get them over the line, but I would certainly recommend the process to anyone willing to invest the time in it. — Amakuru (talk) 16:02, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I am sympathetic to Ritchie333's points, but for different reasons. As I pointed out to Alanna the Brave, the main thing they should do NOW is get involved at FAC and FAR because of the serious shortage of reviewers. This business of FACs taking months to be processed (which was NOT always the case) needs to change, and the only way for that to happen is to get more activity in there. The big change occurred when we lost the factor of Ealdgyth being in there very early to shut down the poorly sourced FACs, and Tony1 being in there early to shut down the poor prose; with those two factors, FAC turned in to an extended peer review, and stopping that is in everyone's best interest. ANYONE can develop a specialty in reviewing a particular aspect of WP:WIAFA to help speed things along, as we used to advise: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-04-07/Dispatches. The selfishness and cliquisheness that has taken over FAC is discouraging and what has slowed it down; one has to be in certain groups these days to get their articles reviewed. People want *their* FAs, and their friends' FAs to pass, without digging in selflessly across the board to any type of article, for the overall good of the FA process, with some eliticism in what folks will review being introduced. As someone who has read thousands of hurricanes, ships, coins, pop culture, and whatever else FAs (that rarely interested me), this selfishness is a serious pet peeve to me ... anyone who wants to improve the process and speed up time on page should be willing to review Squirm. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:00, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Teahouse ping list
Hello everyone, I am compiling a list so that willing editors can be pinged to Teahouse posts that need (/better) answers before they get quickly archived. It is currently at User:Usedtobecool/Tea. All of it, including editors/areas combo, is just off the top of my head. I shall seek explicit permission from each editor and remove those who are not interested, before the page is moved to project space. Editors who would like to volunteer are encouraged to add themselves (or, contrarily, remove themselves); suggestions about who else to reach out to for each area would be most appreciated, as well as any other feedback you might have. You can also edit the page to make it more formal and suitable for project space. There is of course, a lot to do; I reckon once I have enough willing editors, I will have to cross-check them to make sure any i-bans are appropriately indicated so they don't get pinged together. One urgent question I have is, it isn't inappropriate to list editors like I have done before I have their permission, is it?
To Iridescent specifically: You are welcome to edit the page to add or remove yourself to and from various rows. Currently, I have you listed for "Featured Articles" and "Wikipedia History". But it's just a draft (proposal). If you are not interested, I will remove you from it. Any other advice/feedback would also be welcome. Regards! Usedtobecool☎️ 16:28, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
I have no problem being listed, but make it clear that given the rate at which Teahouse threads are archived, there's a very high likelihood I won't answer any given question. The activity on this talkpage makes me look deceptively active; my Wikipedia activity at present is largely restricted to periodically checking my talk and responding to queries here (my last 50 non-minor mainspace edits go back four months), and I wouldn't want new editors thinking they're being ignored and getting upset if they don't get answered. ‑ Iridescent 20:28, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
This looks similar to the historical WP:HAU project. –xenotalk 13:27, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
If I remember right, that was more about tracking who was likely to be active at any given time so people knew where to direct urgent questions without having to wait for an answer. It never made a great deal of sense since with 99% of queries, it doesn't matter who answers as long as somebody answers and they're vaguely competent. ‑ Iridescent 15:36, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
WikiProjectMed
Quickly popping in to ask how much you (or others watching this talk page) know about the wiki at WikiProjectMed and the fallout from the medicine-related arbitration case? I've heard that content is being imported there from here (see here) and that there might be attempts to take things in a different direction but I have not had the time recently to follow this all closely enough. Carcharoth (talk) 16:16, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I have been following it closely, as a matter of copyright and licensing, and it's quite interesting. Those who did not prevail in the ArbCase have now created a fork to which they apparently intend to take all of Wikipedia's medical content, without proper licensing attribution. A Wiki, by the way, that not "anyone can edit" (you need "their" approval, read between those lines). And, they are porting the full and complete contents of Wikipedia articles to this external Wiki without complying with Wikipedia:Copyrights by including a link back to the articles copied in their entirety. As I own significant copyright[2] to this, I expect to see a link back to dementia with Lewy bodies ON THAT PAGE, rather than a statement that "This site contains content from Wikipedia" with a link to Wikipedia's main page, which does nothing to satisfy my copyrighted contribs. This is not WP:CWW, it is to an external forked Wiki, and an edit summary does not suffice. It is quite unfortunate that this is occurring just as we are seeing a re-emergence of the skills and talents that WP:MED had before 2015. I would like to hear how the WMF feels about licensing being disrespected on a wiki founded by one of their board members, which "not anyone can edit". So far, no discussion of this at the WMF level has surfaced; perhaps you are aware of one? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:05, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
It does have "This site contains content from Wikipedia" in tiny print at the very bottom of the page. (They're perfectly entitled to copy us, but technically they're legally obliged to link to the article or its history from which they've copied, not just a generic "contains content from Wikipedia". I'm not sure we've ever enforced this very hard though.) If you want to be by-the-book the procedure is at Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks#Non-compliance process, although you've pinged WhatamIdoing above and I presume she knows how to get a message to Whatamidoing (WMF), who usually seems to be the WMFer who gets shafted cleaning up spills like this. (While I assume the Board is not going to approve legal action against Doc James, I assume the Wikipediaocracy crowd will be gleefully emailing every journalist they can think of as soon as they notice, and the WMF doesn't like bad publicity.) ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
I wouldn't consider discussing action against an external website to violate Wikipedia:No legal threats which is about legal action regarding libel or copyright violations on Wikipedia; you're discussing legal issues regarding a website, not regarding named individuals at that website. Besides, A complaint in cases of copyright infringement is not a legal threat is a verbatim quote from WP:NLT. Where there does seem to be a genuine legal issue in which the WMF might want to get involved is that any reasonable reader would read Welcome to MDWiki, a project by the Wiki Project Med Foundation (WPMEDF), also known as Wikimedia Medicine (my emphasis) as a claim that they're a WMF project.
(While you're here you might want to have a look at #Tips for a first-time FAC nominator? above as well, and see if either I've missed an obvious tip, or if you think I'm being too nitpicky.) ‑ Iridescent 18:31, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
The problem with trying to enforce copyrights is that they're held by each individual contributor, so there's no "we". I suppose in theory the WMF could fund a class action suit, but under the assumption that virtually all contributions are unregistered with the copyright office, only actual damages can be recovered, and good luck trying to show that. (The only way I can think of for there to be a registered contribution is if someone repurposed their own text from a copyrighted work.) isaacl (talk) 07:13, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
You know what they say about assumptions. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 08:02, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I can't imagine who would register a snapshot of a Wikipedia article to capture the copyrighted contributions of all the editors—you'd have to get them all to sign the paperwork. I can imagine someone registering a compilation copyright of a set of articles put into a book, but that wouldn't affect anything regarding trying to enforce the copyright of individual contributions. isaacl (talk) 00:36, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Registering a snapshot is not how the process works. Nor do you have to have everyone "sign the paperwork". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:47, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Well, I suppose it can be done online now, so you don't need actual signatures, but you'd need actual names. Under U.S. copyright law, copyrighted works must be fixed in a medium of expression and so you must register a specific instance of a work. Some countries don't have a fixation requirement, but specifically for written text, I can't see how you're going to register it without actually providing the text to the copyright office, so violations can be clearly identified. isaacl (talk) 01:02, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
To clarify, I responded to "I'm not sure we've ever enforced this very hard though" as if "we" referred to the WMF. Of course, individual contributors such as you may feel sufficiently motivated to sue for actual damages (or statutory damages if you've registered your personal contributions). isaacl (talk) 01:05, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification about reference to the WMF; no doubt that an individual editor’s concern and motivation about enforcing their copyright is substantially different from that of the current W?F—a group pretty well understood by most followers of this talk page. And whether you apply online or not, you still don’t need all the signatures. Or actual names. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:17, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
You would be misrepresenting the authorship of the work if you omit authors. The other authors might not care, but it would be an inaccuracy on the application. But I see that U.S. copyright registration allows for pseudonymous registration when the actual names don't appear anywhere in the work. isaacl (talk) 01:28, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I would never do such a thing to my co-collaborators. If I were of that sort, I would instead be over at mdwiki. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:31, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
My apologies for being unclear. Just as when you said "whether you apply online or not" I assumed you were referring to a generic "you", I too was not referring to you specifically regarding how a copyright application is filled out. isaacl (talk) 01:38, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I have seen that wiki and will be following its development. I have real respect for several of the registered users but am obviously partial to Wikipedian content. I might have more to say in the future but for now I think that's where I'm at. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:36, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
@Barkeep49: Don't be fooled into thinking that those "registered" editors are there either intentionally or willingly: the signup interface allowed people to either create an account or to sign up using your Wikipedia log-in. If you did the latter, it didn't just sign you in, but automatically registered your account whether you intended it or otherwise.Incidentally, how does it link to the servers to process that sign-in information? 2A02:C7F:BE17:2D00:F855:F99A:FC9:72FD (talk) 09:36, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
On linking to the servers, see mw:Help:OAuth; they're piggybacking on the same interface that third party scripts and tools use to use your SUL account to verify your identity as a given Wikipedia (or Commons) user without being able to access any other information than "this computer is logged on to Wikipedia under this username". The "visiting a wiki makes you count as a member of that wiki even if you have no intention of ever editing there" issue has been with us ever since unified logon was introduced; I have accounts at 285 different projects within the WMF ecosystem alone and have only ever actually edited 8 of them. ‑ Iridescent 13:08, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Is bizarre that anyone can piggyback it, but I suppose harmless if that's all they get; thanks for the information though. 2A02:C7F:BE17:2D00:715E:C5EB:7B15:554D (talk) 12:44, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
If the WMF wants to assure en.Wikipedians that their work can be copied by any external website without attribution and without links back to the en.Wikipedia articles-- thereby assuring that no one has any motivation to contribute work on en.Wikipedia-- here's their big chance. The issue would hinge on what a judge would find "reaonable" re attribution, and expecting en.Wikipiedia's own admins and board members to include a link back to the original work hardly seems unreasonable. If the WMF thinks it is, I can save a lot of legal fees in not going after the predatory journals; IP attorneys are not inexpensive, and there is no point in enforcing CC-BY-SA if WMF doesn't take it seriously enough to expect the highest standards from our own. But to whatever extent the WMF is beholden to anything that increases revenues for salaries, conferences, travel junkets, etc, we will see if concerns about predatory journals, high standards in what we define as "reasonable" attribution, or the impact on the regular editor will prevail. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:44, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Licensing aside, back to Carcharoth's question about "attempts to take things in a different direction". Generally, if those who want to focus on drug prices have a place to do that, that is probably a good thing, as the external focus had been draining WPMED of talent and will to improve on-en.Wiki content for half a decade. The question remains whether the goal is to further Internet in a Box or to create an entire fork where compliance with English Wikipedia policies and arbcom can be avoided. Overall, WPMED has been re-invigorated post-arbcase, and I have had to eat my words, errr criticism, that the arbs didn't go far enough, as the proof is in the pudding. Medical articles matter, and the recent focus was not on accuracy, rather on spreading information worldwide regardless of accuracy. While WP:MED had been focused for years on spreading marginal content to every language and corner of the globe rather than improving that content, the focus has once again returned to collaborative work towards improving content. FAs are being saved at WP:FAR, new FAs are being written, editors are signing up to collaborate to fill the void left by WMF's decidedly faulty decision to remove Wiki Ed staff (medical articles are highly hit by student editing, which is rarely competent), and editors are generally collaborating on all sorts of different efforts via the Project, rather than via individual editor talk pages, and attempts to engage camaraderie towards overall content improvement are abundant. So, for those who are more interested in spreading demonstrably inaccurate drug prices and faulty medical content via Internet in a Box to have a fork from which to work is probably a win-win for all concerned. But that they do it by skimming content from the English Wikipedia without giving full and open attribution to en.Wikipedia on each page is sketchy, and lends to consideration of ego issues and questions about benefit. It's also curious that James is tracking issues introduced to Wikipedia, as if he fully believes that these kinds of issues didn't and haven't always occurred, and that it was possible for a few editors to "fix" all of Wikipedia-- yet ignoring errors they themselves introduced. Perhaps they intend to publish a "peer reviewed" journal article about how much better mdwiki is than en.Wikipedia. We've seen lots of flawed methodology coming from these open access journal publications about Wikipedia's medical content, which do a fine job of demonstrating why we prefer secondary reviews over primary (biased) sources. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:56, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
So apparently after these discussions began, all those pages became private-- now you can't even see them, and of course, you have to be approved to be an editor. This is very much in line with Wikipedia's aims and goals, right? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:39, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
My general take is that this is hilarious and that I am going to protest their 2021 funding application when it comes up on Meta. Doc James is more than able to fork, but WMF money and server space shouldn't be spent to fork an existing project without the approval of the wider movement. Especially an experts only fork that exists because of a content dispute that was settled unfavorably. Imagine if Wikimedia Guatemala created a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia that removes all references to Belize and used WMF money to do it. --Guerillero | Parlez Moi 00:25, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
That is a good point. I couldn't see anywhere on meta that shows it was discussed or authorised (Don't wikis like this have to go through an approval process?) Cas Liber (talk·contribs) 01:06, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Guerillero I don't follow anything Meta (it would make me crazy-ier). Are you saying that at the same time that the WMF cut Wiki Ed staff, as Wiki Ed staff was helping hold the line against the disastrous impact of student editing on medical content, so that now WPMED is overwhelmed by the effects of student editing, WMF is simultaneously funding stuff like this? "Stuff" being, we want our own project because we don't like Wikipedia policies? If so, someone please ask WMF to instead give money to Wiki Ed, as all of WPMED is now dealing with the effects of student editing, because Wiki Ed can't keep up with all of the effects. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:22, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Casliber as we learned from the latest new Wiki affiliate related to student editing of medical content as discussed at WT:MED-- no, there is NO significant approval process and there is no oversight or scrutiny. It's ridiculous. Pretty much anyone can be an affiliate or whatever they call them, and there seems to be no concern about accuracy, knowledge, policy compliance-- anything that matters. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:25, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
arbitrary break
Their main page now says Please note that this is a work in progress. We have attribution of Wikipedia, from were much of the content originates in the footer. We are working on a full history import. Until that import is done we have limited viability of the article space of this wiki to established editors. This project is run by a Wikimedia thematic organizations and not by the Wikimedia Foundation., which seems to me that they're at least making a good-faith effort to listen to concerns.
Having thought about it for a while, I don't see any particular issue with what they're doing, provided they attribute properly. (Someone who's in a position to check, needs to check Internet-in-a-box itself once it's up and running; attributing on the website is all well and good, but if the only purpose of the website is to serve as a platform for offwiki publishing, I'd expect every article they publish offline to include an equivalent to this.) Assuming they're attributing properly and that they're not in any way using WMF money or WMF servers and not being supported by WMF employees while on the clock, James forking our medical articles because he's unhappy we don't let him include everything he wants to include is functionally no different to the Star Trek Fan Club forking our Star Trek articles because they're not happy that we don't allow them to include every fan theory about the backstories of the characters, and that kind of thing happens all the time. (If "hosting another wiki which directly competes with Wikipedia and has a dubious attitude towards copyrights" is a hanging offense, there are much bigger fish than Doc James in the barrel.)
The optics of it being a board member doing this is terrible, but (if I'm reading the history right) this went live on 10 August and the new Board of Trustees was supposed to be announced on 9 August, so the timing was presumably decided before the BoT unilaterally extended their own terms (a decision James didn't support), and was intended to avoid this kind of awkward situation. (We have no issue at all, legally or ethically, with people who don't have a conflict of interest forking their articles of interest to their own website following a dispute on Wikipedia. People as varied as Larry Sanger, Eric Corbett and Greg Kohs have done it in the past without causing any issues.)
James should probably resign from the board, but they may be pressuring him not to; the WMF party line is that all seats on the board need to be occupied and that it's not possible to hold an election during a pandemic. (Don't ask me why or how, but that's their official line.) That said, I find it hard to get too het up about it; James is not exactly the trustee whose continued presence on the board raises the most concern right now. ‑ Iridescent 05:52, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
The timing you are laying out is not working. The WMF board decision was made in April, before the arb decision in June. But I am glad someone over there has put on listening ears. Unless they have changed it, which we can’t see, the link in the footer went to the Wikipedia main page, which is not what Wikipedia’s own policy pages say is required. As to the “trustee whose continued presence is raising the most concern” right now, I guess we all need to be more vigilant about the next election. And I think the ongoing COVID excuses (eg, for letting Wiki Ed staff go) are a bunch of baloney. Other than that, as I have said, I agree with you that as long as they attribute, it is probably a win-win for those who want to write about drug prices to do it over there, and let those who want to focus on policy-compliant content over here do so without constant disruption. But, we will end up back with the arbs if coordinated editing coming from there disrupts en.wikipedia editing, driving through non-policy-compliant content by abuse of dispute resolution processes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:34, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
But in terms of timing it didn't need to wait for the arb decision, just for the point at which it was obvious that there was genuine strong opposition to his vision rather than just a couple of people who didn't like it. From James's point of view, I assume the line of thought was "I think drug pricing and videos are both essential to include, it's obvious that even if they get accepted on Wikipedia there's significant opposition to them so consensus could change at any time, so it will be better for all concerned if we take this to a site which the WMF can't touch". I assume WikiJournals will slink off in the same direction fairly soon as well; at the moment people turn a blind eye because they have no readership, but if it ever picks up readers there's genuine reputational damage to be done to the WMF and Wikipedia. (On that topic, connoisseurs of wiki-weirdness might appreciate When the Wikimedia movement challenges how to do science.)
You need to bear in mind that James isn't sitting in a bunker stroking a white cat and planning how best to be disruptive; in his eyes himself and his small group of followers are making things better and everyone else is being disruptive for not letting him do things his way, so from his point of view it makes complete sense to create a safe space where he (and Ozzie, and CFCF) can work on things without being interrupted in the hope that one day the rest of us will see the light and they can have a triumphant homecoming and overwrite Wikipedia with their preferred versions of everything. ‑ Iridescent 06:53, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I have never seen any evidence that James plans things to such an extent. But I like the analysis anyway ;) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:00, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
That the Grand Scheme is to edit content offline away from that pesky "anyone can edit" and subsequently to parachute in and overwrite the existing articles is no secret. This remarkably bad-tempered exchange two years ago is worth reading in full despite its length. ‑ Iridescent 07:27, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
That was quite a read. Even Ottava, for gosh sakes! I suppose I could regret being absent from WPMED for four years ... or be happy I was blissfully unaware of what was driving so much that I saw when I returned. Much of this year’s goings on—and many odd things said—now have context. So, thanks for helping reinforce my determination. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 08:34, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
No one took up my suggestion we should get Kanye to review Taylor Swifts article tho.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:21, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
We had enough trouble with Peter Hitchins. I can all too easily imagine what Kanye on Wikipedia would be like. ‑ Iridescent 15:07, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
In re delayed Board elections. I suspect this is to enable one of the board members to push thru a favored policy change which will remake all of the projects into more civil & inclusive environments, for one individual's definition of "civil & inclusive". I won't elaborate on this further, because (1) I figure everyone who lurks here can figure out who & what I'm alluding to; (2) Further discussion would be more appropriate to one of Websites That Shall Not Be Named than one Wikipedian's Talk page, who might not be interested in such wild theories discussed here; (3) Based on my ability to understand the Foundation, I'm likely enough to be wrong that my theory will be refuted in short order by another TPL; & (4) If I am right, & if this one individual succeeds in having this change enacted, said policy will not survive long due to widespread antipathy -- although many volunteers & staff may be lost in the brief time it is in force. -- llywrch (talk) 20:52, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I recognize that most people feel like we've already lived through a full decade so far this year, but at the time the decision was made to delay the election, about a third of the world was in some form of lockdown, and almost everyone's life was being disrupted in some way or other. While the Board is something of a big deal to those of us who are embedded in the community, it's not really a big deal in the great scheme of things. Back in April, there was such a degree of uncertainty that it would have been very difficult to recruit the best candidates, and Wikimania (which includes significant new board member onboarding) was already cancelled, so that was no longer a deadline. For a lot of Wikimedians, their real lives were their priority. Sure, the 500-1000 people most likely to really care about the election would probably be around; but that really isn't the point of a broad community election. It's worth noting that just about every major WMF project that was in the pipeline at the beginning of the year has already been significantly delayed, those that are continuing are moving in slow motion, and many less important ones have been sidelined entirely. This isn't really to defend the WMF, but I can tell you as a former election committee member that trying to run an effective, representative election in April/May of this year would have been nearly impossible, and certainly wasn't worth the potential failure to attract the best candidates or the widest range of participants. Frankly, I think it would have been potentially very damaging, since it was clear that huge chunks of the global community was being significantly impaired in any kind of wiki volunteering. Risker (talk) 04:53, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
You know more about the WMF's internal workings than me, but I'm not at all convinced. I can understand that a difficulty in meeting face-to-face could cause hypothetical problems with induction and training for new board members, but that's not the argument they were making; the resolution specifically and explicitly says that the issue was the impossibility of holding a vote. Unless we're talking a the Stand situation, I can't see any means by which the lockdowns could or would have had any impact on the ability of people to participate in a purely online process—literally every metric you can point at (total cross-wiki new editors, pages created on all projects, total edits across all wikis, en-wiki active editors, en-wiki number of edits, highly active editors on French Wikipedia, new account registrations on Mongolian Wikipedia…) shows that engagement increased measurably as the shit hit the fan (there are only so many Netflix box sets you can watch); the only community where activity seems to have dropped is Wikivoyage, which is fairly self-explanatory with international travel so severely restricted. If anything, a time when as few editors as possible have the distraction of work would be the ideal time if they're genuinely interested in getting as much participation as possible. (I don't for one minute believe they care about increasing participation, FWIW. I'm quite certain that if they thought they could get away with going back to a board consisting 100% of Jimmy appointing his drinking buddies, they'd do it in a heartbeat; the WMF has never shown the slightest interest in community representation unless the community representatives happen to be telling them exactly what they want to hear.) -- Iridescent 19:58, 14 August 2020
Anent Jimmy staffing the board: having watched him over the years, I know he wants to do as little work concerning... well, maybe anything, but in this case Wikipedia. Wikipedia was an accident & helped by a bit of luck -- who would know there are so many nerds on the Internet who think writing an encyclopedia is fun? What was a vanity side project of a sketchy Internet portal surprisingly became the most exciting technology creation of the 3rd millennium, & Wales earned himself a permanent spot in the history books, next to Marc Andreessen & Tim Berners-Lee. However, now that Wikipedia was up & running, he found it did not run itself: there was the constant strain of handling the troublemakers, the chronic bickering, the dreariness of managing a business. (Not to mention the fact that if he stuffed the board with his drinking buddies, he'd be forced to make decisions upon which Wikipedia's existence depended.) Wales nicely slid out from under this responsibility by creating the Mediation Committee & the Arbitration Committee, which gave him the time to exploit his celebrity status & hang out with the kewl kids like Bono & one or more UK Prime Ministers. His duties are little more than monitoring his Talk page, showing up at the Board meetings (& maybe doing a bit of log-rolling by offering other high tech celebrities a seat of the Board in return for one or more favors), giving a keynote speech at Wikimania, & guarding something he likes to call his "reserve powers" -- & he likes this light workload. (Not ragging on him, just cynically pointing out that he doesn't like hard work -- but who does?) -- llywrch (talk) 06:05, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
break: long aside about forking and COI
Wikipedia was designed to be forkable; special interest communties in the past have usually chosen instead to go to Wikia, which is in many ways an inferior route, if only because of its necessary commercial connections. I was personally in my first years a member of one of the abortive forks, Citizendium, which failed due to a combination of over-complexity , over-interference by its founder, and the consequent failure to maintain sufficient participation. Originally Citizendium was designed to be two-way compatibility with Wikipedia, but a variety of licensing and personal considerations prevented this (The original intention was to directly use WP articles as content for all topics for which Citizendium had not yet written articles to its higher quality specification--I thought and still think the decision to do otherwise a serious error.) I had joined with the specific intention of importing content from WP, and upgrading it to the more academic ideas of Citizendium.) There's a sense in which Wikidata and Commons are forks, though still within the WMF. Wikidata in particular, has the posibility of serving as a bridge between the various databases. I know there's an intention to eventually use wikidata for bibliographic information, and I can see using it as a link to pricing information also. DGG ( talk ) 04:42, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
Indeed. I still firmly believe that when the histories come to be written, one of the biggest mistakes in WMF history will in retrospect be seen as Jimmy allowing his personal (and admittedly understandable) dislike of Greg to cloud his judgement, and blocking his proposal to shunt the paid editors into a noindexed fork where they could the PR people could write their puffery, but it wouldn't be re-imported back onto Wikipedia unless and until independent editors had reviewed it and said it was OK. We could have largely avoided burning through a decade of time, energy and goodwill fighting an unwinnable fight against COI, and avoided the unmanageable morass that is draftspace, if we hadn't had the kneejerk "forks are always inferior" mentality.
I don't believe anyone here has any issues with the existence of the fork—we say variations of "if you don't want to follow our rules, go set up your own wiki" so often it's practically a ritual chant, we can hardly complain when somebody does it. The problems are with potential issues in attribution, possible misleading of donors who aren't necessarily going to be clear which project their money is going to, and what the relationship between the two wikis will be when it comes to who can overwrite whom and in what circumstances. Yes, Nupedia and Citizendium were held back in part because they both had the dead weight of Larry Sanger upsetting everyone in sight, but we can't hold him exclusively to blame; we have ample evidence from things like Google Knol which had big budgets and competent management that mixing "anyone can edit" and "experts have a veto" doesn't work and just ends up simultaneously annoying the editors and frustrating the experts. ‑ Iridescent 20:13, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't think that would have done much about paid editing, because the whole point is "your content shows up top on Google". They wouldn't bother with the no-indexed forks because readers wouldn't be looking at their puff pieces. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchstalk 16:45, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I disagree. If we signposted a clear "if you think a topic warrants a Wikipedia article but you're not sure you can write about it within the rules, here's a set of steps to follow" process, I strongly believe most of the people who are currently bombarding us with spam would follow it. The reason we get so snowed under with cut-and-pasted press releases is that we have no workable mechanism for people with a COI to submit suggestions. Even when they try to do the right thing and go the draft-space or AFC route, they tend to be met by some variant of "if this topic is notable someone else will write about it, until that happens you're not welcome".
It's no real surprise that people with a potential COI—not just the PR types but employees trying to write in good faith about their company's products or services, subject-matter experts trying to cite their own books, fans of a musician or author…—give up even trying to follow the rules, since when they do so we at minimum make them feel extremely unwelcome and quite often just block them outright and ignore any appeal. We don't have a functioning process for "I think Wikipedia should cover this topic, but I'm aware that I'm not neutral, can someone uninvolved work with me to ensure it complies", since at the moment they only get as far as "I'm not neutral" before their draft is deleted.
At the moment, the choice facing a COI editor is between "don't bother at all" and "throw it at the wall and hope it sticks long enough for a few other sites to scrape it before it gets deleted". If the choice was between "try to sneak under the wire in the knowledge that it will be deleted as soon as an admin spots it" or "take a bit longer to work with reviewers but with the result a permanent presence on Wikipedia with all the implications for SEO and the Knowledge Graph that entails", I'm sure most would choose the latter once word got round.
As I've said many times before (after one of the mailing list leaks I got a nice thank-you letter when he discovered I'd been saying it privately as well and wasn't just posturing for public consumption), Greg did himself no favors at all by being so obnoxious about it but he deserves credit as a genuine visionary not just for spotting problems with the wiki model—any Tom, Dick or Somey can do that—but for actually trying to think of ways in which those problems could be addressed instead of just perching offsite complaining. On this particular point I still think history will prove him right; with the editor-to-article ratio slipping every day we can't hold a "none shall pass" position against COI editing forever, and we should have been thinking for the last 15 years about how to assimilate COI editors into the community and teach them to work within the rules, instead of focusing on how best to spot them and kick them out. ‑ Iridescent 08:23, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
I think where you and I disagree here is that I think you bundle COI editors together too broadly (though that’s hardly your fault. Our guideline on that is expansive and amorphous.) I’d break them down into groups something like this:
Fans and other hobbiests (not really COI, but sometimes hard to distinguish)
SMEs who literally wrote the most reliable source on the topic trying to update Wikipedia
Employees of notable companies trying to update basic factual information
Employees of notable companies trying to upload PR nonsense
Employees of non-notable companies trying to place factual articles
Employees of non-notable companies trying to place PR pieces
Freelancers hired to create a PR piece
Major promotional sock farms (largely stopped at this point thanks to User:SQL’s mass VPN blocks, but a few are still around.)
From a practical perspective, I don’t really care about groups 1-3. Enforcing COI there probably isn’t worth it in terms of effort. 4 isn’t great, but can be dealt with through the normal process. The real issues that harm our credibility are 5-8. I don’t think having a process that invites people in to create stuff outside of the really ineffective option AFC would really be good for the project.Also, I’ll just take the opportunity to again point out that the massive sock farms in this area have decreased tremendously in the last few years. Now we’re mainly dealing with freelancers who are both crappy at writing and usually crappy at getting an article on Wikipedia. Oddly enough, for all its ills, draft space might be the best way to deal with that particular problem. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:08, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
TonyBallioni, You said outside of the really an effective option AFC - is this what you meant to say? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 18:41, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
Autocorrect. That’s what I get for editing on my phone early before my coffee. Fixed. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:45, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
1–3 are all non-problematic, as they all want to help and just need to be told how to do things properly. However, because they're the ones most likely to declare themselves, they're also the ones most likely to be hassled by Defenders Of The Wiki trying to get a high score in the Wikipedia MMORPG; as you know, we have a long and proud history of people who pop up with some variant of "I work for the Acme Widget Company and I want to point out that the Widgetomatic 3000 was actually released in 2011 not 2010" receiving a talkpage full of scary-looking templates and never editing again.
4 is marginal and blurs into 3. A lot of what looks like PR nonsense is just the way corporate people are used to speaking, and they get confused and annoyed when they're trying to work in good faith but get accused of spamming. This is a group that would genuinely benefit from a noindexed incubator where the PR-speak could be rewritten to comply with NPOV at leasure.
5 is where we run into difficulty. A lot of these companies only appear non-notable because the employees don't understand how to demonstrate notability in Wikipedia's terms. You and I have the knowledge and ability both to write—snd crucially, to defend against deletion—on borderline topics; if I felt the desire, I could probably write a Wikipedia-compliant article for any given business in any town with a functioning local press. People who aren't Wikipedia pros but are genuinely trying to write a neutral article rather than a puff piece don't know what to avoid. I regularly—in my opinion rightly, obviously—insult the ARS for the way they hunt in packs, but they're right in one respect; in those cases when something is neither self-evidently notable nor self-evidently non-notable, deletion on Wikipedia is a total crapshoot, and our reputation for arbitrariness and unfairness is well-deserved. (If the article is neutrally written and adequately sourced, why does it make the slightest difference if the author is an employee or not? Treating it as a problem just creates a perverse incentive for people to be dishonest.) This is another group which would benefit from an incubator where their submissions could be neutrally assessed at leisure, rather than summarily deleted as spam.
6–8 are obvious problems, although 7 in particular is a group that in some cases would benefit from a functioning incubator—a fair few of these freelancers actually want to help, but just aren't aware that they need to be balanced.
By lumping all these groups together, we not only drive away significant numbers of people who might once they've finished with their hobby-horse go on to be productive contributors elsewhere, we also incentivise the genuine spammers to find sneaky ways of pushing their message. What the War On COI has actually created, at huge expense in editor time, huge opportunity cost of people driven away or scared from joining up in the first place, and not inconsiderable cost in actual developer time and WMF money, is a massive shit-flinging machine for punting our paid editor problem over to Wikidata. ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
I found this an illuminating thread and I agree that the focus sometimes seems rather misplaced. Articles that really are perfectly fine can get stuck with some scarlet letter $$$ template to no-one's benefit. But I am not as optimistic as Iri about editors starting out with a COI topic and then moving on to being a productive editor in general. I'm sure it can happen but I'd think it'd be rare. For comparison, the Icelandic Wikipedia has quite weak COI rules but I don't know any case of an editor starting out with, say, posting an autobiography and then moving on to non-COI topics. A recent iswiki discussion concluded with the observation that playing nice with COI editors has been a pointless waste of time - participants were in favor of moving to stricter enwiki-type rules. Haukur (talk) 20:33, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
For the people who turn up, post a a piece of puffery for their no-hoper band, and vanish, sure. By Wikipedia's insanely strict definition of "conflict of interest" (which is worth quoting in full, as I suspect a lot of people aren't aware of just how restrictive it is: contributing to Wikipedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships), not so much. It's difficult to measure since the culture of anonymity makes it difficult to test and a breach of policy to demonstrate—plus a lot of people made their early edits as IPs and only registered the account later—but I'm sure a significant fraction of Wikipedia's editors made their start as ex-military writing about their former unit, members of a congregation writing about their church, employees writing about their employer, friends or acquaintances of notable people who felt Wikipedia wasn't covering them adequately, residents of a noteworthy building writing about that building… We're always advising people to write what you know, after all, and "financial and other relationships" covers a lot of ground. (Don't underestimate just how zealously fundamentalist some of the hardliners that dominate these policy discussions are in their interpretation of "relationship". I can't be bothered to go looking for the thread, but I can confirm that in one of these discussions I was earnestly told that yes, the ludicrous strawman example I'd given of "if I wrote an article about a painting and I later visited the museum holding that painting, and they found out that I was the author of the article and gave me a gift as a thank you" would render me blockable as a paid editor unless I reimbursed the WMF for the cost of the gift.) ‑ Iridescent 22:37, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
(Iridescent, I'm sorry, I hadn't seen your reply above when I wrote this, because I was so busy looking from one tab to another to make sense of the numbered list.) Responding partly to Haukurth and partly to TonyBallioni and Iridescent. I believe a lot of things intersect in a truly woeful way at present with regards to AfC. For one, as a result of the creation of Draft space and the introduction of G13, AfC has almost entirely ceased to be the workshop for potentially notable articles that we used to recommend to people when creating their first article, and become a conveyor belt to deletion with one or more bruising put-downs along the way. This has been exacerbated since it became common to draftify articles as an "alternative" to deletion, since it's extremely hard to get that decision reversed. The high-risk strategy of moving it back to mainspace and having it get AfDed has a higher chance of success, since it offers the chance that a broader spectrum of editors will see it and weigh in, and since AfD in theory is based on notability rather than on the state of the article. Secondly and interwoven, wiki-politics (the unassailability of the stance that COI editing is a grave threat to the encyclopedia and outweighs other considerations, such as WP:BITE and WP:BIAS), the past (WMF-promoted) emphasis on article quality over breadth of coverage, such that expectations for number of references and even for formatting in new articles have continued to rise since the introduction of verifiability requirements, and the increasing implementation of bots and filters reducing the number of easy vandal patrolling tasks have made new page patrolling, including AfC, an increasingly important way for the hardworking and possibly ambitious patroller to feel important and demonstrate their worth; this doesn't just mean those with the MMORPG mindset, it involves the inevitable magnification of biases in such an echo chamber, and the way people become hardened, or are trained by their peers to be stricter, as they work within a peer group dealing with case after case—I would have been the same way if I'd had to do holistic grading week after week or even term after term with no norming, only my fellow teachers grumbling about the shitty essays. Thirdly, WP:BIAS again: evaluating new articles is where the rubber meets the road on Wikipedia's aim to cover not merely the obvious encyclopedic topics, and not only what we all learned in school, but what others learned in school in entirely different countries, and things that have emerged since many of us went to school, and things that should have been in the encyclopedias ... and I haven't even touched on cases where reasonable people can disagree, like Pokemon and cricketers who played one innings in 1890 (my feeling, of course, is that if they played for Yorkshire we should include them all on that basis). We 'do have a COI problem that is not even mentioned in the list above, probably out of politeness: members of certain professions, or even students, especially from certain countries, creating autobiographies; these are harder to politely dismiss than are garage bands that have yet to make their first recording, but the persistence of this problem suggests to me that there are also cultural problems at play; my original hypothesis that some new editors are unfamiliar with what an encyclopedia is may actually be right; I'm ill equipped to judge. But I suggest that Haukurth's point about is.wikipedia might support that hypothesis in the inverse: people who contribute more than very occasionally to is.wikipedia are almost certainly Icelanders, and Iceland doesn't have the humongous pots of money available for publicity in many English-speaking countries, and Icelanders know each other and therefore keep each other honest to a degree surprising to an outsider. It may also be relevant that they pretty much always have more than one way to earn a living and therefore are not likely to have the entirety of their being invested in the success of a company; both were remarked on following the 2008 crash. (No, I'm not one, as Haukurth and all the other linguists here know.) Anyway, I'm running out of logic, and it's over 100 degrees out and not much less in here, so I will just put forward an example. Draft:Rikkeisoft. Created in user's sandbox and then moved to main space, on a company in a country en.wikipedia does not cover well, with references that look impressive to me but are in languages that are under-represented on en.wikipedia, especially among NPPers; moved to draft space as undersourced when it looked like this; meanwhile the creator was hammered with assumptions he was an employee editing promotionally, to which he responded politely and clearly; insta-rejected with the template for irrecoverable unsuitable topics; still languishing, though a couple of us have tried to help. The creator moved it back to mainspace instead of resubmitting it, and has since asked for his account to be deleted. I got involved because of a plea for help that a busy admin hadn't answered. Now, I may be wrong here—this may be a shit company, the editor may be a conniving employee cynically trying to elicit sympathy or even a sockpuppet of Greg or someone setting us up for a smart-ass blog post. But I think it was a legitimate test case that en.wikipedia failed in a crummy way. I'm ashamed of us, frankly. Yngvadottir (talk) 23:16, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
I already offered my thoughts on the Rikkeisoft debacle at the time. It's a topic on which I'm not qualified to pass judgement—I have no idea how to assess the notability of a Vietnamese software company—but it certainly gave the impression of being a gang of bullies mocking the new kid for not knowing all the local slang. As I said at the time, everyone has occasional lapses and it's easy to slip into superciliousness without noticing, but if I saw an established editor making a habit of addressing good faith new editors the way multiple editors were addresing KV I'd consider it grounds to block that editor for disruption. I agree that this is an excellent example of where the War On COI has failed; people got so busy holding an inquisition to try to establish whether the author had a conflict of interest (IMO, the author's claim that he lived near their office and was friends with one of their employees, looked them up to see what they did, was surprised there was no article so decided to write one himself is quite believable), that everyone involved lost track of the fact that this was supposed to be a debate over article quality. The creator has now walked out in disgust saying he no longer wants to participate on tis website because the harassment from people accusing him of being a spammer is affecting his mental health, the article has been removed from mainspace, so we're down one editor and one article, all because the self-appointed Spamfinders General think that "assume good faith" doesn't apply to them. ‑ Iridescent 07:15, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Before I run out of edits for this month (I keep finding stuff I need to fix, arghhhhh), and in full awareness that it is not the fault of some clique but of an awful combination of factors (for a case not involving AfC or a newbie but again involving weaponisation of Draft space in pursuit of a well meant objective of reducing our coverage of companies as far as possible, see Talk:Whistle (company), where I again and again say I just can't agree with multiple experienced and respected Wikipedians that the article's references are churnalism, and CorporateM's almost complete retirement and the June conversation on his talk) ... I want to underline that the Rikkeisoft debacle carried right on happening. After being draftified, it was quick-failed in the most absolute manner possible, by an editor who I have personal cause to know was not always an anti-business zealot (see Bad Dragon history. The editor tried a few more times to get help before giving up on the project. I see our article on Arrayit was deleted in 2008, probably with justification, so now that it's in the news it's bleeding into BLPs instead, because of course we can't have an article on a business. For less inherently recentish stuff, the de facto ban on company articles reinforces a "great man" approach that is one of the project's problems with entrenched bias: we ought to have Eichler Homes with coverage of Joseph Eichler's visionary micromanagement amongst a heck of a lot more about the company and its houses, but instead that redirects to a bio that is mostly about the company. (I keep thinking about spinning off an article but don't have interlibrary loan right now to do it, and I imagine there would be protests anyway; the bio really isn't justified.) But outside the bias against businesses, geographic myopia also plays a role; AfC is so hammered by biographies and promos from new editors who, remember, I strongly suspect don't understand the concept of an encyclopedia, and an unfortunate side-effect of the push to enforce standards there is that it reduces the group participating, thereby adding to the mutual reinforcement I alluded to above as an echo chamber with my holistic grading example. One thing that could be done is to ask reviewers not to vet drafts where the majority of references are in languages they can't read, but to use Babel boxes and wiki-projects to try to find experienced editors who can read them. I suspect Wikipedians with Japanese reading skills could quickly enable us to distinguish between the calibre of sources at Rikkeisoft and, for example, ja:井桁弘恵 (the English equivalent's notability is in question, but I obviously can't evaluate those sources; I suspect there are some fan sites). Meanwhile, perhaps ironically, that unnameable site is discussing the increasing backlog at AfC without considering how many draft articles have been draftified as a means of getting rid of them, or in some cases while praising that use of draft space to get rid of promotional articles. I'm glad I'm not a member there; I would embarrass myself. I am really fed up over all this, not least because I wonder how much "the WMF's TOU" is in some patrollers' minds an ultimate authority justifying any kind of holy war. Yngvadottir (talk) 23:18, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
I disagree to some extent, in that I do think it's at least indirectly the fault of a clique, albeit a well-intentioned one. Because Wikipedia has had genuine problems with spammers, people sometimes find it difficult to argue against any proposal to tighten policy, so the ultra-puritan tendency who think like this are taken seriously rather than laughed out of town. We did manage to block that particular piece of knee-jerking, but it burned through significant time and goodwill to stop it. (One of the people back then who was shouting loudest for the head-on-a-spike of anyone holding advanced permissions whilst having any kind of COI—and demanding that we go so far as insisting that WMF Board members be required to step down from non paying positions at other WM related charities—was some guy called "Doc James". Sometimes Wikipedia is genuinely beyond parody.) ‑ Iridescent 16:10, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
break: attribution
By the way, as to making the Wiki private while they iron out attribution:
That doesn't mean what you think it means (unless I'm wildly understanding you). That clause prevents people who've reused CC content from trying to put limitations on subsequent reuse—i.e., Amazon is legally allowed to copy an article you've written and sell it in the Kindle Store, but they can't call it "Amazon Exclusive", claim copyright, embed tracking code and threaten other people who make further copies from it. The official explanation is here. It doesn't restrict someone from hosting it on a members-only site, any more than if I printed it out and kept the hard copy on my shelf I'd be legally obliged to allow members of the public to wander into my house to read it. ‑ Iridescent 20:22, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
With the caveat that Iri's shelf version would still need correct attribution according to the license. Even if no one apart from him has access to it in order to read it. Which unfortunately becomes a legal issue for the WMF (or any individual editor who has a lot of time on their hands). As the only way to prove someone is abusing a license without public visibility, is to compel access in order to prove it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 04:15, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Falling trees in the woods. --Izno (talk) 14:13, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Second round of letters ready to go on my other DMCA issue.Back on Iri's statement that:
That the Grand Scheme is to edit content offline away from that pesky "anyone can edit" and subsequently to parachute in and overwrite the existing articles is no secret
and to my earlier statement that the arbs had gone far enough, because "the focus [at WPMED] has once again returned to collaborative work towards improving content". If Iri is right, that would go a long ways towards explaining why only one "side" engaged dispute resolution (both before and during the arbcase), and why the ArbCase was provoked by James himself, including provocation during the case at MEDLEAD. So, if Iri is right, and if the "parachute back in" situation occurs, we can expect ongoing disruption of the English Wikipedia, where all of the conflicting goals (accuracy of content ON the English Wikipedia vs. futhering of less-than-accurate content via external apps) to continue. And, they can be more easily augmented by conflicts of interest coming from collaborations with Cochrane, the US Preventative Task Force, WHO, NIH, etc ... whose literature gained fait accompli prominence over other authoritative sources in our medical content, particularly in the leads. The content of many medical articles has already been compromised by COI. If Iri is right, we have an ongoing problem, that has the potential to get worse. Which comes right back to ... why bother to improve medical content if it is just to be downgraded via this later "parachute"? In fact, it appears that the arbs did not go far enough, and disruption from the very parties I identified in evidence is likely to continue, considering that the one-sided approach to dispute resolution all makes more sense if the context Iri supplies is accurate. The arbs missed the opportunity to make a call on coordinated editing and recruiting, and if Iri is right, we can just turn our medical content over to WHO, NIH, USPSTF, Consumer Reports, and the like. No point in writing content here if we are to duplicate what those sources have. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:32, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
Actually a very simple solution. Community ban all those working on it. Then any parachuted edits can be instantly reverted under the basis of them being proxies for banned yadda yadda. Job done. No chance in hell of it happening tho without a long drawn out series of edit-wars first. Still, its the eventual outcome. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:49, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
But avoidable. I suppose the arbs didn't all read the evidence or follow the case because they thought it was just my typical verbosity, and failed to grasp everything that was going on and the consequences or that there was a reason I asked for extended word limits and worked to get them to see the whole picture (which was much more than drug prices-- it amounted to the integrity of our content being downgraded to reflect COI interests). Probably my fault for not being a better writer, but maybe we can convince these arbs (or future arbs) to re-read all the evidence, and everything in the Proposals page (taking particular note of casting of aspersions that were allowed to stand), with 20–20 hindsight, to see how dispute resolution was being disrupted by coordinated editing, and how they missed a chance to deal with that, and recognize that same will now continue. Medical production of quality content had ceased, and it was just getting going again when this was revealed. Now it will cease again; no point in writing FAs or saving them at FAR, if they will be rewritten to NIH and WHO patient leaflets. We can go back to non-GAs being passed GA, then semi-protected unnecessarily, so biased primary studies, by writers with a COI, can be used to make false claims about quality of content. Well, maybe my evidence didn't do the job, and maybe part of that is my (lack of) writing ability, but at least it's there now for all to see. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:21, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
There's some more background to save me re-posting links and quotes at Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/archive76#A proposal for WikiJournals to become a new sister project. That was (obviously) specifically about the clash between "panel of experts" and "any interested party" approaches to reviewing article quality rather than about an entire project, but a lot of the basic principles regarding a self-selecting panel of experts declaring themselves to have veto power over Wikipedia articles were the same.
On the broader issue, I have no issue at all with the existence of the fork, which in many ways could be an equivalent to the kind of incubator for not-ready articles I lobby for above (it would be quite good in some ways to have a little-viewed place to park something like Poppy tea until it's actually in a fit state to show it to the public) and even if it doesn't end up working as an incubator, is no different to any other fork. (If we wouldn't have any issue if Doc James was a Trekkie who was unhappy that Wikipedia didn't list the differing prices of the VHS, DVD and streaming cost of each episode, so copied the relevant articles to his own website where he could add additional details, how does it magically become different when the articles in question are about medicine?) To me, the issues are the ethical issue of the potential conflict of interest between Wikimedia and Wikimed, and the practical issues regarding under what circumstances "we held a private discussion offwiki to decide on our preferred wording" will ever be acceptable. (If we'd consider it blockworthy for someone to overwrite our articles on Star Trek with their equivalents from the Star Trek Wiki on the grounds that the latter was more likely to have been written and reviewed by subject-matter experts, how does it magically become different when the articles in question are about medicine?) It's not Arbcom's job to rule on what is and isn't ethical, nor should it be, particularly on a meta-issue that doesn't just affect English Wikipedia; this is one either for the community to come up with cross-wiki policies organically on Meta (good luck with that), or for the WMF to impose an ethical position for or against it by fiat with the tact and diplomacy not to push the individual wikis into uproar (good luck with that}). ‑ Iridescent 12:11, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Another discussion I missed during my absences. Explains the difficulty in getting blatantly inaccurate information removed from English Wikipedia articles that have been through the Journal project. May also explain having multiple medical “journal-reviewed” GAs that are semi-protected and grossly outdated. IPs can see the datedness and the issues, but can’t fix them, and even experienced editors are reverted when trying. As much as I respect Mike Christie, he was writing in a different area, and medical content is constantly evolving. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:23, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I was mostly commenting about my own (positive) experiences with WikiJournal peer reviewers, at least some of whom were genuine experts in those fields. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:28, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
On RfA away from WT:RFA
Since that page doesn't usually achieve much, just wanted to get your thoughts (and the assorted talk page watchers) on the actual state of RfA. I've been coming around to the view that there isn't much actually broken with it beyond the human component (my recent comment at WT:RFA) and that I'm not actually sure there's much we could do to change it without functionally getting rid of any opposition.That, and I'm not entirely convinced that we're actually in a crisis mode. Yeah, the core group of people with +sysop on a day-to-day basis is 50-100 with another 400 active, but focusing on other things and then 500 inactive, but it seems to me that we're doing a relatively good job of replenishing and retaining the 50-100 that do the bulk of the admin grunt work, and there's also less need for thousands of admins than we had in 2006: bots and edit filters have automated a ton of the anti-vandal work so you don't need 300 people focusing on recent changes with a block button. Yeah, more help is always welcome, and I think increasing the diversity of ideas within the active pool is important, but I don't really think we're in a crisis mode that requires radical reform. Nor do I think we'd have any issues maintaining the project if the number of total admins decreased to 500. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:47, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
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
My opinions should be reasonably well known—I don't think there's a crisis, and although the number of active admins has fallen that's a function of the number of active editors collapsing during six years of Sue Gardner and only slowly recovering since she left. (Cue the usual chart.) The backlogs are no higher than they were a decade ago; while it would always be nice to have more and fresher admins so it's not always the same people doing things, we're not suffering from a lack of them. If Wikipedia does have an existential crisis, it will come through one of (a) the number of articles continuing to rise faster than the number of editors, making it unmaintainable, (b) a competitor coming up with a genuinely better alternative, or (c) the WMF doing something so egregiously incompetent that all the people who mutter about forking leave en masse. The fact that people raise concerns about competence issues on a page specifically designed for people to raise concerns about competence issues isn't going to come into it. ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Just to comment: "there isn't much actually broken with it beyond the human component" - basically the problem with life, the universe and everything. Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:33, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Agreed, and there’s no real fixing that. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:36, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm not convinced there's a particular problem with the human element, either. The usual WT:RFA crowd always talk about how hellish RFA is, but ask them to provide examples of a hellish RFA and they quickly change the subject. RFAs have always had a small number of people opposing for stupid reasons—"username should be more fear-inspiring" was way back in the supposed golden age of 2006. If anything we have considerably less of a problem than we used to (both at RFA and in general) of unreasonable opposes. Sure, we have lots of opposition, but in general people now will explain in detail why they're not supporting and what they feel would need to be done to address the issue.
Humans are by their nature flawed, and an editor who doesn't have at least one person who dislikes or mistrusts them is an editor who's insufficiently engaged with the project. Unanimous supports in which nobody points out any problem at all with the candidate are themselves a sign of a failure in the process. We have empirical evidence from the Arbcom elections' switch from public to private voting that if the votes are publicly visible, it suppresses voters from going against the grain (people don't want to publicly oppose a popular candidate or oppose someone who's clearly unpopular, so to avoid making potential enemies they don't participate at all); compare both the percentages and the overall participation rates between the last arbcom election held with publicly visible votes and the first election held by secret ballot. (In last years arbcom elections, over 200 people opposed the sainted NYB. How many of those 200 would have felt comfortable if they had to make their names public?) This flocking and unintentional intimidation issue isn't unique to elections but is an unavoidable result of transparency—for instance I'm sure there are contingents of people who think rebranding the WMF to "Wikipedia Network Trust" is a good idea, that Wikipedia is overegging the problem of paid editing and shouldn't be so zealous in enforcing WP:COI, that bots should be allowed to construct articles from Wikidata into article space, or that building a WMF-branded search engine would be a sensible strategic move, but don't feel comfortable speaking up about it because they know they'll be mobbed by a crowd earnestly explaining at great length why they're Just Plain Wrong.
With the disclaimer that I don't follow RFA particularly closely and Kudpung, Swarm and WereSpielChequers are better qualified than me to comment, my take is that the decline in nominations is primarily an artefact of a change in the shape of the editor base. Back in the old days when we were on average promoting an admin every day (this is what the RFA assembly line looked like when I passed and that wasn't atypical) the wiki was a different place. Most editors had only been active for a couple of years at most, and potential candidates were generally either people who wanted the admin bit for a specific (pre-unbundling) reason, or who specifically wanted to help in the back-office administration of the project. (My "I have no idea what I'd do with this but if you want me to have it I'll take it in case it turns out to be useful" RFA was something of an outlier even then.) Nowadays, most of the active editors who would be potential candidates have been active for at least two or three years and often upwards of a decade, and have had time to look closely at what admins do and what they have to put up with and concluded "that's not a responsibility I want or need"; that is, most of the people who would be good admins are either already admins or have consciously decided they don't want to be. Changing the shop layout won't have a significant impact on sales if the product you're selling lasts forever and everyone who wants one already has one. ‑ Iridescent 06:39, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
While I'm not a fan of Sue Gardner, I do wonder how much of the decline in raw edit numbers during her era was down to Huggle speeding up vandalism reversion so that vandals got fewer edits in before they had their four warnings and a block, then the edit filters automating a lot of vandalfighting by rejecting a lot of vandalism by not allowing those edits to be saved (which also lost us millions of goodfaith edits to revert said vandalism and warn the vandals), and then the migration of interwiki links from a many to many system to the current hub and spoke system based on Wikidata. We usually think of the last as losing us millions of bot edits a year, but the bots only kicked in after a human had linked their new article to an article on the same subject in another language version of Wikipedia, and I'm sure we had people coming here to do that who would get over a hundred edits a month. It would not surprise me if the underlying level of editing was higher now than in 2007, and even if it has dropped by a third, that doesn't account for the drop in new admins from a peak of over 400 a year to the 2018 crop of just ten. No one disputes that edit levels since 2005 have never dropped as low as they were in 2005, a year when we appointed 387 new admins. Apparently it isn't possible to work out how much the edit filters have reduced editing, but it should be possible if tedious to work out how much the 2007 peak would have been reduced if the intrawiki links had moved to Wikidata in 2005 instead of 2012. I used to worry much more about the decline in RFA numbers than I do now, then I realised that the unbundling of Rollback in early 2008 had completely changed RFA - we now have over 6,000 rollbackers, four thousand more accounts than have ever passed an RFA, while anyone who now installs twinkle has no need for rollback. RFA has gone through some silly phases, I can remember one editor who worked out he would need to do 30,000 manual edits to get his percentage of automated edits down to a level that would not engender opposes at RFA - thankfully the percentage automated opposes seem to have gone the way of the "user is a self nomination" and "user has an atheist userbox" opposes. All that said, I am concerned that we have a wikigeneration divide. It is now August 2020 and the only admin from the class of 2016 is a bot. There must be some people who joined us in 2016 who would easily pass RFA if they ran. ϢereSpielChequers 08:03, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
It's impossible to say whether the malaise was linked to Sue Gardner or not, but the timings are striking. Her appointment coinciding with the start of the collapse in editor numbers could be coincidence, but that chart has a second inflection point, albeit not as dramatic, in which her leaving coincides with editor numbers picking up again. Edit filters were introduced in 2009 and Wikidata ILLs were introduced in 2013; neither could have been responsible for the collapse in editor numbers in 2007.
I'm using ">100 edits per month" as the metric for the chart above simply because the table of figures already exists in the coding for {{Wikipedia editor graph}} so I can just copy and paste them to generate the chart. I agree that the "highly active editor" figures could be impacted by bots and semiautomation scripts taking on work previously done by humans, but if that were the case one would expect the number of editors to remain roughly the same while the average number of edits-per-editor tails off. (There were certainly lots of people whose primary area of activity on Wikipedia was vandal-fighting, typo-correction or link-adding; there were very few people whose sole activity was such, to the extent that they would have resigned altogether when a script took over the job of search-and-replacing "doe snot".)
People born in 1992 entered their second year of secondary school and graduated university in those years. +/-3 years from that makes up a significant portion of recent functionaries, and I suspect admins. Maybe I’m overplaying the life changes card, but “Huggle the video game gets boring because you have better things to do; rediscover Wikipedia because entry level jobs suck” likely does have something to do with that. TonyBallioni (talk) 07:08, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
That would explain the drop and subsequent revival in the highly-active-editor count, but it wouldn't explain why we see the same pattern in such things as IP activity. The financial crisis of 2007 onwards probably had some impact as if people are working longer hours to make ends meet, they have less spare time and probably don't want to spend that time staring at a screen, and the post-Siegenthaler protections likely had a delayed effect on recruitment as the hardblocking of IPs cut off the traditional "start off as an IP goofing around but gradually get drawn in" recruitment path. Neither would explain the re-reversal in 2014 though. ‑ Iridescent 07:21, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
My assumption is that the position is complex, and several factors are in play. Yes the edit filters and the interwiki links don't explain the 2007 inflexion point, but they are real and they contribute to the 2007 decline extending all the way to late 2014. The speed up of vandalism reversion is also real and I think may have come around the 2007 change. What also came in about that time was the expectation of inline sourcing. Having people revert unsourced edits with an edit summary of "revert unsourced" has become more common over time, and whatever your position on the quality v quantity debate, the less welcome we are to unsourced edits, the less likely people are to continue making them. Some of us, myself included, made the transition and learned how to do an inline cite. Perhaps I'm being ageist, but I suspect that change made editing less attractive for adolescents and younger. The Smartphone revolution and the rise of the Ipad also came too late to account for the 2007 change, but the weakness of our mobile platform as an editing device is in my view the biggest constraint on our ability to recruit new editors. When we were first discussing the 2015 rally in August 2015 there were a couple of theories in play - I was a bit more dismissive of Visual Editor and more impressed by HHVM than I might be now. Both probably contributed, and while V/E was rolled out years earlier, 2011 I think, 2014 could well mark the point where it started doing more harm than good. When it was first released it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between newbies whose V/E edits had unintended consequences and out and out vandals. Since 2015 we have had some more mistakes by the WMF that have driven some regulars away, and some transfer of editing to Wikidata and also to the Thanks feature. But if I'm correct in thinking that our editing community is mostly a subset of the part of the community that has "PC" as opposed to "mobile" access, we have a combination of a low gentle growth rate that is sometimes more than masked by things that depress editing. Aside from the mistake in rolling out V/E too early, and a decision, possibly a correct decision, to have mobile optimised for readers not editors, I doubt that Sue or her successors have done much that anyone but a proportion of the most active editors would be aware of. ϢereSpielChequers 15:32, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
(For the record, VisualEditor was deployed to logged-in editors only at the English Wikipedia on Monday, 1 July 2013. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:41, 3 September 2020 (UTC))
Another factor would be that spike is somewhat misleading. Around 2006, 2007 Wikipedia was thought to be the k-rad neato spot on the Internet, & that if you wanted to be somebody in cyberspace you had to have a Wikipedia account. These newbies came to realize that Wikipedia was not some new form of social networking, something just like Facebook or Twitter but different, that it was a serious effort to create an encyclopedia: if writing articles about insects, cult television programs, local government units, & the like was not interesting to you (as opposed to, say, creating userboxes or signature pages), then you probably shouldn't be here. And those who had no interest in encyclopedia articles drifted away. In brief, 8,000 volunteers making more than 100 edits a week was not a sustainable population. A lesson which seems still unlearned by many in the Foundation -- & the Foundation groupies. -- llywrch (talk) 20:21, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
There's a lot in that, but imo the main change since 2007 is those most of those who did have "interest in encyclopedia articles drifted away", at least as far as actually writing them goes, leaving those who like fiddling with categories, infoboxes, images, templates, policing and policies, who now form probably the majority of "actives". Johnbod (talk) 21:31, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Johnbod, I think that's part of it, and I think it's connected to the rising standard in terms of referencing, not only directly but because an awful lot has been deleted. (I keep seeing my own deleted edit count rising.) But WereSpielChequers and others, I'd like to ask a perhaps stupid question here. Can editors who do use the mobile platform—or even view the site on mobile while logged in—easily see alerts, or find their own talk page, let alone article talk pages? I'm noticing a steady drumbeat of reports at AN/I of totally uncommunicative new editors, too many to be just the linguistically shy, and of complaints from new editors that they couldn't figure out how to respond to messages or how to message a fellow editor. I haven't got a smartphone, but looking on someone else's at how only a single section of an article is shown, and recalling the WMF's total incomprehension of the effect of removing the Orange Bar of Doom without replacing it with some other alert for IPs that they had warnings piling up on their talk page. We are losing an appreciable number of new editors, some with obvious good intentions, to the "what talk page?" thing, even if it's just that the button is hidden in a pull-down menu or its label is unclear to them. Yngvadottir (talk) 23:28, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
@Yngvadottir, looking at your deleted edits, it seems that the steady rise in it is largely accounted for by a mix of you nominating things for deletion (when you put the AfD tag on the page, it still counts as an edit), of you making minor fixes to drafts which are subsequently abandoned by the creator and eventually get cleared out, and of edits to "you knew the deletion was only a matter of time" ephemera like Nude weather reports. I'm not seeing any pattern of substantive work by you being deleted. If one does any kind of cleanup work one's deleted edit count inevitably makes one look like some kind of deranged spammer, just because a percentage of those minor cleanups and reformattings are going to be on pages that go on to be deleted—my own deleted edit count is up to something like 20,000. ‑ Iridescent 16:22, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I know about the deletions at AfDs I start or participate in, and I suspect I lose a certain amount of gnoming work on things like members of no longer recognised noble houses (I recall working on at least one article on a Hawaiian princess, and a recent jump in my deleted edit count coincided with a drive against people related to former European nobility that was flagged on the unnameable site). I've made a lot of gnomish edits, and in addition to deliberate deletions there's been a tendency in recent years to draftify articles and then of course they are out of sight behind a deleted redirect and go "poof!" after 6 months. I don't often work on things already in draft space because it's such a road to heartbreak and also because it's more likely the owner will reject my changes. I'm more concerned with things speedy deleted as creations by a banned user on which I put in effort (if the banned user is not the only significant editor, such deletion should not be automatic, and IMO shouldn't happen, but most people know I'm pretty inclusionist) or deleted after an AfD where I wasn't notified despite putting in a lot of work; sometimes not even the article creator is notified (e.g.: Hans Jørgen Lysglimt, no links to talk pages from the AfD, and I must have worked hard on that, I put it on my user page). Then of course there are PRODs where not even the creator is norified, like the notorious case with Autocunnilingus, which is now back thanks to a deletion review ... including all its previously deleted incarnations in the history for everyone's edification. I'm sure there's also stuff I've worked on that has been quietly redirected. It makes me very sad, especially the contempt for others' work in not notifying. But I can't single-handedly save the encyclopaedia, and knew I couldn't even before I had to throttle back my activity. The reason I raised the issue is that I suspect the pattern of some editors' contributions looks different when deleted contributions are included, because AFAIK they aren't usually included, and the further back you go, presumably the more deleted contributions there are. (I have a zero-edit month way back at the start that I don't think was actually zero.) And I still wonder about my stupid question about finding talk pages on mobile; Apple's facial security gizmo plus fear of breaking it makes it impossible for me to check on someone else's smartphone. Yngvadottir (talk) 17:29, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Article in default mobile view
The link to the talkpage appears on at the top of every article in mobile view. The link is fairly unobtrusive but it's there. If there's an issue, it's not the difficulty in finding the talkpage, but the array of mystery-meat icons with no indication of what they do; I'm not the most inexperienced editor, and I just had to click on each of them to see what they did. (Would you guess that from left-to-right the five icons are "interwiki language links", "print", "bookmark", "revision history" and "edit"?) If I were the WMF I assume my position would be that 99% of readers just want to know "who voiced Anna in Frozen?" or "are there international flights to Akureyri?" and have no interest in editing or commenting, so keeping everything that isn't content as unobtrusive and non-distracting as possible trumps every other concern. ‑ Iridescent 19:33, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
I saw the "article" and "talk" after a moment, I suppose that's a sensible place to put them. It took me longer to find the 5 icons you refer to, but then I don't use a smartphone. Were you logged in? If so, where's your talk page? I think those "related articles" are ill-advised, especially since one comes with a little dirty picture. Not to mention pushy: there's no See also, why are the WMF deciding to take up screen space advertising other articles? Do they do that for articles with lead images or infoboxes, too, or is it just for articles they deem lacking in visual interest? Yngvadottir (talk) 23:28, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
(After some brief experimentation, my talk is in the three-line hamburger menu next to the "Wikipedia" header, which seems a reasonable enough place to put it.) The "related articles" list comes up on every page. If you're interested in the technalities, they're explained at mw:Extension:RelatedArticles. It is possible to manually override it, but I doubt anyone actually does. I doubt many readers even know it's there let alone use it, given that it appears at the end of an article well after whatever piece of information one was looking for. I presume it was somebody's pet project. (If you're curious as to what related articles are being suggested for any given page, select mobile view—at the very bottom of every page next to the disclaimers and the WMF logos—and you'll see the current suggestions for that page. The algorithm throws up some occasional spectacular weirdness—e.g. all the related articles for Death are obscure concepts within Hinduism, Stupidity leads to Deaf-mute…) ‑ Iridescent 04:50, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks! After a while I'd wondered, but I still don't tend to notice that and think "menu", even after someone years ago pointed to that icon in a masthead and explained things were hidden behind it. And I suppose the number in a red circle is your notifications? I do wonder whether increasing smartphone use has reduced the number of new editors who stay, though I suppose the vast majority of users now do see that icon and think "menu". It's apparent from the complaints about non-communication and the complaints from some new users that they had difficulty finding out how to respond to people that the talk pages—or maybe just how to edit them—is eluding some. That suggestion for "stupidity" is appalling. I hope someone from WMF sees it here. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:28, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
On a few occasions, where practical, I have used email to communicate with new users because I do not trust the talk page interface to be intuitive enough for them. On one occasion, I grabbed an email address off a diff where somebody had left it in an edit summary, completely confused as to what to do. I expanded and improved the article (well, somebody else did the heavy lifting), and the new editor was incredibly grateful and went away with a positive impression of Wikipedia. I think that's your use case scenario there for why talk pages suck. I'm being a bit vague here because I'm probably paranoid about some jobsworth admin flying in and saying "you harvested a private email address! WP:OUTING! Don't let the door hit you on the way out...." Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 17:08, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
The "three lines=main menu, gear=settings menu" is so standard across phone apps, it's reasonable of the WMF to assume anyone using the mobile site will be aware of it. Regarding the "stupidity" link, this is a lot lot lot better than last time I looked at this feature—IIRC "ugliness" recommended a bunch of biographies. As you presumably know, a few years ago the WMF got a grant to massively beef up Wikipedia's search feature but it led to certain amount of acrimony, so the CirrusSearch system we're stuck with is relatively primitive. ‑ Iridescent 19:28, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
The full text of Hans Jørgen Lysglimt at the time you stopped working on it was Hans Jørgen Lysglimt, also known as Hans Jørgen Lysglimt Johansen, (born 13 September 1971) is a Norwegian entrepreneur, politician and social commentator. Lysglimt was born in Fredrikstad and graduated from Lund University in 1996 with a degree in business and economics (Siviløkonom). From 2000 to 2003 he was the leader of the Free Democrats. Since 2012 he has been a leader of the Mises Institute of Norway, which he co-founded. He is a candidate for the 6th seat in Oslo in the 2013 election to the Storting on behalf of the Pirate Party. In 1999, he founded the Runbox e-mail company, which has worked on issues of personal privacy and surveillance. In April 2010, he conducted one of the first video interviews with Julian Assange. In June 2013 he went public with information on how the FBI had used Norwegian law to require him to surrender personal information about a customer and to instruct him to keep the matter confidential. He headed the effort to relaunch the classic economics journal Farmand, and now heads the new online version at the modern Norwegian spelling Farmann. In 2008, his was the eighth most searched name in Aftenposten's database of income tax paid by individuals. - I wouldn't lose sleep over it. ‑ Iridescent 19:35, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Put me in the "no crisis" camp. Panics about the falling number of RfAs have been occurring regularly in the 13 years I've been here, and they periodically take up lots of of time and talk page space. But the sky is still up there, the blocks and protections are still happening as needed, and the backlogs remain manageable. I also don't think the actual RfA is as bad an ordeal as many suggest. I watch most of them, and it's a long time since I recall any being unfairly harsh. And having to maybe take a bit of criticism for a week is nothing compared to the shit an admin is likely to have thrown at them over the longer term. I think a bit of tough feedback at RfA is a good thing, not a bad thing. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:57, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
I used to think, like many others, that there was an impeding crisis to do with the attrition of admins. But no, there aren't any significant backlogs among the admin tasks, at least if one discounts ththosee AfDs that no one in their right mind will touch with a barge pole. WT:RFA: a place where clueless newbies barge in with their typical 'I wanna get myself noticed' and witlessly think they are the inventors of ideas that were already discussed to death ten years ago, or worse, make wild claims that no discussions on the plight of RfA as a miserable institution ever took place. As the most prolific contributor to that page (after Eric Corbett), I used to think, like Jimbo, that it's a 'horrible and broken process', but no, it's just horrible. And frankly I couldn't care less. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm not even convinced it's particularly horrible. On most of the RFAs I've looked at over the last few years—even the really contentious ones like Fram2 or GRuban—the oppose section has largely consisted of polite variations on "I don't believe you're a good fit for this particular job", not the semicoherent rants of 2008. (AFAIK we only have a single serial disrupter still at it, and even he seems largely to limit himself to a single inane comment per RFA before wandering off.) ‑ Iridescent 17:11, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
I agree it is rarely horrible for those who run, even if your boyfriend/nominator accidentally picks up your logged in PC and edits as you during your RFA. Most qualified candidates have uncontentious RFAs with the vast majority of the voters only looking at stats and the Q&A section and very few now assessing the candidate's actual edits. I consider that we have a current crisis in that there is a WikiGeneration divide between a large proportion of our current editors and the Wikigeneration that provides most of our admins. Ignoring bots, only 51 of our current admins first created their accounts in the last ten years, over 95% of our admins did their first edit more than ten years ago. When I first wrote about the wikigeneration divide in the signpost ten years ago, over 90% of our admins had first created their accounts over three and a half years earlier. I think that some of the toxicity re the RFA debate comes from this growing Wikigeneration divide. As for our declining pool of admins, I still don't know when the admin cadre will dwindle to the point where we have to go out and appoint a large bunch of poorly vetted new admins, (most of whom will do just fine). I'd prefer that we fix RFA before such measures are necessary, but a decade of declining numbers of admins has left me as convinced as ever that at some point we will have an admin shortage, hopefully not in my lifetime. ϢereSpielChequers 17:29, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
The issue is that people don’t like what my workplace calls “developmental feedback.” To use a work analogy: in your performance review the two negative things people are forced to put in about you stick out, even if as whole it’s a phenomenal review. It’s the same with RfA. Just like IRL, the comments not being fun doesn’t make them wrong. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:53, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Sure, and (again as an artefact of the generational divide WSC mentions) the candidates are likely to feel more emotionally invested than they used to. If you've goofed around on a website for six months and get told people don't really think you're ready yet, it genuinely is no big deal. If you've spent ten years, not only have you committed a sizable amount of unpaid work but you're you're probably by now used to being treated like some kind of wise graybeard within whatever your particular niche is. RFA forces candidates out of their comfort zone and obliges them to sell themselves to people they've never met; when you're used to being the go-to-guy/gal on 1720s clock design or typo corrections in the TimedText namespace and every thread on your talkpage begins "I'm sorry to bother you but I was wondering if you could help", it can be a severe culture shock to realise that people outside your usual circle aren't going to be deferential just because you feel you deserve it. (I imagine a close variant of this exact same culture shock must be what WMF employees feel every time they post on any of the wikis, and lofty "the advancement of learning depends on community leadership for financial and political support and the products of that learning, in turn, are essential to the leadership's hopes for continued progress" ideals collide abruptly with "why are you interfering with our work and what makes you think you have the right to boss us around?" reality.) ‑ Iridescent 19:19, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
The impression I get is that the people who have invested ten years of their lives in this project take things seriously if they run, and often have good reasons not to if they aren't currently admins. I'm not averse to recruiting a few more from that group, and there is at least one such person who knows that I would be honoured to nominate them if they ran. But my point about Wikigenerations isn't that we should continue to recruit from the pool of people who started editing over a decade ago. My point is that we have lots of members of this community who could easily pass RFA if they chose to run, some made their first edit litle more than a year ago, others have been here for almost ten years. We currently have only 51 admins whose first edit was less than ten years ago, not one from the editors who started in 2016. I haven't done stats to see how many of the editors who regularly contribute over 100 edits a month started in each year. But my assumption is that we have lots of regulars who started editing less than a decade ago, and our problem is in persuading them to run. If it turns out that we have stabilised as a community and we really aren't recruiting many newbies and those 51 are a good proprtion of the editors who started in the last ten years then I will have to reconsider the problem. ϢereSpielChequers 13:18, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
I’m going to quibble with that statistic because I think it’s misleading. My first edit with this account was in October 2007. Of the 27 months between them and 1 January 2010 I was “highly active” for 5 of them and basically none existent for the rest (see stats.) For the 99 months between October 2007 and 1 January 2016, I was highly active 8 months.For all intents and purposes I’m a 2016 editor, but you’d not count me in that 51 number. See also this example of a “2005 admin” who started editing in earnest in 2018. There’s a lot of returners. Even the more recent registrations at RfA, the returner trend is pretty clear six year old account that’s only been active for 2 years. Registration date isn’t the best point of analysis here. We have a lot more post-2010 admins than you’d expect going by that number alone. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:44, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm similar. I started editing in 2006 and between then and 2018 had 12 months where my activity was 100 edits or more and went years without editing on multiple occasions. Am I really a 2006 admin? —valereee (talk) 14:27, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Arguably there are three groups here, those who have been consistently active for donkeys years, those who joined recently, and a third group of people who tried Wikipedia years ago but only became more active recently. Yes by using account creation date I am lumping together two of those groups, but my focus here is on the people who first created their accounts in the last ten years, only 51 of whom have become admins. I'm not focussing on those who first created their account more than ten years ago because my assumption is that a reasonable proportion of such people have become admins, you two being prime examples. I dpn't know how many regulars started editing in 2016, but none of them are admins yet. ϢereSpielChequers 15:47, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
If you really care, someone could probably rustle up a "median edit date" script easily enough, which would probably be a better measure of editor age. It would be simple enough—you'd just need to take the date of the editor's (editcount/2)th edit. It would be skewed by changes in editing style—someone who started off as a vandal-reverter making 2000 edits a day rollback-and-warning but later got confident enough to move into writing would be tilted towards their early edits—but it would give an idea of shifting activity levels. I would imagine the WMF have huge stacks of statistics on various measurements of activity, engagement and retention even if they don't publish them, given that their entire model depends on maintaining the balance between editors, readers, and reusers. ‑ Iridescent 19:19, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Be still my heart. —valereee (talk) 19:50, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
I have to disagree that they care about anything other than attracting new editors through their own outreach efforts, in the belief they can then mould them, wedded as they are to a model of inevitable turnover and an ideal of recruiting a different kind of editor from those of us who volunteered but they are now sick of. (Based on their failure with the "gender gap", I also have absolutely no confidence in their ability even to collect statistics, let alone to analyse them, but in that respect a STEM incompetent like me should refrain from throwing stones.) Yngvadottir (talk) 23:28, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
They very much care about retention; the final cause of most of the recent unpleasantnesses was the obesession among a small but vocal element within the WMF with the notion that the projects have been hijacked by a reactionary clique intent on driving away by any means necessary anyone who represents "progress". In that worldview, expelling the unrighteous isn't the damaging exercise it looks like to outside observers, but a necessary removal of blockages and deadwood to allow faster and better growth in future. (It's by no means unique to Wikipedia; anyone who's encountered the Corbynista left, Trump Republicans, or religious fundamentalists of virtually any variety will be familiar with the "we know people generally like unity, so if people aren't joining us it must be because we're not harsh enough on dissidents" fallacy. )
I've no doubt at all that with all their ham-fisted interventions (and less visible but equally disruptive, the occasions they should have intervened but didn't) the WMF:
Sincerely believe they're acting on behalf of an imaginary silent majority,
On each occasion are freshly hurt and surprised not to be metaphorically greeted by cheering crowds waving "Thank you for liberating us" banners, and
Take the hostility of the reception their pet initiatives receive to be proof that the purge hasn't gone far enough.
Given that they're convinced they're giving us what we want, a negative reception must be proof that the Toxic Editor Culture is still intimidating the silent majority of supporters into silence, and thus that the bonfires will need to be built higher next time. They wholeheartedly support the principle of retention; it's just that they sincerely believe that you and I aren't the type of person they want to retain. ‑ Iridescent 08:12, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
I've noticed that tendency -- specifically, of individuals in the Foundation to carry out whatever actions she/he thinks is right while ignoring all protests to the contrary from the community. My suspicion is, perverse as it might appear, that it is a survival of a pattern of behavior from the pre-ArbCom Wikipedia.Back in the Stone Age of Wikipedia, when policies were not as defined as they are now, it was often a major undertaking to ban people who weren't contributing positively to the encyclopedia. Call them cranks, salespeople, advocates of the fringe, or just plain incompetent, back then it would take countless weeks of debate & negotiations, second chances, sockpuppetry, & final bans to handle the kind of disruptive individuals WP:AN/I at its worse disposes of in a matter of days. Yes, lack of a firm rules was part of the problem. So was the fact many of us were doing something no one had ever done before -- creating a community-driven encyclopedia that anyone could edit -- & there was sincere concern that legitimate minority viewpoints be represented. (One problem was that we were all forced to be generalists, while discovering just how little we knew outside of our limited areas of competence. The edit wars over Polish place names were so fierce, in par, because one side had no idea this was an important matter to those living there, while the other had no idea that many of the disputed English place names had come from the German ones.)As a result, those who wanted to actually create a usable encyclopedia adopted the attitude that can be summed as "I know what is right, & I will do it though the heavens fall." They refused to participate in negotiating with problem people, acted decisively concerning policy -- or what they thought was policy -- & otherwise trod unsympathetically over anyone who opposed them. Act first, apologize later, which was sometimes called "acting like a cowboy". Fortunately most of these "cowboys" were close enough to being right for Wikipedia's immediate needs -- or they simply forced the English Wikipedia to choose between two options of equal value -- & Wikipedia managed to evolve in a constructive direction. Yet as Wikipedia matured, the need for such an unsympathetic approach lessened: the troublemakers were excluded more efficiently, experience had better informed how to write an encyclopedia, & more importantly consensus leads to a more enduring solution than arrogation. So many of these cowboys either faded from Wikipedia, or were invited to find another hobby.Sadly, this attitude found its way into the Foundation ethos or culture. Instead of making a serious attempt to find a consensus with the volunteer communities they impose solutions upon them. Their -- admittedly sincere -- justification is that the problem has been thoroughly discussed (albeit by a small, unrepresentative group), a consensus reached (again, of a small, unrepresentative group), & therefore the only people who would object are cranks, troublemakers, or the misinformed. Who need to be removed from the "movement" so it can reach its perfect, unprejudiced potential of containing all knowledge for all to access freely.TL;DR -- Wikipedia gave birth to the monster known as the Foundation, creating it in our own image. -- llywrch (talk) 23:26, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
I think you are overthinking it to be honest. Its standard office politics in an organisation that has a large amount of money to throw around. In order to get more funding internally (and also keep their jobs), the various groups have to show they are doing something successful and making an impact. External factors rarely have any effect, so can be safely ignored. The projects do not even need to be considered 'successful' by any external/independant standard, they just have to appease the internal management and purse holders. Its common greed and self-interest. Its a symptom of bloated organisations that they are unable to finish a technical project to a high standard due to the competing time and resources. Too many teams each pulling in different directions and no clear or competant leadership directing the ship. Its not surprising the development teams have had failure after abject failure. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:01, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
I won't argue that the Foundation has far more money than it knows what to do with. (This seems to be the curse of all non-profits: that the Gates Foundation had billions to contribute to various humanitarian causes is often cited as the reason many NGOs suddenly became less effective.) And I've stated at least once that the W?F appears to be packed with employees who spend most of their work days in meetings arguing that they are the most important person in the Foundation. Nevertheless, over the years I've watched the Foundation it has never acted on the basis of "Let's find out what the volunteers want, then deliver it" (which would have prevented Visual Editor from being received so critically), but "Of course we know what they want, & only the troublemakers will deny we are right." Why else would they take dubious actions such as decide something like Superprotect is a good idea? -- llywrch (talk) 00:00, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
At the risk of expulsion from the Malcontents' Union, I don't think Superprotect was an inherently bad idea. There are areas where a single compromised (or just incompetent) admin account could have a significant impact on the reader experience, and there's a case to be made for a very high, "prove you have consensus for this change and that it's been tested and won't break anything" level of protection, in the same way we have the interface admin permission on top of the vanilla admin bit. (For instance, it would have prevented all the unpleasantness when Edokter tried to unilaterally redesign the main page, if it had been literally technically impossible for him to edit it without consensus.) The problem with Superprotect was that after the WMF imposed a buggy beta version of MediaViewer—which made it almost impossible to see the copyright status or attribution history of images—on all the projects, they created Superprotect to prevent people disabling it even though there was a clear consensus the changes weren't wanted. ‑ Iridescent 11:57, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
@Only in death: One counterargument to the idea that the problems come from inherent office politics issues in well-funded NGOs: Present-day Wikimedia Germany isn't that far off of superprotect-era WMF in terms of staff count and budget, yet it doesn't seem to have anywhere near the level of disfunction as the WMF then or now, as far as I can see. --Yair rand (talk) 21:44, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
There's certainly some nasty infighting at WMDE as well; I speak almost none of the language and have no involvement with any de- wikis, and even I see the regular accusations flying around that a small group of people run it as a pet project and don't tolerate dissent. (WMDE also has the luxury of serving a relatively cohesive audience with at least a roughly shared set of values; the German language projects are serving a fairly cohesive group of relatively prosperous communities with shared values, whereas WMF is trying to simultaneously serve communities that have virtually nothing in common. Yes, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Südtirol have their cultural differences—and there are outriders like the Brazilian and Namibian German-speakers—but it doesn't compare to the balancing act the WMF has to engage in.) Also, WMDE has spent so long defining itself in terms of opposition to San Francisco, they have the cohesion that comes of being united against a common enemy. ‑ Iridescent 05:17, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
New message from Nathan2055
Hello, Iridescent. You have new messages at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF). Message added 23:38, 1 July 2020 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
Some wars aren't worth fighting. It's obvious that the change to Wikipedia Foundation and the subsuming of the sister projects into Wikipedia and Wikidata is going to happen regardless of the level of opposition and the obvious problems. The discussions to be had now are damage limitation regarding the inevitable problems this will cause, particularly if the enforced name change of Commons (which appears in every one of the WMF's proposals) leads to a Wikitravel-style mass exodus. ‑ Iridescent 17:44, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
I don't think that blink tags work on wiki, but I can ask if them to try it, if you think that would help people notice that neither Commons nor any other project is going to be renamed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) No, but Commons nor any other project isn't getting their name subsumed into that of the mothership either. ——Serial# 21:14, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
I’ve mainly stayed out of this for private reasons (pretty boring, but Iri if you want to know I can email you), but from someone who at one point worked in a similar field, it makes a lot of sense. The foundation exists for the sole purpose of supporting Wikipedia in practice. Renaming it to reflect that would be pretty standard for other non-profits these days (think university foundations.) Yes. Legitimate concerns have been raised, but if you had asked the community to propose a new name themselves they likely would have suggested it, but there’s opposition given the source, which is understandable given recent events. Anyway, mitigation of potential challenges is normal in such a thing and good, but what people are mad about seems to be standard non-profit naming conventions. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:29, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF):(talk page stalker) The problem is that we keep getting conflicting information, depending on which Foundation staffer is responding to the community on any particular day. As I mentioned over on WP:VPW, there was literally a slide in one of the initial WMF branding proposals talking about how the ultimate end goal was to eventually rename every project to some variant of Wiki* and then eventually fold them all into either Wikipedia or Wikidata. This is not the only time this has come up either, we've gotten conflicting messages from the Foundation over whether the rebranding is 100% going to happen and the current discussion is just a formality as well as whether the Foundation is even open to names other than "Wikipedia Foundation" or some variant. In fact, your second link even includes a "This section is disputed" notice leading to a discussion over the dilution of other projects in favor of overemphasizing Wikipedia that received only the most cursory response that didn't really address the main concerns people had (pinging User:ELappen (WMF) too since they were the one who responded to that thread on Meta). These are legitimate issues concerning potentially catastrophic long-term damage to both Wikipedia and all of the other projects from this rebranding that people keep trying to bring up, and yet we can't get a straight answer on any of these questions out of anyone. Nathan2055talk - contribs 23:22, 8 July 2020 (UTC)
Nathan2055, from what I hear internally, I gather that, as of two weeks ago, it was still 100% certain that a set of branding-related changes would be proposed to the Board. NB that known points of uncertainty include, but are not limited to: which aspects of branding would be proposed for changes (e.g., names, logos, color schemes, the "Powered by MediaWiki" button at the bottom of every page, other things?), what the proposed changes would be, when those proposals will be made, and whether the Board will accept any/some/all of the proposed changes. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:15, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF), I'd hazard a guess that the reason people are under the impression that even though renaming the other projects is off the table the WMF plan to forcibly rename Commons, would be the fact that the WMF made an announcement that even though renaming the other projects is off the table the WMF plan to forcibly rename Commons. "Retaining Wikimedia project names, with the exception of Wikimedia Commons" (my bolding); that's a statement from Director of Brand, Wikimedia Foundation, not Joe Blow from Kokomo, so can reasonably assumed to reflect the branding team's intentions.
@TonyBallioni: "The foundation exists for the sole purpose of supporting Wikipedia in practice" is flat-out untrue. English Wikipedia may be the oldest of the children and certainly the noisiest, but at minimum Commons and Wikidata would pass the "if Wikipedia were shut down tomorrow, would they be viable as standalone sites?" test. One wouldn't be laughed out of the room for saying that although Wikipedia is better known, Wikidata and Commons are both already more significant in terms of impact, and that as the internet shifts from being primarily document-based to being information auto-collated by AI systems from databases and image repositories to create custom responses to queries, the balance is going to keep shifting. (I sneer—justifiably—at Reasonator, but "articles written on the fly to be permanently up to date and to emphasise different aspects of the subject depending on the reader's interests and level of comprehension" is going to be the future much as I dislike the fact, and for all its faults I'd much rather see the WMF directing that future than Mark Zuckerberg or the Chinese Communist Party.)
In my opinion, from the perspective of anything other than English Wikipedia the rebranding looks like English Wikipedia engaging in kill stealing on an industrial scale. At the time of writing 851 editors and 68 affiliates have signed the open letter, and they're by no means the usual malcontents (the affiliate signatories even include Wikimedia DC whose unquestioning support for anything the WMF does is a long-standing joke); this really isn't just people making trouble for the sake of trouble.
Nathan2055: Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head. There are three different issues here which are being conflated; the process issue of whether the WMF has the authority to rename the project and if so whether they need to engage in genuine consultation or just a rubber-stamp exercise; the issue of reputational damage if the wrong name is chosen (such as a too-vague name like "Wiki Movement" that will antagonise every non-WMF wiki and potentially see us held to blame for Wikileaks); and the issue of how to create a unified identity across the projects without tying the other projects to Wikipedia in general and English Wikipedia in particular, and potentially alienating both editors and readers on sister projects. (Wikipedia isn't universally loved; there's a reason Instagram and Whatsapp hide the "a Facebook product" as much as possible.) ‑ Iridescent 08:11, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
‑ Iridescent 08:11, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Reply in my insomnia: sure, but commons and Wikidata are both auxiliary sites that exist to assist other wikis, of which Wikipedias are the only ones that have been successful. You could make an argument for commons from a commercial perspective, but even then Commons fundamentally exists as a hosting site for free media to be used on other foundation projects. In terms of Wikidata, it’s primary usefulness is in letting smaller projects semi-automate translations from larger projects. There’s also the question, at least for Commoms, as to whether the critical mass needed to maintain it would exist if the various Wikipedias ceased to exist. I think there’s a fairly strong argument it wouldn’t. While these two projects are significant in their own right, the role of Wikipedia in keeping them in existence can’t be understated. You’d find me skeptical in an argument that the University of Foo Foundation should change it’s name to the Fooian Foundation because it also supports the Media School and Information Science School beyond the main college of arts and sciences at the university. That’s probably the closest analogy I can think of to this situation. TonyBallioni (talk) 08:34, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Your "it's common to rename the parent body to reflect its area of greatest activity" argument doesn't really hold up here. As an analogy, consider Blue Cross, a relatively large UK-wide animal rehoming charity. As the time of writing they have 22 dogs and 59 cats on their books (the numbers are lower than usual due to that "highest per capita death rate in the world" unpleasantness, but I'll assume the ratio stays reasonably constant). A 59–22 ratio is fairly overwhelming—if they were Wikipedia editors it would be enough of a voting bloc for the cats to have a supermajority consensus against the dogs in every decision. However, if the management decided "hey, the name 'Blue Cross' is meaningless and doesn't represent what we do, let's change it", they'd never change it to something like "Pussy Palace", since even though such a name would represent their area of greatest activity it would be misleadingly restrictive and misrepresent what they do. That's the situation we have here; any reasonable person seeing the name "Wikipedia Foundation" is going to think "That's the foundation that supports Wikipedia", not "That's the foundation that supports a number of wiki-based projects including but not limited to Wikipedia". I think I speak for most objectors when I agree that "Wikimedia" is a stupid name and should probably be changed—it sounds like it ought to be either a wiki-based fan site for the media or articles from existing wikis read out as audio or video clips—but changing it to "Wikipedia" is not the answer. ‑ Iridescent 08:37, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
To take the "University foundation" example, in your example the Information Science School is still a part of the university. In the case of institutions that have split from their original parent body to be fully autonomous within a federal umbrella body, not so much; if a foundation supported the whole of the University of London I wouldn't expect it to be called the "University College London Foundation", even though University College London is the largest and most important of the constituent colleges of the University of London. (If you want an even more obvious example, at the last census the population of the UK was 63 million of whom 53 million lived in England, and that ratio has likely shifted even further in intervening years. Head on over to WMUK and suggest to them that they rebrand themselves as Wikimedia England, and see how far you get.) ‑ Iridescent 08:51, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
I had a long reply to your first reply, but edit conflicted with the second, which is actually better because I get the premise where I think we disagree. I reject the idea that Commons or Wikidata could survive more than five years without the various language versions of Wikipedia. Commons is dependent on them for new editors to maintain and upload (and to an extent for retention) and the role of non-English projects in making Wikidata useful and providing a userbase can’t be overstated. Both of them exists to support Wikipedias and rely on them for support as well. They might be significant on their own and provide other functions not related to this project, but the centrality of it to their existence is fairly important. I don’t find their existence to be a good argument against renaming the corporate support entity. Not trying to be a shill or argumentative, I’ve just literally been making the argument for this name change in private to other editors for years before the consultants came up with it, so I’m naturally fairly supportive. TonyBallioni (talk) 09:03, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Commons I think would wither and die. Wikidata has reached the critical mass to allow it to survive; if it ever were to look like failing, Google or Microsoft would step in immediately to take it over. It isn't immediately obvious because so much of what it does flies below the radar, but Wikidata is so embedded in the way search engines now operate it could be deemed critical infrastructure. (In this case, we can rely on actual evidence not just speculation; Metaweb, Wikidata's predecessor, was quietly absorbed by Google to ensure it stayed operational.) Indeed, with Google→Alphabet we have a good example of an umbrella body changing its name in the opposite direction, to prevent their other activities being misleadingly associated with their best-known product. ‑ Iridescent 09:19, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Iridescent, you're quoting things that were posted last year. The one you put in bold at 8:11 is one of the early recommendations by an external marketing agency. It was posted about 18 months ago. The idea was noted, considered, and rejected. I did my bit to help kill it, but the truth is that it would have died even if I'd been cheering for it. It was that unpopular. AFAICT the only people who liked the idea of renaming any of the online projects were the agency that proposed it and sort of Doc James (who has long supported a more integrated approach to branding, and whom I'm absolutely certain wouldn't want to change the name of any project without the consent of its own contributors). It's just not going to happen. You can safely stop worrying about that now, and get back to debating the more interesting and salient points, which are the ones you and Tony are talking about. While you two finish your debate, I need to go make someone swear that mw:Desktop improvements' plan to shrink the usable width of my editing screen is going to come with a built-in opt-out button. (I was thinking signing in blood, but I'm open to suggestions.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:05, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
If that's a deprecated proposal, there's nothing whatsoever to indicate it. When something is entitled Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 research and planning/project summary#What is the proposed brand strategy?, the entire history comprises (WMF) accounts, and there are a total of five points four of which are variations of "rebrand the WMF as Wikipedia and force all projects and affiliates to define themselves in terms of Wikipedia", any reasonable reader is going to assume that the WMF's preferred outcome is to subsume everything else into a Greater Wikipedia. If this genuinely isn't the WMF's aim, you probably want to take that page down or at least plaster it with "rejected proposal retained only for historical purposes" templates, since it would be deeply ironic if the WMF were plunged into outright civil war just because someone forgot to delete a page. (Given that it's only a few days since I completed your official survey in which the only three options were "Wikipedia Network Trust", "Wikipedia Organization" or "Wikipedia Foundation", you'll I hope forgive me for not being convinced that the branding team doesn't have its heart set on a forced renaming to "Wikipedia".) ‑ Iridescent 20:51, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
A couple of points that haven't been mentioned about this latest CF. One is that AFAICS, no one seriously objects to the Board saying they have the right to rename the Foundation. The point is that if they do so without including all (or at least some sizable section) of the volunteers in the discussion over it, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs: volunteers will take offense & fall away. And the manner this proposal has been communicated to all of us volunteers has been probably the worst possible manner conceivable. (Despite what we have been told, I'm still convinced that someone has set her heart on renaming the Foundation as the "Wikipedia Foundation", & all of the subsequent activity has been to justify the change. It's going to take a lot of work to undo that conviction.)Another is that with all of needs that could be addressed, someone decided rebanding was the best use of finite Foundation funds. It's one thing to decide the Foundation needs another name; I've read arguments that have convinced me it's a topic worth debating. However, it's one thing to put this on a back-burner level priority to have an ongoing discussion about, maybe run a poll of various communities to see what they might like -- or dislike -- & another thing to spend all of this time & effort on something that won't pay immediate returns. (If anything, it's going cost money & resources: the name needs to be changed on letterheads & legal documents, then the job of putting out the word that the Foundation has a new name, etc.) And lastly, for the most part the name of an organization isn't as important as branding managers claim it is. Look at any successful business or organization: they are successful not because of their name, but because of what they accomplish. Achieve important goals, & an organization will be perceived as successful. One only needs to consider rebranding when one hasn't achieved anything of note -- or one has established a negative reputation for him/herself. If the PTB at the Foundation wants it to be the backbone of free knowledge, then achieve a goal that accomplishes that. At least stop pissing away money on renaming itself & alienating volunteers. -- llywrch (talk) 22:23, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
I suspect that Ducks Unlimited would have a different public persona if it were called "The Preservation of Prey Society" (which would better reflect where its funding largely originates). I agree that re-branding in itself isn't terribly valuable—it has to be accompanied by a strategic initiative that the re-branding supports—but names can make a difference. isaacl (talk) 20:48, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
The more I think about it, the more I think this is actually going in the wrong direction. While I agree that "Wikimedia" is a stupid name, I'm unconvinced we should change it (nobody aside from a few collectors and purist retro gamers has owned a microcomputer for 30 years and I doubt anyone under the age of 40 even knows the significance of the name "Microsoft", but nobody seriously suggests changing it). If we are going to change it, if anything the rename should go the other way to something mushy and meaningless; it's not the "media" that's the problem, it's the "wiki". If we really need to rebrand—which we don't—it ought to be to something corporate and bland like "Disseminata" or "Informius", to allow us to drop the fiction that things like Commons or Wikidata, let alone this FWOTAM, are "wikis". ‑ Iridescent 20:51, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
Microsoft was named after that gadget in Neuromancer, right? -- llywrch (talk) 20:26, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
ease-of-editing break
Someone gave me a link to an external website in which VisualEditor was described as "the de facto standard" (in the context of third-party wikis), so I've fled back here to find reality again.
Of course some groups have their hearts set on renaming various movement corporations to "Wikipedia". Not the projects – the corporations, and specifically the ones that are engaged in grant writing and fundraising work. It'd be strange if anyone involved in any type of external fundraising didn't want this change, given how much time they waste explaining the name to people who just want to make sure that they're in the right place.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard a conversation about how staff introduce themselves. So you'd expect conversations around the Silly Valley to work something like this:
Where are you these days?
I'm at Apple.
Is it true that they take away everyone's iPhones?
Yes, but only in certain areas. They don't want people taking pictures of the new prototypes.
or like this:
Where are you these days?
I'm at Google.
Do you like it? I hear that the food is great.
or like this:
Where are you these days?
I'm at SpaceX.
Didn't you guys have a rocket blow up?
That only happened once!
And with WMF staff, the conversations seem to sound like this:
Where are you these days?
I'm working for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Huh? Did you mean the Wikipedia Foundation?
No, the organization is called Wikimedia, with an M, but, yes, Wikipedia is the best-known project that we support.
or
Where are you these days?
I'm working for the Wikimedia Foundation. It's the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia.
Oh. So you're working for Wikipedia?
Not exactly, see, what I do is arrange funding for partnerships, and Wikipedia is the ultimate beneficiary of my work, but I don't technically work for Wikipedia, because Wikipedia is supposed to be all volunteers.
So you're a consultant?
No, I work for the main organization. Look, it's complicated, but back when they picked names for things, the volunteers didn't know whether an online encyclopedia would actually be all that popular, and they didn't want the central organization named after the encyclopedia if the online dictionary turned out to be more popular. So they made up this name, and we've been stuck having these confusing conversations ever since.
Oh. (brightly) I'm at Google now!
(with relief) Do you like it? I hear that the food is great.
One's perspective on something depends on where one's looking at it from. Back when they picked names for things, the volunteers didn't know whether an online encyclopedia would actually be all that popular, and they didn't want the central organization named after the encyclopedia if the online dictionary turned out to be more popular is certainly one version of the history, but I could make an equally good case that the correct answer is Back when they picked names for things, the volunteers wanted to go either with "Wikipedia" or with the deeply stupid "WikiWiki", but Sheldon Ramptonconvinced them to go with a name to match a more ambitious scope rather than focusing on Wikipedia as the only significant product.
The way I see the conversations you reference above going is slightly different:
Where are you working these days?
I'm at Wikipedia.
I love Wikipedia! I've always been interested in the medieval round-tower churches of East Anglia, and there's nowhere else online I can go to see detailed information about them. Keep up the good work!
Oh, so what do you do then? I didn't realize Wikipedia did anything aside from those cool articles!
My responsibilities include liaising with the Ombuds Commission, supporting the Foundation's work in furthering Healthy Community Culture, Inclusivity, and Safe Spaces, and a variety of smaller tasks like wikification of Foundation documents.
Oh. Hey, I didn't realize how late it was, I must go. Nice meeting you.
Yeah, I figured that if someone really thinks clarification is necessary, they're going to clarify, whether or not it's necessary. I might add another one:
"I love Wikipedia..."
"Ah no, Wikimedia. We run the servers for Wikipedia and its sister websites and advocate for open knowledge."
So what do you do?...
Speaking of "open knowledge", that should really be the name of the foundation if we think "Wikimedia" is too often conflated. "Open Knowledge Foundation" has a nice ring to it and actually fits the mission as established in the rest of the past few year's worth of effort (and the past 2 decades of organizational life). --Izno (talk) 20:26, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
While I think "Wikimedia" is a stupid name because it almost-but-not-quite Wikipedia, I really don't see conflation as an issue; people in real world jobs manage to cope with variations on "I work for the Army but I'm not a soldier" all the time. ‑ Iridescent 20:52, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
User:Whatamidoing (WMF): your example is interesting. That Google employee doesn't work for Google, but for Alphabet, which (1) was rebranded because Google was doing a lot more than just Google, (2) zero people outside of the physical/mental SV bubble have heard of, and (3) has no relation to their main product (Google Search). Your hypothetical Google friend isn't being very precise when they say where they work. Which leads me to suggest a solution to this problem: lie! Then WMF staff can lie to their friends "I work for the Wikipedia Foundation"[1], but they don't have to spend so much money and time (of WMF staff and the community).
Iridescent: I actually think that Wikimedia sounding a lot like Wikipedia is a good thing: they're related!
References
^Once the WMF rams this through against consensus, I look forward to the edit wars over the {{R from incorrect name}} rcat on this page and the inevitable community rejection of the WP:Requested move, culminating in the office moving the article itself, then, once reverted by the community as being against consensus, calling it an office action and move-protecting the article at the WMF-preferred title, then desysopping all admins who restore the consensus title, and ultimately move-superprotecting its own article (WP:INVOLVED/WP:COI, anyone?). Or perhaps something dumber happening.
I think the point Mdaniels5757 is making is that under the new restructuring, the people employed in the internet companies can continue as if nothing's changed, but the people working on flying trucks, clinical immortality, power stations in the sky or whichever other harebrained money pit into which Sergei Brin has decided to throw investors' money, no longer need to have the "I work for Google but I'm not involved with any of the things you've heard of" conversations. As things stand under "Wikimedia Foundation" there's nothing stopping you (plural) from telling people "I work for Wikipedia" (or "I work for Wikispecies", "I work for Commons", "I work for Wikidata" etc) if working for Wikipedia is actually what you do, any more than an employee of the New York Daily News feels obliged to introduce themselves as working for the Chicago Tribune even though the latter is technically correct. ‑ Iridescent 06:58, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Of course, this whole lengthy sidetrack is a pretty good example of that legendary Wikipedia Unconscious Systemic Cultural Bias in action. Anywhere other than the US (and maybe the more Americanized parts of Canada), introducing yourself with "Where are you these days?" would at best earn you a blank stare, and more likely ensure that the person you asked it of avoided you for the rest of the party. I've lived outside the US for long enough now, that when I return I have to consciously remind myself that people asking variations on "so what do you do?" are trying to be polite, not being deliberately rude. ‑ Iridescent 07:36, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
This. I'm not in the US, and it's rare that a conversational gambit with anyone other than close friends or family will include discussion of the specific employer. I've never really talked about my employer; at most, I might have mentioned my general field of work. And I have never once had a hard time saying "I'm a volunteer with the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia and many other [educational] projects." Staff should have no problem saying that, if they feel the absolute need to reveal their employer. Risker (talk) 17:49, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
As an aside on naming, I do note that the WMF's donation page and the text accompanying the "Donate" button on wikimediafoundation.org carries a very strong implication—to the extent that an uncharitable person would call it "blatant lying"—that all donated funds go towards the maintenance of Wikipedia. (Buried in tiny print on the donor form is the mention of "a wide variety of projects", but other than that the only way to find out that your money isn't actually going to new hardware for Wikipedia but is instead going to pay for a wide network of projects and the salaries of a huge bureaucracy is a grudging mention, well below the fold, on the FAQ page.) If the WMF genuinely isn't trying to rebrand itself by stealth as Greater Wikipedia, they're certainly going about it in an odd way. (Other than a single link to Commons—and some unreadable white-on-gray links in the footer of the page—the front page of the WMF websiteliterally doesn't mention a single WMF project other than Wikipedia.) ‑ Iridescent 19:04, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
There are many cultural differences. Americans will generally ask what your field is and sometimes who your employer is; Indians will ask you for your exact title and salary. Germans don't want you to ask about their families (or any other personal questions), but most of the world expects it and considers your interest in their personal lives to be a sign of friendship, respect and shared values.
In the tech industry, "Where are you these days?" can be a prelude to "Any chance you'd recommend me for a job there?", so knowing the employer is a relevant detail. It's a high-turnover industry, so this happens a lot. (Speaking of job recommendations, the WMF is still hiring for a few jobs, and if you know any editors who are applying for any of them, then please encourage them to ask any staff they know for an internal recommendation. It can have a significant effect on who gets interviewed.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:35, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
It possibly depends on context. If you're talking about some kind of tech conference where it would be reasonable to want to know "who is this person I'm talking to and what is their relevance to me?", it probably would be acceptable. In general social situations one could maybe get away as a last resort with a non-specific "so what line of work are you in?", but "which company do you work for?" would have people looking at you oddly and asking why you want to know, and any variation on "how much do you earn?" would likely have people refusing to talk to you. Other than people whom I know through work (for obvious reasons), I have no idea who most of my friends are employed by. I don't know about India (although certainly British Indians are if anything even more hostile to inappropriate personal questions), but it's undoubtedly the case that of all the places I've ever been, the only place I've ever encountered "where do you work?" in general conversation has been the US.
Main entrance to Google UK—note the complete absence of branding other than a small and discreet logo frosted into the glass of the door, and a small YouTube logo used as a directional arrow over the side door.
In the tech context it would be particularly unlikely. Unlike in the US, in the UK and Europe the big American tech firms have a reputation as little more than crime syndicates; "I work for Google (Amazon, Facebook, etc)" in most social situations would go down about as well as "I'm a drug dealer" or "I'm a journalist". (The fact that the Google UK building is almost totally unmarked and is designed such that people leaving the building are in constant view of CCTV cameras until they reach the station, is not a coincidence.) Some of the WMUK people are better placed than me to advise (ping to RexxS), but I assume they all regularly need to have the "no, we work with and support Wikipedia but we're not responsible for their more questionable practices, and although the WMF is an American internet company it's not as crooked as the others" conversation. I know WMF staff need to publicly endorse the "we're working for the public good and everyone loves us for it" party line, but don't underestimate how many people even among our supporters see us as at best a necessary evil rather than something warranting actual admiration, let alone how many people among the more general population lump Wikipedia in with Twitter and Spotify as just another slightly quirky manifestation of gangster capitalism. ‑ Iridescent 12:30, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
I know this is reviving a necro-thread, but just pointing out the revised timeline for anyone who may have missed it. The data from the community consultations on naming is now not going to be published until after the board meeting to decide on renaming. ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
I have to wonder if this repeated delay by the Board to receive this report & vote on it is because they are caught between (on one hand) acknowledging that the community does not want the Foundation to change its name & (on the other) recognizing that a lot of money was pissed away on a stupid idea, which would necessitate someone in the Foundation losing her/his job. Nonetheless, the pandemic does furnish a plausible explanation for the delay. -- llywrch (talk) 22:31, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
I have no issue at all with delaying the decision. Indeed, there's a strong case for arguing that every non-time-sensitive decision be deferred until after the new board is in place, both so the elected trustees have a mandate either to support change or vote for the status quo (since people can ask them "what do you think about issue?" during the election), and because any decision made between now and the delayed elections will be forever tainted with "the board that made that decision was illegitimate" and be at risk of challenge further down the road. What I have the issue with is that now "Release raw data from surveys; release report on naming data" comes after "Board meetings on 24, 28 and 30 September to review renaming work". Thus, assuming the results of the private, official survey at least vaguely match the outcomes of the unofficial community discussions, the fact that less than 10% of participants support the rebranding and less than 1% of participants consider the way the official survey was framed to be legitimate won't be made public until after the decision has been announced, despite it having an obvious bearing on the outcome. It's entirely possible either that there's a silent majority in support of rebranding who feel intimidated against publicly supporting because so many chapters and affiliates are opposed, or conversely that a significant number of people are so strongly opposed that individual projects start disaffiliating. In either case, the WMF shouldn't be making decisions that could potentially change the entire internal dynamic of the projects without making their reasoning public beforehand, particularly when they know that whatever they decide is going to be extremely unpopular. ‑ Iridescent 14:40, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
llywrch, I don't think that the WMF is in the habit of firing people for doing what the Board told them to do, and it appears that the Board told them to spend this money on a rebranding project.
I'm not sure that the September Board meetings will necessarily result in a vote or any final decision. They seem to take as much time as they need (which is good, obviously). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:39, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
Above a certain job title level, one is never fired. But one may be subjected to irresistible pressure to resign. -- llywrch (talk) 15:54, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
Yeah; when the Board makes seriously bad calls, it's not the Board that gets hammered. Not for the first time, I recommend to anyone who hasn't done so (or hasn't done so for a while) reading Molly White's timeline of the WMF's Clone Wars top to bottom—and Molly White is a consummate WMF insider and loyalist, not some malcontent who's spent the last decade on Wikipediocracy nurturing a grudge that in 2008 we deleted a photograph she uploaded of her cat. ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
You're noted on notability
Just a heads-up that I've mentioned you—but deliberately not by name, in case you don't want to get involved—in an essay, here. If you do choose to comment there, I'd be interested in your thoughts. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:36, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
I'll comment there in full later, although my basic notability rule of thumb would be "does sufficient material exist to write at least 500 words about this topic without padding?".
People get too fixated on "we don't have enough source material to cover the whole of this person's life". Wikipedia isn't about writing biographies in the traditional sense, but about summarizing what sources say about the subject. If all the sources only talk about one period of someone's life or one aspect of their life, then it's quite acceptable for Wikipedia to do the same rather than feeling that we have an obligation to illustrate them as a rounded individual and that we're somehow failing by not covering their personal life even though the sources only cover their work career, or not discussing someone's career when the sources only talk about their criminal record.
Assuming your oblique reference is to Selina Rushbrook and the rest of that series, I'll make a slight correction in that they weren't from London but from Swansea, and the distinction is significant. London in the 19th century was not only the center of the world's media, but was the base of operations for the Salvation Army, Karl Marx and his followers, the City Mission movement, and Charles Booth. As such there's no shortage of documentary evidence from the time of the way the working classes and the criminal underclass lived. Swansea, by contrast, was to 19th-century Britain what Trenton or Toledo is to the modern US; an unquestionably significant city, but near-totally overshadowed culturally by its neighbors and as a consequence comparatively undocumented except for those people at the very top of their fields. As such, when it comes to historical biographies both our coverage, and coverage in dead-tree sources, is almost exclusively either lords & ladies, bewhiskered industrialists, sportsmen, and people who were born there but got out early and gained their notability somewhere else (here's Category:People from Swansea; see for yourself). I would argue the case that in these circumstances the very existence of enough sources to write a viable biography of a member of the criminal underclass—particularly a woman—is itself unusual enough as to confer notability, in the same way that we confer de facto automatic notability on anyone from the pre-Columbian Americas, the Roman Empire, pre-scramble Africa, Anglo-Saxon England etc for whom enough records survive to write a full-length biography. ‑ Iridescent 05:48, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll make that correction and I look forward to any other comments. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 07:38, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
Interesting questions! I recently !voted Keep at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Neerthirai with the same rationale, it turns out, you, NYB, have in one of the examples in your essay; I got a similar response. There's also one, Rajinder Singh, who is at AFD for four days of notability. I almost brought up Jesus on that one, except I couldn't be bothered to find out the exact number of days that are accepted as historical in that preacher's biography. So, it seems these are recurring questions at AFD; I find myself more tempted to argue more than just the letter of the notability guidelines as I spend more time on the project. Subjects can meet WP:V plenty and still fail to meet WP:GNG. So, I think there are cases, like Neerthirai, where we could very well keep some articles even if we don't have much to say about them, for "completeness" sake (but it would probably bring with it new challenges we are currently saved). Usedtobecool☎️ 17:34, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
I can save you checking; the exact number of days that are fully accepted as historical in the life of Jesus is zero, since there's a minority but still significant school of thought that considers the gospels as a synthesis of existing Mithraic doctrine and pagan mythology (see Christ myth theory), and a much larger school of thought that considers it likely that he existed, but that the only fact about him that can be assumed with reasonable confidence is the crucifixion (see Historicity of Jesus). Someone notable for something that only took place over four days of their life isn't unusual; in many cases (criminals, war heroes, religious martyrs…) the notability comes from an incident lasting only a matter of hours or even minutes. (Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark David Chapman are both notable solely for incidents lasting a few seconds, and good luck getting either of those deleted, and we have numerous people like Charles Brandon, 3rd Duke of Suffolk and Khalid bin Barghash of Zanzibar whose sole notability comes from positions they only held for a matter of hours.)
I used to think like you, but over time I've swung to the view that if a topic is covered in multiple independent reliable sources it's notable in Wikipedia terms, and that if that is causing a problem then the problem is that our definition of "reliable source" is too lax. (In particular, we give far too much respect to newspapers, most of which decide what to include solely on the basis of whether they think it will be of interest to their local audience rather than on any neutral scale of significance. Even stolidly respectable newspapers like the New York Times and The Scotsman publish reams of local-interest stuff of no possible interest to anyone outside their core distribution area.) If sources which we consider capable of deciding whether something is significant consider something notable, it's not Wikipedia's job to second-guess them as to what's notable; by substituting our own judgement for that of the people writing the sources, that's itself a violation of the neutral point of view. Yes, it would theoretically mean that someone with a subscription to a bunch of Inside Soap type magazines could write hypothetical articles about every episode of any reasonably popular TV show, but so what? If it's popular enough to be getting in-depth coverage, it ought to be viable as a Wikipedia topic; it's only the innate biases of Wikipedia's nerd-heavy editor base that decrees that every single episode of Doctor Who ever made is worthy of its own article but not a single episode of The Young and the Restless gets even a brief synopsis let alone a stand-alone article.
As I've said before, I think we made a serious mistake in deleting (almost) all the Pokemons. These are part of a multi-billion-dollar media franchise and some of the most valuable intellectual property in the world, but we allowed ourselves to be bullied into deleting them because of snobbery over what "a proper encyclopedia" should cover (why do we delete Growlithe but not Jennyanydots?), which in turn set a precedent for "well I don't personally think it's important" as a de facto deletion criterion. (NYB, when I get round to it I'll post an expanded version of this on the talk of your essay, or feel free to cut-and-paste.) ‑ Iridescent 19:09, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
I’ve come around to viewing notability based deletions and the sourcing we require on a harm continuum. I also don’t think the GNG is particularly worth much because of an issue you hint at: what we define as reliable in the context of the GNG can vary widely and it depends on who shows up as to what that standard is.Generally speaking, there’s a continuum of sourcing we require with BLPs and currently existing corporations on one end and train stations, bus stops, and long dead people on the other. I’m personally fine with that. My long-standing example is train stations. I’ve read your explanation of why they’re notable multiple times and don’t buy it, but I honestly think they’re the best example we have of AfD working well: there is next to zero harm done to the encyclopedia by having an article on every train station that has ever existed. Even if I don’t buy the argument that they’re inherently significant because of the history of how they developed, they do no harm existing and rail fans source them well enough that they aren’t an embarrassment (and many are quite good.) I’m willing to lower my standards of sourcing for stuff like that or for the long dead 14th Bishop of Foo, where I can make a strong argument for inherent notability based on my understanding of sourcing and historical texts, but many others will disagree with me. He’s dead and is important enough to some people to document. There’s no reason to hold him to a BLP standard for notability.BLPs and corps have other concerns that could hurt real people or damage our reputation, so we tend to have higher standards for sourcing there. I think that makes sense and isn’t a bad thing. I guess my pet peeve is people thinking that the GNG should be the same for everything without taking into account context. Context always matters, even in deciding if something is notable. Also, by the standard I’m using above, I agree with you on the Pokémon topic. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:29, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
The impact of the placement of 19th-century railway stations is visible to this day as long linear strips of towns, even in those cases where the stations themselves have been closed for decades.
I'll still disagree with you on the rail stations. Pre-WW1, the rail station was almost invariably the most significant building in the town; the only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head would be cathedrals, the largest markets, and major military facilities, and the latter two were both typically reliant on the station. In many cases, the station was the reason the town existed in the first place; in all cases without exception, the station was the basis of the local economy. (The easiest way to see the transformative effect of the railroads is to look at those places that were significant in 1830, but for reasons of geography were bypassed by the railways; places like Shaftesbury with no rail service at all withered and died, while places like Exeter and Norwich which were connected but by long inconvenient branches from the main network stagnated and went from being among the most important cities in the country to provincial outposts. To this day you can trace the routes of the 19th-century railroads by looking at a map of any given country and looking at the populated areas, even when the railroads themselves have long-since closed). As such, it's a reasonable assumption that any given station was the subject of significant coverage, even if nobody has bothered to dig the coverage out of the archives yet, and thus provided WP:GNG continues to exist, it can be assumed that any given station will pass it. ‑ Iridescent 06:50, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
I understand your argument there, but still disagree that we’d consider that type of sourcing adequate for anything other than rail stations or (3 years ago) high schools. It’s why I use it as an example of how the GNG has a completely different meaning based on the topic—if someone who wasn’t a Recognized Name(tm) were to make a similar argument over a BLP, say for every town councilor elected in the small town US, we’d delete the article without a second thought.Note, I’m not actually arguing we should delete rail stations. I think they’re a great example of how our notability system should work: they’re something with a cult following, they pose absolutely zero danger of harming another human being, and they aren’t going to cause an embarrassment that makes the rest of the encyclopedia look bad. If they can be sourced to basic locally reliable sources and people want to write about them, sure. I just don’t find the argument that they meet the same sourcing standards we expect of present day corporations, BLPs, and other things where there’s some danger of harm convincing. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:04, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't believe each one needs its own article—my proof-of-concept example has now been got-at by the "every station needs its own article" contingent, but I still firmly believe this kind of list/article hybrid is the way we should be handling these things. What I do believe is that every railway station is inherently notable enough to be mentioned. This kind of automatic presumed notability isn't be any means unique to railway stations; I'd argue that at minimum it automatically applies to:
Top-level pro sports, at least in the modern age—if someone played in the NFL, Bundesliga etc, then even if he sucked and never played again, we can be certain that there would have been significant coverage of his one game;
Olympic medalists, no matter how obscure the sport—the bronze medalist in women's Dwile Flonking at the 1973 Olympics may not have attracted any great public interest, but one can guarantee she'd have been the subject of lengthy profiles in Dwile Flonking Monthly and in her hometown's local paper at an absolute minimum;
Winners of major awards (the winners of those technical Oscars that don't get the glitzy red-carpet appearances can nonetheless be assumed to have got the rockstar treatment in Cinematic Stop-Motion Animation Today or whatever);
Musicians who reached #1 in their national chart (and I mean the actual chart, not "acoustic country chart" or whatever); we may not have the native speakers to translate the profiles of whoever's number one in Iceland, but we can reasonably assume the coverage exists;
Elected members of national legislatures of sovereign states. I don't agree with the current "anyone who ever served in a legislature" position, which gives undue weight to people like Wilfred Stamp, 2nd Baron Stamp (who nominally inherited the title from his father and immediately died from the explosion that killed the pair of them) and to powerless party apparatchiks with rubber-stamp roles in assorted dicatorships, but elected legislators always get significant coverage. (I wouldn't extend this to regional/state governors, legislators or mayors purely because the line is more subjective. "National" is clearcut, but we don't want to give automatic notability to people who are barely household names in their own households, or holders of meaningless sinecures like the Lord Mayor of London);
Historical heads of state and heads of government. Yes, that brings in flyspeck fiefdoms like Lawa Thikana and the mess that was the Holy Roman Empire, but whoever was boss of these places may have been relatively inconsequential, but was still important, if only by virtue of the fact that they managed to avoid being absorbed by their neighbors. We wouldn't consider deleting the biographies of the current leaders of the assorted mounds of guano in the Pacific that are independent countries because they didn't have any assets worth stealing and the US or Britain didn't want the hassle of administering them and thought making them independent would be a good way to votestack the United Nations; we shouldn't consider deleting the leaders of somewhere like Saxe-Altenburg if someone wants to go to the trouble of writing a biography.
There are probably quite a few more, and it presumably won't escape your notice that these bear a striking resemblance to Wikipedia:Notability#Subject-specific notability guidelines. I don't actually object to SNGs when they serve their intended purpose in highlighting topics that are so obviously going to be the subject of significant coverage that it would be perverse to delete the articles even if they're currently of poor quality; what I object to is when SNGs are gamed to get permanent immunity from deletion or merging for nonsense like those unexpandable one-line biographies of cricketers* or microstubs on species who are known only from a one-line description in a single paper.
Your footnote surprises me. Many months back I was involved with gently shepherding many of those Cricket stubs into List of English cricketers (1787–1825), & figured those stubs had long since joined the infamous Pokemon ones. (And the detail about the MCC clubhouse burning down needs to be added to that article, to explain why there is nothing more to be written about these men.) I guess the final step of taking those articles to AfD had never been taken, either out of attachment or lack of perseverence. -- llywrch (talk) 16:17, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
You can merge things into lists as much as you like, but the "policy says we need to have an article on each grain of sand regardless of whether we have an article on the beach" contingent always win out. My usual example is Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway, where I carefully collated everything anyone could ever want to know into a single unified page where readers could compare and contrast all aspects of the topic, but the ideology of "everything needs its own page" means we have pointless articles like Wood Siding railway station which are less useful to the reader than the relevant subsections of the parent page. ‑ Iridescent 18:40, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
The almost total neglect of WP:NOPAGE is one of the great sorrows of Wikipedia. EEng 21:28, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
I'm glad that I've been pre-empting this possible development with articles on Roman consuls. (By holding that office, an individual does meet the notability standard, but for many only their name is known, & little more for many others. We don't need hundreds of two-sentence stubs that will never grow beyond that length.) I've been creating redirects to an existing list articles, which not only puts a speed bump in the way of writing those articles, puts the burden of proof on an article creator.But about the existing cricket stubs. If it was generally accepted that getting rid of them is a good thing (they are bait for trolls & vandals -- there will never be enough volunteers to watch all of these articles), I could get rid of them. The tactic is simple: you just need to remember that there is no deadline, that time is on our side. (And if this works, there are a lot of forgotten Classical Greece & Rome articles this tactic could be applied to.) -- llywrch (talk) 01:14, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
Kipple drives out non-kipple. In my experience, whatever the topic the "create a separate page" faction usually wins over the long term; it's against Wikipedia's culture to be nasty about something which someone has worked to create, so unlike in the real world on Wikipedia it's actually easier to create than to destroy. When it comes to topics with lots of watchers like the Pokemons or the Harry Potter characters we can hold the line against proliferation, but they're an exception.
(I know this is a cheap shot against someone who's not here to fight back, but just look at how difficult it was to get rid of Neelix's walled gardens. Every redlink at (for instance) 2012 tour of She Has a Name and Critical response to She Has a Name was at some point a—usually quite lengthy—article. Virtually all those redlinks (and bluelinks that have now become redirects to subsections) needed to go through the AfD timesink despite the fact that it was obvious at a glance that they were inappropriate. These weren't ultra-obscure pages which slipped under the wire because nobody was aware they existed; "2012 tour…" even appeared on the main page as Today's Featured Article.)
On Wikipedia, time isn't on the side of progress; time is on the side of change, regardless of whether that change is a benefit or not. The real meaning of Wikipedia:There is no deadline is that if something doesn't exist, sooner or later someone will try to create it. An infinite number of monkeys will eventually create an infinitely large heap of monkey shit unless there's someone prepared to clean it up, and every statistic we have points to the fact that we have a rising number of monkeys and a declining number of cleaners. ‑ Iridescent 04:56, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
So does that mean I should try to get rid of them or not? -- llywrch (talk) 22:32, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
(Very much personal opinion not policy) Get rid of them, but don't expect them to stay gone. Wikipedia has always had a sandcastles-in-the-tide tendency when it comes to holding back the gray goo, and the rate of decay will increase exponentially if the WMF follows through with their intention to make it a banning offense to distinguish based on accomplishments, skills or standing in the Wikimedia-projects or movement so we're no longer able to revert or warn well-intentioned incompetents. My language in this rant from eleven years ago may have been pretentious, but it still sums up my basic philosophy, that the most we can do is try to nourish the flowers in the sewage for a while. ‑ Iridescent 15:56, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
Arbitrary break: artists
I agree in general, but most of Category:Anonymous artists probably fail the 500 word test, at least without doctoral padding, but are notable. Johnbod (talk) 11:39, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
Which rather proves my point… Clicking at random in that category, the first five I get are Master of Jannecke Bollengier, Master of 1328, Master of the Dresden Prayerbook, Master of the Friedberg Altarpiece and Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, three of which are completely unsourced, three of which are creations of the same long-term disruptive editor (including one with the proud edit summary of "I translated this from the German, and I don't even UNDERSTAND that language!"), and all five of which I would argue should be deleted in their current form. There are anonymous artists about whom there's enough to say to fill a stand-alone article—although ironically, the only one of which 99% of readers will have heard isn't actually listed!—but as far as I can tell these are all right up there with G. Chandler, Porcellionides apulicus and Woodstock Road railway station as examples of Wikipedia's "it exists so therefore it needs a standalone page" fallacy. The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia's stubs would be more useful to readers if they were merged into long tables where readers can skim, compare and sort them (with breakout links to standalone pages in those cases where there genuinely is enough to sustain a separate article); "this is a topic Wikipedia should cover" doesn't equate to "this is a topic which needs its own page". ‑ Iridescent 16:06, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
Master of the Dresden Prayerbook and Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds certainly could be expanded, though by talking about the works rather than the life. I'd imagine sources could be found to expand all of them at least a bit. I'm not sure I'd actually vote for deletion of the others, though I remember complaining too many of these were being created to one person doing it. Banksy is no more anonymous than Prince; we just don't know his real name (or are supposed not to), which is different. Johnbod (talk) 20:24, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
Re the only one of which 99% of readers will have heard - Banksy is contemporary but anonymous, the others mentioned above are notnames. Ceoil (talk) 21:01, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
Thank you Mdaniels, hadn't seen that cat, and you are right. One are artists that dont wish their name to be known publicly, he others are convenient groupings of seemingly connected paintings under a grouping that may, ot may not be the workings of a single historical individual. I agree with Johnbod that we have too many of these...as can be seen from the, frankly horrifying, edit-ise at work List of anonymous masters, which somebody should probably, out of kindness to readers, redirect. Ceoil (talk) 00:35, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
There's an RfC going on here that is related to CITEVAR; I've suggested to the proposer that they ask for a watchlist notice, but they demurred. I think of you as an expert on Wikipedia cultural expectations; am I right in thinking that anything that changes CITEVAR needs maximum exposure if it's not going to cause a riot when/if it passes, from those who didn't happen to be watching the relevant pages? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:10, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Absolutely it needs a watchlist notice, and if there's any likelihood of it passing (which it looks like there will be) the WMF needs to be formally notified as well as they'll need to field the gleeful press coverage of the ensuing editwars. As per NYB's comments a few threads up this will cause chaos—as you know, people get very wedded to preferred citation styles. As I've said before I'd happily support a unified citation format and I'd certainly theoretically be in support of hugely thinning out the 2000+ different citation templates, but that's not where we are at the moment, and if we start declaring any given citation style (other than bare URLs) as forbidden and start rolling out mass changes, one can pretty much guarantee wheel-wars and resignations. Given that I've not participated in the RFC I can engage in summoning the Old Gods who were here for these arguments last time around without violating WP:CANVASS; @SlimVirgin, SMcCandlish, Herostratus, Llywrch, SandyGeorgia, and Victoriaearle: do you agree this would need to be broadly advertised and have overwhelming consensus to be closed as anything other than "no consensus"? ‑ Iridescent 19:08, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. I was pretty sure I was right but I don't have my ear as closely to the ground as some do. I can nudge CaptainEek again, but I think others chipping in that a watchlist notice is needed is better than me repeating myself. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:27, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
We have lots of FAs with those kinds of citations ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
The rfc "question" is extremely unclearly worded, and has already been messed about with twice at least while the rfc was running, including a far-from-minor bolt-on. As a result, "supports" and "opposes" often appear to be talking about different views, and different bits. I don't see how any policy-changing conclusion can really be drawn from what is currently a fairly finely balance tally of votes - for different things. There would have to be another stage to discuss properly-drafted proposals, and vote on a range of options. It might be too soon to raise the fyrd at this point. Johnbod (talk) 21:39, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Of course, MC. It's discussions like this (i.e., concerning a specific, bike-sheddish, point) which end up causing the most bitterness when people learn a decision was made without them even knowing it was up for discussion. One reason why MOS is so disliked. (As for being an "Old God", perhaps I should insist on a proper invocation: chanting, incense, offerings of the beverage of my choice. We Old Gods tend to be reactionary & primitive. I'd include something about my choice of worshippers & whether they should be garbed, but the forthcoming UCoC might have a clause about retroactive application of "the use of sexualized language or imagery, and sexual attention or advances of any kind". Pity.) -- llywrch (talk) 21:47, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Can't you just upgrade it to a CENT RfC if it isn't already? That will bring eyes. More commentors tends to move results away from a supermajority either way, thus no consensus for change.
On the merits, enh. They're talking about gently deprecating it. If a robot slowly moves inline cites into a ref format or whatever that seems no big deal. It's not broke tho so I'd leave it alone I guess. Herostratus (talk) 22:14, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
I would just list it on CENT. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 01:59, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
Well, we've got the watchlist notice, and it seems to have backfired, with the latest votes nearly all supporting the change. Johnbod (talk) 01:45, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
That's fine. I think taking this baby step towards reference standardization is a mistake which will annoy a lot of editors for minimal benefit and consequently make it harder to bite the bullet further down the line and introduce the single data-based citation style we should have had from the start, and I think the question in the RFC is so poorly written that whatever it decides it's going to be unimplementable since the supporters and opposers are supporting and opposing different things. The important thing, though, is that whatever decision is reached it's reached as visibly as possible such that nobody can reasonably claim it was hatched in a smoke-filled room and sprung on them without warning. (FWIW I'm not convinced it's headed towards an outcome of "deprecate one of the 2000 competing and mutually incompatiable referencing styles, leave the other 1999 in place". I'm not going to close it myself—although I've intentionally not participated in it, my opinions on the matter are too well known for me to be considered neutral—but with my "one of the closers of last resort for contentious RFCs where nobody wants to take the inevitable abuse from the losing side" hat on, it looks to me to be headed straight towards "no consensus, default to status quo".) ‑ Iridescent 05:50, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Having noticed a couple of responses that seemed to interpret the RfC in slightly different ways, I asked the proposer earlier today to post a wording change to CITEVAR that would implement the RfC if it passed. It occurred to me as I was typing that not only would any closer find it hard to close such an RfC without a proposed wording, but that if CaptainEek does put in candidate wording they might find it backfires — it’s usually harder to get agreement on wording than on a vaguer principle on which it could rest. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:37, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
More like large numbers of responses that interpret the Rfc in very different ways (and who can blame them, given the vagueness of the proposal), plus a fringe who seem to be talking about something else entirely. Since some sort of "support" is for now ahead, it might close as "Ok, some change is wanted, now we need another rfc to vote on a range of coherently-drafted options (obviously with CaptainEek allowed nowhere near drafting those)". Look at the most recent 3 votes for example - all "support"ing very significantly different things, when you get to the detail. Johnbod (talk) 01:17, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
I think we're saying the same thing in different ways; the proposal is so hopelessly ambiguous both in terms of what it wants to get rid of, and what it wants to replace it with, that no possible closure in favor of any kind of action could ever stick since nobody (including CaptainEek) seems at all sure what they're actually supporting. ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
Well, the close was along the lines I predicted, calling for discussions elsewhere to sort out the details. We shall see - a big crack in WP:CITEVAR anyway. Johnbod (talk) 16:08, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
This connects to the TFA thread on top (now), but I believe it's about time to start a new one. As indicated up there I am happy about another tribute to Brian, and it happened, in great collaboration, and was presented, see also. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:21, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
I'm glad to see it, and glad that it got a very respectable level of readership on the day—introducing people who hadn't previously heard of it to something Brian found interesting is exactly the kind of legacy he'd have wanted to leave. He could be cantankerous and obstinate at times, but there were few other people who understood as well as Brian that the point of Wikipedia is to introduce people to topics with which they're not already familiar and to expand reader's understanding of topics about which they already know, not to play games regarding what does or doesn't comply with arbitrary rules. Nobody is indispensable, but Brian is a genuine loss both to Wikipedia, and as a person. ‑ Iridescent 12:24, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
In contrast today: matching colours music to the Dahlias, "brute loud and secretly quiet". - Btw, I managed to write Franz Leuninger (mentioned before), and received great help in doing so, - always love collaboration happening. - I miss Jerome Kohl. We disagreed on things, but always "In Freundschaft". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:04, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
We spoke about "leave my talk as it is when I die", - today's would be great for the purpose. Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:58, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
note re colloquy
Hi. i am writing to let you know about this recent colloquy with Nick Moyes at his talk page. As per this exchange I have now I have met the conditions of the arrangements that we agreed to above. based on that, I am now free to interact fully, without restrictions, in the same manner as any existing editor here at Wikipedia. I hope that is satisfactory. I appreciate your help and understanding. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 13:55, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
My opinion hasn't changed from what I said four months ago. The only thing you need to remember is that editor time is a valuable and finite resource; as long as you're not pointlessly wasting other people's time with proposals which you know have no chance of being accepted, there's no problem. ‑ Iridescent 17:08, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
okay that sounds fine. I think I agree. and I think that sounds fine and very fair on your part. I will take that as a positive statement on this, from you. I appreciate your response, and will keep it in mind. I am glad to be in touch with you in this way.
if any further discussions, issues, etc, should arise, even though i don't think any will, I will look forward to discussing any input you may have in a positive manner. i appreciate your help and your response on this. thanks. cheers! --Sm8900 (talk) 14:05, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
Downgrade of protection to Semi-Protected
Sock blocked, nothing to see here
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
This article should be released in it's usage of the extended confirmed protection because it has not been the focus of vandalism, sockpuppetry, or any other misdemeaning factor. The Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign only is semi-protected, so this does not require extended either. Please consider this request. Thank you! BlackWidowMovie0000Editor (talk) 16:35, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
Is this about Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign? If so, my EC-protection was a reduction of its protection level. Given that this is both a topic that's certain to be a magnet for vandals, and a topic on which it's unlikely someone not very familiar with Wikipedia policy is likely to be able to edit constructively, I'm very reluctant to unilaterally downgrade the protection further. Any reduction would IMO be something that needs community input givem the sensitivity; if you genuinely feel you can make a case for why new accounts should be able to edit such a sensitive topic, go to Wikipedia:Requests for page protection#Current requests for reduction in protection level and post an explanation as to why you feel a further reduction in protection is justified. ‑ Iridescent 16:59, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
@Iridescent: Got it. Sorry about the lack of clarification on the article name. Yes, it is because Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign. As the Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign article is only semi-protected, this should not be any different than that article, but they have 2 different layers of protection. Just asking in this case. BlackWidowMovie0000Editor (talk) 20:24, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. This is a notice that Delienaar, a page that you created, has been tagged for deletion. This has been done under two or more of the criteria for speedy deletion, by which pages can be deleted at any time, without discussion. If the page meets any of these strictly-defined criteria, then it may soon be deleted by an administrator. The reasons it has been tagged are:
user:313SissiYao, I have no idea what this is, but Wikipedia doean't have and never has had a page called Delienaar and I certainly have never written one. ‑ Iridescent 06:46, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
From their other edit, it appears they were referring to the Deilenaar page; its latest revision before that edit was your typo fix, your only edit to that page. Still seems pretty weird though ... Graham87 08:07, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
Yes, it looks it. Not sure either how they get "test page" from that, or why they chose to notify someone whose only edit to the page was the addition of a hyphen but didn't bother notifying any of the actual authors. (It can't be a Twinkle error as that wouldn't have got the page name wrong and would have automatically notified the page creator; this must have been a conscious and hand-formatted notification. Curiouser and curiouser.) ‑ Iridescent 08:21, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
I do get a good laugh when an admin and former arb with 300,000 mainspace edits and numerous FAs, especially one who is seen as one of the most knowledgable editors about the background and reason for policies, is told to read a guide for writing their first article. Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 09:42, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
I get more of a laugh from a supposed new account whose first edit is to nominate what may be the most obscure page I've ever seen for deletion. ‑ Iridescent 13:28, 30 October 2020 (UTC)
No, sorry; this is not a topic about which I know anything, so I can't judge either the reliability of the sourcing or the accuracy of the writing. ‑ Iridescent 14:19, 1 November 2020 (UTC)
Best wishes, Aasim (talk) 18:55, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
I was a bit bemused by the sheer volume of templates here (thought there would be more coordination from the birthday committee), but then I remembered back to the days when we used to thank all the RFA participants individually with nice template cards. Ah, after all these years Phaedriel is still the Wikipedian I miss the most. bibliomaniac15 21:05, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
I used to think these annual circulars were fairly twee and irritating, but I'm now coming to see it as one of Wikipedia's nicer traditions. So much of Wikipedia consists of people complaining noisily about you, of obviously mentally ill people spouting nonsense but where it's considered "uncivil" to point out that they're obviously mentally ill and spouting nonsense, and of fixing other people's mistakes and being criticized for "interfering"; it's quite nice to occasionally get a straightforward variation on "we're glad you're here, thank you"). The variation in templates is what makes it work—a stack of identical WikiLove-generated messages along the lines of those insufferable "A ____ for you!" templates would just be annoying. (I have taken the liberty of condensing them into a single thread, though.) ‑ Iridescent 06:10, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
There is an IP hopper going around and it might be him. What should I do other than post on his talk anyway? Meteorologist200 (talk) 22:30, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
@Meteorologist200 , if you're going to make accusations like that you need to provide some kind of evidence. Yes, of course the vandal "might" be him, in the same way that the vandal might be me, but the probability of either is equally unlikely. The way we deal with IP vandalism is not to latch on to someone at random and start throwing accusations about without the slightest evidence. In this particular case, the editor in question has been active on Wikipedia for five years, has made 65,000 edits, lives in the East Midlands and writes almost exclusively about computer game design; alleging that they're vandalising articles on American hurricanes is an extraordinary claim which preferably requires extraordinary evidence but at minimum requires some evidence.)
Up to now I've assumed good faith, and am operating on the assumption that either you actually have some evidence, or that this was a good-faith mistake and you confused Adam for somebody else and consequently warned the wrong editor. As such, I gave you the lowest-level warning possible. If that's not the case and you're going to keep this up, then you need to provide some evidence; otherwise if you continue to make accusations without evidence, it's straightforward harassment on your part. ‑ Iridescent 07:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
I didn't know that the tags didn't work I'm sorry. :( Meteorologist200 (talk) 16:16, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
@WP:TFA coordinators If we're going to use the usual TFA format, then unless you have a particular attachment to the article's lead image I'm not sure it's a good idea using in on the main page; at TFA resolution (right, top image) it just looks like a solid sheet of dirty yellow. It might make more sense either to use a photo of an individual element rather than of the whole thing (see right for some examples of how various images will appear at the default TFA sizes).
Seeing as this is a visual arts article and the appearance of it—rather than the descriptive text—is what's most likely to interest potential readers, I'd suggest pushing the image size up as high as we can reasonably squeeze into the box (see the final option to the right), and cutting the blurb text correspondingly. Realistically when it comes to this topic readers are going to decide whether to click on it or not based on whether they think the image looks intriguing, rather than anything I can say about Albert Waterhouse, the significance of the concept of an index collection within creationist science, or how and why the individual plants were chosen. I know the usual whiners will scream blue murder if we deviate from the Sacred Protocols Of Main Page Layout, but as far as I'm concerned screw 'em—we did the "oversize the image and cut the text to compensate" for Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret and the Main Page failed to spontaneously explode.
The blurb on this one might be a bit tricky to write, as the concept of "a bunch of small paintings, which in turn form part of a six-panel work (a sixtych?), each of which in turn forms part of a larger coherent whole, which in turn is complemented by other pieces which are detached from the main body but form part of a broader work" is complicated to explain. I'll wait until I hear back from you regarding how you feel about oversizing the image and (if you agree) how much accompanying text should remain, as the number of characters I have to play with will determine how I approach writing the blurb. ‑ Iridescent 14:25, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
(adding) Oh, and be prepared for an angry onslaught of everyone on the NHM payroll demanding that "Central Hall" be changed to "Hintze Hall". Nobody ever calls it that and "Central Hall" is undoubtedly the WP:COMMONNAME (Michael Hintze is such a controversial character, I suspect the "Hintze" name will go the way of Colston Hall and the Jimmy Savile Trust as soon as they can find a pretext), but it's in their sponsorship agreement that they need to call it "Hintze Hall" whenever it's mentioned. ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
I remember Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret. The oversized (170px) image and link seemed to work fine, as you said. I'm happy to let the image experts do something similar here, and you have plenty of time to adjust the blurb accordingly. FWIW, Britomart blurb was 815 characters inc spaces. Jimfbleak - talk to me? 15:39, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
Provided we can push the size up enough to make it visible, I'm inclined to go with the current lead image even though the aspect ratio is a bit awkward. The main distinguishing feature of the ceilings is the use of gold and silver leaf (remember, the NHM was built by creationists who in their view were building a shrine to showcase the Works of God, and the resemblance to religious iconography in the decor is quite intentional). The gilding is obvious in the full-ceiling photo, but the Banksia photo doesn't really capture the light reflecting from it, and consequently it just looks like routine botanical illustrations on a dull beige-yellow background. ‑ Iridescent 17:43, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
Take a look at "demo 2" and "demo 3". Would either of those work? Before we trim the text and go with an oversized image, I would like to see if one of these will work. --- C&C (Coffeeandcrumbs) 18:46, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
I think the point is that we go with a reduced-text/increased image size as an image describes the subject far better than any blurb could do. In cases such as this, every pixel counts. ——Serial# 19:01, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
Compare "demo 4" with "demo 3". I think demo 3 shows gilding better, especially when you click the images for a quick preview. --- C&C (Coffeeandcrumbs) 19:28, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
Of the four demos, I'd lean towards demo 4 provided we can shoehorn it into the space (trimming the blurb down to 700-ish words to compensate) without unbalancing the Main Page or creating too much whitespace on wide displays. We're ideally illustrating two different points; "this is made of gold" and "this is goddamn huge", and cropping loses the latter.
(Anything based on the assumption that readers will "click the images for a quick preview" is irrelevant in any context, be it the main page or the layout of individual articles, which is why I could never get as upset as others did about the MediaViewer debacle. While clicking on images is second nature to editors, most readers have no idea it's even possible, and I doubt one reader in ten thousand would ever think to click on an image to expand it. Main Page gets about 5,000,000 unique visitors per day. These are the click-through figures for the last week's worth of TFA images, and they included some ornate and striking images that one would expect to draw more reader attention than usual.)
Under normal circumstances, we'd rustle up an alternative photo that was aligned left-right rather than up-down, but in this instance we're constrained by the dead blue whale that now obscures the view of the ceiling from ground level. Unless we're going to crop the skylights out of this one—which I'm reluctant to, as the lighting is quite gloomy and dark—this is pretty much what we have to work with. ‑ Iridescent 20:37, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
That works for me. I'll give it a few days in case anyone else has any thoughts or credible objections, after which I'll set about writing a reduced blurb to fit. ‑ Iridescent 2 20:37, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
@Dank, Coffeeandcrumbs, does that work? That brings it down to 767 characters but crams in the most important aspects (designed by Waterhouse, botanical theme, despite looking random everything depicted is there for a reason, lots of gilding, dead whale). In an ideal world the blurb would mention the religious angle as well—the essential theme of understanding the bizarre architecture of the NHM is that Owen and Waterhouse genuinely believed that by understanding the works of God taxonomy was a branch of theology and as such expressly designed the building as a religious institution—but I'd sooner sacrifice text for the sake of pushing the image as large as possible. ‑ Iridescent 07:02, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
Perhaps one could discuss both halls at once rather than in two sentences, and mention the religious aspect instead? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:58, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
North Hall ceiling
I intentionally relegated the North Hall and the balconies, in both the article and the blurb; the Central Hall ceiling is very much the main event. (The balconies, I've omitted from the blurb altogether.) I can't think of an obvious way to have both Central and North ceilings in a single sentence unless it's going to be one of those huge run-ons that makes Sandy cry; although they form a pair, they're very different. As a stand-alone artefact in its own right, the North Hall ceiling is fairly uninteresting, and wouldn't look out of place in the ticket office of a suburban railway station. The North Hall's significance is as a counterpoint to the main golden canopy and in the fact that it demonstrates that from the start, contrary to popular belief about the values of Victorian England, the NMH's designers were intentionally relegating coverage of the British Isles to a small back-room and genuinely trying with the main museum to give equal prominence to the whole world, albeit with particular focus on those topics of interest to a British audience. ‑ Iridescent 09:20, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
Thing is that this sort of information doesn't peek out in the current version either. All what it speaks of are two halls, the numbers of panels and what they show. Condensing that down wouldn't lose much. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:55, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
Some slight tweaking. I know it isn't riveting, but it isn't a particularly engaging topic. On reflection I've left out the religious aspect from the blurb, as it's too complex to include without overwhelming the blurb. ‑ Iridescent 20:09, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for the article! "This is more interesting than it sounds, and takes in everything from the invention of chocolate milk, to the Boston Tea Party, to the religious significance of olives in the Church of England. The two botanical ceilings of London's Natural History Museum are one of the unheralded treasures of 19th-century art. They're also very hard to describe, let alone illustrate; the nature of their design means that there's no point from which the entire extent of the main ceiling is visible at once, their use of reflective materials mean they (intentionally) appear different from different angles and in different lighting, and they're too high off the ground and too fragile to photograph in detail without the use of specialist climbing robots. (Not to mention that from most vantage points, they're obscured by the skeleton of a dead blue whale.) To add to this, the records of its design and construction are lost, so we're not entirely sure how they were created and what everything depicted is actually supposed to represent. The Natural History Museum spent most of the 20th century loathed by architectural historians, so there hasn't been as much written about the ceilings as you might expect, but over the last 20 years or so they've started to get the attention they deserve. As far as I am aware, this article summarises everything of significance that's been written about them."!
Thank you also for the great and short comment on my talk: "... all that arguing about infoboxes is never going to end well for anyone". How true, and how can it be achieved? All constructive ideas welcome!
30 July is the day I remember a great person whose dream was building bridges, - we once visited the pictured one (top of my talk) that day. Nice to look up on this day to the ceilings and the bridge and the thistles that were even taller when I was a little girl. In order to stop talking about infoboxes we need to talk about them a bit, sorry for that. What I see is articles with infoboxes growing like thistles, and articles without like orchids, needing extra care, gardening, protection. I have worked on many biographies recently, and seen few problems, only two this year, one last year. It would be great to close that sad chapter.
Dratted Apollo 11, it means this ultra-niche article on the 19th-century Arts & Crafts Movement is only the second-most-viewed TFA of the month… (It's still as true as it ever was that arguing about infoboxes is never going to end well for anyone, but for what it's worth, in my opinion this particular article is a canonical example of an page that refutes "every article would be improved by an infobox". Not only is it more important to make the lead image as large as possible to illustrate detail instead of constraining it to a small infobox image, but almost every potential infobox parameter—even those as simple as "dimensions" and "creator"—is ambiguous, needs explanation in text, and would be misleading if stated as fact as a data point.) I'll have a look when I get the chance at Wikipedia:Featured topic candidates/Operas by Claudio Monteverdi/archive1, although it looks like a done deal by now; as I understand it FTC is a straightforward "is everything that ought to be here listed, and has everything listed undergone a independent review?" exercise, rather than something that needs significant reviewer input. ‑ Iridescent 12:28, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, and I agree, and not all "my" articles have an infobox, nor should have. Monteverdi's operas, for example. On my first edit day (11), I reflected (see my talk) the many who ever helped me, and thank them all. Some are banned, blocked, gone. Some don't speak to me. Some think I am an infobox warrior. I thank you all! But I admit I'd like to see the label infobox warrior go. My first mission in the infoboxes field was accomplished when Andy wasn't banned in 2013, my second mission when arbitration set me free in 2015, and my last mission when infobox opera was installed in project opera's guide lines (2018, I believe). I linked to biographies above, and while I don't see any reason not to show when and where a woman was born, died, and what she did, I'm not going to spend any more minutes of my life in discussions about that (some of which only say infobox yes or no, without saying how it should look. We had Mozart, this year ... What would Brian have said?) I advise everybody to stay away when they see such a futile waste of time. Life is too short. - Today's new article Herbert Leuniger, and I can't believe his uncle has no article yet. I hope someone beats me to creating that one ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:18, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't speak any but the most broken German so I won't touch Franz Leuninger, but (for obvious reasons) there are enough people here with an interest in the resistance to Hitler that someone will probably translate it.
Oddly, when Ceilings was on the main page it also caused a spike in pageviews for Gilding so high that it beat the views for most of last months TFAs. I suppose at least it demonstrates that readers actually pay attention. ‑ Iridescent 06:31, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Great, - because readers' attention is what matters, much more than disputes about layout. I'll do my article of the day now, and have the other planned for in a few days if nobody else does. (There's a shorter version in French, and I already asked my greatest helper in that language.) One per day is what I usually stick to, will be two today, - no strict rulez ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:04, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Absolutely; "if I didn't know about this before would I find it interesting?" and "if the contents of this article were all I knew about the topic, would I have a good understanding of it?" should always be the main considerations, not complying with whatever arbitrary rule the permanently-angry mob at WT:MOS have made up. We have far too many people who may like to quote "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it", but don't appreciate what it actually means. ‑ Iridescent 15:09, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Monteverdi's operas now became a featured topic! ... exactly 10 years after both Brian and I were declared awesome ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:58, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Today, remember User talk:Fylbecatulous, - what an opening: "Talk page for Fylbecatulous ~ enchantment". It works for me. The hat note is as I'd like on my talk in case you'd get to know that I died. No candle please (mentioned before.) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:21, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
In a vignette of what's wrong with Wikimedia, the cat in File:Large Siamese cat tosses a mouse.jpg is very clearly not a Siamese cat and the website from which it was taken correctly categorizes the cat as a Ragdoll, but because when a Commons editor copied the file they added their own inaccurate filename and description, that photo is now used to illustrate "Siamese cat" in assorted languages. Owing to that, it's now become a stock photo, and is used to illustrate "Siamese cat" in entirely respectable publications like Popular Science. That in turn means that we have a reliable source for the fact that Psycho is in fact a Siamese cat, Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth kicks in, and should we ever decide to write Psycho (cat), we're now supposed to give due weight to sources that claim he's a Siamese not a Ragdoll despite the only source for the former ultimately being a sloppy Commons uploader making a mistake.
This is citogenesis in action. It's trivial when we're talking about a cat, but is an example of just how easy it is to manipulate the deficiency in editorial oversight on Wikipedia and the near-complete absence of editorial oversight on Commons and Wikidata to rewrite reality. (Ends rant) ‑ Iridescent 12:33, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
I was hoping to avoid naming and shaming - it's nobody's fault as such, anyone has made errors at some point. The issue isn't who made the error, it's that the WMF ecosystem has systemic faults that make it very difficult to put the toothpaste back in the tube when errors are made. ‑ Iridescent 17:03, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Iridescent + @Johnbod: Thanks for pointing out the error. I am glad I get to learn this lesson over a cat pic and not something more serious. I was careless and presumed too much. To try to make things better, I documented this error at Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:14, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
I've put in a file rename request. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:03, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
I once found a biography from a semi-respectable publishing house that plagiarized uncited information from our article on John Paul I. I called them and they thought I was a crank. You now have uncited Wikipedia content word for word in a RS biography of a pope. Given, a pope no one really cares about, but still. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:59, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
I've spotted similar issues which I only picked up on because they used language I wrote or stock Wikipedia lead-sounding constructions. An automated system that could trace possible copyvios back to determine if citing Wikipedia has occurred would be really useful (certainly more useful than Earwig's detector, which I've never seen in normal use to be of any assistance besides highlighting extremely common phrases as plagiarism.) Der Wohltemperierte Fuchstalk 18:04, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
When an article uses an odd bit of phrasing, after a while you can often see it multiply across the internet as people either plagiarise Wikipedia or rewrite our articles but retain elements of our wordings. The awkward After being suspected of eating a toddler he was ejected from the hospital wording in Tarrare—my own paraphrase and intentionally worded to differ from any other article about him or translation from Mémoire sur la polyphagie I could find, none of which use the word "toddler"—has spread across the internet like Japanese knotweed ever since National Treasure Stephen Fry blatantly plagiarised our article (from 00:18:07 onwards), to the extent that the phenomenon of people riffing off (and ripping off) this one obscure article was even the subject of an earnest article in New York magazine. (Just to put this in perspective, there are ten articles defined as "the very most important articles on Wikipedia". This year, this ultra-niche article has had more pageviews than five of that ten, and all those pageviews are coming from people copying from or referencing this article and referring people back to us.) Thus, any mistake I may have made is now well and truly in the wild, and is replicating to the extent that whatever I said will now be the accepted version of events even if none of the sources actually back it up. ‑ Iridescent 06:53, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
I recently published an article about a pre-Internet version of citogenesis, in which an incorrect statement in one source became disseminated and over the years became common knowledge, until someone questioned the evidence and took a closer look. The difference is that in that case the misinformation took two decades to spread, whereas an on-wiki error can propagate in an hour and a half.... Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 17:04, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I hope you mentioned Stephen Jay Gould's spirited demolition of the idea that Eohippus was "about the size of a fox terrier", which until then had been going strong for about 150 years, predating the emergence of the modern breeds, which apparently aren't even the right sizes. Johnbod (talk) 17:12, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I didn't mention it in that article, which was about Sidney Paget, but I remember Gould's essay. The Paget example is something of a converse of the one Iridescent identified above, in that the false claim originated off-wiki and was spread via a Wikipedia article, rather than the other way around. At some point I knew the claim on Wikipedia was wrong, but since it appeared in Reliable Sources I might have been scolded if I'd said so and deleted it; I had to wait until I published a refutation elsewhere and then see if anyone would find the refutation convincing enough to edit our article. (I'm in the process now of doing the same now with the quotation attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes in Fer-de-Lance.) Another good example, for fans of the U.S. Supreme Court and/or baseball, is here. The original models for this sort of thing, at least for me, are The Dictionary of Misinformation and its sequel, which I read at a formative age, and later the "Tracers" that Bill James used to run in the Baseball Abstract. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 17:28, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
@Johnbod: Your mention of Gould's "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone" sent me down a rabbit hole, and I hope you or someone else who actually has a science education can help sort it out. Our Eohippus article is woefully short on description (as an IP complained on the talk page years ago). It asserts eohippus stood 12" tall at the shoulder, but the reference for that doesn't seem very scholarly, even though it's published by a university. It also asserts that that makes the fox terrier a good comparison, at 13" tall at the shoulder, but the source we cite says 15", and so does our article on the breed. I know that dog breed articles are notoriously subject to tinkering with size numbers, and that competing breed websites can disagree, but I also read your comment above as Gould having debunked the comparison, and as you mention, fox terriers have like many breeds changed shape over the last century or so, so I did my best to find the essay online; we don't have a copy of Bully for Brontosaurus and the library still has only kerbside pickup. I couldn't find it, and instead I found conflicting interpretations of what he wrote, including some saying eohippus was twice as large as a fox terrier. (As an aside, this provides me with another example of why I dislike the "Bloggs 2024" style of referencing; not only did I have to chase around Google Books to verify which assertion went with which Gould essay in some cases, but it originally appeared in Natural History or something, in 1988, and the book was apparently published in different years in the UK and the US, or immediately reprinted, or something, so it's "Gould 1988" and also "Gould 1991" and "Gould 1992". I don't have WorldCat in my head, and this is comparatively simple compared to the publication history of some works I frequently have to cite.) Can anybody look up what he actually wrote? I think the reader would be better served by an article section headed Description, covering the number of toes as well as the height and mentioning Gould's point there, rather than just Discovery and Stephen Jay Gould comments, but I clearly can't do that, I can't even find out the truth of that detail, and who knows what's been published since on the actual animal. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:16, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
Ah! Sorry about that. I wrote from memory, then looked at our Eohippus later. As you say it doesn't accord with my memory very well in detail. I thought Gould picked up the comparison from a rather earlier date, for one thing. I've got the book but currently in a box somewhere - I've just scanned my shelves & can't see any of the Goulds I've got. If & when it surfaces, I'll check it out. Maybe someone will beat me to it. Johnbod (talk) 13:05, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
I've dug Gould's essay out after not reading it for decades. He actually makes a more subtle point, that the original comparison in early papers was "the size of a fox" and that it appears "fox terrier" supplanted it because it resembles the reconstructed Eohippus/Hyracotherium in shape as well as in size, and that although it's an obscure reference today it would have been intimately familiar to the British scientists who wrote the original textbooks since they were all part of the huntin'-shootin'-fishin' set and would all have had regular dealings with fox terriers. He says nothing about the comparison being inaccurate, nor anything about the comparison losing accuracy because the species has subsequently changed in size. (That wouldn't make sense; fox terriers are a hunting breed bred to go down holes. By design, they need to be the same size as a fox, since they need to be small enough to fit into the fox's earth but large enough to stand their ground if the fox fights back.) Gould does end with an observation that the "fox terrier" comparison may be erroneous, but because recent-as-of-1988 research suggested that Eohippus may have been larger than previously thought, not that the size of fox terriers had changed. His point isn't that the fox terrier comparison is an error that's been allowed to propagate, but that it's proof that texts are copying from each other and thus that it's a mechanism by which an error could propagate.
As with everything Gould wrote in his This View of Life column, if he's not talking about his specialties of evolutionary theory and molluscs take everything he says with an extreme pinch of salt. He was woefully prone to spouting nonsense (in one This View of Life Gould claimed Isambard Kingdom Brunel* was a forgotten figure who had "slipped so far from public memory" that few were even aware was a person, not a placename), and he had such a cavalier attitude to referencing that an entire cottage industry has grown up in publishing based on identifying which of his claims were actually based on fact and which were his imagination or speculation. ‑ Iridescent 19:36, 14 August 2020 (UTC) *For any TPW who's genuinely not aware, Brunel is to engineering what Shakespeare is to literature, and has a decent claim to be themost famous figure in British history. In the (unscientific but reasonably reflective of popular opinion) 100 Greatest Britons poll he came a close second behind Winston Churchill, ahead of Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Darwin et al.
If anyone's still watching this
The fearless beacon of integrity and honesty that is the Daily Mail is including the NHM ceilings as part of their latest "the immigrants are coming to destroy our way of life" conspiracy theory. It will almost certainly not gain any traction since the Mail change the target of their Two Minutes Hate very quickly and it should be very obvious to even the most knuckle-dragging white supremacist that the NHM have no intention of removing "paintings of colonial exports such as cotton, tea and tobacco" from the ceiling, but Mail fake news pieces have a habit of being resurrected months or years after the event on social media. ‑ Iridescent 2 06:28, 3 October 2020 (UTC)
Ah those cunning foreigners, well known for being handy with some portable scaffolding they are. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:04, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
An IP just removed Hikaru Kobayashi's redirect to an article, I noticed it and expanded a little bit, then a new user (probably the same person) added some possibly copyrighted images and copyvios. I had already reverted the copvios twice, would like some help with what to do with the crufts. Corachow (talk) 14:29, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
Looking at their other contributions, it looks like this is a fan of the Royal Ballet trying to write biographies of their principal dancers, rather than a spammer or anything malicious. The subjects are obviously notable (ignore the previously-deleted article in the log, that was on a computer programmer of the same name), so I'd be reluctant to delete them if they're at all salvageable, although you might want to consider creating List of first soloists at the Royal Ballet and merging them into there rather than keeping a walled garden of stubs. I saw your mention on Gerda's talk of the lack of Japanese sources, but I don't consider that significant; given that she came to Europe as a child and spent her career there, it would be expected for coverage of her to be mostly in European sources. For someone like this, the sources will exist, but they'll probably mostly be in specialist ballet magazines and I suspect a lot of them will be in French. I don't know enough about ballet to make any useful edits; I'm fairly sure I remember that at some point Wikimedia UK had some kind of partnership with the Royal Ballet, so it might be worth asking them if they still have a Wikimedian In Residence or anyone similar who might be able to help. (Johnbod or RexxS will either know, or know who would know.) ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
No WiR for some time, I'm pretty sure. Notability shouldn't be too much of a problem, but it would be good if they released some pics, which I don't think they've ever done. RexxS may know more, but he's rather under the weather at present, though looking good on Zoom yesterday. Johnbod (talk) 17:46, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
I think the vast majority of principal dancers in the Royal Ballet are notable enough to have their own articles, but the main problem is its quality, and I'm slowly working on that. There are a few Royal Ballet first soloists (one rank lower than principals) with individual articles before I started editing Wikipedia, and some of them does seem notable enough for standalone articles (e.g. Melissa Hamilton, though I expanded it based on local newspapers) I'm considering making List of dancers of the Royal Ballet, but it will probably take forever. There is a train wreck called list of New York City Ballet dancers, and I must ask is there anyone familiar with the nearly a decade old hot mess regarding most New York City Baller related articles. I don't think there will be many French sources about Kobayashi since she spent most of her career in England, but I would expect some "Japanese dancer finding success abroad" stories from local media. I did find a few local sources about her organising a gala and I'll dig deeper for more. Corachow (talk) 18:38, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
If you haven't already, it might be worth contacting the Royal Ballet's (and the Royal Opera House's) press office. In light of current events they're simultaneously both unlikely to be busy at the moment and facing a catastrophic loss in income, and would probably happily bury you in press clippings if they thought it would potentially raise public interest. There are sometimes advantages in being able to haul out the 850 million unique visitors per month statistic. ‑ Iridescent 19:50, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
The Royal Opera House do allow researchers to access their archives ([3]) though I'm not sure what do they have, does working on Wikipedia articles count as research, and there's no way I'm going to London under the current circumstances. I'm also figuring how their image licensing works. Some deceased American choreographers' estates are very strict with copyrights. Corachow (talk) 23:40, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
WMUK and the Royal Opera House had a series of events in 2013/15 [was one that involved a very helpful ROH archivist]. As with most successful GLAM relationships, we had a person at the institution who was keen to help us. We held one event after I left WMUK, it was in the works before I was made redundant by WMUK, as I remember our contact there was about to move on. I don't know if there has been anything else happening since WMUK's retrenchments in 2015. ϢereSpielChequers 06:01, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
Iri-talk re-run please
Trying to find it in your archives to reference elsewhere, but at one point you had an excellent explanation as to why it looks like we have an anti-far-right bias but not an anti-left-wing one. Something about Maoists, Trotskyists, and the like thinking the system was rigged against them and not participating in it vs. QAnon, neo-Nazis, and general alt-right wanting the system to take them seriously. The result being we mainly get the latter and not the former so it looks like we only get rid of one brand of extremist crazy. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:34, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
I can't remember where it would have taken place—it could have been on almost anyone or anything's talk page. In addition to the above, we also need to take into consideration that in much of the world (and not just insignificant banana republics, but significant players like China, Venezuela, and even mature Western democracies like Cyprus and Germany) the ideology of the far left remains a part of mainstream political discourse to a much greater extent than the ideology of the far right has entered the mainstream under even the most right-wing governments. As such, we can't and shouldn't be treating communism purely as a fringe position, in the same way that we don't treat even the most obviously goofy major religions in the same way we treat crank new religious movements. When the most populous nation in the world is still putting Mao's portrait on its banknotes, it would be systemic bias not to give due weight to the fact that significant numbers of sensible people still take Marxism seriously, whereas even within the most hard-right sections of the Republican Party things like QAnon are still considered fringe cranks. (TL;DR summary: because the English Wikipedia core nations of the US, UK, Canada and Australia are all both politically quite far to the right in relative terms and culturally based in Christianity, any attempt to represent fairly global attitudes is by necessity going to appear to have a left-wing and anti-Christian bias.) ‑ Iridescent 06:03, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
Drmies might know; discussions about crazies often either take place on his talk, or involve him. ‑ Iridescent 13:19, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
I resemble that remark in the most strongliest of terms. Drmies (talk) 16:26, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
But this is interesting subject matter, isn't it. I agree that there is a watering-down of sorts on the one side, and I see that here in the US but also in Western Europe--the pendulum has swung to the right, meaning that the center has shifted, in that perception. The leftest editor I know of is Soman--that is, I assume he's leftist, from his love of the game--and they're just churning out one article after another to fill in the blank spots on Wikipedia; somebody ought to give them a medal for it. But I do not see any of the kind of widespread disruption and trolling that we see from what appear to be right-wing editors, and I think that Tony's paragraph here, whether it's partly his own and partly recollection or not, is pretty damn accurate. Drmies (talk) 16:38, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
For reasons already given I don't think we get anywhere near as many left-wing lunatics as right-wing lunatics, but we do occasionally get marauding gangs of left-wing crazies as well. Watchlist the biography of any public figure who's ever said anything remotely critical of Saint Jeremy of Corbyn, and you'll see enough Twitter-coordinated sock-packs to keep you busy for a good long time. (Talk:Emma Barnett is a fairly typical example.) The Canary, the de facto house journal of the leftist lunatic fringe, rants about Wikipedia just as much as the lunatic right does. I suspect the reason the leftist cranks don't attract as much notice as the rightist cranks is that while being the target of a left-wing Twitter mob is unpleasant for the target, there isn't usually the general "I think (insert group) must be exterminated" ranting (except on the subject of Jews, and the filters both automatic and human tend to prevent too much of that getting through), so unless one's directly involved the venom of left-wing ranting isn't typically as apparent as the venom of right-wing ranting at a casual glance. ‑ Iridescent 17:53, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
You at one point had a monologue I agreed with on the topic roughly along the lines I mentioned above (Drmies, I’m not nearly smart enough to come up with that myself), and I liked it so I adapted it as my own on a few lists. You make good points on NPOV as well. I think a distinction I would make is that if a Shining Path or equivalent type showed up, we’d likely show them the door as quickly as we’d show the guys claiming the Holocaust didn’t exist even if it was a good idea the door. There’s a difference between the Maoists occupying offices in Beijing and the ones doing firebombings. The latter, if they even bother engaging, have gone past the point of reasonable exchange of ideas to the point of violence IRL, so they’re exceptionally unlikely to be reasonable if they decided to register as User:ThePeopleWillSurroundTheCities or the like. The thing is, they’re too busy trying to blow up the system to engage with it, so we usually don’t have to block them since they’re not here. The aspiring Hitler’s of the world come here a few dozen a week, though, and at some point the far-right that’s newly emboldened post-2016 starts complaining to the mainstream right-wing press and eventually Wikipedia hates conservatives. TonyBallioni (talk) 06:41, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
Outlines?
If someone here could offer some insight: as someone who is relatively new to the site, I'm baffled by the purpose of outlines. I mean, what are they for, really? Sure I get the idea of having a central place for the related links of a topic, but they're rated as "list-class" and I can't imagine how one would ever become a featured list, in fact there are none that are (time for an "outline-class"?). Looking around at some of the page views they seem relatively low, an exception I found was the Outline of philosophy, getting ~5k page views per day. However, I suspect if the Philosophy article were in better shape, wouldn't it effectively be an "outline of philosophy..."? There are other things I wonder like how do readers even find them or why won't editors work on them? Also, if anyone recalls a community discussion about their use, I'd love to hear about it. Aza24 (talk) 04:22, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
Talk page watcher here. The attempt to try to create "hubs" of summarized information by topic is an age old one here on Wikipedia, with portals and books representing some of those attempts. WP:WPOUTLINE was one of those attempts, spearheaded by a single user, The Transhumanist. Originally it started off as making "Lists of basic topics," but eventually the whole tree was moved to its current form as "Outline of..." after MANY discussionsatthevillage pump (disclaimer: may not be an exhaustive list. I'm also pretty sure there may have been some AN discussions too). Iridescent might know more about how they've been perceived more recently, but my memory from back then is that they were controversial from the get-go. I think these outline articles survive today mainly through the sheer force of will of one individual. Actually, I think TT is still around these days, you could probably ask him for his side of the story. bibliomaniac15 06:20, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
Interesting... thanks for all the background. Looking at Outline of anarchism (a better developed outline) it really just looks like a dictionary and seems to just ignore WP:NAD... Aza24 (talk) 07:18, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
I endorse everything Bibliomaniac said above. Basically the "outline" pages are a relic of a single user back in earlier times when Wikipedia was a lot smaller and Wikipedia's notability criteria were a lot higher, and it genuinely was possible to talk about "indexing Wikipedia" with a straight face. AFAIK, as with their close cousin Portals, they're all largely moribund but kept on the grounds that they're not actively damaging and that after all the ill-feeling over whether to keep Portals, nobody wants a rerun. With some complicated topics it's useful to have a simple-to-read overview page like Introduction to viruses, but I honestly doubt whether anyone in Wikipedia's entire history has ever actually gone looking for an outline page. (Outline of philosophy gets a lot of hits because it has spam links from 610 mostly high-traffic pages, not because anyone's actually going looking for it. The talk page—generally a more reliable metric of whether readers are actually engaging with a page—gets so few pageviews that the software rounds its daily average to zero. The WMF does have a fancy tool that measures the time each reader spends on a page and whether or not they scroll, to assess whether people are actually reading pages or just skimming the lead and hitting 'back' as soon as they realize it's not what they're looking for, but AFAIK mere mortals aren't able to access it and you'd need to ask whatever Community Engagement is calling itself this week.) ‑ Iridescent 09:34, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
AWB edit to 2019–20 Coupe de France
Hi,
I came across this edit in my watchlist [4], and my immediate thought was to boldly revert, but I thought I'd query it first, especially as it was semi-automated and there might be a rule-set behind it that needs tweaking.
The text being changed here, "eighth round" to "eighth-round", is an ordinal eighth, not a fractional eighth. It's synonymous with "Round 8" rather than "1/8 round". There are literally thousands of mentions (in sports tournament articles) of ordinal rounds and I don't recall hyphenation being used anywhere else I've looked.
If you get a minute can you help me understand, please? Cheers, Gricehead (talk) 07:13, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
Hmmm. This isn't some arbitrary rule I've invented and trying to foist on Wikipedia, but a part of the default AWB fixes* which are usually based on policy rather than personal preference, but I'm not seeing anything relevant at either MOS:NUM or MOS:HYPHEN that explicitly states it as a rule. To me, "eighth-round match" is a situation where the hyphen is self-evidently correct—it distinguishes between a match that was part of the eighth round, rather than that there were multiple events called "round matches" and this was the eighth of them (something not that implausible given how many sporting events follow round-robin formats)—but that may be a regional WP:ENGVAR thing on my part. At the risk of igniting a fresh installment of the great Wikipedia pastime of heated arguments over extremely trivial things, I'll call the MOSNUM spirits from the vasty deep; @Greg L, Tony1, EEng, and SMcCandlish:. As with all these minor edits, I won't be remotely offended if you revert me. ‑ Iridescent 07:36, 14 October 2020 (UTC) *The relevant part of the regex gibberish is
if you care about such things. ‑ Iridescent 07:36, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
→“Extremely trivial”?? I was less busy back then. But I am quite busy lately and am inclined to substitute “extremely trivial” with “timely and rather important”. Greg L (talk) 01:30, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
This is an example of why the "semi-" in "semi-automated" is important. AWB actions need a lot of manual review. Here, the phrase should be hyphenated when it's a compound adjective ("an eighth-round victory"), but not when it's a noun phrase ("a victory in the eighth round"). "An eighth round victory" would indicate no. 8 in a series of victories that are round (as opposed to ... square or triangular ones?). Someone intimately familiar with a game/sport would not be confused, but those who are not might be, since sports jargon can be very thick and very different from game to game. E.g., the fact that round-robin tournament is a common format is, by itself, room for potential confusion, and various games provide for different kinds of win/lose scenarios with different terminology. The term "round" can also refer to a period within a game (a turn or inning), a period of multiple games (a frame or set), or a bracket level in a tournament or other competition series. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 08:34, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
A couple of points - (1) the rule in question is quite restrictive, it only matches the nouns which follow from the list above, i.e. decisions, game, knockouts etc. Even "victory" would not match. And (2) this is only activated within AWB if you check the "fix regex typos" box, and when you do that it explicitly warns you that there may be occasional false positives when you enable that option. So, as always, it's up to the editor using the tool to make sure the minor fixes all make sense. Anyway, the bottom line is that the change Iridescent made was indeed a correct and valid change, and the OP maybe needs to go and study up a bit on what constitutes a compound modifier, at MOS:HYPHEN. Cheers — Amakuru (talk) 09:36, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
Thanks everyone (I think) - one more question, referring to the original diff, as I don't have a brain for regex. Why was the "eighth round" in "the eighth-round games involving" selected for hyphenation, but not (in the previous paragraph visible in the diff) the "seventh round" in "the seventh round match was defined". Just curious. Cheers, Gricehead (talk) 15:45, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
The "seventh round" didn't change because "match" isn't on the list of nouns (decisions?|game|knockouts?|KOs?|newspaper\s+decisions?|technical\s+knockouts?|TKOs?) that causes the fix to activate. (I would assume its absence is down to round match boxes, but it could equally be that whoever wrote the current version of the regex just forgot to include it.) Had it been in the same paragraph as the change that was made, I'd have spotted it and changed it manually, but the AWB edit window only shows you the paragraph(s) in which changes are potentially being made rather than the whole article.
Under normal circumstances I wouldn't make a change this minor unless it was accompanying a significant fix, but I'm currently doing a run of "accept every legitimate suggestion, reject every false positive", to get a feel from the changes made/pages skipped ratio as to what proportion of "fixes" the AWB regex suggests are actually correct. (It's currently running at about 1⁄3 false positives.) My particular bugbear at present is whoever thought forced expanding of date ranges into text was a good idea, which is currently causing the software to make literally hundreds of obviously inappropriate suggestions like "2011–12 football season" → "2011 to 2012 football season". I know enough to know to skip these, but a keen new editor—particularly one who doesn't understand the nuances of English grammar and sporting jargon—could easily find themselves blocked for disruption just for trying to be helpful. ‑ Iridescent 18:48, 14 October 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, that regex pattern needs some work. While it's not magical and can't detect stuff by "part of speech", we should at least account for a lot more likely hits. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 02:32, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
Always decapitalizing the C in "the City" is another new addition that could happily go. Between the number of sports teams called "City" ("the City half-back scored twice"), the fact that it's British English for "financial sector" ("the City reacted badly to the news and all share imdices dropped sharply"), its popularity as part of proper names ("she worked for the City and County Dairy"), and the fact that the City is a city and county of England after which numerous things are named ("the City and South London Railway"), in the admittedly small initial batch of around 1500 pages I've checked thus far, I don't believe I've seen a single incidence of that rule triggering that's not a false positive.
If I were in charge of such things, I'd make all the capitalization, hyphenation and grammar rules separate from the spelling mistake "true typo fixes" and allow people to choose whether to load one or both sets; that way, people who aren't confident about their grasp of grammar wouldn't need to worry about being asked to make judgements on the use of en-dashes or how to capitalize "president macron met with president trump, president obama, british prime minister boris johnson, former prime minister theresa may and a group of us senators and british mps and lords". Needless to say, I'm not in charge of such things. ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
If they're not going to use their brain cells worrying about capitalization, then can we make them worry about the correct titles? Back when anyone cared about formal address, the US believed that it was only possible to have one president. Consequently, your example should say either "Senator Obama" or less formally, "the former president, Barack Obama". We don't get as many opportunities to make rule about titles as y'all do, so I'm inclined to cling to the little that we've got. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:09, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
That's technically correct, but (a) the notion of former presidents and VPs keeping their title for life in the US is so prevalent nowadays that it's hard even to say that it's now incorrect (this isn't somewhere like France where the style guides are guardians of the language; the purpose of an English-language style guide is to describe common usage for purposes of consistency, not dictate it, and there's a decent case to be made that when every outlet in the country is referring to "Vice President Biden" it's the duty of style guides to reflect the new reality), and (b) Wikipedia's rules on capitalization do have their own internal logic, but are utterly incomprehensible to normal people. Something like Julia Gillard is a former prime minister of Australia. She became Prime Minister of Australia in 2010, and ceased to be prime minister when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd replaced her in 2013. might be correct, but any reader is going to think it looks incorrect, and given how confusing it is even to humans, any software script trying to fix cases is going to have so many false positives as to be useless. You do know SMcCandlish, EEng and myself are all from the US? I think your "y'all" might be misdirected. Besides, "titles lapse the instant someone leaves office" is one thing that the 95% of the world that isn't the US handles fairly consistently; unless one were specifically writing historically about their time in office, nobody would ever call Dimitri Medvedev "President of Russia", Rowan Williams "Archbishop of Canterbury" or Juan Carlos "King of Spain". The only exception I can think of—although someone will no doubt point out another—is Pope Benedict XVI, and in that case the RCC were literally making up protocol on the fly.
The "they're not going to use their brain cells worrying about capitalization" isn't entirely fair. A sizeable number of Wikipedia's editors—including some very significant contributors—either don't have English as their first language, are from places like Singapore or India where written English doesn't always follow standard English grammar, have some form or another of dyslexia or a disability that makes it difficult to capitalize anything other than their software's autoformatting suggestions, or just don't understand that the Wikipedia Manual of Style doesn't reflect what they were taught in school. It's not uncommon to see "I know my spelling and formatting is going to be incorrect, anyone feel free to correct my grammar" disclaimers. ‑ Iridescent 15:33, 17 October 2020 (UTC)
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