MediaWiki talk:Revdelete-reason-dropdown

October 2009

My reason didn't fit in the edit summary - The removal of sections broke the form - there needs to be at least 1 section. Also, by keeping suppression reasons separate, this will indicate to admins that they should consider asking for suppression if they delete a revision for one of those reasons. No real opinion on the "other" suppression reasons, but its not like there's a limit to the number of things we can put on the list. Mr.Z-man 22:10, 19 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

RD4 removed

RD4 is "removed prior to oversight". An admin deleting under RD4 should not tag the item as such (see WP:REVDEL). Removed to avoid errors. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 14:29, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Plural

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"Violations of the biography of living persons policy" should be changed to "Violations of the biographies of living persons policy" — plural "biographies". 2001:18E8:2:1020:A5A9:6E82:BFCB:13A0 (talk) 16:02, 6 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Done — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 17:05, 6 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"Non-public identifying of personal information"

@Jc37: We can certainly argue about my labeling it a "typo", but the wording you just returned an item in the Oversight section to was, indeed, a good-faith error. It was added by JamesBWatson about a month ago, apparently based on what he thought made grammatical sense; unfortunately the wording he changed it to made a standard oversight tag that had been in use for years into something rather incomprehensible. The tag's phrasing is not intended to say "this edit is an identification of personal information [belonging to someone]", but "this information is either personal or identifying". "Personal" and "identifying" are categories of information that overlap but are not identical. It's not the end of the world if you insist on keeping the wrong version, I suppose, but it's a pretty glaring change to make/restore to something that's been standard for years and is in regular use by oversighters. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 01:33, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Just a note to say I undid this (before seeing this entry) for basically the same reasons. — foxj 01:37, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The use of "typo", indeed was why I reverted, since it really didn't look like a typo. And while I suppose use of the conjunction "or" can presume that the word "information" applies to both "personal" and "identifying", I think that that is unclear in this case. Can it be better worded then? - jc37 01:40, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. I agree with Jc37, that it is unclear. (Incidentally, I also wonder why User:Fluffernutter regards "Non-public identifying of personal information" as "incomprehensible". Its meaning seems clear to me, even if that meaning is different from what was originally intended.) To me, "Non-public identifying or personal information" really is incomprehensible. I don't even know how to parse the expression: is it intended to be read as "Non-public [[identifying] or [personal information]]" (i.e. it could be either "identifying" or "personal information", but in either case it is "non-public") or as "[Non-public identifying] or [personal information]" (i.e. it could be either "identifying" or "personal information", and if it's the former then it's also "non-public")? Since apparently "identifying" does not refer to the "personal information", as I thought it did, then what is happening to the "personal information"? If it is not being identified, something else must be happening to it. Fluffernutter and I evidently read the wording quite differently, because he or she appears to see "Non-public identifying or personal information" as OK, but to me it is a syntactically incoherent string of words, and I honestly honestly do not know what it is supposed to mean. The best guess I can come up with is that it is supposed to mean something like "Non-public identifying of a person, or revelation of personal information". I am also a little puzzled by the use of the word "non-public". Surely the whole point is that the identifying is public, whereas is should have been kept private. Would some wording such as "Public revelation of identity or personal information" be acceptable? That seems to me far clearer, if that is indeed what it is supposed to mean. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 14:02, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Jc37: @Fluffernutter:

Since I wrote the above, it has occurred to me that "identifying" is probably supposed to be an adjective, governing "information": i.e. "identifying or personal information" is supposed to mean "identifying information or personal information". That makes much better sense than my earlier attempts to read it. If that is what it is supposed to mean, then the fact that an intelligent and educated person who had studied the expression at length and racked his brains over what it could mean did not come up with the correct reading for so long is an unambiguous indication that the expression is unclear.

To try to clarify what it was originally supposed to mean, I have looked at the history of the page. The original wording was "Posting of non-public personal information", which was changed to "Non-public identifying or personal information" without, as far as I can see, any explanation for the change. The original wording seems to me to be absolutely fine, and in my opinion the best thing would be to revert to that original version. I don't see any need to treat "identifying information" and "personal information" as two different things: how can information that identifies someone be anything other than personal information? However, if anyone thinks that for some reason we do need to distinguish "identifying information" from "personal information", perhaps we could make it "Posting of non-public identifying or personal information", or "Revealing of non-public identifying or personal information". The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 14:06, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Jc37: @Fluffernutter: Having thought about it, I have gone ahead and added the words "Revealing of ..." Please revert and comment here if you disagree with that change. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 14:11, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

(bunch of ec's with James) Well, that wording has been standard in our tools for quite a while, and this is the first I've ever heard of someone having trouble understanding it, especially among those of us who use it, so I'm not sure it's really the problem you see it as. Whether the intended meaning is "information that is non-public and identifying, or information that is personal" or "information that is non-public and either identifying or personal", or even "information that is non-public, information that is identifying, and information that is personal", the "of" that was added doesn't fit. The oversight policy and the way the tool is actually used both align with "information that is non-public and either identifying or personal"; something meaning "this edit non-publicly identifies information" makes no sense, as the whole point of suppression is to take something public and make it hidden. As far as personal-versus-identifying, like I said, it's a set/subset thing: all identifying information is personal, but not all personal information is identifying (think of, for instance, "This person has erectile dysfunction" added to an article. Well, their medical status isn't identifying information, but it's sure as hell overly personal and well beyond what we'd host).

That all said, it's four words in an obscure menu and I'm not going to insist everything has to stay the same way forever if changing it has no real impact. I'm fine with HJ Mitchell's compromise from earlier ("non-public/identifying"), or James's newest change from today; even if I don't particularly think either is an improvement, neither does much harm if others feel strongly that they should be implemented. My only concern would be if changing it away from the long-term wording is going to mess with any kind of metric tracking that's done on oversight use, and I don't know who we'd ask about that. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 14:41, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) James, I strongly suggest you revert yourself, for several reasons. Most importantly, yours was the last in a chain of admin actions and reinstated a reversed action, so you're technically wheel-warring. Of lesser concern, it seems to make sense to just about everyone else (including me) and has been that way for years, and—not to put too fine-a-point on it—it's not really any of your (or my) business, because that particular criterion is only for use with suppression, a tool to which neither of us have access. Quite apart from all of that, does it really matter? Since that log summary is only used in a private log, you and I (never mind any member of the public) don't see it. At the end of the day, it's not necessary for summaries in private logs to conform to the same standards of prose as encyclopaedia articles. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:46, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Fluffernutter: Everything you say makes sense, but you seem to have not understood what my problem with understanding was. In your passage starting "Whether the intended meaning..." you give several interpretations, all of which take it for granted that both the parts joined by "or" refer to "information". My reading was that the word "or" joined two parts, one of which was "personal information", but the other was either "non-public identifying" or simply "identifying", not "identifying information". I may be in a tiny minority of people who would read it that way, but it is how I read it, and it seemed like total nonsense. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 15:05, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@HJ Mitchell: Well, I disagree with several of the things you say, but it's probably not important enough to be worth explaining them all. However, I don't see any wheel warring, for a couple of reasons, not least that my latest edit does not revert back to anything that existed before, unless it was in some edit that I have never looked at. Yes, I now see that the wording has a perfectly meaningful reading, and I fully accept that many people, such as yourself, read it the right way from the start, and saw no problem; however, it is equally possible to read it the wrong way, and surely avoiding the risk of doing so is a good thing. At the worst, does including the words "Revealing of ..." do any harm? As for self-reverting, I have already invited anyone at all who disagrees with the change to revert it, and I will leave it at that. When I made the original change, I never imagined it would lead to all this, and I certainly don't intend to spend yet more time on a matter which, as you rightly point out, is not that important anyway. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 15:05, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, so afaik, I was reverting what was claimed to be a typo, which didn't look like a typo to me (and which fluffernutter clarified above). Beyond that, I'm looking at a page full of rather experienced editors who I would presume are definitely clueful, debating the clarity of two sentence fragments. So while I keep our spot warm at WP:LAME, would someone explain the importance or each over the other? Thank you : ) - jc37 03:55, 23 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed edit

I'd like to change the wording of RD1 from:

"Copyright violations"

to: "Violations of copyright policy"

I hope this is straightforward and noncontroversial.

In a nutshell, the issue is that these two terms are almost identical but not quite. There are some examples (notably, a long quote which might be legally acceptable but is longer than we'd like to permit, or a passage of text closely matching a source that might prevail in a court battle, but is closer than we feel comfortable accepting). When you add in the fact that virtually all of the editors making this conclusion are not lawyers, or at least not copyright lawyers, stating that something IS a copyright violation might be a legal conclusion but stating that it's a violation of copyright policy is a different kettle of fish.

Any objections?--S Philbrick (Talk) 21:00, 8 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Support as it makes clear that admins are not lawyers and what we are tasked with enforcing is the local copyright policy of the English Wikipedia. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:07, 8 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would also be beneficial to link to Wikipedia:Copyright violations in the summary. Perhaps Violations of [[Wikipedia:Copyright violations|copyright policy]] would do? —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 21:16, 8 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Please do ~ Amory (u • t • c) 21:47, 8 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed change to RD2 (Serious BLP violations)

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Would you please change revision deletion criteria number 2 (Serious BLP violations) to "serious violations of the biographies of living persons policy". People don't know what "BLP" stands for in Wikipedia. 70.138.211.34 (talk) 22:39, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would expect the vast majority of editors to know what BLP stands for. It's one of our highest profile policies. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:30, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not done the only people this page applies to are administrators, and if they don't know what a "BLP" is we have a much bigger problem! — xaosflux ^Talk 12:56, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well, not really — this will be shown in the log entry, which is visible to all users, so it's visible and used by everyone to understand the history of a page. That being said, BLP is linked to WP:BLP, so I agree it's fine to leave it as is rather than clutter logs and dropdowns. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 20:16, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]