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More cemeteries

Just dropping over here to say firstly that I did see your comments above about the Memorial tablets article - many thanks for those, and I will get back to that eventually. Secondly, I wanted to pick your brains about London cemeteries (not the Big Seven, but the smaller ones). The one I visited the other day was South Ealing Cemetery (red-linking this; unsure what makes a cemetery notable). This was mostly to photograph the Cross of Sacrifice, though ironically there is no real place to use that photo and it was a horribly gloomy day anyway. What I did stumble across was the graves of a couple of Polish generals (Ealing having a big Polish community, during and after WW2). I managed to add the image to the Polish Wikipedia article here (pl:Henryk Piątkowski (generał)). The other one was pl:Kazimierz Wiśniowski. As far as I can make out, the article over there says he was buried in Gunnersbury Cemetery. Which is still roughly the right area of London, but not the same cemetery. Maybe I should find some Polish editors to help out... Finally, I noticed your user page linked to Yngvadottir's retirement/departure essay. If you are willing to say something about what was said there, would here be a good place? Massive amount said there, and lots of responses that don't seem to actually discuss anything about what was said in that essay. Carcharoth (talk) 00:44, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

My attitude towards notability is at odds with Wikipedia custom-and-practice. WP:ITSUSEFUL is listed as a "argument to avoid" in that essay people keep quoting as if it were holy writ, but to me it's the single most important criterion. There's no point wasting time writing and maintaining something in which nobody will ever be interested, and if a lot of people want to know about something than Wikipedia ought to host an article on it even if it doesn't strictly meet the arbitrary notability criteria. Thus, my rule of thumb for cemeteries would be "what is the likelihood that someone will look this up?"—is there anything architecturally significant, is someone famous buried there, is it near to another major landmark which will generate traffic, does it have a particularly interesting history… By this measure I would say South Ealing is automatically notable, by virtue of Polish people wanting to pay respect at the generals' graves, but whether it's worth the effort is another matter. (In practice, the notability criterion for London cemeteries seems to be "if anyone can be bothered to write about them", if Category:Cemeteries in London is any guide. Bizarrely, this doesn't appear to apply to the rest of the country—Category:Cemeteries in London has 50+ entries while Category:Cemeteries in Manchester‎ has only one entry and Category:Cemeteries in Newcastle doesn't even exist, despite the northerners being much active on Wikipedia than the southerners.)
It looks like en-wiki doesn't have an article on Kazimierz Wiśniowski, but does have one on his wife (I guess this author didn't get the memo from Jimbo about Wikipedia only caring about male achievements), which slso concurs that he's buried in South Ealing. I can't imagine it would be too hard to find a Polish-speaker able to fix the pl-wiki article—Piotrus springs to mind.
Sure, ask away about Yngvadottir's essay, about 90% of which I agree with—here is as good a place as any, since most people who'd be likely to chip in will still have it watchlisted. (WT:RETENTION would be the other obvious place, but from what I've seen of it despite the good intentions that page tends to be something of an echo chamber of people slapping themselves on the back over how caring and supportive they are, particularly since Dennis Brown left.) – iridescent 10:13, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
@Carcharoth: 1) Thanks for the ping. Fixed. Do you have a picture for his article? 2) Since Wikipedia:Notability (architecture) hasn't passed, some relevant guidelines are Wikipedia:Places of local interest and even better, Wikipedia:Notability_(geographic_features)#Buildings_and_objects. Over the years I have found myself more and more in the deletionist camp (due to uncovering ever larger layers of spam), but I am still very open for geographical objects, which are rarely spammish. For cemeteries, many (if not all) of them are of historical and cultural interest. Many have the status of the status of cultural heritage or national heritage, so if a refer can be found for that, it's totally fine to create an article. Of course GNG applies, so other sources are fine, too. I have created commons:Category:South Ealing Cemetery, as Commons can have categories for defined entities even if we doubt their notability. Unfortunately, this suggests it is not classified as a monument yet. However the "10.9 Statutory listed buildings and ancient monuments" (can't copy link for that file) lists "Two Chapels at South Ealing Cemetery, (197) Cemetery Lodge (includes the Boardroom), (199) South Lodge, and the cemetery boundary wall to the western boundary at Ealing Cemetery (70m) – (Grade 2)". I think a valid argument could be made that notability can be inherited by a building if some of its immovable architectural elements (walls, statues) are recognized as notable. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:13, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, Piotrus. A couple of thoughts:
  • (i) I've added two more photos (that someone else took) to the Commons category - those show the front and back of the two chapels at the main entrance. When I went at the weekend, they were still boarded up and in a state of some disrepair, as were some parts of the cemetery. Not as bad as some cemeteries I've been to, but I am guessing more affluent councils like Kensington and Chelsea who look after Gunnersbury Cemetery which is the other side of Gunnersbury Park from this cemetery keep that one in better condition. In terms of notability, there is not a huge amount, I agree, but sometimes you can find more in the earlier history - this one used to be called 'Ealing and Old Brentford'. THere is also stuff that can be said about the burial companies themselves.
  • (ii) You and Iridescent may (or may not) want to look at what was said (or claimed) on notability back in 2010 at Talk:List of cemeteries in London. See also List of cemeteries in England. Some things that need fixing that I don't have time to do properly right now: (a) remove the incorrect claim that Southern Cemetery, Manchester is the largest in the UK (see also this - not a reliable source, but interesting); (b) re-add the red links that were removed with this edit (one of those red links is now an article at Macclesfield Cemetery), and add blue links to Template:Cemeteries in England. Possibly follow up with the editor who incorrectly removed red links from the list and explain why red links are good.
  • (iii) For an idea of how to handle things within one article at a local level, see Cemeteries and crematoria in Brighton and Hove. The main author there is Hassocks5489, who may want to comment here, so I've pinged them. There is probably a WikiProject that might be able to help as well.
I think that's everything so far. Carcharoth (talk) 09:13, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Death comes to mind, through I don't know how active it is. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
WikiProject Death looks fairly moribund, if the talkpage is anything to go by. I personally would say that as regards cemeteries, the same argument applies as is used to justify Wikipedia's tiresome "every railway station needs to be a separate article" policy—since by definition, it's certain that any given cemetery will have received multiple independent non-trivial coverage ("Funeral of xxx to be held today"), even the smallest village churchyard can be presumed to meet WP:GNG even if one doesn't have the sources to hand. I don't really like the "everything needs to be a separate page" approach and think cemeteries are an obvious case where a single "Cemeteries in town/country" is more informative than a separate article on each one, since it allows readers to see the broader trends of different sites and methods of burial going in and out of fashion, and what impact they had.
I'd be reluctant to push "notability can be inherited by a building if some of its immovable architectural elements (walls, statues) are recognized as notable" too hard, as that opens the floodgate for an article on every street containing a building considered notable. Given the hassle it took to get The Roundway deleted, on a short residential street which has never had any building of the remotest significance on it (The eastern half of The Roundway is residential with a newsagent, a Chinese takeaway and a Snack Bar in a small parade at the junction with New Road. The western half of The Roundway is also residential with an off licence and an Indian Takeaway, almost opposite Risley Avenue Junior School.), I'd hate to open that particular floodgate, since it would set a precedent for "anything containing something notable is itself notable, and all the potentially notable elements need to be mentioned", and lead to the unwelcome return of pages that look like this.
Regarding Talk:List of cemeteries in London#What is notable?, I wouldn't pay the slightest attention to it. One user does not get to unilaterally invent a Wikipedia-wide notability policy, let alone on an obscure talkpage in which no other editor has ever participated. I'd argue that cemeteries are something which need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, since the situation varies so wildly geographically—a tiny Jewish cemetery in Eastern Europe, or a parish churchyard in Berlin Mitte could be highly notable by virtue of having survived intact to the present day even though it has no particular architectural significance or notable persons interred there, while a huge municipal cemetery in the US might not be particularly noteworthy since the US tends towards large out-of-town cemeteries so something enormous by European standards wouldn't be notable in context. By JHvW's criteria neither Postman's Park, Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, Cross Bones nor Cannock Chase German war cemetery would qualify as notable, and it's questionable whether even cemeteries of major significance like Piskaryovskoye would meet them without exercising his "special historical significance" get-out clause. (Even the huge 44,000-burial Indiantown Gap National Cemetery doesn't meet any of his criteria.)
On the subject of CWGC cemeteries, I've cleaned out the worst of the fluff at War Cemetery in Kohima (which I'm sure isn't the correct name), but a lot of work still needs to be done. The author is the same person who wrote London in the 1960s, of which roughly 50% consisted of wildly undue weight, fabricated sources and outright lies, as documented at Talk:London in the 1960s#Removed material, so I don't really want to go in all guns blazing in case he feels I'm victimising him.
(While the two of you are here, and on the subject of Ealing, Polish War Memorial could do with some serious attention. Thanks to its location on the M40 motorway between London and Birmingham, at the point where traffic jams tend to build up, it's possibly the best-known war memorial in the entire UK, since "tailbacks as far as the Polish War Memorial" is a phrase used almost every day on traffic reports.) – iridescent 17:10, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
There are similar problems with schools. I well remember the Polish War Memorial from my time in London for exactly the reason you say, repeatedly getting stuck in traffic there. Eric Corbett 18:28, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
Eric, while you're here, is my comment at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/The Sirens and Ulysses/archive1 regarding "likely" (in American English, "likely" is both an adjective ("it is likely to depict") and an adverb ("it likely depicts"), but in British English it's only an adjective.) actually correct? I felt fairly confident while saying it (and the CUP guide backs me up), but am starting to doubt myself. – iridescent 18:52, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
I consider "likely" in that context to be an Americanism, as I'd say "probably". The argument about "likely" being only an adjective in Br English has some merit, but I wouldn't invest in it. Eric Corbett 20:03, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
Certainly an Americanism in my book, though like many of these it may be getting a foothold among British youf. 22:11, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
I'll leave some comments on cemetery-related articles here in a day or two, per Carcharoth's invitation. Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 19:08, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, Hassocks (er, that's a place name, isn't it? I'm sure I've been there at least once.). Oh, I see! I'm going to try and work out which cemetery we don't have an article on, which might be easiest to write about. Quite a few to choose from... (probably not South Ealing, as it turns out). As for the best-known war memorial in the UK (a comment by Iridescent somewhere up above), sure that is The Cenotaph, Whitehall? Carcharoth (talk) 23:54, 17 March 2015 (UTC) Hmm. It's not as easy as I thought to find a clearly notable cemetery that doesn't already have an article. And I got distracted by an article on a site about derelict sites in London... Anyway, anyone here have any ideas for cemeteries that should have articles? Carcharoth (talk) 00:38, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
I'll see your Cenotaph, and raise you Trafalgar Square and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. I'd still be prepared to bet a reasonable amount that the average Brit hears/reads the words "Polish War Memorial" far more often than they hear or read the word "Cenotaph", particularly if they live in the south.
The most obviously significant English cemeteries Wikipedia doesn't currently have an article on that spring to mind are (on a quick think):
I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly in the north (my knowledge tends to get hazy once you're past Milton Keynes). If you're going to take "includes elements considered of architectural or historic significance" as a criterion for notability, then just searching "tomb", "grave", "gravestone", "tombstone" and "burial" on Images of England brings up 9912, 659, 170, 209 and 402 hits respectively, although obviously some of them will be within churches or multiple hits on the same graveyard. (Doing it through the listed buildings register brings up lower figures, but still enough to keep anyone busy for months cataloguing them.) The Anglican and Catholic tradition of grave reuse makes JHvW's proposed "five notable burials" criterion doubtful (if the grave no longer exists, does it still count as a notable burial?), but if you accept it as "five notable people were buried there" than you could make a case for at least 50% of the village burial grounds in Europe being notable, since over a thousand years virtually every village will have seen five people who are "notable" by Wikipedia standards, even if their articles haven't yet been written. (I could create, and justify the existence of, a separate page on the tiny graveyard of St. Mary's Church, Chesham in a matter of minutes if I didn't feel it would be a disservice to the reader.) – iridescent 18:04, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: Any chance for the image for pl:Kazimierz Wiśniowski? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:36, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, Piotrus, I've now uploaded the image. See File:Grave_of_Kazimierz_Wisniowski_and_Halina_Szymanska.JPG. I put it on her article, but will leave you to put it in the Polish Wikipedia articles. Carcharoth (talk) 01:55, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

Some thoughts from me, on cemeteries and more generally.
  • One of my main interests here is improving the general, overall coverage of particular geographic areas (let's use Brighton and Hove as an example, since that's where I do most of my work.) On that basis I am an advocate of what you might call the topic-based approach: rather than lots of little, stubby articles which could flirt with AfD territory, I concentrate on writing comprehensive articles which cover all aspects of a topic area. (Hence I would eventually like to write e.g. "Cinemas in B&H", "Theatres in B&H", "Breweries in B&H", "Economy of B&H", "Housing in B&H" etc. etc.) So in Cemeteries and crematoria in Brighton and Hove, for example, I researched and wrote about all of them, even the small and obscure ones which only merited a few lines, and covered related stuff like church burial grounds. I was helped greatly by the fact that a decent-sized booklet had been published on the subject (Dale 1991: see the bibliography), which I was able to cite frequently. I would say only two of the cemeteries would genuinely be notable enough for a standalone article (Extra Mural and Woodvale), and it just made a lot more sense to combine what I would have written in those standalone articles with material covering everything else in the city. In summary, my suggested approach to articles on cemeteries (especially in urban areas) would be: consider writing a general article covering a whole city/local government district/London borough, and write about every cem/crem in as much detail as you can based on the available sources. On that basis, something like South Ealing Cemetery would be on the borderline of standalone article or major section in Cemeteries in the London Borough of Ealing.
  • Regarding historic tombs etc. (particularly those with English Heritage listings): my thoughts would be to include everything in a "Memorials" section in the relevant church article, as demonstrated at e.g. All Saints Church, Patcham. That obviously requires the church article to be written as well, but virtually all churches with notable monuments, memorials etc. would be notable enough in their own right for a pretty decent article to be written.
  • For places too small to write a standalone article either for Cems/Crems or for an individual cemetery, a possible alternative would be to incorporate it into a "Public services in ..." article, as I have done with Public services in Crawley and Public services in Worthing. Such dry topics may struggle to pass the interesting-ness test mentioned by Iridescent above ("...There's no point wasting time writing and maintaining something in which nobody will ever be interested"), admittedly!
  • However ... if there is just one notable/interesting cemetery in a place, and no others to write about (so that a "Cemeteries and crematoria article in..." couldn't be written), especially if it has memorials/tombs/burials etc. of heritage interest and/or notable people, I would personally be inclined to write a standalone article.

Not sure if that lengthy stream of consciousness helps very much; hopefully a few interesting thoughts are buried in there! I will add more if I think of anything pertinent. Will keep this page on my watchlist. PS Good to see Brill on the Main Page today! Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 13:24, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

I think we're broadly on the same page—my comments regarding "every listed building" are a discussion of where the limits of the envelope currently are, rather than where I think they should be. I think Wikipedia ought to be covering everything which anyone might find of interest, but find the insistence of separate articles for everything to be actively damaging. Brill railway station is actually a pretty good example of this—it (and its four friends) only exist because of WP:TRAINS's insistence that "every railway station which had a timetabled passenger service needs to be a separate article". As far as I'm concerned, these would be far more use to all concerned as part of a single page in which people can compare and contrast them. (My proof-of-concept page for this approach to the Brill Tramway still exists at Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway.)
I agree that the place for burials in churchyards is in the article on the church (I didn't pick the example of St Mary's Church, Chesham out of thin air!). I can't think of any cemetery or burial ground that isn't going to be attached either to a place of worship, a local authority, a notable company or in very rare circumstances an employer, so the question of "where to put the mention of it?" should hopefully never arise.
Regarding doing it by local authority, it would probably work well in small and medium-sized towns, but I imagine it would fray when you get to the cathedral cities. Somewhere like Exeter or Norwich probably has well over 50 churches, each with their own burial ground, and each of which has enough notable features to justify a mention. (For a big cemetery like Highgate, Brookwood or Glasgow Necropolis, even List of notable burials in… articles would be among the longest pages on Wikipedia if they were done properly). – iridescent 18:50, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
Briefly (as it is late...), I was re-reading this, and was reminded by your claim about 'List of notable burials in...' articles that I had a number of years ago quoted this bit over at Talk:Burials and memorials in Westminster Abbey: "Over 3,000 people are buried in the Church and Cloisters and there are over 600 monuments and memorials." Do you think that is more or less than the scale of what you were thinking of with regards to the big cemeteries? Just curious as to what you think the ballpark figures would be? Actually doing an article like that 'properly' (as you put it) is not easy. I once took a crack at Poets' Corner (some of the discussions on the talk page might be of interest). Carcharoth (talk) 01:50, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
The ballpark figures would probably depend on how the list was formatted. Something like List of American film actresses or the existing Westminster Abbey article, where the entries are just a Wikilink and minimal information, could reasonably include a much greater number than something like List of tablets on the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice where each entry includes detail on the person, an image of the marker etc. Provided the list is split with subheads for ease of navigation, I would imagine the "reasonable length" limit would be around the 100kb mark, with the number of entries depending on the detail of the entries.
It's possible to go much longer—List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States is a browser-crashing 784kb, with List of United States counties and county equivalents and the ludicrous Opinion polling for the 2015 United Kingdom general election (which someone should really AFD—it's about as pure an example of WP:RAWDATA as I can imagine, and is three times larger than the equivalent Nationwide opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2012) coming in close behind. I personally would say that, once an article or list goes above that 100kb mark it ceases to be of much practical use, and should be split up unless there's a very good reason to keep it together. For cemeteries, the split would be fairly easy—just go by the Wikipedia parent categories of each burial, to result in List of scientists buried in Anytown Cemetery, List of soldiers buried in Anytown Cemetery, List of writers buried in Anytown Cemetery etc. It would probably be worth asking Tony1 what his thoughts on realistic maximum sizes would be, given that he's the person most likely to raise concerns about them.
This is wiki-heresy, but it may not be worth the effort to split the burials lists up, or even to create them. Very few of them get much attention—Westminster Abbey is something of an outlier as it's such a well-known building and gets Google traffic from "where is [insert king] buried?" searches, but something like Burials in Glasnevin Cemetery gets roughly half the monthly pageviews of the spectacularly obscure Whipping Tom[1], while Tarrare had as many visitors in the first two days of this month thsn List of people buried at Arlington National Cemetery—arguably the most notable cemetery of them all—had in the past 90 days. If the public interest is really this low, it would probably be more important to get the articles on the cemeteries themselves up to scratch, rather than worrying about the lists. Yes, I know I've always been a leading advocate of the idea that Wikipedia's mission is to highlight obscure topics rather than to duplicate Britannica on well-known ones, but equally there's no point spending the amount of time it would take to do justice to these lists if the readers aren't there. (In the particular case of Westminster Abbey, I'd be sorely tempted to just send people here rather than try to replicate the list. Since the Abbey's own records are by definition going to be more accurate than Wikipedia, and their website is optimised for searching in a way Mediawiki could never do, trying to replicate it seems doomed to end in failure.) – iridescent 15:54, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
This discussion of lists reminds me of List of Fellows of the Royal Society and how that is split up. Template:Fellows of the Royal Society shows how the list has been split up alphabetically (this came first, I think), and then for some reason it was 'decided' (there might have been no discussion) to do it by year as well. That doesn't seem that sensible to me, but I didn't object at the time. Oh, *groan*, look at List of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 1661. What the hell is Template:FRSyears for? Anyway, back to the Abbey. I think the monuments database you found there is new-ish. I don't remember there being anything like that 5 years ago. I'm glad they have done that (or at least started it). It dies say "The list is NOT COMPLETE at present, but further entries are always being added." I am extremely pleased to see they are including monument inscription transcripts and translations (from Latin). That will be very useful to add to the articles on the individuals. It is interesting that they have 90 listed for Poet's Corner. I bet they don't have the monuments that were moved to the triforium. Though come to think of it, they will list them under 'triforium' (hopefully. Hannah Pritchard was one. Ah, they do have her here. Very good. They definitely didn't have that four or five years ago. Excellent that they have done that. Wonder why they did it? I suppose I'd better not ask, as I might be told it was there all along and I'd missed it somehow... Carcharoth (talk) 18:41, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
If I had to guess, I'd say a certain wedding prompted a flood of interest in Westminster Abbey from people hitherto unfamiliar with its history, and they got fed up with answering "what am I looking at?" queries, so decided to write it down. For all I know, they copied you—I've certainly noticed recent additions to at least one major reference work looking startlingly similar to existing Wikipedia pages.
Bear in mind that my opinions on these things are not representative of anyone but myself, and there are certainly people who'd argue that there should be no such thing as an upper limit. It's not that long since List of people by name was a page people were sincerely arguing in favour of keeping, and we still have behemoths like List of Australian diarists of World War I and the trainwreck of over-referenced listcruft at List of Dutch inventions and discoveries, and nobody except me seems particularly keen to get rid of them. – iridescent 19:07, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
Um. Did you see my name in that discussion? :-) For an example, search for "obscure historical people". Seriously, if biographical articles were properly maintained in a database it would avoid pages like John Aiken (disambiguation) and George Butterworth (disambiguation) and Charles Hopkins. All the human name disambiguation pages. I am surprised no-one has tried to tackle that sort of thing. Probably because (according to Template:Hndis) there are over 46,000 such pages. But probably just as many missing. I forget what the number of biographical pages is now. Somewhere around 1.3 million. But I suspect that is an underestimate. I still see biographical pages with no talk pages and hence not tracked through something like Category:Biography articles by quality. Gah! Never get me started on biographical things! Carcharoth (talk) 21:14, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
"... by quality"—now you've hit one of my pet peeves, those "article quality" rating templates splayed all over the place. Almost my first, newbish substantial contributions to Wikipedia was the biographies of the federal judge in Puerto Rico under Woodrow Wilson (Peter J. Hamilton). A few months after I wrote it, a wikiproject came along and tagged my article "start class and low importance." Those were both accurate ratings, but it was fortunate that I was already invested in the project by that point. I've often wondered whether, if my initial contribution had been tagged "start class and low importance" the day I wrote it, I would have wanted to write any more. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:53, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Another break

Newyorkbrad, as you may know you have hit one of my pet peeves, the monumental "we've always done it this way" bureaucratic inertia that characterises Wikipedia. (Try to come up with a convincing argument other than "it's the way we've always done it" for the existence of almost any aspect of Wikipedia, from Arbcom to In The News to sidebar navboxes to the civility policy to barnstars. In what other environment would "Block per no climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man" or "obvious duck or at the very least meat" be considered a rational comment? In fact, in what environment other than Wikipedia's warped and un-self-critical culture would WP:No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man even exist?)

That article assessment scale is a by-product of a decade-old pet project of Jimmy Wales to create an offline version of Wikipedia for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so, and the Importance/Quality metric was used to determine which articles got the limited number of berths on the CD-ROM. Nowadays, the girl in Africa is far more likely to have high-speed mobile broadband than she is to have a computer, CD reader and reliable power source to run them, and the CD version of Wikipedia hasn't been published for years. However, "because we've always done it this way" Wikipedia persists with a grading scale which runs "F, G, B, C, Sta, Stu", with an additional grade between G and B only available to articles on hurricanes, computing and military history. You've been here so long it probably seems natural, but stop and think how messed up that must look to every outside observer, and there's no rational reason to keep doing it other than that understanding it gives some people a momentary buzz of "I understand this secret code".

As long as the mainpage remains in its current format[A] I can see grounds for keeping the FA and GA grades, as they determine eligibility for the main page.[B] I can also see grounds for keeping the "stub" classification as it theoretically draws attention to articles in need of expansion, although realistically I question the value of it. (How many people looking to write something actually go through Stub categories looking for something to write about?)

Those "importance" categories were necessary in the days of WP:1.0 when the WMF could talk seriously about "producing a print version of Wikipedia" and it was necessary to decide what was worthy of printing, but are pointless now. Quite aside from "importance" being completely subjective, importance in Wikipedia terms doesn't necessary equate to importance elsewhere, since the most important function of Wikipedia is collating information not easily available elsewhere—for Wikipedia, John Sherman Cooper is a more important article than John F. Kennedy.

I completely agree that "importance" tagging of brand new articles is a pointless and WP:BITEy exercise, except in cases where the article has obviously been moved out of a sandbox in a reasonable state of completion.[C] However, you're not going to change it, since these people have too much time and emotional energy invested in maintaining the status quo.[D] The obsession with tagging and categorization is a perfect storm caused by the interaction of a number of the more toxic aspects of Wikipedia's internal culture and the WMF's inept meddline, and Yngvadottir summed it up better than I ever could.

Carcharoth, I'm not sure how any system running on Mediawiki could avoid pages like John Aiken (disambiguation). No matter how they were categorised and filed, Wikipedia still needs to account for those cases where people type [[John Aiken]] into articles without thinking to check if there's more than one person by that name—the only viable alternative I can see is an unsightly This article is about Air Chief Marshall John Aiken. For the painter, see John Macdonald Aiken. For the hockey player, see John Aiken (ice hockey). For the cricketer, John Aiken (cricketer) and the like at the top of every page which is currently linked to by a disambiguation page, which doesn't seem to be any more user-friendly. – iridescent 17:03, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

  1. ^ Don't get me started on that. I would love it if the WMF configured the Main Page to make every feature opt-in and cookie-controlled, meaning people (including the general public, not just logged-in users) interested in DYK, TFA, OTD etc could choose to keep seeing them, while people could perma-hide those parts they aren't interested in. Not only would it give fields not currently represented on the MP—random articles, featured sounds, country- or topic-specific FAs—a chance to prove their worth, it would also drive home how little most readers care about some of Wikipedia's Cherished Institutions™. I would give reasonable odds that given a free choice, more than 50% of readers would opt for a Google-style main page and choose to hide every element other than a searchbar, and more than 90% (probably more like 99%) would choose to hide In The News and On This Day. Because it holds such exalted status in Wikipedia's internal MMORPG, it's easy to lose sight of how little the outside world cares about the content of the main page. Taking 1955 MacArthur Airport United Airlines crash (not to single it out for any reason, but just because it's a recent TFA on a reasonably interesting topic), it got 18,742 page views on its day in the sun. On the same day, the main page got 17,081,542 page views, meaning the highest profile link on Wikipedia's main page had a click-through rate of roughly one reader in a thousand. It would also finally put a stop to the interminable discussions at Wikipedia:Main page redesign proposals which have been going on without result for eight years now.
  2. ^ Although ideally not under those names. German Wikipedia's "Exzellenter Artikel" and "Lesenswerter Artikel" ("Excellent article" and "Worth-a-look article") seem much more accurate descriptions of what those categories are used for.
  3. ^ On the subject of articles which have been moved out of a sandbox in a reasonable state of completion, Template:Did you know nominations/Victorian painting could do with some attention.
  4. ^ If you ever want to use your position as the Cicero of the Wiki for something practical, take Wikipedia:Vital articles to MFD. I struggle to think of a more pointless exercise than trying to sift through the 6,925,879 articles on Wikipedia attempting to produce a definitive list of the 10,000 most important.
Uh,I may come back to this later, but you do know what happened to Cicero, right? :-) Carcharoth (talk) 23:08, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
When I make a snotty comparison, the comparator is generally carefully chosen. I assure you I'm aware of what happened to Cicero and why. Opinion divides roughly evenly nowadays between those who see him as one of the greatest defenders of rights and justice in history who was able to put into words the thoughts of the people and was willing to stand up to the most powerful of interests in the name of liberty, and those who seem him as an obnoxious reactionary whose efforts to defend an indefensible ruling oligarchy against the tide of reform ultimately led to the failure to introduce necessary reforms and the collapse of the very system he was trying to defend. – iridescent 23:25, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
My own opinion on Cicero is (c) - he was an obnoxious suck-up who inflated his own importance through his (admitedly great) writings and in the end dithered so much he couldn't decide what to do and ended up dead when no one really wanted to kill him, they just wanted him out of Rome. But I'm a cynic at the best of times...Ealdgyth - Talk 23:57, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
Those "importance" categories were, and sometimes still are, useful when there were enough people manning the decks of wikiprojects to do something about Top Importance/Low quality articles, but almost all wikiprojects are now so dead that the whole bannering bollocks is just a waste of time in most cases. The B to Start range covering most articles was always judged mainly on length anyway, without any sense that some things are well covered in a short length, especially when nobody knows that much about the subject, as in medieval biographies. Nobody takes "Vital Articles" at all seriously, not even at the Core Contest (& they have no influence over anything, speaking as one myself). Johnbod (talk) 23:27, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
Core Contest has no great influence as an institution, but has a lot of influence owing to who's involved. Regular editors see names like Cas and Coren, and assume "this must be important." You'd be surprised how many people take WP:VITAL seriously—a variant of that list is also used to generate the equally pointless List of Wikipedias by sample of articles, which some WMF people take far more seriously than it deserves.
In terms of wikiprojects, realistically almost all except MilHist are dead or dying. I still put the banners on because it's what the bot uses to update Article Alerts, which I know some people do still use – iridescent 10:20, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
The wish in your footnote "A", to hide parts of the main page when logged in, are easily achievable through editing your user style sheet. Someone at WP:VPT will help you to do so, I'm sure. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:44, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Pigsonthewing, that's not what I had in mind—it's not an issue for regular Wikipedia editors, since most will land straight on their watchlist from bookmarks and won't see the Main Page from one month to the next. What I'm envisaging is using cookies to allow readers (not just editors) to select what content does and doesn't appear on the main page for them, in the same way that newspaper websites can remember the fact that I'm not interested in rugby. By allowing people to choose what appears on their main page it would revitalise Portals, all of which are moribund; would revive things like Featured Sounds which were denied access to the main page for lack of space and subsequently withered and died; and would give a mechanism for counting how many people actually want to see the existing elements of the mainpage.
In particular I'm reasonably certain that, given the choice, very few readers actually want to see DYK; the fact that people are talking about 6400 pageviews as a success, given what a minuscule proportion of mainpage readers that actually is (1⁄3000 of mainpage visitors that day), is telling. Given the amount of effort that goes into producing, reviewing, verifying, formatting, and discussing DYK, that's a huge time sink. Allowing readers to choose whether they want to see it would give an idea as to whether that huge time sink is actually worthwhile. (Hiding elements via CSS isn't going to work; not only does it require readers to create an account and to edit a .js page, which most readers aren't going to feel comfortable, it won't be easy to count how many people are choosing to see or hide each element.) – iridescent 08:37, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Another break (missing articles)

With apologies to Iridescent for dumping a huge amount of text here, I'm putting down some thoughts I wrote on another website (Wikipediocracy). It was part of a discussion about missing articles, but might be better placed here, depending on whether there is anything sensible to say.

The initial premise, that there are a large number of articles yet to be written, I don't think anyone here will disagree with. But I've yet to see a systematic approach to demonstrating that. The usual approach tends to be to work from big lists in userspace or projectspace based on the contents of other encyclopedias or similar content.

It would easily be possible to come up with big lists all day long. But the other side of the coin is the number of articles that do exist. If you have been using Wikipedia for years (as many here have), then you will have noticed that red links do get filled in, but it is very difficult to get a feel for the rate at which they are being filled in and created (let alone whether the creations are mostly stubs or proper articles).

Can anyone here think of a way to systematically do that? You need to take a standard list and generate data such as year of creation [many surveys don't bother with this vital piece of information, for some reason] and what state the article was in at the time of the survey. One example I came across today is here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Science and academia/Science Hall of Fame

"This table is a comparison of Wikipedia articles on scientists against Science's January 2011 Science Hall of Fame (SHOF) list."

I came across that because science biographies is one of the areas I read about and edit on in Wikipedia. Deciding where to draw the line is not so easy though. In the past week, I was attempting to find information on a range of early 20th century geneticists and biologists and other scientists. What was interesting was that the list (maybe not completely random, but a fair sample) had about 34 people with articles already.

I then made a list of those 34. I've added the month and year of creation after the article name, and the current talk-page assessment status (plus a re-assessment if I disagree with that). Survey done in April 2015 (this seems to have morphed into a 'is Wikipedia improving' post):

One article from 2001:

Four articles from 2002:

Two articles from 2003:

Six articles from 2004:

Eleven articles from 2005:

Three articles from 2006:

No articles from 2007

Three articles from 2008:

One article from 2009:

No articles from 2010.

One article from 2011:

One article from 2012:

No articles from 2013.

One article from 2014:

No articles from 2015 (yet).

Four (4) stubs; twenty-two (22) starts; five (5) B-class; one (1) GA class; and two (2) FA class.

Ten (10) articles were tagged.

Conclusions from that are nothing new - lots of articles created early on in the history of Wikipedia, with the article creation slowing down but continuing ever since. Article assessments and tagging are often outdated, so are an unreliable guide unless combined with manual checking. Some articles have improved, most have not. Is Wikipedia improving? Probably, but could be better and could be improving faster. Simple tasks are being left undone. More effort and more focus needed.

There were 10 with no Wikipedia articles.

  • John Whittemore Gowan (1893-1967)
  • Alvin Nason (1919-1978)
  • Warren P. Spencer (1898-1969)
  • Benjamin Paul Sonnenblick (1909-1998)
  • Edward Laurens Mark (1847-1946)
  • Jack Schultz (1904-1971)
  • Andre Dreyfus (1897-1952)
  • Winthrop Osterhout (1871-1964)
  • Hans Gustav Emil Bauer (1904-1988)
  • Maurice Whittinghill (1909-1998)

The question is how many of these should have Wikipedia articles? [Why create these articles instead of improving the existing ones?] Some may be too obscure to have anything sensible written about them. My rule of thumb is to see whether the birth and death years are available, and if an obituary was written.

Some are a real struggle to unearth the information (for all the above, I only had the names and nothing else, sometimes just the surname and initials). For Whittinghill, you find a death notice buried deep in an online copy of the November/December 1998 copy of the Carolina Alumni Review. In the case of Nason, it was a real struggle, eventually finding this on some website called 'LibraryThing', which as best I can make out would be someone who owns a book by Nason (who published a number of standard biology textbooks) putting up some biographical details. From that, you get birth and death years, and a possible middle name of Abraham. That then led me to this index (Gale's Literary Index), which has an entry for Nason (and where an obituary was published). Warren Spencer, I eventually found by following a breadcrumb trail from Wooster College to his birth year (1898) to his obituary published 6 years after his death.

Of the above, two have an article in another language Wikipedia:

The only ones I am sure are clearly dead-cert notable are Winthrop Osterhout (biographical memoir published by the National Academy of Sciences) and Edward Laurens Mark (Hershey Professor of Anatomy and Director of the Zoological Laboratory at Harvard University). The others I am not sure about yet.

[Off-topic: The lack of an article about Edward Laurens Mark is quite ironic in the Wikipedia context, when you realise this guy is said to have invented what became known as the Harvard referencing system. See also parenthetical referencing.]

Anyway, if someone approached this systematically, you might be able to find out whether certain topics are (slowly) being filled in, and at what rate, and you might be able to identify areas that are neglected, but is this sort of analysis something that would point up a glaring deficiency in the current approach (or lack of approach)?

[Another question is who is creating these articles and why?]

One view is that in some cases it is not that the information has not been published, but that it is not yet widely available or online. It might seem that lots is available online, and much more is available than was 10 years or so ago, but there are still huge amounts of published information that the current crowd-sourced approach is not capable of picking up unless libraries and archives and journal/book publishers do more to put information online (but in some cases there is little incentive to do so, and in some cases much incentive not to). Carcharoth (talk) 01:06, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I now follow new Fellows of the Royal Society. When the 2015 crop is announced I'll look to see how many already have articles - all will be notable - also comparing genders. This was last year (and WMF blogpost). Fewer than 50% of the 2012 set have bios (still), though the photos we now get encouraged 100% of the 2014s to be done. The same should be done for the US National Academy. This study is also interesting. Johnbod (talk) 10:07, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure there is really any point trying to demonstrate that there are a large number of articles still to be written, since it's self-evidently true. Just pick any category where any reasonable person would concede that every entry in said group is considered noteworthy, and you'll find swathes of missing articles or one-line stubs. Even the most minor work by Vincent van Gogh is considered of great significance and is worth millions; van Gogh painted around 900 oil paintings and 1300 watercolours, but Paintings by Vincent van Gogh and its subcategories only contain around 200 entries. And when you get away from the A-list artists, visual arts coverage is far more spotty—The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate, which I wrote yesterday, is only the second article on a William Etty painting on the whole of Wikipedia. (The Manchester Art Gallery holds about 25,000 items, most if not all of which are independently notable in Wikipedia's "non-trivial coverage in more than one independent reliable source" terms; Category:Collection of Manchester Art Gallery contains 13 pages, and two of them were just written by me.) Wikipedia currently has 6,925,879 articles; the British Museum alone has a collection of eight million items. Even today there are pages on significant topics which are Featured Articles on other major wikipedias (wikipediae?) but still redlinks on en-wiki: fr:Symbolique du cheval/Symbolism of the horse, pt:Escultura etrusca/Etruscan sculpture, Beleg van Delfzijl/Seige of Delfzil, fi:Noitavainot Ruotsin valtakunnassa/Witch hunts in Sweden, es:Pintura barroca de España/Spanish Baroque painting, it:Storia di Torino/History of Turin, de:Hauptfriedhof Frankfurt/Frankfurt Cemetery are all in fields where en-wiki is typically fairly hyperactive.
If I had to draw up a mechanism for such an exercise, I'd find lists which can reasonably be assumed to be definitive (a list of artworks in a particular gallery, a list of players who have played for a particular sports team, a list of species in a particular family, a list of every named village in a particular county, and so on). Take a few of those from various countries, and compare them against Wikipedia to see how many of their entries have corresponding Wikipedia pages. You would need to discount pages under (say) 500 words, to avoid counting pseudoarticle placeholders like Yuri Luchko, Luxted and Brachinus turkestanicus. As I say, I'm not sure whether trying to quantify it would be a worthwhile exercise, since whatever Somey might say, Wikipedia is nowhere near close to filling in the redlinks and entering the maintenance phase. (As of 2011, there were 953,434 documented-and-catalogued animal species, 215,644 documented-and-catalogued plant species and 43,271 documented-and-catalogued fungal species. Just filling in the blanks on those alone would literally take a lifetime.)
As per Johnbod's & NYB's comments above, don't take article assessments very seriously. I can't remember which article it was, but I know there was at least one article which was assessed as "start class" two days before it passed FAC.
On "Simple tasks are being left undone. More effort and more focus needed.", this is one area where I think Somey got it right. As the number of articles rises but the number of editors doesn't, it becomes impossible to monitor everything. "With the article creation slowing down" is probably more an artifact of the particular field you're looking at, than a general Wikipedia trend. Don't believe everything Peter Damian tells you—the article growth rate has remained virtually constant since Wikipedia moved into the mainstream in 2005. (As I've said previously, I think Wikipedia as originally envisaged died some time between 2009 and 2011 and a lot of what appears to be activity is just extremely prolonged death throes as people fight over what shape Wikipedia 2.0 will take, but the processes do still go on and the new users do keep on joining.)
Regarding "who is creating these articles", that's no mystery—some people create long articles on things they're interested in, and a few people with a disproportionate influence go through lists creating stubs.
I agree regarding "it is not yet widely available or online" as an issue. Indeed, I always take links to Google Books in the bibliography as an immediate red flag, since something sourced to GBooks is only going to capture those sources Google hosts, which introduces an immediate systemic bias (for legal reasons, GBooks almost exclusively offers "free preview" only for works in American collections, and for recent publications is overwhelmingly dominated by American publishers). – iridescent 10:28, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
But really, a far bigger problem than "missing" articles is existing articles that are crap & haven't changed in 5+ years. For Visual art, this includes the Old Master bios still mainly EB1911 (almost all) or the almost always pathetic "Art of Fooland" articles. I've always been tempted to propose a ban on new articles for say 6 months, except for new MPs etc. Johnbod (talk)
I entirely agree. I don't think it would ever be accepted, but I would love it if Wikipedia stripped out all the text copied from the EB1911/EB1902, Catholic Encyclopedia etc. It was arguably necessary on "something's better than nothing" grounds in the early days, but is now an embarrassment. (The very fact that the phrase This article includes content derived from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1969–1978 exists on Wikipedia ought to serve as a badge of shame.) – iridescent 10:44, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
The stagnation was the main reason I reactivated the stub contest. Actually and the core contest for that matter...Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:30, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
@Johnbod, regarding the Old Masters, I suspect a lot of the issues are just that they appear such daunting tasks to take on. Etty has been the subject of four significant books, two of which are sitting on the table beside me and the other two of which are outdated hagiographies which can be discounted—if I had a free weekend, I could sit down and write a 10,000 word biography of him and be confident that it's not missing anything significant from the literature. If I were to decide to do something with the (atrocious) Jan Brueghel the Elder, which at present is virtually a verbatim cut-and-paste from EB1911, I'd need books in English, Dutch and French, and probably German and Italian as well, published over a span of 400 years and many of which will only be accessible in copyright libraries, to be confident I hadn't missed anything significant.
@Casliber, as I think I've said before I am very sceptical of the whole "core contest" concept, which seems to be as much an exercise in "established editors" bullying FAC reviewers into passing articles which don't meet WP:WIAFA as anything else. (One of the low points in Wikipedia's history is when Jesus passed at FAC. The idea that a Wikipedia article, no matter how well written, is "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature" on a topic this widely covered is ridiculous—for that to pass was a step right back to the days of "Brilliant Prose Candidates") To put the whole "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature" thing in context, the Bibliography of British Railway History as of 1998 listed 25,000 books on the history of British Rail alone—the widely covered core topics by definition can't meet WP:WIAFA as currently worded. – iridescent 12:27, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
Yeah I know, we've had this discussion before - I kept the prizes for the core contest trivial for that reason so that there wasn't too much angst. I think you're being too pessimistic about literature and that many people can sift and prioritise the most salient/core points. "Featured" does not mean "perfect".....anyway....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:44, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
Most of the medieval Welsh bishops need articles (Bishop of Bangor, Bishop of St David's, etc). As to the Scots bishops. And the Norman bishops (Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rouen - which is the archdiocese of the province - the suffragan's are much worse). And those are just the ones on which I have a chance in hell of actually getting to them - the rest of the French medieval bishops are on par with the Norman ones. I've never even looked at the German, Italian, or Scandinavian ones, I'm afraid I'd cry. And the English monasteries are in sad shape too - I looked for Woburn Abbey, which is a fairly important Cistercian house - but there is no separate article for the monastic house, it's subsumed in the article on the country house .... I could go on and on. And that's just the medieval ecclesiastical history articles. The redlinks in American Champion Older Dirt Male Horse are scary if you know anything about American racing history... or we still lack articles on a lot of early winners of the Belmont Stakes. Harness racing suffers worse - Messenger Stakes is mostly not even redlinked and Hambletonian Stakes is almost totally redlinked. Both of those are in the triple crown of harness racing (Messenger is for pacers, Hambletonian is for trotters). There is plenty to write - it's just not glamourous. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:48, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
Yes—anything that isn't high profile tends to fall by the wayside unless it happens to be someone's pet project. Pick any list from Category:Lists of Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom or Category:Lists of United States legislation—which are surely the easiest articles of all to write, as the source by definition will always be available, and explain the thinking leading up to each piece of legislation—and count the redlinks. – iridescent 14:11, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
I think the bigger problem isn't that the topics aren't glamorous, or even that some are more obscure - it's that many of these articles need print sources or sources otherwise not freely available online. A lot of people just don't have access to those sources. The Wikipedia Library efforts over the last few years are priceless for helping editors access these sources, but most of us are already operating at maximum WP-editing level. For editors like us, our lists of what to write are just getting longer and longer, rather than work getting shared across even more people. Karanacs (talk) 14:47, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I agree with that—that kind of goes with my comment above about Google Books. I'm spoiled by being a member of the City of Westminster's libraries which are arguably the best in the world, but the great majority of Wikipedia editors don't have access to reference libraries (or don't have the particular skills to find what they're looking for in a reference library). This puts them at the mercy of what they can find online, which in practice generally means Google Books, and GBooks is very biased in terms of which books make it onto their systems. – iridescent 14:11, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
I agree of course, & maybe we need to publicize the free resources online more. Few of them realize it, but for Old Masters & art generally anyone in the UK can access the Oxford/Grove Dictionary of Art via their library or Manchester Central. The full monty as outlined above is of course the ideal, but most OM bios could be improved a few 100% by simple rewrites using Grove, & eg the Metropolitan catalogue bios that are online (globally). The Met has over 1,000 titles fully online as PDFs (essentially anything out of print) which covers most things very well. Johnbod (talk) 21:00, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
I would actually support "ads" at the top of Wikipedia saying "Want to help? Free source (link) - help us write articles on X". Sure, we need money too to keep the servers running, but if we want volunteers we may have to ask for them (and point them in the right direction). Karanacs (talk) 21:04, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
Yes, and just shouting more loudly that you can edit, which, ten years after the big media blitz, many people are again unaware of. Johnbod (talk) 21:24, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
There's a grammatical fiction in considering "allowed to edit" to be synonymous with "can edit". Eric Corbett 21:42, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
Certainly, but "the encyclopedia any is theoretically capable of editing providing they comply with a set of arbitrary rules which aren't publicised anywhere" doesn't scan. Johnbod's main point stands—I'm always astonished as how many people think Wikipedia is written by an editorial panel somewhere, and that the "you can edit this page!" banners that appear when you read Wikipedia logged-off are just an invitation to apply for jobs at the WMF, along the lines of the "You could be driving this bus!" signs you see on the back of buses. – iridescent 15:06, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Break again: completeness

<outdent> On "Wikipedia is nowhere near close to filling in the redlinks and entering the maintenance phase", I agree, but some limited areas maybe should be in this fabled 'maintenance phase'. There should be a mechanism for that, a plan of some sort, but there isn't. Carcharoth (talk) 23:26, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

On "the widely covered core topics by definition can't meet WP:WIAFA as currently worded" - the example I am most familiar with there is what happened with the improvement and nomination of sea as a featured article. I went back there for the first time in a while, and found the following on the talk page: Talk:Sea#Lead sentence and Talk:Sea#Missing. No idea whether there was any follow up there. World War I is another example, a rather topical one given the centenary events. It is an interesting example also of a topic that is being revisited and having more written about it with thousands of books being published in the past few years and over the coming years. Where do you draw the line, though, and at what level of expertise? If someone better able to do such an article comes along (e.g. a retired professor in that subject area), should the article be redone or would effort be better directed elsewhere? Is Middle Ages a counter-example, or an excellent example of how to do this sort of thing? Carcharoth (talk) 23:26, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm confused with your last sentence - are you saying there are some issues you have with the Middle Ages? I'm not sure why the "or" is there... it implies (at least to me) that the two phrases are opposites - but the first phrase seems to be saying that Middle Ages is the opposite of sea and WWI, which you seem to be saying are deficient. So if MA is a counter-example of bad core topics (thus a good treatment), why use "or an excellent example of how to do this sort of thing?" as it's not really an "or" kinda thing. After working on MA (and then dealing with POV pushing sockpuppets for almost six months in 2014), I can't say I'm at all interested in ever working on anything large scale-topic wise again. It was hellish. The collaboration with some of the contributors was great (Johnbod did wonderfully with the art/architecture topics) but the aftermath is not much fun at all, as everyone seems to do nothing but snipe at your efforts... and nitpick. It's obviously gonig to be impossible to completely cover everything as well as possible in a summary article ... but I tried my best. In all honesty, dealing with MA and the sockpuppets has seriously damaged my interest in wikipedia and I've never really recovered it to the levels from before working on it and dealing with the sockpuppetry. Ealdgyth - Talk 23:58, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant it was a counter-example, an excellent example of how to do that sort of thing. I've struck the 'or' (I suspect I rewrote the sentence without re-reading it properly). I think you (and others) did an excellent job on that article. Having said that, the fact that you found it hellish means something. Probably that there wasn't enough support. Were the POV-pushing sockpuppets specifically pushing a POV at the Middle Ages article? I must have missed that. I saw some big argument about the lead image, but didn't follow much after that. Carcharoth (talk) 00:49, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
Bulgarians. Talk:Middle Ages/Archive 7, Talk:Middle Ages/Archive 8, and Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Sumatro/Archive. Basically early December 2013 to early June 2014 was spent on it. Ealdgyth - Talk 00:55, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
Those discussions (or more accurately, "beratings") about Bulgaria are actually quite a good example of what I mean by "the widely covered core topics by definition can't meet WP:WIAFA as currently worded". I have no doubt at all that the current article is a good and representative summary of what readers are looking for in an article entitled Middle Ages—lots on the clash-of-civilizations thing between the West, East and Islamic worlds, lots on the the developments in France, Germany and Italy that led to the creation of nation-states and modern Western European culture, and a quick skim-through of the Slavic nations, the Mongol advance and other things necessary to put Western Europe in context. However, unless you're planning to write a 200,000-word article, you have to omit or severely restrict things. (The word "France" appears in the article 40 times, the word "England" appears 30 times, the word "Hungary" appears five times, the word "Lithuania" appears once.) I completely agree with the balance you've chosen—the overwhelming majority of English-speaking readers are going to be primarily interested in the background to the events that shaped Western Europe (and its cultural siblings in Western European former colonies) which means lots on Charlemagne and his successors, little on the Mongols. However, it does mean some areas are of necessity skimmed-over or omitted altogether. (I'd be interested to know if the corresponding articles in Slavic languages tilt the balance the other way, and—for instance—cover the Uprising of Ivaylo and omit the Jacquerie.) As currently worded (it is a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature) it's literally impossible to meet WIAFA with an article on any topic too broad to cover in a single article, since you're by definition leaving something out.
To be absolutely clear, I do not support and have never supported the addition of the "thorough and representative" language to the FA criteria and certainly not the precriptivist change which removed "characterized by". As far as I'm concerned the current wording wilfully misrepresents what the seven people who supported it thought they were supporting, which from the context of the discussion was clearly an attempt to reduce the use of low-quality sources where more reliable alternatives exist. (Those seven supporters read like a "where are they now?" section—only two of them have edited Wikipedia in the last six months.) Virtually every article to have passed FAC since 2009 has passed only through the application of IAR when it comes to 1(c)—even on the most niche topics imaginable like Daniel Lambert or Wood Siding railway station, I'm well aware there are reliable sources in existence which haven't been used, and aspects of the topics which haven't been mentioned. When it comes to the likes of Sea, that crack becomes (IMO) too wide to paper over with IAR. (I was having thoughts along these lines while thinking about whether to finish off Victorian painting or leave it in its incomplete-but-adequate current state. If I add a paragraph apiece just on topics which would need to be covered for it to have any pretence at comprehensiveness, I estimate it would take the article to around the 100,000 character mark, and that's on a relatively minor topic in a single country.) – iridescent 20:59, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
I started a response to defend that sentence in the FA criteria and then realized while writing that you are mostly right. I think many of my niche articles do cover every single source I can find on the topic (he number of sources is limited). For my larger articles (like Texas Revolution), I interpret that phrase as "adequately covering the consensus of modern scholars on the topic and mentioning the most notable newish theories". If I meet that threshold, I'm satisfied with my article. Otherwise I'd be spinning endlessly in the research phase (and TX Rev took 7 years as it was). As a reviewer, for a niche topic I have to trust the nominator, and for the larger topics I might be able to identify a gap or two if it's something I've come across before, but it's more likely that I won't know enough to know what I don't know. Karanacs (talk) 21:50, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
There's a slight degree of hyperbole—on something like The Sirens and Ulysses it probably is reasonable to claim that every significant source is covered (at least I hope so, as I claimed it in the FAC)—but that's something of an edge case as it spent 150+ years hidden from view. For something like Jesus (or Barack Obama, or India, or Dinosaur, or any of the other FAs on widely-covered topics), 1(c) compliance becomes either becomes:
  1. An exercise in damned knowledge, where a reason has to be found as to why any source not used in the article doesn't qualify as part of "the relevant literature" (and we've all done this at times—you presumably remember my needling you over the lack of Spanish-language sources on TX Rev, and I certainly remember Carcharoth complaining about my not sufficiently covering memorials on OOTL&MR) See the contortions on the Jesus FAC to justify discounting as unreliable every author who didn't treat Jesus as a historical figure;
  2. An exercise in institutionalized IAR, where collective blind eyes are turned to the fact that the letter of the law is being disregarded.
Neither is particularly desirable; they both reinforce the stereotype (which has some basis in fact) that FAC is the habitat of a self-appointed elite who think that rules are only something that apply to lower mortals. But because we've done it this way for years, there hasn't been a single substantive change to WIAFA since the 2009 changes which brought in "it is a thorough and representative survey". (For more of my thoughts on the institutional failings of FA, see this very long 2008 thread, as my views on the matter haven't shifted substantially.) I'd be quite interested to hear what people with a solid background on Wikipedia but no history at FAC actually think of the process these days—I suspect that to most editors, let alone readers, WP:WIAFA looks as much like the catechism of a crackpot cult as Jimmy Wales's civility manifesto does to me. – iridescent 20:36, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, except for your observation on civilnation of course. There are some subjects on which hundreds if not thousands of sources have been written, and nobody, but nobody, ever has or will ever read them all. "Completeness" doesn't mean that every single source ever published has been consulted, it simply means that every significant point of view has been considered. I've occasionally been asked at FAC why I didn't make use of such-and-such a source. to which my usual response is because it doesn't add anything new. Eric Corbett 21:17, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
The point I'm trying (badly) to make is that 1(c) explicitly says "thorough", not "reasonable", and no longer has the "characterized by" get-out clause, so the FA criteria as currently worded are asking the authors to do the impossible. Even if you don't read it as "cover every source" and just as "cover every significant aspect of the topic", it still becomes impossible to do for high-level articles—writing on any big topic inevitably means making value judgements as to what gets kept and what gets excluded. (Why does Manchester mention the Buzzcocks and not Simply Red?) Since participants in FA reviews pretty much by definition ignore "thorough and representative", why do people insist on such strict enforcement of every other criterion? To be absolutely clear, I'm not advocating for strict enforcement of "thorough and representative", I'm advocating for it to be dropped. – iridescent 21:04, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Long aside about the Manchester article

On the subject of Manchester, I know Chetham's Library claims to be the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, but it's a doubtful claim sourced only to their own website, and shouldn't be allowed to stand in the lead of an FA without a proper source. The Bodleian Library, Kederminster Library and Francis Trigge Chained Library all predate Chetham's by decades. – iridescent 21:04, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
Not quite. Chetham's claims to be the "oldest free public reference library", not the oldest public library. Eric Corbett 22:08, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
Sure, but what Manchester says is "the oldest public library in the English-speaking world", which is a much more specific claim.

The Manchester article really needs a good wash and brush up at some point, there are some things in there which would make me fail it if it ever came up for review:

  • The words "bold" and "independent" don't appear in either of the sources for the claim that "[Manchester is] recognised as a bold, independently minded city";
  • I've never seen the nickname for people from Manchester written as "Manks", only as "Mancs", which would make sense given that it's an obvious contraction;
  • "The Peterloo Massacre … elevated Manchester's importance which eventually culminated in city status" sounds a very doubtful claim; surely if anything, it diminished the city by scaring off investors? What elevated the city's importance was a certain railway opening a decade later;
  • "linking the city to sea" is grammatically wristslappable, unless one's following a very archaic "the goods went to sea" form of words;
  • That the 1996 bombing is "the most financially expensive terrorist attack other than 9/11" is a questionable claim that needs a much better source than an 18-year-old Independent article—the Baltic Exchange bomb (no article? really?) and the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing both surpass it in terms of repair cost, and almost certainly had more impact in terms of indirect tourism costs as well;
  • "Manchester was the site of the world's first railway station" is flat-out untrue. MOSI likes to claim it, but Manchester Liverpool Road railway station isn't even the world's oldest surviving railway station (that would be Mount Clare in Baltimore), it's the oldest surviving purpose-built railway station on an inter-city line with scheduled passenger service. Britain's first railway station was Swansea The Mount railway station, opened in 1807.
  • "Manchester is regarded as the birthplace of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom" needs a big fat citation needed—Barbara Bodichon and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson are usually considered the creators of the suffrage movement, and were both active on the Women's Suffrage Committee before the Manchester Suffrage Committee even existed.
And that's just from the lead alone (this version, should it change). I do appreciate that an article like this is almost impossible to maintain, since everyone wants to say their piece. And yes, I do realise that the article which passed FAC has very little in common with what exists today – iridescent 16:17, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
I agree with you, it's pretty much impossible to maintain without getting into loads of fights, which obviously I can no longer afford to do. Eric Corbett 17:08, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
The more I think of it (admittedly, I don't think of it that much) the more bizarre that "Manchester is recognised as a bold, independently minded city" seems. Quite aside from the fact I imagine every city's occupants like to think of their city as "bold and independently minded", I can say with some degree of certainty that if I stopped people at random and asked "what characteristics do you most associate with Manchester?", "bold and independently minded" wouldn't be top of the list even if I were doing said questioning in the middle of Piccadilly Gardens. – iridescent 20:37, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Another arbitrary break—stubs and BLPs

Going back to the subject of completeness, I rustled up lists for the awards presented by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The two main awards are the Hayden Memorial Geological Award and the Leidy Award. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is only one article missing from the former (out of 39) and only three articles missing from the latter (out of 26). I wasn't sure whether to make the other two awards into separate lists [no reason not to really, might do that later], so put the lists in the Academy's article: Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art and Richard Hopper Day Memorial Medal. Only one (of 11) missing from the former, and four (of 19) missing from the latter. The overall total is nine (9) missing from a total of ninety-five (95). That is 9-10%. A few years ago, I suspect the number of red-links would have been higher (the filling in over time can be shown progressing as you move forward from 2001 to the present).
Anyway, the nine missing articles (with some potential sources) are: Gilles Joseph Gustave Dewalque [2] [3]; Warren Poppino Spencer [4]; Herbert Barker Hungerford [5]; Donn Eric Rosen [6] [7] es species; Guy Tudor [8] [9]; Lawrence A. Shumaker [10] [11] [12]; Andreas B. Rechnitzer [13]; Charles A. Berry [14]; and Robert McCracken Peck [15]. I've made lists like this in the past, and sometimes it is more interesting to wait and see when (if) the articles get created (and why) rather than create them now. If anyone has a lot of time on their hands, they can look through Talk:Howard N. Potts Medal, Talk:Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute), Talk:Franklin Medal, Talk:Stuart Ballantine Medal (I cheated here and turned three of the redlinks blue myself).
I'm wondering, if I go back to just the lists I created, and make a master list of redlinks still to be filled in, how long that would be and how long it would take to fill in... Reading and writing biographical articles can be rather a surreal experience sometimes. Like living several lifetimes in one. Carcharoth (talk) 02:06, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

As I've just upset Mishae by pointing out (perhaps more roughly than necessary, but someone who comes out with gems like "I understand that majority of people on Wikipedia are Jewish" gets a limited degree of AGF) that a topic theoretically meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines doesn't necessarily equate to it being a good idea to create an article on the topic. Some people just don't have enough interesting to say about them to justify creating an independent article rather than a line on List of …—I suspect some entries on those lists would be better off red, as any biographies would literally be "He was born, he led a blameless but uninteresting life, he did this one thing which makes him technically notable, he died". Is there any reason other than "it would leave a redlink on some lists" for Wikipedia to be hosting Thomas Burgoyne? (Head on over to Category:Living people and click five articles at random. I'll be surprised if you can make a legitimate case for a stand-alone article, other than "it technically meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines so it can't be deleted", on more than two of them.) – iridescent 16:17, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
SBHB agrees with you. :-) And see what I said here. I suspect Comrade Boris had been reading what I said.

  • "I really favour not having a biography article at all until after the subject is dead (and at that point, if needed, the historical assessment process starts, or in some cases concludes) and up until that point you either have no article, or a strictly word-limited article (plus picture if available) with a link to an official website or other resources, if they exist. The reason for limiting the word count is to make it easier to maintain BLP articles as short informative stubs (I mean really short!). On the other hand, if you don't couple that with a tightening of the notability criteria, you end up with a Who's Who directory. But that might still be better than the current situation." - Carcharoth. I then turned up at WP:BLPN and pointed out that Barclay Knapp was a sad lonely article with issues, and SBHB made a bid for a scorched earth approach: "Instead, Wikipedia should have a goal of eliminating 90% of BLPs by year-end 2015." - Short Brigade Harvester Boris.

To be clear, I do realise that some of the redlinks on some of the lists aren't really worth the effort it would take to do a proper article. But it would be easily possible to do a short set of footnote-style appendix entries if you put to one side the (foolish) pretence that appearing on a separate page makes it in some sense an 'article'. It would not be an article, it would be a brief aside, a digression. There are some examples at User:Carcharoth/Article incubator/Fleming Memorial Lecture. I spent far too long going through that. Some of the people on that list most definitely will never have articles, despite me redlinking them there. They are a fantastically varied bunch, reflecting the change in British radio and television and telecommunications from the 1940s to the present day. J. T. Mould appears to have been a barrister (KC) who assisted Ambrose Fleming with patenting his thermionic valve. There doesn't appear to be much more to say about him than that. Henry Grainger Jenkins and Thomas Robertson Scott are likewise obscure (something to do with inventions of fluorescence for TV screens and crystal valves respectively). Gordon H. Cook appears to have been something big in lens manufacturing. There are two FRS people there: Harold Barlow and James Dwyer McGee. It was interesting to find an article already existing on Geoffrey G. Gouriet, and other early BBC engineers in that list include R.D.A. 'Darrell' Maurice, Arthur Valentine Lord, F. Howard Steele, G. Boris Townsend, and C.B.B. 'Bill' Wood. They could probably all be lumped together in a treatment of the early history of the BBC and its research and development departments. Then you have a succession of lords (and a lady) and several BBC Chairmen and Controllers, again interspersed with some people who are obscure (or were boring 'business people' [boring to me, hopefully not to them], or earning lots of money, or playing corporate musical chairs, or all of the above). All I remember about Peter Laister is that he was ousted from whatever TV company he was at in a boardroom coup the year after he gave that talk. I hadn't looked up who Phil Sidey [16], Albert Scharf (de:Albert Scharf), Kenji Aoki (Managing Director NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and Rupert Gavin [17] were (though I have now). I had guessed mid-level TV executives of some kind. Bruce Bond was something to do with British Telecom. Articles on businesspeople leave me cold, I can't get interested in that at all. What happened with Barclay Knapp was just sad. It was ignored and tagged and ignored again for years and the Wikipedia 'article' outlasted the 'source'... On these TV company bigwigs, I could put a sentence or two saying who they are (or more relevantly, what role they held at the time and why they gave the talk), and that would be enough. Contemporary sources announcing the lectures would give that. Ditto for George Russell and Samir Shah. I am still rather amazed that David Ingram on that list turned up at the NPG here. Anyway, enough of that. I'm going to create a hndis page for David Ingram and turf the singer out to make way for that. Maybe by the time I have done that, you and SBHB will have made some headway with the BLPs? Sorry about the lack of paragraph breaks. Carcharoth (talk) 02:07, 19 April 2015 (UTC)
One of my many ideas which will never be put into practice until either Jimmy Wales is sent off to spend more time with his wristwatch, or Google finally manage to create a version of Knol which isn't a piece of crap and Wikipedia disintegrates into irrelevance, was to give every BLP subject the automatic right to stubbification; anyone, no matter how prominent, unhappy with the state of a Wikipedia page about them would be able to request that it be reduced only to non-disputed information ("Sir James Paul McCartney MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. He is a former member of the Beatles and Wings, and has had a lengthy solo career.") and locked in that state. Provided it eliminated the positive as well as the negative it wouldn't cause an issue with bias (if anything, it would reduce puffery), and it would avoid the sea-of-redlinks which SBHB's proposal would create. Sure, it would mean some Wikipedia pages would be uneditable, which would make the usual extremist "The Man is trying to suppress information's right to be free!" libertarian conspiracy-theorist fuckwits who hang round Jimbo's talkpage cry, but Wikipedia already has pages not everyone can edit—"anyone can edit" has never meant "anyone can edit everything in any way". Why should something purporting to be an encyclopedia be acting as an unhealthy combination of advertising host and defamation platform for any person unfortunate enough to unintentionally meet an arbitrary guideline? If readers care about these people, they are perfectly capable of looking them up somewhere else, and if "somewhere else" doesn't exist, that's generally a pretty good indication that the person isn't important enough to justify coverage. – iridescent 16:09, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Pet wikipeeves

Starting a new section here simply so my reply doesn't get lost, as the page has moved on since the other day. (I'm pleased to see it, and you, so active here again.)

Thank you for the background and history of the article-rating system, which you are right helps explain why it evolved the way it did.

I agree that "we do it this way because we always did it this way" is a poor reason to do anything. At the same time, we can't be in a state of perpetually reevaluating everything we do, because that leads to a state of too much discussion and not enough action on anything, to say nothing of the distraction from mainspace. And all experienced editors have probably come to the conclusion that "perennial proposals" will never be implemented. But once in awhile, suddenly, consensus changes and proves us wrong about that. (Not that it was a huge change, but the implementation of inactivity rules for administrators, after several years of agreement that there shouldn't be any, is an example that comes to mind.)

I happen to generally approve of the structure of the main page, but again, that might just be out of force of habit or what I am used to, as opposed to thinking that it is what we would design if a group of editors were given the blank page and asked to redesign it. One discussion forum that I've been participating in on-and-off lately is WP:ITN/C, which selects blurbs for the "in the news" feature and the accompanying "recent deaths" (RD) line. Speaking of my pet peeves ... There is a strong view frequently expressed there that no one's death should be posted to RD unless there are abundant inline citations in every section the person's article. The stated rationale for the rule is that the main page is for "our best work" and any article without lots of specific references can't qualify as that. The operational value of enforcing this view is that it can motivate people who want the RD posted to spend the time improving the article and adding references, before attention shifts elsewhere. On the other hand, the downside is that highly notable RDs sometimes don't get posted due to disagreements about article quality, because some or other section is unreferenced, even though the article quality is perfectly reasonable and is well above average for Wikipedia articles as a whole. (I am not talking about unreferenced negative or controversial statements; sometimes it's a list of film credits or the like.) When I urge that such an article get posted before the recent death is no longer "recent," I find myself accused of losing site of the project's goals and seeking to reduce the quality of the encyclopedia. Feh.

Another example I have wondered about literally for years, but hesitate to raise even now, is featured article review (FAR) and featured article removal (FARC). This is a process I haven't yet participated in (I still need to get my FA done, or for that matter started; pfui on me for stalling on article-writing by spending my time writing this sort of thing), and have participated in very occasionally if at all, and I certainly don't mean to be critical in the least of the people who organize the FAR process and participate in FAR. But ... is this a process that serves a purpose that justifies the time spent on it? I can understand reassessing if an article that was promoted to FA long ago hasn't yet been mainpaged. But, let's suppose an article was promoted to FA in 2006 and ran on the mainpage in 2007 (those were the dates for the article that's at the top of the FAR page as I type this). What is the value in asking in 2015 whether the article still meets the FA criteria or not? If the effect is typically that editors move in and further enhance or renew the quality of the article, great! But is that what usually happens?—does this process indeed motivate article improvements, or does it merely distract attention from the next round of articles? (I put to one side the fact that an improvement often demanded is more inline citations, which to my taste threaten to turn articles into footnote salad.)

Or am I asking the wrong question, and undermining one of the few quality control mechanisms we have, when what we need is more of them rather than fewer? We definitely need more quality control. I noted in this book review I wrote last summer that we have a dozen dedicated noticeboards, for everything from copyright problems to sourcing issues to edit-warring ... but we don't have a space (beyond individual article talkpages that may be drastically underwatched) to raise concerns about whether the article content is right or wrong....

I suppose the Village Pump is the place where proposals for changes in how we operate are logically posted—but the discussion there is often diffuse. I wonder if there should be a method of selecting one particular aspect or feature of the project at a time and convening a community discussion for, say, a month about how to improve that aspect? Someone would have to show some leadership in selecting the discussion topic, and since the project is in some ways intentionally leaderless, I don't know if that is practicable.

Thoughts? This has been unusually meandering even for me, so take from it what you will. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:03, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Sure, permanent revolution is almost as bad as stagnation, but it's still better than the current Wikipedia model of punctuated equilibrium, where the main driver of change seems to be the personal whims of a half-dozen people in San Francisco, at least some of whom give the distinct impression not just of being eccentric but of being outright insane, and where when change does come it's handled so badly that it makes things even worse. At the highest levels, Wikipedia has too many true-believers in the Agile Manifesto, which to the rest of the world is a fringe management cult that never really caught on outside its California heartland but to the clique at the heart of the WMF is a design for life which the peasants of the editor base are too uncouth to appreciate.
I can completely understand the argument for demanding perfect sourcing on anything in "In The News". The purpose of that section is, theoretically, to show that Wikipedia covers recent events as well as traditional news sources; it doesn't do anyone any good to have articles full of speculation. If I had my way, that section would be gone. To every normal reader, it doesn't say "showcase to highlight the fact Wikipedia covers a range of news", it says "news ticker that tends to be three days out of date and have a strange obsession with US sports". (Pick any ten non-US people and ask if "the NCAA Men's Championship (MOP Tyus Jones pictured)", currently on the main page, makes the slightest sense to them.) To me, In The News pretty much by definition highlights the articles which are new, incomplete and prone to edit warring—I don't get why anyone would want that to be Wikipedia's public face. Wikipedia does have some areas where it excels, but ITN and DYK are pretty much waving a big flag saying "look how bad we are!" and "look how boring we are!" respectively.
I never had very much involvement with FAR, so can't really comment. I can certainly see the argument for delisting—there's a bold link on the main page saying these articles are "the best articles Wikipedia has to offer", which you don't want to be listing Kitsch, Kammerlader, Imagery of nude celebrities and other fine members of WP:FFA. Someone like Eric Corbett,Bencherlite or Nikkimaria could probably explain the thinking better. I think you may be crediting FAR with more influence than it really has—the number of successful delistings is very low (there have only been 1069 FAs delisted in Wikipedia's entire history, and that includes crap from WP:Brilliant Prose days like this). It's necessary, though—if FA status were for-life, all that would happen is that the assessment process would become impossibly difficult for anything other than the blandest and most non-controversial thing to pass. (See also: WP:RFA, WP:RFB, Work with us.)
I'm not sure how much use internal discussions, no matter how focussed, are going to be. The nature of Wikipedia is that any discussion will result in "no consensus". To push changes through you'd need a mini-committee with the authority to issue binding RFC closures (either a standing committee or recruited jury-style case by case), which would probably be too much of a step towards GovCom for anyone to accept. – iridescent 16:52, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
I've been thinking about this for the past couple of days, and I think I have an idea. Not necessarily a good idea, but an idea, anyway. I'm offline this weekend, but will try to hone it in my head, and write it up for discussion on-wiki Monday or Tuesday. Who knows, maybe it'll help. Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:25, 11 April 2015 (UTC)
(Quick driveby "and another thing"), I have to take issue with "an improvement often demanded is more inline citations, which to my taste threaten to turn articles into footnote salad". Since one thing everyone involved with Wikipedia, from Jimmy Wales to Thekohser, would concur with is "Wikipedia should not be treated as a reliable source in its own right", those inline footnotes are essential for people using Wikipedia to find out exactly where the information has come from and to be able to verify it for themselves. If I had my way, "a citation for every fact, immediately after the fact in question" wouldn't just be permitted, it would be compulsory. A correctly-written Wikipedia article is essentially a directory of sources on the topic, rearranged into narrative form. – iridescent 07:01, 11 April 2015 (UTC)
That's not a bad characterisation of a decently written Wikipedia article. Eric Corbett 16:15, 11 April 2015 (UTC)
......which is why I tell folks with some expertise on a subject to skip to the bottom and peruse the refs instead. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:23, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
Regarding "footnote salad": just before I effectively stopped doing article work, I commissioned this template: Template:Ref supports2. You wrap it around the inline citation <ref>Blah blah</ref> or <ref name=Blah blah/> or whatever, so when the reader hovers their mouse pointer over the footnote marker the text supported by the source appears in a "popup".
If you have a sentence whose various parts are supported by different sources, you can cluster all the footnote markers at the end of the sentence but still be clear about what is supported by which source. (See footnote markers 14 and 15 here). You could use this to cluster all the footnote markers at the end of a paragraph, reducing the "salad" effect while still unambiguously associating the text with its source, like here.
I've enabled "previews" or something in my preferences so a big preview box obscures this function for me, but it works well for 99% of typical readers who haven't customised their settings; and it doesn't help those using text-to-voice. Log out if you want to see what the typical reader sees.
This isn't the final solution, obviously, but something like this that highlights (rather than pops up) the cited text and workes somehow for the sight-imapired should be available. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 22:08, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
That approach may work in some cases, but is it not simpler to take the approach of using footnotes (more properly endnotes, as seen in some books) to explain what sources have been used for parts of a particular passage? And then to put the references on the endnote. That way you have just one thing to click on the end of each passage. i.e. Bundling citations. Carcharoth (talk) 23:48, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
My solution gets the footnote markers out of the body of the paragraph into a cluster at the end, so improves (a bit) the footnote salad problem, and is a little more functional for the reader, but bundling reduces the string of footnote markers at the end to one, and so deals better with the footnote salad problem. My approach might be slightly simpler for the reader but I think both are as simple for the editor. It's probably horses for courses. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:54, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Would {{Ref supports2}} be able to handle the situation where multiple references support a single fact? This situation isn't wildly uncommon—Jan Bondeson, for instance, is a perfectly respectable medical historian. He's by far the most readily available source on the history of teratology, so I try to cite to him where possible as it makes it easier for readers to check for themselves. However, he also has something of a (well-deserved) reputation for sloppiness and inaccuracy and for passing off his own opinions as undisputed fact, so whenever I cite him for something contentious I try to cite something else to back up the claim, even though it leads to double-footnotes and Brad's dreaded footnote salad.

An obvious drawback I can see is the same problem I have with list-defined references, and even citation templates to some extent; that it makes the edit window absolutely incomprehensible to newcomers. A new editor, even one with no experience, can grasp "put the fact, then put <ref>, then put where you found it, then put </ref>", and even though they may not get the reference formatting correct they'll get the information in place in such a way that it's easy to clean up later, or to see exactly which source they've used and explain why it isn't appropriate to use.

Under the {{Ref supports2}} system, the edit window is frankly incomprehensible; a new editor wanting to amend this 16-word paragraph will be confronted with The tender twig of this plant is used as a toothbrush in south-east Africa and India.{{Ref supports2|<ref>Saurabh Rajvaidhya ''et al.'' (2012) [http://www.ijpsr.com/V3I7/13%20Vol.%203,%20Issue%207,%20July%202012,%20RE-654,%20Paper%2013.pdf "A review on ''Acacia Arabica'', an Indian medicinal plant"] ''International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research'' Vol 3(7) pp 1995-2005</ref>|"The tender twig of this plant is used as a toothbrush"}}{{Ref supports2|<ref>A Hooda, M Rathee, J Singh (2009) [https://ispub.com/IJFP/9/2/4968 "Chewing Sticks In The Era Of Toothbrush: A Review"], ''The Internet Journal of Family Practice'' Vol 9(2)</ref>|"used as a toothbrush in south-east Africa and India"}} when they click "edit". To quote my comment to NYB on the article assessment scale a couple of sections up, "You've been here so long it probably seems natural, but stop and think how messed up that must look to every outside observer".

If I were a new editor confronted with that, my reaction would be "those people who say Wikipedia is a club of self-important nerds speaking an incomprehensible private language were right", and never try to edit again. The academics and professionals Wikipedia wants to attract aren't, in general, going to want to take the time to learn an arcane markup language which isn't used anywhere else; the Visual Editor project may have been an expensive fiasco thanks to the ineptness of Brandon Harris and the arrogance of James Forrester, but the WMF were correct to try to pursue it.

If I were making the decisions, I'd be pushing a system where one highlights a block of text in edit-mode, clicks "reference this", and fills in a pre-formatted popup citation template, with the references themselves being saved as subpages in a separate namespace so they aren't visible in edit mode unless one clicks "edit references". However, I am not the one making these decisions; that would be these fine characters, none of whom have ever shown any great degree of willingness to listen to anyone suggest things aren't perfect the way they are, unless said suggestion already happens to be their pet project. – iridescent 16:56, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like a reasonable idea, if only it weren't for the gender gap being the only issue of any importance this year. Eric Corbett 17:08, 19 April 2015 (UTC)
Meh. Enough bigshots are "choosing to move on" from the WMF, that it's a reasonable bet that either (1) it's in desperate trouble and the rats are leaving the sinking ship; (2) Lila Tretikov is so unpleasant people are refusing to work with her; or (3) some kind of major change is afoot. The WMF is notoriously rolling in cash, and Lila Tretikov appears perfectly decent and competent, so the smart money would have to be on (3). If this half-baked notion is any indication of the direction they plan to take Wikipedia in I don't hold out much hope, but (to go back to my comment above about permanent revolution still being better than stasis) it's encouraging to see someone in charge who's willing to consider making major changes to Wikipedia's stagnant culture, even if I don't agree with the particular proposal. – iridescent 17:33, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Break: "core contributors"

A few days ago Lila announced a restructure of the WMF's engineering division.[18]

"...I wanted to share more about the plans for the Community Tech team. The creation of this team is a direct response to community requests for more technical support. Their mission is to understand and support the technical needs of core contributors, including improved support for expert-­focused curation and moderation tools, bots, and other features. Their mandate is to work closely with you, and the Community Engagement department, to define their roadmap and deliverables. We are hiring for a leader for this team, as well as additional engineers. We will be looking within our communities to help. Until then, it will be incubated under Toby Negrin, with support from Community Engagement. ..."

(My bolding.) Gathered here on Iri's talk page are a few core contributors (I guess - what is a core contributor?) who could be working closely together with Toby and his successor to get them making things that actually improve editor efficiency and the reader experience. I hope the thoughtful people here do engage with the Community Tech team - when it becomes an actual thing. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:53, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
So what sorts of technical tools or features do y'all think "core contributors" need or would like? Iri? Anthonyhcole? Eric? Nikkimaria (talk) 17:46, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
"Core contributors" are an easier group to talk about than to identify. Is someone who doesn't contribute any significant writing, but spends a lot of time copyediting or fact-checking, a "core contributor"? How about someone who does a lot of work restoring images, but doesn't actually create anything original? How about the bot writers? How about myself, who has only written three articles in the past three years?
Top of my list would be a decent referencing system. The current situation is a mess of twelve years of fudges and compromises. I can say with certainty, as I've intentionally avoided articles affected by it, that the WP:CITEVAR policy in particular is actively damaging—if someone wrote a shitty three-sentence stub ten years ago on a topic, than even if I have the knowledge and time to write a full-length FA on the topic I'm literally forbidden from using anything other than whatever referencing system the user chose ten years ago. (On at least one occasion I've just ignored the previous referencing system and overwritten the article completely, but I'm well aware that invoking IAR in this way leaves one open to challenge and even sanctions should one of the previous editors have complained.) I would ideally have a single approved reference system, with an automatic right for any author to convert any existing articles using one of the previous deprecated systems into the new system without fear of challenge or reversion. Ideally, references would be invoked from a separate Ref: namespace, and only visible when "show references" is explicitly toggled, rather than cluttering the edit window. (Yes, I'm aware there are js scripts that mimic this, but the new editors aren't going to be aware of them, and any fix relying on js is always going to be a klunky compromise.) – iridescent 22:17, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
I normally (except in medical articles) normally just add in my own usual non-template style for articles that are not well-developed. If people want to convert these, as some do, then fine. If it really is a stub that I'm going to more than double, say, then if no one has edited much recently I might redo it all in my style. I can't recall anyone objecting. Many articles have mixed styles, & some like standardizing them. It seems less of an issue than a few years ago. Johnbod (talk) 01:15, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Nikkimaria, I used to patrol Recent changes (medicine), and may do again some day. I'd like patrollers to be able to mark each entry on the recent changes feed as we check it with "Reviewed by Anthonyhcole", "Reviewed by Johnbod" or whatever, so it's obvious what has and hasn't been checked by someone with a grasp of MEDRS. Most changes do get checked, but some are missed. This feature would allow patrollers to catch the few that no one has looked at. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 10:24, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Another issue that occurs to me regarding {{Ref supports2}} is that it includes the text which is supported by the reference. Since, when you start approaching FA level, there shouldn't be any fact that doesn't have a reference, then at a minimum—assuming each statement supported by only a single reference—you've more than doubled the size of the article, since every sentence will be "text, {{Ref supports2}} template, reference, repetition of text". For something like Tourette syndrome, with a lengthy body text and many multiple citations, it would easily push the article size to around the 300,000 byte mark. – iridescent 17:42, 19 April 2015 (UTC)
Yep, it's a wall o' wikitext back there, if you use {{Ref supports2}} for a whole article. As I said above, it's not the final solution - because of what it fills the text editor with, because it pops-up the supported text rather than simply highlighting the relevant article text, and because it doesn't work with text-to-voice. But it's useful in limited cases.--Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:29, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Break: FAR

Newyorkbrad, to answer a few of your FAR questions. But ... is this a process that serves a purpose that justifies the time spent on it? I can understand reassessing if an article that was promoted to FA long ago hasn't yet been mainpaged. But, let's suppose an article was promoted to FA in 2006 and ran on the mainpage in 2007 (those were the dates for the article that's at the top of the FAR page as I type this). What is the value in asking in 2015 whether the article still meets the FA criteria or not? If the effect is typically that editors move in and further enhance or renew the quality of the article, great! But is that what usually happens?—does this process indeed motivate article improvements, or does it merely distract attention from the next round of articles? (I put to one side the fact that an improvement often demanded is more inline citations, which to my taste threaten to turn articles into footnote salad.)

See:

  1. The percentage of FAs that were restored to status when FAR was active at Wikipedia:Unreviewed featured articles#Stats
    Of the half, or 523, FAs that did not have inline citations when that requirement was added in 2005 because of the Siegenthaler controversy, one third were brought to standard. Many needed citations to conform with the new requirement, but many had other problems. (As probably the editor still working at FAR who has been there the longest and was the most active, I can't really agree with your statement that most of the work is in improving inline citations, although vetting uncited text is part of the work.) In the next batch (unreviewed list generated in 2008), that ratio has fallen to one in five (see Wikipedia:Unreviewed featured articles#Unreviewed stats and my discussion below of the cultural shift). But there are still significant "saves" and article improvement at FAR, and even those articles that are defeatured are typically improved by the process.
  2. Chart of FAC/FAR numbers over time at User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox#FAC and FAR stats.
    To answer your questions accurately requires separating the period before 2010, when FAR was an active process, restoring a third of deficient FAs to standard, and after 2010, when FAR fell off the map. Before 2010, most of the editors who worked at FAR were also active at FAC, both writing FAs and reviewing at both ends of the process, and the processes worked hand-in-hand, assuring the integrity of the bronze star across the board. After 2010, FAR stopped processing basically, well, anything; the reviewers who spent so much time at both ends (FAC and FAR) mostly departed (for reasons many will recall), and there was a cultural shift away from the notion of maintaining the value of the bronze star across the board. Post-2010, FA has become a one-way process (once an FA, always an FA), where articles by an increasingly small group of nominators are promoted by an increasingly small group of reviewers, most of whom do not participate in FAR to help assure the overall quality of the entire FA pool. A culture of pride in the bronze star existed pre-2010; that has been replaced by a TFA culture.

    This one-way street has led, in turn, to a separate problem of extra review required when choosing Today's featured article for the mainpage, as there are so many deficient FAs "on the books". The TFA schedulers can no longer assume that an FA is mainpage ready. And where one person used to be able to pick and schedule all TFAs, we now need apparently three. Whether we assess at FAR, or assess via a separate effort that has sprung up to address the moribund FAR at User:Dweller/Featured Articles that haven't been on Main Page, resources are going into sorting out the deficient FAs anyway.

  3. A rough estimate of the number of missing FA nominators at Wikipedia talk:Unreviewed featured articles/sandbox#Missing FA nominators_.3F.3F.
    Because of the cultural shift and the drop in FAR reviewing, FAR has fallen at least six years behind in processing relative to what it ran pre-2010. Add to that the number of FAs that are no longer watched by their original writers, and probably one-third to one-half of our current FAs are deficient. So, how can we choose from a pool of largely deficient FAs, and what the heck is an FA, anyway, if most of them are bad?
  4. The longest FAs trend at Wikipedia talk:Unreviewed featured articles/sandbox#Summary of longest FAs.
    In examining only the longest FAs, several issues came to light, that hopefully will be looked into and be addressed once the worst of the bunch are identified and can come to FAR. If you review the section above that data, you'll see that my brief analysis there identified multiple BLPs a) whose original writer is gone and they aren't likely being watched, and that b) have doubled or tripled in size since they were last vetted in a review process. Potentially LOTS of really bad text in articles wearing the bronze star, including BLPs.

Is FAR worth the effort? Well, improvement does happen, regardless of outcome. And, if FA has become a one-way street, why are we still running FAs on the mainpage? Google hits are really where the action is now anyway, so shouldn't we be striving to assure quality across the board, for all readers, rather than focusing review on whichever FA is going to run TFA (that is, focus on overall improvement rather than one day's hits)? What about after TFA, and the third to half of FAs that are full of unvetted crap? Restoring FAR to a functioning process-- and hopefully restoring a culture that values the star across the board, not just as fodder for TFA-- will hopefully bring quality back up across more articles, and not just for those that run TFA. That was how the two processes worked historically-- it was a matter of pride in the bronze star and a desire to maintain quality across the board. Whether that culture can be restored is another question, but I'm game to try. If ongoing reassessment is not done, what is an FA, anyway? It has increasingly become something that three people pass. If we eliminate FAR, why not eliminate FAC as well ? The skill set is the same, and for FAC reviewers to take a moment each day to also check or pitch in on a FAR should not be a big deal.

HTH.

Iri, relative to autism and schizophrenia, Tourette syndrome is not densely cited at all ... have a look at that citation wrap issue at autism, for example!

And since you're on the topic of "Pet wikipeeves", one of mine is FA writers who only review FAs of their "friends", won't review anything else to help train up others and improve the overall pool, can't be bothered with FAR, don't care about the overall quality issue, only care about getting TFAs, and will never Oppose a FAC because <gasp>, then someone might oppose one of theirs! If we decide that FAR isn't necessary, let's do away with FAC as well. But please be assured, there was once as much pride associated with restoring an article to status at FAR as there was in getting one promoted at FAC; just ask the old-timers (oh, you can't ... with the exception of Ceoil, most of us who once worked there are mostly departed). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:11, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I can confirm Sandy's point that the number of things being nominated for main page appearances which need remedial work seems to have risen sharply. I'm not sure if the collapse of FAR is wholly to blame for this. Newyorkbrad mentions In The News somewhere in the morass above—a glance at Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates shows the exact same problem TFA sees, of people nominating things to appear on the main page which have glaring issues, and anyone who raises questions about problems being mobbed and abused. (The Rambling Man could probably give a better idea of the problems there.) I can see the exact same thing happening on T:TDYK as well, to an extent it never used to.
(Regarding not opposing at FAC, I'd put myself into that camp to some extent, although not out of concern that someone might oppose me in retaliation. If I see an issue with a particular article, I'll try to raise it on either the article talkpage or one of the authors's talkpages. I remember how daunting it was coming in to comment at an FAC which already has a huge amount of back-and-forth on the nomination page, and feel it makes sense to have as much of the discussion as possible away from FAC. Texas Revolution is a good example—my support at the FAC itself is only a couple of sentences long and looks like a drive-by, but it's off the back of an enormous "here is every single issue I can see with this article" thread at Karanacs's talkpage.)
I can't say for sure, but I'd say with a fairly high degree of confidence that this is all a direct consequence of the particular cultural shift Yngvadottir identified in relation to the collapse of New Pages Patrol—the departure/driving-off of a large proportion of the "old timers" over a relatively short period of time broke the institutional memory and triggered a major cultural change. The loss of so many experienced people so quickly also had quite a severe impact on Wikipedia's culture of mentorship. When you or I started, if you weren't sure of something you'd ask someone and most people were glad to help; now, the culture of helping still exists to some extent, but who is helping whom seems to create a subculture of tribal obligation. (I dare say NYB remembers how many Arbcom cases' "evidence" pages were an exercise in who could bring more people saying "this editor has helped me in the past so I'll support them" to the table.)
Per "why are we still running FAs on the mainpage?", I personally don't think we should. I stand by my comment a few sections up: I would love it if the WMF configured the Main Page to make every feature opt-in and cookie-controlled, meaning people (including the general public, not just logged-in users) interested in DYK, TFA, OTD etc could choose to keep seeing them, while people could perma-hide those parts they aren't interested in. Not only would it give fields not currently represented on the MP—random articles, featured sounds, country- or topic-specific FAs—a chance to prove their worth, it would also drive home how little most readers care about some of Wikipedia's Cherished Institutions™. I would give reasonable odds that given a free choice, more than 50% of readers would opt for a Google-style main page and choose to hide every element other than a searchbar, and more than 90% (probably more like 99%) would choose to hide In The News and On This Day. Because it holds such exalted status in Wikipedia's internal MMORPG, it's easy to lose sight of how little the outside world cares about the content of the main page. Taking 1955 MacArthur Airport United Airlines crash (not to single it out for any reason, but just because it's a recent TFA on a reasonably interesting topic), it got 18,742 page views on its day in the sun. On the same day, the main page got 17,081,542 page views, meaning the highest profile link on Wikipedia's main page had a click-through rate of roughly one reader in a thousand. It would also finally put a stop to the interminable discussions at Wikipedia:Main page redesign proposals which have been going on without result for eight years now. The overwhelming majority—as in, well over 99%—of visitors to the main page don't click a single one of the links on it and don't care what goes on the main page.
If the WMF really wanted to make Wikipedia's article assessment processes mean something, they'd have a chat with Google about having article quality ratings and maintenance templates affect PageView ranking, so (for instance) articles with the {{BLP unsourced}} template are hidden from search results, or only pages of at least GA status or higher can appear as the top Google hit. Sure, this would hugely incentivize gaming the system, but it would also hugely incentivize people to take maintenance and assessment tasks more seriously. Moonriddengirl, Ironholds, is there any obvious reason this wouldn't work? – iridescent 10:08, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
Iri, your kind of FA reviewing (commentary on talk) was not and is not the problem of which I speak :) On the cultural issues, I guess I would sum it up as the star-collecting culture won. It's no longer about overall quality, rather more now about how many stars can an individual accumulate, with little concern for what it means to have a bronze star that was endorsed by only three editors and that is standing in a pool of perhaps 50% B-class articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:57, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
I don't know. I know nothing about Google's page rating algorithms. If you want me to look into it, feel free to drop me a note at User talk:Mdennis (WMF), and I will see what I can find out. :) Any investigation would be preliminary and lightweight, of course, before consensus is developed, and we'd have to figure out whether Google has the capacity to handle articles from English Wikipedia differently than articles from other projects unless the consensus was movement wide. There are some projects that don't even have a GA process. But as Moonriddengirl (and having read precisely the last paragraph of this, since I seem to have been pinged on a specific question) I have to say I'm not so sure that having only pages of at least GA status appear as the top Google hit is the best service to our readers. Just because content is not our best doesn't mean it isn't the best information that's out there on a subject, and while some subjects it's critical to get it right, on others less-developed content can still be of service. For instance, I've worked on a fair number of articles related to obscure jazz albums that could not become GAs (or I feel sure shouldn't) because there really isn't enough sourced information to expand them into GA-worthy articles, but they're still the best overviews of those albums available on the web. (And I know this because I exhaustively researched some of these myself prior to the creation of the articles. :)) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:16, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
And conversely, just because something is our best, doesn't mean it is even good-- we have some really bad, even POV, FA content out there, and I have BLP concern ... Much more so than when there was a culture that valued the bronze star, and I can't even speak to what is GA these days, except for the GA reviews I know of that have been open for maybe half a year, with nothing happening. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:37, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
Absolutely agreed with Sandy. For Featured status to be meaningful from a reader point of view, we'd need a lot more activity in terms of FAR and similar processes - I've seen some hair-curlingly bad FAs simply because they were passed a long time ago, meaning simultaneously that they were greenlit under more loosey-goosey rulesets and that they've had a lot of time in which to accrete crud. Like Maggie, I have no idea about Google's pagerank algorithm, but I don't think it's a workable response; we should be coming up with genuine positives of doing maintenance, rather than having any kind of incentivisation scheme that is centred on 'dangling potentially-bad content in front of the reader and hoping this terrifies contributors enough to make sure it's not potentially bad'. Ironholds (talk) 18:23, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
I'm thinking more of persuading Google to omit articles we know are problematic. There are certain maintenance templates which can generally be assumed to mean a reader shouldn't trust an article ({{BLP unsourced}}, {{Medref}} and {{Hoax}} are all instant red flags; likewise a {{Disputed}} tag or {{Update}} tag which has been in place for more than a certain number of months). It does neither Wikipedia, Wikipedia's readers, the article subjects or Google's advertisers any good to have things like this at the top of Google's search results, and might also do something to limit the flood of spam and poorly-written gibberish once writers came to realise they were no longer going straight to the top of Google's search results. The thoughts regarding preferential treatment for "quality" articles was something of an afterthought; per my comments to Brad above, I think the article assessment scale is a vestige of a failed decade-old pet project of Jimmy Wales to create a print version of Wikipedia, and would happily abolish it. (Even GA/FA have outlived their usefulness—they're necessary in the current setup as they determine what qualifies for TFA and DYK, but I question whether that's really necessary. If the bronze stars were abolished tomorrow, TFA would work just fine as a group of people discussing whether any given article is high enough quality to appear on the main page, in exactly the way ITN operates now.) – iridescent 22:17, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
I couldn't disagree with moving away from the whole "vestige" aspect of assessment, including FAs, since FAs can no longer be said to represent a pool of "our best work", GAs represent little, and below that, few WikiProjects are even accurately assessing at all anyway. I don't think we'd miss much if we abolished the whole article assessment system, FA included. But neither can I agree that ITN or DYK "work" or that TFA could work either sans FAC/FAR as a means of showcasing whatever might replace the current process (I could see TFA continuing to have turf issues). Without FAR or FAC, we could lose the TFA space as well. I'd see Wikipedia moving in a direction of doing away with the main page as we know it ... I sure don't get my news from ITN, and don't want to see most of what DYK produces, and wouldn't want to see anything on a mainpage modeled after those two processes, or TFA trying to operate in the absence of FAR/FAC. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:34, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
You know my thoughts; I think www.wikipedia.org is a far better design than en.wikipedia.org, and that the overwhelming majority of readers don't want to see anything on the main page except a search bar—I would bet that if the WMF did one of their A–B tests, giving half of readers the current main page and half a Google-style blank screen, the majority would prefer the blank screen, rendering the whole concept of FA moot. (There is a precedent for deprecating a featuring process, as those who remember WP:Featured sound candidates can testify.) I can see TFA continuing in the absence of FAC, as some kind of combination of the original spirit behind DYK and the old Brilliant Prose Candidates; a group of people assessing whether the nominated articles are interesting enough to warrant appearing on the main page, and have no obvious issues. (Other sites with an equivalent to TFA—Britannica being the obvious one that springs to mind—must have some kind of similar "is this accurate enough that it won't embarrass us, and interesting enough that it won't bore readers?" process happening behind the scenes.)
That ITN and DYK work isn't in doubt, since they continue to produce a steady stream of ITNs and DYKs. Whether they work well, let alone whether the existing setups bear much resemblance to the actual motivation behind their creation or are of any benefit to readers, is very much open to question. (The Sirens and Ulysses was one of the most-read DYKs in February, with around 13,500 views. On the day it ran, the main page had 11,983,191 views, meaning 99.89% of visitors ignored it.) – iridescent 09:03, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Speaking as an eventualist, I would suggest that comments that FA has outlived its usefulness are focused on product rather than process. That is, the usefulness of FA as an ongoing process cannot and should not be measured by examining the overall quality of individual FAs left trailing in its wake, but rather on the relative difference that these ongoing processes exert upon the encyclopedia. To determine the value of FA itself, don't fall into a prescriptivist focus on the difference between WP:WIAFA and any given extant FA. Instead, think of FA and GA as ceaseless engines for relative improvement, and they come out with strongly positive value. Imagine FA and GA were abolished today; what engine would drive the process of would article improvement? Wikiprojects, to some degree, as a cluster of content domain editors.. a few other sources, too. It would continue, but in greatly reduced quantity, with less directed editor energy and with less explicit guidance. Everything is in process, and the process of positive change is what's important. This is a true eventualist outlook.• Arch♦Reader 12:04, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
That's only if you make the category mistake of assuming that "compliance to arbitrary guidelines" is synonymous with "quality". The GA and FA processes don't measure "quality", they measure whether the article complies with WIAGA and WIAFA which is a completely different matter. Victorian painting or Destruction of country houses in 20th-century Britain don't remotely meet WIAGA or WIAFA, but by any reasonable measure are of much higher quality than the FAs Wood Siding railway station or MissingNo.. – iridescent 12:18, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
You're explicitly looking at product rather than process, while the entire point of my comment was that the primary value of the entire ratings system (along with FA status as its tentpole social good, and the FAC subprocess as an added layer of goal-oriented interaction among editors and groups) is that it strongly encourages the process of article improvement. That is to say, FA/FAC/GA/GAC/PR/WikiProject A reviews etc. are not primarily guarantors of measurable article quality (though they often have that outcome); instead, they are social constructs that encourage interaction with the goal of article improvement. Articles are socially constructed, even in the context of one editor working alone (though that seems counter-intuitive, the sole contributor is generally working within boundaries that are determined by the larger discourse community). THe ratings system, FA/FARC/PR etc. provide several related things: venues for interaction defined by the goal of article improvement, a set of conventions for pursuing that goal, and various social goods (generally, the approval of peers) for motivation. Absent that system, we would have isolated WikiProjects and isolated editors pursuing the same goal, but with vastly reduced interaction, a sharply constricted audience for feedback/approval, a vastly reduced store of social goods that reward this behavior directed toward this goal, etc. I'm not saying that an awards-based system has no drawbacks; it can be gamed, and gaming does occur. But the relative availability of opportunities for gaming FAC/GAC/MilHIst A are far fewer than for other subprocesses, e.g., article ratings drives (where folks just use AWB and blindly steamroll a "B" status on any number of articles of any quality). This is seeing the entire article improvement sphere in the light of both social constructionism (and the closely-related social constructivism) and m:Eventualism . • Arch♦Reader 19:41, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure on this. Certainly, the GA process in my experience is very much about a single editor deciding whether a second editor has jumped through an arbitrary hoop to their satisfaction, rather than about improvement in any meaningful sense, with the honorable exception of a small handful of reviewers like Eric, Prhartcom and Pyrotec. I haven't really followed it for years now but the impression I get of FAC is that by-and-large it's gone the same way; for every Texas Revolution with a large number of editors collaborating to make one big article, there are a dozen articles with a single author, and the process consists of whether said single author happens to have jumped through the pet hoops of whichever reviewers happen to have turned up that day. (Yes, I'm committing the sin of judging by impression rather than evidence, but I think there's a broad consensus that the heart of the process was ripped out during the chaos in 2010 and has never really recovered. I never had much dealing with FAR, but I understand the same slow-decay-from-inside has affected that to an even greater extent.) In some ways I think what Wikipedia needs now isn't so much quality improvement drives, as systemic pruning and a mindset of "does this really need to be here?" rather than "how can I add to this". Wikipedia always uses the term "editors", but in practice very little actual editing goes on. – iridescent 11:26, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

LDR

You mentioned LDR, and I had no idea what it stands for, - guessed from the context that you mean list-defined references? I had no idea of background and history but saw them and use them where I may (unless for more complicated articles where I want to quote different sections of one source), example pictured above. They simply make sense to me. Whenever I want to fix a ref in an unknown article (add a title to a bare url being the most frequent wish), I find it so much more helpful to find that thing where I expect it, under the label "References", than searching through the complete article. If I want to fix a date in a ref by some author, I find it so much more helpful to know where to look in an alpha-sorted list. If I want to change text in an article, I find it so much more helpful not to have to "read around" the longish refs. A newbie will probably edit the whole article anyway, - section editing is not the first thing they will see. If editing a section, you may find a named ref in one, while it is defined in another. - I had no idea that my view is a minority but don't mind ;) ---Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:03, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

You're not going to convince me on this one. Whatever marginal benefit they provide is overwhelmed by the downside of their acting as a de facto mechanism for enforcing article ownership by making articles effectively uneditable (explained in more detail here and here). Whether the new editor is editing an individual section or the entire article is immaterial—it's completely counterintuitive to expect even experienced editors, let alone newcomers, to know that on perhaps one article in ten thousand—which aren't marked in any way—they need to edit two separate and completely unrelated sections if they want to make a change, and are unable to remove a statement from the body text without generating alarming-looking red error messages. The LDR system wasn't the result of any community desire for such a process, it was a single developer unilaterally implementing it because he was "in the mood to patch something". I have always refused as a point of principle to touch any article in LDR format (if Merridew and his cronies want to make such a fundamental change, then as far as I'm concerned they've taken responsibility for that article and I'm washing my hands of it), and would encourage everyone else to do likewise. There's no legitimate reason to be using LDR; the only reason people use it is because it discourages other people from editing articles, which the "everything I've written is perfect and I don't want the peasants messing with it" brigade loves as it given them an official reason to revert any change they dislike as unreferenced, without having to waste their time providing an explanation to those less-experienced editors they consider beneath them. – iridescent 11:29, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
(General point—whenever you see someone on Wikipedia using an acronym and you're not sure what it means, you can always find out by typing WP: followed by the acronym into the search box, in this case WP:LDR.) – iridescent 11:36, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
You are not going to convince me on this one because the newbie editor can still add their ref the way they are used to, it will show in the proper position, and it's up to someone maintaining article consistency to format it to make life easier for people like me ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:43, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
No, that's not how it works. On an article in LDR format it is literally impossible for someone unfamiliar with the obscure, little-used and poorly-documented LDR system to remove a referenced statement from an article, now matter how untrue or inappropriate it is, without generating error messages, unless they're aware that they need to remove the reference from a completely different part of the page at the same time. (If a reference is defined in the references section but not invoked in the body text, readers will see a big red Cite error: A list-defined reference named "foo" is not used in the content error message—try it yourself.) There is no legitimate reason for (at most) one article in 10,000 to be using a completely different referencing system from the rest of Wikipedia, with which there's no reason for editors to be familiar.
I agree with you that "named references defined on first appearance" also causes a problem, and if I had my that would be deprecated also; the only reason I ever use that system is because AWB is set to force articles in which a reference is used twice into the "named ref defined on first appearance" format, picking unhelpful reference names like "ReferenceA", and long experience shows that the people who run AWB tend not to have the common sense to actually look at the articles they're "fixing" to see if the fix is actually an improvement; by defining the named references it at least makes it possible to give them sensible names. The referencing system on Wikipedia is a hopeless mess and really needs a complete rebuild from the ground up into a single format (probably a separate Ref: namespace), particularly given that once Visual Editor goes live referencing will become even messier than it already is. Per my comment to NYB above, You've been here so long it probably seems natural, but stop and think how messed up that must look to every outside observer, and there's no rational reason to keep doing it other than that understanding it gives some people a momentary buzz of "I understand this secret code". Unfortunately AFAIK the WMF have never shown any inclination to grasp that particular nettle. – iridescent 12:06, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Let me be the newbie editor seeing the red message: I would search for "Foo" and find it, and if I didn't I would simply leave the message in the ref section for the next person to fix, - it's not in the way of understanding the article. Sorry, I still fail to see a big problem here. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:18, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
I tend to agree with you, Iri. I do use "named refs" but I try to make them understood - using things like "authorname#" where the number is the page number. I do not like sfn but that's because I like having the name of the work in the ref as well as the author and page number. LDR is complexity for complexities sake. It's entirely possible to do short references that don't clunk up the editing text without making them so entirely complex that new editors can't grasp it. Not only new editors, but anything that makes someone collaborating with an article more difficult should be depreciated. I feel the same about using things like the age templates or the fancy "hlist" crap in infoboxes or the circa template. Some of our technically inclined editors seem to not understand that simple is better..Ealdgyth - Talk 13:37, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
I use LDR for simplicity's sake but said enough above. "sfn": YOU can define what's in the ref name (in {{sfnref}} instead of "ref=harv"), and if you like the work there, define the work. I never studied these things, only observed, Kafka for example, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:10, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
I think in principle, some of the same objections to LDR apply to the sfn system; in practice, that's probably mitigated in your scenario by the fact that works so referenced are usually cited multiple times throughout the article (so removing one won't create an error) and most articles has a mixture of sfn for works cited many times and <ref> tags for one-off sources (which can be copied by the hypothetical newbie). Having the refs off in their own namespace and some sort of semi-automated tool to look them up and add them without having to lard the article with templates would indeed be ideal; unfortunately, the WMF's current design philosophy seems to involve creating tools that make easy things easier and hard things harder.
I view this as a symptom of a larger problem, though: in the post-Seigenthaler (?) era, we've increasingly adapted this philosophy wherein the article itself is treated as a finished project, rather than a work in progress where imperfect contributions can be dumped and picked over. (Unless no one else is watching the article, in which case, do as you please.) There are perfectly good reasons for this, and I wouldn't want to go back on the progress that's been made in referencing, but I feel like we've never really developed an organized support structure for article development to replace what used to happen on the article itself. You can use a Talk page for virtually anything: compiling lists of references, drafting new sections, writing article outlines, etc., but in practice that's entirely dependent on the list of individual contributors. And it's much easier to just revert a subpar contribution than to drop it onto the talk page with appropriate commentary. To use a chemical analogy, we've reached a point in many articles where further improvements have a very high activation energy, and we should be thinking about what exactly makes those improvements hard, and how to catalyze them. Choess (talk) 15:23, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
I used to be genuinely manic in my opposition to "One Ref to Rule them All" (espoused above by the esteemed iridescent). Now I WP:DGAF.. I probably owe an apology to any number of editors on this score... As for LDR, there are two objections: on offensive red error message, and difficulty editing. Or are those both the same: does the difficulty lie in avoiding the Red Plague splashed across the article? if that is the only difficulty, it is a technical fix: hide the error msg (hidden category), and let gnomes go find and fix them. The (perhaps temporary, see "gnomes") cost would be refs that refer to nothing, and those are common in academia (also known as "ref padding"). But if LDR actually does make editing more difficult in other ways, then it is indeed problematic. I don't know if it does or not. As for "activation states" and inertia in general, that is an interesting point. Will consider. • Arch♦Reader 20:20, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
I tend to agree that the {{sfn}} system isn't great either. I started using it a few years back when I was writing a batch of articles on tube stations, as that was the format Redrose64 had used on existing articles and it seemed sensible to use the same format for the new articles to enable cut-and-pasting between articles, and just kind of stuck with it. IIRC (and I may well not be remembering correctly as this was about eight years ago) MZMcBride was at one time exploring the possibility of having the references in a separate namespace with some kind of tool to invoke them in articles. (Since that's describing the basic structure of every Microsoft Access database ever written, I refuse to believe the technical difficulties are insurmountable.) If the WMF are serious about pushing forward with Visual Editor I don't see how they can avoid making this change at some point, since WYSIWYG and embedded tags really don't play nicely together unless they plan on having a WordPerfect-style separate markup window visible when editing. – iridescent 10:39, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

I was initially against LDR when it was first introduced, as it meant either having two edit windows open or editing the entire article rather than just a single section. But I use it all the time now, although I am one of those criminals tainted by being near the top of the WP:WBFAN list. The real solution of course is to completely redesign the citation system, but that will likely never happen. Eric Corbett 20:51, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Sure, but you and ArchReader aren't who I have in mind when I talk about the problems LDR causes. You understand Wikipedia well enough to know that you need to have two edit windows open or edit the entire article when editing a LDR article, and you know where to look and who to ask if you come across something you don't understand. To a would-be new editor, that is not going to be the case.
Thought experiment: you meet someone one day who's obviously knowledgeable and enthusiastic about widgets, and has lots of free time on their hands. You encourage them to share their knowledge of widgets on Wikipedia. You have the choice of three things you can tell them:
  1. "Go to the section to which you want to add, click the button next to the title that says 'edit', put the cursor where you want to add text, type in the fact you want to add, followed by <ref>, a note of where you found this information, and </ref>";
  2. "Go to the section at the end labelled "Bibliography" and see if the book you're using is already listed there. If it isn't, go to {{cite book}}, copy the blank form you see there and paste it into the Bibliography section, filling in the fields as appropriate. Click save, then go to the section to which you want to add, click the button next to the title that says 'edit', put the cursor where you want to add text, type in the fact you want to add, followed by {{sfn|authorname|publication year|page number}}";
  3. "Go to the section to which you want to add, click the button next to the title that says 'edit', put the cursor where you want to add text, type in the fact you want to add. Without clicking "save page", open the same article again in a separate edit window. In the second edit window, go to the section at the end labelled "Bibliography" and see if the book you're using is already listed there. If it isn't, go to {{cite book}}, copy the blank form you see there and paste it into the Bibliography section, filling in the fields as appropriate. Immediately before the template you've just pasted, add <ref name= and a name. Then, remembering the name you've given the reference you've created in the second edit window, go back to the first edit window, check the cursor is still at the end of the block of text you added, and type <refname= and the name of the reference you created, ensuring you reproduce the name exactly. Then, click "save" in both windows simultaneously. If anyone else has edited the article in the meantime you'll get a message saying "edit conflict", you'll need to check the history of the article to confirm whether any of your changes were saved, and if not will have to go back and start again.
One of the few things on which the hapless Sue Gardner was correct is that Wikipedia's mess of templates and obscure code markup, often unique not just to Mediawiki but to English Wikipedia, creates a huge barrier to entry which discourages casual contributors and potential new editors from contributing. Visual Editor may be a piece of crap, but the thinking behind its introduction is entirely sound. To my mind, the barrier to entry erected by unnecessarily complicated code is just as much a WP:ACCESS issue as misuse of low-contrast colours or line-separated bulleted lists. (Pinging RexxS, who probably has better knowledge than me regarding what potential new editors actually do and don't want to see.) – iridescent 10:46, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for cleaning up after me (a combination of two mistakes: wrong brackets and no time to preview, not even to check the result) ;) - If you ask me: the question is theory because I am not telling people what to do (unless I am asked or see a problem). Yes, I do have two windows open, one for the article, another for the source, but believe that is what other editors also do. I edit the section in the article with a new named ref, then (with the copied name) edit the ref section adding the details, and I don't mind the two minutes or so with no ref for the new item. I didn't arrive at LDR because someone told me to, but because I saw it (my 4 steps in learning to reference are linked above, - a 2012 description) and liked it, for the clarity of uncluttered text here and a list in a predictable alpha sort there. I confess that I never looked at the template documentation of the cite templates, and I easily believe that it is not helpful ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:12, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
If you want to try a quick experiment, dig out an iPad or other tablet—which an ever increasing number of Wikipedia's editors are using as their primary input device, particularly among Wikipedia's supposed priority areas of college students and the Global South—and see how easy "edit in two windows simultaneously" or "edit the entire article rather than sections" is. This is Franz Kafka in the en.m.wikipedia.org format which said users will see; open it in a window approximately 20x15cm or 15x10cm to roughly replicate what an full-size and mini-size tablet editor will see. Note in particular that "having two windows open side by side" and "edit the entire article rather than just a section" are physically impossible on a iPad. (It's possible to force a mobile device into desktop view, but most devices can't cope with the Wikipedia desktop edit window and editors won't be able to see what they're typing.) I think you're falling into the Jack Merridew fallacy, of assuming that every Wikipedia editor has the same equipment and level of technical knowledge as yourself. – iridescent 11:53, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
I see what you mean (came to late to know Jack Merridew, I knew Alarbus and found the person behind the user tremendously inspiring and helpful), but can only repeat: I don't tell people what to. If they add a bare url to an article I am interested in, I format it, - without missionary ambition. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:32, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Jack Merridew was, despite his reputation, a fundamentally decent person who was treated badly by the Wikipedia system—you may be aware of my voting to lift his "one account" restriction—but he always seemed incapable of grasping the idea that when someone did something in a way other than the way he would have done it, it wasn't necessarily an error. Wikipedia has never been short of people with the "my way is the only correct way to do things" mentality. – iridescent 09:44, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
I was recently invited to help reviving a dormant project and felt immediately at home ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:13, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Sorry I'm late to the debate, but today was General Election day in the UK and I've been out all day. To answer Iridescent's question, when I teach new editors, I simply teach them how to {{cite book}}, {{cite web}} and put references in the text. I find that it's enough to allow them to source their edits - and that's the key thing that goes a long way towards helping them make contributions that are not rapidly reverted. If that means they write the same cite twice (or more), I don't worry; there are plenty of gnomes who will come along and consolidate duplicate references all in good time. I'm much more relaxed about LDRs, I think. I use them myself regularly in general use and I use sfn whenever I'm citing multiple pages from the same book, as I think that has net advantages, but I can see the point that it could present a barrier to new editors. Of course, a new editor adding content and defining the cite in-line doesn't cause any problems to an article that uses LDRs - I'd bet that a new editor wouldn't even notice. However, when you come to the situation of a new editor removing citations, if they remove the last named reference in an LDR-based article, then they do get an error telling them that the named ref was defined but not invoked, as Iri says. Compare that with the situation where a new editor removes the citation that defines the reference in an article that uses named references, but not LDR: they get a red error message telling them that the named ref was invoked, but not defined. Swings and roundabouts, I think - what do you expect anyway when new editors go around removing citations? Fortunately there's a bot that goes round fixing those sort of errors, so I tend not to worry much. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 21:34, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
" MZMcBride was at one time exploring the possibility of having the references in a separate namespace with some kind of tool to invoke them in articles." I like this idea. Type in an ISBN, with or without dashes, between two curly braces at the end of your sentence. Done. Have a nice day. Nothing to see here. Move along. We're in the 21st century now. They can do this. • Arch♦Reader 22:42, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Having references in a separate namespace makes sense from a maintenance point-of-view (updates, error corrections, avoidance of link rot, etc.), but it isn't a panacea to make entry any easier for newbies. Right now, I show new editors how to call up the cite toolbar, pick 'cite book', type in an ISBN (and page number - you mustn't forget that) and have the cite created for them. Academics love that - it's a very powerful demonstration of the power of an online encyclopedia, compared to all the effort they often have to put into hand-crafting cites in their papers. We don't need anything we don't already have to accomplish that. But I agree, if we could create a database of references - similar to Wikidata's database of articles - and make it easy to find a reference in there, then we could start to lower the barriers to newcomers. It's not a difficult task for books with ISBN numbers (but not all books have them); it's easy for doi and pmid; but good old 'cite web' is the deal breaker. And unfortunately it's the cite most fresh editors will be wanting to use. --RexxS (talk) 00:48, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Citoid is apparently going to be extended to wikitext editing as well as VE, and will support automatic completion of cite template fields based not only on DOI and ISBN but also URL. If it works (not there yet), that would solve the cite web issue. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:55, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
I'd need to wait to see Citoid in action before I could comment, but I can't see any insurmountable reason, other than the WMF's notorious reluctance to work with outsiders, why Wikipedia software couldn't pull in external data from catalogue numbers (ISBN, PMID, OCLC, ISSN even Google Books reference…; even antiquarian or self-published books which don't have an ISBN will almost always have an OCLC number). There's no reason a Wikipedia citation to a book couldn't look like {{oclc=1234567|page=89}}, with the editor inserting the citation not needing to do anything else. (This would also have the welcome side-effect of highlighting articles using a large number of Google Books references, in my experience "proportion of references which have come from Google Books" has a virtually perfect inverse relationship with article quality.) If the WMF focused attention on getting this to work, they would have the opportunity to set an industry standard for citations not just on MediaWiki, but for referencing in web-based publications as a whole. Certainly, this couldn't cope with citing websites, but as I understand it even the beta version on use with Visual Editor can handle website citation. – iridescent 10:02, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm told VisualEditor now supports automagically filling in references using just a nytimes.com URL or whatever. I haven't played with it much myself. For references generally, it's increasingly clear the current system isn't working. Every time this comes up, people usually point to Wikidata as the solution. If/when arbitrary Wikidata querying is enabled here (hopefully in 2015), it might be a real option for references. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:58, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

My confidence in Wikidata is not as high as some. I like to think I'm reasonably familiar with both the underlying structures of MediaWiki, and the social dynamics that led to those structures being developed, but I still find Wikidata almost incomprehensible. I can't begin to imagine what new editors, especially non-techies, would make of it. (Wikidata's introduction page for newcomers contains "Data may be accessed in client Wikis using a Lua Scribunto interface. Apart from that, all data may be retrieved independently using the API.", which to anyone unfamiliar with web design might as well be written in Japanese. As an experiment, assume you're a new user who doesn't know what API stands for and wants to find out; see how many steps it takes following links from that "introduction" page.)
If I were the WMF, rather than creating a system for entering references I'd be working to integrate the API with WorldCat, Google Books etc. The Wikipedia editor types in an ISBN or OCLC number and a page number, and carries on with their work; this cues the software to work silently in the background to cross-check databases until it finds a corresponding hit, and either fill in the reference itself in the background or show an error message that it's not found a direct match and you'll need to fill in the fields manually. Per my comments to Gerda, as mobile editing becomes increasingly common, expecting people to fill in fiddly templates becomes less and less reasonable as an option. – iridescent 08:35, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata is a bit overwhelming, to be sure. The terminology used (including statement, claim, item, etc.) can be a lot to handle. We're going to have arbitrary Wikidata querying soon, hopefully. The underlying logic exposed to template editors will be via Scribunto/Lua, but there's nothing to stop us from having nice wrapper templates. {{insert birthday of article subject from wikidata}} for example. That would be neat, I think.
Regarding templates generally, yes they need proper input forms. Have you checked out TemplateData, which is used in conjunction with VisualEditor? It's an attempt to basically make templates/template parameters serializable so that they can be turned into Web forms. But from what I've seen, it turns the citation templates and infobox templates into what you might expect from a reasonable and usable editor user interface. Once wiki templates are capable of being standard Web forms, the mobile issue is easier. Then, of course, the challenge becomes loading VisualEditor on shitty mobile phones. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 05:46, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

tiny barnstar of amused appreciation

★ "ANI flu". pablo 10:02, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

DYK for The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate

 — Crisco 1492 (talk) 02:24, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! Even better title than The Modification and Instrumentation of a Famous Hornpipe as a Merry and Altogether Sincere Homage to Uncle Alfred, and nice timing with me breaking my promise to self not to appeal ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:54, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm debating taking it to FAC, if only to end the nine-year reign of Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering as the FA with the most ridiculously unwieldy title. Given that nobody seems interested in taking on the GA review, I may do that, once the issue with the formatting of the citations is resolved. – iridescent 08:43, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad might also go for unwieldy title, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:25, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I saw someone (Tony?) complaining about that suspended hyphen somewhere. FWIW, a suspended hyphen when two unhyphenated compound words have the same suffix is perfectly grammatically acceptable in English, it just doesn't arise as often as English doesn't have many compound words. "Pre- and postwar" is probably the most common usage. – iridescent 08:03, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, I wasn't aware of it in English, learning. The cantata title is obviously impossible to translate, at least not singable (with the same number of syllables to match the music), - but even in meaning most translators fall in the Holy Spirit trap. There is a note explaining the grammar. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:11, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Detail from The Destroying Angel
Detail from The Destroying Angel

Heh, The Destroying Angel actually beat Sirens in terms of page views, which kind of ruins my naked women=page views hypothesis. (There are a couple of topless bacchantes, but I'd challenge anyone to make them out at 100px resolution. To be frank, I'd challenge anyone to make out anything of what is actually going on in the picture at this resolution, even cropped down to only show the central Raving Madness tableau.) – iridescent 09:10, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

... while my peace piece has no recorded view at all, almost predictably so ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:30, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
It's how you sell it. Something Giano said a decade ago which I've tried to bear in mind ever since is to always assume that your reader is a bright 14-year-old. I never used to nominate anything at DYK unless I could find something which passed the "could I imagine a teenager thinking that looks interesting?" test. For arts articles, bad reviews are generally a good hook; when you mention that a reviewer described something as "a disgusting combination of voluptuousness and loathsome putridity" readers want to see what provoked such a strong reaction, even if it's on a topic in which they'd ordinarily have no interest. – iridescent 09:48, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Of course, to put this in perspective (and in keeping with my comments up above), 99.88% of visitors to the main page didn't read The Destroying Angel while it was up. – iridescent 09:53, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Selling would not have helped, - the "check views" function didn't work. But certainly, if I could add "Nazi" to a Bach cantata it would collect 1k extra views, - possibly not the readers I want to attract though. I like the titles of some of them, like one for tomorrow: Es ist ein trotzig und verzagt Ding (There is something defiant and fainthearted), - and "trotzig" has a more expressive sound than "defiant" ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:10, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
If I remember correctly, they do go back and fill in the missing days later when the bot fails to collate them like that. (The obvious question about "written possibly as a personal plea" is surely "plea for what?"—as the article stands the reader could reasonably assume from the dates that he was missing the Nazis and pleading for them to come back, given that to most of the English-speaking world that's the only thing they'll associate with Germany in the late 1940s.) – iridescent 15:27, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
To my eye, "trotzig" sounds like it ought to be the German for "Trotskyist". Don't underestimate how little German most Anglosphere readers have; for obvious reasons, it fell from favour in British, American and Commonwealth schools 80 years ago, and by the time relations improved French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian had become more useful languages for Anglosphere schoolchildren to learn. – iridescent 15:45, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Wanted to know what improvements can I make to my page to prevent deletion?

Wanted to know what improvements can I make to my page to prevent deletion? Himanshu Suri (talk) 08:01, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Himanshu Suri, the only page of yours I've ever deleted was Suri Himanshu (aka Suri), which is problematic for a number of reasons.
  • Firstly, the title isn't appropriate, if the name by which someone is famous is "Himanshu Suri", the title of the article should be Himanshu Suri.
  • More importantly, it's strongly advised against writing an autobiography on Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest for why we consider this inappropriate).
  • Most importantly, the page did nothing to demonstrate why you're notable in Wikipedia terms (see this page for an explanation of what we mean by "notable". Wikipedia isn't a directory, it's a tertiary reference work, and we only cover material which is sourceable to multiple, independent, non-trivial reliable sources; basically, you need to demonstrate why other significant publications consider you important. Neither of the two sources on the article (the company's website, and a blog) meet this criterion.
The Coding Institute LLC will almost certainly be deleted as well unless you take steps to address the issue of notability, as at present it reads like an advert with no evidence of coverage in independent sources. Per my previous comments, I very strongly advise against writing about your employer unless you're certain you can do it neutrally—and that means giving appropriate weight to criticism and bad reviews. Wikipedia is not an advertising platform, and it's not appropriate to attempt to use it as such. – iridescent 15:19, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
Rather than pointing to WP:COI, it may be more effective to explain why an article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 00:12, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
For someone who was here only to write their autobiography, I agree, but if you look at the history Himanshu Suri is here to promote his employer (the deleted article begins "Himanshu Suri is Online Marketing Lead at The Coding Institute LLC"), so conflict of interest is the main concern. – iridescent 06:30, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Deletion review - Autoblopnik

I'd like to review the speedy deltion of "Autoblopnik", please. The page was tagged and deleted within a few hours, and there was no time for adequate discussion. Pages about other web sites with similar content exist on Wikipedia (Sniff Petrol, The Truth About Cars), so I think Autoblopnik should have its own page. The site's appeal is narrow, but it's very well known in the automotive community. Thanks! GH Ack, wasn't logged in. GH Gearhead4847 (talk) 14:29, 1 June 2015 (UTC)Gearhead4847

I've undeleted it, but I guarantee that as it stands it will promptly be nominated for deletion again without very significant improvement very quickly. Wikipedia isn't a directory, it's a reference work, and we only repeat coverage which has already been published in multiple, independent, non-trivial reliable sources. You need to demonstrate that significant reliable sources (respected trade magazines, major websites, books) have discussed the website in detail—the mixture of blogs and self-published sites currently used definitely don't qualify. Wikipedia:Notability (web) has more information on what sort of thing is required. – iridescent 14:33, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Pathetic Revisions of Text

I contest the basis of your revision and deletion on the basis the referances

File:700,456 nef
Benjamin Gort wins landmark legal victory
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Polgardi1 (talk • contribs) 15:21, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
I assume you mean Benjamin Gort photographer, in which case no, I'm not going to restore it and nor will anyone else, since the existing article was an unsourced biography of a living person which accuses other people and public agencies of criminal acts, again without a source. Wikipedia isn't a newspaper or a crusading organisation; if you genuinely feel he meets Wikipedia's notability requirements—which are very specific and are based exclusively on whether the subject has received significant coverage in major publications you need to provide the sources to back that up. "I have seen Benjamin's work and believe it to be of cultural and ethical interest to the Residents of The North west of England" makes no difference either way; as far as I can see, not even the MEN has covered him in any detail, let alone any major artistic presses or academic publishers.
If you genuinely believe that he's received significant coverage in significant sources to justify inclusion in Wikipedia, then any biography you write needs to be neutral in tone, and any potentially contentious statement needs to be sourced to indicate where it came from. If you ask at Wikipedia's Manchester project, they may be able to assist with finding sources. – iridescent 06:47, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Hello, could you please restore Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and AfD it? It is a major research institution and I expect that it meets WP:GNG. I would like the issue examined in AfD. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:19, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
Bluerasberry I've restored it, although as you'll see in it's current state it's 100% unsourced and extremely spammy (written by the obviously-COI User:SCCAINFO). It might be better to wipe it out and start again from scratch if you think keeping it is justified, since keeping the existing version is going to mean the article will permanently be tainted by paid editing accusations. – iridescent 06:33, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I reformed the article to be a stub. Was there a talk page also? If there are paid editing accusations then I would like to keep the record of those, but the talk page is not there. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:39, 2 June 2015 (UTC)
The talkpage was completely blank—it didn't even have a WP:WPMED or WP:SEATTLE tag (which is probably why it slipped under the radar for so long). In some fairness, User:SCCAINFO was active before Jimbo began his great anti-COI jihad. (As you may know, I have never really understood the problem with employees writing about their employers, provided they stick to the facts. Sure, this kind of puffery is inappropriate, but if its something straightforward like the number of staff or the opening date, employees are probably better placed than outsiders to have the correct figures.) – iridescent 13:54, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

"Den of pigs"

The phrasing of your opposition to the VP proposal regarding the MoS is inappropriate. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:58, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Was this channeling User:Smith Jones? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk • contribs)
Everyone should be aware that this is a community, not a crazy den of pigs.
Ah, truly there is no sight Wikipedia has to offer more magnificent than that of the Civility Police in full faux-indignation, is there? (Ever noticed how the people keenest to tell other people how Wikipedia writers ought to be working tend to have a distinct lack of actual experience in writing for Wikipedia themselves?)
@SBHB: Yes, of course, as is every other occurrence of the phrase on Wikipedia to which Darkfrog24 is presumably also pretending to be offended. (The phrase even has its own userbox, FFS.)
@Darkfrog: Do one. Given that WT:MOS and its ludicrous proliferation of subpages set a bar for "pointless arguing over things about which no sane person gives a shit" which even WP:ITN/C, arbcom-l, WT:INFOBOX and Jimbo's talkpage struggle to reach, "crazy den of pigs" is among the mildest things one could call it. (Myself, Sue Gardner, and Carrite all agreeing on something is rare as hen's teeth, but one thing on which we could all agree is the fact that too many of Wikipedia's backroom areas are dominated by a small coterie of obsessives who see themselves as guardians of the flame and bite the heads off anyone who dares challenge their fiefdoms, unless the newcomer has already built up their own clique of friends in high places to protect them. The idea that these people are the people of whom Wikipedia wants to be encouraging new users to ask questions makes about as much sense as pointing well-intentioned newbies towards Wikipedia Review as their first port of call.) – iridescent 23:33, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
I think you were being too kind to arbcom-l here. --Guerillero | Parlez Moi 05:53, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Probably - I keep that image of my "new messages" notification at the top of this page as a reminder of just how much crap the arbs have to wade through whilst simultaneously being expected to respond to every query instantly. The leakers had the presumably unintended effect of making arbcom-l seem less soul-destroying than it really is; because they only published exchanges that contained something substantive, they failed to communicate both the tedium of trying to hold a 15-way discussion via "reply all", and the sheer volume of minor queries and notifications that are nonetheless important enough to need a reply, prompting in turn another 15-way chat about who should reply and what the reply should be. (The panicked notifications from two editors who'd met up and used the same Starbucks wifi and were now concerned about checkuser were a particular bugbear of mine. I understand the reasons the CUs have intentionally let this "all-seeing eye" mythos build up, but it can't be denied that it creates a climate of fear among legitimate editors whilst having little impact on the sockmaster hardcore.) – iridescent 08:03, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
At 5 months, I am sitting at 350 unread with more coming in by the day. --Guerillero | Parlez Moi 06:15, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
You're probably on course to outlast myself and Floquenbeam in that case, at any rate. Am I right in thinking that about now, "this is a complete waste of my time and nothing I do is making the slightest difference given how hidebound the 'we've always done it this way' mentality is" is dawning on you? – iridescent 15:31, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
Only two more months and Guerillero beats me. ArbCom was the dumbest thing I've done on WP; ArbCom's current setup and my skill set overlap 5%-10% max. --Floquenbeam (talk) 20:20, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Ditto—as far as I'm concerned, Arbcom was one of the most soul-crushing experiences of my life. The obvious failings could be excused if the system were working, but it clearly isn't; most Arbcom cases would come out no worse if they were resolved on the roll of a die. – iridescent 21:06, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
"Roll of a die", thanks for that, please don't correct. The dice fell on parole for me, - a good day, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:14, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Nothing to correct—die=singular, dice=plural. You have The Dice Man to thank for the fact most people nowadays think "dice" is the singular (well, that and the fact that children no longer have the phrase Alea iacta est drummed into them). – iridescent 21:17, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for more enlighteniment, - forgive me, never heard of die other than in the opposite of live ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:33, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

I have ups and downs in my feelings about how effective the Arbitration Committee was during my years of service; I can think of problems we resolved, and problems we failed to resolve, and things we made better and things we made worse. As I've written more than once (for example, somewhere in here, we especially aren't very good—as a project, I'm not just talking about ArbCom—about systematically going back and reviewing which approaches to dispute resolution have worked well and which have not.

That said, I am going to gratuitously flatter myself and my quondam colleagues to the extent of saying I think that the outcomes, in the matters I participated in at least, were significantly better than random chance. Make of that faint praise what you will. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:22, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Surely an element of the victor writing history there, though. Not wanting to go all Wikipedia Review on you, but the people in the cases where Arbcom made the wrong decisions tend not to still be around to complain. (Pretty much by definition, the cases that reach Arbcom don't have an obvious "right" and "wrong" side, since when it's obvious that one side is in the wrong it gets resolved before it ever has the chance to reach arbitration. If Arbcom has a real-world equivalent, it isn't a criminal court, it's a court of equity.) – iridescent 21:28, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
I praised you before for that, - but I remember the case where you were the only one for the better outcome which (the outcome) was still bad enough, - it should not have been accepted, imho. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:33, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Infoboxes

TAKE THIS SOMEWHERE ELSE:

Take this somewhere else; my talkpage is neither the Arbcom Appeals Court nor Wikipediocracy Lite, despite the number of people who appear to think otherwise. Why is it that this page seems to be the first place people run to when they feel the need to try to rake over the embers of the infobox wars? If you want to talk about getting FA standards changed, or if you want to chat about whether TFA selections fairly represent the contents of WP:FANMP, I'm sure everyone at WT:FA and WT:TFA would be delighted to have yet another interminable thread on the matter.

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.
Iridescent, I was a bit surprised by your estimate of 30% TFAs without infobox, having watched TFA for about three years. I only looked at May 2015 now: one article without vs. 30 with, - close to 3%. Do you think that was an exceptional month? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:29, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
Doing some dip-sampling, I think the 30% figure is reasonably accurate. Of the first 10 articles on WP:FA, three (Anthony Roll, Beaune Altarpiece, Belton House) are box-less. Taking the third item in each of the 52 categories at WP:FA (or second in those rare categories that don't have three entries; the third not the first, in case there's something unusual to being the first given that these are more likely to start with a digit),1 shows 16 without an infobox, or 31%. Repeating the exercise with the last item in each FA category2 gives 15⁄52, 29%. There are some categories like geography and biology where I'd expect infobox usage to be higher, but overall I suspect 30% without infoboxes at FA level is going to be fairly close to the correct figure, and on many of the articles that do technically have infoboxes the box is very minimal. The "every article needs an infobox" faction have always consistently exaggerated how popular the boxes actually are; a few large categories like sporting biographies and botany where it does make sense for every article to have an infobox distort the figures as to how many people are actually using the things. – iridescent 15:27, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
1 Economy of the Han dynasty, London Necropolis Company, Joseph Priestley, ANAK Society, Atomic line filter, Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany, Ecclesiastical heraldry, Chinese classifier, Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act, Euclidean algorithm, Confirmation bias, AdS/CFT correspondence, Family of Gediminas, Æthelbald of Mercia, 1910 London to Manchester air race, Akutan Zero, should you care.
2 John Michael Wright, Wage reform in the Soviet Union, 1956–62, Joseph Priestley, Zong massacre, Vkhutemas, Nikita Zotov, Melford Stevenson, Problem of Apollonius, Wind, White dwarf, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Xenu, Royal Maundy, Zimbabwe women's national field hockey team at the 1980 Summer Olympics, We Can Do It!
(Adding) I suspect the low number of infoboxes in May was a statistical quirk. Of the 24 articles scheduled so far in June, seven (Waterfalls in Ricketts Glen State Park, Carl Nielsen, Underground Electric Railways Company of London, Panama–Pacific commemorative coins, M-theory, Great Stink and L'Arianna) are boxless. – iridescent 15:43, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
I am not surprised that we arrive at different figures if we don't look at the same thing. I look for TFA - today's (!) featured article. I looked at May. Looking at April, I see 1 without, 29 with, - that's what we show to our readers as Wikipedia's best work. - I know that one in June will not have one, Carl Nielsen, - I was silent on the topic ;) - 10 supporting articles were created in the context (initiated but not writen by me), such as Oluf Hartmann, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:50, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
ps: L'Arianna is not "boxless", - actually it was one of the first attempts of a compromise, see article talk, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:55, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
The reason I'm looking at the 30% figure for current FAs rather than the figure for TFAs is because the discussion from which you're quoting me is about FAs, not TFAs. These are "what we show to our readers as Wikipedia's best work", which is why WP:FA is where the large bold link on the main page has led since the current main page layout was created in 2004, as well as what the reader will get to if they click on the bronze star on any FA page. (As I've already pointed out, "I know that one in June will not have one" is true but rather misleading; seven so far in June will not have one, with more dates yet to be scheduled. Seven out of the 24 TFAs this month is—astonishingly enough—30%) – iridescent 16:15, 6 June 2015 (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.

Article was deleted under speedy deletion category. Would like to understand reasons

We have posted an article titled - Seer Akademi. It was our first experience on writing article on Wikipedia. It was deleted under Speedy Deletion category with G11 - unambiguous promotional material. We are absolutely certain that we neither were promoting the organization, individual or product or service. We have provided the following:

1. Evolution of an organization to tell the path it had taken and it served as a background or context to the article. 2. A unique pedagogy or teaching approach that has been innovated we wanted others to learn from it.

Would like to understand in detail the reasons so that we can either make the improvement or drop the idea of publishing an article on Wiki.

Any mentoring will be highly appreciated.

Seer A123 (talk) 11:23, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Seer A123, I see this question has already been answered here, and while I agree with the answers you've already been given I'll give my views as well. Wikipedia is a neutral reference work, not a webhost or a listing site, and Seer Akademi was an absolutely blatant piece of advertising. It was over 1800 words long, virtually unsourced and did not contain a single piece of critical commentary; what it did contain was "a worldwide pioneer", "a vision in mind to create world class electronics engineers", "It reinforces our belief that strong course framework & right pedagogy will transform students", "It was like a dream come true for most of the students", "We continued with our mission and kept improving our pedagogy", "Seer gives the independence to students to follow their hearts", "designed & developed by master practitioners", "This approach has transformed individual talent", "Our lab is equipped with all the tools required", "Seer is proud to implement Two Dimensional Bloom’s Taxonomy", "Seer’s ground-breaking approach", "it has emerged as a privileged destination", "offers a unique benefit", and "working on cutting edge technology". Even if it weren't immediately obvious from all the references to "we" and "our", this was clearly not a neutral article but a press release. The very fact that you can say "unique pedagogy or teaching approach that has been innovated" in your question above makes it clear you're on Wikipedia to promote this organisation, not to write a neutral article about what other reliable sources say about it, even if it weren't obvious from your username that you have a conflict of interest.
Wikipedia can be confusing if you're not used to it. If you do want to try to help in creating a neutral and unbiased article on the subject and you think that it's received enough coverage in other sources to create one, I'd strongly recommend reading Wikipedia:Your first article which will explain how to get started and what to avoid. If you have any queries about what to include, the best people to ask would probably be the Computing project, who will be more used to dealing with articles of this nature. – iridescent 19:18, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Salih Al-Talib

Hi,

I noticed that you deleted the article Saleh Al-Talib. Could you also delete the redirect Salih_Al-Talib?

Thanks RookTaker (talk) 17:17, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Sure, done. In future, it's generally best to put {{db-g8}} on any orphaned redirects or talkpages you happen to come across—that adds them to the speedy deletion queue and means any admin who happens to be monitoring it will know to delete them. – iridescent 23:42, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

???

I must say that's a first. What was wrong? --BDD (talk) 21:59, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Absolutely no idea - I must have accidentally hit the rollback button. I do apologise! – iridescent 22:22, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Arbitration case opening

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Technical 13. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Technical 13/Evidence. Please add your evidence by June 30, 2015, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Technical 13/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Liz Read! Talk! 01:49, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Unless someone specifically asks me to comment, I'll stay out of this one. I'm only very tangentially involved, and if T13 has a genuinely legitimate explanation for his recent behaviour he's better off debating with his main accusers, without a horde of bystanders standing on the sidelines egging one or the other side on. – iridescent 20:25, 17 June 2015 (UTC)
Etty's Cleopatra

Did you see this Cleopatra? How does it compare? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:42, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

French, so much less controversial as Catholic countries traditionally had much more of a tradition of nudity. (Cleopatra is traditionally shown bare-breasted in European art, as that's how she's usually shown in Roman and Egyptian statues; pre-1857* it didn't really come up in England, as I struggle to think of a single significant English painting of her before Etty.) Etty's Cleopatra is something of a special case, as he basically used it as a pretext to cram as many paintings of naked prostitutes into a square of canvas as he possibly could. Artistically, I think Etty's Cleopatra is absolutely wretched. – iridescent 20:13, 17 June 2015 (UTC)
*The year 1857 is significant, as that's when the distinction between "art" and "pornography" came into English law, meaning artists could paint nude scenes without fear of prosecution for obscenity, provided they could demonstrate they were legitimate artists.
When I saw Shakespeare's play first, Cleopatra was played by a young man, topless = bare-breasted all the time, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:22, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of The World Before the Flood

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article The World Before the Flood you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Poltair -- Poltair (talk) 13:41, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of The World Before the Flood

The article The World Before the Flood you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:The World Before the Flood for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already been on the main page as an "In the news" or "Did you know" item, you can nominate it to appear in Did you know. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Poltair -- Poltair (talk) 22:01, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Your Candaules hook

Hello, Iridescent. From the literary side of the fence, the words "a level of offensiveness one would expect from a foreign, not a British, artist" in the hook currently in prep read like a quote, but are not in quotation marks. If they are a direct quote (which I can't verify), how would you feel about indicating the fact? Or I could be wrong … Awien (talk) 21:53, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

It's a paraphrase, not a direct quote—unsurprisingly, given that the original is from a Georgian (era, not state) literary journal, the original is much wordier. If you want chapter-and-verse, the exact quote is "Have we not enough of the voluptuous from the pencils of foreign artists, but is one of our own purer school–a man so capable of better things–to mistake the proper direction of art, and thus to offend against decency and good taste?" – iridescent 22:01, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Hmm! I stand corrected. It was the word "foreign" that caught my attention - not what we would usually say today. Thanks for giving the full quote. What a great reflection of the spirit of the time! Pity it's too long for the hook. Cheers, Awien (talk) 22:16, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
The quotes in the "Reception" section of almost everything in Category:Paintings by William Etty make for fascinating glimpses of the spirit of the time, as he was such a polarising figure. "We fear that Mr. E will never turn from his wicked ways, and make himself fit for decent company" (on Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm) and John Constable's dismissal of The World Before the Flood as "a revel rout of Satyrs and lady bums as usual" are probably the most interesting from the modern perspective. (Note that as regards Candaules, it wasn't the nudity per se that was considered offensive, but the topic of the painting, as it depicted both a peeping tom and a plot to overthrow the king, both of which were A Big Deal in the wake of the French Revolution.)
Love 'em both! Thanks! Awien (talk) 22:30, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:20, 25 June 2015 (UTC)
Cough – iridescent 19:12, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Portrait of Mlle Rachel

Gatoclass (talk) 01:50, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
Excellent. Like your comment on the book. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:57, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
Thanks—I'm aware that this is the weakest of the Etty articles. Very little has been written about it, but per the comments from PatHadley above, this is going to be one of the five Etty paintings in the new gallery, and to my mind is the most eye-catching after Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball, so I wanted at least something in place as I can imagine people wanting to find out more about who Mlle Rachel was. Rachel Félix is a very poor article, and if the unsourced statements were removed from it would be a gutted stub, so I don't really want the readers ending up there; bizarrely, fr:Rachel Félix is even worse. The other three Etty paintings that will be on display—Monk Bar, Male Nude with Staff and Mary, Lady Templeton are all quite uninteresting in comparison. (All three have slots earmarked for them when I get around to writing the bio, though, to illustrate the sections on his campaign to preserve the York city walls, his early nude studies when he still saw himself as the modern heir to the Ancient Greeks, and how strongly he was influenced by Thomas Lawrence, respectively.) – iridescent 12:23, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Musidora: The Bather 'At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed'


Very good article - bravo! Awien (talk) 11:40, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Do feel free to tell the idiot who thinks that "every article needs at least one left aligned image". – iridescent 13:47, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Incomplete DYK nominations

Hello! Your submission of Template:Did you know nominations/The Wrestlers (painting) at the Did You Know nominations page is not complete; see step 3 of the nomination procedure. If you do not want to continue with the nomination, tag the nomination page with {{db-g7}}, or ask a DYK admin. Thank you. DYKHousekeepingBot (talk) 00:54, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Hello! Your submission of Template:Did you know nominations/The World Before the Flood at the Did You Know nominations page is not complete; see step 3 of the nomination procedure. If you do not want to continue with the nomination, tag the nomination page with {{db-g7}}, or ask a DYK admin. Thank you. DYKHousekeepingBot (talk) 00:54, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Hello! Your submission of Template:Did you know nominations/Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm at the Did You Know nominations page is not complete; see step 3 of the nomination procedure. If you do not want to continue with the nomination, tag the nomination page with {{db-g7}}, or ask a DYK admin. Thank you. DYKHousekeepingBot (talk) 00:54, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Hello! Your submission of Template:Did you know nominations/The Combat: Woman Pleading for the Vanquished at the Did You Know nominations page is not complete; see step 3 of the nomination procedure. If you do not want to continue with the nomination, tag the nomination page with {{db-g7}}, or ask a DYK admin. Thank you. DYKHousekeepingBot (talk) 00:54, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

And this is why the robots are destined to lose the final conflict with humans. Explanation of what happened is here, for the benefit of everyone else who's been spammed with this notice—you will all be as shocked as I am to discover that it's the WMF's fault. – iridescent 07:46, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm

Thank you for your help (pass it on) Victuallers (talk) 12:01, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

DYK for The Wrestlers (painting)

Gatoclass (talk) 00:51, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Introducing the new WikiProject Hampshire!

Greetings!

The flag of Hampshire

I am happy to introduce you to the new WikiProject Hampshire! The newly designed WikiProject features automatically updated work lists, article quality class predictions, and a feed that tracks discussions on the 2,690 talk pages tagged by the WikiProject. Our hope is that these new tools will help you as a Wikipedia editor interested in Hampshire.

Hope to see you join! Harej (talk) 20:42, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

User:Harej, I have never been a member of WikiProject Hampshire, never shown the slightest interest in WikiProject Hampshire, and never to the best of my knowledge made a non-minor edit to an article relating to Hampshire. I have no idea how you've generated your mailing list, given that you haven't deigned to bother providing the standard "you are receiving this message because…" explanation, but please consider this an opt-out from any further spam of this nature; if I'm interested in a particular project, I am perfectly capable of watchlisting it myself. (Was this mass-mailing discussed anywhere? I can't imagine anyone considering it appropriate to spam non-members of a project just to notify them that the layout of that project's front page has changed.) – iridescent 14:21, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

A summary of a Featured Article you nominated at WP:FAC will appear on the Main Page soon. Was there anything I left out you'd like to see put back in? - Dank (push to talk) 00:13, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

No problem with the blurb as it stands—Chelsea Bridge is interesting from an engineering viewpoint, as one of the few self-anchored suspension bridges in Europe, but in terms of architecture and history has always been overshadowed by Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge next door and there's not much that's very interesting to say about it. – iridescent 09:46, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for that one, - love building bridges (family tradition) ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:40, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
I'm not very fond of this one, either as a bridge or as an article (although Wandsworth Bridge is worse). Chelsea Bridge is quite boring, so the article reads like a dry engineering article rather than the combination of visual arts and social history I was aiming for with the bridge series. Its near-neighbour Battersea Bridge makes for a much more interesting story. – iridescent 14:55, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

DYK for The Combat: Woman Pleading for the Vanquished

Thanks for your help Victuallers (talk) 12:01, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

DYK for The World Before the Flood

Gatoclass (talk) 00:01, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Norm Sartorius

Thanks, thanks, thanks. I am new, so I have a lot to learn. I get it now and will rewrite accordingly. I am glad to see you are working on behalf of the arts. Many fine craft and woodworker pages are pretty lame. It would be great to see those improve radically over time. Several craft curators, critics, and historians have commented on Sartorius, but hardly anyone ever says anything even slightly negative, unlike other fine arts. The print media tends to be positive and therefore sounds nothing but promotional. I get the idea now on how to cover the juried craft shows,awards, etc. I'll get to it tonight, after the day job. I appreciate your work on behalf of Wikipedia 130.160.143.223 (talk) 14:55, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball

 — Chris Woodrich (talk) 12:55, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
Star on the Main page today, thank you, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:20, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
Thank you… It doesn't seem to be getting too badly damaged so far, although I could have done without the time it took me to repair someone's well-intended attempt to "fix" the references on William Etty which ended up breaking them. – iridescent 20:25, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

AWB runs

I've seen you pop up and down my watchlist with your AWB runs and it reminded me of this discussion at the WP:India noticeboard regarding AWB runs on our numerous village articles. Would it be possible for you to do those runs when you have some time? A lot of these articles need some amount of typo fixing, grammar checks, and MOS changes among other minor changes. The can be addressed by districts, and typically each district can come with one census reference which could be added to all articles under that district. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 17:18, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

I would be slightly reluctant to do systematic runs of AWB—or any other semi-automated system—on India/Pakistan/Bangladesh articles. One of the problems with AWB is that, while the editor still has to preview and approve every edit, the window only shows the section of the article in which the changes are being made. For most articles, this isn't an issue, but Ind/Pak/Ban are particularly prone to having large chunks of either poorly machine-translated semi-gibberish ("This village have beautiful women and many HOLY men and is home of syed hussain whose sells fine meats and fruits and also splendid and clean vegetables") and blatant cut-and-paste copyright violations.
Because these problematic edits don't contain any spelling mistakes or formatting mistakes of the type AWB will pick up (duplicate referencing, double-spacing etc), if there's a well-written section that contains a minor spelling mistake elsewhere in the article then the problematic section won't be noticeable in AWB. Consequently, the most recent edit in the history will be a valid edit by the AWB operator rather than a potentially problematic edit by an IP, making it that much less likely that problem edits will be noticed and reverted. (Sure, problem edits will be noticed quickly on something like Chennai which has a lot of readers and where issues will be quickly noticed, but most I/P/B articles don't get many readers and problems can last for years if an AWB user or bot edit "whitewashes" the edit history in this way. (Thanks to an edit from SmackBot immediately following a problematic IP, Chungtia contained the phrase The Chungtia war dance is one of the most macho war dances which is a treat to watch from 2007 until about 30 seconds ago, and you can see something similar in the history of a substantial proportion of articles.) Sitush, do you have any thoughts on this? – iridescent 17:41, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
Before someone turns up to accuse me of racism, unsourced puffery is certainly not unique to Asian articles; Attleborough is one of Wikipedia's most dubious articles, and is is about a relatively large town squarely in en-wiki's heartland. South Asia does have the fairly unique problem of having a sizeable number of people who can't speak English but think they can, which leads to a unique set of problems. – iridescent 17:46, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
I've only tried using AWB on a couple of occasions and it scared the life out of me. I can well understand your reluctance given the sheer range of problems that exist in those articles and the way in which AWB displays things. - Sitush (talk) 17:51, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
I understand that perspective iridescent -- though I haven't come across the fish sellers yet, that's one of the reasons I seldom touch these village articles -- too much of a headache for too little result; and it's not like we're short of other areas on the India project that could use some help, but that's also the reason I was thinking of an automated approach instead of something that requires editors to spend time cleaning up. I think Anna Frodesiak has spent some time on cleaning up some Indian villages (unrelated) so maybe she has a different perspective to mine and can chime in. (Sorry if I've converted your TP to a musing board!) cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 18:04, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
This talkpage has always served as something of a chatroom (check the archives); I wouldn't worry about it. If we're on the subject of pinging, Magioladitis might also have thoughts on the pros and cons of semiautomating, and it might also be worth asking for input at WT:AWB.
Stepping slightly outside the box, but would booting a lot of the core data from the village articles across to Wikidata and making each article effectively a giant template showing imported Wikidata (basically a prose infobox) coupled with a free-text section go a long way to cleaning up the worst of the village problems, by making it considerably harder for drive-bys to touch the core data while still giving them an "anyone can edit" section if they have something to say? (MZMcBride, RexxS, Pigsonthewing is this actually a viable idea or would the technical issues make it unworkable?) – iridescent 18:13, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
The export to wikidata idea is appealing. A lot of the village articles were created by GaneshBot (an AWB bot) and the source files should be available somewhere. The census data as well as other infobox data like pin codes etc can also be dumped to csv files. —SpacemanSpiff 18:32, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately, the RfC on extending the use of Wikidata in the English Wikipedia concluded that we can "modify existing infoboxes to permit Wikidata inclusion", but we can't "use Wikidata in article text on English Wikipedia at this time". Normally I'd just go ahead and do it as a proof-of-concept, but I'm scared of a backlash that could scupper our chances of making progress in the future. The idea of a custom infobox that auto-populated from Wikidata would work - I've made a number of them already - but I'm naturally wary of being seen to foist an infobox onto areas that didn't ask for them. Have a look at that RfC and you see what we're up against in trying novel solutions. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 19:43, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
As you may know (cough), I'm aware of the issues regarding foisting infoboxes or anything similar, but I think it would be a viable concept. Without the ability for Wikidata to feed data back to the wikis, I struggle to understand what Wikidata is actually for. (The relatively minor uses I'm aware of, like updating interwiki language links and the {{authority control}} template, certainly don't justify the time it hoovers up and the ill-feeling it creates; I would think an actual visible use for it beyond "spending the WMF's money on something whose primary purposes are enabling external companies to make a profit from Wikipedia's information more easily, and in due course to take over from Commons as en-wiki's penal colony now Wikiversity no longer wants the job" (Before half the Wikidata admins turn up here wailing and gnashing their teeth, that may not be how you see Wikidata but it's certainly the impression it gives to a sizeable chunk of en-wiki.) would be a good thing. – iridescent 20:04, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
Well, I can show you an infobox on Audrey Russell that is a pointer to what could be done. Small beginnings, but it scales well. What is more exciting is the possibility of dynamic articles - where a visitor could ask for a list of notable composers born in the 18th century and we could deliver a properly formatted list article where the content was generated on-the-fly from Wikidata. I'm also looking hard at how we could use Wikidata to create stub articles on the Welsh Wikipedia that could then be fleshed out by Welsh speakers (not me, sadly). Once we've learned how to do that, there are a couple of hundred more small language Wikipedias where we could take the concept and make huge strides in delivering "the sum of all knowledge" to "every single human being" - and probably not quite how Jimbo thought we would. --RexxS (talk) 20:28, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
Just to get an idea of what we're up against I went to the category of villages in India, dived down randomly to sub cats and chose three articles at random: Merangkong, Jalanpur, and Kashipur chakbibi.
  1. Merangkong is reasonably ok per our village article standards, though the census link could be included in place of india9 which is, for the most part, a census dump.
  2. Jalanpur is an example for the problems iridescent talks about above.
  3. Kashipur chakbibi is the problem I was concerned about.

While it's not a statistically significant sample, I think the general pattern of the village articles is likely to follow this sort of a split. #1 and #3 have mostly bot/AWB activity outside of the creator. #2 has had its share of problems unaddressed for quite a while now, so I'm not entirely sure that running AWB might hide the problem for a longer duration, but I see that an AWB run on the other two groupings would definitely be helpful. RexxS, I'm not active on the indic wikis, but if you think testing something like a Wikidata populated set of village articles might be worth a try I can check with some of them on that. —SpacemanSpiff 04:26, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

RexxS, to be fair, "Dynamic articles" translates equally well to "vandalism that affects multiple wikis simultaneously". As anyone who's been here long enough to remember the days of template vandalism can confirm, it's surprisingly hard for even very experienced editors to spot where a transcluded bit of vandalism is coming from, particularly if done separately. I can't remember which article it was, but one of the horse editors will no doubt recall the racehorse TFA which over its 24 hours in the sun was showing virtually every horse imaginable as its lead image aside from the horse in question, thanks to an enterprising vandal who'd worked out how to add absolute-positioned images to the transcluded templates. This incident and the time it took anyone to spot it did not exactly cover Wikidata in glory.
Regarding the Welsh stubs thing, if you haven't already it might be worth asking Irish Wikipedia for their thoughts on it. The two have very similar userbases, in that anyone writing for them can reasonably be presumed to have absolute fluency in English (or Spanish, in the case of a few Patagonians) so I would think the whole "an article on every subject regardless of quality" approach would be less important, since most readers would presumably prefer a good quality English-language article than a poor quality Welsh/Irish/Gaelic/Scots stub. (Enough time has passed since the last time it was laughed at that Moose is probably worth another quick kick.) I specifically raise Irish rather than the others because they have (or at least had) Alison chivvying people along for much of their history.
SpacemanSpiff, I agree about the villages, and I suspect that that 1⁄3 adequate, 1⁄3 inadequate, 1⁄3 seriously problematic breakdown would be replicated across India articles in general. A quick dip-sample in Category:Indian people and its subcategories certainly seems to bear it out.
(The WMF would never allow it, but I think one could make a decent case for moving every Indian article into a special draft namespace, and requiring an established editor to manually move each one back into mainspace before it becomes visible to Google, in much the same way WP:Articles for creation was meant to operate. It would cause the mother of all backlogs, but would clear out a huge chunk of Wikipedia's problem articles at a stroke as well as giving an indication as to which of these articles people actually care about.) – iridescent 19:29, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
That proposal might do some good, especially for BLPs. I'd thought of something along those lines regarding stubs -- putting them in a cleaning pen on WP:IN but then I came to realize that the class ratings are way too random with GA/FA etc being added to articles at random (I've had to remove two random GAs this past month). Some variation of your idea begs consideration, so I'll think about that. —SpacemanSpiff 04:27, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I have my own issues with the usefulness of the whole article quality/article importance matrix, which I think is a decade past its sell-by date and survives only through bureaucratic inertia. ("That article assessment scale is a by-product of a decade-old pet project of Jimmy Wales to create an offline version of Wikipedia for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so, and the Importance/Quality metric was used to determine which articles got the limited number of berths on the CD-ROM. Nowadays, the girl in Africa is far more likely to have high-speed mobile broadband than she is to have a computer, CD reader and reliable power source to run them, and the CD version of Wikipedia hasn't been published for years. However, "because we've always done it this way" Wikipedia persists with a grading scale which runs "F, G, B, C, Sta, Stu", with an additional grade between G and B only available to articles on hurricanes, computing and military history. You've been here so long it probably seems natural, but stop and think how messed up that must look to every outside observer, and there's no rational reason to keep doing it other than that understanding it gives some people a momentary buzz of "I understand this secret code". Those "importance" categories were necessary in the days of WP:1.0 when the WMF could talk seriously about "producing a print version of Wikipedia" and it was necessary to decide what was worthy of printing, but are pointless now. Quite aside from "importance" being completely subjective, importance in Wikipedia terms doesn't necessary equate to importance elsewhere, since the most important function of Wikipedia is collating information not easily available elsewhere—for Wikipedia, John Sherman Cooper is a more important article than John F. Kennedy.", if you missed it.) Personally, I would say the only assessment categories Wikipedia should have should be "Needs major work", "Adequate" and "Realistically as good as it's likely to get".
I would think article assessment—or at least FA status—would be an ideal use case for Wikidata; give the six FAC and FAR delegates admin status on Wikidata, and a protected wikidata "is en-wiki FA" checkbox. Something of the kind must be going on anyway, to generate the "is FA/GA on a foreign language project" markers (see the language sidebar on Tarrare for an example). Provided the source table on Wikidata were adequately protected, this would appear to be an obvious solution to the perennial problem of people trying to unilaterally promote and unpromote FAs/GAs. – iridescent 09:12, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Article quality & importance ratings can work well, but only if there are people who use them to improve the "low quality but high importance" set. Personally I generally prefer to let the people decide on importance, by using the excellent (& I think little-known) Category:Lists of popular pages by WikiProject, together with the quality ratings. The visual arts project wisely decided at the start never to use the "importance" ratings. For most projects I wonder if the effort of maintaining the system is worth it. Far too many raters clearly just go by length, & one might do that automatically. Most projects now have far too many articles for the system to work well, not to mention too few editors. Johnbod (talk) 15:59, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I am not entirely convinced those rankings are accurate. – iridescent 16:09, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
There are some obvious oddballs like this on the India list but a check on the no views under article history will typically set those right, but for the most part I think the list is fine except during article moves and such actions. —SpacemanSpiff 16:18, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Directoire style was a flash in the pan last month; you get these - google doodle, reddit, who knows? Now its back to 1,000 per month. The rugby is odder - betting? That started suddenly last mid-October, & then was very jerky, going from several '000 to bugger-all day by day. Bone char used to be a top VA article for a while, getting over 500K per month for several months, then back to 500 pd. The lists are accurate compilations of the grok.se figures, & such mysteries apart, reliable. Johnbod (talk) 16:28, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Hmmm. Quite aside from all the sporting ones at the top, I am less than convinced that Tuppence Middleton is really a more popular article than Winston Churchill. I don't doubt that the figures accurately reflect the grok.se stats, but I do doubt grok.se as a reliable source. (IIRC it had Daniel Lambert as one of the 1000 most-read articles on the entire Wiki for 2010, while blips like this can't be entirely down to Reddit or passing mentions on QI.) – iridescent 17:14, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Last month she was - just the same pattern as Sense8, and yes, they can. The 4-day bump, mainly on day 1, is exactly what you get with a passing web or news story. It is actually the blippy-ness of the blips, which one can often tie down to a particular cause, that I find pursuasive as to the stats' accuracy. Johnbod (talk) 17:42, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
In which case, why can't bloody Reddit pick up on something actually worth reading, rather than dull tasteless half-finished crap like Whipping Tom? – iridescent 18:06, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
We could tell them about the quality and importance ratings? Johnbod (talk) 18:25, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
I confess that looking at the France list, I feel a certain pride that Tarrare ranks higher than Prime Minister of France and Portrait of Mlle Rachel ranks higher than Dauphin of France. I like to think Wikipedia's readers have their priorities straight. – iridescent 18:37, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
But what about the important articles, like In re Snyder and Bureau of Insular Affairs and "My Name Is Not Merv Griffin"? Newyorkbrad (talk) 18:41, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Or A215 road, which I believe may be the single lowest-traffic [sic] Good Article on Wikipedia? (I have a sneaking suspicion Wood Siding railway station is probably the least-viewed FA as well—it's certainly lower than the mighty Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v Baxter Healthcare Pty Ltd.) – iridescent 18:57, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
All the articles I've ever created currently hold the coveted Bad Article designation (although it appears I will have to change that if I ever want to pass RfA again).... Regards, Diderot a/k/a Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:51, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
You do know you have only yourself to blame for that comparison? I can say from experience that the bureaucratic timesink does indeed distract from the reason we're all (well, all but one apparently) here; that doesn't make it A Good Thing. Since I can see you writing away on Yates v. United States (2015), and since this link is still blue, presumably you feel this as well. – iridescent 20:05, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Actually, my main time-and-energy competitor for mainspace work is not really the wikitime I spend/spent on administration/arbitration/bureaucracy; it's a series of off-wiki recreational and professional research-and-writing projects. I've tried to work some of that into my contributions here, but I need to beware of self-citation and OR. None of which is a good excuse, of course.
I can't help noticing that you seem to be rejuvenated as an editor lately; a whole series of substantive contributions, plus things like typo runs, a sort of activity I assumed you'd burnt out on long ago. Glad to see that, especially if you're having fun, which is also a reason many of us are here. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 20:55, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Both are somewhat accidental. The Etty series had its origins as a piece of trolling as much as anything else, as The Sirens and Ulysses is arguably the embodiment of everything Jimmy Wales and his clique loathe, from gratuitous nudity to WikiProject Greater Manchester, but once I got started I felt I ought to finish the series off. (Despite all the people insinuating that I was exaggerating that "eight hours" claim, FAs really aren't that hard to write provided you know the material to start with and have all the sources to hand, and ideally have an existing similar article to copy the fiddly formatting from.) The run of automated edits stems from a conversation recently with Ling.nut in which I made some rather unflattering comments about what WP:AWB has become compared to what it was in my day, and the things it flags as "typos" which are nothing of the sort; I figured that one shouldn't really criticise something without trying it for oneself. (I am singularly unimpressed with the changes to it. Some of the supposed "errors" it fixes really are nothing of the kind, and I can see this becoming another Date Delinking or Hyphenation case at some point.) – iridescent 21:08, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Hello, could you please userfy a page you deleted on 8 June 2015

The [page you've deleted] on June 8 2015 was missing sources to prove the subject's notability. I am happy to work on correcting that if you put it back in a sandbox under my account. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Youreadme (talk • contribs) 23:24, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Assuming you mean Julia Hasting, that was deleted under proposed deletion so I've restored it per WP:REFUND; feel free to move it to your userspace if you want to work on it (or ask at requested moves if you can't; I forget what the requirements to be able to move pages are). I will warn you that in its current state as an unsourced WP:BLP, it's extremely likely to be renominated for deletion. – iridescent 23:40, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

DYK for William Etty

 — Chris Woodrich (talk) 05:56, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

The Combat

Hello there! Thanks for getting in touch. I've not spoken to the folks at the Scottish National Gallery so far, but I can certainly make enquiries... :) Lirazelf (talk) 10:27, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks—absolutely no rush, as the current compromise works adequately and this is not exactly a high-traffic article. (Although astonishingly, aside from the two Scottish Parliament articles which are something of a special case, assuming this passes FAC it will be the first FA on an Edinburgh topic.) It may well not have been photographed at a better quality—it's such a huge size, it won't fit into the flatbeds they usually use to photograph their paintings. – iridescent 16:22, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

DYK for The Triumph of Cleopatra

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 17:12, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

You have got to be kidding

(cur | prev) 17:11, 7 August 2015‎ Iridescent (talk | contribs)‎ . . (131,644 bytes) (-22)‎ . . (Undid revision 675004524 by ♥Golf (talk) The one in England is clearly the primary usage; there's no need to specify the country) (undo | thank)

    1. (cur | prev) 17:09, 7 August 2015‎ Iridescent (talk | contribs)‎ . . (131,666 bytes) (0)‎ . . (Undid revision 675006605 by ♥Golf (talk) Etty never even visited America, stop trying to change this to en-us) (undo | thank)

What in the hell is your problem? Do you have a corn cob stuck up your ass or what? You are the rudest son-of-a-bitch I've ever come across. Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on. --EditorExtraordinaire (talk) 22:43, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

This article is about a British topic and is written in British English. In en-gb, houses are in the road and cars are on the road. If you really think Etty never even visited America, stop trying to change this to en-us and The one in England is clearly the primary usage; there's no need to specify the country are "the rudest things you've ever come across" and on a par with "Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on", I'm really not sure how to respond to you, nor do I have any particular desire to. (Newyorkbrad, remind me again how this is OK but "sycophant" isn't?) – iridescent 23:22, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
I have done dozens of useful edits on Etty, including a few just today. You seem to be completely oblivious to WP:Good faith. I did an edit awhile back on another of your articles (moved a picture as I recall) and got a similar rude summary comment from you. Not more than 10 minutes later, a total stranger emailed me to apologize for your rudeness. The person said "It's only Wikipedia, just ignore it". I only try to help articles, never to damage them. It would be nicer if you simply changed edits that you don't like rather than do a vicious reversion with a snide remark. --EditorExtraordinaire (talk) 23:36, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
I have commented on Golf's talk page that his language here is unacceptable; his post is also inaccurate in that he has made 12 edits (not "dozens") to the Etty article. Risker (talk) 00:09, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Iridescent, as I expect you realize, I had nothing to do with the "sycophant" incident. @Risker: this editor's latest post on his talkpage is so over-the-top and out-of-character that I think we need to consider whether he is having some sort of issue or whether this might be a compromised account. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:26, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
NYB you're right, I do apologise; for some reason I remembered the admin from the "sycophant" incident as being you but looking at the history I see it was Gwen Gale.
To be fair, Gwen did apologise to me, but what the fuck good is that? It's just two more entries in my block log. Eric Corbett 21:26, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
I wouldn't have any issue personally with deleting those entries from your block log, and would do it if I didn't know someone would immediately reverse it and haul me off to be punished for it. The usual argument (which has some validity) is that deleting block log entries hides the actions of bad admins from scrutiny, but since it happened about eight years ago, and Gwen is barely active, I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to use it as evidence against her. ‑ iridescent 21:36, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
To whoever's about to pop up and say that editing block logs is impossible; no, it's just a matter of politics. This is an unblock of the long-suffering User:ThisIsaTest; the reason you can't see the corresponding block is that I oversighted it out of the block log. ‑ iridescent 21:40, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
I would! ;-) Eric Corbett 21:49, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
If I'm going to be accused of being an agent of evil, I'm sure someone could find something more convincing than "a couple of reverts". For the benefit of viewers, the edit summary which was "so rude somebody emailed to apologise" was You don't get a unilateral exemption from the MOS just because you don't like it, referring to an edit which put two pictures at the same level with the text sandwiched between them. – iridescent 07:42, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Superb work!

Love the William Etty article! Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:01, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Now somebody is at Talk:Main Page complaining about Wikipedia's pro-Etty bias, I feel my mission is complete. (I'm sorely tempted to see if I can persuade someone to schedule three of them in a row as TFA just to watch the complaints roll in.) – iridescent 16:14, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
The one thing schedulers go for is variety, - one month apart for mushrooms and hurricanes. If you want them together, suggest them all three one day,- it has been done for two presidents and two galaxies, and would fight the backlog. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:01, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
I did consider it, but there's no obvious grouping—for things like the Nazi blockhouses or the constellations there was a good reason to run them together. Etty had a very varied output; it's not always apparent because his nude history paintings are more famous than his other work, but his works generally have very little in common. (I could see a case for running the three Judith paintings as a set, but I doubt I'll write a stand-alone article on those.) As a more general arts idea, what would make an excellent series would be multiple artists' take on the same theme. As I imagine you know, I'm not a great admirer of the idea of TFA anyway, and would happily abolish TFA (and DYK, and OTD, and ITN, and TFP, and TFL, and all the rest of the alphabet soup on the main page); if I were called upon to redesign the Main Page it would be a set of randomly chosen tiles each showing a "featured article" chosen by one particular Wikiproject. It will never happen, per the comments here; too many people see appearing on the main page as "winning" and will fight if anyone threatens to end their game. ‑ iridescent 19:01, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Rubens, 1617
Van Mieris, 1698
West, 1773
Millais, 1848
@Gerda Arendt, or reflection I don't think multiple-hook visual arts articles in general are ever going to work at TFA, barring a radical redesign of the main page. As a general rule, they're all going to need a thumbnail image for a blurb on a painting/sculpture/photograph/building to make sense, but having more than one image in the TFA blurb will eat up space, as well as playing havoc with the mobile site; remember that every TFA blurb has to work in this format as well as the normal site. The Nazi blockhouses were something of an exception, as they were architecturally virtually identical so didn't need multiple images, but if one were to (for instance) try to do a TFA blurb on four different paintings of Cymon and Iphigenia, then even forcing the images down to a tiny size the thumbnail would look like this, which would either mean reducing the blurb to a minimum or expanding the TFA slot and temporarily booting ITN or DYK out of their spot to make way for it. (There's also an issue with multiple-article blurbs, in that the first one tends to be the only one anyone ever reads. When they ran the constellation ones and Obama/McCain, Bencherlite had to write a special script to make the order keep changing back and forth to prevent one of them being treated as the primary topic, but for most arts articles that's not going to be practical as there will always be a natural sequence. @Bencherlite, @TFA coordinators , would you agree or is there something obvious I'm missing? ‑ iridescent 21:16, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for thinking much more seriously than I did,- in the meantime I recommended to not even combine two DYK hooks, as it takes away from the second. Had a good one today, about a text offer the composer couldn't refuse, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:25, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Knowing Wikipedia's core audience of bored teenagers, this one ought to do spectacularly well in terms of pageviews. (I will confess to feeling a twinge of smugness when a DYK I've nominated gets more than twice as many pageviews on the day than that day's TFA. ‑ iridescent 21:31, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Not my call. It's true, some days not many people don't click through to that day's FA. I'm still hoping they enjoy the TFA text. - Dank (push to talk) 23:09, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
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