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Mediation proposal (and how to resolve content disputes)

This is obviously where all the fun is. I shall need to watchlist your talk page.

There is a proposal at WP:VPPR about the formal mediation process, and it raises questions I coincidentally started pondering soon after my return from break.

I am somewhat concerned at the trends of change we have seen, over the past decade or so, in how disputes unfold and are resolved on Wikipedia. As only a project old-timer can do, I have weighed in at the proposal with some thoughts about what unseen effects this particular manifestation of the trend might have on the project.

While doing so, it occurred that it was the type of thing I often see you comment on and enjoy reading. Whichever way you lean (as always, I think I would be happy with the wisdom of the crowd), what do you think? AGK ■ 18:09, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Ha, I often see you comment on and enjoy reading seems like we have something in common then. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:17, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
+1 Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:29, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Hmm Iridescent, up for another 6 paragraph treatise on the failings of Wikipedia and reforms needed? Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:29, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
@Galobtter, I don't actually make that much of a habit of lengthy treatises—I tend to save them for occasions where the potential benefits of them are (at least possibly) worth the cost in terms of time. In the cases of the ramblings above; the editor who by day is the mild-mannered User:WhatamIdoing, by night turns into User:Whatamidoing (WMF), so it's worthwhile going into detail; if it's just general sub-Wikipedia Review splutterings about how Things Aren't As Good As They Used To Be And Come To Think Of They Never Were, they'll just be lost in the low-level background whining, but this way next time she reports to her insect overlords she can say "here is a detailed list of problems, here is a list of other people agreeing that they're problems, here are suggestions assorted people have made for addressing these problems". In the case of the #Politics thread, it's simply that Yngvadottir and I go back far enough that she warrants a detailed reply.
@AGK, if it's the proposal to shut down the mediation committee I should probably stay out of it, as I've had so little involvement with dispute resolution recently that it's not really fair of me to sit on the sidelines grumbling about how other people do things. I could make a strong case that if the Arbcom workload has really fallen off as much as Opabinia regalis is always claiming—and with far fewer cases and Arbcom no longer having responsibility for ban appeals and for quietly disappearing the kiddy-fiddlers, I've no reason to doubt that—it would be reasonable to rewrite WP:ARBPOL by removing The Committee does not rule on content, but may propose means by which community resolution of a content dispute can be facilitated and have a single dispute resolution committee which initially tried to get the parties in a case to agree on a compromise, and only if that failed moved on to imposing sanctions. If nothing else, it would save everybody having to repeat themselves three times at the admin boards or RFCs, at mediation, and at arbitration; it would also mean that for the first time the title "arbitrator" would have some resemblance to what those bearing it actually do. ‑ Iridescent 01:49, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
Until the next GamerGate or Balkans or Gun control or American politics, problems which aren't really suited for mediation... I think it's true there have been fewer big cases, but I don't remember us sitting on our hands very much (well, haha, some of us anyway), but a lot of the things that were handled were things that should never see the light of day. Drmies (talk) 21:56, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
In which case, a unified mediation-arbitration-sanctioning committee would make no difference in how these kind of cases would be handled, since if it felt an attempt at true arbitration would be pointless, it could move straight on to the trial-by-ordeal phase of a case. I appreciate that there's a lot that still goes on behind the curtain that isn't seen in public; I also don't for an instant believe the current arb caseload is still at the level where ever arb had to allocate between one and two hours each day just to skim the 100+ emails that they knew would be in their inbox on even the quietest day, and a single Ottava or Damian could literally mean doing nothing else for a week. ‑ Iridescent 22:04, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, I'll take back my low-workload claims just a little, for the same reason you pinged me two weeks ago and "I should read that" has been on my to-do list ever since. Last time I checked the mailing list was stable at 30-35 messages a day, and I have no reason to think that's changed, but the experience is somewhat different when you're on the more-active-than-average side and are consistently all caught up, and when you're on the less-active-than-average side and are consistently a little behind. There may not be much time in reading those 30 emails - most are short, I usually do it on the train - but there's a lot of mental space invested in retaining all of the relevant context. I think you need spare memory, even more than spare time. That alone would make me hesitant to take a more active role in mediating disputes at earlier stages. I do really wish we had a more formalized (and, well, actually active) mechanism for dealing with content disputes, though - arbcom can absorb the remaining ban appeals in our wheelhouse, and the desysopping mudslinging fests, but the cases that I find really draining are the ones where two camps have been duking it out for months over whose sources are misleadingly quoted, whose favorite expert is actually a self-promoting hack, which seemingly impeccable study is riddled with errors, who's obviously POV-pushing and who's just innocently trying to ensure that minority views are represented, and it's all about a subject I didn't know existed until the case request was filed. Those cases don't attract anywhere near the level of uninvolved-editor comment that the behavior-focused ones do, but they're actually important in a way that arguments about who broke which WP:WHATEVERTHEFUCK rule really isn't. Opabinia regalis (talk) 06:36, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Maaaan to have WP:WHATEVERTHEFUCK actually bluelink somewhere—anywhere! :D ——SerialNumber54129 06:44, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
I really thought about creating it, but couldn't decide on a target... :) Opabinia regalis (talk) 07:13, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
If Arbcom don't want the content dispute job and Medcom is dead, how about a separate and independent committee empowered to issue binding and enforceable closures to RFCs? I've still to hear anyone give an actual reason why it wouldn't work (other than the the kind of people who want to act as volunteer moderators aren't always the people you would want as volunteer moderators argument, but I assume it would have a strict vetting process and a simple removal process to ensure people didn't use it as a bully pulpit to enforce their personal opinions on the subject or dislikes of particular editors.) ‑ Iridescent 08:43, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Binding content dispute resolution is something I think will have to come one day to deal with the fact that consensus doesn't scale as a group grows in size and Wikipedia does it wrong anyway, by doing straw polls rather that weighing the opposing views and arguments. (Read a transcript of Clay Shirky's talk, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", for more on the need for dispute resolution in online communities.) The problem with getting there is that editors who participate in discussions on Wikipedia dispute resolution are typically either highly vested in Wikipedia's egalitarian ideal that supposedly underlies its decision-making model, or don't want to cede the power they have with English Wikipedia's current model to diffuse and divert discussions to the point where no consensus can be reached. I suspect if there were a magical way to poll all of English Wikipedia's users, including readers, they would be in favour of a binding mechanism, but there's no way to prove it. I think it may only come to pass once the composition of English Wikipedia's community shifts for some reason, such as getting overrun by non-neutral advocates thereby forcing the WMF to step in, a huge drop in editors driving the community to seek new ways to resolve conflicts, or something else that resets the community. isaacl (talk) 15:52, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) Would the WMF actually step in in such a scenario? It's possible they would just leave everything to the users, like they have (to some extent) for the Croatian Wikipedia. Jc86035 (talk) 16:01, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
I imagine if its flagship site became indistinguishable from an advertising site that the WMF would do something to reset the community. Exactly where they'd draw the line to intervene, I'm not sure, though. isaacl (talk) 16:11, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Another way the community can shift is generational: an incoming cohort might place a higher priority on swifter resolution of content disputes, for example, in today's age of demagoguery. (Although this is the only sure way that the community will change eventually, it's highly unpredictable how quickly a change will happen, and if it will actually precede the end of the website itself.) isaacl (talk) 16:27, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
In my experience, the incoming cohorts from 2010 onwards have been faced with a stark adapt-or-die choice, and are forced either to comply with the norms established in 2006–08 or leave Wikipedia (voluntarily or involuntarily). Don't underestimate just how much of a grip the people who signed up during the initial burst of Wikipedia's Eternal September now holds. (As a case in point, of the 14 members of Arbcom 12 registered their accounts between 2005–09; of the others one is a relic from 2003 and Nupedia days, and the other registered in 2015 but could be politely be described as "questionable" (unless you think this is what a genuine new editor's first contributions normally look like). ‑ Iridescent 17:03, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Time to dust off that {{sayin' what everybody else is thinking}} template. ——SerialNumber54129 18:04, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't think that's necessarily a mark of not being a genuine new editor (see Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/BU Rob13 question #4). My first edit (in 2012) was to add <ref>...</ref> tags partly because I'd previously edited on another wiki. Jc86035 (talk) 18:16, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Yeeessss… but there's something of a difference between adding <ref>...</ref> tags—something explained on the page to which we direct new editors on the Welcome template—and deprecating and standardising infoboxes on Australian railway stations. ‑ Iridescent 18:30, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Huh. So by that standard I who signed up in 2012 and became really active in 2015 and passed RfA in 2016 am a young wiki-child. Or am I supposed to be someone's sock? JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 11:51, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, the fact that consensus doesn't scale upwards means norms have gotten locked into place. (If Wikipedia lasts long enough, eventually they'll be turnover.) Whether or not this the community eventually agrees of its own accord to a decision-making process more amenable to its size will depend on how much it perceives this deadlock to be an impediment to its key goals. isaacl (talk) 15:56, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
"Turnover" for established editors is very low. We lose some, especially younger ones, to major time-sucking life events (think "finish school, get a full-time job, and have a baby"). Those might come back occasionally (a recession helps, since having a job tends to interfere with editing time), but they seem to move on to a different phase of their lives. People like me... I'll probably edit until I die. (There are typos on the internet. I need to fix them.)
On the question of impediments to key goals, I don't think that we have a shared set of goals. I've been contemplating (for most of this year) whether to start a discussion at WPMED about what we want to accomplish. I'm thinking that our goals don't really hang together. It seems like we have several separate goals that sometimes conflict. The anti-woo warriors don't want the same things as the educationists, who in turn don't want the same things as the FA crowd. I'm also not sure how accurate it would be. I'm not sure that people are self-aware enough – or perhaps courageous enough – to say things like "I don't actually care about any of Wikipedia's principles. All I care about is trashing <controversial topic> and driving away any editor who believes in it." You can look at edits over time and see what's happening, but I don't think anyone's going to be that candid. And then the result would be a bunch of meaningless waffle that doesn't help the group work together. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:17, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
WP:MED probably isn't a good example to use for any 'state of Wikipedia' tests—because it has real-world implications in a way most other topics don't, and because it has WP:MEDMOS and WP:MEDRS holding it to different standards than the rest of the wiki, it's something of an outlier. For the other non-moribund wikiprojects like WP:MILHIST or WP:TRAINS, you don't really see the same pattern; people still have vehement disagreements over what to include, but there isn't the same issue of crusaders who want to remove whole classes of article entirely vs people who insist Wikipedia cover every viewpoint no matter how fringe.
On the turnover of editors, you can't just look at raw numbers, but at who is leaving. As I said somewhere, take a look at WP:WBFAN (or any other page listing editors with a high level of input into Wikipedia content) and see how many of the names are no longer active. While the reforms have stemmed the decline in the number of editors, we're still losing the most experienced editors and their replacements will of necessity take a couple of years to get up to speed, assuming they hang around that long. Because the articles-to-editors ratio is steadily rising, the loss of the highly active editors has a disproportionate impact; take for example Wikipedia:WikiProject Greater Manchester, which for years was one of the most active and successful of Wikipedia's projects but since Eric Corbett was harassed off the project has become utterly moribund. Hell, look at Wikipedia:WikiProject London—which is the 'home' project of the city with probably the highest concentration of Wikipedia editors in the world and with the feverishly active WMUK providing sustenance, but which has dwindled to virtually an empty shell since Kbthompson died and I pulled out of it. ‑ Iridescent 16:49, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Or Wikipedia:WikiProject Equine - lost a few editors and I decided that I'd be better off actually writing my own books rather than donating my time to equine topics... Ealdgyth - Talk 16:55, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, every editor has a lifecycle, whether it's just moving on in life or passing away, and so eventually there will be a turnover (like I said, it may or may not precede the lifespan of Wikipedia). Yes, the whole issue of consensus not scaling upwards is that as a group grows, its goals do not remain in strong alignment (see my discussion on this that I linked to in my first post). However a combination of the community shrinking and some very basic goals being thwarted (for example, if the editor population struggled to close any discussions at all due to stonewalling by non-neutral parties) might lead to the community deciding on a change. isaacl (talk) 17:27, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Community turnover or not, I've never understood why the 'binding RfC closure committee' can't bootstrap itself. Set up Wikipedia: WikiProject RfCs with an initial population of a few people known for closing big discussions already, get a few prospective RfC-initiators to agree in advance to use the binding-closure system as test cases, and when someone inevitably doesn't like the result, file Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/No takesies-backsies. Yeah, there would be all kinds of nonsense - arguments over who gets to join as a closer, and who gets to decide who joins, and there would be trainee closers and closing clerks to manage the forest of templates that would develop, and there would sooner or later be a fight over how to remove a bad closer, and all kinds of arcane internal rules would evolve over when to interface with CUs about possible socking and what constitutes recusal and whether the closing committee needs to have a private mailing list and... well, eventually you get Arbcom: Expanded Edition (new and improved! now with twice the bureaucracy!). But you don't need to start with any of that stuff. Opabinia regalis (talk) 09:59, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
​I'd argue that it would need to be created under either Arbcom's or the WMF imprimatur, and to be elected from the very outset, to have any kind of authority. You weren't here last time a bunch of self-appointed Power Users declared themselves to be Wikipedia's ruling council but I was, and it isn't something that ought to be repeated. Without a formal "we grant thee the power to enforce thy decisions", you're just reanimating the corpse of the Mediation Committee, and without an elected membership you're creating a body that will quite reasonably be ignored on "who put you in charge?" grounds. (In hindsight the ACPD debacle was probably healthy for Wikipedia, in that it triggered the end of the "admins rule the peasants, arbs rule the admins" mentality and its replacement with "governance on Wikipedia is by consent and can be ignored if their decisions are clearly perverse"—which also had knock-on effects on other dictatorially-run nooks and crannies like FAC and MILHIST—but it was an unpleasant few weeks.) ‑ Iridescent 10:19, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
I remember looking back through those ACPD discussions - without any personal investment in it or particularly deep knowledge of the wiki-politics of the time, the whole thing seems fantastically self-important. But in that case arbcom tried to hand-pick the Power Users; I'm suggesting they should be literally self-appointed and claim no special "authority" in the beginning other than moderating and closing an RfC - they can develop authority by being effective. (Kinda the opposite of arbcom, which had formal "authority" from the beginning, and yet one of the most persistent criticisms is that it's ineffective.) If it turns out that pre-selecting known-competent closers works consistently, great, we can build on that framework. I think this is different from what the mediation committee did in being more topic- than user-focused. A mediation case has a list of users that all need to buy in, whereas what I have in mind is something more like Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Genetically modified organisms where participation is open but the discussion is moderated and closers commit in advance to working through the mess. (I was extremely skeptical when that started, of the concept and the moderation, but.... it actually worked well, and settled some issues that the arbcom case never did.) Sure, that had the advantage of already having DS in the topic area, but the first step is getting this kind of highly structured discussion out from under the arbcom umbrella. Opabinia externa (talk) 22:53, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Yes, I think moderator-led discussion is a better fit for Wikipedia's collaborative editing environment than closed-door mediation modeled after formal dispute mediation. My personal experience in trying to step in and guide a discussion is that the disputants frequently just want to continue talking about whatever they want, ignoring your guidance. With contentious issues, they'll often be suspicious of your actions and ascribe hidden motives for everything you say, and loudly call into doubt your neutrality, which cuts the knees out from under your ability to moderate. Maybe it would be different if a group of moderators acted in concert to provide checks and balances? Or if the various approaches were outlined on a project page? (For example, having those who favour one approach first work out a proposal most likely to gain consensus approval, before opening up discussion to everyone.) However, all non-binding methods have a key problem: they are biased towards the status quo. Any one wanting to avoid change just needs to kick up enough objections to keep a consensus from forming. As the instinct of those moderating is to look for a happy compromise that as many people as possible can live with, just one or two contrarians can stalemate the discussion by being implacable. isaacl (talk) 17:27, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
That's IMO why there are some circumstances where Arbcom actually is the best option; the "you have 500 words to say your piece" format forces people to focus on what's actually important. I agree entirely with the issue about stasis and the status quo, though; unless mandated by someone, any RFC-closure-committee would just run into the "I'm going ignore you, what are you going to do about it?" issue on all but the most straightforward of issues. Hell, look how much time and effort went into negotiating a hostile armistice at Tree shaping, which is up there with Glass Age Development Committee as the most obscure and trivial article on the whole of Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 15:49, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

Query

I don't know whether you've ever been part of the Arbcom, or if you wish to be. But given the extensive experience and significant grasp you have of issues that concern most of Wikipedia, I thought of requesting you to consider running for the same. (I know, most probably you won't; but no harm trying...imo your inclusion in the committee would be most valuable to the community). Thanks, Lourdes 00:44, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Damnit where's my popcorn.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 01:34, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Oooooohhhhh...entertainment...I foresee a long Iri post incoming....Ealdgyth - Talk 02:01, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
@Lourdes: Iri was on Arbcom a few years back and it was not an enjoyable experience for them...thus the TPS amusement. Ealdgyth - Talk 02:04, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Damn, 7 years ago and more. Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/History. Sucks getting old. Ealdgyth - Talk 02:07, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, but there's only one alternative. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 02:08, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
The rumor is that Shock Brigade Harvester Boris is finally going to run this year. power~enwiki (π, ν) 02:14, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Really? I was thinking kill it with fire tbh.. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:58, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Rumor? User talk:Shock Brigade Harvester Boris#ArbCom. - We didn't need ArbCom in 2017, do you agree? - User talk:Shock Brigade Harvester Boris#Precious 31 October. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:20, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
@Lourdes, I share with Essjay the honour of being one of only two people ever to be expelled from Arbcom. (Admittedly in my case it was a simple case of inactivity rather than malpractice or misfeasance, but I still wear the badge with pride.) If you ever need to check, there's a wall of shame listing all the former members here.
As Ealdgyth says, this was the Arbcom of seven years ago, when general incompetence and laziness at the WMF had led to pretty much every responsibility, from child protection to appeals over inappropriate use of the checkuser tool, ending up on Arbcom's desk—the day (see right) I came home to find 644 new emails was a little on the high side, but not unusually so. By all accounts, it's a very different beast nowadays, now that the ten full-time paid staff of the Trust and Safety team are doing the work that a dozen unpaid volunteers were expected to do in their spare time without training and in addition to all their other duties.
In all honesty, I no longer really see the purpose of Arbcom; it no longer even makes a pretence of arbitrating disputes (look up a couple of threads and you can see a current arb frantically scrabbling against the proposal that the Arbitration Committee arbitrate things), and has turned into a largely-ignored dumping ground for assorted processes that nobody else wants to do. It should have been split into separate mediation-committee-with-power-to-sanction and committee-with-authority-to-issue-binding-closures-to-RFCs years ago, but AFAIK there have only ever been two arbs who seriously wanted reform, and we both had a thoroughly unpleasant time of trying to tell 13 other turkeys that they should join us in voting for Christmas.
I'd have almost no chance of winning an Arbcom election in the unlikely event that I ran again. I've annoyed far too many of the leaders of Wikipedia's various cliques, all of whom would be frantically canvassing against me. Besides, I'm barely active on Wikipedia nowadays—my mainspace edit count in the last couple of months is even lower than Newyorkbrad's—and having spent the last decade railing that it's a systemic failure on Wikipedia's part that our processes allow people who don't contribute to the project to sit in judgement upon those who do, it would be a little hypocritical of me to run. Besides, I can't commit the time; Arbcom needs people who have lots of spare time on their hands day-in, day-out, which ironically disqualifies many of the people best qualified for it. (See this post a few threads up; the principle that the kind of people who want to act as volunteer moderators aren't always the people you would want as volunteer moderators applies to Arbcom in spades.)
I couldn't recommend to anyone that they serve on it—it's a horrible timesink that consumes at least an hour of your life every day, all while being subjected to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse both on-wiki and off. In an ideal world, there will be no successful candidates this year, the Committee will wither on the vine, and either the community or the WMF will come up with a decent alternative; it's obvious to pretty much anyone who's ever had any dealings with Arbcom that a system that was inadequate when it was introduced in 2004 has now evolved into painfully inadequate. ‑ Iridescent 17:50, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the significantly detailed response. I'm in awe of the effort you take to explain these nuances; one reason I would love to see you run again. But then, you're right.... Have a nice day, Lourdes 18:57, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
The last two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are (a) sticky situations where editors might have had personal/mental health issues/delicate situations that might have happened. These are not common but can be very fiddly. it helps having experienced discreet editors who are engaged with the community to help with these and I can't quite see how a WMF community engagement team would take this on (but probably should), and (b) management of some protracted disputes where someone needs to be mandated to review a complex issue properly. I haven't been following those outside arbitration to see if these are managed better than they were several years ago. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:53, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Well... The editors with mental illnesses and personal issues probably shouldn't be dealt with by Arbcom; if nothing else, it means former arbs have inappropriate knowledge of other people's lives which they can't un-forget on leaving the committee, and it means that those mental illnesses and personal issues become public knowledge next time a disgruntled arb or WMF staffer leaks the mailing list. It's not as if Community Engagement are formed in a vacuum with no knowledge of Wikipedia—people like WAID and Elitre are engaged with the community, and if the WMF found they needed more people I'm sure they could stretch to hiring current Wikipedia editors on an ad hoc basis to plug gaps in the committee or provide specialist knowledge on specific cases or issues. ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

English cemetery photographs

I posted this over at WT:MILHIST, but CCing it here for the benefit of any TPWs who feel the urge, given that this page is among other things the de facto WikiProject Cemeteries. Anyone else like me, who's irritated enough at Commons's inability to handle batch uploads and at the general assholery of some of their regulars that they're using Flickr as an alternative hosting site for CC by-SA images which can then be individually imported to Commons as and when they're needed, should likewise get their stuff out of there while you still can, as from early next year their new owners are going to start demanding a $50 ransom and start deleting your uploads if you don't pony up. ‑ Iridescent 23:34, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

In anticipation of the imminent death of Flickr, I've just conducted a bulk transfer of a big chunk of my archive of photos of cemeteries in south east England to Commons; a mixture of CWGC and allied burial sites, interesting funerary monuments and chapel architecture, representative civilian and non-CWGC-design gravestones and wide atmosphere shots of cemeteries. As I have neither the time nor the inclination to catalogue 7000+ images in detail, especially against the 8 Jan deadline for the shutdown of Flickr as a free image hosting service, I've of necessity just uploaded them into broad categories based on which cemetery the burials in question are in, which in turn has resulted in the flooding of those categories on Commons with files with uninformative descriptions and uninformative names. If anyone feels the urge, they could virtually all do with having more specific descriptions, and in many cases more specific categories, added.

The Commons categories in question are:

This change hasn't been widely publicised—I imagine SmugMug, who have just absorbed Flickr, are hoping that most users won't realise the change is coming until the deadline strikes and will then feel the need to pay out the $50 fee to prevent their work being deleted—but anyone else who's using Flickr as an easier-to-upload-but-still-Creative-Commons-licenced alternative to Commons, get your own stuff out now before they start charging you a ransom to release it as well! If you activate Flickr2Commons, the transfer process is virtually automatic and all you need to do is specify the Commons categories you want them to land in. ‑ Iridescent 22:30, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

Now I wonder if someone not on Flickr can do this mass upload. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:19, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Yes; you need a Commons account (which you automatically have under SUL when you create an en-wiki account), but after that the Flickr2Commons tool will hoover up any Flickr photoset or user upload page at which you point it, provided the photos in question are CC by-SA licensed (not everything on Flickr is, but most Flickr users are happy to change the licensing when you explain that they'll still be credited and being used on a Wikipedia article will greatly increase the photo views). It's how Droxford Station on what was the Meon Valley Line opens it's doors to the public was absorbed by Commons:Category:Droxford railway station when I was writing Droxford railway station, for instance. Even if the photos aren't ones you've uploaded, if there's anything you're aware of on Flickr that you feel ought to be rescued, now's the time to copy it across since from February 2019 huge swathes of the content there will be irretrievably lost. (I'd go as far as to say that unless Google or Internet Archive decide to do so themselves, we should seriously consider getting a bot to import everything on Flickr that's appropriately licensed and not already on Commons and dump it into a NOINDEXed holding pen for us to delete the unencyclopedic holiday snaps and home-made porn at our leisure, but given the strain that would put on the servers that's a decision that would need to be made at WMF level.) ‑ Iridescent 10:47, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
commons:Commons:Village pump#Flickr will start deleting photos in 2019-02 has the Commons side discussion. Sadly I don't think I can help with Flickr2Commons as that function apparently (from checking) does not run per-keyword uploads. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 11:10, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
In general, I find that unless the keyword is something very popular like "Eiffel Tower" or a vague concept like "boats" (in which cases we almost certainly already have plenty of photos already so it's not an issue), one finds that most of the photos on Flickr on any given topic are the result of just a handful of uploaders. If you do want to upload every appropriately-licensed image on a topic—e.g. every photo with a Commons-compatible license including the keyword "volcano"—to sort through at your leisure, Magnus Manske might be willing to customize the script for you. (If you do bot-upload 30,000 files, put them in a temporary holding category and not into Commons:Category:Volcanoes! Some hits on a keyword search are always going to be false positives.) Alternatively, you can install this script which will add an "upload to commons" button to Flickr, allowing you to browse through looking for images you think might be useful and bring those you think would be potentially useful across one at a time. ‑ Iridescent 12:28, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Well, it looks like I've opted for a small start by uploading a number of files from one Flickr user commons:Category:Ojos de Mar for use on my recently created Ojos de Mar. Possibly it might become one of the more interesting (and with beautiful images) articles I've written lately. I presume there will be people uploading 10,000 or so files now. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:04, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Pity that none of the things here freely licensed; some images there could be useful in the Atacama articles. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:44, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
In general, in my experience Flickr users are happy to change the license on images if you ping them. The reason they're on there in the first place in most cases is either that they're professional photographers looking to showcase their skills to potential customers, or they're amateur photographers interested to see what the public thinks of their work; in either case, "would you like your photo to appear on a page viewed by 23,000,000 people?" is usually an incentive. Wikipedia's general ban on spam links has never applied to image uploads; if a photographer wants us to link to their website so people who like it can find out more, we're generally happy to comply. ‑ Iridescent 15:47, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
That's good and all, but I don't have access to Yahoo Email (unless another Flickr user can contact them). And I am not sure if they are still active. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:29, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Lridescent

FYI, I've just blocked Lridescent (talk · contribs) as a suspected impersonation of your username. -- Longhair\talk 16:42, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

...The most sincerest form of flattery, of course?—Mind you, if that's as good as it gets... ——SerialNumber54129 16:51, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Huh. User:Jo-Jo Emuerus and User:Jo-Jo Humorus and both were created a mere 3 days after my RfA passed. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:25, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
...Jo-Jo Humorus?! Now that was below the belt ;) ——SerialNumber54129 20:10, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
JO? Below the belt? Gross! EEng 18:57, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
I have legions of admirers. I tend to just leave them to it unless they start being disruptive; since the advent of SUL it's fairly easy for someone on another wiki to accidentally create an account with a problematic name and only realize when they come over here. (Because of the reach of en-wiki, virtually everyone ends up here at some point whichever language they're working in.) ‑ Iridescent 15:47, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
That's nothing! Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:20, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
Haha, Oshwah was the first person that came to my mind. Glad you mentioned those! Softlavender (talk) 23:34, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
That sounds like my old friend, (see these remnants, most have been oversighted); all of us in the IP area who are not considered pro Israeli enough have had lots of them. But he is (thankfully) mostly not active on a computer these days, AFAIK, Huldra (talk) 23:55, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
By the way, there are 493 of those Oshwah spoofs so far. You have to click "500" at the bottom to see them all. Softlavender (talk) 02:19, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
I recently learned from checkuser that I stole Drmies crimson tide tickets. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:31, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
...and then found out no-one would buy 'em  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 18:42, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
don't tell Drmies that :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 20:06, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
YOU TOOK MY TICKETS???? (Serial Number, remind me of the score of the LSU game... ) Drmies (talk) 02:05, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Good Doctor, I went to a basketball school. The only reason to get football tickets was the drinking beforehand. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:40, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

Colourful arguments

Can one of you take a look at this discussion on my talk page and come up with a more convincing argument than mine? It seems to be a perfect clash of common sense over Wikipedia policy. I'm sure the IP is telling the truth and using evidence that would be reasonable in the real world, but I can't add unsourced content to articles without a reliable source - it'll just get reverted "per policy". (I appreciate in this instance that's exactly what I did do, but at least I presented the sources and explained the problem!) Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 10:59, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

Sure, but can you appreciate the argument that it's a lot of work and hassle for something that is "obvious" and not that important in the grand scheme (although what mighty contests rise from trivial things) Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 11:25, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Sometimes I think this entire website is reaching the point of self-parody. Newyorkbrad (talk) 11:50, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Pall Mall is obviously sits comfortably in neither pink nor purple. It's really maroon. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:55, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
...and life is a self-parody Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:56, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
How about mauve? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:01, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
I'd personally say the St Charles Place/States Ave/Virginia Ave group is indisputably "pink" and not "purple". Hand on heart, it's not something to which I've ever given much consideration nor ever expect to do so again. ‑ Iridescent 17:42, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
@Ritchie333, on further thought while it may not be possible to cite "Hasbro call it pink" or "Hasbro call it purple", what you can do is figure out the CMYK of the color in question and cite the Pantone chart for whatever they call that particular shade. Going by eye alone, the shade appears to be Pantone 219C, which is unambiguously called "pink". ‑ Iridescent 18:45, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
NYB, you now think this entire website is reaching the point of self-parody? The megabyte-long discussion about whether "sycophantic" is a swear word, the sitting arb who wrote a 2280-word paean to bestiality-porn, or the earnest discussions about whether it constitutes "outing" to mention the real name of someone who edits under their real name, didn't do it for you? ‑ Iridescent 17:46, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for making me look up "paean": I learn new words every day. Psst...animal porn? Sitting arb?? 199.80.13.80 (talk) 17:49, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
It was a decade ago and those were different times. The argument was that it was a userspace first draft of what would eventually develop into a neutral article on the topic, but one can certainly see the point of view of those who thought it was unduly favorable towards its topic. The page itself has long since been deleted (there are still mirrors on the internet, but I wouldn't advise looking for them). ‑ Iridescent 18:06, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Which page? Sorry, but I really can't resist an open invitation. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 18:33, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Iridescent is (unwittingly) making it sound way more interesting than it is....I'd forgotten about the paean bit. "Paean" is a handy word for scrabble. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 22:56, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Well, sort of—I just re-read it and parts of it are still eyebrow-raising even now. ([I find it hard to imagine the new and sober Wikipedia of today hosting this image, or including the phrase To restrain the struggling animals as they spasm, the dogs are placed in rigid muzzles, through which they must vomit (without being able to fully open their mouths), and forcibly held in position over the girls for this activity.) ‑ Iridescent 23:08, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
I fell for that. Now I have to own up too knowing that the impact has been deleted. In the past ten hours, though?! ——SerialNumber54129 09:36, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
The link above is an admin-only link; everything to do with the incident was deleted a decade ago (legitimately, as it was al at the request of the uploader; there's no implication of a cover-up). As Cas (almost) says, it's not as shocking as the description makes it sounds; although there are some genuinely shocking moments, it's more depressing than anything else, and "ew" is probably the phrase that best sums it up. Thanks to "you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the GFDL", some mirrors which picked it up before deletion are still legitimately hosting the page, if you really feel the need. ‑ Iridescent 10:47, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
I think—not  :) but thanks for clearing that up (as it were). ——SerialNumber54129 10:58, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
Hmmm, couldn't find that phrase and then I realised I was looking at the wrong paean. Silly me. Found that one you were reading. Dunno what to say really. Can't think of anything glib or deep....(shuffles away from topic and waits for winds to change) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:17, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
Well, I did get the link to the page and it was kind of blah to me. I've read pages like human way too often probably. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 07:10, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars#List of London Monopoly locations Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 13:17, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

WP:LAME isn't entirely fair in this case, as this is a Verifiability Not Truth issue rather than people squabbling over which of their personal preferences is included. How Wikipedia deals with the situation when a reliable source unequivocally states something but the reliable source is undoubtedly wrong is something we've never really figured out in almost 20 years of trying (my preferred knot-cutting method is to shove a detailed explanation of what the source claims and proof that the source is wrong into an explanatory footnote). ‑ Iridescent 17:17, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
Given I was an active participant in the edit war, and the most vocal participant in the dispute (if only because I created the article and took it to FLC, so had the most interest in it), I feel a bit of self-deprecation at LAME is not particularly onerous. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 17:31, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
Speaking of sources claiming things that are demonstrably untrue, I'm not in the least convinced that Whitechapel Road is "outside and more than one tube stop away from the Circle line", unless you're counting the as-yet-unbuilt section of Crossrail between Liverpool Street and Whitechapel. One tube stop east from the Circle line takes you to either Bethnal Green or Aldgate East, neither of which is on Whitechapel Road—"get off at Aldgate East/Bethnal Green and walk up Whitechapel High Street/Cambridge Heath Road until you get to Whitechapel Road" seems a little shaky to me.</nerd mode> ‑ Iridescent 17:50, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
I do sometimes also see such issues. Copiapo (volcano) which is also known as Azufre according to the Global Volcanism Program is fumarolically alive, citing "Von Wolff F, 1929. Der Volcanismus II Band: Spezieller Teil 1 Teil Die Neue Welt (Pazifische Erdhalfte) der Pazifische Ozean und Seine Randgebiete. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 828 p." as a source for that info. That source mentions indeed an "Azufre" as fumarolically active but it clearly refers to Lastarria which a) is a different volcano and b) also known as Azufre. It seems like Smithsonian mixed the two volcanoes up.
Don't start me on how many volcanoes have conflicting heights or how some share names. That's a nightmare to find sources in. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 18:38, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
Conflicting heights is a surprisingly common issue. Manchester Council have just discovered that they've been mis-labelling their highest point for a century, and that's a major city which is one of the world's leading academic centres for geology and Earth sciences, not an impoverished backwater whose government is focusing its efforts on feeding the population and doesn't have money to waste measuring hills. (I do particularly like the example I give above, of the Pitt Rivers Museum mistaking a Walter Scott novel for genuine medieval records. Scott may have fallen from popularity now, but he was probably the most successful novelist of the 19th century; that goof is equivalent to a 22nd-century museum mistaking Harry Potter for documentary footage and earnestly stating that dragons were endemic to England in the late 20th century.) ‑ Iridescent 19:25, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Conflict of Interest Noticeboard

Hi, you recently closed my COIN notice for Jytdog. I think you may have overlooked where I mentioned that Jytdog openly stated the confidential settlement amount but was unable to provide the source for his claim until another editor found a single mention in an SEC filing. This should be answered to. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Secondly, I don't agree that it is common to edit Wikipedia for 16 hours a day for months straight. I understand your point that this is suggestive, but I don't see how it would be physically possible to do this with a day job as Jytdog claims to have on their user page. 2604:2000:E0CF:5100:81B8:A314:4A73:70AF (talk) 16:23, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

​No, that's not how it works. It's Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard not WP:Vague insinuations noticeboard; if you're accusing someone of being an undisclosed paid editor—which is about the most serious charge one can level against someone on Wikipedia—you're expected to provide evidence to support your claims. A glance at Jytdog's edit history would show you that they edit on a huge range of topics, with a particular interest in medicine; to claim that this demonstrates that they have a particular connection to this one fairly obscure medication despite 99.99% of their edits being to unrelated subjects is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Someone making a correct claim, and then being unable to remember where they originally read it, doesn't in the slightest fall into that category; I couldn't tell you how I came to know that George Frederic Watts painted Love and Death, but that doesn't mean I'm secretly in the pay of the Watts Gallery.
Your insinuation that Jytdog's edit count implies that they must be paid to edit Wikipedia is also laughable; Jytdog consistently makes around 3500 edits per month, which if anything is fairly low for a Wikipedia regular (as a comparator, I made c. 700 edits yesterday alone; Doc James, who's working in similar fields on-wiki to Jytdog and is combining that with a full-time job as a doctor and with being a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, made just over 3000 edits last month, roughly the same number as Jytdog). Remember that by the nature of the project, many Wikipedia editors are either retirees, stay-at-home parents or in shift-work jobs, as Wikipedia (as with any online project) is going to attract a disproportionate number of people with spare time on their hands; someone regularly spending the entire day on Wikipedia isn't remotely unusual, particularly in November where it's cold and wet in most of the places editors are based so people are less likely to go out.
If you actually have any evidence, feel free to reopen the WP:COIN thread. If you don't have any evidence but you still want to challenge my close, ANI is thataway. ‑ Iridescent 16:40, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
I couldn't tell you how I came to know that George Frederic Watts painted Love and Death, but that doesn't mean I'm secretly in the pay of the Watts Gallery. A similar example might be, "I couldn't tell you who it was was told me—or when—not to link to Gbooks in bibliographies, but that doesn't mean I've ever done so since"  :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:10, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
Those examples aren't comparable because this issue related to information filed confidentially and apparently only available in a single reference in a regulatory filing. Your example of who painted a piece of art is common knowledge for many and widely disseminated in the public domain. You also presumably learned about the topic a very long time ago and this matter was something Jytdog was concurrently researching and then instantly forgot and could not locate his source.2604:2000:E0CF:5100:65FB:CB44:D9A7:62AF (talk) 17:33, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
If you want to re-open the WP:COIN discussion feel free, and I won't revert you, but I warn you that you'll be laughed out. To repeat, claiming that because of the 8973 mainspace edits Jytdog has made in the past six months, a grand total of four of them[1][2][3][4] have been to Finasteride, somehow proves that he has a contact of interest on the topic, is a claim for which you need to provide evidence if you're going to make it. (Here's the man himself explaining where he works and what he does, and his identity and field of work has been confirmed by an oversighter.) There are many legitimate criticisms that can be made (and have been made) of Jytdog's approach, but this isn't one of them. Finasteride is more notable than most obscure pharmaceuticals as it's on record that Donald Trump is taking it in an effort to ward off baldness, so it's completely unsurprising that more eyes than usual will be watching this article. ‑ Iridescent 00:12, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
Its funny you mention that the drug is more notable than average because Trump is taking it. Jytdog tried to suppress that piece of information from the page as trivia, which is a common theme for him. Jytdog even recently got a doctor banned who was an expert on the pharmacovigilance and specifically studied finasteride. It would be crazy to think that his sole purpose on wiki is that he is paid to edit this particular page but many others on Wiki have believed he is a paid editor, I am not the first.
As somebody who has never filed a COIN issue before, I don't understand what kind of evidence you would be expected to report. What kinds of facts could be and have been used to prove a COI if the person knows better than to disclose it? It seems like a simple denial of COI would be enough to shut down any claim, even if untrue. I'm not asking to be argumentative but I genuinely don't know what the answer may be or how the process works. 98.7.48.66 (talk) 00:48, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
Well, any evidence at all would be a good start (and no, "he said the value of the settlement was $5 million and it was actually $4.3 million which is near enough to prove he had insider knowledge" doesn't count). You do realise that "Jytdog tried to suppress [that Trump is taking the drug]" is strong evidence against him shilling for the manufacturer, given that "our drug is so safe, even the President of the United States takes it" is exactly the kind of claim for which any decent PR hack would give their right arm? If Trump is actually taking the stuff, I'd say you have evidence right there that it doesn't cause persistent diminished libido or erectile dysfunction.
You've answered your own question when you say What kinds of facts could be and have been used to prove a COI if the person knows better than to disclose it?. Assume good faith is an absolutely fundamental principle of Wikipedia, going right back to when we only had three rules (and FWIW, "editing with a conflict of interest" isn't and never has been forbidden, except in the very specific circumstances of someone who is being paid for their contributions to Wikipedia and has failed to disclose the fact that they're being paid); if you have no evidence that someone has a conflict of interest you are obliged to work on the assumption that they don't. Wikipedia isn't a court of law, and despite popular perception we don't do witch-hunts just because two editors have disagreed about what constitutes due weight and reliable sourcing in a given article. ‑ Iridescent 01:11, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
So it seems clear according to your explanation that any paid editor can simply not disclose or deny their payment and that is a work around for wiki guidelines. This isn't really important to mention, but just because a single person takes a drug doesn't make it safe or dangerous, regardless of who they are. Trump is a polarizing figure, vain, and has quite bizarre hair so he doesn't provide a positive endorsement for such a class of product. Just an opinion. Definitely not any evidence for or against safety profile though, there is actual scientific evidence for that. 98.7.48.66 (talk) 01:33, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Responding to your message

Wow, how did someone find my test on the Rafael Santana (of all people) talk page so quickly? :) I figured it would be seen by pretty much noone ever. Instead it took about an hour and a half. Your point is taken. If I had a clue as to how to delete it, I would. Please advise. Vcuttolo (talk) 08:38, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Despite what some people think, Wikipedia isn't a giant sandbox, and all changes are logged and monitored; by the nature of a project with 61,816,310 pages sometimes vandalism gets through, but in general we usually spot it. Please don't do it again; I haven't looked into the background that led to them but given the number of recent warnings on your talk page from multiple people regarding multiple issues, you're very much on your last chance. ‑ Iridescent 08:45, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Best way to contact you?

I'm an Australian journalist working on a story about Wikipedia editors and am hoping to chat to you about Michael Jackson's death and the way it was reported on wiki. What's the best way to reach you? Journo10 (talk) 05:12, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
@Journo10, this page is the best place to contact me. My part in the coverage of Michael Jackson's death was minimal, and was primarily due to my being one of the few administrators who happened to be active at the time the news broke. The timeline was (all times in UTC):
  • At 19:21 Jackson's security called 911;
  • At 21:26, 25 June 2009 Jackson was pronounced dead;
  • At 21:44, 25 June 2009 TMZ announced Jackson's death;
  • At 22:15, 25 June 2009 Wikipedia crashes owing to the high volume of Jackson-related searches; by this point Twitter had already gone down and Google had blocked all queries including "Michael Jackson" as a search term;
  • At 22:42, 25 June 2009 an article was created saying The Death of Michael Jackson occured on the 25th June 2009. Jackson was rushed to hospital in Los Angeles after suffering a cardiac arrest and arrived at hospital in a coma. Fans began arriving outside of the hospital. It was sourced solely to the Daily Mirror and the Sunderland Echo, a British tabloid and a low-circulation English local newspaper, neither of which would be considered reliable in Wikipedia's terms for a story of this nature given the potential libel implications of getting it wrong;
  • At 22:47, 25 June 2009 Golbez deleted the page;
  • At 22:51, 25 June 2009 I protected the page against creation for a 24-hour period, to prevent anyone else creating the page until the situation was clarified; TMZ is not a reliable source and at this point there had been no official confirmation. Shortly after this, Malcolmxl5 extended the protection period from 24 hours to indefinite;
  • At 01:21, 27 June 2009 Gwen Gale removed the create protection from the page;
  • At 01:28, 27 June 2009‎ SlimVirgin created the first version of the existing article, as Jackson's death was by that time being reported in sources considered reliable by Wikipedia's specific definition of the term and there was too much coverage specifically of his death for it to be practical to remain in his biography without giving it undue weight compared to his career; all further additions to the page are built on that article.
The way in which Wikipedia covers high-profile events like this isn't really much of a story, as this type of event has numerous eyes on it so tends to follow a very set path of "protect while it's only speculation in unreliable sources, unprotect and create when it's confirmed in reliable sources". Consequently for this type of story Wikipedia tends to fulfil fairly well its brief of reflecting what mainstream consensus on the topic is, even when it's a topic that's moving rapidly.
Where Wikipedia falls down is with lower-profile but still important events, where there are fewer eyes on the topic and it's easier for problematic content to slip though un-noticed, and particularly with figures in non-English-speaking countries where people monitoring Recent Changes aren't necessarily going to be in a position to verify that sources say what it's being claimed they say. We maintain a list of the most seriously problematic instances as a warning from history; that list only gives true hoaxes, and doesn't include the good-faith misinterpretation of sources or the use of sources which aren't themselves reliable.
If you're interested in the behind-the-curtain workings of how Wikipedia decides which sources are and aren't appropriate to be using, the discussions are all held publicly on this page and its many archives. For more general enquiries about how Wikipedia operates—which is usually fairly different to the public idea of how it operates—emailing press@wikimedia.org would probably be the best place to start. ‑ Iridescent 20:48, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
I got a ping as well. It wasn't about any specific article, but do remember performing the Wikipedia equivalent of sticking my finger in a leaking dyke for a couple of hours where Tom Petty was "not quite dead" but it was imminent. There was a huge argument as to whether or not he should be listed as a "living person" and I'm pretty sure there was a bit of wheel-warring going on there as well. Somebody else can dig out the diffs, but Talk:Tom Petty/Archive 2 will give you a basic idea of things. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:02, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
..not dead? What was he? Pining for the fjords?! Just stunned?!
Good grief. I had exactly the same thought. Risker (talk) 13:38, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
Holy moly that was a weird read. "Not technically dead yet". That's the kind of stuff you do not want on your tombstone. Softlavender (talk) 15:51, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
Tom Petty and Michael Jackson were both exceptional cases, in that we had at least vaguely credible sources reporting their death before any official statement had been made that life had been pronounced extinct. (Petty was a particularly unusual case, as the police themselves mistakenly released a statement that he was dead, which the media reasonably enough took as confirmation.) For 99.9% of deaths, things aren't updated in real time so the issues of premature announcement doesn't arise; this kind of "when some sources say something has happened and some say it hasn't, what does Wikipedia say?" question generally arises more with things like wars, elections and major government policy changes than with the lives and deaths of individuals. The next big tests of Wikipedia's resilience will be when blacked-out vans are seen leaving the home of Paul McCartney, Queen Elizabeth or Bob Dylan, although I foresee some interesting edit-wars on March 29 next year. ‑ Iridescent 23:10, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
@Ritchie333: Just for info, the (questionably accurate) article resulting from the above is here. ‑ Iridescent 21:04, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Advice

Thanks for the ping about Flickr and the cemetery photos. It is useful to know about that change with maybe enough time to find/save/keep various photos. I wouldn't normally log in just to thank you for that, so I'll take the opportunity to ask you for some advice, publicly and privately. The two bits of advice I wanted to ask you about here are firstly about the TFA for 11 November (probably too late now, but I left a note here), and whether it would be worth doing an article on the commemorations of the end of the First World War (similar to this article which got posted at 'In The News' four years ago, see here)? (The main problem is that I don't have time to do an article on this, or to expand/reorganise First World War centenary, though I might get to it eventually). On that topic, you gave some useful advice a long time ago here, where among other things you may remember Francis Bennett-Goldney. While updating a page in my userspace with links to a series of blogs about the deaths of MPs in WWI, I was reminded of that when reading this, which has a little bit more that might be of interest. About the other matters, will using 'Email this user' reach you if I use that? Carcharoth (talk) 14:27, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

In an ideal world we wouldn't be running a TFA about lemurs on a day that's the secular equivalent of a High Holy Day for much of the world, but seeing as we're not going to get Poppy or Eternal flame through FAC with four days notice I'm not sure what we can really do. Most of the existing WW1 FAs are about specific regiment/unit, individual or war memorial, and IMO it would be disrespectful and inappropriate to highlight a particular nation or event. A few years back I was eyeing Prisoner of war as a broad-topic article that could be improved to FA standard, but rapidly abandoned the idea. The relevant part of the DYK queue has at least a nod to the centenary. (One of the hooks there, that the war memorial at Woodvale Park is said to be unique in honouring the dead from both sides of the First World War, is total bullshit and I wouldn't be surprised if The Rambling Man or Fram yanks it from the queue. The hook technically isn't inaccurate, as the claim is that it's said to be unique not that it's actually unique and it can be sourced that people have made the claim, but that's a little hair-splitting.) Since the commemorations will involve Trump, Putin, May, Macron, Merkel and Erdogan all being in the same room (and presumably the King of Belgium thinking that his nation has surely suffered enough to have that bunch as house-guests), I'd imagine the potential for it getting on to ITN is quite high as well.
Regarding a Centenary of the Armistice article, wait and see what happens on the day. Given that it will presumably involve Trump, May, Putin, Juncker, Merkel, Macron, Erdogan and Conte all being in the same room, I'd imagine the potential for something newsworthy happening is quite high.
"Email this user" will reach me, but it goes to an account which only gets checked once in a blue moon. If it's anything time-sensitive, it's probably best to notify me—Echo is theoretically meant to notify when someone has used the "email this user" button, but in my experience it only seems to work about two times in three. ‑ Iridescent 18:25, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
I had nothing to work with for the 11th that wasn't specifically about a particular unit. As an aside, Carcharoth, - if you have concerns about TFA selection - it's probably best to bring it up to the four folks responsible for TFA - you can use @TFA coordinators to get all of us at once. If someone brings me a better choice .. .I'm happy to switch things around but it needs to be quick. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:43, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
If you're going to honor the Armistice then skimming over WP:FANMP I'd say Manchester Cenotaph is the least worst of the options. It's not ideal, as it specifically commemorates the forces of one side rather than all nations that took part, but at least it's not celebrating a particular unit or individual, and is something unlikely to cause offense. As you know, I'm not a great fan of "date significance" on the main page, so in my personal opinion unless there's something obviously appropriate (e.g. Vladimir Lenin last year on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution) it's better to ignore the anniversary than to try to shoehorn something in. Since every conceivable surface in Britain is currently plastered with poppies and I assume the equivalent is true in France, Germany, and Belgium, and the date is a public holiday in the US, it's not as if readers are unaware of the date and we'd be doing a service by reminding them.
(On the subject of FAs, I'm not sure which of the delegates is responsible for deciding which categories articles are listed under at WP:FA, but you might want to find whoever filed Neil Armstrong under "Warfare biographies" and give them a slap. Yes, he served in the Korean War so technically it's a military biography, but I'd guess his naval service isn't the reason most readers are looking him up.) ‑ Iridescent 19:14, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
Just a point of information, I can't yank anything from the queue. I can advocate for it, but nothing more. Cheers for the ping. The Rambling Man (talk) 23:02, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
On the centenary specifically, PoTD is relevant: Template:POTD/2018-11-11. However, Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/November 11 doesn't have 1918 yet. Who should I contact about that? I think it would be User:Howcheng, who seems to do updates the day before. Hopefully that will all be OK. Agreed about the Woodvale Park memorial comment. Looking at the DYK nominations, there are none in the holding area flagged for 11 November, but one relevant one being reviewed: University of Reading War Memorial (the French submarine one is not actually WWI). Carcharoth (talk) 12:56, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
@Carcharoth: Long-standing policy has it that OTD doesn't run the same content as TFA/POTD, but we do have The Unknown Warrior and Shrine of Remembrance that we can feature. —howcheng {chat} 16:44, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
That is why I posted to your talk page suggesting an exception (because it is the 100th anniversary, not just any anniversary). Though I then noticed someone else made the changes (to include the article on the armistice) anyway (to quibble there, the official end could be said to be the peace treaties the following year). I was trying to pre-empt things, but then things happened anyway. Given that TFA is unlikely to include anything related, I think it would be good to have both OTD and PoTD include something in this vein. I fail to see why you would allow 'Shrine of Remembrance' and 'The Unknown Warrior' (from different years) but not allow 'Armistice of 11 November 1918' - readers of the main page will be interested in that far more than the other two (other readers will click on the link from the picture caption to WWI, but why not both?). Carcharoth (talk) 16:58, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
As also stated on my talk page, I'm concerned that one of those edits to make the article more presentable for OTD purposes has excised too much material and has compromised our coverage of the history. —howcheng {chat} 17:24, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Yes, that needs fixing. May try and do that. Carcharoth (talk) 17:36, 8 November 2018 (UTC) Done, will go back to Howcheng's talk page to continue discussion there. Carcharoth (talk) 18:38, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

A reply now (may have time to say more later), and with thanks for the responses so far: I think there have been memorial and/or specific WWI or WWII articles focused on specific nationalities (rather than the general history of the World Wars articles that are nearly impossible to get to FA) run on November 11 before (but more likely they were run on dates linked to the event/object, or not linked to any date), but given that this is a more significant date than normal, I agree with the point made above that it would be better to have nothing at all (and we had a memorial last year). My next step would have been to contact the TFA co-ordinators, but I won't do that now, as I am going to leave things as they are (and drop HJ a note back on his talk page pointing him here). For the record, from 2004 to 2018, the TFAs were (with actual military relevance marked with an asterisk): Sarajevo, Peterborough Chronicle, Leonhard Euler, Bobcat, Ronald Stuart(*), Battle of Arras (1917)(*), Saint-Gaudens double eagle, Harry Cobby(*), William Jennings Bryan presidential campaign, 1896, John Treloar(*), Goodbyeee(*), Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence, George S. Patton(*), Norwich War Memorial(*) and (pending) Mesopropithecus. During the WWI centenary years (2014-2018), the years where a WW1-related TFA ran on 11 November were in 2014 and 2017 (the TFA in 2016 had some WWI content as well). Note (for full context) that other WWI-related content ran as TFA on other dates in the period 2014 to 2018, often on more relevant dates. Carcharoth (talk) 11:46, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

On actual news coverage of this coming weekend (and Monday in France, apparently), it is possible to get a flavour of what will happen from a number of sources. Firstly, the news articles that are out there with specific previewed details (though some of the detail is under wraps). There will be the BBC coverage of the actual ceremonies, focusing on Westminster Abbey and Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast, and wherever the main events are in France and Belgium. Some of the focus will be on dignitaries [titular leaders and royalty], rather than politicians (I am defining the two rather loosely here). Some examples: No Trump-Putin summit in Paris with focus on Armistice commemorations; Armistice Commemorations Muted as Germany Reflects on World War Lessons; Europe Remembers One of Deadliest Conflicts in Human History; PM to visit Belgium and France as part of Armistice commemorations. Incidentally, one of the things I was fascinated by over the summer was whether Theresa May would actually still be PM for these commemorations. That press release was only put out on 3 November. The main takeaway point (from the VoA article):

Some 80 leaders from around the world, including U.S. President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, will fly into France this week to attend remembrance events marking a century since the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The culmination of the commemorations in France will come with a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Monday (sic).

(Other sources say Sunday, not Monday, which makes more sense.) The (British) PM's schedule takes her to Mons (Belgium) on Friday and Albert (France) on Saturday, and back to London on Sunday where the German President will "lay a wreath at the Cenotaph in an historic act of reconciliation". There is obviously much more, such as Australian ceremony in France which is an example of one of the many events being held at memorials in many countries (e.g. there will be an event at Brookwood on Sunday as well). A good summary of the French events is: here and here. More here and here. You can never be sure quite what direction the news coverage will take, and how much will get covered, but if other news is quiet there will be quite a bit (not to mentioned the pieces commissioned well in advance). Carcharoth (talk) 15:09, 8 November 2018 (UTC) PS. The main problem with me making a start on an article (I might do that today) is that I am away this weekend, and not back until Tuesday. Carcharoth (talk) 15:14, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Whats worrying me is "How will Trump ruin this?" - its a sad day when you are actively expeciting a world leader to do something awful at such an event. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:12, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
This is one of the few occasions where you can assume Trump will be on best behavior. Unless and until you've lived there, one really can't appreciate just how big a deal veterans are in the US compared to any other country, and that's particularly true among the Republican right; doing anything to screw up a ceremony honoring American troops (among others) would destroy the fragile and uneasy coalition of evangelicals, libertarians and centrists that keeps Trump in office. He's well aware that all it takes is 20 senators to decide that he's an electoral liability and that Pence/Ryan 2020 would have a better chance of preventing the nightmare scenario of a Sanders/Warren ticket winning, and he's gone within weeks and potentially spending the rest of his life fighting legal charges. ‑ Iridescent 17:59, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Yes but 'on best behaviour' in his case means just not actively trying to offend. I'm still allowing for stupidity. Only in death does duty end (talk) 02:18, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
@Only in death: Trump cancels due to heavy rain... Aiken D 17:58, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
Well I suppose you can't balls it up if you don't go. Blessing really. The hair would not survive heavy rain... Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:31, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
Seems to offending enough people with that cancellation anyhow (he could've easily gone by road apparently - "I helped plan all of President Obama's trips for 8 years," he wrote on Twitter. "There is always a rain option. Always."). So much for doing anything to screw up a ceremony honoring American troops (among others) would destroy the fragile and uneasy coalition of evangelicals, libertarians and centrists that keeps Trump in office. I suppose as long as one has a plausible enough excuse for doing so...
Iri, I think you have far more faith that evangelicals/libertarians are only supporting Trump because it is their only choice, and are ignoring that more than half of the Republican party is rabidly pro-Trump (hence the Trump pandering, and emulation, especially in the primaries, by candidates in the midterms) and would revolt against any impeachment. Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:57, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
Good grief; as well as the rain incident, if Le Monde is correct and Sarah Sanders is lying—and I know who I'd put my money on—he also told the Lithuanian ambassador that his nation was responsible for the war in Yugoslavia. Putin and Morawiecki must be bemused at the feeling of being at an international gathering and not being the objects of derision.
I still stand by my evangelicals/libertarians comment. Certainly, many if not most of the Republican party is rabidly pro-Trump, but they have nowhere else to go; if Trump steps down they're not suddenly going to start cheerleading for Hillary 2020. If the opposition party takes and holds a strong lead in the polls, political parties are ruthless when it comes to dumping leaders if they think that leader is potentially going to lose them the next election—there are enough people in the upper ranks of the GOP who know their history well enough to remember both the fate of Margaret Thatcher, and that dumping her kept the Conservatives in office for a further seven years from a point at which everyone expected them to be wiped out for a generation. I know this is a highly unrepresentative sample, but whenever I speak with my family I get the feeling the unofficial motto is "the guy's an asshole but I'm voting for the party, not him"; if it starts looking like those people start feeling in significant numbers that they can no longer support the party, it only takes 1⁄3 of Republican senators to start feeling itchy to eject him altogether (unlikely) and it only takes between two and three (depending on recounts) to frustrate his agenda in the hope that he won't seek a second term and a more conventional right-winger like Ryan can run as the common-sense candidate (highly likely). The usually-spookily-reliable electionbettingodds.com is only giving Trump a one-in-three chance of standing and winning in 2020. ‑ Iridescent 00:12, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
"he also told the Lithuanian ambassador that his nation was responsible for the war in Yugoslavia" - Well the Baltics and the Balkans are very similar... (Sigh) Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:55, 12 November 2018 (UTC)
I'm way ahead of you: see the bottom of this section [5]. EEng 00:07, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
You mean, the section that was added two days after I made the above post? I feel we may be using differing definitions of "way ahead". ‑ Iridescent 21:50, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Am not going to try and do any article on the Armistice centenary commemorations until next week at earliest now (probably later than that). I do have notes on the commemorations for Jutland, the Somme, Passchendaele and Amiens, so might try and write all of them up at some point, with suitable sources (or add to existing or newly created articles). But this all needs more time than I have at present. It is good that PoTD, OTD and DYK will have thematic content. Carcharoth (talk) 15:14, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Realistically there's no chance of rushing anything through in time for Sunday. If "date significance" is important, then September 1st or 3rd next year (depending on how you reckon it) will be the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, which despite not being a nice round number like 100 will possibly be more evocative as it's likely to be the last major WWII anniversary commemoration at which survivors will be in attendance. Because of the general chaos left by the disintegration of the European empires, we also have significant centenaries coming up thick and fast in the next couple of years:
  • 3 Jan 1919; formation of the Nazi Party;
  • 15 Jan 1919, assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht;
  • 21 Jan 1919, formation of the First Dáil and declaration of the Irish Republic (I have absolutely no intention of touching this one with a bargepole);
  • 25 Jan 1919, formation of the League of Nations;
  • 14 Feb 1919, Soviet invasion of Poland;
  • 2 Mar 1919, formation of the Comintern;
  • 13 Apr 1919, Amritsar massacre (I have absolutely no intention of touching this one even with someone else's bargepole);
  • 19 May 1919, Atatürk begins the Turkish Civil War;
  • 28 Jun 1919, Treaty of Versailles;
  • 11 Aug 1919, formation of the Weimar Republic;
  • 19 Aug 1919, Britain withdraws from Afghanistan and formally stops considering it part of the Empire;
  • 10 Jan 1920, the Central Powers formally surrender;
  • 15 Mar 1920, Britain occupies Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire comes to an end;
  • 4 Jun 1920, Treaty of Trianon and the dismantling of Hungary;
  • 21 Nov 1920, Bloody Sunday in Ireland (I have no intention of touching this one with twenty bargepoles lashed together to make a single 250-foot bargepole);
  • 23 Dec 1920, the allies create Syria and Palestine, with hilarious consequences (the bargepole doesn't exist that's long enough);
  • also 23 Dec 1920, the partition of Ireland and creation of Northern Ireland, which presumably seemed like a good idea at the time to someone (the bargepole will never exist that's long enough).
Those are just the MILHIST ones likely to be of interest to en-wiki readers; there are also shedloads of significant anniversaries coming up in Eastern Europe, as assorted Balkan and Baltic states declared their independence from Austria, Russia and Turkey, and the centenary of both prohibition and women's suffrage in the US. Because the people being born around 100 years ago were the generation who fought in WW2 and who created post-war popular culture, there are also lots of 100th birthdays about to hit us over the next two or three years. December 23, 2020 in particular is likely to give the incoming Arbcom who'll be taking office a week later lots of fun things to talk about. ‑ Iridescent 17:09, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
The Treaty of Versailles might be possible. Your bargepoles are funny, though I hope someone does try to improve those articles a bit. The expected Trump soundbite has emerged: Trump blasts Macron. I do like whoever suggested May quote WWI poetry in her tributes: Theresa May pays respects in France and Belgium. It may well have been May herself, for all we know. The quotes used (in the cards used on the wreaths) were Binyon ("They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted"), Brooke ("in that rich earth a richer dust concealed") and Streets ("There lie the flower of youth, the men who scorn'd to live (so died) when languished liberty"). There will be lots more coverage between now and Monday, when the papers may well carry front page coverage if nothing more newsworthy happens (and the Sunday papers will carry feature articles, of course). Carcharoth (talk) 11:18, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
To quote Sir Bernard Woolley, No, you can't have alphabetical seating at the Abbey. You'd have Iraq and Iran next to each other. Plus Israel and Jordan all sitting in the same pew. We'd be in danger of starting World War III. Yes, I know "Ireland" begins with an "I", but no. That doesn't make it any better. Ireland never makes anything any better. You were an arb for long enough to know that nothing good has ever come of editing an article that even contains the words "Israel" or "Ireland", let alone the hyper-sensitive topics of 100 years ago around the origins of Zionism and the formation of the IRA. I'd be reluctant to try to clean up Treaty of Versailles, as I suspect too many well-intentioned school projects and people who are half-remembering things they heard on the History Channel will be edit-warring over it come the day. If I'm feeling particularly masochistic I may take a stab at Occupation of Smyrna, although it's in such a poor state it will probably (appropriately enough) need a scorched earth destruction and rebuilding from scratch; the next ones I have tentatively lined up are the somewhat less controversial botanical ceiling of the Natural History Museum, Reading's Soane Obelisk, de-shittifying our embarrassingly bad Round-tower church article and possibly trying to get Bayeux Tapestry into a less messy condition in time for 2022 if I can summon up the energy and Ealdgyth doesn't get there first. ‑ Iridescent 15:20, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
The Tapestry-that-isn't isn't even on my radar. I have it watchlisted for vandalism fighting, but no interest in working on it. My interests to work up are continuing on the Holocaust article, perhaps Treblinka (it's using Steiner as a freaking source! ARGH!) and maybe a bishop or two eventually. If we ever get moved, I can actually start working on articles again.. I might even return to nominating articles for FAC eventually... Ealdgyth - Talk 17:16, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
I'm not really that interested in the Tapestry, but assuming the Grand Symbolic Gesture of repatriating it in 2022 goes ahead, it's likely to become one of the most read Wikipedia articles of all time, and it would be nice if it were in decent shape. Regardless of its artistic merit or accuracy, or of why anyone would queue for hours to catch a glimpse of it through a crowd when they can scrutinize the thing for hours at their leisure online or go see the stitch-for-stitch replica in Reading for free at any time, it will be the most visited exhibition of all time, and interest in all things Norman is going to soar. ‑ Iridescent 00:12, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Oops

Thanks for the feedback here. I was under the impression that the copyvio detector omitted results which were published after the articles it analyses! SITH (talk) 16:55, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

No such luck; I don't think such a thing would even be possible to automate. Earwig's tool only really works on brand-new articles; because Wikipedia content is so heavily mirrored, anything on Wikipedia will be replicated hundreds of times within at most a week of going live. ‑ Iridescent 16:59, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Ah, well I'll check in future then. And that's quite a list, really emphasises the importance of verifiability! SITH (talk) 17:04, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

File source problem with File:Selina Rushbrook (née Selina Ann Jenkins), 1905.jpg

Thank you for uploading File:Selina Rushbrook (née Selina Ann Jenkins), 1905.jpg. I noticed that the file's description page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is unclear. If you did not create this file yourself, you will need to specify the owner of the copyright. If you obtained it from a website, please add a link to the page from which it was taken, together with a brief restatement of the website's terms of use of its content. If the original copyright holder is a party unaffiliated with the website, that author should also be credited. Please add this information by editing the image description page.

If the necessary information is not added within the next days, the image will be deleted. If the file is already gone, you can still make a request for undeletion and ask for a chance to fix the problem.

Please refer to the image use policy to learn what images you can or cannot upload on Wikipedia. Please also check any other files you have uploaded to make sure they are correctly tagged. Here is a list of your uploads. If you have any questions or are in need of assistance please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 15:17, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Fuck off, Sfan. Your disruptobot is starting to seriously try my patience; in what way do you think that 19th-century official prison photographs could still be in copyright, even if owing to some unusual chain of events involving all the official cameras being broken and the prison having to get an independent photographer to take the photos on that day, they for some reason weren't Crown Copyright? As pointed out last time you incorrectly tagged this for deletion, "not following the arbitrary attribution format you've made up" is not synonymous with "incorrectly attributed" ‑ Iridescent 15:23, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
...is not added within the next days... within the what days? Shame about the copyediting :D ——SerialNumber54129 15:32, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
On Sunday I was at an editathon in the Wellcome Library, mainly to see what sort of things new users did and what they wanted to talk about. One of the attendees said, "what sort of pictures can you upload?" - I just kind of hid because I knew my answer : "Don't bother, you'll just get abuse from random people without explanation if you try it" probably wouldn't go down too well. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:50, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
At the risk of sounding like an egg teaching a hen: I wouldn't bother to reply to a semiautomatic notification here as I don't expect that Twinkle users always watchlist the user talk pages they semi-auto-posted on; I'd post it on User talk:ShakespeareFan00 ~. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:01, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
In this particular case, I'm fairly confident he's watching the page, given that last time I questioned his mis-tagging this image for deletion with a made-up deletion rationale he promptly went off to the admin noticeboard to announce his divaquitting, before coming back and picking up where he left off shortly afterwards. ‑ Iridescent 16:11, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Diggin' da shades, sister: [6]. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:31, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
The answer is extremely simple: anything either not copyrighted or under a license that we support uploading of, where you can prove that license.
Copyright has legal implications and must be dealt with strictly. Vermont (talk) 09:16, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, I also thought it was that extremely simple, until I read the conversation that EEng links to below. How would you respond to that? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:27, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
From a quick read (I read the help desk link, skimmed over the discussion on Magog's user talk, and briefly looked at the OTRS tickets), the conversation linked to below seems to revolve around who owns copyright to a few different images where the person claiming to have copyright either appeared in the image or wasn't directly the photographer. This doesn't effect the simplicity of copyright; it's an issue with proving that the person claiming to own it actually does, which can get very complicated depending on the situation. Vermont (talk) 10:40, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. I can see that distinction. But as far as an outcome is concerned, I guess it's going to be equally perplexing for the image uploader? My experience is that in the "real world" images are frequently transferred for use between friends and colleagues with simple verbal assurances of "you're welcome to use that image on your website" etc., without any kind of formal ownership or copyright declaration being recorded. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:11, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Speaking of ridiculous enforcers of file permissions

[7]. EEng 05:13, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Nobody likes insulting Commons and their arbitrary administration, which appears based more on who you're friends with than anything else, more than me, but I can feel a degree of sympathy for the admins in that particular case. "I don't know who the creator was but I'm the copyright owner" is right up there with "source: personal knowledge" when it comes to being a warning flag for a potentially problematic edit. ‑ Iridescent 08:08, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Based on your comment I don't think you read the discussion carefully enough. This bunch can't even keep straight what their own rules and procedures are, slip back and forth between copyright holder and author without seemingly realizing it, and much more. They're a bunch of clowns out of their depth. The post get at my link above itself starts with a link to an earlier round of the same discussion; to get the full flavor of the Commons hall of mirrors, follow that link and read what happened there too. EEng 17:03, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Did someone mention drowning clowns (with added chainsaw)?? You need.... Herbaria'™' calming tea, allegedly. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:10, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Oh, I'm not defending the Commons crowd in the slightest; it has by far the most incompetent administration of any WMF project, which given that we run Wikiversity is saying something. (We're talking a project that felt the need to hold a discussion about whether someone globally banned by WMF Legal—a serial sockpuppeteer who counted User:WMFcansuckmyballs among his many identities—should retain admin and crat userrights, to put this in perspective.) All I'm saying is that I can appreciate the initial knee-jerk; anyone who's ever worked the speedy deletion queue here can confirm that "I own this, I don't know who created it" is 99.999% of the time code for "I stole this from a website somewhere", and on Commons—where the admins deal with far more images than we do here—it must have set every admin who saw it into the mindset of "this editor is clearly up to something and it's my job to find out what it is". Admins are human, even Commons admins; while one can blame them for doggedly defending conclusions after they've jumped to them, one can hardly blame the initial jump in this case. ‑ Iridescent 17:43, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
No, you can blame them. The release text sent was exactly the text Commons supplies; apparently, depending on which admin you get, they just arbitrarily decide they don't want to accept the clear statement made in that release text they supply. My beef is that if they want more, or more under certain circumstances (or, as it seems, more now and then according to random whim) why don't they say that up front? It put me in an embarrassing situation. EEng 22:32, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Sure I get that, but from the admin point of view just because someone's followed the correct procedure doesn't mean there's not going to be an issue—there's a looooooong history of people who think that appearing in a photograph automatically makes them the owner of the copyright, and who then go on to upload the photo entirely in good faith and through the correct channels, but Commons still needs to delete it because the copyright wasn't theirs to give. Look on it as Commons's equivalent of a new account here who's correctly gone through all the AfC and Article Wizard processes, but creates an article that shows as a 90% match on the copyvio detector; yes, there are cases where someone has legitimately copied a public domain source and correctly attributed it, but there are enough new pages created by copy-pasting websites that the admins are going to examine you very closely.

As I say, I'm not defending the admins in this case, just saying that I can understand their initial reaction. Have the world's most petulant gravestone as compensation for your time. If anyone feels the urge, I imagine John Swan (engineer) could be turned blue with fairly minimal effort. ‑ Iridescent 18:09, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Didn't anyone tell him his reward would be in Heaven...? I suppose he found out soon enough... ——SerialNumber54129 18:17, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
Grave of Frank Bostock, "The Animal King"
He obviously left his daughter enough that she could afford a gravestone the size of a small house, so I assume he didn't die of starvation. If you don't mind stepping over the East European drunks who've colonised it, Abney Park is a great place if you want really peculiar tombstones as it's where the arriviste new money, who weren't posh enough for Highgate or Hampstead but were important enough that their families could prevent the Necropolis Company hauling their remains off to Brookwood, tended to be buried; here's the tomb of lion-tamer Frank Bostock (tragically also a redlink). ‑ Iridescent 18:26, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
We want a strong and stable Brexit, where cemetery means cemetery, but where all East European drunks will be very welcome to stay. thank you. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:07, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Brummie Sewer Lions

That no one has had cause yet to use the above picture in an article is indeed a tragedy. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:37, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
This guy was not only a world-famous lion tamer but also managed to lose a lion down a sewer? How can he not have an article? (Well actually he did, I see it was A7'd back in 2012).--Pawnkingthree (talk) 18:56, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
To be fair, the entire text of the deleted article was Animal trainer from Glasgow Scotland. He received his first opportunity to perform in America from Bolossy Kiralfy.—I don't think one can really blame the admins for that one. It looks like all the recent sources on him are just chapters in books on circus history, so I'm reluctant to take him on as it would mean being lumbered with a stack of books that aren't of interest to me. (I wouldn't really want to rely on the BBC link without double-checking everything; Bethan Bell writes the human-interest filler pieces like Bureaucats: The felines with official positions and What could Harry and Meghan expect at Butlin's? rather than real news, so I suspect her articles aren't fact-checked even to BBC News's poor standards.) ‑ Iridescent 20:09, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
But it's not all Butlins and Bureaucats for Bethan Bell is it? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:19, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
Check the links; she didn't do the actual news reporting, she wrote the grim-up-north back story pieces. This isn't to criticise her – I've just spent the best part of 300kb of text arguing that human interest and linking the story to the readers' own experiences is one of the most important parts of writing for an online audience – but in Wikipedia terms this kind of story, when news organisations have slashed budgets and need to allocate the factchecking teams where the lawsuits are most likely, are the ones least likely to be RS. ‑ Iridescent 20:34, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
So her name's on this, but she merely wrote it, not actually reported it? How do we know if she made some of it up? I just see "BBC" and assume a certain level of veracity, I guess. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:41, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
Other people did the actual news reports—they're at the bottom of the Wikipedia article, and linked in Bell's article—and Bell summarised their reports in her piece. As I say, I'm not critical of it as a style of journalism, but it's one to be wary of in Wikipedia terms. On the general reliability of the BBC, on big stories like changes of government or major incidents they're superb, but on lower-profile take their reporting with a piece of salt, and when BBC local are involved take them with a kilo bag of salt. BBC News is halfway through their four-year programme of £80 million in cuts (that's just cuts to the BBC News budget, not the rest of the corporation), and since given recent—er—developments they can't cut London, Scotland, Belfast, Brussels or Washington, it's English and Welsh news outside of London that's taken the full weight of the axe. If you want to read utopian technobabble at a level that would make the WMF proud, the BBC's official ramblings about how cuts don't matter because in the future everyone will already know about everything the instant it happens so the only job for journalists is to provide commentary (I'm paraphrasing but not by much) are here. ‑ Iridescent 21:17, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, I really don't know if one has to spend years footslogging around the fetid sewers of Hartlepool (hunting large cats with ancient firearms) before one gets a nice cosy office at White City, or if one still just has to go to Oxbridge. Someone still has to put a story together and assume that they've got actual facts to work with from those lower down the food chain? How nice of Auntie to pick up the tab for the free OAP licence in two years' time. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:30, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

The extent of a lion's knowledge of firearms

Sorry Eng, too busy reading about sewer lion to bitch about commons. There must be an editor who likes circus history somewhere... Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:38, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
The circus editors are all tied up writing about the Trump administration. EEng 01:26, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
We do genuinely have a professional elephant-tamer. I don't know if there's some kind of menagerie rivalry and the elephant and lion folk all hate each other, or if it's all one big happy family. Casliber wrote Lion, so I assume if there's anyone with an interest in circus lions he'll be aware of them. ‑ Iridescent 07:55, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
On is it really possible to threaten a lion with a gun?, if it was a tame lion then possibly. His trainer may well have used a blank-firing gun as a punishment. If that's the case, while the lion on seeing the firearm wouldn't have had metaphysical thoughts on whether it is better to die free or live as a captive, he would have thought "that's the bang-stick that makes my ears hurt if I don't go where the man points and lie down". ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, I thought of that later. Good thing cats have good night vision for looking at guns in sewers. EEng 16:43, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
  • "I at once asked... that he would instruct the superintendent of sewers to send me the bravest men he could spare, with their top-boots, ladders, ropes, and revolvers with them." What the hell was going on down those sewers? Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 17:11, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
A typical sight in Edwardian Yorkshire
Charismatic megafauna for sale in the Victorian East End

Although, as well all know, Wikipedia is almost finished and now entering its maintenance phase (ha!) there is still much that could be said on discrete but somewhat niche topics such as the early history of the travelling menagerie.

Bostock added his name to that of George Wombwell (does his memorial in Highgate look familiar, folks?). We don't appear to have anything on Day's Menagerie, but the sources are out there.

And then there are the likes of Charles Jamrach (and his escaped tiger) and Edward Cross (and his rampaging elephant Chunee, whose fate has its historical echo of unfortunate later elephants such as Topsy or Mary), or a little further back Douwe Mout van der Meer (and the extended travels of Clara). All in good time. 213.205.198.205 (talk) 01:46, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

There's probably quite a lot there, but I'm not the one to do it, as I know virtually nothing about circuses. Aside from anything else, these would be harder to write than they first appear, as one would need to put them in the context of both 19th- and 21st-century attitudes towards animal welfare which is a tricky balancing act (look at the history of Brown Dog affair to get an idea). ‑ Iridescent 08:01, 26 October 2018 (UTC)


being pinged in this discussion, I can only share my view after +40 years in the profession, that people working with animals in general are somehow downgraded to be pretty unimportant, unless they engage in political correct fields as animal rights and likewise. Any teenager who run a blog about which makeup they use, will be regarded as more relevant for Wikipedia article, than an animal trainer working all his life in 15 countries, and three continents. I think partly has political grounds. Internatioanlly known animal trainers should be buried and forgotten. Dan Koehl (talk) 10:24, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, I'd agree with that; because animal acts are unfashionable (in fairness, mainly because so many high profile cases of trainers treating animals appallingly has soured the public), nobody's writing much about them. It would be interesting to see if the success of The Greatest Showman leads to a new interest in the history of vintage circus acts. ‑ Iridescent 17:13, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Politics again i guess, animal acts are in politically correctPOV unfashionable (in fairness, mainly because NOT so many high profile cases of trainers treating animals appallingly has soured the public). But Wikipedia should not be POV... Dan Koehl (talk) 16:42, 12 November 2018 (UTC)
I don't disagree—there's nothing inherently more abusive about training an elephant than training any other animal; a lot of people who'd complain of cruelty if they saw a whip being used on a racehorse or a blank-firing gun used to control a circus lion will rub a puppy's nose in its own faeces or slap a cat for jumping on the table; and even the worst-run circuses and zoos treat their animals infinitely better than industrial farms treat intensively-farmed pigs or battery hens, yet the people complaining that zoos disrespect the dignity of the animals are generally quite happy to go home and eat their bacon and eggs.
I'd imagine that what caused the swing in the public mood against traditional circuses is that there were some high-profile cases of circuses—and especially smaller private zoos—treating animals atrociously (yes, most of these cases were in countries like Turkey and Russia which have generally laxer animal welfare standards and less of a tradition of caring for wildlife, but all the public sees is a bear or a lion being beaten by its handler and aren't going to stop and think about differential animal welfare legislation between countries); many of those cases came to light over a relatively short period so although what was actually happening was that the prevalence of cameraphones and cheap video cameras made people more aware of something that had always gone on, it appeared that there was an upswing in mistreatment; and the increased population of Africa and Asia for tourism and a boom in the popularity of wildlife documentaries made more people aware of the natural habitats and behavior of large animals and thus the zoo/circus environment (particularly old-style cages-and-bars zoos) came to give the appearance of cruelty regardless of how the animals were actually being treated.
I suspect that, assuming wild populations continue to decline, captive breeding programs will come back to being seen as a public good (as has already happened in the US regarding bison), while advances in robotics will make the use of live animals in circuses less necessary (Circus 1903 is using robot elephants in place of real ones, and where Vegas goes the rest of the entertainment industry generally follows). ‑ Iridescent 16:32, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
And how about Moby Dick robotscetacean needed too? Martinevans123 (talk) 16:43, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Those exist; the robot whales used in the Free Willy movies were so convincing, most viewers thought they were using real trained whale performers. ‑ Iridescent 16:51, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
I mean, many folks see aquatic parks as the worse kind of zoos, don't they. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:57, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
I once took a four-year-old to an aquarium; she wandered round in near-silence and eventually asked "Were these fish naughty to be put in jail?". (As with my bison comment above, there are legitimate reasons for keeping animals in captivity for study and for a hedge against extinction, and there are legitimate reasons for putting them on display to raise money to fund the breeding and conservation programs. I'm not sure there are really legitimate reasons for training walruses to mime jazz sax. The thoughts of marine animals are harder to read; if an elephant or a lion is unhappy it's obvious to both the trainer and the audience, but I doubt anyone can really tell what's going through the mind of a dolphin or a sea-lion.) ‑ Iridescent 17:07, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
I met one of the penguins from Batman Returns today. 33 years old. Looked pretty happy getting his fish dinner. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:26, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Iridescent, they're probably thinking what we'd be thinking if we had to spend our lives in a big bathtub. SarahSV (talk) 21:14, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
... anything over about 17 seconds is way long enough for me. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:25, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
I've honestly no idea whether "spend our lives in a big bathtub" is fair or not. I've no idea how much space a fish (whale, dolphin etc) actually wants or needs; for all I know a fish-tank is no crueller than keeping a horse in a field, or locking the cat in the house when you go on holiday. (This thread surely must hold the record for the one that's veered furthest from its original topic, even by the standards of this talk page.) ‑ Iridescent 22:24, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Well, ya know what they say.... "You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead". Martinevans123 (talk) 22:34, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

User:Granite07

User:Granite07 has been using an IP as well see [8]--MONGO (talk) 19:39, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

I'm just about willing to buy the explanation for that. Given that Granite is using mobile links for diffs they're presumably on a mobile device; signing in on a cellphone is a bit of a PITA particularly if you have a long password, so I'm willing to believe the "I was using an IP for ease of access but signed in once it became necessary" explanation. It's not like there was any effort to obscure the connection between the IP and the account. The 2601:647:4D01:FA4:A052:FC20:5FE7:C5EA address does geolocate to California, so "I lost my home in the fires" may well be true, in which case I'm willing to cut some slack for being under understandable stress rather than applying strict letter-of-the-law regarding sockpuppetry. ‑ Iridescent 19:49, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
Oh me as well. Granite07 has few edits obviously and its evident their claim of home loss etc. are valid especially considering some years back they edited the Concow, California article and that location was devastated by the fire.--MONGO (talk) 20:06, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fred Bauder

You were recently listed as a party to 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/Fred Bauder. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fred Bauder/Evidence. Please add your evidence by November 27, 2018, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fred Bauder/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, --Cameron11598 (Talk) 20:48, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

When I said Unless anyone has any specific question, I doubt I have anything to add that hasn't been said at the ANI thread, I meant it; if the arbs have something to ask me I'm sure they know where to find me. If you want to save everyone six weeks of arguing, bad feeling and earnest pontification, the result will be "Maxim advised, Fred Bauder's desysop confirmed but with a stipulation he can immediately run for RFA whenever he chooses, Boing! said Zebedee admonished, no action regarding Future Perfect at Sunrise"; the only variable is whether I get advised, admonished or desysopped for the lèse-majesté of reposting information that's been publicly available on-wiki since 2004. (Ironically, the result they actually want—"Eric Corbett banned"—is the one they can't hand down, as they haven't named him as a party.) ‑ Iridescent 21:03, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Actually, you missed another; that you were wheel-warring! ∯WBGconverse 12:41, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
That argument is such pure pants that I doubt the committee will even bother to address it formally. Since self-unblocking is a bright line, and the person who made it a bright line was some guy called "Fred Bauder" so he can't claim he wasn't aware, the unblock was never valid in the first place so all myself and Future Perfect at Sunrise were doing were reverting the actions of a disruptive editor the same as we'd do with a "poop" vandal who kept trying to restore their vandalism. This regrettably-widespread notion that experienced editors somehow acquire immunity to policy is one with which I have no patience whatsoever; I agree 100% with Only in death that Its a common trend (in my opinion) that experienced editors and admins get more leeway when breaking the rules, rather than as it should be, they should get less because they should know better. A Wikipedia variant of "a judge who's been caught red-handed is still technically a judge until he's been formally dismissed so he's within his rights to issue a warrant overturning his own suspension" is never going to fly. Arbcom may have many faults, but outright stupidity isn't one of them, and none of the members have any desire for the final act of the 2018 committee to be a Wikipedia version of the Saturday Night Massacre. ‑ Iridescent 18:07, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
I imagine that the Streisand effect means everybody now knows exactly what you wrote that got redacted. It is not too hard to figure it out. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:17, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

extraordinary claim raises doubts, see "scope under purview"

rfc about source reviewReflets.dans.l'eau (talk) 07:25, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

(This RFC, for the benefit of confused TPWs).
While barring a major shock "Alternative implementation" is going to pass, I still don't see a multi-phase approach to article reviews would help, and I think by making an already complicated process even more intimidatingly complicated it will just accelerate the widening separation between FAC and the broader community of editors. Yes, banning anyone from commenting on prose until after the source reviews have been completed will solve the problem of reviewers wasting their time reviewing articles that then fail because of disputed sourcing, but all it does is displace the problem since people will now be wasting their time checking sourcing—which, if you're doing it properly, is more effort and more time-consuming than reviewing for prose style and MOS compliance, as you're needing to actually source and read the books—on articles that are poorly-written and doomed to fail.
As a concrete and recent example, take Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Birmingham/archive2. This was an article that one could tell at a glance needed major work; within 20 minutes of the FAC being posted I'd provided a brief list of initial concerns, and within six hours the review had been closed to avoid other reviewers wasting their time on an article that was obviously not ready. Under either of the two proposals at the RFC, I'd have been explicitly banned from mentioning any of those issues until the source review was complete, meaning somebody would have had to waste their time checking 341 references even though anyone who'd even skimmed the article would be aware that the moment the source review was complete the article would fail on prose and MOS issues.
I'm not sure how having either of the proposals in place would have helped Bengal Famine. By having the source discussion first, it wouldn't have prevented the argument between you and SarahSV that ultimately sank the review; instead, it would have meant that the source discussion appeared first, and consequently anyone idly page-downing through Wikipedia:Featured article candidates looking for something interesting-looking to review would have been greeted by 6000 words of you and SV arguing and decided that this wasn't something with which they wanted to be involved.
There's also a broader issue, in that source reviews and prose reviews aren't two discrete beasts but are intimately connected—people reviewing the sources come across things that aren't included in the prose, and people reviewing the prose refer back to the sources. As an extreme, but not wildly atypical, example of a source and prose review being intertwined, see point #2 at WP:Featured article candidates/John/Eleanor Rykener/archive2#Life in which there's a lengthy back-and-forth over how we should word an explanation of the fact that a secondary source has stated as unambiguous fact something which isn't backed up by the primary sources they claim supports their interpretation. In a multi-phase review process, would this discussion take place in the "source review" or the "prose review" phase? Were this review to have taken place under the proposed new system, this would only have been noticed during the prose review phase (since in the source review phase the spot-check would just have shown "yes, this book says what it's claimed it says"; it took me actually reading the article word for word to realize that the claims being made here weren't consistent with the rest of the article). How would we cope in future when an article's passed its source review, but once people start reading in detail at the prose review they start saying "hang on, maybe there is a problem with the sourcing after all?".
It's probably worth pointing out that had the two-phase approach been in place at the time, this is exactly what would have happened at the Bengal Famine review; the sources used would all have checked out as they all—with the possible exception of the disputed "buried their children alive"—said what it was claimed they said, but as soon as it moved on to the second "general comments" phase, SarahSV would have raised concerns that Khan's book wasn't being used. (I actually agree with you regarding the non-use of Khan. I think SarahSV is using the "it's published by the OUP, it must be reliable!" argument, and my opinions of that argument are on record; although it's owned by the University the OUP is a stand-alone commercial publisher and publishes whatever they think will earn them money. While obviously many of their books are eminently respectable, many aren't, and their publications need to be subject to the same "what makes this book a reliable source for the topic being written about?" tests as those from any other publisher.) ‑ Iridescent 10:42, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
(adding) I could just about get behind a "two simultaneous reviews" process in which the source review and content review are two separate pages, although I don't really see the point. We'd still need to transclude both pages on the main FA review page, so it wouldn't reduce the amount of intimidating clutter seen by potential reviewers (otherwise there'd be too much risk of people not seeing comments that had been made on the other page), so all we'd really be doing is (a) drawing a big black line between the "source" and "content" review sections, and (b) forcing any interested party to watchlist two pages instead of one. ‑ Iridescent 10:56, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
    • Sarah had no concerns about Khan's book, or its use or non-use; Sarah had a search and destroy mission. Please do not suggest otherwise... we have both been around too long... You miss the mark when you say that the prob with SV's sourcing argument was an "it's OUP, so use it more". I didn't explain well, and I believe I am one of only one person on Wikipedia who has actually read that FAC. The point was how muscular my rather large tabular response was, and more importantly, that no one gave a flying fark that my response was muscular and her argument wws a tissue-thin facade... . The table paints a picture of a veritable mountain of Cambridge/Oxford/other respectable university presses... and no one cared. And SV didn't retract (proof of bad faith). And it ain't just that. Every damn thing she said was tissue-thin posing. You'd have to read through the whole FAC carefully (and alas, to some degree you'd also have to be familiar with the sources) tto see that. and no one cared. And Nick's only non "What Sarah said" oppose reason was "too many footnotes". Which is not in WIAFA> And no one gave a fuck. You've often stated that FAC is ingrown/insular, but it's problems are far far deeper than that. It's problem is that it is nonexistent, from a policy/guideline standpoint. What I mean is, consensus trumps every every every every everything. Reliable sources can go fuck themsleves; I've got (two-person) consensus. Complete coverage can go fuck itself; I've got (two-person) consensus.
    • I agree that saying source review MUST come before prose checking is a fucked up idea. My argument was that splitting them in two makes it harder to game the sysytem AND MAY MAKE IT EASIER TO PASS LARGE ARTICLES. Two reasons: first, FAC is pass/fail for the whole alleged import of WIAFA,and if it fails, the whole alleged import of WIAFA must be retried. Sepearete processes means hat one can forever be laid to rest, freeing the nominators from the burden of re-litigating every point. Second, more eyes on the article if the process is forked. Some people are prose nuts. Some people are reference-heads. Each will feel a greater attraction to become active in the process if the process is ONLY that area they gravitate toward. That makes it harder to get away with such bullshit. In bengal's case, no one reviewed it because the whole of it all together was too intimidating. Fork the processes to make it smaller bites to chew, and more reviewers will come. I disagree it makes it more intimidating. It makes it LESS intimidating.Reflets.dans.l'eau (talk) 15:04, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
As someone who inadvertantly contributed to the whole "source review" problem's beginning - I don't think this proposed process is going to work either. The whole problem is tied up in the beginnings of FAC, when it was 'brilliant prose'. There has long existed a group at FAC who don't appear to think the content is worth checking and they only deal with prose. They don't seem to think that the content is what's important - they'd rather worry about MOS compliance and whether or not the sentences are polished to a high standard than deal with actually digging in and seeing if the content is correct, if it reflects most of the scholarship, and whether the citations actually support the content. Frankly, that means that even when "source reviews" are carried out ... they are more concerned with stylistic matters than with trying to see if the content is correct and correcly sourced. Hades - half the time the source reviews at FAC don't even discuss whether sources would be considered to meet WP:RS. It's not helped by prolific reviewers who do not engage with the sources or the content - who content themselves with trying to polish the prose and actively try to avoid engaging with the content. Frankly, a number of them are behind the two proposals to split source reviewing off from the rest of the FAC process... which is, in my mind, wrong-headed. I think they hope that if they split it off (however that is done) then they won't have to bother with the messy details of content and can feel good that their reviews are useful. Yes, I sound a bit bitter - I strongly suspect people who supported those proposals are hoping they can get me or Brian back to do the dirty work they don't want to bother with. I am not going to. My opinion is that every reviewer should have to engage with the sources and content as well as the prose. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:56, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Sure, but what's being proposed is "source review first before anyone can even consider the content", not "source and content review on separate pages". Proposal 1—the one to which you posted "Strong support"—is to require the source review for a featured article candidate before the prose/MoS review, while Proposal 2 is FAC instructions would change to state that source reviews are expected to be completed before other reviews are posted; "have the source and content reviews run concurrently on separate pages rather than on the same page as now" isn't even an option.
To be frank, there's certainly a systemic problem at FAC which is preventing people contributing but it has nothing to do with source reviews, and everything to do with it being hijacked by a tiny clique of obsessives who think they own the process and have somehow earned the right to demand everybody else comply with their personal whims, regardless of whether their whims have anything to do with policy or writing quality. We've been at this point before, but this time there aren't the numbers for the process to survive a repeat of the large-scale harassment campaigns of ten years ago, especially now that so many of the regulars have already been flamed away from FAC. I'd recommend reading this archive top-to-bottom as a crash course in just how toxic the atmosphere there has become in your absence. ‑ Iridescent 16:06, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
(EC) ::Fair enough, Ealdgyth. But look again at the bit about "re-litigate". I would support (assuming I edited, which is a huge assumption) keeping them together if there were some way to separate out FAC arguments and authoritatively lay them to rest if they are conclusively OK. I proposed this before a long time ago at talk FAC, but my proposal then was that FAC "coordinators" have the voice of authority. So any way to do it with reviewers instead of "coordinators"? make things modular. Make at least some mechanism for setting separate aspects (not just prose/refs but others too "win/lose/draw/not WIAFA" forevermore? This needs to be done for large FACs, and it needs to be done in a clean clear modular fashion. Re-litigation is hell. And is fucking unfair. And puts the power in the Opposers pocket, 100$.... would a modular approach help break up the clique Iridescent dislikes?Reflets.dans.l'eau (talk) 16:13, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
Ultimately, the problem is that of the four FA criteria, (1) is totally subjective (who decides what's "engaging", what constitutes a "major fact" and what constitutes "relevant literature"?), (2) makes the whole process a hostage to the gaggle of cranks who own WP:MOS, and (4) is also completely subjective (if we disagree whether something is "unnecessary detail" or "appropriate clarification", who decides?). Consequently, the crash in the number of active reviewers has meant that to a substantial extent, the FAC review process has become a matter of who can bring their friends to the party, and which group can shout the loudest. I haven't touched FAC since March—and that was Droxford railway station, just about the most anodyne topic imaginable—and don't feel I've missed out on anything. ‑ Iridescent 16:28, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
The cranks are those with 1000+ edits, of course. EEng 18:03, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
Nah, 929 edits and above. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:06, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
Interesting to see the pair of you side-by-side. Galobtter, who could you possibly have had in mind by "the editors of … the few thousand pages that use things like {{ran}} or in text parenthetical citing (which are IMO very reader unfriendly)"? ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
Haha, well Jc86035 mentioned {{ran}} in their rationale which is why I did, but I've definitely complained about Phineas Gage's citation style before. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:22, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
It would probably be quicker to compile a list of editors who haven't complained about the markup on Phineas Gage. As you probably know if you've been watching this page, it's the article I use as my poster-child for markup that's incomprehensible to non-expert editors. ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
It's pretty incomprehensible to expert editors too, unless my wikitext skills are much poorer than I think they are. (Also, I definitely have been watching this page, and have read more archives of your talk than I'll admit to.) Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:41, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
Oh me too (regarding the archives). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:22, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

(Outdenting to reply to the start of the thread.) I saw the link to this discussion from Johnbod's post at the RfC. I've tried to avoid posting too much at the RfC itself in response to opposes, but I thought it would be worth commenting here. (I'm doing this from memory, rather than finding links to the relevant WT:FAC archives, but I don't think I'm misremembering.) The reason I came up with the idea was a combination of a post of Ealdgyth's somewhere in which she said something to the effect that fiddling with prose when the sources should be burned was a waste of time, and Brian's post that he was giving up on the job of being the primary source reviewer for FAC.

I think source reviews are hard for most reviewers, and I also think that setting up FAC so that source reviews appear to be an afterthought makes it easy for reviewers to treat the two types of review as fungible. This means that nobody feels guilty for not doing source reviews. Guilt, or more positively a sense of contributing to the community, is why most reviewers review. I wanted to split the communities in two so that two review types are no longer seen as interchangeable. Contrary to Ealdgyth's comment above, having her (or other source review experts) contribute more source reviews is just what I'm hoping will not happen. Instead I hope that a nominator whose FAC is not getting started because nobody is doing a source review responds by doing source reviews, because that's the backlog they're motivated to clear. Ealdgyth's point, about source reviews being primary, is why I proposed doing source reviews first, rather than second; that wasn't exactly an afterthought but seemed a natural fit with the idea.

Since I'm posting, I might as well respond to a couple of other points I've seen made. More than one person has said they're concerned that a stamp of approval on sources would make it hard to criticize sources once past that stage. I don't see why this would be true; I can't imagine any of the editors who've expressed that concern holding back on a criticism of sourcing just because someone else had asserted they were OK. (This happens at FAC now, after all.) I've also seens comments that once past the source review, reviewers simply would not look at the sources, as they should. Well, yes, they should, but this is a problem right now, and in fact it's worse than that right now, because reviewers will post "content reviews" which ignore sourcing problems. Requiring sources to be looked at first should help, if only a little.

Finally, I'm under no illusions that this approach is sure to work. It's a risk, but the concerns expressed by Ealdgyth, and the lack of interest in source reviewing on the part of many nominators, makes me feel we have to try something. This is the best I've been able to come up with. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:31, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

I agree with Ealdgyth's points. Source reviews are much more intensive than reading through and pointing out grammatical mistakes or wordy sentences. It's something I've definitely been guilty of as a reviewer (caring more about prose than comprehensiveness/accuracy), and my attempts to do spotchecks for Regine Velasquez have made it clear to me that I need to spend more time checking out sources when I do FAC reviews from now on. ceranthor 21:47, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
@Mike Christie, personally I think it will kill FAC. At present it's still generally a relatively good-natured "nominate an article, and for the next two to four weeks people will periodically make comments about it before eventually either supporting or opposing, or making it clear that while they're not actively supporting they're also not opposing", where (with a couple of obnoxious exceptions whom the coordinators really ought to be doing more to eject) every participant treats every other participant with general respect, even when they don't get along. (I'm not doing down the unpleasantness of Bengal Famine or Hector Berlioz, but those were very much outliers.)
The moment this RFC is closed—and barring a major upset, I assume source reviews are expected to be completed before other reviews are posted is going to pass—it will transition into a radically different process. Any article that's not on a recent pop-culture topic where the sources are all online will languish for weeks or even months.* Eventually, it will reach the bottom of the list and someone will conduct a source review. At that point, all the people who've read it in the weeks/months since it was nominated but were restrained by source reviews are expected to be completed before other reviews are posted will be free to comment; all of a sudden, the unsuspecting nominator's watchlist will light up as Tony, Eric, SlimVirgin and a motley band of MOS enforcers all simultaneously post every problem they've spotted with the text, and you'll have unintentionally created RFA for articles.
*People can swear blind that articles won't languish for weeks or months if "sources must be checked" is strictly enforced, but they will. Take something like the FAC for Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball, an short and uncontroversial article on an English-language topic; how many people do you know who are likely to have access to Dennis Farr's biography of Etty (which has been out of print since 1958), or to the catalogue of the Tate Gallery's 2001 Exposed: The Victorian Nude exhibition? Now, imagine how enforcing a requirement for strict checking of sources will work when it comes to something like an Indian topic where it's entirely possible the references will be in a dozen languages.
Alternatively, everyone who's spotted issues with the article in the intervening weeks but can't bring themselves to hold back until the source review is complete, will head to the article talk page. The talk page will suddenly be flooded as all the various editors of the article and people with an interest on the topic—many of whom won't be as familiar with Wikipedia's guidelines and the idiosyncrasies of the MOS as the nominator can be assumed to be—start arguing with the people coming in from FAC, with the regulars on the article posting variants of "you've never edited this article before, why are you so interested now?" and the incomers from FAC posting snotty comments about perceived inadequacies in the writing style of the article's editors. It's bad enough when GOCE/LOCE hijack an article and try to start enforcing their personal preferences, but that's usually only a couple of people, whereas in this case you could be unintentionally paving the way for making the talk page of every article nominated at FAC look like Talk:Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine or Talk:East Croydon station#Chains.
While I (obviously) hope even at this stage that the proposal is rejected, assuming it does pass I genuinely hope it works, but I really don't feel it will. I suspect it will lead to a rapid loss of goodwill among nominators, particularly from first-time nominators more used to the relatively easy-going process at WP:GAN who suddenly find themselves confronted by a wall of bureaucratic hoops, as well as a loss of goodwill among reviewers who object to being reverted when they post content reviews in good faith. People who've had their nominations languish and eventually be archived through no fault of their own, or who've had either of the two scenarios I posit above happen to them, will come away from FAC thinking that the reviewers are a mob of bureaucratic assholes and won't come back; once that goodwill is lost, it will be hard to put the toothpaste back into the tube. ‑ Iridescent 00:40, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Are you assuming that the source checking process will become more stringent? There's no intention in the RfC that it will do so. An article with hard-to-find sources should receive the same review it receives now, except that it would precede the other reviews. Currently we take some of the sourcing on faith in many source reviews in the situations you describe. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:25, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
The problem is .. the source reviewing needs to get more stringent. Too many source reviews just look at the formatting and "style" and don't even try to engage with whether the sources are considered reliable in WP terms. And a deep source review that checks the article content against the actual sources used almost never happens. The discussion and post of mine you're looking for are at Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/archive73#Focus, where I pointed out the problems with some recent source reviews... it's not that they are wearing the few reviewers out, it's that they are superficial. Ealdgyth - Talk 01:30, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the link. The point I was trying to make is that I think Iridescent sees more stringent reviews as triggering the death of FAC, but that the RfC is not about that. I agree many reviews are superficial, and the quality of promoted articles would improve if we made the reviewing more stringent, but that's a different discussion -- and I think there are many who would agree with (what I take to be) Iridescent's position, that it would not be sustainable at FAC. I made the proposal with the intention of recruiting more source reviewers, not changing what a source review is. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:44, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Please dont' take this wrong, and it's not meant to be snide or nasty or even bitchy, but if you did not intend to address my point which was that source reviews are superficial, please don't mention my name as an inspiration for the RfC... my point and objection to much of what goes on at FAC is that we're not engaging with the content, it's all superficial, and we've gone backwards. I don't think bringing in more source reviewers will fix the underlying issues and to be honest, I've almost totally come around to Iri's view of FAC... at times I wish we'd just go back to calling it brilliant prose and stop pretending that it's even trying to do anything about vetting the content. Ealdgyth - Talk 01:54, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
No offense taken, and if I do mention your comments again I'll be sure to be clear that the RfC is not in sync with your comments. But if we get more reviewers, as I hope, surely that puts us in a better position to improve the quality of source reviews? I don't think anyone has disagreed with you on where we'd like to be. It's just about how we can get there, or even if we can ever get there. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:59, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
(post e/c) I see myself as more of a moderate between Ealdgyth/Iri and the other side of the argument. I agree that FAC has been overrun in a sense with people obsessed with prose reviews, but I think that's because doing spotchecks and thoroughly reviewing content for source comprehensiveness and accuracy is time-intensive. It's a lot to ask of people, but I'm optimistic that we can push FAC in the direction of more rigorous source/content review without setting rigid formal processes. It worked in the past; why not now? I do have a bit of a reputation for optimism that verges on delusion sometimes, though... ceranthor 02:00, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
I think that ultimately, it will depend on FAC reviewers championing more rigorous reviews. Sometimes being told you're wrong stings, but you can't argue with objective errors. We need people who are unafraid to point out when things are wrong, sort of like The Rambling Man with the Errors page for DYK/ITN. You can bet that after TRM and an IP clocked a pretty egregious mistake I made with Diamond Peak (Oregon) that I've been far more careful at reading sources and writing content. ceranthor 02:04, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Re all: I simultaneously think the process should be more and less stringent. More stringent because there's too much slipshod reviewing and focus on wording at the expense of accuracy; less stringent because there's pressure to direct reviewing time towards FACs where reviews aren't really necessary. (I touched on this in the RFC, with if an editor has written Cheshire cheese, Mozzarella and Wensleydale cheese and the sources have checked out each time, I don't consider it a sensible use of anyone's time checking the sources when they nominate Cheddar cheese unless there's an extraordinary claim being made that raises doubts.) It's really not a good use of anyone's time doing more than the most perfunctory checks if Wehwalt writes an article on a coin or Ealdgyth writes an article on a horse, since if they were faking sources we'd have spotted it by now, but having a stand-alone review in the spotlight for every nomination will mean people feel obliged to perform in-depth source reviews for everything. On most topics, except a few very recent events where the sources are online, source reviewing (which involves effort finding the sources) is more difficult and more time-consuming than content reviewing (which ultimately is annotated proofreading). What's needed isn't an enforced in-depth source review on every article, which is what both these proposals lead to; it's that the scarce resource of people who are able and willing to do full source reviews (a limited pool, as it at minimum requires physical access to a major library and preferably a copyright library) both be encouraged, and be directed to where their work is most needed.
Per your (Mike's) dismissive comments about asymmetry, I do get the feeling you don't appreciate just how much time and effort source reviewing takes when done properly. Checking the wording of out-of-print books, some of which were in multiple editions each of which had different pagination, many of which have been out of print for a century, and most of which are specialist publications which only had a very limited print run in the first place, is one of the hardest tasks on Wikipedia, and if the handful of people who actually do it are raising concerns, you should listen very closely to what they have to say. ‑ Iridescent 08:52, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
I have a great deal of respect for their opinions, and am doing my best to understand the concerns. Opposition from editors like yourself, Sarah, and Johnbod really worries me; I'm posting here to find out if you're seeing something I'm not. Re asymmetry: that comment isn't intended to be dismissive about source reviewing -- on the contrary, the point of that comment is that the sources for an article must come first, and reviewing them is never a waste of time, whereas reviewing prose can be a waste of time. Reading through the enormously detailed source reviews that reviewers like Squeamish Ossifrage and Tim riley have done at FAC would have led me to understand the both the importance of source reviewing and how difficult it is to do correctly, if I needed to be taught.
To your specific points, in your last post and your earlier ones: I agree that it's silly to cast the same beady eye on Wehwalt's coin articles as on a new nominator's pop culture article. The current rules say that spotchecks are only intermittently required, which is as close as the rule can probably get without it seeming to exempt an in-crowd. I also agree that the full-court press source review you describe above is not being done in cases where it is needed. In addition to the points you make, finding sources that have not been used is rarely done beyond the level of a Google Books or Jstor search. In an ideal world a professional subject matter expert (or an amateur authority, in some cases) would be able to chime in.
Earlier, you predicted a flood of commentary at FACs that pass the source review boundary, or at the talk pages of FACs stuck at the source review stage. I'll be surprised if much of this happens. We'll see some perfunctory source reviews of pop culture topics, but then we see that now. I don't think reviewer behaviour will change much initially. The only situations where I've seen a flood of comments when a FAC starts is when there's been a prior peer review of an article by someone like Tim or Brian, where multiple people have already formed their opinions at PR and are waiting to post; or where there is a flood of immediate opposition, either on source or prose grounds or both. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:20, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
An alternative process could be requiring any editor who has never nominated at FAC to get a peer review. That seems like it could evade the source/content issues, and more, in my opinion. ceranthor 14:13, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
But if you're writing "no other parts of the review can start until a source review has been completed" into policy—which is what you're proposing—how do you not conduct a full review for every article? Are we going to start handing out "exempt from source review" certificates granting the regulars immunity from source reviews? If we have separate source review pages it will be glaringly obvious to all readers when a coin/hurricane/painting/battleship gets waved through without a source review or with just a couple of cursory spot-checks. If we're trying to dispel the (widespread) meme that FAC is a cozy club of a bunch of insiders patting each other on the back, I'm not convinced that a new nominator seeing their nomination remain blank for weeks waiting for someone to conduct the source review, while the regulars are waved through and jump straight to the content review, is likely to help. ‑ Iridescent 18:06, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
In my view, you need to do the source review first. Yes, you need engaging prose, it needs to be well presented, and come across as something that actually shows Wikipedia can compete against Britannica with a straight face. But there's no point polishing a turd if you're copyediting something that's not necessarily true. I recently came across this at Talk:Elton John/GA1, where no effort seem to have been made to check the sources or factual accuracy. (To their credit, the nominator admitted fault, asked to fail the review, and no hard feelings were given). I totally get that obtaining the relevant sources of long out-of-print works to verify information is cumbersome and difficult; I just don't have a good answer to that other than get back our contact at the British Library which would at least have a fighting chance of getting it if you could put forward a convincing enough argument. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:24, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
I have a British Library reader pass myself, and can head over there at lunchtime if there's a good reason to do so - perhaps I should advertise myself as a resource of last resort if there are some works held there that people really can't get by any other means. I do take your point about polishing turds, Ritchie333, but honestly how often does this issue come up? The two examples mentioned in the RfC were from 2015 and 2013. If it could be shown that this is a major problem then I might change my mind, but for now the negative effects will outweight the positive. Take my FAC right now. It had several prose reviews, all looks good, I feel like I'm in a nice place with it... the source review has sat for four weeks, which is frustrating, but at least that's all that's left. In the new world, my FAC would have sat *untouched* for those four weeks because nobody would be allowed to come in and prose review it. Very frustrating for nominators, adding more bureaucracy for reviewers and coordinators, and all for very little demonstrated benefit.  — Amakuru (talk) 13:53, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
I pointed out some recent issues at Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/archive73#Focus, all of which were in this year and had been closed recently. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:57, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
The reason the examples were old is that I've been harvesting data from old FACs, and those were ones I'd been going through recently.
The original proposal has been rejected for NOTBURO reasons, which I understand, but one of the things I liked about that approach is that it created a process which specifically focused on sources, since FAC has been criticized for treating sources as an afterthought. Perhaps it would have been better to propose a source review process completely disconnected from FAC -- just a new, standalone, evaluation process for source quality and comprehensiveness. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:47, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
The original proposal looks dead, but I assume the alternative proposal will pass. I still don't think it addresses the key issue, which is that source reviews are time-consuming and while in an ideal world we'd scrutinize everything, in practice Wikipedia doesn't have and never will have the resources to do that, so reviewing needs to be concentrated where problems are most likely to arise (first-time nominators where we aren't sure they know what's appropriate, apparently implausible statements, older sources on topics where it's likely academic consensus has changed, news reports used as the sole sources for claims, self-published books and questionable-looking websites…). I do think the coordinators need to be prepared—and willing—to treat this as an experiment rather than a change in policy and to summarily abandon "source reviews first" if nomination pages with no reviewer comments start stacking up. ‑ Iridescent 22:58, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Simeon Monument, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page John Simeon (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 10:16, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

It looks like JJE beat you to it, Mr Bot. ‑ Iridescent 16:39, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
To be fair to DPL bot, I did make the edit upon seeing their post here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:46, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Facepalm?

You know, we could still be nice to him. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 20:15, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Someone who has a total of three mainspace edits in the past year, two of which were minor edits and the third was to insert an unsourced claim that someone was dead, turning up at BN requesting "the hammer" and explaining that the reason for their apparent lack of edits was that they'd spent the last four years sockpuppeting? Assume Good Faith is a fine principle but it has limits. ‑ Iridescent 20:19, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
I guess what UC is saying is that we can still be nice to people—even as they launch themselves off Wikipedia's own Beachy Head  :) ——SerialNumber54129 20:38, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
Since the collective response of the 'crats was to advise him to apply at RFA, he's in for something of a rude awakening if he thinks "facepalm" is uncivil. ‑ Iridescent 20:49, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
I'm tempted to take a week off work and get a couple of pizzas in  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 20:52, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Hamster Sandwich is certainly something of a window into a lost world. Those were different times. ‑ Iridescent 21:01, 28 November 2018‎ (UTC)

I'm not sure that it is. Consider other possible explanations. I don't remember anyone using a "hammer" as a metaphor for adminship in those days, and if anything, people were more circumspect about adminship then than they are now. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 21:30, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Number of RFA candidacies (yellow) and percentage of RFAs that pass (blue)
UC, in no possible way were people more circumspect about adminship then than they are now. Back then, the RFA process basically consisted of turning up, and as long as one had at least a few months experience and a few hundred edits under their belt and hadn't pissed off any of the clique who dominated Wikipedia at the time, one was pretty much guaranteed to pass. (We're talking about a successful RFA for a candidate with 1500 edits and 4 months experience here.) Nowadays, there's a general feeling that RFA is akin to walking across a minefield in which the mines are filled with cow pies. (IMO this is a misconception based on a couple of high-profile very bad-tempered RFAs a decade ago, largely spread by a couple of very vocal people at the Signpost with no actual evidence to back it up, and qualified candidates tend to sail through RFA unless someone finds a skeleton in their closet, but there's no real doubt the perception is there.) You're a 'crat; it can't have escaped your notice that (1) a much higher proportion of RFA candidates are passing than in previous years, generally with overwhelming support and (2) the number of people volunteering at RFA has dropped precipitously because the "RFA is hell" meme scares people away. (Before anyone mentions it, the lowering of the 'discretion zone' from 75% to 65% had virtually nothing to do with the increased pass rate; in the past two years there's only been one RFA that's fallen in the 65-75% range that the crats actually closed as successful, and that was Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/GoldenRing which was something of a unique case.) ‑ Iridescent 23:35, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
Sure, I agree with all that. But the point I was trying to make is that there was more idealism about WP:NOBIGDEAL. It seems really unusual for someone who was actually an admin in 2005, and steeped in the community norms of that era, to show up now and ask for a "hammer." I did some more digging, though, and have moved away from that conclusion (see below). The Uninvited Co., Inc. 00:28, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
​If I were nasty and cynical, I'd say that given the events of the past week there's another potential explanation for a long-dormant admin account suddenly reactivating and asking for the sysop bit, but given that it would violate two-thirds of WP:TRIFECTA to say it out loud I probably shouldn't. ‑ Iridescent 00:05, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
I suspect that our thinking may have been similar. But I've since found some evidence that corroborates that he's who he says he is. In any event, he's cross now and wants all his edits anonymized. I think that's unfortunate, and I think the whole thing could have been handled better. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 00:28, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Climb every mountain

To counter a disturbing new trend, I hope you'll join me in calling for a moratorium on editors referring to Wikipedia disputes as "hills to die on" [9][10]. And in the case of the second link, we should seriously consider creating a Mixed Metaphor Noticeboard. EEng 06:07, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Provided you can suggest a more appropriate alternative to something that's been a standard idiomatic US phrase for decades. I'm not going to write out "Is this a cause for which you are willing to make any and all sacrifices and over which you're unwilling to compromise to any degree whatsoever" each time. There comes a point when something ceases to be a metaphor and simply becomes vocabulary. ‑ Iridescent 08:41, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
It's like ditchers, but on a more elevated plane. Kablammo (talk) 13:34, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
Could we have "not worth a whole hill of beans"? Or even a whole bathtub? Martinevans123 (talk) 08:51, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
Not exactly a shelf, but certainly shelf-ish.
Semantically different; "hill of beans" is about value, "hill to die on" is about attitude. Something can certainly be relatively trivial and still something over which someone will refuse to compromise even if the result is their own destruction. (Excluding scampi and scallops, the gross revenue of the entire UK fishing industry is around £500 million) ‑ Iridescent 09:10, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
I think that's being a bit shelfish. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:39, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, even a blind pig is right twice a day, so... Herostratus (talk) 20:05, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Splitting off

No content changed, but I'm taking the unusual step of splitting this off into a completely different thread rather than a subthread so as not to confuse Journo10 with a long divergence from their original question.

WRT the thread on your (Ritchie's) talkpage, the issue in this particular case with Sfan wasn't his indiscriminate template-bombing of any file that doesn't follow the arbitrary format he's made up for what he considers the only correct way to format a citation is, irritating though that may be; it's that the file about which he was making false claims was exactly the same file he'd made the same false claims about last year, which in turn had followed on the heels of his harassment of Giano which included such gems as claiming that something published in 1699 was a copyvio; he openly admits on your talk that he does analysis 'per user' when choosing where to aim his disruptobot, i.e. picking a particular user to target and flooding their watchlist and talkpage with his false claims in the hope of bludgeoning them into complying with his made-up rules. AGF has its limits. ‑ Iridescent 23:10, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

...and the disruptbot has been re-aimed. ——SerialNumber54129 11:12, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
@Serial Number 54129: Keep logs of this; I have a feeling this is going to end in a formal ban from automated editing fairly soon if he genuinely is still using the bot to harass specific editors. Is there any potential AGF explanation for that, such as all the images being uploaded as a single batch so somebody working through "all uploads" chronologically would naturally have come across them all at once, or is it clear that he's specifically targeting you? ‑ Iridescent 11:21, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
They are mostly from one day, but quite a few are from a month or two either side. Will do, in any case. ——SerialNumber54129 11:35, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Looking at Special:Contributions/ShakespeareFan00, it looks fairly clear that he's picking specific users one at a time and targeting their contribution histories rather than working through the upload log or categories; he's also clearly still running an unauthorised bot since he's editing at between 10–12 pages per minute and there's no possible way a human editor could assess the copyright status of images at that rate. I'd be inclined to indef him outright—lord knows he's had enough warnings—but given the history I'm clearly WP:INVOLVED so won't do so myself. I'll take another look in a couple of days just in case he's having a momentary lapse, and if this is still going on will set the necessary wheels in motion for a ban discussion. User:Nick, you seem to be one of the few editors he'll listen to; do you think you could talk him out of trying to martyr himself? Given that how clear the evidence is, there's only one way a ban discussion or arb case is going to end if it reaches that point. ‑ Iridescent 11:50, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Didn't get the ping, so apologies at being slow to reply. I'll discuss this with him. The most recent advice I've given him is to focus on one user at a time, but to leave one custom, detailed message with the problems identified with each image clearly listed instead of multiple 'boilerplate' type messages which are drifting towards being disruptive. Nick (talk) 19:05, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
Right deep breath everyone, What are the actual concern? I'd like to know so we can come up with an approach that isn't going to continually lead to these sorts of heated discussions over what seems to be either a difference of opinion, or a misunderstanding.
Is the concern the sheer volume? I don't use bots, I was however using a combination of Special:Filelist, Special:Logs, a specially constructed query on Quarry at Labs, and TWINKLE to issue the CSD/FFD tags and notifcations. I have an aversion to actual bots, given that in less obvious cases they aren't perfect. (Neither is a human contributor as you can probably tell.). As concerns were raised about the "wall of notifications" being raised the other day (on wiki and on IRC), I switched what I was doing to try and find media which was reasonable to consider for Commons (as your screenshot above shows), I was doing this by using the upload log to find recently uploaded "free" files, and then back through the uploads of a particular uploader with Special:ListFiles, adding {{information}} where needed and then based on an evaluation of that, and context, marking images for Commons transfer (or duplication if they were {{Keep local}} as those should not be deleted locally. In adding the information, I was also examining past contributions of the uploaders, typically to determine if from context there was additional information available such as image captioning, or sourcing.
Is the concern that something got retagged and you got a second notification, or that certain tags are being applied too rashly (or to rephrase that I'm not doing enough before "hitting the button"? This was a "mistake" and when I noticed, I went back and updated the information to something closer to what you describe above as an "arbitrary" format, and was able to resolve the sourcing issue, it was felt in good faith reasonable to remove the notification from your talked as it no longer applied. You then reinstated the CSD notification starting a further discussion. Whilst, even experienced contributors will make mistakes, you seem to be saying, you have a concern that I am making too many of them, either due to speed, (lack of) comptence or a perceived bias? Given the volume of images (which may be part of the issue as noted above), I'm not necessarily expecting to be able to recognise that some image HAD been dealt with previously. I certainly do not want to give the perception that I am in trying to resolve image issues I'm "targetting" specific users in bad faith, or being too willing to 'push the button". I will note here that we may have a considerable difference opinion about free-form file descriptions, vs {{information}} blocks, given that the later is more straightforward when it comes to picking up relevant information during commons transfers (if they appropriate).

My reasons for converting file description pages to {{information}} blocks and querying the lack of sourcing, amongst other issues, were as follows :

  1. The pending implementation of Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons (and other projects), if the information is already present on Wikipedia in a semi-structured form (such as completed {{information}} blocks , this makes it easier to convert, as opposed to conversion from 'free-form' file description pages. The free form pages are of course still equally valid. Structued Data is still a long way off, but it was felt reasonable to try and for once assist in aiding efforts to be ahead of the intended implementation, instead of behind (like with the parser change, there still being many LintErrors to resolve.).
  2. The proposed changes in European copyright policy, which could have made certain platforms more directly responsible for copyright violations. Whilst for the most part Wikipedia is understood to have certain exemptions from the proposed changes, being able to "prove" something is directly from a public domain or freely licensable source is useful, in defending against claims from entities that don't necessarily understand 'free' content collaborative projects (and that they very strongly attempt to respect copyrights).
  3. So that media , that the uploader, other contributors and potential re-users implicitly assume IS under a given license, is definitively confirmed as such, so that it can (eventually) be transferred to Wikimedia Commons, without their being a move, delete local, time passes, deleted at Commons on a pedantic technicality, resulting in the loss of the resource.

The aims here are as I see them intended to be in "good faith", even if you feel that the implementation of the goals/aims is problematic.

As to the specifc PD file, you link as an example, the concern I had wasn't as I see it that it was a copyvio ( It clearly isn't) but that it wasn't straightforward to "prove" it was Public domain without clearer sourcing information, and looking at it subsequently I feel I may have over-reacted. This may be one of the differences of opinion or misunderstandings that is creating tensions, and it would be nice to have firmer guidance on when a source is and isn't needed on something that's clearly old ( in the example you give the original was at least 300 years old if not more)

Is the concern that media files aren't being evaluated correctly? This links into the concern above. Given the volume of some backlogs, It's perhaps not unreasonable for a contributor patrolling images, to do what they can and defer to the original uploader or other contributors , if they can't find what they consider to be relevant details, the issue of what constitutes a reasonable format has occurred before and will occur again. I'd like to think that of more recent images I've updated, I've tried to use CSD/FFD less then before, I typically use it because I wasn't able to determine certain information from the information on-wiki. If you are arguing that there's been an onging 'misapplication' of policy, I'd be interested to know where I am making mistakes, because to date, many of the CSD/FFD tgas went unchallenged (This isn't however, by itself a good indication as to the reliability or competence of those tags or nominations)

I will also note that I've found the current wording of BSR to be confusing, and would appreciate expanded advice on when and how to apply it in a less disruptive way. I also wrote {{bsr-old}}, so that when (and if I am allowed to) update the information on media files with public domain license, I had a mechanism for indicating a sourcing concern, without having to use CSD/FFD. (The logic behind this is the same reasoning behind why I also wrote {{img-unclaimed}} which I've also sometimes used on media to avoid CSD F4 on files that were uploaded before the current sourcing policy was as strongly worded or as vigoursly enforced, and which were in a number of instances uploaded in good faith as own work, but which based on the information given can't necessarily be regarded definitively as such. (I will note here that in the past I had been more prepared to assume good faith and automatically assume own-work or some PD status, that was until probably over a decade ago, I had some other contributors and administrators, tell me off for assuming good faith too easily. Perhaps this has meant I am now not assuming good faith often enough?.

So where from here ?

It seems that until there's a new consensus on a number of concerns and issues, I shouldn't be editing in File: namespace. From the tone of your concerns above, an extended pause (beyond the immediate issue) on my part would be justified.

I'd appreciate it greatly, if there was a groups of other experienced contributors I could defer "stupid questions" at... without CSD/FFD etc being involved. Or if there was a group of contributors able to undertake periodic reviews of my own or other (mass-patrollers efforts).. On IRC I've in the last few months asked on more than one instance if the approach I was using was the correct one and for someone to review, the responses either being not to worry, that contributors didn't have the time, even when I expressed concerns that owing to a lack of talk page concerns I was sure based on past experience, that things seemed too quiet. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 22:45, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

Having had a chance to re-examine the basis of this dispute and the concerns, I am going to say that I feel I've failed to meet the standard needed, on more than one occasion. Despite acting in what I thought to be good faith, I've clearly failed several times to exercise the level of care required, or the degree of caution needed. I'd like to continue editing ( and if allowed in File namespace), but in a way that's not going to cause (percived) disruption, and with approrpiate care and practices that there doesn't have to be another (cycical) discussion of this nature.

Amongst some of the concerns I can identify :-

  • I've relied far too heavily on automated tools, without taking the time to understand what they are doing. This has meant that in an eagerness to push the button to resolve an issue, some details may have been overlooked unnecessarily.
  • I've been far too willing to apply a precautionary rule, or assume that given media is unsourced (needing a CSD/FFD response).
  • I've been too eager to get through certain backlogs, which has severely compromised my ability to give media files more time.

I do not want to get blocked, because I do value the project, but can appreciate fully that you may feel you don't have any discretion. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:54, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for giving me time to rethink certain thingsShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:58, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
I will also note for the record here, as I had not apparently mentioned it previously, that the apparent speed of some edits when tagging for Copy to Commons (on a group of uploads) is due to the having a number of the relevant file pages open in multiple tabs. The initial review of the pages was done using Special:Filelist for a given set and the popups gadget used to examine the information present, build a block of open tabs containing the suitable files, which were then tagged using TWINKLE , moving across on each one. (This tabbed approach is NOT one I've used for CSD/FFD nominations.) The initial review process would not be reflected in the apparent speed of editing recorded, as it had been done prior to the edits being saved, No bots involved, Just a highly responsive multi-tabbed browser, (and reasonable speed broadband) However, because what you where seeing was long pauses, followed by a burst of activity associated with a particular set of files or a specfic uploader, I can understand why you may have perceived there to be what looked like a bot in operation, and would appreciate your advice on how to appear less bot like, going forward. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:04, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
Earlier you said "he openly admits on your talk that he does "analysis 'per user'" when choosing where to aim his disruptobot, i.e. picking a particular user to target and flooding their watchlist and talkpage with his false claims in the hope of bludgeoning them into complying with his made-up rules. AGF has its limits" .. What I actually said was, "Generally to find media that needed to be examined (or which needed meta-data). I've been using a combination of the upload log, (which I had also been using to find material which was already well sourced and suitable for commons BTW) and a query here, https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/18892. In a past comment, someone had mentioned that rather than the scattered evaluation of images (by type of issue), it might be better to do analysis 'per user', which is an approach I've sometimes used when trying to identify media that was commons suitable (the logic here being that if an uploader has already got a few 'free' license images, others by them are likely to follow a pattern.)". Whilst, under the circumstance I can see why you made a link here, the relevant section was nominally dealing with two different things.
You drew a link between various distinct threads in this, which from your perspective, is not unreasonable at all, However, I'd like to expand on my quote a little, in the hope that it provides additional commentary.
The first part dealt with the sourcing/authorship/information concern effort (the upload log, query based approach), and whilst that was underway I'd also been occasionally marking suitable files for possible commons transfer, alongside adding the {{information}} blocks to file descriptions which were already tagged for Commons, In a large number of instances adding the information blocks being intended to assist the tools used to duplicate those files across. Compared to the majority of file descriptions which were easily converted( and because they were already tagged for Duplication to Commons should eventually carry across), the number of files where a CSD/FFD/BSR got used was considerably smaller (But on reconsideration, I am prepared to accept that I am perhaps still too paranoid about certain types of file being challenged.)
The query/log based approach is a 'per file' approach which is problematic (as you and others have already expressed), given that the mass of notifcations (you used the term "bludegon") led to the wall of text situation which I think we can both in consideration agree is undesirable to solving the issue, which is to ensure the file has "sufficient" information for other users, as people are less likely to respond to repeated similar notifications (especially if the are substantially the same as ones they received some time in the past!)
The second part of the quote was in relation to a hypothetical future situation, along the lines of the approach that @Nick: was suggesting, where the notifcations were "batched" up into a single message per user, which would be a better approach. The rest of the quote, then compares this to the approach I had used in the past when identifying potential commons candidate media, of looking through an uploaders other contributions to find if there was other media that was suitable for Commons.
After the concerns expressed in the other discussion, I felt that continued patrolling for sourcing/authorship concerns wasn't going to be sustainable given the concerns that had been raised. So I decided to switch to identifying items that I felt could be duplicated over to commons. As I don't hold grudges, amongst the uploaders I checked for commons candidates where those that had raised concerns previously, I was reviewing their uploads as an act of good faith, as I also wanted to see "useful" media more widely used. It seems perhaps that these attempts were misguided (and misunderstood) given the previous effort had raised tensions. This would seem to be where the most recent concerns about the perceived "disruptobot" may have arisen, despite the more recent edits being intended in good faith to identify media which would be more widely usable.
I apologise for a longish post here.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 18:10, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
Your concern above also appears to be that I'm mis-applying Wikipedia:IUP#RI(which is re-read following the recent concerns), Another contributor had also challanged me over what they thought was a 'mis-application' of this. His view (or at least my reading of it) seemed to be that the issue wasn't the existence or non-existence of any given source (or it's non existence in a predefined format), but that there was "sufficient information" to determine a given media's status. In response to this, I'm more than willing to agree that it would be unreasonable to consider something older than 100 years as still being a copyright issue (given that the date of creation forms part of the status), and therefore concur, that I am based on a continued misunderstanding, (you've mentioned concerns have been noted to me previously) still mis-applying the sourcing requirement. I' willing to listen to what you consider a more appropriate evaluation to determine "sufficient information" should be.

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:09, 6 November 2018 (UTC)


Section break as this is going to be long

OK, if you want this in detail:
The obvious concern and proximate cause of the issues in this case are that you're
  1. Targeting and harassing specific editors (through your "pick one editor at a time and work through their contributions" approach, which is at best a shocking assumption of bad faith on your part;
  2. Spam-bombing both file pages themselves and the user talk pages of uploaders with inappropriate templates, and failing to engage with the people who reply to the templates you post unless they actually notify you themselves;
  3. Working at unfeasibly high speeds. If one's running AWB or a similar application that works in diff-view and is using a very well-crafted regex to carry out an uncomplicated search-and-replace operation, it's just about possible to hit an edit rate of 8–10 pages per minute without making mistakes. When you're claiming to be assessing the copyright status of files—something with which even genuine experts in copyright status struggle—an average time of around six seconds per file is not feasible.

    None of this would be a deal-breaker were it not for:

  4. You're making shitloads of mistakes. Of the users recently targeted by you of whom I'm most aware—myself, User:Ritchie333 and User:Giano—as far as I can tell not a single one of the files you've marked for deletion have actually ended up being deleted.

    People might get irritated when someone raises a legitimate concern with material on which they've devoted a significant amount of time and work, but provided the concern is legitimate they'll be understanding; people are quite rightly going to lose patience with someone raises illegitimate concerns based on their own laziness (in this case, your unwillingness either to conduct the most basic WP:SOFIXIT repairs and your apparent inability to comprehend that Wikipedia is written by and for humans, not machines, and something not being machine-readable is not a deletion criterion).

    Which in turn leads into:

  5. You're repeatedly, and consistently, implicitly claiming that your judgment is superior to that of other editors. Take, for example, the example given above of the wall of {{Copy to Commons}} templates with which you spammed User:Serial Number 54129.

    There are many reasons why editors choose to upload material locally to individual wikis as needed, rather than to Commons (differing notability standards between projects, potential legal issues in non-US jurisdictions, a reluctance to get involved with the famously dysfunctional administration of Commons, well-documented issues with local files being deleted as duplicates of Commons files after which the Commons file is deleted or substantially altered, a recognition that a particular file has been uploaded for a specific and esoteric purpose on a particular wiki and is unlikely to be of value to other projects and consequently there's no point cluttering Commons, that fact that having uploads hosted externally on Commons makes it far more likely that significant notifications relating to that file will be missed as most editors rarely if ever check Commons watchlists…). The basic "Upload File" button in the sidebar, the 'Files for Upload' process, and the guided upload process all point users towards Commons unless the uploader explicitly specifies they have a reason to upload the file locally, so it's not as if someone is likely to upload a file locally unless they intended to do so. (The fourth and most powerful means of uploading files, Special:Upload, is intentionally hidden unless a user knows exactly where to find it; by the time anyone is experienced enough in image use to know where it is, it's safe to assume they're familiar with the differences between Wikipedia and Commons.)

    SN54129 is a highly experienced editor and one can assume that he's well aware of the existence of Commons, and as a consequence anything he's uploaded that he hasn't uploaded to Commons hasn't been uploaded to Commons for a reason. By working through his contribution history top-to-bottom tagging files, you're not only harassing him by means of the general nuisance of watchlist-flooding, you're making the implicit claim that his judgment is consistently faulty when it comes to choosing the most appropriate place to upload any given file, that he—and everyone else on the project, since looking at your history you appear fairly indiscriminate regarding who you target—has an inferior judgment to your own regarding how Wikipedia operates, and that regardless of whether or not he chooses to engage with Commons he should be forced to do so against his will because you happen to prefer it that way. If you were using a bot, this would be irritating but forgivable as bots operate on a GIGO principle; if, as you say, you're doing all this manually, then you're explicitly demanding that the rest of Wikipedia defer to your personal preferences, which is obnoxious when done in small doses and outright disruption when done en masse.

To be blunt, I don't give two hoots about The pending implementation of Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons (and other projects), and nor should anyone else. Wikipedia is written for the benefit of its readers, not for the benefit of Mark Zuckerberg or for the benefit of the assorted self-proclaimed 'consultants' who are trying to profit from peddling Wikidata snake-oil to online marketers. If our own activity happens to benefit private businesses, that's all well and good and I'm glad to be of service, but nobody here should be acting as Google and Facebook's unpaid shills if it causes even the most minimal inconvenience to either our editors or our readers.
And on to "bludgeoning" and the query/log based approach. This is the point at which I urge you, if you haven't already, to read and absorb the lessons of WP:AN/B and WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Magioladitis. Unless one has identified a specific problem that needs fixing, as opposed to a general "some things could be done better" or "not everything is formatted the way I'd like it to be", the Wikipedia community has traditionally been extremely hostile both to people appointing themselves as the Wikipedia Image Police, to people trying to enforce their preferred formats in an absence of a policy-based reason to do so, particularly when done with bots, scripts or semi-automation. Are there some problematic uploads on Wikipedia such as files uploaded under an incorrect license? Sure. Is this something so problematic that it requires a mass sweep through every image file? No, or WMF Legal would employ someone to audit them properly; the existing mechanism of people flagging problematic files as and when they come across them or they're brought to our attention by rights holders has worked fine for 17 years. The query/log based approach is essentially a massive assumption on your part that the of the 48,245,140 editors on Wikipedia, everyone but you is either acting in bad faith or is incompetent, so it's completely unsurprising that the other 48,245,139 are going to feel offended and annoyed.
Regarding a more appropriate evaluation to determine "sufficient information" should be, your first thought should always be "is this obviously old"? Unlike Commons, en-wiki operates solely in jurisdictions that don't recognize sweat-of-the-brow and as such, whatever one may think of it ethically in terms of photographers' rights, from a legal point of view we only care when the original work was published, not how and when it was photographed or reproduced. If it's a picture-postcard of a building that burned down in 1922 or a woodcut printed in 1699, then while it may be nice to have details of who scanned the work, it's not a legal requirement and it has no impact on the file's copyright status. If, after applying that test and doing everything reasonable within your own power to assess the file's status for yourself,* you're still uncertain whether something is in copyright or not, politely approach the uploader—in your own words, not with one of your spam templates—explaining what you feel the concern is, as there's a very good chance that they'll be able to document the file's history. (Even if the editor is retired or deceased, it's still worth asking them; other editors with an interest in the same topics as them are highly likely to be watching their talkpage and might be able to help.) If you're in genuine doubt that an image was published pre-1923 or is in the public domain in the US by virtue of Bridgeman Corel, and you've conducted your own enquiries and are unable to confirm whether the image is or isn't in copyright, and you've approached the original uploader and they don't reply or they're unable to recall where the image came from, then and only then should you be considering tagging a file for deletion, particularly if the file is currently in use.
*If you're researching the history of files on a regular basis, I'd strongly recommend using Chrome as your browser, at least for this purpose. In Chrome, right-clicking on any given image will give a "search Google for image" option, and if the image genuinely does turn out to be something stolen from another website, this will almost always find it within seconds.
As a more general meta-point regarding your editing. the lengthy point I made a couple of threads up about understanding that Ignore all rules isn't just a slogan but is the most important of Wikipedia's principles and Unless someone has had the experience of being frustrated by someone else screwing around with something they've spent their own time and money on there's no way to judge whether that editor has empathy, and empathy is the single most important quality were written about trigger-happy admins who give the impression of lacking an appreciation of just how much time, effort and cash goes into creating and maintaining a decent-quality Wikipedia article, but it applies just as much to trigger-happy patrollers who give the impression of lacking an appreciation of just how much time, effort and cash goes into creating and maintaining a decent-quality Wikipedia article. If the recipients of your templates thought "hey, this guy who templated me is obviously an experienced editor, I should take what he's telling me seriously even if I don't agree" as opposed to "who the hell is this guy and why is someone with no apparent experience taking it on themselves to tell me how I should be doing things", I'd suggest that you'd be likely to get a lot less blowback if you had some demonstrable contributions to Wikipedia of your own. For all I know you have made valuable contributions to Wikipedia and just don't like to boast, but there's nothing at your contribution history to indicate that you do anything other than wander about belittling other people's work. While I'm not normally very fond of "my achievements" sections on userpages, in your case you should. While the principle that all editors are equal in terms of rights is a fundamental Wikipedia principle, it's basic human nature that people will more readily take criticism from people who are qualified to criticize. In terms of appearances (fairly or not), in Wikipedia terms something like this is akin to someone walking into a courtroom brandishing a copy of Law for Dummies and loudly telling the judge that they don't know what they're doing. ‑ Iridescent 15:49, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
All valid points. You've managed to convince me not to continue editing on Wikipedia at all, for competence reasons, once I've dealt with some things, I would like to do a SOFIXIT on. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 16:16, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
However, some other contributors off wiki, advised me not to make a hasty decision.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 20:43, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
For what it's worth regarding having uploads hosted externally on Commons makes it far more likely that significant notifications relating to that file will be missed as most editors rarely if ever check Commons watchlists… it looks like the WMF is working at fixing the problem at least for deletions. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:21, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
Just a few random musings when it comes to your response, Iri.
I understand the concern about 'Targeting and harassing specific editors' - now I know that's exactly how ShakespeareFan00's behaviour comes across as, and that's a massive problem, but I do think focusing on the uploads of one editor at a time is sensible, particularly when they've uploaded multiple images from the same or similar sources, they'll most likely be able to fix a number of images by fixing the first image and then simply copying and pasting things like source and other details into successive files. I think in these sorts of scenarios, picking a file alphabetically in November, notifying the uploader there's a problem (or better, nicely asking the uploader to help add more information to their file) then coming back three months later and asking them to fix the very next file they uploaded would be significantly more disruptive/problematic. If ShakespeareFan00 was to continue to work in this area, they need to get away from 'tag bombing' and they need to start working with the uploaders to help them improve the information on their files.
That sort of dovetails neatly into point two - the tag bombing has to stop, that's disruptive. And I'm not at all happy with the amount of information or explanations SF00 is giving the uploaders. It needs to be tailored, customised, personalised and non automated messages which are left, one edit, one notification, least disruptive process possible.
Speed is an issue and SF00 will need to slow down, but that will probably happen anyway when they stop tag bombing and start writing custom messages, and begin to help uploaders rather than the current hit and run approach.
Error rate is, I think, in part down to the inflexibility of the automated messages. I would hope slowly leaving custom messages with precise issues highlighted would be useful. It might also help them think about exactly what they're tagging and whether they should be doing what it is they're doing.
The Copy to Commons stuff is useful, but where someone has uploaded more than two or three files to en.wp and where the uploader is still active, like SN54129, it would be much more useful to ask first whether they want to keep files locally, if they don't want files moved to Commons, before spending time actually tagging them. Even if they say 'yes' to moving to Commons, you might want to ask if there are any issues which might see them deleted on Commons, understand if there are issues that you don't see immediately.
The remainder of your advice is excellent and cannot be faulted, I particularly endorse the comments you make about SF00 researching the files themselves, looking for fixes they can undertake without having to trouble the uploader (particularly important if the uploader isn't active but important regardless).
Cheers. Nick (talk) 21:44, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
@Sfan, nobody is telling you not to edit on Wikipedia at all; we're telling you not to edit Wikipedia disruptively. Wikipedia is a community, not a group of editors each working in a vacuum, and when one is editing it one needs to consider the impact one's edits are having on both Wikipedia's readers and Wikipedia's editors. For any given edit, if you can't answer "Is this edit going to make things better for either Wikipedia's readers or Wikipedia's editors?" in the affirmative, it's almost certainly an edit that shouldn't be made.
@Nick, part of the reason I'm being so WP:ABF here is that we've been here so often before. As Drmies said last time round, "we keep seeing the user apologize for their approach, yet they keep approaching" there's a clear pattern going back years of Sfan promising to be more careful, lying low for a few weeks, then firing the disruptobot back up and resuming indiscriminate bulk editing. (Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive491#User:Sfan00 IMG, Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Sfan00 IMG, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive626#Image tagging by User:Sfan00 IMG, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive457#Mass removal of links to potential copyvio sites?, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive264#Sfan00_IMG - Taking a break before my Wikistress gets too high, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive235#The Pirate Bay and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive805#User:Sfan00 IMG and Wikimedia Commons are a few to start with. This has literally been repeating itself for years.) If this discussion has genuinely been the one that broke through when all others failed and leads him to start discussing concerns rather than slapping indiscriminate maintenance tags and moving on, then that's great, but given that next week will see the tenth anniversary of it being pointed out that the problem is that he constantly removes or tags things en mass, and apparently often doesn't give enough info as to WHY he feels this way, you'll forgive me for saying I'll wait until I see it. ‑ Iridescent 18:55, 7 November 2018 (UTC)
It's the cyclic nature of the concerns, which is why I'm considering not editing at all. I think you and User:nick can all agree we don;'t want "dirsuptive" edits, but given that there seems to be a difference of opinion, and several misunderstandings on my part, it's safer if I just don't edit (especially in File namespace), because it seems whatever changes in approach I consider or take, I still seem to be unable to not generate the kinds of concerns you mention.
  • As well as the valid concerns, you mention. A long time ago I got advised (can't recall if it was on or off wiki) about not moving stuff to Commons directly (even though I was nominally reviewing them before transfer, perhaps not carefully enough), so I changed to tagging them locally so that they get reviewed locally (at least once), which you say causes issues due to a lot of "watch-list" comments, when an entire users contributions are looked at in a pattern, (It also creates a large backlog, the relevant category of media marked for pending review contained over 20,000 items at one point, which is more than small number of dedicated reviewers may be able to cope with in a timely manner.)
  • I also got told off because some of the images I was tagging locally had percived issues about sourcing, authorship (although as you point out some of this could be due to a lack of SOFIXIT research.).
  • Parallel to this, I also got advised (can't recall if it was on or off-wiki) that I might be assuming "too much" good faith about certain media, and was advised that I should be asking for definitive sources, or applying certain CSD strictly. ( Your concern about applying F4 to something that you felt no-one was ever going to challange being pertinent here.) This is partly why templates like {{assumed license}}, {{presumed self}}, {{img-unclaimed}}, the recently created {{bsr-old}} now exist (and a template called "is-old" previously which it was my recollection was eventually subst or removed. because of it's generic nature.).
  • Precisely because of concerns about the non-appropriateness of a given CSD, I'd put files at FFD (with increasing frequency when it became 'disscusion' rather than 'deletion' to get a determination (in retrospect WP:MCQ may have been better forum, now that I am aware of it), only to be told that quite a few of the files I was unusre about didn't need to go to FFD, and could be handled under CSD directly! (Aside: How to handle the bias of certain closers at FFD towards deleting, is a different discussion entirely, although partially related

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 10:23, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

A tangent in re I don't give two hoots about "The pending implementation of Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons":
If someone in this cabal knows anything about the intersection of Wikidata Property Creators and people who are smart enough about licensing to develop a non-broken, machine-friendly, systematic way of describing licenses for the images on Commons – ideally people who are available to help get it done – then one of my teammates would appreciate your advice. It's always nice to get that kind of legal stuff (approximately) right on the first try. (Leave a note on my talk page, if you don't want to clutter up Iridescent's page any more.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:30, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
You want User:RexxS for that; in my experience he's the only one of the Wikidata people I'd trust to count to 21 without unzipping his fly. ‑ Iridescent 18:33, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Further on certain templates

Although I don't plan on editing again soon, I also have some other followup questions/concerns, mostly to do with the aspects of certain templates I've created in the past in respect of certain (contentious) approaches ( I am not expecting a rapid reponse or even one at all, but your feedback (or that of others watching this page would be desirable.)

  • You stated earlier that one consideration should be if something is obviously old ? At some point I had been considering this, and a while back I'd been using an "is-old" style template in the source field of {{information}} blocks, this categorised to here - Category:Wikipedia files missing original publication data or Category:Mechanical reproductions of original works in need of additional detail as far as can recall. The categories had also been used in some instances, for media that was nominally web sourced (intermediately), but where the publication concerned was older and thus it would have been "nice to have" (not required) to have additional information about the original publication/creation in addition. This category was more finely tuned in focus than the category used by {{bsr}} and {{bsr-old}}. The concerns I have here are to do with it being a "parallel process".
  • {{media by uploader}} (the first attempt) ,{{img-unclaimed}} (the second attempt), {{img-claimed}} (and various categories), a pragmatic response (and on consideration maybe an overly boldy approach). Whilst the intent here was to ask uploaders to reclaim old work, and get credit. The concern here is that what's actually happened is an 'unofficial' parallel process, which is NOT having the desired result. Amongst the concerns that can be identified on further review
    • Uploaders aren't responding... whilst a small number of files were "claimed" , many were not and Category:Unclaimed images thought to be uploader remains a backlog, that's merely moving stuff around, rather than solving the actual issue it's design intent was.
    • That these templates created a "process". You will agree I think that this would (and should) have been better done with consultation, rather than unilaterally.
  • {{Imgnote-hassource}}, This was created to drop certain media that was sourced out of queries. I'm not sure if this is useful as 'human' contributors are expected to check if the source is adequate or not.. This was intended mostly as an "ignore this in your processing" flag for queries and tools. On review I'm not sure it meets the design intent, it's not widely used and can be removed relatively quickly.
  • {{OTRS source}} prgamatic, although possibly a rare situation, It was intended when an image patroller came across something that would clearly be sourced, but which was going to be in an OTRS ticket which only those with access to the queue could read. Useful only for a specfic purpose, and generally those that would be adding this, should be adding the full source at the same time as the OTRS ticket number anyway....
  • {{Duplicate_to_Commons}}. On review this might be problematic. You've noted above that sometimes uploaders have reasons for not putting media on Commons. The intent here was for it to be used where media was felt to be "useful" beyond Wikipedia, despite the local uploader wanting the local copy retained. The same standards in terms of applicability/eligibility (notwithstanding the retention of the local copy) were to be applied, but based on your concerns about "bludegoning" attitudes onto other contributors...
  • {{Expimgsrc}} - Currently this is a redirect, and when I took the previous wording to TFD, it seems it was for the "canned" response nature of it. This isn't necessarily a useful redirect as no-one should now be using this over the target it redirects to. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 10:06, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
  • {{No-date}} - This went through several copy edits.. I'd like a second view because you raised concerns about the use of {{information}} blocks, and about "lazy" updating thereof.
  • {{Add-author-I}} - Based on your concerns this is contentious, and before you'd posted your extensive response above I'd considered asking to have it removed from {{information}}, essentially reversing the outcome of the request I made about adding it about 7 years ago. It's intended to be subst, and it's removal would not break anything. I've now suggested a merge or redirect at TFD [[11]]. Overhaul of the {{information}} template itself, even if it should be retained longer term is a topic for elsewhere ( although I left a comment on User talk:Nick recently..)ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 10:06, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
OK, you've lost most sympathy from me as soon as you got to A long time ago I got advised (can't recall if it was on or off wiki) about not moving stuff to Commons directly (even though I was nominally reviewing them before transfer, perhaps not carefully enough), so I changed to tagging them locally. Do you see what I said above about the arrogance of assuming your personal preferences outweigh everyone else's to the extent that you're justified in forcing them through? This kind of attitude is exactly what I mean. These are, pretty much without exception, experienced editors who are well aware of the existence of Commons (it's virtually impossible to upload a file without being aware of the existence of Commons, as all the upload forms other than Special:Upload explain the difference between local and Commons uploading and nobody who isn't an expert in wiki navigation will even be aware of the existence of Special:Upload). Consequently, all (or virtually all) of these locally-hosted files are locally hosted intentionally. You are unilaterally deciding that these files ought to be hosted on Commons instead and tagging them for transfer, without even doing the uploader the courtesy of asking if there's a reason they're hosted locally (which there almost always will be).
Regarding the templates, if you're not sure whether any given template is appropriate don't use it. You're not the Sheriff of Wikipedia cleaning up the town, you're one editor among 48,245,140, and the wiki is not going to fail apart because you're not there to tag a file with a malformed license template. Seriously, just why is it you feel you need to boss everybody around? As far as I can see most of the rest of your queries are variations on "how should {{information}} be formatted?", and given that I think that {{information}} is and always has been a pointless and disruptive template that serves no useful purpose other than to make life easier for a handful of spammers and data-mining corporations, and I revert it on sight when I see it being added to anything I've uploaded, I'm not going to lose the slightest sleep over how you choose to format it.
Incidentally, please stop canvassing your IRC cronies to post crap on the talk-pages of people with whom you're in dispute. IRC is not loved on Wikipedia at the best of times, and your buddies popping up on the talk pages of people with whom they've never previously interacted to post ill-informed drivel like [12], [13] and [14] not only makes you look like a dick-by-association, but like a coward secretly canvassing off-wiki to try to find someone to take your side. ‑ Iridescent 17:42, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
Yes, I had read what you said, That's why I'd mentioned the examples I gave, so that everything was considered. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 22:40, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
I’d just like to clear this up: it isn’t canvassing. This set of incidents was mentioned on IRC a while back, and I began following the discussion as I found it interesting. At no point did ShakespeareFan00 ask me to take part, and I will note that when I did comment, none of them were in favor of ShakespeareFan00. The first diff link is me commenting about enwiki copyright procedures (about which I was informed a few minutes later that I was incorrect, and I removed it). The second is simply asking someone not to discourage people from contributing to File-space and Wikimedia commons, and the third diff is related to that. None of these support ShakespeareFan00 or his argument, and are simply general comments. Vermont (talk) 00:22, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, Iridescent. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

One day, someone will explain to me what problem this recent innovation of Arbcom sending out spam messages is supposed to solve. If the committee really feels that directly notifying 50,000 people is necessary (itself questionable), surely they can create an Echo event, which will notify every eligible editor just as surely as this kind of bulk spam, but won't make every single editor's watchlist look like a pipe roll on the morning the elections open. ‑ Iridescent 08:55, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
The {{uw-bizlist}} template suggests itself  :) 08:58, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
A minor correction, please: ArbCom does not run the elections, and has absolutely nothing to do with sending out these notices, or deciding what they should say or who receives them. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 09:06, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Well, "the election commission acting as autonomous arms-length agents of the community as embodied by Arbcom now that Jimmy Wales has transferred his function as titular leader to the committee in the context of English-language Wikipedia", if we want to get pedantic about where the dividing lines between "the people" and "servants of the people" lie. For anyone who wasn't around at the time or has understandably blotted it from their memory, pointer to this beast of a thread (summarized here with lots of pretty charts) for more discussion than you ever thought possible about how and why these mass-messages distort the make-up of the electorate in the context of Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 09:26, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Solely addressing the "how?" question: Echo has a limit on how many people can be notified and we are still used to user talk page notifications. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 10:53, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Massmessage also has a limit on how many people can be notified; that's why these notifications get sent out in batches. "We've always done it this way" is a bad argument in this context—the regulars are already aware there's an election on owing to the watchlist notice, these messages are intended to bring non-regulars into participation, and the non-regulars by definition aren't used to a particular way of doing things. The only real drawback I can see to Echo is that it won't reach the people who rely on "email me my talk page messages", which isn't much of an argument. ‑ Iridescent 11:06, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
There was a lot of discussion three years ago about how the mass-message, by stirring less-active editors to vote (and being sent to a lot more people than some had anticipated), would affect the outcome of the election. But then the results came in and the consensus was that the outcome was the same as what might have been expected anyway. I think the same is true the past two years as well. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 11:18, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
As you may recall, I ran as election commissioner last year, on the grounds of having done the job elsewhere and having an interest in electoral calculus anyway, and thinking the job needed to be done by somebody who didn't care who got elected. I was the only one opposing the mass messaging, and dropped out - I think I also took exception to the WMF not believing I was 18 years old - my body says otherwise :-/ I ran again this year, but dropped out as I wasn't that bothered. I really don't see the point of spamming everybody, it's completely counter-productive. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:11, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Really, NYB? No difference between this and this jumps out at you? ‑ Iridescent 15:03, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Hic Harold Rex interfectus est
Where art thou vote at the election RfC then? :) If there's unanimous support to send the messages in this manner, they're going to be sent that way unless someone proposes an alternative or enough people oppose (if you have enough time to complain here, you can complain at next years RfC too). Galobtter (pingó mió) 13:00, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Don't you mean "Wherefore did thou not voteth?" Well this seems to be good enough. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 13:13, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
No, I mean "O Iridescent, Ritchie! wherefore art thou vote?" (And that is my massacring of Shakespeare done for the day) Galobtter (pingó mió) 13:37, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
I'd consider voting in the election RFC a singularly pointless exercise. If you read the actual RFC that resulted in the introduction of bulk mailshots, there was no consensus whatsoever for it (the only consensus was for a trial of notifications to editors who'd edited in the last three months), but they went ahead and mass-mailed everyone anyway and presented it as a fait accompli. I see why, if we have to persist with arbcom elections, the commissioners are a necessary evil to allow decisions to be made quickly enough not to screw up the election timescales, but the commissioners run the elections however they see fit, not in line with any kind of consensus. ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
  • My different view on this: the mass message gets people who otherwise wouldn’t know ArbCom existed to vote. I consider that a good thing because odds are if they are an eligible voter, they’re somehow impacted by the committee (the discretionary sanctions system including so many topics that the odds of editing a controversial article under DS are oddly high.) Having the non-inside baseball editors vote is a good thing because it makes it so people they are comfortable with are represented. I personally prefer that to your or my talk page watchers deciding the election on their own. Not that it always gets the results I want, but I prefer it to the super-regulars deciding amongst themselves. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:18, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Sure, and that's a valid argument if we were electing a ruling council, but we're not; Arbcom is a dispute-resolution not a policy-making body. What the mass messaging does is draw in a big stack of people who don't understand the role of the committee and vote in terms of "who do I think represents my views?", not "who do I trust to hear both sides fairly?". (There are a couple of candidates in this election who I think regularly spout complete garbage, and I wouldn't trust an inch if they were given control over policy, but I nonetheless support because in the context of what Arbcom does I trust them to know their limits and their own biases.) Bringing in a huge crowd of people who weren't aware there was an election on also makes the 'candidate statements' page and the voters guides artificially important, since most of these voters aren't familiar with the candidates and will just go with what the candidates say about themselves, and to a lesser extent the voter guides; as our re-establishing civility as a central policy candidate (who is now trying to play the "victim of a conspiracy" card) is demonstrating fairly spectacularly, what a candidate claims to stand for doesn't necessarily reflect how that candidate actually behaves. ‑ Iridescent 15:37, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Those are fair points, but I still think the positives outweigh the negatives (and this is coming from someone who spent the better part of last year bitching about someone who was elected acting in ways I viewed unsuitable for an arb to other arbs trying to get them to do something). The committee handles a lot of stuff that impacts the extended-confirmed-but-nothing-else editor. I’m generally of the view that increasing participation from people impacted has a net positive on the system. It also has the benefit of counterbalancing the self-appointed dramaboard cops who frequently think they represent the community as a whole, but don’t as most of the community will never visit ANI. I’m not really sure there’s a better way to do it, other than possibly upping the voting requirements in some way to take into account the legitimate concerns. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:19, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
How about "split it into separate committees, one mediation-committee-with-power-to-sanction and one committee-with-authority-to-issue-binding-closures-to-RFCs, with relatively fluid memberships appointed as representatives of interested groups, instead of a single committee with a single annual big-bang election"? Someone really ought to suggest that. ‑ Iridescent 16:36, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Above, I don't think NYB meant the election participation was the same as it would have been without a mass mesage; I think he meant the actual winners of the election were probably the same as they would have been. Which I believe was a widely held opinion after that first election, and which still seems true. I was against the mass message when it was first started, based on the fear that people not as directly familiar with the core community would be more susceptible to Trumpian troublemakers. The relatively normal results of the elections since then have eased that fear; the results of real world elections have stoked it back up. I still don't like the mass message, not because of the temporary distraction of a blown up watchlist one night every year, but because I expect sooner or later a "blow it up from the inside" candidate is going to win because of it. But consensus is against me, and I've been wrong so far, so I generally let it go. --Floquenbeam (talk) 15:49, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
  • The "blow it up from the inside" candidates aren't the issue, because they either get frustrated and drop out (friends, I know this story is true, because I was that soldier), or go native and turn into zealous upholders of bureaucracy-for-bureaucracy's sake. Where we'll see problems is when a slate gets through of hardline supporters (of anything) who see the committee as a bully pulpit from which to smite their opponents. There's only one of those this year, and he is not among the favourites to win, but at some point it will happen; it wouldn't have taken that much of a swing for the attempted coup by the Friendly Space hardliners in 2015 to be successful, which would have caused outright civil war and probably direct rule from SF and full-scale forking. The increase in participation numbers isn't by any means the only difference between elections in mass-message and non-mass-message years; compare the relative placings of candidates you know to be highly competent but who aren't outspoken and look-at-me in elections under the two systems, or the share of the vote supporting obvious no-hoper candidates. ‑ Iridescent 16:06, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
  • I guess we all fear different things, and view the current Arbs thru different lenses. A true "blow it up from the inside" Arb could, IMHO, do a lot of damage before the burn out. I'm not using it in the sense you are, neither you nor Opabinia were the kind of candidates I was worried about. I'd take 6 more Opabinias (Opabiniae?), myself. I wasn't really either type of soldier - at least I don't think I was, tho I guess we all lie to ourselves - I just figured I could keep a seat warm and try to keep one of the Trumpians (I obviously didn't think of them as such, at the time) out. I underestimated how miserable and bad-at-it I would be. --Floquenbeam (talk) 16:16, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
  • I was there for the 2011 leaks and was gone but still a witness to EotR's flameout; I'm well aware how much damage someone trying to sabotage it from the inside, or even someone just a bit frustrated because they're not getting their way, can do. (I'd imagine that if one of the Tribune Of The People types actually did win, during the month between the election result and the new arbs taking their seats Arbwiki would vanish, the mailing list archives would be mysteriously corrupted beyond repair, and the WMF would coincidentally have a change of heart regarding the policy on access to CU/OS data.) ‑ Iridescent 16:45, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

If the committee really feels that directly notifying 50,000 people is necessary (itself questionable), surely they can create an Echo event

No, they can't. My team begged for that feature in 2013 and 2014, and it was killed by a certain former staff member (whom I otherwise admire) who said that if the feature was built, then it would get over-used. He may be correct, but the fact remains that the software to do this does not exist. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:31, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Hmmm, I think I can safely guess which staff member. Surely the software to do it exists (or at least, would only need a couple of lines of code); equally surely, there would be a way to throttle who could use it if they're genuinely worried about overloading the servers ("needs the unanimous consent of every bureaucrat" or something). I fail to see how the current klutzy fudge of watchlist notices and bot-spam is less disruptive than editors occasionally seeing numbers pop up on the penis-and-bra icons at the top of their screen? ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
—"penis-and-bra icons"?! Am I using—ahem!—the right skin?! :D ——SerialNumber54129 21:40, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

You might not have noticed it before but you'll notice it every time from now on. ‑ Iridescent 21:47, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Great to see that at least the template got the right date for the close. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:53, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

They did manage to get the opening date a day off ‑ Iridescent 20:57, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
The closing day of the week is off, too, because of the one-day extension given when the opening date was postponed for technical reasons. isaacl (talk) 20:58, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
Echo was never my product, so I don't know what's been written, much less what's still functional. But I think at this point it won't happen unless it wins a (future) wishlist vote. The product isn't under active development.
But: Maybe he was correct. (I don't mean to be mysterious about his identity; it's just not relevant.) Maybe this would be over-used to the point that everyone ignored them. Maybe we need a fully featured Notifications feed before we increase the volume in that system. I'm definitely a "top 1%" user of notifications, and I'm not sure that I'd welcome even more. OTOH, what I get now is already "even more", just with the message saying "You have a message on your talk page" instead of "You're eligible to vote in the ArbCom election".
The newsletter extension might be a functional workaround, but I don't know if it can scale to ArbCom's needs. (Also, it would have to be installed here. Right now, I think it's only available on mw.org.) IMO the main downside to the newsletter extension is precisely its use of Echo/Notifications, instead of posting the newsletter publicly: It's hard for people to find out which newsletters are interesting if those interesting newsletters never appear on their wiki-friends' talk pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:47, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
Assuming 99% of editors have their notification settings still on the defaults, the spambot approach means four times more notifications, not less; the orange bar of doom, a "User:Spambot left a message on your talk page in the section ArbCom 2018 election voter message" on the penis menu, the edit to your talkpage appearing in your watchlist, and the talkpage message itself. I struggle to see how that saves anyone's time. Sure, there's a theoretical risk that allowing messages in Echo would lead to an increase in spam, but I don't see why it would; if we restricted it to the existing holders of the massmessage userright we'd yank the bit so fast their heads would spin if we caught anyone using it inappropriately. Assuming the anonymous staff member is who I think it is, I'd imagine the real reason is that he was smarting at the reception Flow received and didn't want to do anything to make the existing interface more user-friendly as that would lessen the alleged justification for a hoped-for forced imposition of Flow. It really wouldn't be complicated to enable Echo-spam on en-wiki; all we'd need to do is flip Extension:Newsletter to "on", tag the elections page as nominally a newsletter, and add all those with 500+ edits who've edited in the past three months (or whatever criterion they go with next year) as 'subscribers'. ‑ Iridescent 23:04, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
If you can get evidence of Official Community Consensus™ to deploy Extension:Newsletter here, then you should ping my staff account. It would make my grand-boss very happy to see someone else using it. (Your guess is wrong.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:16, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
Is that Newsletter extension the extension I saw Iridescent complain about a while ago for its overly bureaucratic nature? (Viz. that in order to process any specific newsletter you'd need an user right for each newsletter). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 07:02, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
It is, but that was when we were talking about all the various wikiprojects potentially using it, and consequently each editor would have had a laundry list of userrights specifying which newsletters they were authorised to distribute. Here, we're talking about using it as a central one-shot messaging system for site-wide announcements so the issue wouldn't arise. ‑ Iridescent 08:16, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Taking Arbcom

to Arbcom :D ——SerialNumber54129 11:43, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

good God. I woke up early for a conference call only to see this. Time to take a break from anything but article reviewing for the next few days. ceranthor 11:48, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
AGF be damned; that's just Fram trying to derail Drmies's arbcom candidacy, not a genuine concern (and he'd better present some actual evidence for describing a named real-life individual as "a pedophile" pretty damn quick, or Trust & Safety will be on him so quick it will be as if he never existed). I am no fan at all of Drmies (IIRC my last encounter with him was his accusing me of being a Nazi on the grounds that I'd said being racist shouldn't prevent someone from editing Wikipedia provided they stay away from race-related topics and don't allow it to affect how they interact with other editors) but this is as spurious a case request as I can imagine and reads more like a cut-and-paste from a Wikipedia Review thread than as a genuine request. ‑ Iridescent 11:51, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) this reminds me of why I rarely go to RFA or other "let's get personal pages", seeking instead oases of sanity like here (: Jimfbleak - talk to me? 11:55, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
I was going to mention koolaid, but on second thoughts...but there is some fucking strange shit going on all over WP at the moment. ——SerialNumber54129 11:58, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
@Iridescent: Funny you mention Wikipedia Review. I was going to post here the other day to ask whether you knew of your popularity over at Wikipedia Sucks! or Wiki Review, the dying embers of Wikipedia Review. ceranthor 12:02, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
Good grief, is WR still going? It looks like almost all those edits are a single editor with a grudge, rather than any actual criticism of me. On a very quick skim, it doesn't look like either of those sites have anything in common with the old WR other than the name. ‑ Iridescent 16:51, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
Seems a little late just for derailment. --Izno (talk) 13:16, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
Not at all; candidacies can be derailed even after the votes are counted if it becomes obvious that a lot of voters feel they were misled into supporting during the election. Just ask 28bytes. ‑ Iridescent 16:51, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
"Trust & Safety" - without going into large amounts of detail about this specifically (I gather all the detail about why that unban was a horrendous idea has all been oversighted at arbcom), some individuals still active and many banned previously would have been pre-emptively banned from any of the communities I am involved in (that have large minor-aged populations due to their content, and until the 7 year old is invented that can debug SQL, these things still have to be run by adults) due to *potential* threat, rather than confirmed (as in previous legal cases on record) ones - with the ease of anonymity on the internet where you have problematic behaviour you dont take chances. The overwhelming concern in child safety is preventing issues, if you have to clean up afterwards you have failed. Of course what you also dont do is open up a bloody case and broadcast it at Arbcom either, or ask public questions involving it during an election, however I pretty damn certain if anyone with actual experience in child protection at the WMF (do they even have someone on staff with that experience, or just someone who is handling it, its hard to tell) looked into it, there is more than enough that would have justified it. They have taken similar actions in the past (or at least have appeared to) for far less publically available reasons. I imagine you are more aware of the details there. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:59, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
And while ENWP is not a particularly child-focused website, it is heavily used in education and actively pushed by the foundation and the various Wikimedia affiliates in schools. So adopting a risk-averse position is a very good idea. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:08, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
And once again my curiosity is stoked. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:16, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) It's User:Jalexander-WMF who has day-to-day responsibility for these things and User:EHershenov (WMF) when the shit hits the fan. I have no idea what James's qualifications or those of his team are, but Eileen Hershenov has previously been General Counsel ("head of the legal department" for non-Americans) for Consumer Reports and the Open Society Foundations and is about as high-level as one could ever be.
Wikipedia/Wikimedia likely differs from most of the other online communities you mention. Wikipedia has a significant problem with participants trying to get other participants in trouble—either through malice, through a good-faith misunderstanding that's led them to believe another editor is problematic, or through an attempt to win an edit-war by knocking out the other participants. Consequently, Wikipedia has a fine balancing act between the duty of care to readers, the duty of care to potential new participants, and the duty of care to other editors, which doesn't really exist to the same extent on most other sites (aside from the mega-networks like Facebook and Reddit, and I'm not sure either of them are ethical models to follow). If someone is incorrectly blocked from TV Tropes or the Star Trek Wikia owing to misplaced child protection concerns, the site's administration apologies and move on; if someone is incorrectly blocked from Wikipedia owing to misplaced child protection concerns, we've collectively libelled someone on the fifth most read website in the world. (Despite the lack of transparency, there are good reasons these global bans are dealt with by the WMF and not by Arbcom any more; it's a responsibility that never should have been delegated to Arbcom in the first place.) ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
Size isnt an issue. They are doing it wrong. As the operator of an online service you are rarely obligated or required to provide a reason publically (or often privately) unless money has changed hands. Facebook and other social media routinely ban accounts without publically stated reasons. Although the hilarious 'Donald Trump cant block people' case is an interesting divergence recently. There is also the 'misplaced child protection concerns', Its called safeguarding, not safewatching. There are no misplaced concerns. It might turn out to be entirely un-neccessary but the courts in the US and the UK/EU have generally held that protective measures (with regards to children) are justified on reasonable suspicion alone - conviction is not required. Editing ENWP (despite what some people might think) is neither an inborn or granted right. Of course the key word here is being reasonable, and there have been numerous editors over the years who are waaaay past what would be considered reasonable. The editor for example who was caught trying to secretly arrange contact with a minor after being told the minors parents objected. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:40, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
It's not as simple as that in the context of the WMF (and specifically in the case of en-wiki as the debates here tend to be more heated). If WMF Legal were to adopt an "assume every allegation is true until proven otherwise" stance it would be virtually unworkable; every spammer, political advocate and fringe-science pusher would quickly figure out that they could win any debate with a few well-timed emails. Because the decisions aren't made publicly in these cases, we've no way of knowing whether T&S or Legal have examined any given case and decided there's no problem, or if they just aren't aware; if you know of a specific problem editor, the thing to do—and the only thing you should be doing—is contact them directly to raise your concerns at legal-reports@wikimedia.org. (FWIW, the suppression in this case was entirely correct and Fram should count himself lucky not to have been blocked as a WP:OFFICE action; the policy on making allegations of this nature is absolutely crystal clear and is mandated by WMF Legal so WP:IAR doesn't apply.) The long-suffering User:WhatamIdoing—who I'm intentionally not pinging as I imagine she's sick of the sight of this page—might be able to talk you through exactly who does what and when and why they do it, but for obvious reasons it's probably not something that's ever going to be discussed publicly. (If you want a general chat about how the policies evolved, User:Herostratus might be able to point you towards the discussions.) ‑ Iridescent 18:11, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
From experience it really is that simple, its that people either choose not to pay attention or do not understand the reality of the potential consequences. While I accept the rather unique setup of ENWP means it has challanges, I dont accept they are not easily solved ones given enough money, manpower and appropriate training. I am not advocating 'assume every allegation is true' as that way is nuts, however you cant afford to just ignore every allegation either. There is a big difference in credible allegation and uncredible ones. When you have to assess the reliability and credibility of that sort of evidence, you do learn very quickly the difference between 'User has a specialized interest in anime cosplay' and 'User maintains a social media account with hundreds of videos of (legal) overly-sexualised pre-teen and young teen girls/boys'. The first will get you a few raised eyebrows depending on who you are, the second runs red flags so far up the pole you can see them from orbit. Unfortunately I have personally seen what happens when even mild warning signs were missed with the end result not being a happy one. What happens afterwards is you get to go over and over it at length trying to work out *how* it was missed. And thats the big issue, because when it is missed, it always comes down to someone going 'Well I didnt think it was likely'. And you dont really have an defense against that, because unless people have been involved directly in a situation, almost no-one estimates the risks appropriately. Whats really irritating is when you try and explain to people the risk issues, you come up against Paedogeddon mentality - conveniently forgetting that was made prior to the internet being easily and readily accessible, everyone (including children) with a smartphone, and the ability of anyone to pretend to be anyone. That episode (while being a fine work of satire in its own right) includes a piece about a paedophile disguising himself as a school... Absurd, yet the Metro is currently running a story about paedophiles pretending to be chicken nuggets - and thats not even the *weirdest* shit I have had to personally look into over the last decade. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:40, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
I'm still not seeing it in the Wikipedia context. You're probably not aware—there's no reason you should be—but pretty much every very active editor or admin who's even vaguely active, particularly those who've done anything in contentious areas, regularly gets accused of conflict of interest, POV-pushing and every kind of sexual deviancy one can imagine, and not just by IP trolls but by well-established editors (if you don't believe me, pick anyone with access to the oversighter mailing list—or even better, Arbwiki—and ask them to describe it).
Despite the headline 48,245,140 {{NUMBEROFUSERS}} figure, Wikipedia at heart relies on around 3000 people. Implementing you cant afford to just ignore every allegation either would make Wikipedia's administration unworkable within a matter of hours—the admins who are most active in administrative areas are by definition those who attract the most people with grudges, and even suspending them for an hour each time while the WMF examined each complaint would knock out the admin corps—followed by a rapid and sustained decline in the editor base as the regular editors got fed up with constantly finding themselves temporarily blocked and went to find something else to do. Wikipedia in its current form probably wouldn't last much more than a month. We're not like Facebook or Twitter where the loss of a few thousand users is something that's quickly forgotten; we just don't have the resilience in the editor base if people start leaving en masse.
Despite their occasionally shambolic presentation and occasional tendencies towards obnoxious self-importance, the Board of Trustees and the upper echelons of WMF management include some of the world's leading experts in the management of online communities and the legal issues around open editing and multinational collaboration. Don't make the mistake of assuming that because the trivial aspects of Wikipedia's management appear (and often are) largely arbitrary, that means that the overall management of Wikipedia when it comes to legal liabilities isn't the product of people who know what they're talking about. ‑ Iridescent 21:03, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
I try not to know too much about what Trust and Safety does, but https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/09/22/wikimedia-foundation-emergency-response-system/ might interest you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:09, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Missing article

Police shooting, in the sense of "law enforcement killed someone", is a redirect to a list of lists of individual incidents. Ditto for Police shootings in the United States. But it seems to me that whole books have been written on the subject, as a general subject rather than as a catalog of individual incidents in recent decades in a small number of countries, and that we're therefore missing some pretty significant articles. This subject reaches well beyond Use of force. It ought to be there for the students who are writing papers at school, and who will learn more from a neutral article that covers the subject from multiple perspectives (e.g., history, prevalence, differences between countries and police forces within the same countries, contrasted with military, legal issues, psychological and human factors research, alternatives, economic costs, risk factors and intersection with social problems, etc.) instead of a list of names and dates with no unifying or contextualizing themes, but I don't really know enough about the subject (or care enough to learn enough) to write a proper article on the subject. Who do you (all) think might be? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:00, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

We have Police firearm use by country, which is probably as much as we should have. Because so much of the Wikipedia readership and editor base is in the US, which is an extreme outlier when it comes to the police discharging firearms, a detailed article would inevitably be a long "America vs everyone else" essay. In all honesty I'd advise anyone considering it not to touch the topic with a bargepole; for a US-specific article it would be an everlasting culture war between pro- and anti-police editors, and on the broader topic it would be an everlasting culture war between the US and the rest of the world. Some topics really are better off covered elsewhere; Wikipedia's NPOV environment isn't a good setting to debate ethical issues.
There's also the issue that Wikipedia has to reflect the sources, and the sources in this case will have an unavoidable anti-police bias; "cops screwed up" makes for a more interesting story than "cops followed procedure correctly", so the controversial incidents understandably get a lot more coverage than the uncontroversial ones. (Search "police" on any news site—no matter what its political stance and no matter what the country in question—and you'll come away with the impression that the police are a bunch of bumbling violent thugs.)
There are also purely practical issues; because the US has around 1000 fatal shootings by police each year, while Canada has around 20 and the UK and Australia each have around two or three, a global article would either end up being Police use of firearms in the United States or be giving hugely undue weight to non-US countries; the dividing line between "police" and "military" varies between different countries so counter-insurgency operations and armed border guards can give misleading figures; the definition of "firearm" varies between countries (in the UK stun guns, pepper spray and other such things are classed as firearms; in the US they're not) which distorts the figures; the circumstances vary so wildly that various things filed under "police shooting" have little in common other than that a police officer opened fire ("police shooting" encompasses everything from a gun accidentally being discharged during a training session and hitting someone, to counter-terrorist officers shooting an active suicide bomber, to an officer under attack and defending themselves, to a Rakhine death squad). On top of that there's the issue that the US has upwards of 10,000 police forces and the figures aren't collated centrally, so when it comes to the country that dominates the topic of police use of firearms, we don't even know what the figures are.
If you still feel Wikipedia should have an article on the topic, I'd suggest DoctorKarpiak as a starting point. (It's not his field but Newyorkbrad might be able to point you towards someone dealing with the issue from the legal side.) I do feel you'll need to treat the US and the rest of the world as two separate topics, as otherwise you'll either end up with a "why are the US police so much more trigger-happy than anywhere else?" essay, or a de facto Police use of firearms in the United States with a footnote saying "sometimes the police other places shoot people too". ‑ Iridescent 09:08, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
Police firearm use by country doesn't have a place to talk about the gun-toting marshal tropes in old Westerns, or other appearances in popular culture. (There's a reason that they call some of them "cowboys".) There's no place for talking about effects on survivors (officers, surviving family, etc.). There's no place to talk about effective (and ineffective) training programs. There's no place for information about how this intersects with mental illness. There's no place really to talk about anything except the fact that it happens a certain number of times per year in each country.
I am concerned about the endless disputes. I don't suppose it would fall under any of the existing DS options? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:31, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
And you've proved my point, as every example you give is specific to the US; this is essentially an American culture-and-society topic, not a global law enforcement topic. (Yes, police shootings sometimes happen in other countries as well, but—aside from conflict zones and places undergoing serious social breakdown where the police are acting as de facto paramilitaries, and a very few instances of police opening fire on crowds at protests—you'll struggle to come up with a dozen recent cases worldwide outside the US where the police shot someone when there wasn't reasonable grounds for them to do so.)
Assuming you treat it as an American gun politics issue rather than a law enforcement topic, you could probably shoehorn it into either WP:ARBGC or WP:ARBAP2 if you're really determined to get discretionary sanctions imposed, but I wouldn't bother. I personally am not sure I've ever seen an instance of discretionary sanctions actually working; they piss off a lot of people but ultimately these intractable disputes stem from some people inherently being assholes who refuse to admit that the views of people with whom they disagree can ever be right, and ultimately the only way to deal with assholes is either to persuade them to stop being assholes, or kick out whichever asshole is being most obnoxious in the hope it sends a signal to the others, repeating as necessary until either the others get the message and stop being assholes, or they don't get the message and all end up blocked. ‑ Iridescent 23:50, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
"or kick out whichever asshole is being most obnoxious" - while I agree in general on your opinion of discretionary sanctions, they do actually make it a lot easier to kick people out of the topic. Justly or unjustly. Still, not helped the IP area at all. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:46, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
I think that Police shootings in the United States could be a perfectly decent article subject, but quite a lot of what I mentioned is universal. Family members aren't usually happy about their loved ones being killed by law enforcement (or anybody else, for that matter), even if it seems "justified" and even if it doesn't happen often. Training matters, and it matters all around the world (including in developing countries, where it's nearly non-existent). Local culture matters: Police forces that honor the guy who killed someone get more killings than those that honor officers who are skilled at de-escalating situations. That officers respond to the incentives placed before them is not merely an American phenomenon.
DS has advantages and disadvantages. Some editors (sensibly) won't touch articles under DS to avoid the drama. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:25, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fred Bauder closed

An arbitration case regarding Fred Bauder has now closed and the final decision is viewable at the link above. The following remedies have been enacted:

  1. Fred Bauder is admonished for engaging in an edit war on his candidate's questions page. Future edit-warring or disruptive behavior may result in further sanctions.
  2. For multiple self-unblocks, wheel-warring, and abuse of rollback, Fred Bauder is desysopped. He may regain the administrative tools at any time via a successful request for adminship.
  3. Boing! said Zebedee is cautioned for blocking Fred Bauder while actively involved in an edit war with him at the time. He is further cautioned to avoid edit-warring, even in cases where the other editor is editing disruptively.
  4. Editors should seek assistance from the Electoral Commission for issues that arise on pages related to the Arbitration Committee Elections that cannot be easily resolved (excluding, for example, obvious vandalism). The Arbitration Committee reaffirms that the Electoral Commission has been tasked with the independent oversight of the Arbitration Committee Elections. Matters which are of a private matter should be referred to the Arbitration Committee or functionaries team as normal.

For the Arbitration Committee, --Cameron11598 (Talk) 08:09, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fred Bauder closed
Well, it was really worth wasting everyone's time to come to a conclusion of "maintain the status quo in every respect". (Which scores more points, "cautioned" or "admonished"?) Still waiting for any evidence of my alleged "conflict" or "opposition research". ‑ Iridescent 09:01, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
No not really. As a case request it did no harm, but perhaps could have been dealt with by motion regularising the desysop and asking everyone to communicate a little better and not rush in. And in fairness, there was near universal opposition to the "opposition research" sentence, and universal opposition to the associated remedy. -- Euryalus (talk) 12:18, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
I appreciate that the claim was opposed, but it doesn't change the fact that an obvious smear by a sitting arb, based on no evidence and with no diff to back it up (obviously, as it was a complete fabrication so no diff exists), is now going to sit on the record forever, for people to point at and make "no smoke without fire" insinuations. As The Rambling Man can testify, this is not only not the first time Rob has tried to pull this "fabricate accusations in the hope that people don't notice the lack of evidence and assume they must be true" well-poisoning stunt and the rest of the committee haven't pulled him up on it and told him he needs to supply evidence if he's making accusations, it's not the first time this week. ‑ Iridescent 12:44, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Minor quibble

Re: this, I’m in general agreement with the sentiments, but I think there are cases that may be exceptions: INC adding 600 pages to the pedophile category last year springs to mind, as well as one or two LTAs where Trust & Safety is involved. Obviously I don’t support the script but I think Bellezzasolo was likely referring to these type of incidents. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:11, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Bellezzasolo specifically said that they're talking about the Reference Desk troll. As the entire issue with WP:LTA/REF stems from their hopping at high speed between multiple dynamic IPs, what we're talking about here is the mass reversion of any edits made by anyone on whichever IP they happen to currently be using, without even bothering to check what the edits in question were. Since the script was specifically configured not just to revert what the IP in question is currently adding but any edit they've ever made provided it's the current revision—and dynamic IPs can cycle through numerous editors (in the past, I've noticed editors as varied as Poetlister, VX4C and South Wales Police's press office pop up as previous users of my IP)—my AGF is somewhat limited in these circumstances. (As GiantSnowman can testify, mass rollback has a very high false positive rate even when someone appears to be obviously disruptive.) As I said at the AN thread, if the edits are very obviously the same (clearly part of a batch, all the same diff size, same edit summary) I can see it being legitimate to mass-rollback, but in pretty much any other circumstance I can't see any grounds where things are so pressing we can't spare the half-a-second it takes to hover the cursor over the diff and glance at the popup. (If we want to get rid of the reference desk troll there's one very obvious solution, but nobody ever has the nerve to propose it.) ‑ Iridescent 22:25, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Permanant protection, 30/500 or something? ——SerialNumber54129 22:36, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Moderation in the form of Flagged Revisions applied to FLow; every edit (either a question or an answer) only becomes visible to non-logged-in readers once it's been approved by a trusted user. (Done in Flow rather than the standard interface as that allows each thread to be a separate object, so we wouldn't end up with the mess FR/PC causes on articles where any edit to any section makes the whole page sit in "awaits approval".) Yes, it would need some tweaking to the software, but since this is the method pretty much every non-MediaWiki user-generated site on the internet uses—from Google Maps to Wordpress to the comments sections on newspaper articles—I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of the devs. (To be honest, if I were in charge I'd probably boot the Reference Desks off Wikipedia altogether into a separate WikiReference site, and let them sort out their own problems—they've never really been a comfortable fit with Wikipedia—but there's no real enthusiasm for that.) ‑ Iridescent 22:49, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
I see what you mean; pretty radical stuff. Yet, the fact that it would involve tweaking the software is actually an encouragement to move it off WP I suppose: it could be recreated from scratch without "tweaking" anything. I'm sure there have been discussions—which I'm sure will get used against me in future—in which, although I can't find 'em, I have enthusiastically called for the closing of the refdesks, yet the idea of keeping them but moving them off en-wp may not have arisen. It could be a new Jimbo project; you know, like Wikitribune, but actually doing something. Which is saying something. ——SerialNumber54129 23:03, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
If we're going to move it off-wiki, now would be the time; with Answers.com in Chapter 11, the WMF could probably either buy the www.wikianswers.com domain (which they own) for a song, or even absorb them outright. I'd imagine the RD regulars, once they got over the initial "you're trying to get rid of us" indignation, would actually prefer an environment where they don't have those pesky admins insisting on applying "no original research" and "no personal attacks" to them. ‑ Iridescent 23:15, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Of course, they may find something else has already beaten them to that particular goal  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 00:28, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Yahoo Answers is so infested with weirdos it makes Reddit look like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (as I write this, the top question on their front page is Rex Tillerson says trump directed him to do things that were against the law. Is that fake news or is Tillerson now an anti-American liberal?) and I imagine the only reason its new owners at Verizon are keeping it on life support is that their PR department doesn't want to deal with the fallout from killing both it and Flickr simultaneously. There probably is a market for an "all questions answered" site in which all answerers are expected to provide sources—as opposed to something like Quora where the answers are mainly just people giving their personal opinions as if they were gospel—and it would probably serve as quite a good penal colony for the big Wikipedias, now that Commons and Wikiversity are losing patience with us dumping our problem editors on them. It's not something on which I have a strong enough opinion to push for myself, but feel free to head on over to Proposals for new projects if you think it's worth pursuing. Our long-suffering Community Relations Specialist (Contractor) might pop up in a few minutes to explain why this isn't a good idea. (That Jimmy Wales is a shareholder in Quora, to which this would be a direct competitor, is an obvious stumbling block.) ‑ Iridescent 16:34, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

About deleted page Wikipedia:Yaar jigri

Hi Iridescent,
It would appear to me that this was not actually patent nonsense, but a good faith-y attempt by Tiwana013 to create an article about a web series of the name "Yaar Jigree Kasooti Degree".
I would appreciate your thoughts about this.
My guess is that even if we WP:DRAFT-ify-d it and waited patiently for the WP:AFC process to run its course, the substantial outcome would be delete under {{Db-web}} instead. I'll drop a handwritten note on that user's talkpage about this.
Pete AU aka --Shirt58 (talk) 10:00, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

Well, yeah, in that form it'd be eligible for A7 speedy deletion if in mainspace and in Wikipedia space it'd be misplaced. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:20, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
The entire text of WP:Year jigri was yaar jigri kasuti degree, and this isn't a new editor who isn't aware of how Wikipedia works. AGF isn't relevant; there's no way that isn't delatable for multiple reasons even if it hadn't been in the wrong namespace. I suppose theoretically I could restore it, move it to mainspace, and then immediately delete it again as {{db-nocontent}} but that would be taking "going through the motions" to something of an extreme. ‑ Iridescent 12:21, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

for the backhanded insult [15] May Santa deliver coal to your stocking. Will you be proposing an editong restriction? Legacypac (talk) 20:44, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

UninvitedCompany has already made some proposals that look reasonable to me. Unless there's anything to suggest a continuing problem, I see no reason to head on over to WP:Editing restrictions#Active editing restrictions and create a permanent Mark of Cain; we impose formal topic bans when it's clear someone is out of sync with the community and they've shown themselves willing to edit in accordance with community expectations, not just as a reaction to individual incidents. Since GiantSnowman has presumably been doing this for years and has never had anyone complain about it before, I'm willing to believe his explanation that he genuinely didn't know this kind of "acceptable collateral damage" mentality wasn't appropriate. ‑ Iridescent 21:00, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
All the evidence is in the thread. He continues to defend an indefensible reading of policy and practice rollback in cases he has been told are inappropriate. If not an admin... Legacypac (talk) 21:20, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

On typical pageviews numbers

Re [16], you might be interested in the fact that 1) those numbers exclude the (typical, well-behaving) bots, as better explained in the link, 2) a large portion of English Wikipedia articles receives 0 pageviews in the typical month, and an even larger amount gets less than 10. See for instance the bit quoted by HaeB on mailarchive:wiki-research-l/2018-December/006521.html. Nemo 07:14, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men – Of course not. No one could read that many biographies in one day. EEng 04:53, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
I'm not remotely convinced by On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men unless something has changed wildly in the intervening four years, and strongly suspect that that's an artefact of faulty methodology; it would hardly be the first time a WMF analysis was manipulated to produce the result they wanted.
Just go to Category:WikiProject Biography articles and its subcategories, pick names at random, and check the pageview stats. Glass Age Development Committee, which has a genuine claim to be the most obscure article on Wikipedia (it's just an explanatory footnote to Vauxhall Bridge that I moved into its own article as the footnote was too long, and has no other incoming links) gets more pageviews than that just as a result of random background noise. Even Altlichtenberg—a page whose entire content is Altlichtenberg is a populated place in Upper Austria, Austria, and which is a true orphan with no incoming links (not even an interwiki link, as there's no corresponding stub on de-wiki), still has had at least one page view in 95 of the past 100 days. ‑ Iridescent 13:16, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Actually, it seems like plenty of days go by without any reader on the first 10 random pages in Category:Living people. To my total lack of surprise, they are all mostly sports men too. And the most popular one is a porn actor. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:15, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Can you wonder?
Jack the Zipper ... Following the success of StuntGirl, he signed an exclusive production contract with Hustler Video.[4] He names Salvador Dalí, Andrew Blake and Stanley Kubrick as his influences.
Also, re "To my total lack of surprise, they are all sports men too. And the most popular one is a porn actor" – Is that because porn actors are by definition sportsmen, or does JTZ just happen to be both? I can't tell from the article. EEng 14:32, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
No, it's because I can't count. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:35, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) But nowhere near the "26% on any given day" claimed. Leaving out Samuel Sawyer which is a dab page, in the past 20 days of your sample four had at least one view every day, one had 2 days out of 20 without a view, one had 4/20 without a view, one had 6/20, and only two of the nine (Issiaka Koudize and Glenn Ezell) went more than five of the 20 days without a pageview (the figure needed to hit the 26% mark). Koudize, at least, is a total non-surprise, as he's a footballer from a non-English-speaking country who has never played in an English-speaking country so one wouldn't expect there to be much interest in him here.
It's worth bearing in mind the context of this discussion, which is the argument that an editor should be banned from using WP:G7 on articles he'd written on the grounds that they were averaging one view per day and consequently should be considered so unusually popular that normal deletion policy shouldn't apply and the articles in question should be retained against the author's wishes; I contend, and still do contend, that one-view-per-day is an unusually low readership for a Wikipedia article and consequently the "these are indispensable" argument doesn't hold water. ‑ Iridescent 14:38, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
See, to me it sounded like the claim was "One quarter of all biographies have no reader on a given day". Now, I was wondering if we are all falling for a "high peak" error; there may be few articles as popular as 1257 Samalas eruption or Tarrare or Donald Trump but they have large numbers of readers and might be driving a large proportion of total readership; I am not sure if I have the investment to go look for the statistic. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:47, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Yes, I read the claim as "on any given day, 1⁄4 of all male biographies go unread". I don't believe this to be true, and nor does your sample bear it out, as for the 26% figure to be true, the pages in the sample would need to be averaging a little over five days in 20 without a view which they clearly don't—we're not interested in the height of the peaks, only the number of days in which the trough dropped to zero. (What I do believe is that male biographies average fewer readers than female biographies, as there's a dead weight of long-dead sportsmen from a time when few women participated in professional sports which drags the male side down.) ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Not sure that that is correct. 2.6 biographies out of 10 not being read on a given day sounds like it would still match the percentage given, even if a given biography doesn't go 5 days without readers. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:59, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
We're saying the same thing in different ways; to average 2.5 out of 10 biographies going unread on any given day, each individual biography would need to be unread an average of one day in four (e.g. five days of the 20-day sample). Leaving out the dab page, which isn't an 'article' in Wikipedia terms, there are 31 zeros in total between the nine articles over the 20-day period; for the 26% figure to hold water, the aggregate total of zero-view days for the nine articles over the 20 days would need to be 46. ‑ Iridescent 15:11, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

A very happy Christmas and New Year to you!


May 2019 bring you joy, happiness – and no trolls or vandals!

All the best

Gavin / SchroCat (talk) 21:36, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

And the same to you… ‑ Iridescent 23:28, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Happy Saturnalia

Happy Saturnalia
Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and troll-free. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:59, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
And the same to you! ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Merry

Happy Christmas!
Hello Iridescent,
Early in A Child's Christmas in Wales the young Dylan and his friend Jim Prothero witness smoke pouring from Jim's home. After the conflagration has been extinguished Dylan writes that

Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"

My thanks to you for your efforts to keep the 'pedia readable in case the firemen chose one of our articles :-) Best wishes to you and yours and happy editing in 2019. MarnetteD|Talk 22:52, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Likewise... (I have to admit, whenever I hear the name A Child's Christmas in Wales the first thing it brings to mind is an old Bob Mills routine which would probably be unbroadcastable nowadays for its Taffophobia.) ‑ Iridescent 20:36, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Hi Iridescent, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas
and a very Happy and Prosperous New Year,
Thanks for all your help and thanks for all your contributions to the 'pedia,

   –Davey2010 Merry Christmas / Happy New Year 14:40, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Best wishes

Season's Greetings
Wishing everybody a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Adoration of the Shepherds (Cariani) is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 10:26, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
Adoration of the Cabal would be rather apposite :) ——SerialNumber54129 11:14, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Austral season's greetings

Austral season's greetings
Tuck into this! We've made about three of these in the last few days for various festivities. Supermarkets are stuffed with cheap berries. Season's greetings! Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 22:17, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
If that's what they eat, I think we've solved the mystery of why, despite being wealthier and having a healthier lifestyle, Aussies have a lower life expectancy than Brits. ‑ Iridescent 17:05, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Redrose64 🌹 (talk) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas6}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

--Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:30, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
And to you ‑ Iridescent 17:03, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry holidays

Hello Iridescent: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:43, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message
I get the burning house, the dead ski-er, and the guy about to beat some kids with a stick, but what's the significance of the horse-and-buggy? ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
Ya'll need to ask Northamerica1000. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:08, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Iridescent,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Davidgoodheart (talk) 00:45, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

And the same to you ‑ Iridescent 19:34, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

A small token on the occasion of the arbitrary honoring of a 2000 year old prophet, and other matters

Gothic Seasons Greetings
Wishing you all the best for x-mass, and hope things are good. You gained the unique honor this year of having the most fantastically written, and socially interesting article, ever nominated to ADF. People will never learn. Ceoil (talk) 18:41, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Ceiol: What do you mean this isn't an actual woman?
And to you… Although I'm still equally pissed off about Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Biscuits and human sexuality, even a decade later. ‑ Iridescent 18:46, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
A little known fact is that I'm still alive, so actually BLP. (It was one biscuit, one time, and there was no hush money). Ceoil (talk) 18:56, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
If you ever want to waste a couple of hours, look up the history of Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker (not on Wikipedia as both articles are fairly awful). ‑ Iridescent 19:10, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Thanks but no thanks. Its all behind me and am happily married (to an actual woman) now. Ceoil (talk) 19:16, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Thank you Simon Adler for giving me a pretext to wheel out my all-time favorite Commons image. Yes, that is made entirely by strategically arranging biscuits.
Is it like oreo sex? Simon Adler (talk) 19:22, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Not sure what I was expecting when I googled "oreo sex"...UrbanDictionary, you always deliver, but not always in a good way. Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:29, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Oh dear. I see what you mean. Simon Adler (talk) 19:33, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Simon, much as I love you, you do tend to drag conversations down into the gutter. You and UrbanDictionary are as worse as each other, when this intellectual stimulating conversation was exploring the finer points of human / biscuit emotional & sexual interaction, which had a little know impact on 19th century novelists, painters, cake-makers and other beard stroking stuff (sorry Iridescent for hogging your page). Ceoil (talk) 19:44, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
I still haven't got over discovering that Brexit porn is a thing. (Safe for work although you'll get odd looks.) Whoever thought up all those names deserves some kind of award. Anyone think they can get it to FA by 29 March? ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Gladimhere Putitin? It's deffo WP:SQUIRREL territory. Who could AfD that? Simon Adler (talk) 19:59, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Looking at the lead actress's oeuvre there are some very impressive titles there: The Great British Bonk Off, Sherlock Bones, Friends With Benefits Street, The Iron Ladygarden (and The Iron Ladygarden II: The Fucklands War) and Cum Dine With Me. They obviously had got bored with atrocious puns by the time they got to Double Penetration and Hard Anal Fucking for Free Taxi Ride. I'm also extremely taken with the porn actress in the credits called "Lydia Lunchbox". I can't imagine many of the target audience would get an 80s no-wave reference. ‑ Iridescent 20:10, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
I showed this to my wife, her only comment was "well we're all getting fucked anyway"... Quite. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:18, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
British food is weird, and so is apparently British porn. Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:34, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
British food is an acquired taste as most of the best-tasting dishes look like amorphous brown lumps. I will still never be convinced that jellied eels, crappit heid or tikka masala are genuinely food for humans rather than cats, but such things as beef cawl, rhubarb crumble, full English or haggis are things of wonder. ‑ Iridescent 09:50, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
I had though you were cool, but "The Fucklands War"?? - its commonly known that Lunchbox had lost her shit by this time and The Fucklands War was a poor and populist driven attempt the recapture the glories of "World Wank II". I expect better of so-called connoisseurs of smut. Ceoil (talk) 20:21, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Another bonus point for whoever though of Only Fools and Arses and Poon Raider. Although I'm quite taken with the simplicity of Fuck the Librarians, who I think were the support act to Electrafixion at the Town & Country II in the mid-90s. ‑ Iridescent 20:34, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
You are the only person I've heard mention Electrafixion in polite company. I was always more about Sergeant and the legendary and almighty acid casualty de Freitas, and have a weakness for the neglected Reverberation (album) (ie sans McCulloch), which blew Cork (incl. me) away at Sir Henery's in I think 1989. Although when I rememeber now, there didnt offer much that night in pun based porn, the feckers. Ceoil (talk) 20:42, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
I never had an issue with Electrafixion—they were in the artwank rut, but it was the time of Peak REM and Peak KLF and everyone was either artwank or Britpop. Whisper it quietly but E&theB never did anything for me. ‑ Iridescent 20:52, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
When we wander around looking at ancient and monumental megaliths with Cope's "modern antiquarian" in hand, which is often, the strangeness often calls to mind "Bring on The Dancing Horses", which is equally ancient, and equally mind blowing. Other than that I only like bits and pieces song wise from them, but their sound amazes: Sergeant was an important precursor to Kevin Shields and even stuff like this. Ceoil (talk) 21:05, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
Dig out Y Dydd Olaf by Gwenno Saunders if you haven't already, which gets that balance of etherial and tinny 80s synth just right. The fact that the lyrics are incomprehensible (a mix of Welsh and Cornish) isn't a drawback—if anything it's probably an improvement as when you look at them in translation they're irredeemably trite. It's difficult to believe that either she or Rose Elinor Dougall were once in possibly the cheesiest act ever to walk the earth. (Before anyone complains, I don't consider the cheesiness a bad thing. Some of the Pipettes's material was fantastic, but the jump from this to this and this makes the difference between Scott Walker's first and last albums look minor.) ‑ Iridescent 00:02, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Its not often these days I am blown away, but this. And only just catching up. Initial thought on listening to two vids so far are Billy ze Kick and [Iechyd Da for the psychedelia and sheer joy. If I was to go deep I would recommend White noise. Ceoil (talk) 00:57, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
And to top things off, "Y Dydd Olaf" translates as "The Final Day" which has a decent claim to be the best track ever to come out of the original post-punk scene. (Gwenno Saunders's album was a tribute to a 1976 Welsh-language novel, and the YMGs were from Cardiff; I have no idea if the YMGs song was also a tribute to the book or if it was just a generic cold war paranoia piece.) ‑ Iridescent 09:24, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Cold war paranoia pieces are not unheard of from the time....a favourite [17] from an elder statesman. The line "You say you're self sufficient, but you don't dig your own coal" is very strikingly put, and very good and very bad for many, many reasons. Still, I give points for the rather chilling and blunt "it's hard to talk to enemies, we are enemies"; harsh and admirable words from a man in a wheelchair. ps, to continue the food based theme, the keyboards on the latter song are very evocative in the few hours post mushrooms. Ceoil (talk) 00:23, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
In the spirit of the season, have the only decent Christmas song ever recorded (although as a gift to Martinevans123 just going to put this here). ‑ Iridescent 07:42, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
A Christmas classic. Eternally grateful. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:39, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

How did a simple Christmas card lead to “Fuck the Librarians”? Not that it’s a bad thing to do. Kafka Liz (talk) 03:03, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

The same way the next thread up got from an incoherent death threat against me to the symbolism of pinecones in Christian iconography, and someone mistagging a file for deletion got to whether lions can understand the purpose of firearms. Threads on this talkpage tend to meander. ‑ Iridescent 09:24, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Coming to this late (possibly unfortunate terminology in view of some comments above), but I couldn't let the vile slur on such a fine ethnic London food as jellied eels go unchallenged. Jimfbleak - talk to me? 13:59, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Jellied eels
Bubble & squeak
Pie, mash and liquor
Devilled kidneys
For those unfamiliar with London's gifts to world cuisine, here's a handy guide. None tastes quite as good as it looks. Britain has some fine regional culinary traditions but London's traditional specialties aren't them. ‑ Iridescent 16:02, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
They honestly all look like puke. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:18, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, pie n mash is the fucking bollocks mate. ——SerialNumber54129 16:24, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Laverbread
Chicken tikka masala
Kedgeree
Stargazy pie
In fairness, some other UK regional specialties look worse. Laverbread, chicken tikka masala and kedgeree all look like they've passed through a dog before being served. (Laverbread and kedgeree are actually delicious; chicken tikka masala I could happily never eat again but it's probably the most popular of all the traditional British dishes.) The foulest-looking traditional English dish, beyond any dispute, is stargazy pie.

While on the topic of both Gwenno Saunders and of cultural differences between Britain and America, just going to leave this here. For those who don't want to sit through the song, lyrics here. Note that this was a song released by a band explicitly targeted at schoolchildren and marketed as wholesome. ‑ Iridescent 16:37, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

For the benefit of the uneducated masses, the "liquor" in pie, mash and liquor is a thin sauce made with the cooking liquid from the stewed eels also served in the traditional (and, sadly, almost extinct) pie and eel shop. I feel that Iridescent has done God's gift to the East End a disservice by failing to point out that the nonpareil of this cuisine is actually pies, eels, mash and liquor, not the emasculated triple Iridescent serves us. Oh for the days when you could buy your eels live from the fishmonger too... Jimfbleak - talk to me? 06:38, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
I can't fully interpret this post until I know whether or not pies should read piss and triple should read tripe. EEng 22:25, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Cockneys: The eel's only natural predator  :) ——SerialNumber54129 16:37, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
'ere matey, me ol' china.... I 'ad that Viktor Orbán in the back of me hovercraft Uber cab the uvver night.... Nigel Farage and chips 123 (talk) 22:43, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Tripe
Thanks to E for reminding be of another fine London dish best stewed with onions. A beautiful thing Jimfbleak - talk to me? 07:00, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
I can honestly say I've never once seen tripe on sale in London outside of Polski Skleps and the kind of market stalls that have giant jars filled with chicken feet; in fact I'm not sure I've ever seen it south of Birmingham. I'd consider eating tripe, and especially tripe & onions, as stereotypically northern as rugby league, outside toilets, white pudding or talking to strangers on buses. ‑ Iridescent 21:38, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
Once you've had your fill of all that posh food on Main Street, maybe you'll fancy something a bit more basic from Kingston? The Human Riff 123 (talk) 21:50, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
There's still tripe to be had in St John's market in Liverpool, but even here it's becoming increasingly uncommon. And though I like tripe, I don't much like the smell in that market. And yes, very Northern - I feel naked eating it without my flat cap on. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:06, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Not a Christmas card - or is it?

We talked about leaving my talk in place in case I die, and like today's particularly, on top "stand for civil rights", and a pictured article that was up for deletion (remembering "your" Selina Rushbrook). - My Christmas greetings - and later new years's - will appear there as well, - no individual "cards". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:56, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

And to you as well. ‑ Iridescent 09:05, 21 December 2018 (UTC) On a less festive note, regarding your 'Despised and rejected' sidebar you do realize that the reason Sagecandor is blocked isn't 'despised and rejected' but because it turned out to be the bad-hand account of an editor playing good-account/bad-account games, and who was still playing the same game with a different sockpuppet as of ten days ago? If he wants to contribute constructively to Wikipedia rather than play games disrupting other people's work, his actual account remains unblocked.
My understanding is that he was socking as Sagecandor to evade his topic ban on political biographies (and while his Cirt account is unblocked, that is only because he hasn't used it for editing in a long while, and Bbb will indef block it if he does resume editing there). Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:17, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) This from the blocking admin suggests that if they do resume editing with it...it won't be for very long. ——SerialNumber54129 09:21, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
I'll admit, I haven't looked into it in that much detail; my main reaction when I saw the case was one of surprise, as I remember Cirt as an all-round good editor whose only real problem was a tendency to be overenthusiastic when it came to political causes, whereas Sagecandor was a complete dick with whom my sole interaction was when I caught him faking a source. My main point—that SC isn't someone who's been unfairly cast into the wilderness by Wikipedia's unfeeling bureaucracy, but a net negative by any possible definition who was correctly kicked out for refusing to follow our rules—still stands. ‑ Iridescent 09:46, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda

Martinevans123 (Santa's Hard Brexit Grotto) ... sends you ...


... warmest seasonal wishes for ...... Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda.

Merry Christmas Baby... and hoping that you have a good New Year  !!

Ac yr un peth i chi… ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
... mwynhau. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:23, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
GZM could be awful but when they got the formula right there was nothing quite like it—like Gogol Bordello without the artwank twattery. ‑ Iridescent 17:31, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
That's the most surprising comparison I've ever seen. I see Category:Psychedelic pop music groups from Camarthen is still empty, alas. But I'll have you know that some of us can't survive without a bit of artwank twattery now and then. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:02, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
"Personally I love East European cod"
A quick dip into Category:People from Carmarthenshire to see if I can turn that red link blue yielded nothing (unless you'll accept Cate Le Bon, who Wikipedia claims is psych but I certainly wouldn't), but did lead me to what may be the most ridiculously blatant PR puff-piece about a non-notable figure masquerading as a Wikipedia article I've ever seen. (I stick by my GB/GZM comparison. Listen to the two side by side and filter out the cod-East European stuff; they both have that same "I wonder what would happen if Ut and HMHB got together?" style down pat.) ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
I see what you mean about Kate McGill. Could do with a bit of attention. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:29, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Celebrity trivia and Jimmy Wales

A talk page section I started on what is arguably trivia included a reference to Jimmy in celebrity mode. I was surprised that his presence on that list didn't tip the balance for someone deciding to include it in the article. Maybe there is hope yet. It still seems (oops!) to have started an edit war when someone picked up the ball and ran with it. Though including 'Some guy named Jimmy Wales who invented some kind of online encyclopedia' was probably overdoing it (slightly). The irony is that if I had gone to the match on day five, I might have seen Jimmy there. In the event, I went on day eight and met an old friend instead who I hadn't seen in many years. The people you bump into in London if you go to the right places... Carcharoth (talk) 01:08, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

​Sorry, only just noticed this; the Bauder nonsense distracted me.
With the proviso that I know nothing about chess, I'd be inclined to include the list of celebrities. This is the English-language Wikipedia, and in the Anglosphere countries which constitute our core readership and editor base, chess is largely seen as a board game for young children, and the idea of professional competitive chess is as alien an idea as professional competitive Monopoly or Candy Crush. (The worldwide audience for the chess championship is miniscule when compared to the championships of any vaguely popular videogame—compare the viewerships for League of Legends King of Glory or the Asian championship of Dota 2 which took place at around the same time.) Having the list of celebrities is a way of signalling "look, despite the apparent lack of public interest this really is considered a big deal" to readers who otherwise wouldn't understand why chess appears to be getting an exemption from our usual notability requirements. (In the event, the championship this year did get a modicum of coverage in the non-specialist media, but that was primarily because of the novelty of every match ending in a draw.) ‑ Iridescent 12:44, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
I almost missed your reply (no problem, btw). Always interesting to get another perspective on it. Carcharoth (talk) 15:11, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

GO DUCK YOURSELF

...you won't do dat again!

You are protecting this you rhthrd! I kihhled over 100 terrorists myself, don't make yourself my target you mron! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2C0F:F930:0:3:0:0:0:221 (talk) 18:46, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

That's me told ‑ Iridescent 18:53, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Truly Commons is the gift that keeps on giving. I may be showing my age here but I remember there was once a time when Commons admins used to give earnest lectures about how everything there had to be realistically useful for an educational purpose if you committed the sin of uploading an image that wasn't deeply boring. ‑ Iridescent 19:08, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
I reckon these two on the left are Arbitration Enforcement, by the power invessed in AE by the Chicago Outfit...  :) ——SerialNumber54129 19:12, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Those three are roughly what I imagine Wikimania must be like. ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Original caption. I'm confused. Simon Adler (talk) 19:19, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Duck off Elvina
It's a Flying Duck Orchid, growing in Elvina Track (hence, a duck, off Elvina). ‑ Iridescent 19:25, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Ahh right..Thank you. Simon Adler (talk) 19:29, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Him----->just to confuse the CUs  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 19:34, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
A thing of wonder will be lost from our lives in a month when Flickr dies. ‑ Iridescent 19:42, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
That essay is one of the most misused on Wikipedia. Just go to SPI and randomly click a few of the non-CU requests and you'll see what I mean. It normally goes like: [Account that needs explanation as to why it is a sock] WP:DUCK. Please block. ~~~~ TonyBallioni (talk) 19:39, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
I suppose it is because providing evidence takes time and people are lazy Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:43, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) WP:Civility and WP:No original research are the most misunderstood pages on Wikipedia, hands down; I'll wager 99% of the people who cite them have never actually bothered to read them. The ludicrous WP:ATA and WP:DTTR are probably the most misapplied of all essays; I've lost count of the number of people who think they're both some kind of formal policy and don't realise both are just the personal ramblings of their authors. ‑ Iridescent 19:46, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
I'll leave this here. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:49, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
Why am I not surprised to see AfD's resident definitiely-not-a-white-supremacist yet again trying to invent his own deletion criteria because he doesn't feel our actual criteria should apply to him? See also here and here for some background reading. ‑ Iridescent 19:56, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Uh, Oshwah, a bit pointless to revdel the IPs comment when it hasn't been removed :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:38, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Duck pointing where to go
Galobtter - HA! Good call - I assumed that someone else removed it and just rev del'd the edit. Fixed ;-) ~Oshwah~(talk) (contribs) 20:05, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

That IP is a whole level of special. ∰Bellezzasolo✡ Discuss 20:00, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

One of the few regrets I have from only editing Wikipedia very infrequently is when I see pages like yours and the above: I just know if I knew what was going on, I would have a comment, but, alas, I am clueless. WTF are death threats doing because of Commons images, when everyone knows Commons wants consigning to the wastebin. Similarly, what was all the fuss with Fred Bauder? I thought I had won a war, ten years ago, to have him consigned to that same bin. Have I been away too long or just become old and senile? Giano (talk) 20:02, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
No, the death threat was because the IP took exception to my blocking him for his ravings on Talk:Skanderbeg. The Commons stuff is a response to his telling me to "duck myself". ‑ Iridescent 20:11, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
@Giano, while you're here can you see anything obvious missing from Simeon Monument? It's a bit sketchy because Soane's biographers understandably concentrate on the country houses and don't bother mentioning something this obscure, but as the last surviving structure of his in his hometown, it's more notable than most other lamp-posts. ‑ Iridescent 20:17, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
  • No, I can’t, but that’s because I have never quite got my brain attuned to that of Soane’s. Something essential if you are going to appreciate an architect. All those over austere exteriors coupled with over complicated and over theatrical interiors; what in Hell’s name was going on there? He was like Palladio on skunk. Funnily enough though, you are the second person to mention Soane to me today. I’ve been asked to go and look Pitzhanger Manor which has just been restored, so perhaps I’ll have more of a clue after seeing that. Giano (talk) 20:30, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
  • I don't particularly like Soane's style—his exteriors generally remind me of East European railway stations—but I think the story of the Simeon Monument is quite an interesting glimpse into the way shire Tories conducted their affairs in the dying days of the rotten boroughs. (How arrogant does one have to be to commission a monument to oneself?) I've skimmed over the (unremarkable) architecture itself with a one-sentence a triangular base with each corner supporting a wrought iron lamp, surrounding a fluted three-sided Portland stone column, which in turn supported a stone cylinder topped with a bronze or copper pinecone; the story here is why something so preposterous came to exist in the first place and why it still stands. ‑ Iridescent 20:42, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
  • ​Someone should invent some kind of website where you can look these things up… The nominal purpose was to illuminate the centre of the market (Reading's street lighting at the time was based on lamp-brackets attached to buildings rather than free-standing poles, so open spaces were quite dim in the middle), with a secondary purpose of preventing wagons from cutting across diagonally, but the real purpose was to get the Simeon name visible in the run-up to John Simeon's parliamentary candidacy. The pinecone was a symbol of the tree of life and of eternity—presumably in this case meant to symbolise the permanence of the structure, the lamps and the town. (Unlike much Christian iconography, which medieval and renaissance artists largely made up as they went along, the symbolism of pinecones is genuinely ancient and goes back to the Old Religions; the Vatican still has this whopper taking pride of place outside the Vatican Museums.) ‑ Iridescent 15:22, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
  • I remember seeing the coverage of that when it first appeared. I'm sure I remember seeing these things which are just as colorful in NYC fairly regularly in the 1970s and 1980s. Where I live now is currently in the process of being overrun by Egyptian geese, who may be ornamental but are among the foulest-tempered critters I've ever encountered. ‑ Iridescent 19:17, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
  • I used to live in Norfolk; I well remember the attitude of swans who felt that they had more of an entitlement than you to whatever you happened to be eating. My local flock had poking their heads over the riverbank to untie the shoelaces of anyone daring to not be feeding them down to a fine art. ‑ Iridescent 19:28, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Speaking of foul-tempered geese, 13 years ago I lived next door to my landlady who kept watch-geese instead of watchdogs, and they were scary af, and LOUD. Even though they were inside a chicken-wire cage, it was right by the driveway, and I dreaded taking a walk or going to the mail box. *shudder* Softlavender (talk) 19:33, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
Fowl-tempered. In a somewhat related item, I seem to recall that a local SPCA office used to leave a vicious attack bunny loose in its offices at night to frighten intruders. EEng 21:00, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
Gerhard is unhappy with you

Notice

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/GiantSnowman. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GiantSnowman/Evidence. Please add your evidence by December 31, 2018, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GiantSnowman/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Bradv🍁 21:39, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, that's not gonna happen; I'm heartily sick of this new bureaucratic fad the latest iterations of Arbcom have adopted in which all the evidence submitted at WP:ARC is deemed to no longer exist once the case has opened and everyone is expected to say the exact same thing for a second time on the evidence page. I refuse to believe that even the most dimwitted arb is incapable of realising that the material at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GiantSnowman is discussion relating to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GiantSnowman. ‑ Iridescent 21:52, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) Are we expected to vote on that particular accolade? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:59, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
It's harder than you'd think to pick a winner. ‑ Iridescent 22:05, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
I'm perfectly prepared to wait a reasonable length of time. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:09, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
For what it's worth, this particular dimwitted arb recently wrote this motion to avoid exactly that kind of unneeded repetition, not that anyone noticed. As a parting gift, perhaps I can suggest that this become a habit. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:56, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Watch it, NYB. Personal attacks are a no-no, even on yourself. EEng 23:07, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
Cool beenz. I'm so dimwitted I never even noticed. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:01, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
@NYB: In light of this, I assume your colleagues haven't accepted your gift. ‑ Iridescent 23:04, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
UGH. Filing electrons for the sake of filing electrons.... don't get me started. Ealdgyth - Talk 00:26, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Funerary monuments

Not mentioned in our article on Alfred Gilbert, but I came across this account of the history of a funerary monument from the Liverpool Museums, and thought you might appreciate it: Macloghlin funerary monument. I stumbled across this while looking for instances of the phrase 'Mors Janua Vitae' on Wikipedia (after seeing it on the grave of Elsie Inglis in a documentary on the Scottish Women's Hospitals). Amazing where looking something up can take you! Carcharoth (talk) 13:05, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

On the subject of curious funerary monuments
The Walker Art Gallery might have a dubious curation policy (with the exception of Lady Lever, Liverpool Museums has a tendency to shunt actually interesting things out of view to make way for those things they think deserve more attention), but Liverpool Museums's websites are uniformly excellent. (Unlike a certain other set of Victorian museums whose current management think they're cooler than they actually are, whose website has now taken to ripping off Wikipedia verbatim.)
On the topic of curious funerary sculptures, have Captain Henry Surtees Bowes Watson Lowndes, who had the (mis)fortune to be present for both the Fall of Sebastopol and the Indian Mutiny, and died just three years short of seeing the outbreak of the First World War. Beckenham Cemetery is deeply obscure but is well worth a visit if you're ever in the area (the tram runs around its boundary, so both Birkbeck station and Harrington Road tram stop will set you off at the gate); it has a real mix of oddities,including the tomb of toilet guru Thomas Crapper, VC winner George Evans, and Frank Bourne, the last survivor of Rorke's Drift (who lived to see VE-Day!). ‑ Iridescent 13:30, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
Heh. Interesting examples. I see George Evans (VC) has a picture of the grave before it was restored. Am wondering how to include that without overwhelming the article. I copied the image categories over, though some may not be that useful. Some of these individuals with more than one memorial, you can start a category just for them. Two image might not be enough, though that is the best way of linking the images. I also added notes, and even did this! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 14:18, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
The {{multiple image}} template is your friend. As with most of these gravestone photos, I just shoved them onto Commons en masse—I have neither the time nor the inclination to manually sort through and categorise 7000 photographs, especially since many of them are just illustrative examples of particular styles and not of people who are notable in Wikipedia terms. ‑ Iridescent 14:56, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
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