User talk:Iridescent/Archive 33

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Article rescue

As I have notifications turned on when articles I created get linked, I often get notified of changes to related articles, which can be very useful. Sometimes, though, I get pinged about articles that need help. And I don't have time to do that properly. Notification anxiety or something... The most recent example is Colin Alexander McVean (I created 1874 transit of Venus). Even if the editor who created that article does not see this post (not sure if links outside article space are notified), I hope someone will help! Though maybe I should ask elsewhere for help with this article. Maybe (looking at the article history) Nick Moyes might be able to help? Carcharoth (talk) 11:45, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Only (watching), but, Carcharoth, what help does it need? It's not up for deletion, is it? ——SerialNumber54129 12:01, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Eh, rewriting to improve the language. Difficult without access to the sources. The editor is basing it partially on their own writings, as far as I can tell. The other articles related to this (Charles Alfred Chastel de Boinville and John Harington Gubbins) are in better shape, so maybe I should worry less and help more (or concentrate on carving out quality time to actually help properly!). :-) Carcharoth (talk) 12:16, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Colin Alexander McVean might be an unusually difficult one. I'm reluctant to do any significant rewriting without access to the original sources, in case nuances get lost, but in this case I assume a lot of the sources will be in Japanese. The National Library of Scotland and National Museum of Scotland might have some useful material about him; if you ask User:lirazelf she can probably point you towards who you need to talk to. In my experience, figures like this are very, very hard to write about unless there's been at least one published biography; working just from archives tends to lead to He was born on date, he did achievement 1, achievement 2 and achievement 3, he died on date biographies which read like they've been written by Reasonator and do nothing to give any indication of the person's life, interests, motivations or why we should care about anything they did. (To my eyes, the story here isn't what his accomplishments were, but how someone from the Isle of Mull, leading a comfortable life in Edinburgh, abruptly moved first to Turkish-occupied Bulgaria and then to Meiji Japan.)

Incidentally, in what's an impressive piece of procrastination even by my standards, regarding this thread I've finally got around to writing the "brief piece" on the NHM ceilings. This was very much a trip down the rabbit hole; what I thought would be a simple stub to fill a gap on the proto-Arts & Crafts Movement ended up as a 10,000-word saga touching on everything from the origins of chocolate milk to the impact of hallucinogenic drugs on the military in 17th-century Virginia. ‑ Iridescent 10:03, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Eh, we don't have unlimited free time. I am minded of my own African humid period which covers stuff from the astronomy of Earth's past orbit and its colour over pyramids to future storms or Huaynaputina which covers ground from 16th century religious practices in South America over Russian history to 16th-18th century cartography. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 10:11, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I quite like articles that take the reader in unexpected directions; IMO it's one of Wikipedia's great strengths that you can come here to look up information about the .gp top-level domain and end up reading about medieval antisemitic sculptures in just four mouse-clicks. (.gp → Piracy in the Caribbean via the {{Guadeloupe topics}} navbox → Reformation → Stadtkirche Wittenberg → Judensau.) Congratulations or commiserations, depending on your POV, for Allison Guyot, which so far doesn't seem to be attracting too many weirdos. ‑ Iridescent 10:28, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Ha. The underwater mountains were fairly innocuous, it was Taapaca where I got bombed by vandal edits. For some reason I derive more pleasure from seeing something on DYK than from TFA. Incidentally, following that "unexpected directions" logic you might find Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/1257 Samalas eruption/archive1 interesting, it's not currently overflowing with commentary. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:46, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I'll have a look when I next get the time, which will hopefully be within the next couple of days. ‑ Iridescent 11:57, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

The ceilings article is v. impressive. Definitely an article, not a list (I saw the note you left with TRM). Carcharoth (talk) 11:41, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. At some point I'll try to get round to doing the building itself, but don't hold your breath. Natural History Museum, London itself is an atrocious trainwreck of a page which I'm not touching with someone else's bargepole (salvaging it would require the complete-wipe-and-rewrite-from-scratch approach), but there's certainly enough material to write a separate article about Waterhouse's building. ‑ Iridescent 11:51, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

J. E. Gray (Keeper of Zoology 1840–74) complained of the incidence of mental illness amongst staff – there will always be an England. EEng 12:12, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Russian and Mexican lapdogs (immature)

During construction, workmen left a trapdoor within the whale's stomach, which they would use for surreptitious cigarette breaks. Before the door was closed and sealed forever, some coins and a telephone directory were placed inside. The subsidiary (and equally shitty) page on the NHM's suburban outpost does have the honor of containing one of my new favorite unintentionally hilarously bad images. ‑ Iridescent 12:30, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Rather on the nose, what. Headline: Wikipedia editors, pets and self-assessment included :) ——SerialNumber54129 12:37, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm assuming "Immature Russian Lap Dog" is called either Donald or Julian. ‑ Iridescent 12:40, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

That's "Arbcom asked to discuss an Rfa cratchat", surely?

Talking of the NHM ceilings article, I came across that a little while ago and I think it's a terrific read. It's one of those articles that makes me want to go and look at things I've previously overlooked. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:00, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

It's understandable that nobody notices them—who goes to a museum and looks at the ceiling?—but they really are worth seeing in the flesh. Photographs don't really do them justice because you can't capture the whole thing in a single image, and the shimmer effect of the gold leaf is lost in photos, but the way in which their appearance shifts depending on how far down you are and what angle you're at genuinely is extraordinary. Because creationists nowadays are such a risible bunch, it's easy to lose track that to these 19th-century curators, the sciences were a branch of theology, taxonomy was the highest of the sciences because by cataloguing the creation one was revealing the plan of God, and consequently scientific museums were quite literally equivalent to churches and cathedrals. (You do still occasionally see this mindset among physicists, but it's—ahem—extinct when it comes to the natural sciences.) It's just a shame that the NHM is an example of how not to run a museum; compared to the V&A and Science Museum next door, its displays are dreadfully dull and uninspired and have probably turned five generations of schoolchildren away from the natural sciences. ‑ Iridescent 13:12, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I think in general, most people fail to look up when going about their business. Here in Liverpool (and probably most places of any age), there's a mass of great architectural detail to be seen by those who lift their gaze above the shop fronts they pass every day. Some time this year, I intend to visit London to see Van Gogh at the Tate, and I'll make time for those ceilings if I can. And yes, the NHM has always seems stuffy. I still have a memory from childhood of it smelling musty - though I'm not sure if that's a manufactured memory based on the place looking like it should smell musty. On another subject, I visited the Lady Lever a little while ago - it's great being old enough for a free Merseytravel pass. I usually pay attention to the pre-Raphs, but I spent some time with Mr Etty on this visit after your writing on him. I'm still not sure what I think of him, but at least I don't overlook him now. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:24, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure I like Etty very much, but I've certainly come to appreciate him. I came into it knowing him only for his reputation as a purveyor of proto-pornography (the whole thing started off as an attempt to write a FA on an unquestionably encyclopedic but unquestionably offensive topic onto the main page, in reaction to a Think Of The Children comment of Jimbo's), but the more I found out about him the more interesting a character he seemed. He's the painting equivalent of Silver Apples or Ken Russell, as someone who was born at just the wrong time for his abilities to be appreciated.

If your Merseytravel pass stretches as far as Ellesmere Port, I highly recommend the Boat Museum (sorry, "National Waterways Museum"). It's about a thousand times more interesting than you'd expect it to be, even if—like me—you have not the slightest interest in boats. (When visiting Lady Lever, make sure you go upstairs. That's where they hide all the stuff that wasn't part of Lever's collection but was bought by the trustees after his death—it includes some of the most interesting things in their collection.) ‑ Iridescent 12:17, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Hehe, I love the motivation for writing about Etty. The Lady Lever does have some interesting stuff tucked away, yes. I saw an engraving exhibition there last year, most of which I could take or leave, but they had a few industrial landscapes by Joseph Pennell which I thought were great - dark, dirty, depressing. The boat museum, yes, I've been nearby a few times and wondered. I'm no particluar lover of boats, but I do like industrial heritage stuff. My pass does reach there (and Chester too) so I'll definitely give it a go - thanks for the tip. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:51, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Vale Royal Abbey

@Boing! said Zebedee: if your pass takes you as far as Vale Royal Abbey, I'm on a scrounge for photo [1]  :) ——SerialNumber54129 10:18, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Chester and Ellesmere Port are the ends of the two train lines I can use in that direction, sorry. But I'll keep it in mind in case I'm ever nearby. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:29, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Chester or Ellesmere Port...as Edmund Blackadder might say, "the agony of choice"  :) ——SerialNumber54129 11:55, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Ellesmere Port is a much nicer place than the post-industrial wasteland you're probably picturing. As with their twin on the opposite side of the country, Hull, they've handled the collapse of heavy industry a lot more imaginatively than most of the rest of the North, by reinventing themselves as a place to visit but without the social cleansing of Salford, Leeds Dock or L1. Chester IMO has some pretty buildings but isn't the sort of place you visit twice. ‑ Iridescent 14:28, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Chester's very touristy and can be horribly crowded. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:48, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Regarding Vale Royal Abbey, ask at WT:GM; the project itself has slowed drastically in its activity since Eric and PoD's departures, but the former participants will still have it on their watchlist. Although Manchester isn't in Cheshire, statistically at least some of the Manchester people are going to either live in or have an interest in Northwich and its environs. Ddstretch, Espresso Addict or Peter I. Vardy might also be able to suggest someone, back from the days when WikiProject Cheshire was still active. ‑ Iridescent 13:32, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Iridescent  :) I've already trolled talked to Peter, but tbh I didn't think about the GM project—the one I referred to there was the Cheshire one. Bit of a choker it becoming defunct! Hope all's well! ——SerialNumber54129 14:27, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

If it's not a statement of the obvious, have you tried just asking Vale Royal Abbey to release a photo? Since VRA is now a commercial business, presumably they'd be willing to cooperate with something that would be free publicity for them with no downside (the usual reason businesses don't like releasing photos—that it allows other people to re-use it—wouldn't be an issue here). ‑ Iridescent 15:12, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Aah...yes, I wish it had been more obvious. You know, it never occurred to me to ask. Would it be invidious to me, when asking, to emphasise that it could end up on the main page, and not unconnected to Alexa rankings...etc? Why, though, if I can ask, doesn't the "usual reason businesses don't like releasing photos" apply? ——SerialNumber54129 15:49, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Normally, the reasons businesses don't like releasing photos are (1) it legally releases them for other people to use, which means they can appear on sites attacking that business, in the publicity of competitors, or in material with which the uploader doesn't want to be associated,* or (2) by releasing an image for free re-use they lose any potential revenue from commercially licensing that photo in future. A photo of the rubble of a nun's grave in Northwich isn't going to have any potential to turn up on www.valeroyalsucks.com or photoshopped into someone's nun-burial-porn collection, and there's no possibility that VRA is ever going to try to sell posters of it in future.
*The latter isn't an abstract concern; the implications of that "you irrevocably agree to release your contribution to share or adapt for any purpose" warning you see every time you click "publish changes" aren't always fully appreciated, and people use Wikipedia photos for all kinds of weird shit. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Scouting/Archive 2008#Youth images for a particularly notorious case.

I wouldn't see any issue with explicitly saying "if you release this photo it will increase the likelihood of the article appearing on the sixth most viewed page on the internet", provided you don't give any impression that you're going to allow them any editorial control over the article. I personally wouldn't consider it any differently to the various Wikipedian in Residence schemes in which assorted institutions are told—in my opinion usually falsely—that paying for someone from Wikipedia to mooch around their building for a few months will benefit them by increasing coverage of their activities. ‑ Iridescent 16:13, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm assuming that valeroyalsucks.com would be swiftly replaced by valeroyalocracy.com in any case  :) Right; saying nothing about nun-burial-porn (talk about niche markets!), I'll give it a go. It needn't be much more than the gardener taking a phone out with him, I guess. Back to the important stuff, I'm sure that, with his "business" background, JW never intended to host such a site as "spanking art" :D ——SerialNumber54129 16:43, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

With weary inevitability, a quick google search on "nun burial porn" reveals that it is indeed a thing. ("Nun bdsm and buried alive This is our most extreme case file to date, folks!") ‑ Iridescent 16:58, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

"Having missed out on another business opportunity, Wikipedia was founded"  :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:05, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

@Serial Number 54129: Re Vale Royal: Sorry, I have rather lost touch with the Cheshire project since moving to Scotland, aside from polishing its rusty portal from time to time. Does Geograph not have anything? You could try posting a request at the Geograph forums (though you seem to need a user id to do so) or direct messaging someone there. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:10, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I already checked Geograph, and can't find anything. There are a couple of photos on Flickr, but nothing I can see with a compatible licence (although in my experience Flickr users will usually change the licensing to CC if you ask nicely). ‑ Iridescent 20:37, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I can't see any either. I still appear to have a valid Geograph login, so if someone can explain exactly what's wanted, preferably with the precise grid ref, I'm willing to ask at the forums on their behalf. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:24, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

The Nun's Grave, in the grounds of Vale Royal Abbey; the exact location is 53°13'29.9"N 2°32'28.8"W. This or this is what it looks like. ‑ Iridescent 21:32, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Iridescent, for taking up the case  ;) and thanks to you, Espresso Addict if you can help  :) ——SerialNumber54129 13:01, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

If neither the Abbey staff nor the original Flickr uploader come through, you might want to flutter your eyelashes at RexxS. I'd imagine that next time WMUK hold any kind of event in Manchester or Liverpool he'll drive past Northwich on the way, plus he seems to know where everyone on Wikipedia lives. ‑ Iridescent 17:38, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Heh  :) thanks very much for all the advice. By hook or by crook, eh  :) ——SerialNumber54129 18:39, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

The nearest editor to Northwich that I can think of is probably Bazonka, who might find himself in the vicinity whiles he's out geocaching. Otherwise, if you remind me before the next Manchester meetup (scheduled for June), I'll make a point of doing the short detour to get a photo on my way. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 20:42, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Challenge accepted! I'll maybe pop by in the next couple of weeks. Bazonka (talk) 19:27, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Just in case there's anyone else reading this who was planning to help, the photos have now been taken. ‑ Iridescent 17:27, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm guessing you've already seen this

But in case you haven't, here's Jimbo enforcing his code of conduct ten+ years ago. Enigma^msg 16:17, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

And here's what happened when he tried to enforce it against someone willing to answer back. ‑ Iridescent 16:24, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Lest we forget. Also he's requesting COI edits for his neighbors now, and abusing rollback to reinsert PR nonsense for one of his Twitter friends. Whatever, just more diffs for the next to inevitable BLP ban. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:37, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Oh, it's not just his Twitter friends, he's spamming for his real-life friends as well. (And I'm not even going to try to guess what this is.) ‑ Iridescent 16:41, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

🙄. Another user has an IRC bot up that tracks Jimmy's BLP edits. I really should follow it more closely. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:51, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

He's old, and he has seen a lot......

Claims of "first"

The Phelps affair drew some attention for a claim of her being the "first" of something and now we have claims of first-ness for Eddie Ndopu, to which I have responded here. Where does this sort of thing end, and to what extent should we be wary of WP:VNT in this age of fake news and increasing prominence of online journalism for niche audiences? - Sitush (talk) 03:57, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

This is why unless something is absolutely undisputed ("George Washington was the first President of the United States") we qualify these things heavily with "claimed to be by" or "described as". Especially when it comes to things like "first black…", "first African…" or "first disabled…", these things are often dependent on exactly what definition one is using. (Do white South Africans, Melillan Spaniards and Maghreb Arabs count as "African"? Was Bernie Grant or Dadabhai Naoroji the first black MP in Britain?" Should an otherwise able-bodied person suffering from mental health issues who checks the "yes" box on disability monitoring forms, or a person with arthritis who has difficulty in walking but doesn't consider themselves disabled, be counted as "disabled"?) You might want to talk to SlimVirgin if you want to go down the VNT route, as she's been involved in the "when should we go with what the sources say if we feel the sources are inaccurate?" debates from the start and knows where the previous discussions and precedents are.

In the specific case of Eddie Ndopu, it's probably not as problematic a claim as the first African American woman to be part of a team that has discovered a new element. The claim being made for Ndopu is extremely specific (The first African student with a disability to obtain a full scholarship and graduate with a masters in public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University); given that the Blavatnik has existed for less than a decade and is a tiny and not very important (as you know, despite Oxbridge's general reputation, when it comes to the social sciences they're not particularly well-regarded—Harvard, the LSE, Berkeley and Sciences Po are where the ambitious Future World Leader types study) institution of around 100 students, one could probably fit all the students in its entire history who've graduated from it with a masters in public policy and received a full scholarship into a small room, so it would be possible to check them all individually and see if any others were both African and disabled. The issue here isn't so much whether the claim is true, as whether a claim so narrow is even worth mentioning. ‑ Iridescent 08:24, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

I think the claim made in the sources is broader than that made in the article. They do not connect Eddie Ndopu's "first" with his attendance at the Blavatnik but rather with his attendance at Oxford University, of which the Blavatnik is just a small part. But I agree regarding the narrowness issue and the one of definition etc, as I noted in my analogy to cricket in the linked comment above. I'd be interested to know what SlimVirgin thinks if they respond to the ping. Thanks for your thoughts. - Sitush (talk) 08:30, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

I've amended the article to eliminate the confusion between Blavatnik and university now. - Sitush (talk) 08:39, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

While per the above I'm willing to believe the narrow The first African student with a disability to obtain a full scholarship and graduate with a masters in public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University, I don't believe first African student with a disability to be admitted to the University of Oxford for an instant unless we're using "African" in its narrowest possible sense of "black and born in Africa", and even then we just get into the whole "what constitutes disability?" debate. There would surely have disabled black British students who inherited dual nationality of African countries from their parents, and wounded (white) South African and Rhodesian military veterans who went on to study at Oxford (and I'd be very surprised if there were no Ugandan Asian students with disabilities). ‑ Iridescent 09:19, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

I think the claim in the source is "first disabled African student to be accepted into Oxford University with a 'full scholarship'. The writer doesn't make that clear in that sentence, but she later writes: "I am a person of colour who has also been awarded a full scholarship to Oxford commencing in October." So I think that's her focus. She doesn't cite a source. I'm not sure even the university could know this, because disability wouldn't always be marked in records, and as Iridescent says, you'd have to define it. The article seems very PR-oriented. The lead consists of "top 30 thinkers under 30 ... one of the 50 most influential people with disabilities in the world ... top 200 young South Africans". SarahSV ^(talk) 17:25, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

I think you're both right in your reading of the sources and have yet again amended the article. But now, with such a narrow claim and what was obviously a spate of publicity-seeking for the crowdfunding etc, it may be questionable whether the guy is even notable. I'm not sure that is a road I'm willing to travel. - Sitush (talk) 05:10, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

My instinct is that he probably isn't notable in Wikipedia terms and that if you take all the PR puffery out it will basically read "Eddie Ndopu is a student at Oxford", but please don't AfD the article. It's not actively damaging for us to be hosting it, and won't do anyone (including Ndopu) any good to have the usual suspects churning out "After their war on women, Wikipedia takes on the disabled" pieces, and for another biography of a living person to become an ideological battleground. ‑ Iridescent 06:26, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

That is my feeling, too, and is why I said what I did. I'm trying to improve it anyway. - Sitush (talk) 06:32, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

FWIW, if you want to see PR puffery in its purest form, Google Eddie Ndopu astronaut. ‑ Iridescent 06:42, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed yesterday that MTV were trumpeting having done a deal to be the ones who would document the event. This sort of thing says more about the publisher than the article subject - clickbait etc. - Sitush (talk) 06:46, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Curious question for you and stalkers

I think you’re familiar with the Clarice Phelps AfD (tl;dr lab techs aren’t notable regardless of demographics.) but out of curiosity other than Jimmy making some random African meat market notable by writing about it, have we ever had a case where the author of the article succeeds in making the subject notable because they got deleted from Wikipedia? This could be an interesting case study. It’s an op-ed by the Wikipedia author (not outing as her identity is on her userpage). It wouldn’t fail traditional independence tests, but I’m not sure writing an op-ed complaining that your article gets deleted counts even if it’s in one of the two main national papers in the US is what the GNG was thinking of... TonyBallioni (talk) 13:42, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I, personally, think that an article cannot be considered notable if the only coverage it has received is about the article itself, and not the article's subject. An article about a chess website should not be considered notable if the only independent coverage is on the chess website's page on Wikipedia, not the website itself. In other words, an article cannot make itself meet the GNG guideline, it must meet GNG before it is created. That's my 2 cents, anyway. Jeb³_{Talk at me here} 13:48, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't know if that WaPo column contributes to the notability of Clarice Phelps, but it does contribute to the notability of Tony Ballioni. :-) However, it's not just that Washington Post column. Have you seen this from yesterday: "A deleted Wikipedia page speaks volumes about its biggest problem"? Reprinted by Fast Company and The Wire. Phelps was also mentioned in this podcast from two days ago. We almost have sigcov here. This may be the first person notable for having their bio deleted from Wikipedia–which would be a heck of a meta moment. By the way, one last thing: can we please stop calling her a "lab tech"? She is the program director for two isotope programs. Don't forget that of all the thousands of scientists who have ever worked on discovering chemical elements, we only know of one black woman: Clarice Phelps. It's why people are freaking out so much about her bio being deleted, because on Wikipedia, this isn't considered important enough in and of itself. We can argue about whether or not that should be important, but let's not demean her and her accomplishments along the way. I imagine being called a "lab tech" when you're actually a "program director" is the kind of thing black women have to put up with that white men like me don't. Leviv ich 14:40, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Based on my experience, program manager (not director) is usually a low-level administrative title. Your insinuation of racism here is unwarranted. I would call anyone with that title a lab tech (though, depending on the institution the actual lab work may be minimal, so I suppose I could better clarify by saying “low-level positions at research laboratories that do not require anything above a B.Sc. are not notable.”) TonyBallioni (talk) 14:50, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm not insinuating you're racist, or sexist, just that by using this language you're being tone-deaf. I'm saying don't call her a "lab tech" based on your experience or your assumptions. Even if you don't intend to be insulting, it comes across (at least to me) as being insulting. Call her "program manager" because that's the title she is given by her employer. Or call her "scientist". This is exactly like how the media calls you a "moderator" when you're not a moderator, and while journalists might assume based on their experience that website administrators are moderators, that assumption would be wrong when it comes to Wikipedia, and the word "moderator" carries implications that are inaccurate when applied to Wikipedia administrators. You're an administrator, not a moderator; she's a program manager, not a lab tech. Respect a person by respecting their title. Leviv ich 15:08, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Glazing hygienist? - Sitush (talk) 16:56, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

We have a "Talent and Culture Administrator", which I think is Wikispeak for "Personnel". ‑ Iridescent 17:05, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I agree that sadly Clarice isn't notable. I say 'sadly' because she's a fabulous role model for both girls and ethnic minorities and as a result, her story should be far more widely covered in the mainstream press. We have, by default thanks to the NPROF SNG, a wide array of people who have done very little and get an article on Wikipedia by virtue of promotion and title, whereas Clarice is someone it would be really nice to have an article on as a result of her achievements and attainment. Nick (talk) 14:58, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Back to the original question, there's no instance I'm aware of in which the coverage of the deletion of the article has been deemed to make the topic notable in Wikipedia terms, but I can see the theoretical potential for it happening. There have certainly been incidents on Wikipedia which have received enough coverage in the mainstream press to make them noteworthy in their own right (Hillsborough Wikipedia posts, United States Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia, Essjay controversy, Jar'Edo Wens hoax, Seigenthaler incident…). ‑ Iridescent 14:59, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I guess the article wouldn't be Clarice Phelps, but rather Deletion of the Wikipedia article on Clarice Phelps... ——SerialNumber54129 15:07, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. I always find Wikipedia coverage of Wikipedia to be interesting. I suspect I’ll be getting a lot of moral outrage over it on my talk page, thanks to the blogging over the deletion, which is why I was curious as to if it had happened before outside of Mzoli's (which IIRC, is now mainly known for Jimmy writing about it.) TonyBallioni (talk) 15:06, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

The topic itself would only become notable beyond the context of the deletion if it prompted reliable sources to start covering the subject itself independently. If a few newspapers decided to go and run full page interviews with Clarice on the back of the incident then she'd start to creep back into GNG territory. Outside of that it could only ever be the deletion incident itself that was notable, not the subject. (And I think we rightly shy away from such things without very good reasons per WP:NAVEL  — Amakuru (talk) 15:18, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I see the article has been recreated as Clarice E. Phelps having been accepted from draft by DGG and almost immediately tagged {{db-repost}}. I can't bring myself to delete it, as I don't fancy being in the news as a clod-hopping deletionist, but somebody will surely do it. I suspect not RHaworth, though had he not had a grilling at ANI this past week, he probably would have. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 22:51, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

I strongly and repeatedly opposed the original article, which made entirely unjustifed claims fror a BLP, and was therefore in effect promotional, besides being of borderline notability . I have been consistently arguing against the inclusion of 21st century and late 20th century people from underrepresented groupds that are of lower notability than than our usual standard, because of publicity campaigns for them --publicity campaigns sometimes, as here, undertaken by employers who are trying to prove they are no longer prejudiced. But sufficient publicity does give notability, regardless of the reason for it, although this is an argument I would make only as in exceptional cases--I've almost always argued against it.

I was notified that it had been rewritten as a draft, making minimal claims. I checked it and it was still unacceptable , because it claimed she was one of the co-discoverers of the elment, which she was not. I thought that she had gotten sufficient attention that it would be a good compromise to have an appropriate article, so I rewrote the claims,and added a little about local activities to give some context for the coverage. I then accepted it.

Even if one still thinks her un-notable, this is still not a db-repost, because it is the first version that is accurate with respect to BLP. I will almost certainly defend it at Deletion Review, or , I would suggest more appropriately at another AfD. I don't like to defend notability as IAR, but if necessary I will use that argument, that havinga proper article is an acceptable compromise.

As is obvious, I have been arguing on both sides of the question. Unlike many of the others in these discussions, I think it well to solve disputes, especially disputes that are in actuality at a borderline between two positions, by compromise. Consensus does not mean finding which of two opposite positions more people agree with. Consensus means finding a position that everyone can at least tolerate. That means that most difficult problems will reach a solution that completely satisfies nobody. But we're here to write and improve articles, not argue about them; and even when we do need to argue, our arguments about them should be aimed at finding tenable solutions, not winning a position. I'm not sure everyone agrees with that. But if I wanted to argue for a deeply held conviction, I'd discuss politics, not WP articles. DGG ( talk ) 23:14, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

DGG, since this seems to be the centralized discussion of it, having looked at the version Amakuru deleted, my rough view is that it is worse than the original creation, and that someone recreating an article that has less of a chance of passing AfD on the merits than the original article does still qualify for G4 (i.e. it makes no sense for us to have another discussion when the article in question isn't nearly as well written as developed as the original version.)

I think something else that is worth discussing from an ethical standpoint beyond the Wikipedia policy is how we treat the creation and deletion of articles like this. The unfortunate reality is that Ms. Phelps is now known more for the fact that we deleted her than for any of her professional accomplishments. This is a travesty caused by the attempt to get her in Wikipedia that is unfair to her. I think to an extent the points made in the arb case about it are true: having a biography on here is not always a blessing, and the fact that it would inevitably be dominated by the deletion controversy here is almost certainly a BLP violation waiting to happen.

I very seriously believe that we have a moral duty not to let an early career individual be defined by the fact that one of our editors has decided to make her an apparently unwilling mascot of some internal Wikipedia squabble. If the situation changes, yes, then we certainly should have an article, but right now, where the only major change is that the original author has written an op-ed about it (and some other non-mainstream sourcing, which I suspect can also be traced to someone involved in the on-wiki dispute), I don't think we can really justify doing that to the person just to come to a on-wiki truce about it. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:40, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

This was different from the original article in one key respect: the basic statement of what she has done is accurate. The original article said she " is the first African-American woman to identify an element", and the basic objection to that version of the article was that she did not do that. An ORNL press release can be read as asserting she did, but it is not borne out by the published facts in the scientific reports., which are of much higher authority. That is why I noticed the article in the first place: to be the first person of a particular group to have p discovered an element is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extremely reliable sources. That is the basic BLP matter; it is similar to some other exaggerated claims for the importance of work done by beginning scientists here, and I saw this as a particularly easily disproven example, and as a warning to those whose atempts to show notability lead them to careless reliance upon press releases.

otherwise, I continue to think that the best way to deal with difficult questions about coverage in WP is by compromise. I continue to think that having a compromise here is the best way to avoid repeated contention on matters like this. Looking now again at all the the various versions, it does seem I could have done a higher quality version for my proposed compromise.

I am sometimes willing to engage in a argument I am almost certain to lose, for the sake of making a point about principle which I think may be accepted later. In this particular instance, there are too many competing principles to make a clear point, and I no longer intend to carry the argument further.

The question of how we will deal with our actions on WP receiving press coverage is one of those. AsWP becomes the information source most widely accepted in the world, and because our actions here are so visible, will will have to deal with it, just as , for example, the NYTimes deals very well --objectively, not defensively, with the criticism of its coverage. I think an appropriate example for this discussion will not be a BLP, especially a BLP on a non-public personality. because I do agree with you that further attention there is unfair. DGG ( talk ) 05:59, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

@DGG: Apologies for not notifying you of the deletion. I had assumed that pinging you in my note at User talk:TonyBallioni would be sufficient, but obviously that was not very courteous of me and I should have notified you directly. As I said in my reply to you on my talk page, I also commend your efforts to broker compromise and dialogue - of course that's what we should always be striving for. I disagree, though, that recreating this article with different text and a slightly different title has any consensus or is likely to achieve the sort of dialogue you want. Emotions are still running high, and this is now the second re-creation following the initial delete. We just need to let things rest a bit to avoid fanning the flames of conflict. Hopefully with time, and as her career progresses, she will become an easy shoo-in for an article but for now the consensus at two AFDs and a DRV is that she does not meet GNG or PROF, and it's IMHO not going to do anyone any favours to keep going through a delete—create—delete—create cycle ad infinitum, or to have a fresh AFD on the subject every three weeks. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 08:42, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

When I said above I was not going to pursue Del Rev, I should have said that I was also not going to re-create, neither an article nor a Draft. DGG ( talk ) 16:37, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Good grief

I'm away for three days and this happens? Courtesy links for anyone trying to untangle this who's not aware: Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2019 May 1#Clarice Phelps and Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Rama.

Commenting here rather that at ARC, to avoid adding to the wall of text, to avoid another encounter with the Conformity Police as this certainly isn't a "statement", and to allow people to reply if need be without complying with whatever arbitrary rule the clerks happen to have made up this week:

Speaking as someone with no interest in the topic and who has never heard of Clarice Phelps in any context other than this discussion and has no opinion on whether she warrants coverage on Wikipedia, at the risk of challenging the wikilawyering skills of the consummate wikilawyers, @Newyorkbrad, SilkTork, Opabinia regalis, I think you're in the wrong here. It's almost a full decade since Jimmy renounced godking status,and since then Arbcom has zealously guarded its "sole body with the authority to desysop" status. If someone is bringing a case in good faith, supported by evidence, that an admin has done something that could lead to desysop, and if it's clear from initial statements that the person bringing the case isn't a lone outrider and there's arat least some degree of support for the view that the admin's actions were wrong, then Arbcom has a duty to accept the case, even if it's just to issue an "Arbcom rules that the admin did nothing wrong", or "The admin did something wrong but it was a one-off that doesn't warrant sanctions" motion. The case possibly shouldn't have been brought so quickly when tempers are still hot, but now it's been brought the committee have a duty to examine the allegations.

Otherwise, you're setting up a very problematic precedent, by effectively formalizing "no admin action should be considered wrong if the admin claims they thought it was in Wikipedia's interests" as a defense. WP:IAR is an essential part of Wikipedia, but is intended for such things as "I'm intentionally forcing this image width to twice the recommended size because it contains a lot of detail that would otherwise be obscured" or "I'm closing this thread early because consensus is clear and the parties are starting to argue", not "Being an admin means my opinions are so much more important than anyone else's, I'm entitled to unilaterally overturn any consensus I personally feel came to a questionable conclusion". (I don't see any other way to interpret this statement.) One of Wikipedia's more underappreciated strengths, and the reason we survive when the Citizendiums and Everipedias wither, is that we at least try not to act arbitrarily, so people editing here know that they'll by and large be treated fairly. (Sure, we screw up—there are plenty of editors banned and articles deleted that shouldn't have been, and editors not banned and articles not deleted that should have been—but they form a small minority and we do try to have workable processes for appeal.)

IMO the "admin as super user" issue was exacerbated in this case, as another manifestation of the "legacy admin" issue of admins from the old days re-emerging to try to enforce the values of Early Wikipedia. Prior to the Phelps restoration, the last time Rama restored a page was in 2010 Correction to this; on closer inspection, other than one redirect, two templates and a handful of files, Rama has never restored a page of any kind other than [[Clarice Phelps]] and its associated talk page, and while there are a few deletions between 2010 and now they're all either routine maintenance deletions or unilateral deletions without even an edit summary. I can't find a single instance of Rama ever actually assessing consensus at a deletion discussion (full deletion log if anyone wants to double-check), and yet they're effectively saying that they're so much more knowledgeable about Wikipedia's deletion processes than anyone else, they have the right to discount the views of everyone who commented at the deletion debate because they happen to disagree with the conclusion reached. At some point someone (not me) is going to need to set the ball rolling on a formal discussion of how we deal with the legacy admin issue, as otherwise people are going to keep pulling this "I am the king under the mountain, risen from my slumbers to save Wikipedia" routine. ‑ Iridescent 07:39, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Yeah; some people, metaphorically, can't be trusted alone in the kitchen... ——SerialNumber54129 08:04, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the insight Iridescent (and happy are ye who can make your comments on your own user talk and have the world take notice 😎). I pretty much agree with everything you've said. The incident itself was relatively minor, but what it says about process and the way we work here is far more significant. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 08:13, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, that. I don't think anyone other than professional offense-takers (on both sides) really cares whether we have an article on Clarice Phelps—and there are certainly precedents like George R. Caron for people who had relatively minor roles within a team attaining wiki-notability inherited from the accomplishments of that team. The issue here is one of to what extent and in what circumstances admins have the right to supervote to overturn consensus decisions, and of whether they have an obligation to justify themselves when they do so. ‑ Iridescent 08:24, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

FWIW, I'm only 60th on the list of people who can make comments on their user talk and have the world take notice. (It shows as 64th but four of the entries are bugs.) ‑ Iridescent 08:36, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Professional offense-takers - be afraid, be very afraid. (There is possibly some irony in someone who is profoundly deaf being accused of tone-deafness.) - Sitush (talk) 08:39, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

This is someone who recently refused to come to a WMUK event because the attendees planned to meet in a pub owned by a Leave supporter and he was afraid that he might see pro-Brexit literature left on customer tables if he came. Treat any claim he makes of being offended with the credibility it deserves. ‑ Iridescent 08:46, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

To be fair, I haven't been in a Wetherspoons since Martin started that beer-mat nonsense. Not because I don't want to see it (after all if I was that bothered I'd never be able to set foot in a newsagents or watch Question Time), but because I don't want to give the odious git any money. Though admittedly that's made a lot easier by the fact that my local 'Spoons is inhabited by elederly drunks during the day and fighty teenagers in the evening... Black Kite (talk) 19:42, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I don’t have much to add beyond my brief comments on the requests page. Regardless of past formatting squabbles, I do think you should post your thoughts where everyone voting on the case will see them. Regarding “legacy admins,” I’m not sure that those sysopped in the early days get into or cause trouble at a greater rate than others, but I haven’t done the math. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 08:27, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

The issue isn't whether those sysopped in the early days get into trouble at a greater rate than others, it's whether those who return from long breaks (either from Wikipedia altogether, or from adminny stuff) cause a disproportionate amount of trouble. Someone, somewhere, has probably worked out the statistics.

It's not a case of past formatting squabbles, it's the absolute certainty of future formatting squabbles given the obsessiveness of the current clerks; something as simple as this reply to you would be forbidden under the current regime, as not only is it underneath your comment rather than in my own dedicated section, it takes me over the 500 word limit. Besides, is this list of names a group with whom you want to get into an extended conversation? ‑ Iridescent 08:36, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

All fine upstanding members of the community; some of us, at any rate  :) ——SerialNumber54129 08:48, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

There is a place to discuss these issues. Please do not ping me again to your talkpage as though I am a servant who has to answer your queries. Very pissed off indeed. If you wanted to discuss this away from the arena with me, then via my talkpage or email would have been acceptable, and you would have found a warm welcome and a cup of tea, and perhaps a cake. Good fucking grief indeed! And be aware that if you wish to respond to this, I am not watching this page, and will not respond to pings here. Come over to my place, and I may even have a beer for you. SilkTork (talk) 09:14, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

↑ OR, remember three years ago when I talked about the notion that the arbs are special snowflakes who can't be expected to descend from their ivory tower and you thought I was being unfair? ‑ Iridescent 09:25, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

No insight whatsoever. How surprising. (Silktork I mean, not you.) Eric Corbett 12:27, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

I imagine you're as shocked and surprised as I am to see one of our fine admins responding to concerns with insults and attempted bullying, and apparently believing that they're Too Damn Important to listen to anyone who isn't willing to follow the designated protocols for requesting an audience with Their Majesties.

Don't be too hard on Silktork; unlike many of the committee, he does at least do his fair share of work, rather than just sitting on the politburo issuing edicts. He was very helpful getting this very old article of mine, written before I really understood the principles of Wikipedia writing, up to something approaching modern-day standards. I'd imagine any arb would be foul-tempered on coming back to Wikipedia after a weekend off to find the GGTF and the alt-righters camped out on WP:ARC flinging dung at each other, and being expected to actually read and pretend to pay attention to all the he-said-she-said shouting. ‑ Iridescent 12:41, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

break: legacy admins

I mean, it's not like I've written any actual articles lately, so I'm not judging; I kinda have been doing the sitting on the politburo issuing edicts thing :) I don't agree about the expectation/obligation to accept the case - I don't think it's necessary to review every incident to fulfill the obligation to review admin conduct in general. "Could lead to desysop" is a moving target and too subjective to be all that useful a standard IMO. As far as I can tell, most of this "legacy admin" business is more meme than reality, and while I'd be happy to see some data suggesting otherwise, I'm not aware of any evidence that this is a real phenomenon. (Same with the "Super Mario" stuff - and I remember saying that three years ago [jeeez, has it been that long??] so it's not like I've turned into The Man here...) Single instances of questionable but well-intended judgment just don't seem worth the six weeks of shit-flinging, regardless of whether there's a hypothetical possibility of desysopping. If desysopping were were needed that badly, there would be another incident in short order and we could handle it then. I also really don't think we need to spend all that time on a case involving sensitive issues around a BLP, just to provide a venue for yet another internal wikipolitical fight over adminship. (And like I said on the request page, I'm very familiar with the way this incident has been discussed externally, and it is going to be damn near impossible to communicate to outsiders "yes, there were people on both sides participating for real-life political reasons, but mostly this isn't about diversity and representation at all, a lot of it was a proxy fight over the internal politics of who gets a few extra links on their user interface".) Opabinia regalis (talk) 17:23, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

"Could lead to desysop" may be a moving target, but that doesn't make it irrelevant; it's obvious in this particular case that there is a significant number of editors (and not, or at least not exclusively, the usual group of pitchfork-wielders either) who feel that there is a concern. IMO in those circumstances the committee owes a duty to both sides (if it's dismissed, it's not just sending the signal that the committee arbitrarily ignores concerns; it also taints the admin as by refusing to say "they did nothing wrong" or "this was an error but not enough to warrant action", from now on they'll be tarred as "the one who's only still active because arbcom covered their back").

As someone who's been a legacy admin (four admin actions between 2011–2015), I still believe that it's an issue; coming back even from a relatively short time away is a culture shock since the wording of the policies generally doesn't change but the interpretation of them does. Arbcom's refusal (for arguably legitimate reasons) to maintain archives for WP:ARC means it's virtually impossible to conduct any kind of analysis of "which types of action raise concerns and which concerns does the committee accept as valid?", so we're stuck with anecdotal evidence, but I don't think you can seriously claim that inactive admins re-emerging, and active admins suddenly deciding to barge into an area they've never touched before and screwing up, aren't a genuine problem. ‑ Iridescent 14:12, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't know, I didn't do the "legacy admin" phase, but that sense of change isn't really my experience. Every so often I catch myself thinking that something has changed a lot over the last few years, and then I remind myself that my first reaction on returning after an eight-year gap was that I've never been involved in any other online community that changed so little in so long. I can't remember where I said this now, but it came up a few times after I came back - people who are actively involved in the day-to-day or at least month-to-month dramas on a regular basis who followed the progress of proposed changes, got personally invested, cared about the outcome, and so forth, tend to interpret all of this as reflecting significant change, while people who weren't around for the drama don't experience it as, well, dramatic. Wikipedians almost always believe the project changes rapidly, but if you're not personally invested in the progress of the arguments, it's all just buzz. When it comes to admins, I think it's more the barging-in that causes problems, not the amount of activity that preceded it.

If I had my way now, there would be archives for ARC, but I suspect we'd still be stuck with anecdata - and in any case "what the committee accepts" changes, at least a little, at least once a year. Speaking of anecdata, I'm not sure I've ever seen this "tainted by a declined arbcom case" dynamic in action. More the opposite, that a declined case gets treated by the subject of the complaint as evidence that they're doing just fine. Since we're going ahead with the Rama case I guess I shouldn't rag on it too hard yet :) But considering there's literally another case right now about admin conduct, it's not like there's really much evidence that declining the Rama case would have been some kind of general signal of arbcom being unwilling to deal with admin issues. Opabinia regalis (talk) 08:29, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

It might depend on where you were active before and after. Some things haven't changed a bit, but some things like FAC/FAR (which, while the pair of us were absent, underwent a full-scale civil war and has yet to recover), the byzantine insanity that has developed around mainpage scheduling (if you ever think Arbcom is dysfunctional and bureaucratic, just add Wikipedia talk:Did you know to your watchlist), the ever-increasing reliance on technical fixes (not just megaprojects like Wikidata, but little things like our total reliance on templates and our consequent reliance on the limited subset of people to whom gibberish like this makes sense), and of course RFA and the whole us-and-them caste hierarchy that's developed between editors, admins and arbs, which in turn is a consequence of the RFA logjam and the hugely decreased admin/article ratio. The relationship between Wikipedia and the outside world has also changed beyond recognition; we're no longer the radical upstart breaking the mould and trying to prove ourselves to a skeptical public, and instead have become the establishment defending ourselves against charges of excessive conservatism and inertia. ‑ Iridescent 17:14, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

(adding) And, of course, the role of Arbcom itself has changed beyond recognition, from "dispute resolution body" to "group doing all kinds of ad-hoc firefighting" to its current "priesthood acting as interpreters of the Divine Will of Consensus and as intermediaries between the community and the WMF". One of the lines in the current brouhaha that brought me up short was the matter-of-fact Arbcom has the direct ear of the WMF; you have monthly teleconferences with someone from Trust & Safety; in my day—which wasn't that long ago—on the one occasion when I genuinely did need to communicate with the WMF directly I had such difficulty that I ended up having to privately contact Jimmy and ask him to relay the message. And that, of course, ties in with the professionalization of the WMF, which has gone in a relatively short time from being CBD and a couple of Jimmy's friends in a tiny office, to a sprawling multinational. ‑ Iridescent 08:41, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

That's true, I'm sure perception of change depends on what niche you were in to begin with. Most of my admin work back in the day was deleting crap, and if it was crap then, it's crap now. If your thing was being one of those "admins willing to make difficult blocks", then yeah, you're going to have a bad time if you try to do that without getting yourself up to date first. The level of "polish" needed to get an article through FAC was barely within my patience back then and is well outside of it now, but from the outside it looks like an example of what I mean - I'm sure that fight felt huge and significant at the time, but if you weren't there for it, and now only poke your nose in every so often, the process looks basically the same as it always did, but with different faces and longer review pages. The overall article assessment structure is still stuck in some weird grading system from circa 2006, except it's sprouted even more uninformative classifications. (For a project where everyone's every act is recorded forever, we do a weirdly bad job at self-assessment.)

I know I described somewhere when I first came back what I thought were the biggest changes, but I can't find it (it'd be interesting to know if what I think changed has changed!). Right now I'd say it's 1) the hollowing-out of Wikiprojects (and associated "collaborations of the month", etc) as significant mechanisms for people to organize their content-editing activity; 2) the emergence of a self-defined group of editors who specialize in "patrolling" things (I think all the tagging/sorting/new page patrol stuff has largely taken over what used to be the "countervandalism unit" crowd - i.e. a place for people with a little experience, a lot of spare time, and not much in the way of content work); and 3) the loss of RfA as a normal rite-of-passage for editors who've put in a reasonable amount of work and appear to be reasonable people. I am probably biased by being a technical person IRL, though I generally avoid technical work on wiki, but I see most of the automation, templates, scripts, and so on as a clear positive. The flip side of that reliance on gibberish is that the people who write the gibberish get tons of complaints, not all of which are polite or well-informed, and nearly all of which expect Something To Be Done. You see people get frustrated with the maintainers in a lot of software projects but the dynamic is different here in a mostly-not-software environment. Technical people and CUs seem to have the highest burnout rates.

The whole WMF conference call thing surprised me too at first, and then it became just the Done Thing and I started being surprised when people were surprised. AFAIK the point was exactly to solve the problem of having difficulty getting the WMF's attention on things. It's somewhat useful, but considering the size of their staff overall, they seem strapped for resources on doing what seem to be simple things. (I suppose it's likely there's a lot of other people with "simple" requests too, but still.) Opabinia regalis (talk) 17:11, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Don't get me started on that assessment scale. My rants about it are in the archives somewhere; not only is a scale that goes S-S-C-B-G-A-F (with F at the top, naturally) inherently ridiculous, but since it's now well over a decade since the CD-ROM Wikipedia which made assessment necessary was dropped, I fail to see any point. (And as for the "article importance scale"…)

The shift to dedicated patrollers was already starting Way Back When. This is one particular topic I can date quite precisely, as this marked the birth of Huggle (before then Gurch had just used it for his own use), which was the first patrolling tool that actually did what it was supposed to. I've seen a convincing case made (I can't remember by who but it was probably Kudpung) that the boom in dedicated patrolling led directly to the collapse of RFA, because automated tools based on rollback required the unbundling of the rollback function, which in turn meant "I need the toolset for routine maintenance" was no longer a valid argument at RFA and consequently it was assumed that every candidate was intending to play civility cop, and thus the voters started to focus on their social interactions rather than their technical or writing skills. ‑ Iridescent 17:32, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

@Opabinia regalis: See the "general comments" section and Q&A on your second RfA. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:45, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Ah, I see I'm not very consistent after all! Though maybe your own RfA isn't the place to complain about the collapse of the process :) And apparently the rise of Huggle was after my time... Opabinia regalis (talk) 07:31, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

If my memory serves me right, when I started in 2006 there was already a subclass of dedicated patrollers who did nothing other than monitor Special:RecentChanges for vandalism, monitor Special:NewPages for spam, or click Special:Random looking for things to nominate for deletion. Certainly by 2005 WP:AWB was up and running and we already had a dedicated class of editors who did nothing except search-and-replace typo fixing. ‑ Iridescent 07:57, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

break: obscure topics

Some of this reminded me of obscure articles I've created. Mainly from equally obscure awards articles such as Howard N. Potts Medal, Stuart Ballantine Medal (tagged for some reason, maybe I should refresh the source for that) and James Bryant Conant Award. The first two, I created tracking sections for the red-links (see the talk pages), but forgot to do that for the latter (the education award) - might try and do that retrospectively. That award is still being awarded, and I added the most recent three recipients here (two have articles, one does not). There are at least two red-linked women on that list (Kagan and Haycock), and the Wilhelmina Ruth Delco article (on another woman) got created after the list article was created. Getting back on topic, I did create an article on someone who was part of a team that created heavy elements, but it seemed not to have created a controversy for some reason... (see Kenneth Street Jr.). I have no idea what prompted me to create that article (though digging, I found this and I now see it was prompted by my reviewing Californium at FAC, see here). At around the same time (this is back in 2011), the Stanley Gerald Thompson article was created and similarly hasn't caused any controversy. Other people that were part of teams (space exploration in this case), but seemed to have enough for articles were Jack James (rocket engineer) and Robert J. Parks. Not sure how closely comparisons can be drawn between different eras, though. Carcharoth (talk) 12:36, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

I would think as a general rule (not necessarily in relation to this case) that it depends on whether the team member has been written about independently of their role in the team. If they're only covered in the context of the achievements of the team, then the article should be on the team not the individual. Looking at Kenneth Street Jr., the element discovery is only a small part of his story; there's also the war record and being Deputy Director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. A reasonable thought experiment in these borderline cases is "if there were a hypothetical book written about this group, is there enough to say about this person to fill a chapter?". ‑ Iridescent 12:45, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) On the Ken Street question: he was a full professor at UC Berkeley, which all but guarantees notability under PROF since to get there you usually meet the research requirements of PROF. If you were to create an article on a relatively low-ranking member of that team without a PhD and who never was a tenured faculty member, I suspect it’d be more controversial. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:48, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

The sources on Stanley G. Thompson make interesting reading: [2] and [3] (see also the de.wiki article). I also feel another award list article coming on, as he received the 'ACS Award in Nuclear Chemistry' in 1965, which is now the Glenn T. Seaborg Award for Nuclear Chemistry that is listed at List of American Chemical Society national awards. It is funny to see the (truly) prestigious Priestley Medal on that list of ACS awards. I have no idea why anyone thought it would be a good idea to create ACS Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences or ACS Award for Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences. Compare with Arthur C. Cope Award, which again is clearly one of the truly prestigious awards. Carcharoth (talk) 13:20, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

As with so many questionable things on Wikipedia, they appear to be the products of a good-faith initiative by the WMF. To be fair, I've certainly seen less productive editathons. ‑ Iridescent 13:29, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

That link doesn't work for me, but I get your drift. Gone off the idea of that list article. From about 1990 onwards, it (or rather its recipients) drifts into obscurity. It did bring up Joanna Fowler, which is a good example of something, though not quite sure what. Carcharoth (talk) 13:40, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Odd, it's working fine for me (I just double-checked). If you want a quick-and-dirty way to find scientist stubs to create, Natureium maintains a list of winners of major awards which I'm sure you could borrow. Personally, I dislike creating BLPs unless they're on people so obviously notable it would be perverse not to have an article, like heads of state or chart-topping music stars. By their nature, Wikipedia articles are either going to be warts and all and include negative coverage as well as positive; or, they're going to be very anodyne summaries of a career, and make the subject appear extremely boring. In either event, they rarely serve either the public or the article subject at all well; I strongly suspect most of these people would actually prefer it if anyone Googling their name were to land on their personal website, LinkedIn page or their institution's website, rather than on a Wikipedia page. ‑ Iridescent 13:54, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Was a browser issue. This link also gives background Wikipedia:Meetup/Philadelphia/American Chemical Society Notable Chemists and Chemistry. Thanks for the tip, though I have more than enough stubs (or longer articles) to potentially create! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 14:01, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

arbitrary break

• I get your point, Iridescent, and I agree at least partially. On the other hand, we all know that there's simply not going to be enough evidence of problematic administrator behaviour to warrant anything much more than a serious trouting, so a full case is overkill; it could easily have been handled by motion. Mostly, I see the downside of having the BLP subject continuing to have her name dragged through the mud for another couple of months - yes, the media's watching - and that's a really bad thing. I continue to see no upside to the way we deal with BLPs of "people in the news"; it bothers me a great deal that there are so many Wikipedians who are so obsessed with having an article about everything and everyone that our project winds up in the news for its abusiveness toward people.

  On your other point, the zealous guarding of desysop authority (to paraphrase), I suppose a lot of it comes from the sometimes scary amount of abuse that admins active in certain areas receive; I think there's still some good cause to think that admins working in dispute resolution (broadly speaking), socking (including checkusers) and so on are highly likely to be targeted in "community" desysop processes. While I think many of them would "survive" the experience, it would certainly create a chill in supporting admins to work in those areas. Given the number of admins we have, it just wouldn't be practical to have a "readminship" process - although I could see working our way up to requiring much more logged activity by administrators (e.g., must have at least 5 logged admin actions per year). I could see a new category of admins where, after they have passed a full RFA and held the tools for a period, they can step down to an "admin lite" level that allows them to see deleted content, but hand in the rest of the tools, with full readminship up to 2 years after stepping down. Frankly, the biggest issue is that administrator activities and "trusted user status" are really two different concepts (more so now than 10 years ago), and we need to find a better way to address this. But, this is the English Wikipedia community, and it's unlikely to happen. I think Arbcom (back in the day when I was a member) made a serious error in judgment in having a CU/OS election using SecurePoll instead of on-wiki voting, which resulted in almost nobody meeting the minimum criteria for appointment, and implied that the community was playing politics with those tools; if that hadn't happened, I think Arbcom would have long since dropped responsibility for those tools. I've heard rumours that the WMF has some "brilliant" ideas for setting standards for administrators (which will probably include a lot of behavioural rules)...don't say you weren't warned. Risker (talk) 02:07, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

  I see the case has now opened, though voting didn't finish on the motions. Risker, I went looking for links about the SecurePoll CU/OS elections that you mentioned (wiki-archaeology!) and in addition to those, found something about the Audit Subcommittee elections that were a bit earlier: Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Audit Subcommittee/October 2009 election and Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Audit Subcommittee/October 2009 election/SecurePoll feedback and workshop. Then there is Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-19/Arbitration report (ArbCom to appoint CU/OS positions after dumping election results), plus the results, Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/CheckUser and Oversight/May 2010 election, Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Checkuser and oversighter selection and Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard/Archive 6#CheckUser/Oversight election statement. My recollection is that there was a lot of discussion going on at the time behind the scenes. The community response (part of it) can be seen here. Difficult to get a proper handle on things from that long ago. Akashic records indeed. Carcharoth (talk) 09:58, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

You'll get no argument from me; I think the "Wikipedia as news aggregator" mentality is toxic. As well as the issue with dragging people unwillingly into the public eye, we also have issues with the way we treat people who try to add themselves, their friends or family in good faith, and with people who try to weaponize biographical articles to use in off-wiki disputes. (To take an example that's already been raised way up this thread, see Tim Martin (businessman) which at the time of writing contains 18 words on his career and 327 words on his political views.) I occasionally poke my head in at WP:ITN/C to try to at least prevent the worst messes from reaching the main page, but that's a Sisyphean task.

I did say Arbcom has a duty to accept the case, even if it's just to issue an "Arbcom rules that the admin did nothing wrong", or "The admin did something wrong but it was a one-off that doesn't warrant sanctions" motion (my emphasis). This could all have been cleaned up with a quick "Rama, you did fine" or "Rama is trouted" motion. I don't disagree with the reasons for the "zealous guarding"—a community desysop process would mean every admin constantly worrying about upsetting a lobby group, and constant vexatious filings from crazies—but as long as Arbcom are the choke point through which complaints need to go, it creates a duty on them to hear any reasonable complaint or at least give a good explanation on request for rejecting it.

If and when the WMF start setting loyalty oaths and codes of conduct, I might not complain as loudly as you'd expect, even though I'd likely be on the list of names for the initial purge. At the moment the standards are wildly inconsistent, and it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for everyone to know where they stand. How often do we see some variation of "I never realized what I was doing wasn't appropriate"? ‑ Iridescent 11:17, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Is it really about the people, or is it about the politics and other conflicting points of view? I was looking for information on two hydroelectric power schemes on the Thames, and there was nothing in the Wikipedia articles, so I added the details here and here. That doesn't mean I'm about to go anywhere near the Extinction Rebellion pages, or even the Greta Thunberg page (though both look OK). It did make me wonder how many of the "15 [...] electricity generating projects along the river" have been completed. I found this, and this (from 2009), and this and this, and this and this, but am struggling to find an up-to-date overview site. Hydroelectricity in the United Kingdom isn't much help. The Abingdon one got scrapped. Bit more here and here. But now it looks like the Teddington one got quashed, as also reported here. Enough going down that rabbit hole! Carcharoth (talk) 13:52, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

The Thames would seem a singularly crappy place to build a hydro scheme. It's slow-flowing, not particularly tidal for most of its length, still in heavy use for navigation, extremely environmentally sensitive, and lined along its entire length from Lechlade to the Crowstone with some of the most valuable real estate in the world which both raises construction costs and creates massive liabilities in case of flooding. I have no intention of doing the sums but I imagine even converting the Thames Barrier into a giant turbine would probably generate about 1% of the output of a single windfarm in the estuary. When it comes to hydroelectricity, Scotland and Wales—with steep inclines, heavy rainfall, and unpopulated areas where periodic flooding behind the dams won't cause a national crisis—are where the action is. (Although if you're planning a long term investment in renewable energy in the UK, put it on tidal barrages on the Severn, Taw and Swansea Bay.) ‑ Iridescent 14:52, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port

I went there at the weekend, and you're right, it's a lot better than I'd expected it to be. It's very much industrial heritage rather than messing about in boats, and I love that kind of stuff. All the direction signs still say "Boat museum", and I can't help wondering if that puts people off. I think my favourite bit on first visit was the Power Hall, with a collection of engines - and its smell. I noticed several engines have their exhausts connected to the outside, and it seems that they are regularly powered up and run. None was run while I was there, but my ticket is good for a year so I'll certainly go back there. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:35, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Glad I don't need to feel guilty for you wasting a journey… I suspect that as well as the "Boat Museum" issue—and the fact that Ellesmere Port is virtually impossible to get to by public transport from anywhere other than Liverpool or the Wirral—the NWM (and Blue Planet up the road) probably suffer from the fact that Ellesmere Port is just over the border into Cheshire, so they tend to get left out of the Merseyside tourism machine's publicity, but isn't convenient from Chester or Manchester so they don't pick up any of their tourists to compensate. I imagine they also suffer from the fact that their sister museum in Gloucester probably does get quite a lot of passing trade as it's in the city centre of a major tourist hotspot, but is as deeply boring as you'd expect a museum of the history of inland freight shipping in Gloucestershire to be, so a generation of people touring the UK and kids who've been on school trips to the West Country have been put off ever giving the Ellesmere Port museum a chance. (The NWM certainly isn't the most egregious case of a genuinely interesting museum having a name which misrepresents its collection and makes it sound far duller than it actually is, while also having secondary sites which are so boring they put people off from ever visiting the parent institution—National Museum of Wales I'm looking at you.) ‑ Iridescent 21:52, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

After mentioning the NWM to a number of people now, I think you're the only other person I know who's been there. Despite its being in the Merseytravel area and reachable by passes and cheap all-zone tickets, it seems people in Liverpool have hardly heard of it. It gets very little publicity here. The entrance price might be a turn-off, at £9.75 without a concession (or £8.50 with). That does get you multiple visits for a year (which I will use), but I imagine most visitors will only want to go once. (I've never been to any National Museum of Wales sites, but I do have friends in Cardiff - so maybe I'll go see the main one next time I'm there.) Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:45, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm sure my initial theory—that being technically just outside Merseyside means they're not included in any tourist advertising—is correct. It also doesn't really fit the Merseyside/Manchester tourist authorities' preferred image, as it doesn't easily pigeonhole into their "cutting edge of the future for the past two centuries" official narrative. If you ever visit any of the big Manchester museums—MoSI, Manchester Art Gallery, Imperial War Museum North and the Manchester Museum—it's somewhat entertaining watching them try to cram every single object on display—be it a 19th-century nude painting, a preserved 1830s railway booking-office or the skull of a dead horse—into the "driver of the world's cultural change" pigeonhole. (The new Liverpool Museum next to the ferry terminal manages to neatly side-step the issue by refusing to display any artefact that doesn't fit the "hotbed of progressiveness" narrative, so Paul McCartney's old trousers and assorted April Ashley ephemera are duly displayed but all that unfortunate focal point of the world's slave trade unpleasantness is unfortunately omitted through lack of space.)

If you want to take your Merseyrail pass to the other end of the line next time, the British Lawnmower Museum is also more interesting than you'd expect it to be. Go on a sunny day so you can enjoy the rest of Southport, as it certainly won't take up a full day.

The main National Museum of Wales in Cardiff is one of the world's great museums; don't be put off by the name which conjures up images of "history of the leek" and grimy photos of coal mines. The subsidiary museum in Swansea is worth seeing but not worth going to see, and the Roman stuff in Newport is interesting if you like that kind of thing. Some of their other sites are jaw-droppingly boring. (If you ever get to Tenby, I highly recommend the Tenby Museum and Art Gallery. As with all of Pembrokeshire, the big Welsh bodies see it as something of a ginger stepchild so it doesn't have the NMW imprimatur, but they've managed to build an excellent collection without central assistance, helped by managing to hold on to a big stack of Gwen and Augustus John's best work. Tenby is also arguably the prettiest small town in Europe.) ‑ Iridescent 15:14, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

There is a separate museum devoted to slavery in Liverpool, pretty much next door to the one you mention. Alas, it wasn't very good when I went there, although the maritime museum below it was fine. And there is nothing wrong with the history of vegetables - see this :) - Sitush (talk) 15:23, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Somewhere, I have a (print) essay by William H. McNeill called If Pisarro Had Not Found Potatoes in Peru, making the convincing case that this was the most important event in world history. From memory, the argument was that because potatoes grow below ground they were unaffected by an invading army, and consequently they broke the cycle of scorched-earth genocides in Europe and Asia, forcing conquering armies to either occupy defeated enemies or massacre them completely rather than just looting their cities and moving on, and consequently leading to the development of modern nation-states. ‑ Iridescent 15:40, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

And how would Scousers survive without chips? I remember once eating what was effectively egg and chips in the Himalayan foothills in Nepal (Ellesmere Port, Southport, Nepal - I get around), and reflecting on the power of the potato. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:08, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Yep, I'm sure you're right about being just outside Merseyside as a big problem. And there's no Beatles or football, or "Aren't Scousers great?" in it. The Museum of Liverpool by the ferry is indeed dire in its approach. There have been slavery exhibitions in the Maritime Museum building from time to time, but nothing that even tries to reflect the full horror of it - mustn't put all the Japanese Beatles fans off their overpriced ice creams by showing them the crimes against humanity that we've been responsible for. There's a great Merseyside history that could be told that would be of genuine scholarly interest, but it's all about attracting the tourist dollar/yen here now.

As for Southport, yes, I've already been to see Lee Mack's dibber - the lawnmower museum is a gem. I'm in Southport quite often as I meet friends there for cycle rides, and Merseyrail is very bike friendly. The Southport Botanic Gardens in Churchtown used to have an idiosyncratic little museum, but Sefton Council closed it in 2011 to save costs. As for Manchester, I don't think I've ever been to any museum or gallery there, which is pretty bad really - I've traveled to far-flung places and their exhibits, but I've shamefully neglected those near my doorstep. But I'm slowly putting that right. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:03, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

MAG Gallery Three. Those little squares are actually large oil paintings; Sirens is so goofily large that everything else looks like a speck beside it.

If you get to MOSI in Manchester, then unless they've changed things around the labelling on the rebuilt Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine and on the display on the Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway will look startlingly familiar. The Manchester Art Gallery is worth visiting even if you've no real interest in its contents; photos don't do justice to how disconcerting The Sirens and Ulysses is when you're up close. Plus, they have a huge number of items on show that are such familiar elements of popular culture you almost forget that they actually had originals; it's surprisingly unsettling to find yourself face-to-face with The Light of the World. (Even though Jimbo wouldn't approve, I'm a great fan of Manchester; they've managed to regenerate the city without killing the atmosphere, and without the rich centre/poor inner city/rich suburbs apartheid that afflicts London and Liverpool.) I don't know if it's still there, but Manchester also used to house this thing as well. ‑ Iridescent 18:32, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank You

Dear Iridescent, Thank you for your note about Google Doodles at Wikipedia: Village Pump. If we were to pay Google, how would we find the money? Vorbee (talk) 07:53, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

It could come out of the $2 million bribe Google pays the WMF for not complaining too loudly about Knowledge Graph repeatedly ripping off our content without attribution to the editors "giving back in the spirit of sustainability", maybe? In reality, if such a deal were to happen, it would be in terms of a quid pro quo skill-sharing agreement between the respective boards, rather than a transfer of cash.

It won't happen; forthcoming Google Doodles are a closely-held secret to prevent the SEO firms finding out, which would mean Google would need to use anonymous socks if they planned to work on the articles beforehand without tipping people off. Granting a blanket exemption from Wikipedia's usual rules to Google—which is possibly the least-trusted corporation on the planet (our laundry-list of allegations against them is currently at 7000 words and rising, and the current furore about the blacklisting of Huawei has yet to be added to that list)—would lead to a mass exodus. (If you're not already aware, this is what happened last time the WMF tried to cosy up to Google.) ‑ Iridescent 08:20, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Well, that was interesting

Looking back a day or so later, the discussion here almost became a train-wreck, but the newly found tendency to not pull things where there is some opposition (nicknamed the push-me-pull-you effect), saved the day. Not sure if Ritchie has your talk page watch-listed (I don't think he commented after nominating it, other than on the moment of emotion displayed by May)? Maybe it is OK to talk about this, but as it is still up there on the Main Page, maybe not. I also saw the European Parliament election ITN/R discussion, and that is now up again at ITN/C now the results are in. Maybe that discussion will produce a clearer consensus. I am not going to comment, as I have other things to do today! Carcharoth (talk) 08:00, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

I'd tend to agree with TRM's comment; although it's not worth pulling, the announcement should never have been posted in the first place. It now sets a precedent for every non-spontaneous news story to run on the main page twice, once on the day it's announced and once on the day. (Why isn't 2019 Greek legislative election ITN now, the day after the election was called, as well as the routine posting it will get when the results come in? It's certainly going to be the main news story in Greece at the moment.) All that said, except in the most egregious cases trying to stem the flow of crap at ITN is like trying to beat back the tide with a spoon—along with its equally ugly sister DYK it's largely WP:OWNed by a small circle of cranks who substitute "I like it" for "it meets the criteria".

The European Parliament discussion is, I think, mainly based on a misunderstanding among North Americans on what the European Parliament actually does. Americans tend to see the EU as equivalent to their own federal government, and don't appreciate just how toothless even the Commission itself, let alone the Parliament, actually are when it comes to anything outside their core competency of harmonising trade and trading standards regulations. (The EU doesn't do itself any favours with its "choose your future" posturing, as it just feeds the myth that it interferes in the affairs of national governments; the EU really doesn't do very much that isn't anodyne and uncontroversial.) ‑ Iridescent 09:12, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Hmmm. That sounds almost as easy as fishing with a spoon. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:24, 27 May 2019 (UTC) p.s. "The EU is a real headache. That's why I always take Anondyn."

Even stupid Americans are people too, you know... Martinevans123 (talk)

Old drafts

Unsurprisingly, it is a real pain to try and do something with old drafts in userspace. Leaving a draft knocking around for over 10 years wasn't a great idea, but with a 100th anniversary coming up, it felt like now or never! So I pushed Eddington experiment to mainspace. After tidying it up and various other problems, am wondering if it was worth it (turns out someone out there had written a whole book on the subject while I twiddled my thumbs, and various Wikipedia articles accumulated bits and bobs on the subject). The ambitions I had for that article will have to wait, as that is all I have time for right now. Bit of a moot point as to whether it is a spin off from Arthur Eddington (which has a good account already) or from Solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 (which was created in 2009). Oh, and talking of people stumbling across old drafts, I must go and thank NYB for this (though he may see this post here as well). Carcharoth (talk) 14:47, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Presumably if there's a recent book on the topic, at some point you want to go through that and see if there's anything obvious that's been missed, or more importantly that contradicts what this article is saying. At a very quick skim, this looks the kind of thing that could make quite a good TFA, as it pushes a lot of current hot topic buttons. I cleared most of the drafts out of my userspace, although I might one day have another stab at Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape which is a genuinely important topic that's currently very inadequately covered. ‑ Iridescent 18:44, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

"Men of Science More or Less Agog over Results...." per NYT. Great stuff! Johnbod (talk) 18:58, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

My all-time favourite "people struggling to describe feats of science and engineering that are so unfamiliar they literally have no reference points" style of reporting is Fanny Kemble trying to describe Stephenson's railway experiments, writing at a time when unless one worked in either a mine or a cotton mill, almost nobody in the country had ever seen any kind of heavy machinery:

We were introduced to the little engine which was to drag us along the rails. She (for they make these curious little fire horses all mares) consisted of a boiler, a stove, a platform, a bench, and behind the bench a barrel containing enough water to prevent her being thirsty for fifteen miles, the whole machine not bigger than a common fire engine. She goes upon two wheels, which are her feet, and are moved by bright steel legs called pistons; these are propelled by steam, and in proportion as more steam is applied to the upper extremities (the hip-joints, I suppose) of these pistons, the faster they move the wheels; and when it is desirable to diminish the speed, the steam, which unless suffered to escape would burst the boiler, evaporates through a safety valve into the air. The reins, bit, and bridle of this wonderful beast, is a small steel handle, which applies or withdraws the steam from its legs or pistons, so that a child might manage it. The coals, which are its oats, were under the bench, and there was a small glass tube affixed to the boiler, with water in it, which indicates by its fullness or emptiness when the creature wants water, which is immediately conveyed to it from its reservoirs ...

This snorting little animal, which I felt rather inclined to pat, was then harnessed to our carriage, and Mr. Stephenson having taken me on the bench of the engine with him, we started at about ten miles an hour ... [George Stephenson's] way of explaining himself is peculiar, but very striking, and I understood, without difficulty, all that he said to me ... The engine having received its supply of water, the carriage was placed behind it, for it cannot turn, and was set off at its utmost speed, thirty-five miles an hour, swifter than a bird flies (for they tried the experiment with a snipe). You cannot conceive what that sensation of cutting the air was; the motion is as smooth as possible, too. I could either have read or written; and as it was, I stood up, and with my bonnet off 'drank the air before me.' The wind, which was strong, or perhaps the force of our own thrusting against it, absolutely weighed my eyelids down. When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description; yet strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear ...

Now for a word or two about the master of all these marvels, with whom I am most horribly in love. He is a man from fifty to fifty-five years of age; his face is fine, though careworn, and bears an expression of deep thoughtfulness; his mode of explaining his ideas is peculiar and very original, striking, and forcible; and although his accents indicates strongly his north country birth, his language has not the slightest touch of vulgarity or coarseness. He has certainly turned my head. Four years have sufficed to bring this great undertaking to an end. The railroad will be opened upon the fifteenth of next month. The Duke of Wellington is coming down to be present on the occasion, and, I suppose, what with the thousands of spectators and the novelty of the spectacle, there will never have been a scene of more striking interest.

Per my comments here, this is a good illustration of where a direct quote sheds real light to present day readers on what life in other times or other places was actually like. That NYT headline is the same; anyone can say "this was important", but actually proving that this was considered a big story at the time is something different; the popular-culture view of 19th- and early 20th-century science is that the early physicists were laughed at, and only had their achievements recognised years later. ‑ Iridescent 19:32, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes, will need to get the recent book on the topic. I am expecting a slew of popular science/news articles as well (some have already been published: [4], [5], [6]). The historiography and interpretation of things have changed over the years. I have a soft spot for the topic, as I did an undergraduate essay on this in the 1990s. It has been interesting to see various waves of publications about this since then, as well as taking a more in-depth look at it with the resources now available compared to back then (1990s). Actually, there are two other books as well, reviewed here. Will add them to the article as well. Oh, and a conference on it as well. So I guess wait for all that to settle down and then see where things are at. Carcharoth (talk) 09:24, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom 2019 special circular

Administrators must secure their accounts The Arbitration Committee may require a new RfA if your account is compromised. Use strong, unique passwords for your Wikipedia account and associated email Change your password now if your Wikipedia account password or email password is reused on another website, exposed, or weak Enable two-factor authentication now for improved security

View additional information

Why have I received this message? All administrators are receiving it. What prompted you to send this message? Recently, several Wikipedia admin accounts were compromised. The admin accounts were desysopped on an emergency basis. In the past, the Committee often resysopped admin accounts as a matter of course once the admin was back in control of their account. The committee has updated its guidelines. Admins may now be required to undergo a fresh Request for Adminship (RfA) after losing control of their account. What do I need to do? Only to follow the instructions in this message. Check that your password is unique (not reused across sites). Check that your password is strong (not simple or guessable). Enable Two-factor authentication (2FA), if you can, to create a second hurdle for attackers. How can I find out more about two-factor authentication (2FA)? You can find out more about 2FA at m:2FA.

This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:40, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

For anyone else curious about this piece of scaremongering, the (well-hidden) central discussion is Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Return of permissions to administrators notice. ‑ Iridescent 06:15, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for that link. Now I am busy wondering if the 2FA bit falls into the mentality Technology Will Fix Everything that we are seeing way too frequently elsewhere in the real world... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:41, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

No, it falls into "we need to be seen to be doing something to justify our existence, and this is something"; see Politician's syllogism. Looking at the discussion, it looks like they genuinely didn't grasp that putting out a statement that basically reads "screw what the RFC said two weeks ago, we're going to just make up a non-existent policy and demand that everyone complies" would provoke a backlash. ‑ Iridescent 12:57, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for that link. In many ways I use your Talk the way we used to use AN:K, a central and functional noticeboard. I'm around slightly more than I used to be, but seriously contemplating giving up the Mop. I don't need it, rarely use it and holy crap things seem to have gotten infinitely and unnecessarily more complicated in the last decade. I have a secure password so this isn't about this, but the broader this. StarM 15:43, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

I think Keeper is still about, just editing mainly from IPs. (On how different things have become, see my comment above that As someone who's been a legacy admin (four admin actions between 2011–2015), I still believe that it's an issue; coming back even from a relatively short time away is a culture shock since the wording of the policies generally doesn't change but the interpretation of them does. Arbcom's refusal (for arguably legitimate reasons) to maintain archives for WP:ARC means it's virtually impossible to conduct any kind of analysis of "which types of action raise concerns and which concerns does the committee accept as valid?", so we're stuck with anecdotal evidence, but I don't think you can seriously claim that inactive admins re-emerging, and active admins suddenly deciding to barge into an area they've never touched before and screwing up, aren't a genuine problem. It may not necessarily be that things have actually got more complicated, but it's hard for anyone who hasn't been there and done that to appreciate just how different things are now.) ‑ Iridescent 15:48, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

I actually wanted to respond on the discussion board to the notice, but the amusing part is the discussion was never created, and I figured it was not in my best interests to create a new thread. At the bottom of the motion, it said 'Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Return of permissions for compromised administrator accounts'. If you click the link, I believe it still doesn't actually take you to the current discussion which was manually created by a current admin after she noticed there was nowhere to discuss it. It merely takes you to the discussion board, not the topic. Enigma^msg 00:45, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

It looks like what happened is that the section was correctly created at the time of the motion, but the committee then spent so much time discussing whether a special notice needed to be sent out, and deciding on the wording of the motion, that the discussion was archived by the bot in the meantime, and consequently User:Liz needed to re-create it when she received the notice and wanted to ask about it. As with most of this sorry episode, the absence of a discussion seems to have been a cock-up rather than a conspiracy. ‑ Iridescent 07:10, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Ah, ok. Here's what happened. I went to the archive list and they were all dated up to "Feb 2019 –", so I figured that was the most recent one and it should include the discussion from April, if there was one. No discussion there. It appears someone must've been manually marking the archives and dating them, but that person stopped doing it, so the archive I mentioned is actually Archive #39, and not the most recent one (#40). Enigma^msg 16:05, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Arbcom being disorgnanized? 😲 ‑ Iridescent 16:11, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Yep I sent up the bat signal to him. How different is a very good way of putting it. Amid all the inactivity discussions I keep hoping to find a Readers' Digest of changes akin to how you can track changes to notability and other guidelines. In the mean time, this is a pretty good clearing house as everyone seems to land here. StarM 02:16, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

@Star Mississippi, working through the back issues of Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter would probably be as good a place to start as any. ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Ooh, thanks for that tip. Apologies for the delay. Remember when I had to rename due to a certain editor's actions & you mused whether I'd ever been to Mississippi? You were indeed right, I finally remedied that last week. Alas I didn't pass through my namesake as I took a different route. StarM 02:03, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

I've been through through MS, but AFAIK have never actually stopped in it. Of all the states, it's probably the one about which I know the least. (I tend to avoid the South; I don't do heat if I can help it.) ‑ Iridescent 19:58, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Administrator account security (Correction to Arbcom 2019 special circular)

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are required to "have strong passwords and follow appropriate personal security practices." We have updated our procedures to ensure that we enforce these policies more strictly in the future. The policies themselves have not changed. In particular, two-factor authentication remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.

We are sorry for the wording of our previous message, which did not accurately convey this, and deeply regret the tone in which it was delivered.

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:03, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Apparently the Arbs got the message from your talk page response above, Iri. I chuckled. ceranthor 21:14, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

The annoying thing is that part of the intent behind this—"if you use a weak password you only have yourself to blame"—is completely valid, but the attempts by a couple of arbs to take the opportunity to rewrite policy by fiat to push their pet theories about 2FA, and the subsequent lies and obfuscation, have meant that the sound part of the message is being missed. I personally think the whole thing is completely overblown—there are a couple of things a compromised account could do that would actually cause damage rather than being a slight nuisance but they've never happened and even if they did would still be fixable. We're not talking about the secret override codes that will destroy the internet. ‑ Iridescent 09:06, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

TFA

... with thanks from QAI

Thank you for Droxford railway station, with a history!

"In 1897 the London and South Western Railway built a new railway line to block the Great Western Railway from expanding to Portsmouth, and as a consequence we now have Brexit; I may have left out some intervening steps, but that's basically the gist.

Droxford was an obscure country station that was built just in time for the combination of the First World War and the internal combustion engine to render it uneconomic. For three days in 1944 it was one of the most important places in the world; it was here that Commonwealth leaders monitored the troops massing for the Normandy landings, it was here that Ernest Bevin and Anthony Eden held their secret discussions about the Conservative and Labour parties cooperating in peacetime; above all, it was here that Winston Churchill annoyed Charles de Gaulle to such an extent that Anglo-French relations broke down, leaving Britain (and Ireland) outside the nascent European Economic Community."

I am sorry I missed the FAC, but you had John, sadly missed. Blues mood. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:01, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Optional_RfA_candidate_poll#Shut this down?

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Optional_RfA_candidate_poll#Shut this down?. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:40, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Replied there. ‑ Iridescent 11:13, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Red link in the image sequence at the page top

File:Free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects. (14332427586).jpg has gone the way of the dodo, seems like. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:05, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Don't know what the image was about but Billinghurst deleted it, as out of scope. Commons improving standards? ∯WBG^converse 08:46, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Ironically, it was an illustration intended to represent "bullying and harassment". ‑ Iridescent 19:04, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

@Winged Blades of Godric: The file is still available on Flickr. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:22, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Signs of hope?

Spotted this (the COI announced; still rather blatant; it got shut down very quickly, but it is a good example of several things, some good some not so good). Was also impressed with this. Carcharoth (talk) 15:51, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Jack Cade got to the nomination alright  :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:03, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Given that Opabinia regalis says a couple of threads up that this "legacy admin" business is more meme than reality and Arbs Are Never Wrong, there must be a legitimate reason why a self-confessed spammer with 942 edits and a grand total of one admin action in the past decade still retains the sysop bit. (For those who've blotted out the WMF's early history from their memory or weren't around at the time, Brad Patrick was the general counsel and interim director of the WMF who managed to fail to spot that the person they were hiring to be the WMF's CEO had a string of criminal convictions and was currently on parole.) ‑ Iridescent 18:03, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

BP's user page looks like a promo. - Sitush (talk) 18:22, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

I probably should not ask, but what are we talking about? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:28, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

This piece of spamming at WP:ITN/C, and its nominator. ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

IIRC, he is currently the only sysop on en.wiki (and probably any project?) that retains +sysop without an RfA. Well except the obvious exception. There was a rather pointless AN thread about it a few years ago. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:53, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

I've seen legacy admins who are out of touch with policy, but being unable to handle an ITN template or even wikilinks is a whole new level.-- Pawnkingthree (talk) 19:03, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni I don't believe that's correct. This is the list of admins as of 13 June 2003 (the day before WP:RFA was created), and while many of them are inactive or blocked, there are still around 20 survivors from the days of Jimmy handing out user rights to his buddies, a few of whom are still very active. You may recall a certain amount of unpleasantness at the time of the Arbcom elections last year regarding a then-admin who got their adminship via the "puff of white smoke from Jimbo's chimney" route. ‑ Iridescent 19:12, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Ha. That reminds me, over on TVTropes we all get the stick via "puff of white smoke from the staff chimney". Although some people I recognize as active and not as troublemakers are also on that list. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:41, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

But TVTropes hasn't spent the better part of two decades beating its own chest about how radically transparent and accountable it is. Plus, I would imagine that if you discovered that one of your sysops (1) didn't know what a wikilink was and (2) was using their userpage to host an advert for their employer and (3) was requesting you run advertising for their employer on your front page, either that user or that user's sysop rights would quietly disappear. ‑ Iridescent 20:01, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Ah yes, I should have clarified, I meant without any discussion either on the list pre-RfA, though I suspect Angela might also fall into that camp. Now that I think about it, you’re right that there’s probably a few still kicking where Jimmy just flipped the bit with no questions asked after a private email. Might be fair to say he’s the only RfAless RfA-era admin on any major project. That being said, there are some projects where even crat has been handed out on a whim without an RfB, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the Latvian Wikiquote has an admin who never went through one. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:32, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Some diffs: [7] [8] [9] Enigma^msg 23:31, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Magnus Manske will certainly fall into that camp, at least—as the author of MediaWiki 1.0 he was quite literally the first person with advanced user rights. ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Iridescent, I'm not sure that "arbs are never wrong" is a good paraphrase of Opabinia's comments above. (And it's obviously not something she believes, given, if nothing else, the number of times she's been outvoted on things). Were you possibly thinking of someone else's comment there?

On the subject of "legacy admins," your observation about your own relatively inactive period illustrates why a solution to the perceived problem is so difficult. Under many of the failed proposals, you would have been desysopped by 2015; I doubt (correct me if I'm wrong) that you would have been interested in going through RFA again after you returned; but it's clearly beneficial that you remain an admin today, so any policy that would have removed you would be a "net negative" in at least this instance, and I expect a number of others. Newyorkbrad (talk) 07:54, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

The part I'm attributing to Opabinia is the part highlighted with the {{Talk quote inline}} template (this "legacy admin" business is more meme than reality), which is definitely a fair paraphrase of her words since it's a direct quote. Arbs Are Never Wrong is a more general tendency which certain committee members (not OR) have always suffered from but seems to be more pronounced with this incarnation, and with two committee members in particular who appear genuinely to believe in Arbitrator Infallibility and consequently consider disagreement with their opinions to be prima facie evidence of disruption.

There would be ways to address the legacy admin issue, but they all suffer from the difficulty in turning around Wikipedia's huge cultural inertia. Ultimately the issues all come back to the "RFA is hell" meme; if there were routine reconfirmations (say, every five years for active admins, after a year of complete inactivity or after two years with no logged admin actions), RFA would be as routine and uncontroversial as renewing accreditation in any real-life field. (The concerns that a mass of renewals would flood RFA are valid, but there are ways around them; the reconfirmation only runs the full week if there is significant opposition in the first 48 hours, for instance.) Besides, it would for the first time in a decade give the crats something to do. ‑ Iridescent 08:51, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

I agree in principle with reconfirmation RfAs but always have a lingering suspicion that everyone the admin has offended will come out of the woodwork. While that can happen even at a first RfA, I think it pretty inevitable that any moderately active admin will have upset a lot more people than most in their pre-admin state. And on the subject of emerging from woodwork, Master Jay isn't showing much sign of doing that yet. - Sitush (talk) 08:59, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Well, I guess Users:NJA and Amorymeltzer are the epitome of being legacy admins, and they haven't smashed the windows yet. But MasterJay, yeah; we could've dried that out and fertilized the lawn with it. ——SerialNumber54129 09:53, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, would that sentence have read differently if I'd put parenthesised yet...?  :) ——SerialNumber54129 09:53, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

If I'm infallible, and I say I'm wrong, am I right? :)

Eh, I think this is actually a pretty good example of what I meant. If the worst a "legacy admin" is doing is making a sort of tone-deaf suggestion on a back-office project page, what's the actual problem? (Getting too fussed about "COI on the main page!!!" seems a little over the top about a post that's basically "hey, my coworkers did something cool and I'm excited about it", as a proposal for a single link in a little-noticed section of a page whose contents nobody really wants anyway, except the search box and maybe the TFA.) It's not like we're short on admin bits and they're stopping someone else from getting one.

I've never warmed up to the reconfirmation idea. A real-world re-accreditation would be a judgment in relation to a reasonably well-defined standard by a specific professional body. RfRC would be a judgment in relation to the current wikipolitical winds by an unstable group of mostly reasonable people unpredictably mixed in with varying numbers of petty grudge-bearers, RfA obsessives, and ANI shitposters. 85% of the time it would go fine, because most admins do mostly boring things and one or two bad calls or unfortunate troll encounters wouldn't cause much fuss. But it'd probably cause more harm in the form of hurt feelings, frustration, and disengagement on the part of perfectly good admins than benefit in the form of removing bad admins. Everybody who thinks that the problem with RfA, or with the existing admin corps, is insufficient desysopping of bad admins knows where the case requests page is. If terrible adminning is really so widespread, we should be drowning in cases. Opabinia regalis (talk) 06:46, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

OR, have you seen the page of the user in question? This isn't "hey, my coworkers did something cool and I'm excited about it", this is blatant advertising. I agree that ITN is unloved, but we're still talking about a page that averages 17 million views per day and is arguably the most valuable piece of internet real estate in the world (the only pages that get more views are the homepages of Google and Baidu which are untouchable by advertisers, and Facebook and Youtube which are unique to each viewer).

"Nobody is complaining to Arbcom so everybody must be happy" is a nonsense argument given the nature of Wikipedia's bureaucracy. As you know we have a current open admin-conduct case—a relatively bland and straightforward example of the "I am concerned this admin may be interpreting rules incorrectly and/or overstepping their remit" school rather than a full-scale descent into vindictiveness or a case which requires lengthy analysis of complex social or legal issues. At the time of writing, this case—only half-complete—runs to:

1. Case request page, 7,098 words, 42,118 characters;
2. Case request talk page: 12,261 words, 73,178 characters;
3. Evidence: 9,348 words, 57,973 characters;
4. Evidence talk: 6,010 words, 35,579 characters;
5. Workshop: 22,564 words, 139,184 characters;
6. Workshop talk: 1,467 words, 9,149 characters.

That comes to around 60,000 words already, with all the sound and fury of the PD, the decision, and the enforcement to come. Given not only the timesink issue, but the fact that except in the most blatantly clear-cut cases the filing party will be typically subsequently be targeted for harassment by the friends of the reported admin, the surprise isn't that there aren't more arb cases filed, but that there are still any at all. I could, without pausing for breath, instantly name three admins who are so incompetent their activity is actively disruptive, but they could be replacing every image on the main page with goatse and I still wouldn't bother formally reporting them to Arbcom (as opposed to a "hey, have you guys seen this?" email to arbcom-l).

Reconfirmation would provide a mechanism for weeding the problem admins out; because there would no longer be the "this decision is de facto irreversible" concern we'd then be able to start giving the admin bit out far more freely, so although it would result in increased churn, we'd probably improve in terms of both the total admin numbers, and in editor retention in general. As NYB alludes to but is too polite to say so explicitly, I'd be one of those whose reconfirmation would be likely to fail, as I've told too many people over the years that they can't always have what they want; I still think it's a price well worth paying if it breaks or at least weakens the hierarchical mentality. I don't really get it'd probably cause more harm in the form of hurt feelings, frustration, and disengagement on the part of perfectly good admins than benefit in the form of removing bad admins as an argument; if someone is that invested in the admin bit as part of their identity that they'd walk out altogether were they to lose it, they're probably someone whose relationship with Wikipedia is unhealthy for both them and us and it would do good for them to be forced to think "is it right I devote so much of my time to blocking strangers on a website?". Swedish Wikipedia has annual mandatory re-RFA, Portuguese Wikipedia has "anyone can call for an admin to re-run RFA" and Dutch Wikipedia has "every year, if an admin has five complaints about their conduct they're obliged to re-run RFA", (all with an "as far as I know this is still the case" disclaimer; they may have changed their processes) and none of them have fallen apart yet. ‑ Iridescent 07:55, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

The problem I see is that if someone is that invested in the admin bit as part of their identity that they'd walk out altogether were they to lose it, they're probably someone whose relationship with Wikipedia is unhealthy for both them and us and it would do good for them to be forced to think "is it right I devote so much of my time to blocking strangers on a website?". and many similar arguments will invariably be read as "well, suck it up". Besides, some people will take issue with having a pile of often questionable complaints raised even if they pass the reconfirmation RfA, just like some people go away after being blocked/brought to ANI even if the block was overturned as improper (and perhaps the blocking admin defrocked)/the ANI ended up with a boomerang. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:29, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Regarding reconfirmation, I'd actually look at the Commons process for deadminship RfAs; it specifically says Please note this process should only be used for serious offenses in which there seems to be some consensus for removal; for individual grievances, please use commons:Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/User problems. De-adminship requests that are opened without prior discussion leading to some consensus for removal may be closed by a bureaucrat as inadmissible.. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:29, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Serious offences, we can handle fine, as those go to Arbcom. Where en-wiki falls down is with admins with a long history of repeated low-level incompetence but never quite rising to a smoking gun of a serious breach. (Obvious recent example, but hardly unique.) I'm not sure we really need to be taking lessons from Commons on vetting standards, anyway. How many convicted sex criminals currently hold advanced permissions there? Is the answer anything other than "none"? ‑ Iridescent 15:20, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Reconfirmation RfA standards or admin standards? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:54, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Your link to that ANI reminded me of another obvious example of an admin who is prolific with the block button who, imo, makes worse blocks than anything in the recent ArbCom cases, but makes so many of them that the Huggle crowd would be up in arms if the committee did anything. (and no, I will not name names)

I'm not really sure how to describe the problem of so prolific with their use of the tools in one area that we tolerate their blatant disregard for policy because it would be too much work to fix type of situations. We have several of those, and they always make me shake my head when stuff like the Giantsnowman case happened because I can think of multiple admins off the top of my head that are way worse on the type of behaviour that was complained about there. It is an area we as a community (and as sysops) fail, but I'm not really sure there is a good solution. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:16, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

I assume I know who you have in mind, and (again without naming names) just gonna put this here; the small handful of trigger-happy admins are literally responsible for more blocks than the rest of Wikipedia combined. ‑ Iridescent 20:45, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

The problem with a list like that is that it doesn't, in itself, reflect whether the names at the top are the worst admins or the best or somewhere in between. An admin with a lot of blocks may be trigger-happy and driving contributors away ... or else perhaps that admin is doing far more than his or her share of the work at AIV and (the useful part of) UAA.

I don't necessarily want to get into naming names either, but in my roughly eight-and-a-half years on the ArbCom, I can't recall any case involving repeated, significant misuse of admin tools (as opposed to isolated incidents) that were brought before us and that we didn't at least take a close look at. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:21, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Well, yes, I'm not critiquing ArbCom and I don't think Iri was implying that necessarily everyone near the top of the list was trigger happy. My point was that there are definitely admins who no one will take to ArbCom if only for the fact that AIV/CSD/UAA/WHATEVER will grind to a halt because in addition to making up their own rules as they go along, they also do the overwhelming majority of the work there, a substantial portion of it good, and no one really wants to have to go through thousands of log entries to find the 5% that are bad enough to merit a case, not to mention pick up the slack that would occur if a desysop happened. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:30, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

One thing that would help good admins avoid mistakes would be to more strongly encourage admins to request more second opinions in borderline or unusual cases. When I used to spend a bit of time patrolling UAA and AIV and occasionally AN3, I'd block the obvious vandals and trolls, no-action or warn-only on the bad reports, and occasionally post a "this is borderline" or "I'm not sure, what do others think." That may seem like a luxury when a board is overflowing with reports, but we need more of it. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:36, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Tony, there's plenty of admins to pick up the slack if the most prolific three-letter-acronym-process grinders were removed. F'rexample, every time I've poked my nose into CAT:CSD or one of the weekly image deletion categories like CAT:ORFU in the past year, I open a half dozen pages up in tabs, get through one or maybe two, and then find out everything in the entire category has been simultaneously deleted with Twinkle. I can't possibly be the only one this happens to, over and over. —Cryptic 01:23, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Cryptic, reminds me of how I stopped regularly going to AIV when I became 99% certain some admins go through the page history to block accounts that haven’t edited since other admins declined the block request. To be fair, I also regularly block declined AIV request, but that’s usually because of CU... TonyBallioni (talk) 03:32, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Cryptic, I used to work on CSD quite a lot, and as you know there are many improper nominations (which is to be expected, as the criteria are very specific). I got pissed off with it for various reasons. One is that I kept seeing what you and others have seen, some admins just nuking everything that's been reported without taking any time to check properly. I've seen similar problems at various WP:TLAs (and don't get me started on AFC) but I just don't have sufficient time or motivation to challenge the fiefdoms of incompetence that some obsessive regulars have staked out. Another reason I gave up at CSD is the shit I used to get from people whose nominations I declined, and I'm talking about experienced people who should know better. G11 is the most common one, and there are experienced people here who use it to nominate anything that they think has any hint of conflict of interest, and they're supported by admins who delete regardless of content (when G11 is only for pages "that are exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten"). Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 07:45, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Oh, and on the subject of "plenty of admins to pick up the slack if the most prolific three-letter-acronym-process grinders were removed", I recall one example of a prolific admin working on unblock requests (another backlogged area). Their eventual exclusion from the admin cadre might have added to the backlog, but it greatly enhanced the fairness of the process. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 07:49, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

I concur with Cryptic's observation, to the extent that I've largely given up patrolling CAT:EX and CAT:CSD as it's intensely irritating to spend time drafting a patient explanation of why I'm declining a particular nomination, only to find one of the usual suspects running "batch delete" and deleting everything regardless of whether it meets any deletion criterion or not. Watch WP:RFPP for any length of time and you'll rapidly notice a couple of admins who'll automatically accede to all but the most frivolous requests, despite protection supposedly being a last resort when all other measures have failed. @NYB, I'm not suggesting Arbcom don't take seriously concerns that are brought to them; I'm suggesting that the recent fetishisation of bureaucracy by the committee makes it virtually impossible to bring such concerns to them in the first place; few of us want to embark on a process that can quite literally take up an hour per day for a full calendar month, just to say "I'm concerned that User:Foo may be misinterpreting the criteria for revision deletion but when I raised the matter with them they didn't give a satisfactory answer". ‑ Iridescent 20:00, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Iridescent, how does batch delete work—does it mmen you have to delete everything selected under a single criteria, or carn you have a mix? E.g., delete a 100 pages under both U5 and G11? ——SerialNumber54129 12:54, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

@Serial Number 54129: With one "batch" of Batch Delete you can use only one deletion reason. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 13:11, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: You're very kind, many thanks. I wondered how someone had managed to delete a hundred userpages as U5 without there being a G11 among them :D ——SerialNumber54129 13:25, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

I sometimes think there is competitiveness among those I call, the "deleting admins", to delete the most pages (I don't think it's similar for blocks). I look at the numbers and there is just no way that they are giving individual pages a glance of more than a few seconds. And I wish we could disable batch delete option from Twinkle...except for rampant vandalism, I think it holds the potential for serious damage. If an admin is going to delete a page from Wikipedia, I think the least they can do is inspect each page and make sure the tags are accurate. I'm reassured when I go post a message to an editor and see a notice on the talk page from an editor or admin about incorrect CSD tagging...I know that person is paying attention and got to a tagged but valid page before it was deleted.

But as a newish admin, I'm unlikely to accuse any specific admin of incorrect behavior. If they are brought to ArbCom I might comment, but otherwise the most I will do is not emulate their behavior. Of course, maybe when I've been an admin for 10 years, I might feel differently than I do now. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:12, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

WP:ADMINSTATS: worst idea ever. Evvverrrr. At least the xtools page loads slowly enough that people can't really keep score with it. —Cryptic 01:56, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

P.S. My personal pet peeve? User pages that are tagged for not WEBHOST or PROMOTIONAL reasons when there might just be a sentence or two about the editor on the page! Seriously? That tag is supposed to be for user pages where the editor keeps the results of their fantasy football league or pages full of information about their job or band, not for an editor to say a little bit about themselves. But I see those two tags misapplied, usually by eager, newbie editors. And when the editor has been inactive since 2008? What is the point in deleting that page? Grrrr. </soapbox> Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:21, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes; WP:U5 is a particularly sore spot with me as well. If you read the discussion that led to its enactment, it's clear that it was meant to exclude anything that even looked like an attempt at an article. So what does it overwhelmingly get used for, well over 95% of taggings in my experience? Drafts like User:James1770/sandbox. And I don't even bother declining them anymore, because they kept on getting retagged and then deleted as soon as my back was turned. —Cryptic 01:56, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

And the admin who deleted that is something of a case in point, unless you actually think they can not only asses 40+ pages per minute. It's dispiriting when you decline a deletion and try to explain to a new editor what they need to change to comply with the rules, in the knowledge that someone else will over-rule your decline and delete it anyway in the next few minutes. This is also the reason so many people have given up making any comment along the line of "I don't think this warrants sanctions" at WP:AE, as a couple of self-appointed super-users almost invariably come along, disregard the attempts to negotiate settlements, and start blocking indiscriminately. ‑ Iridescent 07:14, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Yep, AE is scary because of that - almost a kangaroo court of one. - Sitush (talk) 07:33, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Of eine...?  :) ——SerialNumber54129 07:54, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

The issue at AE of late has actually been the opposite. You get a consensus for something and then someone who wants to look merciful for ACE2019 decides to unilaterally close with a sanction substantially less then what was being discussed. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:34, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

And there I was thinking that the buttons Administrators: check links, history (last), and logs before deletion are stuff you are supposed to click on, in that order... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:00, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

I agree that this WP:ADMINSTATS is something problematic. Too bad that we'd need some informal research on the (anti)correlation between the number and the quality of one's admin actions to get that removed. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:00, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

In either irony or hypocrisy, depending on your point of view, I think Wikipedia has problems at both ends of the spectrum. We have the hyperactive admins who delete/block/protect nearly indiscriminately without regard to policy; we also have a problem with inactive admins who delete/block/protect based on their personal opinions because they've lost touch with policy. (The latter is being demonstrated fairly spectacularly as I speak at Arbcom, where a legacy admin is in the process of talking himself from "mild rebuke and asked to be more careful" to "full site ban".) If someone ever writes the definitive history of Wikipedia (Andrew Lih's hagiography doesn't count), the dichotomy would make an interesting chapter in Volume Three: The Maintenance Phase. ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

As I've said before on here, I've got a problem with the way WP:G5 is used, and have started at least one conversation on this very page over it. As I understand it, it was designed to be a simple and quick device to stop banned editors repeatedly posting the same completely inappropriate content over and over again. However, the biggest farce I personally witnessed was this incident, where I got yelled at and threatened to be desysopped for having the total audacity to reverse a G5 deletion on a notable topic that subsequently closed as a unanimous "keep" at AfD. Plus ca change. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:27, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Now see, my impression is that nowadays G5 is also used as a way to quickly zap a block evader's contributions in the hope to discourage them. Certainly that's how we do on TVTropes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:36, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

But that's not what it's supposed to be; it was always intended to be that edits in contravention of a ban could be reverted, not that they must. ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Indeed. That is why when I cleaned up after a sock this week, I only tagged certain creations for G5 - those were ones that effectively had no reliable sources etc and, in some cases, which they had created in the past with similar lack of usefulness. Some other creations - a couple about places, one about a dynasty, and so on - I just tried to tidy up as best I could because they do have potential. One of the farm was this. - Sitush (talk) 18:48, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

re: G5, it depends on the case, tbh. There are a few where I’ll fire up Special:Nuke and not wait for others. This is usually the case with specific long term sockmasters where I know the history and most don’t and you’d end up with well done hoaxes, hard to spot BLP vios, etc. if it was left for the standard four eyes rule. There are other long-term sockmaster who get off on bragging off site about how they’re able to create so many notable articles and we can’t do without them. I typically support G5 in these cases depending on the subject. At the same time I usually just leave it up to the clerks and reporters to figure out what to do with articles (like the one Sitush just mentioned.) That way you’ll usually have had six eyes looking at a case before deletion. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:52, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Here's a good example of a sock knowing what it's talking about  :) 12:54, 19 May 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Serial Number 54129 (talk • contribs)

I'd call that a good demonstration of the point TB is making, and of why the wording of the banning policy has that the presumption in ambiguous cases should be to revert clause. VX4C is someone who's quite often right, but is wrong often enough, and prolific enough, that it's not a good use of people's time to check every one of their posts to see if on this occasion it's valid. ‑ Iridescent 02:50, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

What TonyBallioni says. I tend to stay away from the whole G5 thing, and I can recall an administrator who routinely rolled back and blocked *any* IP that added results to certain sports articles, claiming that it had to be a certain vandal. The fact that the edits were always correct (although often unreferenced) was immaterial; the fact that the IP addresses were often local to where the sporting event took place was immaterial; the fact that more than one checkuser told him he was wrong was immaterial. He was completely certain he was right. Ironically, he was also notorious for adding unreferenced or poorly referenced sports results himself. Ah well. I'm probably one of the few people visiting this page who can say she took an "admin" case to Arbcom and saw it through all the way, but I wouldn't have wasted my breath on the sports result guy.

On the other hand, earlier this year as part of addressing the hacked accounts issue, myself and another CU went through page by page and removed certain information that the users had put on their userpages; sometimes we just removed the info, but if the account hadn't been used for more than a year, or it was obviously promotional, we deleted using G6 (doing this for security reasons, if ever questioned) or G11 (for obvious reasons). I'm sure I racked up over 1000 deletions in a few weeks, but I'm not in any way motivated to look at the admin activity log to try to figure it out. I'll admit I was on tenterhooks for a bit wondering if someone would call me out on those deletions. I pay a bit more attention to the CU/OS activity logs, mostly because we have to maintain a minimum level of activity to keep the bits, but even then it seems my OS specialty is saying no to people rather than actually suppressing stuff. Risker (talk) 03:39, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

The administrator who routinely rolled back and blocked *any* IP that added results to certain sports articles, claiming that it had to be a certain vandal has already been named further up this thread, (and for reasons I don't quite understand given my lack of involvement with sports articles was also discussed as some length on my talkpage at the time) so don't worry about naming GS. In general I lean slightly more towards DragonflySixtyseven's allegory than I do towards "comment on content not the contributor applies to banned users too"; the problem with the Mattisses and Gregs isn't that all their contributions are problematic—most are positive—but that enough of them are problematic that it's a timesink monitoring them, and because of their positive contributions it upsets other people who haven't seen their bad side if we don't nip the socks in the bud. ‑ Iridescent 09:54, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Actually, it was someone else (further back than GS, and I've the name-and-shame because at one point he was editing under his real-world name), but the point is taken; even though the admin I was talking about is largely inactive now (at least I think he is), there's still the opportunity for someone else to fill those "over-enthusiastic" shoes. Risker (talk) 03:34, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

To be fair, as I said in the GS case I can sympathize with editors who revert over-enthusiastically on sports articles. The combination of "too many articles to verify every change", "lots of obscure stats where incorrect information is unlikely to be spotted" and "large numbers of new editors making mistakes" must make the temptation to just lock things down almost irresistible. ‑ Iridescent 14:47, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes, we have the same problem with a few other sockmasters if we let them be around too long. My biggest issue with socking, however, has always been the dishonesty about it. In an online community where no one knows who you are for the most part, maintaining a sense of order/trust/things working really does require AGF to make it work. AGF can't really work if the community is afraid that everyone is a sock of a banned user. On those cases where people are able to pull off months long socking you'll see the wailing and mourning for them combined with anger that the community was lied to. Luckily, despite the claims at WPO and other sites, the beloved banned editor socking away is pretty rare. We catch most of them pretty early. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:20, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

How do you know that you catch most of them early, as opposed to never catch most of them? Eric Corbett 15:53, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

To be blunt: most people aren’t that competent/don’t care enough to try to hide. I of course can’t prove that there aren’t 100 banned editor X socks out their writing FAs: you can’t prove a negative. What I can say is that in my experience, most people are too lazy to try to evade detection long-term. I’m sure some do it, but just from a pure effort standpoint, it’s more work than it’s worth, especially if you can just create a new account. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:04, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

The idea that "you can't prove a negative" is quite simply untrue, "a principle of folk logic, not actual logic". So however you cut it you cannot possibly have any idea whether or not most "beloved banned editors " are caught early. Just saying. Eric Corbett 16:46, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Most people who've been caught aren't that competent/don't care enough to try to hide/are too lazy to try to evade detection long-term. Whereas, most people who haven't been caught are probably not any of those things. – Levivich 16:51, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Most human beings are all of those things. So are most sockmasters. CU isn’t useful because it’s a particularly sophisticated tool (it isn’t.) It’s useful because of human nature. I probably know more about it’s use on en.wiki than most LTAs, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to put in the effort to consistently evade. The fact that we’ve had multiple CUs and former CUs on other projects get caught socking goes to show that even those who know how to use it usually slip up. The reason banned editors tend to get caught early is they inevitably act in a disruptive manner that draws attention and leads to grounds for a check. Yes, some can pull it off long-term: we can all think of examples. There is not, however, some great sock army out there of productive unjust banned editors out there. We can’t give you a list of every sock we don’t know about, but we are fairly good at spotting them. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:26, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Six years!

Thank you with soothing blue. Thank you also for understanding the inflammatory significance of a poppy. I recently replaced the image by one I took myself, for the untranslatable Freundliche Vision, which I understand as a vision of friendliness. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:07, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

More pic talk - too many words for me even to read - I like your sock cat, and wonder if you'd have a secret police supervision and no appeal cat? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:13, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

How about Psycho here, who is also in the rotation? Thank User:Ceoil for finding that one. ‑ Iridescent 16:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

She's mrs Psycho to you, Iridescent. Ceoil (talk) 19:03, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Since in light of Recent Events we no longer need to be so uptight about linking to Youtube, have one that seems apt for the current climate. IMO this works much better acoustic and with JC doing the vocals; the album version with Lucy Brownhills's whiny voice and the rock arrangement sounded too much like a petulant teenage garage band. ‑ Iridescent 19:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

This where you and I will have to fall out. Much as I love Julian Cope's book writing, and I really love it - we go nowhere without The Modern Antiquarian, and his head-on books are kind of bibles, he doesn't half come up with some total bullshit in interviews, though that maybe part of the charm (yes I get dragged in too, esp via Brain Donor, but have calculated that 93.4% of his music is wank). This is the perfect antidote[10] Ceoil (talk) 20:34, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, both. Gender of police doesn't matter, but what's the bet that most members of secret police are men. This used to be the encyclopedia anybody cam edit, and isn't. You have a few believing that you are disruptive and harassing, and convincing police of that, and that was it. Sad. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:08, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

In real life certainly, although that probably reflects their regimes' view of a woman's place, and the fact that the agencies were recruiting from the army, rather than an innate masculine need to snitch. In totalitarian regimes with more gender equality, not so much; the KGB and Stasi certainly had their share of female agents. Wikipedia's own secret police consists of four men and five women. ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps I was mislead by a name such as Jan, whom Floq told me not to ping. - How about a new caption for the tossing in the rotation? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:05, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Lather, rinse, repeat

As a side point, from what the article says, by the time Hindley's famous mugshot was taken she had begun to emulate an ideal of Aryan perfection, bleaching her hair blonde and applying thick crimson lipstick. So I don't think the pink rinse has any part in the iconic image after all. Or am I missing something? EEng 17:48, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Note for the TPWs; this relates to the recent history of Moors murders. If any of the army of obsessive nitpickers who supposedly infest Wikipedia—or the army of Mancs whom Jimmy appears to think infest Wikipedia, come to that—is watching, please do head on over there as I'm really not enamoured with the idea of individually checking 150+ diffs myself.

The Nazi stuff comes later after she meets Brady. The pink rinse is (a) shorthand for saying that she was already skidding off the rails before meeting Brady and he wasn't solely responsible for her loopiness (something of critical importance afterwards, as Longford's argument boiled down to her being a good soul who'd been led astray by a monster); a non-natural hair colour on a 17-year-old in the north during Austerity would have been equivalent to a present-day teenager coming home with a face tattoo, and (b) evidence that she was dyeing her hair before meeting Brady, and consequently that the iconic "dyed hair and makeup" look was already in place from a young age. The MM is a fairly unique case, as the physical appearance of both parties—particularly Hindley—remain visual shorthand for "evil" more than 50 years after their convictions, so exactly how and why they came to look as they did has a significance that isn't the case for (say) Robert Maudsley or Donald Neilsen.

As I said on the talkpage, the MMs are a much more complicated topic than most murder cases because they had such a profound impact on the law, culture and even economy, and because there has been so much garbage written about them so sources need to be carefully filtered; I know the Wikipedia ideal is that no previous knowledge is necessary and anyone with access to the same sources should be able to write the same article, but this is a topic that really does require subject matter expertise of the murders themselves, of early post-Chatterley English culture, and to a lesser extent of the geography of the Dark Peak. If you haven't already, read the twenty pages of talk archives—the history of which reads like a Who's Who of Wikipedia FWIW, not just a bunch of random POV-pushers or well-intentioned newcomers—to get a sense of what you're stepping into here. ‑ Iridescent 19:45, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

So pink rinses are harbingers of evil after all [11]. No doubt there are sources that explain the significance of the appearance changes and so on, and the article should use them to explain this stuff. Otherwise the pink rinse is like some kind of code phrase understood only by the cognoscenti. As with the "release from prison" stuff, if there's not enough context given to allow an intelligent, educated, interested reader/editor to get even a hint of the significance of such details, then you can't blame that reader/editor for thinking it's no different from Barbara Jane Harrison's wig. EEng 21:49, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

You just can't trust 'em. Ah yes, custody... the original "Non-breaking space". Martinevans123 (talk) 21:59, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

		The Userpage Barnstar
		Hello Iridescent. I don't know much about you, but your talk page often seems to have interesting discussions for some reason. Benjamin (talk) 05:41, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

+1 Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:38, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Er, thanks? Although A "userpage barnstar" when my userpage has been blank for nine years is probably some kind of metaphor for something. ‑ Iridescent 08:50, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

It seemed to be the most relevant one I could find. Benjamin (talk) 22:50, 22 June 2019 (UTC)