User talk:Iridescent/Archive 36

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Kay Burley

Oops, I've hit rollback on the wrong edit. Sorry.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 07:16, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

No problem—it seemed unlikely you'd be doing it deliberately, but Burley is someone who for reasons I don't quite understand stirs irrational anger in otherwise rational people. (Someone—not me—really needs to do something about that article which is a BLP disaster. A fairly bland newsreader on a channel with an average weekly viewing of 13 minutes per person[1] should not have a "controversies" section longer than the rest of the biography combined. ‑ Iridescent 16:53, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, if you're a reporter who broadcasts to millions and you have a persistent habit of putting your foot in your mouth - ranging from ignorance of the facts you're discussing, through complete untruths all the way to outright offensiveness - there's going to be a lot more column inches on your idiocy that there is the run-of-the-mill remainder of your output. Though she does seem to have toned it down in recent years (well, either that, or Sky have told her to get her act together). I think Chris Bryant summed her up best. Black Kite (talk) 17:11, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

"Millions" is probably overdoing it—this is Sky News we're talking about, "dozens" is likely nearer the mark. Given that her 0700-0900 slot is directly opposite Piers Moron, I doubt she even gets the "tuning in to see if anything controversial" audience any more. I assume Sky keep her on as a kind of mascot as the last survivor of pre-BSkyB days; whenever there's anything remotely significant going on, Adam Boulton or Beth Rigby get the gig. (If you want an even better example of undue weight, see Tim Martin (businessman), where his views on Brexit literally get more coverage than all the rest of his biography combined. Don't get me wrong, I think the man is an unmitigated bell end, but at the end of the day his position is "supports current government policy", it's not as if he's advocating a nuclear strike on Belgium.) ‑ Iridescent 17:36, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I was quoting millions as a cumulative audience rather than a daily one. I've never looked at the Tim Martin article before, but let's face it not only is he a bellend but he's using his position to promote Brexit to, shall we say, those customers of his in perhaps more working class areas who believe what they read in The Sun. And he's also a liar. So no, I'm not rushing to "fix" his article either. Black Kite (talk) 19:45, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Hoorah! Good old Captain Underpants!! Martinevans123 (talk) 20:38, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

In the event anyone hasn't seen it, La Burley has redeemed herself somewhat with what's surely the most entertaining moment in what's otherwise been a thoroughly dour election. ‑ Iridescent 19:25, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Pour encourager les autres

Not as interesting as it sounds, just mildly puzzled to find two redirects on this:

• Pour encourager les autres
• Pour encorager les autres

I suppose it says something about French spelling. Before clicking on them, try and guess where the redirects go to. Carcharoth (talk) 18:27, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm mostly shocked that we don't have an article about that phrase. Risker (talk) 18:57, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

I was lazy in 2009. –xeno^talk 19:18, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

I've seen other instances like this, where slight variation in spelling redirect to different places, but I can't now think of any off the top of my head. When it comes to French-language terms, I do think it's sensible to have redirects for every plausible spelling—often even native speakers of standard Parisian French can't agree on how a particular work should be written (c.f. ognon/oignon), let alone the broader Francophone world—non-French-speakers trying to remember rules they learned at school decades ago certainly can't be blamed for getting confused. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Penda revisited

@Haukurth, Kudpung, and Serial Number 54129: Well, I finally managed to find a convenient time to visit my friend in Worcester. See User talk:Iridescent/Archive 35 #Stained glass Penda for anybody who w3ants the background. We have a result! They recently published a new booklet The Cloister Windows in Worcester Cathedral, which I discussed with a couple of knowledgeable guides in the cathedral. It turns out that "East Walk Window 5", which contains the source image for File:Penda of Mercia.jpg is attributed thus:

1918 - James Eadie Reid / The Gateshead Stained Glass Company

I bought a copy of the booklet that I'm happy to donate to anyone who would make use of it, or alternatively I can donate it to the WMUK Office library, where inquiring minds can seek it out. If anyone would like to claim for themselves, let me know before 12 December, when I'm next at WMUK Office. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 21:30, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Great news. You owe me five quid :p. ;) ——SN54129 21:45, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Excellent news! :) Haukur (talk) 11:15, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Excellent work, and I see I was completely wrong. Mea culpa and this is why we insist on reliable sources. ‑ Iridescent 14:50, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Just a note

No one pinged you in the discussion, but one of your edits is a point of discussion-just fyi. –xeno^talk 20:07, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Ah—all I did was issue a warning. If it was recent I'd consider it problematic, but that was in early 2018, which is about a decade in Wikipedia years—if nobody can find any problematic conduct since then, then I'd take that as a positive. (I'm mystified that someone could really be active on Wikipedia for a decade and not know that deliberately following somebody around editing whatever they edit to try to attract their attention is frowned upon—even if one had never stumbled on WP:WIKIHOUNDING it would surely be common sense to assume "even if I haven't personally seen a written policy against harassment, it's at best an appalling lack of manners"—but not impossible that he genuinely wasn't aware.) Anyone can breach policy; someone who'll stop doing something once they're told to stop, instead of digging in, is a good sign not a bad one—what we want in administrators—both in the technical sysop sense and in the broader sense of anyone who participates in administration—is someone who'll follow a consensus and respect personal opinions even if they don't personally agree. ‑ Iridescent 20:29, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

OK, on looking more closely you're challenging "you're coming across as a really, really, creepy stalker". I stand by my phrasing there; I'm not accusing him of a criminal offence, but saying that his words in that thread gave the impression that he was a stalker. Two years later and I still believe that on re-reading—this is someone who explicitly said that whenever he had a dispute with another editor, he would subsequently follow that editor around editing whatever they were currently working on. If instead of issuing a warning I'd forwarded a link to that thread to cawikimedia.org, it's well within the bounds of possibility that he'd have just been quietly disappeared. ‑ Iridescent 20:51, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Not at all challenging it. You said “coming across as” which appropriately AGF’d. Purely a courtesy note. –xeno^talk 23:57, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

@xeno, looking at the page again today I think your clerking may be becoming over-enthusiastic. "Hounding" and "stalking" aren't synonyms—"hounding" means intentionally interfering with other people's activities in an attempt to annoy, distract or upset them; "stalking" means inappropriately watching someone else's activities. (The difference is important; the 'creepiness' factor in 2018 that provoked my "what the fuck is wrong with you?" wasn't that GR was following people around editing pages they'd recently edited—he'd stopped doing that once warned—but that he was by his own admission deliberately poking through the userspace subpages of an editor whom he'd just been asked to keep away from.) By changing "stalking" to "hounding" you're unintentionally creating confusion and unnecessarily inflaming tempers by making it appear that people are making false accusations. If you really feel "stalking" is an inappropriate term to use (although "unwanted and/or repeated surveillance by an individual or group toward another person" would seem to me to exactly describe what GR was doing in 2018), perhaps "possibly unintentional harassment" or even a more WP:WikiSpeak construction like "unwanted following" would be a more appropriate term. ‑ Iridescent 10:27, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Iridesdent, SilkTork has taken a similar tack on my talk page and if you’re both in agreement that “unwanted following” would land nicely, I will go ahead and amend my clerk edits? –xeno^talk 10:37, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

No issues from me, but I'm not the one whose words are being changed; it's really a matter of whether SchroCat and Sagaciousphil think you've changed the meaning of their comments. Maybe something like "inappropriate intrusion" would capture the spirit of the accusations more accurately than the relatively neutral "following"? Any reasonably active editor has followed someone at some point, whether it's "I've just corrected an error this person introduced, I need to check whether they've made the same mistake elsewhere", "I find this person's series of articles on widgets really fascinating so I periodically check their contribution history to see if they've written a new one", or "This person is writing biographies of living people with clear errors and grossly inadequate sourcing and is also a blatant undisclosed paid editor and now I'm aware of it it's my duty to check everything else she's written to see if it has the same issues"—the issue is just where the blurry and shifting line between "duty of care to the integrity of Wikipedia's information and community" and "inappropriately intrusive" lies. As you may recall, even the combined minds of a team of highly-paid professionals tasked with determining what constitutes inappropriate activity and the intellectual powerhouse that is the Arbitration Committee recently had a spot of difficulty establishing exactly where that line should be drawn. ‑ Iridescent 10:54, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I didn’t change anything written by Sagaciousphil or SchroCat: those experiences are their own and they are entitled to describe them in their chosen words, imo.

I think I’m going to hang my hat on “unwanted following” (thank you for that suggested wording), I don’t want to make things (even) worse by trying to make things better. –xeno^talk 11:02, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Many thanks to you both. xeno, I think your decision in leaving mine and SagaciousPhil's as they stand is the right one. The problem I had was as Iri has decribed the difference - not following the edits, but actively interacting across a series of pages. It's a clear difference, but I'm not sure which one or two word subsitute phase could capture that - I'll leave that headache to you! BTW, as others have said on the pgae, the 'general comments' section is probably becoming a distraction to some, so collapsing it or moving it to talk would get my support (although others may disagree, of course. Cheers - SchroCat (talk) 11:13, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Break: lack of bureaucrats

It’s a can of worms proving difficult to digest. Apropos of nothing in particular, but this should be blue. –xeno^talk 11:39, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

If there were a need for more crats I'd be willing to put my name forward, but I'm not seeing it at present. RFAs are so thin on the ground that the existing crats are hardly snowed under, and I don't have the coding skills to assess requests for bot flagging/deflagging. I already have the ability through legacy admin rights to give out IPBE, account creator and PC reviewer should I ever feel the need to do so (unless there's a secret set of additional powers that aren't mentioned at Wikipedia:Bureaucrats). Consequently, unless there's a long backlog of people demanding the addition or removal of the interface admin permission, an RFB would just be hat collecting. (Besides, that 85% threshold excludes pretty much anyone who's done anything remotely contentious. Assuming perhaps 300 people participate in an RFB, I can pretty much guarantee that there are 46 who would oppose—in the wake of the earlier unpleasantness this year I presume I'm on WMDC's hitlist.) ‑ Iridescent 12:14, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

← There is a need to refresh the corps, we’re down 7, basically wiped out all the gains in the Last some years (back to 2013 I think?), if only to account for attrition. I’m not sure if you’re aware but bureaucrat discretion just expanded somewhat substantially; I also really want more bureaucrats that are willing to actually get their hands dirty and clerk RfAs while they’re running (community asked this of us in 2015 but a lot of current bureaucrats are less active and such clerking takes a lot of time, thought, response ability, etc.). I think you’d pass, but I thought Fram would pass too so clearly my internal polling figures are miscalibrated somewhat; my ear clearly isn’t as closely to the ground.

Grassroots work by fresh bureaucrats in improving conditions at RfA would hopefully create the work for them that you’ve indicated is lacking. –xeno^talk 12:37, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Assuming you mean Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard#RfC closure grants bureaucrats new discretion in processing resysopping requests, I'd hazard a guess that this will have the unintended consequence that nobody will ever pass RfB again, as the process will become an endless procession of carefully-constructed "gotcha" cases trying to trick candidates into saying that someone whose last 250 edits go back 7 years is clearly WP:NOTHERE and so on, in the same way the self-appointed gatekeepers have already made RFA such an obnoxious pit of smartassery.

I think Fram would have passed if he'd held his nerve and not withdrawn; the people who'd been canvassed on the mailing list to oppose had all said their piece by then, so that dip in support would probably have self-corrected in the following days. That said, I can see why he withdrew—it can't be nice having so many people methodically listing why they hate you. ‑ Iridescent 12:49, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Heavy sigh. –xeno^talk 14:11, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Break: potential arb candidates

You're right - it should be blue, but so should this too. - SchroCat (talk) 11:51, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I wouldn't pass an Arbcom election at the moment, and would probably oppose myself were I a candidate—there's no way I could commit to such a timesink at the moment, and I've been virtually inactive in the last 12 months (my last 150 non-minor article edits stretch back to 2018). If you're looking around for someone to pester into running, Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2019/Candidates/Ealdgyth would probably be my choice as a fresh voice who understands the issues and isn't a typical "middle aged men and slightly overenthusiastic students" member of Wikipedia's bureaucratic class. ‑ Iridescent 12:14, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I think she would make an excellent addition to ArbCom. Whether she'd want to or not is another matter, or course - there are a lot of good people who would run a mile from it. - SchroCat (talk) 12:53, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Although I've opposed them both previously, this time round I think The Rambling Man and Newyorkbrad (and Risker, but I can't imagine she'd be tempted) would make good candidates as well. This election is unique: not just because the expansion of the committee means 11 candidates being elected, and not just because the wave of resignations means only three existing arbs (plus whoever runs again) to carry on the institutional memory, but because for the first time we're electing a group in the knowledge that there's a small but non-negligible chance that they'll end up becoming the War Cabinet holding the line against an attempt by the WMF to impose direct rule. (This is why—even though Eric would be disgusted—I'll support GW 100% if and when the mob turn on her; even though she's made some weird calls in the past, she's one of the few people on that committee to really grasp just why Wikipedia only works when people aren't making well-intentioned interventions to try to make it work better.) ‑ Iridescent 13:08, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

oh, fuck no. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:31, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I figured this might happen....which is why I've run in case an insufficient number of folks do.. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:49, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Well if Ealdgyth still refuses to sign up (and, really, who can blame her—or anyone—for running a mile from the opportunity) I'll be voting for you - you may end up serving by default, if you're not careful! - SchroCat (talk) 13:58, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I've been tempted to run again (I only ran once and had to buy a lot of pizzas) but I have an unerring feeling that a non-admin, previously blocked candidate would never be welcomed to the golden archives of doom (where plenty of secret discussions about myself exist) and the tools of might (all of which I've held at various Wikipedias and never abused, but hey). But there's plenty of time for that last minute entry I guess. The Rambling Man (Staying alive since 2005!) 14:15, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Those were different times, but FWIW they certainly didn't sanitize discussions about me from the archive when I was elected. You'd be surprised just how dull Arbwiki actually is; people have the idea that it's full of juicy gossip, but it's actually lots of archives of "does everyone agree with the proposed wording of this resolution before I post it?", and page upon page of "User:Foo is User:Bar's brother-in-law so if a checkuser flags them as potential socks it should be disregarded". From memory, the only part of it that was at all interesting was the discussions about who the Chosen Few were to be for the ill-fated WP:ACPD proposal. ‑ Iridescent 14:30, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

• Apologies, Iridescent, I started this ball rolling with your diffs, and I should have let you know I had done so. ——SN54129 22:24, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Oh dear. Your (Iridescent's (as well as Risker's)) well-expressed views on not always having the same people were a major reason I am strongly leaning toward not running again, and now I see this. Newyorkbrad (talk) 13:50, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I've expressed that as well, but you're a clear exception to that desire - on my part anyway. –xeno^talk 13:52, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Ditto from me too. - SchroCat (talk) 13:58, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

The right-hand side of this chart should explain better than words just why the usual concerns about too many old-timers blocking fresh blood from coming through aren't going to hold true on this occasion. Assuming OR and Katie aren't planning on re-running, that leaves only four people (or five if WTT wins) to act as institutional memory, at least one of whom I wouldn't trust to tie their own shoelaces. Given that we have eleven vacancies, there's a genuine possibility that we'll end up with an absolute majority on the committee who'll see it as a bully pulpit from which they can smite their enemies, rather than a dispute-resolution body of last resort.

In some ways I think that would be good for Wikipedia—I assume it's no secret that I think the current setup isn't fit for purpose, and a judicious dose of HTD might force people to start thinking seriously about workable alternatives—but now really isn't a good time for that unless you think the WMF imposing a hand-picked provisional government is really going to be good for anyone concerned. ‑ Iridescent 14:24, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

To be fair, that's probably the only angle that could work to persuade me to run... the "keep WMF and T&S from putting something in place" angle. However, I've just finished (mostly) moving, the kids are mostly on their own (assuming the stepdaughter doesn't come back home with two toddlers), and I've got horses to work, books to write, and stuff to do. It's no secret that in the past I've not been a big fan of GW on ArbCom, but I will say that I'm more inclined to support her given her likelyhood of not knuckling under to T&S. I supported both TRM and SMcC in the past and would again if they ran... (hint hint). Who else would work well (and not-so-incidentally save me from a fate worse than death?) Ealdgyth - Talk 15:29, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I would also run to counter additional land-grabs from WMF. --Laser brain (talk) 15:47, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Sandy will probably never forgive me for saying it but Wehwalt might be a good bet. A committee of fifteen of him would be a nightmare, but as one voice among 15 he might well be valuable for giving a slightly different view of events to the usual wikiorthodoxy; the same "their more eccentric calls would be outvoted 14–1 and they might have some interesting things to add" case could also be made for someone like Bishonen (who I'm certain wouldn't want the job) and Carrite or Tryptofish (who might). Tim Riley would also be an excellent choice although I doubt he'd be interested. If we're going down the 'institutional memory' route then Dweller (who out-insiders even NYB) and Johnbod or RexxS (who are familiar with the wikibureaucracy through their work at WMUK) would be interesting each-way bets.

If you want to speculate about long-shots who would really spice things up, then bear in mind that unless there are twelve or more candidates this election will be a straightforward matter of "anyone whose support outnumbers opposition by even a single vote is automatically elected", and in that context Fram would have a realistic shot. It would be worth it just to watch the WMF panic. ‑ Iridescent 15:58, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Arbcom is a horribly thankless job. The rate of burnout always astounds me. It seems to me that most years, there a lot of fresh arbs that go in as active editors, become sort of half-active during the term (understable, as Arbcom is a timesink), but they're never quite back after the term is over. That said, I think we're at unpleasant time where we need to assert as a community that we can deal with the sort of problems that Arbcom is regularly tasked with, lest the WMF and T&S step in. To anyone considering running, or having been advised to run, I would advise them to consider where they want to see our dispute resolution/governance/etc processes in a year or two. Perhaps the mentality of "if you want something done right, do it yourself" applies. It's a two year term, but if it's truly awful, I guess it's possible to call it quits after a year such that the seat is filled in the next election. Maxim_(talk) 16:45, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Iri, I don’t have to agree with people to like or appreciate them; you are worth your weight in gold even when you are wrong. Laser brain has my support as the best candidate among those mentioned, not only because of his knowledge, but because he is governed by principles, and cannot be counted on to go with any crowd just to maintain his popularity. Bish, too. Trypto tends to follow the pack even when the pack is wrong. RexxS is a knowledgeable straight shooter, but he has developed a following of influential editors who could oppose him. Risker, as a sane person, is sorely needed and missed. Of course to Cas and NYB-- goes without saying-- and NYB should reconsider, since there are only three returning. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:07, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

While no one asked me, I've occasionally considered running for ArbCom, & if either I retire or my kids get old enough I can ignore them without feeling I'm neglecting them I just might. While I would work to oppose the Foundation's arrogation, my campaign slogan would be "Since everyone needs to take a turn in the barrel, I'll take my turn now." But I figure I'd either come across as the ultimate dark horse, or a long-term volunteer who knows enough to do a good job yet fails at it. (And I figure more than a few long-term editors believe the same thing.) -- llywrch (talk) 18:54, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

• Wow, I'm flattered as all get-out. And Iri is right, the answer will be no, at least for now. I am already stretched pretty thin with other commitments. On the other hand, while I've actively been campaigning to get some fresh faces onto arbcom, it does still need some folks with historical perspective, particularly if they've taken time away from Arbcom in the interim. And any of my fellow "functionaries" can confirm that one of my most regular contributions to discussions involves providing historical perspective to existing practices, policies and things that we're definitely NOT doing.

  One of the things that is a bit of a red flag for me is that there isn't a lot of awareness within enwiki that some of the "initiatives" being pressed by the WMF are actually coming from different parts of the global wikimedia community, and the general unwillingness of English Wikipedians to engage with or learn about the bigger picture has given our community a reputation of being arrogant, ignorant, and sorely in need of some discipline. I can tell you that, outside of our project, there was near-universal support for the WMF actions related to Fram. So, anyone wanting to "keep the WMF in line" needs to realize it's not just the WMF that thinks we're the problem child. Risker (talk) 19:13, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Break: En-wiki dominance

• I don't know how the WMF works, so I'm sure you can enlighten me. My question would be, if the English-language Wikipedia were to suddenly implode and disappear, would the WMF survive? Dr Horncastle (talk) 19:22, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Because I'm lazy, I'll just repost a reply I gave further up this page:

To me "here" is English Wikipedia, Commons, and to a lesser extent French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish Wikipedias, and Wikidata. The WMF has—by accident or design—hidden most of the more interesting statistics since Wikistats 2 went live, but I assume things haven't changed particularly dramatically since the final snapshot in October 2018. Of the across-all-projects stats, English Wikipedia on its own accounted for half of all page views, 1⁄3 of all edits and a little under half of all active editors; the big six (English, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, French) accounted for 76% of all page views. The non-Wikipedia wikis—Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wiktionary—are all statistically insignificant. (Commons and Wikidata are statistically insignificant as well, but obviously have a disproportionate importance as changes there affect pages elsewhere.) It doesn't fit the WMF's "we are a global resource" PR to say so, but ultimately every other project is a bolt-on to English Wikipedia, and the decisions taken by and regarding English Wikipedia ultimately affect all the other projects regardless of how much they might dislike the fact.

Even though the other projects might not like the fact, ultimately the rest of the WMF ecosystem rises and falls with English Wikipedia first and foremost and is completely dependent on the big six Wikipedias plus Commons. We should certainly take the opinions of Kazakh Wikiquote et al into account, but ultimately what happens here is what matters. (I'm honestly not really convinced by "outside of our project, there was near-universal support for the WMF actions related to Fram", either. From what I saw, vocal factions within WMDE were ready to declare open warfare. Yes, I know there's always a vocal faction at WMDE ready to pick a fight with WMF on any given topic, but they seemed more sincere than usual this time.) ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Just a note from a page-stalker: the en.wp is even more dominant than the numbers give an impression of. Eg.: I follow most of the Palestinian villages/cities -articles. When other projects start expanding in this area, they typically copy/translate directly from en.wp. Eg. the nn.wp and the ca.wp all copied directly from, say Huwara and the other West Bank villages on en.wp. And when fr.wp want to start articles on these articles, they go to English wp to copy/translate from. (When a guy like this have added more than 50.000 articles to nn.wp, then I would guess at least 99.99% of those are directly copied/translated from en.wp.) En.wp is the "mother of all Wikipedias", whatever the WMF would like to think, Huldra (talk) 23:33, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

This. I'm on very good terms with most of the Stewards who aren't robots, and I've had multiple sensible ones tell me in private that the most useful thing a native anglophone can do is make sure the articles on en.wiki are high quality so they can be translated into the other language editions. Build up a strong English project, and because of the nature of English as the de facto language of education and research in much of the world, you're significantly more likely to help smaller projects than if you started contributing to them directly. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:06, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Just an example; I had been collecting sources for the West Bank cities/villages, hoping to bring them to a DYK or two.....then I suddenly realised that someone was translating them all directly to Catalan, like this: ca:Beit Furik. They had started in the northern most part of the West Bank, working themselves south, one village/city at the time. I think they were at Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate when I discovered them. So I just let potential DYKs go to heck...and worked like hell updating everything from Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate and south of it. So if you go to ca.wp, and look at ca:Governació de Jerusalem, and everything south of it, you will see that the history is "expanded"...but if you look at the northern most, say ca:Governació de Nablus, you will see that a lot of the articles only have sources listed (and not actually used). Huldra (talk) 21:55, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Definitely. It's particularly noticeable with featured articles, presumably because people look at WP:FA and assume that anything listed there is important enough to warrant listing, so one ends up with such things as pt:O Anjo Destruidor e os Daemones do Mal Interrompendo as Orgias dos Maus e dos Intemperados, da:Quainton Road Station or most bizarrely si:රැම්ස්ගේට් උමං දුම්රිය මාර්ගය. Yes we shouldn't try to second-guess what readers want but I assume that any Sinhalese speaker interested enough in a derelict tunnel in Ramsgate to want a 2300-word history of it, would already speak English. ‑ Iridescent 23:15, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Well, the thing you’re not factoring in is that while there are some projects where being an anglophone is enough to make you persona non grata (see: id.wiki) there are projects where English is the prestige language for the region, and this includes major language editions of Wikipedia. To them, it’s a sort of signaling that their community should be taken seriously because they have similar featured content to en.wiki. So yeah, anyone from Sri Lanka that cares enough to read about the tunnel speaks English, it’s reasonable to assume that people in a former British colony want to show that they can translate English content. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:31, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

One could do a test to see how many translations of a FA, or a DYK have been made, say, one week/one month after they appeared on the front page of en.wp: I would presume quite a lot.

Another reason why people come to en.wp is to find people with like minded interest. I am not a native English speaker, alas, no-one on my "native language" wikis have any interest, or great knowledge of the Middle East (=my interest). I have learned a lot about the ME from my fellow (very knowledgable) editors, which I would never have learned if I had stayed at my local wiki. If you are, say, a Romanian interested in Romanian issues, the local Romanian wp would be fine. Alas, if you have an interest in British rail (or the Middle East) ...or anything not-Romanian, then the en.wp is the where you end up, Huldra (talk) 23:58, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

I used to get quite a bit of my more obscure stuff on European medieval art & the like translated (often shortened) in Thai and Portuguese in particular. I thought much of it was people practicing their foreign-language skills, probably starting from the mother tongue. Johnbod (talk) 04:28, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Pt.wiki is very friendly to en.wiki users/has a sizable contingent of people whose English is virtually indistinguishable from native speakers, so I wouldn't be shocked if pt.wiki actually had people translating stuff from English to Portuguese because they wanted it on their project. Thai my guess is you're probably right on the source of the translations. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:28, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Might Paul August be interested in rejoining? He was and would be good. 174.91.115.150 (talk) 19:26, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Risker, I'm surprised that anyone outside of en.wiki knows about the Fram incident. I went to WikiMania, which occurred around the same time & Fram, and Fram & T&S, was mentioned 0 times in the sessions I attended & the keynotes. I went to talk to folks on T&S about the issue & they definitely didn't want to discuss it. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:36, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Arbitrary break: "new blood"

If you all are really thinking of "new blood", why don't you suggest some experienced editors who have been active 5 years or less? I'm sure there are some dedicated in this range of experience editors (admin or not admin) who'd give it a shot. Editors don't have to have been here 10 or 15 years to make a contribution. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:41, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

There are, but the collapse of RFA as a functioning process acts as a throttle. There are some voters who will automatically reject every non-admin in Arbcom elections on "well, if they're not trusted to drive a car, why should we give them the keys to a truck?" grounds (a legitimate reason to oppose); very well-established non-admins like Giano or TRM have the reputations to potentially get past that, but newer people haven't generally built up the name recognition. Someone who's been around for five years and is an admin realistically means someone who passed RFA in the last three years, and there aren't many of those around. Back in the Days Before The Dawn Of Time when I was on Arbcom and before we got blown off course by the mailing list leaks I was tentatively suggesting Arbcom having either electoral constituencies or recruitment quotas to try to get a broader spread of people, but nothing ever came of it. (Have you considered running? Unless you have a skeleton in your closet you'd almost certainly get in, although I'll warn you it's a truly unpleasant experience.) ‑ Iridescent 19:56, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Ha! Iridescent beat me to it; I was going to suggest that you consider running, as well. I've bugged two editors whose accounts are more than 5 years old, but one didn't really become active until 2014 and the other had a 7-year hiatus before jumping in again in 2018, so I think they'd more or less meet your criteria. I do hope you'll consider, Liz. I won't say it's fun, but it's...educational. (I'm not surprised that you didn't hear a lot about Fram at Wikimania. There was a lot of active "not talking" about Fram at Wikimania, for a lot of reasons, one of which was how divisive the issue is within the global community.) Risker (talk) 20:05, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Oh for Heaven’s sake, the pair of you MUST run. If you do Lady C will be very positive and kind in her famed and very perceptive analysis of the candidates. Seriously, 99% of editors don’t give a stuff about Wikimania and its, frankly mostly odd, attendees, they just want to see some common sense (preferably not of the kind bred in some obscure, sanctimonious N American state); they want to see honest editors complete with their human faults improving a still worthy project. Just go for it, what have you got to lose? Giano (talk) 20:24, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

As an arbitation clerk, I know too much about the demands of the job. And if my painful RfA is any indication, there would be significant & vocal opposition. But, who knows? Many people enter on the last day when they see if enough good people have decided to run. There have always been enough people I thought were qualified to satisfy me. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:36, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Meh—I was the significant and vocal opposition. The things I considered negatives at RFA (stubbornness and a tendency to get involved in other peoples disputes) are exactly the things that are positives in an arb. FWIW, the reason those in the know wait until the last day isn't because they want to see if enough good people have decided to run, it's so they can see what questions people are asking, which answers are going down well, and what the people who write the election guides say they're looking for, and tailor their statement accordingly so the trend-setters think "hey, this person thinks just like me!". ‑ Iridescent 20:47, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

You're too smart for your own good. Dr Horncastle (talk) 20:54, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

This is no secret and not remotely unique to Wikipedia. The US is an anomaly because candidates are selected by means of primaries, but I assure you that if you're in the UK the candidates for the forthcoming election are almost all waiting for the 14 Nov deadline to declare their candidacies, so they can see which way the public mood is blowing on key issues before making their candidacy public and being forced to express opinions on those issues. ‑ Iridescent 23:06, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Arbitrary break: identification

FFS, just go for it. If it all goes horribly wrong (it won’t), who cares or knows? There must be at least twenty billion Lizes in the world, and at least one other Iridescent. If it wasn’t for this having to confess one’s personal identity I’d run myself, but once WMF know I’m a mass murderer and war criminal (which Jimbo suspects already) they’d probably say that would be one too many or something similar. Be brave....Go! Giano (talk) 21:07, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Well, you have to provide an identity. Unless they plan to fly every checkuser, oversighter and arbitrator on all 700+ WMF sites in to San Francisco to verify their identities in person, there's nothing to stop you giving any name you feel like, other than the fact that the legal department will do their best to hassle you to set an example should they catch you out. Plus, in many jurisdictions—most pertinently from en-wiki's point of view California and England—it's specifically in law that name change by usage is a legal right and one can call oneself anything one likes provided it's not done for the purposes of fraud. It's a known security hole, but one that can't be patched since even the WMF would baulk at flying someone around the world to physically check everyone's identity or demanding everyone attend their local WMF chapter to identify themselves in some kind of wiki-census-of-Augustus, and more to the point isn't worth patching since nobody cares who you are in real life provided you're not a child or a sex offender. ‑ Iridescent 23:01, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

No identifying information is required anymore. One signs a confidentiality agreement using one's user account. That's been in place since 2015. Only the WMF Board, the FDC, and the Audit Committee require real-name verification nowadays, and that's all for fiduciary purposes, not for access to private and non-public information. Risker (talk) 23:31, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

I know they no longer check passports, but aren't you theoretically supposed to put your name on the Phabricator request when you sign the access to nonpublic personal data document? ‑ Iridescent 23:37, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Nope - nothing. They realized that there was no practical way to truly link real-world ID to usernames, and Legal even got the Board to change this rule. The folks in Legal at that time figured there was no point in continuing the security theatre. It got changed as part of the update of the Privacy policy. You do have to create a phabricator account, but you do that from MediaWikiWiki by logging in to your normal SUL user account. I *did* have to verify my identity with photo/signature ID at the first FDC meeting after I was appointed, but those were always in-person meetings so there wasn't much wiggle room there. Risker (talk) 23:44, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

The WMF realised that something was a pointless waste of time and decided to stop doing it, rather than setting up a highly-paid task force to spend eight years trying to engineer a technical solution from scratch? Are you sure we're talking about the same WMF? ‑ Iridescent 00:00, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

• Seeing as I've been the most vocal proponent of not using the term "stalking" to characterize GRuban's actions from January 2018, I wanted to chime in here and say that I didn't find your warning to be particularly problematic. Yes, it was harshly worded, but I don't think a warning of some sort was unwarranted. And to be very clear, I do agree that what he did was inappropriate, even if done with the best of intentions. I'm not in any way intending to invalidate the feelings and experiences of SagaciousPhil and SchroCat, both of whom I feel are warranted in feeling uncomfortable. I'm sorry if anything I've said has given anyone the wrong impression. Kurtis ^(talk) 23:14, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

  I'm finding this hard to understand. You can't "invalidate" anyone's feelings, they are what they are. Dr Horncastle (talk) 23:46, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

  It's an Americanism, but it's a legitimate term of art in psychology, not a misuse of language or a neologism; "invalidation" in this context means declaring that one doesn't feel someone's response is genuine. Here's a quick RS for it. ‑ Iridescent 23:56, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

  I see, thanks for the clarification. Dr Horncastle (talk) 00:00, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

  Full disclosure: I'm Canadian. Kurtis ^(talk) 08:01, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

  Just was alerted to this thread. I am no longer ambitious on Wikipedia and am disinclined to exhaust my limited enthusiasm that remains with pointless and thankless work. So with all due respect to the other fourteen of me (hi, guys), I'll pass. I would support Iridescent if they cared to run.---Wehwalt (talk) 04:34, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

  @Nikkimaria: Nikkimaria for arb. And Iridescent. ♦ Lingzhi2 (talk) 06:43, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

  I would support her too. There is some hope of getting rid of much of the anticontent clique on the AC if such good people run.--Wehwalt (talk) 06:56, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

• Not a chance. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:00, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

But on the plus side, this is all a moot point because our overlords at T&S have a cunning plan to automate the resolution of on-wiki disputes, so Arbcom will presumably become unnecessary. (You see where I said above that "setting up a highly-paid task force to spend eight years trying to engineer a technical solution from scratch" is their knee-jerk response to problems? This.) Connoisseurs of WMF bullshit will particularly like we plan to implement a user risk prediction model which would be able to predict and flag users who are at risk of getting blocked in the future. This model will make use of the “toxicity scores” generated by the abuse detection model. In addition to these ‘‘toxicity scores’’, the proposed model will also leverage the temporal user activity features generated out of the revision activity data. I'm also taken by the assumption that one-fifth of the personal attacks get reported must mean that there's a huge shyness among 80% of editors to complain, rather than that it could possibly be the case that their model only has a 20% success rate in correctly distinguishing "personal attacks" from "reasonable commentary". ‑ Iridescent 16:16, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm entertained that the Foundation insists on pursuing the mirage of AI-generated content, when they should be going in the direction of other online encyclopedias such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Encyclopedia of Life. (To mention the two I am most familiar with.) -- llywrch (talk) 20:08, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

And that direction is...? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:24, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure EOL is such a great example if you don't like autogenerated content—some of their pages (that one is currently on their main page, so I've hardly gone on a cherry-picking expedition) make Wikidata look like a masterpiece of Brilliant Refreshing Prose. ‑ Iridescent 20:58, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Hmm. From reading their intro pages, I was under the impression that EOL consisted primarily of human-driven content. Drop that example then, but still sticking with SEP as an example of how experts, when properly managed & credited, will contribute to a free/libre knowledge project. (After all, having an article published in something like SEP is much cheaper than getting published in many academic periodicals.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:19, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

@Llywrch: EOL started like that (with some fanfare), but at some point I believe it was automated to some degree and started scraping from other sites. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:48, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that the project that got roundly pilloried on WO and then someone pressed Jan to admit that it's not actually a thing they actually plan to use? (P.S. This is smelling like a new subsection...) –xeno^talk 03:25, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

You're thinking of the old m:Research:Detox which was just an amateurishly-made Naughty Word Scanner. As far as I can make sense of the dripping chunks of WMF bureaucratese at Automatic Detection of Online Abuse and the assorted papers and presentations linked from it, what this latest wheeze is attempting to do is have a neural net check the history of existing blocked editors in the run-up to their block, establish if there were common themes present in the actions of editors in the days before they got blocked, and subsequently monitor the actions of every other editor in real-time and report editors whom the software thinks are shortly going to deserve a block to the Wikimedia Precrime Division (there are some unintentionally hilarious examples here of which comments would be permitted and which would put you on the deathlist). You presumably don't need me to tell you in just how many ways I think this is an awful idea even as a proof-of-concept. (Additional bonus unintentional hilarity points for Ethical considerations in Wikipedia automatic abuse detection system which reads like something Jon Awbrey would have written as a parody on Wikipedia Review circa 2008.) ‑ Iridescent 14:19, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Precogs? Kablammo (talk) 22:13, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

• So how widely known is the fact that you don't have to submit your identification to the WMF anymore? I'm wondering if it's holding back candidates. Note that the candidate editnotice page says: "You will have to identify to the Wikimedia Foundation if you are elected. Please do not run if you are not willing to identify, ...". I thought it was outdated but it was created this year; Cyberpower678 was it copied from somewhere else (if so please see WP:CWW)? @TonyBallioni, Vanamonde93, Primefac, and Ivanvector: (sorry Iri. I didn't want to have to rehash it all at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2019/Coordination#Candidate editnotice incorrectly advises candidates they will be required to identify to the Wikimedia Foundation.) –xeno^talk 03:18, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

  Resolved, xaosflux to the rescue. –xeno^talk 04:41, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Change

Question: There has been generational change. Is it a functional improvement, or are we losing our way?

I saw a note at WT:MED (of all places) this morning, which was advertising an RFC at RSN about The Epoch Times, which writes about lots of things, with more than the average level of attention against alleged human rights abuses by China. The RFC is asking whether the source should be officially declared "not reliable" by the English Wikipedia.

Now, you probably know that I have followed the RFC help pages for years. It happens that I think attracting even more attention to an already high-traffic noticeboard is IMO not a good use for an RFC, but like most things around RFCs, it's not technically prohibited.

But what disturbs me is the idea of evaluating any periodical as being "generally reliable" or "generally not reliable", without considering any context at all. It's just "Here's a magazine: Is that 'generally reliable' or 'generally not reliable'?" with nothing like "The stories about the local events are useful, but don't use their health column at all – oh, and by the way, you can't actually use this bit that says 'Politician Paul won, and Candidate Carol got 35% of the vote' to support a claim in the article that 'Politician Paul got 65% of the vote', because it doesn't actually say that any vote that didn't go to Carol went to Paul".

We've had requests from almost the beginning of WP:RS to make a complete list of all reliable sources, and we're refused to do so, because reliability depends upon context. But it seems in the last couple of years, a group of editors has decided to make a list of "unreliable sources", and now they are busily holding RFCs to demonstrate a consensus that this or that publication is "generally not reliable" and therefore deserves to be on their ever-growing blacklist (now more than 200 entries). I'm sure it has the usual disclaimers about it not really, truly being an absolute ban on using the sources, just like I'm sure that inexperienced (>99.5%) editors, people who are most comfortable with black-and-white thinking, people who don't really know what they're doing, etc. are applying that list exactly like an absolute ban.

If this were merely a catalog of RSN's archives for the convenience of the RSN regulars (which is how I think it might have started), then it wouldn't be such a big deal. And for really difficult cases, like the DM ban a few years ago, I can understand the utility of an RFC. But now we seem to have new-ish editors (at a quick glance, most the editors who start these RFCs have been around for about two or three years) who seem to be actively seeking out sources to ban. There was another RFC at RSN on the subject of whether to have so many blacklisting RFCs, and it's clear from the comments that some of them think that being able to tell querents that a source is definitely, absolutely, unquestionably "generally unreliable" or "deprecated" is a good thing. That RFC (still unclosed and on the list at WP:ANRFC) was prompted by them starting RFCs to ban sources that were either unused or not actually causing disputes.

Overall, I'm worried about a shift from "use your judgment" to "follow the rules". Blacklisting whole periodicals is a really serious move away from using your judgment and considering all the fact and circumstances, and the system is really not set up to consider problems like Red Herring (magazine), whose reliability has changed (declined) over time, especially in the context of notability or even The Epoch Times, which might be useful in certain articles even though I would avoid it in others. I find that I'm giving the speech about You Are a Grown-Up Editor Now, and It's Time For You to Start Acting Like It more often now.

So I'm grumpy about this shift to increasing bureaucratization. But I'm looking for other opinions. There are a lot more potential sources now than there were when the World Wide Web was new. We are more aware of the problems of misinformation than we were when Wikipedia was new. Could systematically classifying the "general reliability" of hundreds of sources (so far) actually be a positive thing? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:45, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

Other people will post longer and more thoughtful replies, I am sure, but I would be a Strong Support on any initiative to delete every Wikipedia blacklist on sight. Blacklists are POV weaponry. They serve no other purpose.  ♦ Lingzhi2 (talk) 23:06, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

This seems to be a stage all editors pass thru. First it's the somewhat dangerous assumption that, "If it is in a printed book, it must be true". Next the assumption is, "If we can determine which sources are reliable & which are unreliable, we can write accurate articles". (Or score them on a scale of 1 to 10, or accurate/inaccurate about specific topics.) And at some point an editor realizes, "Wow, I have to figure out on my own which statements are likely accurate, which may be not, which are not yet point to an accurate statement. I think I can do this. But now how do I present this so not to conflict with WP:NPOV?"

The only intelligent suggestion I can make is that we should keep a list like the one at WP:RS/P simply to minimize bickering over the obvious (e.g., "No, the New York Times is not a propaganda rag for the leftist wing of the Democratic Party. Consensus says so. See the List"). And yes, any such list will be abused by the tendentious & inexperienced, but deleting it may lead to even worse problems. (See the infamous case where an Admin tired of the bickering that WP:AfD caused & deleted it.) -- llywrch (talk) 19:47, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

llywrch, I haven't heard this story before! Please tell! WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:35, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Well, little fella, back in the days when Wikipedia was the Wild West, & WP:AfD was called WP:Votes for Deletion, there was Yet Another Dispute over just how dysfunctional that process was. This led to a complaint on the now-morbund WikiEN-L mailing list. Apparently it was a very persuasive complaint, for Ed Poor replied "I'm tempted to just Be Bold and just go ahead and delete vfd. Just see if I don't!!". And did. ISTR Tim Starling posting an angry email demanding to know who deleted WP:VFD, but I can't find that email. (The WikiEN-L archives are not in the best shape.) The result of this deletion was that the servers went to their knees due to thousands of page histories being updated then reverted, & the Wikipedia website was in read-only mode for several minutes. (Further details can be found either in the archived WikiEN-L thread linked above, or a TL;DR version can be found at the Signpost article about the episode.)

And no, this was not the act that led to Ed Poor's eventual loss of Admin rights. That would be another story in the saga of the downfall of a once widely-respected Wikipedian. -- llywrch (talk) 15:58, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

I can't really imagine that "just" deleting thousands of pages would bring Wikipedia to a halt now. Was this event the source of the restriction on being able to delete very large pages, or was that a different thing? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:48, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

That wasn't for another couple of years yet, in January 2008. I thought I remembered it being in response to someone deleting and selectively restoring WP:AN or WP:ANI - that was the only way to remove individual revisions back then - but both of their last deletions were in May 2006. Maybe some similar page? —Cryptic 01:09, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

That was the sandbox. Graham87 04:14, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing:, one thing to remember is that Wikipedia in 2005 didn't have the enormous server farm to support it that exists now. From this LiveJournal post, it appears that all of the WMF projects ran on a cluster of 10 servers -- which was an improvement over the three servers it had previously. (Which were once described to me as "one doesn't work, a second can't handle DNS, leaving only one to handle all of the work".) So a run-away job like that could easily bring the cluster to its knees.

As an aside, I'm finding the written records for Wikipedia's earliest days are beginning to dissolve. I spent hours looking for materials to confirm my memories -- which I admit can be incorrect after 15+ years -- only to repeatedly come up short. It appears that the Foundation has purged all of its content from its website before 2010; the Signpost only started publication in 2005; the WikipediaEN-L archive is missing emails from that time; linkrot is endemic in the wider Internet. (If I need to research activities in those years again, I will need to find my own mail archives which are on a hard drive somewhere in my house. If I can get the hard drive to spin up.) While I believe I can provide a sincerely accurate account of Wikipedia prior to 2007 from my own memories, I know others from that time will disagree with at least some of what I might write; having primary sources to refer to will limit the controversy. -- llywrch (talk) 21:26, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Time for all bronze-age Wikipedians to write their memoirs. Thanks to WMF's bold new strategy-vision-thingie, this neglected, indeed oppressed, minority group may soon be able to post its oral history as articles. Johnbod (talk) 21:34, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Or stone age. I'm just kidding Llywrch — Ched (talk) 22:54, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

"As an aside, I'm finding the written records for Wikipedia's earliest days are beginning to dissolve." - this sounds bad. Is it too late to do anything about it? Carcharoth (talk) 14:15, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

The records will almost certainly be kept somewhere even if they're not publicly visible, for legal reasons if nothing else. Have you asked the WMF? ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

@Llywrch: as they brought this up (I'm only responding to what they said). Carcharoth (talk) 15:10, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Hi. A couple of things caught my attention in your original post: 1. There has been generational change. and 2. Overall, I'm worried about a shift from "use your judgment" to "follow the rules". Now in all fairness my observations are completely different so I'll freely admit that context matters. For my observations I'll say that I was away for a while and only recently returned a couple months ago. grrr ... I want my comma splices With item 1 regarding the generational change I'd have to say both yes and no. Some of the editors when I started were teenagers; those teenagers are now adults raising their own families in many cases. Still we do have our younger editors; unfortunately, they tend to be much more impertinent in the extreme. I've seen several cases of young'ish' editors berating other editors, admins, etc. who have been around for 10+ years. or more. .. teehee - I know you love the English language With respect to number 2 I would say it's gone the other way. Policy and guidelines that have been followed since the beginning seem to be mere suggestions to many editors these days. You want to edit inside a closed discussion? Sure, so long as you have something you want to say. You want to gravedance? Go right ahead after you change your post to a "civil" degrading insult. You say you want to have all kinds of BLP violations on your user and talk page? Of course you can, we'll even find you an sysop who thinks it's funny. So yes, since my return I have found some rather unexpected things about the project. — Ched (talk) 22:54, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

The "rule-following" that's on my mind isn't so much the problem of people behaving badly on the internet (although I think you're right that we might have a bit more of that going on than we used to – back in the day, I understand that people were too busy creating still-missing VITAL articles to have much time to insult anyone who wasn't directly interfering with their own work). What's bothering me is that I'm seeing people with thousands of edits whose orientation is all about What Policy Permits, and who never seem to have an opinion about whether the proposal is a good idea or a bad idea.

As an example, a couple of months ago, a four-year-old account with 30K edits seriously asked whether the {{coord}} template violated the WP:External links guideline, because that template was "in the body of the article", where external links are generally prohibited. More recently, there was a dispute about whether bibliographic citations in a WP:PROF's ==Publication== list needed to have all URLs removed, to comply with the External links guideline. None of them seemed to even think about whether this was a good idea or a bad idea; it was just "My guideline prohibits this" vs "My guideline says it's okay". WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:55, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Well, maybe it's because the policies (rules) have been in place for so long that some people no longer question them. Back in the "old days" :) .. folks were still so fond of WP:BOLD and WP:IAR (I figure you know the 'links' to them) that it was common to see folks making changes to the policy page, and having long discussions on the accompanying talk pages. Now that the project is more mature, it's harder to make those changes. Deciding "consensus" is one thing, but changing it can be a bit harder once it's been established. Just IMO. — Ched (talk) 16:33, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

I've seen this "rules" mentality at work in other websites and it was chalked up to a) people being inexperienced (from young age, say) and thus following any guidance to the letter as they have no other frame of reference for appropriate behaviour, b) people using policies and guidelines as a club to win arguments and c) people confusing any policy or guideline for a firm rule because they didn't bother to read the "occasional exceptions" text atop of {{guideline}}.

My hypothesis is that rules wonks tend to drive out non-rules wonks and thus the proportion of rules wonks in a website user base tends to increase over time. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:51, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Your hypothesis feels plausible. Also, if we assume that rule-following is harmful to the project, then it feels scary. If rule-following increases over time, and if it is harmful to the project, then we're doomed. Eventually, nobody will write articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:07, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

The ultimate problem is that consensus doesn't scale upwards as a decision-making mechanism, and so English Wikipedia's attempts to do so will always run into difficulties. Without a hierarchy to manage disputes, editors instead try to enact specific rules for every situation, to try to make every case cut-and-dried. But eventually it becomes far too unwieldy to manage the network of rules, and despite its disadvantages, having some kind of hierarchy is the only way to protect the group from its own internally conflicting aims (see Clay Shirky's "A Group is its own Worst Enemy" for more on this). isaacl (talk) 19:15, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Ched, it wasn't any different in the "old days" when Bishzilla wasn't the only dinosaur & we wrote Wikipedia with stone tools. (It was hard carving those electrons with flint knives, let me tell ya!) My browse this weekend thru the archives of WikiEN-L for 2004 & 2005 confirmed that. People sniped at each other -- or followed the letter of the rules while ignoring the spirit -- while writing those "VITAL articles". There were valued editors who were more of a pain to work with than Fram ever was. Despite being someone from those old days, in some ways I'm glad to see less reliance on WP:BOLD & (especially) WP:IAR nowadays than 15 years ago -- although I would be happier if some rules were revoked, such concerning WP:MOS. Things will never be perfect, & everyone will know too much about how the sausages are made in this factory. -- llywrch (talk) 17:27, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

What I miss most about the dinosaur days is how easy it was to contribute something that was accepted as worthwhile. My first ever Wikipedia article was all of three words, had no wiki-syntax and certainly no references.[2] And that was fine! We could learn how to wiki while working on totally worthwhile things requiring very little effort. It's something we can't bring back but I wish we could give newbies a little taste of it. Haukur (talk) 19:27, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Ah yes, the days when you could just load up an article, hit the edit button, and start writing anything you happen to know about that topic, with referencing just a nice-to-have on top of that. You clearly get a better output the way we do it now, but it's a different skill and one that's harder to rope newcomers into, as the learning curve is much steeper.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:34, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Which raises the following dilemma: do we want an encyclopedia that is easy for people to contribute to, or an encyclopedia that is informative for its users? A dilemma the Foundation hasn't even bothered to acknowledge. -- llywrch (talk) 04:57, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

• Not entirely off topic I suppose; the whole "IP" issue is up once again at: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Require registration. I know I saw Jo-Jo Eumerus there, and I voiced a very strong neutral. — Ched (talk) 05:20, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

To be honest, and I mean no disrespect - but it seems to me that the WMF has very little clue about what goes on here. (present company excluded of course). There's a few folks from WMF that I have a lot of respect for, but in general, as a group - not so much. — Ched (talk) 05:24, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

Are "informative" and "easy for people to contribute to" mutually exclusive? I think that a lot of readers are really only looking for the first sentence, so getting the first sentence onto the page at la:Islandia is (somewhat) informative. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:21, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

@Ched, I don't think "the WMF has very little clue about what goes on here" is entirely fair. It's probably an artefact of the fact that WMF people tend to use their real name for their 'official' accounts but their original and probably pseudonymous screenname for their 'editing' accounts (User:WhatamIdoing/User:Whatamidoing (WMF) is a rare exception), and that some of them have their experience in other-language projects so aren't particularly familiar here. If you dig through the histories of the people here, quite a few of them have fairly extensive experience. A lot has (reasonably) been made of the fact that the responses to recent high-profile debacles have illustrated that there are people in positions of high authority—including the three most recent CEOs—who literally have no idea what Wikipedia does, and while I'm not disputing that it's an issue, I don't necessarily see it as a deal-breaker (the chief executive of United Airlines probably doesn't know how to fly a plane).

I can make—and in the past have made—a reasonable case that most of the problems with the WMF don't stem from inexperience, but from inappropriate experience. Those employees who've come from the wikis tend to be old sweats from the early days, before the Free Culture lunatics and Wikipedia Is An Agent Of Social Change cranks had been marginalized, and consequently the WMF has a set of values which no longer reflects either the editor or reader bases.

Adding to that, the whole Wikimania culture acts as an echo chamber. Wikimania is invariably scheduled during the summer vacation in the US and UK, which is invariably both the most expensive time for travel and in most professions the period in which it's most difficult to take time off work. Unless you happen to live within commuting distance of the venue, I doubt there's ever been a Wikimania that would cost less than $1000 to attend and probably closer to $2000, no matter where one is coming from, when you add travel, lodging, admission fees and incidental costs. (I can think of experiences for which I'd consider $350 a day to be a reasonable price, but I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that the phrase Crosslingual Embedding via Generalized Eigenvalue Decomposition would not be involved.) Since they only subsidize the travel of the truest of True Believers, that means the people management meet—and assume constitute the editor base—are either the ultra-loyalist payroll vote, or the kind of people who think paying for the privilege of taking a week off work to fly across the world to listen to a bunch of WMDC types slap each other on the back and talk about how wonderful they are. Someone like Katherine Maher or Jan Eissfeldt will quite reasonably assume that the people they meet at Wikimania and at the WMF office are representative of the editor base, whereas in reality they represent the fringiest edge of Wikipedia/Wikimedia's lunatic fringe.

As a consequence of all the above, strategic decisions are being made in entirely good faith, by people who either have a wildly unrepresentative view of what editors and readers want, or by OG Wikipedians from the early days who lament the change in culture and are trying to socially engineer us back to 2004.

On the original query about blacklists, I don't personally think we should be blacklisting anything; even something like Stormfront is theoretically a reliable source in certain circumstances. I do think we ought to be much more forceful when it comes to discouraging the use of newspapers as sources in general. They're completely appropriate in some circumstances (sports scores, reviews of the first night of a play, totally uncontroversial facts…); they're a necessary evil for recent events when the reliable sources haven't yet been written, but there are way, way too many people using "it was in the paper so it must be true" as an alternative to fact-checking. All that said, I can understand why people are supporting blacklisting specific cases. There's been a recent proliferation of pseudo-news sources that contain just enough genuine news that they're not immediately recognizable as propaganda outlets or hoax-farms, and I can entirely see why people who patrol current affairs articles would like to be able to blacklist sites like The Canary, Mail Online and Breitbart rather than have to patiently explain over and over that no, regardless of whether you read it on a website we're not going to include it. (TL;DR answer; rather than arguing over individual cases we should be treating all newspapers as generally unreliable, but some are more unreliable than others.) ‑ Iridescent 17:10, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Since you pinged my other account, I'll reply from here with a few factoids that might amuse:

• I requested my work username when I was hired in 2012, and it has been officially enshrined as an example of one of the four desirable username styles in the WMF's (internal) user account policy since 2014. (They are: the default first initial+last name [watch the capitalization: it's not a bad signal for the age of the account – if the username is all lowercased, then the staff member was probably hired around the same time as my team originally was], your real wiki-name, a name that people can actually spell, and any of the above with -WMF rather than (WMF) [for people who do a lot of RTL work, because parentheses behave oddly].)
• I asked Jan E about his view on Wikimania attendees just now, and he said, "the statistical correlation between Wikimania and onwiki editors is terrible". Staff going to Wikimania who don't already know this get lectures about it from those of us who do. It's more affiliate folks and edit-a-thon folks than everyday editors. In my particular area of interest/self-defense, most Product PMs get a lecture (half of them directly from me) about the critical difference between enthusiasm at Wikimania and enthusiasm on the wikis.
• The scholarship distribution process is up for review soon-ish. If you've got suggestions, please feel free to share (here, on my talk page, e-mail, ping me to any related conversation – it all works).

Now for the less amusing part: If there is a shortage of information about "what goes on here", where's "here"? How many of them are there? I had a brief conversation this morning with a couple of PMs, about the mw:Talk pages project. One mentioned a goal of encouraging "positive and productive conversations". (Design can affect some aspects of communications, e.g., Twitter encourages short comments, IRC encourages impermanence, etc.) It's kind of an obvious idea, right? Except (as I told them), Rudeness#Utility is a thing, and sometimes positivity isn't good. But – and this is a major problem with just saying that we shouldn't care about rudeness – if you're operating in a permanent system (and we are), a certain level of background rudeness drives away potentially valuable contributors. There's a reason that Aaron Halfaker described the English Wikipedia as "the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection, and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit". It's because our system isn't appealing to a lot of folks, e.g., folks from the very large parts of the world where a little superficial politeness is typical and culturally valued.

All of which is to say, is my own favorite "here" the only "here" that matters? If the WMF's attention is primarily on other projects, I don't think that's necessarily a problem. Most of English Wikipedia editors don't know what's happening at the Indic Wikisources; those Wikisourcers don't know much about what's happening in the Carribbean Wikipedias; they, in turn, don't know much about what's happening in Wikinews; they, in their turn, don't know much about what the edit-a-thon folks are up to; the editing event organizers don't really know what's happening with the Stewards (mostly another spambot attack over the weekend, from the sounds of it); the Stewards – well, I'm going to stop before I imply that the Stewards are anything less than omniscient. ;-) The movement is huge and sprawling, and nobody knows all of it. If the WMF's focus is on some other parts of the movement, maybe that's a good thing. I know there are things we could use (e.g., better anti-spam protection), but maybe the value that the WMF can provide (e.g., grants and training) is actually more needed in other places. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Hmm, better check out Languages of the Caribbean - the only thing that can really be called "the Carribbean Wikipedias" [pap.wikipedia.org/wiki/Página_Prinsipal has 1,916 articles]. Johnbod (talk) 20:09, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

w:ht: has over 56K articles.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:14, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Ok, missed that - but there doesn't seem to be an iw link at Haitian Creole. Johnbod (talk) 20:23, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

There is an interwikilink from Haitian Creole to w:ht:Kreyòl ayisyen, as it should be, but at the bottom of this page there are also four templates pointing out to Wikimedia projects in Haitian Creole, Wikipedia included.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:30, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

(quick driveby comment, substantive reply to WAID when I have time) Haitian Creole Wikipedia isn't a good example to be using for anything as it's a unique case. It's the wiki that was chosen for testing publicly-visible Reasonator pseudo-articles generated on-the-fly where in normal circumstances the reader would see a redlink, which skews their article count as it makes it much easier to flesh out the bones to create pages. In reality it's virtually moribund (its last 500 recent changes go back more than a week and are almost all the work of a single editor), according to the WMF's own figures a grand total of 27 people have made at least one edit in the past 30 days, and it has a mighty one admin registered (who has never made a single edit). These are the sort of engagement levels that would embarrass a schoolchild's Snapchat account, not something you'd associate with the sixth most visited page on the internet. If you (plural) are serious about wanting to engage more extensively with Caribbean communities, you'd almost certainly be better off improving coverage of Caribbean topics on the English, French and Spanish Wikipedias, since I guarantee you that the Kid In Port-au-Prince might speak Creole at home but it's French they're taught in at school and French they read and write in; this kind of "every country's dialect needs to be treated as a separate language in its own right" mentality among a certain WMF faction is the same kind of warped misunderstanding of what respecting diversity actually means that gave us Scottish Wikipedia. (IIRC you're Russian; if you have a very long memory you may recall the Siberian Wikipedia farce.) ‑ Iridescent 23:32, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Siberian is an imitation language which was fully invented by one person and has never been used for anything except to create the Siberian Wikipedia, whereas the Haitian Creole is real, but I see indeed your point and I was not aware of the background of the HC Wikipedia. And I also agree that our coverage, in any language, of Caribbean topic is miserable - last month I was the first person writing articles on stations of Line 2 of Panama Metro, open in April, in any language; this month I have the same story with Santo Domingo (only Portuguese articles exist), open in 2009; people after whom the stations are named often do not have articles either.--Ymblanter (talk) 05:41, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

The Haitian Creole Wikipedia has 56K actual articles, and 41K of them were created by a single editor, operating as an unflagged bot, between December 2007 and August 2008. Most of them say little more than "____ is a town in the ____ state of the US". (The "admin" is the AbuseFilter.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

• A quick note that I saw and appreciate the ping. I admit I hadn't been aware of, nor had I considered anon accounts becoming first, last (WMF) accounts. I see there's a lot for me to read, and once I've done my research I'll respond once I get back up to speed, and if it's proper. TY Iridescent (and other folks too). Cheers. — Ched (talk) 05:23, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Break: reply to WAID

Belated reply to WAID's substantive points:

• If staff get lectures about the critical difference between enthusiasm at Wikimania and enthusiasm on the wikis, that's certainly a step in the right direction. Although you haven't mentioned it, I assume they're also lectured on the critical difference between the type of people who have the time, money and inclination to attend events of any kind; the type of people who reply to WMF surveys (both surveys of editors, and surveys of readers); and the actual makeup of the editor and reader bases.

  I keep saying it ad nauseam, but the people who actually drive the wikis are middle-aged people whose kids have moved out and who consequently suddenly have more spare time on their hands than they're used to; professionals who have either recently retired or are divorced/bereaved and as a result have more time then they're used to and simultaneously less money to engage in more expensive activities; people in jobs that involve shift-work or work in a foreign country, who are out of sync with their friends and families so have big chunks of spare time at 3AM with nothing else to do; and stay-at-home parents of young children. The scheduling of Wikimania in peak-travel vacation season couldn't be more hostile to all of these groups if the WMF specifically set out to deter them.

  Yes, I know you've told me before that the WMF has conducted surveys and found these groups aren't disproportionately represented, but go to the areas where the heavy lifting is done and run your eye over the most active participants there, and I'll roughly estimate that this "middle aged and middle class" demographic accounts for at least 75% of the actual work on the wikis, and if you add in military/law enforcement (who don't necessarily fall into the same age group, but are also disproportionately represented owing to the "weird hours" aspect) and graduate students, it's probably closer to 90%. (There are certainly a lot of younger editors here but not that many of them are particularly active and when they are they tend to hang round drama boards and talk pages and the gnoming areas, rather than substantive work in either content or policy.)

  

  Wikimania 2019

  I find it hard to believe that—with the obvious exception of ethnicity—the demographic makeup of other wikis is going to be substantially different to that of en-wiki or Commons, but I cast my eye over the attendees at Wikimania and this is not the Wikimedia I recognize. You can lecture people as often as you can that this isn't representative, but people go by what they see not what they're told. (If I've visited Japen five times and on each occasion been robbed, then while intellectually I may know that Japan has the lowest crime rate in the world and I'm just an unfortunate statistical outlier, I'll still think twice before booking a vacation in Tokyo.) If these are the only people that the management-level folks are ever meeting, then it's no surprise they keep signing off on initiatives which seem to take it as read that everyone on Wikipedia is a 20-something tech nerd, and are freshly shocked each time when the relatively conservative (small-c) editor base greets it with something between skepticism and disdain.

• I can't really comment on the scholarship distribution process, as I think the whole thing is based on the flawed premise that Wikimania itself is something worthwhile, whereas as far as I'm concerned the WMF should be allocating a grand total of $0 to any aspect of Wikimania (and that if any of the individual chapters are funding it in any way, the WMF should withold an equivalent amount from their grant in the next funding round).

  Wikipedia/Wikimedia is an online community, and flying (and it almost always is flying) in 500+ people just so they can slap each other on the back and tell each other how great they are is a complete waste of time and money; we're supposed to be a website, not a religious cult, and IMO it's a clear misuse of donor funds to use them to reward True Believers with free vacations. (Particularly in the current climate—pun intended—we shouldn't be flying anyone anywhere unless it's genuinely necessary. That the WMF boasts about its green credentials, while having a CEO who boasts of taking 200 flights each year and whose official biography says that she "lives in a metal tube in the sky", is just embarrassing.) If these people want to talk to each other and for some reason are incapable of installing Skype, let them organize their own event and pay their own way the same as any other Wikipedia meetup. (Slightly bitchy aside, but if the WMF really want to shed their image as being obsessed with management buzzwords and Grand Visions and completely out of touch with what readers and editors actually want, then publishing drivel like this recent offering from two of your Community Engagement colleagues a few days ago is probably not helping.)

• On If there is a shortage of information about "what goes on here", where's "here"?, I know I've said this to you before (not sure if it was in private or on-wiki); to me "here" is English Wikipedia, Commons, and to a lesser extent French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish Wikipedias, and Wikidata. The WMF has—by accident or design—hidden most of the more interesting statistics since Wikistats 2 went live, but I assume things haven't changed particularly dramatically since the final snapshot in October 2018. Of the across-all-projects stats, English Wikipedia on its own accounted for half of all page views, 1⁄3 of all edits and a little under half of all active editors; the big six (English, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, French) accounted for 76% of all page views. The non-Wikipedia wikis—Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wiktionary—are all statistically insignificant. (Commons and Wikidata are statistically insignificant as well, but obviously have a disproportionate importance as changes there affect pages elsewhere.) It doesn't fit the WMF's "we are a global resource" PR to say so, but ultimately every other project is a bolt-on to English Wikipedia, and the decisions taken by and regarding English Wikipedia ultimately affect all the other projects regardless of how much they might dislike the fact.
• Background rudeness is a problem you're never going to solve, given the existence of the "have a nice day" problem; the WMF is a global project and English Wikipedia is the most global of the WMF's projects (although 40% of en-wiki readers are in the US, the remaining 60% are spread across the entire world), and what constitutes politeness in some places constitutes rudeness in others. (Remember the guy who thought he was being polite by signing all his talkpage posts "Cheers"?) The best you're ever going to get when it comes to trying to impose a code of conduct is "if someone asks you to stop doing something, please don't do it again unless there's a justifiable reason why doing it is necessary", which ought to be a universal basic rule of life anyway.

TL;DR summary of all the above: if the WMF feel that some of the smaller subprojects could do with being watched over by machines of loving grace then they're welcome to do so if they feel said project is genuinely incapable of resolving their issues themselves. However English Wikipedia and the other five big Wikipedias continue to be the geese that lay their golden eggs and the WMF should learn that just because someone tells them that it's theoretically possible to mould the shape of the eggs by shoving their fingers up the goose's butt, if they try to do it in practice then the goose is eventually either going to turn and bite them, fly away and never return, or die of internal trauma, and even if it works in the short term they might briefly get eggs that are a more pleasing shape, but they'll still be the one with their hands covered in goose shit. ‑ Iridescent 14:44, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Insightful and interesting as always. Quick question: How do you know stay-at-home parents of young children do a substantial amount of editing? I know plenty of people in this category and they have no spare time whatsoever. (I was going to sign my post with "Cheers" but now I know not to :)) Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 16:30, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

I'm sure the overwhelming majority of parents never edit Wikipedia, but the same could be said of any group. My analysis of the demographics of highly active editors is purely apocryphal and based on personal experience rather than any statistical analysis, but I'm nonetheless fairly sure I'm right, based on personal knowledge of those people I've met IRL or communicated with extensively. (I won't name individuals, but pick the "active editor" metric of your choice—WP:WBFAN, the "Top editors" tab on the talkpage of a non-moribund Wikiproject, the regular participants at a bottom-of-the-rabbit-hole page like Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom etc—and you'll see the same breakdown when it comes to who the most active people are.) Some activities, like using WP:AWB to search-and-replace for all instances of a typo, are ideally suited to looking after children, as they don't require concentration or your full attention so you can do them while simultaneously watching TV with the child. WAID or someone else from the WMF will pop up shortly to say point out that the WMF's surveys show that only a small proportion of Wikipedia editors are parents, but that misses the points that (a) WMF surveys don't measure editors, they measure people who consider it a good use of their time filling in surveys and (b) those parents who are editing might be lower in numbers than the proportion of the general population who are parents, but they're disproportionately active. ‑ Iridescent 16:44, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Hmmm, I'm still scratching my head. In my 13 years on the wiki I can't think of a single editor whose occupation is taking care of their young (younger than school-age) children. I'm also struggling to reconcile the overwhelmingly-female nature of the stay-at-home parent demographic with the gender gap we have here. And our articles on parenting tend to be lousy. I'm not arguing with what you've personally experienced, just putting out that my experience is different. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 17:13, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

We did attachment parenting for our older three kids...but they were all in school by the time I began editing. My youngest was born in 2008 but I worked more with that one. My wife has never edited. Sort of agree with Clayoquot - free time is definitely patchy, and times children are not occupying your time you're busy sorting laundry/kitchen/etc. I asked a friend when it got easier, to which they replied, "when they learn to drive" ......Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:23, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

It depends on the child. After my first daughter turned 5, I found I once again had time to edit Wikipedia; if you look at my edit stats, you can make out the approximate dates she was born & when she became old enough I could spend my a part of my non-work time at other pursuits than watching endless episodes of Caillou & Curious George. Then her sister came into our lives, & based on my experience I expected the same thing would happen; no such luck. Today I & Ms. Llywrch spent an hour & ahalf in a conference at her grade school with the principal, vice principal, half the kindergarden staff, the case worker, & the head of the afterschool care center concerning her behavior. (How bad is her behavior? Were she an African-American attending a charter school in Florida, she'd likely be in jail by now. If there was no WP:NPOV policy, I could use this experience to improve a number of articles currently languishing at a "Start" class.) -- llywrch (talk) 04:35, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

I also can't recall ever being aware of a heavy editor with pre-school kids. Among heavy-duty female editors, empty-nesters are very common. But one thing we can be sure of: dogs, horses and husbands are no impediment to editing. Johnbod (talk) 16:42, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

I am unsure if you are forgetting extremely active editors with young children that you did know and interact with frequently, or if my knowledge of the ages/children/gender of those editors was private rather than publicly known, but you did know such editors, Johnbod, including prolific female editors. I started editing as an empty-nester, and was in awe of the parents who were active editors with young children. (I was less in awe of those I felt were neglecting their children and spouses, and told them so :). I think Iri has it about right. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:13, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

On the lectures:

• the type of people who have the time, money and inclination to attend events of any kind
  • Yes, but that message is complicated. There's a lot of talk about how only privileged volunteers can attend (because even if you get a scholarship to pay for the entire trip, it takes time away from work and other responsibilities), the problem of an English-only or English-primary event, some talk about privacy concerns, and in the last year or two, some talk about autistic people, who either don't want to attend or who don't feel fully supported when they do.
• the type of people who reply to WMF surveys (both surveys of editors, and surveys of readers)
  • The team that runs the ~annual editor survey regularly complains that highly active editors are disproportionately over-represented in the survey.
• the actual makeup of the editor and reader bases
  • This is a broader subject than just Wikimania participation.

I'm going to go find some breakfast. In the meantime, if anyone has any ideas on a machine-friendly method for differentiating high-volume gnomes from people who create good content, please share. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:18, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

About editors' age: I saw a question over at the Village Pump about how many of us made our first edits before creating an account. The similar question I've been thinking about is how many of us made our first edits while we were students at university. Back when I was new, that seemed to be normal. Ten years later, it's not as typical, and the median age of survey-taking editors has risen by approximately the same ten years. I know people who edited as students and stopped when the whole marriage-job-mortgage-baby thing happened to them, and there are several others who have disappeared that I suspect of being affected by the same time-sucking process. Back in the day, these were students in the middle of their first university degree, and fixing up Wikipedia articles was a study technique for them. I've encountered several retirees, and there are (and also were, sadly) editors with disabilities who edit because it could be done when they felt up to it and dropped when they didn't. I know two men who started editing when there was at least one pre-school-age child in the house, but there were some extenuating circumstances in both cases. I don't know any women who started editing while caring for young children.

The new(ish) chief of Community Engagement wants to focus on recruiting young adults (16–25 or 18–25; I can't remember which, but it's whatever category the UN uses for similar purposes) as editors. I'm not sure how much it will affect enwiki, because there's an overlapping focus on Asian and African languages. I like the idea of getting another generation of editors in place. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:21, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

If I had to guess, on en-wiki the next generation will come from the 25–34 cohort, not teens–25. Based on no data but a decade of watching people come and go, in general the younger editors sign up in a burst of enthusiasm but don't tend to stick around. We need an influx of new blood and new ideas, but I really don't think the college crowd is the group likely to provide it. If you're planning on targeted recruitment, target it at underemployed graduates. College kids faced with the choice of "partying" or "Wikipedia" are probably unlikely to choose the latter (and the ones who would choose the latter are disproportionately likely to be the kind of loner weirdos who end up either flaming out and getting blocked, or walking out in a huff because we won't host their rant about whatever their pet issue turns out to be. College graduates who are currently driving cabs, working as care assistants or pulling pints, would often like nothing better than a chance to keep active when it comes to writing and researching, and would welcome the chance of an environment where they're taken seriously when they have something to say, and where they're judged by the quality of their abilities not by their job or their earnings. ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

P.S. Tell whoever's in charge that the WMF's IP Masking plan is a really, really, bad idea. If it's really the case that "Most people I talked to [at Wikimania] expressed support for the project, including some expressing surprise that this has not been implemented after so many years", there's evidence right there that the Wikimania crowd is so unrepresentative as to be meaningless, given that the current for/against count on the Meta discussion is 3 for, 75 against. If I were to make a prediction, if the WMF does try to bulldoze this through then the four big wikis will immediately ban all IP editing even if it means going against direct orders from the WMF. ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

And on the subject of change…

I did not see that coming. ‑ Iridescent 08:16, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

• ..Trust & Safety returning to the Legal department.. is what caught my eye - ty for the link. — Ched (talk) 14:13, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
• Well, yeah, that's unexpected. A roundabout way to do thorough house cleaning? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:11, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

• The AGF explanation would be that the WMF has listened to community concerns and from now on T&S is going to give up on the "make everyone adhere to their definition of civility" crusade and focus exclusively on child protection issues, conduct so serious it constitutes criminal harassment, and issues around defamation, and as such it makes sense for it to be run directly by the lawyers since whatever they deal with is going to end up on the lawyers' desks anyway at some point. The cynical explanation is that senior management and/or the board were unimpressed at spending what should have been their summer vacation cleaning up the flaming bag of poop T&S dumped on their doorstep (and presumably one board member in particular wasn't delighted at the fact that T&S's unnecessary escalation led to assorted people of various degrees of crazy poring through her personal life) and have concluded that none of these people should be left in charge of anything more complicated than a spoon without reporting directly to someone else. The WMF is legendarily opaque in terms of its internal structure—read this page and see if you can actually work out who reports to whom and where the buck actually stops—and it will be interesting to see who actually ends up in charge of the various functions of Community Engagement once the dust settles. Someone will probably leak the internal discussions that led to this at some point, even if the minutes don't officially get released. ‑ Iridescent 16:46, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

Yeah. T&S is the obvious one, and I suppose the Community Relations will segue into Communications, with Community Resources (the grants people) going to Finance. It's the bits and pieces - Community Development, Community Programs, Events, Learning & Evaluation - that are less predictable. Their work isn't as obvious, but generally provides some degree of infrastructure and support for initiatives that are wide-reaching and counted upon by chapters and commmunity groups as they develop; in many cases, it's the only support developing groups get from anywhere or anyone, even if it's awfully bare-bones. These don't fit well into any of the other existing departments or programs; there's a reason they weren't already folded in elsewhere. Risker (talk) 19:23, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

In the certain knowledge that nobody at the WMF (with the possible occasional exception of WAID) has the slightest interest in my opinion, I suspect T&S into legal isn't going to have quite the effect they hoped for. Legal understandably has a very precautionary-principle approach to communications and never say anything unless they have to, so I think there's a real possibility that "I have concerns about this editor"—"This is to confirm receipt of your message—"never heard from again" becomes common, and ends up alienating and upsetting people who report what they feel are legitimate concerns and are never heard of again. I could also make a case that the remits of Legal and T&S don't fit as snugly as you'd think; the kind of persistent assholery that leads to global bans doesn't necessarily involve any kind of legal issue, or even necessarily a violation of the ToU.

I'm also confused as to why this is being done; with the exception of T&S who haven't covered themselves in glory since they replaced SuSa, Community Engagement seems to be the only part of the WMF which isn't terminally dysfunctional. Things like providing management support for small wikis in local languages, or assessing grant applications from people who want to hire professional translators, would be an awful fit if they tried to shoehorn them into Advancement. The more I think about it, the more this looks to me like it could be laying the groundwork for a huge Big Bang change like a separate management structure for Wikipedia or a revival of the Knowledge Engine. ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

Based on my understanding, legal had to sign off on any global ban anyway, so making them actually in charge makes sense. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:04, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

AFAIK that's just a double-checking exercise to ensure they're not defaming someone with the block reason, or about to hardblock New York City with the rangeblock (back in the distant past we once inadvertently IP-blocked an entire country), rather than legal actually making the decision. One of the current arbs would be much better placed than me to explain how things are currently done. (There are good reasons for being wary of putting any more power in the hands of Legal than there needs to be. Historically, WMF Legal has attracted some—erm—characters. Plus, one of the known flaws of the WMF is an institutional difficulty in admitting to mistakes, and I find it hard to imagine introducing lawyers into the mix will make that particular issue any better.) ‑ Iridescent 23:11, 16 November 2019 (UTC)‎

Re opaqueness of the WMF internal structure: this version might make it a bit easier. --Yair rand (talk) 06:39, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Not really—it still doesn't show who reports to whom, and what the nature of the relationships is (e.g., who is who's boss, which departments are autonomous and which are sub-departments, whether the high-level folks have authority over junior staff in other departments, etc). None of their staff directories pass the "if I chose someone at random and wanted either to commend or complain about that person, who would I contact and how would I contact them?" test. ‑ Iridescent 13:48, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

The human resources software is allegedly the only place that contains the entire and current reporting chain. Of course, from the POV of most English Wikipedians, commendation should be delivered publicly, and probably in the form of barnstars. Alternatively, you could send it to the m:answers@ address and ask to have it forwarded appropriately.

The WMF has "departments" and "teams". All departments are autonomous, and there are no sub-departments. The only organizational level below department is "team". Anything below that level is not officially recognized. To give an example, Product is a large department, and mw:Contributors is a large team of about 50 people inside of Product. The mw:Editing team, although functionally behaving as a team, is not recognized as a separate, official entity in this model. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Code of Conduct

• Also, plans to go ahead with the proposed CoC seem to be underway in some form or manner. There's an interesting photograph as well, representing universal values of Wikimedia communities .... ∯WBG^converse 14:45, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

• The "universal values of Wikimedia communities" are embodied by a commitment to socialism, a monument to Chiang Kai-shek, the primary site for public executions during the French Revolution, and a memorial to the dead of the US Navy? And then the WMF wonder why they're not taken seriously. ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

• Precisely.
  By the way, who is the uploader? Seem to be a WMF staff, given that (s)he has done precious nothing over any project other than uploading this photo and two other charts, which were all used by a new T&S recruit. ∯WBG^converse 09:09, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

A 'new T&S recruit'? Do we need to avoid naming User:NNair (WMF)? Neha Nair, Trust and Safety Specialist, Wikimedia Foundation, who started that page and says on their meta user page: "I am passionate about curbing hate messages and violent extremism from internet platforms." What is the recruitment process used by the WMF here? Carcharoth (talk) 15:16, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

It looks like User:NNair (WMF) is Indian. Regarding the "constitution of India" issue, in my experience a lot of Indians—particularly those who live and work in India and get their information from the Indian media—have something of a blind spot regarding how unpopular India currently is with the rest of the world. (Saudis, Israelis, Russians, Brits, Turks, Americans etc may not agree with why their country is currently unpopular but in general can at least appreciate why many external observers see their country as a negative influence.) NNair probably genuinely doesn't understand that "a constitution currently being imposed on an unwilling population at gunpoint in a wave of rape, torture, extraducicial killings, government censorship and racially-motivated mob violence onto a public that doesn't want it" isn't something with which most people would want to be associated, let alone something that reflects "universal values of Wikimedia communities". (If I were being very cynical and bitchy, now would be the point at which I'd mention that the Indian Constitution is famously unworkable, is the most-amended national constitution in the world despite having been in place for less than 70 years, and is so full of unnecessary bloat in efforts to appease various interest groups that it's now the longest constitution of anywhere in the world other than Alabama's national laughing-stock, and as such is exactly the perfect metaphor for the WMF's values. But I'm not so I won't.)

Regarding the other issues, at a guess NNair probably doesn't know a great deal of Western history, and has just done a Google Images search on various WMF buzzwords and used whatever came up, without appreciating that (e.g.) while Concorde does indeed translate as "Consensus" the Place de la Concorde is the execution site of Antoine Lavoisier and 2638 others (back then it was the Place de la Révolution—its present-day name was intended to symbolise French regret at its bloodstained history), that the monument outside the US Capitol commonly known as the "Peace Monument" is in fact a memorial to the US Navy (and I don't think even the most devout American patriot would deny that much of the world does not consider the US military a force for good), or that when selecting photos with the intent of illustrating a global project, 50% of the images being of DC and Paris while a grand total of zero black faces are visible (unless you count the statue of MLK) says something about the WMF and it's nothing good.

(As an aside, one of the photos—File:Dongxiang minority student.jpg—isn't even credited, so technically the whole thing constitutes a cut-and-paste copyvio and could be speedily deleted. That image—along with File:Harmony Day (5475651018).jpg—wave some massive red flags to me; they're both scraped from Flickr rather than uploads by established Commons editors, and I'd be willing to bet a sizeable sum that none of the children pictured, or their parents/guardians, ever gave consent for their images to be "specifically and irrevocably released to be used by anyone, anytime, for any purpose".)

The whole thing is something of an illustration of just why trying to create any kind of universal anything, on a project covering so many different cultures, is going to be unworkable. Unless any "Universal Code of Conduct" is just constrained to platitudes like "try to listen to other people's opinions" and "if someone tells you they find something offensive try to avoid doing it unless you can justify why it's necessary", you're never going to find something with which all cultures will agree. Yes, the big American social media sites are making tentative steps to impose worldwide rules, but those are all variations on "wherever you are, you are obliged to follow the cultural values of the United States when using this service", and if the WMF tried to impose anything similar the wikis would explode. ‑ Iridescent 11:52, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

• That page on the proposed CoC is ... interesting. If I understand it correctly, after taking lots of meetings & getting lots of input they've come to the decision that there will be a CoC. And they're going to even more meetings & get lots of input to come up with a process for writing a CoC. (Unless I missed something & they're going to even more meetings & getting lots of input to come up with a process for creating a process for writing a CoC.) -- llywrch (talk) 21:01, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Interesting indeed. Is Maggie Dennis still off for health reasons? –xeno^talk 11:59, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Maybe she is still away. I got a message from Karen Brown that presumably went to all those who failed to follow through on participation at WP:FRAM with participation at the meta survey (guilty as charged). "we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of." So should I fill in the Google Docs survey? Carcharoth (talk) 15:20, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

I filled it in ... and the gist of it was "I don't trust WMF to actually listen to what the community tells them so I didn't bother with your consultation." Ealdgyth - Talk 15:30, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Did you copy me, or did I copy you? [3] --Floquenbeam (talk) 15:35, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

You both copied everyone I know well. And that has been my stance on every survey I have ever received from them. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:49, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

The proposal of a Universal CoC is simply unworkable unless it is so vague and generalistic that can cover lots of things and none at the same time; thus being a useless policy. And a text aimed to prevent or prohibit conducts must be clear and specific, otherwise it'd be quite dangerous. I think Section 4 of the current Terms of Use is enough, leaving ordinary behavioural "micromanagement" to individual projects except of course cases like WP:CHILDPRO or other legal issues. It is still not clear to me what problem is this UCOC aimed to resolve, but I can imagine how many new ones a text forced upon the communities will. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 14:41, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Agreed with the above. The defined purpose is an entirely useless non-answer that basically implies it attempts to unify the movement by applying onto every project the same arbitrary disciplinary authority, which plainly is a bad idea. Vermont (talk) 01:13, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

For the record, anyone following along here (who isn't totally sick of the F-word by now) might also be interested in the related thread at Wikipedia:Community response to the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of Fram#End of community consultation on temporary and partial office bans which in turn relates to this T&S statement. If one cuts through the verbiage, it boils down to "T&S abrogates arrogates to themselves sole discretion to determine what constitutes 'poor conduct', have no obligation to make public how they reach any decision, and are infallible and it's not permitted to dispute any decision made by them". There may be a way to interpret this as something other than T&S digging in for an attritional campaign against the governance of the individual wikis and/or laying the groundwork for a purge of anyone they don't consider a pure enough True Believer, but if so I can't think what it could be. ‑ Iridescent 18:01, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

abrogates -> arrogates? EEng 19:16, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Just testing… Safari has many fine features but whoever decided to switch autocorrect on by default needs drowning. ‑ Iridescent 19:36, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Coropuna/archive1

Pinging you to this discussion as you previously commented on the topic at peer review and the FAC has not received that much input in terms of "support","oppose" or "no opinion". Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:25, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

I will when I get the chance. I've put a placeholder comment asking the delegates not to archive the nomination until I've had a chance to re-read it. ‑ Iridescent 09:51, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Declined CSD

Hello!

I Noticed that you have declined my CSD here. However, I think that the text, the username, and the edit summary clearly indicate that the intention was self-promotion. However it is also possible that I am mistaken on this one, so I would like to ask your thoughts on it for future reference.

Best regards, Kostas20142 (talk) 17:56, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

It was a potential role account so was correctly softblocked pending a rename request, but it read in full we are are a small town wrestling company. It's always been considered perfectly acceptable for Wikipedia users to include a brief description of themselves on their userpage, and that description was as neutral as they come; there's no remotely promotional language there. (There's no plausible way any reader could think "wow, a small town wrestling company, I'd better check them out".) The {{db-spamuser}} template with which you tagged it even explicitly says "simply having a page on a company or product in one's userspace does not qualify a userpage for deletion". ‑ Iridescent 19:44, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

It seems you are right, thanks! --Kostas20142 (talk) 19:51, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

There are way too many people who seem to think that merely discussing a company or a product makes something spam. I see them at AFD all the time, PR being a key giveaway. Sometimes I write a closing statement emphasizing notability based arguments as a response. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:54, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: Yeah I know, merely discussing it doesn't constitute spam. It was just the whole thing that gave me the impression that the only intention was self-promotion. Anyways, thanks for the comment! --Kostas20142 (talk) 19:57, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Meh, if a closer feels the need to decide the tension of NOTSPAM vs. GNG in a closing statement, they likely should be voting rather than closing. We have no consistent notability guideline, and what we keep or delete largely depends on historical practice in a topic area. What the GNG means for some random 11th century religious figure vs. what it means for a BLP vs. what it means for a corporation are very different and we do not at all apply the guideline the same, nor should we. Not really relevant to this particular instance, but the idea that we have a consistent notability rule that reigns supreme and that it is not frequently balanced with other concerns, and that other concerns can never trump it is also incorrect. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:42, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Well, no, because in many cases we end up with "delete, it's PR""keep, it's notable" arguments and then someone either decides - no consensus, keep or delete or something else - or the XFD stays open for all eternity. But since WP:ATD is a policy such cases tend to end up as keep or no consensus in many cases, unless notability is questionable or the promotion severe enough. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:20, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Plus, although WP:ATD is policy and WP:TNT is just someone's personal opinions, with the marginal topics the latter comes into play. The random religious figures differ from the small businesses in that they serve a different purpose to readers. An article that reads in full Ketill Þorsteinsson was the bishop of Hólar between 1122 and 1145. would still be a valid article (albeit one that IMO would be better served as a redirect to a list) provided one could verify that it was accurate since it's something someone could conceivably be looking for, and there's de facto automatic notability since by definition the holder of a position like that was someone that people at the time considered important and notability is not temporary. (We have lots and lots of articles like Mahalath and Hegai about minor Biblical figures about whom nothing more than their brief mention will ever be known, and whose stories aren't so interesting that they'll ever form the basis of significant commentary or artworks* so will never be expandable. Yes I know Mahalath appears in a few paintings of Ishmael or Esau, but AFAIK nobody ever depicts her as anything other than part of a group. We'd never delete them—although again, IMO they should form a single list, same as List of supporting Harry Potter characters—since multiple major religions consider them important enough to mention.)

Re: permanent stubs -- which articles like Mahalath and Hegai are. That's an issue we Wikipedians are going to have to face. IMHO, we should only have an article on a given subject if & only if there is potential content to turn it into a Featured Article; otherwise merge it into a relevant article. Yes, there are some subjects which are more difficult to find a path to FA for than others. But consider Manuel II of Trebizond, of whom there are very few facts: his young age as emperor, the brief length of his reign, & that he was murdered a year after being deposed. I thought about that hard, then realized that what made him worth more than a few sentences was the fact he was a rare example of (1) a child emperor in the Romano-Byzantine tradition, & (2) he was killed after his deposition. I put him in some kind of context, which is something a lot of our articles lack, & is how I expanded this article. That said, I suspect there are many permanent stubs out there that will never lend themselves to either a merge or possibly ever becoming an FA. -- llywrch (talk) 18:30, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

You're preaching to the converted here—I've always believed that most articles are more use to readers as entries in a list where they can be compared at a glance to the rest of the topics in the series, and only broken out when their entries are so long they make the list unwieldy. Having a single list also means that the background section, which is necessary for most articles to be comprehensible to non-specialists, only needs to be given once rather than repeated across a dozen articles which just annoys the readers. Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway is usually my go-to example of what I think most Wikipedia pages ought to look like. Unfortunately, the Great God Consensus doesn't agree with me, which is why (to stick with that Brill Tramway example) we have half-a-dozen near-identical pages at Wood Siding railway station, Westcott railway station etc. The "every grain of sand needs a separate page" brigade is small but is noisy enough to disrupt any attempt to rationalize any attempt to clean things up. You've been here since 2003—you presumably remember just how much time and effort it took to gain consensus even for the idea that each of the 900 pokemons (pokemen?) didn't need it's own full-length stand-alone biography. (Just gonna put this here.) ‑ Iridescent 18:53, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Something like List of seamounts in the Marshall Islands would be my idea of such a list article - only a few of the articles on it are so long as to deserve their own page such as Wōdejebato and Limalok which are at FA level. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 22:12, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

I somehow missed that circus about the Pokemon stubs, although I heard about it later. (Odd none of the standard histories of Wikipedia ever retell that story.) But I did witness similar struggles to merge stubs into larger unified articles, so I know what you mean. I expect that historical forces (to steal a phrase from a political philosopher currently out of favor) will favor combining many of these stubs into lists -- or list-like articles. I base this on the fact that I haven't encountered anyone deconstructing any lists into groups of articles, thus there is a tendency for these articles to combine into larger ones. So over the long run this will succeed; it's just going to take a bit a patience & perseverance. (In my experience, I've found it effective to dealing with irrational objections to the right decision by simply waiting out those who object. Even if it takes years. No need to lose one's temper & start accusing the other party(s) of bad faith.) -- llywrch (talk) 08:18, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Fictional topics have been on a long arc of merging to lists or wholesale deletion since the early expansion days in 06/07, after WP:NFICT failed and we got to a reasonable consensus about how to write about fiction. I expect questionably-notable topics elsewhere to follow a similar arc (where noticed, of course). That said, such lists do end up going the other direction when an editor interested in the topic and willing to put the time in expands it back out which IMO generally appropriate. --Izno (talk) 15:28, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Writing a useful article on a work of fiction that follows Wikipedia guidelines is & likely always will be a difficult task. Part of the reason is that even people who graduate with a degree in Literature don't always learn of resources like the MLA Bibliography or Year's Work in English Studies -- which would greatly aid in finding reliable sources. But an even more challenging problem is that many notable works of fiction lack a discussion in a reliable secondary source, & may never be the subject of one. One example of this would be the works of Jim Thompson; another would be V.C. Andrew's Flowers in the Attic. If there was a way around the WP:NOR rule, the lack of secondary sources would not prevent us from actually discussing the work (e.g., themes, influences, characterization, etc.), which is just one more unintended side-effect of that fundamental policy. -- llywrch (talk) 17:21, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

When it comes to current businesses. the one-liners that just say something exists are a different kettle of fish. As well as the burden of expectation that the author explain why it qualifies as notable, there's also the "even if this is notable, does this page serve any useful purpose?" question; sometimes a redlink is better than a one-sentence stub since a redlink makes it more likely someone will write something better. The whole thing is a gray area, which is why we have deletion debates rather than a straightforward set of rules. On the subject of deletion and gray areas, if any passing deletionist wants a happy hunting ground, try both the articles and redirects brought up by Special:PrefixIndex/List of tall which should be enough to keep both RfD and AfD running for a month. ‑ Iridescent 10:57, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Sure, but WP:DELREASON is also policy as is WP:NOTSPAM, and notability is only one of the reasons listed. We agree on all the minor biblical figures, and roads, and train stations and how we shouldn’t delete them. The tension between not being a vehicle for promotion while also not being a paper encyclopedia is difficult, which is why we have those discussions. I fall on the other side than JJE, and consider arguments based on promotionalism to be significantly stronger arguments to delete than notability based arguments are to keep if we’re talking about some random startup where the claim to notability is borderline at best. This is why we have the discussions rather than G11ing everything on sight, but I was more challenging the idea that notability based arguments are superior in corporate discussions. It depends on the case, but in many cases involving corporations, there’s a significantly stronger case to delete than keep even when notability is taken out of the picture. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:09, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

The problem I often see is that deletion nominations citing the spam rules at AFD tend to be rather vague on explaining why the listed article qualifies as spam, and WP:NOTSPAM is not a blank cheque. It's especially a problem because a spammy article can be rewritten so WP:ATD comes into play whereas one cannot really make a non-notable topic notable during the course of an AFD discussion. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 22:12, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

The deletion pages in general are a mess, as they've had 18 years to accumulate people repeating things they heard somewhere about how things "should be done", which in turn get seen by newer editors who (reasonably) assume that because these are arguments they've seen made by experienced editors, they must have some validity. The rules around paid editing are a particularly problematic one which even experienced admins and WMF employees struggle to understand. My personal bugbear is people who proudly cite WP:USEFUL as if it proves arguments based on utility are forbidden, when in fact it's an especially stupid and very outdated personal essay and in reality "is this article/file/page actually of any potential use to readers?" should be the primary criterion when judging if something should be kept—ironically this is something which the legendarily dysfunctional Commons do manage to grasp instinctively when it comes to their own deletion processes. If I had my way the entire deletion process would be deleted and rebuilt from scratch based on which criteria are both useful and practical and on a practical definition of notability rather than "it's in a book so it must be important", with particular emphasis on destroying with fire and salting the ludicrous Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions. ‑ Iridescent 23:27, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm slightly less critical of our deletion processes, and don't often see WP:USEFUL cited myself, but I do find it silly that the number of pageviews a page gets is regarded as completely beside the point. The bio of an Indian actor with a role in a newish hit tv drama (also Indian) was nominated for deletion despite getting around 200 views a day over a couple of weeks. Johnbod (talk) 02:37, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

@Johnbod:Huh - I am pretty certain I don't see pageviews frequently cited at AFD, either by keepers or by deleters (in portal discussions on the other hand...). OTOH I often see people saying "keep, it's useful" with little explanation of why it's useful. I wonder what practical definition of notability because while the current WP:GNG is mostly "these are topics that we can write policy compliant articles about" "practical definition" to me sounds like it'd turn into a list of all topics that someone likes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:25, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

You and I differ on our views of paid editing, which I view as an issue of utility via credibility, but I'd agree generally with what you've said above. I'd also delete arguments to avoid with fire. It's basically an essay that random people have created overtime to make it easier to shout down people who are raising valid points.

I guess if you had to sum up my views on the deletion process it would be delete things that harm our credibility and/or cause harm in the real world, keep everything else. I'm sure I could find a way to fit utility in there, though I view credibility and utility as going hand-in-hand. It's why I find the GNG so moronic: it means whatever you want it to mean and provides no real guidance as the internet and information sharing have substantially evolved over time. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:51, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

You say it means whatever you want it to mean and provides no real guidance, which I think is true of many of our notability guidelines. Or, rather, experienced editors tend to roughly agree on what they mean but that understanding is not actually codified in the text so it's quite a learning curve for newbies. The exception is WP:NBOOK, which is crystal clear for some reason. Haukur (talk) 07:27, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

The curious thing about deletion debates is that, if you look at it in a certain way, they are irrelevant. On the one hand, any experienced editor knows well to provide sufficient details & citations to any article they might create in order to prevent it from ending up at WP:AfD. On the other, if an article that should fail notability somehow sneaks in under the radar (e.g. practically any biography of a social networking consultant), it survives yet no one knows/cares it exists, like the proverbial tree falling in a forest without anyone to hear if it makes a sound. (And eventually someone will stumble across it & mark it for deletion years after this social networking consultant moved on to a more lucrative career as a barista or grocery store clerk.) -- llywrch (talk) 08:03, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

New biographies are certainly scrutinised, but if they survive say a fortnight are then fairly safe. Many of them are carefully referenced, just not with independent RS. There is often a genuine disagreement about who/what is and is not "notable". The list question is part of the wider issues around most of our editors preferring to start new articles rather than improve old ones. Johnbod (talk) 16:18, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Which I’ve always found interesting (on the start vs. improve point.) I’ve basically been non-existent in mainspace the last year (tl;dr change in life circumstances made that less enjoyable/feasible) but I always preferred improving existing articles over creating new ones, in part because I find it easier and in part because I find the end result is better. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:23, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

There are certainly some things that make starting a new article from scratch easier than expanding an existing one. Citation formatting is an obvious one, when whoever started the article used some kind of goofy citation format like "hand-typed list defined referencing" but WP:CITEVAR means you can't change it to something more sensible so are stuck trying to replicate it on 200+ references in a 10,000 word article just because whoever wrote the original 200-word stub in 2005 happened to use it. (I fairly frequently invoke IAR to completely ignore CITEVAR and overwrite the existing referencing to make the style of an article consistent with others in the series as it makes it easier for reusers and future editors to cut and paste material, and have never been challenged on it, but invoking IAR is always playing with fire.)

The other obvious issue is the sourcing; if one's writing from scratch, then one has all the sources in front of one (or at least, knows which library you borrowed it from and thus where to go to double-check things) and knows what they all say. If one expands on an existing article then quite often one is taking it on faith that "website that no longer exists", "book that has been out of print since 1950 and isn't available in any library on your continent" or "academic paper behind a $300 paywall" actually said what User:EditorWhoResignedIn2004AndIsn'tAvailableForComment claimed it said. Wikipedia's whole AGF culture means it's considered bad form to say "even though this is referenced I can't verify the reference so it comes out". Indeed, Some reliable sources may not be easily accessible. For example, an online source may require payment, and a print-only source may be available only in university libraries. Rare historical sources may even be available only in special museum collections and archives. Do not reject reliable sources just because they are difficult or costly to access. is formal Wikipedia policy; it's technically blockable disruption to say "you claim this book in the sealed section of the Vatican Secret Archives proves your point, but since nobody else can verify that I'm removing it until you can find another source". This isn't some abstract hypothetical point; it was a questionable source used in an early version of the article that had been retained after the article was expanded that set off the string of events at Moors Murders that got Eric Corbett banned. ‑ Iridescent 10:11, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

CITEVAR when expanding stubs from a decade ago is probably the best use case of IAR. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:47, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Aye. When I expand articles, I usually install a form of sfn format. Then again I've noticed that in most if not all cases Wikipedia:Citing sources#Generally considered helpful comes into play as the previous citation format either lacked page numbers or inline citations. Or for that matter, because it was a different citation format but it was me who installed it originally such as at Uturuncu/Uturunku and Coropuna. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:51, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

I always believed WP:IAR was another way to express Rem tene, verba sequentur. Instead of getting hung up on ruleswanking & arguing over the meaning of is, obey the spirit of the rule. If you have to ignore a given rule, have a good argument why you ignored it in this specific case prepared first. And be prepared to take full responsibility for acting like a cowboy when you invoke that clause, instead of expecting everyone to bow down before your 73373ness. -- llywrch (talk) 22:05, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:07, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Why are we still persisting with this mass mailing nonsense? This isn't an election for the Presidency of Wikipedia; anyone who's interested enough in the Arbcom elections to have an opinion, already knows that they're taking place, while anyone who's so detached from the back-office administration of the wiki that they aren't aware of the elections and haven't noticed the watchlist notice, almost certainly isn't familiar enough with what Arbcom actually does (and in particular, the unique-to-Wikipedia definition of "Arbitration") that their input would be of any particular use. ‑ Iridescent 11:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Probably because nobody managed to successfully object to it so it stayed per "we already did this last year so why not this year too". Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:26, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

This is the RFC for this years elections. The ruling Mass Message - eligible voters, have edited last 12 months before nominations was included in the "pre-determined items which we're going to carry over from the previous year" preamble at the start; the only thing that was up for discussion was whether blocked accounts and bots would receive the mailing. ‑ Iridescent 13:11, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

As I understand it, any editor can put an item on the agenda for the annual RfC, so you should feel free to raise this issue next year if you care to. (I don't have a strong view on it one way or the other.) Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:56, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Life's too short to waste any time tilting at that particular windmill. The mass mailing increases participation roughly four times (from ≈500 to ≈2000). Since presumably those people who watch the (small-a) administrative pages are already aware of the election, that means that with the mass mailing in place 3⁄4 of voters are relatively unfamiliar with the candidates. Consequently, the mass mailing hugely skews the process in favor of (a) incumbents, (b) guide writers, (c) the inner core of hyperactive editors who get about enough to be widely recognized, and (d) people fluent enough in bullshit to write particularly flowery self-nomination statements. Since those four groups are also the only people likely to participate in something as inside-baseball as the RFC on the administration of elections, the mass mailing is essentially now hard-wired into Wikipedia's processes as the only people who could stop it are the same people who currently benefit from it. ‑ Iridescent 14:10, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing you (and all lurkers) a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Mystical Nativity (Filippo Lippi) is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 16:39, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Cheers

Damon Runyon's short story "Dancing Dan's Christmas" is a fun read if you have the time. Right from the start it extols the virtues of the hot Tom and Jerry This hot Tom and Jerry is an old-time drink that is once used by one and all in this country to celebrate Christmas with, and in fact it is once so popular that many people think Christmas is invented only to furnish an excuse for hot Tom and Jerry, although of course this is by no means true. No matter what concoction is your favorite to imbibe during this festive season I would like to toast you with it and to thank you for all your work here at the 'pedia this past year. Best wishes for your 2020 as well I. MarnetteD|Talk 11:28, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

A very happy Christmas and New Year to you!
May 2020 bring you joy, happiness – and no trolls, vandals or visits from Krampus! All the best Gavin / SchroCat (talk) 07:48, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Io Saturnalia!

		Io, Saturnalia!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:30, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

To save repeated replies, thanks to all the above and the same to you all. ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

List of cities with defensive walls

I don't normally go WTF at long lists, but I did pause for thought at List of cities with defensive walls... Carcharoth (talk) 14:26, 12 December 2019 (UTC) To be fair, List of town walls in England and Wales does show what is possible. Carcharoth (talk) 14:28, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Oh for pity's sake. Might just as well make a list of "cities that existed before 1700" or something like that; it would be nearly the same thing. And the article is far, far too long. Risker (talk) 16:50, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

I agree about the main article. The more contained ones are interesting. Ones like: Austrian walled towns, and Chinese city wall, and Spanish Colonial Fortifications of the Philippines, or the eight articles in Category:City walls in Malta. Sadly nothing on fortified towns in the Netherlands (what I was looking for), so back to the main article for the Netherlands subsection. Carcharoth (talk) 17:20, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Aye, that kind of list is a nuisance. And I can tell you right away that it is incomplete - no mention of Catania, for example. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:24, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

There are a few cities founded before 1700 that lacked walls. Sparta was famous for lacking one. Another is Axum. (That list Carcharoth mentions includes Harar but omits Gondar; & with that, I've listed all of the Ethiopian cities founded before 1700.) Given time, I bet I could name a few more. (I think Cirencester never had walls in the post-Roman era, but I'd have to check my library.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:44, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

I would venture that an ancient city built without defensive walls, that's rather better known to Wikipedia readers, is Westminster. If you consider kremlins as big castles rather than as small city walls, a sizeable swathe of eastern Europe also qualifies. 195.27.18.67 (talk) 03:47, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Westminster isn't a good example. You can't tell from the modern layout, but before the construction of the Embankment and the culverting of the Tyburn, the historic centre of the City of Westminster was an island. For an invader to capture it they'd either have to have sailed a navy up the Thames and fought their way past all the Thames defences and somehow bypassed London Bridge, fought a land campaign along the north bank past the Tower of London, or invaded from the South Coast and crossed the Thames at Brentford or Oxford and taken Westminster from the west. The reason Westminster doesn't have walls is that by the time any invader reached it, the war would have already been lost. No army ever captured Westminster; William the Conqueror, the assorted Lancastrians and Yorkists, and King Billy won their battles elsewhere and marched into Westminster unopposed, while neither Matilda nor the Royalists ever reached it. (Plus, although it had symbolic value, it wasn't particularly strategically important; the King would have had ample time to flee by the time the barbarians reached the gate, so any conquering army would have found themselves governing an abandoned palace, a abbey-full of irate monks, and a gaggle of surly tenant farmers. Any self-respecting barbarian horde in the Middle Ages would have gone for London, Winchester, York or Norwich.) There are some examples of important medieval English towns that didn't have city walls, such as Cambridge and Manchester, but they tended to use ditches and dykes coupled with natural water features. Someone will probably pop up to correct me, but I can't think of any significant medieval English settlement that didn't have any kind of fortification. ‑ Iridescent 18:42, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

(adding) And a kremlin is definitely a small city wall, not a big castle. ‑ Iridescent 19:59, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

For lack of a natural science themed greetings...

Hello Iridescent: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:46, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

Thanks; I haven't forgotten about the Coropuna review and will get around to it. ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

TFA

It seems TFA is passively accepting random standards by editors of questionable ability and sense, and rather than face up to debate, is pushing the most active volunteers, and FAC nominators to the wolves. I would appreciate your view at this discussion.link. Note the whole thing is rather painful, and it basically implies that some of our most respected editors have been asleep at the wheel. Ceoil (talk) 13:11, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

I'll comment there when I get the time, although I assume Dank and co are already well aware of my opinions of Kevin and his general insistence that he's some kind of indispensable power-user whose whims everyone else is obliged to indulge without question. Looking at Special:Contributions/Kevin_McE it looks like he may have finally got the message that his "corrections" aren't helpful, so hopefully this has resolved itself. ‑ Iridescent 10:03, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

(Belatedly) replied there. ‑ Iridescent 18:39, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Season's Greetings!

		Faithful friends who are dear to us
		... gather near to us once more. May your heart be light and your troubles out of sight, now and in the New Year. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:55, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, and the same to you… ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Be well at Christmas

	Have a WikiChristmas and a PediaNewYear
	I was a little irritated earlier this year, and for that I am sorry. Be well. Keep well. Have a lovely Christmas. SilkTork (talk) 16:05, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

If that was during Framageddon, then don't worry, we were all snappy. If it wasn't, then whatever it was I've already forgotten it. ‑ Iridescent 16:40, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

2 more sleeps

🔔🎁⛄️🎅🏻 Atsme Talk 📧 17:52, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. same to you ‑ Iridescent 16:32, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy Holidays

Hello Iridescent: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, DBigXrayᗙ Happy Holidays! 18:39, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings1}} to send this message

Thanks, same to you ‑ Iridescent 21:10, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy Holidays

	Season's greetings!
	I hope this holiday season is festive and fulfilling and filled with love and kindness, and that 2020 will be safe, successful and rewarding...keep hope alive....Modernist (talk) 02:13, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Good luck

豊かな十年へようこそ/WELCOME TO THE D20s

Miraclepine wishes you a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and a prosperous decade of change and fortune.
このミラPはIridescentたちのメリークリスマスも新年も変革と幸運の豊かな十年をおめでとうございます！
フレフレ、みんなの未来！/GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR FUTURE!
ミラP 03:38, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy holidays!

Hi Iridescent! All the warmest wishes for this seasonal occasion, whichever you celebrate - or don't, while I swelter at 27℃ (80.6℉), and peace and prosperity for 2020. Seriously hoping that you'll join me for a cool beer in Bangkok in August when it will be even hotter! Seriously hoping that the WMF will use their surplus funds to finance the trip for a lot more people - Bangkok is a heck of a long way away for most people. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:50, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, and the same to you. Very unlikely I'll make BKK; per my longstanding gripes to the WMF, while scheduling Wikimania over the summer vacation may be great for the professional-student PhD types who dominate WMF decision-making, it makes the event virtually impossible for ordinary people to attend; not only is it always the most expensive time of year to travel, but workplaces are invariably short-staffed making it very difficult for people to get time off, and kids are off school so it's impractical for people with families to travel (I very much doubt that anyone's children would welcome losing the chance to visit SeaWorld so that mommy or daddy could attend The process of upload, disseminate and report a GLAM and how wikidatifying it improves it: a Brazilian experience and Attribution: Laws and Norms within Open Communities and Communicating to the Public, nor would I want to be the one explaining to a child that they won't be able to meet Mickey and Minnie but instead if they're lucky they might meet Andy Mabbett). I didn't attend Wikimania when it was held a ten minute walk from my house. This is the point at which someone from the WMF pipes up to say that all their research shows that the core editor base doesn't find this a problem, to which my reply remains the same; if that's what your sample is saying, then it's a problem with your sample as the quickest "who is actually doing the heavy lifting on the wikis and what do I know about their personal circumstances?" exercise shows that people aged 30-50 (who logistically can't fly around the world in July), and retirees (who generally can't afford to travel peak-season) are the glue that holds the wikis together. There's a subthread on this up above which I still stand by. ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Nothing like reading a spot-on rant. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:36, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

They always bring back the classics for Christmas! But the new bit in the middle certainly made me laugh. Johnbod (talk) 18:41, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

It's the time of year for repeats. If you're lucky you might get "Wikipedia's notability rules are confusing and contradictory", "List-defined references are a barrier to entry for new editors", "Wikidata is more trouble than it's worth", "90% of the Manual of Style could be deleted and nobody would even notice let alone miss it" and "What does Katherine Maher actually do?" as well. ‑ Iridescent 21:10, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

As a dissenting voice, I'll note that the one time I attended Wikimania I found it very informative & rewarding. However, the choice of talks & presentations were far different all those years ago than what is offered now. And some noteworthy people in the area of Internet & knowledge were invited to speak too, although Richard Stallman showed up anyway. Sometimes I miss the old days, despite its Wild West environment. -- llywrch (talk) 21:18, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

That was in the days when the WMF consisted of CBD and a couple of Jimmy's drinking buddies and the annual budget was $1,508,039 (compared to $104,505,783 last year). Now, per a couple of WMF-ers (including the now-notorious Jan Eissfeldt) a few threads up), "the statistical correlation between Wikimania and onwiki editors is terrible" and It's more affiliate folks and edit-a-thon folks than everyday editors; as far as I can see it's nowadays mainly a bunch of insiders gathering once a year to slap each other on the back and network with an eye on future grants. The informal local meetups are likely a much better place if you just want to share knowledge about getting things done. Plus, those were different times when it came to networking; it's now much more efficient to film your presentation and pop it on YouTube where anyone who's interested can see it, or even just post a transcript on-wiki, and if you want senior people to hear your opinions you have a much better shot tweeting at Katherine Maher than you do trying to buttonhole her in a room full of 1000 people. ‑ Iridescent 21:40, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Which is why I referenced my one Wikimania I attended, not any of those in the last few years. I have noticed that the occasional interesting session does slip in, & yes one can learn from the transcript/video of the session, but it's not the same. Any more than watching a TEDx presentation is the same as actually being there & able to interact with the presenter. Or reading about a writers' conference is not the same as attending Bread Loaf.

But I will agree without reservation that recent sessions are designed for "affiliate folks & edit-a-thon folks". It's the eternal search for the best paying job that requires the least amount of work: the Foundation -- & apparently the affiliates -- attract people who are looking for a paycheck, but really aren't into writing (or research, or even sorting out data), so they look to wriggle their way into a job working for a thing no one claims to understand ("it doesn't work in the theory, but it works in practice"), look like they're doing something productive for a few years, use that on their resume to get a better-paying job, & repeat. The folks who are doing the work that put Wikipedia in the top 10 most visited websites, on the other hand, are not only interested in presentations that are more tangible, they aren't that driven about networking to advance their careers. (Yes, I got to talk to some interesting people at my Wikimania session, like the reporter from Nature who did the comparison of reliability between Encyclopaedia Britannica & Wikipedia, & met other Wikipedians like Paul August in the flesh, but the point was to exchange ideas & experiences, not to buff up one's professional network.)

As for Katherine Maher, Twitter, & getting the attention of the alleged bosses of all this... I do sometimes wonder if my profanity-laden rant at her on Twitter did prompt her to start actually looking into FRAMgate, but it's not important that I had. Rather, it's that one had to use a non-Wiki medium to get the attention of the head of a Foundation known for Wiki software. And that instead of courting burn-out by confronting this, I simply focus on writing content; it's simpler & more satisfying. -- llywrch (talk) 00:36, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

• A lot of people, including the WMF who consulted me over Skype two years ago about holding Wikimania in Bangkok, don't realise that despite it's excellent geolocation, cheap flights, and really low cost of the hospitality industry, due to the climate the Academic year in Southeast Asia is almost the opposite to that of traditional Western countries: August is slap bang in the middle of term time. Attending university here is more like a continuation of Grade 12, and a lot stricter than a UK 6th form centre, with uniforms, attendance registers, etc. Unless they are in Grad Sch doing a PhD or post grad teaching diploma they are very much treated like children (I do know, I taught in a leading Thai uni). Hence attendance figures from Thailand won't be amazing, and it remains to be seen how many come from neighbouring Laos, Cambodia, and Burma. There will be a few from former British colonies Malasia & Singapore, and of course with their cheap flights the Phillipinos will arrive in force, and it's not too far from HK and Western Australia, and there are about 300,000 US and European expats living here who might be curious enough to pay a visit (but most of them are not in Bangkok), so the WMF is going to have to cut a chunk out of Maher's luxury travel budget and use it for scholarships if Wikimania in Bangkok is going to see much more than me and Risker, and a few other regular Wikimania old timers from Europe and North America who go not to hobnob, but to stir things up in the hope of some better recognition for the work the volunteers do - something that it seems a high-flying, tweeting ED ostensibly hasn't got a clue about as this page would appear to demonstrate. Anyway, I'll be there and gladly buying the beers for anyone who can put up with my company for a few minutes. Someone needs to come and help dilute the overwhelming/overbearing presence of WMF staff on their major annual junket (or publicity stunt). Maybe we can twist Guy Macon's arm. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:30, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Heh. I'm planning to skip Bangkok, unless I have to go there to work on something specific like Comms Committee or the last remnants of the strategy stuff. I went to Hong Kong on a partial scholarship and, well, let's say I didn't find the 40-degree temperatures all that enjoyable. (I don't think it ever got below 30 degrees, even at 6 a.m.) Iridescent is at least partly right; there aren't that many English Wikipedians who are ground-level volunteers in attendance. I have to say that there's a rather interesting and much more varied representation from outside of the English/European world, though; probably less than half of the attendees from Asia/South America/Africa are "the usual suspects, if for no other reason than that the chapter culture hasn't really taken hold there yet. In Cape Town, I'd say probably 60-70% of people there were front-line editors first, and anything else they did was extra; it was the first Wikimania I was at that had so many people who would describe themselves as editors first. The Wikimedia Conference/Summit (in March/April of each year in Berlin) is hardcore insiders, though. I confess that, with the exception of the first Wikimania I attended, I have always gone with an "agenda" - whether it be representing a particular group (mostly FDC or Strategy), seeking out support/volunteers on a particular issue (a lot of the infrastructure work for the Orangemoody case was arranged at Wikimania Mexico City). I do think there's something to be said for learning more about the technical changes and improvements that have been made or are coming down the pipeline, and for getting frontline editors sitting beside the developers to better highlight real software issues, and this is pretty much the only big conference where there's a sufficient cadre of both to really have an impact. (Developers don't go to most editing or interest group meetings, and non-tech editors aren't usually invited to hackathons and technical conferences.) As to flights to Bangkok being cheap...well, not from here. Six months out, and I'd be looking at airfare that is about 45% more than my *total* expenses (flights, lodging, food, etc) for the Italian Wikimania. I just can't justify spending that much out of my own pocket.

So yes, I have been to a pile of Wikimanias (and other WMF-related conferences/meetings), and I suppose in some senses I'm something of an insider. Ironically, I keep being asked to do things because the "real" insiders think I'm not one of them. Risker (talk) 05:01, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

I can’t go for RL reasons anytime soon, but even my friends on non-Western wikis have been less than impressed in the past. One comment I got from a steward who went to the one in Montreal (or maybe South Africa?) was that it focused too much on the in-person stuff and not enough on the actual editing communities, and this was from a steward who is highly involved RL in his language group. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:20, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Bangkok, from it's actual geolocation as practically the region's major hub, two airports close to the very modern city, excellent rapid mass transportation systems, and extraordinary low cost nice, budget hotel accommodation (from $20 a night with en suite - yes, there is not a '0' missing), and restaurants with an amazing diversity of affordable food (give the $1 street food a miss), and $3 for a beer, is an ideal location for SE Asia, India, Indonesia, Philippines, and even furthest cities in Australia for only $450 round trip. The downside is the low Wikipedia penetration in Thailand, and with the Philippine WMF handling communications and content with 0 knowledge of local culture and media, I'm not quite sure how they think they are going to do it.

Note that culturally, the Philippines and the rest of SE Asia have nothing in common - a total cultural dichotomy. I am very wary of what's going to happen, following my experience in terrible accommodation in Washington D.C., a chaotic venue spread across the steep slopes of an Italian alpine village, the lack of food and catastrophic organisation of peripheral events in Hong Kong, and the stogy picnic-packed lunches and and sour red wine in London (although there was a nice grand piano in the Barbican...). If the WMF can release enough budget to get things done properly and not 'on the cheap' as they usually do, and confide the organisation to truly experienced people, it could be a success. At least I'll already be here and I won't be wasting upwards of $2,000 on travel and accommodation like I have in the past when/if things go wrong. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:06, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

It's still prohibitively expensive to get to for most of the Wikipedia userbase, who like it or not are primarily in Europe and the Americas, from which travel to Thailand is eyewateringly expensive both in terms of money and in terms of environmental impact. (A quick dip into Skyscanner quotes £800/$1100 for a return trip from London to Bangkok arriving August 4 and departing August 10; that's less than the £794 for a round trip to Auckland on the same dates.) The prices you quote don't seem particularly cheap to me; outside the bubble around London $20 for a room and $3 for a drink isn't significantly different to what you'd pay even in the notoriously expensive UK—if "cheap lodging", "cheap high-quality food" and "ease of access from as many places as possible" were the primary considerations, Wikimania would permanently rotate between Las Vegas, Istanbul and Buenos Aires. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Donations to wikipedia

My boomer dad recently asked me, "What do you think about donations to wikipedia?".

Since he's not at all familiar with Wikimedia, how would be a good way to explain to him in simple terms the controversy, and my mixed feelings about it?

Would it be good to suggest donating to a local affiliate instead?

Benjamin (talk) 10:15, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Say "OK doner"  :) ——SN54129 15:16, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

I am not sure what controversy we are talking about... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:21, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Ditto. There's certainly a school of thought that the WMF is expanding too quickly because they feel obliged to spend the money as it comes in and donations outstrip running costs (see Guy Macon's essay), but that's not a controversy but a dispute over whether incoming cash should be treated as running costs or endowment. (In most jurisdictions, cash donated for charitable purposes needs to be spent on those purposes within a reasonable timeframe, and can't be hoarded as an endowment unless the money was explicitly given as endowment, so we end up spending money on things it could be argued are unnecessary.) @Benjaminikuta, I'm not sure what controversy you have in mind nor why donating to local affiliates directly instead of donating to the WMF so they can distribute the funds to the local affiliates would make a difference. If you're not sure about whether the WMF is deserving of your money, just give your money to your local women's refuge, donkey sanctuary, cancer research trust, or whatever other cause you feel is deserving—it's not as if the WMF is going to fall apart for want of your and your dad's donation. ‑ Iridescent 2 15:10, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Agreed. I've been toying with an essay that argues not to give money to the WMF. Since it's likely the opinion of a long-time Wikipedian might be newsworthy, I have been thinking hard about what points I should make & how to make them. (Since I doubt saying "Don't give them money because they're all meanie-butts" will persuade many people.) -- llywrch (talk) 20:26, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

I'd personally be reluctant to donate any cash to the WMF at present. Slightly cynically, I get the impression that the annual fundraising drive is more a case of a publicity campaign to ensure the general public remain aware that Wikipedia is (at least theoretically) independent, non-profit, and not subject to external editorial control, and a class-consciousness exercise to try to create a sense of a bond between the WMF, editors, and readers.

The latter is a very common tactic; when you pay your £3 membership of a political party, or mail off your $5 to the charity of your choice, it likely costs them more than that in the administrative costs of processing your donation and in the ongoing costs of sending you future mailings, bumper stickers, membership cards etc. The charities, campaigns, political parties etc treasure these small donors nonetheless, as it creates a base of loyalists who feel—both literally and emotionally—invested, and are more likely both to actively participate in the cause, and to proselytise for the cause. (There's a reason Trump sells those MAGA hats rather than give them away even though he doesn't need the money, a reason the British Labour Party charges idealistic young students for the privilege of carrying out unpaid labour, a reason historic buildings charge admission fees even though it costs more to hire the ticket collector than they make in ticket sales…) In reality, it would take 200,000 donors making the suggested $5 donation for US readers, or 380,000 donors making the suggested £2 donation for UK readers—and that's not taking into account the processing fee for each transaction—just to match the money the WMF has received from Amazon this year. Despite all the "We need the cost of your daily coffee to defend Wikipedia's independence!" hype, if we removed the "Donate to Wikipedia" link from the sidebar altogether I doubt Finance and Administration would even notice; the fundraising is an editor recruitment and retention tool.

I'm not really the best person to be talking to about this side of things, as I've never been particularly involved in either the financial or the recruitment-and-retention side of things. user:Risker and Whatamidoing (WMF) are probably best placed to give the WMF's side on why the small donations are important and where the money goes, as previously mentioned Guy Macon has written a lot on inefficiency and overexpansion, and GorillaWarfare has put in a lot of thought in the past into what does and doesn't work (but is probably busy with the Arbcom transition). If you can dig Somey and Kelly Martin out, they've had quite interesting things to say on the topic as well in the past from a pure-blood HTD perspective.

If you do write any kind of public "the WMF has too much money" story, be prepared for a full-on attack from the brogrammers at the WMF. See Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-ed for a taste of how the good ol' boys have reacted in the past, even in the context of an obscure and largely unread article buried in the Signpost, when it comes to anyone questioning the necessity of their constantly raising ever more money so they can keep awarding grants to themselves for their pet projects. ‑ Iridescent 18:09, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

I'm not worried overmuch about the "brogrammers". For one thing, I've been around here a lot longer than most of them. For another, I've worked with computers & the web long enough to know well that even in the most professional surroundings something like 75% of all computer-related projects fail. (It's just that the big technology companies are able to hide their failures far more effectively than a minnow like the Foundation.) In any case, it appears their cowboy days with the software are over so there is little to gripe about on that side of the business. (I have ideas about how they could do their jobs better, but I'm content to wait until they ask for my opinion. Which might happen before the heat death of the universe.) And lastly, I've spoken truth to Jimmy Wales in the past & I'm still here; if he can't drive me away I doubt someone like Jorm can.

No, what I have to say should come as no surprise to anyone who read what I wrote in relation to my ArbCom campaign. The non-technical side of the Foundation has no idea how Wikipedia or any of the projects actually functions, so many -- if not most -- of them pursue commendable but vague goals that accomplish nothing concrete although arguably justifying their paychecks. (The curious can read my recent comment to Guy's excellent essay.) For the last decade or so I've been content to dismiss the Foundation as little more than a honeypot to divert the incompetent while the rest of us actually achieved something, but I was angered to learn this summer just how much Foundation grant money is floating around. Many volunteers who are creating the content that attracts readers are paying for that content out of their own pockets. meanwhile, one individual managed to create a nice little existence on Foundation grants while producing little more than crap articles. If there is enough money to provide volunteers with some level of income, that should go to the people who are creating the content. (Or at least fighting to keep the spam, vandalism & trolling to tolerable levels.) -- llywrch (talk) 19:31, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

The non-technical side of the Foundation has no idea how Wikipedia or any of the projects actually functions isn't entirely fair. It's not always obvious because they tend to use their real names on the Foundation website and a pseudonym on the projects (plus, some of them are active but in other language projects so en-wiki folk aren't aware of them), but quite a few of them have long and active histories on the projects. (As an example, Sherry Snyder, the WMF-er regular editors are most likely to encounter as the WMF's de facto ambassador to the human race, is the alter ego of WhatamIdoing who's been active for years.) ‑ Iridescent 19:49, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Fair point. There are several noteworthy exceptions. What if I amended that to read "Most of the non-technical side"? -- llywrch (talk) 21:30, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

The Internet Archive is running an appeal right now and they have a 2-for-1 arrangement with matching funding. I've no idea how much they need the cash but I found that more tempting than WMF. Johnbod (talk) 15:36, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

I wouldn't be totally surprised if Internet Archive becomes absorbed by the WMF at some point—taking it over would seem to me to be an eminently sensible use of spare cash and server capacity. (It wouldn't quite tally with empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally, but wouldn't be a million miles away either.)

It's also the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley that SmugMug is considering shutting down Flickr because they can't make it profitable, and a Flickr/Commons merger would also seem to make complete sense—the Creative Commons stuff could be moved to the Commons name with the holiday snaps and amateur porn retained on an arms-length residual Flickr to prevent it contaminating the Sum Of All Human Knowledge, and importing the Flickr community en masse would give us an instant and massive boost to the editor base, comprised almost entirely of knowledgable and friendly people with a demonstrable interest in working in collaborative online communities. I don't think even the most rose-tinted WMF loyalist would deny that Commons is dysfunctional and would be improved by a mass influx of new blood. ‑ Iridescent 18:09, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

• Thanks for the ping. Aside from the obvious (that the "small" donations actually make up most of the donations when viewed in aggregate), getting individuals to donate gives them a sense of partial ownership and increases what some corporation would undoubtedly call "brand loyalty". That, by itself, is a valid reason for seeking out those small donations. Generally speaking, active participants in the Wikimedia projects (who make millions of hours of donations in time and effort) aren't making enough monetary donations in relation to the grief they cause when asked to cough up, and it's the reason that logged-in users don't normally get more than one message (if that). Something to bear in mind is that the enwiki campaign essentially pays for the infrastructure of the entire system. Could it be done better or differently? No doubt. And yes, I'd like to see more resources dedicated to areas where Wikimedia projects are just starting to make inroads (particularly in terms of editors), and that means more money. We have to remember that the overwhelming majority of those editors are going to gravitate toward the existing major-language projects, so maintaining and improving the infrastructure that supports those projects is the key to expanding both the editor and reader cores outside of the global north. (The reason that the community tech project is working on "small" projects only this year is that a goodly chunk of those "other language" editors have focused on things like Wikisource because it's their version of low-hanging fruit.) I'm not going to defend the budget in any way, since bluntly put it was never released to the community, and I question how much information even the Board was given this year. Risker (talk) 18:39, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

That's pretty much what I meant by a class-consciousness exercise to try to create a sense of a bond between the WMF, editors, and readers—I'm not saying this is a bad thing, there's a reason groups ranging from major political parties down to your local stray cats' home solicit donations even when they don't actually need them. I'm not convinced by the "small" donations actually make up most of the donations when viewed in aggregate once you factor in the costs in terms of time and admin of running the fundraising campaign and processing all the donations, but I still agree that it's important, if nothing else so we have the option of telling Google, Amazon et al that we no longer want their money should it become necessary. (If there is a controversy—and I'm still waiting for the OP to explain what he meant—I suspect "the enwiki campaign essentially pays for the infrastructure of the entire system" is one of the causes. The WMF is not great at saying where the money actually goes, and I'm quite sure that most of the donors to e.g. French Wikipedia assume that their money is going on improving coverage on French Wikipedia and maybe closely associated projects like Commons, not on vanity projects like Faroese Wikisource or translating Wikipedia into Old Church Slavonic.) ‑ Iridescent 19:23, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

I think I'll have to disagree with the thought that "editor recruitment and retention tool" is a goal for fundraising. If it were, then they'd be able to tell me what percentage of donors are also editors, and they have no idea. (I'm curious whether editors are equally likely as others to donate.)

Having a lot of small donors does provide a certain level of independence from major donors and other funders. In grant-speak (i.e., ignoring the fact that money is fungible), grant money is usually restricted to a particular project (software or otherwise), so the small donors are largely paying for ongoing/operating costs – such as funding the affiliates. Most chapters get 50% or more of their total budget from the WMF.

What I'm hearing about strategy is that there is push for decentralization. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work at a practical level, but I think that I finally understand the problem they're trying to solve. Some (potential and current) affiliates find that receiving funds from a US charity either can't be done, or causes problems for them. So they seem to be looking at ways to make global/movement-wide money be accessible to the whole movement. (That push for decentralization makes it seem unlikely that the WMF would merge with the Internet Archive, or any other group, for that matter.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Related to this, and cross posted to the mailing list:

My dad recently said to me:

"I was solitated by them after looking something up. I thought it strange the way they were pleading for donations. They made it sound like they might be shutting down if we the general public didn't donate."

Has there been any research into how common it is for readers to get the wrong impression from the marketing messaging?

(I know the fundraising team has done plenty of research on which messages bring in the most money.)

I've heard of this sort of thing happening before, and I think it's highly antithetical to our values to be deceptive.

Benjamin (talk) 23:34, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Totally not canvassing anyone

Honest. I just want a couple of smart people to look over Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles/RFC on pharmaceutical drug prices and tell me (on MEDMOS's talk page, or ping me) whether you think that you/other experienced editors would probably be able to provide some sort of constructive response to the question.

Naturally, it all makes sense to me, which in my experience means that it's all the way up to, oh, I don't know, maybe 50–50 odds that it will make sense to people who haven't been following this whole long thing for the last month. If it's seriously screwed up, please have mercy on your fellow editors and tell me ASAP. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:04, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, I personally don't think drug pricing should ever be included, except in those rare cases where an unusually high or low price is itself part of the drug's notability. Retail costs vary so much as to be virtually irrelevant (from my perspective in England, we'd be correct in listing a price of £9 for every drug for acute conditions and a price of 0 for every drug for chronic conditions), and retail pricing is the only number readers are interested in. (Bulk pharmaceutical dealers aren't getting their price information from Wikipedia; nobody outside the business gives a damn what the manufacturing and distribution costs for their medication is, only what they'll pay for it; consider the reaction if I went through Category:IPhone systematically replacing all the price information with Apple's wholesale cost to vendors.) Even the wholesale cost is effectively meaningless since in most countries it's set through collective bargaining between governments and manufacturers so pricing can vary by orders of magnitude between territories. What listing pricing in the articles essentially boils down to is yet another case of "the US is the only place that matters". As you correctly point out, virtually none of the pricing information included actually meets Wikipedia's usual standards of verifiability, but are the result of a small handful of people with an agenda grasping at straws just so they have something to list as a "standard price".

That said, this isn't a hill worth dying on and I'm not planning to participate. The pro-pricing faction is led by some of Wikipedia's most vocal and dogged editwarriors, and if any decision goes against their preferred outcome they'll just run an interminable campaign of obstructionism until everyone else gives up out of exhaustion. On some meta-issues that potentially affect hundreds of thousands of articles (did someone say "infobox"?) it's worthwhile fighting to prevent a perverse outcome, but in practice keeping the dubious pricing information just means a relative small batch of articles will include one extra line which virtually nobody will read.

If you really want to force the issue and can cope with a burst of ill-feeling, put your (WMF) hat on temporarily and pull the necessary strings to get the articles withdrawn from Internet-in-a-Box and the assorted CD-ROM etc schemes, on the grounds of failed verification and potential inaccuracy, and petition Google to exclude them from the Knowledge Graph and search results. Unverifiable price information would probably be gone within a matter of minutes. (Personally, I think petitioning Google to exclude all articles with a {{Failed verification}} tag from search results would be the single best thing to happen to Wikipedia, but good luck with that.) ‑ Iridescent 20:30, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

The WMF doesn't "do" content, and what to include, including whether a {{fv}} tag is deserved, is a content decision.

What I'm trying to figure out is whether you think a hypothetical experienced editor is likely to be able to read that and respond usefully to the question. I've just learned that I've got described some of the examples wrong, and I want to try a suggestion that will cut down on the amount of repetition between examples, so it's not ready to go, but I really want a sanity check (or three) about whether the RFC "question" is too confusing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:57, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I'd think any editor with a basic understanding of Wikipedia's verification rules would understand the point you're trying to make. While it probably violates some arcane rule or other, it might be worth including a TL;DR executive summary at the start like "Is it synthesis to assume that pricing in some places is representative of pricing everywhere?" so people browsing Wikipedia:Requests for comment/All or summoned at random by the bot can judge at a glance whether this is a discussion in which they have any interest. ‑ Iridescent 08:24, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure that example would technically be SYNTH (sounds more like straight-up NOR, as it's not combining multiple sources), but some of the database entries have content from agencies that sell to large sections of the world, so it might not be unreasonable. I'm planning a short question (the first two lines), but I don't want it to be too focused on SYNTH. Within certain reasonable bounds of sanity, I don't really care what the outcome is, as long as I get one. If people say that any item in that database with six data points can be used, as long as it's added during the new moon to a section called ==Probably incorrect cost estimates==, I can go along with that. My goal is just to get this settled in MEDMOS.

Also, please note that by asking you to sanity-check the RFC question, I've disqualified you from being drafted into closing it. Any other admins who want to claim immunity are welcome to chime in with their advice, too.  ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:24, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

Talk:Banita Sandhu

Hello, Iridescent. I notice that you have protected the above talk page because it has been repeatedly recreated. It seems that this actress has been in the news lately, and the article page has been created again. I came across it and was going to add WikiProjects, but I won't bother if you feel that the article doesn't yet pass notability requirements and should be deleted once more.—Anne Delong (talk) 05:19, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

• (Out of curiosity) If you don't mind my asking, why was the talk page deleted and protected in the first place? When the article itself wasn't? ——SN54129 10:17, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

  The article was repeatedly deleted and protected too. Presumably when Ponyo undeleted the article they forgot the talk page. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:24, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

  Crikey, it was and all wasn't it! Many thanks, Jo-Jo. ——SN54129 11:12, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

• @Anne Delong: The current incarnation is IMO different enough to the version that was deleted at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Banita Sandhu that WP:G4 doesn't apply, but there's something very dubious going on here. It's a page which has had long-term problems with recreation by spammers (which led to it being salted in the first place), and the editor who requested its recreation was promptly indefblocked leaving this in his wake.

  As far as I can tell she still fails to meet Wikipedia:Notability (people)#Entertainers—contrary to popular belief "appeared in a film" does not confer notability by Wikipedia standards, the relevant cut-off is Has had significant roles in multiple notable films, television shows, stage performances, or other productions. That said, I don't fault Ponyo for restoring it, as the request came from someone who appeared at the time to be a legitimate and established editor, and there's at least a reasonable case to be made that even appearing in a single film constitutes enough of a change in circumstances for notability to be reassessed.

  I'll unprotect the talk page as it's a perverse situation for the talkpage to be uneditable while the article exists, although I imagine that unless the article is expanded fairly quickly to demonstrate notability by Wikipedia's standards it will be re-nominated for deletion, re-deleted and re-salted. ‑ Iridescent 13:14, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, Iridescent, I expect it will... ——SN54129 13:17, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

It won't be me that does it; I know most admins don't stick to it but I firmly believe that except in cases where it's absolutely clear-cut an admin who's previously deleted/blocked shouldn't be the one to delete/block again but should let someone else do the assessing. ‑ Iridescent 13:21, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that it would be you. Merely that, now its flaws have been highlighted at WP:AN/Iri, its days are probably numbered  :) ——SN54129 13:35, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Iridescent. It may be too soon, but there's a lot of news reports about upcoming roles, films about to be released, etc., so likely if it's deleted it will just have to be recreated later anyway. I'm not very familiar with Indian news sources, so I'll leave it to someone else to determine if these are independent and reliable.—Anne Delong (talk) 12:39, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

TPS query

Iri, I am hoping you can direct me, and if not, one of your talk page stalkers can. What is our current thinking on edit summaries? (Remember the olden days, when non-use of edit summaries was enough to crater an RFA?) My watchlist is being hit extensively by edits from an experienced editor who is not using edit summaries, I have asked the editor on user talk to please use edit summaries and explained why, they have removed the message and yet continue editing without edit summaries. What next? It is not clear to me if we have a guideline in this area (well, don't be a dick applies, but I digress). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:18, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

It's "accepted practice" rather than "enforceable policy" so it's not something that's actually enforceable by anything other than social pressure. It's still considered unacceptable enough to at the very least dent an RFA (see Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Hawkeye7 3 for a high-profile recent example). Looking at the contribution history in question there seem to be no truly blank edit summaries but instead the auto-generated /* Section header */ type, so Ozzie may have fallen into the same trap Hawkeye fell into of thinking that because there's something in the edit summary field it doesn't count as blank, and being genuinely confused at why people considered it disruptive. (Help:Edit summary cautions against leaving the field blank, but doesn't explain that most editors consider an auto-created summary to be equivalent to blank; I'm not surprised that even experienced editors like Hawkeye find it confusing.) That said, given that Ozzie currently has over 200 sections on their talkpage I'm not inclined to take the whole AGF thing too far; one "well, it's technically not forbidden so you can't force me" is one thing but two is the start of a pattern. Some of the people who complained at Hawkeye's RFA (or Hawkeye himself) might be better placed than me to discuss how seriously people actually take the edit summary issue; I've been largely absent from Wikipedia other than periodically checking this talk page for quite a long time now. ‑ Iridescent 19:36, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Very helpful, Iri, and exactly answers my query. Considering your mention of AGF and pattern, I don't know what to do next in this situation. More and more, I am realizing that I just need to unwatch every single medical article I watch, and give up on my area of editing focus on Wikipedia; it has become a special-agenda warzone, and productive editing is no longer possible. Thanks for informing me on whether this was enforceable, which is all I really wanted to know. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:52, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

I don't think your guy has much of a special agenda, but he has his own way of editing & sticks to it. He's busy on the MED project talk page, & a section there might have an effect. Johnbod (talk) 22:05, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

I doubt it, but I know a post there will result in retaliation. If this is not enforceable, there is nothing I can do. I can only continue to do what I have been doing now since 2015: unwatch more and more medical articles that I once tended. I don't want to sit here and click over and over and over to figure out what an edit is and whether I need to check it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:30, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

...but doesn't explain that most editors consider an auto-created summary to be equivalent to blank. I added some note about that at Help:Edit_summary#Section_editing. However I am not sure whether experienced editors are even reading that page to learn using edit summary though. – Ammarpad (talk) 10:07, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

​Pedantic I know but the main concern in Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Hawkeye7 3 were temperament/behaviour issues, not really edit summary usage, at least from my reading of the Oppose section. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:21, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the bcc ping, Jo-Jo (I didn't know such a thing existed). Not to worry. Although I rarely weigh in on RFAs anymore (an interesting bit of history can be found at User talk:SandyGeorgia/arch95#June 2013, and as a once very-high-profile editor, I have to take care not to become a target for trigger-happy admins), I don't miss much in that department. I understood Iri's response in the context of edit summaries. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:22, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

If you don't want to use the {{bcc}} template to force a notification without mentioning the person's name in the text, you just need to link the person's username in the edit summary. If for some reason you want to ping someone without drawing attention to the fact you're pinging them, pipe the username to a punctuation mark (as I've done with the comma and period in the summary to this edit). By playing around with pipelinking to invisible unicode characters in the edit summary it's probably theoretically possible to make the notification completely invisible, although I can't see why that level of secrecy would ever be necessary since by that point you presumably wouldn't be having the discussion in public.

Be aware that in the past some people have got very annoyed at being bcc-pinged, as it means they get a notification saying they've been mentioned in a discussion but when they do a ctrl-f on that discussion to see where they've been mentioned, they don't see their names. I can't find any of the complaints off the top of my head but I know there has been wailing and gnashing of teeth about it in the past. ‑ Iridescent 09:14, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

I see, thanks Iri! I'm still trying to adjust to this new-fangled pingie thingie (and so far hating it). Since I watchlist evey FAC I review, and once had half of our medical content watchlisted (hyperbole alert), and once had the second busiest talk page on the 'pedia (behind Jimbo), these pingie thingies mean I will need a new daily processing style. Until/unless I give up on improving medical content and disappear again, I guess I will have to adjust the way I used to organize my daily activity. I used to process my talk page first (in case there was an urgent FAC need or something I had to know before reading FAC), my regular editing next (to get my "fun" editing done before I "went to work"), and last, I "put on my FAC hat" (which put me in a whole different mode, since I had to be battle ready with my iron-clad asbestos suit on, fully focused, and leave behind my colorful and colloquial vocabulary for a much more professional tone). Now, when I get these blooming pings, I have to go check them in case they're important. I feel like I need to take Ritalin or something (as if I don't have the ability to hyper-focus), being pulled different directions in the middle of work, and it seems as if FAC nominators are used to instant gratification now (not Jo-Jo, whose conduct is quite impressive). Thanks again, Iri, best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:38, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

PS, I can't imagine how the delegates (errr, coordinators) keep up with FAC/FAR these days, with the global @FAC ping going off all the time. When nominators or reviewers needed my immediate attention (to withdraw, for example), they had to come to my talk page or WT:FAC to request it. My TPS and other FAC followers were then able to help me get all my work done, as they often saw my talk requests before I did, and could answer many of them. Other editors don't see pings to the coords, so can't help them process their workload-- maybe another one of the (many) factors slowing down FAC processing, and another reason that FAC talk is dead, and there is no healthy discussion of issues affecting the process? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:44, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

I don't think the {{@FAC}} batsignal to the coordinators is activated unreasonably often—at the time of writing it's been used 297 times since its creation in 2013, which is less than once a week. The only people who are aware of its existence are experienced enough to know not to abuse it. I doubt it has much to do with the decline of activity on FAC talk; I suspect that has more to do with the fact that assorted Defenders Of The Wiki began using the talk pages of FAC and TFA as a happy hunting ground for 'civility patrol', making people reluctant to participate there. Plus, a lot of the disputes that used to generate the most verbiage—to what extent writers retain control, infoboxes, referencing styles, the role of WikiProject local consensuses, main page protection, whether and when the MOS can be disregarded…—have largely reached at least a grudging consensus over the years. (It may be a statement of the obvious, but for better or worse we no longer have Eric, Tony, Mattisse, ILT and the infoboxers picking fights, and the small handful of remaining Formatting Consistency Is More Important Than Accuracy Or Readability en-dash warriors and date format hardliners are largely restricting themselves to grumbling at each other on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style, so there are fewer arguments to have. Declining activity isn't always a sign of stagnation, sometimes it's just a sign that there's less of a need for tinkering.)

I still dislike the Echo system ("pings") intensely, but recognize that it's not going to go away. If you find you're being flooded with notifications, go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo where you can disable any notifications in which you're not interested, and also mute notifications from anyone in whose opinion you know you're not interested. It's still formal policy that pings can't be assumed to be received, so anyone who genuinely needs to solicit your opinion will still notify you on your talkpage in the old-school way. ‑ Iridescent 14:07, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Oh, my. More cans of worms to unpack! By checking my preferences, I solved one irritation (Cross-wiki notifications), but "Muted users" raises another TPS question. Since pinging is so standard nowadays, is it fair for Editor A to demand that Editor B never ping them again? Why can't Editor A mute Editor B in their preferences? Why should Editor B be charged with "harassment" if they are doing standard pinging, and why should Editor B be charged to remember not to ping, when pinging is so commonplace and Editor A could simply mute Editor B in their prefs? If Editor A edits too fast, makes an extreme number of errors, and rarely returns to discussions about those editing errors, yet forbids talk page posts or pings, what next? Another pingie-thingie problem. I yearn for the days when we had Requests for comment/User conduct/Editor name, so we could calmly analyze editor behaviors outside of the circus that is ANI.

Back on topic, seriously, Iri, look at what it must be like to be a FAC/FAR Coord these days. Even if the @FAC template isn't engaged often, add those once-a-week occurrences to the times an individual coord gets an individual ping, and extend this across all of FAC. Consider that I could process the volume at FAC that I did because of the TPS effect: nominators and reviewers posted issues to my talk or FAC talk, and the whole blooming FA community (hyperbole alert again) would dig in, often before I could respond, and often meaning I didn't need to respond. Even when I was a single delegate, and still when I had help from Karanacs, I had a cadre of editors who knew the processes well, and could be trusted to do basic things, like archiving a withdrawal and more. It strikes me that the pingie-thingie has reduced the amount of collaboration that resulted from more open talk page usage.

I believe (could be wrong?) that the infobox wars post-dated my time at FAC, so I didn't see that problem on talk. But what is in abundant evidence after only one week of FAC reviewing is that prose has seriously deteriorated without the likes of Tony and Eric. It is not hard to see why the promotion rate has escalated from the 50% range to the almost-70% range, with a decrease in FA production, and why we have the GOCE combing through FAs; prose that is getting through is problematic. I reviewed one-third of these archivals; most of those were going through without my review. Tony launched the RFC that did away with an FA director, without prior discussion, and the FA process has itself to blame that it is floundering IMO, but that's another can of worms. Nonetheless, Tony's prose reviews were helpful, and no one has replaced the serious prose review we once had. You can look at the same archivals above to see what today's prose reviews look like: long strings of nit-picking followed by an eventual Support, even though I later showed real prose problems.

A problem I see affecting the FA process is the utter lack of respect shown to delegates/coords. In catching up on history after "The Incident" which you posted to my talk earlier this year, I see Coordinators being forced to strike perfectly rational commentary from a FAC, as if a Coord isn't in good position to know what is actionable and what is not. In recent discussions, I see Coords being forced to withdraw from a discussion after their judgment is called into question. I see involved editors shutting down FAC talk discussions before a Coord has even weighed in. On FAC talk, we see one editor trying to force me into personalizing a discussion by pointing fingers at individual articles or writers, as if a delegate who processed around 5,000 FACs and FARs is not positioned to offer a well-qualified opinion in a way that attempts to avoid personalization. To that editor, I offer the monthly FAC archive for perusal, since a former delegate should not be pointing fingers at specific editors' work. I could ask a competent copyeditor to look at the recently promoted examples that I mention, but how does personalizing help here? Current examples should suffice, and avoid the need to personalize. Again, overall, I don't see how the Coords can be effective with this kind of disrespect in evidence.

On the MOS issues, there are some things that are always tipoffs to more serious underlying issues. Just as an article search for instances of "however", "in total", "subsequently" and the like often gives indications of weak writing, examination of hyphens and dashes often turns up grammatical errors. In number-dense topics, it is important to know the difference between a hyphen and a dash, when hyphens are required on modifiers, and how to re-cast sentences to avoid convoluted constructs involving hyphens, dashes and convert templates, which can be dreadful to read through. Many of the other significant MOS issues are easily fixed (I often just do them myself), but for content areas that are dense with numbers, it's important that the writers learn to use hyphens and dashes correctly. Since the writers' and researchers' talents may be wasted in applying dashes and NBSPs, they can also be encouraged to bring in a collaborator who will do that for them before they approach FAC. We should not be seeing repeat nominations from experienced writers that are not MOS-ready.

No, I don't think that FAC talk is dead because the infobox and MOS warriers have moved on: I think it's dead because the three processes no longer work together, with each becoming the turf of sub-segments of the FA community, and no leader for a rudderless ship. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:14, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

(ec) I get more pings from the TFAcoord template than I do from the FACcoord template, at least so far. As for the troubles with FAC ... I honestly lost a lot of heart/etc when Eric was forced out of the whole project. I've long felt that too much emphasis is placed on prose and not enough on the actual content - and I'm frankly scared to dig into any of the sourcing on some of the FACs ... which I know I need to do. I've been less active in the last few years because... well, yeah. Moving. I'm finally settled in one place, and we're going down next month to empty one of the two storage units still remaining to move from the old town to the new place. Hoping to be able to unearth a pile of the book boxes too... and get them into the house .. I feel lost without all my books around me. I do have the most important ones, but it's always the obscure one that you need most. I don't like the habit that's current at FAC of insisting on a huge long list of problems before a nominator will take a reviewers word for the fact that there are enough issues with the candidate that it needs archiving/withdrawing. I can't really blame most nominators for it either... there really isn't anyone to go to for a good copyedit before FAC... Eric's gone, John's gone, Tony's.. well, cranky. Dank's busy with TFA. I have no idea who I'd get to copyedit anything I was likely to bring to FAC. And I will say that WP:ERRORS isn't helping ... the insanity that was going on there where folks couldn't see that their own preferences in prose styling are not the same as prose errors. I'm happy if the prose is understandable and clear to a non-expert. I think we expect too much sometimes on prose and also have too many folks who can't see that prose styles vary and that just because you think something works better doesn't necessarily MAKE it objectively better. Prose is often subjective ... and we need to stop kowtowing at the idea that we please everyone all the time with prose styles.

I'm girding my loins for some digging into sourcing/content after we get the storage unit emptied ... I'll be on the road with hubby for a couple of weeks mid-January... me let loose with a computer, internet, and time to sit and be annoying... we should all be worried.

And as an aside, I'm mad at both of you, SG and Iri. I woke up at 2am last night and made the mistake of poking my head in here and ... well, next thing I knew I was deep in the FAC talk page archives dealing with TCO/Pumpkin/JM/etc. Never did get back to sleep... and I'm blaming you both. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:33, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

I agree entirely with I'm happy if the prose is understandable and clear to a non-expert. My approach to reviewing (and writing) has always been "if I were a reasonably bright 14-year-old with no prior knowledge of this topic, would I understand it?" and "What is being omitted here and why?"; I think MOS compliance is virtually irrelevant provided the article is internally consistent and there's no ambiguity in what's meant. (Something like Ceilings of the Natural History Museum probably breaks more MOS rules than it adheres to, and the world hasn't come to an end.) I respectfully disagree regarding the importance of the hyphen/endash/emdash distinction; there's a legitimate aesthetic argument for keeping them consistent within any given article, but unless you're using some weird font intentionally designed to exaggerate the difference then —, – and - are virtually indistinguishable onscreen unless you're literally measuring pixels. The conservatism of the MOS guardians and of the style guides from which the MOS is drawn means we have far too many arbitrary rules inherited from the days of metal type which just aren't relevant to a wholly onscreen—and increasingly, wholly on-speaker—environment. ‑ Iridescent 19:04, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Not interested Sandy. I don't have rose-tinted spectacles about the past, and don't think I am God's gift to FAC, unlike the way some people obviously do. You have yet to provide any examples of any actual problems; this isn't about claiming that there are no problems, or about "personalisation", as you well know. (Except in the way that that you are trying to personalise it against certain people without naming them - I note that some of the "examples" of heinous crimes you refer to concern me. I stand by them all, and I don't need someone who embarrassed themselves so staggeringly by once accusing me of being Merridew to try and pick a fight when I have better things to do). I'm not interested in whatever games you're playing at, and will continue to do what I do before the diminishing sense of enjoyment I get from editing WP is sucked out of me for good. Big claims require big evidence. If you can't be bothered with the evidence then stop pinging people when they don't need to be. - SchroCat (talk) 16:39, 27 December 2019 (UTC) Addendum: I was not the only person asking for evidence of the problems you keep claiming, so I'm not entirely sure why I was the one you decided to ping. I suggest you either ping the others or drop your suggestion onto the long and meandering wall of text on the FAC talk page. Or you could just do what several people have asked and provide examples. Without proof of the problems, there will be no agreement on what the problems are (I may have missed it in the over-long thread, but it's still not clear what the problems are), and if we don't know what the problems are, no-one is going to suggest ways to improve whatever you think the situation is. - SchroCat (talk) 19:17, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

@ Ealdgyth, Oh, you poor thing! For THAT, I should offer to get in a car and come help you unpack books!! Seriously, Ealdgyth, you are right that the sourcing issues could be more significant than the prose issues. I am sure I told you many times that I frequently threatened Raul to never even consider naming you as delegate, because we could not survive without your sourcing reviews. Although I once had to write to ArbCom because of a bad COI issue involving Awadewit, including a very personal attack on me, we are also missing her serious source work wrt comprehensiveness-- I don't think anyone does that anymore. I would really Really REALLY like to see you recuse from a FAC, put on the Ealdgyth source review hat, and show 'em how it should be done. On TCO/JM etc, when I reread those messes, I see that Raul's approach was so right. He let those discussions rage until everyone had aired everything, and then came in with the gavel. I let those nimwits bother me too much; today I am much more inclined to ignore the unhelpful. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:46, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

@Iri, so back on the pingie thingie, I guess we have evidence of the problem :) You're faulted if you ping 'em (stop bothering me), and you're faulted if you don't (talking behind my back). I won that discussion about the problems with this pingie-thingie :) :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:55, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Back to the original point, if anyone wants an illustration of irony in action I doubt you'll do better than this. ‑ Iridescent 20:42, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, with that laugh, my New Year is off to a grand start! I don't think I should add that to my wall of fame. Or should I? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:50, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Looking at that wall, I'm more worried by the fact that in 2012 I apparently wrote a 174-word sentence. I'm surprised Malleus didn't spontaneously combust. ‑ Iridescent 20:59, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Maybe he did, and it's all your fault? Holy Mother of All Run-ons! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:02, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

PS, some medical editors these days are forcing 12-word sentences into leads of articles, which has totally ruined the possibility of a well-written lead for a Featured article. At 174, you'd be sacrificed and your body donated to medical research. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:05, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

I'll guess the people pushing for a 12-word maximum are all American? The Flesch–Kincaid cult is one of those pseudoscientific oddities like polygraph tests which is taken as gospel in the US and almost totally unknown everywhere else. (Don't get me wrong, short sentences are generally more readable than long ones, but not at the expense of sacrificing meaning. It's keeping the number of clauses in each sentence reasonably low that matters, not the word count.) ‑ Iridescent 21:26, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

bzzzzt ... the three main advocates are from three different, non-US countries. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:28, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Ah, found the discussion in question. Two of those editors are crazy and the third I'm unfamiliar with; you can safely ignore whatever they come up with. Where there is a global consensus to edit in a certain way, it should be respected and cannot be overruled by a local consensus is arbcom-mandated policy, and patience is already wearing thin at the attempts by WP:MED (and by one WP:MED editor in particular) to try to issue a unilateral declaration of independence from consensus whenever he disagrees with a guideline. The infobox wars may have ground to an inconclusive stalemate, but if there's one definite change they brought about it's that both Arbcom, and the community in general, are no longer going to put up with whatever bunch of people happen to comprise the membership of a project declaring that they're the sole style arbiters over whatever articles they decide fall into their remit. ‑ Iridescent 21:59, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

You can lead a horse to water ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:08, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Edit summaries

I've mostly stopped using edit summaries outside the mainspace, and I'm not sure that anyone's any worse off as a result. Most of my talk-page summaries were single characters – r or c for the most part, and sometimes I'd spell out reply or comment if it occurred to me that a new editor mightn't guess what I meant – and almost none of them were actually helpful.

Then the devs finally implemented a way to get your previous edit summaries into the edit-summary dialog box in VisualEditor, and that killed it for me. It turned out that I got what I (we) asked for, but not what I (perhaps only myself) want. I've just given up, and except for now having to actually remember to type an edit summary when it matters (I've missed a few), the Sun still seems to be rising each morning.

But work-me is going to take advantage of this conversation to ask: for a (new) reply on a talk page, do you really care what the edit summary says? If it should exist at all, is there a way to automate their addition? I can think of a couple of options:

• Add a simple pre-determined edit summary, such as one that says "Reply" (ideally, in addition to the section name). This is one step up from my r or c, or the re and fix and typo that other people frequently use, but it's not much better than nothing.
• Auto-paste the (beginning of the) contents of the reply into the edit summary.
• Omit edit summaries entirely (just use the section name).
• Give up on automating edit summaries, and encourage people to continue supplying cryptic and pointless comments.

What do you all think? Perhaps even more importantly, can you think of any other options that should be in my list? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:57, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

I couldn't care less on talk pages, unless something significant has changed (for instance, if you are altering an old post). I kind of like your first list of suggestions, but don't want edit summaries eliminated on talk pages for the times when it is important to say something. I hate the auto-fill option. I often realize after the fact that my edit summary was auto-filled to a previous reply in bad ways. I guess I would dislike auto-paste for similar reasons. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:47, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

I used to paste my replies into the edit summary (“the first bit of the comment”) but people said they found it annoying. Now it’s just “re” or “fix” etc. I do find it helpful when the summaries distinguish between a reply and adding a sig or minor fix. –xeno^talk 13:51, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

User:Xeno, it might have been less annoying when edit summaries were constrained to be much smaller. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:43, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

I mostly either do "re", "ce" or "add" in articles (or "rvt", usually with a bit more), partly because I like to edit in a string of edits, so only the last will appear on most watchlists. On talk I mostly either do "re", "cmt" or copy a headline from my comment. I still expect to see something on other people's edits. Johnbod (talk) 15:26, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

For talk pages, 80% of my edit summaries are "comment", "reply" "question" or "editing myself". For subpages in my own user space, the summary tends to always be "." (It's my scratch area, no one needs to know what I'm doing.) Everywhere else, I try to provide a clue about what I did to help other people when they trudge thru the diffs to see what I did. And the more trivial my edit, the more cryptic my edit summary tends to be. (Sorry, but I get annoyed when I'm forced to write an edit summary longer than the actual amount of text effected.) -- llywrch (talk) 10:03, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Pet peeve, someone makes a tiny punctuation correction with no edit summary, and you spend ten minutes trying to figure out what they changed! On Featured articles, I don't want them messing with my logical quotation or citation style. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:32, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

It's very easy to see punctuation diffs with WikEdDiff, which is a gadget you can enable in your preferences. --Izno (talk) 14:49, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Izno. [4] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:54, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

MOS:POINTS might be interesting on that specific diff. But yes, both full stop removals jump out with WikEdDiff (whereas the one in the middle of the paragraph does not with the normal diff). --Izno (talk) 15:35, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Well, fiddlesticks. I only wrote the medical portions, and left the ENGVAR and other writing to two now-gone editors. I see there is inconsistent usage of Dr v Dr. throughout the article. On my own there, and unsure which way to go. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:12, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

I take it back. The promoted version was consistent with Dr except in one direct quote and one image caption, so I'm going back to that. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:14, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Which is why you'll find I have edit summaries consisting of "+,", "-;" or "&->and". Cryptic, unless you've wasted 5 minutes over a diff only to find someone did no more than fiddled with the punctuation. FWIW, I will usually mark an edit as minor, even if it a substantial change, as a way to indicate IDGAF if someone changes it back. (I will not mark an edit as minor if I have reason to suspect I'm treading on a matter some editors care deeply about. No gain in accidentally triggering a WikiFeud over something trivial, e.g. the misuse of the word "comprise".) -- llywrch (talk) 18:06, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

I write a concise version of the main points to which I want to draw attention, so someone reading the history can get a sense of what the entire comment is about. I appreciate, though, that very few do this (I'm not sure I can recall any others, off the top of my head). Since copy edits don't add any new points, typically all I'll say is "copy edit". isaacl (talk) 17:57, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

I consider it a courtesy thing to at least briefly indicate what I'm doing, even if it's a mini-summary like "re" or "typo". Otherwise, it makes it impossible for anyone reviewing the history to know whether my edit is one they ought to be looking at, short of actually viewing the diff itself; by not using a summary, one is essentially saying "I'm so much more important than you that saving the time it would take me to type one word outweighs the time it will take you to view the diff". Obviously I don't see this as relevant to such things as userspace sandboxes where there's no reasonable expectation that anyone else will have a reason to view the history, but on anything public-facing or community-facing it just seems like basic courtesy. (When it comes to talk and collaboration pages—especially high-traffic pages like the admin noticeboards and Arbcom cases—there's a special circle of wikihell reserved for people who delete or overtype the auto-generated /* Section header */ part of the edit summary, making it impossible for someone viewing the page history to see if the comment was made on a discussion you're following or not so you have to read the whole thing.) ‑ Iridescent 19:17, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Aren't we all reading from WP:NAVPOPS in such circumstances, though? Hovering doesn't require a lot of effort.

Isaacl, what do you do when you're just leaving a quick reply in a section on a talk page? "Copy edit" hopefully doesn't come up very often there.

User:SandyGeorgia, you might want to go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and turn on "Visual diffs". It lets you toggle back and forth, and remembers whichever view you used last. (Work-me really ought to make them move that into regular prefs some day...) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:48, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Considering my years mostly away from the farm, I think I have a ton of outdated editing habits. How about this? I don't even know what you're talking about :) :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:52, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

My approach is the same for short responses. For really short comments, the concise version in the edit summary may well coincide with the full text (I may elide some words). I use "copy edit" when I edit my own comments for typos, grammar, and the like. Sometimes when I'm adding an additional thought for clarification that doesn't alter the main takeaways, I say something like "expand to clarify". isaacl (talk) 01:59, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

@WAID: We're definitely not all reading from WP:NAVPOPS. Firstly, according to Special:GadgetUsage only 52,141 accounts out of 37,969,111 (or 1⁄730) even have the navigation popups gadget switched on in the first place. Secondly, the navpop gadget only works for an old-school mouse-and-cursor user—as the WMF is so fond of pointing out, more than half of traffic is via the mobile interface, and a sizeable chunk on top of that will be people using the desktop interface via mouse-free devices such as ipads or touchscreen PCs. If you think that having navigation popups installed negates the need for edit summaries, try browsing the history of WP:ARCA on a phone.

Normal diff

Visual diff

@Sandy: By 'Visual diffs' she means this feature, which shows diffs in terms of how they affect the rendered output rather than in terms of how they affect the underlying wikicode. It's useful in some contexts—for something like reordering the fields in a table or infobox it makes it much easier to see at a glance whether the change is actually having an effect—but because it only highlights changes to rendered output it masks under-the-hood nuisances like people trying to insert list-defined references. It's worth turning it on (go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and check "Visual differences") as it doesn't cause any disruption to have it on (it just adds an unobtrusive "show visual diff" option when you view a diff) and it's sometimes useful to have the option. ‑ Iridescent 07:15, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Also note that even on devices that allow hovering, this requires a degree of fine motor control which can be a problem for some editors. isaacl (talk) 07:42, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

I can't hover. Some may have noticed how much it takes me just to make one post. As my husband likes to say, "What is so 'essential' about your essential tremor?"

Iri, that Mediawiki page is a mess. I finally found tiny little caption text at the bottom of each image to figure out what they were trying to show us. Every time I encounter techies trying to give instructions, I come away convinced to stick to my old-fashioned ways. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:31, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Ok, Iri, I did it. OMG horrible. I changed the setting in preference, and then got this delightful button that allowed me to toggle between the two views. And I toggled. And was confronted with a mass of eye-jarring color and what seemed to be your whole user talk page. Undo! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:38, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

VE tends to have tantrums on talkpages. On articles, it works fine—e.g. it highlights the Dr Johnson diff you initially raised perfectly, and with something like this it's much clearer to see what the actual change is than trying to figure it out in diff view (viewing it as a normal diff makes it look like a major rewrite took place, when all that actually happened was someone moved one sentence and updated an image). My main issue with it is that—as with everything related to VE—it's unusably slow for any page longer than a couple of paragraphs. ‑ Iridescent 15:21, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Iri, thanks for trying to help me, but I'm really too pissed today to benefit from your efforts. The retirement button looms. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:23, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

There's something about the markup on this talk page that breaks the visual diff view. (I assume it's the unclosed <div> element whose opening tag is added by User:Iridescent/Talk header.) It's a bit flaky: sometimes it will just hang, usually when there are a lot of edits between the two comparison points, but on occasion even where there are only a few. I agree that the colours are not great; I had assumed that the colour-contrast issues were evident and would get addressed, but I suppose I should check if the problem has been raised to the appropriate venue. isaacl (talk) 17:08, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

"Something" is that most of the page is an (unclosed) table. One of the devs is working on making table diffs less-bad in the visual mode, but I make no promises about it happening any time soon, or making this page work even when that patch is deployed.

There's a Phab task to find the ideal color combination. I do expect that to happen someday. It would help a lot if the semantic meanings that most of the world associates with red and green were shifted to a pair of colors that didn't cause so much trouble for colorblind people. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:09, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the update on the colours; good to know one day it will be looked at. Didn't find any unclosed tables, but as I mentioned, there is an unclosed div element. isaacl (talk) 01:38, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

The unclosed div is intentional, to generate the border around the page. I know that it's an unfunny in-joke that wasn't even funny at the time and is now just irrelevant, but it's been there so long I'd be reluctant to lose it. ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I knew it's intentional and for the border. (No idea what in-joke is being referred to, though.) You could close the div and probably resort to some no-archiving techniques to keep it in place, but I don't think there's a way to keep new sections added via the "new section" link from being added after the div closing tag, so it would be onerous to maintain. isaacl (talk) 01:16, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

I have tentatively-possibly good news: If I understand the conversation this morning between some devs, then there's at least a 50% chance that the border will just automagically keep working. This might be confirmed as soon as ...um, probably a couple of months, to be honest. But it's at least not out of the question. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:12, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Seconded

I guess it would look prodigiously self-important if I posted a "Statement" at the Kudpung RFAR merely to the effect that I agree with every word in your "driveby comment". And it doesn't seem like the talkpage is intended for that kind of thing either. But I really do. Every word. I had to say it somewhere. Bishonen | talk 16:25, 9 January 2020 (UTC).

You probably should. If people are willing to bring arbcom cases on the flimsiest of grounds, he might need all the friends he can get. And it's probably setting the stage for a lot more of its kind. ——SN54129 16:30, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

In the "had to say it somewhere" department, my stepfather died last night, while my father is also dying, and I have no interest in engaging Wikipedia anywhere today There, I said it. I said it here only because I cannot find a funeral wreath to put on my talk page as a way of informing others why I will go silent with messes popping up all over the place. And pretty much anyone I care about reads Iri's page anyway. I don't know how Kudpung responded to me, I don't want to know how Kudpung responded to me, I don't want to have to process Wikipedia dysfunction today. (Nor do I want to see any condolences on my talk page; pls let me go away for a few days and process my own stuff.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:32, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm so sorry. Do you like any of these, Sandy? Bishonen | talk 18:23, 9 January 2020 (UTC).

@Bishonen, thanks. @SN54129 I agree, WP:ARC is one of the few places where pileons are important as the arbs need to gauge the depth of feeling not just who can shout loudest. @Sandy I'm so sorry to hear that and hope you're OK; if you don't want any kind of wreath or statement then blacking out your talkpage (just copy the code from the diff) might be what you're looking for. ‑ Iridescent 08:50, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you, but that userpage stuff increases drahmaz anyway. Just saying why I am not engaging: I know I should stay away from anything that provokes an emotional response right now, and with my history of admin abuse ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 08:56, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Large infoboxes

Stumbled across a very large infobox and corresponding discussion: Syrian Civil War and Talk:Syrian Civil War#Size of the infobox. Apparently it is making the article unreadable in some displays. Carcharoth (talk) 18:28, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Good god, that's a mess—quite aside from the fact that it makes the page unreadable on smaller displays, it also breaks virtually every part of WP:ACCESS I can think of owing to its fiddly detail, use of color-coding that's virtually incomprehensible to people with perfect vision let alone those with colour-blindness, even the blink attribute. (The underlying template that drives it is even more of a nightmare.) You probably want RexxS for this one as he understands the accessibility issues but also can't be accused of having an anti-infobox agenda. ‑ Iridescent 18:57, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Good grief indeed. Personally, I'd delete it, or at least take an axe to Template:Syrian Civil War infobox. That's the sort of thing that gives pro-infoboxers a bad name. Anyway, I took a look at it at the extremes:

1. On a 4K screen, I was able to zoom in to the map at 500% and I still couldn't make out any detail, although the rest of article was no worse than most articles on a very hi-res display.
2. On a 1280x1024 display, the infobox squashes the lead into a thin column on the left. That's the infobox doing the squashing, not the image.
3. On my (older) mobile web display using mobile Chrome, the lead comes before the infobox, so that's an improvement, but there's no collapsed content, so there are screens and screens of thin four-column text before we get to the article.
4. On the Wikipedia App, it does a much nicer job: there's a scaled and slightly cropped image of the map at the top, followed by the title and a collapsed infobox, then the lead, and then the rest. That's pretty usable, unless you're foolish enough to expand the infobox, then you have loads of scrolling to do before you even get to the lead.
5. There's nothing unusually problematic for screen reader users, who possibly have the easiest time of anybody not using a HD monitor.

Anyway, the big problem lies in the use of a table of four columns for five of the sections in the infobox. You just can't cram four columns into an infobox-width table and expect anybody without a wide screen to be able to read the info. There might be some sympathy if the four columns were a concrete representation of four distinct factions. However, the USA and Russia both appear in two columns, Russia in the first, USA in the second, and both of them in the fourth column. FWIW, Al-Qaeda appears in the second and third. So I'm not at all convinced that there is a useful structure created by the use of four columns. There actually seem to be six rough groupings. If anybody actually wants to use the information in that infobox, they would be much better off with it presented in just a couple of columns, as that would make the App usable as well as older, smaller screen displays.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure nothing's going to change. I've read the debates at the talk page and at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 August 26 #Template:Syrian civil war infobox and nobody wants to actually fix the problem, either by reducing the content of the infobox or by re-arranging it into a more reader-friendly layout (or preferably, both). The underlying sentiment seems to be "I've put a lot of work into getting all that information into that space, and the readers will just have to buy a bigger monitor". Sorry to disappoint you both, I only work miracles, and this one is going to take a lot more than that. --RexxS (talk) 22:17, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Come on Rexx - you can do it! There's really only one guy, and lots of half-interested opposition, to which you can now add me. That discussion was 7 years ago. Johnbod (talk) 22:22, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Isn't this ridiculous infobox an unavoidable result of these ongoing violations of NOTNEWS? And there's Timeline of the Syrian Civil War, with another one just as big for every six-month period, and there's Cities and towns during the Syrian Civil War (I have no idea what's going on at the top of that page). Open up Template:Syrian Civil War--storing every article in those templates would power a small city. Plus, those timelines are little more than day-by-day updates where the source, most of the time, is Local Coordination Committees of Syria]--so one wonders about RS as well. Drmies (talk) 22:29, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Did someone mention an infobox somewhere that needs deleting... Cassianto^Talk 22:38, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

This one needs pruning, not deleting. A war is a topic where an infobox makes sense, so readers can see at a glance who took part and what the casualties were. An infobox roughly 20 times the size of the infobox on World War II, not so much. (At the time of writing the infobox alone comes to 50,823 bytes; as of last May when the list was last updated there were 2881 Featured Articles shorter than that.) ‑ Iridescent 22:47, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree. An infobox serves its purpose well here. It's just a shame it makes your eyes bleed when you open the page. Cassianto^Talk 23:06, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Yep. The same thing was starting to take hold early on in the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis, and considering that is not yet the Syrian War, it was shocking. People were using the infobox as in a war, with casualties, injuries, commanders, who supported whom, and pretty soon the infobox was extending beyond the second section in the article, naming every politician in recent history. I bolded trimmed the hell out of it one day, explained why on talk, and the edit stuck. Had it not, I'm pretty sure we'd have the same thing there today. (And, yes, Drmies-- all driven by NOTNEWS, which the entire suite of recent Venezuelan articles very much are, because they ran on ITN for months during the acute stage of the crisis. In the Venezuelan articles, apparently we have to track every protest casualty, every protest, etc ... out of control, fed by being on the mainpage, ITN.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:59, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Don't articles on contemporary events always turn into such proseliney messes? At least the infobox map is something rather unique on the Internet. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:36, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

I feel like part of the lifecycle of a Wikipedia article should sort of be a proseline mess, honestly. It's like a geologic process—you quickly add sedimentary facts in one after another, and when better sources come along you combine and prune, and optimally you're left with an article that provides proper context instead of "On X, Y. On Z, AA." Trying to make a really good article out of breaking news is just a waste of time; I don't bother really touching articles on media that hasn't come out, etc. because it's the apotheosis of the "wikipedia is building sandcastles in the surf" phenomenon.

As to the infoboxes, I've always felt the main problem with them is some people treat every field is something to be filled instead of being judicious and focusing on the most important topics. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 15:32, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, that was the logic that stuck when I cleaned it out on Ven topics (we don't need to fill in combatants, casualties, etc to make it look like war because a conflict infobox was chosen). I don't know if this always happens when something is In The News on the mainpage, but what a miserable experience it is to edit a topic that is ITN. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:34, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

This one is a particular favourite example of infobox bloat, given that it's such a high-traffic article so the number of people inconvenienced by it was suitably magnified. As has previously been mentioned on this talkpage (IIRC by Ealdgyth), in any "worst of infoboxes" list the 20 or so boxes using File:Fictitious Ottoman flag 1.svg deserve an honourable mention. ("Well yes, Islamic states didn't have flags until the 19th century, but we need to have something in the infobox. Shall we use the post-1844 flag which might be anachronistic but at least represents the correct country and is recognisably similar to the present-day Turkish flag? Nah, let's just make something up instead.) ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Winston could be worse: |tailor=, |barber= and |fav_whisky= are still missing  :) ——SN54129 18:52, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

If you care: Henry Poole & Co (who now do a steady trade dressing lookalikes and actors using their original patterns for him), Truefitt & Hill, Johnnie Walker Black Label although he preferred brandy. ‑ Iridescent 18:59, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

I’d always heard it was red label and club soda in the bathtub for breakfast. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:06, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

He wasn't much of a whisky drinker; he much preferred brandy. (Special Brew—the uniquely foul-tasting malt liquor much beloved by English street vagrants as having the highest alcohol-to-price ratio of any drink—gets its bizarre taste from an attempt by Carlsberg to make a drink Churchill would like by attempting to replicate the taste of brandy in a beer.) When he did drink whisky he used to dilute it very heavily, a habit he acquired in the army where it served as an ad-hoc water purifier, which is probably how he acquired his reputation as a heavy drinker despite rarely being drunk since people would see him drinking ten glasses of the stuff and not realise it was only a few drops of whisky in each glass. The Scotch Whisky website has a brief article on his relationship with whisky. ‑ Iridescent 17:30, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

I used to enjoy a couple of Special Brews (on the beach, after working the lunch shift) when I worked in a pub/restaurant in Cornwall an alarmingly long time ago. Johnbod (talk) 17:43, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

^^^Football hooligan! ——SN54129 18:10, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Don't get me started on WP:FLAGCRUFT. I think I may hate it more than Cass hates infoboxes on composers. Although ... I probably hate the stupid habit of using coats of arms as icons for medieval military topics even MORE. At least someone might have a chance of recognizing some modern flags - no one in the world is going to pick out File:De Ros arms.svg in the infobox of Wars of the Roses to know that it signifies Thomas Ros, 9th Baron Ros. It's just clutter... but you can't convince the MilHist project that they are useless. It's hard enough to keep the stupid flags out of the sister cities sections on city and town articles! Ealdgyth - Talk 19:18, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

And it went beyond even flags on the Venezuela "conflict" infobox; they were adding logos of political parties as parties to the conflict, in addition to the flags. When I started seeing them naming countries in support of Guiado (there are more than 50) and countries in support of Maduro-- with their flags-- in the infobox, I was able to convince them to STOP THAT! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:26, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

If it's any consolation, at least we finally managed to get rid of this industrial-grade infobox fuckwittery. ‑ Iridescent 19:35, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Bathing regulations at Athens

Not important, but—in the context of that sign, what the heck is a "nant"? None of the definitions I can find seem to fit. Thanks, Newyorkbrad (talk) 12:43, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Swimmers, I guess – in Latin nant is "they swim", and nans, nantis is "swimmer". Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 12:55, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

It helps to know this is taken at Eton, home of Eton College which has its own bizarre idiolect (this is by no means the most incomprehensible sign around the town). A "nant" is a pupil who is able to swim (a "wet bob" means they can also row; a "non-nant" means they can't swim). "Fifth form" also known as "D Block" means age 15–16, and each form is in turn divided into three divisions through which the pupils progress over the year. Once a pupil has passed all their examinations but remains a pupil at the school, their status changes to "First Hundred". "Athens" is their name for a spot on the north bank of the Thames (on the Thames Path about 500 yards west of Eton) where a set of steps lead into the river. So to translate from posh to English, "Pupils in the latter 2⁄3 of GCSE year, or who have passed their GCSEs, are allowed to use these steps to swim in the Thames. They must take precautions to ensure no women see their genitals, and are not permitted to swim across the river to the other side or to touch any passing boat".

I always recommend anyone who's never been there to visit Eton; just walking through the town serves as a crash-course in what's wrong with the English ruling class and why. Literally everything in the town—from the grocery stores to the post office to the parks—is either devoted to catering to the arbitrary whims of the charmless offspring of the landed gentry, tinpot dictators, and the tasteless nouveau riche, or is directly run by Eton College and feels like an 18th-century theme park. I'm no Trot, but I wouldn't shed a tear if the entire town were bulldozed to the ground. ‑ Iridescent 21:15, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

To be quite fair, the “Landed Gentry” can’t afford the fees anymore. The rest are all there though. Giano (talk) 21:48, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

If anyone is in any doubt whether Old Etonians are really so inbred they're becoming a different species, I direct them to Eton wall game#Play. ‑ Iridescent 22:04, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

To be fair, I think there are probably worse places. My education was literally hammered into me by Jesuits, so Eton seems possibly progressive by comparison. Anyway didn’t your Prince Harry go to Eton, just look at him. Giano (talk) 22:20, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

My education was literally hammered into me by Jesuits – Um... I'm trying to imagine that. EEng 05:22, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

For Harry, that was progressive – it's not so long ago that there wouldn't have been any chance of sending a prince of the blood off to a public (*gasp*) school with the riff-raff. Most of them don't even have earldoms! Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:31, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Indeed; IIRC Charles's ill-fated stint at Gordonstoun was the first time ever that anyone in the line of succession was permitted something as déclassé as attending school, and Gordonstoun at least has the advantage of being in the absolute middle of nowhere so there's little risk of any of the little darlings ever having to interact with an oik. Eton has always been where the vulgar rich send their offspring; a list of Old Etonians reads like a Who's Who of crooks, conmen and paedophiles. (Your genuine posho either hires private tutors or packs the kids off to Switzerland.) Hilariously, the relevant part of the website of the self-appointed World's Greatest School are a Wikipedia mirror. ‑ Iridescent 20:16, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Ah yes, I think we got blessed with the children of the Danish (?) royal family recently over here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:19, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Arbitration case opened

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kudpung. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kudpung/Evidence. Please add your evidence by January 28, 2020, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kudpung/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, CodeLyoko^talk 05:03, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah but no, I think I have better things to do with my time then get involved in something as blatantly "verdict first, trial later" as this one. I've semi-joked before that it's possible to predict the outcome of arbcom cases before they even take place just by looking at the personal grudges of the participants and calculating how far they each think they'll be able to push their preferred outcome and still call it a compromise, but I'm not sure I can recall an example this blatant before. Why not just save everyone the time and jump straight to "Kudpung admonished" now? ‑ Iridescent 20:22, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Because the winding path to get there is essential to the cathartic release. EEng 21:34, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

To quote Wikipedia, which as we all know is never wrong, the actual trial has as its only goal the presentation of both the accusation and the verdict to the public so they will serve as both an impressive example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors. Wikipedia's bureaucracy may suck at delivering "fair", but all elements of it have always been very fond of the notion that by sending signals they can remould both the editing community and the reader base into something more desirable. ‑ Iridescent 21:49, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

I meant nothing so noble, merely that giving periodic vent to blood lust helps prevent actual violence breaking out. EEng 01:43, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I'd vote for you, Iri.Martinevans123 (talk) 21:52, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Maybe this (which is this for those unable to play BBC News videos) is a better way of resolving Wikipedia conflicts? Carcharoth (talk) 18:30, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

"All the hits.. all the poses... all the hair!!" Martinevans123 (talk) 21:43, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

With most of these established editor-on-established editor "both sides have been dicks but we need to be seen to take action so let's see whose friends can shout the loudest and declare them the winner" cases, which seem to have become the new fad at ARC and especially ARCA recently, they could probably be settled equally well by flipping a coin. Now he's back on the committee NYB presumably can't comment here, otherwise this would be the cue for him to dig up that old Kelly Martin quote about Arb cases meaning blocking whoever's being the most annoying and repeating until the noise stops. This particular spat is a little unusual; usually these things are popularity contests in which friends and allies of the respective parties dig for dirt to smear the other guy, but this one is an unpopularity contest about which of the parties has managed to annoy more of The Wrong People with the people the parties have annoyed over the years scrambling to find pretexts to complain. (See also: Fram, The Rambling Man, Malleus…) In that context TBSDY has an advantage, as despite his long record of obnoxiousness most of it took place long enough in the past that the people he hassled and harassed are no longer around to testify,* whereas some of the people whose toes Kudpung stepped on a couple of years ago are now members of the WikiElite.
*Before any Civility Defenders take exception to this comment, I point out that the off-wiki harassment which was one of the factors that led to TBSDY being blocked a decade ago is still on his website, and that the website in question is still occasionally updated so it's not some old unmaintained site which he's just forgot to shut down.

Somey probably deserves some belated recognition here; a decade ago he was predicting Wikipedia deteriorating into blocs of self-appointed power users manoeuvring to get each other sanctioned, back at a time when most people were predicting that by now it would either have collapsed altogether and been replaced by something better, or matured into some kind of utopian future where the interpersonal shit was a thing of the past and everyone was working for the common good. ‑ Iridescent 21:26, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Well it's the same as any organization, and in particular volunteer organizations: some people won't get along, sometimes it's mainly one person's fault, sometimes it's just a clash in personal styles, and so people end up avoiding each other and the group splinters. Trying to deal with interpersonal issues by mass agreement of the group is impossible; eventually you need a hierarchy to make a decision. isaacl (talk) 04:32, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

But Wikipedia, and in particular Wikipedia in Wild West times, was never a typical mass-membership voluntary organisation; the volunteers at the Salvation Army, Rape Crisis or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds don't spend a significant part of their time trying to engineer purges of those they consider ideologically impure, and there weren't many people back then who thought the backbiting and infighting of 2004–08 were anything more than the growing pains of a new startup that hadn't yet settled on which direction it was going to take. Almost everyone back then was either a pessimist who expected that either the internal tensions would tear it apart and Google or Microsoft would swoop in and pick up the pieces (go back over the history from 2007–08 and you can find lots of earnest talk about how to decide what would be worth salvaging when the Great Reckoning arrived), or an optimist who believed that under Sue Gardner's benevolent guidance, by 2020 the WMF would have done to the rest of the internet what we did to Encarta and Britannica, and by now Google and Facebook would be obscure hobbyist sites. (Neither was a particularly implausible scenario, either; back then the boom-and-bust cycle seemed inevitable for every website, and the burning issue was how we rode out the cycle.)

With the exception of a few minor tweaks like Vector and Hovercards, our general look-and-feel is unchanged since 2004 and our rules (written and unwritten) largely date from 2006–07. There weren't many people who predicted that Wikipedia could simultaneously be both one of the most important websites in the world, and a case study in stagnation (these are the WMF's official charts; it's astonishing just how flat all the lines are between 2007 and now). If in 2007 you'd said that in 2020 we'd not only be discussing the same issues but it would largely be the same people both doing the discussing and as the subjects of discussion, you'd have been laughed at. ‑ Iridescent 09:42, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Great stuff, but you mean what Encarta, and the internet in general, did to Britannica, and we (plus neglect) then did to Encarta. Britannica was already a baked koala in commercial terms by the time anyone had heard of Wikipedia. Johnbod (talk) 14:51, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Clay Shirky talked about the problems with trying to solve interpersonal issues by consensus in online communities back in 2003. It's not surprising that Wikipedia has struggled with resolving the same problems. isaacl (talk) 20:06, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Why is Wikipedia:BUTTHURT red? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:22, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

I assume because in the current climate there's been a sharp turn in opinion against even jocular redirects that could be taken as offensive. Given that we even got rid of WP:Don't be a dick because it was considered sexist and offensive, creating a joke redirect that's quite literally equating Wikipedia disputes to anal rape is so far beyond the pale it's unreal. Ritchie333, have you lost your fucking mind? People have been indeffed for less. ‑ Iridescent 09:42, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Shocking. But that definition says its only "analogy". Martinevans123 (talk) 10:26, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

The source mentioned above is based on online forums. (WP:RS, anyone?) Here's another one, with a different take. Kablammo (talk) 16:10, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I think on Wikipedia it's always best to assume that the worse possible interpretation will be the most likely one...safer that way  :) ——SN54129 16:19, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

best to assume that the worst possible interpretation will be the most likely one – Certainly I always do; it's perhaps my most important source of inspiration. EEng 22:08, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

For the record I don't endorse censoring "butthurt" (which I consider just a modern variant of "pain in the ass"), nor do I in any way endorse the pearl-clutching reaction of a certain (invariably American) group to "dick", "cunt", "bollocks" etc, but this is the climate in which we operate. As has regularly been pointed out, this is the website where "sycophantic" was deemed a blockable swear word, and Ritchie knows as well as I do (or ought to at any rate) that Sandstein is always looking for a pretext to carve another notch in his gun. ‑ Iridescent 13:37, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I see we don't have DIVA anymore, either, for butthurt editors who flounce (or pretend to-- they never really do). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:58, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

We still have DIVA, but it's now at Wikipedia:Don't be high-maintenance. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:00, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

@JJE, well sort of—the page was moved, but at the same time it was moved it got a thorough neutering from the Purity Patrol to remove any language which anyone could ever possibly find offensive, and in so doing removed most of the point of it in the first place. ‑ Iridescent 14:12, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

If editors who flounced out remained flounced, this whole peculiar episode wouldn't be happening in the first place.^[5][6] ‑ Iridescent 14:03, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

And the first of those based on an AN appeal that was effectively supervoted in (an appeal itself premised on an assurance that drama would be avoided...how's that looking, three months later!) ——SN54129 14:40, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure I'd label the circumstances of one as a flounce. Anyway, I'm actually looking at an entirely different episode, and wondering we can't call spades by name. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:07, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

I don't know enough about Kudpung to say for certain, but his certainly looks like a flounce and subsequent thinking better of it to me. TBSDY was practically the platonic ideal of a flounce, given that he literally spent the subsequent decade bitching about how badly off we were without his guidance (Wikipedia - you once were great, now you are the shit-pile of the Internet was written six years after his resignation) while at the same time socking with his Letsbefiends account. ‑ Iridescent 14:17, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Watchlist changes

The page of the fonts of all wisdom :)

Something caused my watchlist to change in the last few days, and what I am seeing now is dreadful. I don't know if this is some setting I have, or something "they" did. What I see now is a big 'ole wasted blank space on each line, followed by the time, followed by the page edited, and only then followed by the diffs. Diffs used to be first. This is a pain. Can anyone help? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:00, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

(watching:) I can't help. For me, it's still - how I saw this, just now - diff first. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:14, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm certainly still seeing the normal, old-school watchlist. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist and make sure that under the "Advanced options" section, "Use non-JavaScript interface" is checked and everything else is unchecked; also go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and make sure "(This loads the base style for the watchlist. Please do not disable this option.)" hasn't been inadvertently disabled. ‑ Iridescent 18:15, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, both. Checked those, that is not it. I was wondering if it is the age of my laptop, but I have same on iPad. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:21, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Go to one of the other wikis where you have an account, and see if the same thing happens to your watchlist there—if they still display fine, then that means it's not your computer but something in en-wiki settings. If you post at WP:VPT, the volunteers there are usually lightning-fast at explaining what's happened (even if the answer is "there's nothing you can do about it"). ‑ Iridescent 18:34, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I went to es.wiki, where they had the decency to give me some notice saying watchlist prefs had changed. But I have no watchlist entries there, since I haven't edited there in ages. Heading over to WP:T bold, where I am going to need a cot with a banner that says, "I'm a Dork". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:48, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

The Spanish WP greats me with "Te damos la bienvenida al filtrado mejorado de la lista de seguimiento / Revisa las ediciones de manera más eficiente mediante filtros nuevos, la posibilidad de guardar grupos de filtros, resaltados personalizados y la potencia del aprendizaje automático." - of which I understand only "bienvenida", but a translation program says "Welcome to the improved filtering of the watch list / Review edits more efficiently with new filters, the ability to save groups of filters, custom highlighting, and the power of auto-learning." - Now I'm old-fashioned, editing source-code (not Visual editor), which may help against such "improvements". Perhaps someone speaking Spanish could get more info over there? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:46, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Gerda, the problem was something else ... see my post at WP:VPT. (I could translate that for you, but I don't think you really want that, and I have to go translate a poem for a friend now :) :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:52, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Happy it was resolved, Sandy, and I admire translating poems, it's one of the hardest kinds of translations.

Awesome

Ten years!

I support the above line, "The page of the fonts of all wisdom :)" - here the same, less poetic: "Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago", and today. - Justice and Peace kiss ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:45, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, although not sure what I was doing ten years ago to warrant it… ‑ Iridescent 08:41, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Nor do I - was a newbie then, and we can't ask the giver because we have to block such people. So, a FAR for a scout camp will also go without main author's input, as you observed below, and it didn't even deteriorate (I watched), but just never met today's standards. Well, looking forward: I have my FAC plan for 2020, Brian's legacy, a heavy load about unbelievable and uncomparable music. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:53, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

On an unrelated note

On an unrelated note but posting here rather than in the spotlight of the FAC talkpages, @SandyGeorgia are you doing these pre-FAR checks in date order? If you're starting from 2003 and working forwards, it seems to me that you're likely to hit a wall fairly soon, as you'll at some point reach a big stack of articles by Brianboulton, Awadewit and Angusmclellan which were compliant at the time but aren't necessarily going to comply with the current standards (or just haven't had more recent sources added), and whose original authors are for obvious reasons no longer in a position to answer queries. It will obviously annoy and upset people either if these editors' talkpages fill up with "I have nominated Foo for review" boilerplate templates, but it will equally annoy and upset people if we don't give out the appropriate notification (even though we know the recipients will never read it) and thus give the impression of delisting-by-stealth.

If there's going to be a mass FAR, there's also the question of how we handle retired or blocked editors. Presumably there will be quite a few articles written by Yellowmonkey, Cla68, Moni, Raul, Malleus, PumpkinSky etc etc etc which have subsequently deteriorated through no fault of their authors because they're no longer actively maintained or just because new research hasn't been incorporated, but it will be a recipe for ill-feeling if we suddenly dump 20 FAR notifications on their talkpages. One assumes that most of these people aren't following Wikipedia closely so won't see the discussions that led to the revival of FAR, but do still occasionally check their talkpage, so at some point will see a huge stack of notifications on their talk, not realize that everyone else is also getting a similar stack of notifications, and assume they're being vindictively singled out.

None of this is to say we shouldn't be going over every existing FA to see if it actually is of adequate quality, but we do need to bear in mind that this could backfire quite badly if we don't take pains to ensure we explain carefully and sensitively that this is a process being applied to every FA without fear or favor, and that it's not being used as a point-scoring tool to further personal disputes. ‑ Iridescent 08:41, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Somewhat date order, in that I looked at the oldest on Dweller's page, and the oldest at WP:URFA. But not really date order, because I haven't yet approached the whole thing systematically because ... it's just not possible for one person to do that. Per my outline at WT:FAC (that was rejected), I am only scanning for the truly deficient.

The problem that I see is that the FA community doesn't seem concerned that a huge percentage of FAs are truly bad (however we define truly and wherever we draw that line, but it doesn't in my mind extend to older Boulton, Awadewit etc articles). The idea of an accelerated, less-strict-than-FAC sweep didn't take, and the idea of better mainpage exposure may or may not take, so for now all we have to work with is consensus at WT:FAC that we should speed up the FAR nomination process a bit. All I'm trying to do at this stage is see if that will actually work, by giving a list of articles that have been notified. One person can't speed up FAR; it will only work if others pitch in. My sneaking suspicion is that this will have no effect whatsoever, so I don't want to put too much systematic work into it.

Also, I have already hit a few still active nominators who immediately responded that they would do the necessary cleanup, so all is not negative. The other good finding is that a lot of the "haven't yet run" listed on Dweller's page are old songs/albums/TV shows whatever whose content is not dynamic, so they don't really need work and don't seem to have been damaged in all these years-- they just haven't been of interest to the mainpage. I had the idea that all of Dweller's page were FAs in trouble, but a lot of even the older ones are not dreadful, or at least not so dreadful they still couldn't run TFA. So, a side effect of this exercise is to try to get TFA to be less strict about what they run, and recognize that demanding perfection at TFA is biting us in the foot, by discouraging participation.

I'm only looking for the dreadful. The next main place to look would be big geography articles (ala Germany) as they get stale fast if they don't have a main watcher. I'm going to finish looking at Dweller's 2008 list and sort through these, and not sure what next. I remain convinced that a new process needs to be defined, because FAR has been neglected now for more than six years. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:15, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I was running a bunch of older FAs but we were getting a LOT of pushback at WP:ERRORS about how "crappy" the older FAs were and how COULD we feature those AWFUL articles on the main page. There was enough blowback that it was causing stress to some of the other TFA coords so I pulled back on running the older ones. If someone writes up the blurbs ... I'm quite happy to run anything that isn't abyssmal off Dweller's list - although I did just scheduled for Feb so I won't schedule again til May. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:20, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

You should use your whip on the ERRORS people. Do DYK and ITN get pushback for the utter and total garbage they run Every Single Day ??? No. Never. I avoid the mainpage because I see so much total garbage at DYK that it sends me to uncontrollable places. And editing Venezuelan topics, I saw how much damage ITN does. The mainpage people need to get a sense of perspective. This is one of the direct consequences of having lost an FA director, who had and used the gravitas to keep the overall process functioning correctly, meaning that FAC, FAR and TFA had to work together. Without being able to run all TFAs on the mainpage, we lost the ability to recruit new reviewers and writers, and lost all participation at FAR. So now we have a moribund FAR, a declining FAC, and TFA attempting to run only "perfect" articles, which is absurd. It's a wiki. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:31, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, I do try to stay collegial with my colleagues... so when they were getting stressed, it's important to not continue things that stressed them. I'm a little frightened that I've not needed the asbestos suit I donned last night, even my emails have been quite friendly. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop... Is there a current FAC that needs a good picky source review? We're just about unloaded at this stop, but heading to Birmingham for another unload and will have some time while that unloads in a few hours...Ealdgyth - Talk 14:28, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@Ealdgyth:, the Holocaust one. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:31, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I'll look but it may have to wait until I get home, most of the Holocaust books are still at home. For some reason, hubby refused to let me bring along the entire library in the semi... Ealdgyth - Talk 14:33, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Tell him he needs a bigger truck! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:45, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

As I understand it, the blowback at WP:ERRORS wasn't the result of multiple people thinking there was a problem, but of a single long-term troll who decided that he'd granted himself veto power over anything appearing on the main page, and demanding we (Wikipedia as a whole, not just TFA; he also went after DYK etc) pull everything not confirming to whatever arbitrary guideline he'd made up that day, or any article written on a topic that didn't meet his personal and idiosyncratic definition of "encyclopedic". After he had his ass handed to him a couple of months ago, he seems to have got bored and gone off to annoy somebody else. ‑ Iridescent 16:47, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

User:Wadewitz only I think started nom-ing FACs in 2007, & they were heavily referenced from the get-go. User:Brianboulton/Sandbox6 has a table showing his first was in 2008 & it looks adequately reffed. But an FAR on Sicilian Baroque, by User:Giano in 2005, has just been started. This still reads well (well, I think so) but is sparing with refs, & Giano is so far reluctant to return to it. All of these, & I'd guess all by these authors, have been on the MP years ago, so that's not the issue. Johnbod (talk) 13:25, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Were there some truly outrageous claim that wasn’t cited, I would return immediately. However, I have better things to do with my time than trawl through text books to find the bloody obvious. Over the years, experience has taught me that it’s far more relaxing not to have pages that are not FAs. Ordinary pages are vandalised Less and have fewer people trying to add a negative input. Giano (talk) 13:31, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Healthy approach! At the other extreme, badly written and badly outdated medical articles pose a whole different problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:33, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I wouldn't entirely agree with you, Giano - I just think it makes no real difference once it's off the main page. Not to views or anything else. Of course medical, and many other scientific subjects are a different matter. Also BLP biograhies. Johnbod (talk) 13:36, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, to contrast Awadewit's work with Giano's may be illustrative. Awadewit's articles are thoroughly cited, but that doesn't mean they don't have problems, I know where the problems are, and FAR and FAC are unlikely to detect them. Where it does matter, Johnbod, is in the OTHERSTUFFEXISTS arguments. People aspiring to write the best possible articles do look to FAs and do use them as examples. We should at least not have embarrassing FAs. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I agree with that, and (pt 1) probably something similar can be said for Giano's, referenced or not. Certainly I agree with Pt 2. Anyone editing Indian topics, as I've largely been doing for the last year, knows the level of references is a very poor guide indeed to accuracy or balance. See Johnbod's law. And from what I'm just listening to on BBC Radio 4, this will get a lot worse once they start using the new "saffronized" Indian history textbooks, now being rolled out. Johnbod (talk) 13:48, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Five references? How about dozens? In the lead? Seriously, FAC?? Amphetamine. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:14, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Yikes! I don't think I've yet reached the reading age for that lead. Johnbod (talk) 14:24, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Same trend being forced across medical articles, which is why I won't even bring dementia with Lewy bodies to FAC even though it's almost there. Would you rather read this lead or that "headache-inducing" one? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:30, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if there's a Texasisation. Could probably make a good single article on right-wing rewriting of history via textbook publisher and redirect the two. --Izno (talk) 15:02, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

There is, rightly, a large Category:Textbook controversies. Johnbod (talk) 15:51, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

So... Johnbod... are we up to Bosworth Psalter yet? I've finally gotten mostly moved and can consider serious editing again...Ealdgyth - Talk 14:28, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Extremely elegant initials, certainly, but no miniatures, & an FA treatment would probably have to get into a lot on the textual make-up. I spend most of my time now trying to get Indian art topical articles with 100++ views a day from Start class meets gibberish to a decent C or dodgy B (after a few hours collecting the tens or hundreds of excellent museum images Commons now has, that weren't categorized on the metadata provided....). But I'll certainly take a look if you get it going. Johnbod (talk) 15:00, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

On the subject of museums, feel free to head on over to Commons:Category:Unsorted uploads by Iridescent and see if there's anything you deem worth saving. These were a big stack of "might be useful at some point" photos I was keeping parked on Flickr, but in light of Flickr's likely demise I've moved them across to Commons en masse before they're lost. As most of them are of minimal value I'm not feeling particularly inclined to label and categorise them, and at some point will probably go through and tag most of them for deletion, but if there's anything you think might be useful feel free to add proper descriptions/categories. ‑ Iridescent 16:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Well I took the Exeter, Reading and Cardiff museums en masse & some of the Exeter Cathedral (moving rather than copying the last 2, which I hope is ok). I might look at others later. Johnbod (talk) 19:36, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

By all means, help yourself to anything you think might be useful. Most of it is low-quality phone snapshots of things for which we probably already have better quality pictures (particularly the V&A and York Railway Museum) but which at some point I thought looked interesting. ‑ Iridescent 21:03, 29 January 2020 (UTC)