This is an archive of past discussions about User:SMcCandlish. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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March 2019

Please comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Illegitimi non carborundum

I sympathize with your situation. Your words are being twisted around and you are being attacked for saying things you never said. Don't let it get you down. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:33, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: Thanks, and it doesn't. I was a professional civil liberties activist for over a decade. My skin is very thick. I'm actually not offended that people took offense and are twisting it to mean what it doesn't say. Humans just have a tendency to do that with stuff gores any ox they consider sacred (or in this case walks into the same field where the ox is grazing). I will, however, to continue to correct their fabrications about me and about the intent and meaning of the piece. I do of course object to Fæ in particular canvassing and casting aspersions and hounding/harassing me across projects. Not enough to ANI the matter; given that the editor was indeffed and then long-term topic banned for similar antics, it's just a matter of time before they go after someone who actually does have the WP:DRAMA patience to take them back to ANI or AE or RFARB for a re-ban. Someone else will deal with it, I predict within the year. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:56, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Not commenting on the wisdom of publishing, but I do commend you on the very high quality of the writing. Did you know La Leche League (an organization that organizes advocacy, educational, and training related to breastfeeding) is (or was) debating gender neutral material in their manuals to accomodate Transmen who give birth and choose to breastfeed? In this case "she" would be inappropriate as the breastfeeding transman is a "he". Far from common, I would guess, but grounds for a big debate.Icewhiz (talk) 11:20, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
Probably more common than one would think, for the same reason that a lot of gay men have (non-adopted) children; lots of people feel the biological drive to breed very, very strongly, even if the mechanics of it don't jibe with their sexual preferences or gender identity. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:41, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Dfn

Template:Dfn has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. -- Beland (talk) 08:10, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

WP's edit-conflict resolver is barfing all over everyone today

Resolved

– Both cases have been fixed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:57, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Revert

Soory! reverted you at An/I because the 'edit conflict thingy' removed several other comments, cygnis insignis 15:51, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Do you want me to manually reinsert your comments? cygnis insignis 15:52, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

And reclose? Might be better if you did that, there has been another response. I had an edit conflict/delete that did the same thing, the toolmaker was quick to fix it. cygnis insignis 16:03, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

@Cygnis insignis: No worries. I've had issues with the edit-conflict handler today, too. I think I'll just let it run; someone else who has not commented at all in this is a better person to close it even if the snowball is already huge. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:01, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

I am only aware of your edits removing others comments, I was just trying to repair that. I was waiting on a reply for two hours, and didn't know what you thought was going on. I'm taking you off my watchlist again. cygnis insignis 09:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

EC heads up

FYI Leviv ich 18:11, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

@Levivich: Argh! Did you already repair that, or do I need to do it? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:14, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

I didn't touch it, idk if you noticed but there's been a bit of pitchforks and torches about. To be safe I've been restricting my editing to fixing typos on my userpage. Leviv ich 18:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

I fixed them. As for the pitchforks, yes, they've mostly been in my own flesh for the last three days. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:11, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. I guess what the comedians say is true: comedy really is a brutal business. Stand up and make a joke and if not enough people laugh, they draw knives. Bet you wish you had a safe space now :-D Leviv ich 20:12, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Well, with me being a transphobic anti-LGBT right-winger, I naturally have a well-defended militia bunker. It's chock full of Bibles and Pabst Blue Ribbon. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:29, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Inquiry about issue on own talk page

Excuse, SMcCandlish, I am having a bit of an issue trying to solve an incident on my talk page, that you commented on earlier: User talk:PPEMES#Blocked. Would you mind having a look again and if possible comment on the process? Thanks. PPEMES (talk) 17:09, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

I said something over there, but it's pretty generalized, since I don't know se.wp's details. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:12, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Alt-right, alt-left

This topic is one of several alt-right talking points and ignorance of this is inexcusable, this is the means by which your nation is being destroyed from within. Some of your fans don't see the humour, if it is there, the laugh at the reaction of the people concerned about the real world consequences of freeze peach. Defending your creation with the defence it was 'published by someone else!' in the current climate is exceptionally average. cygnis insignis 09:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

@Cygnis insignis: I've defended it, to the extent it needs or is worth defense, in several ways. That's not one of them. I'll correct people when they get the publication history incorrect, but it's not a defense of the content. They're separate matters that simply happen to be on the same page at the same time. I don't think the US is being destroyed from within; it's just going through one of its cycles. Things are much better today for LGBT+ people than they were when I was teenager, and they were much better then than they were in my parents' youth. I'm also not threatened by the presence of alt-right people on WP, as long as they play by the rules. We need them for balance, because the site is overwhelmingly dominated by the alt-left. I'm a progressive on social issues but a centrist on many others, so this perhaps matters to me more than average. Given WP:NPOV policy, it really should matter to everyone here, though. I have no control over what people choose to laugh at. I don't think the far-left overreaction to this piece (especially the "excuse any wrongdoing by someone we like" antics over at ANI) are a laughing matter. That's way, way more dangerous than some alt-right douchebags being, well, douchebags. They don't have any pull here, but il-liberal leftist WP:FACTION behavior to permit gross policy violations by one of their own number to WP:WIN on the censorious side of a content dispute is a serious problem which is apt to multiply. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:47, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

The alt-left is an invention to premise those kind of statements, at least, that is what we tell people. Maybe go to The Atlantic and get some perspective, find the civilisation that is lurking between the channels in the US, or at least stop hanging in places where the grotesque idea that an alt-right is there to provide 'balance'. cygnis insignis 18:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

You're entitled to whatever beliefs you like, but as a professional activist since 1993, I'm quite certain I know the political landscape quite well. You're also not in a position to tell me what I'm aware of and how well-read I am, nor how to make up my mind about what I see and read. :-) If you plan to try to suppress material more to the right than your views, things aren't going to go well for you here. The obvious exceptions – when political beliefs collide with science and we have a WP:FRINGE matter on our hands – apply on both sides of that political axis; being a climate-change-denial or anti-evolution activist isn't any different from being an anti-GMO or anti-vaccination activist when the science tells us both extremes are full of shit. There's actually more fringe stuff coming from the far-left than the far-right (bad science is only good for business when the good science would be used to restrain business instead of turn a profit; I'm sure you can work about the flip side of that). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:50, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, oh, missed that. "If you plan to try to suppress material more to the right than your views, …" I'll note that is where we are up to, unless you are going to show where I have ever done anything remotely resembling that I'll assume you are just putting it out there for the 'freeze peach' readers :-| cygnis insignis 20:29, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Poor wording on my part; I meant the hand-waving generic you (i.e., "If some editors plan to ... then they ..."), not the personal you in particular. You (particular) already have a clearly not-NOTHERE editing record (maybe we need WP:ACTUALLYHERE?). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:36, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

It does read that way, I'm getting a lot of suggestions otherwise. apologies. My head is full of some rabbity thing with a proper common name, a nice old name that looks awful in print and sounds great when correctly pronounced (as lunch, back in the day). cygnis insignis 21:03, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Nah, entirely my fault. That was written on a day in which I was arguing with a whole lot of people about pretty much the same thing, so I was thinking in en masse terms and not being careful with wording and context. (Kind of ironic, given that the dispute started in the first place by not being careful about those things!) PS: Your riddle has stumped me. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:22, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Cygnis insignis: PS – I've refactored this into a separate thread, since it doesn't relate to the edit-conflict resolution stuff above. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:57, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

@Cygnis insignis: I think you may like the essay User:JzG/Politics; it's a good summary of the media-and-society problems that appear to underly your position. Be assured that I'm well aware of this effect; I appreciate that JzG took the time to put up a page on it here, since we didn't already have one. I do not mean to imply that right-wing ideas from their own feedback loop should be accepted here. We literally cannot accept them, because far-right "echo chamber" sources are not reliable. Plenty of what I do on WP in mainspace is against such rather propagandistic nonsense. But there's a big difference between Trumpian ranto-blathering, and legitimate conservatism (of the sort going back generations and well-articulated by a lot of statespersons). They're not views I share for the most part, but they have a place here, and get short-shrift in many cases because of the further and further left-leaning pool of editors. I care about this because I care about WP:UNDUE policy, not because I have an agenda. I have an "un-genda", what I at least used to call radical centrism (before realizing that was a term already used by others), a realization that we live in the middle between extremes and our society is productive when it stays there, and starts to unravel the more extreme it gets in any direction. However, the center itself moving, in a sense, as the US, British, Greek, and many other populations shift rightward en masse. I probably need a new term for this, since "center" can imply the new center not the absolute one. And we do have the problem of plenty of FRINGE and other iffy ideas coming from the far left and being advocated as Truth™. They're popular but they also have to be rejected for the same reason: they're not based on reliable sources, but on ideological twaddle. The left has its own echo chambers, including entire publishing houses.
PS: A very salient statement from the author of that piece [1]. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Hey mate. The essay is a reasonable primer with some nice phrases. I should AGF the alt-right and assume that don't have 'alt-left accounts' to make a point, or someone making an alt-right account then getting carried away. Which is reported to have happened, and pretty much how trolling became a 'political movement'. I will try to remember where I read a centrist view on the Empire destroying Tatooine, and how stormtrooper's warning shots were propagandised by the terrorists as bad marksmanship.

I haven't been following anything like people creating pseudo-troll accounts just so they can troll their real shit in pseudo-retaliation to their own straw man shilling; I don't hang out in the places where this would get tracked down. Sounds like a really sneaky form of DITF: try to wear the community down with the patent nonsense from one extreme to make one's own extremism sound more reasonable. I would hope that we've been fairly good at detecting this, as a community, or at least in nuking the trolls and their pseudo-trolls, since both voices of the same person would generally be obviously WP:NOTHERE, whether we can tell they're the same person or not. On the Star Wars references, that reminds me of Troops (film), still one of the funniest indy shorts ever made. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:32, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Self-domestication

Done

Hello Mac, I just became aware of this unexpected article on Self-domestication (12.5kb) of some mammals, which is in danger of WP:CONTENTFORK from the Domestication of animals (70kb). As a domestication aficionado, you might like to keep an eye on it from time to time. William Harris • (talk) • 09:51, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

@William Harris: Right-o. It is probably a separate enough topic for a page, but Domestication should have WP:SUMMARY treatment of it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

I cleaned up the lead, and removed an off-topic section (about forced domestication in laboratories, which is the opposite of the topic). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Many thanks for your opinion. I had earlier made some edits to it concerning wolves/dog, and will keep an eye on it from time to time. William Harris • (talk) • 20:49, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Arbitration

Moot

– The request for arbitration was declined.

You are involved in a recently filed request for arbitration. Please review the request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Conduct dispute involving gendered pronouns and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. As threaded discussion is not permitted on most arbitration pages, please ensure that you make all comments in your own section only. Additionally, the guide to arbitration and the Arbitration Committee's procedures may be of use.

Thanks, Leugen9001 at 20:33, 11 November 2024 UTC [refresh] (Talk) (he/him) 20:09, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

RFAR declined

A request for arbitration in which you were involved has been declined. For the Arbitration Committee, Miniapolis 18:19, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Kinda figured. :-) There were already 10 votes several days ago (5 no, 3 yes, 2 abstain, which is all 10 active Arbs). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:29, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Apology

I apologize for taking this to arbitration. I was not aware of all the facts and I am an inexperienced editor. I am now aware that conduct disputes are being resolved privately. Leugen9001 (Talk) (he/him) 20:29, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

@Leugen9001: Nothing to apologize for; WP:RFARB is a process we can all use (though it's very, very rule-bound and bureaucratic). I think the reasons given at the ANI sub-thread about why not to go that route were valid, but that hardly compels you to agree they were valid. :-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:32, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I've actually rescinded my objection to the case going forward, anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:20, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

MOS question

I'm asking since I know you're into MOS (and I'm very much not, am a MOS newbie). I know Wikipedia:Article size exists for articles. And I found MOS:PARA for paragraphs. Is there an similar guideline for sections and sub-sections? I'm discussing sub-headers for a section that currently consists of 22 paragraphs (2,789 words, 18,513 characters) in one block, and I was wondering if there are MOS/policy/guidelines here beyond mere common sense. Icewhiz (talk) 07:53, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

@Icewhiz: It's not very specific. MOS:LAYOUT is the overall page, though most of it's about particular sections ("See also", etc.) Length and detail level are just generally left to editorial discretion. One thing I would avoid is completely arbitrary breaks; we use those in excessively long talk threads, but it's not encyclopedic in the content. An over-long section needs to be sub-divided into meaningful sections (chronological, geographical, etc.). Sometimes a single section isn't really about one thing and can be split into one or more sections, rather than subsections. Or sometimes a combo of both approaches is needed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:48, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! Might be worth spelling out just so that a discussion on non-arbitrary breaks (I agree are bad - in the content in question (a large bunch of reviews) there are a number of reasonable ways to sort the content - positive/negative, language or the (similar) region, or chronological) can be started based on length - I guess I'm stuck arguing common sense - it might prevail, :-), or we might have a RfC after discussion. Icewhiz (talk) 10:57, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

There's a general principle that, by this late a date, if MoS doesn't already have something then it probably shouldn't have it (i.e., its absence hasn't been felt much or at all, the 'pedia has worked fine without it, and MoS is too long already). Exceptions are increasingly rare, but a short bit on over-long sections and what to do with them might be worthwhile. Probably something to propose at WT:MOSLAYOUT. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:00, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

My next essay?

I am considering writing an essay entitled "þ" as there is no vowel involved at all, much less any gender. It is an English letter, and used to be in type fonts. þ's combination with other letters allowed the equivalent of "the", "thee", "thou", "that" and a few other words. Absolutely no one could conceivably take umbrage or Umbridge at its use. Though, I fear, as far as humor goes, it might be a "þ" in someone's side. (AFAIK, no MfD applies to comments on an UT page?) Collect (talk) 13:58, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

@Collect: Most importantly, someone would say they know someone somewhere who uses þ as their non-binary pronoun, ergo this blind coincidence makes you a transphobe. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:20, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

More likely, current Wikactivism encourages eventual scriptophobia. "Blind coincidence" as a term makes one a visiophile? Odds are against ArbCom following the actual root of the current problem, unfortunately. Collect (talk) 15:15, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Oculocentric? Vis-ableist? Cis-visioned? A few days before the current shitstorm, I got called out for using lame, as being "disability-phobic", never mind that no one's used lame to mean 'has trouble walking' for about two generations (and we have WP:LAME). And there's that misuse of -phobic and -phobia, which refer to 'pathological fear of', not 'insensitivity to/about'. Around the same time (somewhere on this talk page), I also got lectured at for making light of dyslexia; I am dyslexic (though not that much, and it's much better now than it was 30-odd years ago; mostly affects me when I'm tired – the letters start to swim and fuse, their order slips, my typo rate shoots up, since it affects the output as well as the input). The lecturer tried to tell me that dyslexia has nothing to do with letter transposition, when this is actually one of the more common symptoms, and one that I get. What'll it be next, I wonder? I'll be thinking someone in shorts on the bus has hot legs, and get a Gmail ding with an e-mail from another mind-reading Wikipedian: "Hey, that's objectifying!" I would say this slide into il-liberal censoriousness is depressing, but of course that's a belittlement of and attack on people with emotional health struggles. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:13, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Your unfeeling use of a weaponized rotary phone icon in your signature is an obvious commentary on the elders, who had to grow up finger-twirling a plastic contraption in order to communicate with their fellow ~~man~~ common-ancestor speaking-mammals. Tis true, you have no shame, or at least shame which can be pointed to and reverse-shamed. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:32, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Keep up the good fight. We finally got rid of the "Save changes" button because "Save" is an obvious dog whistle aimed at evangelical Christians. Now we just need to get rid of "Show preview" on the grounds that "Show" is an obvious dog whistle aimed at AKC show dogs. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:54, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, preview is a trigger, suggestive of male gaze and entitlement to more. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:18, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Many years ago (pre-Johnson and Webster), spelling was "mutable" to say the least. It is the modern idea that we should teach kids to read letter-by-letter which really is the "dyslexia" problem - speed readers can understand "misspelled words" readily - per test results. Dyslexics tend to be smart. It is the mode of teaching them to read which is poor. Once one reads line-by-line, reading speed increases dramatically. We also teach kids to read music note-by-note yet musicians read music line by line or even more. We teach kids to dance step by step but dancers learn long sequences. The human brain is a heck of a lot more powerful in learning complex patterns than any "normal school" pedant could ever realize. Sorry for the sidetrack. Collect (talk) 18:51, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Nah, that's spot-on. I've experienced this first-hand, having great difficulty with a specific turn in some swing-dancing instruction. In the second day of failure at it, the instructor distracted me by having me talk about the upcoming dance event and who I was taking to it, as we went through that part of the sequence, and the turn fell right into place because my body and less conscious mental processes knew exactly how it should go. Same with various skating stuff in my youth; I couldn't master a kick-flip after hours and hours, and wrecked my shins trying, but it quite literally came to me in a dream that night, a feeling how it should go, of the necessary (physics-wise, the completely inevitable) flow of the move, and the next day I got it in 5 minutes. Anyway, my actual reading speed is actually quite ponderous (about equal to my typing rate, which is much higher than average but still slow compared to much of anyone's reading speed). A side-effect is that it makes me a good MoS-compliance editor, since I'm poring over every word; I just have to hang that up for the day when the letters start swimming around. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:13, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Previously unreleased video of SMcCandlish skating --Guy Macon (talk) 00:35, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Schweeet. I was talking about the board kind, though [2] (and it was to a soundtrack mostly published by SST Records, though I will out myself as actually a secret fan of "Funkytown"). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:47, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

It girl. Clara was the cats pajamas. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:22, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm a fan. One of my favorite books ever, at least in the visual arts realm, is Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston. I'm just irritated that it's so small, instead of a coffee-table book. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

On transgender

I've collapse-boxed this as likely of little interest to anyone else. The majority of it is ranting from a WP:MEATPUPPET (has had an account for 3 days, but edited literally nothing but my talk page and the related MfD, so clearly canvassed to come here from off-site and "vote"), plus a block of barely parseable invective from an interloper with a long history of nonsensical posting, described by others as "performance art" and probably trolling. If you're an actual WP editor, and are willing and able to make some sense, please feel free to start a new thread about your concerns. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:21, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Wall o' text, round 1

I keep seeing you objecting to people interpreting what you didn't say. Well, here's what you did say in the actual essay - Wikipedia should ignore trans people who choose unconventional pronouns, they are "made-up" (in the talking bollocks sense, not the language evolution sense). You compared trans people who feel this way about their identification to stage performers adopting "wacky" stage names, and you implied they do it not out of a deep seated trauma, but out of some religious conviction or cult like mania. These are deeply offensive things to be saying about trans people and I'm afraid they are pretty obvious examples of transphobia.

You have since expanded on your thoughts, to argue you do not wish to insult all trans people, recognising they are not all of one mind, and so you are quite happy to accommodate those who are happy to fit in with what is the growing convention of they. You've said that you perceive the problem to be as much about language activists than the actual trans people in question, the ones with their wacky ideas and religious fervour which leads them to make up pronouns and give Wikipedia a real headache in how to respect their view.

It's questionable whether, if you edited the essay to reflect these nuances, it would make people change their minds and assume this is not transphonia, just a poorly argued position against the sort of views that are always seen as wacky and strange until society grows to accept them. It used to seem wacky that two dudes could get married, and it might be informative to know if you would have mocked those people if they came to Wikipedia twenty years ago to argue their relationship status be recognised in Wikipedia's own voice.

I get the point of the main part of the essay, why you might have thought it was hilariously satirical, but it rather assumes people who write Wikipedia are pretty stupid, and the readers even more so. Wikipedia is a dynamic resource, it is easily capable of reflecting changes in a subject's personal views even on short time scales, and it is easy to edit the text until things that need clarification or explanation have been. It has all the required articles to clarify for the genuinely confused, the current thinking on issues like gender and pronouns. Anyone with any skill in writing will certainly be well capable of avoiding the sort of scenarios you manufactured for comic effect.

So you disagree with this specific subset of trans people, and chose mockery over sober and respectful persuasion. That's fine. Being cruelly mocked is sadly a good day for many of them. I just hope that in twenty years you don't look back and wish you had found some other way to express your views on the Wikipedia platform. What you say on your own dime is frankly nobody's business but your own. But there's plenty of people out there who regret things they said about gay marriage twenty years ago. Some of them are remembered as homophobes who were undeservedly given a platform, others are simply remembered as having been wrong.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 20:39, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Except that's not what it says at all. WP shouldn't "ignore" trans/non-binary people with neo-pronouns (or ignore their neo-pronouns, rather), if reliable sources tell us what that preference is with sufficient frequency about that individual that we're certain it's worth mentioning as a sourced fact in the article about them. We simply shouldn't use those terms in Wikipedia's own voice. The nutshell summary is super-explicit about this before the real content of the page even starts. The reason to not do so is essentially the same as the reason to not append or prepend religious honorific stylings, spell Kesha as "Ke$ha" to mimic her marketing, render Sony as "SONY" to match their logo design, or do any similar things: It's a WP:NPOV and WP:NOT problem, and thus also against the WP:MOS provisions derived from those policies, e.g. MOS:TM, MOS:DOCTCAPS, MOS:BIO, etc. If it makes you apoplectic that TG people and singers and religion adherents and corporate marketing departments can all be mentioned together as external demand-makers to not cave into in the name of appeasing their "do it our way or else" demands, despite all of their rationales being very different, and all of them taken very, very seriously by those making the demands, there's really nothing I can do about that. Only you control your brain. I can't force you to see that having a blanket approach to all of these matters is sensible and will continue and isn't an evil.

Maybe "made-up" isn't the best way to put it; that's a bit of wording that could be tweaked. However, with every adjustment to it, there's a high likelihood that someone else will think of some reason to object to whatever it was changed to. There are about 1.5 billion English speakers; they cannot all be satisfied about anything, ever. Okay, I edited "made-up" out.

As for "specific subset of trans people", this page has nothing to do with what they choose as a preference in their private lives and among people they know. It's not about them. It's about extremist language-change activists – almost all of whom are privileged, white, cis, het, far-left busybodies acting in loco parentis trying to make Wikipedia write in such a manner.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:56, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
PS: I've changed the heading of this section to something neutral. My talk page is not a place for angry ranters to keep making up bullshit accusations and insinuations, and one of them is already at WP:ANI for it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Self identity ≠ marketing, though. Leviv ich 20:55, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Didn't say they were the same. Our response to demands to use constructions not generally recognized as English has to be the same (i.e. "not in Wikipedia's own voice") regardless of the source or motivation for the demand. It's quite possible that this simply cannot be addressed with humor in the way I attempted, even with endless revision, because a straw man built of false equivalence is likely to always be drawn, as above, by anyone unhappy that their way isn't going to be Wikipedia's way, or simply unhappy that anyone came within 10,000 miles of maybe sounding possibly critical of anything to do with a particular group (or even sub-sub-sub-group that may not really exist, e.g. non-binary individuals in the real world who actually do demand to be called It – someone claimed they're a real group, but can't prove it). At some point, the attempt to appease the manufactured outrage is exhausting. It was still worth attempting a humor approach, even if this one failed, because the discuss-it-seriously approach has been an endless nightmare of divisive anger for as long as I've been on Wikipedia. See related thread higher up this page for a summary. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC); revised 05:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Something I didn't address about the OP's comments, on changing norms: Wikipedia does not blaze trails, it follows the lead. When dictionaries and style guides and other reliable sources consistently tell us that xie or hirm or any of hundreds of other candidates for new pronoun-hood have become "real words" – are terms used and understood in mainstream English and found in almost every contemporary dictionary – then reality itself will have changed, and WP will go along with it. It has not changed now, and WP's job isn't to help people try to change it. This simply is not at all like what you liken it to. As a linguistic matter, the inflectional morphology of a language – its really basic nuts and bolts like pronouns, grammatical-function-determining suffixes, the definite and indefinite article, etc. – cannot be altered by whim, force, or suasion. They naturally shift very slowly and not in predictable ways. This is not culturally relative but is true across all language. Nothing like that applies to (using your example) acceptance of homosexual couples, which does vary widely from culture to culture and always has, and which has been directly responsive in the recent West to just-change-it pressure within a very short time span, relatively speaking. They're very dissimilar processes.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Wall o' text, round 2

It is like you traded all these ideas for a short list of "it"s. Can you explain for me please, what is "Wikipedias own voice"? ~ R.T.G 23:33, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

@RTG: It's the wording in which our content is written from an encyclopedic perspective, outside of quotations (including other literal strings like titles of works, and close paraphrases of claims attributed to someone else), and words-as-words usage. It's a phrase we use pretty frequently here. WP certainly should note (with reliable sources) that Sony styles its logo "SONY", that Genesis P-Orridge personally uses the neo-pronouns s/he, h/er, and h/erself, that Muslims traditionally add Peace Be Upon Him or an acronym for it after any mention of Muhammad, and that Kesha presented herself publicly as Ke$ha until mid-2012 (a stylization even the entertainment press did not take seriously; contrast Deadmau5, who is virtually never called "Deadmaus" by anyone in print – if sources are overwhelmingly consistent on a stylization that we would normally avoid, then we use it, as covered at MOS:TM). It's not okay for us to write "According to an article in SONY Entertainment Network news, Genesis P-Orridge says h/er favorite pop album is Ke$ha's 2010 Animal. P-Orridge hasn't produced music h/erself self since 2004, focusing on other art. H/er 2019 exhibition in London will focus on cross-cultural perception of Muhammad PBUH and Islam."

We wouldn't do that even if someone else did; WP doesn't follow other publishers' house styles, and they don't follow ours (not usually; various topical wikis actually do, but they are not reliable sources, being user-generated content). "We" in "we wouldn't do that" is the consensus of the broad editorial base, and the policies and guidelines and featured articles they've produced over the years. The problem is that individual editors on a "mission" of one sort of another quite frequently do all of these sorts of things and have to be reverted for turning WP's material into what amounts to a personal blog written in their own style from their own individual perspective (or that of some off-site entity like a religious body, a corporation, an individual celebrity and their fanbase, or a cluster of language-change activists). The most disruptive among them will continue to do it over and over again until blocked or topic-banned. It's not sufficient that someone feels really, really strongly about one of these things. Those in favor of doing them all do, about which ever one of these they want WP to use.

The language-reform people acting in loco parentis for TG/NB subjects often present the additional problem of well-meaning but confused false equivalence between a) accepting someone's gender declaration (intergender, non-gendered, transman, etc.), and b) accepting their preferred pronouns as something required to be used even when they invented them and are not part of the English language. (It's an error of confusing a term for what it refers to; in general semantics it's been generalized as mistaking the map for the territory, the menu for the meal.) It's perfectly acceptable in encyclopedic, news, scientific, and other writing to use a singular they for such cases and to simply write around pronouns as much as possible. The claim that failure to use someone's "h/erself" or "xem" is the same as mis-gendering a transwoman as "he" is patently false. But people unfamiliar with gender studies debates and lingo are ill-prepared to make that case (and often just unwilling to make it because of the ginned up hostility they will likely receive from the activism crowd), so we have way more xie and hirs sort of things in our articles than we should, sometimes for months or years at a time, and sometimes "slow-editwarred" back in after being removed (as has happened repeatedly at P-Orridge's article). PS: I've outdented this since it's better as a stand-alone subthread.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

There was an editor came and went on Wikipedia before I ever looked closely at it but he became a minor celebrity or notoriety here. He would go around the site searching for "comprised of" and changed it to "comprising". Well everybody would revert him back and start war. But he was accurate and most who heard the story probably learned something.

Good humour brings divided communities back together but even good comedians can drive it wider apart. You/anyone might believe from the situation of a friendship circle they've got a particular social issue tied down but it has to be in good faith. If you mean well on people you've got to project that sentiment on them in your responses. Even if you stand by the work, you've got to accept the criticism of the work. Not must accept personal attacks, but social philosophies that work are like indestructible toys. Cliches stick not just because they roll off the tongue, but because they apply to further and further meanings. NPA is a cliche in a non-confrontable situation like Wikipedia discussions.

Wikipedia does follow other house style to a degree after a collaborative fashion. If the big houses take a uniform approach it is possible for Wikipedia to diverge but unlikely. A non-conformist name will be chosen by those who call it, and approved by those who it is called to, and no amount of unenlightened speculation will tell who will be the callers or what will stick, as far as I can see. ~ R.T.G 06:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Thankfully, I don't think I see anything I have to disagree with in that. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:03, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Blegh!

You've been puked on.

Don't take this too seriously. Someone just wants to let you know they did something silly.

~ R.T.G 13:35, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Wall o' text, round 3

I'm sure you don't see it, but there is an astonishing level of arrogance and bullheadedness in your replies. The fact you have altered my quite deliberate choice of "On transphibia" as a heading to read 'On transgender", and without even having the courtesy of asking, much less noting what you have done, is very indicative of the problem.

I don't even recall the last time I was incandescent about anything, for example, but you decided to project that emotion onto me. It seems obvious why you would do that. Similarly your suggestion that mind control or the need to force me, is the only way you think you could convince me you are quite correct, and I am wrong. In your mind, your critics all either fit into one of two neat categories - crazy leftist activists, or crazy self-serving freaks.

No real recognition there that your critics are by and large, well adjusted and rational humans. People who really don't need patronising about style guides etc. It is you who seems to have the most difficulty mastering the English language, if we are really to assume none of any of these things are meant deliberately.

What you really need to do, if a sincere and persuasive argument is your goal, is stop deploying the most offensive aspects of your case, because they really don't show what you think they show. These people are not brands, they are not just making shit up in any of the senses you describe, not even in the language sense. For a start, Wikipedia literally doesn't allow things that have literally just been made up.

These so-called leftist extremist language activists are I am sure an entirely exaggerated part of all this, and they can look after themselves, but there are undoubtedly people who are upset for no other reason than obtaining a little dignity for themselves from the behemoth that is Wikipedia is their goal, and they could care less about changing the world, much less bending the Matrix all out of shape.

You want Wikipedia to represent reality, fine, the reality is trans people are different, but equal. Your language and your sense of humour suggests you have difficulty keeping this in mind enough to convince others it is your sincere belief. Your deeply held position is conservative, for sure, but is it really only about language and reality for you? Nothing at all to do with what you think of this subset if trans people? It is a brave man who stands alone, beating his chest and denying what the vast majority are telling him he looks like.

These pronouns are unusual and uncommon, but nobody with an open mind has any difficulty wrapping their head around what they mean. We already know enough about the brain to know that the precise spelling matters less than the word position, and these words are, of course, in the usual places a brain expects pronouns to be, and are deliberately crafted to look and feel like the traditional forms.

It was and still is the attempt to repurpose "they" that really confused people, because it was a kuldge, a real head-scratcher for the human brain used to what is "normal". Someone as concerned about a traditionalist and dare I say proper use of language as you, would presumably still be utterly horrified this even hapoens. But you are not. I suspect it is because it wasn't just "made up". Perhaps these trans people should find their own existing word to appropriate. Was that the subtext of your choice for "It?" I wonder? As in "It can bloody well use this and like it".

Wikipedia can quite easily cope with all this in its own voice, in the ways I explained, without all the tragic consequences that you predict. It is a small thing to do, in the name of decency. There is literally no sign you even understand the alternatives to your view, the compromises that can be made by well meaning and intelligent people, much less that you could be convinced they are not a precursor to the coming of the Apocalypse.

Shakespeare is said to have coined hundreds of brand new words, all by himself, just by literally making shit up and foisting them on a presumably baffled audience. I'd love to have known what you would have done, were you in the stalls. Storm out and write a mean little essay, putting that silly freak Shakespeare right back in his box. No doubt many did at the time, and thankfully he, and wider society, took no notice. Ancient Wikipedia would have been using these words in its own voice well before they reached a dictionary, and probably because many of them are rude and offensive.

It is a triviality to demonstrate Wikipedia is a very early adopter of new words in its own voice, well before style guides or dictionaries, so on that score, when stripping out all irrelevancies and the scaremongering, you really only have common usage left as an argument. And in context, when you sit down at look at how and why these pronouns appear and are used, and what Wikipedia is meant to stand for, it is a very thin argument indeed.

That is perhaps the most offensive aspect of all this, the thing that really does suggest where this all comes from, really, deep down, even if you yourself aren't ready to admit it. It is the realisation that no amount of reason, no amount of deconstruction of your argument, is ever going to change your mind. There will always be a reason the other person is a crazy language destroying fool who wants to sell our children to Sony to work in their collective farms, unless or until enough time has passed and the only argument you have, common usage, has shuffled your views into the sidings, to join all the other arguments whose proponents always insisted were not coming from the place we all kind of know they did, in retrospect.

I think it ironic that you set out to shape your own reality by getting Wikipedia to promote your views on this matter, but I think it came at a cost to you that I don't think you have even begun to appreciate yet. Or perhaps you do, given the observation I opened with. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 18:32, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Sometimes the other person really is a crazy language destroying fool. Sometimes the other person is so crazy and language-destroying that they contact your employer and try to get you fired if you dare to disagree with the new language usage they are trying to shove down your throat. I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:19, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

And sometimes people who, through no fault of their own, decide that rather than live a life where merely being mocked is a good day, decide to end it all. Contact your employer? Oh the mannity. How did you ever survive the trauma? Cast your mind back through history, think of all the pioneers of civil rights, and find me one that would give that sorry anecdote the time of day. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 00:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Now I see what that was referring to, I think both of you need reminding that Wikipedia is not an "Open Venue" in the sense of allowing free speech. I don't know the details, but I agree that if the posts of "Tech Ambassador" and "Visitng Scholar" for Wikipedia carries the usual implication that you are representing the values and ideals of Wikipedia, then sure, people are gonna get fired for being this offensive, unless like Barbara they do the decent thing and resign. Anyone who didn't expect a call for writing something like this, is not living in the real world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 01:04, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Please sign your posts. The fact that you don't know to do so triggered me to check, and you've only been here for less than two days. This strongly suggests that you were canvassed to come here and stir up trouble from off-site.

I decline to respond to most of this, but will summarize a few points: our user talk page guidelines expressly permit refactoring of material. I can even simply delete what you post here on-sight if I want to. You do not "own" section headings; I've done nothing to the actual content of your post (and we usually would not, per the general talk-page guidelines), unless it contained something grossly inappropriate. Being stubborn and not reacting meekly to off-base verbal attacks is not a crime; your attempts to demonize me in this regard are a dismal failure. The fact that you're "incandescent" in anger over something that doesn't say what you think it does, is all about you, not me. See also "Wikipedia is not a forum". A transgendered person's dignity has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Wikipedia is forced to write shim or zie in our own articles, it has to do with mis-gendering, like referring to a transman as "she"; the singular they will suffice in encyclopedic writing for non-binary people and indeterminate references, and has become well-accepted English (has become again – it actually dates to the 1400s, and fell out of favor only because of the activism of Victorian prescriptive grammarians). If you refuse to or are unable to absorb the difference between what subjects prefer in their private lives and what WP must do, between a gender identity and descriptive words about that gender identity, then you should not be editing Wikipedia. You don't understand what neologisms are. When Shakespeare invented a bunch of words (around 400; the "over 1000" claims made by some have been debunked), at that time they were neologisms. In 2018 they are not, because we use them every day and they appear in all dictionaries. I decline to pore over any more of your off-base ranting.

I suspect that your underlying gist is that I should be contrite for having A) having written this at all in the form it has taken, and B) allowed its use in this state in Signpost. I've already conceded on B (many times, on many pages) and have conceded on A on this very page, though I oppose deletion of the user-space copy on procedural grounds and deletion (versus blanking) the Signpost copy because it would render all the community discussion about it meaningless. I also will not accept false accusations of being transphobic. No amount of brow-beating by you or anyone else is ever going to change that.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:32, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

My gist is that you are wrong, but there are such fundamental problems with the way you treat people and argue you case, and how you respond to those who argue against it, that makes it all rather futile. There's not a person in the world other than you who would think I do not know what a neologism is, or believe any of the other ridiculous things you've felt forced to say about me, in the absence of anything better to say to counter my most important points. You're obstinate and strident, but worse than that, you take people for utter fools, people who manifestly aren't. You're losing the one thing you prize most dearly because of it. That it being a word you used at least once in every reply to me, probably quite unwittingly. I will not sign this post, because you did not sign your alteration of the meaning of the heading. It's as easy as that, any fool can spot these flaws of yours. The risk to your future ability to do the things you want to do, is how many take time out to their day to tell you this is now easy it is to see? — Preceding unsigned comment added by MaryKontana (talk • contribs) 20:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I did sign my alteration of the heading, in a very specific statement about it, which I'll quote for you since you didn't bother to actually check: PS: I've changed the heading of this section to something neutral. My talk page is not a place for angry ranters to keep making up bullshit accusations and insinuations, and one of them is already at WP:ANI for it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC) "You keep arguing around me and my buddies" isn't a "fundamental problem" in the arguments I present, it's called debate skill. Most of the arguments you and they present are patently fallacious and easy to deflate. You don't understand a thing about neologism and WP's relationship to it if you really think that WP, if it existed in the Elizabethan era but had the same policies, would have started running with Shakespeare's new words while they were fresh-minted. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of MOS:NEO (and the policies that underly it), and of neologism as something to do with a popularity contest of new terms' coiners. (If you wanted a proof of this, it would be easy to provide, using examples from both Stephen Colbert and Dan Savage, both of whom are popular, but one of whose neogisms have had their articles deleted because they do not have actual currency in our language; of Savages' does have an article about his campaigning about it and controversy surrounding that, because it used a politician's name as a sex term, but that's about controversy not about the word itself; contrast Truthiness.) You are not a mind-reader and have no idea what I "prize most dearly". You're sadly mistaken if you think it's your respect; I don't value it from people who care more about feelings than veracity, about spin-doctoring for public view than standing on principles.

You've done nothing to address a single point of substance, and just keep circling back to your hand-wringing projection of hurt feelings and blame. That's not an argument, it's argument to emotion, hand-waving, and proof by assertion. I don't take most people for fools; I take most people for poor at formulating reasoned arguments, and overly ruled in discourse by their emotions. I'm hardly alone in this, and we're shown over and over again that it's true. (The problem, of course, is that for most people reason and critical thinking is a non-mandatory university/college subject (i.e., for most people it's never something they have to learn), when it should be introduced as part of the core curriculum from 1st grade onward – along with the basics of cultural anthropology.) While unruly hominid hooting, chest-beating, and shit-throwing makes up the vast majority of our political discourse and the op-eds in the newspapers and the commentary on so-called "news" shows, in an encyclopedia project, it's just a cancer. It bends the project toward mob rule.

I'm unlikely to have any further interest in discussing this or anything else with you, here or elsewhere, until you have an editing history demonstrating that you're actually here to help build an encyclopedia instead of a troll whipped up to come here from off-site for activism purposes. We know you are one. We have some time-tested principles: WP:DUCK and WP:SPADE, and you fit the patterns, since you've done absolutely nothing but rant at me on my talk page and in a related deletion discussion, despite being here for several days now. It simply isn't possible for you to have landed at these pages, among millions of them, without having been drawn directly to them by off-site canvassing. You needn't remain a "single-purpose account" created through meat-puppetry for non-constructive agitprop. But either get to work on the actual project, or you know where to door is and can show yourself out. Continuing this with you is just getting circular, anyway. I collapse-boxed this, on a page at which discussion length isn't really a factor, simply because this thread isn't going to be of interest to anyone else and just a waste of their time to even skim it. PS, I have to return to your earlier, snide [and what was that you said about arrogance?] theme: If you're actually convinced that I'm unable to absorb what you call reason at this point yet will inevitably come around to your view with the passage of time, then you have no incentive to continue this, either.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:12, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Nobody bothered to educate you

Just not a productive discussion. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:11, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Not being aware of a law will not get you out of court in most modern states. Not being able to understand the law will get you off, but you won't be believed. That is, however, the court legal system.

This is a community. There are things we must do. It's been nearly a week. It is not good enough to let you break all the rules, but never explain them to you.

Most transgenders you ever saw are happy well adjusted people, beaming about the changes. Or sometimes you might see a kid who is allowed to live as the opposite kid, nothing but picture perfect Time spreads.
The reality is, apparently, trauma. Most transgenders wouldn't get approved unless they were suicidal. It's a really significant operation. The situation isn't like changing house or changing job. It's about people who have not been able to live with themselves. It is literally a joke about suicidal children.
I didn't really know that until the last couple of years, so I am not inclined to insist that McCandlish was purposely malicious. However, making a joke about transgender=suicide IS NEVER going to fly until freedom crosses back over.
With the rise in transgender popularity, recognising the suicide joke will soon change from a possibly innocent remark, to absolutely pathetic dark humour remark.
The real options for gender neutrality in speech and text drawn from existing traditions, is neutral honorifics. Colleague. Comrade. Citizen. Friend. Etc.
It doesn't matter how you feel. Not all freedoms add up to the same dream. There are two kinds of freedom in this world. The one you cherish is based on restriction. Humans are the most clever animal on the planet. We are also the most stupid. You already knew that. Have a nice day.

~ R.T.G 04:39, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Regarding your heading, see meta:Don't be a jerk. I'll try not to take it too personally, but seriously: Someone who says transgender issues are a matter of "popularity" and confesses that they had no idea until a couple of years ago that TG people are often traumatized is in no position to "educate" anyone about anything even close to this topic. Do you remember our discussion about the Dunning–Kruger effect? This is a textbook example of it. To go over this all in detail:

Your first three paragraphs don't have a clear point. I think you're trying to indicate that you wish there were some rules or different rules you could use against me, because your desire is to punish for a perceived wrong. I never said you're a self-appointed anything. Taking your bullet points in order:

You are not a mind-reader; don't presume to tell me what I have seen and who I know.
If you have to say "apparently" then you're just offering an opinion. Your "I didn't really know that ..." confirms this. You're lecturing me about something you say only just kinda figured out for yourself recently. In point of fact, I've known about this in considerable detail since the 1980s, and I'm quite certain about it that, yes, most TG people have a considerable amount of trauma. However, most of them are not on the verge of suicide or leading miserable lives, and its extremely tiresome to see people suggest or imply this. I'll repeat that you're misusing the word literally.
I made no joke that's actually about transgender, but about people who do inappropriate things to encyclopedic wording (sometimes in furtherance of TG, for corporate marketing purposes, out of fandom, out of religious conviction, etc.). And I said nothing at all about suicide. Even what the Signpost did with my piece didn't do that. It did link to something that had the word "suicide" in it, in a different context. I had no editorial control over that, wasn't asked about it, and would not have approved. No one noticed but you. Good eye, then, but it has no actual impact on the larger debate.
"With the rise in transgender popularity": I hope you realize that this strongly suggests that your interest in this topic is some kind of pop-culture fixation for you, a form of fandom, not something connected to your own identity or real socio-political concerns. If that implication isn't correct, you should seriously re-think your approach to how you write about this topic (especially if you're going to lecture other people on how they do). I suspect that English isn't your native language, so this might be understandable, but you should probably stay out of extremely nuanced topics except in your own native language or you're apt to be misread. Hell, I'm proof you can be seriously misinterpreted even in your native language!
I don't disagree with your observations on collegial terminology as a conversational matter, but it's not how an encyclopedia is written (we'll never write "Our friend and colleague Genesis P-Orridge is a British artist and musician who ...").
"It doesn't matter how you feel". I matters how I feel precisely as much as it matters how you feel or anyone else feels. That "mattering-ness" level varies by context. It matters a great deal on talk pages (something you clearly need to absorb better), but it matters not a whit in encyclopedic writing, or we could not have WP:NPOV policy and could not actually write an encyclopedia, only an emotive editorial blog. I have not said anything anywhere in this debate about "freedom" (other than to correct someone's legally wrong claims that Signpost has or should have completed editorial freedom under US free speech and free press laws; it does not because it's a house organ, and the US First Amendment does not apply except against governmental censorship anyway).

Lest this sound all negative, I will close with strong agreement that "Humans are the most clever animal on the planet. We are also the most stupid." As an anthropologist by original training, I make points like this all the time. And "Not all freedoms add up to the same dream." is a very evocative statement, verging on plaque-worthy.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:52, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Look McCandlish, I can't teach you good faith. I didn't say you are uneducated. I didn't tell you what you think or feel. You don't know anything about me to make out like I don't know enough gay people to talk to you or something. Attack, attack, attack. Here is your thoughts:- That what you had in mind when you wrote the joke is what it is, not what it should be. Forget about it then. ~ R.T.G 06:54, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, you did: "Nobody bothered to educate you". Yes, you did: "Most transgenders you ever saw ...". Yes, I do, because you said it yourself: "The reality is, apparently ..." and "I didn't really know that until the last couple of years ...". And you've said much worse, including "With the rise in transgender popularity ...", and now confusing transgender and non-binary people with "gay people". Gender identity and sexual preference are separate topics. They get covered in the LGBT+ umbrella because the social stigmas against all of them drive them together to a certain extent, all being based on mainstream, conformity-seeking, narrow socio-religious mores. Criticizing the very strange things you are saying here is not an attack (see WP:NPA#What is considered to be a personal attack?). I don't follow your last point; yes, it is true that what I had in mind when I wrote the piece is what I had mind, not what someone else (or even I) retroactively wish I had mind – none of us have a time machine. I'll repeat that I don't think someone who has this much difficulty communicating clearly in English should get involved in this topic area except on their own native-language Wikipedia. I may have failed badly to communicate in it myself, but in a way that's a matter of interpretation. You're failing a way that is not open to interpretation at all, but just wrong. "Gay people" cannot be equated with "transgender". Transgender isn't a "popularity" matter, like following a TV show or considering it fashionable to grow a beard; it's how people are. As I said at ANI, I was willing to respond to this stuff for one round with you, and it's already gone to two, in two threads. Let's just stop, please. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:59, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Transgender isn't a popularity matter. Your joke is though. cya ~ R.T.G 08:43, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Keep monitoring the user, until their username is more clear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RTG (talk • contribs) 13:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Uh, okay. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:34, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Pretty sure RTG is some sort of performance artist or troll. Recommend denying recognition. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:50, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

A performance artist? How very dare you! ~ R.T.G 01:51, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

I made a similar DENY suggestion at the RfArb, and also left a {{Ds/alert}}; if RTG keeps making up weird-ass accusations that couldn't possibly be proved (e.g. trying to deny anyone the ability to speak their mind, being supportive of TG people suiciding, etc., etc.), then they can be swiftly blocked. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:36, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

John T. Koch

Is it my imagination, or were you complaining a while back that he had no article (with the implication it would have been vulnerable at AFD)? In fact he's been officially notable since 2010. Though if it wasn't him, do you remember who it was? Johnbod (talk) 02:11, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm misremembering. I think I may have wondered why his Celtic-from-the-west hypothesis didn't have an article (well, it's not just his – if even the preeminent Barry Cunliffe propounds it, it has wings). I've worked a little on Koch's page, but I had a browser crash and, despite plugins for saving form input, I lost hours of work on it. Haven't had the heart to pick it back up again yet; have to wash the blood off my keyboard first [3]. If there was a bio about which I'd said something to this effect, I'm not sure. I say that sort of thing pretty frequently. There are so many subjects (especially academics and other non-"celebrities") that are just right on the edge of notable. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:40, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

As I said at the time, wherever it was, it's rarely a notability issue, but a nobody-has-bothered-to write-it issue. I expect I referred to the several '000 Fellows of the Royal Society (inherently notable of course) with no article, many still alive and kicking. Johnbod (talk) 15:05, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Details-wise, I'm drawing a blank. :-( — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:12, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Oh well. On the non-bio issue, we have Atlantic Bronze Age & I think Koch's views are reasonably well-represented at Celts, the language articles and so on. Johnbod (talk) 18:16, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Glad to hear that. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:46, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Use of circa with non-dates

Is the use of Circa in a non-date function something that's done here? I know that circa means "approximately", but I've only ever seen it used with dates. The California High-Speed Rail article, where the subject of the article isn't built yet, apparently uses circa when mentioning the lengths of track in the infobox. But is that a correct use? It seems weird to me, but the template page doesn't specify any non-use situations. I'm asking you because your name was the only one I recognized as a recent poster in the Circa talk page. Thanks for any input you can offer. Spintendo 16:36, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

IMHO, "circa" is a well-known term, and it is not restricted to dates. Dates are, however, the most common place for "circa" to be used. "Rush Hour on I-95 runs circa 24 hours" seems clear enough. It is simply not a "common usage". When dealing with measurements, use of "about" is simpler, and thus generally preferred. Collect (talk) 19:16, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Much appreciated! Spintendo 00:05, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

@Spintendo: I concur with Collect. I've encountered it used with distances and some other things, but it comes across as an old-fashioned usage, and seems to have lost currency, while the usage with time/date remains very common. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:56, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

FYI

[4] --Guy Macon (talk) 18:13, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

If Arbcom doesn't do something about this sort of behavior, we really should file an ANI report concerning his WP:NOTHERE behavior on multiple pages (not just at arbcom). --Guy Macon (talk) 18:16, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

This sort of thing can also be taken to AE, since it's disruptive and pertaining to the subject area about which he recently received a {{Ds/alert}}. The broader (years-long) pattern of off-topic blathering and ranting, plus frequent incivility and personal attacks, however, is a bigger, ANI matter. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:02, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

March 2019

Hello. This is a message to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions, such as the edit you made to ANi, did not appear constructive and has been reverted. Please take some time to familiarise yourself with our policies and guidelines. You can find information about these at our welcome page which also provides further information about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. If you only meant to make test edits, please use the sandbox for that. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you may leave a message on my talk page. If you continue to post falsehoods like "Legacypac has already !voted in this discussion, above, twice [165], [166]. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:39, 5 March 2019 (UTC)" I will be forced to take you to ANi for consideration of your absurd behavior. You know full well that making comments is not a vote. I gave you a chance to correct yourself and you mocked me. Don't bother commenting about me again as you have nothing worth reading to say when you can't get basic discussion protocol correct. Legacypac (talk) 19:31, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

DYK

Hi Stanton, hope you are well. Just a quick message to apologise if you were worried about me nominating the ground billiards article for DYK. I wasn't sure if you were ok with that. I've done quite a few pool dyks recently, but realised I didn't ask about this one before nominating. Hope that's ok. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:47, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

No, no, have it! I'm so happy to see this stuff actually get into the 'pedia proper. I kept sitting on it for too long, lingering over the unresolved bits you wisely just commented out. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:49, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

No problem. It's a notable topic; so it's more likely someone will find all those missing bits of information. I don't have a great deal of knowledge on the subject, so thanks for giving it a once over. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 07:18, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Good one. I have an interest, as you may remember. This sentence jarred, despite having just read who he was, "probably most commonly made of wood. Cotton, writing" However, it is late, the rabbit is the article I'm wrestling with today, Nabarlek. cygnis insignis 22:12, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Ah, I never would have guess that. As for that sentence, I'll try tweaking it. Some kind of joke about cottontails is probably in there, but I can't seem to ferret it out. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Done. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:05, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Brought back by the crusaders, as so many things apparently were, but the point the author makes about being maintained by the clergy rings true. It is easy to imagine how that allowed refinement of rules and equipment, regional competitions, and so on. I would probably have joined the clergy to get access to the billiards. cygnis insignis 07:10, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Stein & Rubino make a really good case for it, and it can be backed up well with parallel histories of other games that became sports. A large number of them were developed in monasteries, during a period when much of Europe tried to forbid any organized game-playing of any kind to the common people (as the Devil directing idle hands away from work toward pursuits that too often turned violent in and of themselves and led to gambling and other vices). We got tennis and various related games via the church, as well as several forms of bowls and bowling (both obviously related to ground billiards – start whacking the ball into the air, or abandon the stick and use your hands), and they helped preserved in Europe various gentler Eastern games like chess and backgammon. Suppression of peasant games was hardly successful all the time, of course, especially with regard to big events like bull-runs and early forms of football (more like inter-village brawls) – sometimes troops were sent to suppress the events. And lots of dice and card games also survived (having easy-to-conceal implements of play). The rationale for the suppression was secular profiteering off the serfs and maintenance of power over them. Within the cloister walls, the church had different concerns, like keeping young monks from getting bored enough to seek out prostitutes, etc. The games developed within their walls – often with complex rulesets and requiring considerable skill – were eventually picked up in royals' courts (there was a lot of permeability between the two spheres, with higher clergy almost always being from the nobility, as with military officers, who also helped preserve and refine some games), and they spread out of court to the gentry then trickled down to commoner people, but mostly only as feudalism wound down. It was very gradual, tracking the progress of the Renaissance from around the 14th century until the real florescence of sport in the 18th. One interesting thing I ran across a while back was that the Spanish language simply did not have a word for 'sport' at all until well into this era, and had to backform deporte as an intentional neologism, along the same lines as the more natural disport in English (later shortened to sport) and desport in Old to Middle French (both from a Latin root meaning 'to behave', i.e. in that context 'to follow gentlemanly rules'). By the time of renewed wide-scale public game-playing by the people, the French had lost this meaning of what became déport, and borrowed sport directly from English. It's weird to imagine entire cultures with organized game-play so suppressed they didn't have the words for it. (They did have words for simple games, like juego in Spanish and jeu in French; like English joke, they're both from from Latin iocus, 'play, jest, pastime'.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:14, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) I call bullshit on entire cultures with organized game-play so suppressed they didn't have the words for it, at least with regards to Europe in this period. Because of sport's utility in getting young men fit for service should they be called on to join the militia, if anything the authorities in this period had an obsession with sport unparalleled in modern times, from the jousting tournaments of the nobility, to buhurt mass brawls, to weird-ass sports like goose pulling and fox tossing (and the even weirder stuff that grew up in the Spanish Empire like pato), to compulsory participation in archery contests for yeoman farmers, and that's before we get on to the entire competitive hunting-shooting-fishing subculture. The sports played may have changed from that day to this, but the concept of organized sport has been a part of all major European cultures right back to the start of recorded history; it's only the specific notion of professional team sports that's a 19th-century development ‑ Iridescent 22:08, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Military-oriented competition (mostly target oriented, or directly martial, like boxing/wrestling) were a big deal, but largely controlled by the military (i.e., the nobility); if the lord of your land wanted an archery competition, then he got one, and might authorize various other things at a festival (a controlled gathering with guards aplenty), but he'd not take too kindly to 100 of you having a near riot on his land for your own amusement and without supervision. The common people weren't able to participate in things like jousts, just watch them. Organized games without a practical and regulated aim like fight-training were banned (for the common folk) in various places by various rulers for considerable periods, including in England, along with gambling-oriented activities like card games. The latter were seen as vices, and the former as threats to order and the gentry. The army was sometimes sent out to stop things like bull runs. Didn't stop people, entirely, of course, and this kind of oppression wasn't universal; it came and went, and affected some areas barely at all. A lot of animal-oriented stuff seems to have been exempted (bear-baiting, etc.), but not when it got too many people together in one place for landholder comfort. England was trying to suppress bull runs well into the 19th c. (for the "lawlessness" reasons, not out of animal welfare concerns. Even in English, "sport" and "sporting" and such often referred to hunting-related activities until pretty recently; the lines blurred, and "let's kill some animals" was often in the mix.) So few forms of football survived probably as a result of the suppression; we know that villages had quite violent matches between each other without permission (there are some eyewitness accounts) but little is known of the rules, to the extent any existed and lasted more than a generation. Things like Rugby come down to us because of later institutions (of the upper class). Same with cricket and many other sports; they weren't pastimes of the common folk, though folk forms of stick-ball in general were clearly being played in numerous variations whether it was approved of or not. The suppression for long stretches does see to have had a language effect, since French lost its general word for it, and Spanish didn't develop one, and even the words for "game" in these languages doubled as a word for "joke" and other forms of amusement. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:52, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Without most of my relevant books available (in boxes due to moving), the earliest game-ban stuff I'm finding in a trivial amount of searching around is Henry III of England banning boules among the military, so they would practice archery and such instead of gambling over ball games. So, even the military dispensation for competitive activity had limits; if it wasn't practical, it was out, at least inasmuch as something like that would be enforceable. PS: Bowling-type games (which would have included ground billiards probably) were legally banned for all commoners in France (to whatever actual effect) starting with Charles IV and Charles V in the 14th c., and the ban wasn't lifted until the 17th c., which is quite a long time. The games were still played but largely by the gentry, including the clergy (we know they were since detailed account of them survived, and the games, including jeu de mail, spread around from court to court and eventually became popular in England, as bowls and pall-mall). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:55, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

I have some scrawled note about laying blame on you for some errors propagating out across the interweb, "lOcal con-census [exclamation points]" and something about placating creationists in flyover states for "bALance [more exclamtion marks and an interrobang]" … you would think I would remember what that was about. Can you remind me? And how are you. cygnis insignis 15:39, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Okay I suppose. :-) As for that stuff, I'm not sure. I move from thread to thread pretty fast. I'm the furthest thing from a placater of creationists, though. "Conservative" and "religious nut" aren't synonymous, though they overlap rather too uncomfortably in the US. To anyone overly equating them, it might easy for a suggestion of balance in articles on fiscal policy and other purely political left–right issues to be mistaken for a suggestion that FRINGE should be suspended for "balance" at articles that touch on religious matters. Any WP:LOCALCONSENSUS arguments to so so ("[[WP:OWN|Those of us who mostly wrote this article want it to read this way") are kind of out the window (per WP:CONLEVEL – site-wide policies and guidelines can't be trumped by individuals or WP:FACTIONs). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:12, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
It's coming back to me. Those sort of labels are not synonyms, and it is annoying when people equate it with foul and stupid for their factional purposes. Likewise when people presume to know another party's positions, as you pointed out. There is some consensus here, at wikipedia, and some manufacture of consent. My concern is a marginal concern in 'the scheme of things', communicating that without the awkward constraint of one of the local consensuses and the reactionary know-nothingness of 'goddam scientists takin' away muh name' that is the only concern of those with no 'vested' interest. cygnis insignis 17:23, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Well, when it comes to damned scientists wrongfully re-naming and re-classifying things, the real victims are obviously Pluto (being demoted from a planet), and dogs and cats (renamed to Canis lupus familiaris and Felis lybica catus, respectively, as just subspecies). Heh. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:40, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, Pluto deserved what it got, don't pretend otherwise. I don't think cat or dog has been a universal term for 250 odd years, still isn't, but I thinking along those lines: core vocab for the diversity of things people don't generally give hoot about. "is this a cat or a dog" "dog?" "correct!" [child beams with delight] cygnis insignis 17:54, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
If Pluto is the dog, then what is Goofy? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:47, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Deletion review for Template:Puke

Done

– Commented at the DRV.

An editor has asked for a deletion review of Template:Puke. Because you closed the deletion discussion for this page, speedily deleted it, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the deletion review. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 21:15, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

I just reviewed that AfD and thought I'd summarize it to save other editors time:

Q: "Why should we keep the template?"

A: "Because it is puking on McCandlish."

Closer: "QED."

Leviv ich 21:32, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

I think it should be deleted because it's an insensitive mockery of people with eating disorders. Keeping this template is a trigger and is harming people. Someone might suicide over it, and even if they don't, it sends a terrible signal to the entire world, which is always watching every petty dispute on Wikipedia, that the project is hostile to people who are nutritionally different and gastrically challenged. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:07, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

I object to your insensitive use of the phrase "sends a terrible signal" I had a terrible experience with a railway signal (I won't get into the painful details, but it also involved a platypus and an ornithopter), and any mention of "terrible signals" triggers me. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:23, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Isn't all this "trigger" talk an insensitive trivialization of the victims and survivors of gun violence? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:53, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

You are right! How could I be so thoughtless? I think that the paqge I linked the "T" word to above says it all. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:16, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Apologies in advance to any thoughtless-Americans who might be offended by the above. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:16, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Getting back to the deletion review, I just !voted and at the same time asked the question "Would it be possible within the rules for deletion reviews to do what Kusma suggested late in the TfD, which is to delete and then re-purpose it as 🤮? --Guy Macon (talk) 02:31, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Could be done after-the-fact regardless; WP:CSD has a line-item for re-creating previously deleted material, but it doesn't apply to re-using now-vacant page titles for something else. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:42, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Done. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:45, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on WP:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Combining parameters in Template:Db-t2

Almost exactly three years ago, you added a parameter (reason) to {{db-t2}}, basically treating it as a parenthetical to the unnamed 1. Was there a reason for that as opposed to just using combining them? I've merged them in the sandbox, what do you think about doing it that way? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:46, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Merging is fine my me, along with also supporting |rationale=. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:45, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

User page

"Coincidentally, I was briefly a tech roadie for Aerosmith in 1994; they were probably the first band to do live online chat stuff with fans backstage at shows."
– How funny. It must be a genetic/fate thing, like you were somehow meant to be there! Let me guess, Oakland Coliseum Arena? North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 19:57, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Nah, I was on the East Coast back then. The shows in question were in Chicago and a few other places on that side of the country, I forget. Tyler was funny. He's much smaller than he looks on stage. And he's weird. The band were all "clean" by then (backstage, they did some meet-and-greet, then had a quiet dinner with their wives – no drugs and sex parties and whatever). But Tyler would be talking, in that raspy voice, then burst into random song lyrics, then go right back to the sentence he was in. Like: "Yeah, I remember this one time, on our third European tour, we were at some club in London and WALK THIS WAY, WALK THIS WAAAAAY, yeah, I think we we hanging out with AC/DC, and ...". Nice guy though. I didn't think he was clear on who I even was or what I was doing there, then on the third night, I was watching the show from the over-by-the-amps crew seating, and he came over behind the amps for a breather while a guitar solo was on, and he's all like "Stanton! Man, you wouldn't believe how hot it is up here!" Then went back to the show. So, he knew me by name already. The tech crew was me, and Selena Sol (author of some CGI-scripting books), plus someone who wrangled the hardware. It was just for a week, I think, but quite a kick. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:44, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

I love stories like this. Awesome. The singing could have been his way of warming up (if it was before the gig). You're the second person I've met on-wiki that has met Tyler (pinging Atsme), per File:Steven Tyler & Atsme.jpg. It's a small world after all. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:55, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Fun times, huh, Mac? Na1000, I've learned that what happens in Sturgis stays in Sturgis especially during the bike rally. 🙊🙈🙊 I will add that we were neighbors in a quaint, sparsely populated valley about 50 miles outside of Sturgis. There was a little bar/restaurant across the highway where we all hung out in the evenings for hamburgers and drinks - it was local stuff, far removed from the ravages of the rally. Steven behaved normally - mmmm...normal might be stretching it for some...and like Mac said, he'd randomly burst into a few lines of song during a conversation. He played country songs on the juke box and just hung out with the locals. I don't think the man ever meets a stranger. He was in Sturgis to check on his chopper shop and the progress of his new bike but mostly to have fun. He really liked my new biker hat - it's the kind that won't blow off your head. Bikers treat him like he's just another biker, and I imagine he appreciates it. I've dealt with quite a few celebs when I was doing TV production, and when I was active in the cutting horse business. When they're away from the stage, they just want to blend in like everybody else. Anyway, like Mac said, Steven is much smaller than what he looks on stage, although I've never seen him on stage. I think maybe my arm is bigger around than his leg. 😂 ^Atsme 📣 📧 03:44, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Make that four–I met him about fifteen years ago. I was surprised he was shorter than me, but he was still very cool. He sang a bit of Sweet Emotion a capela shaking an Altoids tin for rhythm, sounded great. Leviv ich 03:44, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Levivich: Actually, that makes you #3, as I've never met the man. Seen them live though, and I was close to the stage. Good enough for me. Atsme: Yeah, I can dig that stance of the bikers treating him like anyone else; that's how it should be, really, particularly at a rally. Fact is, I've never bought into the celebrity idolization hype at all (not implying that you do). Funny thing is, being a Grateful Dead fan, at shows they never really tried to hype up the audience, and actually rarely spoke much on stage after the 70s. This is all despite the fact that later in the 80s and 90s, they were often the top-selling concert act in the U.S. No "hey New York, how ya doin' tonight?! Wooo hooo, we've got a great show for you tonight!" No stylized showmanship, just music, although the showmanship would come out in the playing/jamming/improvisation. They also dressed rather normally, essentially in street clothes. I liked these aspects of their approach a great deal, for various reasons. Another funny thing is, they're the only celebrities that I would actually get a bit hyped about when they were mentioned in mainstream media, because mainstream didn't really cover them that much, so it was like, well, all right, they're getting some deserved credit. Pinging another Wiki-friend, Mudwater, at this point, to see if they've met Tyler too! North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 07:36, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Not to worry, Na1000. I was the one signing autographs for celebs...on their paychecks.

^Atsme 📣 📧 08:03, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Atsme, I want your autograph! North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 08:48, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

The easiest way to get over being star-struck by celebs is going to sci-fi and comics conventions. For cheap entry fees, you'll end up meeting half the cast of every sci-fi, fantasy, and horror TV show and movie made in the last 30 years. Virtually all of them are chill, and they do seem to like being treated as regular folk instead of icons. I remember talking to Richard Hatch about Hatch chile and New Mexico's green chile culture, at the Albuquerque Comic Con; that kind of stuff. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:58, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Makes sense. Haven't made it to one of those yet. Hey, is it just me, or is there something horribly wrong with a celebrity that is famous for being famous, who became famous for having a corporation set-up video cameras in her family home when she was a child, becoming a 21 year old billionaire from hawking makeup products designed for women to adhere to society's imposed standards of what should define female beauty? Ugh (Womp Woooooommp). North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 17:56, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Sounds worthless to me, but would hardly be the first FfBF case. What chaps my ass even more than, say, "reality" TV people who get way more press attention than they deserve (but do in fact get it, a bit like Zsa-Zsa Gabor back in the day, so are in fact notable) is when we have articles on little-known character actors that don't get any coverage other than passing mentions and maybe some trivial interview fluff, but we have articles on them because they have fans who lobby to keep them using rather IMDb-like rationales ("has been in 7 feature films and a guest stared on 15 TV series so must be notable") My favorite example is Chipo Chung, an article that has not improved in the slightest since it got a no consensus at AfD years ago, and arguably worse now being full of non-encyclopedic trivia. The actress herself gets less work now than she did 5 years ago. Unless she pulls a Robert Downey Jr, and pole-vaults back from obscurity, she's never going to actually be notable. I get the impression she doesn't even focus on acting any longer, but on some nonprofit/charity work. Then there's the cat breeder I'm AfDing as we speak, and being met with a towering wall of heartfelt, hand-wringing WP:AADD arguments. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:57, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Hmm, well, I have my share of complaints. I laugh at the formula of how anyone who has been on SNL is then essentially guaranteed to be a millionaire through subsequent, certain movie deals to follow. I am not impressed with some musicians who became actors, with the A&R people shoeing them in per their musical popularity. Some of them are not necessarily the best actors, imo (hello Markie M, J Lo). I cringe at how the same actor has been used for all of the Harry Potter films, essentially shoeing-in another millionaire. Why not use different actors and give other's a chance? The list goes on and on, but there are a few pet peeves. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:22, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Hard to argue with any of the above. The comic genius I became accustomed to back in the 70s-90s at SNL has changed, but isn't that typical of generational change? I can speak to the talent of Bill Murray because I worked with him while on-location in NYC in the 90s. "What About Bob" was in the can, so Bill had some free time. My old friend, the late Bob Boyle wanted me in NYC to shoot the International Sturgeon Conference. Bob was in charge of the logistics. I had no idea at the time that Bob & Bill were neighbors - both residents of the Palisades (Hudson River). I also wasn't aware that Bob had arranged for Bill to appear as a surprise guest at the International Sturgeon Conference. It wasn't until Bob came by the Museum of Natural History where we were shooting that I knew we were having lunch with Bill Murray. I was still in my work clothes!! I don't remember the name of the restaurant but the food was outstanding. Bob seated me next to Bill so I could do a casual interview. It was far more than I expected, and rather difficult to work with him because he kept everybody in stitches. He prepared his whole presentation for the conference on a napkin during lunch - asking me questions from time to time (I pretended to know the answers). I included a short clip of his conference appearance in the documentary, Sturgeon: Ancient Survivors. I had another opportunity to visit with Bill when we were shooting the dinner that was arranged for us by the Hudson River Foundation. They served smoked sturgeon and caviar they had shipped in from a white sturgeon farm in California (first time I had ever eaten smoked sturgeon or caviar). I also remembered that I needed a release from Murray, so I jotted something down real quick on a small note pad I kept in my purse. Bill wrote "Yeah, sure!" and signed it - never bothered to read it. Fun memories!! ^Atsme 📣 📧 02:45, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Bill Murray. "Dat's da fac', Jack!" — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:19, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Atsme: Back in the day, Jerry Garcia bought the bought the film rights and penned a script of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, which he then worked on with Tom Davis. During a quite serious meeting about moving forward with a film, with Garcia, Davis, Bill Murray, a Hollywood exec, attorneys, etc, Murray was hanging out at the edge of the table "making his mouth like a billiard pocket" while Davis rolled gumballs across the table trying to make them into his mouth (pp. 256-257). Figured you guys would like this anecdote, with SMcCandlish being a cue sports enthusiast and both of you apparently being Murray fans. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 15:58, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I definitely believe this. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:05, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

😂 - the kind of loose & fancy-free things that make you a regular on SNL! ^Atsme 📣 📧 21:29, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Hey SMcCandlish, Atsme and Levivich: Nice discussion. Perhaps a phoenix out of the ...

"I was cryin' when I met you, Now I'm trying to forget you, Your love is sweet misery ..."

... ashes could be for a new article to be created, such as Band outreach, as per SMcCandlish's commentary above about the band's outreach to fans via online channels. Also, what with ...

"Livin' on the edge, You can't help yourself from fallin', Livin' on the edge, You can't help yourself at all ..."

three users just from this convo having met Tyler, I guess he gets around a lot! North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 21:49, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Dream on! LOL. Seriously, we might want to have some kind of piece on early interactive use of the Internet by bands, including the MBone and simulcasts on it (dating to ca. 1991 or 1992, I think). I'm not sure that "bands having websites" would be useful; rock groups were sometimes among the earliest adopters, outside academia, of the Web, but a website is a website. Not much to tell. It may be too investigative for WP, though. That is, I'm not sure any RS have actually covered this sort of thing yet; the development of e-broadcasting, streaming A-V, etc., may be an Internet history book that hasn't been written (and will mostly have more to do with pr0n than, uh, other entertainment). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party

Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party. Legobot (talk) 04:23, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

No such article

Hi,

FYI Runaway climate change does not exist. It has been recently merged to Tipping points in the climate system. There is also a merge discussion underway about merging [{Abrupt climate change]] to the tipping points article. However, as the involved eds got into it, there is a slowly evoloving thought that they really are separate things. In any case your recent edit at Exitinction Rebellion restored the wikilink to the redir. Could you clean that up pleaes? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 18:17, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

@NewsAndEventsGuy: That's perfectly fine, per WP:NOTBROKEN, though of course I have no issue with replacing the redir with a piped link to Tipping points in the climate system. The entire point at that article is that this group is concerned about those; their belief is that society and the whole planetary ecosystem is on the brink of disaster (i.e., a tipping point); they are not up-in-arms about every sub-sub-sub-topic of climate change. The anon going around changing these links is doing so specifically to make left-leaning groups look extremist (or, in this case, even more extremist than they are) and to make right-wing ones look centrist and entirely rational. He/she/it has been changing left-related links to either re-point from something general the subject supports to something extremist and specific to imply a far-left agenda, or to re-point from something specific the subject opposes to something general to make their position seem to be against much more than it is (and vice-versa with the right-leaning links). I caught wind of this at one of the noticeboards, probably WP:NPOVN. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:46, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

PS: I updated the link to bypass the redirect. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:03, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

You probably saw my thread at NPOVN. At the top of my sandbox I have some links to monitor the known IP ranges. As for the Tipping Point article, I'm one of the main editors there. As we're overhauling the climate sub articles the ground is probably in flux so I'm not going to care about which article is the target at this point. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:29, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, that was it. I ended up there for something else and noticed that one and started going over the anon's "contributions". — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:28, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Gender feminism

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NPR Newsletter No.17

Hello SMcCandlish,

News

The WMF has announced that Google Translate is now available for translating articles through the content translation tool. This may result in an increase in machine translated articles in the New Pages Feed. Feel free to use the {{rough translation}} tag and gently remind (or inform) editors that translations from other language Wikipedia pages still require attribution per WP:TFOLWP.

Discussions of interest

Two elements of CSD G6 have been split into their own criteria: R4 for redirects in the "File:" namespace with the same name as a file or redirect at Wikimedia Commons (Discussion), and G14 for disambiguation pages which disambiguate zero pages, or have "(disambiguation)" in the title but disambiguate a single page (Discussion).
{{db-blankdraft}} was merged into G13 (Discussion)
A discussion recently closed with no consensus on whether to create a subject-specific notability guideline for theatrical plays.
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposal to create subject-specific notability guidelines for chemicals and organism taxa.

Reminders

NPR is not a binary keep / delete process. In many cases a redirect may be appropriate. The deletion policy and its associated guideline clearly emphasise that not all unsuitable articles must be deleted. Redirects are not contentious. See a classic example of the templates to use. More templates are listed at the R template index. Reviewers who are not aware, do please take this into consideration before PROD, CSD, and especially AfD because not even all admins are aware of such policies, and many NAC do not have a full knowledge of them.

NPP Tools Report

Superlinks – allows you to check an article's history, logs, talk page, NPP flowchart (on unpatrolled pages) and more without navigating away from the article itself.
copyvio-check – automatically checks the copyvio percentage of new pages in the background and displays this info with a link to the report in the 'info' panel of the Page curation toolbar.
The NPP flowchart now has clickable hyperlinks.

Six Month Queue Data: Today – Low – 2393 High – 4828
Looking for inspiration? There are approximately 1000 female biographies to review.
Stay up to date with even more news – subscribe to The Signpost.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:18, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Assamese people

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The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Assamese people. Legobot (talk) 04:25, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

A side note on the gender kerfuffle

There was some recent drama I got embroiled in here, about an essay criticizing shitty writing practices, which turned out to be controversial to a certain subset of editors because one of these shitty writing practices, in one particular variant that I didn't even illustrate, has a fanbase among language-change activists who have a fixation on transgender people. This drama is part of a broader wave of extremist browbeating and non-encyclopedic advocacy. Someone pointed me to this article, as just one example. It's a quick and interesting read. Précis: Someone in a philosophy journal made the case that arguments in support of transgender/non-binary (TG/NB) identity can also be used in support of the less common idea of transracial identity (which takes several forms, including "passing" as a member only of the dominant ethnicity despite ancestral admixture, to adoption of another ethnic identity that doesn't match one's genetics at all, which is often claimed to be a form of cultural appropriation and something of a social fraud). Rather than take this as it was actually written (same problem in the way my essay was received and reinterpreted), in this case as a potential defense of transracialism and tolerance toward it (or at least an argument that our rationales need to be clearer), the same kinds of TG/NB "allies" who misrepresented and attacked me started a letter-writing campaign of opprobrium against the paper's author. Their idea is that transracialism isn't actually acceptable (at least not the appropriating kind), ergo any argument in support of it that relies on logic in any way related to TG/NB is an actual attack on TG/NB people (i.e., as saying that TG/NB should be suppressed because TR should be suppressed). It's an obvious straw man that reverses the actual meaning of the paper, and all in the name of being blatantly intolerant while posing as tolerance activists. As with Wikipedia Signpost caving in and one of its editors "apologizing" under duress and the publication subjected to actual censorship of its e-pages, the publisher of the journal article also retracted the paper with an "apology". These are not actual apologies, they're PR moves to bring negative attention to an end, at the cost of some public shaming and – important here – throwing the individual author under the bus, despite what they wrote not saying anything like what the ranty critics said it did. This is not a good trend for broader reasons, since it suggests that rational discourse no longer has a place; it's telling us that as long as you can generate enough angry ranting, you can get what you want, both on Wikipedia and in real life.

Well, fuck that noise. I've said this before and will say it again: The real danger to Wikipedia's long-term future isn't the kind of vandal wave we survived in the 2000s; it's creeping takeover by people with socio-political and other agendas. More broadly, TG/NB (and LGBT+ more broadly) are not well served by "allies" like this. They do far more harm than good, and turn centrist, neutral, open-minded people to the political right, just to get the hell away from these creeps. And they are creepy. Nearly none of them are themselves TG/NB, but are privileged, cis-gendered, white, and mostly hetero New Left activists engaging in an in loco parentis "manufactured outrage" posturing party, and rather objectifying actual TG/NB people in the process (it's closely related to "inspiration porn"). They have no real-world political power, and rather than try to do anything about Trump, et al., they verbally attack people for imaginary doctrinal faults. It's kind of a form of public mental/verbal masturbation. It's so much easier to start shit with people on the Internet over fake interpretations of what they said than actually do any real-world grassroots effort to make the world a better place.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:58, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Your point eludes me, perhaps because I keep tripping up at "adoption of another ethnic identity that doesn't match one's genetics at all", ancestral admixtures and so on. Are you assuming that these premises can be verified objectively, or do they merely accord with the american obsession with 'race' and otherness? I hope I'm getting this wrong :| cygnis insignis 23:02, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Maybe read it again? My point has nothing whatsoever to do with how such matters are actually defined. :-) My point was that the same "gender warrior" types are making everyone miserable everywhere about everything they can think of, using the same "distort what you really said and claim you're saying something very different and that it's an attack on TG people" bullshit, and they're crawling all over Wikipedia like ticks. As for the background matter, the controversy seems to be about "reverse passing", namely white folk self-identifying as some other ethnic group. (And I'm sure it is probably is bound up in racialist thinking, a common fault in North American and European thinking, though it's worse over here in the US of A). I really don't care about the "issue", or any side on it; I care about reasoned writers being witch-hunted by censorious TG/NB "allies", a bunch of hypocritical busybodies – over things the writers didn't actually say or mean. It's just one example of the sorts of PoV crap that hits us in waves, of course, but it's one hardly anyone will dare to speak up about, because even doing so garners accusations of "transphobia" (it has nothing to do with that at all, but with calling TG-obsessed, cis-gendered extremist activists on their bullshit). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:47, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

that is why I asked, as I've said I haven't read the piece and didn't read the links to your example. Do I need to accept the premise that someone can identify as some other ethnicity and it can shown that they are are, in fact, white, science is amazing. I guess my comment is on the 'conversation points' and I should probably hold my tongue about those, I don't presume to have a right to air my views on conversations that trigger more absolute forms of censorship. As an editor, and part of this community, I am comfortable with being conservative and censorious with regards to personal views, but at the end of the day we can agree to disagree about how wrong you are :P Have a good one, cygnis insignis 05:35, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

On the science stuff: genetic markers are pretty well catalogued now. But I think this has more to do with family history. If someone claims to be an Arab, and the members of both sides of their family say there are no known Arab ancestors, then people are going to point fingers about it. The article in question neither pointed fingers nor refused to, but simply asked some epistemological questions about the rationales one might use to come to such a decision. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:56, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Need advice about an article title

Hello! May I pick your brain about how to disambiguate the title of an article I am writing? I thought you would be the person to ask because I notice you have written several authoritative explanations about how to deal with nicknames, and that is how I am thinking of disambiguating the title.

The article is about a man named Jeff Berry; you can see the draft at User:MelanieN/Jeff Berry. There are already three other articles here about people named Jeff Berry so it needs disambiguation. Normally I would use a parenthetical word describing his occupation for the DAB, but his occupation is hard to sum up in a single word; basically, he is an authority on the history and mixing of tropical drinks. So I would like to use his nickname, Beachbum, which is the name he uses on all his books for the article title. Would something like that be acceptable, do you think? Should it be done as Jeff "Beachbum" Berry, or just Beachbum Berry, or in some other way? Thanks for any advice. -- MelanieN (talk) 23:44, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)I would suggest Jeff Berry (mixologist), even though I find that term cringeworthy. --Orange Mike | Talk 00:00, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. That would be possible, although he only got into the business of actually making and selling drinks a few years ago. -- MelanieN (talk) 00:45, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

(talk page contributor) Mixologist came to mind immediately, then I saw the same suggestion just above. If that's what the subject is mainly notable for, I'd go with that. Hey, MelanieN, nice article, by the way! North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 02:20, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

@MelanieN: I would use "(mixologist)". If he's best known as a writer of books and/or blogs about the topic, "(writer)" would also work. We would not use "(Beachbum)" because a) we do not use alternative names as disambiguators (they don't help since they presuppose knowledge of the subject, in this case the person's nickname); and b) using this one in particular would imply he's a beachbum and notable as a beachbum – a disambiguation that introduces another ambiguity is a failure. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:52, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Well, OK, that sounds like consensus. Even though I agree with Orange Mike's opinion of the term, and even though he is not and has never been a bartender (which according to our article is a synonym). I guess in the larger sense, "mixologist" means "a person who knows about drink mixing", and that is definitely the case with him. Thanks for the advice, all. -- MelanieN (talk) 14:39, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

P.S. I am guessing he will be the only person on Wikipedia so designated. Maybe I should start a category for notable mixologists? 0;-D -- MelanieN (talk) 14:43, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

@MelanieN: There are at least three others, and some other people in Category:Bartenders would also qualify (though most people in that category are there for a former, pre-notability occupation). However, a) Mixologist just redirects to Bartender, and b) three-article categories have a tendency to be upmerged, so I would just use Category:Bartenders. There's no parent category structure for "people in the gustatory arts"; e.g. Category:Chefs doesn't share a parent with Category:Brewers, which has become Category:Businesspeople in brewing and is not focused on craft brewers as such, but those successful at their product marketing. This may be a flaw in the category system as it currently exists, or maybe too few people are notable simply as award-winners for aesthetic not business reasons to make such an "artistes" category feasible (this is probably less true of chefs). PS: I don't like the word either (because it's a sloppy commingling of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate elements), but it's a real world and will be found in most modern, non-pocket-sized dictionaries, and people are actually familiar enough with it for it to be used (it's something of a neologism, but not a protologism like "dubstepologist"). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:10, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Huh! I was joking ( 0;-D is my usual smilie = an angelic grin) because I didn't think there would be any others. That'll teach me: never assume. I agree we should not have a separate category for "mixologist" even if "bartender" doesn't always apply. Thanks for the advice. I'll categorize him as bartender and writer and whatever else applies. Meanwhile I intend to untangle the situation with the various Jeff Berrys: the one with the primary article title is a barely-referenced stub about a KKK member, clearly not any more primary than the others. IMO none of the four deserves to be primary and I will create a DAB page at Jeff Berry. I have posted a notice at Talk:Jeff Berry before doing it, in an abundance of caution, but it doesn't look like a very active or highly-watched article so I don't expect any objections. -- MelanieN (talk) 20:36, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. You can always just WP:RM it, if in doubt. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:42, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm not really in doubt. I think I could have just boldly done it, but decided to give a little notice first. -- MelanieN (talk) 21:09, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Right-o. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:38, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Century

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #030, 17 Mar 2019

Previous issue:

Single-page portals: 4,704

Total portals: 5,705

This issue:

Single-page portals: 4,562

Total portals: 5,578

The collection of portals has shrunk

All Portals closed at WP:MfD during 2019

Grouped Nominations total 127 Portals:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/US County Portals Deleted 64 portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Districts of India Portals Deleted 30 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods Deleted 23 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Allen Park, Michigan Deleted 6 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cryptocurrency Deleted 2 Portals
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:North Pole Deleted 2 Portals

Individual Nominations:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Circles Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Fruits Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:E (mathematical constant) Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Burger King Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cotingas Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Prostitution in Canada Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Agoura Hills, California Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Urinary system Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:You Am I Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Cannabis (2nd nomination) Reverted to non-Automated version
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Intermodal containers Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adventure travel Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Adam Ant Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benito Juárez, Mexico City Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Wikiatlas Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Greek alphabet Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Accounting Deleted G7
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Lents, Portland, Oregon Deleted P2
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ankaran Deleted
Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Jiu-jitsu Deleted G8
Portal:University of Nebraska Speedy Deleted P1/A10 exactly the same as Portal:University of Nebraska–Lincoln also created by the TTH

Related WikiProject:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals Demoted

(Attribution: Copied from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Portal MfD Results)

WikiProject Quantum portals

This was a spin-off from WikiProject Portals, for the purpose of developing zero-page portals (portals generated on-the-screen at the push of a button, with no stored pages).

It has been merged back into WikiProject Portals. In the MfD the vote was "demote". See Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Quantum portals.

Hiatus on mass creation of Portals

At WP:VPR, mass creation of Portals using semi-automated tools has been put on hold until clearer community consensus is established.

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Hiatus on mass creation of Portals.

The Transhumanist banned from creating new portals for 3 months

See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Proposal 1: Interim Topic-Ban on New Portals.

Until next issue...

Keep on keepin' on. — The Transhumanist 09:32, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist:. What I'm seeing here is mostly what I would have expected: redundant (e.g. minor food topic) portals being eliminated (one might want to redirect them, e.g. Portal:Spaghetti to Portal:Pasta), and the same with those for which no one would expect a portal, e.g. Portal:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn due to lack of a large enough number of articles for a portal to make sense, or Portal:E (mathematical constant) for the same reason plus obscurity. I can also see deleting Portal:Burger King for WP:NOT#PROMO reasons (readers in large numbers should commonly have a real-life set of concerns about a company in order for us to justify a company-centric portal; Portal:Apple, Inc. makes sense because of the large impact the company's products have on many people's lives. However, some of these deletions are puzzling/disturbing, like Portal:Accounting, Portal:Jiu-jitsu, Portal:Fruits, Portal:Cryptocurrency, and locality-based ones that are city-wide or larger Portal:Allen Park, Michigan, US counties, Indian districts. These are all broad and non-trivial enough to support a portal. People deeply interested in Jiu-jitsu (or jujutsu, whatever) are specialists; they generally are not interested in "martial arts" material broadly speaking, and aren't going to be looking for kung fu material. It's similar to the split between snooker, pool, and three-cushion billiards (the disciplines are so distinct, even down to radically different tables and other equipment, that most players do not frequently cross these lines, especially professionally; by contrast, a portal specifically about eight-ball or nine-ball would be a bad idea, because pool players almost always compete in both [and more] sub-disciplines of pool). PS: The quantum portals idea (though as a stand-alone wikiproject that didn't make much sense) may be the direction to go. If someone really, really is interested in an "ancient" performer like Adam Ant and wants their WP experience tailored to that obsession (or a specific shape of pasta, or a mathematical constant, or whatever), they should have at it, as long as it doesn't actually impose any kind of maintenance cost on us. That cost is the main reason for these deletions. However, something like snooker should probably be somewhat hand-maintained portal, even if auto-tools help generate and update parts of it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:29, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

ANI discussion involving you

Done

– Resonded at ANI, and had also been opening this AN report about the same incident when the ANI was opened.

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding your conduct on my personal talk pages. The thread is User:SMcCandlish disregarding ban from my talk. . --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

Please comment on Talk:1976 Tangshan earthquake

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The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:1976 Tangshan earthquake. Legobot (talk) 04:29, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

"Country A - Country B relations" et seq

I get the feeling of deja vu sometimes when I recall all of those articles (?) ca. 2009. Remember "Ikip/Inclusionist/TravB et socci"? He led the first mass canvass against me (including canvassing himself!) back then for thinking that "permutations and combinations of everything" for Wikipedia articles was inane, and writing to every editor I had ever had a dispute with, even though the RfCs on each issue agreed with my positions. He finally actually apologized to me, but he had done his damage back then. Collect (talk) 14:56, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

I guess I was fortunate enough to miss out that drama. ;-) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:37, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Jean Mill

Hello SMcCandlish, I thank you for pointing out the major weaknesses in the article. I am hoping you can give the article a look and see if it is can be a "keep". I will continue to research and hopefully improve the article. Lubbad85 (talk) 03:13, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

@Lubbad85: Frankly, I'm impressed you were able to dig up that much. It looks like a proper encyclopedia article now. I would expect the AfD to close as keep at this point. I still have concerns this will inspire creation of much worse articles on every other cat breeder under the sun, but I guess we can deal with that if it happens. I'm still no convinced Mill is actually notable for anything at all outside of her direct association with Bengals, but the question is more open now, I suppose. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:33, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

SMcCandlish Thank you for checking that out. If not for the Afd, it would be a fluff piece. Lubbad85 (talk) 13:26, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

@Lubbad85: I'm glad that the AfD was extended for a third round, since you have sources on order. However, the other commenter's source analysis is meaningful. Cat fan/chat sites are WP:UGC. Books by Mill herself are primary sources. Books from no-name publishing companies are self-published sources. TICA and CFA are primary sources (they're reliable per WP:ABOUTSELF for what they say about their own breed standards, but they're breeder-run and promotional organizations (trade associations), so their version of a breed's history – for breeds as they chose to accept them, from TICA/CFA breeder members they chose to recognize as breed developers – isn't independent sourcing). Any "cat breed encyclopedia" books are going to be tertiary sources. Cat magazines like Cat Fancy are going to also lack independence from the subject (their breed profile articles are written by breeders of the breed in question, are promotional, and are tied strongly to "official breed history" (which are often erroneous) as promulgated by TICA, or CFA, or some other clan of breeders, and their breeder profiles are written by friends of the breeders in question.) None of those help establish notability (and so far all they've done is cement the view that Mill isn't notable beyond the Bengal topic).

The newspapers are good secondary, independent, reliable sources for notability purposes (though are actually quite weak sources for factual claims, since they're obviously just repeating what is said in the primary sources). They focus on the Bengals. The best possible sources would be well-researched books on the modern history of the domestic cat, but these are scarce; most cat books are tertiary breed encyclopedias (which are also just regurgitating whatever is said by TICA, etc., and in biased breed articles in cat fancier publications), or are veterinary references which will lack information on breed history. Most books about specific breeds are either children's books (categorically unreliable per WP:RS), or are "cookie-cutter" books that are all the same basic text about cats, plus some tertiary breed-specific paragraphs pasted in near the front.

What this comes down to, in a nutshell: Where is a professionally written article focused on Mill's conservation work, and barely mentioning Bengal breeding? Where is such an article focused on Mill's work as an author and the impact of her books? (Oops, they're all about Bengal breeding.) There isn't any non-trivial coverage of Mill that isn't all about Bengals. When one of our best sources says Mill is basically synonymous with Bengals this is a strong indicator toward compress, merge, and redirect. (That also means that the research work isn't wasted effort; most of our articles on modern breeds need better history sections, including information about the breeders who did the most to establish the breed – but well within WP:COATRACK limits.)
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:41, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

SMcCandlish I agree with much of what you say. You are a very experienced wikipedian and your critique has been helpful in getting me to develop the article. I am of course very disappointed to see that nonsensical article entries are thought to be worthy of an encyclopedia. I do know that an argument against another article is not justification for this one, but it does puzzle me.

Going forward: I have been attempting to go back to pre-internet to find sources - filling in the subject's biography is the goal now. I now have a wide array of sources, many of them far more credible, and worthy of an encyclopedia than other articles.

the notion that Jean Mill is synonymous with Bengals and so she does not deserve a stand alone entry, leads me to examine other articles. Many articles about persons (both fictional and real) on wikipedia are synonymous with other subjects and yet they have a Wikipedia entry.

I do hope that the article survives this third afd. I am of the opinion that the subject is notable. I have been weeding through (and eliminating) the type of self published, and unreliable sources you have outlined above. There is an endless amount of this to go through and I have rejected most of it as you have suggested.

One avenue I have used...I contacted the living daughter and received personal information which has led me to other research i.e. her federal indictment for running afoul of the U.S. immigration laws.

I have another a lead on more sources as well.

Thank you for the opinion on this matter. Even though I disagree with the opinion that the subject is not notable, I see your arguments have validity and they do give guidance to me. Lubbad85 (talk) 18:48, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Lubbad85: I'm waiting for a drive to de-fragment, so I have a little time to ramble. >;-) On crappy articles: see the thread elsewhere on this talk page about Aerosmith; there's a divergence in it about people "famous just for being famous", and actors who aren't actually notable at all but simply have some credits (i.e. are just competent and employed). On effective synonymity with another subject: There are a lot of articles that need to be merged. But there are also various cases (e.g. a singer from a band, where the band is notable and the singer is notable, but the other bandmembers are not) in which there's an appearance of synonymity, of shared notability, but we do in fact have RS treating the individual bio subject on their own merits and mostly apart from the other subject (e.g. their earlier band, in that example). It's not really about how subjectively "worthy" or "distinct" the subject may be to editors or even to potential readers, but how independent, secondary, reliable sources have treated the subject to date. We can also end up with two articles if the one on the main, overarching topic gets too long. E.g., if the Bengal cat article were approaching the WP:SIZE limits, then it would be reasonable to split out a bio on Mill even if we wouldn't have one otherwise.

On sourcing: Do note that sources that don't help establish notability are not always useless. A subject's own book, for example, can be a reliable source per WP:ABOUTSELF for what their published view about something is. WP:UGC stuff is just junk, though. Breed articles regularly rely on TICA, etc., for standards details (reliable primary again). Such organizations, and cat fancier magazines, can cautiously be used for more general material; anything questionable should be qualified, e.g. "According to CFA, the Foo cat is "an ancient breed" and dates to 13th century India,^[1], though Desmond Morris's [book title]^[2] and GGCF^[3] claim the breed was developed in 19th century England from cats from India, Persia, Turkey, and Europe.' That sort of thing.

On the legal matter: I'm not sure it's even good to include that. If sources about Mill's life don't mention it, we probably shouldn't either, for the same reason we don't report celebs' traffic tickets (unless something weird happens and it gets press, like Zsa-Zsa Gabor slapping her cop, or a drunk Mel Gibson saying something racist to his cop). Since she's deceased, it's not a BLP matter, but more of an encyclopedic relevance one. By contrast, Martha Stewart's sweatshop legal issue happened after she was notable and was something that got a lot of press. Same goes for the drug-related prison sentences of Boy George and Robert Downey Jr., and Pee-wee Herman's indecent exposure arrest. Some pre-notability events can also become relevant when they get reported in the press after notability (e.g. the various "scandals" around a number of pageant queens for having done amateur nude photoshoots before they were famous).

While we're on (or returning to) the cat articles subject, here are some general observations on writing about cat breeds: Wacky or vapid behavioral claims should just be omitted. There are no known controlled studies proving any particular cat breed to be more playful, better with children, better mousers, etc., etc. (It's quite different for dogs, as many breeds were developed for specific behavioral traits without regard to appearance, and are tested for them at "trials"; it's rather the opposite of cats.) Even with Bengals in particular, various claims that they behave more "wild", expect or take better to outdoor walks after harness training, can jump 15 feet straight upward, are apt to attack children, etc., etc., don't have any verifiable basis. The only cat-breed-specific behavioral claims I've seen that are so frequently reported (by sources that don't have a vested interest) that they're worth mentioning, as claims, not as facts, are probably: a) that Main Coons are more likely to engage in some dog-like behavior, and are easier to train to play fetch; b) that Siamese and related breeds tend to be uncommonly vocal; c) that the Turkish Van is less afraid of water and may actually like to swim (this is commonly stated but actually false, and is a confusion with the Van cat landrace); d) maybe that Manx cats are more apt to favor a single person and are thus less family-oriented pets; and e) that Ragdolls and their offshoot Ragamuffins tend to go limp or at least very relaxed when picked up. This last appears to be a neurological mutation like pointing and setting behavior in birddogs (it seems to be a mild form of seizure), though I'm not sure it's been studied as a genetics matter yet in the cats as it has in the dogs. It can be verfied, though; the very reason the Ragdoll breed was developed was to fix that trait, and it's part of the breed standard.

Unfortunately, many of our breed articles are reporting all sorts of dubious claims as if proven fact. Another set is claims that a particular breed is a hypoallergenic cat; there's no such thing, including the hairless breeds, because it's an enzyme in the saliva that people are allergic too, not the cat hair. Such claims are pure "buy my expensive cats" marketing.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:51, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

SMcCandlish Agree regarding the anecdotal descriptions of cat behaviors. I do see almost universal mention of the Bengal Cat's love of water and intelligence. However I am sure there has been no empirical evidence to support the claims. so I am of a mind that these things warrant inclusion in some way. I agree also about the lack of notability of some persons on Wikipdeia.

I am learning my way around the Wikipedia editing community. Recently I edited the Elton John regarding Elton John headlining the Harley Davidson 100th anniversary party. The concert was widely criticized. Another editor edited out all negative mention. It seemed to me as if someone was guarding Elton John's page to prohibit any negative press. However I let it go and moved on.

It remains to be seen if the Jean Mill article will get a keep designation. I think the afd has made me a better wikipedian. And I have much more to learn so that I can grow as a Wikipedian. Lubbad85 (talk) 18:50, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

Eltonians: That's quite likely. Anyone with a fanbase can get that treatment here, until some pressure is applied, e.g. via WP:NPOVN or an RfC. Then again, the concert being panned isn't necessarily pertinent unless John's performance in particular was singled out as poor (for the show and for him) and multiple sources dwelled on it. Cat intelligence: I've been looking for years and there's just absolutely nothing in the relevant literature (ethology journals, cognitive science material, etc.), establishing any breed as more intelligent than others. The science simply hasn't been done. If you read a lot of cat mags, you'll see that the breeder-authored breed profiles almost always make a claim that their favored breed is intelligent, and no one makes a claim that any breed is sub-standard in intelligence. It's a "parity product" situation (all laundry detergents perform about the same, so they are all "the best" and calling any of them that isn't legally false advertising). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:08, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

I know you can appreciate the humor in Elton John as a headliner for an Iconic (badass) America Motorcycle company. Elton John: A gay, British piano player who never sang about motorcycles or even rode one. The news reported that most of the audience walked out. Not really Elton John's fault, however he should have declined the invitation. The fault is with Harley Davidson. Lubbad85 (talk) 18:14, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, that makes about as much sense has having Britney Spears headline at Wave-Gotik-Treffen. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:32, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Had to look that up.... gothic rock, gothic metal, EBM, industrial, noise, darkwave, neo-folk, neo-classical, medieval, experimental, Gothic metal, deathrock and punk. lol Lubbad85 (talk) 22:59, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Or, in short, PiBs. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:21, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Ministry of Transport

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Music/Music genres task force/Colours

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email

Please do not contact me again by email without first seeking my permission at my talk page. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 22:51, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Sure. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 01:32, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, and sorry if I sounded a bit harsh - there was nothing wrong with the content of the email itself. I just don't want to engage in off-wiki discussion with anyone in relation to this incident, as adding another person in possession of emails will only complicate matters if it progresses further - I should have explained myself, but it was late here and I was tired. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:25, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Boing! said Zebedee: No worries. If it really came down to that, I would include that e-mail in my own e-folder for ArbCom, as evidence of trying to stave off the drama of a case opening over an incident of such a trivial genesis and likelihood to blow over on its own. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:59, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion

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Please comment on Talk:Slavery

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Please comment on Talk:Swedes

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Arbitration Request

In progress

– Commented there, briefly, but need to provide diffs and such when I have the time.

You are involved in a recently filed request for arbitration. Please review the request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Portal Issues and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. As threaded discussion is not permitted on most arbitration pages, please ensure that you make all comments in your own section only. Additionally, the guide to arbitration and the Arbitration Committee's procedures may be of use.

Thanks, Robert McClenon (talk) 22:50, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Glad you opened this. I was thinking of it myself. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:39, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Sobibór trial

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Thank you ...

... for improving article quality in March - click on "March" for travel pics --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:16, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Germanic peoples

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Signpost talk page

I have opined at Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom# From_the_editor re: WP:Wikipedia_Signpost/Next_issue/From_the_editors concerning their need for a "formal apology" from people who had absolutely nothing to do with what they are apologizing for in the first place. I thought you might find it of some minor interest. Collect (talk) 17:00, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

I did have a discussion with that new editor-in-chief about what he planned to post, though I'm not sure how much of it he accepted. I guess I should go read it and find out. It's okay for a role to issue an apology, I suppose, but I did strongly make the point that I, The Signpost, and Signpost volunteer staff are in no way in a position to apologize for people being/feeling offended; everyone owns their own emotions and no one is responsible for someone's [mis]interpretation of something but that individual. However, WP's e-newspaper, as a collective work, is arguably in a position to be responsible for predicting likely-to-be-obvious [over-]reactions by the readership, and to make decisions accordingly. Signpost's error was in running something that was almost certain to offend some subset of people, over a point that's not really all that important and which could have been made some other way. (And of course it's my fault for writing it that way in the first place, but as userspace jotting and basically a work in progress, that's perhaps forgivable. I'm not too sure about my decision to let someone from Signpost use it as a humor piece. That was just a really poor decision on my part.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:00, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Went over it. Some of the issues I flagged in the first draft have been resolved. I would wordsmith it further, but it's not my page. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:10, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Let's hope the concerns are addressed in the end product. Collect (talk) 01:11, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Provided the noise level gets down to only 120 dB or so --- seems that some folks like noise? Collect (talk) 14:21, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Hello, SMcCandlish. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template. -Ad Orientem (talk) 16:33, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Swedes

Disregard

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DYK for Ground billiards

On 26 March 2019, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Ground billiards, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that modern cue sports games such as snooker and nine-ball can be traced back to the game of ground billiards, played with hoops and mallets (illustration shown)? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Ground billiards. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Ground billiards), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:01, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Huzzah! — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:46, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Glad to see another one hit mainspace. Have you got anything in the old archives that needs looking at? Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 08:54, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Some things I didn't know and was pleased to discover, a good DYK mate. cygnis insignis 10:06, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

That was an interesting read, thank you for putting it together. Yunshui ^雲 _水 11:02, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

+4. Nice work there. Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 13:11, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

For reference, I've added this to Wikipedia:Did you know/Statistics, as it reached almost 10,000 views on the date of mainpage. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 12:05, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Wowser! — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:34, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

@Lee Vilenski: The only draft stuff I have laying around worth looking at is under User:SMcCandlish/Incubator. It varies from new articles to overhauls (some of which might be outdated – I'm not sure the one on Russian pyramid is viable, since the article itself has changed over the years), and some splits maybe. A few are pool related, but many are not. Some are too drafty for use at all (e.g. the one on Pedro Rigual – has no sources, and only very skeletal information). Three or four are WP:REFUND rescues from AfD: Gatmaitán, Schuldt, Pool TV, maybe Williams. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:44, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Article titles

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Please comment on Talk:Sino-Vietnamese conflicts, 1979–1991

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Please comment on Talk:Motion picture content rating system

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)

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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Article titles

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Cats under the stars

Since you're a cat guy 😼, check out the unique Schrödinger's cat article, a thought experiment involving a hypothetical cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead. Huzzah! North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 17:37, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I tried to pet one once, but it wasn't there. When I decided I didn't want to pet it after all, it reappeared. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:32, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

"No proof of intent" ≠ "Exoneration"

I rather think the new Signpost direction is "interesting". Collect (talk) 17:05, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

The other side hates it, too, calling it a "sorry-not-sorry" piece. I predicted this outcome and said they should not run it, and simply do a better job with Signpost rather than make a show of groveling about how they're going to a better job. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:28, 2 April 2019 (UTC)