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September 2020

Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

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Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020 on a "Wikipedia proposals" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment

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 – Also fixed mis-classification of the RfC, and suggested it be moved to the proper page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:11, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Superstition on a "Maths, science, and technology" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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ACE stuff

Hi SMcCandlish, I know we had a lot a back and forth on the ACE RFC so far, and I think you have some good ideas - if your proposals don't pass and you want to re-explore for the next year, maybe we can workshop them a bit sooner? I think some of your intent (especially about the "voting system") may be getting lost in the mechanics. One thing that I know would help me would be to start with a mission type statement (what are all of the goals of the election) - then a description of the system, perhaps an example vote table with winners identified for the "old" and "new" mechanics - always ensuring that the mechanics support the goals. Would be willing to workshop with you if you want to. Best regards, — xaosflux ^Talk 14:08, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Sure. I honestly did not expect this to get traction on a "first run". WP is unusually resistant to changes in voting/selection processes even when they have proved problematic. The fear is that any change will automatically be for the worse. Anyway, the "mission" of a voting system change would be for Arbitrators to be elected honestly, transparently, and with less potential for manipulation of the outcome by users who carefully study the mathematics of the system and/or who collude.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:04, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I guess I didn't really mean "mission" (though it is good to have one), more defining the measurable components. For example, the way I see the current election structure, there are some measures that occur:

1. Ensure that no candidate is elected that does not have an individual majority support of those who express an opinion about them.

   This is in part to fulfill global policy requirements for checkuser and oversight admission

   This also allows for the current situation of allowing less than all seats to be filled even if there are sufficient candidates (and in fact allows for no seats to be filled)

2. Determine a ranked order of candidates

   This is because we often actual are trying to fill more than one type of seat (2-year terms, 1-year terms) and this is the discriminator

So I would think the first steps would be to review those components, see if they fit the mission, and determine if those should be changed or not. Once that part is settled, system mechanics should be reviewed such as: Must voters make a countable decision about each candidate? (This can have a huge impact on the 50% rule above)? How should people record their votes? (e.g. approval voting, ranked choices, etc). I'm a bit weary of system changes that will break that 50% rule, so careful evaluation of how things will count for that purpose are important (e.g. in "support" only type votes, if "% support" is #supports/#voters - we'd need to be very clear to voters about the impact - basically letting them know they may not abstain from expressing an opinion on a certain candidate). This is just one example, and there are LOTS of ways it could be adjusted for sure! (Even with the current mechanics there could be a "2 round" counting process, for example round one finds % using the current formula as a gating exercise, round 2 ranks winners solely based off their support count) Sorry for the long wall of text here - just throwing around some ideas! — xaosflux ^Talk 14:45, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

I see what you're getting at. Will cogitate on this when I'm more able to do so. I'm California, where it's so hot (I don't have air conditioning) I can hardly think or sit still. My initial comment is that this kind of list is good for clarity, but this specific one is missing the two points I'm most keen to make: the current system is too mathematically complex for most editors to understand, even after one tries to explain it several times; and it is manipulable to "shape" outcomes, especially by people with a maths/statistics background, and by people with a content PoV-pushing and collusive axe to grind (most especially of all when the editor in question fits both categories). Also, omething that occurred to me last night is the value of charts/tables/graphics. I was poring over nested RAID levels both on- and off-site, and the diagrams were very helpful. It's a quite analogous situation, since RAID is yet another of those mathematically complex areas where the results are not what one would expect if one did not have that background. To drive the point home, our otherwise quite in-depth article is missing a key fact about RAID 1+0 versus RAID 0+1 which to most eyes seems interchangeable; the former is actually more robust and can under 2/3 of circumstances tolerate one more component disk failure than can the latter. It's information you really have to trawl around for, provided by people who have carefully worked out the statistics of RAID-failure scenarios.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:05, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Interesting! Being able to communicate complexities of voting systems is certainly challenging when the audience is wide, I think for this case tables would be the best, such as a few tables labeled (current) (proposal A) (proposal B) that will clearly illustrate how the outcome would change based on factors that don't (e.g. "if we remove the oppose column", "if you only get x approval votes", etc). — xaosflux ^Talk 14:28, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Yar. Well, at least there's a long time to work on it. I'm swamped with other stuff right now, but am not likely to forget. Every time I think about ArbCom, almost, I grind my teeth about this ucked fup voting scheme.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:15, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Media, the arts, and architecture request for comment

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Your feedback is requested at Talk:Involuntary commitment on a "Media, the arts, and architecture" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Article Superstition in Judaism has been nominated for deletion

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Hello,

Since some editors are contesting existence of articles associating religions and religious communities to superstitions, One of the article which concerns topic has been nominated for deletion. You can support or contest the deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Superstition in Judaism by putting forward your opinion.

Thanks and regards Bookku (talk) 05:02, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Feedback requests from the Feedback Request Service

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Your feedback is requested at Wikipedia talk:Wikipediholic on a "Society, sports, and culture" request for comment, and at Talk:Cyberpunk 2077 on a "Media, the arts, and architecture" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Books & Bytes – Issue 40

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 40, July – August 2020

• New partnerships
  • Al Manhal
  • Ancestry
  • RILM
• #1Lib1Ref May 2020 report
• AfLIA hires a Wikipedian-in-Residence

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:15, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

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 – I already did that one before I saw this.

Your feedback is requested at Help talk:Citation Style 1 on a "Wikipedia technical issues and templates" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Nomination for deletion of Template:Language with name2

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Template:Language with name2 has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 08:20, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

"Serbo-Croatia" listed at Redirects for discussion

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A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Serbo-Croatia. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 September 15#Serbo-Croatia until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Soumya-8974 ^talk _contribs ^subpages 12:18, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Society, sports, and culture request for comment

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 – and then some. We had a WP:TALKFORK trainwreck. Someone removed the RfC tag, and started a duplicate discussion on the other involved article's talk page. I've now soft-redirected the one to the other, put an RfC tag back on it, and made sure it's properly listed at WP:PM.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:52, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Your feedback is requested at Talk:2020 United States racial unrest on a "Society, sports, and culture" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Dots in "U.S." at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations

I just discovered (to my surprise) that you recently swapped the dot usage for Georgia (U.S. state) and Great Northern Railway (U.S.) in the article title discussion in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations. I have a problem with that. The MoS is discussing the article titles, and I believe it should use the titles that are actually used for the articles. Although it might be stylistically better in article space to consistently omit the dots if discussing a group of topics in which some topics omit the dots, this is the Wikipedia MoS, not an article. It should stick to the facts as they exist. It should describe the actual article titles that are used, not alter them in a way that might imply that something it is referring to should be changed. —BarrelProof (talk) 15:09, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

Fine, though they actually should be changed, per WP:CONCISE and because use of "U.S." on Wikipedia is effectively doomed in the long run for reasons I've been over many times before. The short version: MoS permits "U.S.", but not in a context in which "UK" is also used, which rules out innumerable – probably the vast majority of – cases of "U.S." And this will just increase over time; as articles about the US develop more, and as articles on various topics that, in stub form, only mention the US are developed more, they are more and more likely to contain other country acronyms like UK and PRC and so on. In turn, this makes their text, with "US", conflict with the titles if they contain "U.S.", which is undesirable (we have a guideline against that, too). In the very immediate short term, I agree that the guideline examples should represent article titles the way they actually are as of that writing (or replace them with "US" ones, or use made-up examples). But that short term should in fact be short.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:45, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Pix file

One for you main page, perhaps? File:The wikipedias serious.jpg William Harris (talk) 08:35, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Will save for special seriouser okkashion. Like cheezburger day.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:47, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Maths, science, and technology request for comment

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Your feedback is requested at Talk:Superorganism on a "Maths, science, and technology" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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September

September

Dahlias in Walsdorf

Thank you for improving articles in September! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:45, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

DS alerts

Hey. Came across an old proposal of yours to autodeliver DS alerts. Unfortunate AC decided to outlaw it. The community sanctions system isn't in sync with the ArbCom one in terms of policy, and doesn't have the prohibition, so it could still be done for community sanctions I think. They cover less and smaller topic areas (COVID is probably the largest), so the effects are on a much smaller scale, but I suppose that proposal, or some amendment of it (eg summary talk/edit notices counting as awareness) can be implemented in the WP:GS system? Thoughts? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 01:02, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

I don't see why not, but I don't think that GS require anything like {{Ds/alert}}. The "notice" templates are only required, by ArbCom (and consequently by AE) for DS matters. GS and DS are different regimes. It might not be a bad idea for topics covered by the comparatively rare GS (as topics; GS are more often applies to individuals, I would think) to have a corresponding template, which the community might want auto-delievered. The "tech" to do that was never developed, of course, but I think it's probably not a not terribly complicated scripting job. I will note that in my original DS-related proposal, the support was around 50/50, and much of the opposition was based on the bogus idea that the community can't tell ArbCom to do anything. Templates and notices for GS wouldn't have that cognitive dissonance, so I would expect the support level for auto-notice to be even higher. That said, I have no idea what the community reaction would be to a proposal to have a "{{Gs/alert}}" in the first place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:33, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

{{Gs/alert}} does exist (along with identical templates to talk/edit notice templates), but (strictly speaking) I'm unsure if all community sanctions require it (I think recent ones do, at least). I'd imagine most admins would probably look for awareness before sanctioning, but not sure in practice. It currently looks the same, but it's within community purview to change, of course. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 03:51, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Oh! I had not noticed. I must have missed whatever discussion led to the GS template. In that case, by all means propose it be auto-delivered. Feel free to crib as needed from the original proposal. If it were accepted, and if it worked well, it would lead to additional leverage to do it with DS alerts.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:42, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

There probably wasn’t one, if I had to guess. The community DS system just seems thrown together over time, with not too much cohesiveness between parts (some more after my changes, but still) — it’s not very well maintained. I’m thinking your bot idea was a way to achieve the objective of better alerting without changing the process (which the community can’t do with ArbCom’s system), but since the rules of the community system can be modified maybe it’s better just to create a better/different set of awareness rules? Who knows, AC may take note and apply the changes to their system. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:34, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Sure, and even if there are not formal awareness rules for GS, people should be aware anyway. WP's rule set is complicated, especially for new users. Hell, I didn't even know GS had an alert template all and I've been here more than 15 years!  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:50, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

What do you currently think is the best way to do awareness? I've read your essay (particularly relevant, 1 and 2) a while back, are your thoughts there still current? I gather that you don't think an alert template, at least not as is currently used, is the best approach? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:35, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

I would update it a little bit, that the wording and appearance of the Ds/alert has been softened a bit in the interim. However, very little about how it is received has changed, and I don't detect any changes in the DS system that would warrant my revising my overall analysis of it. I remain convinced that simply being active in a topic subject to sanctions makes you aware of the sanctions, and that we should not fret about this anyway. "Ignorance of the law is no exception" is a principle in all systems of laws and other rules, so there's no reason it should not apply here. That said, ArbCom and the AE crowd appear "addicted" to DS and its templates and awareness-foo, so we're probably stuck with it. If the community wants to make GS work the same as DS, that could be said to be an overall BUREAUCRACY/CREEP reduction, despite being more bureaucratic at the fine-grained level, because it gets rid of two systems to have to learn, instead of just one. However, I don't think it's actually necessary for GS to be subjected to a notice-and-awareness regime. The existence of {{Gs/alert}} doesn't require one, and it can simply serve as an FYI template. If the template becomes required in order for GS to be applied, though, I would be in favor of the bot-delivery scheme originally proposed for Ds/alert. If it works, then it will be easier to get ArbCom to accept it for Ds/alert later.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:24, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Interesting idea. If you're still interested enough in this, if you can get a proposal passed (since that's not quite my forté), I can probably code up the bot. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:38, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

Maybe at some point. I don't have a lot of bandwidth for WP right now, and this would require some background research into how GS operates, what its rules are, what previous discussions might have been held that could impact this idea, etc. I already knew all about DS when I wrote the proposal relating to that one, but GS is something I know little about yet.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:05, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Nice answer at ACE. Take a look at this, this, this, and this from just the past week - heck, from decent admins and a functionary - and I think it becomes a pattern that the system is too complex for its own good. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:01, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader: Yeesh, that's some wretched mess. Honestly, it's worse than I expected. I've mostly seen DS problems from a WP mission and philosophy erosion viewpoint, and an unfairly harmed users perspective, and an effect on community subsets position, an also with regard to the thwarting of content development and collaboration, an even observing the effect DS has had on making WP look more like a hostile and trap-laden environment to join. Hadn't looked much into an "admins coughing up their own skulls over it" effect.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:41, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

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Your feedback is requested at Talk:Dennis Nilsen on a "Wikipedia style and naming" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Pichenotte

Hi SMcCandlish. Since you appear to be one of the primary contirbutors/editors of Pichenotte, perhaps you can help this person asking at WP:THQ#Greetings, I am new at this and would like help editing a page about the boardgame called PICHENOTTE about improving it. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:36, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. I've offered, over there, to review and, as appropriate, integrate appropriate and sourced userspace draft material.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:20, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to try and help this editor out. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:25, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Adding Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pichenotte in case you haven't noticed yet. FWIW, it hadn't yet been nominated for deletion when I posted here yesterday. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:32, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

I commented in the AfD. I think a merger is possibly feasible, but I also don't think proper WP:BEFORE has been done, just some perfunctory WP:GOOGLE.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:09, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Hello Scott, please see my suggestions and references at ThreeVictors (talk) 16:18, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

I have made a draft of changes for Pichenotte

Hello SMcCandlish I have made a draft at Do you have time to look at the suggestions and give some feedback ? Thank youThreeVictors (talk) 02:24, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

I have not yet had time to pore over it in great detail, but the feedback on your talk page hits the high points: what we really need are independent (non-manufacturer) sources that cover this game in non-trivial detail, to even salvage the article at all. I think that will most likely be paper books, about games and about Quebec folk-ways and pastimes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:32, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

And the AfD has been relisted for another week.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:57, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

References

"MOS:QUESTION" listed at Redirects for discussion

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A discussion is taking place to address the redirect MOS:QUESTION. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 September 28#MOS:QUESTION until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 13:03, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Biographies request for comment

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Your feedback is requested at Talk:Dafne Keen on a "Biographies" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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Nomination for merging of Template:Being merged

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Template:Being merged has been nominated for merging with Template:Merging. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. JsfasdF252 (talk) 01:52, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

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