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Describing species

You have a good handle on taxonomy, but peer review is not a requirement to describe a new species. I've encountered organismal biologists with years of experience who think that peer review is a required, so it's not an uncommon misconception.

The peer review process didn't exist in Linnaeus's time (although there are many rules for describing species that have been added since Linnaeus). Raymond Hoser#Taxonomic work and Wells and Wellington affair are a couple of notorious cases where taxonomists self-published new species, in a way that the taxonomic community thought was unethical, but they did follow the all the requirements for naming species. It is true that most new species description are published in peer-reviewed sources, but reputable scientists do describe species in sources that aren't peer reviewed. Taxonomic monographs are often published as books (which may have an editor, but not peer reviewers), and usually contain descriptions of new species.

This goes back to the importance of taxonomic databases. Since self-publication is in accordance with the rules of nomenclature, some secondary source is needed to show that the taxonomic community accepts that a new species is valid. 20 years ago, that secondary source would've been a monograph. And the opinions as to validity presented in the taxonomic databases are often based on monographs. But if the most recent monograph was published 10 years ago (which would be a very short time in taxonomy), and 2 new species have been described since then, Wikipedia needs a source that shows whether the recently described species should be regarded as valid or not. General practice among Wikipedia editors who work on taxonomic articles is to not create articles for newly described species until a relevant taxonomic database acknowledges them. We do get new articles for newly described species from editors who see a news item about the new species (very few new species make the news), but theses aren't editors that do a lot of work on taxonomy articles. Plantdrew (talk) 17:10, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Now... how much of this can you get in the relevant Wikipedia articles? Many editors use them as a source of truth. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:14, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

Relevant Wikipedia articles (I think Taxonomy_(biology)#Taxonomic_descriptions and species description would the primary ones) don't say that peer review IS a requirement. Are you saying that they should explicitly state that peer review is NOT a requirement. There are 3 independent sets of rules of describing species; one for animals, one for plants/fungi and one for bacteria. I wasn't thinking about bacteria when I wrote my previous comment; there is one single journal approved for publication of new bacterial species (not sure if the rules of nomenclature for bacteria explicitly call for peer review, or if it's implied as prerequisite to getting published in the right journal in the first place; and I can't check right now as the relevant website is down). The different rule sets make it a little hard to talk about species description practices generally, especially for sourcing a negative statement (i.e. that peer review is NOT required). I do have a source that could serve to support peer review NOT being required for animals.

I'm a little puzzled by your comment that editors use Wikipedia articles as a source of truth. Surely far more readers do than editors. Were you thinking about some guidance that is more editor focused? It seems an essay on the role of taxonomic databases is Wikipedia is needed. Plantdrew (talk) 22:06, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm thinking about the internal debates, and especially the upcoming Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Requests for comment/Article creation at scale. Editors (the ones who are trying to base their responses on facts, at least) often look in our own articles to find out, e.g., what constitutes a Secondary source or what Editorial independence means. I think that the two main examples in that RFC will be individual species and professional athletes (especially the ones from before about the mid-20th century). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:54, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Discretionary sanctions alert: Gender and sexuality

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in gender-related disputes or controversies or in people associated with them. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

To opt out of receiving messages like this one, place {{Ds/aware}} on your user talk page and specify in the template the topic areas that you would like to opt out of alerts about. For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Madeline (part of me) 20:06, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

@Maddy from Celeste, since you're a relatively new editor, I'd love to know what you think of the wording in these boilerplate messages. The first time you saw one, did it seem kind of scary? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:49, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

I did think it's a bit ominous-sounding at first, though by the time I received one myself I already knew the procedures so I wasn't freaked out. On the other hand, there are only so many ways to inform someone that getting banned is significantly easier in certain topic areas. Madeline (part of me) 06:33, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. It's always good to have an idea of what someone with "fresh eyes" sees. I think we made some progress on it during a re-write a couple of years ago, but I still wonder whether a more ...humorous? message would work better: "Friendly warning: other people (possibly including the person posting this message) were really bad at these articles a few years ago, and Mom is still mad about it. Keep your head low, move slowly, and stay out of the line of fire." It's not really suitable for such a ceremonial action, but I think it would give people a clearer understanding of the actual situation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:42, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

@Maddy from Celeste and WAID, I know this thread is a bit old, but I'll poke my head in.

I think the message does sound ominous; at least, editors will think "why am I getting this warning"? The italic part helps.

About the comment "there are only so many ways to inform someone that getting banned is significantly easier in certain topic areas", you are right. The message could say "Just so you know, it is easier to get banned when you are editing in (topic), so please be careful". I like seeing plain language when possible. David10244 (talk) 06:42, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree. Plain language is also helpful for people who aren't native English speakers, and that's a sizable fraction of editors here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:29, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Well, the good news is that only the first notification about a designated Contentious Topic needs to use a specific template. Later notices for other Contentious Topics can be done with any message you like. isaacl (talk) 17:47, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

WAID, on your point, @Chiswick Chap just accused me of misbehavior for alerting them [1] Venkat TL (talk) 18:58, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

I can certify that when someone that one has been having a discussion with suddenly puts such a thing on one's talk page, many thoughts go through one's mind about that person's intentions, mood, personality, and emotions, so it is hardly likely to be conducive to an open and collegiate discussion, even if it is formally correct. It also leaves the average person thinking that it will be best to avoid the whole area, of course. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:04, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

If you are in a dispute with an experienced editor, and you leave a DS alert, then you should expect them to notice you've taken the necessary step to permit you to tattle to Mom about them. Even an inexperienced editor might assume you were trying to scare them away from editing. Leaving DS alerts during a dispute is not an effective way to win friends and influence people. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:10, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

"Accusation of misbehavior" is so far the worst over-reaction I have seen for a procedural act. It is an 'alert' and if the user isn't alarmed (alerted?), well then the alert might fail its purpose. Venkat TL (talk) 19:24, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

It's challenging, isn't it? Because there's the procedural act, which could be taken as a purely routine action, but there's also the fact that an individual editor decided to take this consequential action, at this specific time. In the context of a dispute, it is rather like a guy sidling up to your home or business and saying something like "Nice place you've got here. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it". It will feel like an attempt to intimidate, even if the words themselves are neutral.

I have wondered occasionally whether we should have these delivered automatically, by bot, e.g., on your fifth-ever edit to a tagged article or your third in the same week. Bots are rarely accused of malign intentions. It'd probably be simpler to have a noticeboard where you could ask uninvolved editors to consider threatening the person you're in a dispute with. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:45, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

What is the alternative if not done in the moment? we cannot go back in time, and waiting a week/month later to alert may be misconstrued. (may even be called psychopathic, the user waited for n days and then posted that.)

I have a better suggestion expanding on your bot idea. These pages are generally tagged on the talk page. so a bot can easily alert every editor on their first edit to such topic page once a year. This will probably need RFC, but starting a subscription based bot service like newsletter would be easily acceptable I believe. People who take offence with the human alert can subscribe for a bot alert. Venkat TL (talk) 19:58, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Well, the most popular alternative to not doing it during a dispute is not doing it at all. Most editors don't want to see people sanctioned, and the only significant difference between delivering this exact message, and delivering any other message ("Were you around during WP:ARBPS? It's amazing how that subject has been such a problem for so many years"), is that sending or receiving this particular message makes editors eligible for sanctions through Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement. If you don't want someone sanctioned (including yourself), then don't deliver the sanctions-enabling message.

Bot-delivered notices have been considered in the past and rejected on the grounds that we don't want needless spam (e.g., if you were just fixing a typo) or to scare off less experienced editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:09, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

By suggesting not doing it, you are assuming that the users dont need to be sanctioned at all. If so then the sanctions itself will not be existing in such a utopia. nobody knows how people are going to behave in a topic area full of people with passions and POVs. Thanks for trying, I believe this kind of sugarcoating works in negative way, it can be construed as "Nice place you've got here..." .

I think a plain, "Please note: the article X is under DS Y" should siffice. but sadly it wont count as an alert, as DS mandates this template and only that template, nothing else.

Speaking for myself, I think this alert asks people to follow the rules, specifically about non consensus based editing and revert wars. Most of the time the intention is not to sanction but ask the editor to stick to the tested rules.

If I had to choose between spam vs getting offended, I would easily choose spam.

It was good talking about it, I have never discussed it with anyone before, thank you for kind replies. It is late here, so I will take a bow. Have a good day/evening. Venkat TL (talk) 20:23, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

I believe that most editors don't need to be sanctioned at all. I think that my view is common throughout the community. I see that you've gotten blocked three times in the last three months, but that's really unusual. Most editors are here for a decade or more with zero blocks.

I also suggest being slow to bother with DS alerts because if people really "need" to be sanctioned, then the DS system is not the only way to make that happen. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:29, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

twice. Thanks to the generosity of @Daniel Case. Venkat TL (talk) 08:46, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

UK RfC

Hi, WhatamIdoing. Would you be willing to close the RfC with a brief statement? I don't think anyone else is going to do it and I'd rather not be the one to close it as the originator. Legobot will close it in two day's time (11 Oct) if we don't do anything. Maybe that is fine? Angry Candy (talk) 14:45, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Bryan or Redrose64, I wonder if one of you could manage to do this in the next few days, assuming nobody responds to the ANRFC post before then? I commented at the RFC (though not on the substance), and Aquillion and I both commented at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment#Are Request for Comments meant to be neutral, so there's a small risk that an editor might feel like I was biased against the less popular viewpoint.

Angry candy, in plainer language, Legobot will stop advertising the RFC in two days. "Closing" is one of those words that gets used for multiple purposes. Also, Wikipedia:There is no deadline. You don't need a summary statement right away. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:11, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Done. Bryan Henderson (giraffedata) (talk) 02:20, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you!

Thank you!

Really appreciating your thoughtful, sensible comments in the Article creation at scale RfC. I want a double plus thanks with sparkly bits button that means the Foundation has to give you book token credits, but perhaps this meagre coffee (exchangeable for your beverage of choice) will suffice. Cheers, Espresso Addict (talk) 01:30, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Aww, you're sweet. I'll take hot chocolate, please. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:46, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

On "A is a village near B in county, country", I'm thinking of a series of stubs on CPs in an administrative division in which I used to live that were created in 2005 from A to mid-B by an editor who never touched them again. Several years later, I created the set B–W (there are no XYZ) as fat stub/start articles, but it took me a further couple of years and a deal of obsessive–compulsiveness to go back to the As and make better articles of 'em, even though I lived near one particular A, a gorgeous village with a complex history just begging for further expansion. And even now, if I'm honest, I resent just a teensy-weensy smidge that the B-class article on that particular A, of which I am the only non-bot editor with >=1% text, "belongs" to the original creator. Perhaps I'm unusual, but there's enough defensiveness over the list of editors by article count that I doubt it. Cheers, Espresso Addict (talk) 23:52, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

You're certainly not unique in that regard. I've seen editors ask whether they could get prior edits deleted (especially redirects) so that they can claim credit for creating the article. The Wikipedia:Four Award is sometimes blamed for this, but I suspect that we would have some of these requests anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:45, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

House dress

"House dress, a type of simple dress worn at home for household chores."

I added this to Dress then User:Toddst1 and keeps reverting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dress&diff=1115561269&oldid=1115552126

Do you think House dress is an improvement? .... 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 03:27, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

I would assume that Todd doesn't have much reason to know what a house dress is – presumably he's not a woman born into the Greatest Generation, which is the generation that wore those dresses – and wasn't thinking about just WP:Building the web to existing articles.

Have you considered having a polite conversation at Talk:Dress about whether the article should include a link to House dress? Perhaps other editors would have some alternative suggestions, such as adding a sentence in the ===20th century=== section, since that type of dress was invented in the 20th century. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:41, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks

My fat fingers - GizzyCatBella🍁 03:56, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

No big deal. (Of course, if there had been a problem, I'd certainly want to know. My fingers sometimes seem to type of their own accord, and then I look up and discover that I've destroyed the formatting on a page, left out half a sentence, or typed words that start with the same letter as what I was thinking, but otherwise don't match, like "random" when I meant "ranger".) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:02, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

🙂 I don’t even know how or when that happened to be honest 🤷‍♀️, I’m getting old you know.. - GizzyCatBella🍁 04:22, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

medical terms

It seems that many of us are beginning to think about making our articles more readable for our readers. In medical articles we try to avoid terms that are familiar to those in the trade but not the general public when we can. However, we do frequently write that such and such was found to be whatever according to a review article or a systemic review, something that most of our readers know nothing about. Look for example at a brand new article, Birth plan. These reviews can be very misleading. For example if they looked at 100 studies and only found a small number that met their standards they might well come up with something that casts doubt on the value of, in this case a birth plan--which I find very hard to believe as accurate. Do you have any ideas on this issue? Sectionworker (talk) 21:07, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Well... the story presented there doesn't seem to have much to do with my rather cynical understanding of birth plans. The view I've developed may be as (in)valid as the fear of the full moon in the emergency room, but they seem to be a list of how it's never going to happen. Also, I tend to believe the nurses who joke that if the birth plan is longer than two pages, it'll be a C-section. I don't know any mothers who wrote one. I wonder if it's more of a thing for first births, as a way to manage fear of the unknown, or for home births, which require more planning in general. I looked at a few books by promoters online tonight, and they seem to have padded the birth plan by including chapters on deciding whether to have a hospital birth, whether to have a midwife or physician, what to pack in your suitcase, etc. By the time you hand over the birth plan to the nurse at the hospital, all of those choices have either been enacted or it's too late.

It might be useful to rearrange the article to describe the contents of a typical or officially recommended birth plan (assuming we can pretend that a typical version exists) before getting into questions of who recommends it. For example, consider the line "which individuals should be present at the birth for support, food and water intake, body position, care of the newborn regarding separation and skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding, desired interventions if there are complications, pain relief, and cultural preferences". I read that and think: "which individuals should be present at the birth for support (hospitals handled that for centuries before birth plans were invented, and midwives for basically all of human history), food and water intake (you don't necessarily get a choice), body position (a first-time mother won't know what works for her, so this is likely to be practical only for people who need to write things like 'I can't roll over on my right side because of an injury'; otherwise, it's just going to be 'here are all the options I read in a book that sound appealing to me'), care of the newborn regarding separation (you don't necessarily get a choice) and skin-to-skin contact (why wouldn't anyone want this, if the baby's healthy enough to do it? I suppose it's the place to write 'I have sensory processing needs and can't tolerate being touched' or 'My husband's carpal tunnel problem has flared up recently, and he's terrified that he'll drop the baby – and for solid nerve-damage reasons, not just new-father jitters'), breastfeeding, desired interventions if there are complications (the parents may be the least competent people in the room to make these decisions), pain relief (first-time mothers are likely to be unrealistic), and cultural preferences (useful)."

If I were running the L&D ward, I might insist on birth plans, but turn it into a checklist based on local policies and practical points. "Choice 1: This hospital uses intermittent fetal monitoring whenever this is medically sound. If the staff recommend continuous fetal monitoring, it's because they think there are medical problems that could result in your baby dying today, and they are hoping that if the machines alert the staff to a problem quickly enough, we might be able to save your baby's life. Your choices: [ ] Yes, please take reasonable steps to save my baby's life, even if it means I will be stuck with a cart full of beeping machinery. [ ] No, I am not the kind of person you can trust to choose my baby's life over the temporary annoyance of a beeping machine. Choice 2: It's the hospital's policy that people who may suddenly need surgery, such as a C-section, don't get to eat or drink much, if anything, for their own safety. [ ] Okay, but what happens if I get really hungry or thirsty? [ ] No, and when you request the legal conservatorship, you can tell the judge that I said I believe that I'm magically protected against all complications of anesthesia, including aspiration pneumonia."

As you can see, I'm not the kind of person you'd want on the hospital's marketing committee, but I'm struggling to see what a reasonable, well-informed person would put in a birth plan for a hospital birth that would make a significant, positive difference and not just be standard operating procedure. You could note things like an initial preference for a comfortable birth vs a natural one, but the kinds of things that I'm seeing online could probably be shortened to "I really don't know what I'm talking about, and I manage anxiety by overplanning".

In terms of how to expand the article, I wonder if it would be possible to find sources about its use in vulnerable populations. A birth plan might be valuable for people with certain disabilities, because they can write things like "I'm blind, but that doesn't mean I'm incapable of caring for a baby" or "I had my breasts removed due to breast cancer, including the nipples and the milk glands all the way up into my armpits. Put a sign on the door that warns the lactation consultant not to come in here and tell me to 'just try' breastfeeding." I can also imagine that a birth plan might be appropriate for fetal death, or when the baby is expected to die during or shortly after birth.

Facts that are missing: There's no single thing that's a birth plan; a note scrawled on the back of a paper napkin could be called a birth plan. The article should say that they're used all over the world. I'd also like to know something about the difference between a collaborative birth plan and a self-prepared one. The first cited source suggests that a self-prepared birth plan, sprung on the providers at the last moment, may be somewhere between useless and slightly harmful.

This reminds me about living wills. Some years ago, one of the midwestern hospitals apparently reduced the concept of a living will to a small number of simpler questions. There were three or five questions. One of them was "Do you want antibiotics?" Every person admitted to the hospital answered those questions. Over time, it solved a lot of problems for them – mostly, they thought, because the patients later talked to their kids and grandkids about how they answered those questions and why. If anyone has figured out what content in a birth plan would be useful, it would be good to mention that in the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:42, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I think this has perhaps veered off from the original question. It may have veered usefully off, but I think the original question was more about whether we should explicitly attribute "according to a review article or a systemic review" in-text and also on the value of systematic reviews for article writing. Maybe it would be better to deal with this by thinking about other medical issues and leave discussion of specific articles to those article talk pages.

For the first, I would say generally no. If their conclusion represents mainstream medical/scientific accepted views then we can state them in Wikipedias voice. You are absolutely right that the general reader will have no idea what a "review" is (other than, an opinion about a restaurant, a film or a product on Amazon), never mind what a "systematic review" is. And furthermore, they have no need to know what those are in order to understand that Wonderpam is effective. I think we often explicitly cite reviews like this because either we are used to writing like that on talk, or because we think it gives authority to what we say. Sectionworker is right that all it does is confuse the reader with jargon. Sometimes explicitly citing reviews can be a sign of an article becoming a battleground between two factions, who then effectively fight in front of the reader. Or maybe just editors who are so used to writing defensive text in such battleground topics, that they forget what encyclopaedic text looks like.

There will be cases where we should mention reviews and I'm thinking perhaps of cases where they have been historically important in the adoption or rejection of some practice. Areas where the science was notably contested or in doubt and was then conclusively decided perhaps. And for some topics where the history is dealt with in detail, it is useful to show how the science has progressed. I'm thinking e.g. Lung cancer#History. A treatment section in an article should I think preferably cite clinical guidelines or consensus guidelines which are often based on systematic reviews but which can take into account the practicalities and options available. An article dealing extensively with research on a therapy, like ketogenic diet, needs to explain then what these kinds of reserach and reviews are. We could write a much shorter ketogenic diet article that merely says whether it is effective and for whom, but then I think it would be less educational. If we did do that, I'd argue that it should just comment on the effectiveness without attribution.

Wrt the general use of systematic reviews, I agree with Sectionworker that often they can set the bar so high they conclude saying "we know nothing". I've recently read two systematic reviews on the ketogenic diet (PMID 33354711 and PMID 35535020), which come to somewhat different conclusions and vary wildly in whether the authors consider animal models relevant, and one even suggests (I think) looking at biomarkers rather than observation. I've read several systematic reviews on this topic where it is clear the authors are not subject experts, have unrealistic expectations of the patient population group, and are merely following an algorithm or perhaps drawing a line wherever suits the case they want to make. In other words, I'm not sure they are always the gold standard we think, and may be as prone to bias as a narrative review.

But more importantly for article building, they only tend to look at one narrow thing: effectiveness (or toxicity/tolerance) of a treatment (or toxin). When we build articles round such reviews, we end up with a highly medical-science point-of-view of a topic that is far more complex than that.

To return to the original topic, and trying not to get side-tracked, think about choices for pain relief in childbirth. We do that because a medical science approach might be to impose whatever option the medic thinks is best (and that science has determined is best), which could be an epidural say. When we go in for other kinds of operations or procedures, we don't tend to get offered a choice (at least not in the UK, maybe you can pick the cheapest in the US). They recognise that some people want to try without pain relief or have experiences of previous choices that they don't want to repeat, etc. And they also discuss the choices in terms of managing expectations, so someone wanting a home birth won't get an epidural, and even if you go into hospital, there may not be time or availability-of-staff to give you one. So here the benefit of considering and discussing the options, and expressing a preference, are for reasons quite separate to something you can measure and assess in some systematic review. Ok, you could do some questionnaire "How much agency did you have during your birthing experience, from 1..10", but I can think of 101 ways that the results could be influenced by factors quite separate from whether or not there was a birth plan document.

I think instead, we offer choices (and manage expectations) about pain relief because medics recognise that people vary and they too would want a choice in that situation. That kind of human empathy and acceptance of human variation isn't something you can measure in a systematic review. -- Colin°^Talk 10:34, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I blew past the easy question, because it was settled years ago: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#Cite sources, don't describe them. You shouldn't write things like "In a 2019 review article" for accepted facts. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:50, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the above re reviews Waid. But re your long response to birth plans, it seems that we disagree on almost everything. As I think you may know, I am a retired RN. In all my years I never met a nurse or any other staff that would laugh and make fun of a birth plan and I never worked in any hospital where that sort of attitude would be acceptable either. I've always remembered back when I was a new nurse and another one told me about her first patient death experience. The family was gathered about a youngish woman's bed as she died when her cancer caused her to blead out. The nurse told me you could see her life going out in her eyes. And then she said the dead woman's sister and she ran into the closet hugging each other and crying. You usually avoid showing that sort of emotion but never the less you do care very much about your patients. As you may know, the nurses that took care of dying COVID patients and were the only ones allowed to be with them as they died suffered and could hardly take it any more.

About the birth plans, I thought that the UK would have more birth friendly hospitals than even here because I thought that most births are in a hospital but assisted by a midwife. Plus I thought that most women are released the next day because they have midwives to watch over them at home. And I don't think that there's any question but that a midwife gives better care than an OB&GYN gives. My understanding re a birth plan, even with a midwife in charge it helps a woman to feel in control of the birth, helps her parter or other person of her choice to understand the guidelines that she and her midwife or other birthing professional have decided on, and in the rare case that a midwife has two births going on at the same time assures her that her plan is available if it is needed. Furthermore, if the nurses are laughing about a birth plan, it is hard to believe that they are not familiar with the midwife that practices at their hospital's expectations. Furthermore, any midwife that assists with either a home birth or a hospital birth is well aware of the always present danger of a lawsuit. So, they know exactly what the hospital expects of them, too. All of this is helpful as a woman draws up her birth plan, and it is clear that it is best done with her midwife's help or if she has a physician as her care giver the birth class that s/he has her taking. Colin, I'd like to make some comments about your helpful edit too. Sectionworker (talk) 21:06, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I can get the idea that someone who turns up with a 10-page birth plan they've written entirely themselves is likely to be a problem patient. The way I see it, the plan is tool to begin and work on a discussion between all those involved. While yes I'm sure many people think about who they want with them for support and don't need a prompt, there are plenty clueless people in the world who need a little nudge that they should think about it before labour starts. Examples like whether you want the baby cleaned up before being placed on your tummy haven't just appeared out of nowhere. I can see how it might be best to ask that question before the baby is born, unless someone is offended you think their baby is especially dirty. My experience of all this is a generation out of date. But I do recall feeling that they wanted to give you as much control over this very personal and special event but at the same time making you aware that it may all go to shit. I remember the midwife at the antenatal class demonstrating birth using Playmobil figures round a tiny bed. That while some births might be you, your partner and a midwife, which is all very cosy and private, if you urgently need a caesarean, ... and then they dumped an entire tin of Playmobil figures into the scene. -- Colin°^Talk 21:39, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I suspect that whether a birth plan is useful depends on its contents, which is why I'm interested in the difference between a collaboratively written plan and a self-prepared one that's sprung on the L&D nurses at the last minute. The sort where the parents and the midwife/ob sit down together and review the actual policies and guidelines, in light of the individual situation, sounds helpful. For example, one of the hospitals near me doesn't do salpingectomies (all the others do). For about half the women planning a C-section, that would be an important thing to know, and you'd find this out by talking to your healthcare provider rather than by writing a self-prepared birth plan. However, that kind of useful information doesn't seem to be going into birth plans. Here are some examples of the other kind:

• Don't use words like labor or contractions.
• Don't let her know how far labor has progressed.
• Don't look at or touch the birth canal.
• Don't give any advice or coaching unless she specifically invites you to.
• She's planning to post on social media every five minutes.
• They're filming everything for television.
• The father is to be naked throughout labor and delivery.
• Nobody at the hospital is allowed to mention the baby's sex.
• The only light in the room is to be a lamp that looks like a candle.

Plus an endless supply of trivial things that the staff don't care about (in the US: Bring your favorite pillow? Wear your own T-shirt or make the hospital handle all the laundry?) or that require no advance planning (e.g., listening to music on your own phone; turning down the lights) or that can't be fulfilled (e.g., a water birth in a facility that doesn't do water births).

In this blog post, a woman describes her own birth plan (first birth) and what she thought about it afterwards. It does not sound like it was an especially useful exercise. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:42, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Well I will discuss that silly, silly list later but for now I am just filled with rage at this woman's doctor and what she put her through. All this was done just to let it be known that all this about empowering women is just silly, silly when it comes to decisions that only the highest level of humanity, physicians, should be making. (Not to mention that it makes control of the timing of the birth easier for the physician to plan their day around.) What an absolute asshole her physician is and there are plenty of them out there who are just like that. (fortunately a lot more of them are men than women) She lets her write that silly birth plan but then puts her on pitocin long before it is medically necessary. For example, see the Mayo Clinic's advise here: " Inducing labor is a serious decision. Work with your health care provider to make the best choice for you and your baby."[2] And then to have the physician come into her room sneering at her about "natural" birth? More later. Sectionworker (talk) 21:04, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

"She lets her write that silly birth plan" is my point. Silly birth plans are being written. Does anyone (i.e., any reliable source) know what is actually useful and non-silly to put in those plans? I haven't found anything yet. Maybe the research hasn't been done. I could imagine, though, that useful conversations could be had about things like general pain tolerance (e.g., if you have a very low pain tolerance for everyday things, you should be encouraged to embrace the benefits of an epidural; if you have a high pain tolerance, you should be encouraged in the opposite direction) and to review some basic facts, such as the fairy tale that you can "opt for a cesarean to avoid the pain". Nobody tells any other class of patients that if a surgeon slices your lower belly open and roots around in it for a few minutes, you'll "avoid the pain". We tell them they'll be in pain for at least a week afterwards while everything heals. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:45, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure that finding an example of someone doing something silly on the internet is relevant. Perhaps it would be useful to set our personal opinions aside, you know, like Wikipedians? :-). The NHS for England and Wales, preparing for the bith, list a birth plan along with antenatal classes, thinking about location, and packing your bag for hospital. The Getting ready for the birth page on NHS Scotland is similar. This is a thing that a national health service regard as a standard (though optional) part of pregnancy preparation. If it was widely regarded by health professionals as a silly foolish thing to do, you'd only be able to read about it on some wellness section in a glossy magazine. Indeed, if it was as stupid an idea as is being suggested above, then perhaps the NHS pages would say "Please please, for crying out loud, don't make a birth plan, you are wasting our time and setting yourself up for disappointment".

Sectionworker, a good source might be NCT: Writing a birth plan and deciding about pain relief. They are a reliable lay source, and you can click the little slider button on the page to show their references. One of their sources PMID 30675962 is a systematic review (hmm) and surprise surprise finds "There is not enough evidence to support or refute that birth plan can improve the birth experience or satisfaction with birth." Let's be clear here, they are saying they haven't found enough evidence meeting their standards, to support but also to reject birth plans. And yet they exist and they continue to be promoted by my NHS and childbirth charities. The second source PMC 3392605 has some huge caveats in it about being only an interview with a self-selected 15 people and "this study is very specific to the Waterloo Region in Ontario, Canada", which mirrors my comment above about how it is impossible to measure these things without 101 other factors entering the mix. It is a good example of how I think even thinking a systematic review might work out is naive. Their comment The clearest recommendation that results from this study is that all members of the labor and birthing care team, including family, partners, nurses, doulas, midwives, and obstetricians, need to support women in making informed choices and negotiating these decisions during the birth process. is useful. Becasue that is the aim, "to support women in making informed choices and negotiating these decisions during the birth process", and whether that is done formally with a template you download from the NHS, a few sentences on piece of paper, or just a verbal discussion with health professionals during your preparation for birth, those things are undeniably appropriate goals. There are choices and we want them to be informed ones and for them to be also aware of when choices might be made for them. A healthcare system can, I think, use such a document as an aid in that process, and that opinion is demonstrated by the fact that it is used by health professionals in that process. There are some silly people in the world, there are some rude health professionals in the world, and there are some opinionated Wikipedians in the world, but none of them change this hard fact. -- Colin°^Talk 10:55, 23 November 2022 (UTC):

Waid says this and I fully agree: "I'd also like to know something about the difference between a collaborative birth plan and a self-prepared one. The first cited source suggests that a self-prepared birth plan, sprung on the providers at the last moment, may be somewhere between useless and slightly harmful." This also shows how some physicians use their patients to boost there already sky high egos. To let that blog pt. have such unrealistic expectations about the amount of pain involved in a natural birth and then let her call that her birth plan is just maddening to me because I have known in my career some like that. That doctor knew full well that she would be screaming with pain when the pitocin took effect. And then to ridicule her about her "birth plan", which had nothing what so ever to do with a real birth plan...grrr. If she was not willing to help her patient to write up a real birth plan she should have had her go to birth classes. Which she should have done anyway but seemingly did not. I rate her doctor D- because there are plenty of them out there and in other fields that are even worse.

BTW, if the hospital that this doc works at has these sort of "birth plans" thrown on their desks perhaps the nurses do laugh in the break room and write up the above list like the husband will be naked throughout which sounds to me to be an exaggeration of something that really did happen. In the U.S. we only have (from memory) about 3% midwife attended births. But they are not allowed to be the attendant in the hospital and could only, perhaps, act as a doula. Also, only around only 28% (memory) are certified Baby Friendly where the dad holds the baby skin to skin. Perhaps the above mentioned hospital was in Florida or some other Southern state where things a pitifully backward in many areas who are not aware of dads doing skin-to-skin.

Anyway, I will try to work with the article to make it plain that it is a tool to use with the help of some sort of professional. I did look for that already and didn't see anything.. I have asked CrossRoads if it would be ok to have the page be for both education and plan as that will help. Much thanks to both of you and hopefully we can improve the new article. Sectionworker (talk) 19:23, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

Yes, NHS! I had completely forgot about them and in fact before we got on this long discussion here I was going to try to work that site into the pregnancy article section. It should be easy enough to work NHS info into the birth plan article. They say "midwife" but I'm sure it's OK to add "or other healthcare..." Sectionworker (talk) 19:40, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

That doctor knew full well that she would be screaming with pain when the pitocin took effect. Maybe, but everyone's different. I know several women who thought childbirth wasn't that bad, including one who was was describing her experience of being induced with pitocin. I also know a couple whose experience with ordinary, uncomplicated, non-induced childbirth put them off having any more children.

I suspect that the "naked" birth plan came from a nudist couple. Skin-to-skin doesn't require being completely naked, or being naked before the baby's out.

In California, certified nurse midwives aren't required to have any physician supervision for low-risk births. They can be the sole attendant in the hospital. I think about 10% of births here use a CNM, and that almost none of them are home births.

I am looking forward to seeing what you can make of the article. "A tool to be created in partnership with a healthcare professional" sounds like it would be a useful concept to communicate to readers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:29, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

OK the, since you seem to want to continue to argue. It does not matter what a few women told you. Let's use stuff we can source. It is well known that pitocin does make cramps hurt more. As for the silly list, as though it happens all the time and is worth discussing here, please show me the source where you got that stuff. If we're going to argue about it I need the source. As for CNMs using hospitals I see I was wrong about that as it is now being done in many hospitals here. I am glad to see some progress. Sectionworker (talk) 04:30, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

I think we shouldn't be quick to condemn the ob for teasing the woman. After all, if she knew what she was doing, and she thought that having her husband make funny faces at her would get her through labor, then maybe the ob expected her to have a high pain tolerance, Or maybe they had the kind of months-long or years-long relationship that included gentle teasing, or one in which difficulties were met with humor.

Some sources for you: Page 162 in this book covers birth plans from the POV of informed consent and legal issues. Page 79 in this book has a list of "topics typically included". Page 128 in the same book puts limits on implementation (safe birth first, birth plan second). Page 381 in this book has a list of topics that a birth plan "should" include and puts the duty to explain to the family that they can't have what they asked for on the nurse. Two useful points on that page: First, "The woman must also understand that the more extensive her birth plan, the less is the likelihood that all her expectations will be met", and second, that the birth plan gets integrated into the nursing care plan. Page 381 in this book says that birth plans "should be developed collaboratively during prenatal care to assist families and the healthcare team discuss their respective expectations". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:17, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

All good information but I never argued that the plan should be made without assist from a health care person. As for defending that asshole OB she had, I just will never see how you can defend her. OBs have on the average 10 to 20 births a month, thus they know full well what the experience is like. And then you are telling me that she just thought that the patient seemed to have a high level of pain tolerance and so, oh let's just joke about it rather than ask the patient to take birthing class to learn what she's in for. And then to start pitocin at 4cm instead of 6 goes against all protocol except of course the protocol of not waking the OB in the middle of the night for a patient birth. Please see this site to see what should have happened[3] Sectionworker (talk) 20:57, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't know, or say, what the ob was thinking. I only say that I can think of several scenarios in which it wouldn't have been completely inappropriate or unwanted, and the mother did not say how she felt about this. Some women would have felt crushed by disapproval. Others wouldn't. Others might even gain confidence from a joke, the same way that nervous fliers gain confidence from seeing a smiling, laughing, clearly unstressed flight attendant when the plane encounters turbulence. I wouldn't recommend it as a general behavior towards a stranger, but I don't think we should make assumptions (either way) about how it was experienced between those two particular people, within their own unique relationship. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:45, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

I find it totally amazing that you would want to continue to defend an OB that wanted her patient to check into the hospital to be induced because she was 1cm dilated. And then to start induction at 4cm before she was even having any regular cramps, which signifies the beginning of real labour. And then tease her about her wish for a natural childbirth? Not only did this doc not help her patient prepare for a natural birth she saw to it that the patient was sure to fail. It should be plain that the way the doc handled this woman's birth was standard practice for her in her practice because it made her schedule more 9 to 5 than up at any hour of the day or night.Sectionworker (talk) 17:56, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

1 cm dilated, yes, but also 100% full-term and with an 8.5-pound baby, which is bigger than average even in the US, much less in Asia. High-birth-weight babies have their own set of risks, and I don't think that advice on a US personal-injury lawyer's website is a good way of determining what a doctor in Asia should be doing for a particular birth.

I'm not endorsing the ob; I'm endorsing a small amount of non-judgmentalism, at least to the extent of remembering that we can't fully know what other people, in other countries, in other cultures, think is okay in their relationships, and that it's what they think, and not what completely uninvolved strangers who have only a ftiny part of the story and no experience with the local culture think, that actually matters. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:04, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Re the lawyer's site, don't forget that you used a blog to make your points and you still have not provided a source for your "silly list". Plus, you have completely ignored my earlier information re starting pitocin with an acceptable site. Re the size:

Most full-term healthy newborns weigh anywhere from 5 pounds 11 ounces to 8 pounds 6 ounces (2.6 to 3.8 kg). Low birth weight is less than 5 pounds 8 ounces (2.5 kg) at full term, and larger than average is a birth weight over 8 pounds 13 ounces (4.0 kg).

So, at 8.5 she still had a few more days to see if natural labor would begin. Besides, from what I read it is hard to estimate the weight of an unborn baby to more than a one pound accuracy anyway. You seem to know that that blog is from a foreign site--I thought it was from the US. Where is it from? Sectionworker (talk) 22:42, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

NHS: Here's the team. Also Birthrights, who say "NHS maternity care in the UK is led by midwives". And a good thing too. -- Colin°^Talk 18:26, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

I am using that site in the article. I added a little more to the section and removed any talk of birth plans are available, etc. I never heard back from Crossroads about making the birth plan include classes as well. It needs to be done. Sectionworker (talk) 17:56, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't know where the blog is located, but the mother gives her location as a particular city in southeast Asia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:15, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Talk page alert: It's too full!

This is an attempted funny reminder that your talk page is ２８０，１６６ bytes full. Which is technically incorrect as this message will take up at least a calculated minimum of １ byte. :P --Super Goku V (talk) 10:30, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:29, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

~~~ Merry Christmas! ~~~
Joyeux Noël! ~ Buon Natale! ~ Vrolijk Kerstfeest! ~ Frohe Weihnachten!
¡Feliz Navidad! ~ Feliz Natal! ~ Καλά Χριστούγεννα! ~ Hyvää Joulua!
God Jul! ~ Glædelig Jul! ~ Linksmų Kalėdų! ~ Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus!
Häid Jõule! ~ Wesołych Świąt! ~ Boldog Karácsonyt! ~ Veselé Vánoce!
Veselé Vianoce! ~ Crăciun Fericit! ~ Sretan Božić! ~ С Рождеством!
শুভ বড়দিন! ~ 圣诞节快乐！~ メリークリスマス！~ 메리 크리스마스!
สุขสันต์วันคริสต์มาส! ~ Selamat Hari Natal! ~ Giáng sinh an lành!
Весела Коледа!

Hello, WhatamIdoing! Thank you for your work to maintain and improve Wikipedia! Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 15:16, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove and leave other users this message by adding {{subst:Multi-language Season's Greetings}}

Two items of software feedback

Hi WhatamIdoing, I'd be grateful if you could look into the following issues and/or pass them on.

1. The Reply feature on talk pages used to work perfectly. Over the past few days, however, I've encountered errors such as text in the edit window not corresponding to the preview (e.g. a paragraph becoming duplicated in one window but not the other) or additional characters being inserted when adding a paragraph break. Is this a known issue?
2. A banner just invited me to try a new interface (Vector 2022). However, when I didn't like it, there was no easy and obvious way to undo the change; I had to go into Preferences, which might be beyond more casual users. When a software user is invited to try something, the expectation is that it can be undone with a single click.

Thanks and best wishes, Andreas JN466 09:34, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

@Jayen466, for the first, I need to know what your browser/OS is. Please also read this: User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF)#Problem with add topic tool and let me know if that feels familiar. (I think yours is a different problem.)

I know they considered putting instructions for turning off Vector 2022 in the banner, but since Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions, and definitely nobody's going to remember a single line about how to disable it after trying it out for a few days, it's not the best way to go about it. Consequently, they put a semi-permanent link in the main menu (the replacement for the left sidebar). It says "Switch to old look" in bold. It seems to be very effective: About 10% of registered editors opt back out, but yours is only the third comment I've seen about it being too hard to figure out how to do it.

I believe that this semi-permanent link will stick around for some months, maybe even a year or two, but it will eventually be removed. I don't know what the specific plan is in this case (or if they've even settled on a specific plan yet), but a typical thing to do would be to keep it as long as it seems to be used at any significant rate, and then remove it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:34, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Re Vector, I was reminded of how it works when you change screen settings in Windows. You can "Apply" a new setting, and are then asked whether you want to keep the new setting. If you say No, everything goes back to the way it was. That would be cool here.

As for the Reply feature, I encountered the problems on two very different platforms: once in Opera on a desktop running Windows, and once in Silk on a Kindle Fire. Don't worry about it for now; if it happens again, I'll take notes on what exactly I did, along with a screenshot. Andreas JN466 21:29, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

The Windows system sounds like the "Preview" option in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering.

If you can come up with a reliable way to trigger the bug, I'd love to have it. I suspect that it's an intermittent bug that requires repeated, slightly complex actions (like copying and pasting ref tags) plus the right phase of the moon. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:09, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

@Jayen466, here's my usual list of the three "weird behavior" bugs:

• phab:T319090 – for inexplicable copy/paste problems
• phab:T156228 – shift key + GoogleTrans gadget
• phab:T316838 – shift key without the gadget

I suggest that you look through them and see if one feels similar. If it does, then that's the place to post your description and any screenshots.

I don't expect these to be specific to DiscussionTools/the Reply tool. You're likely to encounter them in anything that's got mw:Extension:VisualEditor behind it. And in all three cases, it feels like a problem in VisualEditor itself (i.e., before VisualEditor hands the contents over to Parsoid). But until we can reliably reproduce it, the actual cause can't be determined, so I could be wrong about that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:09, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Happy holidays

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing everybody a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Adoration of the Magi by Luca Signorelli is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 18:34, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Belknap and advocacy

Hi, please see my recent comment about Belknaps carnivore diet advocacy [4]. Is it worth me filing an ANI report because this user is disruptive on red meat and saturated fat articles. (disclosure I have debated Belknap on Twitter about his carnivore diet) 90.241.67.238 (talk) 15:09, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

I doubt that it would be productive. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Happy New Year, WhatamIdoing!

Happy New Year!

WhatamIdoing,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
— Moops ^⋠T⋡ 04:33, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

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

— Moops ^⋠T⋡ 04:33, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:18, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Mulberry, KS

I did some research and the best restaurant (and maybe the only restaurant?) is Gebhardt’s Chicken Dinners [5] - seems like to get a sandwich we'd have to go to nearby Pittsburg, KS. Andre🚐 07:08, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

You made more progress than I did. I only found a convenience store (using Google Maps). You might have a shining future at Wikivoyage. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:28, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Oh wow, yeah, I could do a lot of damage on that, but I probably won't. Andre🚐 05:36, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

They're nice people, and there's lots of scope for fun editing. There's also a lot of really useful not-quite-gnoming work that needs to be done, especially to remove restaurants that closed during the pandemic. It's not difficult work, and the listing editor is really quite nice to work in. I suggest looking up the article for a place you know fairly well, and seeing whether it needs anything obvious. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:43, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, an old version of my meta userpage is there [6] but SUL doesn't seem to have logged me in... Andre🚐 05:55, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

If you're in Firefox/blocking third-party cookies, that is probably the problem.

It's the same username/password even with the automatic login doesn't work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:53, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Template:Did you know nominations/Empath

You helped empath along so I credited you as a co-author in the DYK. If you don't want the credit or the bot message you can remove yourself from the template. (After it is reviewed I will promote it so User:Psiĥedelisto § Best and at that time if you are on the DYK will give you a co-author note there too.) Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 11:22, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Congratulations on the nom. I hadn't realized that it was such a new article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:52, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Thank you! I actually wrote it because someone told me they're an empath and I couldn't find any reliable information on what that meant and was very surprised we just had a redirect to empathy without any information on this concept. In some ways it makes sense that it took this long, as until recently this was a classic case of a WP:FRINGE topic. But given all the media attention, the internet culture usage of the term, and the fact that more and more people self-describe as empaths, I felt we needed to split the page for real this time. The past attempts were not well written so replacing them with a redirect (in 2010, 2015) probably made sense at the time per WP:Think of the reader. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 14:11, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Trump Talk

Just a suggestion to add the following after the part "For comparison" of your message [7].

Whereas for this article,

• Donald Trump: 18 links per 631 words, rated B

Bob K31416 (talk) 21:24, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Hitchhiker's guide

If you like Douglas Adams's humour, the book series is great and I highly recommend it. Books vs radio series have different strengths, so whether or not you prefer one to the other is just a matter of which strengths you find more appealing. (The movie actually got good critical reviews.) isaacl (talk) 00:50, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, @Isaacl. I tend to prefer books overall, but I've never encountered a radio show that got turned into a book, so I'm not sure what to expect. I'm much more likely to try a book than a movie. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:16, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

The books aren't a straight adaptation; more of a remix/new variant with parts of the different series ("phases") drawn into different books, new content added, and as Adams stated in the introduction to one of the omnibus editions, in some cases the same scenes are included but with the characters having entirely different motivations (which he described as being like adding new content except for being able to reuse dialogue). Text allows for greater verbosity, which gives Adams more room for his elaborate absurdist humour and punchline setups. (Radio of course provides an aural background along with the actor readings to convey emotion.) Regarding the movie, Martin Freeman's acting style is a great fit for Arthur Dent. isaacl (talk) 16:35, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Inquiry

I seem to recall reading somewhere that the majority of edits made through unblocked TOR exit nodes were constructive, was that WMF research and if so do have a link handy?

Also the internal effort to assist editors from filtered countries fizzled, did the foundation ever try something similar? At some point I remember running across discussions related to the issue on meta but I can't seem to remember any details at the moment.

Disclosure, this inquiry was prompted by Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Allow registered editors to use vpn (open proxies) I doubt I'll have the time to add anything thoughtful to it, but I'm trying to collect my thoughts since I have a feeling that many of the related issues are going to come up with increasing frequency. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 04:51, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I've never heard about research from unblocked TOR exit nodes. I've heard that claim made (for years and years; I think the study was done around 2006) about unregistered/IP editors. I'm not sure that the research was done by the WMF, but it is probably documented on Meta-Wiki.

I'm not familiar with Wikipedia:WikiProject on closed proxies. The most recent big discussion at Meta-Wiki that I'm aware of is m:Talk:No open proxies/Unfair blocking.

I agree that this is going to become a bigger problem over time. For that matter, it already has. Tech-minded folks have been warning us about this for at least 10 years already. It's worse now than it was back then. It will continue to get worse until we stop relying on IP addresses as the primary form of identifying bad actors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:34, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Yeah I still remember all the headaches AOL gave us back in the day, but it's worse now than it ever was. I guess I'll have to search around and send out a few feelers. I appreciate the pointer to that meta discussion and I'll try to look it over when I get the time. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 17:52, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

As a quick update, this is what I was thinking of in case you're curious. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:50, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Delete everything?

I am a little worried about a recent tendency towards working up new policies to needlessly delete tens of thousands of articles. I saw your patient response and explanation at the Village Pump in one of these cases and wanted to thank you. It sucks that you have to waste your time arguing things like this instead of fleshing out lepidoptera articles, but be assured that at least it was appreciated by someone. Best,  Mr.choppers | ✎  03:50, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@Mr.choppers, thank you for the kind message. One of the nicer things about Wikipedia is that everyone knows something, and no one knows everything. That was one bit that I can contribute, but the best days are the ones where I learn something from other editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:28, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@Mr.choppers (alt) Marthatak (talk) 06:31, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

A heart for you!

	A heart for you!
	Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. Born25121642 (talk) 17:09, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:17, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Talk page vs RM name change discussions

Hi WhatamIdoing, You mentioned on the Mpox talk page that most moves happen out of RM. This feels right, but do we have any data on the numbers? Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 14:47, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

I've never seen any research on it, but Special:Log/move shows about a thousand page moves today (which, if they all have talk pages, could be 500 actual moves). For comparison, Wikipedia:Requested moves/Current discussions#March 9, 2023 lists 13 moves for discussion. If that's typical, then that suggests that there is something on the order of one RM for every 30+ actual moves. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:56, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Which is encouraging as this is a wiki and we are supposed to be bold, not bogged down in bureaucracy. I suppose not all of those moves are undiscussed via RM as, for example, about thirty 2022-23 mpox outbreak pages all got moved as a result of one discussion. Is that kind of thing, where whole sets of pages get moved in sync common? Currently the log is showing a whole bunch of pages starting "NA-" for the National Assembly of Pakistan.

Btw, I cannot for all my many years, learn how to spell bureaucracy. The edit window has a spell checker (Chrome?) which offers suggestions, but no matter what way I try to spell and alternatively spell the word, none of the suggestions ever include the correct word. I have to stick my abomination into Google and then of course it appears by magic. -- Colin°^Talk 08:16, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I think it's common for large sets of page moves to be discussed in advance, and sometimes (usually? almost always?) those will happen with RM tags.

(If you're using the Reply tool, then try its link tool to make a link to Bureaucracy, and then remove the link formatting. Nobody will ever know. ;-)) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:30, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

It is a bit awkward. It offers to link to a spelling mistake redirect. -- Colin°^Talk 14:40, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, but you should be able to see which one is the redirect and which one is the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:52, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

How do these figures cope with undiscussed moves that are reverted? The page mover software gives "revert undiscussed page move" as one of its standard reasons for the edit summary. I revert a good few; it is a classic new editor form of over-reaching. A RM rarely follows. Johnbod (talk) 15:58, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Less than 5%, if the most recent thousand page moves are representative.

It would be convenient if we could isolate only moves within the mainspace, but I don't see a way to filter for that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:13, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

UNIT26 I ENJOY REDING BOOKS,AND Miked BOOKS CEAS.

THIS SOME THINGS:- EXAMPEL:I WOULD LIKE SEE IN VIDEOS AND LIRNING 2.90.201.224 (talk) 08:33, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

applause

I like your Internet words. That is all. jengod (talk) 21:31, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I went to look at what this might concern and found Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 April 6#Category:Women who experienced pregnancy loss. I'm reminded a bit of the nonsense that was written at the monkeypox/mpox rename by people who hang about discussion forums concerning that very activity (rename/categories). How can so many people be so confidently wrong about policy, and when you point out the numerous examples of how their wrongheaded policy ideas can't possibly be correct, they don't change their vote. There should be a word for the exasperation at having to teach !voters about the very policy topic that concerns the discussion they are voting in.

It seems perhaps related to WP:UPPERCASE, where people take a very simplistic view of what a policy means, either from the shortcut itself or just a few remembered words. With the WP:COMMONNAME argument about mpox, few it seemed remembered that WP:NAMECHANGES was part of WP:COMMONNAME, or had read that far. With the above, people are getting stuck with a perfectly reasonable interpretation of "defining characteristics" (what someone is primarily known for) and not realising that that isn't Wikipedia's definition which is far more broad. Barak Obama is not primarily known for being a Grammy award winner. A moments thought should be enough to make someone think their interpretation can't possibly be correct. But it doesn't happen, and it doesn't get fixed when you explain to them that it can't possibly be correct.

As an aside, looking at Barak Obama's categories, why are Americans so obsessed with their descent from Europeans? Obama is apparently an American of Scottish descent. The Scots all came from somewhere else, they didn't get implanted there by God. -- Colin°^Talk 09:52, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

My daughter and I have had many long talks about the how and why of the difference between men and women and the importance of family and clan. As to Colin's question, we Americans are obsessed with our descent from Europeans because we are trying to satisfy a deep-felt need of family and clan, since not one of us, unless we are Native American, can find it here. We believe that this need is right in our genetic makeup, or at any rate goes back thousands of years to when we first split off from forest tree dwellers into animals that much resemble how we look today. In the animal kingdom every animal puts the rearing of young as a top priority. So one can imagine that thousands of years ago when we became meat eaters the men were off to hunt while the women, for the most part, stayed home to take care of the children, gather wild edibles, prepare hides for clothing, etc. The women were the first talkers while the men were mostly silent, using hand signals and short comments for hunting. At any rate, family was important for survival. Not only family, clan was also important. The best territories needed to be guarded from invaders, except for the stealing of women because every animal tribe needs to go outside of its own small group or the gene pool begins to deteriorate. I also wanted to talk about why I find the men just totally unable to discuss the importance of women's feelings about a miscarriage, as I see is happening at that article, but I will save that for later... Sectionworker (talk) 19:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

I think that a desire for family and clan probably varies.

There is a historical connection to waves of immigration. Did you ever read Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott? The 1901 book was largely set around the American Civil War, and promoted integration of previously enslaved Black Americans. But the anti-Irish racism in it surprised me. The white characters would happily work with Black women and rally her friends to support formerly enslaved people, but she calls the Irish girl "shiftless" and the Irish women "incapable".

But... when the immigration from Ireland and Germany declined, the fears turned towards Asian immigrants. By WWI, it turns against immigrants from southern Europe. Suddenly the Irish policeman and the German farmer is everyone's ideal immigrant, and the problem is those Italians with their weird food, like spaghetti. And when spaghetti and pizza becomes popular a generation later, then the Italians are okay, but the problem is the Greeks, and eventually Mexicans, or whoever else happened to be immigrating at that moment. So of course Americans have wanted to claim that we're of Scottish descent; they were stereotypically everything that America approved of: white, Protestant, and next door to being English by descent as well as thrifty, hard-working, good at running a business – all traits that were compatible with the traditional values in New England. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:05, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

A little more... How interesting to have that discussion going on at the very same time that my country is watching the rights of women, that we have worked so hard to achieve, stripped away. It is reassuring to see the voting at that article, at least for now, about even. It's more than I would have expected. Sectionworker (talk) 13:13, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

jengod I read Emotions around infertility can be raw. Let’s talk about them with solidarity today, which remined me of the category discussion. For all the talk of male-dominated votes, which I don't deny may well affect the voting, it seems there isn't always "solidarity between all women". The article, which had women who had (eventually) become mothers in a degree of conflict with women struggling or accepting they aren't going to be mothers, reminded me also of the point I made in that discussion that we don't seem to have categories for "married twice" or "widowed" or "father to three children". Most of the arguments about the importance of pregnancy loss in many people's life and in some biographies could equally and perhaps more commonly apply to those life-status categories too.

Did Wikipedia ever consider categories for marriage/divorce/widowhood or children or step children. It seems odd that we record in a category someone became a lawyer or what instruments they play but not that they became a mother. We record that David Bowie died of liver cancer in New York State but not that he had a son and a daughter. We record five different LGBT categories and five different bisexual categories but not that he was married twice. -- Colin°^Talk 12:40, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Colin These are all wonderful questions to which I don't have answers. Maybe no one does! Just yesterday I created Infertility and childlessness stigmas and Reproductive loss and the article you linked is another piece of the puzzle. I think some of this is so close and personal or normalized and socialized that we aren't even able to recognize it as a concept. But the people that have a lack of "normal" can see it more clearly. Maybe. It's all big stuff. Anyway I will use this good link and related others on the site. Maybe they will help someone somewhere along the line. Thank you for your thoughtfulness about all of this. jengod (talk) 13:23, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Parts of the piece in The Guardian resonated with me. I appreciated the nuance about "privilege" only applying to families with other sorts of social privilege. Some infertile women might feel angry that the "wrong" people get pregnant easily, but they're not likely to use the word privileged to describe a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl, or the pregnant woman standing in line at the food bank.

Parts of it made me wonder how we became so envious. Maybe we should just get rid of this anti-social media entirely, so that people won't fill their lives with looking at curated versions of other people's lives. At points the author described objectification around fertility: I want this thing. I want this status. Why does she get to have this, when I don't? This made me think about people with green eyes and natural red hair. Some people envy their #prettyprivilege, but their distinctive looks give them a higher risk of skin cancer and showing signs of aging earlier than average. We aren't looking at the whole package in either case, or (as the author says) treating children like humans. The infertile couple wants a baby; the new parents probably want some sleep; some parents of teenagers might wonder why they ever thought having a baby was a good idea. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:15, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Wrt social media, don't disagree, though we had glamourous lifestyle magazines before that. But one new media thing the article mentions is a podcast. Where before the BBC Radio or TV had to be watched live or self-recorded, I can now listen to a radio or watch a TV documentary (and other entertainment) whenever I want. And recommend it to a friend with a link. That's wonderful. -- Colin°^Talk 19:23, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Condom

Condom has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:50, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Gratitude

A few months ago, I said something sassy on a page in NewYorkBrad's userspace in the context of the mobile interface. My main point was that I like using it on my phone, pace what some other editors were opining, but I tacked on a completely unnecessary jab about how any substantive interface propositions would just be ignored by the Foundation anyway. I had wanted to name you as a specific counterexample to lack of Foundation engagement, but didn't, and a bit later you joined the same thread. I've felt guilty about it ever since. I've long held but never expressed an opinion that if there were two or three more of you working for the WMF, that would be enough to dispel anyone's concerns about lack of engagement.

I hopped into an appreciation thread on this page – I think last year – and said how much I admired your dedication and how you always seem to have in mind what's best for readers and editors both. I understand that your job description includes community engagement, but I think you're really crushing it. You also recently answered a question I had about zero-edit editors, and I just saw you again reply to a reply of mine at VPI, so I thought I'd finally come here and apologize.

I don't know why I was feeling so salty when I said what I said. I've had a difficult season. I just wanted to clarify that I really appreciate you and your work. Folly Mox (talk) 08:58, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, @Folly Mox. I've always liked you, and this message is just another reason to prove that I was right. I, too, once made a belated apology on wiki, only it took me about six years to make it. The recipient died suddenly about two years later, and it has been a source of comfort to me that I had apologized for an undeserved remark. So I congratulate you on being quicker off the mark than I was, and I will take reasonable steps not to die two years from now. ;-)

I think that the mobile interface is going to get some work in the coming years, though not necessarily during this coming year. I think this mostly because the woman now in charge of the Product and Technology departments is a mobile-first editor, and I suspect that she is finding lots of opportunities to wish it were improved. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:56, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

I really appreciate that, and thank you for your commitment to not dying. If I get a free wish for mobile, it's unhiding navigation templates. I'll reiterate for any watchers that the genesis of this thread was a post about how I like the mobile interface (which ironically I'm not in for this edit, since following a notification link sends you to desktop view). Folly Mox (talk) 17:24, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Have you ever asked at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) for a script that would unhide them? It might be possible to do this in your .css file.

In terms of getting this changed more generally, it'd probably be necessary to first determine whether those links are generally useful, and then whether they're useful on small screens. The infrastructure is in place (it's wikitech:Provenance), but nobody has ever done the study. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:43, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

That's a good idea! I'll poke around and see if there are any well-known scripts with that functionality or if anyone's asked about it before. Oddly I've never modified my css or js, despite writing in those languages professionally in a previous life of IT.

I know people say that categories are for navigation, but I've always found them to be either underpopulated or overpopulated, and the context-free alphabetical ordering doesn't help, so navigation templates were one of my go-to trapdoors into Wikipedia rabbitholes back when I had a computer. I know I'm not the target audience though. Folly Mox (talk) 00:56, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

I've just seen your announcement at VPT, and am experiencing greater than usual difficulty in ordering my thoughts due to entirely off-wiki matters. Your kind and thoughtful engagement over the years significantly positively altered my opinion of the Foundation. The appearance of your signature below a block of text indicating a position contra my own causes me to question my assumptions irrespective of the argument you're presenting. I understand you'll still be around, without your official regalia, and I'm very grateful for that. You've done so much for this place. Folly Mox (talk) 09:22, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

@Folly Mox, thank you for your note. Today's my last day, and in a few minutes, we're having my kind of party – an editing party!

I hope that your off-wiki situation resolves. I'm looking forward to having more time for Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:47, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Strange talk page notes

Hi! Have you ever seen talk page edits like this: (link to talk page edits)

It is the same editor who is trying really hard to add in Earthquakes and a related syndrome to the Concussion article that I moved to the concussion talk page in the same time range. I just posted on WP:MED talk page to get a few more watchers. If you have any advice on my personal talk page, I would appreciate it. Thanks so much, JenOttawa (talk) 13:13, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@JenOttawa, I'd guess that the editor is not a native English speaker.

Talk pages are very confusing to newcomers. We are so accustomed to them that it can be really hard to imagine how deeply strange they are. But imagine that you showed up for work at a new company, and your new colleagues said: "We use word processing documents for everything. And we mean everything! Phone calls are banned. E-mail is discouraged. Text messages are never used. Instant messaging software is strictly unofficial (and we're not really inviting you to join us). Social media is for losers. Face-to-face discussions will only happen if you pay for it yourself, or maybe if you dedicate your life to this for the next ten years. Instead, if you want to ask a question, leave a note in a regular doc. Yes, just like the docs we use for writing articles. Just open it up, ignore the fact that you could change other people's comments, and add your own comments at the bottom. We all check the server logs when we feel like it, and we'll probably notice your message. There will be no way for you to find out whether we read your message, no way to require us to respond, and definitely no way to make sure that the people who respond (if any) actually know what they're talking about. It's just a blank doc, and you type in it. See how simple it is?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:34, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Good points. Thanks for your input and perspective! Sorry for the delay in responding. Have a great week. JenOttawa (talk) 13:57, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) There's a generation-gap point based on this that has given me a lot of heartache. The default way of handling anything in the universe for Gen Z is making a group chat for it. You make a group chat for your classes. You make a group chat for your different non-overlapping peer groups. You make a group chat for your family, and for multiple branches of your family if it has multiple branches. You make a group chat for your hobbies, obviously. So you join the group chat for your hobby, Wikipedia, because that's the most obvious given in the entire universe, and there's no possible way or reason why you wouldn't, it's the most fundamental basic assumption. And...then this becomes a massive shitstorm across the entire project and everyone tells you it's prima facie evidence you're evil. "Confusing" is one word for it, and it becomes no less so when you read 'some arbcom argument from 2005 about a tangentially related subject'. Another series of words for it is "the single biggest barrier to editor recruitment and retention there is". Vaticidalprophet 03:42, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Something I see often at dramaboards is experienced editors telling people off for having conversations in edit summaries instead of on talk pages, but each time I've had to explain something important to a newcomer about why I was reverting their edits, it was only through edit summaries that I was able to get them to understand that talk pages even exist. It would be nice if the notification bell icon had to newcomers the same meaning it has to more experienced editors. I almost always click through to my notifications right away, but on many platforms a notification is often deeply unimportant and sometimes outright spam. Folly Mox (talk) 04:05, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I have typed old-fashioned memos. On paper. With M E M O R A N D U M neatly centered near the top, just in case someone picked it up and didn't recognize what it was based on the fact that it looked exactly like the previous zillion memos that were dumped in their inbox trays every day. (We had actual inbox trays back then, and people who were paid actual money to carry pieces of paper from one tray to the next.)

I still have warm feelings towards the printers who made sure that every line on paper forms were exactly spaced, so that if you got the first one lined up, you be set to go for the rest of the page. They knew what they were doing, unlike approximately every person who has ever created an allegedly fillable PDF.

@Vaticidalprophet, I think the Wikipedia:Discord channel is sufficiently popular that it wouldn't be proof that you're evil. Joining a Facebook group might, though, but mostly by people who don't do Facebook, so they might not find out. (Though that's not guaranteed, especially if you fail to disclose participation in a WP:BADSITE. Loose lips sink ships, or at least RFAs.) About the old IRC cabal channels, I can only say that Wikipedia:There is no cabal, and therefore it is impossible for the cabal to have a secret meeting penciled in for this coming Thursday. (Though do expect me to be offline a few hours that day. I'm sure it's a coincidence. I've had a terrible cold this week, and I believe that I'll need a long nap that day. Don't worry about it.)

@Folly Mox, I usually restrict that to newbies who are obviously using the Undo button. I figure that if they can find the Undo button, they'll be able to see the edit summary, and if they aren't using the Undo button, they probably haven't found the page history yet, either. But if memory serves, newbies don't get notified when they're reverted. I believe that The Community™ decided that that dubious feature should be restricted to those of us who know how to edit war without getting blocked. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:30, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I have also had to tear a document ⅔ composed straight out the typewriter because of a typo but I wanted it to be perfect. We even had the fancy ink ribbon that could do black or red. Such times we had. I was referring to notifications in the general sense, like user mentions, pings, and talkpage messages. I didn't know we get them if we're reverted as well. I think what I was trying to convey is that edit summaries are more visible to newcomers than talk page messages or pings, at least in my experience. Folly Mox (talk) 04:37, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Well, I could revert you, just to show you how it works, but...

The reversion detection is a little limited. It pretty much only triggers if someone uses the Undo button (or similar), but not if the next "normal" edit just accidentally happens to be the same as a prior version. The "Reverted" tag in Special:Tags is better at detecting reversions than the Echo/Notifications tool. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:56, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

@Folly Mox I agree and have a few more concerns. First, edit summaries and talk comments are the same sort of thing; An edit summary is just a one way talk comment with an action associated with it. Both should be visible chronologically in the same space.

Second, notifications swamp people, there is duplication of work, and only you can decide if you action them. Large scale systems have notification systems typically allow triage, escalation, multiple people to action/close them, and the ability to flag certain notifucations as always needing my review

Third, the revert and edit process. The notification links to the revision compare screen. The screen has an overwhelming amount of information for a new editor. Based on my knowledge of UX, this confusion and the layout encourages action on the page of the person who did the revert based on colour and placement.

Fourth, there is a flow issue with reverts. It's not immediately clear what an editor should do if her change is reverted. The various help screens suggest remedies that aren't particularly effective (discuss on talk (many are never read), project (most are moribund), or escalate for review (time consuming for Admins). Each one of these involves more work for the revertee than the revertor (who also has knowledge of the system, and I suspect has an easier time as they are more often on a desktop).

Fifth, the word talk confuses - improve would be better.

Sixth, talk page. Archiving adds complexity (Most new editors will never look at an archive, archiving can be used to end conversations that shouldn't, no way to unarchive, there is no obvious way to archive..) The various flags (closed ..)are used on some pages, but there is quick way to add common close reasons (fixed on page, escalated to ..)

There is too much information on talk page (long references to projects, long comments from bots) and they aren't folded except on the app.

Seventh, visibility of comments. if I remember correctly 90 % of topics never get actioned. it would be nice if no archived non bot topics was visible similar to open emails. Even better, would be able to flag topics (not comments) as important and worthy of review by other. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 01:59, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Good post. jp×g🗯️ 20:18, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Yet another point of confusion for newcomers is the distinction between an article's Talk Page and a User talk page. In fact, even an old-timer like me can hesitate about whether to post a comment in the edit box, the article's talk page, or the editor's talk page. (Let alone whether to ping — another exotic technique for non-Twitterers that took me years to understand — in fact I suppose I should ping everyone who contributed above, except that, like me, she or he probably already has this Usertalk page on their watchlist). And as for Project Pages... —— Shakescene (talk) 21:04, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

@Shakescene, I find the new [Subscribe] feature to be wonderful if you don't want to miss a reply. If you don't see that button up in the ==Section heading==, then check Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion and "Enable topic subscription". WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:51, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi! And...

Hi WhatamIdoing! Thanks for your note and for calling the tune. As you seem to be "an editor who seems to be familiar with the subject", please go ahead and fix my "mess" 'cos I'm only likely to mess it up even more. It's all yours. Happy editing! --Technopat (talk) 20:38, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

No problem. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:38, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

True Nuff Comics

Hello, WhatamIdoing Have you ever been uploaded True Nuff Comics to Internet Archive (archive.org)? Yuliadhi (talk) 22:20, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

To expand on my edit summary

Hey. Just to expand on why I don't think it's necessary to remove, it's a variant of the you go high, we go low argument. No matter what I, you, or anyone else says, the folks who would say something like pro-trans studies are bad or the data is fabricated just because the lead authors are trans are always going to say that. My making a sarcastic comment on a dataset that has huge ethical issues is not going to affect that for better or worse. But I've removed it anyway. Sideswipe9th (talk) 16:57, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

And just in case it's not clear or comes across as otherwise, I'm sure you made that comment in good faith and meant well with it.I'm just explaining why I don't find it a particularly persuasive argument. Sideswipe9th (talk) 17:13, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Per my comments at WT:MED I think we have to be alert to any sources of bias. I get that one has to be careful when those sources of bias are someone's identity vs someone's chosen set of beliefs, but that doesn't make them less of an issue. And I get it can be particularly a problem when that identity is a disadvantaged minority that is being attacked. Writing off someone's research, say, because they are trans or because they are gender critical isn't acceptable but nor is ignoring that either of those may have influenced the research and the supposed conclusions. Sideswipe9th, I guess the problem with a sarcastic remark is that it is likely to be interpreted as a "I write them off entirely because they are X or believe X" rather than a more cautious scientific, "This potential source of bias should influence how readily we accept the findings". -- Colin°^Talk 10:18, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Mmm. So the target of my sarcasm was not at the bias of the authors, but instead the similarities in data collection methodology and suspect data handling practices between this paper and Littman's 2018 ROGD paper. That we have two papers, both of which are based on survey data from websites targeted at parents who are the most likely to believe in this proposed sub-group of gender incongruent youth (three websites for Littman, one for Diaz & Bailey), and both of which have been subject to scientific controversy because of this (Littman's paper was subject to major corrections, Diaz & Bailey's paper was retracted entirely), is one hell of a coincidence.

However now that you've more explicitly said this, I can see how that comment could be read as being sarcastic about authorial bias. Sideswipe9th (talk) 14:20, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree that being dispassionate will not change the tone of the overall, real-world discourse.

What it will change is the tone of discussion at WT:MED itself. I don't want editors unfamiliar with our group to look at sarcastic comments, ad hominems, rants about people believing the wrong thing, etc., and concluding that we are an unfriendly, sarcastic, unpleasant group of people to be around. We all have moments of irritation, but if we can find ways to talk about problems without being off-putting to the innocent, then WikiProject Medicine could gain something, too.

BTW, I've been reading https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing-levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581/ again. It think it is interesting to consider various forms of real-world dissent (e.g., the claim ROGD might exist in a few cases) in light of the concepts he names, like Liquid modernity, the rise of strict moralism (with a new set of morals, like anti-racism and accepting people's self-descriptions uncritically, even when their actions don't align with their words), and the decline of classic liberalism, with its agree-to-disagree nature and tolerance of ambiguity.

In this subject area, I think I'd apply those concepts this way: We are going from "I've no idea – there are about a billion kids in the relevant age range, and some people claim to have seen something they experience this way, so I guess it's possible that somebody, somewhere has an ROGD-ish thing going on, but they haven't really proven anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" to "How dare you not respect my beliefs and my identity and my whole moral world by saying that it's even possible for a recently self-identified trans person to maybe not actually be trans! We don't need no stinking 'insistent–persistent–consistent' rules, because even compulsive liars and master manipulators can't lie about being trans! I shall fight you and your evil to the social media death!"

It does not seem like an improvement off hand.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember this, but it wasn't that long ago that US activists pushed the idea that women would never, ever, ever lie about being raped. The cost of lying about rape was too high for someone to lie about it, they lectured. Rape is always 100% clear, and no woman could struggle to differentiate between bad sex, unwanted sex (e.g., "pity sex"), or unconsented sex. We needed the resulting police reforms, but there's a problem: False accusation of rape do happen. However, for a while, if you sided with the actual truth, then you were considered an evil supporter of rape and rape culture.

The same ways of (not) thinking are happening today. You can't admit to the possibility that ROGD might exist, or you are evil. No cis person ever claims to be trans. The cost of coming out is too high for someone to lie abut it. Gender is always 100% clear, and nobody needs to spend years exploring their own.

It seems to me that if someone wanted to prove ROGD to not exist, they'd be doing similar surveys at non-similar websites, with a study design that was intentionally calculated to identify subgroups (it's easy to lose unusual data signals in a sea of bland averages). Some of the questions addressed, such as how many kids have already been diagnosed with a mental health disorder at the time they come out to their parents and whether parents believe their kids' gender claims, are of general relevance. But I don't think that anyone will attempt to do the research correctly, in a representative (or at least less-biased) group, for fear of being attacked unjustly. I'm not even sure you could get through the survey without social media discouraging people from participating, or encouraging them to provide false information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

The interim Cass Review commented that there was a void, a big area where we don't really know the answers, but neither side want to admit it. Both sides claim with over-confidence that their explanation is 100% the case and their proposals are 100% what to do every time. And each side hates the other side. That's one problem. The other thing is that we haven't yet found a way to work out why people are the way they are. There are similarities with being gay perhaps. There was for a while a loud claim that "our" children were being "turned gay" by deviants. And if one can be led towards being gay then one can be led away from it too: conversion therapy. Autism had that idea too, with the "refrigerator mothers" being blamed for their autistic children. Today, we tend to assume someone is gay or is autistic rather than became gay or chose to be gay or developed autism. Autism spectrum's another explosion-in-cases we don't have an explanation for. And a fight back by some with ASD that they don't want to be "fixed". And perhaps ideas that such groups are homogeneous. That the university student with ASD writing a blog is speaking for and representative for the child in a special school who is unable to speak and can't tolerate any changes to their daily routines. (I know one teacher in such a school who wore the same perfume since forever, so that nothing changed for their pupils). -- Colin°^Talk 07:55, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

ASD communities have rejected the homogeneous story; that's why they say "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism". I don't necessarily find the story universally put into practice (e.g., letting the university student speak on behalf of an intellectually disabled autistic person), but I think it's true.

I'm not convinced that one can "learn" to be autistic, but there's a possibility that gender is an imperfect parallel in that respect. Gender is socially constructed, and if the construction that your culture comes up with is a significant mismatch with your experience, then you might find yourself having a different response than if your culture had come up with a different match.

Years ago, I remember reading a trans woman saying something like "I feel like a woman internally", as proof of being a woman. I want to know: What constitutes "feeling like a woman internally"? How does anyone woman know if her feelings are the right ones? If the answer is "I'm a woman, so all my feelings are feeling like a woman", then the argument becomes circular:

The model that interests me at the moment is one in which we define ourselves as identifying with a group, rather than identifying as having a trait. I'm a woman because I see myself in other women, and what happens to other women, for good or ill, is something that happens to me.

But here's the problem: What if you feel alienated from everyone and everything? Could that drive someone to feel excluded from being a man/woman as well? If an AFAB feels no connection to other girls/women – no identification with them, and maybe instead a sense that they actively don't belong to that group – couldn't non-binary seem like a more accurate self-description? I'm not that kind of girl, so I must not be any kind of girl.

So if you follow my story so far, that suggests that the recent rise in non-binary self-identification could (in some cases) be causally associated with a rising level of alienation and social problems. Getting back to why people are the way they are – we don't know, but it's possible that society is causing susceptible people to think of themselves as not being the gender associated with their birth sex, by taking vulnerable people and putting them in a society that tells them they don't belong, won't be supported, are doing their birth gender 'wrong', and will never have satisfying human connections. This might actually constitute society "leading" someone to a trans identity, especially for non-binary folks. (Also to sky-high suicide rates.)

A few years ago, I read about a US group that checked obituaries for murder victims, and then claimed that many of them were secretly trans women. It was a sort of posthumous diagnosis, and the point was to show that trans women were far too frequently murdered. There's a similar(ish) study last year (doi:10.1192/bjp.2022.21) that tries to find undiagnosed autistic people among suicide deaths. Perhaps we aren't directly causing these things, but probably we are creating a world in which it is difficult for some people to avoid these things. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:22, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I suppose one difference is that we don't have a test for being trans, so when someone says they are, there are unknowns in terms of (a) they are (b) they aren't or (c) they are but others say they aren't. We can screen and diagnose ASD (even posthumously according to your study). I suppose one could learn the questions and train one's behaviour in order to pass such a diagnosis even if one didn't have ASD. And people do self-diagnose. But essentially this is something testable. And we seem to have concluded it is life long, and not just some awkward teenage phase.

My "homogeneous" wasn't quite the right word, though I've heard that line about depression as well as ASD. Yes I don't think anyone claims people with ASD are all the same, but it is all too easy to fall into a trap of thinking that "people with X are like me who has X or like my child who has X". There is quite rightly a campaign to promote a social model of disability but those who need some help (and are frustrated they don't get it, or sing praises when they do) do I find sometimes forget those who need an astonishing amount of help. This can mean that special schools and residential places are held up as examples of "failure" and the evil "medical model of disability" that must be attacked.

In the context of the causes of the increase in people identifying as trans, both sides hold up their examples and extrapolate that as how everyone else must be too. And then you also get random people on the internet speculating why someone thinks that way about themselves. A bit of speculation is fine but the ROGD seems to be speculation that is taken to its limits. I suppose, WAID, you could take your speculation and call it "non-binary alienation syndrome" and when it sounds like a medical DSM disorder, then it sorta becomes real all by itself, rather than just speculation. -- Colin°^Talk 09:03, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure that someone could come up with an even more impressive name.

We do see the "people with X are like [me/my child/this one person I know with X]". MEDRS is very helpful in these "just like me" disputes. In real life, I've also seen it the opposite way: "I have X, and you are not like me, so you don't have X, no matter what the clinic told you".

I think your list of options was incomplete. There's also the category of "you might be trans under [very broad definition], but you aren't trans according to more typical definitions." WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:17, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes I suppose have/have-not got X is a problem when people can't agree on a definition of X or whether X is a spectrum condition (like autism is now viewed) or more absolute.

Related to all this, I happened to mention some UK opinion stats at a recent AN/I and someone described my country as "TERF Island" and presumably thought they should all therefore collectively take a hike. But then the other day I found similar stats for the US so it didn't seem the US was much different (though perhaps split along liberal/conservative lines in the US more than the UK). Do we have stats on whether Wikipedia editors differ socially/politically from the nations they belong to or if there is a perception that we do (even if that perception is wrong)? -- Colin°^Talk 13:49, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

I haven't seen much information that is specifically about politics, and I'm not sure that it would make sense to ask a question like that of a global audience. The left/right split of US politics doesn't translate well to every country.

However, we know that editors aren't representative in other ways, and I believe we can safely infer that we are different in politics, as well. For example: the community here is about 85% male, and if there is a male/female split in politics, then there will naturally be a similar split here. I believe we are, on average, more neurotic and more disagreeable (as defined in the Big Five personality traits) compared to the average non-contributor, and personality traits correlate with political views (though I don't know how you would translate that to a specific party: political parties are unlikely to advertise themselves as particularly appealing to disagreeable, neurotic folks, and if your opponent runs down your supporters, your supporters might not accept that criticism as being legitimate). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:07, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

In Big Five terms, I generally read Wikipedians as high-Openness, low-Agreeableness, low-Extraversion, sort of a wash on the rest, but the O signal probably stamping out the rest in terms of effect size because of how many O measures amount to "are you the kind of person who thinks it's incredibly fun to read a ton of books about a weird thing so you can write 5000 words on it?". Openness is also strongly associated with political liberalism far moreso than the other OCEANs are with anything (barring conscientiousness with conservatism), but this is confounded by a lot of Openness questions also amounting to "are you left-wing? y/n" -- I'd suspect, controlling for that set of them, left-wing and right-wing Wikipedians score quite similarly. Consistently high neuroticism outside of its general correlation with the others in interests would be unexpected, though; large chunks of Wikipedia weirdness make most sense as low-N low-A (e.g. the bandying about of NOTTHERAPY as something roughly translating to "don't have negative emotions where I have to see them"). Vaticidalprophet 19:08, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Think about the editor who has corrected the same typo hundreds of thousands of times. Does that sound like an average level of neuroticism? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:42, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

RfC help needed

Hello WhatamIdoing,

I would like some help on an RfC I'm about to start about whether or not pricing information should be included in computer products list articles.

Right now, the articles I were working on have had the pricing information there for years, and recently a small number of editors are intending to have them removed from all the articles.

So since the information is being removed, rather than being added, does it make sense to ask the second question rather than the first one?

1. "Should pricing information (e.g. the original MSRP) be included in computer CPU and GPU product list articles?"
2. "Should pricing information (i.e. the original MSRP) be removed from computer CPU and GPU product list articles?"

Here's a more open modification of the first question:

• "Should pricing information be included in computer CPU and GPU product list articles? If so, what kind of pricing (e.g. the original MSRP, current retail price)?"

Additionally, should I start the RfC at the article talk page where the original argument started, or at the Wikiproject Computing talk page?

Let me know what you think of this. Cheers, — AP 499D25 (talk) 03:00, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

@AP 499D25, I think it will be easier to help you if I had an idea about what the products are. For example, I believe it's typical to provide the MSRP for cars, and there's an agreed-upon convention for figuring out which price to include (the price on the day it was first released, with "standard trim", less taxes, or something like that?).

It might be more difficult to that for a product whose value fluctuates over time (e.g., eggs) or by place (e.g., housing). WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:00, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Relevant articles: List of AMD Ryzen processors, List of Intel Core processors, List of AMD GPUs, List of Nvidia GPUs, Intel Arc. The article I was having the dispute on was the AMD Ryzen processors article, specifically the AMD Ryzen 1000 Series table template. I started a discussion here, but the number of editors involved seem very low, there are hundreds of other CPU/GPU product list tables that have pricing information, and some of them have had that info for more than a decade now, so I want to start an RfC on this on whether all these list tables really should have pricing or not, and gather a wider consensus. — AP 499D25 (talk) 14:14, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

If you want to keep the price information, then I think you will need to spend a while adding sources and also explaining why this matters. WP:NOT says "An article should not include product pricing or availability information (which can vary widely with time and location) unless there is an independent source and encyclopedic significance for the mention, which may be indicated by mainstream media sources or books (not just product reviews) providing commentary on these details instead of just passing mention."

I've underlined the bits that you'll need to overcome. The Wikipedia:Independent sources might not be difficult, but it may take some time. The encyclopedic significance bit will probably require you to write a paragraph. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:18, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Alright, thanks for the response and explanation of that policy! Not exactly what I was looking for, but helpful either way. The Ryzen article certainly has a lot of places where I can write a paragraph about the pricing of some popular CPU models, describing how they competed with the Intel Core CPUs at the time. I also really don't like how the lead section of that article currently looks, a good chunk of the lead should belong in a "History" section or similar. I remember the current 'History' section of the article used to be in the lead a few years ago, then someone put it into that 'History'-named section because the lead got too long, the lead became short and comfortable to read again, and now it's back to being a long, overly technical, difficult-to-read mess. This is not going to be an easy one for me since I am usually the type of editor who adds little sentences, references, does quality fixes, copyedits, and other minor edits. — AP 499D25 (talk) 04:09, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Different people have different ideas about the "best" length for the lead, and MOS:LEADLENGTH has IMO never been very useful. However, I did a survey of a month's worth of Featured Articles a little while ago, and they had a lead length of about 300 words. The Ryzen lead is over 500 words. This is not unreasonable, but it suggests that your goal of shortening it would be in line with best practices. WhatamIdoing (talk) 09:15, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

I thought of tagging the Ryzen article with 'lead section too long' back then, but funnily enough, someone else just did it a few days ago. — AP 499D25 (talk) 04:16, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Congratulations. When two editors separately come to the same conclusion, it often leads to consensus for improvements. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:16, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Certain types of computer parts, notably processors, are different in kind from eggs or cars (or from other computer parts such as cases or cables or cooling fans) in that there has long been interest in equations and correlation of processor power increases and price decreases over time, so much so that there is a word (and an article) for it, namely, Moore's law. This argues in favor of the admissibility of price, as part of this long-standing interest in the connection of price with the topic of processors over a period of decades, but if included, I'd prefer to see it linked somehow to that subtopic, and not merely in isolation. Mathglot (talk) 21:12, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

That section of NOT is perhaps suboptimal. For one thing, MSRP is inherently non-independent; it's like asking people what their favorite colors are, and then demanding that an independent person verify that their stated favorite colors really are their actual favorite colors. The authoritative source is not the independent one, and the best case scenario for this is that the independent source doesn't misrepresent the authoritative source. But generally speaking, if you want to include information in an article, and someone else ants to keep it out, you need to comply with every jot and tittle in the law, and that means adding an inline citation to an independent source for each and every price in the table. A well-sourced paragraph or so in the list/article about why price matters would also make it more difficult to argue against including price information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:The Dawn of the Black Hearts § Question about the cover itself being a copyvio

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:The Dawn of the Black Hearts § Question about the cover itself being a copyvio. You talked about this in the discussion page, so I assume you'd also have an opinion on this. QuickQuokka ^{[⁠talk • contribs]} 11:21, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Reliable sources

Hi - I came across this conversation entirely by accident and was quite disappointed to see a lengthy debate referring to me and statements that I had made. I appreciate that the string just refers to as "some editors" or "the editor who's arguing with you" but it is quite clear who was being referred to. Positions were even being taken against me, but nobody had the courtesy to inform me. I thought I would raise the matter here first. Dormskirk (talk) 22:27, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi, @Dormskirk, I can understand how frustrating that might feel. I think the person who started the conversation really did want to have a conversation on the general point, separate from the ongoing dispute. As you can see from the first reply, the first response from many experienced editors to such suggestions is to assume that someone's trying to get the guideline changed to gain an advantage in a specific dispute, but I believe the OP was sincere in wanting a general rule written down, to help lots of editors at thousands of articles, rather than just wanting to win this one dispute.

That said, the fact that you, personally, were the person who opposed over-reliance on self-published, non-independent primary sources was not really important to the OP's request, which was going to be denied with one hand (because audited statements are not independent) but halfway given back with the other hand (because non-independent sources are not banned). WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:04, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

OK. Thank you for your thoughtful response. Dormskirk (talk) 08:52, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Venue advice

A few of us are working on a rewrite of H:YFA over at User:Houseblaster/YFA draft. We've got some concerns about whether we can offer firm guidance that's not actually policy level yet, the most specific of which is whether or not we can tell new editors straight up not to use ChatGPT in composing. I'm wondering where would be a good place to check the temperature of the community about this, and I thought you might be a good person to ask. Best wishes, Folly Mox (talk) 09:20, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

I've been looking at the Wikipedia:Large language models page, and I am not overly impressed. I also don't think that a "popular vote" (e.g., at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), which is one of the places to ask about such things) is going to get you an accurate answer that will hold up over time. Consequently, I think you're probably better off softening the advice: Instead of "Don't use", say "It's a bad idea" or "Write in your own words. Don't copy from websites, sources, or software like ChatGPT". WhatamIdoing (talk) 09:29, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

I've seen your contributions to the talk page of WP:LLM and I agree with your concerns. I'm not sure where that piece of guidance is headed. I'm mostly interested in letting good faith new contributors know that ChatGPT is not going to be able to help them write articles. I'll see if I can rewrite the language in the YFA draft to make it less of a prohibition and drop the link to WP:LLM. Thanks for your advice 🙏🏽 Folly Mox (talk) 09:36, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Sources of financial information

Thank you for your continued engagement on this topic. We probably have very different backgrounds and I am just so puzzled that we see this topic so differently. Would you be willing to have a phone call about this so that we can see where our differences on this are? Jaeljojo (talk) 10:58, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

No, but partly for selfish reasons: I loathe telephones.

I have an idea about the different perspective, though: you seem to look at it from the POV of an honest employee in the finance department who is genuinely trying to comply with both the letter of the law and the spirit of the process. I'm looking at it from the POV of the auditor, who is aware of how many problems the auditing process is structurally incapable of detecting.

Perhaps it is a bit like going to the doctor for a routine physical. At the end, she says "Everything looks good. You're healthy!", and the patient goes away comforted. But the paranoid researcher thinks "There are about 8,000 known diseases, and she only tested for the dozen or so most common ones. Why would she tell me that I'm healthy when she hasn't checked everything?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 11:21, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Too bad. I guess we can the not reconcile our differences. Let me just leave you with the thought that the entire finance world believes that audited accounts are more trustworthy than newspapers and that no bank would ever rely on newspapers to give a loan but they would on audited accounts. Again, I do not dispute that auditors get it wrong sometimes. But it is grossly wrong to therefore conclude that newspapers know it better than auditors. If I want to know Sales, EBITDA, capital expenditures, interest expenses and balance sheet of a company, of course I go to the audited accounts - why would I possibly think a newspaper knows this better than the auditors? If you read the FT, you will know that this is what they are doing too. Check their reporting on Silicon Valley Bank (e.g. How crazy was Silicon Valley Bank’s zero-hedge strategy? | Financial Times (ft.com)) https://www.ft.com/content/f9a3adce-1559-4f66-b172-cd45a9fa09d6) and all they do is to analyse audited accounts and report what they conclude. They seem to be trusting audited accounts a great deal. Jaeljojo (talk) 21:54, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

I have never claimed that newspapers know a company's finances better than their auditors.

I have claimed that newspapers know the sources behind their own stories (most of which have nothing to do with companies or finances or auditors) better than auditors know their customers' finances.

To give an example, if you think that KPMG understood SVB's finances better than the Wall Street Journal understood the sources behind their series on insider trading by US federal regulators, then I think you don't know how newspapers work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:17, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Akane Yamaguchi

Hello. Help improvements. Thanks you.27.75.126.65 (talk) 13:30, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Template:Bibleverse

Hi – was there any prior discussion regarding these edits to the Template:Bibleverse doc? Specifically, about permitting the inline use of the template? You cite these three discussions [8][9][10] as evidence of "long-standing consensus to permit the use of Bible verse sources either in the body or in footnotes", but those are very short discussions, one of them very old, and in fact I see in them a general disapproval of the inline use of Bibleverse.

The previous text, This template should not be used inline in the body of an article (added by me under my former username DanFromAnotherPlace), has stood since March 2021, and this was only a strengthening of Usage of this template inline in the body of an article is discouraged, which has stood since November 2019; and for years prior to this, the documentation quoted the EL guideline external links should not normally be used in the body of an article without any suggestion that this template was an exception. I would call this a long-standing consensus against the inline use of the template, and I don't believe the cited dicussions provide adequate justification for your changes.

I've long wanted to see an RfC about the use of Bibleverse, so if you stand by your edits then perhaps we could put this to the wider community? Sojourner in the earth (talk) 19:32, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Very old discussions are the better evidence of long-standing consensus than recent ones, no? Of course, it's not the original consensus; originally, editors linked to Wikipedia articles on the whole chapter, and there was quite a discussion ~2006 when some editors started linking to specific verses on websites that showed copyrighted translations. We could add more:

• "As for citation style, WP:EL discourages external links within the body of an article, but external Bible references are permitted as a convenience to the reader where appropriate." (2011 comment, replying to a direct question about whether ref tags are necessary)
• It's "usual" and accepted as "customary" at FAC per this 2010 exchange. It was recommended at this 2012 FAC for a list of popular passages, resulting in this edit. Contrast that with this 2020 FAC which begins with an editor recommending the same approach, but later another editor quotes the late 2019 advice from the /doc page (apparently undiscussed and unnoticed), and they compromise on a separate section of explanatory footnotes.

As for the general theory, these two factors seem to be the most relevant:

• It's often not (really) being used as a reliable source. It's more like linking to the name of a book/song/story. Just like an editor might write "Sonnet 18 is about love.^{[reliable source]}" instead of "Sonnet 18 is about love.^{[link to Wikipedia article]}, an editor should write "The creation myth opens with [link to Genesis 1:1].^{[reliable source]}" and not "The creation myth opens with Genesis 1:1.^{[link to Genesis 1:1]}"
• The KJV version links to Wikisource, which is explicitly authorized in Wikipedia:External links as an acceptable link placed in the body of an article.

And since policy says that our written rules should match what experienced editors do in practice, rather than trying to impose rules top-down on them, I checked the first five articles listed in Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Bibleverse and found that:

• Three use the template directly in the text to give an external link to the book/chapter/verse directly in the text. (Example: "In Judaism (Genesis 2:7), the fetus is not considered to have a human soul until it is safely outside of the woman, is viable, and has taken its first breath. The fetus is considered valuable property of the woman and not a human life while in the womb (Exodus 21:22–23).")
• The two that did not were providing a primary source for a longer direct quotation but not mentioning the book/chapter/verse that the quotation was taken from. (Example: "she says to the villain of the story, Holofernes, "my lord will not fail to achieve his purposes".)

(That aligns more closely with the two examples I wrote for the /doc page than I expected to find.)

As another way of looking at current practices, a quick insource search finds almost 2600 articles that likely use the bibleverse template inside ref tags out of 5250 articles that both contain the string {{bible and use this template. There are almost 6600 articles use this template, so my search misses ~1400 instances of redirects that don't begin with the word bible, such as {{KJV}}), but since the "check five articles" approach and the quick search align, it's probably fair to say that editors are using the two approaches approximately 50–50 (and no more than a 60–40 split, even if all 1400 of the uncounted instances are used the same way, which seems unlikely).

I am not sure that an RFC would produce any improvements. We could realistically expect some useless "Follow teh rulez" comments and a handful of bigoted "Don't cite it because all religious texts are inherently unreliable" comments, but I doubt that we would end up with better or more nuanced advice than what we've already got. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:58, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

On your point that "our written rules should match what experienced editors do in practice", I agree with that. And what experienced editors do in practice is documented in WP:EL and WP:CS:EMBED; experienced editors do not put external links in the body of an article. If one small subset of editors – those who write about Biblical topics – are doing something different, then they are acting against a global consensus. Per WP:CONLEVEL, editors in one topic area cannot declare "their" articles exempt from the rules without the agreement of the wider community.

In the discussions you've linked so far, I see three editors explicitly recommending the inline use of Bibleverse and three editors explicitly disapproving of it, with the remainder simply asking questions or making observations about common practice. You seem to be interpreting this as evidence that both citation methods are equally acceptable, but since one method (footnotes) is endorsed by our guidelines and the other (embedded links) is strongly discouraged, I believe a much clearer consensus is required before we can state definitively that embedded links to Bible verses are permitted. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 22:34, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

I disagree on two points:

• When that "one small subset" has multiple discussions with the "wider community", and the wider community accepts what they're doing, then that's not a case of CONLEVEL. Also – and I say this as the editor who has written more of Wikipedia:External links than literally anyone else on Earth – when we say at the top of WP:EL that "External links normally should not be placed in the body of an article", that word normally is not just some rhetorical quirk. We actually do mean that there are times and circumstances in which it's okay.
• In most of the cases that you object to, the links to Bible verses are not usually being used as "citations" that support article content, so whether they are acceptable "citation methods" is irrelevant. Consider this, from Martin Luther: "Luther's boldest assertion in the debate was that Matthew 16:18 does not confer on popes the exclusive right to interpret scripture, and that therefore neither popes nor church councils were infallible." Matthew 16:18 does not support the content of the sentence, right? I have clicked through, and there is nothing in that verse that says anything about Luther, his assertions, popes, exclusive rights, interpreting scripture, or church councils. The Bible verse is therefore not a source for this sentence, and it should not be treated like one. The actual sources are two modern books, not an ancient religious text.

Finally, I suggest that you spend more time thinking about how the template works. Click on the Bibleverse link from Martin Luther and see what website you end up at. If someone went to the wider community and said "This template, even when it's set to produce links to Wikisource, must always be wrapped in ref tags, because WP:EL says that normally you shouldn't have external links in the text, even though it also explicitly authorizes links to Wikisource", or "If you want to link to Wikisource, you have to type [[s:Bible (King James)/Matthew#16:18]] and not use a template", we'd all laugh at them.

I think the bigger problem is not giving people a handy link to the Bible verse that Luther mentioned during a debate, but editors using the Bible as a source when they ought to be using a secondary source. The quote above about what the woman said to Holofernes is a quite minimal citation: It's a direct quotation, so it must have something. But it ought to have a source behind it that says this is relevant to the topic of the article, which is Ambiguity. WhatamIdoing (talk) 10:45, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, I'm not objecting to the use of this template to create links to Wikisource; I'm talking specifically about the embedding of external (non-Wikimedia) links in article text. I have no problem with you making this distinction clearer in the documentation; the change which you do not have consensus for is the removal of "Place external links to the Bible in footnotes" and the addition of new language that permits the in-text embedding of external links. In the spirit of WP:BRD, I'm going to revert your changes until you can show a consensus for them. I may start an RfC on this in the next couple of weeks if I get time. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 16:17, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

@Sojourner in the earth, a link to Wikisource is an external link, according to the Wikipedia:External links guideline. If you say "Place external links to the Bible in footnotes", you are saying "Place links to Wikisource in footnotes".

I'm also curious how you would handle the Martin Luther sentence above. Maybe "Luther's boldest assertion in the debate was that Matthew 16:18 does not confer on popes the exclusive right to interpret scripture, and that therefore neither popes nor church councils were infallible."? Is that actually helping anyone? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:54, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Okay, sorry if I used the wrong terminology; I've always considered "external" to be distinct from "interwiki". On your Martin Luther quote: I think it's a good general principle not to force readers to click on links in order to understand the content of an article. If the text of Matthew 16:18 provides important context, then it should be quoted in the article. I would write: Luther's boldest assertion in the debate was that Matthew 16:18 ("thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church") does not confer on popes the exclusive right to interpret scripture, and that therefore neither popes nor church councils were infallible. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 05:18, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

The secondary source () would probably be sufficient for the quote (surely if it's important context, then the source would quote it?), but it wouldn't let people read the context around it, if that's what they wanted to do.

What would you do if you thought that clicking the link was not necessary to understand the content of the article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:48, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

When I quote a primary source, I generally include a reference to it, even if the secondary source also provides the quote, and this is for exactly the reason you mention: it lets the reader see the quote in context. It's not really there for verification, more as a convenience for the reader. This, I believe, is the same purpose that you think is being served by the inline external link; but in my version of that Luther passage, (a) there is no need to click anything, because the quote is right there, and (b) if the reader does decide to follow the link, the footnote can give them additional information about which translation the quote comes from, its date of publication, the site it's hosted on, etc. I grant that most footnote links to Bible verses don't contain this information, but they could (and in my opinion, should).

As to your second question: If I thought that the text of the verse was not at all relevant, then I wouldn't quote it or link to it. Just as, if I were to write "John Smith was born in 1974", I wouldn't wikilink 1974, because the content of that article is not relevant.

I'd like to ask you a question in return: what precisely is it that you consider to be an exception to the "no external links in the article body" rule? Is it specifically links to Bible verses, or are other types of convenience link also excepted? Let's say I wrote: "One of Plato's most influential passages is Phaedrus 229e–230a." Assuming the assertion is backed up by the footnote, is that an acceptable use of an external link? I'm interested to know where you draw the line. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 17:39, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I'd prefer a link to s:Phaedrus (Jowett), or to create and then link to the relevant page at s:Index:Plato, with an English translation (vol. 1 of 12) (Fowler, 1913).djvu if you prefer the Fowler translation, but:

• If editors who regularly edited articles about Plato believed such links to be helpful to readers strongly enough that they added them to hundreds of articles, and
• If most other editors did not disagree strongly enough to revert or change such additions, and
• If editors had multiple, independent, unrelated discussions over the years about whether such links were desirable or about details of implementation (e.g., which translation to prefer), all generally converging on the idea that these were (at least sometimes) acceptable,

then I should not disagree with them. Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible all have standardized referencing systems that make this approach feasible.

I would not expect editors to accept the same for lyrics to a song, as an article might discuss multiple passages from Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible in the same article (more than 500 articles mention all three), but an article is unlikely to discuss the lyrics from multiple songs in the same article, and when the lyrics for a song are mentioned, the article tends to be about the song. In that case, I (and I believe other editors) would prefer to see that single link to the song lyrics put in an infobox or the ==External links== section for the whole article (which, in this example, is about the song, after all), rather than linked in the middle of a sentence (as if it were only relevant to the one sentence/paragraph). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:42, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

About Just as, if I were to write "John Smith was born in 1974", I wouldn't wikilink 1974: But every reader knows what "1974" means, but most readers won't have any idea what "Ecclesiastes 12:12" means. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:51, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the reader who doesn't know what "Ecclesiastes 12:12" means would be helped more by a wikilink to Ecclesiastes or Ecclesiastes 12 than by an external link to a page such as this, which would not much enlighten them. But the use of inline exernal links prevents us from providing useful wikilinks.

On your second and third bullet points – I frequently see experienced editors removing inline Bibleverse links, and I've already said that I don't believe the discussions you've cited demonstrate any general agreement that these links are okay. However, it seems evident that neither of us is going to change the other's mind at this point. Thanks for discussing this with me. I'll think further about where to go from here; I still feel we would all benefit from a clear community consensus on this issue. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 05:12, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Why do you think a link to a general encyclopedia article on "one of the Ketuvim ("Writings") of the Hebrew Bible and part of the Wisdom literature of the Christian Old Testament" would be more helpful than a link to a page that contains the sentence being discussed?

I imagine that a reader who did not recognize the name of the book would glork from context that it is an old book, and wants to know specifically what the twelfth verse of chapter 12 says. I was looking for an example similar to your "1974", but I feel like you've said that if necessary, a link to 20th century would tell the reader all they need to know about 1974. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:41, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

I thought we were talking about a situation where the actual content of the verse is not relevant, but where a reader might still want to know what Ecclesiastes is and what the numbers mean. Maybe my analogy wasn't great, but I can't think offhand of an real situation where an article would mention a specific verse that wasn't at all relevant to the reader's understanding of the subject. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 07:00, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

"James Middleton, the bride's brother, read Romans 12:1–2,9–18 at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton."

"Donald Trump, who claim to be a devout Christian has been publicly doubted, misread a reference to a Bible verse in his speech notes. He said 'Two Corinthians 3:17' instead of the customary name, which is 'Second Corinthians 3:17'. This made commentators claim that Trump is unfamiliar with the Bible."

In the case of Ecclesiastes, I'm mostly thinking that the reader is curious, much the way someone might be curious if a sentence said "This parallels the opening of Act 1, Scene 1 in Macbeth", and they have forgotten how the play opens. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:30, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Your Donald Trump example is a case where I definitely wouldn't add a link. Knowing what the verse in question says would not assist the reader's understanding in any way; in fact, you could drop the "3:17" part without losing any relevant information. Of course there's a chance that the reader will still want to know what it says, but it's a slim chance. To return to my not-so-good analogy: there's a chance that a reader who is told that John Smith was born in 1974 will want to know who else was born that year, but it's unlikely enough that it's not worth the cost of adding link clutter.

In any event, I think we're drifting from the point. Whether or not to link to a Bible verse will always be a subjective editorial decision; the policy question here is how that link should be presented. You say it can be embedded in the text, I say it should be in a footnote. I don't think we're likely to break through that impasse, and ultimately our opinions aren't important so long as we remain two lone voices. I'm happy to continue the conversation if it interests you, but I doubt it will move us forward at this point. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 16:12, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Do you say it should be in a footnote? Or do you say that it should be in a footnote when it's pointing to non-Wikimedia websites? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:30, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

My personal preference would be always in a footnote, but I'm less concerned about interwiki links, and I accept that general opinion is probably evenly split on whether embedded links to the Wikisource KJV are acceptable. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 20:55, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Are you aware that readers rarely click on footnotes? There are zero clicks on footnotes in 99.7% of page views. In 0.3% of page views, the reader clicks on one footnote. Clicking on more than one seems to be a rounding error. So "always in a footnote" realistically means "almost nobody clicks on this". It might mean "readers are less likely to click on this", but it definitely means that almost nobody clicks on it.

Are you trying to discourage them from reading the text? Is that a desirable outcome from your POV? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:05, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Of course not. Like you, I wish to provide the links for those who want them. If the majority of readers don't want them, that's all the more reason to keep them out of the way.

Incidentally, though, I disagree with your characterization of those statistics. You're saying that if an article like Abraham gets 100,000 views a month, that means 3,600 people a year are clicking on references. Do you call that "almost nobody"? Sojourner in the earth (talk) 06:11, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

If 3600 people click on one ref in a year, then that's 300 in a month. There are presently 129 refs in this article,which means that (assuming clicks are evenly distributed) each ref would be clicked on less than slightly more than twice a month. So with 100,000 views a month for that article, two or three people each month will discover that we provide a link to any given Bible verse. (This doesn't mean that they'll click on the link and see the Bible verse; they'll just be the only people who know that that clicking through to read the named Bible verse is possible.)

Two people a month feels like "almost nobody" to me. Does that sound like a lot of people to you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 10:15, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Of those 129 refs, about 50 are Bibleverse links, so let's make that 100 or so people a month clicking through to a Bible verse. But from the rest of your comment, it seems that what you're measuring is not how many people click the link, but how many people click the little blue number. Is that right? Because I myself rarely click the number; I generally hover over it and click the link in the pop-up. I know most readers are on mobile, but you're still excluding a significant portion of the userbase if you're assuming that no-one will click the link without first clicking the number.

However, let's say you were to convince me that almost nobody is interested in reading the sources. For me, that would be a reason to stop adding Bibleverse links, not a reason to make them more prominent. We both agreed that these links are usually not there for verification, but only for convenience, in case the reader wants to see the verse in context. If the readers aren't interested, why include them? Sojourner in the earth (talk) 15:28, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

You can read the research yourself: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3366423.3380300. Mobile use of refs is much lower (a quarter of the desktop rate), and Abraham is about 70% mobile readers. Longer and well-developed articles also get fewer clicks.

I don't think that we can assume that a reader who doesn't think that the little blue clicky number will contain information that interests them is also a reader who is uninterested in reading the named verse. It could be that they're not clicking on the ref tags precisely because they expect it to contain a source for verification, rather than a Bible verse link. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the ref. I must have misunderstood you before; it looked like you were saying that 0.3% of pageviews, divided by the number of references, gives the number of people who will discover any given footnote, but it seems from the paper that 0.3% is the fraction of readers who not only view a footnote but also click the link. If I'm reading it right, 1.4% of desktop readers will hover over at least one footnote and view the reference tooltip, and about 0.6(ish?)% of mobile users will click a footnote marker (of whom 0.13% will click the link). The section "Link-Level Analysis of Citation Interactions", with its textual predictors of hovering and clicking, indicates that readers are indeed finding the links that interest them and ignoring the ones that don't. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 20:43, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Always precious

Ten years ago, you were found precious. That's what you are, always.

I read our discussion back then, and smiled. So 10 years ago, the infoboxes arbcase began, requested because a friend found that the opposition to {{infobox opera}} needed examination. Where the arbs looked I don't know, certainly not there. I was restricted and admonished for things like Talk:Richard Wagner/Archive 13#No infobox: an infobox to remain only on the talk. Look now on that talk, - did the case accomplish anything? I'm not sure, but quite willing to stay away. My restrictions were rescinded in 2015, I left the topic in 2016 (after Pierre Boulez), and still feel treated like an infobox warrior, while I believe that I'm all for peace ;) - Mozart happened, without me doing anything (besides supporting the arguments of User:Voceditenore, - I am focused on articles. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:39, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Grande-Anse?

What in the world brought you to edit that article? Not that's a bad thing, just you know... these articles tend to be edited by locals :p. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:54, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

A quick check for a village of the same name but in Nova Scotia, and then one thing led to another, and... WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:00, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I picked the NS to not have people fight over the NB one... Looks like my plan... frontfired? Whatever the opposite of backfired is? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:43, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

"Had unexpected benefits", perhaps.  ;-)

I'm not sure that red-linked museum would make a very good article (though w:fr:Musée des cultures fondatrices exists and links some independent sources), but it probably clears the official minimum standard. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

It used to be more popular in the past that's for sure. People were more religious back then. Everyone still calls it the Pope's Museum though.

Anyway, if you ever visit, I suggest hitting the beach, bike trails, kayaking, and the nearby Village Historique Acadien (the pictures in that article doesn't do it justice). Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:32, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I dislike traveling, so I'm unlikely to make it there. I do like editing Wikivoyage, though. I see that living museum is mentioned in several different articles there. Bertrand doesn't have an article, so I suspect that voy:en:Caraquet is the central listing. You could edit that page. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:18, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

The "believe that I'm offended" stuff

I wanted to respond pretty fully to this, but doing it in the middle of that VPPOL thread seemed kind of off-topic. I know this is long, but I'm trying to address your specifics, and I'm also chock full o' coffee.

So... I wrote that comment above, and now you are telling me what my stance is?

Is there any chance that you could believe me, when I say that I just want to stop editors from having this kind of exchange?

• A: I feel offended by this.
• B: No, you don't. I've rationally analyzed it, and it's not offensive; therefore, nobody's offended by it.

Or this kind, which I had just a couple weeks ago at a different village pump?

• A: That doesn't help anyone edit articles.
• Me: I found that it made it easier to edit this specific article.
• B: No, it doesn't make it easier to edit articles.

I realize you can't unilaterally solve all communication problems, but do you think the two of us could agree that I am the expert on my stance, and you are the expert on your stance, and not the other way around? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:05, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Of course I believe you on what your stance is. And if you want to write an essay about this, have at it. I just hope the wording is careful and specific enough to get around some of the concerns I've raised, most especially the use of claimed offense as a weapon against other editors in doctrine/ideology-related squabbling (either as a means of forcing self-censorship, or punishing those who decline to self-censor). There's an epidemic of it. It's a real problem we have that certain people find everything that doesn't fit their worldview to be "offensive" and try to make other people in to "the bad guy" for not agreeing with them. "... the way you show that you believe that is that you don't say stupid things like 'nobody is offended by this'", below, is a reasonable approach to some of this.

But given the specifics you laid out in that post, this looks like a solution in search of problem that doesn't solve the problem and introduces new ones, and as with most of those, implementing it could cause more harm than good, in ways I've already outlined in probably too much detail at VPPOL.

No one in the first of those kinds of discussions you laid out above ever seems to actually be saying "therefore, nobody's offended by it" (open to being proven wrong on that, of course; it's not like I see every discussion thread, but I do see lot of those kind). What really seems to be happening to me are two kinds of responses: One is that "offense" is often so subjective that there isn't particularly anything to do about it other than assure that no offense was intended, and then try to tiptoe around that specific editor, to the extent one can figure out what their sometimes idiosyncratic (and sometimes extremist or hyperbolic) concern is. The other one is observing that people on opposing sides of a politicized disagreement tend to find everything the other side says is ideologically offensive in general, so again no change seems warranted to someone because the offense-taking is a "natural" part of the discussion, or even just seems like a politicized attack from the other side. (This kind of response is very often taken by left-leaning editors against the concerns of centrist or right-leaning or even less-left-leaning ones; it's not just the rightists being dissmissive of "woke" concerns.) We don't seem to have much tolerance as a community for a third sort of response, that anyone taking offense at anything is just being a big baby and needs to STFU; people who go there don't last long here.

I'm not familiar with the second "discussion failure" you bullet-pointed, in its specifics, but just "not hearing" the other editor is clearly a common enough problem. I'm skeptical, though, this it is related to literal lack of belief that the other person believes what they say; rather, it's more often a dismissal of the view as irrelevant or insufficient in the glowing radiance of the respondent's own opinion/concerns. :-)

Aside: All of this is a bit separate from the MoS-change arguments that boil down to "MoS should say this if offensive" (or, the flip side of that, e.g. in an recent MOS:GENDERID debate about neopronouns, that "MoS should say this is the correct way to write"). The push-back on these is primarily lack of evidence that the majority of real-world, mainstream, high-quality publishers, and style guides MoS is built on, agree (though, yes, there are also some right-wing ideologues who pop up in these discussions, too, right along with the left-side ones). A strong current running deep through all these discussions, about reader-facing content or not, is a belief pretty much entirely on the far left but not by any means shared even by all far leftists, that there is some kind of moral right to be free from offense, and that offense is only determined by the offended, which is obviously not how the world (or our little wiki microcosm of it) operates.

On the subject: I don't mind you saying something like "If we write 'If an editor says they're offended, you should believe them', then some troll is going to claim that it means 'If an editor says they're offended, everyone is morally required to believe something the editor never actually said, and it is especially incumbent on you to twist a simple, personal statement that 'I'm personally offended' into a claim that the editor has conclusively proven that every single human on the planet is extremely upset with you and that if you are not equally offended, then you are a horrible, shameful excuse for a human'." Because, you know, everything gets quoted out of context eventually, and the amount of stupid on the internet is vast and deep. It might even be pointless to hope that an explicit sentence 'If an editor says they're offended by this, you should believe that they actually are offended by this, and the way you show that you believe that is that you don't say stupid things like 'nobody is offended by this'" could address the problem. But I would still like it if experienced editors stopped telling me that my own view is the opposite of what I've just told them my view is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:39, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Some troll might possibly try some logic-twisting game like that, but it's not a concern I have. The one I do have is that there has already grown a dismal atmosphere on WP especially in topics that cross the "culture wars" boundary, that cancel-culture style aggression toward other editors will go unpunished, even be vigorously defended, as long as it aligns with the majority socio-political stance on the project, and even when it goes quite a bit further than that majority is actually okay with, because speaking out against it just makes you the next target in line to be cancelled. Several of these topics where MoS intersects with language-reform advocacy are probably headed for ArbCom (again), but I have uncertain faith in that body doing the right thing for the project rather than the thing that will help them get re-elected at the next ArbCom election. Kangaroo-court noticeboards like ANI and even AE generally fall right on their faces in such matters. Anyone who even slightly comes off as a right-wing agitator gets banned on the spot, while anyone who is really obviously a left-wing agitator gets reflexively and loudly defended.

The technique of trying to mis-cast any left-leaning editors (or, obviously, centrist or mild-right ones) who simply are not extreme ultra-left, and thus not in perfect lockstep with a particular position, as being right-wing agitators is frequent, and dangerous both to their survival at the project and to the project doing what it is supposed to be doing instead of becoming the left's equivalent of Conservapedia. I didn't come here to work on Progressivapedia; I spent most of my adult life pushing progressive and civil-liberties causes all day every day, before I switched for stress reasons to doing more neutral tech work. I came here to work on a neutral encyclopedia (even if I recognize that "reality leans left" as the saying goes, and that the more right-leaning the source the less reliable it is likely to be).

Just the number of times this week alone that someone has tried to smear me as an offensive right-winger in various discussions, all relating to my rather neutral-minded and fact-based resistance to language-reformation advocacy until we are certain actual mainstream usage has changed, was the major topic at my counseling session today. Hell, I even got attacked by one of these people for changing my mind to agree with them based on new evidence! WTF? These "smear my doctrine enemies with false aspersions, even at the cost of driving away another leftist I agree with on everything else" (laced strongly with "I am addicted to fighting with people on Internet forums") behaviors have real consequences for real people (and the intended message is actually "you are a shameful excuse for a human", no matter how much it is hidden behind WP:FALSECIV and carefully WP:SANCTIONGAMING wording). I hope people "believe" me when I say it's "offensive".

Anyway, I hope it's clearer that the concern I have about "you should believe them" is its weaponization potential, not its potential for strange "the editor has conclusively proven that every single human on the planet is extremely upset with you" trolling, which I haven't run into any evidence of either.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:37, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish, I stopped reading when I got to the point where you told me that I had a solution in search of a problem. I have a problem. I have a problem with editors telling me things like I don't find something easier when I have just told them that I actually do find it easier. This is a problem. You can call it mansplaining if you'd like; you can call it gaslighting if that makes you happier; you can call it an unfortunate failure of listening skills; you can call it a characteristic trait of Wikipedians to reject any evidence that disagrees with their personal experience; you can call it further evidence that the average human is far stupider than we'd like to believe, but please stop telling me that I don't have a real problem.

Feel free to re-write if you want me read the rest. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:48, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Alright, so better wording might be that "Any solution proposed must be better than no solution" is usually poor reasoning. It's common but not well thought-out, and it leads to implementation of "solutions" that don't solve the problem and introduce new problems (often unrelated to the origina one) on top. By using wording like "when someone says they are offended you should believe them" or other close phrasing of this sort (which is borrowed directly from a school of extreme activism that posits that "harm", "violence" and other concepts are entirely defined by the alleged victim, whether you know the phrasing came from that realm or not) implies an obligation to change position/wording/behavior upon any allegation of offense, you create or enable an array of problems that really have nothing to do with things like people not listening when you tell them a certain technical problem exists or that doing things a certain way is more productive at a particular article. Cf. also WP:DTTC; it's a similar situation of (often innocently) borrowing extremely loaded "dogwhistle" language from one sphere and trying to apply it more generally.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:14, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

So, if we can't say that you should "believe" people who aren't likely to be lying to you, then what can we say that means basically the same thing? "If someone claims to be personally offended by something, you should accept, trust, and behave like you are convinced that they really are personally offended"?

I think this is pretty basic AGF content. If someone someone says that ____ in an article is offensive to them, you are demonstrating AGF when you believe that they're not lying about their own personal emotional reaction (however irrational or unfounded you think that might be). You are either assuming bad faith (i.e., you are assuming that they are lying to you), or you are demonstrating serious reading comprehension problems, when you tell them that it's not offensive at all right after they told you that it was offensive to them.

They really do get to decide what's offensive to them, just like you really do get to decide what's offensive to you.

I'm doubtful about your claim that there is a direct connection between Believe women and the idea that harm and violence are entirely defined by the alleged victim. For one thing, I'm not sure that anyone actually believes that harm and violence are entirely defined by those who claim to be direct victims. I'm not aware of any philosopher or reliable source that thinks harm and violence you're unaware of – and therefore that you can't "define" – isn't still harmful or violent. It should be easy enough to find a source if any exists, though, as the thought experiment is utterly predictable.

But let us go one step further: Are there actually any sources that say someone else gets to decide what your emotions are? Because that's the flip side of claiming that it's "extreme" to believe that someone feels harmed when they say they feel harmed. If it's "extreme" to say "I felt disrespected when you interrupted me" means that the speaker really did feel disrespected, then which of us gets to decide what the speaker actually felt? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:10, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

has the same sorts of potential problems; it's all about the "victim" and their offendedness, and is even about changing how you "behave". It would probably be better, if this were going to be a real essay, to recast it more broadly and be more explicit that this is subjective, even at the cost of less pithy wording, e.g.: "Assume good faith by believing, accepting, trusting that other editors believe and mean what they say when they disagree with you, whatever the topic, which might range from a technical problem like ease of use, to a more charged matter like potential offensiveness of certain phrasing to a particular audience or just to that individual. Acknowleding that you understand that their view is genuine to them is not the same as having to agree with their opinion."

Oh, I entirely accept (doesn't everyone?) that each personal internal sense of offense or harm is defined individually, so of course I don't have sources that claim otherwise and wouldn't go looking for any crap that did. But the sense of "I feel harmed therefore you harmed me" (i.e., therefore you did wrong) is dangerous. I just encountered a serious example of it a few weeks ago at a queer crafts fair. Someone showed up a bit late and right out of their car started venting in an strident, panicky, aggressive manner at the organizers that they (the late arriver) didn't have enough booth space because others setting up booths had encroached on it. The organizers understandably asked this person to chill out and that it would be dealt with quickly by shifting some booth positions, and they did this in calm and understanding tones. I was there for the entire exchange. And it did get resolved that way, but all the time while people were moving their booth setups a few feet to make more room, the late-arriver burst into tears and went on a drama roll about how the organizers had "yelled at" and "disrespected" them, and tried to turn anyone who would listen to their side of the story (and some did), kind of demonizing the organizers behind their backs, when nothing of the sort happened at all. The yelling and disrespect was from that individual's own side, and continued in this public-display manner after the organizers moved on to deal with something else. I even had a friend of this person, who showed up later, chastize me that "'yelling' is all in the perception of who was yelled at", which is circular reasoning (so, yes, there are people in this socio-political sphere who firmly believe that harm/offense/etc. are just defined by the alleged victim), when I later pointed out that no one had yelled at this person, after opinion started to turn negative toward the organizers among some of the later-coming "un-witnesses" being exposed only to the "victim" side of the story. I have no doubt that for whatever internal reasons they feel that their side of the story, including a feeling of being attacked and that they did nothing wrong themself, are quite real. But no one should act on it by taking up the complainant's side without the more objective history of the interaction. Unforunately, people will demonstrably pick a side reactively, that aggrees with their own prejudices and feelings or even just which party they identify with more or know better, or who does a better/louder job at being heard.

And this is by no means an unusual case. It's a good example of what I mean by progressives using this sort of thing as a weapon against other progressive just to "win" on something. (This one in particular seems to have had the real-world consequence that various people now believe that that event's organizers will verbally abuse someone asking for their agreed booth space, and may be further skewed into thinking they have some kind of issue with genderqueer people of colour, because of some of what the offended party expressed as possible motivations for the "yelling at me".)

I feel (and you can believe me >;-) this sort of thing very accutely because I am frequently labeled or dogwhistled at as a supposed conservative -ist/-phobe who hates woke social justice workers (and now its greens, as of yesterday), just for not agreeing with PoV-pushing advocacy being used on WP, for reasons that have nothing to do with the socio-political ideas behing the advocacy but simply because this is not a platform for PoV pushing. Progressives will very happily throw other progressives under the bus for alleged infractions of doctrine or right-thinking perspective on some other issue than the one they were just happily agreeing about. It's why the left is always tearing itself apart and the right is rising seemingly without effective challenge; the latter will put their differences aside much more readily, despite all the "acceptance and diversity" preaching on the left.

I wasn't thinking of Believe women in particular (which seems to have more to do with credibility of legal claims against sexual assaulters), as I much more often encounter this kind of reasoning in ethnic relations and TG/NB/QG matters, between leftists (because trying to convince conservatives of such questions is a waste of time), though it's a common current throughout the entire sphere of progressivism, including on subjects like "committed suicide" wording.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:41, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the jump from "they were harmed" (e.g., by being made to experience unpleasant feelings) to "therefore you did something wrong" is an unsupportable leap of logic. Your line that "Acknowledging that you understand that their view is genuine to them is not the same as having to agree with their opinion" is much more polite than what I had been thinking, which would have sounded a lot more like "Note for the exceptionally stupid: If someone says that they're offended, "Believe them" means "Believe that they are experiencing an unpleasant emotion". "Believe them" does not mean 'Believe that the thing that offends them is universally offensive to everyone' or 'Believe that it is logical for them to be offended'."

I am leery of adding 'Believe that you must change your behavior so that they stop being offended', because sometimes you really should (e.g., if you're transgressing basic social rules, like 'keep your hands to yourself' or 'if you're upset because of a fight with your boss at work, don't take it out on the waitress at lunch'), sometimes you could (e.g., because changing that behavior is not a significant burden on you and reducing the amount of unpleasantness in the world is a pro-social behavior; because changing that behavior will re-focus attention on the thing you care about), and sometimes you shouldn't (all those people who would prefer that our articles didn't clearly state that universally fatal diseases result in everyone with those diseases dying).

Let's now consider your tardy crafts seller: The seller was harmed. The first person to inflict harm on the seller was: the seller. If the seller had not arrived late, none of the entire Chain of events (accident analysis) would have happened. However, the seller was also harmed by the nearby booth sellers (who shouldn't have encroached on the empty space even if they genuinely thought the neighboring booth would be empty all day) and by the event organizers (who failed in their duty to organize the event, by marking booth locations clearly and/or not previously noticing and correcting the neighboring booths' sprawl [Seriously, at least two booths were misplaced by a few feet? In my not-inconsiderable experience, it is unusual to see booths extending even a few inches outside of their designated spaces]).

The seller also harmed others, and an enumerated list of those harms would be long, so I'm going to skip that and focus on the understanding of yelling that seems to have concerned you. The dictionary definition of yelling supports the POV that you disagree with. See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/yelling: "to utter or declare with or as if with a yell : shout". The "as if" in that definition means that yelling is a matter of perception. You can say that you did not perceive a given utterance as being either "with or as if with a yell", and the next person can say that they did, and you would both be right. One person might prioritize the volume in their perception, and another person might prioritize the tone of voice, or whether they felt like the other person was expressing anger. You may have heard some "whisper yelling" from a librarian or seen a scene in a movie in which the characters need to keep the volume down, but are still having the kind of tense, angry exchange that is associated with yelling. According to that dictionary definition, it really is fair to consider that yelling. It is also fair to consider it to not be yelling; it is something reasonable people can disagree about. And while the seller's friend was right that the seller gets to decide whether the communication felt like yelling, other people also get to make their own decisions about it. Were you ever to have a serious discussion with the seller's friend about this, I'd ask whether they would apply the same standard to a victim of domestic violence who says that she's not being yelled at, when the volume makes everyone else plug their ears and the angry tone makes them wince.

(If this is an event that you would like to see repeated, I suggest that the the real-world consequence you should be concerned about is the event organizers quitting.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:55, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

On reading the craft fair story and the analysis, I'm reminded of the The Guardian’s 1986 Points of View advert, which I'm old enough to remember the first time. The texts: "I was there for the entire exchange", "I later pointed out that no one had yelled at this person" and "the more objective history of the interaction" suggest to me that apparently the only accurate and complete description of events is that provided by SMcCandlish. It may certainly be a truthful version of events, as they saw it. But there are gaps. Why was the person late? Why did they burst into tears, which seems to be an over-reaction that would make me think "woa, there's something else going on here, either in that person's life or in this interaction I'm witnessing". Was there actually something you didn't see (like rolling of the eyes or a whispered "ffs Nigel"). Was there history of issues with the organisers? Maybe this guy is always late, because the simply can't get there "on time" after leaving their job, say, and the organisers keep letting people overlap their space, and they promised they would ensure it won't happen again, and here the very next week it has. Maybe the organisers and the neighbours deliberately overlap Nigel's space because they can't stand Nigel and enjoy coolly distressing him, and they know just how to wind him up till he bursts. That makes a great story for them to tell down the pub after. "You'll never guess how Nigel reacted this week? Tears. Actual tears". The Guardian advert makes us think the young skinhead is a baddy. Until we see the final version. In the fair story, the late stall holder is the baddy. Maybe the true story is the coolly calm and understanding organisers, who have been regularly psychologically torturing him for fun, are actually the baddies.

I think this demonstrates the problem of judging someone else's claim to be offended, from our own and limited point of view, and deciding that not only are they the one being unreasonable (like our stall holder) but that one's own limited point of view is much more complete, objective and true than it really is or than anyone else's. Examples in the real world abound, with "old rich white men" being the textbook example of a group whose opinion hugely dominates but who frequently fail to grasp the realities of those who aren't old or rich or white or men. -- Colin°^Talk 17:20, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

I also wondered why the seller was late. An experienced seller who shows up late and starts panicking as soon as they arrive may have had a very bad day already, and encountering yet another problem might have been too much to bear.

(In the US, a "crafts fair" usually indicates an annual event. Weekly events tend to be called "markets" instead. Consequently, I assumed that long-term friction between the organizers and the individual was unlikely.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:00, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

The long bit above trying to convince me that late arriver could legitimately have felt they experienced being yelled at is unnecessary, since I'm not questioning their internal perception of events. I'm questioning third parties siding with that version of events later, without any evidence, and consequent denial of the perception of actual witnesses. In this particular instance, I know the central parties involved, for a long time, and I like them all. These "what ifs" above are generally not applicable to this case. Why the person was late wasn't relelvant. They had a teary-and-venting period about it because that is just their way of dealing with turmoil. In my account, no one is actually a baddy. It's just unfortunate and unnecessary and emotive rather than rational that the latecomer's reaction to their own stress about being late and having little booth space led next to a chain reaction of "chill out, we'll handle it promptly" messaging in response from the organizers themselves feeling yelled at, then the latecomer's own assumption that this reaction was "an attack" and further assumption that there was something gender- and/or race-related about "the attack" (despite the origanziers being also queer and not a bunch of white dudes). It was all entirely subjective, nothing anyone should formulate lasting character assumptions about, yet people who only got one side of the story probably have formulated negative assumptions about the organizers. It's not that my version is "more true" than anyone elses; it's that I, despite being a close witness, was directly told I was wrong by someone who was not even there for it, because my account didn't agree with their socio-political position about the nature of what "harm", "attack", "violence" mean.

And this is too similar for my comfort to how editors respond to "so-and-so said something -ist/-phobe over here" accusations; while editors can actually rewind a lot and go look at diffs and discussion context/history, and review an editor's entire contribution pattern, they generally won't bother. They just side with whatever emotive and subjective interpretation best agrees with their politics. We've become increasingly habituated to this by meme-think in social media. Or put it this way: Would you still be saying all the same things you are saying above, if the organizers instead, feeling "yelled at", had gone around to everyone who would listen and tried to convince them them all that the late-arriving vendor had "attacked" the organizers (and for supposedly -ist/-phobe reasons), until they got enough agreement from listeners that they felt less aggrieved, and without any regard for reputational damange they were apt to be causing? I somehow doubt it, and suspect you are reflexively siding with the single-party in the story as an underdog. "the real-world consequence you should be concerned about is the event organizers quitting" – I do have concerns like this; while people who organize events generally have thick skins and can put up with more drama than average, and evey social enterprise involves some level of gossipping and politics, people do have their limits. The frequency with which people on WP try to paint me as a conservative anti-woke agitator just because I'm not left in 100% exactly the same way they are gets me feeling like quitting this project all the time, and has much to do with my years-long gradual withdrawal (notwithstanding my last three months of activity on a specific subject, which was covered too poorly at WP to let slide.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:11, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not siding with the tardy seller. To the contrary, I have directly said that the seller caused harm.

I considered the two possibilities for the seller (that it was typical/expected behavior, or that it was atypical behavior), and then I decided that it didn't really matter. The latter is easier to excuse away than the former, but it ultimately didn't affect the analysis: Regardless of whether the seller's reaction is a typical or atypical, the seller was harmed (by not having their paid-for booth space properly handled), and the seller harmed pretty much everyone they came into contact with during those moments.

(I have seen editors quietly quit, not just cut back to "only" one or two hundred edits a month. Most come back, sometimes with a clearer idea of what they really want to do. A few quit and are much happier as a result. As long as you don't post any kind of meatball:GoodBye manifesto, then I think that withdrawing from particular processes, or from the site entirely, from time to time can be a very healthy thing to do.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:49, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I take wikibreaks from time to time, basically not do anything here unless someone emails me about it, other than to fix a typo as an annoyed reader. It's been a while since I've felt the need to pull back that far. But my investment level in the project has steadily dropped over the last several years (aside from the last 3-month blip) primarily because of the level of leftist-against-the-rest-of-the-left factional animosity swirling around "culture wars" topics. I would just stay out of them, but they inevitably turn into MoS disputes, and MoS and its evirons (RM, etc.) are a large swath of my internal interest area and my watchlist. The only other causes for wikibreaks I've felt compelled toward were being tag-team revertwarred by a pair of editors in a near-WP:OWNed category for about two years, and being tag-teamed by a pair of admins who hated me for my MoS involvement (I came back after one got desysopped and the other criticized so sharply by ArbCom that they asked him to stop being an AE admin, and ArbCom vacating a bogus sanction against me from the latter). By which I mean to say that being attacked as a supposed conservative agitator by people who know damned well that I'm no such thing, I'm just not their exact brand of leftist, feels indistinguishable from being viciously tag-teamed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:02, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Most come back, sometimes with a clearer idea of what they really want to do. A few quit and are much happier as a result -- mm. I think there's a lot more grief in many quiet-quits than that. The famous example is how often people leave for months or years after failed RfAs, which some people point to as "proof they would've been bad admins", as if the kind of RfA that fails for an experienced contributor isn't way harder than basically anything admins do. As a returning quiet-quitter, I don't feel like I have any idea what I want to do, and I don't feel like I was happy about when I was away (I felt heartsick about it much of the time, when it was relevant). Vaticidalprophet 00:03, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

"Failed" RFAs are extremely painful, especially if the editor didn't know that it was a significant possibility. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:03, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I've never run through RfA again after over a decade, because the number of people with axes to grind against MoS regulars would overwhelm the odds of passage, and I don't need that awful experience again. I'm content with the "devolved" tools I have. Getting rejected at RfA was pretty traumatic, especially since my second RfA (the first was TOOSOON) was torpedoed by a sockpuppet the accusations of which everyone just believed (mass AGF fail). My two runs for ArbCom as a non-admin actually had more support than I expected, so I might actually pass RfA, but I have no intentions of finding out. "Twice bitten", and I don't have any pressing need for admin tools.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:02, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

I wasn't siding with the tardy seller either. I merely allowed my imagination to consider scenarios that might deviate from what you observed and took from it. I think that's an important mistake to think that someone who can imagine things from another's POV or imagine alternatives, somehow is also siding with them. Your story was front loaded with "There was this guy you turned up late and kicked up an outrageous fuss", so you were setting things up for us to dislike the guy.

You went to a craft fair presumably looking for a pleasant way to pass the time, and got caught up observing an unpleasant and highly charged exchange that clearly drew you in and captured you such that you felt you witnessed the entire event. There has to be a certain amount of "this guy spoiled my afternoon/mood" especially when shortly afterwards it got your good friends picking arguments with you. I don't think you are an objective witness at all.

When you write "the more objective history" and speculate others "just side with whatever emotive and subjective interpretation best agrees with their politics" I can't help keep thinking you think your view is the objective one, not a subjective one, and that emotions and subjective views are inherently bad. And further, that it is just fine for you to suppose things about other people's politics, based on the position they took, examples they gave or POVs they offered that weren't even necessarily their own, but when other do that about you... If editors keep coming up claiming you quack like a duck, maybe stop quacking. If you are being bombarded by editors misrepresenting you (or sometimes, not misrepresenting you at all, but you being so oversensitive to it that you look for misrepresentation where there isn't any) the problem may lie in how you are engaging with others and which fights you keep picking. -- Colin°^Talk 20:15, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

We should now all pull out our copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and we will begin with chapter 1, "If You Want to Gather Honey, Don't Kick Over the Beehive"... WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:29, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

"so you were setting things up for us to dislike the guy" - Having you pick a side was never the point. The point was that those present and more importantly those not present until after the event, were siding with the vociferous party in making harmful -ist/-phobe laden assumptions about the other side. The point was the effect on this "audience". (For all I know, the organizers of the event were doing the same thing out of my earshot, and I would criticize them for it too; I also think using language like "chill out" is pretty well-known to be taken by some people as dismissive and was poor wording they could have expected a negative reaction to; they're not blameless, even from the perspective of just managing the booth spacing better from the outset.) The effect of damning someone though strategic use of public emotion and volume and character-assassinating claims relates to activistic parties on WP pointing such -ist/-phobe fingers at other editors for "failing" to use dogmatically correct language (or obstructing efforts to change WP's rules to force all editors to use it). "the problem may lie in how you are engaging with others and which fights you keep picking" – I do actually think about this sort of thing, and tweak my interaction. But there's a fine line between making adjustments to such things and simply self-censoring out of fear of WP:GANG behavior from "culture warriors" abusing WP as an advocacy platform and treating any disagreement of any kind as evidence of "enemies" in their midst to hunt. I don't have to worry about this sort of thing from the far-right, because those kinds of people get banned by the community rapidly; but there is no collective will do anything at all about far-left agitators, and suggesting something should be done about them just makes one their next target. PS: Yeah, I should probably read Dale Carnegie again. I haven't perused that book since my early teens.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:02, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Nothing like the classics.  :-)

It's a 1936 book. I wonder if we'll get some good sources next decade, in the run up to its centennial. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Maybe a new edition with some revisions based on modern psychology or something. Then again, I've seen some revision attempts at Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and they were arguably not improvements.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:40, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

A new edition wouldn't be as useful for the Wikipedia article as a source evaluating it against modern theories. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:49, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Article breakwaters, or nipping bad or naive additions to articles in the bud

Howdy, Grüß Gott.

Occasionally, I ponder the long-term maintenance and policing of articles as the (current) principle author of two GA+ VITAL articles. Today I was discussing this with Vaticidalprophet, who brought this comment you made on WT:MED to my attention. I believe we are of the same opinion, so I wanted to ask if you could speak your mind on the subject and elaborate on your ideas. Alternatively, I'd like to see if a constructive conversation could be had here with anyone watching or interested. For the latter: my belief is that it is better to disincentive specific (read: unwanted) edits rather than reverting them when they are made, that this edit-policing is demotivating to policer and policee, that that policing is undesirable because of the prior two things, and that that policing could be avoided or minimized by metaphorically building breakwaters. Restated: that it would be in the best interests of regular and casual editors to briefly discuss subject matter in an article that leads the latter to make those unwanted edits so that they are less inclined to make those edits.

One of the two VITALs I mentioned is Léon Degrelle, where I have been the "experienced editor" portrayed in WP:FETCH. Degrelle's is an article where I have gone against the grain of other writer and military biographies by excluding a list of works and of military awards because I find the former particularly odious and the latter generally odious (and unnecessary, but that's a different can of worms). Degrelle, after all, was a fascist and later neonazi championing holocaust denial and other swill. It is in my opinion undesirable to give an easy-to-reference list of his writings, especially when fascists are still reading and recommending him. There is a convincing argument to be made, however, that my stance is contrary to WP:PURPOSE, and a less convincing one that to exclude a list of his works is ineffective because other places and people (like those fascists) will furnish a list of Degrelle's garbage anyway and that I'm wasting my time.

After a moment of contemplation I realized I could, following your logic at WT:MED (It's usually more effective to mention this somehow in the article ... [if] it's missing, people assume they're "helping" by adding the exciting new news), address in this particular case the issue of a list of works by giving Degrelle's article a section specifically about his writing and its influence... but what about the military awards? I mention the receipt of prominent awards in the body prose as they come along and when I have RS coverage, but as the article history (and my talk) show, this may not be enough. The answer to these particular questions would doubtlessly be found via BRD or an RfC at WT:MILHIST, but I digress.

Neither Léon Degrelle or the article discussed in that WT:MED conversation are isolated instances in which for whatever reason it is desirable to monitor an article. The tendency of Wikipedia articles is to corrode, especially if the subject matter is or becomes contentious or high traffic. Would it be more beneficial then, to keep policing them as individual articles or take a different, Encycolpedia-wide approach? I believe the latter of course, which I'd liken to installing breakwaters or storm drainage rather than throwing floodwater out with a bucket, and in the spirit of WP:DURABLE. But, how much does taking the latter approach solve, really, if we have to continue to monitor some or all of these articles? I hope we can find answers here. –♠Vamí_IV†♠ 17:41, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your note and sharing your ideas, @Vami IV.

In the Legrelle article, I'm not sure that you need to include a list of works. Many people have written something (or many things), and we tend to include a list only when it's a primary part of the person's job (e.g., author, painter, singer). When the person is known for anything else, we tend not to include a list. Take a look through Category:Nazi propagandists and see how few include a list of works. A section that describes his works and their effects sounds desirable, but the list itself is probably not be required.

For the military awards, I suspect the problem is that some editors think it's normal, and they want all articles to be normal. (Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Content guide#Biographies lists it as optional.) You could just keep on as you are, and if anyone ever asks, tell them that not only is the list in the infobox, but the article mentions the awards, and does so in a way that complies with MILHIST's advice. That won't stop the next editor with matchy-matchy motives from trying to add it again, but it should be understandable to the few who take the time to ask. ("The WP:UPPERCASE says so" is convincing to many editors, especially less experienced ones.) If you think that having a section heading would save you time in the end, then you could create and ==Awards== section but put a paragraph under it, rather than the usual bulleted list. (Think "Like many officers, Legrelle received multiple, mostly unimportant awards from the Nazis", rather than "* [[German Cross]]" [which many readers will not know is a Nazi-only award].) However, if the section exists, I think you are very likely to find that someone tries to "help" by adding a complete list of all awards ever. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:27, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Note

You edited external links page, if can check situation of a sport league i edited and user picked it to be strict, even hiding correct parts now...thanks Bhutan Premier League 93.138.253.156 (talk) 23:38, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:External links applies to only this change. You made this change, and nobody has complained about it.

For all other disputes, try talking about it on Talk:Bhutan Premier League or ask for help at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. You will probably need to explain to them why you think Facebook and similar social media pages are Wikipedia:Reliable sources. (Hint: Try to find a newspaper article that says the same thing.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:57, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

One more week

(Hi, Peter! One more week of vacation. See you soon.)
Yay! I'm looking forward to it, @WhatamIdoing ^ _ ^ PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

Generative AI and Wikipedia research

Hi WhatamIdoing,

My name is Dr. Tim Koskie and I am a researcher at the Centre for Media Transition (CMT) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). We are conducting a study on the implications of content-generating AI systems such as ChatGPT for knowledge integrity on Wikipedia, and are approaching you because you have participated in discussions on this topic on Wikimedia pages.

If you are interested, we would like to invite you to participate in our study. It would involve joining either a focus group discussion or an interview (around 1 hour), in person at Wikimania in Singapore if you are going to be there, or online at a future date. At these sessions we would ask you questions about how you think generative AI will impact Wikipedia, as well as about the kinds of work you do on Wikipedia.

The project is funded by the Wikimedia Research Fund grant programme. You can find out more about the project here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Implications_of_ChatGPT_for_knowledge_integrity_on_Wikipedia If you are interested, let me know and I will forward you some more detailed information on the project. Tbkoskie (talk) 01:39, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

No, I'm not interested. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:42, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

I just want to show you a counterexample

Hi, you once told me Surely each person is the authoritative source on which religion(s), if any, they have affiliated themselves with. I would like to tell you that, in India, the ruling BJP is trying to broaden its social base at a time when many tribal leaders and organisations have demanded that India’s Scheduled Tribes should be enumerated separately from "Hindus" in the next Census. Their claims that different tribes follow different traditions and so should have their own ‘Sarna religion code’ in the next Indian census are gaining traction. Read more here: https://www.telegraphindia.com/jharkhand/sarna-code-tribals-sit-in-dharna-to-demand-inclusion-in-census/cid/1842301 https://www.thestatesman.com/india/tribals-demand-separate-status-census-hold-protest-jantar-mantar-1502857329.html and https://theprint.in/opinion/droupadi-murmu-isnt-just-symbolic-she-is-central-to-rss-bjps-hindutva-project/1009966/ P.S. Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren even stated that “Adivasis (a tribal community in India) were never Hindus and they never will be,” he had said at a conference at Harvard University. “The tribal community has always been nature worshipers and that is the reason why they are counted as ‘indigenous people’.” The BJP has naturally opposed Hemant Soren’s assertion. More here: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/adivasis-were-never-hindus-they-never-will-be-jharkhand-cm-7199096/ Belson 303 (talk) 16:22, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for this note, @Belson 303. I don't know as much about Indic religious systems as I would like to.

It sounds like this might be partially about religion and partially about ethnicity.

But in the end, I think that if a person says they believe ____, then they believe it, and if they say they don't, then they don't. Others may disagree about your self-identification, but if religion is about belief instead of birth, how could other people know what you truly believe? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:57, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	On reading your latest post to the NPOV talk page, I decided to give you this barnstar for your many thoughtful policy talk page comments. Andre🚐 18:44, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. Perhaps it might do some good. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:11, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

"outing"

I'm quite aware of the policy. Where is it that you're alleging I am saying x user is x person? Graywalls (talk) 04:43, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I am primarily concerned about the discussion at WT:PSY. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:06, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Also, just for your personal peace of mind, did you know that Wikipedia has set the nofollow flag for URLs, so spamming your website into Wikipedia has no effect on SEO or Google ranking? The only possible "benefit" is a reader clicking directly, and that's pretty uncommon (~one out of 300 readers on one ref). It also almost never results in people buying anything (before your time, we used affiliate marketing URLs on Amazon and similar links, but we gave it up because it wasn't generating any revenue), and it can actually be harmful to the linked website. The net result is that you really don't need to worry about such things at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:18, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

The "non-FACable source"/"bad source" issue

I've been thinking about this one since it came up on Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations#What the good article criteria are not a few days ago I feel like all our conversations lately are disagreeing -- sorry!, but I was really thinking about that well before then, because the fundamental contradiction/impossibility in how reliable sources are term-of-art defined on Wikipedia is a really interesting matter I keep digging into. There are whole topic areas I don't really touch, because things we assumed about self-published sources and legacy media in the early-mid 2000s don't fit well with reality these days, and bigger-again swathes of topic areas I do not intend on bringing to FAC ever again.

There's an observable phenomenon at FAC where articles that have gone through fine until then get held up because of sourcing concerns that wouldn't rate at all in any other part of the project, like use of dissertations, or books published by little-known publishers. These are always painful to watch, because the chance of first-time nominators in particular convincing FAC the source is good enough aren't great in practice, and when the article uses them heavily (and especially to cross from "broad" to "comprehensive") there's nothing that can be done. This was my experience at my first FAC, which was one of three contributing factors to why I didn't edit much at all for a couple months in what was otherwise still my most active year, but the examples that stand out most prominently to me (recent example) are in a pretty diverse range of topic areas across the couple years I've been watching.

There's also a more complex issue, which is that the concept of 'reliable sources' itself is a little mythological, and the RS/PS-thumping way it's frequently interpreted across the project pretty awful. My perpetual example has been Sixth Tone, easily the most reliable English source on Chinese culture -- an incredibly difficult subject to get much good Anglophone coverage of, especially under SPS rules -- which had a six-person RfC that didn't talk about much at all except "well, it's a couple steps removed from the CCP, so don't use it for politics", which several games of telephone later means one of my source highlighters marks it "RED DON'T USE" forever. RS/PS was recently updated to bring it from "yellow for non-politics" to "green for non-politics" after I...complained about it enough, frankly -- but FAC source reviewing guidance explicitly encourages source highlighters. (I think this is actively bad guidance -- source highlighters are very useful at the 'low end', and to check stuff you've never heard of while writing, but at the 'high end' any use of a source that turns up poorly on them is going to be very well-considered.) I think inasmuch as FAC source requirements amount to "a stricter version of the way RS-ism is usually interpreted by the project as a whole", this is at best orthogonal to whether those sources are bad. Vaticidalprophet 20:26, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for being the kind of person who cares enough about Wikipedia, and apparently thinks highly enough of my ability to listen to your views, to take the time and energy to disagree with me.

About FAC: I don't know if you were around for this, but a few years back, there was talk of making FAC a two-step process, with the first step being sourcing review. I don't follow FAC, but I think it was abandoned pretty quickly. If memory serves, the real goal was to find out whether the sources were appropriate and actually verified the content they were alleged to support, but (a) some people misunderstood it as a citation formatting exercise (and why would you do that first, given that new sources might be added in response to comments?), and (b) most of the individual FAC regulars are more interested in doing just anything other than comprehensive reviews for reliability and appropriateness (e.g., whether you missed some great sources). And, of course, there is the difficulty of specialized knowledge, as 99% of us have never heard of Sixth Tone and therefore have no real business talking about its general suitability, except to the extent that we can provide reliable sources to back up our comments.

I agree with you that you're right about new FAC noms. As with any other group-oriented process, if you hang out at FAC long enough, you'll know which comment(er)s are respected by the coords and which are likely to be ignored. But when you're new, none of that is apparent.

About RSP and enforcement thereof: When RSP was created, several editors predicted that we would see editors choosing mindless, semi-automated rejection of sources over actually thinking. I think that it might be possible to salvage RSP by renaming it and reframing it significantly as something like a WP:List of selected prior discussions at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard (and then waiting several years for editors to notice this), but I don't expect this to happen. In fact, I see signs that the RSP model of (effectively) banned sources and thoughtless adherence to ambiguous, nuanced, or outdated discussions being exported to other Wikipedias. See also, e.g., User:Credibility bot.

Another thing that might help is requiring scripts to either restrict themselves to use by their own actual author, or to restrict themselves to the most severe cases (e.g., indisputably predatory publishers but not "mixed bag" publishers).

On the general problem of reliable sources and sources that are reliable: We use "reliable" to mean two different things. One is that the source is suitable for a particular statement. The other is that the source is one we'd generally recommend. For example, if you were writing about Breast cancer awareness, we'd generally recommend ISBN 978-0-19-974045-1, because it's a serious scholarly book written by someone with relevant expertise and published by a respected university press. But it's not reliable for statements about the 2012 Komen scandal, because the book was published in 2010, and consequently says nothing about anything that happened in 2012.

I wish that we used different words for these two concepts. Right now, we have 'tis/tisn't kinds of conversations about whether a source is "reliable". Imagine someone saying "Donald Trump's Twitter account isn't a Decent Source™ for anything" and being told "You're right that it's not Decent™, but it's Suitable™ in the particular instance, and WP:V requires suitable-reliability, not decent-reliability. Decent Sources™ are wanted for determining notability and neutrality."

What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:56, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

I was made aware of the 'credibility bot' when it went to the Signpost newsroom. I agree quite closely with JPxG.

Was the attempted-FAC-reform the one discussed here? I always wondered what became of that. Now that GAN essentially has that, I always find my advice to new reviewers is "don't 'spotcheck' in a separate column the way everyone else does, get the sources (that you can, and that you won't fall asleep reading, and that are written in a language you can read) and look at them while you read the article, the same way as the rest of the review". Vaticidalprophet 14:24, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Side note: If you clone the second line of m:User:WhatamIdoing/global.js (the one about comment links) into your global.js at Meta-Wiki (or into User:Vaticidalprophet/common.js if you only want it at this wiki), you'd get a cool, slightly subtle system for linking straight to individual comments on talk pages. One of the devs wrote it for me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:11, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Saw this while here ... the proposal is at User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox4. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:17, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

The only change I would suggest to that is moving the proposed 1a to 3c. That would reduce the first pass to just "Did you use the right sources?" and "Did you violate the sources' copyrights?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:45, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Essay location

WAID, where's that essay about editors who write in all Wikipedia acronyms (usually without reading the article)? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:15, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

WP:UPPERCASE. I only know about it because WAID cites it so frequently. WP:ILIKEIT. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 12:20, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

"Repeatedly misciting shortcuts to policy can be disruptive and a sign of activism: an attempt to block or silence those one disagrees with a false claim to have policy on one's side", but then no further explanation of the overkill phenom :) Thanks, Fff. (I think something is missing in that sentence ?) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:28, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

But that led me to what I was after:

• Wikipedia:ALPHABETTISPAGHETTI
• Wikipedia:WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG!

So thanks again! ( WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS ). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:32, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:ALPHABETTISPAGHETTI made me laugh... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:28, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

Ha ha. Funny that it was the See also section that helped. The WP:UPPERCASE essay is more about those shortcuts with actual words, rather than the acronyms that confuse newbies and give off an air of elitism. But this confusion made me I wonder if WP:UPPERCASE might one day end up being an example in its own essay? -- Colin°^Talk 16:12, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Yep! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:27, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

PS, someday, when you need an example, I'll show you the most acronym-laden quasi-personal attack camouflaged as a false claim to have policy on one's side I've ever seen :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:29, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Another RfC help needed

Hi WhatamIdoing,

I would like a little bit of help on an RfC that I'm considering starting on a Wikipedia article also about computer tech. This time, it's about the manufacturing processes of integrated circuits (ICs).

So a bit of background on this. There is a long, never-ending dispute that has been going on, on the 7 nm process article since more than a year ago by now, about whether Intel 7 should be considered a 7nm, or 10nm process. This same dispute also carries over to 10 nm process, 5 nm process, and even 3 nm process articles, but the 7nm article is the centre point of the dispute, especially as that's where the discussion is taking place.

The dispute has recently resumed after nearly a year of inactivity, with the article having been semi-protected just a few weeks ago because of an IP editor edit-warring over it.

So, due to the rather small number of editors engaged in discussion on Talk:7 nm process, I'm considering starting an RfC to gather wider consensus from more editors about how we should really classify these manufacturing processes.

This is the question I've come up with, so far:

"Should Intel 7 be considered a 7nm, or 10nm process?

Support your answer with reliable sources backing up whether it's 10nm, or 7nm (per the verifiability policy)."

Thanks! — AP 499D25 (talk) 02:42, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't know if you need an RFC, and I'm not sure that one will be helpful. You might be better off asking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computing first, in the hope that someone watching that page will actually know something about the subject.

Have you considered a compromise position, like an Wikipedia:Explanatory footnote that says something like "This has variously been described as either 7nm or 10nm"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:28, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Okay, I might try that, asking the question at Wikiproject Computing.

No. I was intending to change / give up my position if there was consensus clearly in the opposite of what I believe. Explanatory footnotes are however what I used to resolve a dispute at Raptor Lake, where some editors were edit warring each other over whether DDR5 is considered quad-channel, or should be called dual-channel (diff of me adding the footnote). — AP 499D25 (talk) 08:17, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Environmental Working Group

I see you're working on "Environmental Working Group". I was working on it too, but I gave up, because I couldn't stand the edit warring. If there are any efforts to end the edit warring, let me know. Nbauman (talk) 20:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I imagine that the subject is rather polarizing. For articles like this, I miss SlimVirgin. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:32, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Some ramblings you might be interested in

Hi. After the recent discussion at CONLEVEL, I was inspired to write an overly long essay. Although the discussion itself, and some of the input, was somewhat frustrating, it did make me reconsider a few things. If you have any comments or thoughts on what I wrote, and if you think it might be at all useful, I'd be very interested to know. Scribolt (talk) 09:04, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi, @Scribolt.

• Which kind of subjective do you mean?
• I made a few small changes. Feel free to revert any of them). (For reference, we'll have at least one edit from about three-quarter million unique registered accounts this calendar year.)
• I think you should re-write the last four definitions so that they don't use the word consensus. (Also, for the definition of consensus, consider "agreement" [but only if it appeals to you].)

On the content, I might add that policy is often speaking generally, which means that the obvious interpretation might not apply in a specific situation. For example, WP:V doesn't overrule WP:MEDRS, even though MEDRS is "only" a guideline; instead, MEDRS tells you how to get WP:V right. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:10, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

About your definition of "discussion", you might appreciate this comment above, which also takes your expansive approach. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:04, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the copy edits, all seem good to me, and I've tried to tweak a little according to your other comments. Re the policy comment, I agree but I think that this is slightly immaterial to the point I'm trying to make. We would hope that the there is a high level of community consensus for our policy documents, but not all of the associated guidelines (which focus as you say on application) might enjoy the same. This essay wasn't supposed to be about a hierarchy of internal documents because that also doesn't work. I'd wager BRD has a higher level of community consensus in practice than some guidelines. In any event, policies and guidelines serve different purposes and shouldn't really overlap in what they tell editors. Thanks again for your time and your comments. Scribolt (talk) 11:01, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:The difference between policies, guidelines and essays might be worth reading (it's fairly short) if you haven't seen it before. Since I've not yet been appointed Her Serene Illustriousness, the Omnipotent Princess of All Policies by Divine Right, policies and guidelines do not universally follow any patterns. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:45, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I like it! I'd nominate you as the Omnipotent Princess of All Policies by Divine Right. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 18:47, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for contributing

Thank you for contributing at WT:V#What to do when a reliable source says something but no evidence and it seems very unlikely?. You read the source and pointed out the letter in the article and gave your opinion about it even though that was not what the question was about. So a +++ I think. I should not have been diverted so easily from the original question so it turned into a wall of text. NadVolum (talk) 09:08, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, the BLP is a divisive character and seems to inspire self-appointed defenders online, so perhaps it was doomed from the beginning. The more I think about it, the less I'm convinced that O'Hagan would know what he was "witnessing". One wouldn't exactly choose an award-winning playwright, novelist, and part-time professor of creative writing to figure out whether a comment like "we hacked Nortel" was true, much less the physical location of the computer system in question. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:23, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the thank

I get thanked very rarely. I think your thank was only the second or third that I've had, in almost seven hundred edits. Would you be willing to share your reasons for giving me that thank?

Best regards, Polar Apposite (talk) 19:39, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Hello, @Polar Apposite. I clicked the thanks button when I saw your edit because I believe the edit made the article better, and specifically because it made the article less human-centric. Given the number of humans, etc., each combination for humans is probably unique, but that won't be as obviously true for every organism. Also, "unique" struck me as the kind of WP:FLOWERY language that, even if it were technically true, wouldn't be understood as relating a simple mathematical fact. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

May I ask why you didn't delete it yourself? Polar Apposite (talk) 20:22, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed it before. The article is on my watchlist, but there are more than a thousand articles on my watchlist, and I've never read it from top to bottom. I watch the page mostly because it is a frequent source of disputes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:14, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

Why don't people click the thank button more often when I edit, do you think? In fact, I normally only hear from another editor when he or she has a complaint to make, or wants to warn me, or explain why my edit was reverted, and things like that. In fact, although I've gotten a few (about three, total) thank button thanks, I don't recall ever being congratulated or thanked in words for an edit. Why do you think that might be? Is it going to be like this always, or will it change eventually? For me, editing Wikipedia is it's own reward, so it's not a problem, but I am mildly curious, especially since I had heard somewhere that there is, on Wikipedia, an awesome community or sense of community or something that. Polar Apposite (talk) 21:36, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

You can check the log at Special:Log/thanks. You've thanked three people in the last month, and been thanked six times this year. I believe, but can't find where I read it right now, that something around 1% of edits on the English Wikipedia draws a 'thanks' response. It might have been 0.1%. It was not very much.

Some tasks are more likely to get a 'thanks' than others. High-profile pages seem to be more likely to draw a response (pleasant or otherwise) than low-traffic pages.

But: finding community is more than just getting a notification. If there's a subject area that interests you (e.g., video games), then I suggest finding the nearest Wikipedia:WikiProject (e.g., Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games). A WikiProject is a group of people. It is IMO the best way to connect with people on wiki. Just put a few on your watchlist, and lurk on the talk page for a little while. Click the thanks button if you see someone post a useful comment, or jump in to help if someone asks. There is nothing so valuable on wiki as a reputation for being willing to solve other people's problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:58, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

There's a lot there for me to follow up on. There's a lot of awesome ideas thare. Thanks for that.

Would you care to expand on the last line: " There is nothing so valuable on wiki as a reputation for being willing to solve other people's problems." Polar Apposite (talk) 18:06, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

If you want to feel like you're part of a community here, then it's helpful to spend time together, even if "time together" is reading the same talk pages asynchronously. As you participate through editing and replying to people, you will get a reputation. A few editors have earned reputations that make you think things like "Oh, dear, not him again..." when you see that username in your watchlist. Others have earned reputations that fill people with happiness. I assume you want the latter.

One way to get that latter type is to help other editors solve their problems. You don't have to solve all their problems; just be around and offer to help when you know it would be helpful. If you have strong search skills, maybe you'd be able to do that by searching for and sharing the sources they couldn't find. (BTW, I think you qualify for Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library now.) Maybe you'll be the one editor who knows a particular bit of grammar, or who becomes known for handling conflict of interest edit requests fairly, or is willing to read the long thing, or whatever other need other editors have. My advice to you is to find a place where people have needs (a bigger WikiProject page is great for this – have a look at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aviation, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games), and see if you can be helpful, even in a small way. Lurking's a good strategy for getting started. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:37, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Request

Please look over WP:CFORK for creep.    — The Transhumanist   19:51, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Question

I've noticed users signing talk pages without writing anything else. What's that all about?    — The Transhumanist   08:38, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't know. Do you have a couple of diffs? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:08, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Content_forks&diff=prev&oldid=1183107570      — The Transhumanist   18:12, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist, this message contains a one-word comment ("Pauna"). The IP geolocates to Romania, and in Romanian, that word appears to mean peacock. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:47, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Appeared more like a signature than content.    — The Transhumanist   02:53, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

And it's not clear to me how that reply could be relevant.

If there were truly nothing, then DiscussionTools could be set to refuse to post the comment. It won't post a completely empty comment, but it will post a single space, which gets stripped by the parser, which amounts to an empty comment. (@PPelberg (WMF), that's probably a bug.)

But you wouldn't want to prevent one-word posts, because that would prevent common replies (e.g., yes/no/thanks). We might be getting more of these simply because more people have been able to figure out how to post. (See this comment on the strangeness of wikitext talk pages if that isn't intuitively obvious.) I know the Editing team did some work (more than a year ago, now) to make sure that these tools didn't increase the revert rate unreasonably, but I don't remember whether that included the mobile site (this particular comment was on mobile) and even if it did, there are going to be some of these pointless/mistaken (non-)comments posted. I suppose we should be grateful that people are making some of their mistakes outside the mainspace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:16, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

As you have likely noticed, I deleted it as a violation of NOTFORUM or simple vandalism, although I didn't even bother to add an edit summary. It just seemed so frivolous that the poster likely knew they were being frivolous. They have not complained. If so, I'd explain NOTFORUM to them. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 18:58, 4 November 2023 (UTC)