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Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret scheduled for TFA

This is to let you know that the Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret article has been scheduled as today's featured article for July 9, 2018. Please check the article needs no amendments. If you're interested in editing the main page text, you're welcome to do so at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 9, 2018, but note that a coordinator will trim the lead to around 1100 characters anyway, so you aren't obliged to do so. Thanks! Jimfbleak - talk to me? 06:31, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

Precious
Five years!

Thank you for the steady flow of articles, some with enormous titles, and thoughtful conversations here! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:03, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

@Jimfbleak No specific objections other than the usual "fuck, not me again, someone else can do the reverting this time". You might want to delay this one for a while, since if you run it in July then following Candaules and Destroying Angel that will make three TFAs on paintings by the same relatively unknown artist in a period of less than six months.
As with most of these cluttered 19th-century history paintings, if you do run it it would make sense to blow the image up as large as reasonably possible, even if it means slashing the blurb text; at the standard TFA size (see right) it just looks like a plate of shrimp as it's impossible for readers even to discern that the three figures are people, let alone what they're doing, or that this is on the—very unusual for the time—subject of a woman in full military kit fighting and defeating a man. ‑ Iridescent 11:53, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
About half of the unrun picture pages are your Etty articles, but I take your point. I think I'll run this one, which I like for the reasons you've stated, and because Dank has already edited the blurb, and then make sure I don't run another for a while. That said, do you want to do have a go at the image— I think only you and David Levene understand the coding? Perhaps it could be top-cropped as well to concentrate on the figures? Jimfbleak - talk to me? 12:16, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
Not a problem, Iri and Jim ... I agree that we want to cut back the blurb text if the image is larger. - Dank (push to talk) 12:34, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
I'll sort out the image, but it might be a couple of days. I assume there's no rush. ‑ Iridescent 14:20, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
✓ Done blurb text slashed to absolute bare bones in order to make the image as visible as possible (something that should be par-for-the-course for arts and architecture articles, since in 99% of these cases it's the image and not the text that readers will use to decide if this is a topic about which they want to learn more). ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for "a somewhat peculiar 19th century history painting. Probably intended as a moral test for male viewers to view a scene of sex, violence and vulnerability without feeling lust, at least one academic considers BRFA as marking the turning point in art history at which nudity ceased to be symbolic of innocence and instead became symbolic of domination and coercion. BRFA is a very odd-looking work to the modern eye, but that's because The Faerie Queene has fallen out of favour in recent years—at the time, Spenser was as popular as Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, and audiences could reasonably be assumed to understand the references without explanation." - There's also a painting pictured in the DYK section, DYK? (which I suggested, to mention one more lover, not only those who made it to husband). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:34, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

​That painting is singularly unflattering; she looks like Kermit the Frog in a jock wig. (I wouldn't want to be the one relying on This artwork is in the public domain because it was first published in the United States before 1923 in court if Kokoscha's heirs ever challenge it. "Creation" and "publication" are definitely not the same thing when it comes to copyright law—and it was created in Austria, not the United States, in any case—and the artist only died in 1980.) ‑ Iridescent 14:14, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
Good points. I took it as written, without hinterfragen. I prefer her ibox image, anyway. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:27, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Forgive my naivety, but is there a good reason for the "Expand" link you've added in Special:Diff/846738767? It seems to do the same thing as clicking on the image, and breaks a few things like Wikipedia:Today's featured article. TheDragonFire (talk) 05:13, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

It's convention when the TFA or DYK image is cropped and thus doesn't show the full image, to make it clear that the thumbnail isn't showing the whole thing. David Levy might remember where the original decision was made, although it's probably lost in the mists of time. ‑ Iridescent 14:04, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
Indeed, I don't recall where it was discussed, but you've accurately described the reasoning.
TheDragonFire: What's broken at Wikipedia:Today's featured article? I haven't observed any problems there or elsewhere. —David Levy 23:48, 9 July 2018 (UTC)
@David Levy, if you open Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 2018 and set your browser font size small and the browser window very wide, then the combination of the intentionally oversized image and the shorter-than-usual blurb text makes the "expand" button overlap the header of the subsequent section; I imagine Wikipedia:Today's featured article (which uses similar formatting) had the same issue. Since the only public-facing area in which the TFA is displayed is the Main Page which uses a columnar format, and consequently one would need to be using a monitor the width of a movie screen for the situation to arise in which the TFA blurb text didn't reach the bottom of the TFA image, I don't consider it an issue that needs addressing. (If it ever did become an issue, all that would be necessary is to add a {{clear}} template at the end of the TFA blurb.) ‑ Iridescent 08:43, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

File:London Necropolis bombing.jpg listed for discussion

A file that you uploaded or altered, File:London Necropolis bombing.jpg, has been listed at Wikipedia:Files for discussion. Please see the discussion to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. Thank you. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:55, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Whither Wikispeak

Somebody seems to have got the wrong end of the stick with Wikipedia:WikiSpeak and done a bunch of copyedits. The trouble is, in doing so, they've taken large swathes of humour out of the article and made it rather less cutting than it should be. (It's possible to get hit by lightning seven times, but is far too sensible an analogy, whereas nobody would ever stick a picture of Jimmy Savile el fragrante in Great Ormond Street and is just bonkers.) Does anyone else agree, and if so, shall I roll back? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 10:01, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

This one agrees with the proposed reversion (though not, of course, using WP:Rollback, which would result in your being cast into dimensions of eternal torment). Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:01, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
I can't really comment on the person who made the "improvements" in question without breaching the civility policy, especially in light of the previous reactions caused by my comments regarding legacy admins from the early days of Wikipedia who are completely out of touch with current custom and practice but make a minimal number of edits every so often in order to stubbornly hang on to the admin bit and the super-user status they think comes with it, and then occasionally resurface insisting that everybody else do things their way because they're So Damn Important. Just going to put this and this here. ‑ Iridescent 19:49, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
You were correct in that particular instance. In a recent encounter, they not only refused a request for page protection on the grounds that the content under dispute was "really stupid", but then proceeded to join in and exacerbate the edit-war further. Brilliant! —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 10:07, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
I have a Cassandra-like ability to be ignored at the time but proved right after the fact, although in that case it wasn't difficult - I remember his alter ego being a total dick for years on Wikipedia Review. (In vague defense, the way railroads use measurements does look really weird to outsiders; because so many of the world's systems were designed in 19th-century Newcastle and Manchester, to this day the world's rail networks tend to use the measurements of 1850s northern England. Even a place as proudly metric as France still uses a rail gauge of 4'8 1⁄2".) I look forward to the weary inevitability of the admin I recently said was about to flare out, and got a lot of stick from a crowd of people including you for thus saying, flaring out. ‑ Iridescent 11:45, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
I didn't give you stick, I merely disagreed  :) I know the terms are usually synonymous around here, but that was an exception (proving the rule?)...incidentally, I don't think your prediction was necessarily wrong, just that a length of rope after the passing of time would be pretty harmless—particularly in the knowledge that at least one high-profile admin with a Level-10 in atrophying Wikicareers will be watching them like a hawk. —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 14:02, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
​If you're playing along at home, in the last 48 hours alone the admin in question has indefinitely semi-protected a page which has had a total of 37 edits in the entire year, locked down a page for four months on the grounds of vandalism despite the fact that all the vandalism was coming from a single IP, and protected two pages to "prevent the addition of poorly sourced or unsourced content"] (I'd love to see what Wikipedia would look like if we applied that everywhere). ‑ Iridescent 17:05, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
Ha! I'm sorry I didn't notice—I've been a bit busy  :) whiiiich I admit is rather more productive than locking down pages that no-one ever goes to. —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 17:17, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
And people wonder why I get pissy over overuse of RFPP and AIV and oppose any further unbundling for self-appointed vandal fighters. As a semi-related aside to some of your musings above, this also exists. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:28, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
Actually TonyBallioni, I must apologise for giving you incorrect information; neither the AFD for Imperial election of 1376 nor the AFD for Norwich Market are the most ridiculous AFD nomination; that would be WP:Articles for deletion/Larry Sanger. ‑ Iridescent 21:03, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
I’m absolutely shocked by the nominator of that one... I think perhaps the thing that puts Imperial Election oh 1376 in the top 3 for me (other than the fact that a brain dead squirrel could tell you that the election of one of the most significant political forces in Europe is inherently notable) is that after it had reached solid SNOW territory the nominator added another election to delete. I suppose this makes the current AfD at most the 4th most ridiculous. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:46, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
The AfD that most annoyed me was probably Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Square root of 5. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:17, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, but that was Dicklyon, and anyone who stopped to worry every time Dicklyon came out with some wacky proposal and then dug in his heels over it wouldn't have time for anything else; his M.O. is to pick as many fights as possible in the hope that people will give him his way out of sheer exhaustion regardless of how perverse a position it is. (See Talk:Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine for a particularly ripe recent example; the institution that built it calls it "Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine" and the museum where it's currently displayed calls it "Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine", but he insists that it was never called MSSEM and is fighting a dogged guerilla war against anyone who suggests otherwise.) I suspect in his case it's as much a case of nobody wanting to be the admin who blocked the guy who invented the mouse as anything else; one of the many drawbacks of so many of the admins being from the 2005–07 intake is that we all remember the hassle the admin who blocked that Nobel Prize guy received. ‑ Iridescent 23:11, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
(talk page watcher)-Whilst I agree that the first two protections were quite bad (esp. the second), I'm a bit curious as to how you would deal with this?I tried to source (and thus, check the validity of the alteration(s) by the IPs) but did not make any progress.
For a quasi-equivalent example, in the domain of Indian castes, where I often invest my efforts, I believe that I have reasons to go absolutely crazy, shall some admin refuse to protect a page penetrated by all sorts of un-sourced glorifying stuff (which doesn't precisely fit vandalism and might be true) under the pretext of your last line.The situation might be insanely volatile over there but I guess nobody's has got a liking to remove un-sourced stuff, from any article, multiple times.
On a more generalized note, I think persistent addition of un-sourced info by multiple IPs/non-auto-confirmed users over a broad span of time shall be enough to manifest in a semi-protection. Where do you stand, as to the broader locus of protection w.r.t un-sourced-content-insertion? ∯WBGconverse 13:43, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
Except that apart from BLP's merely being 'un-sourced' is not actually a reason to summarily prevent inclusion of material. WP:UNSOURCED is very clear that it *may* be removed, but isnt necessary in all cases, and there are objections when done so. WP:BLP has far stricter standards for obvious reasons. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:48, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
Umm, so how do we deal with the maintenance of an article where positive contributions from IPs are solely un-sourced-information-insertion, which can be potentially branded as misleading and hence, vandalism, only after spending enough time on the issue? In all those cases, citing un-sourced is a perfect reason to remove content and sustain that editorial state, unless some sources are presented. Obviously, we can maintain a relaxed demeanor and tax the RC patroller(s) (their over-reaching activities is another story.....) or the area-maintainer(s) to remove them; after-all there's no DEADLINE but that's taking AGF and the principles of anybody-can-edit-anything too far.∯WBGconverse 16:56, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
Well from experience what happens is the IP gets reverted then someone gets a not-particularly-bright admin to semi-prot the article... Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:14, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
I understand your general point here and agree with it, but in this case I don't think the admin in question has done anything that looks like they're pulling above their station, certainly when not compared to a now-blocked ex admin named after a popular breakfast beverage. I can't pinpoint at anything that cries out "admin abuse", and if anything it just highlights how inflated the RfA standards have become. Or am I missing something obvious? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 08:59, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
Ex admin named after a popular breakfast beverage - User:Johnnie Walker? Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:11, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
How about saving the former version under a better name, - Wikispeak being awful enough? Or link at the top to a former version with a comment, such as "If you really want to know ..."? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:57, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

DGG on IHTS

I just went to fix something as you were closing the IHTS section. I didn't realize DGG added his comments about IHTS directly to the section Lourdes created to summarize people's comments, which I soon after hatted (because summary sections...). I was surprised that IHTS took issue with this until I understood what he meant. I don't think it would've changed anything, but my apologies to DGG and IHTS (not pinging because I suspect he'd rather I not). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:25, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

​I read through the whole thing, including the hatted section. DGG's comments are valid as a snapshot of his view of the discussion as it was at that point, but especially when one takes into account the commenters in the three days after that, in my opinion consensus was overwhelming. (Do a ctrl-f for "this has gone on long enough" to get to the comments added after DGG's summary; of those later commenters we have four "support indef block", three "support site ban" and a single non-policy based oppose on the basis that "this is not turning out the way I want".)
Blind headcounting is rightly discouraged, but equally if one's going to close a discussion against majority opinion it needs to be demonstrable that those of the minority opinion have the stronger arguments. Of those who weren't supporting at least one of (a) full site ban. (b) indefinite block or (c) a block for a lengthy period, we have:
  1. Such a block should not be done lightly, and if it is to be imposed, it should be done by ARBCOM—an obviously spurious argument based on a total misunderstanding of how Wikipedia operates;
  2. Oppose indefinite ban at this time … If he can temper his rank incivility and just step away whenever he feels himself getting wound up, he could return to being a great contributor after some (likely inevitable) time off—a legitimate argument if there were any indication that a short-term block would trigger some kind of soul-searching and a return to form, but given the previous history of short-term blocks that have failed to have an impact the onus is on those arguing for this outcome to justify why they feel things will change over a fixed period and why this would be preferable to the "onus is on the blocked party to demonstrate that it won't happen again" element of an indefblock;
  3. I am about to lose an important collaborator, and it's annoying—an argument that I completely disregarded, as it does nothing to address the concerns those arguing for a block were raising. Nobody works on Wikipedia in a vacuum, and every block of anyone other than a pure vandal will lose someone a collaborator;
  4. I oppose an indefinite block—DGG's comment, with no elaboration or indication of policy-based reason for so opposing, and as such not something any closer can reasonably take into account.
None of these, with the arguable exception of #2, are policy based; most of those arguing for either an indefinite-not-infinite block or a permanent site ban did give a detailed justification as to why they were so arguing. It's not the closer's place to supervote and as such the only things I could have done as a closer were (1) close as indefinite block with a clear avenue open for appeal; (2) interpret consensus as being for an outright community ban on the grounds that almost all commenting were either supporting a siteban or a lengthy block; (3) leave the discussion open for another week, which would almost certainly have had a considerably worse outcome for IHTS as it was fairly obvious the "enough is enough" argument was gaining momentum, or (4) punt it across to Arbcom who would likely have thrown the book at IHTS, reaching the same result but with considerably more unpleasantness.
I'd say my close is the best result IHTS could reasonably have hoped for, given that it still leaves an avenue open for immediate return; all he needs to do is convince an admin that it won't happen again. I'm not generally a fan of "you're blocked until you abase yourself", but since the thread demonstrated that multiple people were having multiple issues with this editor, IMO "we appreciate your positive contributions but consensus is that we don't want you back until you can assure us that the negatives no longer outweigh the positives" is the only fair reading of the consensus of that thread. ‑ Iridescent 17:41, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for all of this. I'm not challenging the close, to be clear. There's no way to close it any way other than indef or, at minimum, a fixed-length long-term block. So I don't disagree with your reading. I just wanted to acknowledge somewhere that I made a mistake in not realizing DGG's comments were in the hatted section until it was too late. Not that it would've changed anything. I would've put the apology on IHTS's page below your message, but I didn't want it to be taken as rubbing salt in a wound. I figured my hatting would, if anything, help his case (although I didn't hat it to help or hinder). Unfortunately business regardless. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 17:54, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
just for the record, my reason was that the situation did not rise to the level of disruption that would justify indefinite. This is based partly on my personal view that indefinite is being used much too often. In my opinion it should be reserved for those doing vandalism , not just for uncooperative behavior from a sometimes productive editor. (and my votes on arb com have been in accordance with that view) . It may not be the consensus, but the sort of evaluation necessary for these decisions is more a matter of opinion than of science. DGG ( talk ) 21:51, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
If I were judge, jury and executioner, I'd have probably declined to block at all and instead tried to craft some kind of "any uninvolved admin can ban IHTS from commenting further on any given thread" topic ban. But I'm not judge, jury and executioner, and the consensus was overwhelming here—the only decision to make as closer in this case was "there's obviously a consensus to block, is the consensus to block for a lengthy set period, to block indefinitely in the sense of until IHTS promises to stop doing it, or to block outright and throw away the key?". If Wikipedia ran on supervotes rather than consensus we could do away with discussion altogether. ‑ Iridescent 22:32, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

File:London Necropolis bombing.jpg listed for discussion

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The Dawn of Love (painting)

This is to let you know that I've scheduled The Dawn of Love (painting) to appear on the main page as today's featured article on 8 August 2018. If you need to make tweaks to the blurb, it is at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 8, 2018. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:19, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

@TFA coordinators is that really a good idea? Per my comment in the #Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret scheduled for TFA thread above, that will make four TFAs on individual paintings by the same fairly obscure artist since January. It's beginning to be noticed by the readers; yes, we have a backlog of these, but my withdrawal from FAC means it's a backlog that's unlikely to grow for the foreseeable future. ‑ Iridescent 2 14:35, 25 July 2018 (UTC)
We're a bit stretched for topics that aren't the usual topics. I had scheduled a folklore and a British estate as TFA but got a hell of a pushback through email so had to shuffle things...I'm already cranky and tired and feeling just a bit harried about the whole thing. Find me a replacement (after I finish the tedious scheduling paperwork) that doesn't upset the balance of topics and I'll be happy to reschedule. (We'll leave aside the dog diarrhea problem this morning and my massive headache... but I need to schedule because questions are being raised about leaving it too long). Ealdgyth - Talk 14:43, 25 July 2018 (UTC)
@Dank I've expanded the image to the same size used for Britomart last month (no need for the "Expand" link this time as there's no cropping), and slashed the blurb to 800 characters to compensate. FWIW, in my opinion this should probably be written into your instructions as recommended practice for all visual arts articles (and other articles like coins and botany where the detail of the image is of more significance to readers than the blurb text).

Per my comment above while this isn't something I'm going to fight over, I still think this is a bad idea—this means Wikipedia will have run a TFA on a William Etty painting in January, April, July and August this year. Yes, coins and hurricanes also run at this rate, but we have a lot more articles on coins and hurricanes—Wikipedia only has 13 articles on Etty paintings, and one of those is never going to be more than a stub and certainly never FA. I take Ealdgyth's point that the schedulers feel obliged to periodically run something from WP:FANMP#Art, architecture, and archaeology, but at some point fairly soon that well is going to run dry. With myself, Eric, Victoriaearle, Cassianto and Giano driven out of FAC, Ceoil, Kafka Liz and SchroCat halfway to the exit and Ottava, Geogre and TFMWNCB unlikely ever to return, unless you find someone soon to plug the gap then Johnbod isn't going to be able to keep arts and literature populated single-handed and both will go the way of WP:FANMP#Engineering and technology. ‑ Iridescent 21:43, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Sure, I figured you would trim the blurb. It looks good. I don't handle scheduling at all these days. I have no objection to big botany or coin images, but I've never seen that suggestion before. - Dank (push to talk) 22:39, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
Wehwalt, Casliber, you're The Coin Guy and The Plant Guy—do you have any thoughts on making a double-size image and a 2⁄3-size blurb standard practice for topics where "what does it look like?" is likely to be the primary consideration to readers? Cas, you may recall that what originally got me thinking about the way TFA images appear to readers was the [[Bird]] TFAR in which the proposed image wasn't recognizable as a bird at 100px width. With the spread of smartphones and a consequent rise in the proportion of viewers seeing the TFA image as a centimeter-wide square, the issue is more pertinent than it was a decade ago; I could make a decent case for "big picture, small blurb" being the default position for all TFAs.

While I can't say for sure whether it's caused by the increased image size attracting viewer attention or whether viewers find 1830s history painting inherently interesting—I'd like to think the latter but I suspect it's the former—it's worth pointing out that on their day all the paintings that have run with an oversized image and reduced blurb—even the relatively uninteresting Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret—got pageview levels more associated with A-list celebrities and major sporting events. By my calculation three of the seven most-viewed TFAs of 2018 have been works by this one obscure and unfashionable artist. ‑ Iridescent 16:31, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Maybe that artist isn't as unfashionable as you think... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:46, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
No, he's very definitely unfashionable, as is every 19th-century English artist other than the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Turner; outside the last redoubts of the English School in York, Manchester and Lady Lever—and a few specialists working on the history of the symbolism of nudity in religious art—I doubt even most gallery curators know of him other than as a footnote. You can pick up an Etty original for about $500 for a drawing or $2000 for a painting which is chicken-feed in terms of the art market. ‑ Iridescent 17:08, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
How often does TFA ever get a dose of voluptuousness... —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 17:13, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
More often than you'd think. ‑ Iridescent 17:27, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
I'd be up for a larger image and smaller blurb for a painting yes. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:46, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for a lovely article about "a horrible painting, which when initially exhibited in 1828 was described as "an unpardonable sin against taste", and critical opinion has not become noticeably more forgiving in the intervening 188 years. It's arguably the second most significant artwork in Dorset (I'm nominating this as part of the push to improve coverage of the West Country), but that says more about the state of Dorset's museums than anything else."! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:40, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

IHTS

Per this, can you explain under what authority you are able to add the provision "any admin is free to overturn this block" to a community sanctioned block/ban? Thanks. Nihlus 15:13, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

You're aware that I'm the one who placed the block in the first place? See two threads up for a detailed explanation of that close; my reading is that while there was clear consensus for some kind of block, there was no consensus for it to be unappealable (and given that an unappealable block would be contrary to Wikipedia custom and practice, such a thing would need explicit community consensus). I don't know where you've got "community sanctioned ban" from, as while there were certainly people advocating one I don't see any possible way to read the consensus at the original discussion as being for a ban. Regarding can you explain under what authority you are able to add the provision "any admin is free to overturn this block", this is where the semantic difference between a block and a ban is significant; in the absence of a community consensus for a ban any uninvolved admin can accept a block appeal; the "any admin is free…" language is to make it clear that any admin conducting a block review or accepting an appeal can skip the administrators should avoid unblocking users without first attempting to contact the blocking administrator to discuss the matter step of the appeal process if they deem it appropriate. If you feel my close was inappropriate, Arbcom is thataways.
As I made clear to IHTS at the time, while I explicitly didn't put a "minimum time to serve" on the block, I strongly recommended he not immediately appeal for exactly the reasons we're now seeing; a block appeal that doesn't address the concerns of those who supported the block can be interpreted as deliberate time-wasting if it's made too soon after the event. ‑ Iridescent 15:46, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
Please read WP:NEVERUNBLOCK (emphasis mine): When the block is implementing a community sanction which has not been successfully appealed. The community may choose to allow a block to be reviewed in the normal way, by consulting with the closing/blocking administrator, rather than requiring a formal appeal to the community. If there is consensus to allow this it shall be noted in the closing statement and block log. Reading through the discussion by the community, I see no mention of the block being able to be reviewed by a single administrator. Nihlus 15:57, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Just putting this here because IHTS removed it from his talk page (something which I explicitly said was ok with me). No response required. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 03:02, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Responding to ping, though I don't think I have any more involvement in this than others (e.g. Guy Macon, who opened the ANI thread, but whom I'm not pinging only because I know IHTS asked him not to post here).
Obviously I cannot see the appeal as I am not an admin. I will just say that I have a hard time thinking that anyone could look at that ANI thread, which is so clearly predicated on already having gone through many short blocks over a long period of time, and find it appropriate to unblock after a week. I still feel like a long-term fixed-length block would've been the best option, as a clear escalation before something without an end, and also something that doesn't require IHTS to go through a messy noticeboard appeal (which, at least in my limited experience in seeing similar cases, probably does not have a great chance of succeeding). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:23, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Oh dear!

[1]. Don't you dare laugh. Johnbod (talk) 19:17, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

<insert picard facepalm.gif> Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:39, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
I don't get it...? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:57, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Belated reply

This is a belated reply to this post from Ceoil. Although he's removed it, I think it warrants reply; I won't restore his post without his say-so in case there's a reason he doesn't want it live-and-searchable.

My attitude towards FAC/TFA hasn't greatly shifted since this thread a decade ago. I think that all too often, the FAC process prioritizes "complies with the rules" above "useful" and "informative". As you know, a considerable part of getting something through FAC is being able to dig one's heels in on when to apply IAR; this mentality penalizes those who don't have either an inside baseball knowledge of the regular reviewers, or enough of a wiki-reputation to be taken seriously; consequently, it just reinforces the perception that FAC is a small clique of insiders patting each other on the back.

I agree entirely about main page requirements. If I had my way, if we had to keep "today's featured article" it would be disconnected entirely from the FAC process, and the only criteria for inclusion on the main page would be "is it reasonably complete?" and "does it contain any major errors?".

On Tony, I think we differ; while he did many great things, I think that, especially towards the end of his time at FAC, he became far too fond of nitpicking for nitpicking's sake, regardless of whether strict MOS compliance improved the article or not. Again, this reinforced the clique-y nature of FAC, as it divided editors into regulars who had the confidence to face down his complaints when they felt justified in doing so, and newcomers who got intimidated into complying with whatever arbitrary rule Tony was trying to enforce that week. There are more thoughts on the matter, from myself and others, here.

On general malaise, add the recent war on drafts as another think keeping me away from FAC. (Paging SarahSV for balance as she takes the opposite view to me.) As I said to you the other day, I don't see how it's of any benefit to the reader to have the edit history clogged with 200–300 edits by me correcting my own spelling mistakes instead of a single clean edit. Likewise, when writing something from scratch I tend to sketch out a basic article outline and then fill it out one-source-at-a-time; on something like Victorian paintings or railway stations that's not an issue, but for something contentious on which sources are likely to disagree, working in mainspace would mean intentionally making a non-NPOV article temporarily live to the readers during that period in which the article includes the views of Professor A, but I haven't yet got around to incorporating the views of Professors B, C and D. Working in sandboxes also allows me to write reminders to myself about missing sources, to play around with images to see what works best at various screen resolutions and browser settings, to dump assorted snippets at the end to be moved into place once I've worked out where they should go, and to have a {{lorem ipsum}} lead section until I have a feel for how long the article is going to turn out and consequently how detailed the lead would be, all of which would be impossible in mainspace. (If you want an concrete example, I've undeleted the sandbox versions of Etty's bio prior to my deciding it was complete enough for further work to take place in mainspace. No iteration of this draft, other than a few at the very end when I was just sanding down rough edges, would have been appropriate in article space. Working in sandboxes also has the added benefit that, because nobody except me is reading it, it's not necessary to use edit summaries; while they only take a couple of seconds, when you're talking hundreds of edits per article, that adds up.) ‑ Iridescent 07:11, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Huh. I write articles in the same manner as you - although I do keep the draft history around by moving or history merging as keeping track of changes can be useful to nend citation errors and to leave a record. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 09:15, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
On whether to history merge or cut-and-paste, there's no right answer. Cut and paste makes for a single overwhelming diff, and if more than one editor had been involved in the draft it also causes issues with attribution. (There's also a—trivial—issue in that in 70 years when copyrights start to expire, the apparent go-live date will differ by a few days from the actual go-live date.) My feeling is that it's still preferable to history merge. History-merging 200+ edits into an article's history overwhelms it and makes it more difficult to search for other people's edits. It also causes issues if one editor is making minor edits to the live article while another is expanding it in a sandbox; if Eb spends a month rewriting an article, and during that period Flo makes a handful of minor fixes to spacing or punctuation on the original, then once the histories are merged it will appear to anyone viewing the article history that Flo is an inveterate edit warrior who keeps removing Eb's edits without discussion, whilst Eb is a problem editor who keeps insisting on adding and expanding his preferred version without asking Flo why she keeps removing it. (Make a bunch of minor edits over a period of days to a block of lorem ipsum text in your own userspace, then histmerge it with Wikipedia:Sandbox, and you'll see what I mean—to anyone who doesn't inspect the log in detail—and who does inspect the log in detail?—it will look like you and Cyberbot are having a full-scale editwar. ‑ Iridescent 17:14, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
I have the same thought as that actually. However, the articles I rewrite usually don't get many edits and I usually don't keep any of the old (and usually poor) content save for external links, navboxes and categories as I find writing from scratch easier. So I guess that the aforementioned issues aren't much of a problem in my cases. OTOH, it means that I don't have a clear path on how to improve Coropuna and Uturuncu to FAC status... JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 20:49, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
If I'm doing a root-and-branch rewrite, I tend to disregard the previous article entirely while I'm writing it, and then go through the previous article afterwards inserting those bits of it that are worth saving in the appropriate places. Even the lowest-traffic articles tend to get regular passes by bots and AWB-powered human-bot hybrids making pointless or near-pointless minor edits, although since the defenestration of Magiolatidis the latter is less of a nuisance than it used to be.
For the volcanoes, I'd suggest creating a blank skeleton of just the headers (I'd suggest Location / Geology / significance to pre-Colombian cultures / European discovery / Notable eruptions / Present day including what farming if anything is done on the slopes, and whether it attracts tourism). All those are things that need to be mentioned even if only in the negative, and working to a script like that acts as a reminder not to leave anything out. When it comes to size, eruptions etc throw in some comparisons to volcanoes like Etna or Kilauea which readers have a fighting chance of having heard of, to give an idea of scale. Having all the sections in the same order in every article makes it easier for readers working through the articles as a series, as well, although it does have an unfortunate tendency to create a cookie-cutter appearance. ‑ Iridescent 21:04, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

On VA

In a throw-away comment at ANI, you referred to the vital articles project as "ridiculous". Why? That pains me that you or anybody would say that. I've spent a lot of time working on that. pbp 00:49, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

If you want to be involved in something that has a long-term future and that the rest of the Wikipedia community will take seriously, WP:VITAL is probably not the place to be. It's a content-fork from the actual (and itself questionable) vital article list at meta:List of articles every Wikipedia should have and on duplication grounds alone probably should never have existed in the first place. In terms of function, WP:VITAL was forked from the Meta list to serve a purpose that no longer exists; along with the "article importance" scales, it were created back when the WMF planned a CD-ROM release of Wikipedia for distribution to schools in the developing world, and consequently needed a mechanism to establish what would be included in the limited space on the CD. The scheme was overtaken by events, as the spread of ultracheap smartphones, the mass availability of internet access in even the poorest countries, and the obsolescence of the CD as a medium rendered it obsolete (that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so is nowadays far more likely to have access to the internet than to a CD-ROM reader); the last release of the CD was in 2008, and it's vanishingly unlikely ever to be released again.
I make no apologies for using the term "ridiculous" to describe the mess into which WP:VITAL has metastasized. As a "list of core topics", it might have potential value for those holdouts who consider the notion of "core topics" important (a dwindling group but they do exist). The list as it stands has little if any relation to an actual list of core topics, and just reflects the personal preferences of the handful of people who WP:OWN the list (if you seriously consider Tim Cahill, Newport, Chuck Palahniuk, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Westmorland or Geoffrey Boycott as among Wikipedia's most important articles, I really don't know what to say although it would be amusing to hear you try).
While I know there are some people who consider the idea of "core topic" significant (paging Casliber), in my opinion the concept of a "vital article" indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is notoriously shitty when it comes to coverage of "big" topics, and is rarely if ever the best port of call for someone researching something well known; where it shines is covering those topics the Britannicas of the world don't reach. (If Wikipedia and its mirrors were to vanish tomorrow, someone researching the history of Johann Sebastian Bach or Moscow wouldn't be inconvenienced in the slightest; someone researching Silverchair or Thistle, Utah would be.)
There's also an inherent fallacy in trying to determine what's "vital", as it's purely subjective to the reader; you can claim (as the WP:VITAL clique do) that our shitty and little-read articles on The arts and Culture are two of the 10 most important articles on Wikipedia, but to a reader interested in the logistics of moving visitors around theme parks Disneyland Railroad is considerably more important. We're not the Book of the Month club or setting a syllabus here; who are you (plural) to tell me that the articles you consider important are empirically more "vital" than the articles I consider important?
Incidentally, I'm noting that among the 20 people who've appointed themselves as the soi-disant arbiters of "subjects for which Wikipedia should have corresponding featured-class articles", a grand total of two have ever actually written a featured-class article as opposed to telling those people who actually do write the FAs what they should be writing about (and one of those two hasn't edited since 2014) ‑ Iridescent 17:14, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) Wikipedia is notoriously sh¡tty when it comes to coverage of "big" topics I have wondered why high profile articles such as Donald Trump (e.g.) aren't decent articles, given the amount of daily readership. Being a giant editor-effort sink that it is, to me that particular article passes the criteria, and as for Point 5, it could just be locked and opened up every few weeks to add what material has been recieved consensus for.Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 18:00, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
It's do-able—Obama and McCain have both been TFAs for a decade including through Obama's presidency and McCain's presidential runs—but it's not easy. The whole "anyone can edit" thing means that topics like high-profile politicians and celebrities, which a lot of good-faith newcomers try to help out on without understanding Wikipedia's rules, tend to degenerate very quickly unless they're rigorously stewarded, which in turn prompts accusations of article ownership from anyone upset that their addition of [insert name here]'s membership of the Illuminati was reverted. As most editors would rather be doing something other than explain for the thousandth time why we're not going to change Obama's birthplace to Kenya, it's not really surprising that volunteers to steward these high-traffic articles are few and far between. ‑ Iridescent 18:21, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
(adding) Regarding your edit summary, as you know if you watch this page I'm no fan of TFA, but what do you see as particularly problematic about the current batch? It appears more slanted towards pop culture than is usual, but none of them look particularly unreasonable to me; things like South Park episodes and WWE promotions look odd at first glance, but these are multi-billion-dollar industries; there are probably more people with an interest in cartoons, wrestling, videogames etc than in any living painter or sculptor by multiple orders of magnitude. ‑ Iridescent 18:29, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps it needs more fifteenth-century English nobilty in it  :) although of course that wouldn't really address WP:BIAS, just make it older... —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 18:34, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
You have Æthelbald of Mercia and John de Gray in there—how many medieval English nobility articles do you think we have to spare? We don't want a repeat of what happened with the British Rail articles, where the delegates scheduled so many they literally wiped out the stock and as a consequence unless David Cane starts nominating at FAC again, there may never be another. ‑ Iridescent 18:54, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
WP:BIAS against anything post-John then. What you think this is, the Dark Ages?! :p —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 08:53, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Looks like David's ears were burning. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:51, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
It mostly boils down to what I think is important and interesting to the average reader is probably going to be different from everyone else, it willr eflect my interests and bias'. Most of the following is an example of my war on verbosity, and should not be taken as an offense to whomever was responsible for improving, promoting, and reveiwing the articles. Boletus aereus was an edible mushroom back in 2013, and now is "highly prized and much sought-after", FWIW. Then there is an extinct sloth that died out when we have no clue. Then an obscure Vermont coin containing a rehash of the Saratoga Campaign. Uponw riting this, I take my complaint back, it is more interesting than a sloth. For being a decent content fork, I think Rockefeller Center would be of more use to our readers than Construction of Rockefeller Center. September 17th will have an article/ad(?) Food is available for purchase. about a regional jet company that might have failed a proposed rewrite of WP:NCORP. Then comes an article about a Hurricane's effects on just one state, when two of the three deadliest storms in US history are neglected, 1935 Labor Day hurricane and Hurricane Katrina. Then a dinosaur "known from two teeth", a least-concern species bird, a travel guide to a state highway. Writing all this makes me cringe, I feel like a jerk who takes out his inability to produce anything of note or quality on this encyclopedia by taering down the obvious hard labor and research of others. I have contemplated deleting this and sitting in a hole outside. Drama aside, this is a bit of the iceberg of why I dislike GA and DYK as well, because anything goes for the former, and the latter shoots itself in the foot with sentence three "It is not a general trivia section". It's little New or Expanded law puts a damper on genuinly interesting (to me) stuff, like the hundred year anniversary of the first successful landing on an aircraft carrier last year, which I couldn't run because I couldn't come up with anything to expand the articles with in 5 months. Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 21:00, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Part of the idea of VA was presumably to make big topic articles less shitty, which I certainly endorse (as does Casliber I'm sure). But Level 5 is clearly a step too far, and very possibly Level 4 too. Level 1 and 2 subjects tend to be just too big - User:Eric Corbett loved to mention House, though I prefer Cooking, both I think once Level 2 but now replaced by Home and Food; this is the pit Arts and Culture fall into. I think Levels 2 (100) and especially 3 (1000) have a certain utility, although they are not worth spending much time discussing. Johnbod (talk) 18:26, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
I also wonder about the inclusion criteria for VITAL. Most of the articles mentioned here do get fewer page views than Hurricane Maria going back to January. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:38, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
@JJE, when I said the list just reflects the personal preferences of the handful of people who WP:OWN the list, that wasn't hyperbole; that literally is the inclusion criterion. If you head over to Wikipedia talk:Vital articles, you can see the "I think this is interesting → so do I → so do I → added" process in action. It makes DYK look like a model of integrity. ‑ Iridescent 18:48, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Agree there is a high degree of....subjectivity...in some choices of VA. My only thinking with promoting core articles (as in the Core Contest) was as a carrot to improve some broader articles. Saw some good collabs...so was ok with that. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:46, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
  • The issue with articles on big topics or topics of major significance is that they are very difficult to write on. To use an example from the content area I’m most familiar with here Pope is no doubt a really shitty article filled with POV and broad statements (from zealots of both sorts) containing vague references, in need of both more and less citations at the same time, and likely all but impossible to get to FA because of the nature of the office and simply how much has been written about it. Compare this to Papal conclave, March 1605, one of the least significant political events in history, but one where it’s possible to write a halfway decent article. As an amateur who has a fair amount of historical research skills/access to a research university library as an alumnus, I can write on that small event. It’s much harder to write on the broad concept. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:58, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
  • It's 18 minutes by train and 21 minutes by car centre-to-centre, it's part of the Cardiff-Newport Metropolitan Area, and if the Cardiff Metro ever gets built it will not only be on it, it won't even be near the end of the line. It's a suburb of Cardiff. I'm sure there are nice parts on the other side of the river around Caerleon, but in my experience "dingy" is most definitely accurate (and, since the closure of Le Pub, the only reason for anyone other than residents and rugby fans to go there has gone). Maybe "dingy and absolutely packed with tramps" would technically be more accurate. It does have one of the oddest of all Britain's local museums, though, particularly the upper "weird shit we've been bequeathed and are obliged to display" floor. ‑ Iridescent 21:58, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
  • Ooo hark at you with your fancy 18 minute GWR trains. 30 mins by Arriva. If it turns up... I would still say its not a suburb - the time between them is largely irrelevant given the distinct countryside between, Newport being a city in its own right, and that Newport is not a residential annex of Cardiff - having its own industrial, commercial and residential zones. That and the discrete post-code (NP vs CF). You could credibly argue Neath/Port Toilet is a suburb of Swansea like that, or any of the closer valleys towns are however. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:38, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
  • I'd consider quite a few of the valley towns as Cardiff suburbs as well, since the mines closed. By your argument, Romford, St Albans or Uxbridge (separated by the green belt, own postcodes, at least some industries of their own rather than a purely commuter population) aren't suburbs of London. (NPT is on the borderline of being a Swansea suburb, but the steelworks save it; Newport has a sizeable community who commute in to Cardiff, but that's not the case further west. Once the steelworks finally closes—if I were a gambler I'd say 30 March 2019—I'd expect them to become dormitory towns for Swansea and Cardiff. ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
  • Tim Cahill is an association football player from Australia. There's a contingent on the talk page that feels very strongly in favor of "representation" in the sense that, as football is a prominent sport and Australia a prominent country, there should be some footballer from Australia on the list. In practice, various Aussie-rules footballers or rugby players may be sufficient at this level.
  • Newport seems like an unremarkable suburb of Cardiff, which is listed.
  • Chuck Palahniuk is a fairly-prominent modern author (Fight Club is more famous as a film based on his novel). I would estimate there should be roughly 100 active authors of fiction on the list. I try to avoid arguments about BLPs, particularly in the arts.
  • Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I - trivia. I'll remove it once the current discussion is over, or propose removal if we end up with such a process. Nazi plunder probably is vital at this level.
  • Westmorland - many of the Historic counties of England are notable. If this one only existed for 70 years, it may not be.
  • Geoffrey Boycott - I would defend Charles Boycott, but don't know enough about cricket to comment here. Surely some cricketers other than Don Bradman and Sachin Tendulkar are notable at this level.
Finally: the suggestion that WP:VA should be a consideration for how articles are processed at WP:ITNC should be rejected completely. power~enwiki (π, ν) 22:15, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
Well, you are doing nothing to dispel the rumour that the lists depend solely on the whims of a few self-selected editors! Chuck Palahniuk is only one of the 50,000 at Level 5, and for some reason has had 150k views over his usual 1k per day in the last 10 days. I don't see what is trivia about Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I - it was once the world's most expensive painting, & gets 1K views pd. But you are preaching to the choir about Klimt on this page. I can't see that it is tagged as Vital btw. Tim Cahill has also been getting very high views recently. The important point surely is not that he is Australian but that he plays in India? But really, does it matter in the slightest who is at VA Level 5? Who sees, who cares? Johnbod (talk) 02:10, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Pahlaniuk has a book out and has been doing a round of TV shows to promote it, hence the spike in views; I personally can't stand Klimt but if we have to have a vital articles list wouldn't object to his bio being on it, but wouldn't consider any of his works other than The Kiss to qualify; Cahill comes from a country with no football tradition and plays in a country with no football tradition, and is very much a case of "tallest mountain in Kansas" (if we're going by pageviews, if Cahill is 'vital' on account of page views than that makes Walsall and Watford clogger Troy Deeney a core topic).
Regarding But really, does it matter in the slightest who is at VA Level 5? Who sees, who cares?, the issue (and what triggered the dispute between PBP and TRM that ultimately led to this thread) is that some people have started claiming that being on the VA list should be a determining factor for whether something is featured on the main page or not, so what is and isn't added to the list potentially will have a direct impact on the experience of readers. You presumably remember how much of a hassle it was to get rid of the 'points system' mentality at WP:TFAR; I can't imagine many people want it to reappear in an even more virulent form at WP:ITNC. The same arguments from when we got rid of "high importance visual arts articles" et al also apply here; the VA scale is creating arbitrary divisions based on personal whims, which serve little if any useful purpose and are potentially divisive as people argue over why their own pet topic is or isn't included. (Looking at the "painter" section of the VA list, they quite literally seem to have selected the entries randomly—William Etty as 'vital', anyone? John Constable less important to readers of English Wikipedia than Ilya Repin?—and the less said about this mess the better.) ‑ Iridescent 08:22, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Well that attempt to assert MP priority didn't get very far. Any more and VA5 at least will find itself getting abolished, I shouldn't wonder. Johnbod (talk) 12:03, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
I could argue the Constable one (admittedly out of being TDA rather than personally believing it). There should certainly be no instance where Constable is given less 'importance' in English art than Repin. But it is English-language wikipedia, not English Wikipedia. Its expected to have worldwide information, not only stuff that is important to western English-dominant cultures. Even if we limit ourselves to Landscapes, there are probably artists worldwide of equal importance to Constable/Turner (but I'm British, so I aint about to go searching for them) that would merit an equal or greater 'importance'. And this is the problem with VA - its entirely subjective depending on who is doing it, what criteria they personally choose, and who can argue the loudest and longest. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:57, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
​Regarding Its expected to have worldwide information, not only stuff that is important to western English-dominant cultures, let me re-emphasise the This list is tailored to the English-language Wikipedia at the top of WP:VA; this is (theoretically, at any rate) a list of articles of the most importance to readers of English Wikipedia. (If it were just "the thousand most important articles to humanity as a whole", it could and should be speedily deleted as a pointless fork of Meta's list.) ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
My main issue with the VA project is that they substitute their own opinions for stats. There ARE works out there that try to categorize/rank/etc people/historical topics/artworks/literature/etc by scale... while we wouldn't want to base the VA lists solely on such things - they do not seem to be even consulted. An example - Time Magazine's various "Man/Woman/Person/Topic of the Year" ... while not perfect, it will give you some idea of what was considered important. Nobel prize winning folks AND the subjects they researched (for scientists) should be considered. Similar for other awards and the like. Wikiprojects should be consulted also - they will often be able to help avoid mistakes like Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Horse racing#WikiProject Vital Articles where someone decided that all 13 US Triple Crown winners were of equal value and added them even though some of them had little influence (Sir Barton and Assault, for example) or recentism (both Justify and American Pharaoh are way too recent to even begin to think they are as "vital" as Secretariat or War Admiral). And yes, I do think that page views should factor in a bit - we are after all writing the encyclopedia for readers. While I don't think we should base any VA project off of User:West.andrew.g/Popular pages, if a page is consistently getting Michael Jackson-level yearly page views, that probably tells us something. And I don't see that anyone in the VA project is really trying to bring any sort of sources to their discussions. It operates in a vacuum and seems to have little input from outside its little walled garden. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:19, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
Giving the VA people some slight benefit of the doubt, I can see issues with using sources to define importance as well as they'll inevitably be slanted towards recent trends and whatever's currently in fashion. There's also the sheer subjectiveness of some of these things and the fact that what the public finds interesting aren't always objectively the most significant; to stick with the horse theme if I go out in the street in Britain and ask random passers-by to name a racehorse, I'll guarantee that while I can't predict the order, the top three will be Foinavon, Shergar and Red Rum, despite the fact that none of those except Red Rum would be on a list compiled by a specialist horsey publication. I'd urge anyone who hasn't, to actually take a look at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/People/Sports figures to get an idea of how fucked-up the whole project is. When a page purporting to list Wikipedia's most essential articles (a direct quote from its header) includes a dedicated section for competitive eating, something is seriously wrong somewhere. ‑ Iridescent 15:21, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

TFA

Breaking this out a bit - I pay no attention to VA status when scheduling for TFA. The main things I look for are trying to not overload the month with too many of one type of article (bearing in mind that we have insane numbers of numismatics and military history articles) and date connections. Generally, the first thing I do is schedule any requests (they can be made at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests - hint hint) and then pull anything with a date connection (found Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/pending and Wikipedia:Featured articles that haven't been on the Main Page/Date connection). After that, I try to find at least one woman's article if possible ... just a personal thing. After that, I try to find a few articles that were promoted a while ago and then random pick of things that aren't already overrepresented if possible. Given a good date connection, I'm quite likely to schedule two articles on the same general topic (Given the date connections, I had no issue with running Debussy on 22 August and Vaughn Williams on 26 August for example). Some of the problems with seeing the same topics at TFA is that there are topics that are massively overrepresented. The solution to that is... to write FAs. (I promise that I really didn't plan to schedule a fungus on Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 14, 2018, it just worked out that way. Ben Affleck on the day that Justice League released, however, was intentional.) Whether an article is on a "serious encyclopedic topic" or on "pop culture" has no bearing on what I schedule - I have no bias for or against pop culture. I do recognize what Iri said above about South Park/WWE/etc being BIG names to many of our readers - unfortunately, I don't think Wikipedia:Today's featured article/Most viewed has been updated in a while. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:00, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

I think it's more an issue with ITN; one of the commonest arguments against featuring something is "why are we putting this in a section called 'In The News' when it's clearly not in the news unless you're reading specialist journals?", and there's a push among some elements to make "listed as a vital argument" prima facie evidence for a topic being noteworthy. ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
(adding) WP:TFAMOSTVIEWED should be reasonably up-to-date, at least up to April; it's WP:TFASTATS that's died on the vine. I'm not sure it's really much of a guide, as it's more a measure of who can write an eye-catching blurb than of anything else, unless you seriously believe that The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate is of more importance than Vladimir Lenin (on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, to boot), that Daniel Lambert is of more interest to readers than Elizabeth II, or that The Human Centipede is more significant than Earth. ‑ Iridescent 17:45, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

September 2018

Information icon Please do not attack other editors, as you did at Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. WP:UNCIVIL Openlydialectic (talk) 23:57, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, good luck with that. For those playing along at home, this particular temper tantrum is in response to my warning OD not to accuse other editors of being Russian bots without evidence. OD, you do realise that by posting here you've now drawn the attention of the entire Arbcom, the whole of Wikipediocracy and a sizeable chunk of the admin and editor corps to your antics? ‑ Iridescent 23:59, 5 September 2018 (UTC)
I didn't accuse anyone of being a Russian bot. This warning was given for your phrase: " if I see any more shit like that from you you can argue your case via an {unblock} template." which is an example of incivility at best and of making an attempt so silence editors with opposite opinions at worst. Cheers. Openlydialectic (talk) 00:03, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
If you’re going to template a regular, at least choose the right one. It quite plainly was not a personal attack as it was a response to your edits, specifically your lack of good faith towards another editor. Pawnkingthree (talk) 00:19, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Both comments were clearly open to interpretation, because we all seem to have different views of everyone's intentions. How about this be dropped, with the promise to be polite to each other? Kingsif (talk) 00:25, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
I agree Openlydialectic (talk) 00:57, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Minor quibble: Above, Pawnkingthree links to the essay WP:DTTR, but in my opinion the arguments at WP:TTR are far superior. I wish editors would stop citing DTTR as if it was policy. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:03, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Guy Macon I’m aware DTTR is not a policy, but my own view is that it’s better to err on the side of “don’t” rather than “do”. I’ll also note that OD did not follow at least two of the points in WP:TTR, namely “know what the templates you use say” and “choose an appropriate template.” Pawnkingthree (talk) 08:37, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Eggshells armed with hammers. --Floquenbeam (talk) 02:16, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Just noting that I appreciate the wiki linking of WP:UNCIVIL. Adds a real personal touch and helps to educate one of the longest serving admins on this project of a policy he’s likely never heard of before. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:25, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
I just read that essay--very interesting! Drmies (talk) 02:27, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Wait...what? We are supposed to be civil towards each other? That's what I have been doing wrong for the last twelve years! --Guy Macon (talk) 03:29, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Better WP:CIVIL than WP:CRIMINAL. Newyorkbrad (talk) 03:37, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Why is WP:NOLAWYERJOKES a redlink? Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 03:56, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Having actually looked at WP:UNCIVIL for the first time in probably a decade, I'm most struck by the statement that "Civility is to human nature what warmth is to wax.", thrown in stand-alone and without explanation. Is whoever added that trying to claim that civility either causes human nature to go up in flames, or causes human nature to melt into a shapeless puddle, but in either case it completely destroys the structure? ‑ Iridescent 09:56, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
I thought that meant that civility can mold human nature, if applied correctly. Not sure if that is good or bad, though. Kingsif (talk) 11:29, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
  • "you've now drawn the attention of the entire Arbcom, the whole of Wikipediocracy and a sizeable chunk of the admin and editor corps". Well someone has a very high opinion of themselves. Hmmph! Softlavender (talk) 05:46, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Yep. They'll be getting an early morning knock at the door too, no doubt... —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 07:52, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
On the plus side, I've learned what donkey punch means. Softlavender (talk) 08:30, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
There are sometimes advantages to having 500 tpws… So far, I count three current or former arbs (not including myself) who've commented completely unprompted in this thread in the 10 hours in which it's been opening (and the 10 hours during which Wikipedia activity is always lowest, to boot); as with Eric, Keeper et al this page has a double role as a de facto community noticeboard as well as a personal talkpage.

The history of Donkey punch is a microcosm of the history of Wikipedia, complete with earnest angels-on-pinheads discussions on things which don't affect a single reader, completely pointless "because I can" admin actions, and the fact that the whole thing is a almost certainly a hoax from the early days of Wikipedia in which citogenesis created a feedback loop of mirrors and forks, the existence of the Wikipedia page prompted assorted porn actors to try it for real, and it entered the language (documented here by John Vandenberg). ‑ Iridescent 09:12, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Including a ~rotten film. —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 09:16, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
This one or this one? I know which has the more interesting cover. ‑ Iridescent 09:21, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Ooops! I meant the one with the *ahem* less interesting cover! —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 09:58, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
*perk* You mean there was an actual animated gif, on Wikipedia, of someone getting donkey-punched? Man, I miss all the fun. Softlavender (talk) 10:28, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
It's not that much fun living in a swamp. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:43, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
I feel your pain😔😥😞😢🙍😿🙁😭; damn if there were only some other place on the internet one could find poor-quality home-made pornography. (This is the point at which I reiterate that we still are hosting a biography of Seedfeeder and Commons still like him so much they gave him his own category.) ‑ Iridescent 15:34, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Well, at least Commons deleted Tracey and her fruit loops. Over the objection of one of their admins whose keep rationale was basically “because fuck en.wiki”, but it is proof the commons will delete low quality food pornography if a sane admin happens to be patrolling DR. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:38, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Yes, for those who haven't seen this before, that really is a plate of cookies someone spent time arranging into this pattern.
Did someone say food pornography? I am still pissed off a decade later about the supervote closure of this AFD, given that the relationship between biscuits/cookies and the human sex drive was unquestionably a specific field of study in the 19th century (look up the history of Graham cracker or John Harvey Kellogg some time). ‑ Iridescent 15:53, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
@Iridescent, why not go back to the article now, what nearly ten years ater? I imagine the scholarship has only increased (swollen, they might say!) and in any case, I bet in 2008 bugger-all people knew who you were. Now there's bugger-all who don't  :) —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 16:43, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
There probably hasn't been much written recently—the 19th-century temperance movement isn't a fashionable topic, and I suspect those people who are currently writing about it are mainly members of abstinence-hardliner religious sects and consequently not neutral observers. When it comes to the specific topic of the Victorian notion of controlling the sex drive through nutrition, the time of peak interest was in the mid-1990s when The Road to Wellville was published and Alan Parker's film* was released, so whatever's likely to be published was probably published then. There's also the added issue that in the current climate of paranoia on Wikipedia, if I were to recreate the article the hardliners would probably demand that it be treated as a medicine article rather than as a historical curiosity (just in case some reader genuinely did try to chemically castrate themselves by means of eating nothing but cornflakes and digestive biscuits and taking daily yogurt enemas)**, and I really don't fancy trying to write Soggy biscuit to WP:MEDRS standards. ‑ Iridescent 21:57, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
*Which I can't recommend highly enough if you haven't seen it; no other film captures the strange mix of blind faith in scientific progress and equally blind faith in religion that characterised the mid-Victorian period. ‑ Iridescent 21:57, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
**There actually is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that Graham and Kellogg were on to something, but AFAIK since the Battle Creek Sanitarium closed in the 1930s nobody has conducted a controlled experiment, and I can't imagine a modern ethics board allowing it. Madonna notoriously blamed Guy Ritchie's being on the cookie diet for his lack of performance during their marriage. ‑ Iridescent 21:57, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
I've subsequently, or consequently, also learned about coup du lapin. What is wrong with those frogs? Softlavender (talk) 10:57, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
"Miss Whiplash thanks you for your interest. Please make a booking." Martinevans123 (talk) 11:10, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
I don't know why I ever read any other page. Two questions; why a donkey? (I may regret asking that); and how did Etty miss that one? (Damn, didn't schedule The Sirens and Ulysses this month... Jimfbleak - talk to me? 15:52, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
If you believe Marina Orlova, here you go, although I imagine it's actually one of those terms like "Exicornt" or "Cleveland steamer" that was just made up by whoever started the hoax on the internet. Etty was deeply religious and never depicted sexuality of any kind; he rarely even showed people of the opposite sex touching unless there was a specific reason to do so such as in The Combat. His tits-and-dicks paintings were down to his belief that since God had made the human body in His image it was a duty of artists to show it as He'd made it, not through any desire to titillate (he himself, thinking and meaning no evil, was not aware of the manner in which his works were regarded by grosser minds, from Charles Robert Leslie's obituary of Etty). ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
But poor old Etty wasn't a patch on the quality internet art we get these days. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:10, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
Dear god, don't say that name even in jest; last time he—er—came up, we ended up with a sizeable chunk of Wikipedia blocked and open civil war between Wikipedia and Commons. (I note with complete unregret that the video of him slapping his genitals on a picture of Jimmy Wales's face finally seems to have vanished from Commons.) ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
"I watched a bit of one of them once. God! I couldn't finish it"... JimboSewell123 (talk) 16:21, 6 September 2018 (UTC)
@Jimfbleak: While I realize that once one withdraws from something one forfeits the ability to have any input into how it's managed, I'd request Sirens not just be used as general filler. Similarly to Fuck: Word Taboo and Protecting Our First Amendment Liberties and Gropecunt Lane, it was written with the express purpose of flipping the bird to Jimmy Wales and his "think of the children" clique by writing something that's both 'offensive' on as many levels as possible (this is a picture of naked women dining on anatomically correct rotting corpses, lest we forget), and unquestionably encyclopedic by any reasonable interpretation of Wikipedia's standards. (My original comment—in a thread that was meandering even by the standards of this talkpage—was here; all the rest of the Etty series are products of the fact that once I came to research it, I found Etty a genuinely fascinating character who deserved better coverage on Wikipedia than the piece of shit bio we had at the time.) Consequently, it really ought to be reserved for next time the "ban this evil filth" brigade have one of their periodic moral panics. ‑ Iridescent 19:09, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
So it's all my fault! I see. Johnbod (talk) 01:27, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
Yes, for the reasons we discussed before our temporary moratorium on your Etty FAs, that one definitely won't be run as a filler, although if you ever think the time is ripe, let me know... Jimfbleak - talk to me? 06:17, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

Researchers

Thanks for that clarification; I'd always wondered how WMF justified allowing that, and the apparent explanation is, I misunderstood what they were allowing. --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:39, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

I only know because I just looked at WP:RESEARCHER to see what it said; I remembered Mike Godwin saying this (and his successor reaffirming it), so thought that what you were saying couldn't possibly be true. The whole plan seems to have withered on the vine somewhat. Regardless, even if we did have such a permission, someone with a total of 102 edits, the second of which was 'Bush did 9/11' and most of the rest of which are demands that David Icke's ravings be given equal treatment to reality, would not be at the head of the queue. ‑ Iridescent 17:57, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
Yep. If I recall, it has to deal with some facet of the U.S. code that makes websites immune from liability for things moderators/sysops/equivalents do on platformss they host so long as there is a public vetting process. It’s why even on projects where there are 2 active users, if one of them wants to be a sysop they have to open up a discussion for no one to object to before stewards will grant them the bit, even temporarily. Researchers can’t view the actual text, so the WMF must assume it’s not as big a legal liability to see the history but not the text. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:28, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
To my understanding, a big part of the issue is visibility. Making deleted content visible would also make copyright violations, libel, privacy violations visible and thus expose us to legal action. A copyright holder might not sue us for hosting a deleted copyvio and may have difficulty convincing a court that a copyright violation only visible to a few selected users is legally actionable; a publicly visible copyvio is a different matter. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:05, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) It's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which if you're an admin for any length of time you'll grow heartedly sick of people citing who don't really understand it. The relevant part has developed through case law rather than statute and is very fuzzy, but in essence can be summarized as "it's reasonable for a website to have a few people who can view the copyright violations, kiddy-porn and libel because they need to know what they're removing, but if it's more than a few people who have access then the host of a website (i.e. the WMF) can be considered a publisher rather than just the medium through which other people publish". As Facebook is finding out fairly spectacularly in recent months, not taking the appropriate steps to minimize the number of people who can access problematic material is something on which the courts in the US, UK and EU are losing patience; Mike Godwin's Allowing non-administrator users to have access to deleted pages would vastly increase the frequency and volume of legal complaints. (It could have even worse consequences than that in the long term, up to and including corrective legislation by Congress, which would be a disaster.) wasn't just hyperbole. ‑ Iridescent 19:06, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

The Links, Incorporated

Hi, could you please undelete The Links, Incorporated and put it in User:Nepaxt/The Links Incorporated? Thanks //nepaxt 20:15, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you're asking me, but under no circumstances will I or any other admin undelete it; it's a verbatim copyright violation of this page. ‑ Iridescent 20:30, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
'cause there is more than one deleted article under that name; an older one which you deleted under G11 and a more recent one which was deleted under G12 and is the one with the copyright problem. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:33, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
Aah, I see. The old article I deleted was purest spam sourced to the organisation's own website, and I wouldn't say that has any place on Wikipedia either, although if someone else chooses to selectively undelete it avoiding the copyvios I won't argue. ‑ Iridescent 20:36, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
It's actually a quite significant organization (tl;dr: it's probably up with Jack and Jill of America when it comes to non-Greek lettered groups for affluent African American women). I agree with your G11, and given that I also have a suspicion it may contain copyvio (see being sourced to their website), I certainly won't be selectively restoring it. My normal offer to people in G11 circumstances is to send them the prose via email, but in this case, there are 411 revisions, and I think we'd get in trouble with attribution if any of the content was reused. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:44, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
Per archive.org there's 9 years of history (and per you 411 revisions) - doesn't seem to me like a speedy deletion was appropriate there due to the sheer length of history. The version 8 days before deletion looks in very bad shape and is promotional, but doesn't seem utterly bereft of anything worthwile as for G11... Galobtter (pingó mió) 21:01, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: You can send the article to me via e-mail. Thanks. //nepaxt 20:53, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Before I was a Wikipedia contributor, I know that there was a version of the article which was well-researched and not copyrighted. I would be happy to fix the article and put it up to standards if an administrator would undelete the article. I don't know if it was The Links, Incorporated or The Links Incorporated. Thanks. //nepaxt 20:39, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Watch it you grump

or you'll be accused of trolling. [4] EEng 21:31, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Not sure how CT got "trolling" out of anything there. I'm not inclined to ask as it will just reopen the healing scab.
I don't know where this new fad for using Echo as junk mail has come from; I've now had yet another notification from a complete stranger to a topic in which I've never demonstrated the slightest interest. ‑ Iridescent 07:34, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
It was a rather odd discussion that from the beginning... —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 08:50, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
The notion that the collections of personal essays that constitute Cambridge Companions are so authoritative that they can serve as the basis of Wikipedia articles is certainly—um—courageous. Personally, in my experience CC are so POV-ridden, they're nearly worthless in Wikipedia terms except as a source for the author(s)'s own opinions. (As I've said before, Wikipedia has an odd blind spot when it comes to the Oxbridge university presses; we've always had a contingent who appear to believe that because the OUP or CUP has said something that automatically makes it some kind of infallible ex cathedra pronouncement from the Gods of Academia. In reality, the OUP and CUP are commercial publishers like any other and publish all kinds of gubbins.) ‑ Iridescent 09:29, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
Funny! And university presses in general, perhaps; a recent reviewer told me that they accepted them automatically as a source. Of course, this is all good news for those of us who wish to underpin assertions on the deposition of Edward II with...err..Piggly Plays Truant, perhaps... —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 10:40, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
If you've been watching this talkpage for a while, you're probably aware of my scepticism towards university presses in general and the OUP in particular, who in my experience have a level of fact-checking so poor that some of their showpiece publications would be speedily deleted from Wikipedia were they to be submitted as articles here. (As I write this, the ODNB entry on William Huskisson still claims that he was the first fatality of the railway age despite the fact that he wasn't even the first railway fatality in Eccles, let alone the first anywhere. The actual first fatality of the railway age in the sense of someone run over by a steam train—as opposed to the numerous people killed in accidents during the building of the railways—was an un-named "blind female American beggar" who was hit by a train near Stockport in March 1827. If you include horse-drawn railways prior to the invention of steam power, grooved railways go all the way back to the 6th century BC and "true" railways with flanged-wheeled carriages running on raised rails go back at least 500 years.) One could probably waste a good deal of time counting just how often the Oxford Dictionary of English and the Oxford English Dictionary contradict each other. ‑ Iridescent 11:12, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
Your views on the ODNB have—come up before, say?!  ;) but that is indeed "BIAS" writ large. True victim, a blind african female; preferred victim, a white middle-class male office holder... —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 11:46, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
Huskisson Memorial, Parkside (the accident site)
Huskisson Memorial, Chichester Cathedral
Remains of the Huskisson Memorial, Toxteth (pulled down by 1980s lefties who got the names mixed up and thought it celebrated a slave trader)
Huskisson's grave, St James Cemetery, Liverpool (now both metaphorically and literally overshadowed by Liverpool Cathedral)
Huskisson Memorial, National Railway Museum (originally at the Parkside site)
Huskisson Memorial, London
Huskisson Memorial, Duke's Terrace
Huskisson Memorial, Eartham
American, not African (although if she was living in England as a beggar it's quite likely she was an escaped slave; poor white Americans rarely made the journey back to Europe). It's probably sloppiness rather than overt bias. The actual early casualties were invariably either dirt-poor labourers killed in construction accidents, or the local vagrants too pissed to step out of the way of a vehicle moving at 10mph, and the accidents generally happened in some of the more godforsaken parts of the North with few literate people present, let alone journalists; Huskisson, on the other hand, was killed in front of the Prime Minister and most of the cabinet in the middle of a public ceremony, his death was reported worldwide, and there are huge monuments to him in multiple high-profile locations; it is fair to say that he was the first reported casualty of the railway age; consequently, sloppy researchers assume that because they can't find obituaries for railway casualties prior to him that he must have been the first. ‑ Iridescent 13:16, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
  • In this particular context I'd say the mineral railways don't count. The claim isn't "the first railway fatality", it's "the first fatality of the railway age", and the railway age began in 1825 when the S&D (scheduled service, passenger service, goods service open to anyone, steam-powered at least in theory even though the locos were so unreliable the horses ended up doing half the work) started operations, rather than with Trevithick and the early mineral railways. (In the same way, we'd say that Valentin Bondarenko was the first casualty of the space age, not people killed by or during the construction of V-2 rockets.) ‑ Iridescent 12:49, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
I completely misread American for African! Nice collection of images that----> Is there any particular significance in his (repeatedly) being shown in a toga? Funnily enough, ODNB is currently being lauded to me as we speak, but I'm biting my tongue  :) —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 13:25, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
On a lighter note, I just saw your remark about the CPGB having no left wing bias  :) brilliant. Although less brilliant, of course, is that it has to be even explained in the first place.
Most statues of early 19th-century politicians show them in togas; it was convention at the time, as it symbolised that they were the heirs to the Roman Republic. This wasn't unique to Britain; George Washington, Napoleon etc got the same treatment. Suits-and-ties only really became the uniform of the administrative classes when Prince Albert died and everyone started wearing dark suits as a mark of respect. It's actually the Communist Party of China, not the CPGB, that he's claiming is more right wing than the BBC ‑ Iridescent 13:38, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
I imagine most government ministers would agree with them on that  :) —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 15:01, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

For true connoisseurs

[5] EEng 07:41, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Good grief. Just ignore him; DGG was on Arbcom long enough to know that anyone who actually blocked you under these circumstances would have their actions reversed within minutes and probably find themselves hauled in front of the Star Chamber for desysopping. ‑ Iridescent 12:56, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
I wasn't worried, just something for "true connoisseurs". EEng 15:11, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
Oh my god, I'd completely forgotten he was involved in this [6]. Well, that explains it. EEng 21:25, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
We need more discussion of Phineas Gage like a hole in the head. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:27, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
"One day, boys and girls, the Phineas Gage article will be finished." Miss Snodgrass 123 (talk) 21:46, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
This may seem hard to believe, but I've never heard that one before. No wonder everyone wants to be on Arbcom -- meetings must be one kneeslapper after another. EEng 22:15, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
"I Can't Tell You About It". Martinevans123 (talk) 22:42, 11 September 2018 (UTC) [7]
Ah, Phineas Gage...I suppose the time is now ripe to have a short and swift discussion in which everyone remains calm and civil...
...about its wikimarkup 🎃😏 —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 08:26, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
or lack thereof. Softlavender (talk) 08:29, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
If I had my way WP:CITEVAR would be summarily scrapped in favour of a unified citation style, and {{ran}} referencing—and all the other goofy systems like parenthetical referencing and bluebook that have no benefit and just confuse readers and editors alike—would be sent on their way, with the {{shy}} template—which screws up Wikipedia's maintenance scripts and hinders people attempting to import Wikipedia's content elsewhere, for a negligible benefit—following close on their heels and zero-width spaces not far behind. When the lead of an article is displaying something like [M]:1,378[M2]:C​​[3]:1347​​[4]:56​​[K2]:abstr to the readers and someone trying to insert a new piece of information in good faith is faced with this and needs to try to work out from that what format they should be following and what templates they should be using, something is seriously wrong somewhere. I'm not sure mine is really the talkpage on which you want to be having this discussion. ‑ Iridescent 13:29, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
Oh, how I would love a better citation system. Manually filling in and correcting citation templates is tedious. As is sprinkling them around the article and reading the footnote salad that results. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 17:58, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
I like WP:LDR generally. As for automatic citation templates, the best you'll get is either Citoid or Citation bot--this community doesn't like (for better or worse) the cite doi system we had going on for a while (and I think deleted cite q as a result?). That aside, WMDE was working on a replacement for {{rp}} in the core reference software, which I guess would be a reasonable removal for {{ran}} also. --Izno (talk) 18:28, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
I can see the appeal in principle of List Defined Referencing, but in practice I think that in the Wikipedia context it causes more problems than it solves. A new editor trying to get to grips with Wikitext markup might not understand all the squiggles and codes they're seeing, but will generally figure out that what they see between <ref> & </ref> is the reference, and even if all they do is shove a bare url between a couple of ref tags, they've still sourced it correctly and someone else can clean up the markup later. When a new editor tries to edit a paragraph and sees no references at all, just a block of {{sfn}} and <ref name=> gibberish and not a book title or a url in sight, it confuses the hell out of them and they end up with the impression that they don't need to provide sources, and that those little citations they see at the end of sentences are added later on by the mythical Wikipedia Staff. Because these edits then get reverted as unsourced, in practice LDR has the effect of de facto locking articles in a protected state in which only those with a knowledge of mediawiki markup can edit them.

I recognize that I'm being a complete hypocrite in that, while I don't use LDR, I do use the equally confusing {{sfn}}/{{efn}} markup all the time as it does make it much quicker to edit. I'd still sacrifice it in an instant and accept the slightly longer time it would take to input citations in a more comprehensible-in-edit-view format, if it meant moving towards a standard format and getting rid of all these oddities like the fact that after a fucking decade the {{citation}} and {{cite book}} templates still produce different outputs. Paging RexxS on this one ‑ Iridescent 19:52, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Ha. I do use both sfn and LDR on articles I write/expand and I don't think I've ever seen another editor getting the correct citation format on the articles I've written. Usually they put the content either unsourced or with the regular <ref> tags; in the former case I'll try to source them myself or ask the editor to provide a source, in the latter I reformat the entry. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:10, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
Yes, this is why I never understand the idea that unusual ref systems discourage new editors. All we have to tell people is that they can freely use < ref>< /ref> as best they can, and if need be someone else will come by and integrate it into the article's system. Actually, I tell new editors to just put the source in parentheses -- what could be easier? EEng 20:20, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
  • As soon as someone takes the modest step of making the normal reflist machinery let you declare the order in which you want the refs listed, so that refs can be alphabetical or grouped in useful ways, I'll eagerly scrap {ran}/{rma}.
  • It would be trivial to make scripts simply ignore soft hyphens, just as they ignore linebreaks and nonbreaking spaces. If people don't want to bother doing that, that's on them.
  • Someone wanting to add a new ref can do it the same old way they always do, using < ref>< /ref> -- there's nothing to figure out, and it works fine.

EEng 19:47, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

And now I know why there's a trend in new editors to shy away from content editing in favor of anything else. Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 20:09, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
I don't follow. EEng 20:15, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
EEng, When the most basic required thing on Wikipedia has multiple vehement (not judging just saying) schools of thought on how to reference and footnote an article, and one never knows when a strongman from one side or the other will show to demand their way be followed, that is going to look unattractive to other editors. I use ,ref. and then convert them all using the Visual Editor. Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 21:13, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
But no one here is doing that. We're all saying, Hey, add the source in any way you know, and if it's not the system used in this article someone else will come along and change it -- and after watching that a few times you'll learn how to format refs for yourself. Again, I tell newbies to simply put the source in parens e.g. The sun is big. (John Smith, The Solar System Book, p.22). What could be more welcoming than that? EEng 21:55, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
@EEng, I think you're missing my point and L3X1 is getting it. Take a hypothetical new editor who notices an error in Phineas Gage and wants to fix it. Let's take the very straightforward two-sentence first paragraph of the body text, Gage was the first of five children born to Jesse Eaton Gage and Hannah Trussell (Swetland) Gage of Grafton County, New Hampshire. Little is known about his upbringing and education beyond that he was literate.; what the new editor will see when they try to edit this apparently straightforward snippet is:
[[File:CavendishVermont 1869Map Beers AnnotatedPhineasGageLocations cropped.jpg|link=File:CavendishVermont_1869Map_Beers_AnnotatedPhineasGageLocations.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.3|[[Cavendish, Vermont]], 20 years after Gage's accident: {{smallcaps|(a)}} Region of the accident site; {{smallcaps|(t)}} Gage's lodgings, to which he was taken after his injury; {{smallcaps|(h)}} Harlow's home and [[wikt:surgery#English-doctor consulting|surgery]].{{efn|name=steps_setting}} ]]

Gage was the first of five children born to Jesse Eaton Gage and Hannah Trussell (Swetland) Gage of [[Grafton County, New Hampshire]].{{efn
|name=birth_name
|Macmillan{{ran|M|p=14-17,31n5,490-1}} discusses Gage's ancestry and early life. The birthdate July 9, 1823, is given by a Gage genealogy{{r|cv_gage}} without citation,{{ran|M|p=16}} but is consistent with agreement among contemporary sources{{r|anonymous_national_eagle}}{{r|background}} that Gage was 25 years old on the date of his accident, and with his age (36 years) as given in undertaker's records after his death in May 1860.{{ran|M|p=108-9}} Possible homes in childhood and youth are [[Lebanon, New Hampshire|Lebanon]] or nearby East Lebanon, [[Enfield, New Hampshire|Enfield]], and/or [[Grafton, New Hampshire|Grafton]] (all in [[Grafton County, New Hampshire]]), though Harlow refers to Lebanon in particular as Gage's "native place"{{hsp}}{{ran|H|p=10}} and "his home"{{hsp}}{{ran|H|p=12}} (likely that of his parents),{{ran|M|p=30}} to which Gage returned ten weeks{{ran|M2|p=C}} after his accident.
{{paragraph break}}
There is nothing to indicate what Gage's middle initial,{{thinsp}}''P'',{{hsp}}{{wbo}}{{r|background}}{{refn|[[#M|Macmillan (2000)]], p. 490; [[#M1|Macmillan (2008)]], p. 839 (fig.).}}{{ran|G1}}{{r|warren_index}} stood for.{{ran|M|p=490}} His mother's maiden name is variously given as ''Swetland, Sweatland,'' or ''Sweetland''.{{r|swetland}}
<!--end efn>>-->}} Little is known about his upbringing and education beyond that he was literate.{{wbo}}{{ran|M|p=17,41,90}}{{ran|M10|p=643}}
How is the new editor supposed to work out how to insert a reference into that, since there's no obvious "reference generating" code that one can copy? If we had a single method, or only a couple of methods, for generating references it would be fair enough to say to new editors "here's how referencing on Wikipedia works, go read these instructions and you'll understand what all those codes mean", but when we have all of these to choose from, each of works in a different way, the practical result is that people are frozen out. I disagree with the WMF on many things, and I think the implementation was initially truly shitty and is now just shitty, but I agree wholeheartedly with the principle behind VisualEditor. Wikitext was intended to be a simple markup language for use in applications where it wasn't reasonable to expect people to learn HTML just to make casual edits, but we've ended up with a situation where en-wiki's implementation of Wikitext is more complicated than HTML. ‑ Iridescent 22:01, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
Of course we'll pass over without comment the absurdity of anyone finding an error in Phineas Gage.
Before I answer your question... I reformatted the above code to use the aforementioned hypocritical {sfn} system, and to my mind neither is any more or any less accessible than the other:
[[File:CavendishVermont 1869Map Beers AnnotatedPhineasGageLocations cropped.jpg|link=File:CavendishVermont_1869Map_Beers_AnnotatedPhineasGageLocations.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.3|[[Cavendish, Vermont]], 20 years after Gage's accident: {{smallcaps|(a)}} Region of the accident site; {{smallcaps|(t)}} Gage's lodgings, to which he was taken after his injury; {{smallcaps|(h)}} Harlow's home and [[wikt:surgery#English-doctor consulting|surgery]].{{efn|name=steps_setting}} ]]

Gage was the first of five children born to Jesse Eaton Gage and Hannah Trussell (Swetland) Gage of [[Grafton County, New Hampshire]].{{efn
|name=birth_name
|Macmillan{{sfn|Macmillan|2000|p=14-17,31n5,490-1}} discusses Gage's ancestry and early life. The birthdate July 9, 1823, is given by a Gage genealogy{{sfn|CV Gage|1985}} without citation,{{sfn|Macmillan|2000|p=16}} but is consistent with agreement among contemporary sources{{sfn|Anonymous|1848}}{{sfn|Harlow|1848|p=389}}{{sfn|Bigelow|1850|p=13}}{{sfn|Harlow|1868)}} that Gage was 25 years old on the date of his accident, and with his age (36 years) as given in undertaker's records after his death in May 1860.{{sfn|Macmillan|2000|p=108-9}} Possible homes in childhood and youth are [[Lebanon, New Hampshire|Lebanon]] or nearby East Lebanon, [[Enfield, New Hampshire|Enfield]], and/or [[Grafton, New Hampshire|Grafton]] (all in [[Grafton County, New Hampshire]]), though Harlow refers to Lebanon in particular as Gage's "native place"{{hsp}}{{sfn|Harlow|1868|p=10}} and "his home"{{hsp}}{{sfn|Harlow|1868|p=12}} (likely that of his parents),{{sfn|Macmillan|2000|p=30}} to which Gage returned ten weeks{{snf|Macmillan|2010|page=C}} after his accident.
{{paragraph break}}
There is nothing to indicate what Gage's middle initial,{{thinsp}}''P'',{{hsp}}{{wbo}}{{sfn|Harlow|1848|p=389}}{{sfn|Bigelow|1850)]]|p=13}}{{Harlow|1868|p=4}}{{sfn|Macmillan|2000|p=490}}{{sfn|Macmillan|2008|p=839 (fig.)}}{{sfn|Gage|1854}}{{sfn|Jackson|1876|p=xv}} stood for.{{sfn|Macmillan|2000|p=490}} His mother's maiden name is variously given as ''Swetland, Sweatland,'' or ''Sweetland''.{{sfn|Swetland|1990}}
<!--end efn>>-->}} Little is known about his upbringing and education beyond that he was literate.{{wbo}}{{sfn|Macmillan|2000|p=17,41,90}}{{sfn|Macmillan & Lena|2010|p=643}}
In fairness to myself, by the way, I point out that almost the entirety of this code block is for an image caption (which you didn't show) and a long footnote (which you didn't show). I'm sure you're not saying articles shouldn't have images and footnotes.
Now to answer your question, How is the new editor supposed to work out how to insert a reference into that...? Answer: I guess they'd do it however it was three editors (novices all) did it in these edits [8][9][10]: via < ref>< /ref>, which as already pointed out is perfectly compatible with the refs already there. EEng 00:27, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
I draw your attention to my saying the equally confusing {{sfn}}/{{efn}} system, above. I used Gage as an example as it was the article that started this thread, but the point would serve just as well with almost any non-stub article (here's the first section in edit-view of After the Deluge, possibly the most anodyne and uncontroversial article on the project yet still an incoherent mess of templates). I'd have no issue if all articles used your {{r}}/{{ran}} markup, as we could tell people "here's how you do it" and send them off to learn it; the issue is that if you head on over to Special:Random and select five articles, you'll find five different referencing systems, which gives newcomers to Wikipedia the impression that editing here is far more complicated than it is and drives people away.

You can say Hey, add the source in any way you know, and if it's not the system used in this article someone else will come along and change it -- and after watching that a few times you'll learn how to format refs for yourself but as things stand most new editors never even reach the stage where you can say that to them because they're put off ever engaging in the first place so we don't know they're there; either they get put off because the edit window looks complicated and never start editing at all, or they add something with no source and get promptly rollbacked by someone using Huggle regardless of whether their edit was valid. (Open Recent Changes and count how often you see the phrase "revert unsourced", regardless of whether the edit is accurate or not; this throwaway comment of Jimmy's back in 2006, which on the face of it is commanding his True Believers to stop using the "citation needed" tag and start reverting by default is taken as some kind of Holy Commandment by a lot of people who aren't aware that it was piece of venting about the Siegenthaler incident and not the Archangel Jimbo imparting the Wikimedia Covenant.)

I'm sure the WMF (WhatamIdoing, over to you) will have some editor-engagement figures on just how difficult people coming to Wikipedia now find making making their first edit, and just how many newcomers register an account, open the edit window, and immediately give up without ever actually saving an edit. There was a proposal a million years ago for either a separate reference namespace or for references to be displayed separately in the edit window, but AFAIK it was quietly abandoned when the focus shifted to VisualEditor (MZMcBride might know what became of it.) ‑ Iridescent 07:02, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

I figured that when I wrote the aforementioned hypocritical {sfn} system you'd understand I was referring to your earlier self-deprecation. I agree with pretty much everything you say and wish I knew a solution. I'm sensitive about being singled out because I wasted almost a year dealing with a particularly persistent fool's narrow ideas about such things. All the formats and techniques we use now started as someone's deviant innovation. EEng 07:22, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
I haven't seen any numbers recently, but pre-VisualEditor, 70% of new accounts never saved a first edit during the first month, and 70% of the people who managed a first edit didn't make a second edit. I don't remember the details any longer, but they did track stats on non-bot editors who open pages, make changes, save them, etc., and the success rate was much higher in VisualEditor than the other editing environments. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Editing convenience break

​I'm actually surprised the "this looks complicated, I give up" dropout rate is as low as 70%. Based on the wholly unscientific test of entering random combinations of letters into Special:ListUsers and dip-sampling the accounts listed, the proportion of accounts which have made an edit is so low it may as well be zero. Looking at the user creation log from a couple of weeks ago (to give them time to work up the nerve to make that first edit), hardly any have made an edit of any kind - sure, some of those are sleeper socks and some are spammers who've had their edits immediately removed, but they can't all be. I entirely believe that VE has improved things; it's a monumental PITA for those who do know wikitext, but I remember how complicated starting out on Wikipedia was, and that was back in 2005-06 before we had all these templates and codes. ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
It is easier to "grow up with" the system than to encounter it for the first time now. Is your search including SUL account creations, or only people who registered directly here? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
Filtering out the SUL creations doesn't have an appreciable effect on the ratio. Even among those created by existing users or created by email request - who presumably either care enough to have actively requested creation, or are enrolled on a course for which Wikipedia editing is required - almost always never make any edits. ‑ Iridescent 21:08, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Uh oh

Hi, Iridescent - I hope my humor about templates didn't interfere with anything - my apologies if it did - I was not aware of the circumstances and prefer to stay that way because of the topic area. Atsme📞📧 22:57, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

How did you figure that out?

How did you figure out that Mick2 had been influenced by that DARK SIDE Sinclair Broadcasting video (unless your comment was strictly metaphorical)? It was broadcast in August 2016, but Mick2 had some fairly paranoid beliefs about sinister influences on Wikipedia way back in early 2013: [11], and doesn't ever seem to have mentioned the Sinclair video anywhere on-wiki. As I type this though, a little lightbulb is going on in my head and I realize you probably came to this conclusion from something on WO. Softlavender (talk) 16:09, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Nothing as complex as that (I have no involvement with WO—while the old WR had a useful purpose as a 'neutral zone' for pros and antis to meet, its new incarnation just strikes me as being a bunch of banned editors kvetching about how it's All So Unfair). One of Mick's recent posts linked to a TEDx talk given by Attkisson (the lunatic fringe on both sides love TEDx, as it gives them the at-first-glance legitimacy of the TED name without having to comply with TED's unwritten "don't be nuts" policy), so he's obviously got an interest. While he's been a WP:FRINGE-pusher since his earliest 'Bush did 9/11' edits, it's only recently he's jumped onto the "agents of the Deep State/Elders of Zion/evil corporations/reptilian overlords are secretly manipulating Wikipedia" bandwagon. If you want to go further down this rabbit hole, nl:Speciaal:Bijdragen/Mick2 also makes interesting reading. ‑ Iridescent 16:37, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice nominated at Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates

I have nominated Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice for featured list removal here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the featured list criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks; editors may declare to "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Ham II (talk) 14:18, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

Sometimes, I think Wikipedia really needs an eye-roll emoji. The "it doesn't have the word 'List' in the title" isn't even worth entertaining—not only is there no obligation for a FL to actually include the word "List" in its name, the article should never have been moved in the first place and had you done the courtesy of notifying me at the time, I'd have strongly opposed the move. (Other than a few explanatory footnotes, there's no text that isn't just a shortened summary of the parent article, and removing "List of tablets" from the page title gives readers the misleading impression that this is the article about the MTHSS rather than just a subsection that was snipped off to prevent the 71kb parent article getting unloadably large).
The list isn't "a subsection of the article"—as mentioned above, the only text is a few paragraphs cut-and-pasted from the parent article to give context for anyone who lands on the page direct for some reason rather than via the parent article; "the history of the monument, the development, controversies, public reaction" are exactly where you'd expect them to be, on the parent article; "Some of the notes aren't even sources" I'm not even going to dignify with a reply other than to point out that someone who doesn't understand the difference between a source, a reference and a footnote probably shouldn't be boasting on their userpage of being a "Veteran Editor"; the MOS isn't holy writ and even Featured Articles aren't required to comply with it, let alone Featured Lists. It's probably worth pointing out that the original promotion was done by The Rambling Man, whom I think it's fair to say is not exactly reticent when it comes to pointing out errors, omissions and non-compliances.
Ironically, the one actual potentially valid argument for delisting this is one that nobody has made. Over the last decade there's been something of a revival of interest in late 19th-century England and in Watts in particular (something that will probably accelerate as England descends further into hyperparochialism, as of all the late-Victorian Symbolists and Aestheticists Watts is probably the least tainted by continental and Celtic influences), and there have been both new biographies of Watts published and Everyday Heroism: Victorian Constructions of the Heroic Civilian which covers the MTHSS/Postman's Park in quite a bit of depth, but which haven't been worked into either the main article or the separate list. (I don't plan to, unless there's a significant new discovery or school of thought; IMO both the article and the sub-list are perfectly adequate for the reader as they stand, and if I return to the Watts's their biographies and GFW's key paintings are a much higher priority.) ‑ Iridescent 17:27, 1 October 2018 (UTC)
Iridescent...you know...there's probably a—ahem—"better" place for that kind of rebuttal! —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 17:35, 1 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't participate in the FAC/FAR/FPC/FLC/FTC/FLRC/TFAR alphabet soup (other than occasional comments on Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates, and very occasional reviews at FAC when someone specifically requests I comment on a topic on which they know I have a particular interest or expertise). I've no interest in achieving a high score on Wikipedia-as-videogame, and all that interests me is whether any given article is useful to readers or not, not whether it complies with whatever the arbitrary standard happens to be this week. While I did previously nominate a bunch of stuff for assorted Featured Whatevers in the past, the primary motivation has always been so that when arguing the case for reform, I'm doing it from the "hey, that guy knows what he's talking about, we should listen" rather than the "that guy's an embittered loser who's just jealous because he can't write to our excellent standards" position. (There have been a very few exceptions in which I've intentionally written something to be FA-compliant, such as Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball to be TFA to coincide with the re-opening of York Art Gallery, but they're few and far between.)

Ultimately, my attitude towards FAC is little-changed from when I wrote this screed/manifesto (delete according to taste) a decade ago (which is the thread that originally prompted me to write some FAs so that the "them that can't" argument couldn't be used against me)—it's considerably easier to read if you click "hide" on the table of contents. I'll repeat While a lot of the regulars at FAC/GAN are genuinely helpful, they do – along with the other main "policy gone out of control" area, RFA – attract far more than their fair share of "per a strict reading of policy…" editwarriors who seem to sometimes lose sight of the fact that what Wikipedia is all about isn't a Camazotz-style slavish compliance to arbitrary rules. In some ways, I think a lot of these problems stem from a basic mistake on Jimbo and Larry's part when they used the word "encyclopedia". This is a holdover from Nupedia days, and while it may have been what they were aiming for it is not what today's Wikipedia really is. An encyclopedia is a collection of articles in a standardised format written in a similar style, with a low enough number of articles that a central style can be enforced (Larry's original FAQ talks about one day reaching 100,000 articles) whereas in practice todays Wikipedia (WP:NOT notwithstanding), containing 2,663,761 articles, is actually a de facto web host of loosely interlinked pages, with a somewhat heavier than usual level of moderation; however, many of our core process are still atavistic throwbacks to that idealised vision of Larry's in which all articles would be written to the same level and where there was a basic presumption that most contributors would be well-educated and well-qualified (it's only a few months since Jimbo said "admins should be college students or graduates"). In practice, we do have a lot of people here who don't understand the nuances and power of IAR, and have a "rules were made to always be followed" mentality that was never envisaged when our core policies were drawn up. and For all that people still talk about "ease-of-use" and "all you need to know is WP:FIVE and WP:TRIFECTA", in reality not only are we a site that uses a unique markup and syntax system, but we expect strict compliance from all users with this laundry list, a reasonable expectation of compliance with this mutually contradictory mess, plus whatever arbitrary guidelines the WikiProjects decide to impose; said compliance is then imposed by a bunch of admins, many of whom don't understand the policies themselves (we have over 200 guidelines alone; can you honestly say you've read all of them?), and consequently fall back on "I'm an admin, do as I say or you're not here to build an encyclopedia", with the usual foul-tempered consequences. The problem has more of an impact at FAC because the people coming to you have generally invested more time and effort than the cut-and-paste-from-Myspace articles on bands I delete by the shedload, so you're more likely to get negative blowback. If everyone nominating to FAC received a boilerplate template on their talkpage along the lines of "People are going to say some things that seem really nasty; most of them are genuinely trying to help, and if you really feel someone's being genuinely disruptive then talk it over with someone experienced with the process: here is a list of people who will be willing to help discuss these issues" then I think it would improve the process. again, as even though I said them a decade ago they're still a fairly accurate summary of my attitude towards Featured Whatever Candidates. ‑ Iridescent 17:59, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

One for the Arbcom album?

Apollo and Marsyas, Real Fábrica del Buen Retiro, 1760s.

Saw this & thought of this page. Of course there's a whole Commons category full of the subject. Johnbod (talk) 17:52, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

"You know", said Marsyas, "in here, somewhere, there's an encyclopaedia anyone can edit..." ——SerialNumber54129 19:01, 4 October 2018 (UTC)
Far be it from me to question the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, but is that really Marsyas? (I assume the identification of Apollo isn't disputed, owing to the lyre.) That looks to me more like a liver being plucked than someone being flayed.
I need to do a complete reshuffle of that image rotation at some point; some of them have been in there for over ten years and are getting a bit stale now. It's harder than you'd think to find images that meet my primary criterion of appearing pornographic or violent at first glance without actually being pornographic or violent, especially as Commons haven't rolled back Neelix so a lot of images are hidden in the microcategories he created "to stop people accidentally finding nudity while searching artworks". ‑ Iridescent 01:56, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Fountain of knowledge

AKA how do you always know everything about everybody. I mean, I do prominently link my other identity on my userpage so Aren't you an admin on TV Tropes? isn't that far off but other users? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:38, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) The original mindhive, huh. Always better up look forward than behind :)
There's no real secret to it and certainly no breaches of security; it's just a knack. Remember, I've been here on and off for 12 years now, and you pick up quite a bit just from watching people come and go; remember also that I was at or near the centre of some of the formative disputes circa 2007–10 that shaped modern Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's institutional sclerosis and crisis in recruitment means that in general most of the personalities haven't changed. As with Newyorkbrad—the other half of Wikipedia's institutional memory when it comes to that period—I've spent most of my life in jobs where the key attribute is spotting what might be potentially important and if not actually retaining the information, retaining the knowledge of where to find the information; it just comes as second nature. As a quick-and-dirty way to find out more about a user than they want you to know, look at the early history of their userpage, which will gradually get larger as they add to it, and inspect the revision immediately before it suddenly decreases drastically in size; that's generally the point at which they decided there was something in their history they wanted to hide. (Particularly drastic example.) Don't bother with Wikipedia Review etc—while they're sometimes right, and sometimes very impressively right, at spotting things before we do, they're so often wrong that they can't be taken seriously.
With regards to my digging out the WMF's sooper-sekrit pay rates, which I assume is what prompted this, there wasn't anything special involved. I know that the WMF staff are notoriously demoralized (although as I understand it since Lila got the boot and Jimmy was eased aside into a symbolic-only role things are getting better), that demoralized staff are the ones who leak details of their pay and conditions, and that when American employees want to leak details about their employment Glassdoor is the place they go to do it. (If you want to gawp at just how much of the donor funds Jimmy's cronies are skimming off, meta:Wikimedia Foundation salaries only lists the top brass but certainly raises eyebrows—and that just gives the official figures and doesn't include the 'essential travel', Russian massage parlors on the corporate credit card, et al.) ‑ Iridescent 21:52, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
(adding) On the subject of WMF jobs, Whatamidoing's reply in that thread leads me to what may be the most bullshitty-sounding job I've ever seen. (I assume it's a sinecure created to give a meaningless but high-paying job to some buddy of Jimmy's, rather than a real job with work and responsibilities, but even so…) ‑ Iridescent 21:59, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
Motivation might be right, but the title is becoming somewhat common among non-profits and universities in the States. Typically it’s an odd combination of recruiting and being paid to organize internal training programs/send people to conferences. I suspect the motivation was “Hey! Board member X says [other org] has this! We need one too!” TonyBallioni (talk) 22:10, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm reminded of my favorite job title currently(ish) in the news: Executive Director of Research and Identity. Surely Wikipedia has one of those? Or needs one? --Floquenbeam (talk) 22:15, 2 October 2018 (UTC) (It's all very clearly explained: "Jenkins will use his extensive reporting background and unique interviewing style to contribute to the franchise’s amateur and professional scouting infrastructure, as well as help to enhance the Clipper experience.") --Floquenbeam (talk) 22:17, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
I once worked for a firm that had a “Chief Grassroots Officer.” Let that sink in. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:25, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
We do appear to have a 'Scrum Master', a 'People Relations and Inclusion Lead', and not one but six 'Trust and Safety Specialists'. (We also appear to have a workforce so overwhelmingly white that I'm surprised the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission haven't hauled the board in to ask some awkward questions.) ‑ Iridescent 22:58, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
It looks like the current US workforce is 78% white.[12] The WMF's US staff is 71% white.[13] (Also 71% for their US management staff.) Although those numbers are technically less white than the average US employer, they're sufficiently close to average that I doubt there would be either any significant criticism or any inquiries about what others could learn from the WMF. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 4 October 2018 (UTC)
Those numbers are pretty "reasonable" for the Bay area; Wikimedia should probably not be headquartered in one of the most expensive areas in the world... --Izno (talk) 22:18, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
See this five-year-old thread for my thoughts on the WMF's fixation on expensive areas. All the arguments I made about WMUK there—that the "community hub" aspect doesn't hold water when the building in question has a strict no unauthorized access policy, that the whole point of an online community is that it makes no difference if the admin is done in a city-center luxury block or a nondescript industrial unit in a recession-hit city where one can pick up property on the cheap, and that the lack of effective oversight fosters a culture of friends setting each others' salaries leading to inflation—apply even more so to the WMF. As far as I can tell, the only reason the WMF moved from St Pete to SFO is that Jimmy thought he wasn't being taken seriously enough; Microsoft, IBM, Spotify, Amazon etc all seem to get by just fine outside the Bay Area. ‑ Iridescent 22:43, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
Eh, Seattle has ballooned for the same reason the Bay area has, and that's two on your list; IBM is out just outside NYC, so I guess those costs are similar to Seattle; and Spotify is headquartered in Stockholm... which is similarly expensive (I have family there). I'd agree that those're doing fine outside the Bay area, and the general "they really could pick something a little more podunk" if WMF wanted, but there's a reason Amazon's RFP for HQ2 had requirements like "Good mass transit/good schools/low crime"... --Izno (talk) 23:37, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, try Rockstar which gets by just fine in Dundee,a city that makes Detroit look like Dubai. "Good mass transit/good schools/low crime" could describe Belfast, Buffalo or Belgrade just as well; recession doesn't necessarily mean a collapse in infrastructure.) ‑ Iridescent 10:40, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
Per our article on the company they're now headquartered in Edinburgh not Dundee :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:53, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
recession doesn't necessarily mean a collapse in infrastructure Seems to in America of late! --Izno (talk) 13:35, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
Even in the US, the infrastructure doesn't always fall apart in a recession—Miami, for instance, was one of the cities hit hardest in the past decade but still has an eminently respectable mass transit system. (Indeed, raising taxes to hire people to build and maintain infrastructure is one of the traditional ways the federal and state governments redistribute wealth from rich to poor in a recession while maintaining plausible deniability—even the reddest of red states tend to be littered with freeways that are twice as wide as they need to be, boondoggle mass transit systems, and enormous airports. One of the perversities of the US is that the booming cities like Denver, central Texas, Indianapolis and Salt Lake City tend to have the shittiest infrastructure, as enough people are driving cars to vote down improvements to the transport network, and local politicians in wealthy areas veto anything that might encourage the riff-raff to commute into or through their districts.) ‑ Iridescent 23:28, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
Sometimes I wonder if this is the reason why we moved to California. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 21:24, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

The location issue is a tricky one - my take is that it might be hard to attract good ambitious people to (say) Omaha, Nebraska or Little Rock, Arkansas, but obviously it is a quid pro quo with rent etc. In my field, folks are often on the lookout for a position in a nicer part of town...Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:56, 3 October 2018 (UTC)
PS: I remember driving through Dundee and Bradfor last time I was in the UK (2013) and the city centres of both were giant craters/construction sites. Both might be a bit nicer once finished....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:58, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

But you're in a job where you're dealing with people face to face and consequently need to be near them—for most WMF functions, it doesn't make the slightest difference where the workers are physically located. (The actual hardware that runs Wikipedia is in Ashburn, Virginia, and San Francisco is literally as far from there as you could be while remaining in the lower 48.) I can see a practical argument for having the head offices located in the 9th Circuit, which is traditionally flakier than the others when it comes to enforcing libel and privacy cases, but that doesn't mean the headquarters needs to be in a skyscraper smack in the center of downtown SF.
The Dundee regeneration is now nearly complete, and the waterfront is now graced by this eyesore. Bradford would probably take a Liverpool-sized effort to turn around, as it has the misfortune to be too close to the money-pit that is Leeds, has very poor transport links, and doesn't have the cultural history of Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds to act as a draw for tourists. ‑ Iridescent 10:44, 4 October 2018 (UTC)
Ah, but Bradford does have the Wool Exchange, which is a nice Waterstones, and Little Germany...that V&A thingy is...interesting....Yes in health we need to be near people, but there are hospitals dotted all over Sydney, and workers working in hospitals in poorer white collar areas are often on the lookout for jobs in nicer parts of town.Not sure what that has to do with being face to face. I can see the point about airports below. My vote would be Seattle then :) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 09:40, 5 October 2018 (UTC)
The "Talent and Culture" job is the head of human resources, which is not a job that I'd volunteer for. There has been a lot of title creep, especially in mid-sized non-profits, since we were all young and innocent. Apparently what used to be called "secretary", and then was an "administrative assistant", is now a "manager" of something, and most other administrative positions seem to have experienced a similar range of inflation. (They tried to rename my teammates to be "managers" this last round, but we banded together and fought them off.)
When the lease was up on the old building, the WMF talked (a lot. Endlessly. Oh, my, am I glad that particular topic is over, and I do sincerely hope that the lease is very, very long) about relocating. They ultimately moved to a different building in the same part of SF, but the main qualification for an alternative city seemed to be the presence of a major international airport. It makes sense: only a minority of staff actually work in San Francisco these days, and (almost) all of the remote staff (except me) flies in to the main office about twice a year. Therefore, the serious options were places like Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., and other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. Basically, if you made a List of US airports by number of direct connections to non-American airports, whatever came in at the top would be a reasonable candidate.
Also, if you want to visit the office, then you're all invited. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 4 October 2018 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing: If you made List of US airports by number of direct connections to non-American airports then Chicago leads by a mile, with Atlanta trailing a distant second. (I'm not just blowing smoke, the list exists, it just hasn't made it on to Wikipedia yet. There's a nice little diagram here; note that aside from LAX, none of the west coast airports are even deemed worth mentioning.) I doubt SFO would make the top 20 in the US even if you included Oakland and San Jose—it's a busy airport, but that's because it's a hub for United and Alaskan's domestic flights. If "easily reached from multiple foreign cities" is a primary criterion, the WMF should have stayed in FL which is probably the best-connected region in the world other than London with its seven international airports, thanks to every European and US airline using Miami or Tampa as their interchange points for Europe–Latin America flights, and the non-stop tourist trade through Orlando.
Don't be insulted, but Authors, Celebrities, Civic leaders, Critters, Educators, Elderly folks, Local Embassy heads, Musicians, People making a difference, San Francisco Bay Area historians, Successful, young, disadvantaged businesspeople, Whiz kids and Youth sounds both like my idea of hell, and like a list drawn up by someone with no actual knowledge of what Wikipedia/Wikimedia actually does. If I were ever in SFO (or any of you were here), I'd be more than happy to meet any of you who were interested (with one obvious exception who I'd quite happily beat senseless were I ever in the same room as him), but the idea of being trapped in a room with a bunch of people (only one of whom I even recognize as being remotely active on Wikipedia, and I recognize him for all the wrong reasons), all earnestly explaining to me why their pet interest is one we should all share, is not something that appeals. ‑ Iridescent 01:35, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
I really want the explanation behind "critters". I know we don't discriminate, but if it has more than 4 legs I'll recuse myself. Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 19:11, 6 October 2018 (UTC)
I'd like to imagine that once a month they ceremonially butcher a hog before stripping naked, smearing themselves with its blood and dancing naked on the roof of Montgomery Tower whilst howling at the moon and flinging its entrails at hapless passers-by below. This being California we're talking about, I imagine it's more likely some kind of touchy-feely thing along the lines of therapy dogs. I vividly remember once visiting an aquarium of some kind in SF and being approached by an earnest young man asking me if I wanted to stroke a starfish. Note that the job ad that sparked all this off appears to feel that monthly massages to help staff relax is some kind of perk and not some kind of screaming horror to be avoided at all costs, which gives some kind of idea what we're likely to be dealing with here. (You would think that after what happened last time someone at the WMF decided he wanted regular massages this might be a topic they'd steer clear of.) ‑ Iridescent 01:55, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

Politics

Iridescent, I should probably apologise for addressing my comment at AN/I directly to you. I had been thinking of raising the issue here towards the end of my week off work after getting more substantive things done, and then I saw the posting at AN/I and your response. (I would have e-mailed some time ago, but for your disapproval of Wikipedia e-mails.) Yngvadottir (talk) 17:48, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

​No problem. I'll reply here to avoid pouring kerosene on the ANI fire, but I honestly see no issue with editors declaring their political allegiance on-wiki if they're going to be working on political articles, any more than I'd see an issue with someone working on painting articles listing their favorite artists, someone writing about warfare mentioning that they'd served in the military, or someone writing about music listing which genres they like and dislike. To my mind, it's not at all disruptive, but a courtesy to allow other editors to know where that person stands. That kind of signposting goes on in virtually all real-world papers on politics and political history, it's just that in academic papers the declaration of COI is written in a code to which all the readers have the key; if I see "Marmaduke Arbuthbott-Bumley-Smythe is a member of the European Research Group and a former advisor to Beatrix von Storch" or "Len Flattcapp is a former Special Advisor to David Milliband and a regular contributor to the New York Times" at the foot of a published paper, that's as explicit as if the citation openly said "an identitarian-libertarian hardliner who faps over Alessandra Mussolini" and "has leftist sympathies but is scared by the rise of Corbyn/Syriza neomarxist populism". On Wikipedia with its culture of anonymity we don't have the luxury of knowing the writers by their works and reputation, and consequently it's only through self-identification that we can determine whether articles are receiving a fair degree of input from across the spectrum of opinions.
Note also that JzG didn't say—as a lot of people seem to think he said—that "Trump supporters are not competent to edit Wikipedia", but that "Trump has changed his opinions so often that someone who blindly and unquestioningly agrees with everything he says is not competent to edit Wikipedia".
The slow-burn delete/undelete war that led to Wikipedia:German userbox solution wasn't really about politics per se, but about political templates in the template namespace giving the impression that arguing about politics—"arguing" being key—was officially sanctioned as appropriate behavior. Wikipedia:Userbox policy poll and its sprawling ill-tempered talk archives still exist, if you really want to lose a couple of hours of your life rehashing the angels-on-pinhead argument between "here we are Wikipedians, out there we are advocates" vs "bias is better declared". For a project we're constantly being told is a gerontocracy run by the same faces who ran it a decade ago, it's shocking how few of the names there—who at the time were the Big Beasts of Wikipedia—are still active. ‑ Iridescent 01:39, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
But there is a conflict between the guidance provided and the practice. Also, while as I say I can see the argument for letting people identify their biases, there's an obvious slippery slope regarding unacceptable opinions ... and I'm seeing more and more political lecturing of the "You don't belong here if you disagree with me on this political point" kind, not only on user pages but in talk space and, obviously, at AN/I. I'm not sure many would agree with the desirability of "input from across the spectrum of opinions" per se, but there is indeed a correlation between diversity in the editing community and neutrality and breadth of coverage, and I'm seeing intimidation; also I do regard it as undermining the goal of neutrality if editors feel no institutional discouragement against the belief that articles should reflect their political viewpoint because no right-thinking person could disagree.
One factor may be that views differ as to what is political or even contentious. I suspect for many editors, Trump is beyond the pale. I also suspect the issue regarding which I sent that private e-mail did not fall under political issues, that is, under things regarding which people may reasonably disagree, in my colleague's mind. But I'm concerned enough about this that I've almost stopped serious work here, and I suspect we've already put off quite a few potentially useful editors, including those whose countries use different terminology or have different issues currently on the front burner (I know you work sometimes at ITN, where stark differences in concerns often emerge.) Anyway, I wouldn't stick my neck out if I weren't quite disturbed. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:08, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
There is a pattern in contemporanoues politics of some countries, notably the United States, about black and white thinking where one side is undisputably right and the other undisputably wrong and people cannot agree to disagree. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:00, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
I actually think that is the single most important point here. Tribal Trumpists - and tribal Bernie-bots - are tribal first and foremost. There is a small subset of people who believe that Trump was ordained by God. They are the ones I am talking about. I could have been (and could yet be) clearer, and I will make an effort to be so. Guy (Help!) 08:36, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
@Yngvadottir, the "statements attacking or vilifying groups of editors or persons" at WP:User pages isn't some kind of holy writ that was brought down by Jimmy and Larry on stone tablets. It was unilaterally added by a single editor and this in full was the "discussion" that led to it. One could make the case that because nobody's removed it that means it has implicit acceptance, but it's certainly not something that's ever been enforced with any great enthusiasm.
Whatever the guideline says, practice—as with most statements on userpages—has always been that we allow it unless it expresses a view that would potentially create a chilling effect that would discourage other editors from approaching that user. IMO on English-language Wikipedia, it's a reasonable assumption that most editors will have an opinion about the politics of at least one of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland or NZ, so provided it's not grossly defamatory there isn't any real potential for "I support Trump" or "I oppose Trump" to have this kind of chilling effect (just look at how often some of the choicest examples here from both sides of the US political divide are used).
If you want to get heated about the contents of userpages, you might want to start with looking at how frequently openly racist userboxes are used, at how many people are openly advocating support for nationalist/irridentist movements or for outright combatants in wars on their userpage, or pick the user pages at random of a few of the pondlife that hangs around on Jimmy's talk page and see how long it takes to find a divisive statement. (I find these people, who are appropriating the language and imagery of a real war in which tens of thousands of people were killed, solely to posture about How Damn Important they are on Wikipedia, grossly offensive, but do I demand they remove it? No, I just make a mental note should I encounter one of them that this isn't someone I intend to take seriously, which is exactly what I'd expect a Trump supporter encountering JzG's essay to do. ‑ Iridescent 14:56, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
(Interesting that edits to Jimbo's talk page have declined so smoothly over recent years; I avoid going there. But it may just be tracking the general decline in activity.) I find it interesting that that was Coren, but that's the milder of the two guidance statements: "Wikipedia is not an appropriate place for propaganda, advocacy, or recruitment of any kind, commercial, political, religious, or otherwise" is the one I have regarded as definitive. And see my point above about discussions that some editors may honestly not regard as political (or as open to discussion). We saw the thin end of this wedge with the "gender balance among Wikipedians" issue, which as you know I have taken positions on. And there I should probably shut up, having raised the issue and recorded my strong sense of disquiet, and refusing as I do to contribute to the rising tide by giving examples on-wiki. I personally think we're running off the rails, but I have to admit my growing alienation also has to do with the increasingly hostile editing atmosphere in general. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:14, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

Break: on WP:NOT

That's a cut-and-paste from WP:NOT, and not something I'd consider relevant to user pages. I appreciate that the "and user pages" was slipped in a decade ago and has never been contested, but if one reads the actual wording of Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion (Along with WP:ATA, WP:NOT must hold the records both as the pages that are most often cited by people who haven't read anything other than the headers, and as the pages that hold the highest amount of completely arbitrary bullshit masquerading as irrefutable truth), it's very clear that both the intent and the actual wording are explicitly about preserving neutrality in articles, and to a lesser extent a reminder that disputes on articles' talk pages should be about how articles are to be worded rather than on the merits of the article subject. As you may know, I am definitely not a fan of the Five Pillars and think a lot of the decline in Wikipedia can be directly traced to the point at which its subpages started being treated as policy and the WP:TRIFECTA attitude came to be abandoned. (For any TPW who's confused by this, no; despite what you may have been told WP:5P is a personal essay about what its author considered important, and isn't and never has been policy or even "guideline".) The intent was never that nobody should be allowed to express an opinion on a controversial subject.
(There never was a Golden Age when all Wikipedia was bathed in a glow of pure neutrality. If you've never looked at the early history, it's worth actually reading Nupedia start-to-finish just to see what a mess of bad writing and personal opinions masquerading as fact the alleged Eden from which Wikipedia fell actually was. "Irish Traditional Music"—author, one Larry Sanger—is a particularly steaming heap. The other of the two sites that ultimately evolved/degenerated into Wikipedia, Bomis, was engaged in quality journalism like this atthe time. Despite the generally toxic atmosphere, Wikipedia is probably healthier now than it has ever been, and I'd argue that that's at least partly down to the fact that after years of trial and error we've finally got the balance right between anonymity and disclosure from contributors.)
Without looking at the history, I imagine the decline in participation on Jimmy's talkpage is down in equal part to it being semiprotected more frequently so there are both few IP edits and fewer reversions, and by the fact that he's allowed it to become a friendly space for a small clique of fruitcakes, loons and racists so regular editors tend to feel unwelcome there. The purported decline in Wikipedia participation is a myth put about by the anti sites—other than a spike and subsequent dip in 2006-09, the key "Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in this month" metric has remained virtually constant for the past decade. (The raw figures are here if you want to double-check the math. There are more fancy charts here, showing other key metrics like "number of edits" and "new account registrations" remaining constant.) ‑ Iridescent 02:26, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
Along with WP:ATA, WP:NOT must hold the records both as the pages that are most often cited by people who haven't read anything other than the headers Hear hear. That's a common issue with all short cuts and I think that WP:INDISCRIMINATE is probably the worst. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 08:26, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
Maybe we're all using talk pages less - if I look at my profile at the top user talk pages I have edited and there are some editors there that have not actively edited in years (!) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 09:15, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
@JoJo Eumerus mobile: WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:NOT (and indeed the WP:NOTADVOCACY that got us here) all point to the same page, which is so ambiguously worded that readers can project pretty much any meaning they desire on to it. I realize now that we're both mistaken, and the page that's most often cited by people who haven't read it must surely be WP:Civility, which I'm sure nobody ever actually reads. (And I've still yet to hear a convincing explanation for what "Civility is to human nature what warmth is to wax" is supposed to mean or why we're supposed to think this is a good thing, given that the flame typically completely destroys the candle and at the very least wrecks its shape and cohesion.)

@Casliber: I'll guess that a large part of it is that many of the discussions that used to take place on user talk pages, now take place in Wikipedia space at places like WT:FAC or the Wikiprojects. Plus, as most regulars are now at least vaguely familiar with each other and the style guides are more ossified, there's less of a need for "here's what I think, what do you think?" discussions over every Harvard footnote and spaced endash. Interestingly, my stats show exactly the same pattern of long-departed editors. (It also shows—presumably because of page moves and history merges or scripts having a wider scope than I thought—my having some pages in my 'most edited' list in which I'm certain I've never shown the slightest interest. Book:Mod Bands - England & Europe, TimedText:Parrot sketch.ogg.en.srt, Portal talk:Sims and Help:IPA/Romansh are all on there.) ‑ Iridescent 14:27, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

You sure? Because a certain Iridescent declined a CSD on Portal talk:Sims and AWB edited Book:Mod Bands - England & Europe, TimeText:Parrot sketch.ogg.en.srt and Help:IPA/Romansh Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:55, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, huh. That AWB run really did get everywhere, didn't it? ‑ Iridescent 15:28, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
If I had a dollar for every time WP:NOTINHERITED was used incorrectly.. Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:19, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
Or about when people claim that "WP:PRIMARY" or "primary source" means "unreliable" or even worse "connected to the subject". JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 17:47, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
The one that really annoys me is people who claim that WP:USEFUL—a twelve-year-old personal essay which is clearly marked as such at the top, not any kind of policy/guideline/instructions—means we can't take into account the potential utility to readers when it comes to deciding whether we include something, despite our primary fucking purpose being to deliver information that's useful to our readers and to explain things that might not be obvious. ‑ Iridescent 01:21, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
(Feel free to move this up or just delete it.) I think you may have got the wrong impression of what I'm whining about. Yes, I know there was never a golden age, although it would have been exciting to be here when the wiki-dragons roamed. What I'm seeing is editors enforcing Rightthink, rather than expressing controversial opinions. And to belabour my point, I think part of the difficulty understanding me is that I'm including matters where many editors may assume their position is so self-evidently right or so harmlessly mainstream, it wouldn't occur to them to classify thumping other editors about the ears with it as political, much less polemical. (I first noted this in the area of religion.) From a purely personal perspective, but one that I wouldn't be surprised to find many quieter editors share, it would be nice to have one place on the internet that wasn't awash in litmus test kits and tablets from Mount Zion. But yes, BLP, and yes, NOTFORUM, and yes, NOTTRUTH. I've said before that I don't think our model of consensus scales well; when combined with intimidating both those who may fear expressing a minority viewpoint and those who are simply not up on the (non-wiki) jargon being used (I'm thinking of Indian editors, for example), it loses its viability as a means of hashing out a good solution. Maybe clearer, maybe insoluble ... the user box I need is probably "This editor saves it for her blog". Yngvadottir (talk) 01:19, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
I see where you're coming from, but the only time when the opinion of an editor on American politics is likely to have any impact is when that editor is writing about modern American politics; if you, me or JzG are writing about the differences between the architecture of 6502 and Z80 microprocessors, the 1953 World Series or the endemic waterfowl of Neuquén, none of the other editors on those articles are going to care in the least who we vote for. (To take a couple of examples at entirely non-random, I'm aware that the political opinions of most of the key figures in the horse wikiproject are diametrically opposed to each other, but because horses aren't a political issue it doesn't have any impact on their working relationship; if the Republicans announced that they were considering punitive taxation on horses, or the Democrats proposed a mass cull of mustangs, it would become a political issue and in those circumstances I'd consider public pro/anti statements to be good practice. Likewise, if you've been watching this talkpage you may recall me shooing away some asshole with a white supremacist userbox about a year ago; he still continues to edit unmolested because he's not touching any topics on which this would be an issue.) If we are writing about modern American politics, then our opinions of the topics on which we're writing are directly relevant, and it's not disruptive but a courtesy to make a public "I support Party A and am opposed to Party B" declaration. Per my comment somewhere near the top of this, this kind of declaration is pretty near universal among people writing about politics at the academic level, it's just often couched in terms of former employers and campaigns rather than an explicit "here's what I support, here's what I oppose". Those who are simply not up on the (non-wiki) jargon being used are unlikely ever to be in a position where it becomes relevant, as someone unfamiliar with the jargon of US politics is very unlikely to be making substantive edits on US politics (and to be blunt, anyone so unfamiliar with US politics that they don't realize the Trump administration is a potentially sensitive topic probably shouldn't be anywhere near those articles). This isn't just me venting personal opinions—"American politics is a special case where the normal rules of Wikipedia don't apply" is formal policy. ‑ Iridescent 01:49, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
A lot of this comes from Arbcom, both by commission and by omission. But it's much broader than "American politics post-1932" or even the tendency to assume universality for American definitions and issues; I see a connection, to cite one example, with the unexamined bias that has further reduced what coverage of paganism we did have. And it's not discouraging the uninformed from participating in RfCs and the like; what it is doing that should be obvious is depriving us of articles on things we don't even know we lack, and discouraging jacks/jills of all trades like me from gnoming on swathes of articles. And yes, I do think it makes it harder to maintain neutrality in article space. I was praised for how I pulled off this hairy subject as well as this on which I am entirely self-taught (that goes for much of what I write here), but I'm more and more aware that tomorrow something I edit or something I say in a discussion could render me redactor non gratus; and it makes me reluctant to continue writing up all the major stuff that for some reason I seem to see we lack and others don't; I've more and more concentrated on cute animals and pretty buildings. My wiki-career is far from typical. But I fear I may be articulating something that many feel but don't say. Yngvadottir (talk) 02:19, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Break: medieval sexuality

And then there's always those who, rather than get caught misquoting policy, find it easier not to rely on it at all!
Incidentally, Galobtter, while you're here; you may be interested in this? ——SerialNumber54129 09:35, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
Some arguments can simply be characterised, charitably, as policy-free
Shamelessly plugging, eh? I'll see if I have the time Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:48, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
I hope you're not implyng that just because it's one of the most-watched talk pages on the project...?! Oh, wait, you are :D Charitably speaking: Rumbled! ——SerialNumber54129 10:01, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
We have altogether too graphic illustrations of medieval attitudes to sex and gender issues
I'll have a look at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/John/Eleanor Rykener/archive2 when I get the chance—I've currently got very limited availability and aren't doing anything other than reply to talk posts. One thing that jumps out at me (without having read the article so I don't know if this is an issue with the wording of the FAC or the article) is it is solely from them that modern-day historians and sociologists have been able to attempt an understanding of medieval views on sex and gender which is clearly not true; there are shedloads of cases from Byzantium, France, Germany and the Italian states in this period (the methodology of Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe isn't universally accepted but at the very least is a starting point, those with long wiki-memories will derive a chortle from the title of Of Sodomites, Effeminates, Hermaphrodites, and Androgynes: Sodomy in the Age of Peter Damian, and Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs 900–1700 likewise if you want to look further east; there are also lots of assorted religious figures like Thomas Aquinas and Hildegard of Bingen whose commentaries on clerical attitudes towards sex and gender issues survive), while even if what's actually being claimed is that this is the only insight into medieval English views on sex and gender, we have the Paenitentiale Theodori and there's an entire cottage industry dedicated to milking subtexts out of Chaucer. ‑ Iridescent 15:02, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
If you find time, Iridescent, I'd appreciate you looking in. No hassle. I'll certainly take the liberty of addressing that point of phrasing immediately though: it's most odd that I was that simplistic. Normally I'm accused of over-using "probably...", "perhaps...", "is thought to..." and ending up completely mealy-mouthed over the thing! Meanwhile, nobody's noticed my innocent, wide-eyed assertion that numerous positions have been taken on Rykener yet  :) ——SerialNumber54129 16:08, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
@TonyBallioni: wots a miscitation? ——SerialNumber54129 06:24, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
New word? I was making an (apparently poorly received) joke about what people might think this page was about if we just read the headers like at NOT (mentioned in one of the various discussions above.) TonyBallioni (talk) 06:39, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
New? Maybe if you're a few thousand years old and 1634 is recent :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 07:20, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
And yet for some reason Apple and Google give it a red squiggly line. Weird. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:33, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Unimportant question

While I process the substance of your essay above (given the time you spend on writing them, you should create a space to save such things, analogous to my "Newyorkbradblog" page, rather than let them get swallowed up into archiving), I'll ask a truly trivial question. Is there some difference between formatting italics using the {{em|xxx}} template, as you've been doing, and using the traditional double-apostrophes? On my screen at least, test and test look exactly the same. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:31, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

The documentation is at {{em}}. It has no effect on Wikipedia display, but it's a good habit to get into as some reusers of our articles, as well as screen reader software, interpret italics and emphasis differently. User:RexxS might know the technicalities. ‑ Iridescent 15:59, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
@Newyorkbrad: I think the most important argument goes something like this:
We use italics for multiple, completely different purposes in English, such as indicating emphasis, titles of novels, foreign words and variables in computer code. Our content is often translated into other languages, very often initially by machine translation nowadays. Those languages may have completely different typographic conventions from ours (particularly scripts such as Japanese that are not able to rendered in an oblique typeface), and unpicking the intended meaning of italics for each use can be a major time-sink for the translator – who, for example, may have decide on using 『』 for book titles; ・ for foreign words; or • for emphasis (see List of Japanese typographic symbols). So it's a kindness to our re-users if we indicate what our meaning is by using templates such as {{em|xxx}}, which produce the same visual effect as ''xxx'', but create different html to help translation.
It's not a big issue for screen readers, because as Graham87 tells me, it's common to run the screen reader in a mode that doesn't bother to read out italics, etc. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 17:29, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
@RexxS: Indeed, that's generally the default mode. Graham87 00:21, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

for making me feel like I haven't lost my mind at the Sir Sputnik RfA. The whole affair has left a bad taste in my mouth, so I'm not sure I'll be !voting at RfA again any time soon. ceranthor 13:55, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

You're welcome. I was considering sitting it out as it's obviously going to pass and in the current culture those who oppose popular candidates or candidates with popular nominators—both of which are the case here—tend to get earmarked for retribution, but in the end felt I couldn't sit on my hands and allow a candidate who appears obviously unsuitable to be waved through without my at least registering a protest. I have absolutely no issue with someone who hasn't written featured content running at RFA—at the time of my own RFA, this and this were my most substantive mainspace contributions—but if someone's requesting the right to sit in judgement on other peoples' work, I expect some indication that they understand the nature of that work, the difference between ownership and stewardship, and when and why Ignore all rules should be invoked, none of which I'm seeing here. We have far too many admins already who cause regular damage owing to a narrow-minded "the role of an admin is to enforce policy" mindset. Courtesy ping to GeneralizationsAreBad and KrakatoaKatie, since I'm publicly questioning their judgement on this relatively high profile talk page. I assume you and I will now get the same Two Minutes Hate treatment meted out to Andrew Davidson and Eric Corbett for questioning the "process is more important than content" consensus of the clique who WP:OWN RFA, but I assume we're both big enough to cope. ‑ Iridescent 14:35, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for prodding me to oppose, both of you. Been busy and it slipped my mind. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:40, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
No problem at all (although I do feel for the candidate, who was presumably expecting to sail through and suddenly started getting this in the final two days). When even Ritchie333—who generally gives the impression he'd support a horse if you nominated it for RFA on "no reason not to" grounds—is saying that he feels unable to support a candidate, something is seriously wrong somewhere. Spoke too soon; with a certain inevitability he's indeed supporting on "no reason not to" grounds. ‑ Iridescent 14:48, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Meant to thank you too, Ealdgyth. I had no problem opposing for similar reasons to you, Iridescent, but I did not particularly relish having to defend myself multiple times and being asked how I was qualified to question someone with 120,000 edits when I only have a measly 30,000 (seems that person missed the fact that I have something like 50+ FAs/GAs under my belt). ceranthor 14:49, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm currently #69 on Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits (and most of those above me are running bots or scripts on their main accounts) and #18 on Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations despite my having withdrawn from FAC long ago; if they want to play that "my edit count is higher than yours" game, bring it on. ‑ Iridescent 14:55, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
I was actually surprised that Ritchie didn't ultimately oppose. I have always found him to be reasonable, and his past opposes at the RfAs of popular users with little content work (this one comes to mind) suggested to me that he would have ended up in the oppose camp. ceranthor 15:00, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't mind your oppose, Ceranthor, it was a reasonable one. In fact, all the opposes and neutrals are reasonable, and as you can guess I was wavering towards it myself. Ultimately I thought, "if he does screw up, will he apologise and not defend himself like a thrashing mongoose?" This RfA reminds me of Liz. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 17:38, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict)x2 The badgering of opposers does need to stop. I did eventually move to neutral because of talking to Ritchie and TNT, both of whom I work well with so I don’t mind the discussion, but I was was anticipating less than lucid blowback if I had stayed in oppose. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:01, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
The way to deal with badgering is to ignore it. If I don't feel like replying to someone, its perfectly okay to ignore a ping. I don't have to have the last word... something I learned back in the usenet days.... Ealdgyth - Talk 15:04, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Sitting (comfortably) in support, I have never got the obsession with badgering opposers. Apparently some think that badgering opposers will reduce the acrimony at/unpleasantness of RfA? Somehow adding acrimony to RfA will reduce it? Befuddles the mind. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:10, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
In some cases, it's probably a holdover from the old days. Back in 2006–08 there were some truly stupid opposes (I think this one on BrownHairedGirl's RFA is the all time winner, and every editor of a certain vintage will have unfond memories of this fuckwit). Since in many of those cases it was quite proper to challenge stupid comments, and that's the period in which many of Wikipedia's cultural norms were set, we've retained a culture in which it's considered acceptable to harangue someone for opposition but unacceptable to challenge an ill-thought-through support. Kudpung has probably written something about it at some point. ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
As far as culture creation goes, actions speak louder than words. It may well be a crappy oppose, but wtf has BOOMERANG got to do with it?! ——SerialNumber54129 15:22, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Would BOOMERANG here mean granting sysop rights to Kolya77? :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:30, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
In my capacity as official translator from Admin to Human, "Boldly striking per WP:BOOMERANG"→"It is in the voter's best interest that this vote be stricken, as they have a problematic history and allowing it to stand will mean more people monitoring their contributions which will potentially lead to them being blocked". In my personal opinion it's a bullshit reason for striking and akin to the police arresting protestors who've committed no crime "to prevent a breach of the piece peaceThank you, EEng" (while I don't agree with it, "this user by far do not deserve to be an admin.he will probably start to ban people for nothing" isn't IMO the personal attack being claimed here, but just a case of clumsy wording no different to "I have concerns that this candidate has not demonstrated the judgement necessary to determine when blocking would be appropriate"), but I don't doubt the striking was done in good faith. ‑ Iridescent 15:32, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
You know, I was somewhat bemused by that striking. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 16:14, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
"Breach of the piece" ... "bemused" ... are you two losing your goddam minds? EEng 16:53, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm sorely tempted to oppose every RfA with "I view wanting to be admin as prima facie evidence of power hunger." Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:35, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Y'know, this thread shows how little has changed. The "circle of life" indeed. Someone with an oppose, badgering, complaining about badgering, complaining about complaining about badgering and so on. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:53, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
The math ref desk used to have a serious problem with a sort of competitive attitude towards being the first one to answer questions, and (correspondingly) lots of garbage answers. Numerous attempts to deal with this systematically, either by rule change or by cultural shift, were completely unsuccessful. Eventually, a topic ban was administered the most clearly out-of-line contributor after an ANI discussion. In the subsequent year or so, the situation has massively improved, beyond the level of disruption caused by that single user. A similar dynamic may be at play at RfA. Instead of trying to solve the problem completely, it seems worth trying to get rid of the most serious disruptors and see what that does to the total level of badgering. --JBL (talk) 23:50, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
I mean, a few opposes doesn't really negate him sailing through, and shouldn't give grounds for Sir Sputnik to worry I'd say. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:10, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Iri, why on earth do you think I would be upset with you for opposing? You're entitled to your opinion, and if you don't feel he meets your standards, you shouldn't support. I'd expect nothing less from you. I am not one to badger anyone who has valid reasons for his/her oppose (or support). Katietalk 15:58, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't think you or GAB would be upset; the ping was just to notify you that this discussion was taking place, in case other people see it and are prompted to start opposing as well and you wonder where it's suddenly coming from. (This page has shitloads of watchers.) My comments about the Two Minutes Hate et al were just an observation that the editors who see themselves as self-appointed Guardians of RFA are now likely to start trying to bait and attack me (as is already happening to Ceranthor). ‑ Iridescent 16:16, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
<Takes a gander at list/> Oy. The encyclopedia is "already built"? Really? Why is 1669 Etna eruption a redlink and Huaynaputina only ~18000 characters long, then?
Re RfA badgering, I think the problem is that one man's opinion is another man's irrational POV push. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:53, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
And what is there for Huaynaputina - I added a good chunk of that myself in 2011. I haven't found the time to get back to it, though it is on my extended to-do list... maybe a future collab, Jo-Jo? :) ceranthor 17:05, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
My go-to page for anyone claiming "the encyclopedia is complete" is Enid Blyton bibliography. This is one of the biggest-selling authors of all time, writing in the English language, still in print and still enjoying widespread popularity and regular TV and cinema adaptations of her works, yet 90% of the works haven't got any entry and those that do—even seminal books like Noddy Goes to Toyland—tend just to have ultrastubs. Hell, look at the quality of most of the entries on List of works by Vincent van Gogh. ‑ Iridescent 18:48, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Oh, Enid Blyton. I remember reading some of her books as a child.
​ Assuming that Iridescent does not object to a derail on their talkpage: On Huaynaputina I am inclined to wait until you get some free time; I have decided to pause article writing for a bit after the Allison Guyot/Horizon Guyot/Resolution Guyot/1257 Samalas eruption run and also to store up some energy for the Etna article and African humid period but I can probably squeeze some time in for Huaynaputina as well (I don't think that FAC eats up much time given how slow it is). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:38, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Heh. This is possibly not the best day to say that FAC isn't time-consuming. ‑ Iridescent 19:41, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
If only you were getting paid by the hour eh  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 19:46, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Heh, related to isn't it more likely that Rykener was performing oral sex on him (also classed as sodomy under Catholic law)? I'd need to go back to Aquinas (whose sexual ethics are beyond confusing and have basically been replaced in the circles that matter with JP2's baptized Kantianism) but at least with many historical and current moral theologies, the question as to whether oral sex is sodomy or not depends on the exact circumstances.
That may have been a later development, but I *think* Aquinas recognized nuance and distinctions here, and if he did, subsequent generations of moral theologians would have as well. Anyway, given the time period if the sources aren't clear, it might be best to talk around it while getting to the main idea that it was a sex act considered illicit. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:58, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
I agree it's irrelevant to get into the details when "a sex act" will do, but surely even though it was centuries before Casti connubii, between Romans 1:27, Genesis 38:9, and Novels 141, the RCC had already decided that oral sex between men was A Bad Thing. At the time we're talking about the dissolution and trial of the Templars was still just about in living memory and the first Inquisition was underway, so the RCC hierarchy would have been very familiar with the dogma around sodomy and fornication. While googling for the right Novel, I came across—if you'll pardon the expression—the endearingly po-faced Christian Oral Sex, which is unintentionally hilarious. ‑ Iridescent 21:42, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Oh, I agree completely on those points: Liber Gomorrhianus pre-dated it by a few centuries, and while that dealt with the clergy, the point comes across quite clearly. I suppose my nitpicking was that when you're dealing with a system that categorized sexual vices as those that were against nature and those that weren't (where we get such theories as this infamous ranking, speculating as to which unnatural act if the sources don't say matters less: a mutual handjob would have been worse than rape in the system they were working under, so it'd all be pretty unmentionable. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:31, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
Unnatural axe with a sheep. Also, tell me more about "Gomorrah Hi Anus". EEng 23:38, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Slightly off topic, but on my screen Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Tivedshambo, the bottom half is struckthrough. I see this from time to time in the archives, sometimes the entire archive with be struck out, but I check the history and find no evidence of tampering by vandals. The inital phrase Wheres Kurt? has an improper closing tag, but that should have been solved by the line below, after Sorry Kurt. there is a proper /s. What gives, or is this my older browser having issues again? Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 23:05, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
  • See Wikipedia:Linter. The TL;DR verison is that in July this year Mediawiki changed, so it no longer works the way you describe; each opening html code now needs a corresponding closing code. AFAIK a bot is steadily working through Wikipedia cleaning these up, but with 46,160,798 to work through it will be a long time if ever before they're all done. (See Special:LintErrors if you want to keep track of how many are still outstanding to fix; at the time of writing it's approximately 22,000,000.) ‑ Iridescent 23:12, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
    Well, only ~30000 of page breaking errors like this, since the cause of that is mainly Special:LintErrors/multiple-unclosed-formatting-tags (vast majority of lint errors don't cause issues). Ahechtbot and Galobot fixed a fair few, but there is no bot running currently that I know of at-least, and for low priority lint errors there is no particular timeline on fixing them since they don't cause issues (for now at-least). Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:11, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
  • (since I was pinged). I can't remember evrything I wrote about RfA but it would probably fill a door-stopper of a paperback. I've opposed plenty of RfAs that were likely to pass, and some which passed that IMO quite clearly should not have. I have no qualms about experienced editors opposing an RfA, and certainy not Ceranthor, who I hope will continue to support future RfAs with their votes. Serious opposers do sometimes come up with issues that I or the nominators have missed. Some badgering does actually have the effect of some voters changing their position, but RfA has changed since the reform allowing RfAs to be widely publicised: the coments section at the bottom has become a chat room which in earlier times was rarely even used. Many issues now populate the talk page, again which in eartlier times basically only included a copied and pasted summary of the users' activity.
I therefore question whether or not that Dec. 2015 reform has really been productive in the long run. What people tend to forget however, is that it is most definitely the drama that disccourages many editors of the right calibre from coming forward - Ritchie333 and MelanieN are only too well aware of this. It seems also as if my 3-part series of articles in The Signpost has gone unheeded.
I do not belive that there is a clique of people who consider they 'own' RfA, but there is certainly a group of core voters (me included) who take the process seriously and vote on most of them, and some of whom have spent considerable time analysing the situation and trying to find solutions.
I don't belive either that serious bids for the bit are a quest for power. If they were, the many admins who have retired, or rarely use their tools, or have handed their privileges in for a while, would not do so.
What we are seeing now for a while are relatively few RfAs that fail, and an increase in 'crat chats (though the low frequency of RfAs is probably not a good sample period and may not reflect any trends). I think this demonstrates that some of our almost invisible recent measures to prevent trollish RfAs from being transcluded have worked, and that however nasty the process is, overall it is not strictly 'broken' and no one has been able to come up with a viable alternative for it. (FYI: Tony, Jo-Jo, Katie, Ealdgyth, and GeneralizationsAreBad). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:57, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
Might want to ping Joel B. Lewis as well. I personally don't think that RfA is "broken" but it still has a reputation problem. And the problem with fixing reputation issues is that you need to convince a lot of people. And that you need to give more consideration to a (vaguely defined) group of people's opinion than on your own. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:17, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
@Kudpung, "clique of people who consider they 'own' RfA" is oversimplifying shorthand somewhat, but I certainly do believe there's a small group who see themselves as the moderators of RFA, see it as their duty to steward every candidate through RFA, and hound and harass anyone (particularly in the oppose section, for reasons documented above) who expresses an opinion with which they don't agree. (The formation of cliques who mob people who don't follow the party line isn't unique to RFA; head on over to WT:MOS if you want to see it in its purest form.) Because I rarely join pile-ons, I tend to be in the oppose column more often than support (if someone is sailing through 200–0 or losing 1–30 I don't see the need for me to waste my time researching them when the result is obvious, and if there's opposition already there there's a better than average chance there's a reason the opposition's already there), so I probably see the mobbing and bullying more than most, but you can see a perfectly good example of it on the currently-open RFA (see also the General comments section).
Incidentally, despite all those opposes I'm not some kind of wild serial opposer—assuming Snottywong's tool is correct, the current RFA will be only the 11th RFA where I've opposed and that hasn't matched the final result, and at least three of the editors I opposed who went on to win anyway became notorious rogue admins. ‑ Iridescent 13:04, 21 October 2018 (UTC)
I think the unintended consequence of Dec2015 is that those who run are more likely to be consensus candidates who pass easily, while those who could still pass (but around 80-85%) are AWOL. To be clear, I do not stand for !oppose-badgering, nor do I oppose your !opposes :) GABgab 15:24, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Question/Comment Regarding RFA

First, I wanted to thank you for your well-reasoned oppose of Sir Sputnik's RFA. My general approach at RFA is to support giving the tools to any editor with a track record of being a decent person, and who is clearly editing in good-faith. Your oppose made me wonder, though, whether I should not be more discerning with how I apply my "create good content" rule, perhaps requiring a certain percentage of edits to actual articles, or something to that effect. My basic question is this: where do YOU draw the line? I initially viewed Sir Sputnik as a fairly easy support, but your oppose (which I only noticed after the close) really caused me to reconsider my initial gut instinct.

Regards, Hallward's Ghost (Kevin) (My talkpage) 23:08, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

"Percentage of edits" doesn't really count for much; someone who reverts well-intentioned new editors who make a mistake and then patiently talks those editors through why they've been reverted and how they can avoid it in future, will have far more talk than article edits, but will likely make a much better admin than someone who racks up 10,000 article edits a day mechanically scanning recent changes and machine-gunning "revert". If someone has a high percentage of talk and user talk edits, that's generally a good sign; it's a high percentage of Wikipedia space edits that's generally the warning signal, as that's typically a sign either of someone more interested in process than in results, or of someone who keeps getting in trouble.
The administration of Wikipedia (with both a small and a large "a") isn't about mechanistically applying policy, or we could turn large chunks of it over to bots and scripts. It's about understanding that Ignore all rules isn't just a slogan but is the most important of Wikipedia's principles, and that editors are human, that they do lose their temper when they've removed the same error 20 times from something they've written because it happened to be published in a newspaper and well-intentioned editors try to add it; they do have a sense of pride and while the technical side of a block or deletion can be reversed within seconds, the social cost can't as the person on the receiving end is highly likely either to leave Wikipedia completely or drastically cut down their editing, and experienced writers aren't something that can easily be replaced; that content writing to a high level within Wikipedia's unique atmosphere might look easy but it really isn't, and that series of edits that looks like it's been made in a few minutes with minimal effort may well be the result of months of research, drafting and writing as well as hundreds of dollars of that editor's own money on source materials, and that editor is going to feel rightly aggrieved when someone slaps a big orange {{cleanup}} tag on it because they happen not to like the look of it, or when someone starts hanging around the article whining that they don't like the reference format or that it uses spaced em-dashes.
This doesn't just apply to the seasoned long-term FA writers; plenty of new editors who just like the idea of improving Wikipedia choose their own employer or a relative as the subject of their article because every piece of writing advice in every context other than Wikipedia begins with "write what you know". There are plenty of admins who will quite happily immediately block these editors as spammers, even though they were only trying to help and never understood even that they were doing anything wrong; likewise, there are new editors who create more than one account with no malicious intent but just because "separate accounts for separate interests" is a fairly common practice on social networking sites, get flagged as sockpuppets and promptly blocked because it's easier for the admin to click "block" and move on than it is for the admin to stop and patiently explain what is and isn't acceptable and how and why Wikipedia differs from every other user-generated site on the internet.
There are plenty of people who are editing in entirely good faith but who don't grasp these fundamental principles that breaching policy isn't synonymous with malicious intent, and the "why not?" mentality at RFA (based on Jimmy's "no big deal" comments, which were made in a different time, when Wikipedia had only 1408 registered editors of whom only 106 were active and it genuinely was possible for everyone to know each other's strengths and weaknesses) has meant that quite a few of these people have been given the admin tools at some time or another. They do have the potential to cause serious damage with an over-literal application of policy, particularly Wikipedia's most misunderstood policy WP:Civility. (This isn't just academic speculation; I could instantly name three admins who are actively damaging Wikipedia by their over-zealous use of the 'block' button, and probably a dozen more without much effort. Hell, Jimmy Wales is forbidden from blocking people on en-wiki owing to his over-zealous use of the block button. I could with equally minimal effort rattle off a dozen productive editors who've resigned or near-enough-resigned after being on the receiving end of misplaced admin action, and could probably compile a list of a hundred without thinking too hard.)
Wikipedia has a serious problem with admins, arbitrators and soi-disant power users who don't actually understand that without the content Wikipedia is just Facebook for ugly people, who try to treat Wikipedia's policies as a set of immutable laws, and who end up driving people away. While the decline in the number of active editors (the fourth chart down) has finally levelled off, the churn hasn't. We're still losing experienced editors at a rapid pace (go to Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations, check the contribution histories of the names, and note how many have ceased editing altogether or drastically curtailed their activity), and while overzealous admins don't account for all those losses—people get bored, people have kids or get new jobs and are too busy, people get new hobbies, people die—they certainly account for a sizeable chunk of it. If you don't mind losing half-an-hour of your life, I'd recommend reading at least this section of the monster thread a little way above this, in which (albeit in a slightly different context) I set out in detail just why I believe that the people who want to be admins aren't necessarily the people who should be admins.
Regarding a minimum standard at RFA, except in exceptional circumstances (an editor with a long history of investment in time-consuming and complicated process that directly benefit Wikipedia and have the potential to be challenged by other editors such as tool design or image creation and editing), I'd say the bare minimum I'd expect to see is at least two substantial articles (say, above 1000 words of readable prose), to which that editor has contributed over 50% of the current text, and which other editors have subsequently edited. Unless someone has had the experience of being frustrated by someone else screwing around with something they've spent their own time and money on (and above all, having something on which they've spent their own time and money blanked or nominated for deletion, although an editor who's never had something deleted may just be an editor who demonstrates a superb knowledge of Wikipedia policies on notability and sourcing) there's no way to judge whether that editor has empathy for the content writers, and empathy for the content writers is the single most important quality in a Wikipedia admin since the content is the only reason Wikipedia exists, and all the technical aspects of administration are something that can be learned but empathy is something you either have or you don't. ‑ Iridescent 00:46, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Thank you sincerely for this detailed and thoughtful reply. It really challenges my base assumptions regarding what adminship is, how the tools should be granted, and who should be granted them. I am a fairly experienced editor (much moreso than the age of this account would indicate), having started as an IP in 2006/7 and created an account in 2008. Over the years, I had come to the conclusion that the tools were far too difficult to get for everyday editors who just wanted to have them to help better the project in some way. That morphed into my belief that "reform" at RFA might include unbundling the tools into "sets" that could be awarded upon request to users in good standing. When similar ideas, proposed by various editors, were consistently shot down, I moved toward a belief that the tools should then simply be easier to get, as well as easier to lose. When the "easier to lose" part was never adopted, I guess what I was left with was "easier to get" which, after reading your response here, as well as the discussion right above it, I feel like a bit of an ingenue.
Honestly, I'm likely going to request deletion of that little "support rationale" page I made in my userspace, as I sort of question the base assumptions upon which I based it. I really appreciate your having taken the time to lay out your reasoning, and to help me think through my own.
Regards, Hallward's Ghost (Kevin) (My talkpage) 01:24, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Don't necessarily take anything I say as gospel; I think I'm correct, but there are certainly a number of well-respected editors who feel that "no big deal" still has relevance on today's Wikipedia. (User:Ritchie333 is one who springs to mind.) ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Actually I agree with pretty much everything you wrote there; it spells out my concerns and problems with Wikipedia quite well. I am still brassed off about User talk:Charliallpress / The Mariposa Trust. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:22, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes, that kind of thing is exactly what I mean when I talk about admins finding easier to just decide that something doesn't follow the letter of the law, press a 'delete' or 'block' button, and move on, because it's quicker than engaging the editor and explaining what they need to be doing differently. If I have my chronology correct one of the admins involved there was on Arbcom at the time, which just ices the cake. ‑ Iridescent 15:29, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
More to the point, comforting a family over a miscarriage is just the sort of subject material that would go right over the stereotypical Wikipedia geek's head. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:39, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
You're being more charitable than me; I'm aware of some admins—and I'm sure you are too—who would actively see it as a badge of pride if they've upset someone, because it makes them feel like some kind of tough-guy Sheriff of the Internet,and give them the chance to post some "the needs of Wikipedia outweigh the feelings of individuals" speech they've cribbed from some TV show or other and have been waiting for months for a pretext to use. ‑ Iridescent 15:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
I brought up this article at the ediathon (see below thread), and was asked "If it was okay to put on the main page, why did they delete it a year later?" I didn't have an answer. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 16:25, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Yikes. Yeah, the two of you and I have somewhat divergent opinions on the COI/promo stuff, but that is certainly not a good way to treat people. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:52, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't actually make that much of a habit of lengthy treatises :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 07:31, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
It's not that long compared to some of the screeds I've posted in the past (just ask at FAC); besides, these are arguments I've made so often that I can type the key points on autopilot. If you want a TL;DR executive summary, "nor do I condemn you, go and sin no more" is more important than "keep his charge, and his statutes, and his judgments, and his commandments, always", and knowing when to forgive and when to condemn is something that needs to be demonstrated through actions, not words. We want admins to be a Peelian police force, not an occupying army. ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
No complaints here, and I definitely read the whole thing; a good read as always. Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:41, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
It's not just admins who can drive folks away - see Talk:Manchester Baby/Archive 1 where someone who basically exists to nitpick other editors managed to drive one of the more productive (if occasionally uncivil) editors away by repeated rename requests. I will freely admit I don't have as much time for WP right now, but I'm not sure I'll ever nominate another FAC while the insanity that is the "prose focus" remains there without any shred of worrying about the actual research. (Oh, and I agree with Iri's long post above...) Ealdgyth - Talk 11:43, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
@Ealdgyth: Is that what drove Eric away? I thought he was worn down by a number of factors; after all, he did keep editing through the summer IIRC. ceranthor 12:28, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
It was certainly a factor ... he's mentioned it a few times off Wiki as having a strong effect. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:31, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Oh yes, it's not just admins, which is why I cited admins, arbitrators and soi-disant power users as the problem. (Anyone who's familiar with recent threads on this page will be well aware of the particular soi-disant power user I had in mind, although most of his acolytes such as the one currently disrupting whatever title Talk:Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine happens to be at this week are cut from the same cloth.) I agree 100% about the "prose focus" nonsense; it may have been the decision to introduce TFA re-running that drove me away from FAC/TFA, but it's certainly the recent unwelcome re-emergence of the "brilliant refreshing prose" gang (with "brilliant refreshing prose" not meaning "interesting and engaging prose" but "prose that follows all the arbitrary rules me and my buddies have made up") that's keeping me away. ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Here's a current affair that won't drive off noobs  :) Oh no. ——SerialNumber54129 13:02, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
It could have been worse. The admin who protected the Teahouse initially protected it Edit=Require administrator access. ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Holy shit! What a clusterfuck that move discussion was. And I didn't realize that Eric had left the project. In my 11+ years editing Wikipedia, I always considered him one of the really good content creators, alongside folks like Giano, Iri, and many others, of course. Hallward's Ghost (Kevin) (My talkpage) 14:28, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Eric still pops up very occasionally, but for all practical purposes is gone. I can't blame him; with the Defenders of the Wiki types painting a target on his back and the MOS coterie with their secret off-wiki mailing list coordinating attacks on him, why would he want to stay when there are so many other places—both on and offline—that would welcome him? ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
There's a secret off-wiki mailing list? I can't say I'm surprised... ceranthor 14:54, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Yes—I was very briefly added to it before being promptly booted within a matter of days when the editor who runs it felt I wasn't showing him sufficient deference. I don't know who the current members are, although looking at the list of names who pile in whenever its operator is engaged in a dispute one can hazard some fairly safe guesses. ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
The attitude voiced on that RFA, that people are here to maintain this encyclopaedia that is, arguably, already built isn't an unusual one; there's a strong contingent, supported at the very highest levels in the WMF, who hold that English Wikipedia is essentially complete when it comes to content, that the priorities now are ensuring the existing content is kept up to date, and inventing new ways for people to access the existing content rather than add to it (hence the obsession with mobile access and Wikidata), and that those writers and illustrators who remain are dinosaurs obstructing the path of progress. These are the WMFs priorities for last year (the ones for 2018 haven't been decided yet); note that not a single one of the ten that were chosen relates to the improvement of Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 15:13, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
That is certainly disheartening, though not surprising. Hallward's Ghost (Kevin) (My talkpage) 15:25, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Personally, I think a middle road is needed here: we aren't the Wikipedia of 2007 (which oddly, I remember quite well from the ~7 months I spent active on this and my previous account before finishing high school and starting university got in the way of Wikipedia.) We are not in rapid startup growth mode, and we have become the default source of knowledge, for better or worse, for the internet connected world. Realizing that changes the dynamic on what we are willing to accept in articles from a decade ago is important. On the flip side, some of our content in very important topics is honestly horrendous. Historical coverage of religion outside of certain time periods/regions being my pet peeve here, but this is another example of something that really shouldn't be unsourced given it's significance. Realizing that we both need to maintain and build the encyclopedia and figuring out how to thread that needle is probably one of the most difficult tasks. This conversation reminds me that I need to finish off one of my content projects that has been put on the back burner because my real life became more hectic about 6 months ago.
On the RfA front, while I'm not the biggest of the content creation crowd in terms of RfA voting, I do like to see it these days if only because it shows me they aren't a player of Wikipedia The Video Game and want the magic sysop powerup. I still go by the "not a jerk, have a clue" philosophy, but part of demonstrating the clue bit for me is being able to show that you aren't here to play COD at AIV/SPI/ANEW. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:52, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Meh. The encyclopedia is certainly not built. But with an order of magnitude more content than say 2006, there is certainly more of a need for maintenance than before. In regards to mobile access, with more than half the readers using mobiles to read Wikipedia (and quite a few editors to edit), mobile access seems pretty important. No point having content if people can't read it (nicely)! In the community wish-list, the top priority is certainly an improvement (the mapframe maps on articles like Empire State Building are a lot better than the previous {{Location map}} based maps) and, well, the community wish-list is kind of designed to be a minor backroom improvements sort of thing. Not that I'm saying the WMF does a good job of prioritising things (I'm sure it could be do more to help people build content, and that all the effort into Flow had less of an impact on the way people reply on wiki than this script developed by one person is .. bad) but there are more compelling and easier ways to make that case than pointing to the Community Wishlist. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:59, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
In the past 15 years or so, expectations of what Wikipedia should deliver have increased exponentially. Back in 2003, I thought "well it's good enough for something online, I can always drop back on books and magazines". Nowadays I think that books and magazines are our direct competition and we have a responsibility to get the facts right and deliver them concisely to people. I'm not even talking about GAs or FAs, just a base level of what an article should look like. Hence my disappointment that about 90% of our articles haven't even got up to C-class. Unfortunately, fixing up all the articles so they are properly verifiable and easy to read is a far greater task than blocking vandals or sockpuppets - I have always maintained that anyone who's taken two articles to GA can work a backlog at AIV with zero experience and do a better job than people who sit on Huggle all day. (They might decline reports, advising people to assume good faith, for one thing). This edit springs to mind - it sat pretty much untouched for about three years until I rewrote it, and looks like a copyright violation, or at least something completely out of kilter with how any encyclopedia article should look.
I'm not surprised reply-link is getting a better response than Flow. It's smaller in scope, it is backwards compatible with the old system (and yes, having talk pages in raw wikitext is not ideal but it's what we've got so we have to support it), there are no great expectations for it, its popularity has spread via word of mouth and good feedback, plus (and the WMF will find this cutting) it was written by one guy because he wanted to solve a problem; not a bunch of software developers wandering aimlessly and getting paid by the hour to do so. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 16:12, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
In regards to blocking sockpuppets or vandals, or things like removing copyright violations, it is not so much the difficulty, but having people do it for hours every day, day in and day out, which is necessary on such a large project. The person who creates two GAs can certainly do it - but are they willing to spend that much time on it?
Certainly agree on reply-link. As can easily be predicted, completely changing a system widely used for more than a decade is basically impossible on Wikipedia, but actually trying to solve the problem in a small way is doable. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:24, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
It's also a competence thing, tbh. I mainly do administrative work now, unfortunately due to life changes that make doing research more difficult, but how on earth are you supposed to be able to determine what to revert/block if you've never understood what should be in an article and somewhat related to Iri's point above seen the good faith mucking up of content that is far short of vandalism but has no place in mainspace (i.e. half the reports at AIV at any given time that if you don't actually look at the diffs will result in you blocking a user who should be talked to, but is instead templated for things such as adding correct information and not knowing you need a source, and then gets flumoxed when trying to learn wikitext and receiving more templates.) Having experience writing, and not just the "two-GAs to RfA" type of writing, really helps identify that sort of stuff. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:50, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Hey, people talking about reply-link! Yeah, during my WikiConf talk and Isarra's subsequent talk, there was some discussion about the future of talk pages and community coordination. It was really nice to write this script and see people using it. However, I see it more as a bandage for an existing problem: it really is true that unstructured wikitext isn't the best medium for community discussions, and until we can give new users a "reply button" that's guaranteed to work, discussions - and generally getting integrated into this community - will remain a stumbling block for them. Enterprisey (talk!) 08:18, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
The unstructured wikitext thing is going to be hard to solve. If people may forgive me for soapboxing here, I feel that Flow was supposed to be the fix but:
  • Flow contains a number of questionable features on top of "structured discussions" such as infinite scrolling and a reliance of VisualEditor that are not universally considered to be good things.
  • WMF Engineering had/has a reputation for pushing software changes that many people dislike and are problematic, such as MediaViewer. Thus any large change overhaul will be watched with wary eyes.
  • A lot of features such as discussion page bots and structured discussions would have to be utterly re-done if we were to change to Flow. That is a lot of work.
  • A change in discussion page format would require an RfC or somesuch, which would presumably happen in unstructured wikitext markup and thus be biased in favour of people who can work with the current format and against these who can't.
Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 07:37, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
IMO Flow is a perfect example of what you get when the people designing improvements to a product aren't the people who use the product. All the things that killed it—fixed-width narrow columns with broad whitespace borders, infinite scrolling with lazy loading, a single uniform font face and size—are things that work great on social media, and Lila briefed people that she wanted a social media site so that's what they gave her. Unfortunately, they're not things that work in an environment where many of the people who will be using the talk interface the most are professional writers working on large monitors who know perfectly well how to adjust their window width the way they like it and don't need Jimmy Wales claiming to know better, where one needs true random access as historic posts are just as likely to be the subject of searches as recent ones, and where one regularly needs to demonstrate the effects of markup and display various images. ‑ Iridescent 17:10, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Bummer I didn't get an invite! I suppose I'm too eguor for those corps. ceranthor 15:05, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
If I were a nasty and cynical type, I'd suggest fairly strongly that assuming the mailing list is still active, you can safely assume that this lists its membership fairly accurately. ‑ Iridescent 15:16, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
I'll try to pop back in here later - today hubby and I have about a million errands to run, a pile of crap to take to storage, early voting to do, and some food to acquire. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:35, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
  • I just felt I wanted to say that Ealdgyth is quite right in suggesting that the renaming nonsense at the SSEM was a significant contributory factory in my decision to stop editing Wikipedia when I did, but there were others, as Iridescent has said. I won't bore anyone with a long list - and I do have a long list - but Iridiscent's right, the target on my back was becoming a little too burdensome. It wasn't just my own personal frustrations though, I was seeing long-term collaborators such as ParrotofDoom, Sagaciousphil and many others getting worn down and leaving, and the place began to feel a little bit lonely. I won't ever be editing Wikipedia again, but what's the loss of just another unit of work? After all, the received wisdom is that we're all free to edit, we're all equally competent to edit, and anything I say is just wrong anyway. Eric Corbett 15:48, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
I'm still in contact with Sagaciousphil, and occasionally drop them a line about disputes in dog articles. I know he's not Iridescent's cup of tea but I miss Dr. Blofeld; I can't see any other way of Audrey Hepburn getting to FA status. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:51, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

How To Write A Biography Of Audrey Hepburn In Twenty-one Easy Steps

@Ritchie333:
  1. Get the nine Hepburn biographies listed in the bibliography;
  2. Start with a blank sandbox, completely disregarding the existing article;
  3. Populate the sandbox with a basic infobox, a block of {{lorem ipsum}} for the lead, and section headings just named for periods in her life (I'd suggest using the same ones as in the existing article);
  4. In your own sandbox (because doing this in draft space means other people can also edit it, which leads to an attribution nightmare) go through the first book start-to-finish, and each time you come across something that looks either like it's pertinent to the story, or that would interest readers, add it in the appropriate section;
  5. Repeat with the second book;
  6. Repeat with the third book;
  7. Repeat with the fourth book;
  8. Repeat with the fifth book;
  9. Repeat with the sixth book;
  10. Repeat with the seventh book;
  11. Repeat with the eighth book;
  12. Repeat with the ninth book;
  13. At this point (and not before), enter "Audrey Hepburn biography" as a search term on Amazon to see if anything recent has been published that you should be aware of; because Amazon's entire business revolves around showing you things of interest which you may not have been aware of, their search function is second-to-none when it comes to finding relevant material. If there is, get it out of the library and repeat the cover-to-cover thing;
  14. Look over the images on Commons, and select appropriate images to illustrate each section. Don't be swayed by what's in the current article, as quite often those are things which were added years ago and better images have been uploaded to Commons in the meantime;
  15. Write a lead section summarising your new article;
  16. (This is easiest if you have a monitor large enough to handle split-screen) With your sandbox and the existing article open, go through the Wikipedia article sentence-by-sentence and ensure that everything mentioned in the existing article is also mentioned in your sandbox. If something isn't mentioned in your sandbox, decide whether it's relevant enough to include, and if so copy-and-paste it across, verifying the source as you do so. You're intentionally doing this as late as possible in the process, to ensure that the new-and-improved article doesn't overwrite and lose improvements people have added to the existing article while you've been writing the sandbox;
  17. Copyedit the sandbox as closely as possible. Don't invite anyone else to do so at this stage, as anyone other than yourself editing will screw up the attribution even if it's just moving a misplaced comma;
  18. Ctrl-A, ctrl-C, and overwrite the existing article with the contents of your sandbox. Because you're the only person who's edited the sandbox, you can do this as a cut-and-paste move even though it would normally be forbidden as all the edits are copyright to and licenced by yourself, so you don't need to screw around with history merges;
  19. Invite anyone you think might be interested to copyedit the new version of the article;
  20. Give it three months without making any substantive changes to the article, in case someone finds a serious error or imbalance in your new version. This is frustrating but necessary;
  21. If nobody's complained about your new version, nominate it at FAC.
This is time-consuming, but as long as you have the confidence in your writing to be sure that the quality of your own writing will be equal to or better than the quality of the existing writing, it's the easiest way to nurture any kind of high-traffic but low-quality article to FAC quality, while avoiding either having to work from nine books simultaneously, or have an awkward stage when you've thoroughly integrated the opinions of one author on the topic but haven't yet done the others, so the article is giving undue weight to a particular biographer's views. ‑ Iridescent 16:35, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
If I can be very rude  :) I suspect it's the #21st step that Ritchie's not keen on: the subsequent few weeks' worth of arguing the ritual toss  :) ——SerialNumber54129 16:42, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Don't forget #21a: Write/Do something else while waiting. It did a lot of good for me to do that while Wōdejebato and Ubinas are/were at FAC. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Besides the sandbox bit, Iridescent's approach is almost precisely how I write articles. Incidentally, @Ritchie333: if you end up working on the Hepburn article, I've gotten some good experience providing feedback for famous people biographies prepping for RfA thanks to Aoba and FrB.TG, so I'd be happy to help if you do pursue that. ceranthor 16:51, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Oh, it's not just me offering opinions without experience; this genuinely is how I write articles. In terms of edit count it looks bad, because you end up with only one mainspace edit for what can be months of work, but it's far easier IMO to write from scratch even if you end up duplicating most of the existing article, and then on each point compare your version with the existing wording and decide what to keep. ‑ Iridescent 16:56, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps a bad habit, but I tend to just write on top of what's present, or hide unsourced material until I can find evidence to back it up (or else it gets the chop as original research). Sandbox might be a good option if I ever take on Mount Vesuvius or something of similar importance. ceranthor 16:58, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Writing on top of the existing article can be problematic assuming you're working one-source-at-a-time (which is by far the easiest way to do it). It's not so much of an issue with something like a volcano article, as there aren't multiple schools of thought on how a volcano works, but for anything with any potential to be contentious, it's hard to avoid that awkward phase when you've worked through the fawning hagiography but not yet the muckraking biography, and people quite rightly accuse you of giving undue weight to the opinions of a single author. Even for something like Vesuvius I could foresee issues working in mainspace, since presumably you'd need to cover attitudes towards the Italian government's disaster-readiness measures, on which I'd imagine there is a range of views. ‑ Iridescent 17:04, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
"A range of views": a slight understatement?!  :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:09, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Vesuvius ... now see I was thinking to write something about Mount Etna one day but the 5460 academic articles with "etna" in the name scared me off. Vesuvius has "only" 1990 but it'd be daunting either way. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:03, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
I suppose those kind of volcanoes are probably the sort of articles that would be as much political, sociological and cultural discussions and impact as the pure vulcanology; particularly Vesuvius, I guess, as it must have literally formed Western Europe's entire understanding and awareness of volcanoes for the next ~2000 years. Wouldn't it end up up being 20K words though?! ——SerialNumber54129 19:12, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Exactly. And of the volcanoes that are vital articles, only a few truly deserve that label IMO. Mount Mazama isn't one, for example, even though it had the largest eruption in the past million years in the Cascades. Besides, I find articles like Lake Nyos or Nevado del Ruiz more interesting; it's the human aspects of the tragedy that make it compelling to write and tell the story, not mere geological phenomena, at least for me. ceranthor 19:34, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Interesting. For me it's actually the opposite; I am primarily interested in the landscape and geology and tend to be less interested in human aspects. Probably because I am fairly asocial myself. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:49, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
And for the spectacular landscapes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:49, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Nah, Ceranthor is right; on any topic, the human aspect is almost always the most important. Remember, you're not writing here for an academic audience, you're writing for 14-year-olds who've stumbled across the topic while clicking links, and the single most important thing is to convince them that there's a reason this topic is worthy of their time. It's why somewhere up above I recommended photographs of people who live on or near the slopes whenever you can shoehorn them in to volcano articles; you want readers to think "hey, this isn't a boring technical article about magma domes after all, this is actually a story about people like me". ‑ Iridescent 20:28, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
Sigh. On Nevado Sajama I just got an irritating reminder of why I don't include human interest information: There are no reliable sources for it. That's Bolivia's most prominent volcano and there is a lot of research on its ice and yet there is a sum total of two sources about its geology, both of which apparently don't exist outside of Bolivia. Ojos del Salado and Guallatiri and Isluga, same deal, very important volcanoes very little info on their geology. El Tatio has adequate geology info but little on tourism - presumably it's more oral knowledge than stuff written down. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 21:10, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
I don't know about Bolivia, but for most places you can at least find a bare minimum of information from primary sources like census records. Educational regulators are always a good bet, as school inspection reports tend to say things like "most children go on to higher education" or "over half the children are from immigrant communities" which allow readers to paint a mental picture of the community. Failing that, and as per my comments regarding Putre on the other thread, if there's genuinely nothing to write on the human angle, raid Commons and Flickr to see if you can find photos of local residents and buildings. Readers engage more with an article if they can see a connection to their own lives, and even something as simple as "people live there, hey I'm a person too" create that connection. (It's why adverts almost invariably show people, even when it's for something like an automobile where logic would suggest purchasers would be more interested in technical specifications, and on the rare occasions where ads don't show people—Apple springs to mind—they'll without exception be soundtracked with a piece of music their researchers have shown that the target market will be familiar with.) ‑ Iridescent 09:14, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
Well, miracles still happen; I did just track down one of these two unfindable sources so I guess I'll be working on Sajama over the next few days and on 1669 Etna eruption later unless Ceranthor calls me for Huaynaputina. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis also looks like it might yield an interesting and creepy story. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:46, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

I think I probably should have mentioned User:Dr. Blofeld/Audrey Hepburn, which already covers points 1 - 9. For every serious article improvement I have done, I have stuck to a handful of biographies that I consider the best; for example Keith Moon was done from two, The Carpenters was done from two with a strong tilt towards one, The Who used three with a fourth as a backup, and Bootleg recording used just the one (though if there's a more definitive book on bootlegs that Clinton Heylin's, I haven't heard of it). Also, I have read every book from cover to cover and understood it - this is really important because if you pick up a book and just pull something out of it without thinking what you're doing - you will make mistakes and the anti-vandalism, Wikipedia-as-video-game crowd will not spot them as they can't recognise well-written prose cited to reliable sources that is in fact wrong. SN54129 makes a good point above - on the occasions I have put up an article for FAC I have become so fed up of working on the bloody article that I really haven't got the stamina to tackle any comments that crop up.

So based on that, I realise the "twenty-one easy steps" was tongue in cheek though good advice, but I suspect if I did all that in earnest it would take about three years. I've never been particularly good at biographies of women and have struggled at Women in Red projects to try and write them - I find it much easier to write about inanimate objects like train stations. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 17:44, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

It's only about 5% tongue-in-cheek—provided you have confidence that you can write at the right "not too dumb, not too complicated" level, the above genuinely is the cookie-cutter formula for getting an article to FA standard with minimal conflict. Regarding "read every book from cover to cover and understood it", it kind of goes without saying that I'd expect anyone writing on any topic to know the topic before they start. (Giano used to advocate writing drafts completely unsourced and then sourcing the article once it's finished. I wouldn't go that far—I think there's too much risk of something being left out if one doesn't go through the source start-to-finish when writing it, tedious though it is—but I can certainly see his point.) I know there's a school of thought on Wikipedia that says you don't need to know a topic to write about it provided you have the sources, but IMO that's an awful attitude and leads to the kind of mentality that's turned DYK into the laughing-stock it's become.
In my personal opinion, writing biographies of 20th and 21st century figures is rarely a good use of time on Wikipedia. In most of these cases, particularly high-profile figures like Hepburn, the reader could find out information of equal quality just as easily from Google even if the Wikipedia biography consisted of nothing more than the recipe for honey roast parsnips and a photograph of Jimmy Wales re-creating goatse, and since new material is going to keep being published for some time the articles will go out of date as soon as they're written. Biographies are worthwhile for obscure but important figures on whom there isn't a great deal of information elsewhere—although by definition, these are also the people for whom the Wikipedia articles will be shitty as the sources aren't there—and for people who've been safely dead for at least a century and on whom the historical consensus has formed. ‑ Iridescent 20:24, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

(Wel that is considerably more helpful than anything I had ever found before, but it leaves me with little hope for Robert E. Valett, Military bicycle, or Escort carrier getting to GA or FA without me flying out to get my hands on source material, in the case of carriers the 3 books are either out of print or unavailable at my local and university libraries. If not everything can be FA level, which is more important: making more stub-C-class articles or "expanding" a tiny percentage of pre-existing articles? Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 02:52, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Assuming you're in a reasonably large country, you can usually get almost anything on Interlibrary loan, while rooting around on Worldcat finds books nearby surprisingly often. As a last resort, and providing you can afford to take a slight financial hit, buy whatever book it is on Amazon Marketplace and then when you're done re-post it for sale at the same price you paid for it. You'll pay Amazon's per-item fee (currently $1) and might have to wait until someone else buys the book, but won't lose out otherwise. ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
  • It's free to list on the UK site, but there's fees when you sell, and Amazon have a standard reimbursement which might not cover the p&p. Some big sellers use automation to ensure they have the lowest selling price. There's no hit if you offer something for sale and then claim it's "out of stock" when someone tries to buy it. So you could list your own nonexistent copy at the lowest price, and see if you can drive down the cost of the others- a lot of the prices are almost random. Alternatively volunteer at a charity shop- a friend does that and he processes somewhere around half a ton of books a week. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 07:51, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Here's a puzzle for you. Victorian artist, invented a new technique of painting, was a favourite artist of Ruskin, who hung several of his works in his bedroom. Nicknamed after his most typical subject matter, he influenced a number of followers to paint the same subject with the result that antique fairs still contain several examples either of handcoloured prints of his work or similar works by other artists. He travelled by wheelbarrow in his later life. propelled by his daughter. One biography and a catalogue of an exhibition in the 1980s are the only published works on him. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 08:59, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
  • "Bird's Nest" Hunt. He developed a technique of painting on wet white gouache, and knocked out plenty of still lives- fruit against a mossy background, with obligate snail shell or nest. Appears to have had a number of imitators, judging by the number of badly-painted Victorian fruit assemblages I've seen. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 18:47, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Blame Etty for the prevalence of paintings like this in the second half of the 19th century
  • I was thinking of the other Hunt while going through names, as he was certainly imitated and Ruskin was certainly a fan, but was fairly confident there were no wheelbarrows involved in his life.

    Regarding the Victorian fad for still-lifes, the blame can be squarely laid at the feet of William Etty. Before the 1840s still lifes were seen as a crude exercise only practiced by lower races like the Dutch—if your honest English art student wanted to paint something that didn't need paying or get up and start walking around, he'd find a sculpture or statue and paint that—but c. 1840 Etty, who was a full Academician so could exhibit whatever he liked, started to exhibit assorted fruit bowls at the RA and BI, and they caught on. ‑ Iridescent 19:51, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Imo ""expanding" a tiny percentage of pre-existing articles" is considerably more important, and what I have mostly done for years, like too few others. I don't know why you say "a tiny percentage" - whatever you do that will apply, and there are plenty of really crap articles getting views into 3 figures daily. I certainly ration my effort in terms of the views the article will get, or try to. It's nice to have FAs, but I have only done "special requests" for years, or been added onto someone else's nom after helping out. FAC seems to be getting ever-tougher on referencing and prose niggles, and less demanding over the actual content. Although I do have lots of books, I manage to keep ongoing expenditure on Amazon covered by the modest prizes from Wikipedia:The Core Contest (time for another User:Casliber!), and work in an area where google preview is pretty generous. Mind you, sometimes a good library is really necessary - the two most essential books on St Cuthbert Gospel (one tiny and the other weighing some 20 kg) would both have cost well into 3 figures - one is currently unavailable and the other currently £275 and up. I am supposed to be delivering my views on FA writing to an eager public at the WMUK office on the evening of November 21st btw. All and any welcome. Here's the page. Johnbod (talk) 11:31, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
If the choice is between creating articles on topics you know will never go beyond stubs, or "expanding" a tiny percentage of pre-existing articles, the expansions win every time, but that's a false dichotomy. The priorities should be expanding the pre-existing articles and creating articles on topics where you genuinely feel there's at minimum 1000-ish words to be written on the topic. If you don't feel the article will ever rise above a stub/start ("C-class" is a meaningless term we created a few years back to assuage the feelings of contributors who were taking offence at having articles tagged as inadequate), then it's almost certainly an article that should never have been created and instead should be an entry in a list somewhere. ‑ Iridescent 18:00, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
Step 18 looks like an opportunity for someone to complain: "The diff is too big, you left out my thing, you're destroying what everyone else contributed". Replacing it section by section, perhaps over the space of a week or two, should mitigate that problem. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:56, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
But that means an awkward phase when the article is an amalgam of the two, particularly if you're changing the section order. From experience of twelve years (on-and-off) writing this way, provided your rewrite is clearly an improvement over what went before and provided that if you do omit anything that was previously mentioned you're able to justify why it was omitted, it doesn't generate complaints. ‑ Iridescent 19:51, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
The reaction might depend upon your subject area. Not quite everyone is excited about having their own contributions erased. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:05, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Which is why step 16—integration, not overwriting—is so important; you're not wiping and replacing the existing article when you do the cut-and-paste overwrite, you're expanding it. As I understand it, the reason Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Translation task force annoyed people was that they gave the impression (whether fairly or not) of parachuting in to smaller wikis and announcing "your content isn't good enough so we're going to replace it with ours", rather than respecting existing consensuses (consensi?), working according to the local house style and respecting the sources used by local editors. (As you know, the content of a lot of wikis outside the big four Wikipedias is terrible, but en-wiki is so widely seen as a domineering bully that anything looking like an en-wiki landgrab will unite editors against us.) ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
and I still say write it in draft without sources and references, then look all the facts up and while you are doing so, you’ll find all the bits you had forgotten or thought too tedious to mention while the enthusiasm was driving you. You can pop those bits in to pad out the short paragraphs. Don’t forget you are also writing for the proverbial 14-year-old, so to keep his attention, you’ll need a bit of sex and violence, so you may have to hunt about to find this, but it’s usually there if you look hard enough - nobody wants to read about a perfect saint: it would be too dull. Strongly recommend not writing about people who are still alive, as they may sue or turn out to be a mate of Jimbo’s, which means huge chunks will have to be deleted. The recent dead too are best avoided because for five years after death people are deified by their friends, and people who think they would have been ther friends had they actually ever met them. Incidentally, I have a friend who knew Hepburn extremely well and still hasn’t a bad word to say about her. However, Aud’s mother is a whole different kettle of fish. Now, there could be a warts and all biography if you have the wherewithal to research her. Not a nice lady at all. Giano (talk) 20:13, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
Always interesting to see how others approach writing for Wikipedia. I follow neither Iri's nor Giano's method, which may have something to do with my topics. When I'm expanding for GA and/or FA, I generally don't get the luxury of whole books devoted to the subject - instead I get to tease out their life (since its almost always a biography) from bits and pieces all over the place. If I'm lucky, I'll have a journal article or two on the subject to supplement the ODNB entry. After getting information from those sources in - it's pull out a stack of books on the time period and start hunting for bits in them to add in. Then I do a search on JSTOR (and all the journal articles I already have on my hard drive), then Google Scholar. If necessary, I then order books I uncovered at Google Scholar through ILL. Sometimes, I'm able to snag a really cheap copy on Amazon. This usually provides enough for a GA length article - FA is more iffy. The horse articles are pretty much the same, except the fact that I don't bother with Google Scholar or JSTOR for horse biographies - I already own almost everything published on QHs - instead I'll do a newspapers.com search after pulling everything from my books and magazine articles (which are old fashioned and in hard copy in files in file drawers). For most of my subjects ... it's a case of piecing together ... not distilling. Even the "exceptions" where there are full length biographies of a subject (William the Conqueror, the occasional bishop), it's at best three biographies (that's the total number of good scholarly biographies of William the Conqueror out there - as opposed to crap stuff that pushes fringe theories or is written for grade school kids). If a bishop has a biography ... it's a time for rejoicing (Hubert Walter has TWO... still the record for English medieval ecclesiastics). And English medieval ecclesiastics are lucky - there's good information out there - not only the ODNB but also the Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, which gives the bare bones biographical facts for all bishops (and many diocesan officials below bishops) for 1066-1857. There's an equivalent to the Fasti for Norman medieval sees til 1204, but after that you're digging into old Victorian or earlier sources most European medieval ecclesiastical biography - there is certainly nothing in English on Continental ecclesistics to compare to the coverage in the Fasti and the ODNB. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:52, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
I usually rewrite in main space as I go, using Iri's rationale that every step is an improvement. It's also a good way of sniffing out if anybody is likely to object, which usually they aren't (I also look at the article history early on). If it's a subject I (think I) know a bit about, I have been known to rewrite before doing any or much new reading, and then reference up & adjust as necessary in a 2nd phase. That's for more general topics than bios though, & I'm usually doing them precisely because they have been neglected for years. Johnbod (talk) 23:29, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Civility

You might be interested to partake in what appears to be striving for the most productive discussion of the year.∯WBGconverse 09:45, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

Not sure why you think I'd be interested; AFAIK I don't believe I've ever commented on a civility proposal in my life (other than maybe at a couple of the arb cases), and fully intend to ignore the result of this one whatever it turns out to be. In fairness to Lourdes, the problem is with the commenters not the proposal; this isn't the usual "ban whatever words happen to be offensive in whatever place I currently live" proposal, but specifically about at what point repetitive usage becomes inappropriate. I think it's a misguided proposal—why should the relatively mild "fuck off" be singled out for special treatment as opposed to other, potentially much more offensive language—but she can't be blamed for the fact that most of those commenting—both for and against—appear to be ignoring the actual proposal and voting for/against banning the use of the word "fuck". ‑ Iridescent 17:20, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
(adding) If anyone wants the actual least productive discussion currently taking place on Wikipedia, head on over to Talk:Trypophobia#Survey, in which a bunch of people are earnestly debating whether Wikipedia should disregard Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not censored—which, lest we forget, is supposedly the first of the Five Pillars—to accommodate the supposed sufferers from an 'illness' that was made up on the internet 13 years ago. ‑ Iridescent 00:04, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for that. I have !voted, it is now officially the least productive discussion. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:10, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
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