User talk:Iridescent/Archive 24

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JordanBaumann1211

Thanks for your help in identifying (and repairing) the disruption caused by this user; your having already invested so much time in it I almost hesitate to ask this but, could you look at User:JordanKyser22 and offer your thoughts on a possible relationship to User:JordanBaumann1211? I noticed a funny sequence of interaction between the two - JordanB has edited JordanK's Talk page, and JordanK edited his own User page to add what appeared to be a barnstar from JordanB. There are of course obvious graphical similarities between the two User pages, and a common focus on graphic images & color variations, as well as extensive Sandbox work - but I can't tell whether that's because JordanB is a sock of JordanK or just found inspiration there. The former seems more likely (they're both "Jordan" for goodness' sake) but JordanK has been around for 4 years and if they're related it's a fine little mess to sort out with JordanK.

I'm sorry I didn't notice this before the ANI thread was closed! Anyhow your views would be helpful. Thanks. JohnInDC (talk) 04:45, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't think the accounts are related—JK is a reasonably well-established user who's been active for four years, while JB appears to be so young I'd be surprised if he could even reach the keyboard four years ago. Plus, JK has a respectable history of mainspace contributions, while JB does nothing but goof around with images. (If you're not already aware, there's a mass deletion nomination open for his oeuvre at Commons.) I think it's far more likely that JB has seen someone else called "Jordan" and gravitated towards him. Even if the accounts are linked, AGF implies that in the absence of evidence we treat them as different. ‑ Iridescent 09:29, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't disagree with anything you say (especially AGF) and am content to let it go - even though I'm still skeptical that there's no relationship here. I appreciate your help - thanks. JohnInDC (talk) 13:19, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Your reverts of TOCleft

Hi Irridescent - can you please explain why you object to my use of TOCleft? Thanks Mark^Dask 14:38, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

As I've already explained at the thread you've started, and is explained in the documentation of the template itself, this template is very rarely appropriate in article space. Not every reader has the same browser-monitor setup as you, and you've no way of predicting how narrow their screen width will be; as a rule of thumb, if an article contains any one of (1) an infobox, (2) a bulleted or numbered list, (3) a right-aligned image near the beginning of the article or (4) a section heading within the first five paragraphs of text after the TOC, this template will never be appropriate as it has the potential to cause the text to sandwich. Wikipedia's layout may appear arbitrary, but it's the product of fifteen years of testing what works and what doesn't, not something the devs just made up one day. ‑ Iridescent 14:43, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining, and apols for taking your time. It just seemed so obviously sensible to me I was willing to use Random Article and apply where works. Mark^Dask 14:48, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

No problem. Incidentally, I have no idea what is going on here but you probably shouldn't be doing it, as it looks decidedly creepy. If you want to see someone's edit count, just click the "edit count" button on their contributions page. ‑ Iridescent 16:00, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Decidedly creepy?. I discovered this Stats tool on 18th November, (13.56), and I was so impressed by the wealth of information it provided that I Pasted it to my own Userpage so others could learn more about me as a wikipedian. It provided far more than my edit count, (seemingly your primary measure of the worth of your fellow Wikipedian). It provides info on an editors' status and rights, as well as their committment from when they first joined. So you see my first use of the tool was the opposite of creepy, rather I sought to promote openness on my own page. At 17.12, approx 4 hours later, I added the tool to my sandbox because it seemed a good place to apply the tool, where else to run it? Since then, using that tool, I became acquainted with the name Iridescent who, I learned, is a sysop. If I had not known that you are a sysop, just imagine how freaked I might have been today when at 14.37 you began reverting my edits en masse. Suddenly I was getting alerts - 5 - 15 - 40 - 48 - but because I knew, from the User Stats software, that you are a sysop I knew to ask you calmly for an explanation and - QED - you explained, for which thanks, I learned a lot.

So what's creepy about an informative tool that I first used on my own page to inform others of who I am as a wikipedian, that I subsequently used in my sandbox to better inform me about those on here with whom I interact? Rather than seek to regard me as creepy, Iridescent, perhaps you should go check out the work I did recently on Lucia Zedner. An eminent academic, internationally renowned, and yet her page was trash. I did not seek to write about her - because I know nothing about her, but I knew enough to format the existing, and add many other refs, knowing that if I do the technical stuff in advance then others, more acquainted with the person, might be inclined to contribute. I've also watched several of her lectures and noted her on my mainspace as "things to do".

I will continue to use the Stats tool to inform me about those with whom I interact, and with the same good intent I demonstrated when I first installed the tool on my own page.

With thanks again - wish I understood templates as well as you do. Decidedly Mark^Dask 20:44, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Recording other people's moves can be considered stalking, hence it's creepy. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:53, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

• Markdask, perhaps you don't understand that when you click "edit count" at the bottom of someone's Contributions page, you get exactly the same thing as you're getting via successive versions of your sandbox. And the edit history of your sandbox does look like a creepy list of "investigations", so you should stop doing that. EEng 21:13, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

• Yup, what they said. We can't stop editors (or anyone else) stalking other Wikipedia editors—the "edit count" button is there for a reason—but we take a very dim view of editors who keep a rolling log of who they're stalking. ‑ Iridescent 01:48, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

• Jeez-Luiz talk about paranoia. I am not “Recording other people's moves”, (horrible thought). It might look like that when my sandbox edits are presented as a standalone list but that's only cos I don't use my sandbox much. In any case, I've just bookmarked the tool on firefox, much easier to use than in sandbox, so chill, I've deleted it from my sandbox. Mark^Dask 03:20, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

The irony of being accused of paranoia by someone who last week was claiming that the Huffington Post, the BBC and the Archbishop of Canterbury were "not real" and had been replaced with substitutes in a sinister plot to fool Wikipedia into hosting a biography of a low church missionary in Chorleywood, and that the fact that AOL's website uses AOL search as its search function is proof that it's infecting users' computers with malware is not lost on me. ‑ Iridescent 10:12, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

See also Capgras delusion. EEng 10:20, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Troll kalla mik, trungl sjǫtrungnis, auðsug jǫtuns, élsólar bǫl, vilsinn vǫlu, vǫrð nafjarðar, hvélsveg himins. Hvat's troll nema þat? ‑ Iridescent 10:30, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Who you calling troll, buster? EEng 16:59, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

An user...

I recently came across a user Tahia Akter Chowdhury (talk · contribs) who seems to be entirely non-proficient in the English language and perhaps as a result don't understand the need of providing sources for any addition on any article(esp. when the additions are to cast names of films,telly-serials etc.).

In spite of several warnings on the issue of adding non-sourced content (Now,I really doubt whether she got the meaning of the warning templates) and even a request to change to a wiki of her probable mother tongue, she seems non-reluctant and went on her activity as usual.

I am at crossheads since her edits are not vandalism-based(Hence,reporting may be would not be a good idea) but reverting her repetitive unsourced additions to a particular genre of articles everyday can prove tedious and to an extent disruptive.(Just see the revision history of "Bhutu" and "Goyenda Ginni-two Bengali telly serials.)

Can you devise a plan to tackle the issue?

Thanks!!Aru@baska^{❯❯❯ Vanguard} 09:47, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Sitush, User:SpacemanSpiff, Dr. Blofeld, Bollyjeff, you're probably better placed than me to advise on this one. I'd note in passing that if you think the rules on normal sourcing are complicated, the rules on sourcing fiction articles are doubly so, as there's always a complicated balancing act regarding which aspects of any given work can reasonably serve as citations for themselves and which require external sourcing, so I wouldn't hold it against anyone for failing to understand them at the first attempt. ‑ Iridescent 20:15, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Cyphoidbomb is the resident cleaner upper of Indian TV show articles after TRPoD left(?) —SpacemanSpiff 13:31, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Godsy's RfA

"I know you can't reply here—feel free to reply on my talk and I'll cut-and-paste it across"

I think we both know what would happen if I took up your offer, which is that the "broadly construed" Kirill Lokshin – or whatever his bloody name is – would be down on me like a ton of bricks with a six-month block. What I find rather ironic is that he regularly appears on my Facebook "people you might know" list. "People you might detest" list would be nearer the mark. Eric Corbett 18:30, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

The offer stands, if you do want to take it up. If you want to comment there, post a comment on my Commons talkpage (so it's not "anywhere on the English Wikipedia" and thus outside Arbcom's remit) and I'll ask NYB to cut-and-paste it across, which I'm sure he'd be willing to do provided the comment is reasonable. I don't think even the most clod-hopping members of the Defenders Of The Wiki would be stupid enough to pick that particular fight. ‑ Iridescent 18:46, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

You have more faith than I do. Eric Corbett 18:49, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

'sides, I have the impression that RfA !voting has always been treated like a sacrosanct entitlement. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:51, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Err, yes and no. My cynicism lies probably on the side of Eric with this one in terms of just leaving it and potential risks of anything broadly construed with a very long bowstring....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:25, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah—while Eric is allowed to vote at RFA (albeit not discuss them), there's certainly precedent for banning people from voting at RFA altogether—it's not an inalienable right. ‑ Iridescent 20:30, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Really? From reading the latest ANI argument on the topic it seems like a lot of people treat it like an entitlement. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:59, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

So far as I'm aware I'm still allowed to do more than simply vote: "Malleus Fatuorum [my previous name] is topic banned from making edits concerning the RFA process anywhere on the English Wikipedia. As an exception, he may ask questions of the candidates and express his own view on a candidate in a specific RFA (in the support, oppose, or neutral sections), but may not engage in any threaded discussions relating to RFA." That restriction, which has been in place for well over four years now, is just about the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Eric Corbett 17:22, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

I'd nominate is indefinitely prohibited from discussing any dispute in which he is not an originating party as the most draconian topic ban from the old days still in force (although if you've ever had any dealings with Abd you'll understand why it was considered necessary), with is forbidden, indefinitely, from summarizing any discussions held elsewhere a close second. FWIW, I think the block-at-any-costs contingent have actually demonstrated common sense with regards to your topic ban, and have been following the intent rather than the letter of the law; note that Chillum & co haven't tried to claim that this thread constitutes "threaded discussions relating to RFA". ‑ Iridescent 20:31, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

At least not as yet. Eric Corbett 21:07, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Husband is an Insulting term for gay couples. Please stop using it.

Husband is an Insulting term for gay couples. Please stop using it. Please stop Insulting gay partners by using the term husband for their type of relationship. Husband is only used for straight couples. Gay couples prefer to be called each others Life Partner as it is more fair and equal than the dominating sounding term husband. Please stop undoing edits that correct this.75.174.112.26 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 19:08, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

You don't get to make up your own definitions of words just because you don't like the existing definition. If you want chapter and verse from the OED, it's a. The (or a) male partner in a marriage; esp. a married man considered in relation to his spouse. b. In other (esp. same-sex) relationships in which the two partners are regarded as occupying roles analogous to those in a traditional mixed-sex marriage: the person assuming the role regarded as more stereotypically masculine, i.e. as being equivalent to that of the husband. c. Used to denote either partner in a (generally long-term) relationship between two men. ‑ Iridescent 19:12, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Well, you can't say you didn't see that coming. ‑ Iridescent 19:19, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Wow, I thought I was having a bad day. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:51, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

To be fair, if you insist on hanging around WP:ERRORS and WT:DYK, the two most dysfunctional and incompetent-narcissist-infested pages on the whole of Wikipedia (and I include ANI in that), you're going to have bad days. Come over to the dark side and start planning for how best to ease the problematic sections off the main page and what should replace them, rather than continue trying to polish ITN and DYK's turds. As I once said to NYB (albeit he obviously hasn't taken the advice), if something won't fall apart without you it doesn't need you to save it, and if it will fall apart without you it's not worth saving. ‑ Iridescent 20:04, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

ITN's doing ok. DYK is a fucking omnishambles. Or an omni-clusterfuck. Or a Mongolian fucking omni-clusterfuck. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:08, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

If you don't like dubious new articles, you may want to give Wikipedia a miss tomorrow. I note that nowhere in those instructions on how to add text and images is there any mention of something as boring as "sources", "notability" or "accuracy". ‑ Iridescent 21:16, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't mind dubious articles. I just dislike shit articles with errors that we promote on our main page, pushed there by a massive group of incompetent individuals who want nothing more than their name in lights. And yes, sourcing, etc is boring as shit, so why bother it? It's not like this is an encyclopedia or anything.... The Rambling Man (talk) 21:19, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

DYK was a great idea when Raul set it up in 2004 and we actually wanted people to create more articles. Now, when we can't even maintain the ones we have, not so much. As I've said many many times, it would make far more sense to throw it open to any article of any age which hasn't previously appeared, with an ITN-style nomination process in which only those with a consensus that they're interesting get to appear; it might mean people actually read the things if the hooks weren't so boring and we didn't include so much garbage that readers reasonably assume that anything appearing there isn't worth clicking. Since the half-dozen people who own it are scared of losing their precious high-score table and ability to plaster their userpages with little blue ticks, it will never happen. ‑ Iridescent 21:29, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Well hell yeah. The fight for QPQ and badges is really killing DYK. My first impression of DYK was that it was designed to encourage new Wikipedia editors to start something up and see how it floated. Right now, the average number of edits of DYK nominators is something like 20,000. Point lost. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:33, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Could someone please tell Elton not to be quite so "happy". Martinevans123 (talk) 20:02, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

I suspect Elton wasn't quite so happy with David Furnish a couple of weeks after that interview. Unless, of course, he was in the UK in which case he won't have been able to find out. ‑ Iridescent 20:08, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Did someone mention extra virgin? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:54, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

• Wow, Iridescent, you're this year's raciest homophobe! Congratulations! EEng 00:28, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

• My personal aspiration for life is to be racy in all I say and do, and I'm pleased and humbled that our friend in Boise has chosen to award me with this recognition.

  I can just about see "homophobe" if one genuinely considers option b from the OED definition as the primary usage; the person assuming the role regarded as more stereotypically masculine carries the rather patronizing implication that all same-sex relationships have a top-bottom/butch-femme split. (There is a legitimate argument that Wikipedia does have a systemic bias problem when it comes to sexuality and relationships, as we've taken a conscious decision to use the language and values of Anglo-American culture when discussing the topic. If we were genuinely giving equal weight by head-count to the views of the entire world, we'd be giving considerably more prominence to the "filthy deviants who will burn for eternity and need to be identified and suppressed before they corrupt our children" hypothesis. However, I think it's safe to say that 75.174 has not come here to engage in a debate about the interaction of cultural, academic and religious pressures and the responsibilities and ethics of new media in an era of mass communication.) ‑ Iridescent 08:31, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

What? EEng 08:52, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Same-sex intercourse illegal:

  Death penalty

  Up to life in prison

  Imprisonment

  Unenforced penalty

English Wikipedia reflects the values of Europe, North America and Aus/NZ/SA on social matters; it's always been one of the paradoxes of Wikipedia that "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" who's Wikipedia's _target market is statistically quite likely to hold opinions which the majority of Wikipedia editors find morally repugnant. The argument has always been that our purpose is to show her that there's a better way, but playing devil's advocate one can certainly make the case that our not giving due weight to the arguments in favor of homophobia, FGM, nushûz beatings, child marriage etc are a case of western cultural imperialism. ‑ Iridescent 09:24, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Well, I happen to think that giving lower status to advocates of homophobia, genital mutilation, beatings (of any kind), and child marriage is no form of imperialism. EEng 09:39, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

No more do I, but the fact that we disregard their views is a conscious decision, not a natural law. Remember, those parts of the map marked "death penalty" and "life imprisonment" are explicitly where the WMF is actively trying to increase Wikipedia participation. ‑ Iridescent 09:48, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

OK, but you're still the raciest of homophobes. EEng 09:56, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

It looks like Wikipedia:Randy in Boise really exists! —SpacemanSpiff 11:06, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Please leave my husband out of this. We are very happy here among the lofty pines of coastal BC. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:27, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

When it comes to Boise, one really doesn't need to expend any effort to find comedy names. ‑ Iridescent 17:43, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Undelete Dr. Sellappan Nirmala

@Iridescent: can you please undelete the article Dr. Sellappan Nirmala or provide it as a draft.--Satdeep Gill (talk • contribs 08:46, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Satdeep Gill, I'm afraid not. This was a cut-and-paste copyright violation, and for legal reasons we can't host copyright violations on Wikipedia, whether in the article or the draft namespaces. ‑ Iridescent 08:49, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@Iridescent: I am trying to help BBC staff to work on these articles and improve them according to Wikipedia standards.--Satdeep Gill (talk • contribs 08:52, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@Iridescent: Can you email the article to me in this case.--Satdeep Gill (talk • contribs 08:55, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

✓ Done. Obviously, don't restore it—whether to the mainspace, the draft space or your own userspace—with the copyvios still in place. ‑ Iridescent 09:04, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

The new version still has a lot of phrases and sentences from the deleted one. I haven't done a full copyvio check though. —SpacemanSpiff 11:13, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Someone else can clean it up in that case. I hadn't realised this was part of the BBC's "create an article on any topic you like provided it's about a woman, and you don't need to worry about notability or sourcing" campaign, and I'm not going to be the one to try to put the worms back into that particular can. I have no desire to have the "Wikipedia's notability criteria shouldn't apply to women" contingent* (or their converse, the Men's Rights lunatic fringe) descend en masse on my talkpage. ‑ Iridescent 17:39, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
*No, that's not hyperbole; they genuinely exist.

(Although, The early discovery leveraged the government with enough time to develop a paradigm deserves some kind of award for "best gratuitous use of meaningless buzzwords in a medical article". Assuming this counts as history of medical conditions, influential leaders, etc it falls under WP:MEDRS, and I don't give it much chance once Doc James or RexxS spots it.) ‑ Iridescent 17:50, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Draft Space

In these instances of Julie Huber, it's clear that the article is not appropriate for mainspace. I cannot, as a new page reviewer, add 200 pages to my watchlist just to wait 5 days to have them removed. The draft space is more appropriate for articles of this nature until users can become more comfortable with our policies. biting new users is never good, but policies should not be compromised just to avoid a nip. That is, of course, my opinion, which generally doesn't matter in the large scale of things. But if you believe that new page reviwers should simply create some kind of running list, I don't see how that is an effective way to do that role, not to mention, unless policy has changed in the 4 months I've been away (sans IAR), is definitely not going to be an effective strategy to clear a backlog. Sorry for the rant, but this is what pushes me, as an editor, away from Wikipedia. --allthefoxes ^(Talk) 19:43, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Anyways, sorry for the trouble --allthefoxes ^(Talk) 19:51, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia operates according to our policies, not according to what makes you happy, and you don't get to make up your own speedy deletion criterion just because you don't feel any of the existing ones fit. WP:CSD#A7 only applies when there's no claim of significance (explicitly not notability), and Associate Scientist and Associate Director of the Josephine Bay Paul Center[1] at the Marine Biological Laboratory,[2] Associate Professor of Marine Microbiology at Brown University[3] as well as the Associate Director and Co-Investigator of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations is unquestionably a claim of significance. To be frank, if this isn't just a one-off and you're making a habit of tagging newly created pages for deletion without good grounds to do so, I'd be tempted to formally warn you for disruption and block if it continues; WP:NPP isn't a videogame, and there's a reason the lengthy block of instructions at Special:NewPages are there. (As a new page reviewer, the only things from the front of the queue which you should be tagging are serious breaches of policy; there's a reason we tell patrollers to work from the end of the queue, not the front.) Almost every long article starts life as a short one. If you leave this thread a few minutes, Ritchie333 or Kudpung will turn up shortly to say what I've just said a little more politely. ‑ Iridescent 19:56, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Julie Huber may meet the notability guides for academics, and may be expandable into a full article using the sources from the university websites. You should only tag an article as A7 if you are absolutely certain nobody could ever possibly improve it to survive a deletion debate. This is clearly not the case here. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 20:01, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Spent a little bit of time typing, but I will instead just say, Okay, and thank you for your contributions to the site. --allthefoxes ^(Talk) 20:06, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately we have our hands tied. The New Page Reviewer Right which was supposed to improve the quality of patrolling hasn't made the slightest impact. Due to a large faction of the community insisting that all users, children and clueless newbies included, should continue to be allowed to MMORPG away at their heart's content at new pages, all that the new Reviewer right does is allow some users to decide whether or not a new article is fit for indexing by Google. It does absolutely nothing to address the long-standing serious issues that let the spam in and scare potential good faith new users away. The only thing we can do to errant users is take away their coveted hat if they have one, or topic ban them from patrolling if they haven't. Or, as Ritchie333 suggests, if the disruption bad enough, just block them - preventative, of course, which would give them time to read the instructions at WP:NPP which I and Fuhghettaboutit have spent hours rewriting (and also with a bit of help from xaosflux).

I've asked MusikAnimal (FYI: Jbhunley) if he (or someone) can come up with some much needed up to date NPP stats. The detailed research I did in 2011, _targeted around 3,000 patrolers. About 1,400 responded to the poll, of which 1,100 proved to be trolls or users who had actually never done any patrolling despite their claims. It left us with 300 usable respondents which was no longer a representative sample, but which the WMF cleverly used to publish, with great aplomb, a completely false profile of the average patroller. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:51, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Understandable, pissing me off is ultimately better than pushing away valuable new editors, and I would generally agree with your sentiments, despite basically filling them myself. Hopefully, the community at large will be able to take a closer look at this issue, though I won't keep my fingers crossed. I won't dramallama any further. (though, by saying that, am I only continuing the issue...discussion for another day) --allthefoxes ^(Talk) 21:26, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Forex Club

Hello. The version of this article that was removed in September, I did not write. I wrote this article myself in Russian and then translated into English. In the Russian Wikipedia this article was restored after removal. Administrators have confirmed that this page was written based on reliable sources that are independent of the subject (Veromosti, Kommersanr, Interfax, etc). Please restore the article. Sorry for my English. Andrey Broker (talk) 19:17, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

While the rewritten article has more text than the deleted version, it still appears to be largely based on the same problematic sources. (Whether Russian Wikipedia keeps it is irrelevant; each Wikipedia has their own notability standards.) Under the circumstances, I'll revert the discussion and re-submit it to AFD for fresh eyes. Courtesy notification of Jo-Jo Eumerus, who deleted the earlier version. ‑ Iridescent 19:26, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Now at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Forex Club (2nd nomination). ‑ Iridescent 19:29, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

An explanation of sorts

Hi Iridescent - I thought our recent contretemps on Here deserved some explanation, as well as on Here. I have updated my Userpage to include this in the hope it serves the purpose, but if you need any more persuading of my wikiworth, check out the edit histories of this, and this and this, three articles I've worked on since. I'm really quite constructive when I aint over-enthusing :D. Regards - Mark^Dask 01:59, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Bank to St Paul's (along Gresham Street)

Back on 23 November, you pointed me to the 'supercount' tool at the wmflabs. What X! tools does provide which that doesn't, is a statistic that I found quite surprising. Apparently I've uploaded 983 files to Commons. Quite a few of those will be crops of images by others (or images by others under a free license elsewhere and uploaded here), as I discovered CropTool at some point and now cut out the interesting bits of photos where people didn't realise what they were photographing. Not sure how many of the uploads are actually mine (i.e. I released them under a license, rather than just uploading them), though I'm sure there would be a way to find out.

Anyway, I ended up with a large set of photos (80) that resulted one (long) lunchtime from a trip to London Bridge and then to Bank and walking from Bank to St Paul's along Prince's Street and then Gresham Street. I had only meant to take photos of two things, but ended up taking a lot more. Some things we surprisingly don't have articles on. Can I ask you which you think might be the most obvious ones where an article would help?

• Starting with The Shard (again), towering over buildings in Borough High Street, we have File:WH and H Le May Hop Factors and Lloyds bank in Borough High Street with the Shard.jpg. I was actually there to photograph the Lloyds Bank branch (designed by Philip Hepworth), but took some photos of the listed building next door as well, and gathered some images together at Category:WH and H Le May Hop Factors building. Do you think that can sustain an article, or are lists of listed buildings better? (Similar to the lists of public monuments and public art in various London boroughs.)
• Moving next door, I created Category:Lloyds Bank, Southwark for the photos. I think going inside and photographing the staircase was overkill. Still, some more files added to the 'staircases' and 'lifts' categories... (I also now know why professional photographers take photos at strange times of day - to avoid the traffic and crowds messing up their photos).
• Across the road was an entrance to Borough Market, which has an interesting history. I took File:Art Deco 1930s entrance to Borough Market in Southwark.jpg, and created Category:Borough Market (Southwark Street entrance) and Category:Floral Hall portico (Borough Market). The latter is listed, and a fascinating bit of history. Now slightly better explained at Borough Market#Architecture.
• Moving on to Bank, I got distracted by the Royal Exchange, and was (later) shocked by the state of the article we have on this building. We have a lovely hi-res photo of the pediment, taken with a Wikimedia UK camera (see File:EH1064713 Royal Exchange 01.jpg). But the angle is not quite right. I made a start at Royal Exchange, London#Portico and pediment, but quite a bit more is possible.
• The London Troops War Memorial article (this memorial is in front of the Royal Exchange) is in OK shape, now with a few more photos. So not much to add there.
• Walking along Prince's Street, you are passing the western side of the Bank of England building. This is the Herbert Baker building from the 1930s, infamously replacing the John Soane building (one of London's lost architectural gems). Our article on the Bank of England has just a single paragraph on the architecture. Surely two whole articles could be written about the two buildings? I want to know more about the massive door (1, 2). There is also a Charles Wheeler statue (of Ariel) on top of the Tivoli Corner: File:Bank of England Ariel statue 02.jpg.
• Finally arriving in Gresham Street, I made very slow progress as there was such a lot to photograph! I'll speed up a bit now: Category:History of Gresham College has some photos I took of the 1912 Gresham College building, which Gresham College doesn't really mention at all (obviously now redeveloped into offices/flats as is the inevitable fate of the whole of London it seems). I think this building was listed (can't remember), but not sure about an article here. The foundation stones have some names, but none of much note it seems. Next door is the Mayor's and City of London Court, which does have an article. The foundation stone there has a great name: Japheth Tickle!
• Skipping past the blue police telephone box and mostly ignoring the Guildhall (lots of photos of that already), there is St Lawrence Jewry, with a war memorial on the outside and a memorial chapel inside, which I took far too many photos of (see Category:Interior of St Lawrence Jewry and the stained glass windows category as well). I'm sure someone knows what all the flags and heraldic emblems represent. Hopefully there are sources out there about the chapel as well.
• Finally, near the western end of Gresham Street, is a modern (early 2000s) office building at 25 Gresham Street (1), towering over the garden of St John Zachary. The garden (former churchyard) has an article. The modern building doesn't. Should it? It is the headquarters of what was the Lloyds TSB Group, which has since de-merged and is now Lloyds Bank Group again. I was there to photograph a set of memorials (1, 2), and the memorials use the name Lloyds TSB. Banking groups have been fairly good about preserving war memorials following successive bank mergers, but I'm not sure they planned for de-mergers!
• OK, not quite the final picture. I couldn't resist taking File:Mouse on a London Underground tube station platform.jpg later that same day. Sadly, the mouse wasn't silhouetted against the yellow line. As you doubtless know, these are commonly seen on the tracks (scurrying in the space underneath the rails), but I've only rarely seen them up on the platforms. I suppose someone will tell me this is a baby rat, rather than a mouse?

That probably enough. Which articles yet-to-be-written have most potential, do you think? I think five building articles: the listed building in Southwark, the two Bank of England buildings, the 1912 Gresham College building, and 25 Gresham Street. But maybe only the Bank of England buildings? Carcharoth (talk) 10:59, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

My my, grandma, what a long list you have! Running through them in order; obviously, the "this is just my personal opinion" disclaimer applies. As a general rule, IMO if you can't find enough reliable sources to write a minimum of 500 words specifically about any given topic, said topic is better off as part of a list rather than a stand-alone page. Within London, and particularly within central London, don't take listed building status as meaning anything as far as notability goes; London local authorities (in particular Westminster, Southwark and the Corporation) hand out listings and conservation area status more readily than women in miniskirts hand out free samples at railway stations, as it costs them nothing and gives them ammunition to prise bribes local infrastructure funding from property owners and developers.

• WH and H Le May Hop Factors could stand alone, provided you can find a source about the company, since the building isn't architecturally interesting enough to warrant an article in its own right.
• The bank just looks like a generic bank building for the period, and at most warrants an entry in List of Lloyd's Bank branches. (I'd have said that would be a ridiculously indiscriminate list, were it not for the fact that List of condominiums in the United States was recently kept at AFD so apparently "ridiculously indiscriminate" is the way to go.)
• Borough Market is an obviously notable topic, but the article is such a mess it probably needs wiping and rebuilding from scratch. It would make sense to wait before trying to do anything with it, as there's so much rebuilding going on in the area at the moment that nobody really knows what the end result will look like, or whether the market will even exist in its current form in a decade.
• I personally think the Royal Exchange is wretchedly ugly and looks like a suburban railway station in one of the grimmer areas of the North (unsurprisingly, as it was designed by William Tite who made his living designing cod-Classical stations in the coalfield cities). You probably want to poke Giano out of retirement if you intend to do anything with that one; he has a good deal more sympathy for 19th-century monumental architecture than I do. I'd be surprised if the Guildhall Reference Library doesn't have more sources than you'd ever want on its history.
• The war memorial is fairly generic and noteworthy mainly for its location, so the existing article probably says all there is to say on the matter.
• Re the architecture of the Bank of England, repeating my comments regarding Giano, who likes this kind of thing. IIRC there's a museum in the building (entered from the Lothbury side), who probably have a book about the history of the building. The Lothbury entrance is a staff entrance—the public entrance to the museum is on the other side, on Bartholomew Lane. ‑ Iridescent 09:35, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
• I doubt the Gresham College building will warrant an article, as it's too similar to virtually every other building in the area that survived the war. Mayor's and City of London Court could do with some serious attention, as is the case with every other court article on Wikipedia. From an architectural point of view, I'd put this as fairly low priority among the London court buildings, especially when compared with wretched stubs on genuinely architecturally notable court buildings like Wood Green.
• If the church themselves don't have a booklet on the history of St Lawrence Jewry, the shop at the Guildhall Art Gallery next door almost certainly will. The Corporation may have many faults, but they can't be said to skimp on self-publicity.
• I'd say this doesn't warrant an article, as architecturally it's completely generic, although it should probably go in the main Lloyd's Bank article. Regarding the memorials, as I understand it (and don't take this as gospel) following the demerger Lloyd's has responsibility for England and Wales, and TSB has responsibility for Scotland, as the legal fiction following the split is that Lloyd's is an English bank which happens to have some branches in Scotland, and TSB is a Scottish bank which happens to have virtually all its branches in England.
• Definitely a mouse; with the exception of the Jubilee Line Extension, the LU network is infested with them. (The platforms are typically hollow; the mice nest underneath.) They're a fairly common sight on the platforms, as they come up to scavenge vomit, dropped food, and old newspaper as nesting material. We don't have an article on them, although we do have London Underground mosquito.

Regarding which will be the best to write, iff sources exist on the company I'd say the hop factor, on the grounds that the BoE and Royal Exchange are sufficiently well documented that anyone who really cares about their history will be able to find a book.

City churches are a Sisyphean task, as there are so many of them; I'd personally say the highest priority ones are St Margaret Pattens (for its unusual design), St Sepulchre-without-Newgate (for its stunning interior), St Giles-without-Cripplegate (a rare survivor of both the Fire and the Blitz, which is today completely isolated amidst a sea of concrete) and St Edmund, King and Martyr (which now doubles up as the London Spirituality Centre, so gets a fairly significant footfall but isn't particularly well documented architecturally online), but everyone will have their own opinions. Most of them could probably be brought up to at least adequate standards just with a copy of Pevsner.

IMHO, the most glaring redlink of all City buildings is London Roman amphitheatre—the only significant remnant of Londinium other than the Wall, the Billingsgate Roman House, the Temple of Mithras, and the crypts of St Bride's and All-Hallows-by-the-Tower, but at the moment only covered by a paragraph at Guildhall Art Gallery (which itself could do with some serious attention). In fact, I may do those two next time I find the time. ‑ Iridescent 12:20, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the long answer! We do seem to have a large number of pictures of Lloyds Banks designed by various architects. They are in the Lloyds Bank (no apostrophe, btw) and Lloyds Banking Group articles. I make it eight in total: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It is not that indiscriminate. Though limiting it to "architecturally significant" branches will be a thankless task. Thanks for the tip about the Bank of England museum, I'll try and look into that and get a book on it. Writing an article on Mice on the London Underground network would be worth it to add Tube Mice (and I somehow failed to ever be aware of Underground Ernie). May add some more follow-up thoughts later if time. Thanks again. Carcharoth (talk) 15:47, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Some Lloyds branches are singularly non-notable and their photos will never serve any useful purpose.

Bank of England

Regarding the BoE, this pamphlet alone would probably be enough to give at least an adequate potted history of the modern building. On reflection, I think a list of Lloyds branches would need at least some kind of overarching theme explaining why one bank in particular needs a dedicated list, rather than just a generic List of notable bank buildings in England. (Commons has 148 images of Barclays branches in England alone, although for some reason 65 of those are of a single branch in Sutton; Barclays also has the advantage over Lloyds that their head office is a landmark in its own right rather than just a generic office block.)

I've realised that I actually have a (slim) book about the amphitheatre, so will do something about that redlink when I get the time. Unfortunately, it's published by our old friends at MOLAS so it will take at least as much time translating from gobbledegook to human as it will take to actually write the thing—MOLAS publications work on the "if it was hard to write, it should be hard to read" principle and are peppered with phrases like "cullet dump", "smithing hearth bottom" and "ostracod recovery" without any explanation for non-specialists. ‑ Iridescent 17:15, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

65 of a single bank building? That is a lot. Did I ever point you to this page I threw together over a couple of months. 300 examples of the same structure (but all in different places). I gave up halfway through the examples France. I may go back to that one day, if only to see how many different examples we have of that architectural motif (I think the overall numbers is definitely over 1000). Most of the missing ones will be from the UK, ironically. Carcharoth (talk) 18:21, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes—there's a discussion about the Crosses of Sacrifice somewhere in the archives of this page. I can see the argument for 65 photos of the exterior of one building if it's something like Hampton Court which genuinely does appear radically different from every angle, but a provincial bank branch in the no-man's-land between Surrey and London really doesn't cut it IMO. (But you try getting Commons to admit that a stack of useless images is actually worth deleting; I give even this stack of nonsense at most a 50% chance of actually being deleted.)

Suggesting this probably violates the "doing anything for a multinational is prima facie evidence of evil" Wikipedia covenant, which leads to all our videos being in a format nobody can read rather than sullying our purity by using formats like mp4 or avi which were developed by Evil Corporations, but if you have a bunch of photos which you don't feel will be useful for Commons, you could do a lot worse than put them on Google Maps. The photos on GMaps populate the little boxes in the top corners of a Google search, and while GMaps have plenty of photos uploaded of tourist attractions and obvious landmarks, most of their photos for businesses, parks, monuments, cemeteries etc are grainy images from Street View vans or ropey outdated images lifted from localdatasearch.com. Thus, something like the File:Lloyds Bank, Oxford Street, London (25th September 2014).jpg would potentially be quite useful to someone doing a Google search on lloyds bank 399 oxford street, by showing them which building they should be looking out for. (You can add a photo to virtually anything on Google Maps; just click on its name or icon and select "add a photo".) If you don't think anyone else will ever have a use for a photo, it's a better use of it than just leaving it on your hard drive to rot, and people do look at them—a decent-quality photo on there of something like a park or cemetery can easily get a couple of thousand pageviews per day, as everyone searching for it will see it. ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Am not convinced about contributing photos to Google Maps. Am quite happy with occasional uploads to Commons. There are lots of sites out there, more than I realised, with my continuing perambulations around various memorial databases. Thanks, btw, for the link to the BoE pamphlet - I may well visit the museum. The BoE apparently has two war memorials - a statue in an inner garden not open to the public, and stone tablets in the "inner entrance hall" (no idea if that is accessible to the public). Lots here as well (plus the related links). What I'm really interested in is finding mentions of those with Wikpedia articles (or potentially with Wikipedia articles). Sometimes the connection is more tenuous (they may have a father with a Wikipedia article). Carcharoth (talk) 12:58, 5 December 2016 (UTC) PS. Forgot this: I know Baker's penchant for self-promotion or self-references was legendary, but this is astonishing: " a small red tile marks the village of Cobham in Kent, the birthplace and home of the architect, Sir Herbert Baker". Carcharoth (talk) 13:01, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

If you visit the BoE museum, make sure to nip around the corner to the Guildhall Art Gallery if you've never previously been. Because they don't advertise, nobody knows it's there so it's generally deserted, but it has a genuinely world-class collection. ‑ Iridescent 20:23, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Lloyds TSB & Clyde shipyards

• On a related Lloyds/TSB note, regardless of the legal fiction involved, the practical division of the split was branches that were previously TSB (regardless of location) re-became TSBs, and Lloyds stayed Lloyds (with some geographical exceptions). Customers who had legacy TSB sort codes on their accounts/products were automatically moved to TSB, those originating with Lloyds stayed Lloyds and so forth (again with some exceptions). The Scottish/English split was rather a ridiculous fiction when it was raised anyway - mainly because Lloyds kept hold of entitites like Scottish Widows and Halifax/HBOS - which are both undoubtedly Scottish. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:29, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

• I think it's fair to say that given the timing of the split, the decision there was squarely "how can we create jobs in a part of Scotland that's wavering between Yes and No, while forcing the minimum possible number of the Cityboys who subsidise the party to endure forced relocation to the barbarian wastelands to the north?" Cameron's high-profile subsequent unpleasantnesses with regards to the referendum and his unusual uses for pork have somewhat obscured the fact that prior to 2015 he and his circle were ruthlessly cynical PR operatives. ‑ Iridescent 20:23, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Well that is overly cynical even for me ;) TSB prior, during LBG ownership and post split has been primarily a retail bank (rather than investment) catering to the UK market. Very few jobs would have been created/moved to the north regardless the way both TSB and Lloyds are set up. Branch/retail staff would stay where they were and just put on a different costume... To be honest (and as an insider), I suspect the split has actually decreased jobs in Scotland given the subsequent performance of both entities. I suppose you could make an argument that the PR aspects to the public-at-large over mythical job creation might have some sway, but I doubt anyone who looked at the division for more than 5 minutes would have been fooled. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:23, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Heh, you think it's unduly cynical that despite the historic TSB being based in London and the West Midlands, it miraculously became Scottish exactly a year before the referendum, before being flogged off to the Spanish six months after said referendum? Next thing, you'll be saying there's something fishy about a navy which doesn't possess any carrier aircraft commissioning two aircraft carriers from Scottish shipyards. ‑ Iridescent 20:40, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

*mutter* Well the aircraft carrier thing is a bit more complicated but I get your point. Personally I am looking forward to seeing what happens when Scotland leaves the UK post-brexit and all that naval construction ends up moving south of the border - actual conversation I had with a Scottish friend: "You know you wont be making our ships anymore right?" "Why not?" "Why would the UK allow a hostile nation access to its warships when we have perfectly reasonable deep-water ports that could be used/expanded? It would be a security risk" "Scotland wont be hostile!" "Its hostile now!".... Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:55, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

• *mutter* Why bring your mother into it?
• during LBG ownership I had no idea there were any gay-owned banks.

EEng 10:39, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

• Lloyds Banking Group (Although I am not sure if that is even the current official name - checked, it is). But oddly enough LBG have been consistantly rated as one of the best LGBT-friendly companies to work for in the UK. See here and and here. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:54, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Actually dont know why I said 'oddly' there, being a good company to work for should be the default position regardless of your sexuality. But just thought I would point out it is one of the good things about them. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:03, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

@OID, the Daily Telegraph is running lists of the most gay-friendly employers? Truly we live in the end times; it's not that long they were second only to the Mail for frothing "why we need to stitch up these peoples' bottoms" editorials. ‑ Iridescent 17:33, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Its a wonderful age to be alive in isnt it... Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:52, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

So a Scotsman goes into a bookies and says he wants to bet on the result of a game with England. The bookie says, "it's a friendly, and we don't take bets on friendlies". The Scotsman replies, "No such thing. We don't play friendlies against England". Britmax (talk) 10:59, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Rant about the rise of the "keep, it exists" mentality

@Carcharoth, I'll comment here rather than derail that thread, but I don't think I've ever seen anything that's done more to convince me that Wikipedia's decline into a grey goo of pointless stubs, in which "can I add this?" has overtaken "would any reader ever want to read this?" as the primary mindset has passed the point of no return than Wikipedia talk:WikiProject London#Park articles. I'm not sure one could come up with a more ridiculous guideline than WP:GEOFEAT if one specifically set out to do so, and I include WP:PORNBIO in that since the latter at least includes some kind of cut-off for people about whom there's nothing to say. I feel certain that the authors had the US (80,000 entries for a population of 320 million) and Canada (17,000 entries/35 million people) in mind, and hadn't even stopped to consider that England (500,000 entries/55 million people) hands out 'national heritage' status like Mardi Gras beads. (By my reckoning, taking WP:GEOFEAT as the bar for notability there are more historic monuments in Essex than there are in Spain.) ‑ Iridescent 17:33, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes, well all this made me take more than passing notice of a Barclays Bank the other day. Possibly in Pimlico. Or maybe Enfield (home to the world's first ever cash dispenser no less). Carcharoth (talk) 17:49, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Along those lines... Lot 47, Prince Edward Island. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:59, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

What I know about PEI could be written on a stamp; if it's genuinely existed since the 18th century, you'll struggle to get that deleted as it must be one of the oldest extant non-natural territorial boundaries in Canada. I'll see that, and raise you Bowl-A-Rama. ‑ Iridescent 18:08, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

I didn't even try to prod that article. I know better than to think it'd ever be deleted. With mom dying last month and now the rush to get the house on the market to move, I'm not able to devote much time to WP, but I've been doing some random article copy-editing... and gods, it's bad out there. There is some amazingly bad and non-notable stuff out there... that is never going to go away... Ealdgyth - Talk 19:58, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Those people who still bang the "Wikipedia's medical coverage is its crowning glory" drum could take a long hard look at Diasebesten, even if expel morbid humours through urine is one of the finer phrases I've ever seen on Wikipedia. (It's probably just as well Wikipedia Review self-destructed—I think Category:Listed buildings in England alone would have Greg jammed on "self-righteous sneer" for about a month.)

All this talk of crappy stubs reminds me, do you think any of the horsey types could salvage Lara Prior-Palmer? This looks like there's potentially a fascinating story buried beneath the garbage (even if the story is ultimately another variant of "bored rich folks never get tired of looking for ever-stupider ways to waste their time and money"). ‑ Iridescent 20:13, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia has medical coverage? What about preexisting conditions? EEng 04:24, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

On US/Canada versus UK heritage designations, I thought there were lower-level US designations that Wikipedia excludes from notability? Maybe I'm misremembering that. Anyway, I thought the US was mostly open spaces with a few cities (OK, that is Canada!), and the UK has more urban density hence more urban heritage (I am deliberately oversimplifying here in a jokey way, in case anyone gets offended) and more history full stop, but I take your points about those railings and that stone. On parks and lists, I made a comment over on that WikiProject talk page. Not that I could face doing lists of listed pubs in London. Or even lists of listed banks, come to that. Maybe one day. Carcharoth (talk) 08:20, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Sure, there are lower-level US designations which Wikipedia excludes from notability, but the same goes for the UK; if we included Conservation Areas, Areas of Great Landscape Value, Article 4 Directions, Local Heritage Listings, Assets of Community Value, Sites of Biological Importance and all the lower levels of conservation status, you could triple the size of Wikipedia from stubs on English buildings alone. (That's not an exaggeration; for some of the more picture-postcard English market towns like Shaftesbury and Stamford, literally every building, structure and tree in the town is subject to a preservation order of some kind or another.)

The "Europe has more history" argument doesn't wash, either; "heritage inflation" is a peculiarly British (and especially English) phenomenon. France has a similar area and a similar population, has an even longer and better-preserved history, and is even more obsessed than Britain with le patrimoine culturel, but France has roughly 10% as many listed buildings as Britain, and as I've already mentioned there are fewer listed buildings in Spain than there are in Essex. To put in perspective just how freely England hands out "national heritage" status, there are more listed buildings in the Isles of Scilly (population 2200, area 6.3 square miles) than there are monuments historiques in Marseille (pop 850,000 and one of the most historic cities in the world), and more listed buildings in Bristol than Paris.

I don't really expect anything to be done about these listed building microstubs—there are too many people with the "but it exists" mentality who don't care about sourcing and can't see any issues with things like Railway Hotel, Edgware. When I originally proposed it I wasn't entirely serious, but I'm coming round to the view of a "500 words specifically about the article topic" minimum requirement for all articles, with the microstubs like A Girl in the Street, Two Coaches in the Background redirected into lists unless and until someone can actually find something to say about them. ‑ Iridescent 10:27, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

• This AFD is getting me more annoyed than it should be. A bus route that has *ZERO* sources demonstrating it is notable (of the two independant sources they could come up with, one is a picture of a Routemaster that happens to have that number on it and the other is in a book about bus colours!), failing WP:GNG, and yet people still insist that its existance for X years makes it notable. Only in death does duty end (talk) 01:01, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• London bus route articles have traditionally been one of the spots where the ARS-holes draw their line in the sand, literally going back years. I've never seen a deletion discussion for one that didn't turn into a shouting match, unless they all arrived quickly and it was quickly closed as a snow keep. (If you ever want to really see how many variants of "keep, it exists" can be crammed onto a single page, nominate a street article in either London or NYC for deletion; I've genuinely seen "anything that is labeled on a map can be considered as sourced" wheeled out in the past.) ‑ Iridescent 01:14, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• Oh dear. I have a soft spot for transport history. Where else can you find out changes were made in the past to bus routes, and when a particular route started and things like that? If things are merged to lists, I hope that sort of information is still incorporated somehow. Carcharoth (talk) 06:04, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• You do realise just how many of these things there are? And London is relatively straightforward, as the bus routes are centrally regulated and don't change very often. For somewhere like Manchester or Cardiff with a deregulated market and constant bus wars, routes are created and abolished literally every month. Then, multiply that by the rest of the world, bearing in mind that the London transport system is relatively simple compared to somewhere like Berlin, Beijing or Bangkok. Transport articles are one area where minimum article lengths would make perfect sense, as we have so many Brigg railway stations and West Midlands bus route 360s that are unmergeable under existing practice but would be considerably more use to readers as part of a list rather than standing alone. ‑ Iridescent 09:54, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Woman in Red

At the top of your talk page. Weak attempt at a joke (and anyway, it is a girl). Anyway, would you be willing to give you thoughts on this? 158 or so article creations, a bump of 17% on the normal rate, apparently. And I've only just started reading Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red#BBC 100 Women. Hmm. A success or lots of clean-up work (plus welcoming new editors), or too early to tell? Carcharoth (talk) 21:18, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

PS. Maybe it is a sign of the times, but I can't help but feel that it is next to impossible to compare a career like that of Carole Souter to some of the other women highlighted by the BBC 100 Women campaign. Though I am not sure what to call it. Some people liken it to an award, with the people profiled being 'laureates'. Not sure about that. And now I'm trying to find out if the BBC 100 Women pages ever even mentioned her. Maybe the IP who started the article was using the hashtag for a laugh? Carcharoth (talk) 01:11, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

My first arbitration

My second arbitration

The versions of these images at the time this was written, for the benefit of anyone coming to this thread late and wondering what on earth I'm talking about

(I really need to do something when I get around to it about the My First Sermon/My Second Sermon images. The colour balance is so atrocious—in reality, the background is bright green—that wouldn't be surprised if Bridgeman intentionally included such poor quality images so they could catch Corel in the act.)

I'm very sceptical about editathons in general; from what I've seen of them, they generally attract a big bunch of people who are never heard from again, and leave behind a huge mess to clean up. It is just not possible to write a Wikipedia article of anything even approaching acceptable quality in a single day, unless you're already both very familiar with the topic and know exactly where to look to find every piece of information, and familiar enough with Wikipedia's conventions that you don't have to think about article layout and formatting. (In this particular case, the fear of adverse publicity has led to us intentionally shielding the participants from the usual behavioural expectations we have of new editors, but the dwindling remaining pool of editors can't be expected to give newly-created pages the level of emergency treatment given to Rebecca Strickson, Sellappan Nirmala et al as a matter of course, and will get increasingly resentful if they're expected to do so as a matter of routine.)

On a more general note, I think that much of this particular campaign is based on a false premise, as I don't believe Wikipedia does have a problem with bias as regards the number of biographies, other than the obvious and unavoidable issue that people from English speaking countries are over-represented in a project which works primarily from English language sources. The gender gap with regards to editor numbers is a real thing and genuinely problematic. (While I don't believe the WMF's "only 15% of editors" line for an instant, as it assumes that every "prefer not to say" is male, I don't think anyone seriously doubts that men outnumber women.) However, IMO the gender gap with regards to articles, is an artefact of Sue Gardner opening her mouth before putting her brain in gear, Jimmy being too compromised when it comes to the topic of the treatment of women to feel able to contradict her, and Lila being so incompetent she just took whatever she was told as gospel. It's a straightforward statement of fact that men outnumber women in the historical record, since not only were there so many occupations which were historically closed to women, but many of those fields (politics, the military, visual arts, property ownership, engineering, religion) are precisely those fields in which records were best preserved; if we're summarising sources neutrally than we should exhibit a strong gender bias. Things like this aren't evidence of a problem being addressed, they're evidence of a serious systemic bias in the opposite direction.

Regarding the hashtags, "the instructions aren't clear" is something of an understatement, but the impressions I get was that people were encouraged to use the #100Womenwiki hashtag on any edit related to a woman, rather than specifically those related to women on the BBC's list, to give an indication of whether the campaign was inspiring people to get involved. RexxS was there and presumably knows what the participants were asked to do. ‑ Iridescent 11:14, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Very briefly, this was more than just the BBC in central London. There was also a group at Brunel University and several groups worldwide. See the top of Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/29, where it says:

On 8 December 2016, edit-a-thons will be held in BBC Broadcasting House in central London, at BBC Archives in Reading, and in locations around the world where there are BBC bureaux and active Wikimedia communities: Beijing, Cairo, Cardiff, Delhi, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Jerusalem, Kathmandu, Kabul, Miami, Nairobi, Rome (Italy), São Paolo and Washington, DC.

You can't reliably tie the articles created directly to the locations (there were some London schoolchildren editing on African topics, for example), but sometimes you can. A good way to appreciate the scope is to read through this (a BBC Live Reporting page for a Wikipedia editathon, no less). Remember that WiR is separate from WMUK, and not all have the same goals (see first link above at the start of the section), so some tensions can result. Carcharoth (talk) 12:46, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Or with my cynical hat on, "an average of less than ten articles per editathon" in that case, if the total number of articles was really 158. I can understand the thinking here, of "if we attract a couple of hundred people who wouldn't normally participate to see what we do, and even if only one in twenty of them stays, it's still a long term benefit to us"—it's the principle by which every church carol service, cadet open day and political rally operates—but I still think that prominent figures like Jimmy Wales shouting on national media about how biased Wikipedia is, despite not having any actual evidence for said bias, does nobody any good; depending on their own view, people will either come away feeling that Wikipedia is hopelessly sexist and shouldn't be taken seriously, or is dominated by a clique of inclusion-obsessed Guardianistas and shouldn't be taken seriously. (Since there are so many claims being bandied around, here's some actual numbers; as a comparator, the proportion of female entries in the ODNB is 12% pre-1900, 18% post-1900 which when one accounts for Wikipedia's recentist bias makes our 17% figure exactly what it ought to be.) ‑ Iridescent 13:02, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

I agree absolutely. I found those ODNB figures once, and wanted to quote them, but lost them. Where are they? On a public page, or behind a log-in screen? (I have access, but if it is public it is easier to point people at it). Carcharoth (talk) 13:06, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

I have them from Common Reading by Stefan Collini, but they're also reproduced in this review of the ODNB in the LRB (also by Collini). I imagine there's an OUP press release somewhere giving the exact numbers. (The figures relate to the base version of the ODNB from 2005; I imagine that the post-2005 supplements will have a higher figure although it won't be anything close to parity.) ‑ Iridescent 13:17, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I also found this. Useful. Carcharoth (talk) 13:24, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

I long ago gave up trying to explain to journalists (when a WiR) or complain within the community about the inaccuracies/false assumptions & uncertainty around the % of women bios issue. There was a piece of research a few years ago comparing (all Norweigian I think) WP bios with another encyclopedia, which I think found a rather slight under-coverage by WP (a % or 2 I think). The last bit of this WMF blog post I did examined the % of 2014's new FRSs who had bios before their election, a number obviously bearing on our general coverage of scientists. The numbers are comparable for the genders, but there are too few women for any real statistical significance. I did the sums for the 2015 batch with similar results, but never wrote it up. The larger US equivalent figures would be interesting to examine. But the idea that there is still (after all the editathons) a massive gender imbalance is too attractive and useful to the media and WMF/chapter leadership to be examined seriously. Johnbod (talk) 17:29, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Many thanks for pointing to that blog post, John. Great stuff. I am afraid Iridescent will get distracted by this though... :-) Carcharoth (talk) 17:49, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Heh, nice of them to notify me… The lesson here is that the pageviews barely shifted on 15 November, implying that nobody actually reads the Wikipedia Blog (which I just heard of for the first time today). ‑ Iridescent 23:43, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't be so sure about that - the views for the week after are several hundred per day higher than preceding or following weeks, and that peak on the 13th might be the early edition or something. But it doesn't have that much resonance, and there are too many stories for them to be picked up later. Johnbod (talk) 02:16, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Possibly—that article is always hard to track, as the pageviews swing so wildly depending on which celebrity is tweeting links to it, and on when and where the QI episode that discusses him is being broadcast. If they plan on making this a regular series, then the pageviews of the other articles they cover will presumably show whether it's piquing people's interest. (The cynic in me says that if the intent is actually to highlight some of the weirdest and unique topics that have been covered by Wikipedia’s editors, someone should nominate Pig-faced women or Wife selling and see what excuses they come up with not to run it.) The basic point still stands; if I've never heard of the Wikimedia Blog before this, after either seven or twelve years (depending how you count it) in or near the belly of the beast, I don't see how we can expect casual readers to know about it—at least the Signpost, for all its many faults, manages to make even casual readers aware of its existence and purpose through its notifications on various talk pages.

(To be honest, having skimmed through it, far too much of its contents reads like one of those free "your taxes at work" pseudonewspapers local authorities send out, as it has that same mix of earnest-but-boring pieces about civic duty, uncritical boosterism, and "local interest" puff-pieces; as the time of writing there are twelve articles published in December, every one of which is a variant on "Wikipedia is wonderful and the WMF are perfect". Whoever's running it could do a lot worse than winkle Somey out of wherever he's gone these days and commission some "the problem with Wikipedia, as I see it" pieces, if only to spark some debate in the comments section; the "no dissension, no criticism" approach just makes it look like the internal memos of an evangelical cult.) ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Lists

How would you handle something like this? Both lists. Carcharoth (talk) 15:58, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Lists with defined selection criteria are copyrightable. Its okay to say subject X was featured on list Y. Its not okay to reprint list Y in full where inclusion on the list is subject to editorial judgement of the lists creator. As far as I can see that article needs to be nuked as a blatant copyright violation. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:53, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Not all lists are copyrightable - a list of all volcanoes by latest eruption date would not be copyrightable at least in the US. But that's because the selection criterium is not particularly creative. "Most influential" on the other hand seems creative to me. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 23:39, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah I was trying to get that across. Its a bit complicated. Lists of verifiable facts are not - so your volcano example, or to bring it back to the subject 'List of last 50 women to get Engineering degrees', but lists of 'Top 100 Engineers according to...' is based on their self-selection criteria rather than any independantly verifiable fact. Its to do with dataset selection. There have been a number of cases over it. (Phonebooks & databases etc) which have pretty much set the precedent down both to what is and is not. Only in death does duty end (talk) 00:56, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) What OID said, IMO, but I'm not an expert in copyright. "List of stations on the London Underground" or "List of Fawlty Towers episodes" is perfectly acceptable, since even if you've copied the list from somewhere you'd recreate it word-for-word if working from scratch, but reprinting something as arbitrary as this is tantamount to cut-and-pasting an article. The Rambling Man is the one you want to talk to about lists, and Moonriddengirl on copyright issues. ‑ Iridescent 23:43, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

That was pretty much my understanding as well. Moonriddengirl was already pinged about this discussion, but nothing yet. I'd like to be a fly on the wall when the WMUK person in that discussion raises this with the BBC. A remarkable number of people in high-up positions are unaware of issues like this. Going back to the top 50 list, everyone seems to be studiously ignoring the identity of the creator of the article, who has since (quite rightly) been welcomed (perhaps a tad optimistically) and also welcomed in another way. Carcharoth (talk) 06:13, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• BTW, one of the wrinkles in the current discussions on copyrights of lists, is Wikidata. If it is OK to say subject X was featured on list Y, but not to publish list Y, and if the copyright issue is bound up in database and fact aggregation laws, then surely there will be at some not too distant point a precedent-setting legal case involving Wikidata? The BBC 100 Women list is an example. A Wikidata-generated list exists here. The same sort of applies to Wikipedia categories as well (which sort of makes the point that Wikipedia has had the database features all along, but Wikidata really elevates those features). Carcharoth (talk) 06:21, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• It's even more complicated than that since while copyright laws are governed by international conventions and are fairly similar worldwide, database rights are radically different in the three core en-wiki areas of North America, UK/ROI and Australia. American database law is based on originality (so provided the facts are freely available and one could create the list from scratch, it's legal to copy someone else's list); Australian database law is based on creativity (so unless there's something the original creator has added above-and-beyond the facts, one can't protect a list); EU/UK database law is based on sweat-of-the-brow, and exists independently of copyright provided the original creation of the list involved substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents. It's entirely possible for the duplication of a list to be totally legal on one country, and an explicit criminal offence in another. I'd personally advise anyone living in a country covered by the Database Directive never to copy lists directly or indirectly, unless you can show that you're recreating the list from scratch (the Wiki model helps here, as you can demonstrate the individual entries being added and sourced separately). ‑ Iridescent 08:58, 13 December 2016 (UTC) Pinging Newyorkbrad to this as well; although I know you probably won't be able to participate to any great extent in something with the potential for ending up as an arb case, "substantial experience in the coordination of multi-jurisdictional litigation, both domestic and international" would probably come in handy here. ‑ Iridescent 09:19, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• The jurisdiction question is all very well, but doesn't answer the question about using a bot to generate a list automagically from a database. You are literally recreating it from other people saying "subject X was featured on list Y" (which is apparently OK). Of course, if some of those on the list are missing from Wikidata, then the list will be incomplete. Does that matter? Can partial or incorrect copying of a list still be copying? My head hurts. Carcharoth (talk) 11:43, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• This is where it gets complicated, as unlike copyright the laws in different jurisdictions are totally contradictory. In the case of the EU (and this one will almost certainly remain in UK law post-Brexit, as it would be chaos if Britain and Ireland had different IP laws), if a list is based on objective criteria (List of bus routes in London, to pick one at non-random) by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents, constitute the author's own intellectual creation, then it's automatically protected if there has been substantial investment (in time or money) involved in the creation of its contents, but extraction [of data] for the purposes of illustration for teaching or scientific research, as long as the source is indicated and to the extent justified by the non-commercial purpose to be achieved is allowed. However, Wikipedia (as opposed to WMUK) operates under California law, where the relevant case law is Feist v Rural Telephone Service, which ruled that there needs to be an element of originality to protect a list, so it ought to be that US editors on a US project are untouchable. However, Bridgeman v Corel has established that when it comes to intellectual property rights, US courts can apply the legislation of EU countries extraterritorially if they feel there's a reason to do so. Situations like this are why you never see a poor lawyer. ‑ Iridescent 11:57, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• Poor lawyers abound. What you rarely see is a lawyer without money. EEng 12:01, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• Eh, I know most of that. I'm trying to get to whether the specific use of Wikidata to generate the list automagically makes a difference. Though at the moment (turning 180 degrees and switching lanes and up a gear), phantom battles are more interesting. More examples here. Must be a form of mass hysteria, but not found anything yet definitively naming it. We do have Ghosts of the American Civil War. Carcharoth (talk) 12:18, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• I would say that regardless of whether it's being created via Wikidata or directly, generating the list will constitute the unauthorized extraction and/or re-utilization of all or a substantial part of the contents of that database (section 41 of the actual Directive). Our own Sui generis database right article does specifically state that the DD applies "even if data is extracted and reconstructed piecemeal", but annoyingly doesn't have an actual source, and I can't see anything specific in the Directive (I'm not about to read CDPA itself given how long it is). ‑ Iridescent 12:54, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• I feared that would be the case. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 13:08, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

• Bear in mind (I know you know this, but not every TPW necessarily will) that there's also an ethical issue here as well as a legal formality. Even if a publisher says "sure, no problem" when they're asked if something can be used on Wikipedia/Wikidata, we can lose sight of the fact that a lot of people in the real world don't understand what you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL actually means. The BBC might well be perfectly happy to allow Wikipedia to reproduce the BBC 100 women list. They would probably be considerably less happy if they realised that in releasing it to Wikipedia, Wikidata or any other WMF project, they're also granting irrevocable consent for anyone who so desires to republish it as "100 Hot Bitches I'd Like to Fuck" or "The Feminazis Who Will Be First Against the Wall When the Revolution Comes". You presumably remember the degree of unpleasantness when the Boy Scouts realised that the photos they'd uploaded to Commons were being used on the Spanking Art website. ‑ Iridescent 13:21, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Acknowledging the ping from Iridescent above, but I think he's cogently summarized the international legal situation on this topic (indeed, he seems to know more of the details than I do), and I don't have anything to add. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 18:24, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

There have been more developments at Talk:Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering. Carcharoth (talk) 08:13, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

That's beyond my pay grade; anyone explicitly stating that the list should be kept is personally exposing themselves to all kinds of problems if the Telegraph ever decide to challenge it (and the Barclay Brothers aren't exactly known for their laissez-faire approach), while anyone deleting it is going to be smeared across the Guardian and the blogosphere as "the face of Wikipedia's institutional sexism". (Plus, TRM has just been unilaterally blocked in one of the most dubious-looking AE supervotes I've ever seen, so that particular conversation is going to go nowhere.) Given the number of ways any possible decision here could render the editor or admin taking it personally liable, this is a decision that should be punted upfield to WMF Legal, and I'd advise anyone to steer well clear of it. There's a potentially fascinating legal case to be had over whether the ultimate authority over the situation of UK material licensed to a US project rests with the British, American or European courts, but you really don't want to be the defendant. ‑ Iridescent 10:50, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Examples

Sometimes I wonder how many people actually go through all the entries on a list like this. To be fair, most of the assessment there (more initial triage) was done by a single editor. But I've not yet managed to find the time to go through everything on that list. I've just tried that now, and here are some examples: Tess Asplund, Tamar Ariel, Ethel Baxter, Anne Bevan, Gangubai Nivrutti Bhambure, Mary Bristow, Meredith Jemima Brown, Evelyn Browne, Betty Campbell, Jessie Campbell, Sairee Chahal, Touria Chaoui. I stopped at number 33 on the list (which has a current total of 170 if you exclude the deleted entries and the list article) and those 12 caught my attention for some reason (either borderline notable, not notable, or something interesting). Actually doing this gives a real idea of the article quality and the range of people that have been written about. But there is a lot to go through! Carcharoth (talk) 06:58, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

It depends what you're looking for when you're assessing; if you're checking sources, running copyvio searches or doing a close proofreading it's soul-destroying going through a long list, but if it's purely skimming the article and confirming it's not so seriously problematic it needs deletion or major cleanup, you can work through a list at an inhumanly high speed. ‑ Iridescent 08:41, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Heh. Looking back 7 or so years, how useful do you think it was to do those assessments? A challenge: would you be able to go back and redo those assessments at the same speed today? How long would it take you to give your views on those new articles on women created in that editathon? If you were even going to start on something like that, how would you approach it in a way that would be most useful? Maybe I am thinking about this the wrong way. I look at articles and think: would I bother writing an article on this. Often the answer is no, but maybe it is the wrong way to think about it - seeing the potential that other people see in an article is not always easy. Carcharoth (talk) 11:48, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Reasonably useful; I wasn't doing them to assess articles per se (99%+ of them were "low") but to get an idea of how many topics WP:LONDON and WP:LT actually had. Back in those days before we had all these fancy-pants scripts which could generate a count of articles on any given topic provided it was tagged as belonging to a Wikiproject, we had no idea how many topics each project actually had.

If I were approaching it today, I'd pester someone who's good at writing scripts to combine the copyvio detector with an automatic talk-page updater script, allowing me to run through all the articles in something resembling the Huggle interface, tagging for problems, nominating for deletion, or tagging the talkpage for relevant projects and assessments with just a couple of keystrokes or mouse-clicks. The problem with new page patrolling is that people are either going through the articles manually from the queue which is very slow, or they're using tools like Stiki which were intended as anti-vandalism tools and make it very easy to tag or revert problems, but difficult to fix them. ‑ Iridescent 12:08, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Regarding I look at articles and think: would I bother writing an article on this, as I've said elsewhere IMO the approach to take is "do the sources exist to write at least 500 words specifically about this topic?". If the answer is yes, then even if the subject appears deeply obscure then someone, somewhere will almost certainly have a use for it; if no, then it's almost certainly not a viable topic as even if you write an article, a microstub is less use to readers than an entry in a list in which it can be put into context. ‑ Iridescent 12:13, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

User talk:EEng

Iridescent, I'm quite willing to stop commenting on user talk:EEng. You've indicated that you don't want me to do that, and I accept that. The fact remains that that user never once unambiguously told me to stop; I pointed out to him quite clearly that for him to continue to reply to me encourages comments. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 10:04, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Note that my warning was carefully worded to be non-prescriptive, and my offer was carefully worded to be conditional. If EEng is happy for his talkpage to serve as Wikipedia's fuckwittery heatsink now that Wikipedia Review is no longer with us, as far as I'm concerned he's welcome to allow whatever he likes provided it doesn't spill over elsewhere, subject to the usual non-negotiable rules about personal attacks on third parties or potentially libellous content. (Neither EEng nor myself own his talkpage; as he's recently found out, if someone else does genuinely feel content in userspace is genuinely problematic they'd be perfectly in their rights to take action about it even if I don't feel it's unacceptable.) ‑ Iridescent 17:17, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

talk page stalkers: a gruesome calculation

Apologies may be due – I usually go to WP:RX for such requests, and the topic at hand is hardly art. I also have over a hundred sources already, and some may think one more is overkill. But this one is quite special: perhaps only a page or three from Aykroyd, W. R. "The Conquest of Famine." London: Chatto and Windus (1974).

I have little concrete discussion (just the academic equivalent of angry finger-pointing and name-calling followed by silent scowls) regarding the possibility that the Bengal famine of 1943 resulted in part from profit-driven hoarding or clandestine exports. I found in a footnote (I had never seen this mentioned before in the past... ten months) that Aykroyd was a member of the Bengal Famine Commission 1945, and that "the Commission itself made what it called the 'gruesome calculation' that for every death in the famine roughly a thousand rupees of excess profits were made", which is cited to page 79 of Aykroyd's book. I have exactly zero access to this book, and believe me, I've tried.

I probably don't need info about any other aspect of the famine. [I'm sure if I had the entire book I could find other useful cites/quotes, but they would very probably cover details that I could also source elsewhere.] I really only lack anything substantial about the "blood money" accusation.

If anyone who has easy access to wonderful libraries and scanning machines could get that book, skim/scan around page 79 (and maybe the index?) for discussions of large businesses profiting from the famine, and scan perhaps 2 or 3 pages (hopefully searchable/convertible to text), I would be in your debt. Tks... (oh ps, if he mentions his role on the Commission, just a page number would be good to establish his authority... tks)  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 02:52, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

The going rate on Amazon for Aykroyd's book is a mighty 73c (or one penny plus shipping from the UK site) so it would probably be easier to just buy a copy and work from the source. This obituary of Aykroyd confirms that he was on the Commission (page 247), and cites him as blaming "corruption" for the extent of the famine.

The "gruesome calculation" isn't necessarily a confession to wrongdoing—it's the nature of the world that some businesses profit from disasters, but it doesn't mean those businesses set out to cause disasters (particularly in the pre-Kohima context of 1943, with the threat of invasion a very real fear). In this particular case, I'd say the lack of sources is itself significant—there are any number of communists, Indian nationalists, Muslim fundamentalists, anti-imperialists and Axis apologists who one would expect to be shouting from the rooftops any evidence of "the British authorities and capitalist businessmen conspired to cause the deaths of millions of Indian Muslims", if there was any to be found. ‑ Iridescent 08:49, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

(adding) According to Worldcat, there are copies in the libraries of the London School of Economics, the University of Birmingham, Wellcome, and Glasgow University, all of which have links of various kinds with Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 09:48, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Several thanks are in order: first, thanks for taking the time to look into this. Thanks especially for the trick of finding what libraries a work is in then finding which have relationships with Wikipedia. I had never thought of that. It is a clever shortcut, and it obviates the need for any mewling protestation that I of course could never order any hard-copies from Amazon. I will give that idea a good try... And finally thanks for name-dropping Kohima, which looks like an excellent article to improve, a few months from now.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 03:20, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

If you want to clean up a Kohima article, War Cemetery in Kohima could do with attention (not least being fairly obviously mis-named); although it's not as well known as its cousins at Gettysburg, Thiepval or the Mamayev Kurgan (Nagaland is a lot harder to get to than the Somme), the memorial there is the original use of For your tomorrow we gave our today so it's had a significant indirect effect on subsequent military burials and remembrance services. (Plus, as the high-water mark of WW2, the site has an inherent interest.) I cleaned out some of the worst issues last year, but it could do with some serious work. (A cemetery is "used for those deceased"? Who'd have thought it.) Paging Carcharoth and HJ Mitchell also. ‑ Iridescent 08:50, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

IRC

Iridescent, that Mike V/TRM thread is closed, so I'll respond here, if that's OK: I was about to go WHOA and strike out my entire comment, but I looked at the diff again--there is a big difference between "because someone asked him to on IRC" and "Your conduct was brought to my attention from comments made by other administrators on IRC". The accusation was that there's a secret network of admins who tag each other for dirty jobs; there's no evidence for that. Mind you, I say this without wanting to defend the block or Mike V's apparent radio silence. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 16:37, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't see how it's possible to read the relevant section in full without coming to the conclusion either that Mike V was explicitly acting on someone else's request to block TRM, or that at best someone was dropping hints that TRM needed blocking; as Bencherlite points out there, Mike is undoubtedly lying somewhere along the line as his story is internally inconsistent even within that thread, so I don't see why I should feel obliged to extend AGF. If one accepts his claim not to have been aware of the AE thread, then the only possibilities are (a) someone canvassed him on IRC, or (b) he's stalking TRM's contributions looking for a pretext to block, since it's beyond the bounds of coincidence that Mike just happened to stumble across TRM's comments on Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors, a page in which he has never shown any interest in his entire time on Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 17:17, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Still want to pretend he's not making up policy as he goes along to suit himself? ‑ Iridescent 17:24, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

sometimes people get pissed off and do silly things. --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:32, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

You promptly admitted you were wrong and reversed it. What do you think the odds that Mike would have? I came into this thinking this was a purely procedural issue regarding the definition of WP:INVOLVED, but the longer it's gone, the more it's looking like a case of someone with a serious "I can't break the law—I am the law" complex who's consciously abandoned impartiality and is trying to settle scores. ‑ Iridescent 17:39, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

So that Admin's only IRC channel doesnt exist then? The one that in the past has banned admins if they didnt follow the status quo? Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:40, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

I think an IRC channel exists for admins only (not all of them; I don't participate there), actually. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:01, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

I know, I was being sarcastic :) My point was that it is very hard to say 'there is no evidence of a cabal on IRC' when you have a private channel that restricts access, even to other admins (I know of least a couple of admins who have been forcibly excluded), where admin decisions are raised and acted upon. Which has a 'you must not log this channel' rule in order to prevent scrutiny. There may be little evidence of a cabal, but only because of a concerted effort to prevent any being gathered. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:05, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You mean these people? To his credit, Drmies isn't listed there; unsurprisingly, Mike V, Chillum, and all the other people who like to posture as Jimmy Wales's temperance spoons most definitely are. ‑ Iridescent 17:17, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

I used to be on that list but got kicked off for using foul language. Look, I don't know what kinds of conversations take place there. It is entirely possible that nudge nudge, wink winking goes on--but you don't know either. Having a "secret" channel serves useful purposes, if only because of privacy concerns. Think about CU evidence and linking IPs to editor names, for instance, or about content which may or may not need to be revdeleted. And such communications are fast: frequently I don't know stuff happened until it's too late. I have to assume good faith, as I do with all of y'all. You may not care for it, or you may not know, but Mike V has done lots of CU work, much of which takes place behind the scenes, and it's not always pleasant. Anyway, I am not in a position to defend anyone, nor do I wish to attack anyone--I just want all of us to be a bit more measured and not jump to conclusions. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 18:01, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Ah you mean like the time he violated the privacy of every editor with IPBLOCK exemption by checkusering them all with absolutely zero indication they were abusing the privilege? That was a good one. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:08, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

OK, that's enough sarcasm for the day, at least for me. Drmies (talk) 18:11, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

It may be sarcasm, but it happened. He didn't admit he'd made any mistakes there, either. ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Oi. He didn't make a mistake with that. It had been done several times in the past, usually on an annual basis. You'd be surprised how many socks we used to find; the year MikeV did it (which was at least the third or fourth time it had been done) was the first time there weren't a lot of people with inappropriate access/socking/etc., and I'd venture to guess that everyone had got a lot more careful with IPBE (including admins handing it out) because of the auditing checks. I know those routine audits were done pretty much annually at least from 2011, possibly even 2010. While I get what the Ombudsman Commission was getting at, the reality is that most (not all) of them work on wikis that block as many socks in a year as enwiki blocks on a quiet day, and lots of our socks have been working the system since...well, there are some that have been around and working the system since before I started editing. Risker (talk) 19:19, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, "mistake" is probably the wrong term; I know why we check IPBE editors periodically, and why it's sometimes necessary to conduct fishing expeditions on the IP ranges of some of the more problematic sockmasters. "Failed to account for his actions" would probably be nearer the mark—in this particular case, he was unilaterally deciding who he deemed deserving of IPBE status and unilaterally stripping it from everyone else, and refusing to explain what criteria he used to decide who he deemed deserving. (He appears to have deleted his talk archives, but the huge stack of complaints he got at the time is here.) All it would have taken is a routine "I have removed IPBE status from your account as you don't appear to be using it, if you do still need it please contact xxxxx" notification to avoid it; looking over his recent history this appears to be part of a fairly consistent pattern of taking controversial actions and then vanishing until the storm blows over whenever one of his decisions is questioned. I don't expect anyone not to make mistakes—lord knows I have—but I do think it's a reasonable expectation that anyone with advanced permissions be wiling to explain their lines of reasoning (or explain why they can't be made public), and be willing to reverse actions should they either be demonstrably based on an error or have an obvious consensus against them. (As others have pointed out, Mike is totally detached from actual Wikipedia content editing—3.3% of his edits in 2016 have been to mainspace, apparently all minor—and while he does valuable work as a CU, he gives the impression that he's completely lost touch with how people in a collaborative environment actually behave.) ‑ Iridescent 19:34, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Neither the Meta checkuser policy nor the ENWP supplementary policy allow for checkusering large groups of editors just to sweep for potential sockpuppets where there is no suspicion the editor is sockpuppeting. The policies are both quite clear that Checkuser is only to be used where there is a legitimate suspicion/reason for checking. Both you and Mike are of the opinion that merely having been given IPBE, a right that is MANUALLY granted when someone makes a compelling case for it, is grounds for an editor being checkusered. Which is so ridiculously self-serving it wouldnt fly in any organisation that takes privacy seriously. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:56, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

You're talking about Wikimedia, Only in death, an organization that publicly broadcasts the IP addresses of unregistered users (with very poor warning, I've had very serious arguments with WMF staff in the past over how obvious the notice should be when editing without logging in). Wikimedia, an organization that permits anonymous users to have access to the "checkuser" data (IPs and user agents only, really) of everyone that edits on its sites. English Wikipedia, which gives the ability to over a thousand users to grant IPBE to anyone they want without any kind of oversight or verification that it is appropriate, whether or not they actually understand what they're doing or have taken any precautions to ensure they aren't enabling problem users. Conversely, Wikimedia, the organization that only permits access to its sites via HTTPS in order to "protect the privacy of its users", despite the fact that large chunks of the world population are not able to use HTTPS and thus the WMF cannot meet its publicly stated goal of making information available to everyone in the world. Privacy is not a clearcut issue here. If you're really worried about user privacy, have the WMF vet and hire everyone with access to CU data; it will only cost about $7 million a year for employees to do the work that unidentified volunteer checkusers and stewards do now. Would I suggest doing another run-through of IPBE today in 2016-17? No - not with all the global blocking of IP addresses (largely outside of the control of enwiki). Almost all requests for IPBE that I've seen in the past 2-3 years have been because people using VPNs for any number of good reasons are being prevented from editing because of some sockpuppetry, and quite often socking that happened on another project. I can say unreservedly that in earlier reviews (say around 2010-12) we identified a surprisingly large number of socks of banned users being granted IPBE - users who probably would have been identified if only CUs could give out IPBE, in many cases. While I think there's still a chance there are similar accounts being granted IPBE today, I'm not convinced that it's worth the effort; it's sure not worth the angst. On the other hand, now that we have this "extended confirmed" user right, I don't see why IPBE can't just be tacked on to that, as it would cover at least half of the accounts that currently have IPBE. Admins have it automatically, and I don't see why solid users can't have it automatically too. Risker (talk) 13:04, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

RE the checkuser parts - not even close to the top of my list of problems with current checkuser practice. The use of mailing lists and Checkusers conducting business with email accounts outside the US or the EU being the top one. The lack of proper independant oversight, pro-active auditing, data/record retention, etc etc. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:31, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

I hear where you are coming from, Only in death, but will point out that none of it is within the control of English Wikipedia, and all of the concerns you identify are more appropriately addressed to the WMF. There is a single checkuser mailing list - the only place where CU data should ever show up, and it's owned and maintained on WMF servers and does not log; the primary use is to introduce new checkusers, and to flag cross-wiki socking. Absent the WMF giving all CUs and stewards a WMF email account (something I suggested years ago, but apparently they are to be used only for staff or board members since the "Wikimedia.org" label implies the WMF is responsible for those accounts), the CUs have to use their own email accounts. Most of them are hosted in the US or EU, but to be honest I have no idea why you think that's better than anywhere else since they're all susceptible to government interference. Who do you think should be auditing? If it's the WMF, again that requires staff, and we have to bear in mind that different standards apply to different projects. (Example: the Orangemoody investigation could never have occurred on Dewiki, due to their community rules.) We had an AUSC, but that mostly turned out to be a stepping stone to permanent advanced permissions/arbcom, and was pretty much ineffective after the first 18 months. What are your issues with data/record retention? I've never held CU data anywhere other than the CU wiki (controlled by the WMF) and include only information about longterm serial sockpuppeters, and I'd expect the same of everyone else, but perhaps that's just me. There are the CU logs, of course, which list what checks were done, but there's no UA data and in many cases no information to link specific accounts to specific IPs. It sounds like you have big-picture, meta issues rather than just a problem with verifying that IPBE is appropriately distributed. Risker (talk) 15:34, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

The short version is: Big picture meta issues are not a huge problem when those issues are unlikely to impact that often. When you have one person checkusering *hundreds* of editors on what is at best, a really weak rationale, those big picture issues become a lot more immediate. RE mailing lists, by the very function of how a mailing list works is that anything submitted to it is distributed to all subscribers. At that point data security depends on their personal settings, archiving, access etc. RE Data Retention, after a member of WMUK with checkuser rights colluded with the Guardian's political desk to state a living politician was guilty of editing their own article and sockpuppeting (at a politically sensitive time) - based on completely stale users - either the retention criteria that allowed that data to be accessible have an extremely lax definition of what constitutes 'serial sockpuppeting' or someone was working off of their own database. Either of which is amazingly problematic in the UK from a private data retention standpoint. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:52, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

I know of the case that you speak, because I was the one who brought the Arbcom case that resulted in removal of CU/OS rights. As I explained at the time, there was *no* archived CU data, not even in the logs, that could have resulted in a CU block. In other words...the system worked, someone did something wrong with the tools, and they lost them. If you are trying to push for greater "professionalism" amongst CU/stewards, then it's preferable not to point to a time CUs themselves both publicly and privately pushed very hard for someone's tools to be removed to demonstrate that there's insufficient monitoring of activities; it's exactly what you'd expect a professionalized group to do. But I can't tell - do you want the WMF to do it, or do you not want CU done at all? If it's the former, it's about $7 million. If it's the latter, then we need about 800 new admins to handle the vandalism and blocking and working out empirically whether accounts are "probably" the same (i.e., SPI without the checkuser). What's the middle ground here? Risker (talk) 16:28, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Well if you did confirm that, it wasnt to me, and I asked publicly (and privately) repeatedly on what basis was a checkuser positive result gained (Given the expectation of the stale-ness of the users, that no data should have been available), what type of data was used, when from etc. And never got a clear answer from anyone. I got a variety of responses from 'no comment' to 'I cant confirm that due to confidentiality blah blah', the former I put down to being generally unwilling, the latter I put down to a mistaken understanding of what is and is not private. The main problem is not that volunteers are doing the work, its that the method by which they are doing it opens them personally up to a variety of data legislation depending on their location, and with the current setup being that there is no real independant oversight/auditing. No one is actually looking pro-actively at why checkusers are performed, and asking the performer 'Why did you do this? What was the basis? Where in policy does it say you can do that? Would a reasonable person have done this?' and then telling them (if a negative result) 'no you really need to not do that, as you personally are liable if it goes arse up'. Even the most *basic* of protection, that of the WMF taking responsibility for the storage of ALL private data and access to it (no a mailing list with every subscriber using their own email provider is not acceptable for this) has not been implemented. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:46, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Unless I missed something, the WMF does not want to carry responsibility for private data. Hence Wikipedia:Access to nonpublic information. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:02, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

The WMF does not want to be responsible for *anything* which could possibly leave them liable to a court. What users seem to forget most of the time is this means they are left holding the bag. This does not prevent them taking some basic data protection practices. Risker wants a middle ground? It should not be a reach to suggest that some of their fundraising could be spent on some basic auditing practices to ensure that editors are not overly exposed to liability for the bad working practices that have grown up around the WMF's hands-off approach. One full-time worker could successfully audit the number of Checkusers ENWP has working a standard 37-40 hour week. Anyone who has worked in auditing knows you can successfully audit on a surprisingly low amount of checks if you get your selection right, even when allowing for random selection. Assuming you wanted to cover the globe, again given current worldwide salaries, it would need remarkably few full-time staff. Hell even if you didnt want to actually employ people it could be accomplished with grants. Hiring someone professional on a 1 year contract just to overhaul the current working practices would be a start. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:20, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I know perfectly well that a lot more than nudge nudge, wink winking goes on, and so do you; they may have a no-logging rule (actually a "no publishing logs to non-members" rule), but it leaks like a sieve. (Does the phrase You should however have instead taken your pen, punched a hole in her windpipe and looked on as her attempts to wave for help got increasingly feeble ring any bells?) At one point it go so blatant we had to set up a dedicated noticeboard to stop the abuse reports flooding ANI. ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't know if *I* have any credibility, and I'm not in -en-admins like all the time, but for what it's worth, I don't think it's like that any more. I don't see anything like back-door dealing when I'm on there, and I'm not the only one who protests when something starts to approach it. I've been told by people with longer tenure than I have that this wasn't always the case, that back in the day there *was* backdoor dealing, but things changed in the interim and -en-admins hasn't been a secret cabal meeting place for years now.

Of course, this doesn't mean that there is no backdoor dealing among admins, and not even that it doesn't happen on IRC. But in my experience, it doesn't happen on -en-admins (anymore). Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 18:18, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

There certainly used to be a serious problem (Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IRC admin channel is well worth a read). I can believe that things have got better now, as Ironholds demonstrated very publicly that what goes on on IRC does leak out, but if it's stopped on IRC that just means that the abuses have shifted to another venue. (Even I get the occasional "please can you block User:foo" email, so it's safe to assume the genuinely block-happy admins certainly get them.) Per my comments near the top of this thread, it beggars belief that Mike wasn't being prompted on IRC, given that he's literally never commented at WP:ERRORS so it's not reasonable to expect us to believe he just happened to be watching it, and that the one factor which is consistent across his radically different claimed version of events is "someone brought it to my attention on IRC". (IMO, any admin proven to be participating in non-public discussions which materially affect either the content of Wikipedia or administrative actions towards Wikipedia editors, other than in circumstances where privacy is demonstrably necessary or where the impact is demonstrably trivial, should be summarily desysopped. Yes, we don't have enough admins, but the solution to that is to promote more decent people, not to consider the crooked ones indispensable. With the existing setup of secret channels, invite-only mailing lists. Using external channels for coordination of activities that, on-wiki, would be inappropriate is also improper is still Wikipedia policy.) ‑ Iridescent 18:57, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh, absolutely, I don't disagree with any of that. I mean, not to trivialize serious real life issues, but what you're describing is the Wikipedia equivalent of a mob hit, and it should be perfectly obvious that that's not okay. All I was saying is that I don't think -en-admins is the nexus for it anymore, and my larger point is that meta:IRC/wikipedia-en-admins/User list isn't a list of made men or anything. obviously, my name is on that list, so my feathers were a little ruffled by that implication, though I don't know whether you really meant it that way or not. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 19:29, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

The list was in response to So that Admin's only IRC channel doesnt exist then? The one that in the past has banned admins if they didnt follow the status quo?. I recognise that a lot of decent people are or have at some point been members of it, but it's not in dispute that (1) it exists, (2) at least in the past, it's been used to coordinate attacks on non-members, and (3) in the past, the channel operators have unilaterally banned people (I have no idea if they still do). I suspect—albeit by definition without evidence—that since Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds made it common knowledge just how leaky that channel is, the really problematic collusion has moved off IRC to the private and semi-private mailing lists. ‑ Iridescent 19:50, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Okay, fair enough, and you're probably right (though I am equally without evidence). Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 19:55, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Best wishes for the holidays...

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Adoration of the Kings (Gerard David, London) is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 10:26, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

And likewise to you. (I've obviously been on Wikipedia too long—my mind immediately parsed that as "David Gerard".) ‑ Iridescent 22:35, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Method for AWB typo fixing

What is your setup for WP:AWB/T? I'd like to start doing it... and I already have AWB. How do you prompt it to go through random pages? Thanks --Jennica✿ / ^talk 21:30, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

My selection isn't actually random; there is a pattern to it of pages linking to or linked from pages on my watchlist, and certain categories in which I have an interest (for instance, if you look at my most recent edits they all have some kind of connection to north-west England), although the way Wikipedia is structured makes it hard to spot patterns from my edit history. Generating a genuine random list in AWB is difficult for non-admins, as the "random pages" feature is intentionally lobotomized for non admins due to the server load it creates. If you want to generate a pseudorandom list of articles which will have a better-than-average chance of containing errors, RecentChanges is a good bet; select Source/Special page/Recent changes (and make sure once the list is generated that you click "filter" and remove duplicates). If you generate the list this way, work from the bottom up—the most-recent changes will be at the top of the list, and what you don't want to do is make an edit to a vandalized page which nobody has had the chance to fix, as your edit will hide the vandalism in the history. (My usual AWB caveat applies; I strongly recommend switching "Auto tag" and "Apply general fixes" off altogether, and bear in mind that AWB has a very high false-positive rate and a very high potential to annoy a lot of people very quickly, so don't make any 'fix' using it which you don't feel you could justify making manually. I estimate that I reject about 75% of the typo fixing regex's proposed changes. It has a particular propensity for trying to insert inappropriate commas and hyphens, which really irritates the authors of the articles if you accidentally click "save" rather than "skip".) ‑ Iridescent 21:58, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh ok.. it generates a fairly long list when I select recent changes [40k or so] and it is all in alphabetical order. I just tried running it on new pages and it skips all of them. Maybe it's a setting I have on? --Jennica✿ / ^talk 22:22, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

It shouldn't generate the list in alphabetical order, but in order of last change—have you got "alphabetize list" checked in the "filter" box? Regarding the skipping, make sure you actually have "Regex typo fixing" checked (and "skip if no typo found"). ‑ Iridescent 22:28, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Yes I had accidentally had the alphabetical option ticked. Thanks for all the help! It's still just skipping a bunch. --Jennica✿ / ^talk 23:15, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

This sounds obvious, but make sure you have "enable regex typo fixing" selected—if you don't have either that, general fixes, or a custom change activated AWB will just skip through everything, not finding anything to change. You may also want to check the "skip options" tab to make sure something inappropriate like "skip if the page contains the letter e" has somehow been selected. ‑ Iridescent 16:26, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Chris Troutman (talk) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year! Spread the Christmas cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas3}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Thank you, and the same to you ‑ Iridescent 09:29, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

RE: A-Team

Enough. ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Iridescent, in the future, please be a bit more polite. In the description I just posted, I said that click on the name John "Hannibal " Smith (Admin) brings me to John's page. I realize we have a user named John "Hannibal" smith, however he's not an admin, therefore his name sh ouldn't show up as (Admin) in recent changes. KoshVorlon 15:14, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

So how is it User:John's fault that the tool you're using is generating faulty links? And don't remove my posts on other editors' talkpages; you're not the Chief Censor of Wikipedia. It's beyond any doubt that you've confused User:John and User:John "Hannibal" Smith, since you ask John why he signs as "John "Hannibal" Smith, and the fault is with you, not John or I. ‑ Iridescent 15:31, 22 December 2016 (UTC) For the benefit of the TPWs, this is the thread in question—if anyone can find the purported attack from me in there, feel free to point it out.

I'm not saying it's his fault, nor implying it in any way. I'm pointing it out, that's all. Once again, I'll point out this tool uses "Recent changes " which is itself a wikipedia tool. Within that tool , it's showing John "Hannibal " Smith with an Admin tag. User John "Hannibal " smith is not an admin, User: John is. I'm not blaming Admin JOhn for that, merely pointing it out, that's all, also, referring to me as "Chief Censor" is very much a PA as I'm not. I will admit, removing a comment directed to me was wrong on my part. KoshVorlon 15:53, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Lupin's tool is not either a part of Wikipedia or of Special:RecentChanges (it uses the Mediawiki API to compare recent page versions), it's extremely buggy, and Lupin retired seven years ago; you shouldn't ever be taking its results seriously. This isn't the first time you've been warned about treating its results as credible, nor is it the first time I've warned you about your habit of trying to censor Wikipedia according to your own idiosyncratic notion of what's appropriate. I remind you that you're currently on a final warning for disruption. ‑ Iridescent 16:10, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Those happened 2012, 2011 and 2015 (in order), so they're old disputes. By the way, per Lupin himself , his tool states it works "By using the RC feed to check a wiki-page's differences against a list of common vandal terms, this tool will detect many of the commonly known acts of online vandalism.". So yes, it does indeed use recent changes. (Not arguing, just pointing out that Lupin himself describes his tool that way). You're right that Lupin hasn't updated the tool since November 21st , 2007, however | the tool's been updated by others up to yesterday. Again, please understand that I'm not complaining , nor blaming Admin John for how his name shows up, just pointing it out to him.

And again, my removing your post was wrong, I admitted that. Notice that I haven't touched it since you restored it? Your edit summary is incorrect, I removed it because it was at the least rude, not that I was trying to cover a mistake, so could you re-word your edit summary ? Thanks! KoshVorlon 17:40, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

---

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

ygm

ygm  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 17:50, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Replied. ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

User:JordanBaumann1211

You might also consider blocking 2602:306:3797:50D0:C1AF:A724:397E:FA39 until he loses interest! JohnInDC (talk) 00:54, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

If he's only vandalising his own editnotice, I'd say let him vent—nobody but him is ever going to read it, so provided he's not saying anything actually libellous then taking any action will just encourage him. ‑ Iridescent 14:57, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Yo Ho Ho

Iryna Harpy (talk) is wishing you Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's Solstice or Christmas, Diwali, Hogmanay, Hanukkah, Lenaia, Festivus or even the Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!

Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{subst:User:WereSpielChequers/Dec16a}} to your friends' talk pages.

Thanks, and yourself ‑ Iridescent 13:22, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Holiday card

Wishing you a Charlie Russell Christmas, Iridescent!

"Here's hoping that the worst end of your trail is behind you That Dad Time be your friend from here to the end And sickness nor sorrow don't find you." —C.M. Russell, Christmas greeting 1926. Montanabw(talk) 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, and a belated merry Christmas to you ‑ Iridescent 18:58, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Merry, merry!

From the icy Canajian north; to you and yours! FWiW Bzuk (talk) 22:00, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, and the same back ‑ Iridescent 22:22, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Whoop-de-doo (Wikidata lists redux)

"An ironic exclamation of approval or pleasure in an event in which the observer is actually bored or unimpressed.": Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of female Egyptologists. Subtitled: how utterly tedious it is to make edits to 'maintain' such lists. I find myself asking again, why did this happen? I suppose the upside is that I am a bit closer now to creating such lists myself. But someone please trout me if I ever put any such list in the mainspace. Properly curated list on the article page. Wikidata-generated list on the talk page (or linked to as an appendix). That is as far as it should go. Though I will admit that some of the pages in Category:Articles based on Wikidata look useful. What do you think of the various paintings ones? Carcharoth (talk) 11:22, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Previous lengthy rant on the topic here, for the benefit of the TPWs. See also this thread.

My opinion of these Wikidata-generated lists is a matter of public record—see Talk:List of women linguists. If Wikidata had procedures in place to ensure both accuracy and consistency, and the will and means to ruthlessly enforce them, this kind of list would be a godsend. Unfortunately, what actually happens is that the bot imports a load of crap from Wikidata, a Wikipedia editor wastes their time fixing it, and then the bot promptly comes along and overwrites it again with the same garbage. Per my many previous comments, Wikidata is great in theory but in practice is an overwhelming net negative, and since they've now been live for four years my patience with the "we're new, you need to give us time to find our feet!" excuse is wearing extremely thin. If I ran the WMF, I'd immediately give it full independence and cut off all funding for it (since the only people who appear actually to benefit from it are the big search engines and a handful of self-proclaimed "making use of community-generated content consultants" and their clients, they can bloody well pay for it if they actually find it so valuable), and make all traffic one-way so Wikidata can still import material from us, but changes made on Wikidata no longer affect en-wikipedia. It's getting ridiculous that a group of enthusiasts small enough to all fit comfortably in a London bus is being allowed to disrupt a top-ten website to the extent that they do just because Sue Gardner was sold a bill of goods a few years ago and her successors don't want to upset their prospective future employers at Google. ‑ Iridescent 18:53, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I took one look at List of women linguists and put it up for AFD. Most of those women aren't linguists to start with, and a spot check of the list indicated that none of them had references for the "linguist" data point on Wikidata, either. Risker (talk) 00:51, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Must not get distracted... But yeah. Horribly ambiguous listing. At least in the Egyptologists, you only got a couple of edge cases. Now, why doesn't the redirect Nina de Garis Davies have a Wikidata item that could be used to include it in a list? (No, I am not expecting an answer to that!) Carcharoth (talk) 02:19, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Aak, I could have told you how that AFD would go, and presumably the Wikidata-at-all-costs faction will just canvass more supporters from Wikidata (sorry, "legitimately notify interested parties at sister projects") as needed to ensure a "no consensus". FWIW, I don't think a list like this should exist even if it were impeccably written and beautifully sourced; there are some gender or ethnicity based lists which make sense, where a field has excluded members of a particular group so their very participation makes them notable, but as far as I'm aware nobody has ever claimed that linguistics or Egyptology were exclusively male professions. At some point, either Arbcom or the WMF are finally going to have to pick up the can they've been kicking down the road since the days of Betacommand and Rich Farmborough, and hold a structured formal vote on what degree of bot editing and automation is acceptable and in what circumstances. I am very glad that particular cowpat is going to land on someone else's plate rather than mine, and I imagine both of you are too. ‑ Iridescent 21:25, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Memorial reviews

Commenting here, as I don't want to distract from the review: I am pleased to see you (and others) reviewing those memorials articles (and even more pleased that they are being worked on). They are arriving at a rate of knots! 1 and 2. It has reminded me: (a) that I wrote this set of criteria nearly seven years ago now; and (b) as a rule if one (i.e. me) doesn't get round to writing on a topic, someone else will one day! Though to be fair, my _target has always been the big ones in France and Belgium (I don't need to be reminded of the state the Menin Gate and Thiepval Memorial articles are in; and the Vimy memorial got there eventually, though with only a smidgin of help from me). These memorials in the UK are some that I wouldn't even have considered starting articles on back in 2010! On style across an article series, I was reminded by this about various summary and overview issues across similar articles. I tend to agree with J3Mrs that repeating the same things across articles gets boring, but I know you are in the "give the full background in each article" camp. @HJ Mitchell: to keep him in the loop. Carcharoth (talk) Most obscure source I've found yet on Lutyens: here. Carcharoth (talk) 03:00, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

As Wikipedia grows, the scope of what warrants a full article expands—if you look at Talk:George Frederic Watts, you'll see a 2008 explanation as to why Hope doesn't warrant a full article. Although, as I just discovered following a recent WP:PROD I declined, one of Wikipedia's earliest articles (August 2001, pageid=4081) is a spectacularly obscure stub.

How much background to include varies by the topic and in particular who the likely readers will be. For an article about an individual Doctor Who episode, most readers will be fans researching that particular episode, and it's reasonable to assume that the reader will know that Daleks and Cybermen are the villains and it doesn't need to be explained each time. For The Sirens and Ulysses, a significant proportion of readers will be people who know no background at all, have ducked into Manchester Art Gallery to get out of the rain or to buy a last-minute gift for granny in the gift shop, and are curious as to why an entire wall is occupied by a garish mural of rotting corpses and ten-foot-tall naked women (TSAU really needs to be seen in the flesh to appreciate just how weird it is, as thumbnail images don't do justice to the sheer size of the thing) and can't be presumed to know anything about William Etty or the impact the rise of uneducated but wealthy industrialists had on the 19th-century art market.

In the case of the war memorials, if anything I'd say they need more background, not less; remember that a very sizeable chunk of readers will be visitors to Ayscoughfee House wandering around the grounds who stumble across it, people whose great-uncle Bert is listed on it and want to know more about it, and visitors to the area looking through a list of visitor attractions or clicking "point of interest" buttons in Google Maps; none of these people can be presumed to know anything at all about Lutyens or other war memorials. (In the case of anything intended for FA, then bear in mind that at TFA an article needs to be comprehensible to people with no previous interest in the topic at all; for readers in India, Nigeria, Singapore and other places where en-wiki's readership is still growing, you can't necessarily even assume the reader will be familiar with the dates of the First World War, or have more than the haziest idea what actually happened.) ‑ Iridescent 13:53, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

I've always appreciated a healthy background section. The best way I've heard it described is that the article should tell you everything you need to know to fully understand the subject without having to follow any links, or in other words, treat it as though the reader has printed out a hard copy of the article. It does mean that you get repetition between similar articles, but I doubt anyone other than the three of us and the wonderful reviewers at MilHist A-class and FAC is reading the articles about Lutyens' war memorials as a series. I certainly hope not, given the slightly random order in which I've been working on them. I started with the relatively low-hanging fruit and I'm working my way up the tree, hoping that I'll have anticipated all the likely stumbling blocks by the time I get to Southampton and Whitehall. I might go on to do Thiepval and some of the other Western Front memorials at some point, though there are many other fascinating memorials just in the UK, and I want to write an overview article about Lutyens and war memorials and write articles for his various memorials in the Commonwealth. And that's before I even start to think about the cemeteries. I was looking for a project to keep me occupied for a little while but I've been working on this on and off for a year and it's nowhere near finished! They're only coming through at a rate of knots now because I bought the pile of books needed to flesh the articles out and then went on a writing spree a little while ago. That and I'm taking a break from the project space. By the way, thank you both for your reviews on Spalding; I will get back to you in the next few days. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 01:45, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

I think the article should tell you everything you need to know to fully understand the subject without having to follow any links, or in other words, treat it as though the reader has printed out a hard copy of the article is a very thoughtful and intelligent position, and whoever originally said that should hitherto and henceforth be bought free pies at every opportunity. (I don't actually subscribe to that position 100%—there are some hyper-niche topics like Interstate 15 in Arizona or Episode 14 (Twin Peaks) where one can reasonably assume that anyone who cares enough to read it will already know the background—but particularly for FAs, one has to assume that a significant number of readers will be in other countries and only have the haziest idea what the First World War was, let alone who Lutyens was.) It occurs to me that for these memorial articles, going into background context in detail is particularly important, as Lutyens is probably better known nowadays in India than in Britain, and I'll guess WW1 isn't a part of the national identity in India to anywhere near the extent it is in Europe, North America or Australia. ‑ Iridescent 18:38, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

I think my favorite comment on a TFA was this one from Hygeberht, one of the more obscure of the many obscure episodes of English episcopal history. It appears that someone out there disagrees that background for a historical subject is a "good thing". (with all apologies for invoking Martha Stewart). Ealdgyth - Talk 22:50, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

It's the middle of the night where I am and I can't be bothered to go hunt for links, but there was a guy went absolutely batshit crazy when Waddesdon Road railway station was TFA over the level of background detail. (By the time I wake up, someone will no doubt have found the link.) ‑ Iridescent 22:54, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Doesn't sound like this, but I remember that as well. Carcharoth (talk) 00:12, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Found it. I dread to think what he'd have made of the war memorials. As you're probably aware, my attitude towards "core v obscure" is virtually diametrically opposite to his; to take the current example, if Wikipedia shut down tomorrow readers would have little trouble finding a biography of Lutyens or a history of the First World War elsewhere, but they'd have great difficulty finding a decent history of Spalding War Memorial. ‑ Iridescent 21:16, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh, yes. That was TCO. I remember reading through that powerpoint presentation and being impressed that someone had actually done that. The depressing thing about reading through old threads like that is how active things were back then (5 years ago) compared to now, or am I looking through rose-tinted glasses? Carcharoth (talk) 22:20, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

I think rose-colored glasses to some extent. There are still hotbeds of discussion around the wiki, just not on FAC lately. Ealdgyth - Talk 22:23, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah—the discussion has moved away from the traditional venues like ANI and the formal processes like FAC and the various Arbcom-related pages, and are fragmented to a much greater extent across individual article and editor talkpages, but they're still going on. (The fact that this talkpage grows by about 150kb per month is itself a sign of something.) As Somey used to be fond of saying, the primary focus on Wikipedia has gradually transitioned from addition to maintenance, and with that cultural shift the venues have shifted. (Another cultural change which AFAIK hasn't been commented upon to any great extent, is the fact that most of the regulars now are at least vaguely aware of who each other are. Coupled with the slow death of the "Wikiproject" concept—even former big beasts like WP:LONDON are now dead in the water—that also shifts the venues. If I want to discuss a painting article, I'd be much more likely to post on Johnbod's or Victoriaearle's talkpage, on the assumption that anyone whose opinions are worth listening to will see it there, than I'd post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Visual arts in the certain knowledge that I'd be attracting every crank and weirdo to the article in question; likewise if I had a query about infoboxes I'd ask RexxS rather than the infobox project, if I had a query about the administration of Wikipedia I'd ask NYB or Risker rather than wade into the ANI or Village Pump cesspits…) ‑ Iridescent 16:36, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Pervertations

Permutations of Iridescent include Cretinised; Iced Nitres; Recited Sin; Dicier Nest; Cited Rinse; Ed inciters; and Cretins Die; and (my favorite) Dire insect. If you meditate, you might like I is centered. [1] EEng 11:47, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Great to see that Cretinised is top of the list. Satan Vermin 123 (talk) 12:17, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Happened to be at the top of the list (it's apparently the only result that's a single word). Such exercises make me regret not having a longer name. However, Editor EEng --> I tender ego. Or I rent geode. EEng 16:31, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Imagine the fun the rest of us could have if you used your real names (not that anyone knows them, of course). Martinevans123 (talk) 16:39, 17 December 2016 (UTC).

I did for a short period circa 2007 have a randomising script that made my signature appear as a different anagram each time, until I realised that having a signature which doesn't include your username (or at least the first part of it) was a mildly disruptive thing to do, as it makes it impossible for anyone not in on the code to ctrl-f search for your contributions on a given talkpage and doesn't actually bring any benefits to justify the mild disruption. Are you listening, Muffled Pocketed? ‑ Iridescent 16:53, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Deaf as a post mate... O Fortuna!   ^{...Imperatrix mundi.} 14:18, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Can't you get indeffed for that kind of thing, these days?? Martinevans123 (talk) 16:56, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah—it means signing with a subst-ed template, which is banned nowadays (for good reason). Standards were lower back then, in so many ways. ‑ Iridescent 16:58, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Technically, it's signing with an unsubsted template that is banned. Substed templates are OK but very dicey to use. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:40, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, but anyone doing it is an idiot, since there's no legitimate reason to do it and it's an open invitation to vandals. When I see something like this, I'm always sorely tempted to change it to "I am an idiot who left his signature open to every passing vandal". ‑ Iridescent 17:56, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

• "Arbitration committee" is "Tame moronic tit-baiter". Just saying. ‑ Iridescent 22:41, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Iri. This may be your best ever contribution to Wikipedia. I shall treasure it always. Sane Varmint 123 (talk) 22:52, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Gosh, it's also Tame, trite, a bit moronic and Motto: bait, recriminate and Motto: recriminate a bit. When I add these to The Museums, do you want me to credit you, or not? EEng 23:34, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Feel free to credit or not as you see fit; I won't be offended either way. (Astonishingly, given that Wikipedia has spent the last decade under constant onslaught from every crank mystic imaginable—I just spent a chunk of my life I'll never get back arguing with a guy who was unhappy that Wikipedia didn't give due weight to the theory that stars are actually giant light bulbs—Themuru, the well-documented belief that anagrams reveal the true nature of their subject, is still a redlink.) ‑ Iridescent 21:37, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Happy Hogmanay!

		Happy Hogmanay!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Hogmanay. May the year ahead be productive and harmonious. --John (talk) 21:17, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, and to you. (If the old saying that the first day of the new year sets the tone for the rest of it is true, I don't hold out any great hopes for this year, as I spent the first twelve hours of it frantically trying to coax an entire network of crashed computers which shut down on the stroke of midnight back to life, but let's give it a chance.) ‑ Iridescent 17:34, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Iridescent!

Happy New Year!

Iridescent,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Donner60 (talk) 06:49, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

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

Thanks, and the same to you ‑ Iridescent 17:34, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Dead links and autonomous bots

Really a rant about websites that move and don't leave permanent URLs or redirects behind. Government ones as well (well, Canadian government). The story starts here, continues here and has so far ended up here, where I am told that the bot running round doing archiving of dead links at a very slightly faster rate than I am fixing them is 'autonomous' and can't be talked to or it will get an attack of the vapours and fall over. I should still eventually check all the links anyway, and having the template set up will help if the link changes again. I do sometimes think I should pay more attention to archiving/retrieving links that have gone dead on articles that I've worked on. What are your views on that? Carcharoth (talk) 16:58, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Personally, I'd say that any situation where a bot of any kind is operating outside the control of its operator to the extent that the operator is explicitly saying The bot is fully autonomous, and I do not control where it chooses to run is grounds for instant indefblocking of the bot, but that isn't my decision to make. As you may already be aware, uncontrolled bots are something of a sensitive topic right now, so unless the bot is actually doing something wrong, rather than just working in the wrong areas, I'd say just leave it alone. I personally don't feel broken links are an issue worth wasting time over, provided the old link and the access date are kept in situ, so that anyone who really needs to see the exact wording at the time can fish it out of an archiving site. We had something similar with every historic building in Wales, when Cadw thoughtfully shut down their old website without notice. ‑ Iridescent 17:11, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. Having such links wrapped in a template does make it easy to make such changes providing the underlying ID is still used in the URL in a way that can be put in such a template. Carcharoth (talk) 17:24, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

For some reason I can't figure out, the FAQ has two questions not answered, including "The Bot left a message on the talk page saying the revised links need to be "checked". What does this mean?". The answer provided is "???". Which is not very useful. I'll have to ask the normal way instead. Carcharoth (talk) 23:28, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

That bot leaves messages on talk pages of articles where it adds archived links. The messages have a parameter that allows for editors checking the additions to indicate whether or not the archived links work properly. When filled out, the checked= parameter leaves either a green check mark (type true) or a red X (type failed). The second question looks like it has to do with bot edits to articles that don't use citation templates for references, where it adds a template with the Internet Archive link at the end of the cite. Giants2008 (Talk) 21:28, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I got that much by reading the messages on the talk pages of the articles I've been working on. My view so far is that no-one reading that bot-generated message is likely to actually do these checks. If you know how to fix a dead link, you will just do it anyway. If you don't, you almost certainly won't understand what the bot is trying to tell you. It comes across as horribly bureaucratic, which is ironic as I've been an advocate in the past for people ticking boxes to indicate that they carried out a silent check without noting anywhere that they carried out that check. But saying that you've carried out a check needs to take at least as little time as carrying out the check itself, otherwise it just eats up time. All but one of these edits were me either blanking a dealt-with bot notice or adding a note that I'd dealt with it, copying a standard note I drafted for that purpose. I won't be doing any more of that (unless the bot laps me again on its route around Wikipedia), as there are no more bot-changes to the links I was tidying up and checking, but I wasn't about to fill in some bot-generated form that is proliferating across talk pages, though some people do. Anyway, there is no indication on the article itself whether the link has been checked by a human or not, which should be the real point. I'm not at all against dead links being identified and archived and fixed - but the way human editors are being asked to interact with the bot feels a bit prescriptive. Carcharoth (talk) 01:54, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Arbitration Case opened

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Magioladitis.

Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Magioladitis/Evidence. Please add your evidence by January 17, 2017, which is when the evidence phase closes.

You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Magioladitis/Workshop.

For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.

If you no longer wish to receive case notifications for this case you can remove yourself from the notifications list here.

For the Arbitration Committee, Amortias (T)(C) 22:52, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

I see that the request I made to not be notified has been heeded. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:02, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

Its basically because the notification list was created 2 mins before the first notification which provides the link for you to remove yourself from the list. A couple of solutions - clerks create the list at the start of the case and update it as people comment - editors can remove themselves at any point. Or they just create the list, stick a warning at the top of the statement page and in the 'add your statement' editnotice, then its up to individual editors to add themselves to the notification list. That way I suspect you would get wailing and gnashing of teeth for people who forget to add themselves and will complain about not being notified... Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:13, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

I agree with OID here; the sensible course for any clerk in these circumstances is to notify every single person initially, since the problem of mildly annoying someone who has to make two mouse-clicks and three keystrokes to remove the offending item from their talkpage, is vastly outweighed by the potential hassle of someone making a legitimate complaint that they weren't notified and demanding that the whole case be re-run. (My opinion on the existence of "arbitration clerks" is also on record; every other group on Wikipedia gets along fine without its own private army.) ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Ayscoughfee House

Per your Spalding Memorial review, I live in nearby Stamford and have often visited Ayscoughfee House and indeed the Lutyens monument. The common pronunciation generally approximates to "esscoffee", and I agree that some guide in the lead would be useful. It's a particularly horrible word for non-native speakers to attempt. Best seasonal wishes. Brianboulton (talk) 16:47, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Glad to see you back! I'm aware of the historical reasons for so many British place-names having totally counterintuitive pronunciation, but it still occasionally surprises me just how confusing some of them are. (It was only when Hellingly Hospital Railway was selected to be recorded for Spoken Wikipedia that I discovered "Hellingly" isn't pronounced the way every single reader in the world would assume it's pronounced, and it still grates on me that the pre-recorded station announcements on the London Underground pronounce "Plaistow" and "Chesham" as they're spelled.) ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

I'll bite. How are they pronounced? I know Plaistow and Cheshem (I think), but Hellingly is a new one on me. I did find some discussion at Talk:Cuckfield. Carcharoth (talk) 01:33, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

"Plaah-stow", "Chessum" (for some reason the same announcers never have a problem with "Cheshunt"), and "Helen-glie" to rhyme with fly or sty. If you click the little speaker icon next to the FA star, you can hear a version of it read by our very own Hassocks5489. ‑ Iridescent 13:22, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Indeed – in Sussex we have the the phrase "Three lies, but all are true: Hellingly, Chiddingly and Ardingly"! But East Hoathly and West Hoathly (which are nowhere near each other, oddly) are pronounced how you would expect...! Incidentally we have a Plaistow in Sussex as well but it's pronounced "Plass-to"... Best regards to all, Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 18:18, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

• Heather and Belvoir, Stoughton, Houghton and Coton, South Croxton. Sinope. Agar Nook. Lounge. I have no idea how "Lounge" is pronounced, nor why there was a "Lounge Disposal Point" there. It's near Lount. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 19:14, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

• At least with Chesham there are clues in the location in the Chess Valley of the River Chess, and the spelling of the Chessmount area. No idea why the town spelling went from (presumably) Chessham to Chesham. Maybe it was the other way round, and 'Ches' became 'Chess'? The river name arose from Chesham, apparently (the river had an older name). And then there are the names: [2]. Carcharoth (talk) 11:30, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

• The locals still pronounce it "Chessum"—it's London Transport who announce it as "Chesh-um". It's almost certainly because of its proximity to Amersham, which is pronounced as you'd expect. "Chess" is definitely the original pronunciation—the name in Domesday is "Cestreham". (While Chesham is in fairly poor repair, St Mary's Church, Chesham and Chesham branch contain a very good potted history of the pre-industrial and post-industrial history of the town respectively, if I do say so myself.) ‑ Iridescent 18:28, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

And of course Domesday is pronounced "Luxury yacht"... EEng 19:16, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

• Brian I had no idea you were in that part of the world. I don't suppose you might be able to take a few photos of the Spalding memorial for me would you? As you can see, the article relies on a handful of very similar (and mediocre) Geograph photos, which are a lot better than nothing but don't convey much detail. I live at the opposite end of the country; I hope to get there sometime in the new year (I intend to get to all of Lutyens' war memorials at some point, but they're scattered around the country) but I ca't guarantee it. It would be worth a pint if or when I do eventually make it. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 02:04, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

• It might be worth asking at Wikipedia:WikiProject Lincolnshire. The project looks fairly moribund, but someone might still be watching it. ‑ Iridescent 18:28, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

• Per HJ Mitchell - sorry for the delay in responding. I am unfortunately immobile at present so unable to get to Spalding. If you do get to Ayscoughfee Hall, be sure to admire the topiary - it's magnificent. Brianboulton (talk) 10:48, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

• We do have Category:Wikipedians in Lincolnshire, who may be worth pestering individually. One name on that list in particular strikes me as someone who's most definitely still very active (some would say considerably too active) on Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 20:26, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

• That does work sometimes. I once asked for a picture from Canada, and someone was fortunately in the right location (the user provided this image). I tried the same in Amiens, but ended up going there myself (visiting Amiens Cathedral on the way to somewhere else). Sometimes it is more fun to go yourself if you can, as you will know what to look for and may spot other things as well. But some places are just too far to go... (I currently draw the line at anything that is more than a day's journey there and back). Carcharoth (talk) 08:58, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Question

RE [3] But what if I do like talking about doe snot? :P Hasteur (talk) 01:41, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Unlike some of the save-save-save button-mashers and the people who run unauthorised bots on their main account[4][5][6][7], I always check the diff for context—as I mentioned somewhere on that workshop page, I always reject well over 50% of its proposed changes. Your doe snot and The The albums are all safe. ‑ Iridescent 07:25, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Natalia Ghilascu

Could I ask you to please delete this and protect it from recreation? One deletion via AfD and one speedy deletion for recreation don't seem to have sent a message. - Biruitorul ^Talk 00:03, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

This version following Nerd1a4i's changes is so radically different from the version I deleted that I'd say WP:G4 shouldn't apply and the AFD should be allowed to run its course. The wiki won't come to an end if we host a slightly promotional article for a week. ‑ Iridescent 07:30, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Happy Saturnalia!

		Happy Saturnalia
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and troll-free. Ealdgyth - Talk 01:39, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

And to you—is it that time of the year already? Feel free to retract it, given that I've just deflated the mood of mutual backslapping at WP:RFAP somewhat. (If we're following Wikipedia's usual naming convention, shouldn't be RFAP be Requests for Fapping?) ‑ Iridescent 17:01, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, it's that time of year ... again. And I'm not worried about you "deflating" the mood at RFAP - I'm genuinely interested in all opinions. I think I could avoid some of the woodwork-leaving-people that came out at MBW's RfA - at the very least RO is still blocked, I believe? I'm sure I'd get plenty of no votes from Bulgarians though... and some from EC's very favoritist people. I will admit that helping out at DYK was a thought ... as well as possibly opining at AE with what I hope is a voice of sanity at times. We'll see how things go. Ealdgyth - Talk 21:06, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

If nothing else, I imagine it would save the checkusers a bit of work by flushing all the current batch of Mattisserie out of the undergrowth. If you do run, get someone from QAI (I'd suggest Wehwalt if he's willing) to be one of the nominators, which will at least prevent the infoboxers turning up en masse to oppose and tanking it from the outset. ‑ Iridescent 21:14, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

I don't really think I've been that "anti-infobox", have I? I might get a bit more from the MOS-field - I've been a bit vocal occasionally about proper names. What say you, Wehwalt, you up for a co-nom? And I really do have to run and get some pellets for the wood stove before we see Rogue One. At least the ponies are all staying warm in our lovely -14F wind chills....Ealdgyth - Talk 21:19, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

It's always been about tribalism, rather than about what people actually feel about IBs—as Rexx has pointed out previously, my opinion on the things is actually more hardline pro-box than Andy Mabbett, yet I get filed among the antis. Because you're on speaking terms with Tim, Cassianto etc and don't take the opportunity to denounce them as anti-metadata luddites, the knee-jerk position will be oppose; likewise, because you're on speaking terms with the Dark Lord Corbett, assume the GGTF will be rooting through every comment you've ever made, ever, frantically trying to find pretexts to oppose. This all sounds horribly cynical, but it's a reflection of RFA being a fundamentally dysfunctional process in which any given vocal clique can derail any candidacy. (If you're hunting for nominators, Casliber and Slimvirgin might also be good choices; they've both generally respected by widely different groups, and haven't been particularly active at RFA so don't suffer the "well, they'd nominate anything that moves" reputation which certain RFA regulars have acquired.) ‑ Iridescent 21:32, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Let me know if you go for it, Ealdgyth. My participation at this time of the year is dependent on whether or not anything goes kaplooie at work. Risker (talk) 21:43, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

• I would be most happy to be one of the nominators.--Wehwalt (talk) 21:57, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
• I would too. I'm on good terms with nobody, so a nomination by me will carry no faction's taint. EEng 22:36, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
  • I avoid RfA like the black plague, but would drop in to +S Ealdgyth.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 00:04, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

I am an utter failure at even smoking out Mattisserie... I have to admit I'm a bit amazed that I haven't had anything from that department... I fully expected some. Ealdgyth - Talk 23:27, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm shocked as well; per my comments at the poll, I'd at the very least have expected Mattisse's socks, the IRC clique and Chillum's cronies to turn up, and if you'd asked me to predict the numbers I'd have said "assume about 40 opposes, so the issue will be whether you get the 120 supports necessary to cancel that out". (See Montanabw's RFA, or even Malleus's.) My only tentative hypothesis—since other RFAs are drawing opposes, the "Wikipedia is now a kinder gentler place" theory doesn't stand up—is that because so many people piled in to support right at the start (this is what it looked like one hour after going live, this is what it looked like 24 hours after going live), Mattisse and ItsLassieTime decided they wouldn't be able to sway the outcome so it wasn't worthwhile blowing their current sockfarms' cover, while the Civility Patrol didn't want to damage their credibility fighting a cause they couldn't win. (Wikipedia shouldn't operate on the principle that the 'winner' of debates is whoever does the best job at intimidating the opposition into silence, but the reality is that sometimes it does.) ‑ Iridescent 10:37, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

What I find interesting is the sheer numbers of people who don't normally vote coming out the woodwork to take part. If someone had time, they could (at the end) see how many people voted here who are rare to low-level RFA participants. At 208 with three full days to go, this one is already going to be in Wikipedia:Times that 200 Wikipedians supported an RFX. To put that into perspective, in the 2015 ArbCom elections, you got several candidates making it into Wikipedia:Times that 1000 or more Wikipedians supported something, but only Newyorkbrad broke the 1000-vote barrier this time round in the December 2016 elections. Carcharoth (talk) 12:28, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

The 2015 elections are a statistical anomaly—Kevin's cack-handed attempt to rig the vote meant that (literally) thousands of people who'd never previously shown the slightest interest in Arbcom elections were canvassed to take part. It's also worth bearing in mind that the winning margins in the 2016 contest are artificially inflated—because there were so few candidates running, and one candidate in particular whom I suspect a lot of voters were determined to prevent winning, I'd be fairly confident in asserting that many voters who'd normally only have voted (yes or no) on a couple of the candidates intentionally supported seven candidates to minimise the chance of that particular candidate winning. ‑ Iridescent 16:35, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

If you mean the vote notifications on talk pages, that happened in 2016 as well. See here. See also here. Rather depressingly, the election feedback page is completely lacking any feedback. Carcharoth (talk) 17:41, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Voter participation, 2015. The green dots mark the times of Kevin's mass-mailings

Nope—this year the mailshot was quite tightly _targeted to only go to people who were currently active, whereas in 2015 they literally spammed everyone they could think of (well over 100,000 accounts)—the impact of the spammings is very noticeable on the voting log (see right), as is the fact that the median edit count of voters drops precipitately at the time of each of the mailshots, implying that the campaign was jolting the socks and sleepers out of their slumbers rather than its purported purpose of notifying active members of the Wikipedia community who hadn't previously taken an interest in the elections. 273 of the voters were editors who hadn't edited for at least three months at the time of the vote, which is easily enough to have a significant impact, even though it turned out not to have the impact Kevin wanted. ‑ Iridescent 18:01, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Ah OK. To really compare, surely a similar graph is needed for this year's elections? It is possible the more _targeted mailing this year had a similar but lesser effect. Wouldn't most of the 100,000+ accounts in 2015 have been inactive? I probably need to refresh my memory about the exact criteria used. Carcharoth (talk) 18:19, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Number of votes (blue) and median edit count of voters (red) over the time of the mass mailings

Paging Opabinia regalis regarding this years figures. Yes, most of the 100,000+ accounts in 2015 have been inactive is entirely the point—Kevin & co's grand scheme was to poke enough inactive editors out of retirement to get his Civility First slate elected, and then use Arbcom as a bully pulpit to launch a purge. It's easiest to see on this version of the chart that those editors voting in the wake of the mass-mailings are virtually inactive compared to those voting at other times. ‑ Iridescent 18:25, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

This may be breaching something or other to say, but I'll also point out that you're an active member of a website which counts among its prominent members a professional statistician with an obsessive interest in Wikipedia. If you asked for statistical analysis of Wikipedia trends, I suspect your main problem would be getting him to shut up once you'd seen enough. ‑ Iridescent 18:32, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Number of votes (blue) and median edit count of voters (red) over the time of the mass mailings (2016)

Here's this year's equivalent - well, edit counts are from just now, not from right after the election, but anyway.... No little green message dots because the messages all went out right at the beginning this year. I meant to do this when voting wrapped up, but this year's election wasn't quite as exciting ;) You still see the lower-edit-count contingent right at the beginning when the messages went out, though. Opabinia regalis (talk) 22:15, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

It looks very like Drmies 5 years ago - friendly likeable editor with massive strengths in content and a clean sheet apart from the inevitable rows on article talk pages. Johnbod (talk) 15:32, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

I got supports from Andrew D, BMK, Carrite, Kraxler and Eric in my RfA and apparently that's unusual. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:19, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Arbitrary section break

So - not a single Matisse sock uncovered. I failed to garner any opposes that I could disagree with. I did get one MOS-regular neutral at the very end but... I'm a failure as a drama magnet. Seriously, thanks to all. And immediately after I got the bit I hit "block" instead of "contribs" on my watchlist ... luckily, block is not immediate and has to be confirmed. Going to take a while to get used to having a third option after editor names on my watchlist... Ealdgyth - Talk 17:26, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Do you have any time for a review at FAC?

Hi, I have an article (very) slowly going through the FAC process: Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Henry Morgan/archive1. It relates to the 17th century privateer and politician Sir Henry Morgan. If you have any time to have a look, I would be very grateful, but I understand if your time is too limited to take part. All the best, The Bounder (talk) 12:25, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, can do although it may not be for a few days. If you haven't already asked, you want Parrot of Doom and Wehwalt for this one as well, as they're the authors of the two most comparable existing FAs (Blackbeard and Woodes Rogers). I lose track of who's on speaking terms with whom, but Eric Corbett might be interested in this one as well, if you can poke him out of retirement. At a very quick glance, the black picture Exquemelin portrayed of Morgan has affected history's view of the man in the lead introduces ambiguity right from the start, as it isn't clear if "the man" in question is Exquemelin or Morgan. I can also say right away that describing someone from Monmouthshire in this period as "Welsh" without at least an explanatory footnote regarding the ambiguous status of 17th-century Monmouthshire is an edit-war waiting to happen. ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

TPS - the Monmouthshirians barely consider themselves Welsh now... Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:51, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Depends where you go—Monmouth, Chepstow and Abergavenny see themselves as English market towns which have had the misfortune to be occupied by the barbarian hordes from beyond the dyke, but Newport and Caerphilly are as Welsh as anywhere. ‑ Iridescent 17:00, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

I live in Cardiff ;) The overall view of the 'Welsh' parts of Monmouthshire is that are in fact, in Gwent, not Monmouthshire - despite them being two very different types of 'county'. Its funny, the Welsh in Monmouthshire dont want to be there, and the English in Monmouthshire dont want it to be in Wales. A boundary re-drawing today would make a lot of people very happy. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:06, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

See also Pembrokeshire, Shetland, Berwick, Oswestry, Saddleworth and even the nascent London independence movement—if the UK ever does break up, whichever bright spark thought twinning Cardiff with Luhansk* was a good idea might one day be seen as some kind of soothsayer. ‑ Iridescent 17:18, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
*Yes, really.

• Thanks for the advice. I've asked Wehwalt and he will be able to assist once he has got a couple of others out of the way; Parrot of Doom was hugely helpful in the peer review (and the main reason it is in any shape to go through FAC), so I don't want to disturb him any further given the the work he has already done. I'll address the two points ("the man" and the Welshness of Monmouthshire) shortly. Thanks again and all the best, The Bounder (talk) 23:36, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

I'll try to look in tomorrow. But after I take care of the Hungarian king first ... Ealdgyth - Talk 23:49, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

(belatedly) ✓ Done. My comments look worse than they are. ‑ Iridescent 23:17, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Misclick

Mobile mis-click, apologies. Kuru (talk) 22:07, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

No worries, it happens—I doubt anyone will lose sleep over a misplaced comma. ‑ Iridescent 22:09, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Rammstein article

Why you've deleted the "Herzeleid tour"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.170.222.62 (talk) 21:36, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

For the reasons that you're perfectly well aware of, since you must have read the deletion log entry to see that it was me who deleted it. It consisted in its entirety of a setlist, a list of tour dates and a completely unreferenced block of text. Wikipedia is not Wikia; we only host material on demonstrably noteworthy topics sourced to independent reliable sources and not general fan commentary or indiscriminate lists of information. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Concert Tours#Notability for an explanation of the (relatively rare) occasions when we can host an article on an individual concert tour. ‑ Iridescent 21:45, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

I disagree completely, otherwise you have to also delete the other tour, so the article on an important band regresses further information ... Lots of bands have the tour article that are in the same situation (if not worse) of Herzeled tour but were not deleted. I kindly ask that the page is restored, which gives no discomfort. Sorry for my english. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.170.222.62 (talk) 22:22, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

I'll treat this as a contested deletion and restore it and nominate it for an AFD debate to get broader input. ‑ Iridescent 22:24, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.170.222.62 (talk) 22:31, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

If you have a spare 5 mins

Could you take a look at (and close) the RFC at the top of Talk:Michael_Greger? Its completely stale, I was attempting to clear out some of the older RFC's transcluded to AN and archived it since it was stale and didnt need a formal closure (being an obvious result), but everyones favorite RFC gnome opened it up again. As far as I am aware you have no vested interest in the topic area. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:51, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm probably not the best placed to close that one. By headcount, there's a fairly strong "no" consensus (e.g. that the paragraph is question should stay), but reading the article as a complete outsider with no interest in the topic, that paragraph jumps out at me as inappropriate—why should the opinions of Retired physician Harriet A. Hall, who is known for applying critical thinking to health claims warrant an entire paragraph on somebody else's BLP, and if her opinions do reflect mainstream thinking why can the article's writers not find a more reliable source to make the same claims? I wouldn't feel comfortable closing this as "no" in these circumstances since I think it would be the wrong result, and if I closed it as "yes" there'd be an angry mob squawking about "supervotes" and demanding my head (I can see some of Wikipedia's most vocal pitchfork-wavers lined up in the "no" camp). If one of my TPWs doesn't rise to the challenge, you could try pestering Floquenbeam or Sandstein. (Besides, I have an aesthetic objection to making any decision that would involve ruling in favour of keeping a 91-word sentence anywhere on Wikipedia.) ‑ Iridescent 11:21, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately its the state of affairs due to Pseudoscience coverage in the media. Pseudo/fringe science is covered extensively. Because its obviously pseudoscience its rarely actively refuted because actual scientists have better things to do (you dont often get funding to investigate obviously bogus claims). So we are left with WP:Parity. Its not the perfect solution, but without it there would be a lot of pseudo/fringe articles that have zero criticism/refutation. Re Harriet Hall specifically - the reason 'why' her is to satisfy Parity. She has opined on it, she qualifies as an expert opinion and is used as such. If there were other people with the same level of status and who had taken the time to do a write-up on it, they would probably be used to. In short 'Hall was available'. The wording is clunky, but thats what happens when you get people fighting over how to say 'this is rubbish, here's a doctor to tell you why its rubbish'. (To be honest I assumed you were fairly pitchfork immune, or at least, if anyone prodded you they better have a flame-proof jacket on.) Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:35, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm fairly pitchfork immune—it's why I'm one of the ones who ends up closing trainwrecks like Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 126 #RfC: Religion in biographical infoboxes—but it doesn't mean I particularly want to spend the next month being hauled in front of a self-appointed kangaroo court, which looking at the names involved will almost certainly happen if anyone closes it with any result other than "no". The meta-issue here is ultimately "if I'm sure something is true but because the topic is of such marginal interest no reliable source has ever said it, under what circumstances is it appropriate to use questionable sources?", which is an industrial-grade can of worms, and has the potential to set a precedent for every decent-sized WP:FRINGE group to demand we include quotes from their spokespeople on their pet topics. (I'm sure the Scientologists could happily provide an eminently-qualified spokesperson to explain why any given author is incorrect because they fail to take the space aliens into account.) I don't have any particular doubt that whoever closes this will close it as "no", but I don't feel I should be the one to do it. ‑ Iridescent 12:01, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

The lunatic fringe already try that, it doesnt get anywhere. Fortunately when fringe/pseudoscience gets to 'decent size' there are usually much better sources refuting them so we dont have to rely on blogs or independant opinions. Eg acupuncture or homeopathy. Even 'Rolfing' has some decent criticism sources. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:39, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

ODNB gender stats (redux)

Spotted an interesting snippet here about the gender (and other attributes) distribution in the latest update to the ODNB:

"She [Thatcher] is one of 59 new women to grace the biography pages, making up just a quarter of the total additions. Only five entries are from black or minority ethnic backgrounds."

Some other interesting stuff there as well. Made me wonder what the other long entries might be in the coming years, but could only think of (eventually) Queen Elizabeth II. Carcharoth (talk) 01:15, 14 January 2017 (UTC) For the benefit of anyone else reading this, the preamble was here.

Paul McCartney, Tony Blair, Francis Crick, Ian Paisley (if he wasn't added in the last update) would be the obvious forthcoming very long entries. (I don't envy whoever has to write the Queen's; anything less than eight pages will be taken as an insult, but her total list of achievements could be summarised as "smiled and waved".) The only current woman I can think of who'll get a long entry—unless Theresa May discovers a hidden reserve of ept somewhere—is Nicola Sturgeon, although Hilary Mantel and J. K. Rowling will probably get decent-size entries. (Although if things continue on their current course, May has a decent shot at a permanent spot in history as the last leader of the UK.) ‑ Iridescent 01:30, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

(adding) Only five entries are from black or minority ethnic backgrounds is totally unsurprising, since you have to be dead to qualify and mass immigration didn't start until the 1940s; since the initial wave of immigrants were mainly young and poor, it's not until the 1960s that black and Asian people start making their mark and most of that generation are still alive. ‑ Iridescent 01:32, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Crick already has a long ODNB entry.[8] Paisley has not been dead long enough, and the other two are not dead enough - ODNB sensibly waits for a few years (minimum of four years, if I remember correctly) for the dust to settle and a little perspective to emerge before publishing a biography of a recently deceased person, which is why Thatcher's biography (died 2013) has just been released. I'd expect to see Paisley's (died 2014) next year. The ODNB is making good efforts to improve gender and ethnic diversity. Some examples.[9] [10] It is not just limited to British citizens, of course: "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century." For example, [11] [12] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.75.197.90 (talk) 09:59, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Makes me wonder who those five entries are. The full list is here. I can only work out McDonald Bailey, Pratap Chitnis, Baron Chitnis. And there are some on there we don't have articles on, which may or may not be surprising: John Basil Zochonis (I think George Zochonis was his father) and Arline Usden to name just two. Carcharoth (talk) 02:07, 14 January 2017 (UTC) @Charles Matthews: as I know he has a long-standing interest in the DNB and ODNB. Carcharoth (talk) 02:10, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Paul Scoon is one of them, at least. (Stretching the definition of "British" to the limit, too.) ‑ Iridescent 02:11, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

And I'm not sure how flattered Ruairí Ó Brádaigh would be at being included as a part of British history. ‑ Iridescent 02:17, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed those too. It is interesting they included Bert Trautmann. Since they also included Boris Berezovsky, I suppose Roman Abramovich will also feature when the time comes. Globalisation writ large. Carcharoth (talk) 02:20, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Trautmann at least lived and worked in Manchester so is "British" culturally whatever his passport said. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh loathed Britain and everything it stood for, never lived or worked in the country and is included because he organised an anti-British campaign from abroad—one could make just as good a case for saying Napoleon Bonaparte is "British" by their "shaped British history and culture" definition.

IMO, the ODNB's "more women, whoever they are" drive is starting to look faintly ridiculous. Going back to one of my pet subjects, I note that Alice Ayres has now made it in as well, despite there literally being no biography to write. You might find this essay in the ODNB about the 19th-century emergence of the cult of self-sacrifice and memorialisation interesting, incidentally, although I'm not sure I entirely agree with its thesis. (IMO its author fails to appreciate that 19th and 20th century memorials aren't solely the product of 19th-century aestheticism and social activism but are an artefact of more public money to spend on them, increasing literacy making Great Deeds more widely known, the changing nature of war meaning more people being personally affected by conflict, and the rising population and increased mechanisation creating an exponential rise in the number of hazards from which people could be rescued in the first place.) ‑ Iridescent 14:24, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Red disambiguation

Hi Wikipedia administrator Iridescent, this is about about the Red (disambiguation) page, what should go under people red and nickname red, should it be the exact same thing? Please check out my recent edits and see if there are correctly done, and if they are not done right please explain the correct format.

@Davidgoodheart: —Preceding undated comment added 09:24, 15 January 2017‎

I don't quite understand the question, or why you're asking me (and please don't go around addressing people as "Wikipedia administrator"—this is a non-hierarchical project and "administrator" here is just a specialist tool which doesn't give the user any special status). There's nothing obvious in your recent contributions I can see that relates to this issue so I don't really see what you're asking me to do. To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of Red Rum nobody has ever had "Red" as their first name—every example listed at Red (disambiguation) is a nickname and Red (given name) is just a redirect to Red (nickname), so I don't quite understand what the issue is. If you have an query regarding a specific aspect of Wikipedia editing, Wikipedia:Teahouse (for beginners' questions and step-by-step guidance on Wikipedia basics), Wikipedia:Help desk (for more substantive queries about Wikipedia practices) or the five subsections of Wikipedia:Village pump (for higher-level discussion of bugs in the software or proposed changes to policy or practice) are much better places to ask than just asking random editors on their user talk pages. ‑ Iridescent 16:33, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

Pars Aqua Village

I'm pretty sure tourist attractions are places, which are not A7 eligible? Adam9007 (talk) 16:41, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Is it also a company? O Fortuna!^{...Imperatrix mundi.} 16:52, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

If it is, I can't see where in Category:Organizations it is. Adam9007 (talk) 17:01, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Google Cache version of the article is still available. This was a Tehran Water Park. So a business. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:02, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Water Parks are classed under Tourist Attractions. Adam9007 (talk) 17:06, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Which would still be a business. Being a commercial enterprise doesnt exempt you from A7 just because you can physically walk there. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:32, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Adambro9007, you've been warned more than often enough about making up your own notability criteria and then demanding the rest of Wikipedia complies with them, and our patience is not infinite. Where on earth have you got the idea that being a tourist attraction prevents something being a business? If you want to complain about this absolutely clear-cut WP:A7 deletion, I'm sure you know the way to both ANI and DRV well enough by now, but I can tell you now what will happen. ‑ Iridescent 17:32, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#RfC: A7 and tourist attractions, for those of you playing along at home. ‑ Iridescent 18:34, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Ironically it sounds a worthy G11 candidate too. Cherries / cakes, and all that. O Fortuna!^{...Imperatrix mundi.} 18:48, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive929#Concerns about Adam9007 declining speedy deletion nominations for some background here—this "making up his own notability criteria" thing has been going on a long time. ‑ Iridescent 18:58, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

I am not making up anything (A7 is not about notability anyway), nor am I demanding anything (where did you get that idea from?). I am simply asking for some clarification, about something which is not obvious. Was it obvious that anything involving some sort of business is an organisation? No, it was not. It's a shame that I have to do things like this just to make something clear. Adam9007 (talk) 21:39, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure I could put it any more clearly than Boing does here. We have 41,214,301 pages; if you know you don't understand (or, do understand but are unwilling to follow) the Wikipedia consensus in any given area, why continue to hang round there annoying everyone else who's trying to get on with their work, rather than work in an area in which you feel comfortable? ‑ Iridescent 04:04, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

(adding) And yes, of course it's obvious that every business (other than a sole trader, but those will rarely if ever be notable in Wikipedia terms) is an organization. What else would you think they are? ‑ Iridescent 17:30, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

uw-vandalism5

I was curious about this, because I thought I knew all the templates. I learned about it on The Teahouse and the comment was made that it shouldn't be used except by those who could actually block.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:49, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

It doesn't exist. It was created as a redirect to {{uw-block}}, and deleted shortly afterwards by me under WP:R3; it's never been an actual template, nor should it be. (If someone has received four vandalism warnings and is still vandalising, AGF is well and truly gone; a fifth level of warnings would serve no useful purpose.) ‑ Iridescent 19:56, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

One wonders why we even bother with four, instead of just using one or two. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:05, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

...or three, even?! O Fortuna!^{...Imperatrix mundi.} 20:50, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

I couldn't find anything in the person's contributions. There were so many warnings that it wasn't clear when the template would have been used but I didn't see it.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:46, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Hope (painting) scheduled for TFA

This is to let you know that the Hope (painting) article has been scheduled as today's featured article for 19 January 2017. If you're interested in editing the main page text, you're welcome to do so at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 19, 2017. Thanks! Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:03, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm new at this -- hadn't paid attention to the fact that there's a blurb prepared for the TFAR nominations. I'll remember next time. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:18, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Any TPWs—particularly in the US—if you're able, head on over to the proposed blurb and take a look in advance. This is going to run on what's likely to be the single most politically sensitive day of 2017, so there's a very delicate balancing act around making it clear why its running on this particular date and what its significance is to the Obama administration, while avoiding any implication that Wikipedia is endorsing the outgoing administration, or implying that the incoming administration makes hope more necessary. (Some people will no doubt assume it regardless, but that's unavoidable.) This will also probably get both higher traffic than most TFAs, and within that a higher proportion of vandals, cranks, and people demanding it be changed from British to American spelling, so could likely do with being on as many watchlists as possible. ‑ Iridescent 15:39, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

That's a good idea, Iri. Regarding your original point ... IMO the TFAR and TFAP processes could do a little better job of letting people know what to expect. We're going to tackle this and other questions after Mike and Jim have had a chance to settle in on the job, maybe in February, maybe later. - Dank (push to talk) 15:42, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh, no worries, and sorry for being snappy; it's just that owing to the issues outlined above, this blurb took a lot more time and effort to write as the usual "take the lead and condense it to 1200 characters" approach doesn't work in this instance. (This is an English visual arts article, but we're presenting it as an American politics topic.) To reiterate the comment I make almost every time an artwork is scheduled, this could also do with having the image forced as large as you can without actually bleeding through into DYK, as at {{TFAIMAGE}} size it's quite hard to make out anything more than "girl sitting on an orange". ‑ Iridescent 16:02, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Pinging David Levy, just in case there's something to resolve here. - Dank (push to talk) 16:33, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

I'll see your David Levy, and raise you Fram and The Rambling Man, since if neither of them is able to find something about which to complain, there's unlikely to be much to worry about. ‑ Iridescent 14:27, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

I think the blurb is fine, but in the past few weeks I've noted a few editorials in the US media with titles mentioning the death of hope. I don't have a link to one at the moment, but can dig around if you're interested. My feeling is that, regardless, running this will be seen as a political statement. That said, I did not know about the painting, the back story to Obama's campaign slogan, all of which is interesting and there really won't be another time to run it. I'll keep an eye on it when it runs. Victoria (tk) 15:52, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

I couldnt see how anyone on reading the article could *not* see it as an overt political statement given the context. Then I realised I wouldnt actually care if TFA was about Trump's sex allegations on the day. So really I have no strong feelings one way or the other. Except about Trump. Which could not be printed anyway. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:05, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) This was actually planned back in September, when Trump was still a rank outsider—it's not actually a response to Trump's election, although I agree it will unavoidably be seen as a political statement. (Realistically, whatever runs on Jan 19 and 20 will be seen as political statements; I have no doubt at all that Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 20, 2017 on the day of the inauguration itself will be seen as a calculated snub in running an article with no connection to the US, and Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 18, 2017 will be seen as a calculated dig at the Republicans by scheduling an article glorifying nationalized industry and international cooperation, and I dread to think what the lunatic fringe will think of Marilyn Manson and Ayn Rand side-by-side a couple of days earlier. Haters gonna hate, the important thing is not to give them free ammunition.) Because this is probably the only day in which Hope will actually have any significance—I suspect that soon afterwards, it will quietly disappear from display into the Tate's storeroom or on a long-term loan to a provincial gallery somewhere—if it's going to run at all, it really ought to be on 19 Jan (because Wikipedia follows GMT and presidential transitions follow EST, Obama actually leaves office on the 20th in Wikipedia terms, but having this on the mainpage at the actual time of the inauguration really would generate complaints). ‑ Iridescent 16:16, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Why would anyone care about Ayn Rand and Marilyn Monroe being side-by-side? One was an empty headed narcissist, the other was Marilyn Monroe... Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:27, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Not the same

Marilyn Manson—not quite the same thing. ‑ Iridescent 16:39, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Am I allowed to blame that mis-reading on excessive holiday alcohol consumption? I can see why the Manson fans might get annoyed though. Who would want to be associated with Ayn Rand? Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:49, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Personally, I am a great supporter of Hr. Trump and this pictorial trbute should show all right-thinking Americans that we at Wikipedia are not just moronic nerds. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:39, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

...The Twilight Zone music starts up... Carcharoth (talk) 00:04, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

My signature

I'm not currently using a template in my signature, but yes I had one in for a few days as an alternative time stamp. I discontinued using this as of January 5th (I started on January 3rd). My current and past sigs are stored here in case you want to double check, so I'm thinking you saw my signature with the timestamp in it. Right now my signature has no templates in it and is at 298 characters, no blinking or flashing or eye burning colors. If you still see something wrong with my signature, let me know and I'll correct it. KoshVorlon} 21:55, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Pro-tip; I'm not currently using a template in my signature would be more convincing if you didn't then sign the post with a 298-character signature. If you're not misusing template substitution to get around WP:SIGLEN, I take it you won't have any objections to my deleting the template which you're patently using as a signature? To reiterate, you've been warned about this literally for years now (by my reckoning you were first warned about this in 2008); if I see you signing any more posts with a ridiculous signature like the one you're using, you can argue your case from an {{unblock}} template. ‑ Iridescent 22:02, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Warned nine years ago and still unable to understand rules about signature templates? Deleted. Bencherlite^Talk 09:15, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

For the record, he's also been warned in May 2009 (leading to him being taken to ANI), September 2009, October 2009, May 2012, June 2012, and May 2014. ‑ Iridescent 09:28, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Talk:Hope (painting)

I'm absolutely appalled by your serious oversight in my edit here. You blindly reverted without even checking that the thing you accuse of was not even present. Please be careful from next time. —IB ^{[ Poke ]} 09:19, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

I believe I'll survive. Why are you doing importance assessments for a project which has explicitly deprecated importance assessments, anyway? ‑ Iridescent 09:31, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Keep that sass to yourself, I removed that assessment when I realized it was a copy paste error from when you had reverted the first time. You blindly reverted second time without even checking that it was not present anymore. Good day! —IB ^{[ Poke ]} 09:34, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Paintings by Watts, biography

Just because the "background" section contains biographical data of Watts, this is no background of the painting itself. Using the same argument, you could include a short history of Great Britain.

What you did is nothing more than duplicating information. But not only that, you just copied the text both into the article for Mammon and also into the one for Hope. That is a violation of WP:CFORK. There is an article containing the biography of Watts, and that's the one that should be linked to in the painting articles to avoid violation of WP policy. ʘχ (talk) 21:24, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

No, that's not how Wikipedia works; when you see a "Background" section on an FA, it means "historical background", not a literal description of what's seen in the background (so in this case, who Watts was and why he was interested in this type of subject). At FA level, a Wikipedia article should stand alone—that is, it needs to contain enough context that a reader reading only that article can understand the topic without having to go to any other page. (Remember, not everyone is going to be reading this online; a lot of Wikipedia articles are republished in print form.) In this case, the background for Mammon and Hope are necessarily going to be very similar, as they were painted by the same person less than a year apart. ‑ Iridescent 21:30, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

No, that's not how Wikipedia works; when you see a "Background" section on an FA, it means "historical background", not a literal description of what's seen in the background

Er ... yes, that's self-evident. With "background" I mean historical background. And it makes no sense to explain to the reader what Watts did in his life when this is not directly related to the painting. Copying text around violates WP policy. And even apart from that, it should be clear that this renders articles unmaintainable if the same information is distributed all over the WP. The Watts biography does not belong there since it does not directly relate to (a) the history or (b) the interpretation of the painting. ʘχ (talk) 21:48, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Adjusting my own behavior

To address my own erroneous behaviors, including my own disruptive part, I made oaths to myself which ones to normally avoid. Since I'm under scrutiny, I'm doing my best to know which topics and/or categories are too heated for me to handle. And... about the "Redirects for Discussion" thing months ago, you were right about how much of a difference I can make. I undervalued it too much then, but I'll value RfD a little more. However, I don't want to start too many request discussions as I did in the past. In fact, I am minimizing my number a lot and doing my best to do so. I am struggling to have good terms with the Wikipedia community. However, I'm doing my best to undo my errors and make things right. I recognized which ones I made a huge fuss about, and I think I will recognize more. --George Ho (talk) 19:41, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

Update: I made substantial changes. From now on, I can read them over and over whenever I have temptations to do something, so I'll do my best to lower/ease my temptations but will do something at huge discretion. --George Ho (talk) 08:02, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Infoboxs

Where do you stand in general? I feel in a lot of cases (when manually curated) they can be a useful tool, but I ran across an article last night where a well-known infobox-proponent added one where the only information contained is the first (and only) line of the intro/lead - at that point I could see exactly where the rabid 'infoboxs are a plague' crowd were coming from. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:58, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

I am more bothered by infoboxes which oversimplify stuff. Not all parameters in an infobox can be reduced down to a line - Lake Tauca might have drained into the Tumusla River, but only may, and the lake infobox assumes it's a determined property (thankfully it now accounts for this). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:02, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

My attitude is that the default position should be "include an infobox" for most articles, since some readers are just looking for names-and-dates or statistics, and it makes sense to put them in a standardized place for people to find them. The issue isn't some clique of anti-infobox obsessives (who exist only in Andy Mabbett's mind; nobody has ever actually argued for getting rid of them), but those edge cases where an infobox isn't appropriate but people demand they be included "for consistency". There are numerous reasons not to include the box—the standard arguments off the top of my head are:

• Some articles don't contain enough relevant information, meaning any infobox will be ludicrously short and make the article look ridiculous;
• The article topic is such that the lead image needs to be at an unusual aspect ratio or forced unusually wide to make detail visible, and because the width of the infobox is tied to the width of the lead image it will make the box look ludicrous—this is most often the case with arts and architecture articles (Beaune Altarpiece is the standard example), but comes up fairly regularly with paintings that include a lot of fiddly detail as well;
• The topic is complex and can't be summarized easily in bullet points; this is often the case with biographies where either the infobox tries to be comprehensive and looks ridiculously long (Winston Churchill take a bow), or an effort is made to limit it which means arbitrarily deciding what's important enough to go in. It's particularly problematic with biographies of people who are notable in more than one area (is Brian Cox notable primarily as the particle physicist who co-designed the ATLAS experiment at CERN, as the former keyboard player of D-Ream, or as the presenter of Wonders of Life? Does Arnold Schwarzenegger get {{Infobox Politician}} or {{Infobox Actor}}?);
• Especially with Wikidata's increasingly tiresome efforts to hijack Wikipedia's infoboxes, it provides a path for errors to come into Wikipedia without appearing on watchlists. Wikidata has a very cavalier attitude towards data integrity (here's one of their leading luminaries just last week explaining that a 25% error rate is acceptable because "we need content"); if someone were introducing that level of inaccuracy into Wikipedia they'd be sitebanned before you could say "competence is required", but Wikidata-enabled infoboxes mean this comes in via the back door with no way to detect it or stop it. (Wikidata themselves make virtually no effort to weed out problematic editors. The last 50 entries in their block log for the entire project stretch back more than a month; for comparison, the last 50 entries in en-wiki's block log stretch back 45 minutes.)

If you haven't already, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Infoboxes and its subpages is worth a read, even though you'll be wanting to claw your own eyeballs out by the end of it. Not only is it a fairly good summary of the viewpoints on both sides (albeit pre-Wikidata), but it's one of the best case studies of Arbcom at its most dysfunctional you'll ever see. ‑ Iridescent 17:11, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

I have actually read all publically available arbcom cases going back to its inception. Thats not top of my list of 'dysfunctional'. But re what set me off last night. Behold! the wonders of the informative infobox! Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:16, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Did you read the link in my first bullet? ‑ Iridescent 17:19, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

I think I missed it looking at the one with the picture sizes. You win, I didnt think there could be a less useful one about. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:26, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Why would someone want to read each arbitration case? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:27, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

I was bored and at the time running very long automated reports (click a button, wait 5 hours for result). There was only so much useful information I could look at before I got saturated and needed a break. Imagine just watching National Geographic 24/7. After a month you will start craving Jerry Springer. Arbcom cases if read in order from oldest-most recent are quite an interesting study in the rise of bureaucracy. There is a noticible era which I call the 'Waffle' period where useful discussion/evidence starts to be overwhelmed by pointless adherance to process. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:32, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

(If you really want to see useful discussion/evidence overwhelmed by pointless adherance to process, ask someone to leak you a copy of the arbcom-l archive.) In fairness, what looks like pointless adherence to process was in many ways a conscious reaction to the early committee, which saw themselves not so much as a dispute resolution body, as Jimmy Wales's on-wiki death squad. Much as I may criticize NYB, it's primarily down to him that Arbcom nowadays at least tries to be impartial. ‑ Iridescent 17:39, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

OID, I can't decide if that's impressive or horrifying. I read a decent chunk of stuff last year in filling in gaps of wiki-history that I missed while inactive (OK, and old wikidrama makes surprisingly decent airport reading) but every case? I think my brain would leak out my ears to make it stop. Opabinia regalis (talk) 20:22, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

I was really really bored. Of course there are cases like Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/JarlaxleArtemis_2 which are summarised in the archive here which directly links to this which should probably have been oversighted. The IRC case shows that over the years Arbcom has still failed to handle off-wiki harrassment in any real manner. Of course the real fun is looking at all the "User X banned" cases and guessing their current usernames.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:09, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

...and when their current stint on arbcom ends ;) O Fortuna!^{...Imperatrix mundi.}\

Subpage oversighted, thanks Only in death. -- Euryalus (talk) 06:43, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

The IRC case is particularly fertile ground for anyone wanting to play "where are they now?". All it's missing is Poetlister, FT2 ha, he even managed to poke his nose in on that and someone hysterically accusing everyone of paid editing, and it would be a full house on Wikipedia Bingo. ‑ Iridescent 23:24, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Well there are very few other places where "Administrators are strictly and most seriously forbidden from engaging in warlike behavior".... Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:30, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

You're doing a disservice with "failed to handle off-wiki harassment". Remember, by definition this is generally dealt with off-wiki; all you're going to see in the Arb archives is the instances where the usual procedures fail. Arbcom is actually fairly efficient when it comes to making problematic editors quietly disappear or decide that resignation would be in their best interests. ‑ Iridescent 23:33, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
And now, somebody head over to Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates#RD: William Onyeabor and either support or oppose him, before the nomination becomes stale. They've already posted two fish and a tree in RD and are about to post a monkey; they can damn well find a space for him. ‑ Iridescent 23:33, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

I dont hold that harrassment/attacks (there is a difference between criticism that takes place at forums/blogs etc and blatant harrasment) off-wiki in a venue that is entirely populated by wikipedia editors, admins and arbcom members should be ignored (its rarely 'handled' offwiki) or handled 'quietly'. If someone is 'quietly' encouraged to fade out and no one actually knows why, it has no effectiveness as a deterrant. As the subsequent cases involving IRC problems showed, the lack of consequences bred a culture that was toxic. And it does have a direct impact here, people do not suddenly forget what others have done offwiki. Which some people who blog about all their 'problems' seem to forget. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:21, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

@OID: Since the WMF is currently trying to impose a free-for-all of harassment and stalking—assuming this gets imposed, anyone is now free to post whatever opposition research they can dredge up, provided they can plausibly dress it up as part of a good faith investigation ("I had concerns that User:Foo might be a paid editor, so I conducted a good faith investigation and found that he's actually A. N. Other of 123 Main Street, Anytown")—I suspect you're going to start feeling nostalgic fairly quickly for the old days of smoke-filled rooms and metaphorical loaded revolvers, when "harassment" generally meant no more than incoherent ramblings on Wikipedia Review which would only be seen by a dozen people, or a post at ED or Hivemind which nobody would take seriously. (While I've made unkind comments in the past about GorillaWarfare's talk/action ratio, she's shot up in my estimation for pointing out the inconsistencies in this idiocy.) ‑ Iridescent 09:01, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Well imho thats a problem of the communities own making given the wording of the ENWP 'Harrassment' policy - specifically the interpretation of outing regarding off-site public identities. On one side you have the anonymity must be protected at all costs, on the other you have the 'not at the expense of the encylopedia'. The WMF are stuck in the middle and have been forced to point out, quite rightly, that there is no legal issue nor contradiction of the WMF's terms of use in disclosing publically available information. Had the anonymity crowd been more reasonable with regards to the outdated (in regards to current COIN practice) outing part of the policy, we probably would not have got to this stage. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:13, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

I think this might tie Iridescent's example. I don't usually remove infoboxes I wouldn't add myself, but this was too much to bear. And you probably won't be surprised to see who put it there, although it's not one of the usual "infobox warriors". Choess (talk) 04:08, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

I think it wins, by the one factoid being manifestly wrong. Johnbod (talk) 04:28, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Choess's microfobox article still has no box, but is now a W:GAN nominee. I hope that's not impertinent. O Fortuna!^{...Imperatrix mundi.} 19:35, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Second opinion, please?

Please see the top (Trump) thread on WP:ITN/C. I raised the subject and proposed the original blurb for reasons I thought were blindingly obvious, but the thread has been SNOW-closed against posting. Am I crazy, or is everyone else? Should I take this to ANI and try to have it fixed? Newyorkbrad (talk) 11:28, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

(posting on phone, ignore any errors) I'm torn. My heart says this is a momentous day and qualitatively different from other inaugurations, my head says that the election was the notable event and this is just a formal ceremony. There's also the systemic bias issue - because of the weird US system where elections don't take effect right away (in Britain for instance, the moment the result becomes clear the incumbent leaves Dowding Street and the winner moves in), setting a precedent for running both the election and the inauguration would effectively mean US elections automatically "counting double". I suppose the best way to approach this would be, "would we feature the inauguration if Rubio or Bush had won?". Given the likelihood that either DC erupts in protest, or Trump announces a major policy shift in his speech, that will itself become the story and render the point moot. – iridescent 2 11:57, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

From Jayron's research it appears inaugurations have been posted about 50% of the time. Which means there is no historical consensus (and ITN likes to do what has been done before) to post it - the postings being on their own merits. Obama was the first black president (apart from the other that no one talks about) etc. "Inauguration ceremony that the most people have refused to go to?" maybe... Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:09, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

I think, outside of the merits or otherwise of the arguments, what irked me and maybe Brad particularly was that the discussion was closed down repeatedly when we were still in the middle of discussing it. I can understand WP:SNOW closures for open and shut cases, but the fact that Iridescent is torn, precedent is seemignly not as open and shut as suggested in the debate, and several people supported the proposal with what seemed to me to be decent arguments, I don't think it should have been closed so early... when the inauguration hasn't even started yet, and many contributors may not yet have weighed in. That's not to say it would ever have been posted, and I would never be the one to post it against consensus, but I don't think it was a good candidate for WP:SNOW, precedent or otherwise. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 12:28, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

FWIW, I think we should run it. Victoriaearle (tk) 14:19, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

On reflection, I'd support running it—regardless of the arguments against it, the fact remains that this is one of the top three stories in every country in the world at the moment. That said, at the time it was closed voting was running 11–4 against posting it; anyone closing that as anything other than "don't run" or at best "no consensus" (which by defaulting to the status quo, translates as the same thing) would quite rightly be crucified for supervoting. If something noteworthy happens at the ceremony (someone takes a shot at him, the crowds start rioting, Trump uses his inaugural speech to declare war on Belgium etc) that would be a reasonable grounds to re-nominate it, but as things stand with 11 opposers, it would need at least 20-30 supports to give it a chance of running, which realistically isn't going to happen even if it's re-opened. ‑ Iridescent 16:26, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Belgium? Has someone been reading too much Douglas Adams? Ealdgyth - Talk 16:33, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

That wasn't plucked out of the air—one of the very few foreign politicians close to Trump is raving racist nutcase "populist civic nationalist" Nigel Farage, who sees Belgium as the wellspring of everything that's wrong with the world. ‑ Iridescent 16:39, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Well we have finally got rid of him to the US, hopefully he will do a Piers Morgan and never return to the UK. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:30, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Piers Morgan unfortunately came back (probably when he realised that the US authorities were considerably more likely to prosecute him than their English equivalents). ‑ Iridescent 21:32, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Apparantly the police have fired tear gas to disperse protesters according to the BBCs live coverage. Not quite a riot yet I think. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:38, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Iridescent, for your balanced views in both posts. I wound up deciding not to pursue this further, in large part because I had to be offline for much of the morning and wasn't in a position to do so even if I wanted to. But having thought about this some more I still think this was an entirely indefensible outcome, and one that no one unfamiliar with the weirdnesses of Wikipedia decision-making would understand. Newyorkbrad (talk) 20:41, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Sure, but there are a lot of precedents for posting changes in government when the outcome becomes known (generally elections, or sometimes the announcement of a forthcoming handover or it becoming clear there's only one candidate), not when the formal change takes place. (Here's some guy called "Newyorkbrad" last year arguing that the correct time to run the accession of Theresa May was when Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the leadership contest, rather than the formal result.) I'm still flip-flopping on whether running Trump would be the right thing to do—AFAIK the US is the only major country that has a gap of more than a couple of days between elections and inauguration (presumably an artefact of the days when the news had to get to California by horse), but it would have the potential to open quite a few cans of worms, since "leader announces that they're going to retire in three months and hand over power to their vice-president/deputy party leader/hand-picked successor" isn't a particularly unusual situation. (Tony Blair→Gordon Brown is the most obvious one that springs to mind, but there are plenty of other examples like Castro, some of the Middle Eastern monarchies, or military strongmen who announce they'll give power back to the civil authorities when the emergency is over.) Yes, the US is more important than most, but every country is important to the people who live there. (As you may know, I think ITN is a waste of space and should be deprecated altogether. By definition, if something is in the news the readers either already know about it, or don't care; plus, by definition it highlights Wikipedia's most unstable articles on the main page.) ‑ Iridescent 21:24, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Well, I certainly wasn't suggesting that we shouldn't have included Trump's election on ITN in November, on a theory of "wait until January." I anticipated in my proposed posting comment last night that people would say "including both the election and the inauguration is the same event twice," but ... ah, the hell with it, I'm not rehashing the arguments again. This is a situation that's going to come up once every four to eight years (I don't think the inauguration of a reelected President of the United States is quite as obvious a case for posting as that of a new one). As Jayron32 pointed out, we did mainpage the inauguration the one and only prior time we had a new President of the United States since the inception of Wikipedia.

I personally think the news section on the mainpage has a role, but I am going to unwatchlist WP:ITN/C and try to forget about it, at least for awhile. This is at least the second time in two weeks that I thought a decision there was so outrageous that I probably should have taken it to ANI. (The first being the "recent death" posting of Sutter Brown; that sounds like a human name, and a reader thinking "I wonder who that is who died recently that I hadn't heard of, let me check" and clicking through would not reasonably expect to find that it was a dog.) The emerging insistence on a source footnote for every statement in an article before it can be posted is also unreasonable; yes, it triggers accelerated improvement of the referencing when someone really wants to get the article onto the main page, and I've accepted that some of that is useful—but it also translates directly to "the more notable the person or subject was or is, the less likely it's going to get approved before the nomination gets stale—we can't possibly post the death of, say, this world-reknowned actress who appeared in dozens of parts, because we don't have a source for her guest-appearance in an episode of The Brady Bunch in 1967"). In 2009 I did get a decision on WP:ITN/C overruled at ANI, but I don't have the patience for trying to do that again ever, much less every week. Pfui. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:59, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

@Newyorkbrad: I completely agree with what you say here. Something happens in the news that is being talked about all over the world, the headlines are continuing to dominate even into a third day now (and in fact ITN seems to have decided to post about the women's marches with a side link to the inauguration now, though I didn't watch the debate). Yet readers go to the main page, and its "in the news" section and it's like "nothing to see here folks". A chance lost to showcase our articles on the election, inauguration, and Trump himself (all of which are reasonably good, even if tainted by persistent instability at this time). As a non-US editor, I have occasionally thought ITN and other similar venues to be US-heavy, but this case has taken it so far the other way it's ridiculous. Like you, I have been absent for a couple of days, and there doesn't seem much left to pursue, but longer term it does seem like some sort of reform is needed to avoid glaring silliness like this.  — Amakuru (talk) 08:36, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

@Newyorkbrad: the article (as part of a different item) did get posted in the end, I assume you saw the discussion here (though I don't think you participated), though the bolding was added later. Carcharoth (talk) 20:04, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I did see that. I also saw the discussion on Talk:Main page where people were assuming that the non-posting of the inauguration (after having posted Obama's) was an anti-Trump political statement. I don't personally believe it was that, but we left ourselves wide open to that as a quite reasonable perception, which is one of the reasons for my original nomination. In any event, as I said, I'm disengaging from ITN for awhile as my level of wikistress on that page is not worth it. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:36, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

New Wikiproject!

Hello, Iridescent! I saw you recently edited a page related to the Green party and green politics. There is a new WikiProject that has been formed - WikiProject Green Politics and I thought this might be something you'd be interested in joining! So please head on over to the project page and take a look! Thanks for your time. Me-123567-Me (talk) 03:55, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

In my case...

In many cases I claimed the bug was fixed i.e. Bot returned back to its "normality" while some asked for a complete code reformation. In some cases it was difficult to convenience that I actually dealt with the bug because most of the reports are "It's broken" then I claim fix and some days later a different case may appear but people will complain that "You never fixed it at the first place" while they refer to a different bug. Since AWB deals with so many pages multiple bugs may occur. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:57, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Sure—I know how unstable AWB can be—but the accusations are your using bots for tasks which were never approved as bot tasks; that you disregard it when members of the community raise concerns; and that you run unauthorised bots on your main account to evade blocks on your bot account, none of which really relate to the interaction between AWB code and changes to Mediawiki. While it may look like my proposals at the workshop are harsh, they're actually an effort to create a framework which will give you no more than a slap on the wrist and an "admonishment", and won't end up in you being kicked off Wikipedia altogether—not wanting to state the obvious, but you may want to consider what Betacommand, Kumioko, Lightmouse and Rich Farmborough have in common.

It may be because Arbcom's members tend to come from the manual-editing side of Wikipedia (either content writing or dispute resolution) and don't really understand the role automation plays—coupled with a general distrust of any case revolving around scripts and code doing unpredictable things, stemming from the general exasperation with the infobox wars and with Wikidata parking their tanks on Wikipedia's lawn—but Arbcom's default position in any "bot editor vs manual editor" dispute is going to be that the bot is in the wrong. (Also, bear in mind that those committee members like Drmies who come from an article-writing background are by default going to have a deeply negative view of AWB, as like every other person with a lot of articles on their watchlist AWB to them is "that script which keeps plastering my articles with inappropriate maintenance tags, adding and removing spaces for no good reason, and 'fixing' non-existent typos".) Consequently, what you need to be doing is demonstrating that regardless of why the problems are happening your bots are going to stop causing problems; the committee members have all been around long enough to know that there are plenty of people like MZMcBride who run shedloads of bots with minimal complaints, so the "there will be unavoidable collateral damage to civilians but it's worthwhile if it secures the strategic objectives" argument isn't likely to go down well.

It's not really appropriate for this conversation to be taking place here rather than on one of the case pages or talkpages (and it's certainly not appropriate for you to be providing separate evidence to individual arbitrators); I'd suggest if you do want to discuss aspects of the case, you do so on the workshop page or at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Magioladitis as appropriate. While I don't for a moment think you're deliberately doing anything untoward (this is a singularly poor page to post to if you're trying to evade scrutiny), by posting on user talk pages rather than the case pages there's the potential appearance that you're trying to avoid public scrutiny of your comments, and as the accused party you want to avoid even the hint that you're trying to affect the result through back-channels. ‑ Iridescent 11:44, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Hmm maybe I shouldn't comment here either, but let me just say real quick that yes, I am from a content background, but I don't have a deeply negative view of AWB. I think it is a very useful tool, certainly in principle. Ha, I have a bigger problem with SineBot, which frequently interferes with my attempts to roll back forum edits on talk pages and stuff like that. Drmies (talk) 15:13, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

And Magioladitis, please take Iridescent's advice about what to post where to heart. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 15:16, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Drmies Yes, that SineBot thing is a nuisance which Materialscientist also mentioned in the case request as it hampers anti-vandalism efforts. I did find phab:T16211 which is the bug to fix that. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:37, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

BGBot (or whatever it is) is my annoyance. I remain unconvinced that running a bot whose only change is to move a full stop from outside to inside the reference is a neccessary bot task. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:41, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Although I can appreciate the work it does, Internet Archive Bot would be my main irritation at present, especially as it seems the answer to attempting to fix some of the errors it causes is to have yet another BOT (Wayback Medic?) follow along behind it while other errors/bugs languish on Phabricator. I'd also add AnomieBot doing the substitution of templates over and over again on the same page rather than making the changes in one go. SagaciousPhil - Chat 16:34, 10 January 2017 (UTC) At this rate, we'll have managed to list almost every BOT ...

Wikidata sidetrack

As mentioned elsewhere, ListeriaBot is my pet hate at the moment; it would be fine if it stuck to its alleged purpose of generating internal lists for projects, but it's been let loose on the mainspace without consultation or approval. If I saw a human making edits like these, I'd have blocked them for disruption long ago. While he's not an actual bot as such, the person (whom I won't name, but I'm sure you're all wearily aware of by now) who is using a script to add a comma after every occurrence of "Subsequently" and "Meanwhile" is also coming a little closer to being sent to join Betacommand each time I see his name pop up on my watchlist. ‑ Iridescent 16:52, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Why? And why United States of America and not United States of America? Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:58, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

On Wikidata, I can see that enforcing disambiguation of "United States" to "United States of America" does make a certain sense; that has to cater for projects in multiple languages covering a near-infinite variety of topics, and there have been quite a few other countries which have been called "United States" at some point; on en-wiki we can take it as read that the reader will know that "United States" without qualification will always mean the USA, but on a Greek-language biography of someone from Corfu, "he was born in the United States" could reasonably be a reference to the United States of the Ionian Islands. This is yet another problem with the Wikidata tail wagging the Wikipedia dog—the way their data is structured makes sense for them, but not for us, but because they've shoehorned their advocates into so many positions of authority once they get their claws into anything on en-wiki they're harder to get rid of than herpes. (Look at how much time and effort the relatively straightforward task of kicking the Wikidata bots off List of women linguists took.) ‑ Iridescent 17:07, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

(adding) If there's anyone who doubts the proposition that "Bot operators are arrogant, out of control, and have complete contempt for the concerns of anyone else, and the BAG just acts as a bunch of cronies rubber-stamping each others' proposals regardless of anyone else's concerns", I advise you to have a good long look at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ListeriaBot. I'm sure you will all be as shocked as I am to discover who it was that approved that particular bot despite the bot operator himself openly admitting that he was going to ignore anyone else's concerns and run the bot whether or not it was approved. ‑ Iridescent 17:14, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm rather confused, if a human editor consistantly inserted incorrectly sourced information into a list, after other human editors had removed it for being incorrect, they would be blocked very quickly. As far as I was aware, Bot owners are responsible for their bots. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:18, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I certainly would be happy to vote in an RfC on articles auto-created from Wikidata... have any more been created since the AfDs on those two articles? Ealdgyth - Talk 17:27, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

@Ealdgyth: You're too late, the RFC has already happened. The issue is that the bot operators are just ignoring it and carrying on as if it never happened. ‑ Iridescent 18:38, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

So correct me if I am wrong: A bot is creating a list of (in some cases living) people which includes biographical information, photos, and zero references? Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:37, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Yup—the way the citogenesis is working here is that Wikidata imports from Wikipedia (any language, and regardless of the quality of sourcing for the information), and then the bot vomits it back out onto en-wiki, and from then on will revert any attempt by anyone on en-wiki to remove or edit it unless they also edit the underlying Wikidata information (which virtually nobody on Wikipedia, even the experienced editors, has any idea how to do). My previous thoughts on the matter are here. ‑ Iridescent 17:46, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

(adding) It looks like Fram has just disabled the bot on every mainspace page on which it was operating, but I've no real doubt someone will try to sneakily re-enable it at some point when they think nobody's looking. ‑ Iridescent 18:02, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Is that code for 'he blocked it' or is there a neat trick somewhere I am missing? Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:50, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

No—he's manually removed {{Wikidata list}} from each of the pages in question, which takes it off the bot's hit-list. That still allows the bot to perform it's intended purpose, of generating "these are things on Wikidata which you may want to consider adding to Wikipedia" lists for Wikiprojects, which blocking it outright would prevent. ‑ Iridescent 18:54, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I am kind of afraid what phab:T152743 will lead to, considering all the issues mentioned so far with Wikidata. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:47, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Oh good—so the commitment to accuracy and ethics that led to this lasting over two years because loads of people had seen it, but because it was on Wikidata nobody knew how to fix it is going to be forcibly imposed on the sixth largest website in the world? What could possibly go wrong? ‑ Iridescent 09:24, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

For the WMF? I imagine a challenge to their 'We are not responsible' get out of jail free card. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:55, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

I should have mentioned that my comment was about "In the case of complaints against bots, the complaint should be presumed valid by default and the onus on the bot operator to convince the community either that the complaint is baseless or the bug in question has been fixed". The "or" is the problem I think. In all cases I have fixed the bug in question still some community members were still complaining. i.e. to fix the bug in question may be not enough. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:17, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Ozerzealous automation

Iridescent, WTF? Please tell me about the comma--I got a bone to pick with overcommaers, as do you, I suspect. Drmies (talk) 23:37, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

It's a result of the string <Typo word="Furthermore," find="\b(Accordingly| Consequently| Even\s+so| Furthermore| In\s+other\s+words|Indeed| Meanwhile(?!\s+Gardens)| Moreover| Nevertheless| On\s+the\s+other\s+hand| Therefore| For\s+example| Subsequently(?!\s+(?:enacted|renamed|told)))(?=\s)" replace="$1,"/> in the AWB regex. (When I said unless and until the nettle of AWB's scope creep is grasped, any remedies will be akin to fighting a forest fire by focusing on individual trees, I wasn't joking; a hell of a lot of what looks like problems caused by individual editors or misprogrammed bots are in fact issues with the AWB devs trying to "solve" issues which nobody but them see as problems.) That means that if if finds any of the aforementioned words with a capital letter, it will automatically put a comma after it, even if it's a fragment like "Subsequently sold" in a table. Most of AWB's users have the common sense to disregard it every time it tries to make this particular "correction", but two editors—both of whom have been here long enough to know better—machine-gun accept it. (You can figure out who the worst offenders are just by looking at the archives of Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos, doing a ctrl-f on "hyphen" and "comma", and looking to see who's squawking the loudest about how this punctuation-bloat is absolutely vital because some page they found somewhere on the internet says that having lots of commas and dashes makes you look clever, and that false positives are just a nasty myth put about by bad people.) I was completely serious in my "nuclear option" proposal at the workshop with regards to AWB, and would seriously consider taking it further and disabling every piece of functionality it currently has and only re-enabling them one by one as consensus is demonstrated for each option, and removing every single entry from the typo regex that isn't an actual typo. (If you have a very long memory, you may recall that I once disabled Huggle project-wide—there comes a point when one has to call the script-coders' "without my tool the wiki will fall apart!" bluffs.) ‑ Iridescent 00:12, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

(adding) Per my comment to Hasteur above, there are quite a few AWB users who just click "accept" to every single suggestion despite the fact that two seconds looking at the proposed change would show that it's obviously inappropriate. ([13][14][15][16], and those are just the four examples I found immediately and none of them is from the two worst offenders. If you go to WP:WBE, pick any name at random from near the top, and check their history, you'll almost certainly find a dozen more within a minute.) ‑ Iridescent 00:17, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Minimal complaints? I've been party to at least three cases before the kangaroo court! :-) Focusing on the use of AWB or any other editing tool misses the point, perhaps. After all, we have plenty of stupid manual edits. It's not really about what tool the editor is using, it's about the quality of the edits. A lot of AWB edits should not be necessary at all. An easy recent example I found is documented at phabricator:T154346.

The "ie" --> "i.e." and "Eg" --> "E.g." changes really are quite special. It's easy to marvel at that level of stupidity. It doesn't take a computer science degree to know that blindly applying find and replace across encyclopedia article text is a terrible idea. Sheesh.

Regarding Wikidata, I think this is a bit too harsh. Wikidata still shows great potential, in my opinion, but I agree with having completely lost patience with the incredibly slow development efforts, including the integration, such that it is, between Wikipedia and Wikidata. You may find mailarchive:wikitech-l/2016-December/087206.html interesting; it includes a discussion of ListeriaBot. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:13, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Weeelllll… This is hyperbole, but I stand behind the sentiment. Wikidata looked great on paper, but it hasn't delivered, and it's long past the point when its enthusiasts can keep claiming "growing pains" an an excuse. At the same point in en-wiki's lifespan, we had 13,000 active editors, and we didn't have the benefit of a top-ten website constantly plugging us. Wikidata is effectively moribund, but the handful of remaining enthusiasts have dug in their heels and insist their concerns take priority over those of Wikipedia and Commons. The stats suggesting they have c. 6500 active editors look impressive but are totally phoney. Every time a page is deleted or renamed on any other WMF project, the deletion is logged as a Wikidata edit by the deleting admin, which adds up very quickly over the 820 WMF projects. (I'm shown as having well over 1000 edits there, for instance, despite never once editing there or even registering an account. Even Newyorkbrad, who has never shown the slightest interest in it and I doubt would recognize Wikidata if its source code were tattooed on his inner thighs without anaesthetic, is shown as an contributor there.) ‑ Iridescent 11:26, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Have just discovered that I also am a Wikidata contributor going back to 2014, with 219 edits to my name despite never having visited the site. Only actual experience with wikidata is in having to fix some of the inaccuracies in the wikidata infobox stubs which have started mushrooming here and there on en-WP. Like others, I can see the point of wikidata but from recent experience its error rate is way too high. -- Euryalus (talk) 12:30, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

I recently got a notification that one of my edits to Wikidata was reverted. I hurried there to check what it was as I have no memory of ever visiting that place, found out that I have more than 200 contributions over two years! The revert notification happened to be useful because a page that I had G5ed from a self promo sock farm had been re-created and so one of the Wikidata denizens had reverted my "page deleted on en.wiki" edit that was apparently made by some ghost in the server. I G5 deleted the page again on en.wiki and salted that title too, so no new notifications on that since then! One of the promo sock farms that I keep track of has figured out the wonders of Wikidata and has switched to spamming there instead of here, probably because of the idea of an article in multiple languages driven off the unchecked data on that is more appealing than getting caught here. —SpacemanSpiff 14:30, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Yeah—Wikidata is an untapped seam for spammers, particularly for firms marketing to places where the main Wikipedias in the local market still have lots of redlinks so ArticlePlaceholder kicks in. (If the Wikidata hardliners ever get their way and allow articles to be machine-written directly from Wikidata, that's when things will get really interesting.) ‑ Iridescent 23:55, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Sure, the goofy contributions at Wikidata are nothing new. Many of the metrics for most Wikimedia wikis are pretty sad (edits per day, active editors, etc.). Wikidata's metrics are particularly skewed and distorted due to the rampant bot activity and other semi-automated editing or triggered editing, as you note.

I think there's great value in having the ability to store and re-use structured data. I don't really have to make this argument because I can just point at nearly every file on a computer or on a network, and I mean "file" in the most generic and broadest sense, and that file probably operates with the ability to store and re-use structured data. In my mind, Wikidata lacks proper integration with Wikipedia. Bots like ListeriaBot may be doing more harm than good if they're souring people on the idea of Wikidata. I don't care about how many editors Wikidata has, I care that I can't query it and re-use data from it here on Wikipedia easily. Imagine Wikimedia Commons, but without the ability to embed images on Wikipedia. This situation is insane and we must address it.

Aside from Wikidata, other proposals and ideas for more structured data such as the Gather extension have merit. The core idea is sound, and we know this because we already have private versions (watchlists) and public versions (categories) of these types of wiki page lists, to say nothing of the various navboxes, sidebars, and articles that contain lists of wiki pages. I think being able to more easily store and re-use arbitrary lists of wiki pages on the wiki would be hugely powerful. But with Gather, we see that this implementation was so poorly executed that all that happened is that we got set back several steps. ArticleFeedbackv5, VisualEditor, Flow, MP4, Gather, and other projects, all to varying degrees, exhibit this same anti-pattern of trying to move forward too quickly in the wrong direction or with the wrong approach and causing problems as a result.

Earlier this week I was thinking about the big gripe people are expressing here with Magioladitis interfering with anti-vandalism efforts. In short, automated/semi-automated edits using tools like AWB obscure underlying page edits that could be bad in user watchlists. This is a real workflow issue that we should address in MediaWiki, in my opinion. A more common case, for me at least, is an edit to an article that's vandalism/garbage that doesn't get caught. Someone then comes along and makes a subsequent fix to some small portion of the article, and then over the next few months, additional automated or semi-automated fixes are made to the article, while parts of the initial vandalism/garbage remain. Instead of simple vandalism and a quick revert, we often end up with a damaged article that has lots of minor fixes patched atop. It also really doesn't help that it's still difficult to attribute wikitext to a particular person/revision without manual(ly) searching.

These various workflow gripes should be appropriately captured so that we can analyze them and hopefully find solutions to them. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:20, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

I can only speak for myself, but I have no problem with the concept of Wikidata. My issue is with the current setup, which is so poorly executed—and so zealously guarded by a handful of True Believers against any attempt to fix it—as to be worse than nothing. Unless and until they can fix the "a dubiously sourced fact from a little-watched article on one Wikipedia can make it into Wikidata and immediately overwrite the actual sourced and reliable data on the Wikipedias where people actually have a knowledge of the topic" issue, Wikidata is never going to be viable since it won't be usable for its supposed core purpose. At the moment, the Wikidata response to anyone raising any concerns about their sourcing methods or data integrity seems consistently to be "if we shout loud enough we can drown out the complaints, and if we close our eyes hard enough we can pretend nothing is happening". You've been around long enough to know that the WMF has a long history of trying to run before it can walk and ending up launching projects that are so shitty, they poison the ground for any decent attempt to fix things—it's why it's 2017 and I'm still having to indent this post with colons—and IMO Wikidata fits squarely into that category. There's absolutely no point continuing to pour money into supporting a system which isn't doing what it was supposed to do, is showing no signs that it will ever be able to do what it was supposed to do, and which at a very generous estimate 0.1% of editors across the various languages and projects have the slightest clue how to use. What we were promised was a system where I'd correct an error on a page here, and Wikidata would propagate the change, together with the appropriate source, to other places on other projects where the change needed to be made. What we have in practice is a crude hybrid of MS Access and MediaWiki, whose only settings are "do nothing and force people to check manually" or "spew everything out regardless of quality and regardless of what's being overwritten" (and which generates garbage output like this if the underlying data isn't adequate or correctly formatted), where if an editor spots an error in a Wikidata-generated field here the workflow has changed from "click edit→make change" to "click edit→be presented with an incomprehensible screen filled with scary-looking boxes and gibberish like 'instance of human'→click edit again→be presented with yet more gibberish and boxes" and which isn't delivering any obvious benefit to anyone other than a few big data-mining corporations, and a handful of self-appointed "information use consultants". ‑ Iridescent 13:58, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

Heads up to watchers

Heads up to anyone watching this with an interest in Wikidata (pro or anti): Wikipedia:Wikidata/2017 State of affairs. There's a decent chance that this will evolve into the RFC which either opens the door to authorized Wikidata editing on en-wikipedia, or severs the link with Wikidata and leaves it to wither on the vine, so although it looks like yet another "my views on something I don't like" personal essay, it has the potential to be A Big Deal. ‑ Iridescent 13:37, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

I see the expected "defenders of Wikidata" have appeared in droves on the talk page and the main page of that. I may try to get over there after I get out from under my pile of work that must be finished. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:16, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

I do feel sorry for the one reasonable Wikidata enthusiast (not naming names since as soon as I specify a name, that becomes a personal attack on everyone else, but I'm sure you know who I mean); every time he tries to make a legitimate explanation of why he feels the pros outweigh the cons, the rest of them drown him out with their craziness. One supporter in particular is so obnoxious, he's literally increasing the probability of WD being deprecated altogether and going to join Gather, MoodBar and Flow in the Lila Tretikov Retirement Home for Things Which Seemed Good on Paper every time he comments. ‑ Iridescent 00:23, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

• Sigh, well it has descended (in part I suspect due to my attempt to contribute my perception and actual experience of its failings) into bickering as is usual for anything involving one of the WMF's pet projects. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:59, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

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