Tamzin

{{ds/aware}}

I don't like the idea of getting pings over someone putting a box on my page that says I did nothing wrong while vaguely insinuating that I did, so I'm just parking these here instead. {{ds/aware|ap|gg|a-i|blp|mos|tt|ipa}} Update 18:24, 25 October 2021 (UTC): You know what, screw it. Keeping track of which to list is more trouble than it's worth, and I don't need any one-hit immunity. I'm aware of all of them. Even the weird ones like the Shakespeare authorship question or Waldorf education. If anything, I'm more likely to think something is a DS topic when it isn't, than vice versa.

Selected WikiLove

Chosen at random from the 37 barnstars at User talk:Tamzin/Nice things. []

		The Admin's Barnstar
		I stated in the discussion below the vote that I felt quite bad for whichever poor admin got tasked with closing the ADL RfC - props for being one of the ones to do so! The Kip (contribs) 21:40, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

@The Kip: Thanks! Although I've got some bad news for you about your choice of barnstar. 😛 -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe) 22:04, 22 June 2024 (UTC) Whoops, my bad haha. I'll leave it as-is, though - thought that counts and all that. The Kip (contribs) 22:05, 22 June 2024 (UTC) I'm glad it was you two helping The Wordsmith performing the close. I can't say I agree 100% with your close, which (by my reckoning) puts your pitch right in the sweet spot. Thanks for taking that responsibility with leek. BusterD (talk) 03:30, 27 June 2024 (UTC) I'll have you know, BusterD, that according to (an otherwise pretty good piece by) the JTA, The Wordsmith, leek, and I are all a single editor. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe) 03:51, 27 June 2024 (UTC) Ha hahahahaha. Hahah! Hah! Hah! Huhhah! Hooooooohaaaaaah! Hahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hhahahahahahahaha. Haha. Haha. ha. ha. ah. Ahem. BusterD (talk) 04:40, 27 June 2024 (UTC) That would put you all in violat.... hahhhahahahahahahahaha! Hoooooohaaaaaaah! Ohhhhhhhh hahhhhhhhh! I'm sorry... BusterD (talk) 04:43, 27 June 2024 (UTC) First people called me a sock for being more than one person. Now they call me a sock for being less than one! -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe) 04:47, 27 June 2024 (UTC) Keep: I agree wholeheartedly with Tamzin. Right as always. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 05:05, 27 June 2024 (UTC) That would be an extraordinary claim. And we all know extraordinary claims have steep sourcing requirements. Mere accusation may have worked for some previously. Here you'd need proof AND a consensus. It's amazing how some people don't realize this almost always works in justice's favor. If ad hominem is all they've got, you've already won the argument. BusterD (talk) 05:08, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Selected WikiHate

Warnings from the late great Nosebagbear and whoever whomever whoever most recently edited this page

Hello, I'm Jannatulbaqi. I wanted to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions have been undone because they did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use your sandbox. If you have any questions, you can ask for assistance at the Teahouse. Thanks. Nosebagbear (talk)

​Block me if you must, but you'll never catch my socks!

(They're very cozy slipper-socks with like a stylized dog face on the top and then little fake ears on the side. Very cozy socks. AND YOU'LL NEVER CATCH THEM!) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 13:28, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello, people from the future. Confused why your name shows up here? See here. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 05:18, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Toki Pona in the wild? Mute olin!! :D Atomic putty? Rien! Atomic putty? Rien! 16:05, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

@Atomic putty? Rien! "Quantity of love"? :P (For "much love", use olin mute, or more properly mi olin mute e ni 'I love this', although ni li pona mute 'This is very good' is probably more idiomatic, since the colloquial English use of "love" to mean "like a lot" doesn't really translate.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 02:01, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

@Tamzin omg ur so right, sorry I’m rusty. I love finding ppl who speaks Toki Pona outside of the discord server, it’s like a little linguistics easter egg Atomic putty? Rien! 12:30, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@Tamzin P.P.S. Apologies for my English, German’s actually my first language ^-^ Atomic putty? Rien! 12:32, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

---

Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Special:Diff/1148616329. Your edits appear to be disruptive and have been or will be reverted.

• If you are engaged in an article content dispute with another editor, please discuss the matter with the editor at their talk page, or the [[:|article's talk page]], and seek consensus with them. Alternatively, you can read Wikipedia's dispute resolution page, and ask for independent help at one of the relevant noticeboards.
• If you are engaged in any other form of dispute that is not covered on the dispute resolution page, please seek assistance at Wikipedia's Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.

Please ensure you are familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, and please do not continue to make edits that appear disruptive. Continued disruptive editing may result in loss of editing privileges.
Please note that such behaviour is distinctly unacceptable on Wikipedia. However, I realise you are still new to Wikipedia and learning the rules - please feel free to ask at the WP:TEAHOUSE if you are unsure about making an edit. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:00, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

f u delete this or im gonna tell the mods on u. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 11:19, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm afraid, @Tamzin, that that statement is in breach of rule 1 of this talkpage listed at the top. If you do not retract the comment, I may need to tell this user about the poor behaviour by yourself. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:20, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

tsk, really should have discuss[ed] the matter with the editor at [...] the [[:|article's talk page]] — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 15:00, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Special talk:Diff/1148616329? Sounds like a good place for settling disputes TheresNoTime ;)

Talk pages for special pages when? /j Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 17:19, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Meta-WikiHate against my mother of all people

Re above: by itself, from whomever is correct, if that's the end of the expression, placing 'whomever' in the objective case, due to its function as the object of the preposition from. But, in the longer expression From who[m]ever edited this page, who[m]ever is not the object of the preposition from; rather, the entire noun phrase who[m]ever edited this page is the object, and that is an independent clause, containing a subject (who[m]ever), a transitive verb (edited ), and an object (the noun phrase, this page). In this independent clause, the subject is in the subjective case (a.k.a., nominative case), thus it must be whoever. The object noun phrase (this page) is in the objective case (invisible, because most nouns don't change; but if it were a pronoun, like they/them, then it would be whoever edited them). Upshot for this expression: it must be from whoever edited this page. See the first example here, for example. Moral of the story: Moms aren't always right. Oh yeah, and one other thing... congrats on your election. But, first things first, right? Mathglot (talk) 08:55, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I prefer "whomsoever." --Deepfriedokra (talk) 09:37, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate that you dug into the page history to find that I did originally have it right. My lovely mother, whom I will stress is a published author and editor and taught me everything I know about writing, concedes defeat on the matter, Mathglot. However, for questioning the woman whom brought me into the world, you've still earned a place in the WikiHate section, congratulations or not. (Also thank you. :) ) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:33, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Outrageous abuse of power by Tamzin

I have unreviewed a page you curated

Hi, I'm Tamzin. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Opposition to human rights, and have marked it as unreviewed. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

(Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:08, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Outrageous, Tamzin. I demand you resign your patrollership. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:10, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Why don't you like being called Tammy?

Is there a personal reason for it? 2607:FEA8:FE10:80D0:19BA:6297:7766:A64 (talk) 02:29, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Many brave Tamzins died in the Great Tammy Wars. Some find strength in looking back, but I find it easier to forget. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 02:37, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

RE: Would there be interest in a bot that makes a "watchlist" just for recently-edited pages?

OMG YES! El_C 14:31, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

-- TNT (talk • she/her) 21:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree. Watching my watchlist gets boring at some hours of the night. wizzito | say hello! 02:45, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

@El C, TheresNoTime, and Wizzito: Well, currently item 1 on my big-project wiki to-do list is some content work (gasp! I know), and item 2 is the second round of 'zinbot automatic patrol circumstances, which I got consensus for months ago but still haven't run with, but this is item 3. If anyone else would like to take a stab at it (hint, TNT), what I'm thinking of is something like:

{{User:'zinbot/Secondary watchlist
|source_page = <!-- Watch all pages linked from these pages, emulating Special:RecentChangesLinked for them. Separate by newline. --->
|source_user = <!-- Watch all pages edited by these users in provided timeframe. Separate by newline. -->
|user_days_back = <!-- How many days back in a user's contribs to follow. Default: 7. -->
|user_edits_back = <!-- How many edits back in a user's contribs to follow. Default: 200. -->
<!-- Either of `user_days_back` and `user_edits_back` can be set to None, as long as the other has a value -->
|namespace = <!-- Name or number of namespace(s) to watch. Use 0 for mainspace. Separate by commas. Default: All. Prefix with - to mean "everything but" -->
<!-- Days back, edits back, and namespace can be overridden per source page or source user, by appending a # and then `days=`, `edits=`, or `namespace=` to the entry. You can also use a `prefix=` parameter. -->
|always_watch = <!-- Will be watched even if not covered by the above parameters. E.g. Your own talk page, AN/I, etc. ... -->
|never_watch = <!-- Will be ignored even if covered by the above parameters. E.g. your own talk page, AN/I, etc. ... -->
|update_frequency = <!-- A number in minutes, or "auto". At "auto", the bot will update as frequently as possible, with the understanding that after each update you are moved to the back of the queue for updates, and the bot only edits once every 10 seconds. -->
}}

Thus mine might look like

{{User:'zinbot/Secondary watchlist
|source_page = User:Tamzin/spihelper log
               User:Tamzin/XfD log
               User:AnomieBOT/TPERTable <!-- Open TPERs -->
               Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion # namespace=4 prefix=Redirects_for_discussion/ <!-- Only watch active RfD subpages. -->
               User:Mz7/SPI case list <!-- Active SPIs -->
|source_user = Tamzin
               'zin is short for Tamzin
|user_days_back = 2
|user_edits_back = None
|namespace = -Category, File <!-- I don't really edit these namespaces -->
|always_watch = User:Tamzin
|never_watch = Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents
|update_frequency = auto
}}

That would render as {{Special:RecentChangesLinked/{{FULLPAGENAME}}/links}}, while a bot would update the /links subpage in accordance with the {{{update_frequency}}} value.

Should be pretty straightforward to set up, when I get around to it. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 03:34, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

"hint, TNT"—thank you but no -- TNT (talk • she/her) 03:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Wait, what do I do? You're not my mom/s! El_C 04:56, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Quick question

Hi, Tamzin! I was rummaging through the NPP archives and stumbled onto this discussion. First, my belated THANK YOU!! Second, please see this redirect which showed up in the NPP queue as a result of: 07:39 · Turtle-bienhoa · ←Blanked the page and then reverted 07:39 · Turtle-bienhoa · Undid revision 1097374915 by Turtle-bienhoa (talk). Is there any way we can get the Bot to recognize that type of activity so that it doesn't remove reviewed status? Best ~ Atsme 💬 📧 14:02, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Example male and Example female

Hi Tamzin—hope you are doing well. I was wondering if you would be able to update User:Example male and User:Example female to use Special:GlobalPreferences to set their genders, instead of setting them locally? As an irrelevant aside, as I was writing this note, I realized I would ping both accounts. This made me curious: how many pings are they currently sitting at? Anyways, happy editing! HouseBlaster^talk 22:51, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Article suggestion for talkpage watchers!

Hello, talkpage watchers! If anyone's looking for an article to write, here's one that I think is really interesting, easily notable, and maybe has GA potential, but with which I have a minor COI: Edgar Labat, a Black man wrongfully convicted of rape in Louisiana in 1953. At the time he was freed (1966), he was the longest-serving death row inmate in U.S. history. He was the subject of protracted litigation throughout that time and became a cause célèbre, with lots of coverage. This Time article gives an overview. Newspapers.com^TWL has lots more. And there's scholarly coverage. My COI is relatively small (my grandparents advocated for him and he lived with them briefly), enough so that I'd be fine assisting once written, but I shouldn't be the main author on this. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 18:48, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

bcc

I didn't know {{bcc}} existed. I wish there was a list of semi-obscure and occasionally helpful Wikipedia features. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 09:00, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

'zinbot question

Hey Tamzin. I was curious, would it be much effort to modify task 1 of 'zinbot to also mark pages sent to AfD as reviewed? Hey man im josh (talk) 19:31, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for this essay

I believe we all encounter some form of mental illness in our lives, some all encompassing, some apparently trivial. Nothing is trivial, but we can think it is.

I knew all this, but I know it better now I've seen it written down.

I took my own wikibreak a few years ago, and it was for a few years. It coincided with sudden busy-ness in real life, and I think I would not have handled things well had I continued, 🇺🇦 Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 🇺🇦 19:50, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

A year late, @Timtrent, thanks for appreciating the essay. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 07:21, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Ambition achieved

User:Tamzin/userboxen/User non-admin someday You finally got there! 😃. JBW (talk) 18:03, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

@JBW: Sadly I forgot to ask the 'crats to use the userbox. But, for whatever reason I'm back in the saddle now, so maybe next time.

Some say my tenure will end in arbies.
Some say in 'crats.
From what I've tasted of ol' ANNIE.
I hold with those who favor arbies.
But if I had to de-mop twice,
I think I know enough of burnout
To say that for desysop 'crats
Are also great
And would suffice.

(With apologies to Robert Frost.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 16:16, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Aah, Robert Frost! I read and very much liked his poems back in my youth, but I can scarcely remember anything about them now. The sadness of the passing of time... Sigh... JBW (talk) 17:11, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

The sadness of the passing of time ← That's more Proust. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|she) 17:36, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I believe so, but I've never read him. JBW (talk) 17:51, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps...

I want to talk to you,

And if you forget me,

You will protect us.

I want to smile at you,

And if you remember me,

You will understand me.

I want to sing to you,

And if you will sing with me,

Our harmony will light up our lives.

I want to understand you,

And if only Google would help...

Only it fucking won't.

JBW (talk) 17:24, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Not trying to invite the wrath of the evil eye, but...

and maybe there's some reason you want all 142 of these conversations here, but if there isn't, maybe do some archiving? They have bots for that, you know. :D Valereee (talk) 20:40, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Valereee. Your punishment for asking this forbidden question will be getting this whole schpiel in return. Eye (heh) of the beholder as to whether that makes me an agent of the evil eye.

So, when I started to understand my dissociative identity disorder in late 2020, I wound up with a lot of great insights into myself, but also wound up a lot less functional than before. Basically everything I did was on impulse, and it took exceptional energy to plan things out more than a day in advance. In a lot of ways that made life Hell, but that bare-minimum stability meant that I could slowly tug my mental health to where it needed to be, in order for me to be the person my family deserved. And eventually I got to that place, got to create the happy domesticated polycule life I'd dreamt of, but I still was stuck on that 24-hour planning loop.

And so in all that time, about 3 years, responding to messages was the hardest thing. I set a hard rule for myself that any ADMINACCT inquiries got a drop-everything response, because at any slower pace there was no guarantee I'd remember to reply at all. Once something fell off that 24-hour radar, I often forgot about it entirely. Every few months I'd comb through old messages and reply to some, and leave others. But it was always a losing battle.

So, that's the "maybe ... some reason": I've left a lot of messages up because I'd rather respond late than never (and, for ones I've already responded to, or that don't need no response, the same phenomenon's always made it hard to remember to archive/remove). Now, for all my willingness to speak about mental health in the abstract, I generally dislike explaining on-wiki issues with "because mental illness". The reason I'm answering this now is because all of this stopped being true about two weeks ago! And I'm excited about that and wanted to take a moment (at the expense of your reading patience, no doubt) to commemorate it. After three years of figuring out my DID, it turned out that if certain parts of me merged with certain other parts, the result was a combined part with an actual working memory, healthy sleep schedule, and much better disposition. It's pretty awesome! I've spent a lot of the past two weeks doing things like place important phone calls and then get really excited about how I just totally placed that phone call without forgetting for 6 months. On-wiki, I've been working on my "white whale" draft, which I'd wandered away from for the third time in July. (I shan't link. 🪬) And so, this is a fortuitous time for you to remind me about these back messages. I'll try and get to them this week. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 04:42, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Hey, T! Well, first, I'm so happy for you that whatever strategy you've found is working so well that you're feeling a true sense of delight with it! That's great. And second, I get it about needing to keep messages "live" (for want of a better term) in order to prevent yourself from forgetting them. I use my email inbox the same way -- if a message needs responding to but I'm not ready to respond, I remark it as unread. It's not a great solution -- I have messages months old that need responding to. Oops, including an invoice that's probably at least that old, yow. :D At any rate, third, I intended more gentle ribbing than anything else, and apologies for getting into mental health territory with that, it hadn't occurred to me that might be what I was doing. Valereee (talk) 11:35, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I take no offense, @Valereee. I just enjoyed the chance to give a brief update on where I'm at, since I don't think I've said much on-wiki about that since August. Also thank you for reminding me I need to pay an invoice. (Got to pay for the new solar panels! Very exciting. We'll see if they pay for themselves before '44 repeats itself.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 18:48, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm very happy to read this, especially the part about the benefits of your internal M&A. (Who says they're all bad?) You were a great person to chat with when I was regularly in the Discord VC, and I miss those days. Come by WP:WMNYC sometime if you feel up to it! <3 SWinxy (talk) 06:46, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

I just assume those with long user/user talk pages are in a contest with @EEng: -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 10:55, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

draft

Would you have any interest in vetting the History section at User:Valereee/ Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender to remove any stupidity or ignorance on my part? (Any TPS also invited to edit.) Valereee (talk) 13:46, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

@Valereee: I absolutely would have interest, which is why I haven't removed this section for nine months, because I keep expecting to want to look. Empirically, however, it seems I don't have interest. Sorry. Maybe Pretzelles? -- 'zin^{[is short for Tamzin]} 05:16, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

No worries, I went ahead and moved it and added the LGBTQ+ studies WikiProject. Someone who knows more than I do will no doubt happen along! Valereee (talk) 12:42, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Please Self-Revert

Hello, please self-revert your latest edit to the MfD or I will be bringing this matter to the ANI for violating WP:NPA. Thank you Durchbruchmüller 22:07, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Lol fuck off. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:08, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Tamzin, would you like to go to ANI and dance that dance, or shall I just block them? Drmies (talk) 22:15, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

A sock, Doc? Such a shock. Good block. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:20, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Well that was fun. Nice alliteration. Do you want to go to that MfD and strike out all their comments? Enjoy, Drmies (talk) 22:21, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, I have a previously scheduled trepanation that seems much more pleasant. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:24, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Hmm I'm sorry to hear that. What's for dinner? Drmies (talk) 22:28, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Me, if they do it wrong. Got a 100% discount for agreeing to that. But I trust Fat Sal and his whole team at the auto body shop. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:32, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Follow up

On your interesting Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-06-08/Opinion

May I suggest linking your work from PubPeer entry on the academic article in question, to give it more visibility? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 14:25, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

@Piotrus: I don't have the fight in me for all that, but if you'd like to, by all means! -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 17:28, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

@Tamzin Done (I left a comment linking to your piece). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:30, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Would this be a useful essay? Or is this topic either irrelevant or sufficiently covered?

Hey, I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to you because of your excellent work on Wikipedia:Hate is disruptive, as well as the discussion at Talk:F1NN5TER about doxxing. The question of how to treat sources that are at least somewhat reliable but are (rightly or wrongly) perceived as prejudiced (either broadly or based on protected class) has been repeatedly discussed on Wiki. Therefore, I think that writing up a „how-to-deal-with-this“ might be useful, titled something along the line of WP:PREJUDICEDSOURCES. What do you think? FortunateSons (talk) 14:48, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Interesting

[1] Drmies (talk) 15:40, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

@Drmies: Yeah, I noticed that too. Possibly better to leave the ES but yeet the IP, rather than the other way around, to leave a clearer record if anyone ever adds it back? (I'd suggest OS over RD; email me if not clear why.)

But yeah, seriously, at least the sixth time I've seen this with a BLPNAME violation being worsened when it turns into deadnaming someone and/or forcing them to overpublicize a transition. A friend's boyfriend, Seph Mozes, reached out to me years ago about the plight of being deadnamed in his mother's article but not having publicly transitioned. I offered to remove it as a BLPNAME violation but he was worried that, given his mother's fame, celebrity journalists would notice the removal. Not a likely event, given that most journalists can't even find the history tab, but I understand why he was that concerned after a childhood in the spotlight, and he shouldn't have been in that position to begin with. I would have been in the same position, during my 9 months of partial social transition in 2019, if Rms125a@hotmail.com hadn't had the sense to remove my name from my dad's article in 2013. In the past few years I've also run into the non-notable-trans/enby kid problem at Mike Tyson and Eric A. Meyer as you know, and also at Terence Tao, Bob Lee (businessman), and Tony Hawk.

Not sure what to do about this. It's not a trans-specific issue, obviously, just more obvious there. BLPNAME violations are ubiquitous, possibly on more bios than not. Perhaps some cleanup project is needed, especially for minor children. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 20:55, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

I'd love to work on that cleanup project or start it! pauliesnug ^{(message / contribs)} 14:52, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Audio Essay

Hi Tamzin. I came here after seeing your post at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to respond there, so I'm posting here instead. I just listened to your audio essay from when you resigned your admin rights. I was so impressed with it. I thought your reasoning was considered, concise and insightful. The part about the computer game, big circles eating up smaller circles especially hit home with me. Social capital does seem to be prevalent here at Wikipedia, a tiny microcosm of life in general, distilled down to a couple of noticeboards. I'm glad you've decided to go back to admin duties and I hope you can return making the changes we need, no matter how big or small.

If you ever need a change of career, you should think about audio books. Probably inappropriate to say this but what the hell, your voice is so soothing lol.

Good luck, Knitsey (talk) 01:19, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, @Knitsey! At some point I'd like to do a whole treatise on the social economics of Wikipedia—for instance, how opposing at RfA is essentially a ritual sacrifice of social capital, while closing a discussion is a gamble, since more social capital lowers the risk of challenge, but a successful challenge costs you a multiple of what you spent. But for now I'm glad the essay gets the general point across.

And I get that a lot about my voice. The secret is that, just like half-baked cookies taste better, doing only half of transfeminine voice training sounds better. :D It's funny you bring that up, though: Yesterday I woke up with a sore throat, and then toward the end of the day found myself suddenly having to console a stranger who was crying, and doing that without my normal voice was like fighting with a hand tied behind my back. Usually I can just say anything and it'll calm someone down. So, uh, if you know anyone looking for audiobook narration with a soothing androgynous voice, sure, hit me up. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 01:35, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Social economics and how we calculate trading is definitely something that might interest quite a few people on here. I think a lot of people do it without realising (I include myself somewhat in that) and recognising that trade could help in a change of some behaviours. Or at least give pause for thought.

Transfeminine voice training - I never even thought about that! Now I've gone down the YouTube rabbit hole of voice training when transitioning. I honestly never knew that was a 'thing' but it make complete sense as part of the transitioning process. The thing is, many decades ago whe I started my career it was male dominated and I found that over the first few years, my voice changed so that I didn't stand out as female. I haven't thought about that in years. Knitsey (talk) 01:57, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

My mother experienced the same thing as a TV news producer in the '80s. She's naturally a soprano but learned to be a low alto to differentiate herself from the secretaries. That's actually one of a number of masculine traits she picked up in that line of work, which led to the funny situation that if I ever think "What would Mom do?" in a situation and try to act like her, that's literally the only time anyone reads me as a "sir". -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 02:13, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

I probably shouldn't have laughed at your 'sir' comment...but I did. The amount of times I would turn up to a job and the look of disappointment because I wasn't the 'hunk' they assumed I was going to be. Much eyerolling and pretending it was still funny to hear that for the umpteenth time. Knitsey (talk) 02:29, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Incidentally, if any talkpage watchers want an impossible sourcing challenge: A while ago someone made a Wikidata item for my mom. I was going to ask someone to add the fact that she co-won an Emmy in 1990 for CBS' coverage of Hurricane Hugo, but this has proven shockingly difficult to find a source for, even though I've seen the damn statuette. The closest I've come is this article that at least verifies that CBS won for its Hugo coverage, but says neither the name of the category nor the producers who were honored. Searching is complicated by the fact that there are five kinds of Emmy award, awarded by three different academies, and the relevant one here, NATAS, doesn't list old winners on its site, while the ATAS' search engine optimization scoops up a lot of search terms even when they explicitly mention the news Emmys. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 03:08, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Few sourcing challenges are impossible when a procrastinating Wikipedian is on the case: official verification here (bottom of page 1); secondary verification here (bottom of page 446). Very glad to see the BN request, by the way! Extraordinary Writ (talk) 04:18, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Well I'll be damned! Ping @AntiCompositeNumber, who's been editing the item. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 04:25, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm going to blame the Internet Archive outage for me not finding that, even thought it had been mostly fixed by the time Tamzin asked me. Bunch of Wikidata edits done, plus a few added citations here too. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:23, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Ayy, and just like that a 14-year-old {{cn}} vanishes at Kathleen Sullivan (journalist). @AntiCompositeNumber: I'm not even sure it'd be a COI for me to do it since I've never met Sullivan, but at least to avoid an appearance of impropriety, at her article could you change to [[Emmy Award for Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Event|Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Event]] to [[Emmy Award for Outstanding General Coverage of a Single Breaking News Story|Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Event]] per source? The former seems to be something Wikipedia just made up (or more likely, someone wrote out from memory and then someone else "helpfully" linked—haven't checked). -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 18:28, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Went with [[Emmy Award for Outstanding General Coverage of a Single Breaking News Story|Outstanding General Coverage of a Single Breaking News Story]]. Maybe in another 14 years someone will decide to write about the News Emmys. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:41, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Reading the stuff above about trans voice training and related issues brought to mind four memories from a very long time ago. Of the first two trans women that I knew, back in the 1970s (which will give you some idea as to how old I must be) one of them just spoke in a very deep masculine voice. I got the impression that she hated doing that, but wasn't able to overcome the problem. She very likely had no idea how to; there was, of course, far less information and support available for trans people then than there is now, though already far more than there had been just a few years earlier. The other one spoke in a really forced and artificial falsetto voice, which sounded totally weird. Very likely she too suffered from the same lack of information and support, but dealt with it in a different way. The third and fourth memories that it brought back were being mistaken as female myself, once in my late teens and once in my early twenties. I was not generally regarded as feminine. If anything, the opposite; for example once at school (an all-boys school) a teacher thought that I was unsuited to take a female part in reading a play, because my voice was too masculine. Nevertheless, twice I was misidentified. The first time, the woman who made the mistake realised pretty quickly, and almost died of embarrassment. She apologised repeatedly, evidently thinking what she had done must be really offensive and insulting to me. I tried to explain to her that I wasn't offended at all, but I couldn't persuade her; evidently she just couldn't conceive of a male person who didn't regard being being thought to be female as insulting. However, I had no problem at all in being taken for a girl; there's nothing wrong with being one, so what's wrong with being thought to be one? The second time it happened, I had a conversation for several minutes with a bank clerk who thought I was a woman. I kept expecting her to realise any minute, but she never did. The strange thing is that she was dealing with my bank account, in my name, and my first name is one of the commonest English male first names. I guess she just hadn't noticed it; she just called me. "Mrs" + my surname. Why didn't I correct her? I'm not sure, after all these years, but I rather think it was just because I found it rather amusing.

A bit more on topic for this section, I read your audio essay shortly after your desysopping, and found it very interesting. I was also glad to see your return to the fold. Welcome back. JBW (talk) 19:59, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: You're sort of scratching the surface of what I wrote at User:Tamzin/Gender—an approach to gender that isn't at all unique to nonbinary or trans people, and in fact was partly inspired by what the cisgender linguist Taylor Jones says in this video essay. For me, if gender is a social construct, then who am I to decide how others construct me? I can do things to my presentation that push the needle in one direction or the other‚ but it's up to another person how to process that raw data. I have an androgynous-to-fem voice and facial features and almost always wear dresses (not because I'm under any impression that most women only wear dresses; I just like dresses), and that means ~100% of people say "she" or occasionally "they", but if someone comes from some cultural background where those things are all coded masculine, and they see me as a "he", very well. Similarly, I've had a few times ever where I was speaking in a particularly assertive way, and someone went with "he", even though everyone else to gender me that day had gone with "she"—and that tells me something interesting about how people see gender. So all I really care is that people are honest with themselves about how they see me, y'know? I know not all nonbinary/trans people see it that way, but that's sorta my galaxy-brain take after a few years of transition. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 20:55, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Something which I intended to mention when I wrote that message, but which somehow got left out, is that now, in a culture where such ideas as "non binary" are fairly well known, I'm sure that it would be far less surprising to encounter a teenage boy who's happy to be taken for a girl than it was then, when probably many people, like the woman I mentioned, would not have been able to conceive of it. However, there must have been a lot of us around, but mostly invisible. JBW (talk) 21:30, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Incidentally, my note about pronouns on my user page is vaguely related to this. JBW (talk) 21:32, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Excellent edit summary

Great wording on this. "Low profile" is just the term I was looking for. "Non-notable" (my previous go-to) sounds mean in that context. Joyous! Noise! 23:07, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

@Joyous!: Thanks! Taken from the wording of WP:BLPNAME and WP:LPI (an imperfect essay that works well enough here). I'm trying to do a cleanup of needless kid-naming in bios... 9 down so far, thousands more to go. See § Interesting for backstory on this. Feel free to join me! I'm starting with the results of this search. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 23:35, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

A fox for you!

Welcome back to the admin corps!

— Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 00:41, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

• To say this is shocking is an understatement. Given your comments this year about administrators and administrative work, the last thing I expected is that you would want to return to the admin corps when you didn't seem to have much respect for the position. We can always use more help, I'm just very surprised given your previous statements. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 09:22, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

  @Liz: I have neither respect nor disrespect for the position, because I don't think of positions as something meriting respect, but I certainly have lots of respect for (most) admins as individuals and (mostly) as a team. My issue is with the culture surrounding user conduct matters. Even a decade into better civility enforcement (and I know you remember the bad old days), we're still inconsistent and pick favorites. We still allow a self-appointed peanut gallery at AN/I to be one of the most powerful entities on the site. And most importantly, our system of user conduct enforcement still functions more like a gambling game of social capital than anything approaching a justice system. But I've realized I can still operate within that system, to some degree, despite my reservations about it. I think I had to find a certain degree of both passion and dispassion within me... so in a way, the "radical changes to how I work" that I wrote off in my essay have come to pass. Plus, two of the things that most frustrated me—unchecked RfA incivility and the ability of admins' friends to stonewall legitimate complaints about them at AN(/I)—have been significantly mitigated with this year's reforms, which has been great to see. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 10:25, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

• Woah, welcome back Tamzin! I see you felt like being in the position of using the mop again after a while of careful reconsideration. Great to see you return to taking part in administrative tasks with a new approach! — AP 499D25 (talk) 02:33, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

NSPECIES

Thank you for your thoughtful close at that RfC. I appreciate that you recognized the difference between "acknowledging current practice" and "endorsing that practice" and left open the potential for amendments to the language. Would you be willing to look over the newer section I made and advise on the issues I've pointed out, because I am getting a lot of condescension and misreadings by the regulars over what seems like a very straightforward problem: the guideline explicitly states a species "having a valid name" meets the SNG, and also that this is by definition always accompanied by SIGCOV in a reputable academic publication -- this is probably true for all taxa except animals, where a species can get a valid name with an un-peer-reviewed self-published paper. Somehow this is getting dismissed as a non-problem? Or being wildly misunderstood? Am I going insane, or is it still considered "not good" to base articles around SPS from hobbyists?
Thanks JoelleJay (talk) 23:45, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

@JoelleJay: Closing the RfC doesn't give me any special insight on the subject, just the ability to read consensus. All I can volunteer, having read through the discussion, is that y'all have gotten quite abstract and have reached the point of arguing about what you're arguing about. The discussion might benefit from some more concrete examples. And/or it might benefit from waiting for a while for the dust to settle from the RfC close. Also, I'll note that NSPECIES is a guideline, and cannot trump WP:V, a policy that states any claim "must have been previously published in a reliable source before you can add it" to an article. So if your concern is that a specific source or kind of source fail WP:V, that goes beyond the bounds of NSPECIES, and is something you could discuss at WP:RSN among other places. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 17:53, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, Tamzin. I asked you because you're the only editor I know who has read the whole discussion without participating in it. I do think the appearance of "abstraction" is from editors just categorically not understanding what the ICZN is or how valid names work and arguing against positions that don't exist (e.g. "merely having an ICZN listing"). I don't anticipate this area ever becoming more receptive to changes; it's been a walled garden for over a decade.

I did give some concrete examples -- we have 600 articles sourced to the self-published magazine Visaya -- but I think the bigger problem is that the SNG just does not have usable guidance for the animal kingdom in general. I explained this in one of my comments: The guideline does not state that "acceptance by the relevant international body of taxonomists" means "acceptance by certain authoritative databases"; in fact, the only "relevant international bod[ies] of taxonomists" ever referenced on this page are the nomenclatural committees, and we state concordance with their definitions of "valid name" directly satisfies the SNG. So how is it at all intuitive for NPP, AfC, etc. to read this guidance and conclude that "this new animal species description in SPS meets the criteria for a valid name as dictated by the ICZN, thus meeting the SNG section on eukaryotes, but actually we can't use those rules that we link to and instead we should check whichever taxon-specific database requires positive, reliably-published community acceptance before it designates a name as "valid", even though the SNG doesn't even hint at mentioning such databases"? Editors are also arguing that "the standards" in taxonomy regarding publishing trump WP rules on unreliability, and therefore databases that make no claim of editorial oversight or which have clear COIs are acceptable as the sole sources of pages. JoelleJay (talk) 00:09, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

More examples: ~440 articles sourced to Malacologia Mostra Mondiale, a self-pub "edited" by a physician-turned-shell-seller and sold on Poppe's ConchBooks website. Its most recent issues feature new species descriptions by NN Thach (whose taxonomic vandalism has been described in multiple academic papers)... There are dozens (hundreds?) of articles sourced exclusively to this magazine and the species' minimal entry on MolluskBase, apparently all created by GaneshBot around 2010. We've also got dozens of pages sourced solely to Thach's 48HrBooks books and a MolluskBase entry, and sometimes only the former source, e.g. Amphidromus mariae. These are just hits for the first two fake journals I looked up...there are bound to be many more. JoelleJay (talk) 01:53, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

AMP (Any Means Possible)

Hi, looking at the sources, I see a G11, but it's no big issue, I leave it for somebody else to handle. A7 doesn't seem applicable, I think. Cheers. --Randykitty (talk) 20:01, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Aras War

I'm curious, what makes you think the Draft:Aras War was a hoax? I'm not saying you are mistaken. Or even if you are, I'm very sure several other speedy delete categories would apply. It just keeps on getting recreated and I can't understand what's going on there. Feel free to email me if WP:BEANS applies. --Yamla (talk) 19:17, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

@Yamla: I was going off of JBW's findings at Aras War; see tangentially related Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Nuraddin historys13. But yes, if not G3, it's likely G5—compare to Idkarmenia21's version at Special:Undelete/Draft:Aras War—and definitely a WP:GS/AA ECR violation. Speaking of which, I'm going to go EC-salt the article. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 19:23, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Oooh, that was the context I was looking for. Thanks! --Yamla (talk) 19:25, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

@Yamla and Tamzin: My attention was drawn to the article Aras War when I was investigating an elaborate web of sockpuppetry and hoaxing. I don't remember all the details, but, as Tamzin has suggested, Nuraddin historys13 and their sockpuppets came into it. Anyway, however it was that I came to be investigating the article, I put quite a bit of time into checking supposed references, searching for information about the war, and so on. I found absolutely no reliable sources supporting the claims made in the article, and what is more, it wasn't mentioned in sources which certainly would have mentioned it. I became 100% confident that it was a hoax. JBW (talk) 21:52, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: My suspicion, based on the breadth of this, the fact that it seems more MEAT than SOCK, and the fact that Nuraddin historys13 is (per userpage self-disclosure) a YouTuber who makes explicitly nationalist content that sometimes references these articles [2] [3], is that this is less "something the user made up" hoaxing and more "something that is being taught as ethnonationalist pseudohistory somewhere on the Web" hoaxing, with varying levels of complicity by the people perpetuating it, and maybe a dash of AI-generated "improvement". But, hoaxing either way. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 22:45, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Yeech, what a world we live in. --Yamla (talk) 22:47, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Unfortunately I think you may well be right, Tamzin, from what I saw. JBW (talk) 22:56, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

History repeats itself

Hi, Tamzin. A few hours ago I found the user page Lukasnorman65, and decided to post some advice to the editor. I also intended to move the page to draft space, because I foresaw the likelihood that it would be nominated for speedy deletion. As I was writing my message, I was called away, and it was much later that I found time to finish it. When I was ready to save it, I found that, just as I expected, it had been nominated for speedy deletion, which you had declined. I just thought it was rather funny, because, as you know, yesterday you declined a speedy deletion nomination that I was going to decline. Could this become a regular habit? 😏 (I find it astonishing how many editors can't see the difference between misuse of a user page as a personal web page and use of a userpage for a draft article.)

On a completely different matter, yesterday I referred to you as "she", but I have now seen that you ask for they/xe. My apologies, and I will try to remember in future. JBW (talk) 21:31, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: Yes, U5 has been a frustration of mine for a long time. With it no longer being emptied with such... precise regularity, shall we say... I've taken it upon myself to keep a closer eye on the category. I find that most taggings do meet the wording of U5, or fall under G11 while being close enough to U5 that I wouldn't fault the user for tagging as that instead, and indeed I've been deleting more userpages in the past few days than I ever had before... but an alarming number are of things that would be entirely normal to see as AfC drafts, or of basic introductory text exactly along the lines of what WP:UPYES calls for.

This is something I've talked about in the past with, variously, @Elli, @Clovermoss, and @theleekycauldron, among others. Now, inspired by @HouseBlaster's WP:What G6 is not, I've written an essay, WP:What U5 is not. Thoughts welcome!

Oh, and on the pronouns note, JBW, if you click what "they|xe" links to, you'll see I don't care at all what people use, as long as it's authentic to how they see me. That could've been clearer, though, so I've managed to shave off a few bytes from my sig so I could fit in a 🤷 to, I hope, clarify. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 23:19, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) That "precise regularity," is very euphemistic.😛 Glad you are wrangling the U5's. And G11's. They are sometimes over-applied. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 10:58, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@Tamzin, I thought (without looking closer) that that was a fireplace, lol.

JuxtaposedJacob (talk) | :) | he/him | 06:34, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Seeking a second opinion

I am highly confident that 178.218.129.106 is a VPN server being abused by WP:LTA/BMN123, but before taking the somewhat intrusive step of reverts edits on a user talk page followed by a friendly advisement, I'd prefer someone else double check; frankly it might be better for a sysop to leave the advisement anyway.

As background, BMN123 has a habit of archiving talk page discussions that don't go their way which is to say all of them, and then placing NOINDEX tags on them. As just one example these discussions did not reach the result they wanted so they have been attempting to NOINDEX that page for some time, I suppose so that people are less likely to notice their slow motion edit warring against consensus. This is easily viewable in the page history. All of this is also documented on their LTA page. One of the more recent edits mentions the same user that 178.218.129.106 is attempting to influence. 103.115.17.30 also tried to NOINDEX one of the usual _targets, and subsequently created the section 178.218.129.106 added to. The only slightly oddball thing is that 178.218.129.106 has been reused over a longer period than is typical of their non-mainspace use of proxies/VPNs, but that's not enough to cause me to doubt this one.

I think that's enough, but if you have some extra time you can feel free to review the LTA page in full. It's not as compact as say WP:LTA/TVFT, but the detail does serve a purpose and it even got excerpted in the signpost, so there's that. There's actually a lot more that was left off for various reasons, some of which is linked on the LTA talk page (e.g. [4], [5], [6]) along with many pieces that like this old AN discussion, there's other stuff on the LTA talk page too which I've used as a notebook of sorts until there's an edit request worth making, but it's a pretty deep rabbit hole, and I don't think you need to good down all of it to make the connection here.

Sorry to trouble you with this. Sideswipe9th was always the best at sniffing them out and is the first person I would think to ask, but their currently on wikibreak. Softlemonades and GeneralNotability were also at least as good as me, but they're not active either. I know you've managed to follow some incredible faint and confusing scent trails before so I trust your judgement on this.

If you need to follow-up I might be able too, but I really need to put my nose back to the grindstone soon, and the best way to avoid Wikipedia distraction is to go cold turkey, so we'll see. Thanks for any assistance you can render. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 20:07, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Removal of image in obituary

Hi @Tamzin, could you let me know why the image was removed from the obituary I posted, please? As a first time obituary poster, I'm wondering if I have missed a rule somewhere? Thank you in anticipation. AlphaLemur (talk) 09:12, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I responded at Wikipedia talk:Deceased Wikipedians#Adding image to an entry. RIP, a terrible loss here. Graham87 (talk) 09:24, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Responded there. Thanks for the pointer. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 09:32, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

NP. You might want to see my reply to your reply; I don't feel like doing the whole re-add comment/ping routine. Graham87 (talk) 09:45, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

thanks to you both for your help. very much appreciated! @Graham87@Tamzin AlphaLemur (talk) 09:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Administrative culture

I have just read the expression "my disdain for a lot of our administrative culture". That exactly encapsulates a lot of my feeling. If you spend long enough searching through my editing history you will see that just very occasionally I mention some of my feelings on this. What you will not see, though, is that on those occasions what I say is a toned-down, censored version of my true opinions. Every so often I seriously consider posting somewhere a diatribe giving something closer to a full account of my thoughts, but so far I have always held back, because I think on balance I will probably achieve more by just doing what I can without stirring things up. Who knows, though, whether one day I will decide to let rip. From things that you have said and written in the past, I know that your criticisms of the admin culture are not identical to mine, but there's a considerable overlap, and I feel that there's a similar overall character to them. (Having said that, I hope when you read this you won't be sitting there thinking "What does JBW mean by posting this crap? They are one of the worst examples of the noxious admin culture that I hate so much". 🥺) JBW (talk) 16:41, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) @JBW: I'd be interested in reading those thoughts. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:52, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: Well, you have already read a "toned-down, censored version" on at least one topic, namely the way that certain administrators (not you, and not Tamzin) are so reluctant to give blocked editors another chance. What really frustrates me most about that is the way the system is stacked in favour of administrators who don't like unblocking: anyone who does not want to unblock can just decline an unblock, and that's the end of it; on the other hand anyone who does want to unblock can't do so without consulting the blocking administrator, and although the policy doesn't say so, in practice most administrators treat that as though it means that one is virtually banned from unblocking unless the blocking administrator agrees. And unfortunately there are administrators who deliberately use that situation to make sure that their decision stays no matter what, not to make sure that their opinion is taken into consideration, along with others, in making a decision.

That's for unblocking. How about placing the block in the first place? Again, the system is stacked in favour of administrators who like blocking. Here are two situations which I have enocountered probably literally thousands of times in my 14 years as an administrator. (1) I review a report at WP:AIV. I see that it is a new editor, and there are problems with their editing, but I think a friendly warning is appropriate for the present, so I go to the editor's talk page to post a warning, only to find that another administrator has got there first, and blocked the editor. I can't override that and impose my preferred outcome, because reverting an admin action merely because I personally would have done it differently is frowned on, and if I did it frequently I would be ArbCommed & desysopped. Maybe you are thinking that's just a matter of which administrator gets there first, and it could have gone the other way? Well, no, because here's the other one of the two situations that I mentioned: (2) I review a report at WP:AIV. I see that it is a new editor, and there are problems with their editing, but I think a friendly warning is appropriate for the present, so I go to the editor's talk page, and this time I'm the first to get there, so I do get to post my warning. Then along comes the other administrator, who, as before, has chosen to block, but this time has been a little slower than me; they go ahead and block. They are under no obligation to accept my prior decision, because posting a talk page warning is not an admin action. So, you see, it's not a matter of who gets there first; it's a matter of the one who likes to block always being able to get their way, if they choose to use the system that way. They don't have to do it that way, they choose to: they know I have chosen not to block (or they should do, because they should have checked the talk page before deciding to block), and have consciously decided to impose a different decision over mine. In that situation in reverse, where I am the one inclined to block an editor but see that another administrator has decided to just warn, I usually defer to that decision, and leave the editor unblocked. However, there's a large body of administrators who don't, and many of those are also the ones who aren't interested in listening to anyone else's opinions relating to unblocking. To be blunt about it, they are happy to use the setup to impose a blockist agenda. I can't help wondering whether the most extreme cases of that are people who impose and maintain blocks for sadistic pleasure, rather than to protect the encyclopaedia. (Yes, I mean that absolutely seriously.) I won't mention any names, but probably I don't need to.

Well, there's just a very small fraction of my anger about just one of the many ways that I think the whole administrator system works. A full account of my thoughts on the matter would take up a hefty chunk of the Wikimedia Foundation's server space, and Tamzin's talk page isn't the place for it. JBW (talk) 21:22, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: MY BROTHER! -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 22:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: This is absolutely the place for it! :)

One thing I've thought about a lot is how we have no real case management system here. I moderate a fairly large Discord server, and there, if a user reports something, there's a button I can hit that says "I'm handling this." It's not perfect but it's a lot better than nothing. Right now we have no way for an admin to say that they're composing a response to something, or for that matter that they agree a block is needed but are looking at evidence to decide what kind, or that they've responded and consider a matter resolved. One could imagine restructurings of AIV, UAA, and CSD that would address that, especially if some JS were added to MediaWiki:Group-sysop.js that lets us know "The user whose contribs you're looking at has a new talkpage message" etc.

"Overruling" a no-block decision is tougher. I think I've done it a few times, when an admin seemed incredibly off-base, like giving a gentle username note to someone with a name like I-hate-gays or whatever. Then again, I've also overturned other admins' decisions to block a few times (and only landed at ArbCom one of those times :P). I think the root problem here is with WP:RAAA. It begins Administrators are expected to have good judgment, and are presumed to have considered carefully any actions or decisions they carry out as administrators. I mean. Fucking seriously? Every fucking admin knows that's a lie, because we've all had times where we deleted a page or blocked a user within seconds of looking. Usually entirely justifiably, because some deletions and blocks are just that obvious, but there's no world where that's "consider[ing] carefully". And in other cases, the lack of careful consideration speaks for itself. If an admin blocks two users as sox because they didn't know about the meme both were referencing in their usernames (actual thing I've unblocked over), they obviously did not carefully consider that block. Just like the admin who nolle prosses I-hate-gays (also based on a true story) has obviously not carefully considered that decision, because if they'd carefully considered it and still found no violation of WP:ATTACKNAME, that would mean they are either too bigoted or too clueless to be an admin.

So I think the solution, or at least a major necessary step toward a solution, in all this, is replacing that presumption of careful consideration with something else. I'm not entirely sure what. I'm honestly not sure if we need RAAA-shielding for routine admin actions. If an other admin were to see some routine vandalblock of mine and think I was hasty, and wanted to just unblock, then more power to them, as long as they're the one who wears the responsibility for whatever comes next. RAAA is useful for, say, blocks of experienced users who might have an admin-friend in the wings, or keeping people from fucking with things they mightn't understand the full story behind, like sockblocks, copyvioblocks, and socking-based page protections. But it creates a latch effect on the simplest admin actions, I think often more than even the admin intends. I think the solution starts with fixing that. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 03:25, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

In part this harks back to the recent Graham recall debacle. Perhaps that could have been avoided if I'd voiced my concerns with some of his blocks. Speaking up and speaking out are the only tools we have now, but they are useless when we don't use them. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 03:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Goodness, Tamzin, what you have said is very interesting, and raises a whole load of points that I have thoughts about. However, here are just a couple of them.

• You say that you have "Overruled" a no-block decision "a few times". I have done it probably more than just a few times (though of course that depends on what you mean by "a few") but a very small proportion of the number of times when I have decided not to. Most often it's just a question of a different personal judgement, and I accept that they have as much right to decide as I have. There are also very occasionally the "incredibly off-base" cases such as you mention, but far more often there are in-between cases, where I think there's a serious misjudgement, but not completely off the end of the scale. Those are more difficult to judge. I think in that situation I far more often than not leave things as they are, but not absolutely always. It depends on various factors, including what particular administrator it is; there's one in particular who has an astonishingly extensive history of not blocking for reasons which (in my opinion) can only possibly mean that he hasn't actually checked the editing history of the relevant editor beyond the last day or so, and I tend to be less inhibited against taking action in that case. However, this is drifting away from the topic of administrative culture and onto issues of individual administrators' approaches.
• You have said "Right now we have no way for an admin to say that they're composing a response to something, or for that matter that they agree a block is needed but are looking at evidence to decide what kind, or that they've responded and consider a matter resolved." Well, that's true in the sense that there's no formalised way of doing it, but there's nothing to stop one from doing it informally. In relation to AIV, for example, I have quite often thought that it might be worth posting Note: I'm investigating this, and hope to make a decision soon. JBW (talk) 14:16, 4 December 2024 (UTC) while I'm checking a report. There are reasons why I've never actually done that, but they aren't really compelling reasons. Probably the main reason is that far more than 90% of cases just don't need it. I don't know whether you ever look at UTRS, Tamzin, but that does have a button to click for an administrator to click to reserve a report that they are dealing with. (Since Deepfriedokra has taken part in this discussion, I will mention that he knows all about that, being one of the most active administrators on UTRS, maybe even the most active one.) JBW (talk) 14:16, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Just one more thought about blocks. You are of course right in saying that accounts with deliberately offensive names such as "I hate gays" should be blocked on sight, but apart from that kind of thing I absolutely don't understand why anyone would consider using a block for just a username. Someone comes along to contribute to Wikipedia, and, like most of us when we start editing, doesn't know about the username policy, so, in perfectly good faith, they create a username which is against policy. Am I missing something, or is it totally gratuitous biting of the newby to slap a block on them, instead of giving them a friendly message explaining the situation to them and asking them to change their username? As far as I remember I have never blocked an editor for a good faith username policy violation, and if I have it was a long time ago, and I don't expect to ever do so again. However, I see other administrators doing it all the time. Why? I honestly can't understand the mindset of someone who would even consider doing that. If any of those administrators reads this and thinks there is a good reason for it that has escaped me then I will be really interested to be told whatvit is. (To avoid any possible misunderstanding, I'm referring specifically to the situation where a good faith username policy violation is the only reason for the block, not where there is any further problem, such as continuation of editing under the unacceptable username after being told about the policy.) Bizarrely, I have seen these good faith username blocks even from administrators who will refuse to block outright malicious vandals unless they have been warned several times. Why????? JBW (talk) 21:02, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@JBW: Lots to think on here, but just to get the easy bit, I feel like the username-softblock situation could be solved with a warning that says "Your current username is in violation of <rule>. Please request a change before you continue editing, or you may be blocked from editing. You may also simply abandon this account and create a new one. Or if you think your username is not a violation, please explain why below." Then have a bot that replies to that message with "User has requested a change" if they request one, or reports to UAA/BOT if they keep editing without doing so. (The bot would have to have global renamer rights to see the queue, but I feel like we could probably get that cleared on Meta if it's read-only, or get a custom group made for it.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 18:38, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, reading this does make me feel less like I might become some kind of bull in a china shop with my developing unblock habit. Or at least perhaps that the china shop delenda est.

As for I can't help wondering whether the most extreme cases of that are people who impose and maintain blocks for sadistic pleasure, rather than to protect the encyclopaedia. (Yes, I mean that absolutely seriously.) I won't mention any names, but probably I don't need to., uh, seems bad? We probably shouldn't be able to joke about and active admin like that, let alone say it seriously. Is there a reason we're ignoring the missing stair? -- asilvering (talk) 03:13, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

It's only an impression of mine. It may not be so, and whether it is or not I have absolutely no evidence that would stand up at ANI or ArbCom, and I have no intention of making what would amount to an unsubstantiated personal attack. JBW (talk) 18:20, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Some of us are much more approachable than others. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 20:49, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

I should really carefully read all the policies and try to memorise their content. I have just discovered that the username policy says the following:

A user who both adopts a promotional username and who engages in inappropriate advertising or promotional edits or behaviors – especially when made to their own user space or to articles about the company, group, or product – can be blocked from editing Wikipedia...

(Emphasis of "both" and "and" in the policy.) I have always thought that blocking for an organisational username and no other problem is not only unjustified but so obviously unjustified as to make it bewildering why so many administrators do it. However, I did not know that policy specifically indicates that the username alone is not justification for a block. Will that now justify me in reverting all these unreasonable blocks when I see them? JBW (talk) 21:13, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Rajshalini

I probably would not have blocked for just the two instances, but whatever works. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 05:59, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: I also usually wouldn't, but when it comes to material that reads like pure SEO material—not "John Doe is an accomplished web developer", not "Acme Inc. is the best place to buy a gun for your coyote", but just keyword-stuffing and a link to a shady website—I tend to treat that as a spambot or someone behaving indistinguishably from one, not someone with any potential for actually contributing. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 06:03, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. That is freeing -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 09:03, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: Oh, and if we're playing "Why did Tamzin leap straight to blocking?", with Butternutsquash911 bruh it was because I don't fuck around with mass-murder hoaxes. I've seen them lead to police involvement before, and I've seen an experienced user in the mass-shooting topic area become a mass shooter himself (according to the OS team I can't say both the username and the killer's name, lest I harass a dead murderer, so let's go with the latter), and so it's a rare case where I'd rather block first and let them prove they're not actually here to incite violence. In this case, seems they probably aren't, but are still a more regular kind of NOTHERE, although that's up to you to decide. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 20:14, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah. No. Gotta bad feeling about that one. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 22:06, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

( in my James Earl Jones voice ) the wiki lawyer is strong with this one. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 22:11, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Welcome back to adminship

I am not sure when you picked up the tools again, and you probably remember my initial reservations. But noticing the change, I just want to say thank you for what you do, and welcome back. Cullen328 (talk) 07:26, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

+1 I wish you will soon return to SPI too. Maliner (talk) 20:44, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Salt evasion template

Thanks a lot for your quality of life improvements at User:Chaotic Enby/Salt evasion! For the "verify" part, what I had in mind was the case where a page might have not actually been salt evasion to begin with, and should be kept at its current title rather than deleted or moved (as the previous wording could imply that those were the only two choices). Although I wasn't sure how to word it in a less clumsy way. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 08:25, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I think the word "apparent" does enough there, combined with the fact that "X or Y" doesn't necessarily mean "only X or Y". Or at least hopefully we admins are smart enough to figure out we have the option to just do neither. :D -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 08:32, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Sometimes I feel like we're never too careful, but you're right that it should be clear enough! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 09:40, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Soft vs. hardblock for obfuscated names

Thanks for you comment about User:Sheolkino; I've gone back over my block logs and also lowered the block level for User:𝓔𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓵0 - it may be that there is some innocent reason for users doing this kind of obfuscation, and it would be interesting to find out what it might be, and where they got the idea/tools to do it from. — The Anome (talk) 09:13, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@The Anome: It's a not-uncommon username style on sites like Discord that allow the full range of Unicode characters in display names. I think a lot of people who do it think they're just "putting their name in italics" and don't realize that they're actually misusing special characters that will be unreadable to screenreaders and scripts. There are even sites like https://lingojam.com/ItalicTextGenerator and https://capitalizemytitle.com/italic-text-generator/ that further that impression. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 09:19, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm baffled by why there seems to be resistance to blocking usernames containing these characters at user signup time. It's easy to generate a list of such mathematical and other 'stunt' characters that look like styled versions of Latin alphabet characters. See User:The Anome#Literal patterns. — The Anome (talk) 09:28, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I've now put in a request for blacklisting them here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Title_blacklist#Non-script_characters — The Anome (talk) 09:39, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

A stupid question

Hi Tamzin! An IPv6 was messing about on Open Orthodoxy and I reverted them, but because I reverted quite a way back I am not sure if good edits got caught in the crossfire. Would you be so kind to check if I did everything correctly? I know very very little about this topic. Polygnotus (talk) 07:52, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm about to go to sleep, but I've blocked the IP three days. @Theleekycauldron may have more knowledge on the content side than I do. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 07:57, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you and sleep well! Polygnotus (talk) 07:59, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Hamsa for you

	Hamsa for you
	I am very happy to see you back. This Hamsa from Morocco will protect you from evil's eye. 👀 Maliner (talk) 20:46, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Admin's Barnstar
		For awesome, saint-like patience above and beyond the call of awesomeness in dealing with Butternutsquash911 bruh -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 21:05, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

And now for something completely different . . . .

Check out the latest request . . . . -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:21, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Well that's sure... somethin'. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 16:24, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Never a clerk around when you need one.😜 -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:32, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I like being Southron. You get to say things a little bit different. Though living down here amongst all these Yankees, I've lost my accent. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 12:14, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: I've been thinking a lot lately about Southernness. I've never lived in what most people think of as the South, but I would say I'm culturally southern—Dad was from a D.C.-based Louisiana Creole family, Mom grew up in New York but moved to Atlanta at 17. I've been realizing just how much my adherence to pretty basic parts of Southern etiquette causes unSouthern people to read me very differently than how I come across to Southerners. For instance, I never hesitate to offer someone a few nights to a week in my guest room, and to me this is just good manners, like the sort of thing you'd literally offer a stranger, but to Northerners it's apparently a whole thing. My mom ran into a similar problem trying to cook red beans and rice for 40 people, who couldn't fathom someone just doing that like it was nothing.

I feel like there's some connection to your and my adminning style here, but it's left as an exercise to the reader. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 04:49, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Gentility. aka good manners. aka proper upbringing. Our moms should be proud -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:55, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

UTRS appeal #97716

Could he have been Joe-jobbed? Meh? -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 12:07, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

told 'm to email the checkusers -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:56, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Explanation of U5 nom

Hi Tamzin. I saw your edit summary for declining my U5 nom for the userpage of Elle.Campbell. I did it because it's a copy of the mainspace article Prachin Buri radiation incident, so I believed it qualified because of WP:COPIES. Otherwise I would have draftified it - was I too quick to pull the trigger? --Drm310 🍁 (talk) 16:05, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

(talk page watcher)@Drm310: They might have copied it there to work on it. Maybe sandboxing it would have been better. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:56, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

This one's tough because it had already been moved back to the userpage, so technically speaking draftifying wouldn't have been the usual deletion-avoiding mercy but actually a redraftification. I wouldn't have U5'd it either, but I guess I'd have been stuck with moving it to a user subpage to try to keep future U5-taggers away. -- asilvering (talk) 18:34, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

@Drm310: If I'd realized, at time of declining, that the page was a copy, I probably wouldn't have declined with such strong language, but I still would have declined, because a copy of an article is still generally a plausible draft for the purposes of WP:U5. The solution I took in the end of blanking was actually probably not correct either, since I'd missed that the userpage-copying came after the mainspace edit, not before, but it's still there in the history if the user wants to restore, so I'll leave as is for now.

@Asilvering: As to draftifying, you may be interested in a new template I made the other day, {{Draftified userpage}}. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 20:09, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I like it. I will probably forget about it unless it's integrated into the draftify script I use, because I am lazy like that. Probably needs an informational link in "user subpage", since I doubt most people drafting on their userpage have any idea what that means. Not sure a link would help that sort of editor either, but at least we could say we'd done due diligence. -- asilvering (talk) 02:48, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

I've linked "subpage" to WP:SUB. I could've linked to WP:UP instead, but I think SUB is the more relevant page. --rchard2scout (talk) 08:23, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

UTRS appeal #97742

Best unblock request ever -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 01:33, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Well uh. For their sake, I'm hoping that's an impostor. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 02:17, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

What do we think of this?

• Draft:Lavish_Looks_Salon
• User talk:Lavish Looks
• @JBW:

-- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:15, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra: I mean, there's a good chance they wanted to do something G11able, but they didn't get the chance to, and there's no such thing as inchoate G11, so, I'd decline. As to the block, I would've softblocked, as there don't appear to be promotional edits (CC Rsjaffe). -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 04:41, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking, too. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:44, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

"without form and void". -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 04:45, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

I couldn’t see that draft as being anything other than the start of a promo page, which was my thought when doing the hard block. On the other hand, I can see your reasoning behind doing a soft block instead, particularly with their COI statement. Probably the best course of action would have been to do nothing until their edits more clearly defined their intentions. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 05:04, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

@Rsjaffe My usual approach for promotional usernames is:

1. Edits comply with WP:COI or at least make a good-faith effort to do so: Warn, monitor, block later if necessary
2. Edits violate WP:COI, but aren't outright spam: Softblock
3. Overt promotion/spam: Hardblock

(There's also a zeroth category here of "Username looks promotional but there's no COI edits", to which the answer is "do nothing".) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 05:09, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. By the way, I’m going to use your {{Draftified userpage}} template, if that’s ok. I’ve been rescuing U5’d userpages that are misplaced apparent attempts at articles and this’ll help. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 05:28, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes of course, that's why I made it! I've been meaning to advertise it more but hadn't gotten around to it yet. May also be of interest to @Deepfriedokra, @Rsjaffe, and @Clovermoss. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 05:32, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

koan of promotional user names

• This brings up several opinions of mine about administrators' approaches to people who come here to promote their businesses. If any of you don't like this wall of text, then don't blame me, blame Deepfriedokra: he's the one who pinged me here. Also ping Rsjaffe.

1. Suppose that we decide that an editor's username is unacceptable because it's the name of a business, but we don't see their editing as problematic, so we choose to let them continue editing under a new username. I have never been able to understand the thinking behind achieving that aim by blocking and telling the editor they can create a new account. We are obviously dealing with someone who has created an account with an unacceptable username in perfectly good faith, unaware of the username policy. Therefore, if we intend to let them continue editing, why not just explain to them, in a friendly way, that their username isn't acceptable, and they can edit with a new one? Why BITE them by throwing a block in their face without any warning? There are administrators who refuse at AIV to block unambiguous bad faith vandals because they haven't been warned, or even because they've only been warned once or twice, but who will throw an immediate block, without warning, at a good faith editor who had no reason to think there was anything wrong with what they were doing, when all that us needed is to ask them to change their username. Why? Why?
2. Now let's add a further feature to that situation. Although their editing has not so far been problematic, we think it looks as though there may be problems to come. To me, it seems obvious that it makes sense to keep a watch on their editing, so that if there are problems we can step in, whether in the form of giving a gentle warning, or a stern warning, or a block, as the circumstances warrant. If we either give a warning about the user name and suggest a change of username, or block without the option of creating a new account but with the option of a rename and unblock, then it's easy to keep a watch on their editing. If, however, we block with a message suggesting they create a new account, then keeping a watch on their editing will be more difficult, or even impossible, because we have no way of knowing what new username they choose. So why do so many administrators so often go for the one option which makes it difficult to monitor the situation? As I see it, either of the other two options is arguably a reasonable possibility, but that one isn't.
3. If you have read the two paragraphs above, you will realise that I am not keen on immediate blocks of good faith editors who have unwittingly violated the "spamusername" requirements. Nevertheless, I frequently do it. That is because in my early time as an administrator I found that if I gave a friendly warning, much more often than not another administrator would soon be along with an inappropriate block and often a totally inappropriate block message, so I decided, very reluctantly, that a less unreasonable block was the lesser of two evils. Some of the blocks were, in my opinion, much worse than those I have already mentioned. The following situation was really common. A new account would appear, named "BlenkinsopWidgetCompany", and would create a user page or a draft telling us in glowing terms how the Blenkinsop Widget Company provides its clients with unique solutions by leveraging their skills... etc etc. So an administrator would block the account, telling them that "the only reason for the block is your username." Please note the word "only". So the editor would request and receive an unblock and would then carry on editing in the same way as before, only to be blocked again. Alternatively an administrator with more sense than the one who placed the block would decline the unblock request because of the promotional editing. Either way, the editor was now blocked for something which a Wikipedia administrator had explicitly told them was not a reason for being being blocked, but which obviously was. I'm sure there are even worse ways of biting a new editor, but that one is pretty high up the scale. That particular type of idiocy is much less common than it was, but it illustrates the kind of reasons why I decided that a less bad block is often a better choice than sitting back and letting someone else make a worse block.
4. I have never been a fan of the interpretation of the policy on promotional editing that even if it's obvious that a page has been created for promotional purposes, we can't treat it as promotional unless it reads totally like blatant marketing copy. Wikipedia's policy on promotional editing is, basically, "don't edit for promotion", not "don't edit for promotion in ways which immediately hit the reader in the eye as promotional". I would not have deleted the page in this case, but that's because I'm a wimp, and find it very stressful and unpleasant to be the subject of concerted criticism from a whole bunch of people who hold to a different intetpretation. If someone else, with a more robust personality than mine, is willing to go ahead and delete a page on the grounds that it obviously exists only for promotional purposes, then I totally applaud them for doing so.

My conclusion from all this is that there is no perfect way of dealing with this situation, but there is no alternative to what was done which would have been unambiguously better, and several other possibilities would have been unambiguoisly worse. JBW (talk) 16:44, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Ah, the koan of promotional user names. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:52, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

For my part, I have in the past, left them a COIUSERNAME warning. For the most part, I get no response. In the past, they would sometimes be blocked despite my attempt to discuss. Perhaps, due to recent events, it will be less of a problem -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:08, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

I feel @Just Step Sideways: might be able to contricute to discussion. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:19, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

The point I resonate with the most here is that our treatment of potentially promotional editors is based too much on appearances and not enough on whether their edits tend to improve the encyclopedia. I declined G11 on a userdraft the other day that had a fair bit of puffery about how important some guy was—but also was clearly a reasonable attempt at an encyclopedia article on someone marginally notable, where the puffery was more like what you put in a college paper to show why your chosen topic is important, rather than trying to sell anything someone. So I cleaned it up a bit, and someone from WikiEd (no surprise there) cleaned it up a bit more, and now we have an encyclopedia article that we didn't before.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have very little patience for anyone being paid to edit who can't do their job well. If I'm having to hold someone's hand through the disclosure steps, while they churn out poorly-written and/or AI-generated SEO garbage, well, I care a lot more about the fact that they aren't here to build an encyclopedia than the fact that their articles might not meet G11. Not that I'll delete the article out of process. My point is just we AGF in all the wrong places. User:AcmeWidgets gets blocked for updating the new CEO; User:GenericUsername gets to make several articles about nobody businessmen before someone finally acknowledges the obvious that no unpaid editor joins Wikipedia to write about the CFO of an obscure tech startup. We just need to think more about why a person is editing, and whether it is going to get us net-positive encyclopedic content. That involves being more lenient in some places and stricter in others. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 19:52, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

P.S. I see Jimfbleak has deleted the draft that started this conversation. Procedurally that's incorrect, since I'd already declined it, but it doesn't benefit Wikipedia in any way to contest that, so I won't. I don't entirely disagree with you, @JBW, in your positive view of deleting in such a situation, but I wish we as a community would handle cases like this by adapting the CSD policy, not by having admins push or exceed the limits of what's canon. In a case like this, I think a CSD D1 for something like "Drafts for a topic that would be covered by CSD A7, A9, or A11 in mainspace, with no prose content other than a statement that the subject exists" would fill a significant gap and avoid this tug-of-war between "Not G11 so don't delete" and "Unencyclopedic and likely meant to be promotional, so delete". -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 00:08, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

I've been working around these issues long enough to have gone ahead and developed a rough guide to how I determine what to do. If the wind is indeed shifting on no-warning ORGNAME blocks I'd certainly be willing to alter my approach as well. I do think that more often than not, these are just people who don't really get what WP is and how it works, as opposed to malicious spammers. As you can see from the guide I do draw a distinction between drafting a spammy article and actually spamming in article space, one is obviously more harmful than the other. And I have also had the past experience of certain admins coming in later and blocking anyway, which may have had some impact on how I tend to do it now. It's kind of a shame that that was allowed to go on for so long.

However I would also note the history here, what we used to do in some cases was drop the discussion template on their talk pages, and then move the report to Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention/Holding pen, hypothetically each report there would be re-reviewed a week later, but in practice they were not. There were times when I was the only admin working on it at all. About six years ago we went ahead and closed it [7].

When I reply to a report that it is worth watching their edits, I intend that to mean that the reporting user should do so. There's way too many reports to realistically watch them all. I just cleaned up my watchlist and the bulk of it was names I put on there back before times watchlisting was a thing, just hundreds and hundreds of them, and they never popped up on my actual watchlist because they never edited again.

When was the last time we had a thorough review of the username policy and how we interpret it? It may have been Wikipedia:Username policy/RFC which was just over a decade ago. Maybe it's time? Just Step Sideways ^{from this world ..... today} 02:14, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Sigh. Since this sort of thing was already under discussion, thought I'd alert those still watching this to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Several admins just standing by interrogating a user who was the subject of an obviously bad block. El Beeblerino ^{if you're not into the whole brevity thing} 22:29, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:BADLOOK

"a fucking bad look" could become a catchphrase after that close, good work. CNC (talk) 23:08, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

In my opinion, it is also a "bad look" to inject passion and supervoting into closes. I would have preferred a factual summary of the discussion with a less emotional tone. I won't close challenge this, but this is not the style of closing I am used to for RFCs. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:01, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae: There is a really bleak irony in an admin complaining about an observation that there is a disconnect between admins and non-admins on admin accountability, in response to a non-admin's positive reaction. I expected to get that kind of pushback from somebody or other, but not from someone who's generally a good, down-to-Earth admin, which you are, so this is at once surprising and disheartening. You're much more the sort of person I'd expect to take this close as a charge to go forth and work on bridging that gap, getting both sides of the divide to better understand the institutional perspectives of the other.

If you do have any questions about the merits of the close, feel free to ask. I always have more to say than I put in a close. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 07:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

I just would have preferred a close that didn't rebuke the other side so much, since I think the position I took in that RFC (of wanting to reduce toxicity in admin areas, which I'd argue is in alignment with the goals of WP:RFA2024) is reasonable. I think the usual advice for RFC closing is that passionate statements should go in RFC comments rather than RFC closes. But I think I've gotten my point across, so I will keep this short. It's nothing personal, but I did want to (hopefully gently) plant this seed. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:48, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Random unsolicited opinion: I think if a closer wants to give their opinion on some related matter at the end of a closing statement, that's fine, as long as it's clear what they are doing. Closers are often in a good position to give fresh insights; I've done that many times before, and I know I'm not the only one. That said, I agree that it's odd for a closer to chide a group of participants in a discussion for something that's not a behavioral problem. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 23:08, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm one of your biggest fans, and I thought the expletive was unnecessary, and certainly undercut the seriousness and relative precision of your close. BusterD (talk) 23:16, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Softblock

Tamzin, you made this comment at ANI. I noticed Special:Contributions/Onüç Kahraman yesterday too. That user did turn out to be socking, but your initial {{uw-softerblock}} didn't really make sense, as Onüç Kahraman is a film that came out in 1943, not something subject to any ongoing promotion.

I'm replying here because this seems peripheral to the main issue there regarding my obvious misblock. The account wasn't promoting, so no grounds for a hard block, but I've assumed until now that any account that is the name of a business or product (like a film) should be soft blocked. So if there's an account User:Bloggs Widgets Ltd, I would soft block even if the company had ceased trading. Doesn't happen often, doesn't stop the editor creating a new account, and I've not been challenged on defunct companies/products before, so I'd welcome clarification on why you think it's against policy. I'm not making an issue of this, just asking, cheers Jimfbleak - talk to me? 15:10, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

@Jimfbleak: WP:ORGNAME applies to the name of a company, organization, website, product, musical group or band, team, club, creative group, or organized event. I guess you could call a film a product, but it's quite a stretch if you ask me. If the account were representing itself as the film's production company or rightsholder, that would fall under company or organization; and if it were trying to sell DVDs then that's film-qua-product; but by default, I would think of a reference to a film's name as being about a creative work. I'm happy to request clarification at WT:UPOL, but I feel like, if ORGNAME included creative works, it would say "creative work". -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 02:57, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

OK, makes sense, thanks Jimfbleak - talk to me? 06:28, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

What if the unblock process were good?

Recent events have brought me to return to an idea I've tinkered with on and off since last September: completely overhauling the unblock system. I'm now ready to unveil User:Tamzin/wild ideas/Unsucking unblocks and begin workshopping it. Pings to @Deepfriedokra, JBW, Beeblebrox, Elli, theleekycauldron, Asilvering, Significa liberdade, Chaotic Enby, and MJL. Feedback welcome on the draft's talk page. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 02:53, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

I like it. -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 13:17, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Io Saturnalia!

		Io, Saturnalia!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth (talk) 15:28, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Special Barnstar
	Thank you for alerting me of the problem with my mass importation yesterday. I'm quite new to this whole importing thing and probably would not have learned this quite basic fact without your help. JJPMaster (she/they) 15:01, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

Hello yestarday i oublished an article about my gradnfather. who was a shipowner and you deleted it. And they told me to speak to you. Cmadq12 (talk) 08:23, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

@Cmadq12: Your userpage was about Nikos Sakellariou (born 1924)[,] a Greek shipowner and maritime entrepreneur who rose to prominence in the mid-20th century. I cannot find anything on Google about a shipowner of that name. I tried adding search terms related to his year of birth, his place of business, and his wife, and still could not find anything. And I cannot find a single result for "Sakellariou Shipping Lines". If I was wrong, and this is a real person, I'll restore the draft with sincere apologies, but could you please show me some source that verifies that the person you wrote about exists? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 18:33, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Happy Holidays

Thinking of you, thanks for everything this year. Fathoms Below (talk) 19:44, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Merry Merry!

★Trekker (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 cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas5}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

★Trekker (talk) 09:11, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Seasonal greetings:)

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2025!

Hello Tamzin, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2025. Happy editing, — Benison (Beni · talk) 18:21, 22 December 2024 (UTC) Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

— Benison (Beni · talk) 18:21, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

Hello Tamzin: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 01:55, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

Seasonal greetings!

Hello Tamzin: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, 1234qwer1234qwer4 20:01, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

Happy holidays!

	Happy holidays!
	Wishing you a Merry Christmas filled with love and joy, a Happy Holiday season surrounded by warmth and laughter, and a New Year brimming with hope, happiness, and success! 🎄🎉✨ Baqi:) (talk) 11:03, 24 December 2024 (UTC)