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Zizhi Tongjian Gangmu

Hi...

Today I had been studying some ancient Chinese philosophy... and browsed into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizhi_Tongjian_Gangmu and found that you had just today made a slight edit to the page after almost two years of no changes.

Given the nature of ancient chinese philosophy, I couldn't help but think there was a special reason for it, from my point of view? Could I inquire as to what prompted you to add that one dash on April 1st?

Beamas3232 (talk) 22:40, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Nothing exciting, I'm afraid; I've been doing a lot of similar edits to standardize the use of hyphens/dashes in date ranges and curly/straight apostrophes and quotation marks. I'm intentionally trying to rotate between topics and only do a handful of pages from each category at a time, to avoid swamping the watchlists of people who have a big batch of similar pages watchlisted, and it just happened that at that time I was doing a batch on Chinese literature; had you checked my contributions a few minutes later, it could have been Indian musicians or stamp collecting. I'm afraid I don't have any knowledge of this particular topic; this is just one of those "trivial but needs to be done by a human because there's so much potential for false positives so it can't be left to a bot" type of tasks that I perform when I get home from work and am not tired enough to go to sleep but too tired to concentrate on actually writing something. ‑ Iridescent 22:56, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Is there a reason I'm unable to access your main page and am redirected to talk? Beamas3232 (talk) 23:28, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't see the point in user pages, unless one has some kind of specific skill or specific issue one needs to make other editors aware of; this is Wikipedia, not Instagram. An editor's talkpage and their contribution history is IMO generally a much better guide than whatever they choose to say about themselves—the nature of wiki software means this is an environment where it's possible to judge people by what they actually do, not whatever boasts they choose to make. ‑ Iridescent 23:36, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

But I just was just reading your user page before posting on your talk. I even confirmed with web archive that it existed as recently as March 10th. The only explanation is you made it redirect right after I posted on talk. Unless this a wiki thing where all new talkers are automatically barred from userpage. Beamas3232 (talk) 23:43, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

I have no idea what you've been reading, but it certainly wasn't my userpage, whose history can be seen here. ‑ Iridescent 00:10, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Given the nature of your exact time and date of your response, I can't help but feel there's more going on then you're letting on... especially if I go over the short history of your user page... it's very "cryptic" to say the least. But this doesn't seem to be expanding my knowledge and is consuming your time. Thank you for humoring me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Beamas3232 (talk • contribs)

I have absolutely no idea what you're on about with your exact time and date of your response. If you find it unusual that my reply to you came after you asked me a question, I'm not sure what to say; were you expecting me to reply to you before your question? If you're trying to make some kind of allegation against me, come out and allege it, (although I'm not sure what you think I'm involved in; a consipiracy to hide the fact that I standardized the en-dash formatting?) Be aware that my userpage currently has 577 people watching it, all of whom would have noticed had it been edited, deleted or otherwise amended, and by trying to claim that you've read a page that doesn't exist you're just making yourself look ridiculous. (Have you tried searching for one of the phrases you remember from whatever you thought was my userpage, to see what page it was that you actually read?) ‑ Iridescent 00:34, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Uhhhhh, I was noticing that your reply came exactly 10 minutes after midnight, 00:10, 2 April 2020 (UTC)... Curious though, what kind of allegation were you thinking I was thinking of making? Are there conspiracies on Wikipedia? Beamas3232 (talk) 00:52, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Forget it, you've been very helpful with the code. If I've made you angry, I apologize. Could you explain about the code part though? Under what circumstance would "Jimmy and Lila, discussing the terms of her resignation" appear? https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Iridescent&oldid=948608870, used to show it, now its just kangaroos. Beamas3232 (talk) 01:05, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Nevermind about the code, I figured it out.

While I have you, what is the code that shows the pictures and words "An administrator "assuming good faith" with an editor with whom they have disagreed."? With "administrator" being variable, sometimes it is a a checkuser. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Beamas3232 (talk • contribs)

The code is here. It's very old, and there are nowadays much more elegant ways to achieve the randomisation effect (see the {{Random subpage}} code at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/September 12, 2013 for example). ‑ Iridescent 00:34, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm new to wiki editing, but the source begins with MiszaBot... am I talking to a bot? Beamas3232 (talk) 23:32, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

No, you're not; Miszabot is the bot that archives stale threads from long talkpages. ‑ Iridescent 23:37, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

That's what every bot says. E Eng 00:24, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

To be fair, at the moment I think I'd need at least three resits before I passed a Turing test. ‑ Iridescent 10:14, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Admin noticeboard

When did I make an unsubstantiated accusation and when was I warned?--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 17:28, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Here, as I suspect you know perfectly well. ‑ Iridescent 17:30, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

What? Where is the unsubstantiated accusation? What was wrong with my comment? Why are you even an admin if you can't tell where is the unsubstantiated accusation? Are you going to apologize?--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 17:38, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Could you tell me what was wrong with saying Oppose IP editors are not causing any problems. The last IP edit I saw was this edit. It was fine and perfect. Wikipedia is free for everyone. Protection should be based on real vandalism history not speculations based on page views.?--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 17:41, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

As already explained to you in the diff I just gave of it being explained to you, what's wrong with it is that it was patently untrue and the edit you claimed was "fine and perfect" was clearly nothing of the kind. If you don't like that warning, does this one a couple of weeks before that suit you any better? No, I'm not going to apologise; you were either making untrue claims without bothering to check, or intentionally telling untruths to try to be disruptive, and neither of them is something you should be doing. Why do you appear to feel the need to keep wading into threads on the administrators' noticeboards (411 posts to ANI and 162 posts to AN at the time of writing), anyway? ‑ Iridescent 17:47, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

In fact what you said here but don't just come here and make shit up in the hope we won't notice, and if you're going to tell lies tell lies that take more than ten seconds to fact-check, is unsubstantiated accusation and its even personal attack, accusing me of telling lies and making sh*t. I didn't respond because I found your language very inappropriate? Why are you speaking like this? I thought admins should be more civil than other regular editors. Why did you write the word "sh*t" in a public page on a well-known website. Imagine if someone saw that comment and saw your language?. In fact the edit was made in good-faith and I agree with it. Calling the coronavirus, Wuhan virus seems inappropriate. Again, I didn't want to respond to your low level street language.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 17:54, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, in my opinion calling the coronavirus "Wuhan virus" is inappropriate. Noting that reliable sources (not just a handful of bloggers, but reputable news media and government agencies) have called the coronavirus "Wuhan virus" is not. If you can't grasp the difference between the two, Wikipedia is possibly not the place for you, as "check our personal opinions at the door and reflect what the reliable sources say" is arguably our single most fundamental principle. Quite aside from the matter of that edit, it's obvious that the article was being disrupted by IPs; you can check its history for yourself and see the IP vandalism if you can't be bothered to click on the diffs you were given at the time. (Nobody at AN/ANI ever agrees on anything; when you're the sole person arguing against a unanimous consensus there, you may want to stop and think that maybe you're the problem.)

If you seriously think people are going to come over with the vapors if they see the word "shit" on an internal noticeboard, I think we're done here. ‑ Iridescent 18:03, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

"check our personal opinions at the door and reflect what the reliable sources say" is arguably Only arguably? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:14, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

There's general agreement on what the non-negotiable core policies are, but not so much on what the single most important one would be. I'd argue that WP:NPOV (which is just a longer-winded way of saying "check our personal opinions at the door and reflect what the reliable sources say") is the single most important, but there's a reasonable argument that "Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute" trumps it, and I've in the past seen a do-no-harm argument that WP:BLP trumps all the other considerations (just because something can be written about neutrally from reliable sources, doesn't mean we're obliged to include it if doing so would potentially harm the subject; it's why we quite often oversight the good-faith addition of people's birth dates.) If we're going back in history; when we had only three "Foundational Principles" neither NPOV, FREE or BLP were on the list. ("Don't be a dick" was, incidentally.) ‑ Iridescent 18:23, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Let me tell you a real story about me and Wikipedia,

When I joined Wikipedia, my English language was very basic. One time I was exploring some old discussions and I found this discussion Talk:Tunisian campaign and saw this comment. There was a phrase there that grabbed my attention. It was Stop acting like a whiney bitch. I googled it and I found some sources like Vice : "Why Is Ray J Acting Like A Whiny Little Bitch?" I assumed that it means to act aggressively or inappropriately towards other people. It sounded really cool. It was very weird and unusual phrase to me. I then wanted to say it in Wikipedia. I was waiting for a chance to say that word. Until one day an editor in Wikipedia called me "anti-Arab", I told him that it's not his first time to act like a whiny bitch. [1] then Oshwah reverted me and blocked me (and the other editor) for personal attack. I was shocked, I thought it was okay to say that phrase. I realised that people get influenced very easy by what they see. I double-check every word that comes out of my mouth. Don't influence other people with your language.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 19:02, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Don't be so melodramatic. If someone doesn't have the English-language skills to appreciate that the word "shit" is context-sensitive, they shouldn't be editing on an English-language website; if they are editing on an English-language website I certainly hope they're not trying to learn the language from the Administrators' Noticeboard.

Hold on a second, I didn't come here to debate whether that article should be protected or not. I came here following your comment in the admin noticeboard today, where you said: It's even less long ago that an administrator warned SS about, er, making unsubstiantiated allegations about other editors on the admin noticeboards… Glass houses/stones. ‑ Iridescent 11:24, 6 April 2020 (UTC) when I asked you about the "unsubstantiated allegations" and the warning, you brought that discussion about page protection. There was no allegations in my comment and your response to me was aggressive with no reason. Saying that I am talking lies and making shit up etc. I didn't respond to you but you kept pursuing this vendetta against me and today you made that comment.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 20:08, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

I know Iri doesn’t particularly care for meta stuff, but it’s worth pointing out that you were a large part of the drama behind ar.wikis equivalent of WP:FRAM this summer when you suddenly switched positions on an Arabic dialect wiki after getting into some sort of fight on that project and started accusing editors who opposed you of being Saudi government agents, despite the fact that many of the people who you were arguing with have publicly disclosed being from the Levant and for a variety of reasons are exceptionally unlikely to be spies planted by the Saudi government. For those less aware of the history of ar.wiki, the topic of national dialect projects is extremely sensitive there after the Egyptian Wikipedia debacle, and you went around actively creating drama by posting on proposals for projects that were either closed or would never survive outside of incubator for a variety of reasons (so I’m not casting aspersions, I’ll leave your meta contributions here.)

You’re now frequently creating drama on multiple projects. Iri is correctly telling you to back off the noticeboards. I think you’re generally a good editor, but your xwiki history indicates that when you get involved with behind the scenes parts of Wikimedia projects, it’s not usually in a way that adds clarity. Focus on content, not drama. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:23, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

That's a weak attempt to change the subject the discussion. Iridescent said I was warned about false allegations and when I asked when and where, they posted this link. There is no allegations there and his response was actually a personal attack saying that I am telling lies etc.

I didn't participate in that discussion for no reason, I am a Muslim and I found that editor comments very offensive.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 07:48, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

I can change "making shit up" to "knowingly making demonstrably untrue statements" if you'd prefer, but the net result is the same. You made a statement which the most minimal research (i.e. clicking on the history of the page in question) would have shown you was obviously untrue; as such either you had checked the history and were deliberately lying, or you hadn't checked the history and were just making things up.

You're clearly not interested in what either I or anyone else has to say, but just trying to pick a fight. I very rarely do this, but get off this talkpage and stay off this talkpage; any further posts from you will be reverted. If you have an actual, credible, allegation to make about me, I'm sure you're well aware of how to find the relevant noticeboard for whatever the complaint is. If you don't have an actual, credible, allegation to make about me, then go away. ‑ Iridescent 08:29, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	Thanks for suggesting about Webfont Settings. RIT RAJARSHI (talk) 09:41, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

You're very welcome. WebFonts is a bit problematic, which is why we have it as opt-in rather than opt-out. It's very useful in that it allows people to view pages which contain fonts they're unlikely to have installed (so someone reading a page with a block of e.g. Inuktitut syllabics text won't just see a mess of error codes). The problem is that if we're installing a font on all our readers' computers for free, it needs to be a font that's (a) entirely public-domain with no fees involved and no legal issues if people re-use it commercially, and (b) not so elaborate that it uses up a huge quantity of bandwidth. Thus, the character sets it uses are rather dull and visually unappealing. ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

You did not restore portal kitten

Its okay that tou deleted the draft but when I asked for a copy tou did not respond. Thats mean. Aaron Justin Giebel (talk) 05:15, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

I didn't delete Draft:Portal:Kitten (Fastily did that), I just declined your request that it be restored, for reasons already explained to you. Since the whole thing was just a cut-and-paste copyvio of the lead of the existing Kitten article, there is no original content to email to you, even if I felt inclined to disclose my email address to someone who addresses me like this. ‑ Iridescent 08:08, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Weird strategy. Insult the guy yer asking a favour of. What's the success rate, I wonder. ——SN 54129 09:50, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Depends—do you think it worked here and here (both of which were a response to the reversion of this, an edit AJG tried to claim he never made)? ‑ Iridescent 11:36, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Bizarre. [2], so hopefully there's room for improvement...I feel sorry for Sam4You, who must have received about fifty pings in the course of that short discussion. ——SN 54129 12:04, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

For the record, and to put an end to this, here is the entire wikitext of Draft:Portal:Kitten as of AJG's final edit to it on 23 September 2019:

= Kitten =

{{Box|Introduction: A kitten is a juvenile cat. After being born, kittens are totally dependent on their mother for survival and they do not normally open their eyes until after seven to ten days. After about two weeks, kittens quickly develop and begin to explore the world outside the nest. After a further three to four weeks, they begin to eat solid food and grow adult teeth. Domestic kittens are highly social animals and usually enjoy human companionship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitten|header=Introduction|align=|box type=inline-block|style=|color=#d5d5d5|link=}}

= Featured Image From Wikipedia Commons =

Kitten plays with ball

[[File:KITTEN plays with ball.jpg|thumb|Kitten Plays With Ball]]

<br />

‑ Iridescent 12:37, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Certainly not worth risking Iridecimation for :) ——SN 54129 10:48, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

origin of covid

Hi. I hope you are doing well. Do you think the origin of covid19 is correct here? Or am I missing something? —usernamekiran (talk) 23:01, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

I have no clue (I've been sweeping the COVID articles every couple of days for obvious grammar, spelling and formatting errors as their high visibility and dismal quality makes them a high-profile embarassment to Wikipedia, but except for some very specific elements relating to emergency planning I have no expert knowledge). You're probably better off raising it at WT:MED or WT:COVID. What I would say is that I'd be extremely skeptical of the claims of anyone claiming to have identified a specific route of transmission for its entry to any given territory; given the high number of asymptomatic carriers and the lack of knowledge of its potential modes of transmission, trying to search for a Patient Zero is a futile task. ‑ Iridescent 23:12, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I think its simply logically impossible for a virus to have origin in different continents. I removed the origin completely, similar to other few articles. On related note, WHO gave a statement loosely saying "first recorded case was in china, but the origin/patient zero can be outside of china". Now many say that the statement was politically motivated. Remaining highly skeptical, and indoors is the best policy for current days. See you around

—usernamekiran (talk) 00:00, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

It's certainly theoretically for a virus to appear simultaneously on two different continents—if, for instance, its animal reservoir was in migratory birds and infected specimens happened to be caught and eaten separately at roughly the same time in two different locations, or if an infected animal were slaughtered for meat and the meat was insufficiently sterilized and subsequently exported to different countries. In the case of C19 I don't believe it for an instant. ‑ Iridescent 00:09, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

At this point in time, I recommend WT:COVID instead of WT:MED for this type of question. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:46, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

At this point in time I don't recommend either, as the medicine project seems currently to be in the middle of a full-scale mass psychotic episode and no sane person should go near it, and the coronavirus/covid articles are a mess which would probably be better off replaced by a blank page and a notice reading "When it comes to a topic like this why the hell would any sane person trust an article which anyone can edit? Here are the external links to the WHO and to relevant national health authorities; go read them instead." I don't know who at Google took the decision to blacklist Wikipedia from the coronavirus search results, and whether that's a global thing or nation-by-nation geolocated, but whoever made that decision deserves some kind of medal. ‑ Iridescent 19:55, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

It isn't blacklisted, it's just that they've prioritised sites like the NHS/WHO/.gov and so on. Our article is 20th in my search results, seven places below the Daily Mirror... Black Kite (talk) 20:02, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

If our article is appearing seven places below the Daily Mirror, that hasn't happened naturally; someone at Google has been fiddling with PageRank to intentionally push Wikipedia below governmental and legitimate news sites. ‑ Iridescent 20:06, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable, because it's still above the Mail and the Sun! Black Kite (talk) 20:27, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

If anyone is actually taking medical advice from the Mail, I think that would be an example of evolution in action. ‑ Iridescent 20:34, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

An extreme example of my long-expressed belief that we shouldn't have an article on a current event until it's been out of the headlines for, say, three months. — Preceding unsigned comment added by EEng (talk • contribs)

No argument from me on that one. I'd go further and say "any article on a current event sourced exclusively to websites and newspapers should be summarily deleted". ‑ Iridescent 20:17, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Speaking of our coronavirus coverage (in the midst of the above-referenced "full-scale mass psychotic episode"¹), go ahead … take a deep deep breath, and read the first sentence here, aloud, without taking another breath. [3] I thought of you because of the sentence on my user page you are so proud of, at 171 words!

* ¹ Wikipedia, naturally, has no article or definition anywhere for the medical use of the term, episode, but Yale says these episodes have three phases, and the length of each varies. That's not encouraging.

Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:38, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

We have only ourselves to blame. We spend a lot of time hammering home the point that [The lead] should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies, and jumping on people who don't comply with that; we spend just as much time insisting that If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article and if the source material exists, even very poor writing and referencing within a Wikipedia article will not decrease the subject's notability and jumping on people who suggest that just because it's theoretically possible to create a stand-alone article on something, a stand-alone article isn't always going to be appropriate. It's only to be expected that people editing in good faith will be under the impression that "cram a summary of all the key points on to the page as soon as possible" and "it's better to have ten uninformative stubs than a single informative overview" is what we're looking for. ‑ Iridescent 10:42, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

(adding) Just in case someone is thinking that ten uninformative stubs than a single informative overview is hyperbole, at the time of writing Category:COVID-19 and its subcategories contain 1393 pages and that's only going to go up. Every one of them has the potential to kill our readers if misinformation finds its way into them; do you believe that WP:COVID are actually monitoring all of them, let alone the 2614 articles that currently link to Coronavirus disease 2019? ‑ Iridescent 11:37, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

You only managed a 135-word sentence there.

A frightening percentage of Wikipedia's medical content is dangerously dated to blatantly inaccurate. (Yes, this can be said about most of Wikipedia's content, but with medicine, it matters.) Yet our medical content is touted in media coverage and mentioned in journal articles that use flawed methodology that would be rejected by our medical sourcing policies.

You may recall that there are three times I have been !outvoted on the issues that we now see in our COVID coverage. 1) We need a BLP-style policy to shoot on sight poorly cited medical information. 2) We should have a disclaimer on every medical article (beyond the site-wide disclaimer). 3) COVID should not have a banner at InTheNews. The fourth factor has been a quiet attrition over the years-- good editors and doctors who gave up in despair at the current state of the Medicine Project, and don't speak up because they know it to be futile-- such that EVEN IF all of those problems you mention above were not the case in the the COVID articles, we no longer have a cadre of medical editors capable to keep even one correctly written article up to snuff.[4] The days of a collaborative group of "gentleman and scholars" working together towards precisely worded, timely and accurate medical content are long gone.

Thank goodness Google did whatever they did to keep us from showing up in the search results, but the number of hits those pages are getting anyway is frightful. And you see Wikipedia's coverage touted by people who have the media's ear, as if none of these problems exist.

At least we were able to highlight one example of one good medical editor's contributions at TFA, in Introduction to viruses. Has your thinking on the suitability of that TFA re-run changed? Another of my goals there was to try to do something to regain lost flexibility in TFA scheduling. Without that, TFA runs the risk of becoming an irrelevant showcase for a very small group of editors still writing FAs, with declining pageviews reflecting little interest in the topics highlighted (User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox2#March mainpage TFA views). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:53, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

No argument from me on any of the above; yes, there's an iceberg-tip of decent quality content but it depends solely on whether there happens to be someone both interested enough in the topic to maintain it, and expert enough to gatekeep against the woo and the outdated sources. For every Oxygen toxicity or Linezolid, there are a thousand Poppy teas or Male genital diseases.

As you know, I'm not a great fan of re-running TFAs except in exceptional circumstances like Barack Obama where changing circumstances mean it's effectively a completely different article, or genuine once-in-a-lifetime major date relevance like Pluto on the day of the New Horizons rendesvous. I think the Chicken Little routine pulled by repetition's advocates to force the policy change through was based on completely false premises. With 836 articles still in Wikipedia:Featured articles that haven't been on the Main Page, at the current low rate of (promotions−delistings per year)≈250 it would be a decade before the stock started to run low. On top of that, I suspect the current drop in participation and nominations at FAC is largely the result of a single editor who's taken it upon himself to gatekeep against any page that doesn't meet his personal stylistic preferences; once he gets bored and finds a new hobby the people he's driven away will start drifting back, the newcomers who are too intimidated to participate for fear of spending the next year shooing him off their talkpages will be encouraged to dip their toes in the water, and the promotion rate will gradually go up again.

With regards to the specific Introduction to viruses article, I have no objection to it as an article, but I still firmly maintain that Wikipedia's best response to the current pandemic is to keep all current medical information off the main page. We don't want people to get the idea that our medical information is trustworthy.

The declining pageviews areb't an artefact of the TFAs being too niche, they're (in small part) an artefact of fewer people visiting the main page because Google is increasingly good at directing them to the right article, and (in large part) because the art of blurb writing is dying. (There never was a Golden Age when all the TFAs were core topics; this was the TFA queue a decade ago under Raul654.) If you can convince readers that the topic sounds interesting, you can get 100,000+ views for even the most niche topic. Something like Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret is as niche a topic as they come but still managed to get more pageviews on its TFA day than Washington D.C., Jennifer Lawrence or even Earth did on theirs, because the blurb focused on those aspects which were likely to appeal to readers, rather than those aspects which were likely to appeal to Wikipedia editors. (The single best piece of advice I ever received on Wikipedia was Giano's injunction 12 years ago always to write as if addressing an intelligent 14-year-old.) ‑ Iridescent 14:40, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, and an intelligent 14 year old would have understood the origin was stupid people eating their sweet and sour bat medium rare. Giano (talk) 15:54, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

I can't quite put my finger on just why eating bat seems so vile, given that I grew up eating rabbit which is basically a wingless bat, but I don't care; the whole idea seems only one step away from eating dead rats. ‑ Iridescent 16:00, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

I could do with a dish of cold rat right now. With ketchup of course. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:55, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

That's the last time I'll read Iri's page while eating breakfast. But I do want to remind you all of the side effects of living under Chinese-style regimes such as the one they help maintain in Venezuela, where hungry bands of people have killed zoo animals for food, gang-attacked cows in fields to kill them with their bare hands for a meal, and eat all manner of animals one would otherwise never consider as food, which I won't mention here for the disgust factor. In other words, those regimes are now killing us all as they been killing Venezuelans for years. [5] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:06, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

I can't speak for Venezuela, but in the case of China it isn't "economic hardship forces people to eat weird animals" (Wuhan may not be Beverley Hills, but the purchasing power of a typical resident is probably no different to that of a resident of Warsaw or Mexico City). As anyone who's had the misfortune to visit a market in Hong Kong or Taipei can confirm, the Chinese just have a fundamentally different view of what consttutes a food animal, regardless of government. (It works both ways; try serving cheese to someone from China and watch the expression on their face as they try to discreetly avoid touching it without causing offense.) Every country has some kind of food that disgusts the neighbors; if you ever visit France ask just what goes into a traditional Provençal salami. ‑ Iridescent 17:24, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Casu marzu. But then, on the other hand, there is hotdish, which will just kill you in different ways than Giano's sweet and sour bat medium rare (via obesity). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:29, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Signpost

Oh good god… Sometimes I think this website is losing its collective mind. ‑ Iridescent 14:11, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

It gets better.

Graham Beards (aka Graham Colm)-- who I won't ping because the man is actually a physician who specializes in viruses and is on the front lines now, called out of retirement to help, and busy up to his eyeballs, and who actually KNOWS something about viruses, and actually KNOWS something about writing quality medical content (eg Introduction to viruses, rotavirus and more) and actually helped WRITE the core guidelines governing medical content and UNDERSTANDS Wikipedia policy and MEDRS guideline and whose actual views on the aforementioned "full-scale mass psychotic episode" are well worth knowing -- is not quoted at all in this response to that silliness, even though he is interviewed and reported by same media. Take that, Iri; 117-word sentence!

When the Signpost overlooked Brianboulton's death, and I got such a horrific response when I inquired, I asked other FA-process people why they hadn't mentioned his death to the Signpost, I discovered in what regard the Signpost is held these days. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:00, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Ah, well, I don't want you to get the impression it's just a question of the number of words... um... I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important. E Eng 16:23, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Eeng, I see your sense of humour is right back on its nuts after the lapse during the Kablammo ship-gender episode! Welcome back! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:31, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

For those who missed it: WP:Queen Elizabeth slipped majestically into the water. E Eng 17:35, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

What became of "mortally wounded and subsequently died"? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:46, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

WP:Principle_of_Some_Astonishment#mortally. E Eng 18:06, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Statements that are probably less exciting than they sound. ‑ Iridescent 12:15, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't follow it avidly, but I get the feeling the only thing the current Signpost has in common with the Signpost of Tony1 or Kudpung is the name. This may be horribly unfair but when I look at it now, it gives the impression of being the private blog of a small handful of insiders, rather than having even the pretence of neutrality or accuracy. ‑ Iridescent 16:05, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

That was pretty much the feedback I got. But just in case we deceive ourselves, all was not rosy in the Tony1 days, either. How do you think the subject of this headline might have perceived it? If that's what you get when the writers are friends, holy moly, what will you get when they're not? Iri, put a sub-head somewhere in this section ... gettin' long. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:14, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

I can understand why you took offense at that headline, but I can't see any malice or ill-intent there. "The sun sets on…" is a fairly stock journalese phrase for "a lengthy period is coming to an end". I don't read "The sun sets for featured article delegate SandyGeorgia" as implying that you were dead or had left Wikipedia altogether, any more than I'd read "As the sun sets on Donald Trump's first term we look back at his successes and failures" as implying that Trump had died or resigned from office.

The discussion on that link you provided somewhat illustrates what I see as the difference between the old and new incarnations of the Signpost. There, you and other people raised concerns, the Signpost people discussed them with you, and changed the page accordingly. When people raise concerns with the new management about inappropriate or misleading content, the Signpost people bleat about "free speech" and throw a tantrum. I'm fairly certain that the archives of the Tony1 era don't include redlinks where an article was deleted for intentionally containing fabrications which the writers refused to correct or community-mandated blanking of their own articles, and that Tony1 never put the Signpost in a situation where it had to be hauled off to Arbcom to be formally reminded that as a part of Wikipedia it needs to abide by Wikipedia's policies. ‑ Iridescent 12:16, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

I had not revisited the discussion until you mentioned it. That was a painful read; the reminders of what a BunchASocks did to FAC still gives me a big ouch. And of course, there was much I couldn't say there and still wouldn't say, but recall one certain ex-arb EoTR effect. But you are correct; my issues then are trivial compared to what the Signpost has become today. Has it ever been to MFD? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:40, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

If you mean the Signpost itself, not as far as I'm aware (although individual pages have been). I imagine it would be a pointless exercise, as there are enough wannabees who wouldn't want to risk upsetting them for fear of adverse commentary in a RFA/Arbcom/Board run and would vote "keep" come what may, that they could fill every issue with photos of their editorial staff recreating goatse and a deletion discussion would still result as "no consensus". IIRC there was talk a few years ago about them taking the whole thing off-wiki as a kind of Wikipedia Review Mark II, to avoid being bound by Wikipedia and WMF policy, but it never came to anything. ‑ Iridescent 14:51, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Which brings us back to the responses I got after Brianboulton's death, where I was told no one reads it anymore. Should I expect a sound beating when they report on the upcoming arbcase? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:01, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Putting a bunch of articles from the current issue through the pageview counter it looks like each page typically gets about 1700 views, although obviously some of those are going to be re-visitors. The WMF might be able to tell you the numbers of unique readers, but I certainly couldn't. It's not quite dead, but it's certainly dying. (To put that in perspective, since the most recent issue was published my talk page has had well over twice as many views as any Signpost article.) ‑ Iridescent 15:11, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Took the words out of my mouth. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:46, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

That sounds quite unsanitary. E Eng 15:54, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Meh

I see the WMUK crowd are as corrupt and self-serving as ever. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:28, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

This was surgical. ——SN 54129 12:32, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

(for the benefit of confused TPWs, this is about this thread.)
That's not the WMUK crowd (most of whom are decent people and will try to explain themselves when asked even if they disagree with you); that's the Wikidata crowd running their usual plays of covering each other's backs, posting "we're So Damn Important that policy doesn't apply to us and we're not obliged to explain ourselves to the peasants", claiming that whichever page the complaint has been made it (whatever it may be) is somehow "the wrong place", and when none of that works bombarding the discussion with walls of text, claiming that because they've posted more words than anyone else it constitutes "consensus". It's not the first time it's happened and it won't be the last. ‑ Iridescent 12:42, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

(Edit conflict, also I disagree somewhat regarding the WMUK and Wikidata crowd, they are very interconnected) Please, Mike Peel knows exactly what he was doing. Its now admin action, admin action reversed, so even if they wanted to no-one could reblock it (until it misbehaves again) due to WP:WHEEL. Its not a case of 'I disagree with this admin action' it was 'issue has resolved'. Except in the case of bots, there either has to be an indication the problem with the bot itself has been resolved (it hasnt), the task its running has been halted (it hasnt, since many people are using it), or the underlying data its using has been altered so it wont re-occur (can you get the theme here, no it hasnt). So no, problem with bot not resolved, bot has just been let loose to re-offend. And Mike Peel is not an amateur, he knows full well all of the above, the potential consequences, the relevant ENWP policies. So ignorance is not an excuse. And dont even get me started on the COI between the people complaining about it and their well documented attitude to NFCC and free knowledge in general. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:44, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, wrt a COI, this and this is pretty transparent... ——SN 54129 12:56, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict, re to OID) Other than Mike Peel, the only WMUK folk I'm aware of who have any particular connection to Wikidata are RexxS and POTW, neither of whom appears to have had any part in this particular incident. On your other points no argument from me; there are no legitimate circumstances when a Wikidata bot should ever be posting a non-free image (non-free images can only be used in articles and these bots are specifically banned from editing any part of an article other than in some cases the infobox data) and all those involved are perfectly well aware of this. However I have no particular desire to have the starring role in WP:FRAM 2.0 and nor I suspect do you. Either they'll quietly fix the bot in the background to prevent this happening again, or it will happen again in which case the existing thread has provided enough background that they can no longer play the "we didn't know it was an issue" card, and it will be Arbcom's problem not mine. (If you're not aware of the background here, this bot was written by the same guy who wrote MediaWiki; if we have to start dishing out desysops or community bans it will go right to the top because of the potential media interest.) ‑ Iridescent 12:58, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

AWB editing

Hello Iridescent, you have made over 1500 edits inside the last 2.5 hours, the majority of which appear to be bot like. Could you please slow down? Based on WP:AWBRULES, this is in conflict with numbers 2 (through high speed editing using AWB / WP:ASSISTED) ~~and, in some cases, 4 (insignificant or inconsequential edits).~~ --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 19:53, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Just dropping by as a lot of these edits popped up in my watchlist - probably from my category work. Hitting speeds of 17 epm is a bit much. Combining that with 1500 edits in 2.5 hours is very bot-like. ~riley (talk) 19:57, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

No comment on the speed but I don't see how typo fixing is An edit that has no noticeable effect on the rendered page. "Curly" apostrophes and hyphens instead of endashes are both well-known MOS errors that need cleaning up. TheSandDoctor do you have any examples of these "insignificant and inconsequential edits"?-- P-K3 (talk) 20:35, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

@TheSandDoctor: You forgot to mention, accidentally I assume, that However merely editing quickly, particularly for a short time, is not by itself disruptive. Nuance, of course, but. ——SN 54129 20:42, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

@Serial Number 54129: you are correct; however, the emphasis is on a short period of time. 2.5 hours is not what I would consider short. Please see full response below. I wasn't sure how to work this in and thought this response to you was best left as its own comment anyways. Apologies to Iridescent for the extra ping. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 00:16, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Then you should be able to point to that in policy, rather than as a personal consideration. ——SN 54129 10:22, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) They look bot-like, but they aren't—I am manually reviewing every one as I make them. They're dull but necessary, mainly standardising the format of en-dashes and apostrophes. It's a job that can't be left to a bot as only a human can spot the false-positives where curly-quotes or hyphenated number ranges are actually appropriate; the trouble is that this in turn means the "hide bot edits" watchlist option won't hide them. (They are all marked as minor, so "hide minor edits" will hide them.) I'm intentionally trying only to do a few from any one category at a time, to avoid flooding the watchlist of someone who has all the entries in a given category on their watchlist.

If you have any examples of my making an actual "insignificant or inconsequential edit"—which in this context has a specific meaning of An edit that has no noticeable effect on the rendered page—please point it out. There certainly shouldn't be; some things like standardising on en-dashes on pages which mix en-dashes and hyphens may look like they don't have a visible effect, particularly in a fixed-width edit window, but they definitely do. Likewise, if you have any evidence of my violating WP:MEATBOT—which again, in this context has a specific meaning of a) contrary to consensus or b) cause errors an attentive human would not make—please point it out. (I know I have made a couple of fat-finger mistakes in which I've accidentaly approved an incorrect edit, but AFAIK I've immediately reverted within seconds—example.) Unless policy has significantly changed, there's no maximum edit speed limit on human editors provided they pay attention to the edits they make, and ensure that they do not sacrifice quality in the pursuit of speed or quantity, both of which (I hope) I'm doing. ‑ Iridescent 20:42, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

I have struck out the #4 as you and Pawnkingthree make a good point in that respect. I believe that the most relevant section here is WP:ASSISTED ("semi-automated processes that operate at higher speeds, with a higher volume of edits, or with less human involvement are more likely to be treated as bots."), which is why I added a link to it above after making my initial comment. To be clear: I have nothing against your changes themselves and believe that they are, overall, "good". The issue I have is the high edit rate without a bot flag, which has the real potential of flood watchlists and recent changes (as was evidenced above), despite your mitigation efforts of doing a few from multiple categories. An entirely supervised bot account is not unusual and would mitigate all of the potential issues that Riley and myself have pointed out. However, if editing is done at slower speeds, the issues would be mitigated and a flag not required. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 00:13, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
- TheSandDoctor, has anyone actually complained? If no one has complained, that’s fairly good evidence that the lack of a flag isn’t an issue and that Iridescent’s editing is within policy. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:19, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
  - @TonyBallioni: Riley complained that his watchlist was flooded right at the top of this thread. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 01:25, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
    - No he didn’t. He said he saw a lot of them on his watchlist after you raised the issue. That’s not the same as a sui generis complaint where someone is actually annoyed. Are there any actual complaints of someone asking Iridescent to stop? This run is newish, but he’s been running AWB to fix typos for years, and I suspect at the same rate. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:39, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
      - "Have there been complaints" seems to be the wrong approach. It's perfectly reasonable and understandable for a BAG member to raise concerns about unapproved bot activity (as a matter of policy, there is no distinction between "bot-like editing" and a literal bot). And his concern seems to be in line with the standards of "bot-like editing" that are articulated by the policy itself: "Editors who choose to use semi-automated tools to assist their editing should be aware that processes which operate at higher speeds, with a higher volume of edits, or with less human involvement are more likely to be treated as bots." Based on this, an extremely rapid semi-automated tool run, lasting hours and making 1500 edits is likely to be treated as bot-like editing. Why a leviathan semi-automated troll would be flagged by a member of the BAG as "bot-like editing" is obvious. Why the concern should be met with obstinance and hostility is not. Surely any reasonable editor could acknowledge the concerns, explain why they feel it should be allowed, and ask what the recommended course of action to alleviate the concerns are. I'm not saying Iridescent must submit entirely and bow down to TSD, but as a BAG member raising a concern in good faith, they should at least keep an open mind and be willing to accept feedback and negotiate their actions going forward, and not just aggressively reject his concerns. This goes beyond bot policy, into the collaborative nature of the project. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 03:40, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
        I don’t want to speak for Iri, but I actually think his response was pretty open. This talk page can be a baptism of fire on stuff like this though if you haven’t posted here before by all the talk page stalkers.
        I commented because I get on well with both Iridescent and TSD and was trying to raise what seems to me to be question at the heart of what the bot policy is talking about in these cases: does the editing actually bother people? If yes and and it’s not just one or two, setting up a bot account or making changes might make sense. I don’t think anyone actually has complained though, and he’s been using AWB to fix typos in mainspace for a very long time. That’s what I’m getting at. Are we dealing with something that’s actually disrupting how people work, or are we talking about a theoretical disruption at some point in the future.
        I think everyone’s trying to be helpful here, but the bot policy doesn’t exactly speak in absolutes on this topic, so figuring out if there’s an actual complaint seems to be the starting point to see if there’s something with that issue that can be resolved. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:23, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

@Swarm, I'm struggling to see where any "obstinance and hostility" from me is, let alone "aggressively rejecting concerns". TheSandDoctor raised concerns; I explained what I was doing and pointed out that while something like this might look as a quick glance like it's not having any effect on the rendered page (and thus breaching the "insignificant and inconsequential edit" rule), it's actually bringing a non-compliant page into line with current practice; TSD agreed and struck the relevant part of the original post.

TSD also raised concerns regarding potential WP:MEATBOT violations, and I explained that WP:MEATBOT doesn't just mean 'working so quickly that an observer might say "wow, that's as fast as a bot"', but has a specific definition in the context of Wikipedia of "a) contrary to consensus or b) cause errors an attentive human would not make". Since cleaning up malformed formatting is obviously not contrary to consensus, and (as far as I know) I'm not making errors an attentive human would not make,* that also doesn't apply; again, TSD agreed with that.
*I have made a few errors, but that's human nature and I'd be still be making the occasonal error—in fact, almost certainly more as there's more scope for mistyping—were I doing everything completely manually. Judging by the number of edits I make that are subsequently reverted, and doubling it on the assumption that not every page is being watched, at a very rough guesstimate my non-self-corrected error rate is probably somewhere around 1/10,000. It's certainly lower than the number of errors I'd be making were I trying to do the whole thing by hand.

I'm not someone who's just stepped off the boat; I was here for the original discussions that created WP:MEATBOT (they originated as a spinoff from the Town bot BRFA, continued here and were codified here), and the key line from the discussions was Xeno's "check[ed] each edit to make sure all are good" <-- In that case, you aren't the one being addressed with this policy., and I'm manually checking all of these as I make them. (When it comes to approving/rejecting edits made using AWB—and other semiautomated editing tools like the antivandalism revert-and-warn scripts—the limiting factor isn't the size of the article but the distribution of the proposed changes in diff view. An article with multiple potential changes spread across multiple paragraphs means scrolling through reviewing each one, and reviewing takes time. An article with only a single proposed change, or where all the changes are close enough together to be visible at once, is just a case of glancing at both sides of the diff window and saying "yes, that's a straightforward error" or "no, that's intentional" and the human review and decision to approve/reject can easily take no more than three or four seconds.)

That just leaves whether this should be done on a human or a bot-flagged account, and "excessive speed", as the two potential issues.

There are strong downsides to human editing (whether semi-automated or not) on a bot-flagged account unless the task is both absolutely routine and with no potential for controversy whatsoever, such as search-and-replacing every instance of a renamed template or category:

By hiding the edits from many people's watchlists it reduces the likelihood that people will spot it if and when the human does make an error;
It confuses other editors (particular newer editors) as to what is and isn't an appropriate task for a bot since they see the edits being made with a bot flag, don't realise there's human review of every edit, assume that unsupervised search-and-replace is acceptable on Wikipedia, and promptly find themselves warned or even blocked (I consistently reject roughly 1⁄3 of the proposed changes on a task like this);
It means that if while doing the routine search-and-replace one spots a typo, a piece of vandalism, or a factual error, one either makes a substantive edit using the bot account (very bad practice), or needs to come out of the bot account and into the human account to make the edit, then back again, wasting time. By the nature of AWB it fairly frequently spots typos or significant formatting errors in the course of doing other tasks, and log-out → log-into-main-account → make-the-edit → log-out → log-in-to-bot-account each time adds up very quickly;
Accounts with the bot flag aren't permitted to make talk or usertalk posts, meaning that if anyone raises a concern or just asks a question, it again entails the full log-out → log-into-main-account → make-the-edit → log-out → log-in-to-bot-account cycle each time, wasting the time of the "bot" editor, delaying a response to the person asking the question, and increasing the likelihood that the "bot" editor accidentaly forgets to switch accounts and either makes an inappropriate edit using the bot-flagged account, or inadvertently runs the script on their non-flagged account.

Given the obvious downsides of using a bot account for non-bot edits, I'd only consider doing so if there were evidence that working on a human account were actually causing issues. As TonyBallioni says, I've been doing this task on-and-off for 13 years now and to the best of my recollection this is the first time anyone has ever raised a concern (and people are not shy when it comes to telling me when they think I've done something wrong), so while I'm certainly willing to believe that watchlist flooding is an issue, I'm not yet convinced that it is. "1500 edits in 2.5 hours" sounds like a big number, but that's only a rate of 10 edits per minute, which compared to some of the other AWB regulars is practically glacial). ‑ Iridescent 10:01, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Apropos of nothing, but some non-enwiki projects use a so-called "flood" flag instead of the "bot" flag for humans when they do some kind of mass edit that swamps recent changes. Same underlying user right but different name. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:11, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

The non-enwiki projects tend to have fewer editors and consequently fewer edits, and as such flooding recent changes is an actual issue. Here, it would be impossible for anyone other than the Mass Messaging script to flood recent changes even if they wanted to; at the time of writing (one of the quietest times of the day in editing terms, and during a public holiday so the edit rate will be even lower than usual) the 500 most recent non-bot-flagged edits stretch back only four minutes. An edit rate of 10 edits-per-minute is barely going to make a ripple in that. ‑ Iridescent 10:29, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Regarding This talk page can be a baptism of fire on stuff like this though if you haven’t posted here before by all the talk page stalkers I think this is fair and I apologise for butting in, particularly as it resulted in edit-conflicting with Iridescent's reply. It would perhaps have been prudent to wait before the person being addressed had gotten their response in and this may have contributed to the sense of aggression that Swarm picked up on. (It's just that this subject is rather close to my heart as the amount of times overt the last 14 years I must have violated MOS:ENBETWEEN by lazily rendering a sumo wrestler's win/loss record as "10-5" instead of "10–5") I certainly appreciate this particular type of AWB run.)-- P-K3 (talk) 11:41, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

I wouldn't read your original comment as aggressive either. I agree about the 10-5 vs 10–5; it's something we all do and it's on the increase. Hardly anyone can remember the complicated rules of when to use en-dashes, em-dashes and hyphens, and the rise of tablets, smartphones and laptops just makes it more difficult even if one does remember the rules. (On a standard desktop computer if I want to insert an en-dash I know I can do alt-0150 on a PC or option-hyphen on a Mac; on a tablet if I want to insert an en-dash it means going to the bottom of the edit window, bringing up "insert" from the drop-down menu, and zooming in to squint at the options trying to discern on a tiny screen which is the en-dash, which is the em-dash and which is the minus sign. It's no wonder people say "screw it, a hyphen is good enough".) We also have the additional problem that Wikipedia is a stubborn holdout against curly quotes; thus, editors who are trying to be helpful and not flood an article with a string of minor edits will copy the paragraph in question into their favorite word processor, edit it there, and copy it back into the article as a single edit; unfortunately the word processor will try to be helpful and will convert the apostrophes and quote marks into "smart quotes", meaning that when the paragraph is pasted back in we're left with one paragraph using curly apostrophes in an article that otherwise uses straight apostrophes throughout. ‑ Iridescent 11:54, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the "alt-0150" tip – I do most substantial editing on desktop and that's preferable to changing the drop-down menu (which of course is always on "Latin" when I want it to be on "Wiki markup," and vice versa).-- P-K3 (talk) 12:26, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Alt-0150 for en-dash, alt-0151 for em-dash (and option-hyphen for en-dash, option-shift-hyphen for em-dash on a Mac); you'd be amazed how much time it saves once you've used it often enough to do it on autopilot. There's a PC shortcut for all those weird characters that are routinely used on Wikipedia but so obscure elsewhere that they don't always appear on standard keyboards. ‑ Iridescent 12:38, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

If you're using a Mac, in System Preferences/Keyboard/Input Sources, check "Show Input menu in menu bar". Then at the right of your menu bar you should see an icon that looks like a tiny window showing a "Command" symbol. From there, "Show Keyboard Viewer" will display a little keyboard, which changes according to the combination of modifier keys you use. Look at the hyphen key, for example, as you hold shift, alt, and shift-alt. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:01, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Saying that, that's using my desktop Mac running 10.11. I've just checked my MacBook on 10.15 and it doesn't work like that! Horror! Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:06, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Aha, on 10.15, System Preferences/Keyboard/Keyboard and check "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar". Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:09, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

With Apple products (both computers and iphones/ipads), the other really useful and not very well documented trick is that if you press and hold a letter key, a pop-up will appear with all the variations on that character (so pressing and holding the s key will give options for ß, ś, and š), all of which are numbered and you just need to press the number (so o followed by 5 gives the œ character). This being Apple they won't make things too helpful, so it doesn't work for the hyphen key. ‑ Iridescent 13:34, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

YGM

Thanks for your talk page stalking-- YGM. By the way on the typo AWB thread above ... since I make so many typos, I just want to say a big thank you for frequently showing on my watchlist. I stayed out of the meta discussion, but I keep you busy! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:02, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Replied ‑ Iridescent 14:30, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Requesting help about creating a "free software" organization both community and company

Hi ! First thanks for observation of my page i'm searching Wikipedia help pages but i couldn't find a useful article. I want to create a page like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat which is about our free software efforts. Please let me know what information should be included in that official company page. And what format that i need to use. In the meantime i'm looking at the Red Hat Wikipedia page source code to understand how it is written to learn the Wikipedia page format.

Thanks for your help MertGor —Preceding undated comment added 11:05, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

MertGor, I'm assuming this is about Masscollabs(free software company) which I recently deleted? Our policies on which topics Wikipedia will cover are complicated, but can be summarised as "we only cover things which are already the subject of significant independent coverage elsewhere". In addition to this, when writing about a person, company or product we only say what independent sources have said about that topic, not what our article subjects have said about themselves.

It is theoretically possible for a new startup, that doesn't yet have a product on the market, to be "notable" in Wikipedia terms, but these are quite rare; they'll be companies with either very significant backers, or where their proposed product or service is considered so significant by independent sources, that the preparations for the launch themselves generate significant independent coverage. (We're talking something like SpaceX, where the personalities involved and the sums of money at stake meant significant independent coverage before they had a product on the market.) In all cases, the key phrases are "significant coverage" and "independent sources"; because Wikipedia doesn't engage in original research, the independent coverage needs to exist before it's potentially appropriate for a Wikipedia article.

(Incidentally, I'm not sure if you have any kind of connection to Masscollabs or if it's just a topic whicb interests you. If you're employed by them or connected to them in a significant way, while we don't expressly forbid writing about a topic with which you have a conflict of interest we very strongly discourage it—it's almost impossible to write neutrally about a topic with which you have a connection.)

Don't take the deletion of the article personally or as any kind of snub. The sheer size of Wikipedia's 50,057,954 pages can sometimes give the impression that we cover absolutely anything, but we actually have quite strict rules on what is and isn't included. As I said, startups and new tech products are very rarely appropriate for Wikipedia—at the same stage of their development we also deleted the articles on Twitter (twice) and iPhone (seven times!). ‑ Iridescent 14:21, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Iridescent first thanks for clarification about Wikipedia rules I'll be happy if someone who is interested in our project (who is not in our community) writes "Masscollabs" article because i like Wikipedia to use and i want to contribute to it both for articles and the Wiki software. If i'm right / as i understand i should wait for someone to write that article who is outside our community. In the meantime i will create the official company (now we are a community enterprise like all free and open source communities like Trisquel GNU/Linux) and set all rules suchs as services , service level agreement text and code of conduct.

Thanks for your reply and help. I'm new to Wikipedia and an excited user but i will learn Wikipedia* deeply soon.

MertGor (talk) 14:42, 12 April 2020 (UTC) MertGor

From the "our community", I'm taking it that you're connected to this site? If so, before you go any further at all read Wikipedia:Conflict of interest, in particular this section. If at all possible you shouldn't be editing a topic with which you're involved; if you do edit a topic with which you're involved, you need to declare your connection to the subject. To reiterate my earlier point, nobody (including you) can write about Masscollabs on Wikipedia unless and until you're able to source whatever goes in the Wikipedia article to independent sources. ‑ Iridescent 14:48, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Iridescent Yes i'm the creator of the community and company project.I understand the process i read the articles. So it is time to work and wait for independent sources to be created. Sorry for taking your time and thanks for your help.

MertGor (talk) 15:15, 12 April 2020 (UTC) MertGor

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine opened

You were recently listed as a party to a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine/Evidence. Please add your evidence by April 21, 2020, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 20:38, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

What the actual fuck? I assume this is an error; I've never added nor removed a drug price in my life, nor do I have any interest in drug pricing (my medical contributions have been on early teratological case studies, nothing related to current practice or issues). If Arbcom wants to list me as a party to this case Arbcom can do me the courtesy of explaining why. ‑ Iridescent 20:42, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Yea, that's a mistake. You aren't listed as a party. Someone (not me) should get this fixed. You can look at the case page and see you are among the collapsed (non-party) respondents. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:48, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Apologies. Used wrong template. You are not a party in this case. See the correct note below. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 20:49, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine/Evidence. Please add your evidence by April 21, 2020, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 20:50, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

File:Cat on suitcase.jpg

A case has been opened? I already have a case, see?

Why do I get the feeling this start sums up how the rest of the case will go? Cases like this are why arbs burn out. ‑ Iridescent 20:54, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Think like a theatre buff: a bad dress rehearsal = a good show. Things could get better. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:56, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Well yeah, nothing's more likely to go well than a fourteen-party case in which one of the parties is on the WMF Board of Trustees, one is a WMF employee, one is on the board of the Wiki Project Med Foundation, one is currently serving a lengthy block for disruption on medical articles, one is a former arb, thirteen of the fourteen are Big Beasts who will each have a flock of supporters trying to do the legs of anyone the supporters think is giving a hard time to their guy/gal, all over an issue that 99% of readers don't care about, and all being held in a climate that's making people treat minor disagreements like huge deals. I supported the committee accepting this one, as the underlying bad feeling was making petty squabbles break out all over the place and the buck has to stop somewhere, but I'm under no illusions over how foul-tempered this one is going to be. ‑ Iridescent 21:10, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:46, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Iri, where are you getting a former arb out of the 14? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:01, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Seraphimblade, I think. 184.145.124.169 (talk) 23:10, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

D'oh. Thanks, 184; been here too long to remember it all. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:26, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

I’ve never noticed the stuffed bear in that cat picture. I quite like it. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:10, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

The bear's sensible. Hears of an arb case and sews its mouth up! ——SN 54129 12:31, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

I like the cat best. Partly because it looks just like the calico (female by definition) of my youth, who disappeared from home and was never seen again when I went away to college. I guess her heart was broken by my abandonment. But mostly because she also has her mouth shut, but her eyes are optimistically looking forward, and she is sitting on a suitcase full of information. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:20, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

File:Cats clawing couch.jpg

Don't let that innocent expression deceive you, she can vandalize a couch like a professional. ‑ Iridescent 08:35, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Darn cats. I like dogs better. Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Medicine/Evidence#WPMED tension is long-standing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:20, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Meh. I get your point, but if we started cracking down on all the people who frantically canvass their buddies off-wiki to cover each other's asses when they sense a discussion isn't going their way, whole swathes of Wikipedia would be a wasteland. (You think all these people—on both sides—just happened to stumble across a discussion on a noticeboard that typically gets less than half the pageviews of my talk page?) At least the WPMED people are being (or at least, appear to be being) open about the fact that they're agreeing a party line and tag-teaming to try to create a fait accompli consensus before anyone else has the chance to respond; this is more than I can say for some processes like DYK reviewing, MOS disputes or even dare I say it FAC. ‑ Iridescent 19:45, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Ah, but that suitcase! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:47, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Spam spam spam

I don't seen enough of the folks who watch this page at Talk:Gothic architecture, where there is an RFC, a split proposal, and assorted other needs for help. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:11, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Our civility policy makes it difficult to explain exactly why people who've been round Wikipedia more than about five years or so are unlikely to want to touch that particular article with someone else's bargepole, so I'll just put this and this here. ‑ Iridescent 07:21, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't especially think that's the problem. The article was written to a certain level around 2007, then largely left free of major edits for several years. A couple years ago, when the "main author" was away from WP (for about 5 years) two other editors started expanding it, more than doubling the size, which peaked around 199kb raw. Everybody now agrees its too large (most people being more bothered by this than me), and there have been some disagreements about fundamental points or how to express them, as well as what and how to split off. A new, highly agressive, editor has now appeared on the scene, has seen off the main author (currently again retired, which is a great pity) and is currently getting started on the remaining other editor. Those stats don't tell the full story - there have been many large recent edits switching in and out between different versions. I've hardly edited the article at all myself. Johnbod (talk) 12:42, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Me, I notice both the ludicrous overuse of {{citation needed}} and the parallels between that split discussion and the one currently (OK...) playing out here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:24, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, all those cn's arrived a few days ago, in a clearly pointy move. Johnbod (talk) 14:13, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

If you (Johnbod) and I mean the same thing by "the main author" then I think we have somewhat different experiences of them. I remember them as one of the most aggressive and unpleasant people I've ever encountered (and I include Mattisse in that); we're talking someone whose obsessive obstinacy was responsible for the Middle Ages clusterfuck, who got into an argument with Eric and came out with a consensus that they were the needlessly argumentative one, and who IIRC (I may have the timings wrong as I wasn't about at the time) retired after we rejected their demand that we block EEng for blasphemy.

Yes, comment on content not the contributor, but if they've really been "seen off by a new, highly aggressive, editor" then in all honesty my initial reaction is "now you know what it was like for everyone else". I know for certain there were at least two articles for which I wrote the bulk of the text which I deliberately unwatchlisted after losing patience with their "I demand you do everything my way" ramblings, and I can't imagine I'm alone. ‑ Iridescent 14:04, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Gosh, I'd forgotten about the blasphemy uproar. Good times, yeah. E Eng 16:02, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I ... prefer not to remember the whole thing of the Middle Ages article. If there is one article and its talk page that has gotten me away from editing big topics again, it's that and the insane discussions about Bulgaria and the lead image. Sorry, Johnbd, but those discussions were almost enough to give folks PTSD. --Ealdgyth (talk) 15:08, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

And we wonder why folks throw their hands up and quit...

Why is it so difficult to just abid by the spirit of things? I'm going back to bed. --Ealdgyth (talk) 19:03, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

You're looking at the wrong restriction; you want Rich Farmbrough is not permitted to make any mass changes to articles, broadly construed, and regardless of editing method, cosmetic or not, without a demonstrable consensus from the community that he is explicitly permitted to do so. It was only imposed this year, so he can't claim he's not aware of it. I assume no rational editor would contest that this constitutes "mass changes". (What is it with bots this week?) ‑ Iridescent 19:07, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

I Need Those Words; they should come in useful. Speaking up throwing up hands and quitting, Ealdgyth! (You were just pinged-- gasp-- to my page.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:13, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

I specifically pointed to all the restrictions listed on the personal restrictions page... is this one Iri references not listed there? I swear, restrictions are enough to make me scream and throw a toddler tantrum. --Ealdgyth (talk) 19:19, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

It is listed, but it seems he only responded to the first of the 3 restrictions he is under. I've asked him to explain his position on his talk. Mdaniels5757 (talk) 19:23, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Just gonna put Special:PermanentLink/950772657#Descriptive edit summary here. ‑ Iridescent 19:40, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

You told me edit summaries were impossible to enforce. But when you have an editor who makes hundreds of (known) controversial bot-like edits, along with known controversial reverts, without edit summaries, or with deceptive edit summaries, can that be added to arb evidence? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:53, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

That was quick... Mdaniels5757 (talk) 20:11, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

(e.c., re to SG) Personal opinion only; I'd think that it's impossible to enforce the use of edit summaries, since they're officially "good practice" rather than mandatory, but repeated violations of WP:SUMMARYNO could be taken as evidence of bad faith. Bear in mind that you're dealing with a dedicated wikilawyer here who's always taken the "if it's not specifically forbidden it means I can do whatever I want" line, so if he appeals his block, or immediately restarts the bot the moment the block expires, it will almost inevitably lead to a long and tedious case. ‑ Iridescent 20:12, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

There have been cases at AN/I over edit summaries. Basically because it wasnt that the editor wasnt using them, it was that they were not using them and the edits turned out to be deceptive in some fashion. Likewise marking as minor etc etc. Usually ends up with a block for the generic 'disruptive editing' which can be applied to absolutely anything if it annoys enough people. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:19, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh sure, misleading edit summaries can be taken as evidence of a pattern of behavior, particularly if it's obvious there's a deliberate attempt to mislead and not "shit, I forgot to change the pre-formatted edit summary I was pasting onto a run of 2000 identical edits once I finished with that task and moved on to something else, thanks for pointing it out". To the best of my knowledge the absence of edit summaries isn't enforceable—Edit summary is explicitly neither policy nor even guideline—although not using them is such poor practice that it can bite you hard in the ass if you ever apply for a position that requires trust. ‑ Iridescent 20:32, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I've sort stopped using edit summaries, except (usually) in the mainspace. It was a technical change to the 2017WTE, actually. After years of me asking the Editing team to support previously used edit summaries, so I wouldn't have to re-type them, they made the change, but it somehow put me off using them. "Just what I asked for, but not what I want", I guess. I don't imagine that anyone's much hurt by getting no edit summary on talk pages instead of my traditional r or c, though. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:25, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't think anyone cares about talk page edit summaries, although I think it's a good idea to use them everywhere to keep your mind in the habit, in the same way that I try to stay in the habit of following WP:ACCESS even on talkpages. Where edit summaries become a problem is when people use an anodyne summary like "tweak" or "clean up" to mask something potentially contentious. ‑ Iridescent 07:08, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh, yes, some of them do: phab:T249391. I suppose that work-me ought to go analyze how often custom/non-boilerplate edit summaries happen on talk pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:47, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

DOB

I think there may be some misunderstanding. I don't have any issues with your sources. I was saying that the previous source provided for Kylie Minogue was unreliable and unacceptable. I have no objection to someone other than myself using a reliable source for the full DOB on a sufficiently famous person's article. I personally will not add the full date of birth to a living person's article on principle. I maintain that we must be very careful as this is not something we should normally be revealing. I don't want it to be normalised. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 09:11, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

I agree that with non-public figures who've given no indication they're happy for the public to know their personal details we should err on the side of not including someone's full date of birth, but that isn't the case here. Kylie is one of the most famous people in the world (on Google's auto-generated list at the top of a search for most famous Australian she's #4, ahead of Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger and behind only Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Cate Blanchett). Given that she released an album called Golden to mark her 50th birthday she's obviously not trying to conceal her age, and the risk of identity theft—the other typical reason we suppress exact dates of birth—obviously don't apply, since any fraudster giving their name as Kylie Minogue would be laughed out of the bank.

Looking at the Wikipedia pages for the ten most-searched-for living people on Google in 2019 (Antonio Brown, James Charles, Billie Eilish, Kevin Hart, R. Kelly, Neymar, Joaquin Phoenix, Jussie Smollett, Greta Thunberg, Jordyn Woods, if you wondered, and I agree there are some surprising omissions from that list), every one includes their birth date in the lead. WP:DOB isn't a blanket ban on publishing birthdays providing the birthdate can be sourced—which for people this famous will always be the case—it's advice to omit the date of birth if a subject complains about our inclusion of their date of birth, or the person is borderline notable.

On a skim through a few famous people off the top of my head whom I know to be secretive about their real-life identities (Deadmau5, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Sia) Wikipedia nonetheless includes their dates of birth. Those privacy provisions in the BLP policy are aimed at singers who had one minor hit in 1983 and have spent the intervening 37 years running a hardware store in Buffalo, local elected officials who just scrape over the notability bar, actors who appeared in three flop movies and then got a job at a bank, or non-public figures who happen to be notable ex officio in Wikipedia terms owing to their jobs, not for people at the level of fame that mainstream publishers publish print biographies of them. ‑ Iridescent 2 13:34, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

I suspect as is common in BLP's) the BLP requirement for in-line citation meant it was just sourced to a convenient one, not the best one. A recurring problem with BLP's is that well-sourced information from the article is used without in-line citation somewhere, an editor demands in-line cite as per policy, and the first one available is picked. What happens then is someone quibbles over that, and it gets cite-spammed with 8 different ones. Sometimes these later get removed for over-cite (by a different editor) and we are back to the one less-than-perfect citation. I say 'problem' but its not so much a problem as a necessary outcome of the BLP policy that prevents in most circumstances badly cited information being hand-waved into articles. Ideally people would pick the best citation available, but thats just not always the case. Also ideally, when someone spots that something which is almost certainly available from reliable sources already in the article, they would read the references and cite it. But that requires a time dedication that many editors are not willing to commit to. You could be at that 100% of the time in BLP's and not make a dent.

Saying that, if someone proposed an amendment to the BLP stating only year of birth can be included in relevant living biographies, they would have my full support. For a living person the exact day and month is almost never relevant - people who release albums to mark their birthday and stuff like that being the exception - and their are legitimate identity concerns even for the really famous. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

You;d be surprised how often the exact date of birth turns out to be potentially significant, even in cases where you wouldn't immediately expect it. Eligibility for 30 Under 30 and 40 under 40 awards (of which there are shedloads, as there are separate awards for different geographical areas and different industries within those areas) is an obvious one, and there's also a steady tick of "youngest ever to…" and "oldest ever to…" landmarks. In countries which have a statutory retirement age (which includes almost all English-speaking countries and hence the majority of Wikipedia's BLPs), that exact date becomes increasingly significant to many biographies as it draws near, plus tiny variations in dates of birth are disproportionately important in some other fields because of the variation in achievement depending on when in the academic year the child was born. (There's a fairly well-known study that proved that children in the oldest half of their class at school grow up to constitute something like 90% of professional sports players, for instance, which couldn't have been done if the only published data was the birthyear rather than the birthdate.)

As I'm fond of saying in many different contexts such as the "article importance" scales, notability discussions, and the whole wretched infobox-vs-lead and text-vs-data debates (and the WMF is fond of saying as well; WAID can no doubt pop up with the statistics on which parts of an article different readers look at, if you ask nicely), trying to second-guess which piece of information the reader is looking for when they visit any given article is a fool's game. We can talk at length on the cultural influence of the Rolling Stones, the details of their recording techniques, and their interpersonal relationships, but sometimes the readers just want to know if Mick is older than Keith. ‑ Iridescent 22:15, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Actually, I don't think we have much at all on "which parts of an article different readers look at", other than how long the page is open, whether they hit on links or refs etc. All website average-time-spent-per-page times are incredibly short. People wanting to know when Stanley Baldwin was born/died/became prime minister is my standby example of what (and all) a large % of people want from WP. As reporters were/are trained to do, it's always best to assume they will only read the lead. Johnbod (talk) 22:23, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Research:Which parts of an article do readers read has been marked as a draft for close to five years now, but they do still update it occasionally. The mobile site may be ugly and annoying, but the collapsed-sections-by-default and the need to scroll through makes it possible to track what people are looking at. (60% of mobile visitors don't uncollapse anything so only see the lead) There was some chatter on the topic on this talkpage a couple of years ago as a small subsection of a very long meandering thread. ‑ Iridescent 06:49, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks - both good stuff, which if I've seen previously I've forgotten. No need to adjust my views above from the first. Johnbod (talk) 11:37, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I imagine if they studied the traffic pattern on a dozen different articles, they'd get a dozen different answers. (This is already visible in the limited information they have published, where the reading pattern on Barack Obama doesn't follow the usual asymptotic drop through the article but instead clearly shows readers are skipping over the parts about his career as a senator and jumping straight to the meat-and-two-veg of his presidency and his personal life.) There are some topics like Thierry Henry where most readers will only be looking for a specific factlet like "which teams did he play for?" or "did he ever compete in the Olympics?"; there are some like Stanley Baldwin where some will only want to know what his term of office was or when he died but some will actually want a long essay on his achievements and failures; there are some like Actuary where the majority of readers probably are people who've heard the term but aren't sure what it means, and will probably be satisfied with just the lead; and there are some that are either so hyper-niche that the only people reading it are likely to be people who'll want to read the whole thing (Did You Hear What Happened to Charlotte King?) or broad concepts like Philosophy where it's impossible to summarise the topic in the lead so readership will largely be all-or-nothing. Plus of course there are those topics where we know readers are only likely to be interested in a single facet of the story, but WP:UNDUE means we're too polite to say so and consequently we have vast swathes of text which the readers ignore. (Most of our medical articles could safely be replaced with a four-question FAQ of "How do I avoid catching it?", "How do I know if I have it?", "How do I treat it?" and "How likely am I to die from it?" plus a link to the relevant health authorities in various countries, and nothing of value would be lost.) ‑ Iridescent 16:20, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Serial Number 54129, "chocolate welshcakes" sounds so spectacularly revolting that "disgusting" wouldn't suffice and a new word will need to be invented. ‑ Iridescent 16:42, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Actually, I could've sued 'em; my one only had three chocolate chips in. Perhaps's there's a COVID-due shortage. Even so, they weren't unpleasant, the plain one too. As a welshcake virgin, I'm not unimpressed. ——SN 54129 17:30, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

If you want authentic Welsh things that are actually nicer than they look, dig out some laverbread and Glamorgan sausages, both of which look and smell like they've passed through a dog but are actually very nice and deserve to be better known than they are. ‑ Iridescent 17:33, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Snarky Puppy Redirect

If there is no longer a link to Snarky Puppy Live At The Royal Albert Hall, what is the reason for a redirect page? The only link was in the Snarky Puppy Discography, and it has been corrected to the proper title, GWFrog (talk) 18:32, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Huh? That's not the purpose of redirects (although "someone forgot to pipe the link in wikitext" is a secondary function); the point of redirects is so that if someone enters the name in the search box the software will take them to the correct page, and Snarky Puppy Live At The Royal Albert Hall is an eminently plausible search term; why would any reader expect that they need to type "Live at the Royal Albert Hall (Snarky Puppy album)"? (And they'd need to type it in full, given how many other articles we have called Live at the Royal Albert Hall.) If you disagree then RFD is over there, but "unnecessary" isn't and never has been a speedy deletion criterion. ‑ Iridescent 18:39, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

And yet I find that about fifteen editors have used "unnecessary" as their reason for supporting deletion in the current entries at RFD. Maybe RFD needs something like Template:Single-purpose account that says "Unnecessary is not a valid reason for deletion", "Unused in current versions of articles is not a valid reason for deletion", etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:05, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Break: admin areas of interest over time

RfD is something of a mess at the moment; a few years ago it was virtually taken over by a single "eccentric character with strong personal opinions who was vocal in expressing his views when people disagreed with him", who managed to bully, intimidate, and just generally bore most of the participants away. He eventually got initially banned from RfD and shortly afterwards from Wikipedia altogether, but the previous participants had found other things to do with their time in the meantime, and the space hasn't yet been fully re-settled. Couple that with the general unenthusiasm among admins for closing deletion discussions—the constant bombardment with "how dare you not delete this you are OBVIOUSLY BIASED!!!" (completely non-random example) and "how dare you delete this you are obviously AN OBSESSIVE DELETIONIST" gets tiresome very quickly—and it's not surprising that RfD has become a bit of a mess.

If with your work hat on you're looking for something on which to spend some of the $101,932,698, then tracking what admins actually do and how that changes over time and between projects would be a genuinely useful exercise. (It could probably be done just by plotting the figures from all the old versions of User:JamesR/AdminStats.) I'd be willing to bet a reasonable sum that almost all newly-minted admins start off by heading over to XfD eager to start doing routine maintenance, but within a year almost all of them have become disgusted with the atmosphere there and have largely given up on it. If this is actually true it has obvious implications in terms of concentrating the gatekeeping in the hands of the handful of admins who do still regularly patrol deletion, something that can only be exacerbated by the disintegration of RFA and the lack of new blood to take their place. A sizeable proportion—arguably all—of the recent high-profile unpleasantnesses on Wikipedia have been some variation of "someone was doing something they shouldn't, but they'd been so active in that area for so long that casual observers assumed they must know what they're doing, and there were so few experienced editors working in their area that there was nobody in a position to call them out on it". ‑ Iridescent 21:52, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

User:Jmorgan (WMF) probably has some good ideas about how to study such things. Are you thinking that the key point is "Alice spent her first year doing XFD, and then stopped doing XFD"? Or "Alice spent her first year doing XFD, and then stopped doing anything"?

I have wondered whether encouraging a rotation would help: A bot invites Alice to spend the next week at MFD, Bob gets a day at ANI, you get a year at CCI, etc. When your ~~sentence has been served~~ invitation expires, then the bot can invite you to a different area. But maybe a more intentional, deeper engagement would be better: Alice invites Bob and Chris to spend several months training to be the next Lord High Coordinators of MFD. That could produce more stability, but less "average Joe tries to follow the written policy and common sense" effect. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:20, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm thinking the key point is the former; "Alice spent her first year doing deletions, her second year doing blocks and protections, and all subsequent years either hanging round drama boards posting in-jokes and belittling new editors for not understanding obscure jargon, or settled into some hyper-specialist niche like WP:Requests to change the font on TimedText subtitle files where she's appointed herself the sole arbiter of policy". In the old days it didn't matter so much as we knew Bob was a year behind Alice in the cycle so would take up the slack, but the general malaise at RFA means Wikipedia is an army with a shedload of generals and a shrinking but still substantial number of privates, but no lieutenants or captains. I'm obviously basing all of this on anecdata—I have no intention of plotting each admin's activity in various areas as a set of 1144 separate time series—but I'm fairly sure I'm generally right, and I'm reasonably sure this is what has led to the current setup of little administrative fiefdoms where everyone is reluctant to challenge the self-appointed boss of that particular obscure administrative area. ‑ Iridescent 16:57, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Belatedly, but to save reinventing the wheel: WereSpielChequers, Kudpung, when you were doing your big piles of adminship statistics was any analysis done of adminship activity after RFA, or were you only looking at the run-up to and immediate aftermath of RFA? My feeling is that newly-passed admins initially head straight for the deletion backlog; after six months to a year they largely abandon deletion and move on to AIV/RFPP and start handing out blocks and protections; and after a year or so of that they either largely stop using the admin tools and confine themselves to some permutation of content work, writing essays, and/or hanging round on noticeboards issuing pompous pronouncements, or carve themselves out a specialist niche as the go-to admin in one particular area after which they become virtually impossible to dislodge from that area because everyone assumes that because they know so much about that narrow niche, their personal opinions must be a reflection of policy even if they contradict the actual policy. However, this may be more a reflection of the people I've had the most contact with, rather than an accurate representation of Wikipedia as a whole. ‑ Iridescent 19:55, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

And there I wonder where I fit into that scheme... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:18, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't know, person who passed RFA and immediately carried out 500 deletions in three days, but who only made 42 blocks (including tests) in their entire first year of adminship, you tell me if "new admins immediately head for the deletion backlog" is accurate… ‑ Iridescent 20:39, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

I think you also need to account for time. People usually become more active on Wikipedia when they have excess free time: unemployed, first job out of school that has about 10 hours of work a week even though they pay you for 40 (🙋🏼‍♂️), being in high school or university and not having many friends, being retired, etc. As people move along with their lives and careers, the amount of time they have to devote to this project wanes so they can’t really be the all-rounder that’s needed to pass RfA these days and so people settle in. I got CU/OS around the time my life got more complicated because of changing careers and the associated education and so I settled into working in the privacy related areas of the site since there are less people who can do it and it requires a lot less work than finding books in academic libraries and using them for research on papal conclaves. That, and when you’re back in grad school the last thing you want to do in your free time is write more (or at least I didn’t...)

Settling into that sort of behind the scenes role was a way for me to give back to a project I care about and whose mission I support while using my limited resources and energy in the way I thought/think would have the most impact. I suspect the “life evolves and here’s something I enjoy/am good at” factor plays a huge role in admin activity and areas of focus. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:43, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh, that undoubtedly plays a part—my own editing pattern is largely dependent on how much real life is interfering. At the moment I'm doing virtually nothing that requires actual thinking, and in the past I've been virtually absent literally for years at a time. I still think that even taking all that into account there's a definite trend of admins initially starting off (understandably) in those areas where "is this action appropriate?" is generally relatively clear-cut (mainly deletion, but also some other routine maintenance type things like page renamings and DYK promotions), after that moving on to more complex things, and subsequently either moving on to broad-sweep meta issues, or busying themself in one particular arcane corner which after a certain time they appoint themself sole arbiter of.

Stereotypes generally exist for a reason, and "Legacy admin from ten years ago who doesn't actually do very much that's actually useful but nonetheless writes lengthy sermons on just why the people who are doing something that's actually useful are doing it wrong" (something I've been guilty of myself on occasion) and "Admin who does so much of the work in one particular area that the other people working that area insist they're indispensable thus and shouldn't be sanctioned despite their obvious obnoxiousness" are both very well-established Wikipedia archetypes and have been pretty much back to Bomis days. I certainly can't be bothered to go through and count (and "contentious" is subjective), but per my earlier comments on a quick skim of the recent history at WP:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard I'd say at least half the contentious decisions (either cases or motions) in the last couple of years have been some variation on "an admin spent so much of their time in a particular niche they didn't notice they were gradually drifting away from consensus, but because they were so important in that niche nobody felt able to call them out before the shit hit the fan". ‑ Iridescent 23:20, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I'd agree with all that. I just think the last stage you reference has more to do with external factors than Wikipedia. A substantial portion of RfAs and/or functionary appointments in the last 5 or so years are from people roughly at the I've been out of school for 1 year and am bored out of my mind at my entry-level white collar job age. I think it's you or WAID who recently pointed out that our relatively stable activity level is less from new accounts and more from returning users. I'd suggest that people who create an account at 14 and return at 23 are likely a substantial portion of that population just from anecdotal experience and my familiarity of a lot of the bigger "new" personalities in this timeframe.

If you figure it takes 1 yearish to RfA, then 2ish years to get to "meta or niche admin" stage, you're looking at around 26-28, which is when a lot of people go back to grad school or get promoted to a position that actually requires thought and where instead of sitting at the office hoping your boss doesn't realize there's not 40 hours of work for you to do actually have 45+ hours of work to accomplish. Both grad school and having a job without much downtime tend to make the meta/niche roles much more attractive. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:37, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Thank feck for online solitaire packages :) ——SN 54129 05:37, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Age distribution of respondents to the WMF editor survey, 2011^[6]

12–17 (13%)

18–21 (14%)

22–29 (26%)

30–39 (19%)

aged 40+ (28%)

We don't have decent demographic data; the WMF and some external researchers have done some limited surveys, but they've been of a self-selecting sample so what they're actually sampling is "the type of people who respond to surveys". I suspect that while variations of "I graduated and got a full time job for the first time" account for some of the lengthy absences it's a smaller proportion than you'd think. (Wikipedia isn't actually as young a place as its reputation suggests. Because younger editors tend to engage in more activities that draw attention, they're more likely to get noticed in the first place, and because younger editors are more likely to give a clear indication of their age—either directly or indirectly—they're more visible. For most editors one has very little indication of their age unless they choose to say or have posted a photo.) People who visit wiki-events are an equally self-selecting and not necessarily representative sample, but my experience of such events tends to mirror the WMF's figures from 2011 (see right).

If I had to speculate, I would say that "long disappearances" and "sudden returns" are more led by relationship status (when you're trying to impress your new girl/boyfriend you're unlikely to lead with "I spent four hours today arguing with a complete stranger at Talk:Eat Pussy over whether the disambiguation page should include a link to Cat meat!", but after you've been together a few years s/he will either have learned to be tolerant of your quirky habit, or will dump you and give you even more free time); by health (either ill-health forcing people away from Wikipedia for a few years, or ill-health reducing the capacity to pursue more active hobbies so one spends more time in sedentary hobbies like Wikipedia editing); by children and childcare issues; and above all, by retirement, unemployment, and people switching between full-time and part-time work.

Along with changes in admin activity patterns over time, an in depth anonymous survey of editors who've returned after long breaks asking why they left and why they came back would probably be a useful tool to try to stop people leaving and encourage people to come back. However, that would be quite time-consuming (the replies would need to be in the form of free-text so some poor intern would need to read everything rather than just tabulate a column of numbers). Courtesy ping to User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (in case User:WhatamIdoing hasn't already made her aware of this thread) who presumably would be the one to explain why it wouldn't be a sensible use of money. ‑ Iridescent 08:39, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Is it just me, or does that pie chart assume there are no 17 year olds on Wiki(p|m)edia? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:50, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

I took the legend from the "Age distribution" sidebar at Wikipedia:Wikipedians. Looking at the actual press release, the first slice is actually "12-17" not "under 17"; I've corrected it. ‑ Iridescent 09:00, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

2011 is a long time ago. I have been attending London meetups for over a decade, when I started I was one of the oldest present. More than ten years later there are often several people older than me. Wikipedia being a complete pig to edit on a smartphone, I am pretty sure that we are seeing the "Greying of the pedia", the community has been gaining pensioners rapidly while failing to recruit current teenagers. I'm pretty sure that the teenage admins we used to have have long ago graduated from university. I would not be surprised if none of our 500 or so admins were under 18 today. I doubt if 1% of our admins are currently teenagers. Ϣere SpielChequers 14:30, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

It's been talked about, e.g., m:Grants:IdeaLab/Email inactive (formerly active) users with a survey on inactivity reasons. m:Research:Necromancy was looking at whether former editors could be re-activated via e-mail (answer: 99.7% no) and has been billed as a "why editors stop" study, but it doesn't seem to have done much beyond asking people to edit again. m:Research:Harassment survey 2015#Results says that some people quit editing (temporarily or permanently) in response to harassment. I've heard people claim that some newer editors stop because they have achieved their goals (e.g., wrote the definitive article about whatever their favorite thing is), and that some stop because their contributions get reverted so they think it's pointless. Volunteer-me's e-mail inbox says that editors quit when they finish school, get a job, get married, have kids, etc. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:03, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

One of the ideas from the 2009 strategy project was to survey the community, and one of the interesting things we learned from that survey was when we asked why people left a lot considered that they hadn't left. It is a pity that there has been a lack of research in this area, I'm assuming that like any longterm volunteer community the more open we are to people returning the more likely people will return. So things like automatic expiry of userrights without an easy return option aren't sensible. Talking to people who do return is always instructive, I like to think of us as a digital potting shed or allotment site, ready to welcome back the divorced, retired and redundant. It would be possible to survey returnees and ask them why they returned. Of course that only works when people return under the same username, lots have returned under new names. Ϣere SpielChequers 20:56, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

WereSpielChequers, I’m not sure off-wiki events are that great a way of measuring editor population. In the United States, due in large part to geography, the local affiliates are pretty niche and only active in a meaningful way in major population centers. I lived in a state that has some of the more high-profile personalities on the project either resident in it or strongly connected to it. I went to a few off-wiki events to help out and I was the only person with more than 500 edits, and I was certainly the youngest. I’m not sure how it is in the U.K., but I think a large part of it here is the editors in their 20s-early 30s might as a group just don’t care about the off-wiki stuff. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:29, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Off-wiki events aren't representative. By their nature they're more likely to be attended by people with fewer real life committments which skews the sample. The choice of venue skews the sample further; they're often held in pubs/bars which can discourage young people, lone women, and people who avoid places where alcohol is served (either through religious reasons or other personal reasons such as recovering addicts who want to avoid the temptation), and when they're held in more academic settings that in turn discourages a different group of people who don't feel comfortable in such an environment. For obvious reasons they tend to be in big cities or cities with a strong student presence, which distorts the sample further, and they'll disproportionately attract people who can afford to travel to them.

All that said, they can still be useful as a rough indicator of whether the project is stagnating. If one compares the photos from "WikiMeetup Fooville 2010" and "WikiMeetup Fooville 2020" and it's all the same faces, just ten years older, that's a reasonable indicator that Wikipedia is no longer attracting or at least retaining new blood. ‑ Iridescent 17:50, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

(EC) I've not done all that much analysis on areas of interest and career paths of admins. I've always taken it on trust that admins will at least start out in the area(s) they said they would in their RFAs, even though I didn't - I've barely touched AIV in all my time as an admin. One bit of research that I did with Kudpung and ScottyWong some years ago was in debunking a WMF claim on their promotional material that 30% of our top editors had started out as vandals. The truth was much more interesting, and possibly more embarrassing. The WMF had taken two stats, almost all blocks are for vandalism, and 30% of the thousand editors with the highest edit counts (as at about ten years ago) had at least something in their block log. On the principle that 1 and 1 makes eleven, the WMF had revealed part of their prejudice about the community. But of course most vandalism only accounts only get to do enough edits to count as a new user before they get indef blocked, the blocks among our most active editors were very different. The two most common reasons, about three quarters of the blocks were accidentally blocked self and accidentally blocked someone else - Kudpung might remember which accounted for half of the 30% and which for half of the remainder. Three of the lessons that I took from that episode were that the longer one edits here, the greater the chance of being accidentally blocked, a not insignificant proportion of our admins have made embarrassing mistakes, and that if you point out a WMF mistake quietly and diplomatically you are going to waste months of time - I don't use "badsites" but, the WMF pays more attention to them than they do to the community, so a short post there would have been a much more efficient use of my time. Simpler bits of research include looking at intervals between adminship and desysopping - a probationary period would not seem to make sense as the problem is more long term admins drifting away from community norms, there may even be a three year risk period. The other one I looked at was the "admins who get the tools and do nothing with them" meme that sometimes comes up at RFA. If you look at the admins who have near zero logged actions on adminstats three things jump out at you. The first is that lots of people who have never had admin rights have a handful of admin actions attributed to them. The second is that the adminstats data only goes back to December 2004 and there are a number of ancient admins who are down as doing almost nothing with the tools, but if you look at their talkpages from 2003 and thereabouts they clearly were active admins then; and there are a few exceptions such as admins who only had the bit for days or who only wanted it to maintain the spam filter. Ϣere SpielChequers 14:22, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

There was neither an attempt nor intention during the research to make any analysis of what editors do after they get the bit. For those with successful RfAs, the effort was to AGF that they would do what they claimed were their reasons for wanting it. Over the years however, it becomes empirically clear that some were interested merely in the prestige of the position, or as I have said more than once: 'having something to brag about in the schoolyard'. I doubt that this fits for mature, retired academics in their 60s who just get on with the job of admining in all it entails, and doing a lot of outreach and other off-Wiki work (but they seem to be the ones that Arbcom is anxious to get rid of).

Anyone who knows how is welcome to do that research - I'm sure the results would prove very interesting if not directly useful. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:15, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

From experience, it's easy for an admin to say they want the tools so they can do a given task, but then hardly ever do it. Sometimes it's not until you have the tools and try to do something that you realise you don't find it interesting and go do something else instead. Sometimes, the task ceases to exist; I had the intention of primarily cleaning up the torrent of stubs—back then Wikipedia was less than a third of its current size and the number of active editors was rising faster than the number of articles, and it was still possible to think in terms of "cleaning up everything"—but New Page Patrol made "hovering over Special:NewPages zapping the spam as it came in" largely redundant. (I wonder how an RFA that answered "What admin work do you intend to take part in?" with "To be honest, probably not a lot" would fare nowadays.)

I do think that in general regardless of what someone wanted the tools for, they'll tend to follow the "straight for the deletion backlog, and after that on to blocking and protecting" path. It's why at RFA, even in the cases of people who say they only want it for a single specialist use like editing the WP:DYK queue or amending full-protected templates, temperament is still generally the primary concern; we have too much emperical experience of admins who decide that having sysop=1 makes them into the wiki-sheriff. ‑ Iridescent 18:06, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

TPS question on revert notifications

Iri and TPS, what kind of revert triggers a notification to the user being reverted, and alternately, what kind of partial revert or edit is done to avoid notification to the reverted editor? I understand Rollback, so no need to go there. I don't understand the other tools (Twinkle, etc), and I don't understand if partial reverts trigger an alert. (Yes, in spite of 15 years of editing ... I do know how FAC and FAR work, though!) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:59, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

As far as I know, rollback doesn't trigger a notification, while the Mediawiki "undo" and Twinkle "restore this version" and "undo changes" do, but I may be wrong. I assume (just because I can't see any technical way the software could detect it) that manually reverting—that is, opening the old version, copying the wikitext, and then editing the current version and overwriting it with a paste of the old text—wouldn't trigger a notification. All methods will obviously still show up in watchlists. The official documentation is at mw:Help:Notifications ‑ Iridescent 15:17, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Dunno if it's directly relevant, under Preferences>Notifications>Edit revert you can check/uncheck as to whether you want to be notified every time you are reverted. Even by email, if you happen to have an empty email account and want it spammed to bits :) ——SN 54129 15:23, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Shameless plug: Wikipedia:Revert notification opt-out. Opting out was the best thing I ever did. E Eng 16:55, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Agreed; given that it doesn't always work nobody should be relying on it anyway, and it just causes unnecessary stress when you see that "your edit was reverted!" pop up since it's almost invariably something like an en-dash you fixed four years ago. Anything you actually feel strongly enough about that you might want to edit-war on it, just watchlist it. If someone were in a position to actually get changes made (for instance, if there's a Community Relations Specialist, Contributors Product who happens to be watching this page) one of the simplest ways to reduce the general shittiness of Wikipedia with no real downside would be to have that checkbox disabled by default or even make the option to switch it on admin-only. ‑ Iridescent 20:14, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I think I said once that making revert-notifications-off the default would reduce the overall decibel level substantially. Like you said, If you care about an article you should care enough to take note of all changes to it, not just get a warning flare when your change got reverted. E Eng 21:19, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

The grand old gentleman of WPMED who first and best welcomed me was User:Encephalon, and his advice then held me in good stead for many years. He said something like, "As long as you never edit war, you'll be fine", and explained it was a bright line. (Now I know it is not.) I did a revert once last month, in the midst of an edit war, when I was in … complete shock and disbelief at what I was seeing. Miss that Encephalon influence! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:35, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Hmmmm ... thanks ... but all that leaves me nowhere. I will try to dig around and come up with an example, to better hone in on the question. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:34, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

If you want to test the effect of a particular action, probably the easiest thing to do is make a bunch of sandbox edits, log out and undo the edits by various methods, log back in and see which ones have generated a "your edit was reverted" notification. If this is for the purpose of evidence at the arb case (something along the lines of "well, User:Foo must have been aware because this generates a ping), work on the assumption that nothing generates a notification, since you can't ever assume that it's been delivered—this is why we insist that people posting complaints at the noticeboards manually notify whoever they're discussing. If you're asking how to edit a page while reducing the likelihood of someone else noticing, then the only certain way is to use the "edit" button and take the offending edit out manually. ‑ Iridescent 15:41, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

While perhaps replacing it, if possible, with something else of the same size...zero-kb changed ;) ——SN 54129 15:44, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Iri, I suspect your final sentence is in play, but will have to test that myself, I guess. I assume "take the offending edit out manually" has the same effect as "add back in the preferred text-- that others had removed-- manually"? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:53, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, or open the old version from the page history, copy the wikitext, and then edit the article and paste the wikitext in. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to do this, as if you're only partially undoing an edit this is generally easier than undoing it completely then trying to reconstruct it, so if you've seen someone doing it it's not necessarily evidence of anything untoward. ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Ok, yes. That. Not implying that it is untoward, but demonstrating that the reverted editors may not even know they were reverted. Related to no use of edit summaries. Would that be a correct statement? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:15, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes; other than actually leaving some form of "I have reverted you" message, or when the reverted editor responds to it so has shown themselves aware, there's no way to prove that any given editor is aware of any given revert, regardless of what mechanism was used to perform the revert. The software is glitchy so it may never have been delivered, the reverted editor may have notifications turned off, the reverted editor may have muted the reverting editor, or they may just not have checked their notifications for a while. (If you don't mark notifications as "read" and allow the count to reach 99—which isn't that uncommon, particularly if you've made a bulk change to lots of articles and someone has undone a lot of them—the software starts acting goofy; it doesn't like three-digit numbers.) ‑ Iridescent 16:21, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

OK, overall then, I am going to stop worrying about this issue; it is the editor who was reverted responsibility to follow that. I do wish we could do something about misleading and missing edit summaries, particularly on edits known to be controversial. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:31, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Both undo and rollback produce notifications (see mw:Notifications#Features). IPs never see these and I think that brand-new editors don't, either. The defaults were determined in consultation with The Community™. I doubt that we could get them changed here with anything less than a local RFC.

AFAIK nobody has compared the use of the Undo button before and after this feature was released. I keep wishing that someone would make a list of ideas for grad students. Figuring out whether experienced editors used the Undo/Rollback buttons to revert other experienced editors less, and plain old edits that 'just happened' to match a previous version more, should be on the list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:14, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Yup, just tried edit-warring with myself using a sock account and I can confirm that the vanilla rollback button does generate a notification.

As regards figuring out whether people are consciously trying to subvert notifications, then presuming the WMF still has the raw submission data for each edit stored you wouldn't need to pore over everyone's history manually; just check the proportion of edits that have wpUndidRevision flagged and see if there's a sudden unexpected jump.

Were the current defaults definitely determined by The Community, or just decided by the devs? From those parts of the Help talk:Notifications archives I managed to skim through before my eyes started glazing over, the only place I can see this being discussed was The revert notification encourages edit-warring, consider removing or modifying it which was a discussion about whether the function should exist at all, rather than as to whether it should be opt-in or opt-out. (With a certain inevitability, one of the people who was most vocally in favor of revert notifications is now under an indefinite partial-block from the entire article space owing to inappropriate mass reversion.) ‑ Iridescent 07:42, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Can't find it now, but there was once a long, long discussion of changing the bull-angering-red little square-with-number-in-it to a more soothing color. Came to nothing in the end, of course. E Eng 12:23, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Personally I tend to use Twinkle for reverting more than one edit, opening and saving an old revision when I do a partial revert, undo for when a rollback isn't the correct move. For what it's worth I keep revert notifications, so that I can check when people are unilaterally reverting AFD closes or if I make a bad edit. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:15, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm not (and I assume EEng isn't) disputing that there are circumstances where revert notifications are useful. (For instance, I always make sure they're switched on before I do any kind of semi-automated search-and-replace run; if I see an edit I've made being reverted it acts as an early-warning system that what I'm doing is potentially contentious and I should double-check it, although in practice it invariably turns out to be that my edit was correct and someone has misunderstood the diff and thus restores spelling mistakes and/or mangled grammar.) All that we're suggesting is that instead of the current situation, where "Notify me when someone reverts an edit I made, by using the undo or rollback tool" is active by default unless and until the editor chooses to turn it off, it be made off by default unless and until the editor chooses to turn it on. ‑ Iridescent 08:32, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Multiple responses: regarding poring over someone's edit history, proving to be quite impossible with the tools not working for the last three days, and the added complication of deficient use of edit summaries. Jo-Jo, where/how do you keep these revert notifications? The need to go back and discover ten years' worth of diffs is daunting, yet they can't be saved onwiki. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:59, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

New notifications appear on Special:Notifications, which you can set to show read notifications, unread ones, or both. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:06, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Ah, thanks Jo-Jo; now I understand. But that will only get you reverts of your own edits, which is not the issue I am dealing with. Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:26, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Are you trying to generate a list of all the reverts someone else has performed? Go to their contribution history, click the "Search for contributions" box at the top to bring up the search options, enter mw-undo (for "undo") or mw-rollback (for rollbacks) in the "tag filter" box, and click the blue "Search" botton—e.g. this is every edit you've made that's been tagged as an undo. ‑ Iridescent 15:44, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

OMG. It just gets worse and worse. I did not know of this use of the search. I am not sure whether to thank you or not :( Rollback is ONLY for clear-cut vandalism, right? (Although so many of us hit the rollback button by mistake and then have to revert ourselves, so those have to be individually examined.) And, back to the original problem I raised: this only detected undo or rollback, not other kinds of reverts, and ... lack of edit summaries. Too Much Work. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:01, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

It will detect anything made using the "undo" button or any equivalent (such as the "restore this version" button in Twinkle), regardless of whether or not an edit summary was used (the undo tag is added by the software even if the edit summary is blank). In theory an admin can remove the "undo" tag from an edit but it will show in that admin's log, and I imagine anyone doing so without very good reason like fixing a bug would be called out on it very quickly. "Rollback" is for clear-cut vandalism (or for cleaning up your own mistakes) only, "undo" is a revert for any other reason. ‑ Iridescent 16:09, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

(adding) As a belated addendum to the above about rollback, see also Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Ryulong#Rollback, which created a precedent for an additional exception to the "only for vandalism, your own edits, or on your own userpage" rollback policy. Provided it's publicly explained why the rollback tool was used, it's permitted to use the rollback tool to undo mass edits (my emphasis) even if they were made in good faith and don't constitute vandalism. (The classic example would be one of those editors who doesn't understand the difference between American and British spelling, and search-and-replaces every instance of "centre", "realise" etc on hundreds of pages. Provided it was explained to them why they were being reverted, it would be considered acceptable to use rollback on all the edits even though the individual edit summaries wouldn't explain why the edits were being reverted.) ‑ Iridescent 10:24, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

Quantifying edit summary use is pretty easy: Go to https://xtools.wmflabs.org/editsummary/en.wikipedia.org/SandyGeorgia and wait (and wait and wait) for it to load, and then you almost give up and say that you already knew that SandyGeorgia uses edit summaries anyway, when it finally confesses that she'd used edit summaries on 100% of her last 150 major and 150 minor edits, and on 99.7% of all edits ever.

As for getting good edit summaries, phab:T54859 might be an interesting starting point. Maybe it's something to keep in mind if the m:Community Wishlist happens this year. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Does that Community Wishlist actually have any effect? I always assumed it was the WMF equivalent of giving a child a toy steering wheel so they can pretend to drive the car, and that the devs work on whatever they want to work on and on the occasion that it happens to correspond with something that was supported in the public vote, they claim it as a win for democracy. (Otherwise, where's my dark mode toggle, my cross-wiki watchlist, my default global gadget set, the auto-archiving of external links, named references in VE, multiproject article alerts…) ‑ Iridescent 22:06, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

They promise to "address" the top 10 vote-getters. The others get a Phab task but usually nothing else; for example, reviving m:Crosswatch was #29 at m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Results and will therefore not be fulfilled by the WMF (although a volunteer dev asked for a grant to do something similar).

On average, I think about eight happen, and approximately one is declined in some fashion ("too big for this program" seems to be the most common reason), and another one they start but don't get finished (maybe doing something useful, but not everything). Most of the wishes are fullfilled by the jack-of-all-trades Community Tech team, and a couple get parceled out to others, especially the Editing team. There is a bit of "happens to correspond with something"; one year, everyone voted for the Wishlist to do something in the next fiscal year that Editing had already planned for the current fiscal year. However, that's not intentional, and whenever they're noticed, those wishes are usually removed from the wishlist before voting starts or at least get a note that the WMF plans to do that work anyway.

About the top 10, they're not "supposed" to be done with the 2019 wishlist items for another several months, but they spent so much time on New Page Patrolling that they were running late on everything, and now everything's delayed even further because of pandemic-related disruptions, plus they just hired a couple of new folks (with the unavoidable short-term productivity hit that entails). So it should be coming, but probably not by the normal 30 June 2020 target date. (Work-me sees that PM most Mondays, so ping me if there's a particular project you'd like an update on.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:04, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Cross-wiki watchlist is the only significant change I can think of that I'd actually be interested in seeing (oh, and maybe "get VE and Wikitext references working together properly"); most of the top-10 proposals in any given year are fairly anodyne tinkering since anything complicated gets opposition. Since that's been an outstanding Phab task since—er—September 2005 (and a top-5 vote-winner in 2015), I'm not holding my breath. ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Ha, that's the thing I'd also like to see. meta:Grants:Project/DannyS712/Create a global watchlist extension is the next iteration on the list as the other task is blocked on phab:T158880. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:39, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Break: Wishes

WhatamIdoing ... they spent so much time on New Page Patrolling ... - that's their own fault entirely. NPP is a crucial, major operation. The community wish list was designed as a forum to request improvement or accessories that would be 'cool' to have, but NPP is not some convenience gadget of the kind you might buy to stick on your dashboard in the hope it will make your car go faster - the makers of modern motor cars have mostly thought of everything anyway, but the attitude of the WMF is, well, no longer modern despite its bold claims of being progressive.

Those concerned with NPP and its importance as en.Wiki's fundamental process and only firewall against irrelevant and totally inappropriate new pages in mainspace, have been pleading with the WMF for a decade for a dedicated team of devs to address what is an on-going task. But no, a self-important mid level dev insisted time and time again that anything to do with NPP should be requested from Santa at the Xmas bid for candy, and deliberately blocked any other avenues of appeal for work on NPP.

The result was that the community finally got their way with ACTRIAL which proved once again that the WMF is often disasterously wrong, and got their way with NPP by ensuring that it topped the table at the Wishlist. Perhaps you (and anyone else who is following) should read this seminal essay which was basically an open letter to the WMF, and which led towards breaking the impasse: New Page Patrol - a necessary evil . Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:18, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

What should be relatively easy to do is to identify the areas of admin work, see who currently are the most active admins there (for example who edits the request pages most), and check when they got the flag.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:56, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

A lot of admin work leaves no trace on any central pages, like request pages. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:09, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Kudpung, I agree that it's a self-inflicted injury. If the rule is going to be that "wishes" have to be small enough for that team to address in about a month, then the rule should be the same for everyone. This would have meant splitting the multi-part NPP request into many normal-sized individual items, instead of one omnibus item. But instead of doing that, they decided to take on an outsized "wish" for the English Wikipedia's New Page Patrol plus the usual number of normal-sized wishes. They're paying for their decision now, with a disrupted schedule (and we all are, too, with half as many wishes happening in the coming year's work and none unrelated to Wikisource). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:37, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I'd agree with you (WAID) if this were the WMF of 2007, but that's not really the case any more. From the whole way the wishlist setup is structured, I sometimes get the impression that the WMF is still in the mindset of the old days, where whether or not any given proposal got implemented was largely a function of whether a developer thought it looked interesting and whether an enthusiast for that particular change was good at lobbying and was friends with the right people.

Back then, the "we focused on NPP so that meant nothing else got done" argument made sense. The same isn't the case nowadays. The WMF's cash reserves alone—not including investments, property, and restricted cash—are currently over $100 million, and rising by $30 million a year. If the WMF wants to go ahead with ten, fifty, a hundred changes simultaneously, they're in a position to hire as many programmers and testers as necessary (or persuade Google, Facebook or Microsoft to send them on secondment) to get it done. The real purpose of the annual wishlist isn't as a mechanism to ration out scarce resources to where they'll do the most good, but as a mechanism to judge whether any given proposal is actually something that has broad support, or just something that there's no enthusiasm for but which has a handful of very vocal supporters. ‑ Iridescent 17:37, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

But you also know that no dev team is infinitely expandable. So long as the Wishlist remains the territory of a single team, then the capacity of that single team limits what they can do.

You also know that organizations can't grow above a certain rate without pain, and the WMF has been at that point a couple of times. "As many programmers and testers as necessary" is achievable long-term but not short-term. So in between now and that magical future, "more Wishlist" is basically synonymous with "less other stuff", and I don't see a lot of people lining up to say that the projects they're personally involved in (e.g., new editor retention, research, multimedia) should be cut so that there could be more resources available for the Wishlist. In fact, I see a lot more people saying that the Stewards ought to get what they need, or that Commons has been neglected, or that map support is needed everywhere, than saying that the best prioritization system is to let partially informed and sometimes heavily canvassed editors decide, by popular vote, more of what ought to happen. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:15, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh, it's not infinitely expandable—and we wouldn't want it infinitely expandable, since aside from a few lunatic-fringe types who fap to the Agile Manifesto, the wiki communities are fairly conservative and don't want to have to integrate multiple simultaneous cultural and design changes simultaneously. My issue is more with the idea that NPP somehow derailed every other improvement—it might have been a big project but it was still ultimately only one project. If there's one thing we learned from Lila, it's that the WMF has the resources and the ability to throw an unlimited amount of time and money to throw at a problem when it happens to be someone's pet project, without derailing or unduly disrupting everyone else's workflow. ‑ Iridescent 07:03, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Draft:Legende WoW-a

Hello. You just removed my CSD:G3 from the draft. You don't belive that "Soon a decade will come, when the peak of the new WoW expansion, the game is joined by one of the best paladins of this game ever. It is an unknown Balkan player with a clever name; MirsoCetnik. Maybe satirical, or just like any other Balkan resident; buzovan. Somewhere, the more powerful paladin never stepped on Azerot." is a hoax draft? MistyGraceWhite (talk) 08:01, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Certainly not; WP:G3 isn't a generally catch-all for "I don't think this page is appropriate for Wikipedia", but has a very specific meaning. This is fairly clearly someone trying to write about World of Warcraft gaming; it may well be a violation of WP:NOTWEBHOST, but that doesn't make it a hoax. (Because of the instructions we now give to new editors, it's not at all unusual for material a new account intended for their userpage to end up inadvertently as an article draft.) I note that despite your template-bombing User talk:AurelijeBalkanski with three separate templates, you've not made the slightest attempt to ask them what they're trying to do or explain to them what is and isn't appropriate and that we strongly discourage non-English text even in user/draft space. ‑ Iridescent 08:10, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Just want to say

Reading your talk page archives has been perhaps the most helpful resource in terms of understanding how the community has changed these past years and what the current zeitgeist is. Your knowledge and insight into issues past and present is a breath of fresh air. Sometimes you'll mention an old discussion or a long-gone user and I'll have an Obi-Wan Kenobi "Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time" moment. I knew there was a reason I named you an awesome Wikipedian 11 years ago.

I've been trying to catch up on years of being a hermit by reading policies, RFA/Bs (and crat chats), ArbCom cases, and other sundry major discussions, and it's been a real bear. I think about how on the Wikipedia article it says right underneath a big fat {{update-section}} that "Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia's large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words as of 2014." Zoinks. I would really love to see what the numbers are 6 years later. bibliomaniac 1 5 05:29, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

In many ways, I think this talk page is an ideal model for what a Wikipedia talk page should be. It's definitely one of my favorite talk pages (the characters! the drama! the monologues!) and it often acts as a good portal to other zany parts of the wiki world. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:45, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to both… Every so often I look through my old archives, and my main reaction—other than "wow, I could be pretentious sometimes back then"—is the same as yours; either "wow, I'd completely forgotten that name" or "huh, I can't believe I ever thought that particular issue was significant". Policies and guidelines are still too bloated, but not as bloated as they could have been. It's at least theoretically possible to read and remember every entry at Wikipedia:List of policies, and while it's not possible for a sane person to read and remember everything at Wikipedia:List of guidelines and its subpages, it's still possible for someone to at least remember where the best place to look is when one needs to know. (Some of the "Wikipedia has a million words of instructions!" criticism IMO misses the mark. A lot of those pages are things like Wikipedia:Event coordinator and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Snooker which 99.9% of editors can completely ignore, and which the 0.1% are going to be well aware of, but where it's nonetheless useful to have things down in writing rather than relying on consensus and precedent.) Despite the bloat in written instructions, IMO the old "Assume good faith / Don't be a dick / Ignore all rules" WP:TRIFECTA still applies. ‑ Iridescent 06:54, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Thirding this. I've always skimmed it when I was around, but did a deep dive on my return-ish of late. All conversations seemed to touch here at some point so it was an easy way to follow out to longer reads without having to fully wade through the drama of the AN boards yet still access key info/updates. I had a personal chuckle at the recent thread about AWB edits. One of yours was an edit to a town I used to live in 20+ years ago. I also know you were involved with my rename and why it is in no way reflective of where I live. Thanks for this resource. I also still miss WP:ANK days. StarM 20:01, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

As far as I know Keeper is still around, he just mostly edits from an IP these days to avoid people pestering him. He was one of the Great Old Ones who briefly emerged from hibernation on the edit summary thread a couple of years ago (as were you). ‑ Iridescent 20:24, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Paradigm overflow sewer

I recently ran into the delicious (?) notion of a paradigm overflow sewer, which apparently is an actual thing (e.g. [7]). It seems to me that there are parts of the Wikipedia/Wikimedia world which might usefully be described as paradigm overflow sewers, and thought you might want to add to your rhetorical toolbox for use at the appropriate moment. E Eng 14:33, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

I watched them build that thing, and never once heard it called "paradigm overflow sewer". It's just a fancy way of saying "connect the sewage treatment plants so if one is full the inbound traffic gets diverted someplace else to be treated, instead of either backing up or being dumped into the river". I don't know how much you know about the civil engineering history of London, but for some reason the sewage engineers have always been incapable of talking about any aspect of the sewage system in normal terms; everything is "palatial" or "monumental". (We're not just talking about Eminent Victorians either; this is Bazalgette Tunnel Ltd's current website, and they still talk like they're colonising Mars rather than trying to find ways to pump megatons of shit into the North Sea more cheaply.)

If you want a hot tip for our very own paradigm overflow sewer, I hotly tip Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF), which seems to be being earmarked as a future autonomous free port of Meta on Wikipedia's territory. ‑ Iridescent 14:55, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Well to be fair, a lot of those projects were truly monumental. E Eng 16:11, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Sure, and I don't object to the florid language when used to describe something genuinely world-changing like Abbey Mills or the New River, but Thames Water and Bazalgette both use the same Brontë-meets-Tolkein style to describe (e.g.) clearing a clump of used sanitary towels and cooking grease from a pipe. It obviously goes with digging holes; until it became clear that their project was a disaster from both an engineering and financial perspective (so far three years behind schedule and £4 billion over budget, and both numbers rising) Crossrail were equally bad offenders, while HS2 is only just off the blocks but already showing promise. ‑ Iridescent 16:36, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Oh come on, Fatberg was truly monumental.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:13, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Roadster Diner A7

You declined CSD A7 twice on Saturday. What was the credible claim of significance or importance I missed?-- Dewritech (talk) 12:17, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) Being a US restaurant chain in a country where the US was, only a generation earlier, less than popular to say the least...? SERIAL ^# 12:32, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Also, Today, Roadster Diner is one of the leading food chains in Lebanon and has numerous locations all around the country. is a claim of importance. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:05, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

(Article now moved—I think incorrectly but it's not something over which it's worth edit-warring—to Draft:Roadster Diner, if any TPW is wondering what this is about.)
As JJE says, Roadster Diner is one of the leading food chains in Lebanon and has numerous locations all around the country is a credible claim of significance by any reasonable measure. As per Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion#A7. No indication of importance (people, animals, organizations, web content, events)—which are written in very carefully worded detail that was the result of (literally) years of discussion—there's no way this qualifies for deletion under A7.

If you can demonstrate that the claim is false, it could theoretically be deleted under WP:G3 as a hoax, but that particular set of circumstances (the claim is simultaneously plausible on its face, but so self-evidently a hoax that the conclusion can't be disputed) almost never arises, and an admin who invoked that particular clause more than once or twice a year would likely be desysopped fairly quickly in the new climate. (This kind of behaviour was the primary factor in the defenestration of RHaworth; this isn't just an academic debate but a fundamental issue, since every inappropriate deletion tagging potentially results in a legitimate editor resigning in disgust.)

Speedy deletion tagging is (explicitly, and this is written Wikipedia policy) only to be applied in the most obvious cases. If there's any possibility that a reasonable editor could potentially feel deletion was inappropriate, then except in a few exceptional circumstances like Neelix redirects, speedy tagging isn't appropriate. ‑ Iridescent 19:25, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Your edit summary drew me here to read this section, and parts of your concise and understandable reply should certainly either become part of a new essay or a major portion of the existing language. Laying things out as clearly as A-B-C in well-written English seems essay worthy. Randy Kryn (talk) 19:32, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Most of it already is part of the existing policies. People just dont read them properly. The lack of understanding around what the speedy deletion policy allows and what editors (who tag under it) think it allows is depressingly large. And thats one of the more explicitly and simply written policies. Personally I think it comes down to a basic lack of knowledge of what certain words mean when used in a sentence. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:51, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your answers. Those unspecific filler words like leading or numerous sound quite different to me than the sample claims given at WP:CCOS (President, first cricketer, debuted at #5 or invention won). Almost everything or everyone is leading or numerous in some respect. But if consensus is different, I will follow it.-- Dewritech (talk) 11:02, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I tend to think of WP:A7 as being aimed largely at things like "Mary Clegg is the prettiest girl in our class", or "My mates and I have started a band in our basement". That is, things that are clearly, blatantly, and unambiguously nowhere near important enough to be worthy of an encyclopedia article. The bar to clear is described as a lower standard than notability, but I keep seeing people edging it more and more towards notability than has ever been intended. If I have to stop and think "Is it possible this *could* be sufficiently important?", that's enough to turn me away from nominating for A7 (or to have me decline an A7 on the rare occasions I can be bothered getting caught up in it). Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 11:14, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

What Boing said. Speedy deletion isn't for cases where you think the article is biased or puffy—it's explicitly only to be used in the case of pages that are so obviously inappropriate for Wikipedia that they have no chance of surviving a deletion discussion. (This isn't some obscure policy you have to hunt around to find; it's a verbatim quote from Wikipedia:Deletion policy.) If there's any realistic possibility that the topic could be a viable Wikipedia article, and there's at least one revision in the history of the page that isn't so irredeemably spammy it would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic, then except in the case of copyright violations and (in some cases) pages where the only editor is a banned editor, then by definition it can't be tagged for speedy deletion. ‑ Iridescent 2 16:41, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Note re question

Hi Iridiscent. I appreciate your note to me at Village Pump. I understood that you were posing a question to me, and I provided a response, which I hope was responsive and helpful. also, you stated that I "feel this constant need to propose grand redesigns of Wikipedia and constantly act like the only opinions of any value are those of people who agree with you." I am not aware of any area or venue that I am acting in that manner in any way at the present time, or at any time in any edit over recent weeks. In any future interactions, I would appreciate if we could please address each other in a positive and constructive manner, and avoid any personal comments, or any comments on individual actions that are tangential to the current topic, and obviously seek to observe WP:Civil in every respect. I do sincerely appreciate and respect your desire to make Wikipedia a better place. If you reply here, please ping me. thanks. ---Sm8900★ 🌎 23:06, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Moxy has already explained it to you in that thread with If you haven't garnered any support from your previous four post about the same thing last week and the week before .....perhaps best to assume support is simply lacking, but I'll put it more bluntly. When you make a proposal, it's rejected, and you keep coming back with slight variations on the same proposal, you're insulting every other participant on whichever board you propose something on, by repeatedly expecting them to read proposals that you know have little support.

If you were a new editor we'd be making allowances—sometimes people do come in with ideas for reform and try to push them overenthusiastically, and sometimes new editors aren't familiar with Wikipedia's rules—but as you know this isn't the case here. You've been here only seven months less than me so you can't play the "I didn't understand how things work" card, and it's only a couple of months ago that you were engaged in this exact same disruption to such an extent that admins were seriously considering blocking you as an apparent compromised account (I note that at the time of writing WP:HISTORY still includes your self-appointed position as the boss of Wikipedia's historical coverage, incidentally). The only reason you weren't sanctioned then was that you made explicit promises to abide by the restrictions proposed by Nick Moyes—and yes, those restrictions did include the just to stick to content creation and normal editing for a while … and to cease with the 'grand ideas' and problem-solving for a bit to which you're now pretending you never agreed. ‑ Iridescent 19:25, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Oh no, not again. I am so, so sad, so really sad to have to be sucked back into these ridiculous and will-sapping interactions with Sm8900. Honestly, mate, you need to learn when to drop the stick. Forgive me for being so personal - but is it an OCD/ADHD thing that makes you so obsessive and pedantic? If it is, please just tell us and help us to understand and support you. If not - put bluntly, stop annoying the community with you proposals, wikilawyering and weasel-words. Yes, you did irrefutably undertake to me to stop all of this rubbish. You said, when I proposed how you should ease off and stop annoying everyone else with your well-meaning but misguided attempts to improve all of our lives: "I will be happy to adopt every single one of them.". Just stop, please. Go back to basic editing and content creation. Your passive-aggressive demands that we all treat you politely have now rather worn thin, and you need to stop. Right now. Make no more proposals for change; don't say stuff like "oh, I agree, you're quite right; thank you; I won't do it again" but then just carry on in almost exactly the same way as before, albeit with a slight change of emphasis whilst demanding we are polite and courteous with you. Just stop. Stop! Please re-promise from now on to focus entirely on editing article content, and to stop expending everyone else's time with your well-meaning but misguided, off-beam and seemingly unwanted proposals for change. It's become like a person poking a stick into a wound to try and make things better. Stop it now, or the community might wish to step in to stop you. Will you agree to simply edit article content and stay off other project pages and from making proposals for change for the next 12 months? It seems it might have come to "Edit content, or edit nothing at all. Period." Sorry, but I think it's now time that you need to choose which direction you go in, and another visit to WP:ANI might decide what happens next. Nick Moyes (talk) 23:50, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

you didn't give me a time period before. if you want me to agree to a time frame, I can accept that. I would like to discuss the details. can we please discuss at your talk page, Nick Moyes? I will post a message there. thanks. ---Sm8900★ 🌎 23:57, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi Nick Moyes. Since you and I had interacted directly at this page in this section above, I just wanted to thank you again here, for your help at your talk page, in reaching a positive new accord and understanding, to enable us to move forward in a positive way.

Hi Iridescent. I just wanted to let you know that in connection with the points, issues, and concerns that you raised above, I had an extensive discussion with Nick Moyes about some valid ways to address these concerns, and to find some new ways to reach a new positive understanding on ways to address this positively. Based on this, I have agreed to at least a two-week hiatus in making any new proposals. you might find it helpful and informative to view the specific details on the new accord that we were able to reach; this discussion clarifies and updates the prior discussion on this; in other words, this provides new clarifications, modifications, and update to any understandings and points previously made on this set of issues. I hope that is helpful.

you are welcome to view the full discussion and new understandings, at the talk page section User talk:Nick Moyes#New accord and understandings. I hope that is helpful. I appreciate your help. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 18:00, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Honestly, there's no need to have a long discussion. Literally all these walls of text can be summed up as "please don't waste other people's time unnecessarily"; as long as you're not doing that, there's no problem. ‑ Iridescent 2 16:47, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Troubling edsum

Hi there, I got your name from "recently active admins". I just noticed a troubling edit here on the James O Brian page. The two edits at 17:33 inserted and then immediately deleted innuendo on a BLP article, but repeated the assertion in the edsum. The intent was apparently to create a non revertible edsum about the page subject. I am not really sure how this is dealt with. Grateful for your guidance on the matter. I have watched your page should you wish to reply to me here. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 17:46, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

ETA - not to worry. Just went back to the page after writing this and see another admin has already blocked the editor in question. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 17:48, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

I've revdeleted the relevant content, although this looks to me just like juvenile vandalism rather than genuine defamation. In future, you're much more likely to get a response for this kind of thing at WP:AIV. ‑ Iridescent 17:49, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Great, thanks and thanks for the pointer. -- Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 17:51, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if this kind of juvenile vandalism will increase or decrease now, with the coronavirus shutting down more and more countries' education systems. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:56, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Other than an (expected) dip at Christmas when people have better things to do, the IP edit rate and the new editor registration rate barely twitch during the school holidays, so probably not as much as you'd think. What I'd imagine we will see is a slight uptick in the activity of existing editors who are sitting at home with nothing else to do. (In a worst-case scenario we're looking at a genuine cultural change as older people and people with existing medical conditions are both disproportionately represented on Wikipedia and those are the two groups who would be worst-affected if the virus isn't contained, but in the worst-case scenario we'll all have more to worry about than the internal politics of a website.) ‑ Iridescent 18:08, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

There's actually more juvenile vandalism when people are in school (probably because they are bored and also looking stuff up on Wikipedia for school) than in the summer, as can be seen from anti-vandalism filter hits. I think there might be a increase in vandalism now because a lot of kids are probably stuck at home and bored. Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:19, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Reply, having slept on it

What we are likely to see soon is a massive uptick in petty arguments, edit-wars and (much as I hate to use the word) incivility. Social distancing measures are presumably going to reduce the scope for people to say "I'm getting unduly upset by this argument that ultimately isn't of much importance, I'm going out for a drink/meal/movie/walk to calm down", while simultaneously people are going to be under hugely increased real-world stress. It's not just the "will I get sick?" worry; there's also the financial implications of global recession and job insecurity, having bored children sent home from school with nowhere to take them to tire them out, being locked in a house with family with no way to get away from arguments, and the psychological impact of a constant drip of doom-and-gloom from the media.

It's obviously not a decision that's mine to make unilaterally, but for the duration I think we should ensure that WP:Civility#Blocking for incivility is actually applied as written, in particular Civility blocks should be for obvious and uncontentious reasons, because an editor has stepped over the line in a manner nearly all editors can see, and we should start clamping down on admins (and Arbcoms) who play civility cop. By all means we need to continue to have standards, but we equally need to recognise that these are not normal times; that taking away someone's hobby at such a time potentially has a major impact on them; that people under stress sometimes say and do things they don't really mean; that when someone is acting erratically we don't know what else is going on in their life; and that except in the most egregious cases, we should be talking to the people involved—privately if necessary—before we start throwing blocks and bans around, and we should collectively start taking Assume Good Faith even more seriously than usual. In the current environment, those admins and editors who pride themselves on their zero tolerance approach and lack of empathy are an active liability. ‑ Iridescent 10:44, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

I sat through a presentation last week that said movement-wide, the new editor retention rate is flat. It's flat because it's up almost everywhere except here, but down here (also at dewiki and plwiki), and our losses balance out their gains. Enwiki's current growth in active editors comes primarily from the re-activation of old accounts (the number of active registered editors has gone up every month since December 2018). I'd therefore add "an uptick in people who know how Wikipedia used to work" to your list of predictable changes during the next few months. I wonder what they'll think of what they find these days. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Your own published figures don't bear out "the number of active registered editors has gone up every month since December 2018" for en-wiki; between December 2018 and now the "active editors per month" figure has continued to fluctuate around the same level it has ever since the decline of the Sue Gardner era levelled off.

The March figures haven't been released yet so we're not seeing the impact of the UK, CA and NY lockdowns yet, but up to a couple of weeks ago the active editor rate wan't showing any variation other than the usual weekday/weekend cycle. Now the schools have closed in most English-speaking countries I assume the figures for en-wiki are going to start to shift quite rapidly and the existing editors are going to be increasingly stressed (anecdotally, there already seems to be a significant rise in people overreacting to really trivial things). ‑ Iridescent 09:14, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

(I was talking about the movement-wide numbers, not enwiki-only numbers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:30, 14 April 2020 (UTC))

If Commons is any indication, you were right. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 01:01, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

here too. ‑ Iridescent 08:07, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Probably also this one. I think I was being a little too tetchy there...probably due an apology in the future (once I have figured out what to do with this). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:56, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't think you're being unduly tetchy—that's some industrial-grade asshattery going on there, and I'd have lost patience roughly five lines in when the reviewer was demanding you use Oxford commas. Reviewers like that are why I no longer submit anything to GAN and either jump straight to FAC or leave it unreviewed; because of the single-reviewer model, GAN means playing Russian Roulette with reasonable editors in five of the chambers and a self-important fuckwit in the sixth. ‑ Iridescent 21:09, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

I liked GA back in the day, but it got less fun when Geometry guy wasn't around. I don't bother with any of those processes now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:30, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

This may just be selection bias on my part (because I'm now largely uninvolved other than my annual "skin in the game" FAC nomination and occasionally commenting on reviews if people ask me to have a look at something, I usually only notice GAC/FAC when something goes wrong), but I get the general feeling that GA lost its mojo when Geometry Guy and Malleus abandoned it. The knowledge that at any point one of them could appear and berate a bad reviewer served as a brake on the mutual back-scratching and the reviewers who didn't understand the criteria. Now, it gives the impression of being a mix of friends reviewing and promoting each other's work DYK-style, and of being infested with reviewers who invent their own non-existent criteria and insist article authors comply with their personal stylistic preferences.

When it comes to FAC, there seems to be some kind of "conservation of crazy" principle in place. The people involved keep changing but at any given time there always seems to be one nutcase who wanders around the nominations making ridiculous demands and generally poisoning the atmosphere, and it's a matter of pure pot luck whether any given nomination draws their attention or not.

I do think there's still a role for FAC or an equivalent "which are the best articles?" process going forward, as a way of generating and updating a set of examples of Wikipedia getting things right. With the whole WP:1.0 scheme now long-abandoned, I'm not convinced there's any longer a point to any of the rest of the assessment scale which just serves as a massive distraction to editors. (Yes, I know Internet-in-a-Box is offical dogma, but I'm not in the least convinced. We'd be serving "that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so" and her community considerably better if, instead of giving her a portable wi-fi hotspot linked to a memory card containing a database dump which will go out of date within minutes, we paid the bill for a communal phone line and router or a tethered cellphone/mobile hotspot, or arranged for the installation of a BGAN terminal.) No reader ever said "wow, this article is reasonably well-written with a defined structure and no obvious omissions or inaccuracies!"; either the page contains whatever information they're looking for, or it doesn't. The outdated and confusing stub–start–C–B–G–A–F scale could IMO be replaced with "inadequate–adequate–high-quality" as the only divisions, and nothing of value would be lost. ‑ Iridescent 08:30, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

"one nutcase who wanders around the nominations making ridiculous demands and generally poisoning the atmosphere". Yeah, I've seen a few of those float through the process in the 8 or 9 years I spent putting articles through. A few people drop out from FAC each time another one makes ill-judged and idiotic comments. Plus ca change, I guess. – SchroCat (talk) 08:45, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

(Sorry, only just noticed this.) I don't think it's a problem unique to FAC; you see this at any process which is likely to attract Mrs Tiggywinkle types. There's generally at least one of them hanging around the Manual of Style at any given time, and all the active noticeboards tend to have a few lurkers who remain silent unless an opportunity arises to push whatever agenda they're trying to promote. ‑ Iridescent 09:28, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Side observation

I just realized that diffs have sums. Huh. Never thought of that. E Eng 23:17, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

And breaks are to assist with linking. ‑ Iridescent 09:05, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

I don't get it. E Eng 14:12, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

We insert section breaks in threads to allow people to use them as anchors for links (as well as their secondary purposes of avoid scrolling in edit windows and separating off sidetracks), but to link is the opposite of… never mind. ‑ Iridescent 14:35, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Must be like the roof joke. E Eng 15:29, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Bert Hesse

I am new to wikipedia and am not sure why my page about Bert Hesse was deleted. There was an old page about him but mine had eternal references/links. Can you restore it to my sandbox so I can work on it more and learn the rules about posting it? Michelle2w (talk) 15:55, 23 April 2020 (UTC) Michelle2w

Michelle2w, it's definitely not appropriate for the Wikipedia article-space as it stands, but I've restored it to your userspace at User:Michelle2w/Bert Hesse to allow you to work on it. Basically, you need to show that he's notable in Wikipedia's terms; that is, we're only interested in what sources independent of the subject have to say about him. Thus, we can't use material sourced to Studio South Holdings, or to the websites of books or movies connected to him. (For different reasons, we can't use IMDB as a source on Wikipedia at all except in very limited circumstances. They're a user-generated site, so we can't assume anything published there is accurate.) What you need to do is find independent sources (e.g. Variety, The Stage and similar publications), and only include such material as you can source to these independent sources; only then can we determine if he's notable in Wikipedia's terms.

Also, I don't know if you're writing this because you find him interesting or if you're being paid by him to write it; from the tone of the article ("As asset managers, we coordinate the various aspects of the entertainment industry in locations where we operate" etc) it sounds like you're an employee of his. While we do allow people to edit on behalf of their employers, you need to declare the financial relationship, and if you're connected with him in any way you need to read this page before you go any further. ‑ Iridescent 16:38, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

IridescentIridescent I haven't had time to go over the page. Can you restore it to my sandbox so I have a chance to change it? Is there a time limit to make the change? Also, I couldn't tell who deleted it. I am just getting started with Wikipedia. Thanks. Michelle2w —Preceding undated comment added 18:02, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Michelle2w, see my reply above; I've already restored it to your user space to allow you to work on it, at User:Michelle2w/Bert Hesse. There's no formal time limit as such—there are people who have years-old draft articles in their userspace—but if it becomes obvious that you're not going to work on it (say, if it goes for a matter of months) someone right re-tag it for deletion. Note my comments above regarding the need for you to declare any conflict of interest you might have. ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Divine Comedy

May have been better for this one to add some references rather than delete it. It's a reasonably popular regional troupe. Something to consider in the future at least, peace! Rogerdpack (talk) 01:25, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

That's not how Wikipedia works; if you're claiming something meets Wikipedia's notability requirements—particularly something two-a-penny like a student society—the onus is on you to demonstrate that it's the topic of significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources. A vague claim that they're the second hit in google when you search for 'divine comedy', after wikipedia itself (for one-would-hope-obvious reasons, they're not even in the first hundred Google hits on divine comedy and while that's the point at which I gave up looking, I strongly suspect they're not in the first thousand), and a total of three sources two of which are the subject's own website and the third is only the most tangential of passing mentions in the local student paper, don't qualify. There are examples like Footlights or the Harvard Glee Club of student performing societies that are notable in Wikipedia terms, but there are upwards of 4000 universities and colleges in the US alone, most of which have multiple such groups, so this is not a topic where there's any presumption of notability.

The issues on the page were tagged since October 2015 with regards to notability concerns and since September 2017 with regards to the lack of citations; this isn't a case of those nasty Wikipedia admins failing to allow a good-faith editor enough time to put an issue right. Speedy deletion is only for articles that have no chance of surviving a deletion discussion, and I'd be more than willing to restore it into draftspace or userspace if you think you could source this and demonstrate notability to a point where it would have at least a slight chance of surviving a deletion debate, but I won't do so unless you genuinely feel you can bring this to a point where it meets Wikipedia standards, as otherwise I'd just be wasting the time of whoever had to delete it second time around. ‑ Iridescent 08:19, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

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 :
 :[[User:Michelle2w|Michelle2w]], see my reply above; I've already restored it to your user space to allow you to work on it, at [[User:Michelle2w/Bert Hesse]]. There's no formal time limit as such—there are people who have years-old draft articles in their userspace—but if it becomes obvious that you're not going to work on it (say, if it goes for a matter of months) someone right re-tag it for deletion. Note my comments above regarding the need for you to declare any conflict of interest you might have.&nbsp;&#8209;&nbsp;[[User:Iridescent|Iridescent]] 18:20, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
+== Divine Comedy ==
+May have been better for this one to add some references rather than delete it.  It's a reasonably popular regional troupe.  Something to consider in the future at least, peace! [[User:Rogerdpack|Rogerdpack]] ([[User talk:Rogerdpack|talk]]) 01:25, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
+:
+:That's not how Wikipedia works; if you're claiming something meets Wikipedia's notability requirements—particularly something two-a-penny like a student society—the onus is on you to demonstrate that it's the topic of significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources. A vague claim that {{tq|they're the second hit in google when you search for 'divine comedy', after wikipedia itself}} (for one-would-hope-obvious reasons, they're not even in the first hundred Google hits on {{google|divine comedy}} and while that's the point at which I gave up looking, I strongly suspect they're not in the first thousand), and a total of three sources two of which are the subject's own website and [https://universe.byu.edu/2011/08/01/making-1-on-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list/ the third] is only the most tangential of passing mentions in the local student paper, don't qualify. There are examples like [[Footlights]] or the [[Harvard Glee Club]] of student performing societies that are notable in Wikipedia terms, but there are upwards of 4000 universities and colleges in the US alone, most of which have multiple such groups, so this is not a topic where there's any presumption of notability.
+:
+:The issues on the page were tagged since October 2015 with regards to notability concerns and since September 2017 with regards to the lack of citations; this isn't a case of those nasty Wikipedia admins failing to allow a good-faith editor enough time to put an issue right. Speedy deletion is only for articles that have no chance of surviving a deletion discussion, and I'd be more than willing to restore it into draftspace or userspace if you think you could source this and demonstrate notability to a point where it would have at least a slight chance of surviving a deletion debate, but I won't do so unless you genuinely feel you can bring this to a point where it meets Wikipedia standards, as otherwise I'd just be wasting the time of whoever had to delete it second time around.&nbsp;&#8209;&nbsp;[[User:Iridescent|Iridescent]] 08:19, 20 May 2020 (UTC)