User talk:Iridescent

The community engaging in constructive discussions with the Wikimedia Foundation.

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Notification about notification

I hope I didn't step on anyone's toes with the referral to this talk page in this MediaWiki discussion where I've referred a developer (?) seeking comments on mw:JADE. The reason being that in my experience people with presumably little interest in a certain topic and a lot of background knowledge tend to have the best eye for spotting potential problems. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:42, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm probably not the best one to be asking about this; I was skeptical of ORES, am skeptical of the WMF's paranoia that bots and AI are threatening to undermine Wikipedia's integrity (human stupidity is doing that just fine without assistance, but the notion of automated systems to detect bias I consider potty) and am even more skeptical of any further attempts to get a computer to decide between right and wrong in the context of a multicultural project. The person who would probably have the most useful input to make would be Gurch if you can winkle him out of wherever he's hiding, as IMO he's the first and only person ever to write a "potentially problematic edit" detector that didn't cause more problems through false positives (and the equally problematic false negatives; I'm already seeing a lot of "ORES didn't flag this so it must be OK" crap slipping through) than it solved.

Personally, I think it would be a much better use of time and money to have a handful of paid professional moderators monitoring Special:RecentChanges, regularly dip-sampling edits from all active editors, and investigating more closely if anything problematic were found and flagging any potentially problematic editors for admin attention. Yes, the WMF is paranoid about losing §230 protection if they take a more active role in directly patrolling content, but the big social media and blogging firms directly employ moderators and their worlds haven't imploded. If anything, a "we recognized that even though we didn't have a legal obligation we had an ethical responsibility to know what we were disseminating" now would probably stand the WMF in good stead when the rising tide of backlash against perceived corporate irresponsibility and Wild West attitudes on the internet—which is currently destroying the viral content farms, washing over Facebook, lapping at Twitter's feet, and headed steadily towards Wikipedia and Google—finally reaches us. (If WAID is still watching this page from a couple of threads up, her opinions would probably be worth hearing here; even if she isn't, it would probably be worth asking for her input.) ‑ Iridescent 12:12, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Today's officially another holiday. I can take a break from this week's AFD fun, trying to convince someone that a centuries-old philosophical shouldn't get WP:INTEXT attribution to a still-living encyclopedia author, and trying to figure out what promotionalism actually is, to say that I think the AI question is a good one. That system will have GIGO problems, and the only real solution is to get the garbage out of it. JADE might make a useful way to do that. That last discussion is highly relevant: If people who do NPP and AFC work regularly reject direct, factual statements as {{db-spam}} rather sending the articles to AFD on the grounds of non-notability, then we're going to end up with an AI system that believes articles about average companies are spam, and that only those with long sections about scandals could be considered "neutral". There needs to be some way to say that yes, it was deleted as "spam", but it isn't technically spam.

Personally, and noting that I probably know less about §230 than anyone who has actually read the relevant Wikipedia article, and noting that the people who think that "They have more than X stores" should be counted as unambiguous promotionalism are all volunteers, I would rather have this moderation done by editors than by WMF staff, and it sounds like that's the plan. Providing a tool that lets volunteers correct the ORES database doesn't sound like controlling content to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:38, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

The parable of the shitty early-2000s website

@WhatamIdoing: "Moderation done by editors" is fine in theory, but in practice that means "moderation by self-appointed busybodies who see it as their mission to purify the site" as they're the ones who'll devote their time to patrolling, so you end up introducing a huge systemic bias against anything that anyone, anywhere, might consider controversial. (If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading this thread to get a feeling for just how broad a range of articles the self-appointed Defenders of the Wiki consider 'inappropriate'.)

Way back before the dawn of time, I did some work for an early dating website. We discovered early on that we needed some kind of moderation system to filter out the dick-pics and inappropriate profile comments, and we also discovered early on that such a process couldn't be automated as it needed people with a good knowledge of popular culture both to spot people using celebrity photos, and to differentiate between genuinely offensive comments and jocular banter and youth-culture references. We also discovered that when you're running your site on a free-registration model, you'd need to hire a small army to moderate the flood of profiles being created.

The solution seemed obvious; offer people who'd been members of the site for a few months the opportunity to become volunteer moderators, on the grounds that these people obviously had too much time on their hands, and that human nature being what it is many of them would jump at the chance to work for free for anything that made them feel important and gave them a position of apparent authority. It was set up such that any new profile or newly-added photo would be passed in front of multiple moderators, and those moderators whose opinions were regularly out of step with consensus would have their opinions disregarded without their even knowing it, until such time as it was obvious that they were voting in line with consensus again.

The whole thing worked stunningly well at first, with some of the moderators literally reviewing tens of thousands of uploads per day, independent online communities growing up where the moderators would chat and exchange tips on what was and wasn't acceptable and problematic users to watch out for, the moderators recommending the site to their friends which in turn generated more ad traffic, and so on. With minimal staff costs the site boomed, and became a multi-million dollar business.

Then things started to get out of control. The volunteers became increasingly worried about the risk of being the one that let something inappropriate through, and more and more legitimate profiles started to be rejected. The offsite message boards became breeding grounds for paranoia with the moderators posting increasingly lurid speculation about the employees. As the site grew in popularity, religious groups who were opposed to the site on general principle began to figure out that if their members signed up en masse, they could systematically disrupt the system and block anyone they thought looked slutty from posting. Within a year, the volunteer-based system had to be abandoned, and a bunch of low-paid but paid interns took their place, as even though it cost the site more it was the only way to keep it functioning without either allowing a bunch of cranks to determine what was and wasn't hosted, or abandoning moderation altogether, trusting to §230, and developing a reputation as the cesspit of the internet.

The moral of this story is, the kind of people who want to act as volunteer moderators aren't always the people you would want as volunteer moderators. Wikipedia is still to this day suffering from the after-effects of the early days when Jimmy was handing out admin bits to his friends; allowing the small handful of people who see themselves as Fearless Spam Hunters to set the tempo for Wikipedia's attitude towards what constitutes promotion could do irreparable damage, but because they're by and large the only ones who care enough to have input into what ORES et al consider inappropriate (the silent majority are writing articles, not prowling around looking for good faith new editors to harass with A7 and G11 tags), these automated systems are handing the policy agenda to a tiny clique of Free Culture cranks who don't want Wikipedia to host anything that doesn't coincide with their particular view of what it ought to be. This is the point where I ping SoWhy who can probably articulate this better than I can. ‑ Iridescent 02:32, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

I think you articulated that very well 👏 I myself was active in the early 2000s in a number of message boards as a moderator and admin, I even ran a German support board for two major message board softwares. Moderation on such pages always hinged on the fact that it was people with too much free time doing most of the work, which logically included my teenage and tweenage self. Luckily for Wikipedia, the user base is still large enough to not fall into the same patterns but I do see the risks. Regards SoWhy 07:37, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

As always, I feel that switching to a Git style system (or really any semi-modern source control system) with revision control for individual pages would help this problem. Right now it's nearly impossible to tell whether any semi-competent editor has reviewed a version of a page; pending changes has too many problems to be a feasible site-wide solution. I estimate it would cost at least $100 million/year to have paid staff review every change; the Foundation does not have that kind of money. So we make do with free labor. The most disruptive forms of vandalism (fake references, BLP violations, and the like) will not be detectable by AI anytime soon. power~enwiki (π, ν) 02:42, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

In a paid-moderation model, paid staff wouldn't need to review every change, any more than Facebook's or Instagram's paid moderators are inspecting every restaurant review or photograph of your cat you post. They'd do random dip-samples of edits, and whenever they found something problematic would look into that editor's other contributions in more detail, and they'd pay particular attention to edits that added, removed or changed large blocks of text on topics on which that editor hadn't previously worked. This is what already happens, we'd just be making it less haphazard and ensuring that unfashionable topics that aren't on the watchlists of multiple editors also get monitored for problematic edits. There are legitimate grounds for arguing against paid moderation, on the grounds that it would potentially demoralize unpaid admins and RC patrollers to know that other people are being paid to do identical work and that some people were receiving formal training to do a job in which other people were just being thrown in at the deep end and expected to pick it up as they go along, but cost isn't an issue; it would probably take no more than ten full-time-equivalent posts to have a significant impact on Wikipedia's quality, and those posts could be anywhere and wouldn't need Bay Area—or even Biloxi Area—wages. (The WMF is sitting on roughly $30 million surplus cash and the figure rises every year—we quite literally have more money than we know what to do with.) ‑ Iridescent 02:59, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Ten FTE = 2.5 people concurrently, which is the lower end of being able to patrol Special:RecentChanges for vandalism (even with AI aids); in my experience a single person can watch IP edits, or can watch non-ECP edits, or can watch ECP edits and do something else. Doing that for 8 hours straight is borderline-unreasonable at any wage level; I don't think even the top Huggle-users manage that. And then you need other people (or "the community") to manage things that aren't insta-revert vandalism. If the WMF were willing to pay for such a thing, I'd rather them deal with patrolling/verifying references on articles on Indian films, rugby players, Chinese cars, etc. first. power~enwiki (π, ν) 03:10, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Again, they'd not be expected to review everything. RC patrol—with or without semiautomation—is a staggeringly inefficient method; the hypothetical reviewers would be dip-sampling a couple of edits from each editor with a slight bias towards newer accounts and a stronger bias towards newer accounts making large changes. This isn't some kind of crazy blue-sky thinking; virtually every major social media site, blogging platform, advertising site, information site including user-submitted content (e.g. Google Maps) etc with the exception of Wikipedia already does this. ‑ Iridescent 03:19, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

This seems like the class of problem where the good Rev. Bayes could help. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 04:05, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

​As I understand it, that's what they're aiming for. The issue with all these machine-learning approaches is that Wikipedia is too complex a system to model well—if an IP removes a large block of text, are they a driveby vandal who should be summarily blocked and reverted, or an expert copyeditor who's realized that the point can be made far more elegantly, in which case blocking and reverting will likely drive away someone who could have gone on to do great things? With ORES and edit filters in particular, we also have blowback from what it doesn't detect; any WP:LTA case worth their salt can figure out how to word things such that an edit won't be flagged as potentially problematic, and if the RC patrollers are relying on the automated systems to decide what warrants further attention, the next Morning277 could be active for years before anyone even notices there's a problem. When even the human volunteers can't always agree on what is and isn't problematic, trusting in machines is unlikely to end well. ‑ Iridescent 13:37, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

In theory individual revisions can be reviewed (meta does this). On Iri’s point, while I’m certainly more on the “Self-appointed defender on the wiki” end, re: promotion, I also largely agree with his point on this more broadly: any stroll through SPI or AIV when both are crowded and you’ll find a fair number of “why do we care about this?” And “no. I will not indulge your bloodlust for blocks 11 months after the fact.” cases. I call it Wikipedia-the-videogame, and CAT:CSD probably suffers from the similar issues. Part of the problem is that very few admins feel like getting yelled at by the person reporting/tagging/requesting action because it’s not worth the hassle of spending 48 hours on your talk page explaining in explicit detail on how their interpretation of the policy/guideline in question is either wrong or controversial. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:02, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

This one is the worst example I've ever come across of "I haven't heard of it so we should delete it". ‑ Iridescent 03:19, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Oh, I remember that one. The worst I’ve seen was an A7 on an Indian Catholic bishop who was the driving force behind translating the Bible into Kashmiri. Also trying to delete the elections of the Holy Roman Emperor (I think I’ve bitched here about that one.) TonyBallioni (talk) 03:28, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Since I'm feeling grumpy (hmm, maybe it's bedtime? No, I'll post on your talk page first), I'm going to say that we can't even get support for proper version control for the actual software we're all running (i.e., JS/CSS; see phab:T165981 and related requests), so I'm not going to think about it for content.

I want to add another item to the list of problems: The problem is not just that edits are reviewed by bored busybodies (like me). The problem is also that the subset of bored busybodies who review RecentChanges in general have approximately zero incentive to support the addition of content. And perhaps even more importantly, a change gets reviewed, and re-reviewed, and re-re-reviewed, until someone reverts it. So if I happen to review a change, and I happen to believe that it's a net improvement to an article, that doesn't stop someone else from wandering by and reverting it anyway. The way most editors handle their watchlists is to check the net changes, rather than stepping through each change individually, so a change–revert cycle becomes invisible to them. I believe that we lose a fair bit of desirable (if perhaps not perfectly presented) content that way. Each change is subject to repeated review by people who "don't want to be the person who approved that" and whose only significant form of feedback is being Special:Thanked for things that they reverted (but never, ever thanked for things that they correctly accepted or ignored, because nobody knows about that).

At this wiki, anyway. Smaller wikis don't have this problem. There's too much work to be done, and changes are normally reviewed by only one or two people, who review all edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:43, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

I totally agree with every word of the above. The way our software is set up creates a huge inbuilt systemic bias towards action over inaction; as well as "changes keep getting reviewed until someone either reverts it or makes another change so it ceases to be the most recent", there's a serious problem (on which I've commented before) at the admin boards, in which it doesn't matter that a dozen admins have decided that no action needs to be taken if another admin comes along afterwards and decides that protections or blocks are in order. It might be a lingering collective memory from the early days; on Nupedia (and its successor Citizendium) articles were marked as drafts until Larry or one of his cronies signed off on them and pronounced them "ready" whereas on Wikipedia the articles were live from the moment someone clicked "Save Changes", and it's something of an article of faith among the old guard who still largely determine policy that anything Nupedia did was wrong (uou presumably remember how much shouting and arguing it took even to get such a thing as the Draft: namespace to exist, which was surely a no-brainer), so there's maybe a cultural subconscious opposition to any form of "I approve this change".

Ultimately, we're limited by the fact that despite 15 years of additions and enhancements, MediaWiki is at its heart the same software that was designed for use by a small community of friends and colleagues in which everyone knew each other (it's not that long since the 'blocking mechanism' was to leave a polite notice on the editors talkpage that if they made any further edits, consideration would be given to reverting them), and it's never really scaled to an anonymous community with thousands of active editors at any given time.

Because removing stuff—in the sense of "come revert vandals" and "come nominate stuff for deletion"—is one of the key routes en-wiki has traditionally offered to people who want to get involved but don't really feel confident writing their own content, the cynic in me says nothing will change. (This is not to belittle the bored busybodies in any way; I was one myself and still from time to time fire up the RecentChanges patrol scripts or the mass typo search-and-replace tools,* or go prowling around Special:Random looking for things to nominate for deletion.) Community Engagement can scream until they're blue in the face that constantly having time wasted with nonsense like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fownes Hotel or with constantly reviewing the actions of trigger-happy admins is a disincentive that drives editors away, but the rest of the WMF ultimately probably won't listen—the quick-buzz of "I reverted/tagged something and it disappeared! Something I did made a lasting change to the Sum of All Human Knowledge and it took minimal effort!" is one of the tools that keeps the new account registrations and the donor funds flowing.
*I was present at the birth of semiautomation—the sudden spike to 15,000 edits in a month in May 2007 and this talk thread mark the birth and growing pains of Huggle, the first credible attempt at a "likelihood that this edit is problematic" based system for reviewing recent changes. It's only with a decade of hindsight, watching people try and fail to come up with something better, that I truly appreciate what a work of genius Gurch's original incarnation of Huggle was.

Other than you and Maggie/MRG, most of the WMF staff, board and the volunteer devs don't actually have much experience with Wikipedia/MediaWiki as a writing medium (just gonna put this here), and even those who do have experience editing Wikipedia tend to do so from the revert-and-report admin-hurling-lightning-bolts-at-the-peasants-below perspective rather than from the perspective of someone trying to create and improve content from the bottom up—our supply of Doc James's is limited. If you hold your nose and try to read discussions at Meta and Phabricator, it's obvious that the prevailing attitude is towards technical rather than social fixes to problems, and towards a raw-participant-numbers social network approach in which a new account who does nothing but make hundreds of posts on talkpages is worth more than a new account who sits quietly in the background writing articles, because the editor who's made a thousand trivial posts to talkpages is more "engaged" in terms of raw metrics than the editor who's made fifty long contributions to articles. (Since these are your official statistics, it's reasonable to assume that they're the statistics you consider important, and you don't even differentiate between edits to talk and edits to articles.)

To be honest, as long as Jimmy Wales remains in post I don't see the problem ever being addressed, as he creates a huge chilling effect from the top down that freezes the life out of any serious "what do we want to be and how are we going to get there?" discussion from Board level down, especially since the Knowledge Engine farce burned his fingers. The WMF really needs people with the nerve to say "the existing model is ultimately going to reach the point where we can't keep patching and making do, what will Wikipedia 2.0 look like?", but his sitting in the center dismissing any suggestion that the sites aren't perfect as "trolling" means that anyone with a vision that goes beyond "more of the same" doesn't last.​ ‑ Iridescent 15:15, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

(ec) I must say I don't see too much excess reversion, with an insanely large watchlist, but mostly of relatively low-view articles. I try to look at the previous edit(s) if recent, and if such a reversion seems a net negative will of course revert, without knowing if it is a reviewer or not. Regarding Iri's points (which in general I agree with), it would help if WMF had a board with editorial/academic backgrounds, rather than just techie/activist type ones. AFAIK none of the "outside" board members has ever had such a background. Johnbod (talk) 15:24, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

I believe there have been a few journalists/media folks on the board, and a couple whose day jobs were in the education industry. I'm not sure that, say, a Professor of Education would be all that valuable. The board sets the budget (total amount + how much to spend in each of several major areas), and they set the overall direction ("Let's develop a strategy!" or "Give more attention to developing countries"), but none of them are involved in the day-to-day operations of the WMF, and the WMF is only involved in content tangentially (e.g., processing a DMCA takedown) or accidentally (developing software that increases or decreases the likelihood of a particular kind of content being created). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

On the topic of stats, we do have a breakdown of edits to talk versus edits to articles HERE

Have considered the idea of having medical / nursing students systematically review edits to medical content. We are looking at about 500,000 article edits on EN WP per year which would not be impossible. Was thinking to trial with a summer student if I could find interest. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:50, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I'm not sure either that a Professor of Education would be all that valuable, but what would be valuable would be a few textbook writers, museum curators, librarians and people with a background in "summarize current thinking for a mass audience" periodicals like Natural History, New Scientist and History Today; basically, people who reflect what Wikipedia actually does, rather than people who reflect the "better living through science" fantasy that any problem can be solved by throwing programmers at it. Because of the unique nature of Wikipedia, the WMF board has always had a tendency to reflect the values of the libertarian and Randroid lunatic fringe from which it came, and the influence of Silicon Valley types and sycophantic journalists is a negative, not a positive. As a great thinker once said, My ideal recruits to Wikipedia would be the people who write travel guidebooks, museum catalogs and children's nonfiction; they all understand the "absorb a lot of information and summarize the salient points in brief and neutral form" and if the WMF really want to spend money reaching out externally they'd do much better trying to recruit the people who write children's books and the people who write museum labels, as it's the ability to summarize material for people with little prior knowledge of the topic, not the ability to defend a point logically, that Wikipedia needs. (The ideal Wikipedia editor would be the authors of Cliff's Notes and the For Dummies books.); that goes just as much for the board as it does for the editor base, as it's that disconnect between the incompatible mentalities of "what can we do to get more readers and editors?" on the one hand and "what should we be doing to ensure we're as useful to readers as possible?" on the other that's at the heart of pretty much every systemic problem on Wikipedia and the other large WMF projects. It's no good having a board on which at most two members actually understand what it is that Wikipedia does. (I make no apologies for conflating Wikipedia with the WMF in this context. When it comes to the big policy issues, the big Wikipedias are the only games in town; no policy decision no matter how drastic made on Commons, Wikidata etc would have any significant impact on us other than a temporary inconvenience. Despite their protests to the contrary, the other projects exist to be a support mechanism for Wikipedia.)

@Doc James: The content/non-content ratio as a raw figure isn't that valuable—when I racked up c. 20,000 edits in a few days a few years ago search-and-replacing "and and" (something that needs human supervision as there are some instances in computing and logic articles where the term has a legitimate use) then in terms of raw edit count I must have appeared to be Wikipedia's greatest asset, whereas someone like Newyorkbrad or Moonriddengirl who don't make many article-space edits but do a lot of behind-the-curtain necessary stuff appear a total waste of space; likewise, a recent changes patroller who always stops to explain to each editor why they've been reverted and what they need to be doing differently is of considerably more value to Wikipedia than some human-bot hybrid running STiki and mindlessly machine-gunning the 'revert' button with one hand with 90% of their attention on the TV, even though the former will appear in terms of raw statistics to be someone treating Wikipedia as a social network (since each mainspace edit will be accompanied by multiple talk edits as they talk the new editor through what they should be doing).

I quite like the idea of picking a small field and getting people to regularly conduct systematic reviews, but medicine might be too broad a field, as well as too atypical a field if part of the aim is to conduct a genuine quality assessment of Wikipedia. (There are some absolutely fucking awful medical articles, but they're rarer than in most other fields because they tend to be more heavily patrolled and the standards more strictly enforced.) It might be better to start with relatively small and specialist fields in areas where Wikipedia already has good working relationships with relevant academic institutions (there must be some museums we haven't managed to piss off yet), and once we have the assessment and review processes up and running for teratology, 18th-century German porcelain or the comparative linguistics of Mediterranean island dialects, we then start rolling it out to broader fields like "medicine", "painting" and "astronomy". ‑ Iridescent 02:02, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

arbitrary editing convenience break: medical articles

There you go again, with all that high-minded stuff about being useful to readers. Intelligible, even.

Since enwiki's medical articles are the subject I know best, I'll use them as my example. What exactly does "useful to readers" mean for an article about a disease?

I have one simple answer, and it pretty much means that when you get a note from your friend saying "We just left the doctor's office, and it turns out that she has scaryitis", you'll be able to find that in Wikipedia and easily calibrate your response on a scale that runs from "What a relief" to "I'm so very sorry". But (a) that's not the only answer I have, and (b) not everyone agrees, even though a ==Prognosis== section is officially recommended.

Here's another simple answer I have: When you read about scaryitis in the news, you should be able to find out what the patient experience of that condition is. We do this in a very few articles. Off hand, Hyperhidrosis says (or at least used to) that severely sweaty palms make it inadvisable to take certain jobs, because knives slip out of wet hands, and Cancer probably still says that patients have a lot of emotional stuff around it. But with the exception of a few big subjects, such as cancer, our sourcing guidelines push us firmly away from that kind of content. You can get a good meta-analysis on whether drug A or drug B reduces cholesterol more. You can't get a good meta-analysis on whether sweaty palms is a disabling condition for a butcher, or whether parents of premature babies are just "really stressed" or "practically going insane from worry".

That's only two of the answers I would give, and neither of them are things that we're handling well.

BTW, WT:MEDMOS a while ago had a discussion about reading levels that might interest you. Since I've given up on my watchlists (both accounts, all wikis), I tend to wander in and out of discussions based on whether I remember them (pings help  :-), so I have no idea what it ended up like. At the point I last read it, though, we had some reasonable consensus that articles ought to have a range of information (e.g., simpler introductory sentences, but still leaving room for jargon-filled paragraphs later). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:45, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

​Interestingly, I'm exactly the same with regards to watchlists—I tend to use my recent contribution history as a mini-watchlist. I do still keep my big watchlist, but treat it as I would a social media feed, occasionally dipping in to it when I'm bored rather than checking it top-to-bottom on a regular basis. (And after months of grumbling about Echo when it was introduced, I now completely see the point of it; not just the direct pings, but the thanks and links notifications serve as notices that someone else has taken an interest in something I've done so I probably ought to have a look and see why.)

No apologies for banging on about usefulness; too many people seem to see Wikipedia as an exercise in how much obscure knowledge they can show off, and forget that our readers in most cases just want to know more about insert topic without feeling that they're unwelcome because they don't know all the jargon. Years and years ago when I first started, something Giano said stuck with me; assume that every reader is a bright 14-year-old with no prior knowledge of the topic but who's interested in learning. In my experience, other than a few very technical subjects which are usually subsidiary to something else, that rule works consistently both in terms of how articles should be targeted in terms of reading comprehension, and in terms of how we format articles to try to keep readers engaged (mention anything that sounds particularly interesting or unusual in the lead even if it's relatively unimportant so readers keep reading after they've skimmed the lead, top-load the most attractive or interesting images at the beginning of the article, stop to explain anything that might not be obvious to every reader even if it means a footnote section that's as long as the article, if a word has synonyms always use the one that a child is most likely to understand unless you absolutely need to mix them up to avoid repetition).

I agree with you about medical condition articles—we can scream and shout as much as we like that readers shouldn't be using Wikipedia as a medical source, but I've seen enough people using it in the wild to know that Wikipedia is one of the most trusted medical websites in the world no matter how many disclaimers we post. (For most illnesses and medications, the top hits are Mayo Clinic, WebMD, CDC, Wikipedia and the NHS; whether fairly or not, the 95% of the world that isn't the US have spent their entire life hearing horror stories about the American medical system so will automatically discount CDC and the Mayo Clinic, WebMD looks and feels like a dodgy commercial outfit with its "click here to subscribe" popups and adverts everywhere, and the NHS is so specific to England and Wales that it's not necessarily useful to people in other countries.)

As a very-long-term project a lot of the medical coverage should probably get a two-level approach with separate articles aimed at patients and aimed at practitioners/students, at least with regards to common illnesses and commonly-used medications—if I wake up with a sniffle, stomach cramps and aching limbs and wonder if I have flu and if so whether I need to be worried, I don't want the lead of the article to include the terms "polymerase chain reaction" or "neuraminidase inhibitor oseltamivir". (I also am going to be seriously misled and upset by an article whose lead gives the strong impression that influenza has a 10% fatality rate, since if I'm a typical reader I'm going to parse three to five million cases of severe illness and about 250,000 to 500,000 deaths as "one in ten of the people who get it die" and not understand that what Wikipedia means by "severe illness" almost certainly doesn't include whatever I happen to have.*) It's been tried experimentally on a few broad topics like Virus and Genetics, but with limited success as in both cases the specialist technical article has been given the primary title and the non-specialist article hidden away at [[Introduction to...]], meaning the search engines are driving readers to the technical rather than the non-technical articles. ‑ Iridescent 14:22, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
*I'm hating on the Influenza article because this is a featured article and consequently considered to be one of the best articles Wikipedia has to offer, as determined by Wikipedia's editors and used by editors as examples for writing other articles, but the same points could be made about almost any article about a medical condition. In particular, the unnecessarily traumatizing language about mortality/recovery rates without putting it in context front-and-center that for most conditions the risk of death or long-term disability are heavily weighted towards people with already-compromised immune systems, is a particular bugbear of mine. (I don't know if figures exist, but any primary care physician, 911 operator or ER admissions staff can confirm anecdotally that "but I read on the internet that this might be fatal!!!" is a significant driver of people seeking unnecessary treatment and diverting services away from people who actually need them.)

Huh. I do make thorough passes through my not particularly long watchlist. I wonder if the issue with making articles interesting is that a) many dedicated editors can't tell when writing that they are using unnecessarily dense language (something people have said about my articles, most recently on Wōdejebato) and b) not all topics can necessarily be made interesting (Ita Mai Tai has an interesting etymology but Taapaca, Tutupaca and Ubinas don't have much to offer in kind) with the source material available. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:40, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

As a quick-and-dirty way to bring the volcano articles more in line with Giano's guide:

1. Avoid words like "Holocene" in the lead and instead say "last erupted around 2300 years ago"; the former makes readers give up after just reading the lead and go find something that looks less like geography homework, while the latter conjures up images of comely Inca peasants fleeing the oncoming ash cloud astride their trusty llama steeds, even though they're semantically identical;
2. Although most of the volcanoes in northern Chile are far from towns and inhabited areas, nowhere is entirely uninhabited; search round for some photos of people who live on the slopes or in areas at risk from pyroclastic flows, preferably attractive women in colorful native costumes, handsome men with wistful expressions, or cute children, and put it near the top. They're encyclopediacally justified, and adding a human element can transform a boring technical article into something that engages the reader. If you have trouble finding anything on Commons, Flickr is usually a good bet (nudge); whatever the license, Flickr users are almost always happy to CC BY-SA relicense a photo if you point out that an appearance on a Wikipedia TFA will generate between 20,000–200,000 views, at least some of which will be interested enough in the image to click through and view the rest of that user's Flickr photostream. Even interesting looking buildings would do; the historic town of Putre is likely to be destroyed if Taapaca erupts makes it clear that this is a story with a human impact rather than a technical article about magma flow rates;
3. Even if this volcano hasn't erupted recently, that doesn't mean other similar volcanoes haven't; find some volcanoes of the same type and upload images with lots of impressive-looking lava streams and steam venting, to give the reader an idea of what it must have looked like when it was active.

Basically, what you need to remember is that your primary audience isn't "I am writing a history of the volcanoes of South America and want to know about all of them", it's "I went to Chile on vacation and saw this really cool looking mountain and want to know more about it", and if it does wind up at TFA it's "I have absolutely no idea what a Tutupaca is but I've learned from experience that if I click this link in the middle of the main page I sometimes see something interesting". The technical stuff needs to be there, but bury it at the bottom; despite what WP:LEAD may tell you the purpose of the lead isn't an introduction to the article and a summary of its most important contents (although it needs to be that as well), but as a sales pitch to convince people landing on the article that reading it will be worth their while (and equally importantly, to notify people who've landed on the article that this isn't a topic in which they'll be interested to save them wasting their time). ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Really on these, which mostly get fewer than 10 views a day, you are preparing for the day they blow up and get 50,000 overnight. Then you have provided the world's media with stuff to repeat confidently to camera. Ubinas looks promising. Johnbod (talk) 15:39, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

arbitrary break: page view spikes

Har. I did find some good images of Putre for Taapaca and added one of them. Now I got sidetracked by the spectacular imagery of the landscape... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:38, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

It's not just preparedness for the day they blow up; all it takes is one high-profile event to happen there. (My shitty and ill-maintained Broadwater Farm article, which normally gets only a few page views a year, was briefly the most-viewed article on Wikipedia during some unpleasantness in 2011.) It doesn't even take anything interesting to happen; all it takes is a celebrity to take an interest in a Wikipedia page and tweet a link to it, and the page can go viral within seconds. Tarrare is my usual go-to example of the power of Twitter to affect Wikipedia page views; it normally gets the deservedly low page views you'd expect from an article on a case study of a patient with multiple metabolic digestive disorders in 18th-century France, but with metronomic regularity some celebrity or other finds the story interesting, tweets a link, and it becomes one of the most popular articles on Wikipedia for a day or two. (During his last spike his pageviews for that single day made him more popular over the entire week than China, Michael Jackson, World War II or Elvis Presley.) ‑ Iridescent 01:44, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Ha. I am familiar with the "high profile event" thing since 1257 Samalas eruption - one of the most popular articles I've written with several translations - got a little more attention in 2017 during the eruptions of the neighbouring volcano of Agung.Too bad that the eruption was only discovered in 2013 and that there is no review source analyzing its region-by-region impact; if there was one it might stand a chance at FAC. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:44, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

It would probably stand a chance at FAC regardless, provided you can demonstrate that you looked for a review source analyzing its region-by-region impact. WP:What is a Featured Article is one of the more misunderstood pages on Wikipedia, even by experienced editors, and the neglects no major facts or details language is a little misleading. To be an FA an article doesn't need to say everything there is to know about the article subject, it needs to reflect the state of current scholarship on the subject, so if something hasn't been covered in the literature it's perfectly OK to omit it. (The "neglects no major facts or details" wording means that we don't omit the findings of Researcher A just because we prefer the conclusions of Researcher B.)

In general, don't get too hung up on complying with the letter of the law of WP:WIAFA, except for 1d (NPOV); criteria 1a, 1b, 1e and 4 are purely subjective, 1c is an impossibility to comply with for any but the narrowest topic so is disregarded, while 2 and 3 are just common sense with which every article should be complying. In reality, the FA criteria are "is this confusingly or badly written?", "is there anything obviously missing that ought to be there?", "does it fairly reflect the various schools of thought?", "are the images correctly licenced?" and "do the sources say what the articles claim they say?". ‑ Iridescent 13:27, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Jo-Jo, have you seen any readability discussions? I'm partial to http://hemingwayapp.com/ (which requires copying and pasting plus removing the numbers leftover from the ref tags), but other people prefer http://readabilityofwikipedia.com/ (which sometimes gives nearly random results if there's a parsing error due to unsupported wikitext constructions; check its reported word count to see if it "lost" most of the article). In the case of Taapaca, Hemingway says that the lead rates as the last year of high school, and the whole article as the first year of university, and it highlights almost half the sentences as being "very hard to read". ROW says that only 28% of Wikipedia articles are more complicated to read that this one, and that it is "difficult" (but not the most difficult category).

On the subject of medical articles, figuring out that 98% of people survive non-melanoma skin cancer, even if you have one of those, isn't medical advice. "You personally should use ____" is medical advice; "Overall, the most effective treatment is ____" is medical information. I think that we need to provide much clearer medical information.

A solid training program on how to write might be useful. For example, most people understand that "98% of people with non-melanoma skin cancer can be completely cured", but they don't necessarily make the leap from that to "2% of people with non-melanoma skin cancer die from it." And while 98% is fairly well understood as meaning "practically everyone", it's sometimes clearer to write "one person out of 50" than to write "2%".

If you want to get even more complicated, then there are subtle effect. 98% is a simple number that everyone on this page grasps easily – we're not talking about something complicated, like the possibility that the used Barbie doll in the neighbor's garage sale will be one of the few that says "Math class is tough" (about 0.0003%, if you're curious) – but presentation matters, because "2% eventually die" is more salient than "98% are cured". For an affected person and their loved ones, it's not a simple math equation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:46, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the 98%/2% thing, "98% of people can be completely cured" and "2% die from it" aren't at all the same thing. "98% of people can be completely cured" could just as well mean "2% of people will suffer mild headaches occasionally for the rest of their lives as a side effect of the treatment". For cancers it's not such an issue as for most of them the prognosis splits between "full recovery" and "dead" without much in between, but for something like neurological disorders, where the result is a dice-roll on the spectrum between "full recovery within a few days" to "dead within weeks" and the full range from "minor inconvenience" to "lifelong debilitating disability" in between, making it crystal clear whether we're talking about "the percentage who make a total recovery" or "the percentage who survive" is of utmost importance if you (rightly) see a significant function of Wikipedia's medical coverage as letting people know how worried they ought to be. ‑ Iridescent 03:06, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Sidetrack within a sidetrack on readability scoring

I don't think I've seen thorough readability discussions, although "hemingwayapp" rang a bell. I am guessing that it might be harder for me since I am ESL and learned much of it from academic text too. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:13, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Warning; hit nerve alert. I know from previous discussions at WT:MEDMOS that you (WhatamIdoing) are less skeptical than I, but I find the application to Wikipedia of Flesch–Kincaid and similar schemes that claim to assess readability to be very misguided. As with standard IQ tests, F-K doesn't actually measure anything that's particularly useful to Wikipedia, it measures how closely something conforms to American cultural expectations. (The very fact that its results are given in "grades", something completely meaningless in the rest of the world, is a giveaway.) As one very obvious case in point, the syllable and word counts are absolutely key to F-K, but all it takes is a couple of mentions of "laboratory", "Israel", "military" etc to send the syllable counts differing wildly between dialects, and that's before you get to the joys of English place names—want to see what a computer readability program makes of "from Hunstanton to Godmanchester via Costessey and Wymondham" (13 syllables, if you're counting)? If the article happens to include a foreign language quotation, does glasflächenreinigung (one word, five syllables) really improve the readability whilst nettoyage de la surface en verre (six words, nine syllables) wrecks it? The whole "short sentences are always better" thing is a cultural construct rather than an actual rule of writing; Dickens—the absolute exemplar of English language populist writing targeted at people who weren't necessarily avid readers—had an average sentence length just above 20 words and seems to have survived. "If the typical reader is likely to have forgotten how the sentence began when they reach the end, consider breaking it" is the only real rule of good writing when it comes to sentence length that isn't just snobbishness, and even that depends on the reader; if the reader finds a topic interesting, long sentences can increase comprehension as they're easier to focus on than a barrage of staccato short bursts.

The language used in Wikipedia articles should be as simple as it's possible to make them without losing meaning and not one step further. There's a legitimate argument to be had about when we should be assuming the reader has the background knowledge, when we should be explaining terms and background that might not be familiar,* and when we do stop to explain jargon and background whether it's better to do so in the footnotes where people might not notice it or inline where it disrupts the flow of text and risks appearing patronizing to those who are already familiar with the topic—but largely arbitrary scoring systems shouldn't be playing a part in it. (If you want more of me flying off the handle at Wikipedia's culture of 'improving the readability' of articles at the cost of losing the meaning, see User talk:Johnbod/36#Problems?.) ‑ Iridescent 02:11, 15 October 2018 (UTC)
*On an article that mentioned a railroad—I can't remember which—I remember once being quite surprised when Ealdgyth called me out for using "track lifting" instead of "removed or demolished the railroad-related structures". In hindsight she was quite correct, as even though "track lifting" is simpler in terms of readability, it's a false economy as enough readers will need to stop and look up what that means that it disrupts more readers than it helps.

One of the reasons that I prefer the Hemingway app is that the "grade level" score is just shiny chrome (added last year, I believe), and the core function is actually in evaluating the structure of individual sentences. "Go from Hunstanton to Godmanchester via Costessey and Wymondham" is high school reading level, but who cares? What is more important is that that sentence is not highlighted as being very difficult to read. Also, the Hemingway app provides sentence-by-sentence information, rather than an overall score. If you write a lengthy FA for this Wikipedia, and you don't get any sentences highlighted in red, then you probably have not accomplished "brilliant prose". The point isn't to have no difficult sentences; the point is to put your complex sentences where you want to have them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:43, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

​I still can't really see the point of scoring in the context of Wikipedia. It makes sense for things like school textbooks, political pamphlets and news reportage, where you're trying to ensure that you communicate the pertinent points to readers who lack interest in the topic, before they lose attention. On Wikipedia, except for a very few limited exceptions such as material linked from the main page, readers are reading only what they've chosen to read, so if they've ended up at Guillain–Barré syndrome, it doesn't matter that the lead says In those with severe weakness, prompt treatment with intravenous immunoglobulins or plasmapheresis, together with supportive care, will lead to good recovery in the majority rather than If it's serious, injections and replacing ooky blood with clean blood will probably help, since the reader is obviously interested enough that provided they actually know what the words mean, they'll make the effort to understand. IMO, oversimplication is generally more of a problem on Wikipedia than overcomplication, particularly in talk pages; especially on hot-topic or high-traffic subjects there's a tendency to oversimplify, which means that particularly on medical and legal topics, where accuracy is more important than legibility, people tend to cut corners and change the meaning of things. For instance, although our Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is correct, you try explaining to Jimmy Wales that the European Parliament has no legislative powers and their voting to support it has no impact on whether the individual countries of the EU will introduce it into their legal systems. As I said somewhere above in this wall of text, Wikipedia articles should be in as basic a wording as it's possible to get them without losing meaning (until someone discreetly removed it a few months ago, it was a source of irritation to me for years that an article supposedly distinguished by professional standards of writing, presentation, and sourcing included the word "decollated", defended and regularly re-added by the author on the grounds that intentionally using obscure words was advancing people's understanding and knowledge of the English language), but not simplified the slightest bit further. (Paging Newyorkbrad, who I know has had strong opinions in the past about balancing readability and ambiguity, in the different-but-related field of how Wikipedia's internal policy pages and arbcom sanctions are worded.)

I know there are good reasons we got rid of the Article Feedback Tool, and I'd never advocate its return, but if you (with your WMF hat on) want an idea for something on which the WMF can spend money, which isn't very glamorous but likely to be far more useful in the long term than adding another member to the 45 "Community Engagement" staff (at least three of whom I wouldn't trust to count their fingers and get the same answer twice), commission and publish the results of some in-depth polling of what readers do and don't like about Wikipedia's articles and in particular Wikipedia's Featured Articles. I don't mean pop-up "did you find what you were looking for?" yes/no boxes displayed to readers when they leave a page, or "How would you improve this article" feedback boxes at the end of pages for readers to express their desire for more tits. I mean commission some paid, independent focus groups that represent the actual population (not the somewhat undiverse community that makes up the editor base), give them a big stack of printouts of Featured Articles and high-traffic articles, and ask them whether they found the articles easy or difficult to read, comprehensive, unbiased, interesting… and why. Then, start an equally independent group at the www.wikipedia.org search page on a database dump stripped of any indication of article assessment, ask them to independently navigate Wikipedia reading topics they find interesting for a few hours, and discreetly note whether they spend more time on and are more likely to follow internal links from articles with higher quality assessments. And then, use that same database dump stripped of quality assessment (maybe omitting the obvious one-line stubs), give people a genuinely random selection of Wikipedia articles and ask which they thought were the best-written, most readable, most comprehensive, and see how closely that correlates with Wikipedia's own article assessments.

While the wording and formatting has changed over the years, WP:Featured article criteria is still largely based on the arbitrary rules Raul made up in 2004 (in turn based on some equally arbitrary assumptions inherited from Larry Sanger), and carries with it a huge stack of assumptions that "articles meeting these criteria are what the readers are looking for". Because FAs are pushed as a model for other articles to follow, these assumptions leak through into the rest of Wikipedia; because Wikipedia is—rightly or wrongly—seen as a model for other websites to follow, those assumptions leak through into the rest of the internet; because the internet affects so much of the news agenda and everyday life nowadays, those assumptions leak through into reality. AFAIK these assumptions as to what readers want and what readers find useful has never been empirically tested among actual readers. While it might bruise some egos, it would be good to have an empirical list of "things readers want in articles" and "how technical should the language be?"; my gut instinct is that while there might be some surprises about how detailed readers feel articles should be, readability would rank fairly low as a concern. (Also paging @FAC coordinators: @FAR coordinators: @TFA coordinators in case anyone can think of a reason this is actually a Really Bad Idea, or can point out somewhere that it's already been done.) ‑ Iridescent 17:27, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Are we sure that we can treat "readers" as a bloc? I suspect that there are distinct groups of readers with different priorities and interests and that if you drill deep you'll notice some granularity. Also, at the risk of hijacking this talk page further, I shall apply some of the advice offered here to the Samalas article. Of course, the seamount articles have priority in terms of any FAC nomination. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:43, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

I've felt for a decade that Wikipedia would be better served if content contributors were provided better data about how readers use articles, and if such things were the subject of discussion from time to time at the FA talk pages.--Wehwalt (talk) 18:51, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Yeah I'd agree with that too - get a bunch of folks who'd never edited wikipedia, bribe 'em with some money or beers and get them to peruse articles. Not too fussed between either printing them out or just reading them online and posting comments somewhere. You could do a bunch of college students in one batch, a group of high school kids in another batch, and (say) a group of senior citizens another day etc. BTW although the FA criteria are arbitrary, they strike me as pretty sensible and generic. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:03, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

I agree that they seem sensible in general (although you know my feelings on it is a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature—you're not going to convince me that the editors who took Islam or Sea through FAC actually thoroughly read all relevant literature, much less included it in the bibliography). However, in both my and your case it's a gut feeling; we might well find that readers consistently don't want comprehensiveness and would rather have three short articles instead of one long one (or conversely that they find sub-articles confusing and would rather have a single enormous Banksia article rather than 179 individual articles on the species, even if it meant a megabyte-long page), or that the articles we consider our best work are consistently judged less readable than the rest—we have no way of knowing. We might even discover the shocking fact that readers don't care if citations are formatted identically, whether we use dashes or hyphens, or if an article with below 15,000 characters of readable prose has more than two paragraphs in the lead, provided the article is interesting and accurate. ‑ Iridescent 19:49, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) We have some that information, and it's basically discouraging. People generally read the introduction, or they're looking for a very specific detail (so they look in the infobox, and then skip to a relevant-sounding section). So if "write what readers want" is the goal, then 99% readers want much shorter articles, and the other 1% want all the possible infoboxes and lists and trivia about exactly which wrestling-entertainment-actor had which colors and theme songs and whatever else in which seasons. Also, a quick way to find out the name of that TV show that Joe Film had that six-second cameo in.

It's not exactly all about pop culture (e.g., people look things up for work), but the idea that lots of people are excited about spending half an hour (or more) reading about breast cancer awareness and its social effects is not exactly realistic. Even though this is the month for peak page views, I'd be surprised if more than a dozen people actually read it from start to finish. I'm not sure that ever I've done that, and I wrote the thing.

Other research has indicated that users want more media, and especially more interactive media. A timeline that you could swipe through and zoom in on areas that interest you the most, in-article calculators, or infographics would be popular.

I don't think that reader motivation is the key factor. Motivation does not turn you into a fluent reader of English. The writers of patient information leaflets are usually advised to assume that the reader has a functional grasp of English equivalent to what 13-year-old students are given in English class. This recommendation does not change when you think that the patient is "motivated", e.g., you are writing about a life-threatening condition. If anything, you try to write in simpler language in that case. Women who are "motivated" to read about DCIS do not need a bunch of complicated language. They need a sign that says "NOBODY DIES FROM THIS. YOU ARE GOING TO LIVE."

The Simple Measure of Gobbledygook, which I link because of its delightful name, is the recommended standard for pharmacy labels. I think my favorite study on on pharmacy labels was from 2010. It took a reasonably representative sample of Americans, showed them labels on drug bottles, and concluded in a very upbeat tone that all the prior studies were wrong and the old style of prescription labels were perfectly fine. The only little caveat, barely worth mentioning, was that you might need to make some changes to accommodate "special" populations of patients, like those who didn't have a university education (i.e., most people).

With a glance at my staff hat, I'm not sure about the practical utility of any such research. We (the experienced editors) are attached to long-form articles. We like writing them. We idealize them. Making those is Why We Are Here. And if the research says that long-form articles don't get read, or they don't educate readers, or that most readers really need, want, and benefit from infoboxes, then we think the problem is with the readers, not with our beautiful articles. The WMF has talked about encouraging other approaches, and the core editing community at this wiki has not been receptive to this idea. We (the editors) are a bit like the authors of that paper: Everything's fine with our current practices, unless you're trying to accommodate a few "special" groups of readers ...like 99% of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

"Actually I put that typo there intentionally as a tripwire, kind of like the monolith in 2001, to notify me when intelligent life on Wikipedia had evolved to the point of reading articles all the way through." EEng 01:38, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

That wasn't really what my research (when at Cancer Research UK) suggested. Most of the 30 subjects asked to imagine that someone they slightly cared about had developed pancreatic cancer, and then find out about it on the web, went first to the top hits, namely specialized charities, or the NHS. Some later looked at WP, & if they didn't they were asked to at the end, but they had already got the infobox stuff elsewhere, and on the whole rather appreciated the extra depth on WP. Johnbod (talk) 21:13, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I'd go along with that. Someone looking up Cancer might only skim the lead, but someone interested enough in a particular variant is likely interested enough to want detailed information. The same goes in all fields including pop culture; someone looking up The Beatles might just want to know when they split up or who their manager was, but someone looking up You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) probably wants detailed information about this song, why it came to be written and what it's about. To repeat, my point is we don't know how people use Wikipedia and consequently whether we're wasting time doing things readers don't want. ‑ Iridescent 15:35, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, the one thing all 30 subjects had in common is that they looked at a range of sites (but nearly always from the first page of results); of course in this case there were actually plenty of very good sites in that first page. Johnbod (talk) 17:26, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, could you link to the research you called discouraging? I'd be interested to see what the questions were. What would help a lot would be knowing how many unique visitors each article gets, which section headings readers click on, and how much time they spend at the article. Then we'd have some data. You wrote that people look at the lead and infobox, then skip to the section they care about. But you conclude from that that they want shorter articles. A shorter article might not contain the section they decided to skip to. SarahSV ^(talk) 16:21, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

How readers use articles

Yes, I'd agree it would be interesting to see the raw data or at least a summary, if the WMF is willing to release it. When it comes to WMF research, there's something of a history of the WMF concluding that the data supports whatever the WMF party line happens to be (remember the huge support the WMF claimed there was for Flow and Winter, or the search engine unpleasantness?); while things may have got better since the Wikimedia Civil War had the side-effect of purging the noisiest Anything-We-Do-Is-A-Force-For-Good-And-Thus-Anyone-Opposing-Anything-We-Do-Must-Be-Evil cultists from the WMF, I haven't seen enough of the new regime to know if old habits have continued. Given that it's not that long since the WMF was producing stuff like this and twisting research to claim it's "what people wanted", I can believe that it's possible that they've listened to the Wikidata/Reasonator clique claiming "short articles and lots of infoboxes" are what people want and decided in advance that this is what the research will conclude. ‑ Iridescent 21:51, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

I assume Google Analytics data is available for Wikipedia articles. Kaldari, is this something you can help with? We're wondering what research is available about how readers behave when reading Wikipedia articles: how many unique viewers, how long they spend on each page, etc. SarahSV ^(talk) 17:08, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Some of it gets published in great detail, such as m:Research:Wikipedia Readership Survey 2011/Results. Others are in such bits and pieces that publication is not the relevant concept, because you won't find it even though it's been published. Some of it is also platform-specific. For example, they can find out how many sections people read from mobile, where most sections start off collapsed. People read slightly more pages on desktop than on mobile within the same reading session. Hovercards reduces page views (but should increase the proportion that reads more than the first line.) How long they spend on each page (on average) is known, but I can't remember the numbers beyond "short", and I can't find it quickly. Coming soon: 90% of readers read Wikipedia in a single tab, and if they click on a second article, they don't open a second tab for it. If you're interested in this, then stalking Tilman on Meta might be worth your while.

(We won't get unique viewers, because Legal refused.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:53, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, only just noticed this in the morass, and thanks for replying. Pinging SarahSV as well. What I'd be really interested in—although it would be a pain to do—would be if in the next reader survey, the WMF actually asked "did you think this article was too long/too short/about right" for a variety of articles, and whether it varies between core and obscure. Per User:Johnbod's cancer examples, and my own experience with art and artists, I'd be willing to bet that readers typically skim the "core" articles like Cancer until they find the particular piece of information or internal link they're looking for, but when they reach the specific subtopic are much more likely to read top-to-bottom. ‑ Iridescent 18:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Responding to the ping (way) above, there's always a trade-off in writing anything between a simple, straightforward presentation (which will eliminate some facts and details), and a more complicated one (which will be "more accurate" but will take longer to read and be harder to understand).

I've written about this before in the context of drafting policies and ArbCom decisions. Do we want a simple and straightforward statement of what the rule is (which will invariably fail to anticipate some possible scenarios), and a more developed and complicated presentation (which will provide specific guidance for a greater range of possible events, but take longer to read and be harder to understand)? On the one hand, oversimplification leads to more disputes later on, and at best just kicks the can down the road. On the other hand, it is impossible to anticipate every possible set of facts even in theory, so there's a limit to how hard we should try. We should also remember that we are writing policies and guidelines for a website, not a criminal statute or a chapter of the Code of Federal Regulations.

The same trade-off exists in articles. If we write "the sky is blue," we're immediately half-wrong on average: unlike the dog in "Silver Blaze" we do things in the night-time. If we write "the sky is blue during the daytime," we're perennial optimists (or drought-lovers) who have wished the clouds away. If we write "the sky is blue during the night time on a clear day," we're astronomical idiots who've never heard of solar eclipses. And if we write "the cloudless sky is blue during most daylight hours except during a total or annular eclipse of the sun," the reader will either be impressed by our attention to detail or bemused by how we can overcomplicate almost anything.

(Now I'm curious: how do we explain it? The lede of sky gives During daylight, the sky appears to be blue.... Thus only one of the (at least) three qualifications is given. But then again, I could push back against including a reference to clouds because when I see a cloud I'm not seeing the sky; I'm seeing an obstruction that's in the way of seeing the "sky." So we need to spend more time defining "sky." The first sentence of sky is The sky (or celestial dome) is everything that lies above the surface of the Earth, including the atmosphere and outer space. That is unclear as to whether the "sky" includes the clouds or doesn't, plus we have the extra bonus distraction of "celestial dome." I think I'll stop there for now, but perhaps I've made my point.)

Another oversimplified example—choose one: "Leap year is every fourth year." "Leap year is every fourth year, except that the years divisible by 100 aren't leap years." "Leap year is every fourth year, except that the years divisible by 100 aren't leap years, except that the years divisible by 400 are leap years." "Leap year is every fourth year, except that the years divisible by 100 aren't leap years, except that the years divisible by 400 are leap years, except that we'll probably skip a leap year one time about 3,000 years from now." Which is the most useful to the reader? Obviously all this information needs to be included in an article, but how to lay it out comprehensibly requires more writing skill than is generally appreciated.

By the way, on a different topic that has concerned both you (Iridescent) and me: I've come to conclude that variable and overcomplicated systems of referencing are one of the major deterrents to gaining and keeping contributors. I've been here however many years by this point, but I was drawn in partly because in 2006-2007 it was easy to add information to an article. If I found Wikipedia today I'm not sure I'd stick around after I'd messed up the referencing templates for the seventeenth time. But I digress. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:11, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Continuing the digression, if one looks at the history of green, blue and red I have had an ongoing difference of opinion with an editor about blue skies, red blood and green leaves.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:25, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

I like the idea of a naturalistic study - get a bunch of people on wikipedia and track what they read and later ask then what they read and why. NB: if everyone reads bits and peaces of big articles, if they are all different bits and pieces...then surely being comprehensive is a good thing, right? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:25, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

m:Research:Which parts of an article do readers read

Quick link on this subject: m:Research:Which parts of an article do readers read was updated last month, to include information about the effects of Page Previews. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:09, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

That's interesting—thanks. Interesting to see that they're also using my technique of assessing whether a reader is engaging with main page content by seeing how much of a spike there is in related topics (e.g. when Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed was TFA, it got about 90,000 pageviews, [[Candaules]] got about 13,000 and [[William Etty]] and [[Gyges of Lydia]] both got about 11,000, implying that of the people who clicked on it—and I have no illusions that most of those clicks were from people either intrigued by the peculiar title, or drawn in by the naked buttocks, rather than people with an actual interest in 19th-century history painting—about one reader in seven found the topic interesting enough that they wanted to know more).

I don't suppose there's been any research (either automated by by survey) regarding why readers leave pages—that is, of the 60.1% who viewed a mainspace page without opening a section, is it because all they wanted to know was in the infobox or lead, because they realized this wasn't the topic they were looking for, or because they don't realize that the apparently blank paragraphs are collapsed sections which they can open rather than sections that have yet to be written? (Don't discount that last one; I've no idea how common it is, but I can certainly anecdotally confirm that I've had people ask why the mobile versions of articles only include the text from the lead.)

I'm not entirely convinced by their conclusion that because the links in the lead are most likely to be clicked, that means readers aren't reading past the lead. Because the lead summarizes the most important content of the article, that's also where the links that are most relevant to readers of the article are going to appear first, pretty much by definition. One would expect readership of any article, in any reference work, to tail off towards the end, as assuming most readers work from top to bottom, anyone looking for a specific piece of information becomes progressively more likely to have found it the more of the article they read. (I'm astonished that as many as 10% of readers using the Android app are getting as far as the external links section.)

Incidentally, how on earth do they work out that "Links located on the left side of the screen are more likely to be clicked"? Surely what appears on the left and right of the screen is going to vary wildly depending on the user's font settings and browser window size? ‑ Iridescent 01:29, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

On the last question, the answer is that I don't know, but I know that the researchers have talked about the pros and cons of mouse-tracking and eye-gaze studies, so perhaps someone did one of those. You could also make a few assumptions, e.g., the first word in a paragraph is on the left, and links in captions are on the right.

Directly asking real-world users why they leave a page would require phab:T89970, which everybody wants to use, but nobody wants to spend a year building. You could ask people for their general recollections later.

I assume that many readers really only want the first bit of the article. The drop-off in page views that's attributable to the NAVPOPS-like tool demonstrates that pretty conclusively, as does our own experience (Did we put her article at George, Georgie, or Georgina? Let me go look...).

The problem of people thinking that the rest of the article doesn't exist is probably something that the Readers team should take a look at. I wonder if there is anyway to document the existence of the problem. (Maybe someone complaining in a web forum or something?) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:56, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

I can't think of any obvious way to measure the motivations for inactions, and whether someone not expanding the subsections isn't doing so because the lead has given them all they need, because seeing the lead has made them realize that this isn't actually the topic they were looking for, or because they aren't aware that the ∨ opens subsequent sections. It would probably need an a/b test in which a high-traffic article was configured such that half the readers were presented with the article as it normally appears and half the readers with the second section also expanded, and see if click-throughs to links that only appear in the second section are higher for those in the second group than the first. That said, a/b tests are a lot of work for what I imagine the WMF would consider a fairly limited return. A not-quite-as-accurate but much easier method would be to see if click-throughs to links that only appear in the later parts of the article are significantly higher from readers in desktop view compared to click-throughs from readers in mobile view in which these sections are hidden. Per my comments somewhere else in this morass, what I'd be really interested in seeing is how many readers feel they found what they were looking for, and whether that varies between people using different devices and between desktop/mobile view. ‑ Iridescent 22:35, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Here's another on bit of research this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKMFvi_CCB0 (slides at File:(WtWRW-20181211) Research Showcase Presentation.pdf) One result: How much you read depends upon how many options you have. I think we can assume that most, of not all, previous research was done at the English Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

I suppose we have an issue (which that seems to bear out), in that our readers come for different things; some want to find out a particular piece of information and don't care about context, some want a brief summary of the topic, and some want to find out all there is to know about the topic. My aspiration is that the lead of an article should wherever possible sell the topic, such that people who intended only to find out a bit of brief background decide that it looks interesting and they'd like to know more, and end up reading the whole thing. (This goes somewhat against the MOS, which says that the lead should give away all the goods up front such that the reader doesn't need to bother reading the whole thing.) "How much you read depends on how many options you have" can go both ways; should we be aiming to provide simultaneously for those people who just want the Cliff's Notes version and who want the full story, or should we be trying to avoid dumbing down even though it will inconvenience some readers? ‑ Iridescent 15:23, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

If there's anyone still following this (other than WAID who's presumably already aware), this article by some guy at the WMF I'd never previously heard of might be of interest. I'd be very interested to see if the "25% of traffic is generated by people clicking on blue links" figure went up or down once hover-to-preview was rolled out as the default—e.g., was the effect of previewing "that looks interesting, I'd like to no more" or "actually, that's not what I was looking for"? ‑ Iridescent 19:32, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Huh. Here on TVTropes the website owners believe that the net effect of previewing articles is to reduce readership, and thus refused to implement previewing. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:38, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

TV Tropes is funded by ads, and as such has an obvious interest in keeping pageviews high. For Wikipedia, it's more important that readers find what they want. If someone reading Simeon Monument is confused by the cupola would in turn be topped with a caduceus they can hover over cupola and caduceus to see that "a cupola is a relatively small, most often dome-like, tall structure on top of a building" and "The caduceus is a short staff entwined by two serpents, sometimes surmounted by wings"; that's all they need to know so it doesn't break the flow of their reading the main article as clicking the link would, saving them time; that's consequently a win for the reader as they've saved time and seen enough of the linked articles to decide if they're topics that would interest them, and it's a win for Wikipedia as that reader goes away thinking "hey! Wikipedia is really informative and helpful, maybe I shouldn't keep dismissing that annoying yellow popup begging for money". Consequently it's a win-win for us, even if it means the total number of readers drops, but that wouldn't be the case for a site that depends for its survival on visitors seeing as many ads as possible.

What I'd be interested in is whether popups have encouraged rabbit hole browsing habits ("wow, a staff entwined by two serpents, that sounds really fascinating, let's click this link to find out more") or discouraged it ("I came here to read about street lighting in the early 19th century, not entwined staffs, so I'm not going to bother clicking that link"). Since that WMF blog post says that they measure the total number of readers clicking blue links (as opposed to coming to a page via the search bar or links from outside), it would presumably be easy enough to see if that number went up or down on the day previews were switched on. ‑ Iridescent 21:03, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

section break: the result of a decade of WP:CITEVAR

(re Newyorkbrad) On the referencing, I've said and will continue to say that we should have a sole house style for references. There would be some grumbling at first but people would get used to it soon enough; it's ridiculous that we expect editors to be familiar with a couple of thousand different templates

(yes, some of those are sandboxes or miscategorized things that shouldn't be there, but most of them aren't; "a couple of thousand" isn't an exaggeration) and chide them for being unfamiliar with every obscure referencing convention in the world. I'd have thought the introduction of Visual Editor would be the perfect opportunity for this; only have it support a single reference template, meaning the only options for the next generation of editors are to comply with the template, manually format the citation themselves if they absolutely must display it in Bluebook for some reason, or use a bare URL.

(Re Casliber) Probably, although my point is we don't know. It might be that all those readers would prefer their bits and pieces spread across multiple small articles (i.e. instead of a single "Rail stations of Dutchess County" article we have eighteen separate and very similar articles), or they might prefer everything be merged into a single article so they only have to look in one place for whichever bit or piece they need (i.e. Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway lists all the paraphernalia, even though the reader is likely only interested in a specific part of it). The point is, we don't know. ‑ Iridescent 23:50, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

courtesy break so further replies don't need to scroll through the above

Because I was here for something else, I have read the above long thread with great interest. There so much that is important, it's really a shame that the discussion is not in a more prominent venue. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:16, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

It's Wikipedia and consequently all CC BY-SA—feel free to cherrypick the juicy parts if you want to post a summary somewhere else. This is actually one of Wikipedia's more prominent venues; the Signpost may have 256 active watchers whereas I have only 206, but most of those 206 represent the closest thing Wikipedia has to an elite. ‑ Iridescent 10:13, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

• Comment and another parable re: paid moderators: Hi, I'm new to this thread, and just now skimmed it. I read Iridescent's parable of his dating site with great interest, as it has many parallels with the saga of the IMDB message boards, on which I was quite active from 2005 through their demise in February 2017. They started out with paid moderators who reviewed each notification of the user-reported system and took whatever action or non-action they deemed appropriate. Eventually people started gaming the reporting system, creating sockpuppets to double-down on reporting people they didn't like, but by and large the system worked well to remove and keep away troll posts. Then IMDB cheaped out and let the deletions become more and more automated, removing the paid moderators; at that point gaming obviously became easier. Then in 2007 IMDB added a buttload of new message boards to the system: boards that had nothing to do with films; unfortunately, many of the new boards were troll magnets, like Video Games and that sort of youth-skewing stuff, and boards on Politics, Religion, and other dens of iniquity. At the same time, so-called moderation became completely automated -- no human moderators. The kids and trolls from the boards like Video Games soon discovered they could wreak havoc not only on their favorite boards, but all over the message boards, with impunity. Automated reporting got overwhelmed and virtually ceased to work at all, because it punished people who conscientiously reported a lot (there was a lot to report!) by ignoring their reports after a certain number. Also, since IMDB allowed people to create an infinite number of sockpuppets, the sockpuppets not only overran the site, they overran the reporting system and fairly easily got anyone deleted or even blocked whom they didn't like. Long story short: By 2012 or so, IMDB was Troll Heaven. Everyone on the internet knew it, so anyone who wanted to troll headed for IMDB. One of Wikipedia's most notorious sockpuppeting trolls, with hundreds of socks, abandoned Wikipedia to do the same thing on IMDB. Many good people left in disgust, unable to have a civil conversation amidst the barrage of trolling. Finally, when the bad press got too great, IMDB gave two weeks' notice and then deleted all the boards completely. Of course this could have all been prevented had they simply created a subscription service to use the boards; legitimate film fans would have gladly paid $5 or $10 a month to use the message boards. That would have cut out the trolls and socks, and would have provided revenue to return to paid human moderators. But they didn't do that. Softlavender (talk) 04:22, 21 October 2018 (UTC); edited 10:06, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

You know, is it important whether these moderators are paid or not? I am a moderator on the website known as TV Tropes and we do not get paid there. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:10, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

As Iridescent mentioned, it's a matter of size. Once a website becomes one of the largest user-generated sites on the internet, the volume tends to militate against volunteer moderation working adequately. Although TV Tropes is a pretty well-known site, it does not even approach a fraction of the amount of user-generated input as the second-by-second barrage of input that Wikipedia gets or that the hundreds of thousands of now-deleted IMDB message boards got. Or Facebook, etc. Softlavender (talk) 09:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Go back to where we started, to the kind of people who want to act as volunteer moderators aren't always the people you would want as volunteer moderators. On something like TV Tropes which has a fairly tightly focused remit, and isn't high-profile or controversial enough for outside interests to have an interest in infiltrating or destabilizing it, it's probably not an issue as nobody would ever get to the "become a moderator" stage unless they had a strong interest in deconstructing TV, and consequently shared the site's purpose and values. (You won't even know TV Tropes exists unless you have an interest in the topics it covers; you'll know Wikipedia exists if you've ever done a Google search.) For a site like Wikipedia, which by its nature attracts a lot of "I don't want to do any of the work, I just like the idea of criticizing other peoples' work" types and is a constant target for spammers, not so much; since people who enjoy or are good at writing, coding, difficult cleanup or important maintenance are more likely to want to devote their free time to writing, coding, difficult cleanup or important maintenance, that means there's a constant tendency for the routine patrolling to be done by busybody "we must clean up all the trash!" types whose values don't really align with the rest of Wikipedia. But because the busybody types are the ones who hang round the noticeboards, Meta, RFA, the talkpages of Signpost articles etc, if you're not deeply familiar with the culture of en-wiki—which most of the WMF aren't—they're the ones who appear to be representative of the internal culture of Wikipedia, so the WMF assume that the interests of the busybody-patroller types are synonymous with the interests of Wikipedia. (We're talking about a situation where the WMF can conclude that "Ping users from the edit summary" and "Allow 'thanks' notification for a log entry" are higher priority than allowing VisualEditor to handle named references.) Hell, as I write an RFA for someone who's openly running on a platform of "I don't care about the content of Wikipedia, I just like reverting and deleting" is about to pass. ‑ Iridescent 10:13, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

VE and referencing

Visual editor not comletely fucking up notifications would be a start, let alone letting it level up:

...via [[Plymouth]]{{Sfn|Schöttler|2010|p=417}}]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTESch%C3%B6ttler2010417-62|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[54]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTESch%C3%B6ttler2010417-61|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[53]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTESch%C3%B6ttler2010417-61|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[53]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTESch%C3%B6ttler2010417-61|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[53]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTESch%C3%B6ttler2010417-61|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[53]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTESch%C3%B6ttler2010417-59|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[51]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTESch%C3%B6ttler2010417-59|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[51]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTESch%C3%B6ttler2010417-59|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[51]</span>]] and [[Cherbourg-Octeville|Cherbourg{{Sfn|Lyon|1985|p=186}}]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTELyon1985186-63|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[55]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTELyon1985186-62|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[54]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTELyon1985186-62|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[54]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTELyon1985186-62|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[54]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTELyon1985186-62|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[54]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTELyon1985186-60|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[52]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTELyon1985186-60|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[52]</span>]][[User:Serial Number 54129/sandbox#cite%20note-FOOTNOTELyon1985186-60|<span class="mw-reflink-text">[52]</span>]] almost immediately.{{Sfn|Schöttler|2010|p=417}}

...any takers?! ——SerialNumber54129 11:54, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

I believe VE fucking things up falls into WAID's pigeonhole, but I don't really want to ping her as I'm sure she's sick of the sight of this thread. I do support the principle of VE 100%, but honestly if Lila had actively decided to run a feature launch to generate as much ill feeling as possible, she couldn't have gone about it better—"run fast and break things" is a great slogan but a disaster in practice. ‑ Iridescent 12:04, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

If you want me to repeat "sfn is not supported, and won't be" on the clock, then you'll have to ping my staff account. I can tell you that it wasn't just perverse willfulness or personal preference behind the decision; there's some complicated something or another that makes this simple-looking template actually be a royal pain. (They did try to explain once, several years ago, but my eyes glazed over fairly quickly, and I remember nothing of the explanation.) Now, of course, that team is doing little except mobile editing, so no new capabilities are expected there for another year. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:36, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Look up; I agree with the devs that VE shouldn't be expected to support all the variant reference formats. The problem is that at the moment we have two different systems (wikitext editing and VE) which are almost incompatible when it comes to referencing, as they handle them so differently, and there hasn't really been any effort to work towards a single style which both sets of editors can work with. ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Have you seen m:WMDE Technical Wishes/Book referencing? That should let us combine ref tags and {{rp}}, which is a step towards unification. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:44, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Just use {{r}} with |p= and be done with it. EEng 02:14, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Or just use {{sfn}} and stick to bloody source mode... ——SerialNumber54129 17:10, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

But r is 1000 times easier to use than sfn. EEng 03:14, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

But (if I'm reading the documentation correctly), that requires list-defined references to function correctly, and LDRs bring a whole slew of problems of their own. New editors find the <ref>...</ref> system confusing, but they find LDR utterly incomprehensible (this is how Phineas Gage appears to someone using VE; see if you can work out how to add or change a reference). Consequently, converting a page to LDRs has the de facto effect of indefinitely semi-protecting it. From the editor point of view that's a good thing as anything which reduces the flow of well-intentioned noobs reduces the workload, but from Wikipedia's point of view it's strangling the next generation in the cradle. ‑ Iridescent 09:08, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

In fact you're not reading the {r} documentation correctly, but I've rewritten it to clarify [1]. As for PG, we've been over this before: editors can add, and have added, new refs just by doing what any editor would do i.e. use the familiar < ref>< /ref> machinery, which is perfectly compatible with what's already there and works exactly as expected. EEng 22:13, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

But the {{r}} template still doesn't address the central issue, which is that VE can't cope with it so anyone attempting to amend the references using VE will turn the wikitext source into a mess of subst'ed codes.

It's more of an issue with {{r}} than with {{harv}} or {{sfn}}. As long as Wikipedia allows multiple different citation styles there will be people putting a steady stream of pressure on the devs to support sfn and the harv/harvnb templates, but if anyone approaches them telling them to support {{r}}, they'll (quite reasonably) say that they have enough on their plates trying to get VE to cope with the templates that are still live, and it's not a good use of their time supporting a legacy template whose use was deprecated almost a decade ago. (Sure, consensus can change, and one could theoretically hold a second RFC to un-deprecate it, but 26–3 was a clear enough supermajority that the WMF and devs are completely reasonable in assuming "en-wiki doesn't want this so we won't support it".) ‑ Iridescent 09:16, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

RFA and internal moderation

Good point on the last sentence. I found that worrisome as well but didn't want to go against the tsunami of support. People wring their hands about "RFA being broken", by which they mean too hard to pass, but in my mind it's way too easy to pass now, especially when there's peer pressure, unthinking bandwagonism, excessive participation by newbies, and a low percentage mandate. Softlavender (talk) 10:31, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

There are few successful RFAs not because RFA is hard to pass but because there are so many people saying RFA is hard to pass and it consequently discourages people from applying; plus, Wikipedia has been around for so long now that most of the active editors have either run at RFA or decided not to so there's a smaller pool to choose from. Looking at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship by year, I can't see any obvious miscarriages in the RFAs that didn't pass, whereas those candidates who weren't carrying some kind of problem-editing baggage tended to sail through with extremely high support. (Receiving 200 supports in an RFA was once so unusual that we created a dedicated page to document the phenomenon; this year five of the eight successful RFAs got that number.)

On the earlier point, how a site moderates itself is of great importance—in the current climate, arguably of paramount importance. It's obvious just from reading the news that the wild-west internet is becoming a political issue; when the Federal Communications Commission, the European Data Protection Board or the Information Commissioner's Office decides to call the big companies in for a chat, and Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Bezos point to the army of paid moderators they've hired to clean up the user-generated content and the teams of programmers they have working on scripts to spot fakes and libels before they go live, and Katherine Maher can only say "well, we kind of hoped some volunteers would take care of it", who's going to come out of that meeting worst? ‑ Iridescent 10:56, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Just a tiny note re: number of vote(r)s in RFA: It's so high now because of the watchlist notification. Before that was implimented, unless you had the template on your userpage it was very easy to miss the fact that an RfA was occurring, even if you had WP:RFA watchlisted, because it's just a single blip there; whereas via watchlist everyone sees it, and the fewer pages one has watchlisted the easier it is to see the notice, hence all the newbies voting. Softlavender (talk) 11:09, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

In this particular case I'm not seeing many newbies, just a lot of "I've taken the candidate's word for it regarding his contributions and haven't bothered to check for myself and see that the purported creations were things like this, were all years ago, and that his only content creation this year was this". You can't legislate against laziness, but in this case the laziness is on the part of established editors not eager newcomers who don't know any better. ‑ Iridescent 12:19, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

I mean, as with everything on Wikipedia, it only works in practice. So we kind of hoped some volunteers would take care of it sounds bad, but who exactly is doing a better job, of say handling bots, or copyvios - I don't know about Facebook, but Reddit certainly abounds with obvious copyright violations, which Wikipedia at-least tries in taking care of. Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:05, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

We're better than the social networks at handling bots, as the format of Wikipedia articles isn't as conducive as that of Twitter and Facebook. We're not great at handling the Russian and Macedonian troll factories (who as I speak are duking it out on Jimmy's talkpage), and we're certainly not great at differentiating between constructive and unconstructive editing. (This thread has diverged slightly, but it was originally about mw:JADE and mw:ORES, and the possibilities and pitfalls of AI automating recent changes patrol.) ‑ Iridescent 11:33, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

We're "not great" but Facebook/Twitter seems to be absolutely-awful at dealing with Russian trolls with all the fake news/disinformation/ads/propoganda and so on spread through it. (I've been reading this thread as it pops up on my watchlist, and "diverged slightly" is probably the understatement of the year) Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:50, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Sure, but the point I'm making is that FB, Twitter, Amazon etc are now hiring people to patrol full-time, assess the nature of the problem, delete what they need to and develop strategies for preventing it in future. When the FCC calls the big players in, they're the ones who can point to the positive action they're taking to try to address the issue; we're the ones whose solution is ten paid Trust & Safety staff backed up by 511 volunteer admins of varying degrees of activity, and whose figurehead boss openly tolerates assorted trolls, racists and crackpots on his talk page. ‑ Iridescent 11:59, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Or one could say we're not doing anything because we don't have as much of a problem. Not that I think the FCC is going to do anything as long as this person sits in office. Galobtter (pingó mió) 12:19, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Heh—I'd say the FCC is considerably more likely to do something while this person sits in office; Bush Jr and Obama might not have cared for the press or open internet but had enough respect for the constitution to largely keep their mitts away from them, whereas the current administration is openly hostile to any medium they don't control. If the Republicans hold both houses in the midterms (a big if) I wouldn't give §230 more than eighteen months. In any case, when it comes to the internet it's the EU and UK who largely make the running, as they have the clout, and more importantly the willingness, to enforce rulings extraterritorially, and don't have the American fetishization of free speech above all else. ‑ Iridescent 12:25, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

• I haven't kept up with this thread, but as I was about to say before I accidentally deleted the whole thing, here is a new article I just saw on teh interwebz on the subject of humans versus algorithms (on the chance it may be of interest): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/apple-news-humans-algorithms.html. -- Softlavender (talk) 11:59, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

• There was a mass-market book just published on the topic—the name escapes me, but there are posters for it on the side of buses so the publisher presumably expects it to sell. (I imagine they see it as the next Brief History of Time, as a book bought by people who are struggling to find gift ideas for nerds, and equally destined to languish unread on shelves.) ‑ Iridescent 16:57, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

• Especially useful for those people who have coffee tables with one leg an inch too short :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:10, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

• Found it. ‑ Iridescent 17:53, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Celebrity trivia and Jimmy Wales

A talk page section I started on what is arguably trivia included a reference to Jimmy in celebrity mode. I was surprised that his presence on that list didn't tip the balance for someone deciding to include it in the article. Maybe there is hope yet. It still seems (oops!) to have started an edit war when someone picked up the ball and ran with it. Though including 'Some guy named Jimmy Wales who invented some kind of online encyclopedia' was probably overdoing it (slightly). The irony is that if I had gone to the match on day five, I might have seen Jimmy there. In the event, I went on day eight and met an old friend instead who I hadn't seen in many years. The people you bump into in London if you go to the right places... Carcharoth (talk) 01:08, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

​Sorry, only just noticed this; the Bauder nonsense distracted me.

With the proviso that I know nothing about chess, I'd be inclined to include the list of celebrities. This is the English-language Wikipedia, and in the Anglosphere countries which constitute our core readership and editor base, chess is largely seen as a board game for young children, and the idea of professional competitive chess is as alien an idea as professional competitive Monopoly or Candy Crush. (The worldwide audience for the chess championship is miniscule when compared to the championships of any vaguely popular videogame—compare the viewerships for League of Legends King of Glory or the Asian championship of Dota 2 which took place at around the same time.) Having the list of celebrities is a way of signalling "look, despite the apparent lack of public interest this really is considered a big deal" to readers who otherwise wouldn't understand why chess appears to be getting an exemption from our usual notability requirements. (In the event, the championship this year did get a modicum of coverage in the non-specialist media, but that was primarily because of the novelty of every match ending in a draw.) ‑ Iridescent 12:44, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

I almost missed your reply (no problem, btw). Always interesting to get another perspective on it. Carcharoth (talk) 15:11, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fred Bauder closed

An arbitration case regarding Fred Bauder has now closed and the final decision is viewable at the link above. The following remedies have been enacted:

1. Fred Bauder is admonished for engaging in an edit war on his candidate's questions page. Future edit-warring or disruptive behavior may result in further sanctions.
2. For multiple self-unblocks, wheel-warring, and abuse of rollback, Fred Bauder is desysopped. He may regain the administrative tools at any time via a successful request for adminship.
3. Boing! said Zebedee is cautioned for blocking Fred Bauder while actively involved in an edit war with him at the time. He is further cautioned to avoid edit-warring, even in cases where the other editor is editing disruptively.
4. Editors should seek assistance from the Electoral Commission for issues that arise on pages related to the Arbitration Committee Elections that cannot be easily resolved (excluding, for example, obvious vandalism). The Arbitration Committee reaffirms that the Electoral Commission has been tasked with the independent oversight of the Arbitration Committee Elections. Matters which are of a private matter should be referred to the Arbitration Committee or functionaries team as normal.

For the Arbitration Committee, --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 08:09, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fred Bauder closed

Well, it was really worth wasting everyone's time to come to a conclusion of "maintain the status quo in every respect". (Which scores more points, "cautioned" or "admonished"?) Still waiting for any evidence of my alleged "conflict" or "opposition research". ‑ Iridescent 09:01, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

No not really. As a case request it did no harm, but perhaps could have been dealt with by motion regularising the desysop and asking everyone to communicate a little better and not rush in. And in fairness, there was near universal opposition to the "opposition research" sentence, and universal opposition to the associated remedy. -- Euryalus (talk) 12:18, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

I appreciate that the claim was opposed, but it doesn't change the fact that an obvious smear by a sitting arb, based on no evidence and with no diff to back it up (obviously, as it was a complete fabrication so no diff exists), is now going to sit on the record forever, for people to point at and make "no smoke without fire" insinuations. As The Rambling Man can testify, this is not only not the first time Rob has tried to pull this "fabricate accusations in the hope that people don't notice the lack of evidence and assume they must be true" well-poisoning stunt and the rest of the committee haven't pulled him up on it and told him he needs to supply evidence if he's making accusations, it's not the first time this week. ‑ Iridescent 12:44, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Minor quibble

Re: this, I’m in general agreement with the sentiments, but I think there are cases that may be exceptions: INC adding 600 pages to the pedophile category last year springs to mind, as well as one or two LTAs where Trust & Safety is involved. Obviously I don’t support the script but I think Bellezzasolo was likely referring to these type of incidents. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:11, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Bellezzasolo specifically said that they're talking about the Reference Desk troll. As the entire issue with WP:LTA/REF stems from their hopping at high speed between multiple dynamic IPs, what we're talking about here is the mass reversion of any edits made by anyone on whichever IP they happen to currently be using, without even bothering to check what the edits in question were. Since the script was specifically configured not just to revert what the IP in question is currently adding but any edit they've ever made provided it's the current revision—and dynamic IPs can cycle through numerous editors (in the past, I've noticed editors as varied as Poetlister, VX4C and South Wales Police's press office pop up as previous users of my IP)—my AGF is somewhat limited in these circumstances. (As GiantSnowman can testify, mass rollback has a very high false positive rate even when someone appears to be obviously disruptive.) As I said at the AN thread, if the edits are very obviously the same (clearly part of a batch, all the same diff size, same edit summary) I can see it being legitimate to mass-rollback, but in pretty much any other circumstance I can't see any grounds where things are so pressing we can't spare the half-a-second it takes to hover the cursor over the diff and glance at the popup. (If we want to get rid of the reference desk troll there's one very obvious solution, but nobody ever has the nerve to propose it.) ‑ Iridescent 22:25, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Permanant protection, 30/500 or something? ——SerialNumber54129 22:36, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Moderation in the form of Flagged Revisions applied to FLow; every edit (either a question or an answer) only becomes visible to non-logged-in readers once it's been approved by a trusted user. (Done in Flow rather than the standard interface as that allows each thread to be a separate object, so we wouldn't end up with the mess FR/PC causes on articles where any edit to any section makes the whole page sit in "awaits approval".) Yes, it would need some tweaking to the software, but since this is the method pretty much every non-MediaWiki user-generated site on the internet uses—from Google Maps to Wordpress to the comments sections on newspaper articles—I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of the devs. (To be honest, if I were in charge I'd probably boot the Reference Desks off Wikipedia altogether into a separate WikiReference site, and let them sort out their own problems—they've never really been a comfortable fit with Wikipedia—but there's no real enthusiasm for that.) ‑ Iridescent 22:49, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

I see what you mean; pretty radical stuff. Yet, the fact that it would involve tweaking the software is actually an encouragement to move it off WP I suppose: it could be recreated from scratch without "tweaking" anything. I'm sure there have been discussions—which I'm sure will get used against me in future—in which, although I can't find 'em, I have enthusiastically called for the closing of the refdesks, yet the idea of keeping them but moving them off en-wp may not have arisen. It could be a new Jimbo project; you know, like Wikitribune, but actually doing something. Which is saying something. ——SerialNumber54129 23:03, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

If we're going to move it off-wiki, now would be the time; with Answers.com in Chapter 11, the WMF could probably either buy the www.wikianswers.com domain (which they own) for a song, or even absorb them outright. I'd imagine the RD regulars, once they got over the initial "you're trying to get rid of us" indignation, would actually prefer an environment where they don't have those pesky admins insisting on applying "no original research" and "no personal attacks" to them. ‑ Iridescent 23:15, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Of course, they may find something else has already beaten them to that particular goal  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 00:28, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Yahoo Answers is so infested with weirdos it makes Reddit look like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (as I write this, the top question on their front page is Rex Tillerson says trump directed him to do things that were against the law. Is that fake news or is Tillerson now an anti-American liberal?) and I imagine the only reason its new owners at Verizon are keeping it on life support is that their PR department doesn't want to deal with the fallout from killing both it and Flickr simultaneously. There probably is a market for an "all questions answered" site in which all answerers are expected to provide sources—as opposed to something like Quora where the answers are mainly just people giving their personal opinions as if they were gospel—and it would probably serve as quite a good penal colony for the big Wikipedias, now that Commons and Wikiversity are losing patience with us dumping our problem editors on them. It's not something on which I have a strong enough opinion to push for myself, but feel free to head on over to Proposals for new projects if you think it's worth pursuing. Our long-suffering Community Relations Specialist (Contractor) might pop up in a few minutes to explain why this isn't a good idea. (That Jimmy Wales is a shareholder in Quora, to which this would be a direct competitor, is an obvious stumbling block.) ‑ Iridescent 16:34, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

GO DUCK YOURSELF

...you won't do dat again!

You are protecting this you rhthrd! I kihhled over 100 terrorists myself, don't make yourself my target you mron! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2C0F:F930:0:3:0:0:0:221 (talk) 18:46, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

That's me told ‑ Iridescent 18:53, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Truly Commons is the gift that keeps on giving. I may be showing my age here but I remember there was once a time when Commons admins used to give earnest lectures about how everything there had to be realistically useful for an educational purpose if you committed the sin of uploading an image that wasn't deeply boring. ‑ Iridescent 19:08, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

I reckon these two on the left are Arbitration Enforcement, by the power invessed in AE by the Chicago Outfit...  :) ——SerialNumber54129 19:12, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Those three are roughly what I imagine Wikimania must be like. ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Original caption. I'm confused. Simon Adler (talk) 19:19, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Duck off Elvina

It's a Flying Duck Orchid, growing in Elvina Track (hence, a duck, off Elvina). ‑ Iridescent 19:25, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Ahh right..Thank you. Simon Adler (talk) 19:29, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Him----->just to confuse the CUs  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 19:34, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

A thing of wonder will be lost from our lives in a month when Flickr dies. ‑ Iridescent 19:42, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

That essay is one of the most misused on Wikipedia. Just go to SPI and randomly click a few of the non-CU requests and you'll see what I mean. It normally goes like: [Account that needs explanation as to why it is a sock] WP:DUCK. Please block. ~~~~ TonyBallioni (talk) 19:39, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

I suppose it is because providing evidence takes time and people are lazy Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:43, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) WP:Civility and WP:No original research are the most misunderstood pages on Wikipedia, hands down; I'll wager 99% of the people who cite them have never actually bothered to read them. The ludicrous WP:ATA and WP:DTTR are probably the most misapplied of all essays; I've lost count of the number of people who think they're both some kind of formal policy and don't realise both are just the personal ramblings of their authors. ‑ Iridescent 19:46, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

I'll leave this here. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:49, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Why am I not surprised to see AfD's resident definitiely-not-a-white-supremacist yet again trying to invent his own deletion criteria because he doesn't feel our actual criteria should apply to him? See also here and here for some background reading. ‑ Iridescent 19:56, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Uh, Oshwah, a bit pointless to revdel the IPs comment when it hasn't been removed :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:38, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Duck pointing where to go

Galobtter - HA! Good call - I assumed that someone else removed it and just rev del'd the edit. Fixed ;-) ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 20:05, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

That IP is a whole level of special. ∰Bellezzasolo✡ Discuss 20:00, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

One of the few regrets I have from only editing Wikipedia very infrequently is when I see pages like yours and the above: I just know if I knew what was going on, I would have a comment, but, alas, I am clueless. WTF are death threats doing because of Commons images, when everyone knows Commons wants consigning to the wastebin. Similarly, what was all the fuss with Fred Bauder? I thought I had won a war, ten years ago, to have him consigned to that same bin. Have I been away too long or just become old and senile? Giano (talk) 20:02, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

No, the death threat was because the IP took exception to my blocking him for his ravings on Talk:Skanderbeg. The Commons stuff is a response to his telling me to "duck myself". ‑ Iridescent 20:11, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

@Giano, while you're here can you see anything obvious missing from Simeon Monument? It's a bit sketchy because Soane's biographers understandably concentrate on the country houses and don't bother mentioning something this obscure, but as the last surviving structure of his in his hometown, it's more notable than most other lamp-posts. ‑ Iridescent 20:17, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

• No, I can’t, but that’s because I have never quite got my brain attuned to that of Soane’s. Something essential if you are going to appreciate an architect. All those over austere exteriors coupled with over complicated and over theatrical interiors; what in Hell’s name was going on there? He was like Palladio on skunk. Funnily enough though, you are the second person to mention Soane to me today. I’ve been asked to go and look Pitzhanger Manor which has just been restored, so perhaps I’ll have more of a clue after seeing that. Giano (talk) 20:30, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

• I don't particularly like Soane's style—his exteriors generally remind me of East European railway stations—but I think the story of the Simeon Monument is quite an interesting glimpse into the way shire Tories conducted their affairs in the dying days of the rotten boroughs. (How arrogant does one have to be to commission a monument to oneself?) I've skimmed over the (unremarkable) architecture itself with a one-sentence a triangular base with each corner supporting a wrought iron lamp, surrounding a fluted three-sided Portland stone column, which in turn supported a stone cylinder topped with a bronze or copper pinecone; the story here is why something so preposterous came to exist in the first place and why it still stands. ‑ Iridescent 20:42, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

• I was under the impression (I used to live near it) that it's stated intention was as a lamppost-cum-roundabout at which it functioned ok once it was finished? Is there any explanation anywhere for the pinecone? Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:52, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

• ​Someone should invent some kind of website where you can look these things up… The nominal purpose was to illuminate the centre of the market (Reading's street lighting at the time was based on lamp-brackets attached to buildings rather than free-standing poles, so open spaces were quite dim in the middle), with a secondary purpose of preventing wagons from cutting across diagonally, but the real purpose was to get the Simeon name visible in the run-up to John Simeon's parliamentary candidacy. The pinecone was a symbol of the tree of life and of eternity—presumably in this case meant to symbolise the permanence of the structure, the lamps and the town. (Unlike much Christian iconography, which medieval and renaissance artists largely made up as they went along, the symbolism of pinecones is genuinely ancient and goes back to the Old Religions; the Vatican still has this whopper taking pride of place outside the Vatican Museums.) ‑ Iridescent 15:22, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

• Man, I totally missed this cool thread till just now. Since it's too late to be one of the cool people, I will post something that has set the world a-flutter this past month or so: the Mandarin duck that has inexplicably taken up residence in Central Park: see New York Times, with video, October 31, The Independent, with video, December 6. -- Softlavender (talk) 22:04, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

• I remember seeing the coverage of that when it first appeared. I'm sure I remember seeing these things which are just as colorful in NYC fairly regularly in the 1970s and 1980s. Where I live now is currently in the process of being overrun by Egyptian geese, who may be ornamental but are among the foulest-tempered critters I've ever encountered. ‑ Iridescent 19:17, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

• You have clearly never met a Norfolk Swan after the bread has run out... The Aussie Bin Chicken coming a close second. Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:20, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

• I used to live in Norfolk; I well remember the attitude of swans who felt that they had more of an entitlement than you to whatever you happened to be eating. My local flock had poking their heads over the riverbank to untie the shoelaces of anyone daring to not be feeding them down to a fine art. ‑ Iridescent 19:28, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

• Speaking of foul-tempered geese, 13 years ago I lived next door to my landlady who kept watch-geese instead of watchdogs, and they were scary af, and LOUD. Even though they were inside a chicken-wire cage, it was right by the driveway, and I dreaded taking a walk or going to the mail box. *shudder* Softlavender (talk) 19:33, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Fowl-tempered. In a somewhat related item, I seem to recall that a local SPCA office used to leave a vicious attack bunny loose in its offices at night to frighten intruders. EEng 21:00, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Gerhard is unhappy with you

• Geese without exception are vicious bastards. It's an altogether unsurprising observation on the nature of Wikipedia that we are obliged to keep articles like this and that we host a 4000-word biography of a character from a 17-year-old videogame and a 200kb article on a road in Canada, but somehow nobody has yet written Capitoline geese. ‑ Iridescent 20:08, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

• What's depressing is I have just realised I can name all the cosplay ducks in the above pictures without going to search :/ Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:29, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

• I know we're all inclusivity, thousand flowers blooming, different strokes and all that, but I definitely don't understand the mentality of someone who'd go to the effort and expense of Darkwing Duck cosplay. Although ever since I discovered the existence of Commons:Category:Cosplay of Wikipe-tan, nothing surprises me. ‑ Iridescent 20:38, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

• Because he is the terror that flaps in the night! He is the winged scourge that pecks at your nightmares! Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:01, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

About deleted page Wikipedia:Yaar jigri

Hi Iridescent,
It would appear to me that this was not actually patent nonsense, but a good faith-y attempt by Tiwana013 to create an article about a web series of the name "Yaar Jigree Kasooti Degree".
I would appreciate your thoughts about this.
My guess is that even if we WP:DRAFT-ify-d it and waited patiently for the WP:AFC process to run its course, the substantial outcome would be delete under {{Db-web}} instead. I'll drop a handwritten note on that user's talkpage about this.
Pete AU aka --Shirt58 (talk) 10:00, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

Well, yeah, in that form it'd be eligible for A7 speedy deletion if in mainspace and in Wikipedia space it'd be misplaced. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:20, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

The entire text of WP:Year jigri was yaar jigri kasuti degree, and this isn't a new editor who isn't aware of how Wikipedia works. AGF isn't relevant; there's no way that isn't delatable for multiple reasons even if it hadn't been in the wrong namespace. I suppose theoretically I could restore it, move it to mainspace, and then immediately delete it again as {{db-nocontent}} but that would be taking "going through the motions" to something of an extreme. ‑ Iridescent 12:21, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

for the backhanded insult [2] May Santa deliver coal to your stocking. Will you be proposing an editong restriction? Legacypac (talk) 20:44, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

UninvitedCompany has already made some proposals that look reasonable to me. Unless there's anything to suggest a continuing problem, I see no reason to head on over to WP:Editing restrictions#Active editing restrictions and create a permanent Mark of Cain; we impose formal topic bans when it's clear someone is out of sync with the community and they've shown themselves willing to edit in accordance with community expectations, not just as a reaction to individual incidents. Since GiantSnowman has presumably been doing this for years and has never had anyone complain about it before, I'm willing to believe his explanation that he genuinely didn't know this kind of "acceptable collateral damage" mentality wasn't appropriate. ‑ Iridescent 21:00, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

All the evidence is in the thread. He continues to defend an indefensible reading of policy and practice rollback in cases he has been told are inappropriate. If not an admin... Legacypac (talk) 21:20, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

On typical pageviews numbers

Re [3], you might be interested in the fact that 1) those numbers exclude the (typical, well-behaving) bots, as better explained in the link, 2) a large portion of English Wikipedia articles receives 0 pageviews in the typical month, and an even larger amount gets less than 10. See for instance the bit quoted by HaeB on mailarchive:wiki-research-l/2018-December/006521.html. Nemo 07:14, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men – Of course not. No one could read that many biographies in one day. EEng 04:53, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

I'm not remotely convinced by On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men unless something has changed wildly in the intervening four years, and strongly suspect that that's an artefact of faulty methodology; it would hardly be the first time a WMF analysis was manipulated to produce the result they wanted.

Just go to Category:WikiProject Biography articles and its subcategories, pick names at random, and check the pageview stats. Glass Age Development Committee, which has a genuine claim to be the most obscure article on Wikipedia (it's just an explanatory footnote to Vauxhall Bridge that I moved into its own article as the footnote was too long, and has no other incoming links) gets more pageviews than that just as a result of random background noise. Even Altlichtenberg—a page whose entire content is Altlichtenberg is a populated place in Upper Austria, Austria, and which is a true orphan with no incoming links (not even an interwiki link, as there's no corresponding stub on de-wiki), still has had at least one page view in 95 of the past 100 days. ‑ Iridescent 13:16, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Actually, it seems like plenty of days go by without any reader on the first 10 random pages in Category:Living people. To my total lack of surprise, they are all mostly sports men too. And the most popular one is a porn actor. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:15, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Can you wonder?

Jack the Zipper ... Following the success of StuntGirl, he signed an exclusive production contract with Hustler Video.[4] He names Salvador Dalí, Andrew Blake and Stanley Kubrick as his influences.

Also, re "To my total lack of surprise, they are all sports men too. And the most popular one is a porn actor" – Is that because porn actors are by definition sportsmen, or does JTZ just happen to be both? I can't tell from the article. EEng 14:32, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

No, it's because I can't count. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:35, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) But nowhere near the "26% on any given day" claimed. Leaving out Samuel Sawyer which is a dab page, in the past 20 days of your sample four had at least one view every day, one had 2 days out of 20 without a view, one had 4/20 without a view, one had 6/20, and only two of the nine (Issiaka Koudize and Glenn Ezell) went more than five of the 20 days without a pageview (the figure needed to hit the 26% mark). Koudize, at least, is a total non-surprise, as he's a footballer from a non-English-speaking country who has never played in an English-speaking country so one wouldn't expect there to be much interest in him here.

It's worth bearing in mind the context of this discussion, which is the argument that an editor should be banned from using WP:G7 on articles he'd written on the grounds that they were averaging one view per day and consequently should be considered so unusually popular that normal deletion policy shouldn't apply and the articles in question should be retained against the author's wishes; I contend, and still do contend, that one-view-per-day is an unusually low readership for a Wikipedia article and consequently the "these are indispensable" argument doesn't hold water. ‑ Iridescent 14:38, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

See, to me it sounded like the claim was "One quarter of all biographies have no reader on a given day". Now, I was wondering if we are all falling for a "high peak" error; there may be few articles as popular as 1257 Samalas eruption or Tarrare or Donald Trump but they have large numbers of readers and might be driving a large proportion of total readership; I am not sure if I have the investment to go look for the statistic. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:47, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I read the claim as "on any given day, 1⁄4 of all male biographies go unread". I don't believe this to be true, and nor does your sample bear it out, as for the 26% figure to be true, the pages in the sample would need to be averaging a little over five days in 20 without a view which they clearly don't—we're not interested in the height of the peaks, only the number of days in which the trough dropped to zero. (What I do believe is that male biographies average fewer readers than female biographies, as there's a dead weight of long-dead sportsmen from a time when few women participated in professional sports which drags the male side down.) ‑ Iridescent 14:54, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Not sure that that is correct. 2.6 biographies out of 10 not being read on a given day sounds like it would still match the percentage given, even if a given biography doesn't go 5 days without readers. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:59, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

We're saying the same thing in different ways; to average 2.5 out of 10 biographies going unread on any given day, each individual biography would need to be unread an average of one day in four (e.g. five days of the 20-day sample). Leaving out the dab page, which isn't an 'article' in Wikipedia terms, there are 31 zeros in total between the nine articles over the 20-day period; for the 26% figure to hold water, the aggregate total of zero-view days for the nine articles over the 20 days would need to be 46. ‑ Iridescent 15:11, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

A small token on the occasion of the arbitrary honoring of a 2000 year old prophet, and other matters

	Gothic Seasons Greetings
	Wishing you all the best for x-mass, and hope things are good. You gained the unique honor this year of having the most fantastically written, and socially interesting article, ever nominated to ADF. People will never learn. Ceoil (talk) 18:41, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Ceiol: What do you mean this isn't an actual woman?

And to you… Although I'm still equally pissed off about Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Biscuits and human sexuality, even a decade later. ‑ Iridescent 18:46, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

A little known fact is that I'm still alive, so actually BLP. (It was one biscuit, one time, and there was no hush money). Ceoil (talk) 18:56, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

If you ever want to waste a couple of hours, look up the history of Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker (not on Wikipedia as both articles are fairly awful). ‑ Iridescent 19:10, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks but no thanks. Its all behind me and am happily married (to an actual woman) now. Ceoil (talk) 19:16, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Thank you Simon Adler for giving me a pretext to wheel out my all-time favorite Commons image. Yes, that is made entirely by strategically arranging biscuits.

Is it like oreo sex? Simon Adler (talk) 19:22, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Not sure what I was expecting when I googled "oreo sex"...UrbanDictionary, you always deliver, but not always in a good way. Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:29, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Oh dear. I see what you mean. Simon Adler (talk) 19:33, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Simon, much as I love you, you do tend to drag conversations down into the gutter. You and UrbanDictionary are as worse as each other, when this intellectual stimulating conversation was exploring the finer points of human / biscuit emotional & sexual interaction, which had a little know impact on 19th century novelists, painters, cake-makers and other beard stroking stuff (sorry Iridescent for hogging your page). Ceoil (talk) 19:44, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

I still haven't got over discovering that Brexit porn is a thing. (Safe for work although you'll get odd looks.) Whoever thought up all those names deserves some kind of award. Anyone think they can get it to FA by 29 March? ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Gladimhere Putitin? It's deffo WP:SQUIRREL territory. Who could AfD that? Simon Adler (talk) 19:59, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Looking at the lead actress's oeuvre there are some very impressive titles there: The Great British Bonk Off, Sherlock Bones, Friends With Benefits Street, The Iron Ladygarden (and The Iron Ladygarden II: The Fucklands War) and Cum Dine With Me. They obviously had got bored with atrocious puns by the time they got to Double Penetration and Hard Anal Fucking for Free Taxi Ride. I'm also extremely taken with the porn actress in the credits called "Lydia Lunchbox". I can't imagine many of the target audience would get an 80s no-wave reference. ‑ Iridescent 20:10, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

I showed this to my wife, her only comment was "well we're all getting fucked anyway"... Quite. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:18, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

British food is weird, and so is apparently British porn. Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:34, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

British food is an acquired taste as most of the best-tasting dishes look like amorphous brown lumps. I will still never be convinced that jellied eels, crappit heid or tikka masala are genuinely food for humans rather than cats, but such things as beef cawl, rhubarb crumble, full English or haggis are things of wonder. ‑ Iridescent 09:50, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

I had though you were cool, but "The Fucklands War"?? - its commonly known that Lunchbox had lost her shit by this time and The Fucklands War was a poor and populist driven attempt the recapture the glories of "World Wank II". I expect better of so-called connoisseurs of smut. Ceoil (talk) 20:21, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Another bonus point for whoever though of Only Fools and Arses and Poon Raider. Although I'm quite taken with the simplicity of Fuck the Librarians, who I think were the support act to Electrafixion at the Town & Country II in the mid-90s. ‑ Iridescent 20:34, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

You are the only person I've heard mention Electrafixion in polite company. I was always more about Sergeant and the legendary and almighty acid casualty de Freitas, and have a weakness for the neglected Reverberation (album) (ie sans McCulloch), which blew Cork (incl. me) away at Sir Henery's in I think 1989. Although when I rememeber now, there didnt offer much that night in pun based porn, the feckers. Ceoil (talk) 20:42, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

I never had an issue with Electrafixion—they were in the artwank rut, but it was the time of Peak REM and Peak KLF and everyone was either artwank or Britpop. Whisper it quietly but E&theB never did anything for me. ‑ Iridescent 20:52, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

When we wander around looking at ancient and monumental megaliths with Cope's "modern antiquarian" in hand, which is often, the strangeness often calls to mind "Bring on The Dancing Horses", which is equally ancient, and equally mind blowing. Other than that I only like bits and pieces song wise from them, but their sound amazes: Sergeant was an important precursor to Kevin Shields and even stuff like this. Ceoil (talk) 21:05, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Dig out Y Dydd Olaf by Gwenno Saunders if you haven't already, which gets that balance of etherial and tinny 80s synth just right. The fact that the lyrics are incomprehensible (a mix of Welsh and Cornish) isn't a drawback—if anything it's probably an improvement as when you look at them in translation they're irredeemably trite. It's difficult to believe that either she or Rose Elinor Dougall were once in possibly the cheesiest act ever to walk the earth. (Before anyone complains, I don't consider the cheesiness a bad thing. Some of the Pipettes's material was fantastic, but the jump from this to this and this makes the difference between Scott Walker's first and last albums look minor.) ‑ Iridescent 00:02, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Its not often these days I am blown away, but this. And only just catching up. Initial thought on listening to two vids so far are Billy ze Kick and [Iechyd Da for the psychedelia and sheer joy. If I was to go deep I would recommend White noise. Ceoil (talk) 00:57, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

And to top things off, "Y Dydd Olaf" translates as "The Final Day" which has a decent claim to be the best track ever to come out of the original post-punk scene. (Gwenno Saunders's album was a tribute to a 1976 Welsh-language novel, and the YMGs were from Cardiff; I have no idea if the YMGs song was also a tribute to the book or if it was just a generic cold war paranoia piece.) ‑ Iridescent 09:24, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Cold war paranoia pieces are not unheard of from the time....a favourite [4] from an elder statesman. The line "You say you're self sufficient, but you don't dig your own coal" is very strikingly put, and very good and very bad for many, many reasons. Still, I give points for the rather chilling and blunt "it's hard to talk to enemies, we are enemies"; harsh and admirable words from a man in a wheelchair. ps, to continue the food based theme, the keyboards on the latter song are very evocative in the few hours post mushrooms. Ceoil (talk) 00:23, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

In the spirit of the season, have the only decent Christmas song ever recorded (although as a gift to Martinevans123 just going to put this here). ‑ Iridescent 07:42, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

A Christmas classic. Eternally grateful. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:39, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

How did a simple Christmas card lead to “Fuck the Librarians”? Not that it’s a bad thing to do. Kafka Liz (talk) 03:03, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

The same way the next thread up got from an incoherent death threat against me to the symbolism of pinecones in Christian iconography, and someone mistagging a file for deletion got to whether lions can understand the purpose of firearms. Threads on this talkpage tend to meander. ‑ Iridescent 09:24, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Coming to this late (possibly unfortunate terminology in view of some comments above), but I couldn't let the vile slur on such a fine ethnic London food as jellied eels go unchallenged. Jimfbleak - talk to me? 13:59, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Jellied eels

Bubble & squeak

Pie, mash and liquor

Devilled kidneys

For those unfamiliar with London's gifts to world cuisine, here's a handy guide. None tastes quite as good as it looks. Britain has some fine regional culinary traditions but London's traditional specialties aren't them. ‑ Iridescent 16:02, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

They honestly all look like puke. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:18, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, pie n mash is the fucking bollocks mate. ——SerialNumber54129 16:24, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Laverbread

Chicken tikka masala

Kedgeree

Stargazy pie

In fairness, some other UK regional specialties look worse. Laverbread, chicken tikka masala and kedgeree all look like they've passed through a dog before being served. (Laverbread and kedgeree are actually delicious; chicken tikka masala I could happily never eat again but it's probably the most popular of all the traditional British dishes.) The foulest-looking traditional English dish, beyond any dispute, is stargazy pie.

While on the topic of both Gwenno Saunders and of cultural differences between Britain and America, just going to leave this here. For those who don't want to sit through the song, lyrics here. Note that this was a song released by a band explicitly targeted at schoolchildren and marketed as wholesome. ‑ Iridescent 16:37, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

For the benefit of the uneducated masses, the "liquor" in pie, mash and liquor is a thin sauce made with the cooking liquid from the stewed eels also served in the traditional (and, sadly, almost extinct) pie and eel shop. I feel that Iridescent has done God's gift to the East End a disservice by failing to point out that the nonpareil of this cuisine is actually pies, eels, mash and liquor, not the emasculated triple Iridescent serves us. Oh for the days when you could buy your eels live from the fishmonger too... Jimfbleak - talk to me? 06:38, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

I can't fully interpret this post until I know whether or not pies should read piss and triple should read tripe. EEng 22:25, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Cockneys: The eel's only natural predator  :) ——SerialNumber54129 16:37, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

'ere matey, me ol' china.... I 'ad that Viktor Orbán in the back of me hovercraft Uber cab the uvver night.... Nigel Farage and chips 123 (talk) 22:43, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Tripe

Thanks to E for reminding be of another fine London dish best stewed with onions. A beautiful thing Jimfbleak - talk to me? 07:00, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

I can honestly say I've never once seen tripe on sale in London outside of Polski Skleps and the kind of market stalls that have giant jars filled with chicken feet; in fact I'm not sure I've ever seen it south of Birmingham. I'd consider eating tripe, and especially tripe & onions, as stereotypically northern as rugby league, outside toilets, white pudding or talking to strangers on buses. ‑ Iridescent 21:38, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Once you've had your fill of all that posh food on Main Street, maybe you'll fancy something a bit more basic from Kingston? The Human Riff 123 (talk) 21:50, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

There's still tripe to be had in St John's market in Liverpool, but even here it's becoming increasingly uncommon. And though I like tripe, I don't much like the smell in that market. And yes, very Northern - I feel naked eating it without my flat cap on. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:06, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

A very happy Christmas and New Year to you!
May 2019 bring you joy, happiness – and no trolls or vandals! All the best Gavin / SchroCat (talk) 21:36, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

And the same to you… ‑ Iridescent 23:28, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Notice

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/GiantSnowman. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GiantSnowman/Evidence. Please add your evidence by December 31, 2018, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GiantSnowman/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Bradv🍁 21:39, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, that's not gonna happen; I'm heartily sick of this new bureaucratic fad the latest iterations of Arbcom have adopted in which all the evidence submitted at WP:ARC is deemed to no longer exist once the case has opened and everyone is expected to say the exact same thing for a second time on the evidence page. I refuse to believe that even the most dimwitted arb is incapable of realising that the material at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GiantSnowman is discussion relating to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GiantSnowman. ‑ Iridescent 21:52, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Are we expected to vote on that particular accolade? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:59, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

It's harder than you'd think to pick a winner. ‑ Iridescent 22:05, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

I'm perfectly prepared to wait a reasonable length of time. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:09, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

For what it's worth, this particular dimwitted arb recently wrote this motion to avoid exactly that kind of unneeded repetition, not that anyone noticed. As a parting gift, perhaps I can suggest that this become a habit. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:56, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Watch it, NYB. Personal attacks are a no-no, even on yourself. EEng 23:07, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Cool beenz. I'm so dimwitted I never even noticed. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:01, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

@NYB: In light of this, I assume your colleagues haven't accepted your gift. ‑ Iridescent 23:04, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

UGH. Filing electrons for the sake of filing electrons.... don't get me started. Ealdgyth - Talk 00:26, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Happy Saturnalia

		Happy Saturnalia
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and troll-free. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:59, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

And the same to you! ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Merry

		Happy Christmas!
		Hello Iridescent, Early in A Child's Christmas in Wales the young Dylan and his friend Jim Prothero witness smoke pouring from Jim's home. After the conflagration has been extinguished Dylan writes that Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?" My thanks to you for your efforts to keep the 'pedia readable in case the firemen chose one of our articles :-) Best wishes to you and yours and happy editing in 2019. MarnetteD|Talk 22:52, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Likewise... (I have to admit, whenever I hear the name A Child's Christmas in Wales the first thing it brings to mind is an old Bob Mills routine which would probably be unbroadcastable nowadays for its Taffophobia.) ‑ Iridescent 20:36, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Not a Christmas card - or is it?

We talked about leaving my talk in place in case I die, and like today's particularly, on top "stand for civil rights", and a pictured article that was up for deletion (remembering "your" Selina Rushbrook). - My Christmas greetings - and later new years's - will appear there as well, - no individual "cards". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:56, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

And to you as well. ‑ Iridescent 09:05, 21 December 2018 (UTC) On a less festive note, regarding your 'Despised and rejected' sidebar you do realize that the reason Sagecandor is blocked isn't 'despised and rejected' but because it turned out to be the bad-hand account of an editor playing good-account/bad-account games, and who was still playing the same game with a different sockpuppet as of ten days ago? If he wants to contribute constructively to Wikipedia rather than play games disrupting other people's work, his actual account remains unblocked.

My understanding is that he was socking as Sagecandor to evade his topic ban on political biographies (and while his Cirt account is unblocked, that is only because he hasn't used it for editing in a long while, and Bbb will indef block it if he does resume editing there). Galobtter (pingó mió) 09:17, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) This from the blocking admin suggests that if they do resume editing with it...it won't be for very long. ——SerialNumber54129 09:21, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

I'll admit, I haven't looked into it in that much detail; my main reaction when I saw the case was one of surprise, as I remember Cirt as an all-round good editor whose only real problem was a tendency to be overenthusiastic when it came to political causes, whereas Sagecandor was a complete dick with whom my sole interaction was when I caught him faking a source. My main point—that SC isn't someone who's been unfairly cast into the wilderness by Wikipedia's unfeeling bureaucracy, but a net negative by any possible definition who was correctly kicked out for refusing to follow our rules—still stands. ‑ Iridescent 09:46, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Funerary monuments

Not mentioned in our article on Alfred Gilbert, but I came across this account of the history of a funerary monument from the Liverpool Museums, and thought you might appreciate it: Macloghlin funerary monument. I stumbled across this while looking for instances of the phrase 'Mors Janua Vitae' on Wikipedia (after seeing it on the grave of Elsie Inglis in a documentary on the Scottish Women's Hospitals). Amazing where looking something up can take you! Carcharoth (talk) 13:05, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

On the subject of curious funerary monuments

The Walker Art Gallery might have a dubious curation policy (with the exception of Lady Lever, Liverpool Museums has a tendency to shunt actually interesting things out of view to make way for those things they think deserve more attention), but Liverpool Museums's websites are uniformly excellent. (Unlike a certain other set of Victorian museums whose current management think they're cooler than they actually are, whose website has now taken to ripping off Wikipedia verbatim.)

On the topic of curious funerary sculptures, have Captain Henry Surtees Bowes Watson Lowndes, who had the (mis)fortune to be present for both the Fall of Sebastopol and the Indian Mutiny, and died just three years short of seeing the outbreak of the First World War. Beckenham Cemetery is deeply obscure but is well worth a visit if you're ever in the area (the tram runs around its boundary, so both Birkbeck station and Harrington Road tram stop will set you off at the gate); it has a real mix of oddities,including the tomb of toilet guru Thomas Crapper, VC winner George Evans, and Frank Bourne, the last survivor of Rorke's Drift (who lived to see VE-Day!). ‑ Iridescent 13:30, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Heh. Interesting examples. I see George Evans (VC) has a picture of the grave before it was restored. Am wondering how to include that without overwhelming the article. I copied the image categories over, though some may not be that useful. Some of these individuals with more than one memorial, you can start a category just for them. Two image might not be enough, though that is the best way of linking the images. I also added notes, and even did this! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 14:18, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

The {{multiple image}} template is your friend. As with most of these gravestone photos, I just shoved them onto Commons en masse—I have neither the time nor the inclination to manually sort through and categorise 7000 photographs, especially since many of them are just illustrative examples of particular styles and not of people who are notable in Wikipedia terms. ‑ Iridescent 14:56, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

	Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
	Hi Iridescent, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy and Prosperous New Year, Thanks for all your help and thanks for all your contributions to the 'pedia,    –Davey2010 Merry Christmas / Happy New Year 14:40, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Best wishes

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing everybody a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Adoration of the Shepherds (Cariani) is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 10:26, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Adoration of the Cabal would be rather apposite :) ——SerialNumber54129 11:14, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda

Martinevans123 ^{(Santa's Hard Brexit Grotto)} ... sends you ...

... warmest seasonal wishes for ...... Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda.

---

Merry Christmas Baby... and hoping that you have a good New Year  !!

Ac yr un peth i chi… ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

... mwynhau. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:23, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

GZM could be awful but when they got the formula right there was nothing quite like it—like Gogol Bordello without the artwank twattery. ‑ Iridescent 17:31, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

That's the most surprising comparison I've ever seen. I see Category:Psychedelic pop music groups from Camarthen is still empty, alas. But I'll have you know that some of us can't survive without a bit of artwank twattery now and then. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:02, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

"Personally I love East European cod"

A quick dip into Category:People from Carmarthenshire to see if I can turn that red link blue yielded nothing (unless you'll accept Cate Le Bon, who Wikipedia claims is psych but I certainly wouldn't), but did lead me to what may be the most ridiculously blatant PR puff-piece about a non-notable figure masquerading as a Wikipedia article I've ever seen. (I stick by my GB/GZM comparison. Listen to the two side by side and filter out the cod-East European stuff; they both have that same "I wonder what would happen if Ut and HMHB got together?" style down pat.) ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I see what you mean about Kate McGill. Could do with a bit of attention. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:29, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Austral season's greetings

	Austral season's greetings
	Tuck into this! We've made about three of these in the last few days for various festivities. Supermarkets are stuffed with cheap berries. Season's greetings! Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 22:17, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

If that's what they eat, I think we've solved the mystery of why, despite being wealthier and having a healthier lifestyle, Aussies have a lower life expectancy than Brits. ‑ Iridescent 17:05, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Redrose64 🌹 (talk) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas6}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

--Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:30, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

And to you ‑ Iridescent 17:03, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry holidays

Hello Iridescent: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:43, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

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

I get the burning house, the dead ski-er, and the guy about to beat some kids with a stick, but what's the significance of the horse-and-buggy? ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Ya'll need to ask Northamerica1000. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:08, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Iridescent,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Davidgoodheart (talk) 00:45, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

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

And the same to you ‑ Iridescent 19:34, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Giant Snowman and NFOOTY

I don't want to clutter up the case, but in regards to your comments about the crap that goes on in the lower realms of football....isn't that really an indication that our threshold for notability on football-related articles is far too low? We're wasting our time fighting these battles because we've sunk below the level of true notability, whatever that is. Thanks for listening.Jacona (talk) 12:41, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, we wouldn't need to worry as much about bad stats/updating stats if we didn't have football "biographies" that are basically entries in a database. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:23, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

@Jacona, in my view WP:NFOOTY shouldn't exist and footballers should be subject to the same "the onus is on the article's author to demonstrate the non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent, reliable sources" test as anywhere else. Someone who's never played at international level or in a fully professional league can still be unquestionably notable in Wikipedia terms (someone who scores twenty goals in a match, the striker for the plucky non-league team who scored the goal that put Arsenal out of the FA Cup, the goalie who played the last 30 minutes with a broken leg because his team had used up all their subs and he didn't want to let the side down, the guy whose goal celebration is to rip off his shorts and run a lap of the pitch with his meat-and-two-veg flapping in the breeze); someone who unquestionably meets WP:NFOOTY can be completely non-notable in Wikipedia terms (someone who made a single international appearance for Micronesia in a dead-rubber scoreless draw with Kiribati, the teenager who was brought on for the final three minutes of the last game of the season in the German 3. Liga because his manager wanted to blood him, who then injured his knee and never played again, and to be brutally honest about 90% of women's football).

I get why these guidelines were introduced—without them we'd have endless squabbles about whether each individual player is notable enough—but they're not working. The discussion that created that guideline took place at a time when Wikipedia was a third of the size it is now, and football coverage was largely focused on top-level leagues and the lower leagues of major footballing countries. As such, it was reasonable to assume that provided one could demonstrate that someone had made a league appearance for Midtable United, there would be at minimum a biography of him in the local paper and an article about him in The League Paper, that the absence of them as sources was just an artefact of nobody having bothered to dig it out yet, and that consequently we should work on the assumption that professional footballers in professional leagues are always notable. Unfortunately, some people have understood this to mean "every person who has ever played in a professional league must have a biography on Wikipedia", and as a consequence we've acquired a huge stack of unread and unmaintained but undeletable microstub biographies.

As it's not practical to watch them all, the proliferation of microstubs and unwatched articles means the handful of admins who try to prevent the football project degenerating completely end up having to revert en masse when they see something problematic going on. In my opinion GiantSnowman wasn't really to blame for the current fuckup; he found himself in a position where he was trying to enforce two mutually contradictory policies, had to choose whether WP:BLP trumps WP:ADMINACCT and WP:BOTPOL, and in good faith made what turned out to be the wrong call. This case is going almost certainly going to end in GS's desysop or being banned from reverting (which in the context of the work he does, may as well be an indefinite block, since it's impossible to keep biographies clean without reverting), as the usual crowd of Defenders of the Wiki Against the Evil Admin Cabal have all turned up baying for his head and I doubt the incoming committee will have the nerve for their very first action to be standing up to them and guaranteeing they spend the next two years reading hit-pieces against themselves in the Signpost (which in its most recent incarnations has abandoned any pretence at impartiality and become the de facto mouthpiece of the "the WMF are stifling my rights and the admins are their stooges except for those admins who are my friends who are all paragons of virtue!" bell-ends who lost their spiritual home when the old Wikipedia Review closed).

If it's any consolation, the situation is even worse with cricketers. The cricket project has the same "every professional is notable" and the same "our local consensus trumps Wikipedia's normal notability rules and we'll fight anyone who tries to demand notability be demonstrated" mentality; unfortunately, the English cricket archives at Lord's were destroyed in a fire in 1825, meaning we have a huge stacks of biographies from before that date like Clifton (1817 cricketer) where we literally know no information at all—not even the person's name—but can't delete them "Because WP:NCRIC".

(Pinging Dweller, Ymblanter and The Rambling Man, as the three people I most often see trying to stop the football articles degenerating into complete gray goo, for their thoughts.) ‑ Iridescent 17:44, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't edit football but I handle too many football bios at AfC so I've got a lot of football pages on watchlist. This two games in a fully professional team business qualifies way to many players for bios. Lots of football players don't attract signifocant coverage. Contrast to people that built up a large successful business over many yeats genrating all kinds of press, yet it is almost impossible to get them an article that is not quicky labeled as spam. People need to realize that being a football player is a busiess. The players need attention to get hired and make more money, even more than business founders do generally.

I disagree with your evidence at the GS case. Football is not a special topic. Football is a "fan topic" like music, movies, celebs, crypto, and may others. All fan topics attract similar kinds of fan edits. Generally someone sees a fact on TV and rushes to edit the page or reads the page and sees something they "know" is wrong so they fix it. We should not be suspending our general editing policies to accommodate how a few people want to manage football. Legacypac (talk) 16:40, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

No, football is unique on Wikipedia. Most pop-culture topics—film, music, sport, visual arts—are specific to a particular culture or region; what makes football a special case is both that its coverage is fairly evenly spread worldwide, and that the players tend to move freely around the world and (outside players in the top flights of the big four leagues and PSG) only tend to get coverage in the media of the countries in which they're currently playing. Consequently, to write a biography of Nam Tae-hee in detail would require the author to be able to read—and to access—Korean, English, French and Arabic sources; good luck finding someone who can fact-check that. ‑ Iridescent 17:44, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

I didn't think it was held that "every listed building in England is notable" - it used not to be, and should not be. Grade 1 and probably Grade 2-star are different, but there are not so many of these. What has been defended is that every Dutch Rijksmonument is notable - there's a couple of screens-full on some aged planks over a small irrigation ditch somewhere. And of course all those 1940s gas stations and 1840s brick boxes on American official listings. Johnbod (talk) 18:28, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

@Johnbod it was unilaterally changed in 2012, to slip it in; it now reads Artificial geographical features that are officially assigned the status of cultural heritage or national heritage, or of any other protected status on a national level and which verifiable information beyond simple statistics are available are presumed to be notable (my emphasis). In my experience this has consistently been interpreted to mean "any article on a listed structure is undeletable", which is why Wikipedia is now graced by heaps of untouchable drivel like 7 & 9 Bounds Green Road, Ye Olde Dolphin Inne and 128 New King's Road. ‑ Iridescent 18:45, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

(adding) This isn't just a UK problem, although the English prediliction for dishing out listed building status to assorted fences and signposts makes it particularly problematic in England. See Category:Stub-Class National Register of Historic Places articles if you want reassurance that this kind of undeletable stub crapflood affects the US as well. ‑ Iridescent 18:52, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Ye Olde Dolphin Inne is not crapflood drivel, it's Grade II listed!! (...and it's haunted!! so there) Martinevans123 (talk) 18:54, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Looking more closely at that took me—by way of Category:National Inventory Pubs—to Boleyn Tavern, which has now supplanted Radcliffe & Maconie as my new favourite unintentionally hilarious Wikipedia article. ‑ Iridescent 18:58, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Gandhi drinking Cream soda?? What's not to love! Martinevans123 (talk) 19:01, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

The FIFA PR-piece masquerading as a "source" is an equally rich vein of comedy gold. ("Sadly, there is no evidence proving that Gandhi ever turned out himself for any of the teams or took on any coaching roles".) ‑ Iridescent 19:15, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Nce pub, though some of the antics we used to get up to there would have fallen slightly foul of his doctrine of peaceful protest  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 19:20, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

The Old Dolphin is one of the oldest pubs in the country. With proper research, there's a lot more that could be said about that. I agree we don't need an article on every listed building, but a lot of them will be notable, and half a million is only about 3% of all the buildings in England (probably including most of its churches, which will have enough coverage elsewhere to sustain an article). Certainly anything grade I or II* (the top <10% of the 3%) could justify an article. I'd rather not have hundreds of three-sentence articles about each identical house on a street, but even that would be less problematic than all the microstubs on people who have moved a ball from one place to another. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 19:25, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

"Dolphins are people too, you know." dig it? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:46, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for pinging me. I generally agree with your analysis. In my understanding, WP:GNG is a general policy, and specific criteria (including NFOOTY) should just serve as indicators which articles are likely to be notable because sources exist. Footballers who fail NFOOTY but pass GNG should be (and are already considered as) notable; I have seen cases when an article was kept at AfD if it failed NFOOTY but passed GNG. On the other hand, if a reasonable effort was made to look for sources, and the conclusion was that sources do not exist, the article should be deleted or draftified even if it passes NFOOTY. If a player for instance was not notable, and the sources did notexist, the mere fact that he played one match in a low-level professional league is unlikely to generate plenty of sources. However, I have no idea how it could be implemented.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:41, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Iridescent - thanks for your comments/support. If I get de-mopped or topic banned etc. I'll most likely retire tbh.

Ymblanter - there is plenty of AFD consensus that passing NFOOTBALL but not passing GNG (and not being likely to either) is not sufficient for notability - see eg this and this, which both contain lists of others. GiantSnowman 19:19, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

What complicates matters in that regard, is that any reporting on players is now discounted as "routine coverage" which is using the inital assumption, that a player in x-league will get coverage, therefore it must exist, and turning it into the opposite of its intent. Agathoclea (talk) 19:29, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

<personal opinion> I'd say that "routine coverage" would be along the lines of "Midtable Rovers have signed Carlos Kickaball from Pateadores de Pelota for an undisclosed sum" and "in the 87th minute Carlos Kickaball came on as a substitute for Midtable Rovers, player rating 6.8". "Non routine coverage" would be "In an exclusive interview for the Midtable Echo, Rovers legend Arthur Flattcapp discusses promising youngster Kickaball's bright future" and "Carlos Kickaball speaks of his homesickness and submits a transfer request". As a very rough rule of thumb (for all articles, not just sports), if the entire text of the article could be generated from Wikidata by a bot were Wikidata to be given the appropriate facts and figures, it's probably not an article Wikipedia should be hosting. ‑ Iridescent 19:48, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Seen the ping, TLDR, what's the question? --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 20:13, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

'Does WP:NFOOTY's relatively low bar mean we have so many stubs on marginally notable players that it's impossible to check every change in detail, particularly for players in overseas leagues where the sources are patchy and often not in English, meaning the kind of "revert if you're not sure" action that got GS in trouble is the only way to ensure WP:BLP is enforced, and if so should we consider enforcing the "multiple, independent, non-trivial coverage" criteria more rigorously even though it will mean deleting articles like Ephron Mason-Clark not singling him out, picked at random which will in turn cause bad feeling?' ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

That's several questions in one. Do we have too many stub articles? Yes. Is the solution to delete them? No. The solution is to find more editors and not to chase away those who pop up over the parapet. Does it make BLP impossible to enforce? Not really, we're quite good at serious catching infractions of BLP because we're quite good at catching vandalism generally across the squillions of articles on all topics. Did I answer all thw questions? --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 21:05, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

I guess the root question is "how do we stop this happening again?", since even if GS isn't sanctioned this case will presumably discourage other people from reverting questionable football-related edits. When the NFOOTY guideline (along with many others) was written we had 2.1 million articles and 44127 active editors (47 articles per editor); we now have 5.8 million articles and 30900 active editors (188 articles per editor), and at some point the elastic is going to snap. (None of this is really a conversation for which my talk page is the appropriate place, but it's ended up here as a result of my comments at the GS arb case.) ‑ Iridescent 21:20, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't think the GS case will prevent people doing anything that policy says should be done in football or any other kind of article. I stil don't understand the problem. Give me an example? Happy to discuss this anywhere. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 10:07, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Sidetrack (sic) about rail stations

• Related to several of the things you’ve said, but I’ve personally never gotten why rail stations and roads are probably the most sacrosanct articles on Wikipedia. I don’t consider them particularly harmful and that’s basically my standard for deletion, but they’ve always been in the same boat as the guy who hurt his knee in the Micronesian football match for me: things that have an intense niche following but that no one really cares about outside of that. I’m sure they can meet the GNG, but I personally don’t find that a particularly compelling guideline (the squirrel your cat killed likely meets if taken literally). All that to say, I’m actually curious your thoughts here since rail is your thing. Again, I’m not advocating deletion, just musing that as a practical matter the defunct railway station in middle of nowhere Kansas isn’t any different than the rando footballers in my view. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:43, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Passenger railway stations are inherently notable. Especially for stations that were open before automobiles became widespread, even the most isolated strip-of-concrete station was a key part of the local economy, and in many cases the reason the local community existed in the first place. This is particularly true in North America, where the railroads built stations in open countryside and waited for communities to grow up around them, a process documented fairly accurately in the Little House books—look at a map of the Great Plains or western Canada and you can see that to this day, the population centers are strung out like beads along the former railroad lines.

This is the built-up area of London. Note the long strings of little blobs reaching into the countryside, each representing a town; no point for guessing what's at the centre of each of those little blobs, or why each of those towns exists.

Although the process was most pronounced in the Americas, it also happened in the Old World as well; see Metro-land for the most famous example in England, or look at a map of Asian Russia and see how all the new cities developed in the Soviet era are strung out along the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Even for stations that were built to serve already-existing communities, connection to the railway network was a major event with drastic implications on everything from house prices (as commuters move in), to the makeup of local industries (railroads make bulk shipment economically viable, allowing industries like brickworks, mining and grain processing that aren't viable by road transport, to operate in the area). Where towns have lost their rail connection, losing the connection invariably had a significant impact on the local economy; factories closing, people moving out, a steep drop in tourism for those towns that had a tourist trade.

And all of these economic and cultural impacts are invariably documented; even for places that don't have local newspapers, any station will have been the subject of extensive coverage in both the specialist railway press (for its opening and closing, if nothing else) and in the regional media for its broader impact. When you see stubs like East Hampton station or Poyle Halt railway station it's not because the sources don't exist, it's because nobody has yet bothered to dig the sources out. (Before I started expanding it, Droxford railway station looked like this.)

Where I disagree with the trains project is when it comes to the "one station, one article" policy. In my view, in many cases it's more useful to the readers either to have a single article on all the stations in a town allowing readers to compare and contrast the different services (example), or a single article on all the stations on a particular line allowing readers to see the impact of the route as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected pages (example). This is a battle that's been lost, however. Some of the other trains people (@Slambo, Redrose64, and Mjroots:) might be better able than me to give an opposing view explaining the benefits of stand-alone pages for each station. ‑ Iridescent 16:59, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

I tend to agree, Iridescent. The vast majority of stations should be capable of sustaining a stand-alone article, but it depends on the sources available. Take the stations on the Réseau des Bains de Mer network in France. Few sources (in English at any rate), so they are dealt with in the article on the system. Mjroots (talk) 17:11, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Infermedica

Hi there, I was on holidays recently and by the time I got back here, the article that I published has already been deleted and it seems you pulled the trigger on it. I'd like to rewrite it so it will comply with Wikipedia policies and publish it again - can you please help me access the last version of it? Klim3k 13:28, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Temporarily restored to Draft:Infermedica (and a courtesy notification to User:DGG, as the editor who tagged it as spam, that I've done so). If you're going to restore it to the article space, it at minimum needs to demonstrate significant coverage in multiple, independent, reliable sources (my emphasis), and to be sourced to sources that meet these criteria. Reprinted press releases and coverage of routine announcements don't qualify; basically, we don't care what any article subject or people connected to the article subject say about themselves, we only care about what independent reliable sources have said about any given topic. ‑ Iridescent 16:17, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, I have copied the content from the draft. I also appreciate your feedback about the sources - I will work harder on that matter the next time before I publish the article. Klim3k 16:32, 3 January 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Klim3k (talk • contribs)

May I suggest putting it through the Articles for creation process? That will provide more eyes and thus more feedback, and, once accepted, harder to be deleted. ——SerialNumber54129 16:50, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

DYK for Simeon Monument

On 4 January 2019, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Simeon Monument, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that, upon completion of the Simeon Monument (pictured), a local resident complained that "among the generality of the inhabitants it is called a p****** post"? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Simeon Monument. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Simeon Monument), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Alex Shih (talk) 00:01, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

• Good job on the article. Six stars for you. Newyorkbrad (talk) 14:16, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

• Six out of how many? I'm mildly frustrated at this one, as a topic which ought to be quite interesting turns out to be so boring. ‑ Iridescent 17:04, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

• How so? You beat down the opposition at DYK :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:15, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

• I don't have a problem with TRM raising objections; he can be grumpy but understands that not everyone agrees with him. Conversations with him tend to be along the lines of (1) "I don't think you should do it like that" (2) "I did it like that for a reason, here's why" (3) either "Oh, OK, I see your point" or "I still think it's a problem, how about this third way that addresses both issues". I have no issue with that and don't see it as beating down the opposition; where I have an issue is with the outright trolls like Kevin who make up non-existent issues just to give themselves something to complain about. (You have one of his made-up complaints heading your way next week, incidentally; There is no evidence that he was prosecuted for either crime; prostitutes were not usually arrested in London during this period, and sodomy was pursued in ecclesiastical courts clearly means that you're trying to claim that people committed sodomy in court. ‑ Iridescent 17:35, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Having not read the article or the nomination, I assumed that there would be a WP:CENSORED hue and cry somewhere about the use of asterisks and was mildly disappointed not to find anything (having to be satisfied with the Ultima Thule renaming discussion instead). I should have realised that censoring of that type would never be allowed to happen on Wikipedia, and it is explained here on the talk page (and in the article and at the nomination). Carcharoth (talk) 17:25, 4 January 2019 (UTC) P.S. Wasn't there a thread on your talk page about some church architectural feature that was commonly used for urination? I remember it, but can't find it right now. Maybe it was somewhere else? Carcharoth (talk) 17:33, 4 January 2019 (UTC)