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Archive 5←Archive 8Archive 9Archive 10Archive 11Archive 12→Archive 15

Ariel Ace

Hi, I've started a page on the Ariel Ace, which you may care to peruse. Arrivisto (talk) 12:21, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. I'll have a look. — Brianhe (talk) 19:34, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

why?

why did you undid my editing?Volt60x (talk) 08:54, 4 January 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Volt60x (talk • contribs) 08:28, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Please provide a diff and I'll be happy to explain. Did you read the edit history yet? Brianhe (talk) 08:30, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

ok

ok i'll talk you about it later,sir/mam — Preceding unsigned comment added by Volt60x (talk • contribs) 08:56, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

http://www.peoplegroupsindia.com/profiles/balmiki

Dear sir/mam, peoplegroupofsindia.com is not a blog then why did you undid my citation?,please explainVolt60x (talk) 09:10, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Here is their self description from the About Us page. "There’s not a lot to say about the authors of the profiles except that they are genuinely interested in the people of India. They have spent several years living in India interviewing, collecting and organising this information. Whilst there may be inaccuracies (as many visitors have pointed out) it has been published with the intention to inform only." Anonymous local residents, in other words, writing in a self-created vehicle with no editorial control. Is this not the definition of self published? Brianhe (talk) 17:13, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Seth Andrews

Has been hit with an AfD notification. I saw your work with Matt Dillahunty and figured I would ask if you know of any extra sources to add to Seth's bio to save it from deletion via notability. Thanks. Zero Serenity (talk - contributions) 21:55, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Not right offhand. I found the Dillahunty stuff with a casual Google search. If I happen to come across anything I'll put it on the article's talk page, how's that? — Brianhe (talk) 02:20, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
Anything is helpful. Zero Serenity (talk - contributions) 16:08, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

You've got mail

Hello, Bri. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

--Pine✉ 20:09, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

City of Adelaide (1864)

As you are a previous editor of City of Adelaide (1864), you may be interested in the Style Proposal on Talk:City of Adelaide (1864)
ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 22:12, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Just a little cup to thank you for your contribs to this week's TAFI. Bananasoldier (talk) 23:09, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks so much for the oyster info!

I just wanted to thank you very much for your very helpful message on the Bivalve Project talk page about Ostrea lurida and Ostrea conchaphila. All best wishes, Invertzoo (talk) 00:14, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the recognition. — Brianhe (talk) 18:18, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Ariel Ace

The DYK project (nominate) 20:30, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Squid

Yeah.

"Squid (motorcycle) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia does not have an encyclopedic article for Squid (motorcycle) (search results)."

Figured that if it's so irrelevant not to have a page then it didn't deserve to lead a head. I've read a book about them, not even a chapter of a book.

Then, e.g. were/are all scooter boys hooligans? No. When were they described as squid? Never. Is "hooliganism" culture? Not really. Then streetfighters are a kind of bike not person. And is bag snatching on scooters really a part of "biker culture", or petty crime?

The template was a total mess of extremely minor and disconnected references.

What is its purpose? Are bikers different from motorcyclists? What defines "biker culture" as different from motorcycling? - Salty Batter — Preceding unsigned comment added by Salty Batter (talk • contribs) 00:14, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Biker gangs

I think "Biker gang" is a highly problematic term specifically because it has and is clearly being used by the popular press and media in some kind of well coordinated or centralized campaign. The idea has been widely established in public's mind, a public which probably knows or understands very little about motorcycling and motorcyclists generally, and it is being used too inaccurately. It's obviously spilled over into the Wikipedia too. Dennis hints at this when he mentioned some PR campaign he thinks he perceives amongst motorcycle clubs he probably has no experience of.

So has the use of the word gang even and its meaning is changing too.

I am a native English speaker. When I grew up, gang just meant an informal group of individuals. Now it carried all sorts of organized criminal connotations. Especially when it comes to biker gangs. Off my cuff as I type, it's become a sort of code for criminal ventures who happen also to ride motorcycles sometimes.

Are all clubs gangs? Clearly not. Are all members of all clubs criminal gang members? Clearly not. Are the BRMC the representation of criminal biker gang? Clearly not ... they are complete jokes by today's standards, an embarrassing parody even by 1950s standards.

Therefore it is inaccurate and misleading description. They are mob of youngsters. There is no hierarchy and structure as you would find in a mafia like organisation. We need to clarify the difference.

Incidentally, I have a copy of Idiots Guide and re-read. It is a work of humor, not serious.

It's also widely inaccurate which raises in my mind questions about the judgement and motivation of anyone championing it as a reliable source of information as Bratland, eg

"Throughout the 1950s, motorcycling remained the domain of extreme gearheads and one-percenters (outlaws). Nice people did not ride a bike. Nice people didn’t even associate with those who did ride, whether they were upstanding members of the American Motorcycle Association (AMA) or hardcore outlaws.

The reason only gearheads owned motorcycles back then was because you had to be a gearhead to own one. There was nothing easy about riding a bike. Even starting the beast was a traumatic experience in those preelectric-start days."''

WTF? Seriously? Do I need to answer that? The authors clearly know nothing about the history. --Salty Batter (talk) 17:54, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

You've been shown at least a dozen sources which state explicitly that the BRMC was a Hollywood's representation of what the 'square' public thought a "biker gang" was in 1953. No source, and no Wikipedia article, and no editor, has ever said that calling the BRMC a gang is in any way the same as calling the Hells Angels of 2015 a gang. The Hells Angels are a criminal gang, but for reasons that have nothing to do with a 1953 movie. It makes absolutely no sense to try to address the public's opinion about outlaw motorcycle clubs of today, some of which have been called criminal organizations by law enforcement agencies, with what film experts say was portrayed in The Wild One. The connection between the film and the actual clubs is that the film influenced both the public's imagination, and led some motorcyclists to imitate what they saw in the film, stylistically.

If you want to see a half dozen other books which corroborate what the Idiot's Guide said in your quotes above, I can cite them. This pattern of insisting that dozens of sources are wrong is unhelpful to editing Wikipedia, and you will not win the support of many editors if you want to change every article you see to conform to an opinon that is not shared by the majority of sources. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:31, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Salty, I would be intrigued to bring the "well coordinated or centralized campaign" into the article on motorcycling culture. Where can we find out more about this? The campaigns I'm aware of are Honda's Cub marketing, "you meet the nicest people", and to some extent Harley's reverse marketing of themselves as a product for edgy, outlaw customers when in fact they are selling a high-priced recreational consumer good called "palatable, family friendly, and marketable" by one researcher (see Motorcycle hooliganism#Demographics and Cult brand#Harley-Davidson). Can we take this to one of the article talkpages to continue? Please notify me (us) where you care to post when you do. — Brianhe (talk) 02:37, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, page just crashed and I lost my reply to you. Don't have enough time to re-write it.
How do you define or differentiate a group of individuals and a gang?
Do you accept the use of the word in recent years has become more politicized?
Most of the references have been written (for and by Idiots) after the period I was mentioning when the concept of OMGs for OMCs was popularized by LEOs. It's big business for them too. --Salty Batter (talk) 05:32, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Let's continue at talk:Motorcycle club if you think there are issues that were not considered in the conversations there going back several years. Note talk:Motorcycle club/Archive 2 especially. Brianhe (talk) 05:41, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Signpost!

Thank you. Pendright (talk) 00:44, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Museum of Death

Allen3 talk 00:27, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Triumph Owners' Motor Cycle Club membership figures

Hi. I noticed your edit regarding providing a date for the figures - it's a good compromise. I'm assuming you took the date from the reference cited. Unfortunately the reference was originally put in place to cite a previous figure of 4,300. The figure of 4,900 was updated by 86.41.123.235 on 12:44, 30 December 2012. Up to you how you want to handle it. Wyrm (talk) 21:16, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll revise it down to match the source. — Brianhe (talk) 21:28, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 1

Hi! Thank you for subscribing to the WikiProject X Newsletter. For our first issue...

Has WikiProject X changed the world yet? No.

We opened up shop last month and announced our existence to the world. Our first phase is the "research" phase, consisting mostly of reading and listening. We set up our landing page and started collecting stories. So far, 28 stories have been shared about WikiProjects, describing a variety of experiences across numerous WikiProjects. A recurring story involves a WikiProject that starts off strong but has trouble continuing to stay active. Most people describe using WikiProjects as a way to get feedback from other editors. Some quotes:

  • "Working on requested articles, utilising the reliable sources section, and having an active WikiProject to ask questions in really helped me learn how to edit Wikipedia and looking back I don't know how long I would have stayed editing without that project." – Sam Walton on WikiProject Video Games
  • "I believe that the main problem of the Wikiprojects is that they are complicated to use. There should be a a much simpler way to check what do do, what needs to be improved etc." – Tetra quark
  • "In the late 2000s, WikiProject Film tried to emulate WP:MILHIST in having coordinators and elections. Unfortunately, this was not sustainable and ultimately fell apart." – Erik

Of course, these are just anecdotes. While they demonstrate what is possible, they do not necessarily explain what is typical. We will be using this information in conjunction with a quantitative analysis of WikiProjects, as documented on Meta. Particularly, we are interested in the measurement of WikiProject activity as it relates to overall editing in that WikiProject's subject area.

We also have 50 people and projects signed up for pilot testing, which is an excellent start! (An important caveat: one person volunteering a WikiProject does not mean the WikiProject as a whole is interested; just that there is at least one person, which is a start.)

While carrying out our research, we are documenting the problems with WikiProjects and our ideas for making WikiProjects better. Some ideas include better integration of existing tools into WikiProjects, recommendations of WikiProjects for people to join, and improved coordination with Articles for Creation. These are just ideas that may or may not make it to the design phase; we will see. We are also working with WikiProject Council to improve the directory of WikiProjects, with the goal of a reliable, self-updating WikiProject directory. Stay tuned! If you have any ideas, you are welcome to leave a note on our talk page.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing!

– Harej 17:21, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Road Runners Motorcycle Club

The article Road Runners Motorcycle Club has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

The coverage (references, external links, etc.) does not seem sufficient to justify this article passing Wikipedia:General notability guideline and the more detailed Wikipedia:Notability (organizations) requirement. If you disagree and deprod this, please explain how it meets them on the talk page in the form of "This article meets criteria A and B because..." and ping me back. Thank you,

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 16:07, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks!

Hi Brianhe. Thanks so much for joining us at the critical edit-a-thon this past weekend and for helping a newish Wikipedian to work through some of the struggles with sources and notability. Thanks for being a good sport, too, re: feminism and the deleted HCDE article. :) --Mssemantics (talk) 16:58, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

It was a pleasure to meet the established Wikipedians like you, and to welcome the new ones. — Brianhe (talk) 05:55, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

New to Wikipedia

I'm really sorry. Obviously, I'm new. Just trying to update the page with the most accurate information about the company. I'm not trying to be promotional, just factual. I thought by noting that I work for Papillon that I was being transparent. I'm sorry I didn't note that properly. I appreciate the links and I will get more familiar with the guidelines before I edit anything again. Thank you, --Mar-cb2000 (talk) 01:36, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:All Wave logo.gif

⚠
⚠

Thanks for uploading File:All Wave logo.gif. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. Stefan2 (talk) 23:17, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 2

For this month's issue...

Making sense of a lot of data.

Work on our prototype will begin imminently. In the meantime, we have to understand what exactly we're working with. To this end, we generated a list of 71 WikiProjects, based on those brought up on our Stories page and those who had signed up for pilot testing. For those projects where people told stories, we coded statements within those stories to figure out what trends there were in these stories. This approach allowed us to figure out what Wikipedians thought of WikiProjects in a very organic way, with very little by way of a structure. (Compare this to a structured interview, where specific questions are asked and answered.) This analysis was done on 29 stories. Codes were generally classified as "benefits" (positive contributions made by a WikiProject to the editing experience) and "obstacles" (issues posed by WikiProjects, broadly speaking). Codes were generated as I went along, ensuring that codes were as close to the original data as possible. Duplicate appearances of a code for a given WikiProject were removed.

We found 52 "benefit" statements encoded and 34 "obstacle" statements. The most common benefit statement referring to the project's active discussion and participation, followed by statements referring to a project's capacity to guide editor activity, while the most common obstacles made reference to low participation and significant burdens on the part of the project maintainers and leaders. This gives us a sense of WikiProjects' big strength: they bring people together, and can be frustrating to editors when they fail to do so. Meanwhile, it is indeed very difficult to bring editors together on a common interest; in the absence of a highly motivated core of organizers, the technical infrastructure simply isn't there.

We wanted to pair this qualitative study with quantitative analysis of a WikiProject and its "universe" of pages, discussions, templates, and categories. To this end I wrote a script called ProjAnalysis which will, for a given WikiProject page (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Star Trek) and WikiProject talk-page tag (e.g. Template:WikiProject Star Trek), will give you a list of usernames of people who edited within the WikiProject's space (the project page itself, its talk page, and subpages), and within the WikiProject's scope (the pages tagged by that WikiProject, excluding the WikiProject space pages). The output is an exhaustive list of usernames. We ran the script to analyze our test batch of WikiProjects for edits between March 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015, and we subjected them to further analysis to only include those who made 10+ edits to pages in the projects' scope, those who made 4+ edits to the projects' space, and those who made 10+ edits to pages in scope but not 4+ edits to pages in the projects' space. This latter metric gives us an idea of who is active in a certain subject area of Wikipedia, yet who isn't actively engaging on the WikiProject's pages. This information will help us prioritize WikiProjects for pilot testing, and the ProjAnalysis script in general may have future life as an application that can be used by Wikipedians to learn about who is in their community.

Complementing the above two studies are a design analysis, which summarizes the structure of the different WikiProject spaces in our test batch, and the comprehensive census of bots and tools used to maintain WikiProjects, which will be finished soon. With all of this information, we will have a game plan in place! We hope to begin working with specific WikiProjects soon.

As a couple of asides...

  • Database Reports has existed for several years on Wikipedia to the satisfaction of many, but many of the reports stopped running when the Toolserver was shut off in 2014. However, there is good news: the weekly New WikiProjects and WikiProjects by Changes reports are back, with potential future reports in the future.
  • WikiProject X has an outpost on Wikidata! Check it out. It's not widely publicized, but we are interested in using Wikidata as a potential repository for metadata about WikiProjects, especially for WikiProjects that exist on multiple Wikimedia projects and language editions.

That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing! If you have any questions or comments, please share them with us.

Harej (talk) 01:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Gerechtigkeitsspirale has been nominated for Did You Know

Thanks and appreciated

Hi Brianhe, thank a lot for your effort to improve the first article I wrote (Jeffrey Polnaja). I speak Indonesian and English. I am happy if I can contribute article to Wikipedia. Let me know if you need to translate articles from Indonesian to English. Hopefully, I can do a favour. Many thanks, cheers !--AdvPrima (talk) 22:19, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

You are welcome. Will let you know if a translation need comes up. Brianhe (talk) 22:50, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Precious again

motorcycles
Thank you for quality articles for project Motorcycling, such as Curtiss V-8 motorcycle, for dedicated reviewing, and for winning an award such as "Most understandable online friend", - you are an awesome Wikipedian!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:04, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Two years ago, you were the 448th recipient of my PumpkinSky Prize, - thank your also for poetic translation regarding justice - righteousness - equity - rectitude - right living, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:23, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Rogue Beard Beer

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:02, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 3

Greetings! For this month's issue...

We have demos!

After a lengthy research and design process, we decided for WikiProject X to focus on two things:

  • A WikiProject workflow that focuses on action items: discussions you can participate in and tasks you can perform to improve the encyclopedia; and
  • An automatically updating WikiProject directory that gives you lists of users participating in the WikiProject and editing in that subject area.

We have a live demonstration of the new WikiProject workflow at WikiProject Women in Technology, a brand new WikiProject that was set up as an adjunct to a related edit-a-thon in Washington, DC. The goal is to surface action items for editors, and we intend on doing that through automatically updated working lists. We are looking into using SuggestBot to generate lists of outstanding tasks, and we are looking into additional options for automatic worklist generation. This takes the burden off of WikiProject editors to generate these worklists, though there is also a "requests" section for Wikipedians to make individual requests. (As of writing, these automated lists are not yet live, so you will see a blank space under "edit articles" on the demo WikiProject. Sorry about that!) I invite you to check out the WikiProject and leave feedback on WikiProject X's talk page.

Once the demo is sufficiently developed, we will be working on a limited deployment on our pilot WikiProjects. We have selected five for the first round of testing based on the highest potential for impact and will scale up from there.

While a re-designed WikiProject experience is much needed, that alone isn't enough. A WikiProject isn't any good if people have no way of discovering it. This is why we are also developing an automatically updated WikiProject directory. This directory will surface project-related metrics, including a count of active WikiProject participants and of active editors in that project's subject area. The purpose of these metrics is to highlight how active the WikiProject is at the given point of time, but also to highlight that project's potential for success. The directory is not yet live but there is a demonstration featuring a sampling of WikiProjects.

Each directory entry will link to a WikiProject description page which automatically list the active WikiProject participants and subject-area article editors. This allows Wikipedians to find each other based on the areas they are interested in, and this information can be used to revive a WikiProject, start a new one, or even for some other purpose. These description pages are not online yet, but they will use this template, if you want to get a feel of what they will look like.

We need volunteers!

WikiProject X is a huge undertaking, and we need volunteers to support our efforts, including testers and coders. Check out our volunteer portal and see what you can do to help us!

As an aside...

Wouldn't it be cool if lists of requested articles could not only be integrated directly with WikiProjects, but also shared between WikiProjects? Well, we got the crazy idea of having experimental software feature Flow deployed (on a totally experimental basis) on the new Article Request Workshop, which seeks to be a place where editors can "workshop" article ideas before they get created. It uses Flow because Flow allows, essentially, section-level categorization, and in the future will allow "sections" (known as "topics" within Flow) to be included across different pages. What this means is that you have a recommendation for a new article tagged by multiple WikiProjects, allowing for the recommendation to appear on lists for each WikiProject. This will facilitate inter-WikiProject collaboration and will help to reduce duplicated work. The Article Request Workshop is not entirely ready yet due to some bugs with Flow, but we hope to integrate it into our pilot WikiProjects at some point.

Harej (talk) 00:57, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Gerechtigkeitsspirale

PanydThe muffin is not subtle 14:31, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for reflecting and translating the Gerechtigkeitsspirale!

Did you know ... that a church's 1510 spiral of justice declares: "Justice suffered in great need. Truth is slain dead. Faith has lost the battle"?

The poem ends with "Praise the right thing".

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:47, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Reseaching Intellectual Capital

RE: your edit for Intellectual Capital. A search using Google Scholar for the term "components of intellectual capital" would be worthwhile. The first six articles would provide a solid foundation in the history of the topic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.244.10.230 (talk) 01:58, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Your point is what? The lede as you left it is gibberish. — Brianhe (talk) 02:04, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Speedy deletion declined

I declined your speedy deletion nomination of ITrip with no prejudice against its deletion through WP:AfD because G11 does not applies to articles with Minor promotional wording. The argument per your edit summary that No real reference for five years is not a valid reason for speedy deletion per G11. However, no prejudice against its deletion through WP:AfD if the notability is in doubt. Thanks! Wikic¤l¤gyt@lk to M£ 13:21, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
For keeping an eye on the bad guys. Pine✉ 02:36, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Some explation

Hello. Although I do not tend to explain myself, I do wish to point out to some things. I have been suggested to create new article using my sandbox to avoid multiple edits. However, I was not aware of splitting the page history issue and I thank you for informing me. This was a personal attach on me, where user, for some reason, took this company's founder name as it username, a posted this on the discussion. He/She was blocked for that reason, as you can see here. As you can see, I patrol recently created articles and many of my "suspicious" edits come from there. I also patrol articles for creation entries as well as old article for creation and userspace entries. Some of my pointed edits come from there. I will assure you that I do not have any connection with named editors and CheckUser will confirm that. I am not a native English speaker and sometimes it is hard for me to express myself when writing, so some of my statements might look odd or badly written. You could also see that I have more than 10k of edits and that I have done major job patrolling Wikipedia and cleaning out bad entries. In the end, that you for letting me know about the history splitting issue. all the best, --BiH (talk) 12:12, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

This and other behaviors will need to be addressed at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/BiH. Thank you. Brianhe (talk) 17:08, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

RFA?

Hello Brianhe. I've noticed your sock- and paid editor-hunting and wondered if you'd thought of running for adminship? The tools make life a lot easier, in particular being able to see deleted contribs which often help link socks together. I haven't looked at your contribs in detail, but if you haven't pissed too many regulars off, I can take a more thorough look if you're interested. Cheers SmartSE (talk) 15:36, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Sure, go ahead. I had sort of ruled this out at one point as not being worth the pain of going through the RfA gauntlet, but maybe you're right with my recent interest in WP integrity. You might want to start with this WP:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive841#Factchecker atyourservice isn't here to build an encyclopedia and see if it would be a showstopper. I also got dinged in 2011 for outing in another ANI case before I knew about the rule, since redacted. You will also find a couple of other ANI cases I initiated that didn't result in either positive or negative outcomes (for me), like WP:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive822#Swdandap malfeasance this. — Brianhe (talk) 18:13, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Sorry for the delay - I forgot to watchlist you. I've been having a look at things and haven't found anything terrible by my standards and many positives: around for a long time with continuous editing, no blocks, creating content and you could use the tools. If those ANI links are the worst things to have happened in a decade, I can't see why you wouldn't be trusted. The only possible objection I could see would be that you haven't participated at that many AFDs [1] and I haven't checked your CSD tagging yet. I've never nommed before so I want to look over things some more though. SmartSE (talk) 22:47, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Deletion notification

Hello. Why was not I, as a creator, notified for deletion of NV Residences? Are you hiding something? What you do here starts to take shape of a WP:HUNT. You failed miserably to do a proper "research" on me and my work, claiming I do not disclose any COI work. Although I proved you wrong, I never heard a good faith apology from you, no matter what you and other editors think of me as an editor. Moreover, you tried to be funny. Eric Sullivan article proves that you did some bad job doing research on the topics, but nevertheless you nominated some of the article without thinking it twice and doing some deeper research - short to be: WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT. In the end, I admit some article might not pass WP:GNG or are on the margin, but witch hunting on me is not an option as well. I invite Bbb23 and Smartse to read this as well. --BiH (talk) 23:32, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

From WP:AFD "While not required, it is generally considered courteous to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the articles that you are nominating for deletion" (emphasis mine). For reasons I'm sure you're well aware of, I chose not to be courteous in this case. Brianhe (talk) 23:39, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Brianhe, even if I felt as strongly negative as you apparently do about BiH, I would still notify him if I nominated an article for deletion that he created. The only time I can think of when I don't notify the creator is if they haven't edited in so long as it's a waste of time. Notification in this instance would also be taking the moral high ground. @BiH, if you create an article, you should put it on your watchlist. AfD is a lengthy process, so there should then be no problem in your being aware of the nomination.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:01, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Zulus MC

Hello, The club was removed because the article depicts acts commited outside of the clubhouse, not within confines of the clubhouse or by members of the club. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Celticrider (talk • contribs) 18:18, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Assuming you're talking about the changes at List of outlaw motorcycle clubs, I think the point is moot now that Dennis has added a cite to a DOJ report definitively listing them as outlaws. — Brianhe (talk) 20:52, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Leonard's Bakery

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:31, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

If that box is too boring.....

Box of good humour
Casliber has given you this nice box full of goodies...more useful than a ^&$#^() barnstar.... Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:05, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Suggestions to improve article

Hi, You voted to delete this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nmwalsh/Annuity_Shopper_Buyer%27s_Guide on May 6 last. Any suggestions for improving it and making it acceptable? Nmwalsh (talk) 10:20, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 4

Newsletter • May/June 2015

Hello friends! We have been hard at work these past two months. For this report:

The directory is live!

For the first time, we are happy to bring you an exhaustive, comprehensive WikiProject Directory. This directory endeavors to list every single WikiProject on the English Wikipedia, including those that don't participate in article assessment. In constructing the broadest possible definition, we have come up with a list of approximately 2,600 WikiProjects. The directory tracks activity statistics on the WikiProject's pages, and, for where it's available, statistics on the number of articles tracked by the WikiProject and the number of editors active on those articles. Complementing the directory are description pages for each project, listing usernames of people active on the WikiProject pages and the articles in the WikiProject's scope. This will help Wikipedians interested in a subject find each other, whether to seek feedback on an article or to revive an old project. (There is an opt-out option.) We have also come up with listings of related WikiProjects, listing the ten most relevant WikiProjects based on what articles they have in common. We would like to promote WikiProjects as interconnected systems, rather than isolated silos.

A tremendous amount of work went into preparing this directory. WikiProjects do not consistently categorize their pages, meaning we had to develop our own index to match WikiProjects with the articles in their scope. We also had to make some adjustments to how WikiProjects were categorized; indeed, I personally have racked up a few hundred edits re-categorizing WikiProjects. There remains more work to be done to make the WikiProject directory truly useful. In the meantime, take a look and feel free to leave feedback at the WikiProject X talk page.

Stuff in the works!

What have we been working on?

  • A new design template—This has been in the works for a while, of course. But our goal is to design something that is useful and cleanly presented on all browsers and at all screen resolutions while working within the confines of what MediaWiki has to offer. Additionally, we are working on designs for the sub-components featured on the main project page.
  • A new WikiProject talk page banner in Lua—Work has begun on implementing the WikiProject banner in Lua. The goal is to create a banner template that can be usable by any WikiProject in lieu of having its own template. Work has slowed down for now to focus on higher priority items, but we are interested in your thoughts on how we could go about creating a more useful project banner. We have a draft module on Test Wikipedia, with a demonstration.
  • New discussion reports—We have over 4.8 million articles on the English Wikipedia, and almost as many talk pages as well. But what happens when someone posts on a talk page? What if no one is watching that talk page? We are currently testing out a system for an automatically-updating new discussions list, like RFC for WikiProjects. We currently have five test pages up for the WikiProjects on cannabis, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and Ghana.
  • SuggestBot for WikiProjects—We have asked the maintainer of SuggestBot to make some minor adjustments to SuggestBot that will allow it to post regular reports to those WikiProjects that ask for them. Stay tuned!
  • Semi-automated article assessment—Using the new revision scoring service and another system currently under development, WikiProjects will be getting a new tool to facilitate the article assessment process by providing article quality/importance predictions for articles yet to be assessed. Aside from helping WikiProjects get through their backlogs, the goal is to help WikiProjects with collecting metrics and triaging their work. Semi-automation of this process will help achieve consistent results and keep the process running smoothly, as automation does on other parts of Wikipedia.

Want us to work on any other tools? Interested in volunteering? Leave a note on our talk page.

The WikiProject watchers report is back!

The database report which lists WikiProjects according to the number of watchers (i.e., people that have the project on their watchlist), is back! The report stopped being updated a year ago, following the deactivation of the Toolserver, but a replacement report has been generated.


Until next time, Harej (talk) 22:20, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
For your excellent efforts and analysis at COIN! §FreeRangeFrogcroak 00:07, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Dr Panda Games page

Hi. I was just trying to follow back on the edits that were made on the Dr. Panda Games page. It had been noted that "The specific problem is: games should be in chronological order. (March 2014)" so I went ahead and updated our listing of games in the chart as well as the descriptions that followed (and added ones that were missing for consistency). I see you noted " The stuff Joseph2302 removed and the SPA restored was a copyvio too [32] so thatxs another problem." Were you saying that listing the games is a copy violation or was there something more that I was missing? Also, while I have you, any chance you can explain re: orphan articles (I did read the link when you click on it). Can you explain/give me an example of a related article? Any help you can offer would be appreciated. Certainly we would like to update the Dr. Pandas page site in accordance with Wikipedia's rules and guidelines. Thx! LTasc (talk) 17:18, 22 June 2015 (UTC)LTasc

(talk page stalker)@LTasc: Listing the games is a copyright violation if you just copy the text from their website, like you did, see WP:COPYVIO. Also, the use of the phrase "our" show you have a clear conflict of interest, see WP:COI. Joseph2302 (talk) 17:23, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
Before I get into that, I think it's important for you to reply at WP:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard#Dr. Panda Games since you are listed there as a named party. If you have a relationship to the company, which is noted above by Joseph2302, you need to declare it. You're going to get a chilly response from other editors until you comply with this. — Brianhe (talk) 17:25, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you

Thanks for your observation here B. I had a funny thought while I was channel surfing - for all of us to be one person said editor would have had to make at least one edit a minute 24/7 for the last decade. Whew my fingers hurt :-) Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 04:11, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

You're welcome, and something similar passed through my mind. I was wondering if I could disprove sock-hood simply by being so active. Or maybe having an alibi for one of your edits during one of my real-life meetups or something? — Brianhe (talk) 04:16, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Actually, with that accusation I can cross one more square off my sockpuppet bingo card. I've now been accused of being a sockpuppet of an IP address, a regular editor, an admin (new), and a checkuser (two different ones). I need a banned user and an arbcom member to complete the card. --NeilN talk to me 04:24, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
That makes me wonder if someone has ever been an arb who later was banned NeilN? That way you could mark both of them off at the same time :-) MarnetteD|Talk 04:29, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
MarnetteD, can't find any. Guess they're not such a dodgy bunch after all. --NeilN talk to me 04:44, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Seattle Wiknic 2015
In the Seattle area? You are invited to the Seattle Wiknic 2015 on Sunday, July 5, 2015, 11am to 2pm at the Washington Park Arboretum, in the meadow area to the south of the Graham Visitors Center, approximately at 47°38′15″N 122°17′38″W / 47.637435°N 122.293986°W / 47.637435; -122.293986. Click here for more details!

A drive by acknowledgment....

Hi, Brian - just wanted to say thanks for trying to include accurate RS information in the No-go area article. It is becoming more and more difficult to overcome the whitewashing and tendentious editing we see growing on WP. I finally gave up at no-go and a couple of other articles for that very reason - outnumbered by the POV pushers who tag-teamed me to death - but was glad to see your edits and those of other editors who kept trying. I also noticed the PP dates back to Feb. Maybe that's a good thing, but 4 months is a long time for PP. Instead of PP, we need admins who will step up to the plate and do something about the edit warriors who keep pushing their POV and whitewashing articles, or the reverse when it's a topic they oppose. Instead, the disruptive POV pushers get off unscathed while GF editors are censored and prevented from getting the article right. Can't tell you how many times I've seen the excuse, well, they (the edit warriors) edit in highly controversial areas which is why they are challenged and have so many reverts. Excuse me, but they are the ones making the areas highly controversial because of their edits. Happy editing. Atsme📞📧 17:10, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

Well, thanks. That, and more so this, were some of my most unsatisfactory experiences on Wikipedia. The decision to PP the article and not resolve the editor behavior issue was completely shocking to me. So it's good to see someone has appreciated the work put into it. — Brianhe (talk) 17:31, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
I hear ya!! I received an ARB warning for an inadvertent emoji (glitch in the software) and a harmless pun (changed one letter in a user name). Then that same admin came at me a few months later with an ARB article ban for a week over 2 reverts on two different occasions a week apart. I appealed, but then the closing admin ignored the behavior issues and closed with a snarky comment about content. WP reflects a “too big to fail” attitude and the ones who should care simply don’t. It’s actually quite sad. Some project groups step over the boundaries of what projects are intended to do and end up violating WP:OWN, but because of their numbers, they always have consensus. All it takes is an admin who supports their project to close the RfCs, etc. If you get a chance, take a peek at the essay I created and co-authored WP:AVDUCK. The history there is drama personified. The opposition (who actually displayed the behaviors discussed in the essay) managed to get it deleted twice, but failed the 3rd attempt. Now it appears there may be some WP:OWN issues that are preventing me from editing the very essay I created and moved into mainspace. I actually thought about creating a new project - PROJECT ACCURACY - wonder if there’d be enough interest? I also wonder how long it would be before the AVDucks took it over. *lol* Anyway, just wanted you to know your work is appreciated. Sometimes we just get too busy to let others know they’re doing a good job, and we end up with more “oh, shits” than “atta boys". yes Atsme📞📧 22:10, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
The integrity project looks like a good idea to me. It's sort of more paid-editor focused than political agenda-focused, but they both book down to the same thing: advocacy. Which doesn't belong here. - Brianhe (talk) 22:19, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

Wiknic picnic

Hi, thanks for signing up at Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle/Wiknic/2015. The picnic is a potluck, so on the signup page please say what food or drink you are planning to bring. Thanks! --Pine✉ 04:08, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Weather update for Wiknic

Hi, weather update for Wiknic: the forecast is now for 91 degrees and a high UV index. Peaceray is bringing icewater, but everyone do please take appropriate precautions for the weather, such as sunscreen, hats, sunglasses, and staying hydrated. There will be some shade in the trees. It's ok for those of us who are more temperature and/or sunlight sensitive to come but leave early, or skip the event if you think that you should; people who are very young, elderly, or have other health issues are more vulnerable to heat stroke. Health and safety first. Cheers, --Pine✉ 15:06, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Thank you

Hello Brianhe. Thanks for fixing the error in the introduction to the Verizon FiOS entry. As an employee of Verizon, I'm working to improve a few articles relating to the company on Wikipedia. But due to my conflict of interest I do not make any changes to articles myself. Rather, I make suggestions on article Talk pages and ask volunteer editors to implement the changes if everything looks OK. There is one more inaccuracy I've noticed in the lead sentence on that Verizon FiOS entry: the number of people with FiOS access. If you have time, would you be willing to take a look at my original post about it and consider fixing the error? I appreciate any help. Thanks so much, VZBob (talk) 16:22, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for using the edit request process. Brianhe (talk) 16:54, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library needs you!

We hope The Wikipedia Library has been a useful resource for your work. TWL is expanding rapidly and we need your help!

With only a couple hours per week, you can make a big difference for sharing knowledge. Please sign up and help us in one of these ways:

  • Account coordinators: help distribute free research access
  • Partner coordinators: seek new donations from partners
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  • Outreach coordinators: connect to university libraries, archives, and other GLAMs
  • Research coordinators: run reference services



Send on behalf of The Wikipedia Library using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:31, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Koma Kulshan

Hey Beianhe, sorry if I jumped on that article as moved it into the main space before you had time to finish it. It showed up in the Dams article search shortly after you started it. I assumed it was several hours or so old.--NortyNort (Holla) 10:38, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

It's cool. I was just looking for some more coordinates, pictures and final touch-up. Brianhe (talk) 20:32, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
@NortyNort: I self-nominated the article for DYK (here). Let me know if I should not add you for credit. It might sound funny but last time I offered this, the other editor didn't want it. — Brianhe (talk) 05:47, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
You don't have to give me credit. I just did some basic clean-up. You started it and added the bulk. Thanks though.--NortyNort (Holla§) 20:17, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
Already did [2], just before someone started to review the nom. but I guess you can delete your name if you really don't want the credit. — Brianhe (talk) 16:47, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

MMH

Brianhe, I will wait until you return. Thank you. Mary§Mary rose taylor (talk) 12:02, 9 July 2015 (UTC)


Prime Focus Technologies (PFT)

Hi Beianhe, This is regarding a warning (Sockpuppetry) that I received. I am new to Wikipedia and I really want to become a Wikipedia expert. My account has been flagged and this is very demotivating, can you please guide me as to how and what evidence I can provide. All your help will be greatly appreciated, Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by AayushyaBajpai (talk • contribs) 06:52, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

You could start by declaring your conflict of interest and involvement with Everymedia.in. — Brianhe (talk) 17:46, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks

The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
Thanks for all the work you have done helping protect the integrity of Wikipedia! Jytdog (talk) 21:31, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Aw, shucks. - B

Linking

When you link to a section of the ANI or COIN, the link stops working when it moves into the archives. (They can of course still be found by searching the archives ) What I do is also link to the relevant final edit closing the case in the edit history, or if necessary one of the earlier edits. DGG ( talk ) 18:26, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

@DGG: Thanks, I'll remember that next time. Brianhe (talk) 05:42, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Meetup to revitalize & prioritize WikiProject Seattle
In the Seattle area? Edit Wikipedia or Wikimedia sister projects? You are invited to help. Come to our first Meetup to revitalize & prioritize WikiProject Seattle on July 27, 2015, 6pm to 9pm, at Café Allegro
Yours, Peaceray
To unsubscribe from future messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please remove your name from this list. -MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:35, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Koma Kulshan Project

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:32, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

You wrote... Hi, I read your note at WikiProject Integrity with interest. I'm a volunteer at the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard, and in that capacity am interested in knowing more about the way paid editors are recruited. Since you mentioned you had been contacted, I was wondering if you'd be willing to share some details, perhaps even the email sent to you? Brianhe (talk) 17:42, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

I no longer have the emails, and they stopped once I made my email address private. The other avenue has been work in articles, but it would take a long time to find the ~solicitations. Looking around a bit reminds me quickly...
Did you know text sometimes completely disappears from Wiki Talk?
Software could easily find some of the paid editors. Find disconnect between fact and wiki content and who's responsible...and kick them out. There should be clear consequences to edits that produce propaganda or convey false information. There's always room for debate, but pattern recognition would easily find clearly harmful editors, and especially editor groups.
In general, the editors are paid by enterprise, with recruitment occurring at the employee level. Recruitment via identifying existing editors in Wiki should be rare, given we are so very few. I was shocked to see only ~5,000 active editors in the recent Trustee vote. In my experience, the majority of those editors are already owned.
The only solution is an independent body of paid senior editors who step into and settle disputes, with the text then locked and needing a petition to update.32cllou (talk) 23:32, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
Took me 5 minutes to find a harmful clear disconnect. See [[3]][[4]][[5]][[6]]
Now, compare what you've learned to a now effectively ancient medical school approach found in Wiki's Depression or Major depressive disorder. Both articles are riddled with paid junk science, entrenched group-think, dated now-refuted information, and medical system profit motivated bias.32cllou (talk) 20:15, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Website Translation Proxy

Hi Brian,

This topic has almost no white paper documentation, or books written about it. Almost all resources come from the various vendors.

However, the technology exists, is of public interest, thus it should be discussed. I created this article exactly because there are very few neutral sources.

There is e.g. an article on CDN, Content delivery network - how is this info more verifiable than the info about Website Translation Proxy?

Please advise, I need help with this. I think this should not be deleted but improved. Thanks.

Adam webexpert (talk) 15:16, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

@Adam webexpert: Perhaps you should write about it somewhere other than Wikipedia? We have a policy here called verifiability, which means if it has no neutral information like you say, then it's probably not ready for an article. Wikipedia:Alternative outlets has some suggestions for where you could write about it. Brianhe (talk) 18:49, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Global Travel International (August 4)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Sulfurboy was:
This submission appears to be a news report of a single event and may not be notable enough for an article in Wikipedia. Please see Wikipedia:NOT#NEWS and Wikipedia:ONEEVENT for more information.
Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.
Sulfurboy (talk) 20:51, 4 August 2015 (UTC)


Teahouse logo
Hello! Brianhe, I noticed your article was declined at Articles for Creation, and that can be disappointing. If you are wondering or curious about why your article submission was declined please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! Sulfurboy (talk) 20:51, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

Merger discussion for Startup studio

An article that you have been involved in editing—Startup studio —has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Dodi 8238 (talk) 20:32, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks!

Hi! I didn't get a chance to thank you on the nomination page before the discussion closed, so I figured I'd go to your talk page. Thanks for reviewing my did you know nomination for Kim Kardashian: Hollywood! I think the hook you suggested is way better too. :) Kaciemonster (talk) 16:44, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Double checking

I am looking into the copyright issue you reported in connection with Durga Mandir, Varanasi. I also read the exchange you had with the editor. It looks to me that the sole issue involved the photograph, which has been deleted at Commons. I plan to tag this as clean by an investigator or others in close it is resolved. I'm checking with you just in case I'm missing something.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:15, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

@Sphilbrick: thanks for checking. Yes, the problem was the text in the photograph, which the other editor insisted on returning to the article before a determination of its copyriht status had been made. Article looks good now. Brianhe (talk) 14:22, 14 August 2015 (UTC)
Thanks.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:26, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Just a reminder that if you have any questions about my Wikipedia work, you may contact me for a chit-chat just about any time on my Talk page. Sincerely, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 16:18, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Invitation to WikiProject TAFI

Hello, Brianhe. You're invited to join WikiProject Today's articles for improvement, a project dedicated to significantly improving articles with collaborative editing in a week's time.

Feel free to nominate an article for improvement at the project's Article nomination board. If interested in joining, please add your name to the list of members. Thanks for your consideration. North America1000 12:35, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Rewards Board

Hi, I expanded one of the stubs on the rewards board. Id just like to let you know so I can claim my Barnstar, please put it on my user page under awards. Nice meeting you. Tortle (talk) 03:32, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

@Tortle: Saw this, will do my part Friday. Thanks! Were you going to list it at the stub contest as well? Brianhe (talk) 06:14, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, I dont think Ill add it as I only expanded a stub or two this month and its more trouble than its worth as theres only a couple days left. Maybe Ill participate next year when I have more experience in expanding articles. Tortle (talk) 06:18, 28 August 2015 (UTC) Thanks, I just got it. See you around. Tortle (talk) 20:40, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
You truly are a Wikihero, and a WikiGod among men. Your dedication to COIN is incredibly valuable to the project and I sincerely thank you for all your work there. Winner 42 Talk to me! 00:33, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
If only that came with a T-Shirt :) Thanks... Brianhe (talk) 00:34, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
I hear they give out T-shirts to new admins. *hint hint* *nudge nudge* let me nominate you Winner 42 Talk to me! 00:47, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Five minutes to help make WikiProjects better

Hello!

First, on behalf of WikiProject X, thank you for trying out the WikiProject X pilot projects. I would like to get some anonymous feedback from you on your experience using the new WikiProject layout and tools. This way, we will know what we did right, and if we did something horribly wrong, we can try to fix it. This feedback won't be associated with your username, so please be completely honest. We are determined to improve the experience of Wikipedians, and your feedback helps us with that. (You are also welcome to leave non-anonymous feedback at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject X.)

Please complete the survey here. The survey has two parts: the first part asks for your username, while the second part contains the survey questions. These two parts are stored separately, so your username will not be associated with your feedback. There are only nine questions and it should not take very long to complete. Once you complete the survey I will leave a handwritten note on your talk page as a token of my appreciation.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you, Harej (talk) 17:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Hello! Just sending a reminder to complete the survey linked above. (This is the only reminder I'll send, I promise.) Let me know on my talk page if you have any questions. Thank you!!! Harej (talk) 22:31, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

bug in coi-tag , links to non-existent mainspace-article-talkpage

Hello Brianhe, I had two questions for you, about this coi-tag.[7] Currently the article is Draft:Ron_Schnell, and thus the talkpage is Draft_talk:Ron_Schnell , but the COI-tag points 'incorrectly' to Talk:Ron_Schnell which is of course still a redlink. So first question, is that a known bug, or should I bother the template-writing-folks so that the {{COI}} thing will point properly to Draft_talk:Ron_Schnell whilst the page is in draftspace, and then once mainspaced, the same template will point to the newly-created Talk:Ron_Schnell? I've already added the coi-connected-contrib thing to the Draft_talk:Ron_Schnell for User:Aviators99 who is the subject-matter of this BLP-article, and has disclosed as much on their userpage/usertalk.

  Second question, can you give the refs a once-over please, and say whether you think the Draft:Ron_Schnell refs satisfy WP:42 at present? I realize some of the 1980s newspapers are offline, and will need legwork-to-some-library to verify, so I don't expect you to go to those sorts of lengths. But if you can give it the five-minute-quick-assessment, I'd appreciate it. There are a few refs still being added into the article, but most of the coverage-bursts are visible in the draft now. WP:CHOICE applies as always, if you are busy elsewhere on the 'pedia and don't have time for this, no problemo. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:49, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

The draft space is relatively new, so some templates aren't coded correctly to use it. The {{la}} template has the same problem. You can submit a problem report, but maybe you know at IT savvy person who could just fix it :)
Your best bet for article review is WP:AFC; they will not be shy telling you if it has problems. — Brianhe (talk) 16:06, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
Yeah, and I'll advise him to go thataway most likely, aka submit to AfC, but personally I hate waiting the ten days between reviewers.  ;-)   WP:TIAD is much cooler than WP:NORUSH. There is somebody that responded to one of my template-hacker-needed-please-help-requests last month, I'll see if they are tired of helping me with template-stuff this month. Thanks, 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:14, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
Actually, there is already a "fix" for {{la}} being busted, when speaking of a draftspace article, which is to use {{ld}} instead.
Somewhat-annoyingly, {{ld}} forces you to drop the Draft: prefix. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:49, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
You know, I've been around the block on Wikipedia, but this is new to me. Thanks for pointing it out!
A few tips from a very, very quick perusal of your draft. 1) The source quoting is too extensive, you'll need to pare it back. There is no hard and fast rule on how much is too much, but I think what is there will be ruled as excessive by any reviewer. Personally, I try to keep quotes to a minimum to support the quoted factlet. You can use multiple citations to support multiple factlets. There's another way to cite these, but it's probably overkill for this article. 2) The section ordering is wrong, refer to MOS:APPENDIX. 3) a good reviewer won't like the bare URLs in refs. But good news: formatting refs is easy with this tool: https://tools.wmflabs.org/yadkard/yadkard.fcgi. Just paste the URL into the URL/DOI/ISBN box. — Brianhe (talk) 23:16, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
The {{ld}} thing was news to me as well, actually; I only stumbled across it while I was trying to figure out what bug you were talking about in {{la}}, which I've never used, so I had to read the helpdocs... and they had a little table talking about when to use la and when to use ld. "When all else fails read the documentation" as the old saying goes. ;-)     Also, in true zen fashion, approach each problem with the beginner's mind.
    Appreciate the perusal, thanks. And yeah, I realize that the massive quotes for some, and the bare-URLs for others, are utter crap.  :-)     But there are a lot of offline sources, so I put the key bits into the cites directly for the moment, per fair use law, as a means to remind me what they said whilst messing with the draft-article. And by contrast, I was lazy about pretty-ification of the bare-URLs, for the same basic reason, whilst working on the draft they are easy to open in a new tab, and somebody with WP:REFILL or the tool you linked (new one to me -- thanks) can magically fix up the cite-template-magic from the URL. Will give MOS:APPENDIX a spin, admit that I tend to shy as far away from reading the Dreaded Manual Of Stylization when I can, so almost certainly I've violated it profusely in many ways, though not 'intentionally' but rather from intentionally-blissful-ignorance. p.s. What is the "other-way-to-cite" that you speak of? I have a standing question about double-tiered-refTags for a debates-article I was working on, see User_talk:75.108.94.227#multi-cites_with_variable_quotation-portions if you have a few minutes, maybe you know the answer? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 10:04, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
There are a few ways I like to do quotes. {{sfn}} with the quote in a ps parameter is one: example at counter-apologetics. Another for lengthy "feature" quotes is {{quote}} with a quote in the source parameter, as in Kurt Cobain Memorial Park. The most esoteric but maybe most academic looking is embedded references in footnotes using {{efn}} as in List of Washington state bridge failures. See which one you like and have fun! — Brianhe (talk) 14:43, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Three follow-up things:

  • Mdann42 and SiBr4 fixed the COI template, and indeed it points to the correct location on the Ron Schnell draft now. Can you kick the tires, and make sure their changes are going to work in ALL scenarios where you might want to place the tag, e.g. user sandbox, user special-page, anon user special-page under their User_talk:11.22.33.44/myOwnDraft type location, AfC draft, non-AfC draft, maybe more options I'm unaware of? If there are still template-bugs to be smashed, they know better than moi, so please comment at that thread and ping one or both of those fine wikipdians.  :-)     You can ping my talkpage too, though I might not be much help, I'm happy to flail away. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:08, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I appreciate your article-pointers for the ref-thing. I messed around with some of the options, and tried to get what I wanted out of them, but was unable to make it work. Fundamentally, the trouble I have is that I'm trying to come up with a scheme that works on *existing* articles which already have tens or hundreds of <ref>...</ref> things in place, and without either duplicating my insertion (puffs up the apparent ref-count), nor adding a brand new 'Notes' section (puffs up the importance of the quotation-snippets since usually I'm the only one use the fair-use-quote-from-the-source feature slash system)... nor for obvious reasons, rewriting the ENTIRE set of extant refs to use something that will properly nest. I've opened up a helpdesk request, that outlines what I want, and proposes a 'footquote' template... which I'm not sure is a good idea, but seemed like a good idea at the time.  ;-)     There was a helpdesk request just the day before, where somebody wanted to do something very similar to what I'm after, and used a combination of normal <ref>...</ref> followed by normal {{efn}}, which worked decently well... but besides being physically adjacent in the body-prose, there is not (necessarily although one could make it happen) any hyperlinkage betwixt the ref-bit and the note-with-the-quote bit, which I found unfortunate. Anyways, since you seemed to know the existing ref-systems well, I figured I would ping you and see if you had some comments on my footquote idea, or on how to achieve something close to what I am after without any Shiny New Things being needed, please see my own WP:Help_desk#Nesting_ref-tags on the 6th, plus the similar-but-unrelated WP:Help_desk#Help.21 on the 5th (example article now nicely fixed up is at Szczecin#Name_and_etymology in the first sentence of that subsection). 75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:08, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia_talk:New_pages_patrol#Looking_for_Volunteers_to_help_Notability_Detection_project NPP-related thing looks up your alley, methinks, machine learning for scoring WP:42 compliance. That was ongoing before orangemoody went public, but then further down the same talkpage, WSC mentioned your proposal#11A. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:08, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Wi-Fi deauthentication attack

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:03, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Proposed amendment to WP:ADMIN regarding paid editing

You recently commented on a brainstorm that discussed banning administrators from paid editing. A concrete proposal to amend the administrator policy to this effect has been made at Wikipedia talk:Administrators#Proposed change - 'No paid editing" for admins. Your comments would be appreciated. MER-C 08:15, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Would you reconsider?

I note your work on Draft:Orangemoody Wikipedia editing ring - which, as always, is well done. I'd like you to consider, however, whether this isn't a little too much Wikipedia navel-gazing. As a community, we're pretty notorious for treating anything that happens in relation to our project as if it is inherently notable. Yes, I know it's in a gazillion media sources right now (I understand from WMF Communications that the top question is how we came up with the name "Orangemoody" for the case, which perhaps indicates how actually serious the media are - most simply excerpted from the WMF blog or the report to the community). But it's absolutely classic recentism, and there's no reason to believe it's anything more than flavour of the week, just like the latest Taylor Swift handbag (which will get almost as many media hits as the Orangemoody story). I think there's something to be said for writing a good and comprehensive article about Wikipedia paid editing controversies that have drawn significant media attention, but as a single article. The individual incidents aren't really all that notable by themselves. Would you please give this some thought? Risker (talk) 18:55, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

@Risker: I'll pause for a bit while considering your suggestions. However I would have to disagree that talking about literal international front page news is an exercise in navel gazing. — Brianhe (talk) 22:50, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Meh. From today's front pages: On the trail of a mentally ill brother; Ditching the desk (the underlying teaching theory is probably notable, not the specific example); a fire in Sudbury, UK. Being on the front page doesn't mean much; the majority of articles on the front pages of most newspapers aren't notable enough for Wikipedia. (As an aside, outside of the UK, the Independent is pretty much only read by Anglophiles.) Risker (talk) 00:01, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
The problem I see is that if you have only an entry in the incidets section of Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia this becomes just one out of 20 incidents with no indication of proportion. Some of these incidences are very minor and inside Wikipedia news, but others are much larger in scale. One indicator of that is a separate main article. At 5252 words, Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia probably needs to be spawning sub-articles and stick to summaries.

Also, can we quantify each of these 20 incidents by number of edits, number of articles affected, and number of accounts? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 00:56, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Support adding quantitative factoids to the existing summary-article. But these must be selected with some care, for instance, the number of "accounts" is an obviously-inflated factoid methinks. There are 381 socks linked to orangeMoody, but how many people were behind the socks? That (number of actual humans or their technically-checkuser-indistinguishable-equivalents), and the number of edits made in total -- NOT counting the long series of edits by e.g. User:Arr4 who methinks got roped into orangeMoody due to ESL and economic enticements more than as a 'sockmaster' of any stripe -- gives us a pretty good idea how significant (quantitatively) the incident was. The number of talkpage hours devoted to cleanup, the number of socks blocked, and all that stuff... inside baseball to my wiki-eyes. Also known as, WP:IDONTLIKEIT.  ;-)     75.108.94.227 (talk) 01:40, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
Then that article needs to be cleaned up and only notable events of paid editing should be included. Realistically, there are only four, maybe five. None of them should take more than 500 words to describe. That article is so "inside baseball" as to be genuinely embarrassing. Risker (talk) 01:00, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
Article content isn't limited by notability. The only reason to "clean up" (i.e. delete) anything from the article is if it isn't reliable sourced, or if it some how violates undue weight by giving excess attention to a fringe theory and creates an imbalanced impression. A list of all well-sourced the COI incidents in no way violates neutrality, so it doesn't violate WP:UNDUE. Labeling something "inside baseball" is in no way a reason to delete an article, nor is it a reason to remove content from within an article. "Inside baseball" is equivalent to I just don't like it. You need to base your argument on a valid foundation, if one exists. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 02:47, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
There is considerable undue weight on the Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia article. It has no balance at all, in fact. It treats edits from the NYPD IP addresses (which are, incidentally, available to lawyers, journalists and sometimes even inmates) as being more serious than the Wiki-PR case, and equivalent to the Bell-Pottinger case; it's not, and even the media coverage reflects that. The Orangemoody case does not in any way deserve its own article; neither do the others. My post was about a draft, not an article, and I have not recommended the deletion of anything. Risker (talk) 07:04, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
Um, did too: "...only notable events of paid editing should be included. Realistically, there are only four, maybe five...." If there are 20 now, and you think 15 should be gone, and you don't think any of them deserve articles, that's saying to delete 15 of them from mainspace, right? Anyways, very strongly agree about the navel-gazing issue, but WP:NOTEWORTHY applies to article-content at the COI on-wiki article, not WP:N. Technically the orangemoody coverage-burst passes WP:GNG, too, and could conceivably be a spinoff article, though I agree (per WP:IAR mostly) that we should NOT give it a dedicated article... plus partly per WP:CIRCULAR quoting of 'wikipedia insiders' by the media, which is then turned around to become the bulk of the dedicated-OrangeMoody-article. Wait for WP:LASTING effects at least, and more WP:CONTINUEDCOVERAGE that just the initial WP:109PAPERS, before deciding that OrangeMoody: The Movie definitely deserves to be bluelinked, please pretty please with a cherry on top. Also, there is the WP:BEANS issue: we don't want to give future bad-apples specific concrete ideas, of how to mimic orangemoody techniques, right? And a dedicated article has more room for gory details, that a summary-paragraph might elide. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 01:34, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
This sounds dangerously close to self-censorship. Yes, let's not give away all the secrets of the checkuser team, but not reporting about events already in the public sphere, because they might "give people ideas"?? I'm hearing similar defeatist talk of tieing our own hands at Doc's talkpage, where defeatists say anything we do to deter self-interested editors will just drive them deeper underground, and I don't like it there either. — Brianhe (talk) 02:00, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
I'm willing to be called defeatist... if the cause is Let Us Kill Off All Paid Editing, then yes, that is a cause doomed to go down in defeat, so by definition, I'm defeatist about that specific cause. One way or the other, in the long run, that cause is 100% doomed: if champions of the no-paid-editors cause try to get their wishes enacted on enWiki, my expectation is that they will fail to do so. That's doom-option#1. However, even if they *do* manage to get that draconian rule put into place, they will still fail: either wikipedia will be crushed/acquired/whatever by Google in doom-option#2, or perhaps wikipedia would just collapse under it's own weight and be forked as doom-option#3. No matter what, though, I'm a defeatist when it comes to the chances of long-term success of banning anybody with WP:COI, from being able to edit the encyclopedia anyone can edit. It's impossible.
    But I'd prefer if you would refer to me as a Pragmatic Wiki-Patriot, rather than a Defeatist Wiki-Traitor, if that's not too much to ask.  :-)     Yes, I'm advocating self-censorship. We already self-censor what information is world-visible. If wikipedia was truly open, every person who wanted to would be able to skim the raw webserver logs, and learn the IP/browser/flashPlugin/geolocation/etc of anybody who ever edited wikipedia, and of anybody who ever *read* an article on wikipedia. I'd be able to track which pornography articles people read, and which kinds of movies they liked, and what kind of politics they were interested in. Plus I'd know where they lived, and security-sensitive information about the software installed on their computer system, too. So, yeah, I'm definitely advocating self-censorship: we should NOT be giving out raw webserver logs, for security reasons. Also for security reasons, albeit of a slightly different type, we should NOT be giving out specific details of the best way to attack the AfC queue, for future orangemoody-imitators to attempt. We SHOULD be working hard to secure the perimeter around the AfC queue (see my suggestions at signpost), and we should stop wasting time tilting at the no-paid-editor windmill (see my 'defeatist' suggestions on the User:Doc_James subpage ... well, the suggestions I finished writing, before I noticed I was getting angry and stopped reading&writing there temporarily ... I'll return when I have cooled off). That's my actual stance.
    I don't agree that we should delete mention of the incidents, but I do agree that we should keep them short and sweet and vague on the specifics of the particular attack. There is a school of infosec, which believes that the best way to deter attacks is to keep the details of attacks as public as possible, for example, the source code to the Linux kernel is 100% public, and the security breaches against older unpatched versions of that kernel are also 100% public. But nobody in their right mind says that somebody *running* a Linux server should publish the patch-level of that server for all the world to see, or publish the SSH passwords for all the world to see, or publish the other internal-security-procedures that they use. There's a difference between street-smarts, and security-through-obscurity. I'm in favor of the former, and against the latter. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 15:19, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Case in point, of what I mean: there is a WP:VPT thread here, plus a couple of bugzilla-fka-phabricator reports, about a "security" hole. There is no actual risk to the servers, so this is only a scarequoted "security" hole and not a pants-on-fire-fix-it-now-nonscarequoted security hole, but there is the annoyance-factor and the opportunity cost (admins wasting time trying to control the disruption yet they cannot). It is openly being discussed. I am in favor of that. But you will note, that there is NOTHING in the you-have-been-blocked-template, which says "please do not create new sections on your talkpage from a tablet since our software is incapable of blocking you from doing that even though you are not supposed to since officially your talkpage access is revoked". Putting that into the you-have-been-blocked message would be asking for trouble. So we don't say that in the you-have-been-blocked message, we just discuss it on back-end pages like WP:VPT where most blocked editors will never know about the 'security' hole at all.
    I'm recommending the same kind of thing for orangemoody tactics; discuss them openly, but not in detail in mainspace. By contrast, though, I *do* think we need to modify the AfC templates and maybe the login-signup-page, to warn good-apples about off-wiki demands for cash... but without giving significantly more detail than that brief warning. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:05, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Again, respectfully disagree on strategy. Seems to me we have to make a choice to embrace change and fix some majorly broken systems involving integrity. I might be misreading your comments but will reiterate that there's no risk to WP in discussing what's already in the press. The maefactors surely know more about circumventing WP protections than the newspaper writers do. Nobody's talking about writing a "how to mobilize a sock army via Elance" article (though that would be very useful COIN volunteer training handbook material, come to think of it).
I've engaged WMF for direction on some of this, as I think they should be taking a policy lead or at least guiding the community on what they are and are not willing to help with. — Brianhe (talk) 16:23, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Somebody else[8] mainspaced a spinoff, titled simply Orangemoody. I have commented over on the talkpage of the COI-on-wikipedia page, but in a nutshell, my suspicion is the future orangemoody-type attempts will try to rope in good-faith editors to do some of the dirtywork, using social engineering techniques for instance. My further suspicion is that some of those good-apples will be hoodwinked by the future-orangemoody-type sockmasters-slash-meatmasters, and will therefore be blocked by checkuser evidence of interleaving edits, and have all the articles they've worked on summarily deleted. I have a hunch that may have actually occurred during orangemoody, in at least one case, though it was probably more of a thought-I-could-get-away-with-it scenario, rather than a hoodwinked-into-it thing. I hesitate to refer to a username, but you are familiar with the person I'm vaguely referring unto. I don't see much worry of a lawsuit against the WMF in 2015, but I think we should be scrupulously careful so that we are in practice when a much-more-devious incident occurs in 2016 or 2017 or whatever. Anyways, the tide pulling us towards the navel might be insurmountable, now that the new article is up, and nobody besides you has responded to the weasel-tag. I will probably still take a crack at rewriting the summary-paragraph, but my prose-smithing skills are not as sharp as they need to be for such a task, I fear. Anyways, appreciate that you are able to disagree with me in WP:NICE fashion, though you feel strongly on this matter -- thanks for your patience, and see you around the 'pedia. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 22:05, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Road Runners Motorcycle Club

Road Runners Motorcycle Club was deleted via the prod process which is for uncontroversial undisputed deletions. Since you've said elsewhere that you consider that deletion "a mistake" I have restored the article. It could of course still be deleted via AFD, but only if by consensus. Take care and happy editing. ϢereSpielChequers 12:04, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Starkillers

Hello! I wanted to inform you that I have [[9]] a refund of the draft for Starkillers page. I will keep you posted on what the result is. As you may have noticed I was previously named brawlarecords and then an Admin adviced me to change it to my name, and so I did. I would like to clarify with you that even though I am affiliated with Brawla Records, I am on a volunteer position with them so I am not getting paid what so ever. Therefore, I am not getting paid for any edits I ever make. I am currently a university student. I wanted to ensure we were on the same page. Please let me know if you require further info from my end. Thank you again for offering you help! Kiran chandani (talk) 08:43, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

I see they're having some process issues ... I threw in a blurb about my participation, let's see what happens next. I might have to wait till Monday to really dig into this, due to off-wiki necessities. — Brianhe (talk) 16:41, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Brianhe (talk) Hi Brianhe! I spoke with an admin over email at info@wikipedia and they mentioned that we would have to recreate the entire page and we could do so starting with Sandbox and then submit it for approval. They let me know they have contacted you about my discussion with them. They have emailed me the draft version of the Starkillers deleted wikipedia page. Will that be ok to work with? Please let me know and how can we go about collaborating on sandbox. Thank you so much! Kiran chandani (talk) 19:21, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Okay, this is going to be a little harder. You realize it's 100% about sourcing to determine notability, right? Let's start a userspace draft where we can keep sources. I have access to HighBeam, so will scan that. If you don't have a preference, I'd like to use User:Kiran chandani/Starkillers. By the way sorry for mixing up your gender -- I used to work with a male Kiran from South India. Anyway. When I see the redlink above turn blue, I'll start to add what I've got. Oh also, I like to synopsize the sources as I go, like you can see in the references in the last article I started rescuing: [10]. One final thing, you can convert a URL to a Wiki formatted reference using this tool to save time. — Brianhe (talk) 20:11, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Brianhe (talk) Hi BrianHe! Yes absolutely no fact without sourcing. haha no problem about that! Did you still want me to use Kiran Chadani/Starkillers? Thank you! Kiran chandani (talk) 00:16, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

afds

Inspired by your nomination of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/AdSparx, I've just nominated 5 or 6 of the same editors articles for afd. I hope you continue also--sometimes it can be simpler to remove these one at a time than to try to ban the editor--at least as a start , to convince people of the need to ban. DGG ( talk ) 02:50, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

@DGG: Thanks, but someone else nominated. I only !voted. — Brianhe (talk) 02:56, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

DYK nomination of Counter-apologetics

Hello! Your submission of Counter-apologetics at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! BlueMoonset (talk) 21:32, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

SPI

FYI: (new) Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/BiH. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:39, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Kudpung's emerging BOGO philosophy, DGG's emerging NOT STARTUP philosophy

I read your comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Circle (company) with interest. Can you try to elaborate more on what "Kudpung's emerging BOGO philosophy, DGG's emerging NOT STARTUP philosophy" mean? I get the gist, but I think you (and USer:Kudpung and User:DGG) can do so better than I could. I'd invite you to do so at WP:NCOMPANY, where you'll also find some of my proposals (I don't have cool acronyms for them yet, maybe you can help :D). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:49, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I came over to ask if the honeypot metaphor was clear... but then got sidetracked by this one. AfD for the mall is very plausible. AfD for the bitcoin startup is just waaay beyond the pale, though. How can you know about machine learning, and not have heard of bitcoin? There are tons of refs, just a quick search engine jaunt away. But you voted delete-prefer-speedy? Come now, that's just not based in wiki-policy, of any sort. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 17:11, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
p.s. what is 'bogo' por favor? I associate that with 'buy one get one free' at the shoe store I frequent.  :-)     I read what Kudpung wrote but didn't see the acronym. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 17:11, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
@Piotrus: Hi, I think some folks are writing up a new essay ... Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Twitter Power (2nd nomination) has a partial answer and here's another. Corp X hires an undisclosed paid editor to generate a crummy self-serving stub article on X, then X waits for volunteer editors to see its terrible state and improve it for free. Buy one (paid editor), get one (volunteer editor) free, see? I think Kudpung coined the term but it may have been another ed. — Brianhe (talk) 17:28, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
Ah, it was the Payless Shoes slogan.  :-)     And now I understand the connection, which is apt. But I don't see that as a problem -- GE Ventures was created by a paid editor, and I just helped clean it up for free, and it improves the encyclopedia to have that article. Right? In other words, it looks like BOGO is perfectly in line with wiki-policy, as long as the edits are disclosed (eventually) as paid, per WP:TOS. Sure, we could go all ex post facto on the asses of undisclosed paid editors, and nuke all the articles they've ever worked on from orbit, but see knee jerk, that sounds like cutting off our noses to spite our faces. Improvements are improvements, no matter who pays for them, either in time or in money. The point is to improve-qua-improve the encyclopedia-qua-encyclopedia. When done properly, BOGO seems to result in exactly that. Though technically, it is more like buy-one-get-an-infinite-supply, since WP:NOTTEMPORARY. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 17:50, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
Issue and meta-issue. Is the text of WP better with an improved GE Ventures. Arguably. Is the process of WP, as an enduring institution, better, when volunteers realize they are being manipulated into providing their labor for free in furtherance of another's direct profit. Certainly not. DGG has explained this more eloquently but this is my take on it: it's theft of labor, and it's going to boomerang on all of us who care about the project. — Brianhe (talk) 17:57, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
a minor issue "how can you not have heard of bitcoin". That's certainly true--bitcoin is notable. It does not mean every company that may be associated with it is notable also. That's a classic fallacy here: "This is a notable and worthy cause, so this organization supporting it is notable." or, even more absurd "Plastic surgery is important so this plastic surgeon is notable;" DGG ( talk ) 20:58, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
I don't know where 75108 got the idea I never heard of bitcoin. I never said that. But even if I did, DGG is right, it doesn't affect my !vote on Circle. — Brianhe (talk) 21:24, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
I was expressing amazement that you were a computer-type-person, who didn't know bitcoin, because I assumed if you knew about bitcoin, you would have heard of Circle. They are "relatively" new, but not, you know, THAT new. They are arguably the most important bitcoin-related-firm. Anyways, be that as it may, I'm not making the plastic-surgery-is-notable-thus-Randy-The-Plastic-Surgeon-Of-Boise-Idaho-is-wiki-notable mistake, I'm making the bitcoin is well known amongst tech-nerds and people that know about bitcoin also know about Circle, sort of mistake. Bitcoin is *more* wiki-notable than Circle, but I think it's a fair statement that Circle-the-bitcoin-corp is more wiki-notable than the umpteen bitcoin-the-cryptocurrency variants out there (with possible exception of Dogecoin). And as a bit of googling will tell you, Circle passes WP:GNG no question. Which brings us to the question of, is it 'theft of labor' when some corporation has an entry in wikipedia? Any more than it is 'theft of labor' when some wikipedian writes a neutral summarization of an article in the WSJ, which I will point out, is written by paid hardworking journalists, and if wikipedia didn't provide summarizations of the WSJ content, paying customers would have to shell out to get past the WSJ paywall? I just find it ludicrous that wikipedia volunteers standing on the shoulders of paid WSJ journalists, is somehow more noble than wikipedia volunteers standing on the shoulders of paid wikipedian editors. There is very little distinction, in my not-so-humble-opinion, as long as the paid-editor-capacity is properly disclosed. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:02, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
And the major issue: there is a limited amount of volunteer time available, though we seem to have begun attracting more editors, we are not yet increasing then umber of experienced editors. Properly rewriting promotional articles is not really a job for beginners, because it takes a while to learn the relevant written and unwritten guidelines, and the people who do this well are the more experienced volunteers. I used to do a great deal of it, if the subject was actually notable; I could not do more than 1 a day--they take time to do properly, if the goal is to do more than just scrape by. I do much less now, because of the much greater priority of removing the advertising. When I do rewrite an article, I'lll do it only if the encycopedia really does need an article on that subject, and I feel much better about it if I help a goodfaith beginner see how to do it right, than to do the work so someone else who does it wrong will get paid.
The true justification for notability guidelines (besides our desire to look like a traditional encycopedia in order to be taken seriously) is that below a certain level it descends into promotionalism, because there's nothing else to write. Paid editing is a hazard, because paid editors has an incentive to work on whatever jobs come their way that offer some possibility of an article if they can stretch things out cleverly enough--and the Orangemoody group were quite clever this way. Volunteer editors have no such incentive--they want to write about something of some degree of importance. (They may of course be fans, but such articles are easily detected no matter who writes them).
There are paid editors who are careful to accept only indisputably notable clients, but there's no reason why those of such quality would not want to declare themselves. For the great majority of them, who almost exclusively write articles causing us inordinate amounts of time to fix or remove, they need to be able to show their prospective clients that they can in fact get and keep articles in WP (even if they do not offer a guarantee, they still need a portfolio). The only weapon we have against them is deletion of their articles; to prevent their having a portfolio giving the deceptive idea that hiring them will get an article, we need to remove them all. The best course for an actually notable subject--and naive notable people do hire PR agents, especially in certain professions, my current practice is to wait six months or so, and then rewrite the article. There's no deadline.
But there is another weapon potentially available: we can adopt guideline to discourage the sort of articles which they mostly concentrate on. At present, the worst is new companies. That's what the proposals to increase the guidelines for companies is meant to do. There are many possible ways to word it, and that part needs discussion. There are of course other places: for some we have effective guideline that are useful if they are interpreted to restrict the GNG, not broaden it: visual artists whose work is not yet in museums; embryo performers; non-professional athletes. For some we do not: small charities--and charities even more than companies live or die by public relations; lawyers & other professionals; authors with a few reviews but no major books; (etc.)--everyone has their own examples. For some of these I see possible criteria; others may be more difficult. And in almost all these fields there is plenty of opportunity for true NPOV editing of notable subjects--most of our articles on major companies and major charities need extensive improvement, and we are missing thousands of truly important artists and writers. Volunteers can start with the most important missing articles; paid editors will find themselves working from the bottom. At least we can raise that bottom. DGG ( talk ) 21:54, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
That post, DGG, is worthy of being turned into an essay. Some elements of it would make good opening statements for RfCs to introduce new measures and policies. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:14, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
I've started to try to synthesize some of the ideas expressed here and elsewhere on WP, in media reactions to WP's troubles, textbooks on SEO/reputation management, and some stuff of my own. It's a work-in-progress user essay here; some of it is still just an outline. DGG and Kudpung, do you want to collaborate? - Brianhe (talk) 00:20, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) is an excellent acronym and a perfect metaphor; (in BE Bog off! means Go away! or Piss off!) I didn't coin it though, and kudos to whoever did. What our IP friend above doesn't grasp however, is that it is totally inadmissible to make money out of volunteers' work in any shape or form. Broadly, and most importantly speaking, that means the free time the volunteers have dedicated to providing the bulk of the content to the encyclopedia, maintaining it, and policing the edits and the editors.
IMO the only way to put a stop to people exploiting Wikipedia to make money (the paid editors and the advertisers they work for) is to radically delete all such articles. That would involve the free-lancers having to refund their clients'money, and send a clear message to everyone that paid editing isn't worth it. As DGG regularly points out however, some (just a few) of those articles are notable in their own right, so there is not a CSD criterion for them. Looking to the future however, if we had a strict policy that all new paid-for articles will be deleted from the outset, that would probably be a deterrent. For an experienced New Page Patroller, such atricles aren't really all that hard to recognise, but what we desperately want are truly experienced patrollers , and that's another story. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:45, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
BTW, I wouldn't say that my BOGOF philosophy is just emerging. It's been a bane to me for a long time ever since I was rudely personally attacked by a user who also just happens to be a PR/SEO consultant (and makes a not subtle mention of it), for just doing my job and enacting a community block and ban on one of Wikipedia's prominent paid spammers! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:09, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
@Widefox: It looks like I should have given you credit for coining "BOGOF", the honor is yours if you wish to have it. First used 03:56, 13 September 2015 here unless I've missed something. Brianhe (talk) 01:27, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

What our IP friend above doesn't grasp however, is that it is totally inadmissible to make money out of volunteers' work in any shape or form.

Kudpung, I fully *grasp* that you believe it is 'totally inadmissible' for some corporation to have their employee work on their wikipedia article, and then have some volunteer come along and do more work on it. But you and I just fundamentally disagree. I don't think that I'm stealing from the WSJ when I summarize one of their pieces, to add a sentence to some relevant wikipedia-article. This is my stance, even though I don't subscribe to the WSJ, and have never given them a dime, nor likely will. I'm a volunteer, standing on the shoulders of the paid WSJ journalists, to add encyclopedic fair use material to the GFDL&CCBYSA encyclopedia. Not only is that perfectly legal, and has been since 1789, it is perfectly moral that I do so.
    But, by almost the exact same logic, when GE pays some lackey to *directly* put GFDL&CCBYSA material into the encyclopedia, and I later go help spiff it up, that's also perfectly legal (as long as they follow the FTC laws on astroturfing and the WP:TOS and the WP:COPYVIO provisions), but I also firmly believe it is perfectly moral and legit and "admissible" whatever that means. They are helping improve-qua-improve wikipedia. They are getting PAID to improve wikipedia, and that's just peachy, bully for them.
    The long-term question is, how do we make it so that people who are getting paid, and are editing with a financial interest at stake, will do so in an honest and open and ethical fashion? It is wrong to say that "disclosure will not lose us any good apples" because we've ALREADY lost User:CorporateM, just this past month. They didn't like getting told by the WMF in 2014 that doxing was not required by the new ToU, and then getting doxxed at AN/I in 2015 anyways. Who would? But the long-term problem is, unless we make honest disclosed paid editing COST LESS in dollars-on-the-bottom-line terms, than dishonest undisclosed paid advocacy WILL FLOURISH. This is basic economics 101, applicable to ALL conceivable future orangemoody-imitators, it is not WP:CRYSTAL any more than predicting an egg will bust open, when it has already been tossed off the empire state building. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:02, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
I apologize, because I should have mentioned it the first time 75.108 raised this argument (or did I?), but I disagree with the economics argument. To use an analogy, we couldn't possibly make being a pharmaceutical employee at a hospital, more profitable than being a drug dealer, or expect a regular business to have as good of a profit margin as the mob. There is always economic benefits to engaging in covert and unlawful behavior, which is why people do it, and we can't expect to tip those scales. OTOH, such egregiously unethical behavior is typically kept in the margins by threat of law; the only persuasion Wikipedia has used is deleting accounts that are quickly replaced, deleted articles that were already paid for, and bad PR that's just a blip in the news cycle, which are very weak weapons to wield. Raising the notability standard is also a similarly weak and feeble weapon. It could just as easily result in the proliferation of more paid editing as it could less, as article-subjects need more help making them appear more notable than they actually are. Many editors, including myself, have written articles on smaller companies on a volunteer basis and it would revoke our privilege to do so. When Wikipedia's principles erode and we have created a hostile environment filled with paranoia and anti-corporate leanings, only then will astroturfing services have actually destroyed Wikipedia and in the process we wouldn't even know if we discouraged paid editing, or actually encouraged it. David King, Ethical Wiki (Talk) 22:14, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
"Raising the notability standard is also a similarly weak and feeble weapon. It could just as easily result in the proliferation of more paid editing as it could less" Well, I don't know how you *disagree* with me about the economic argument... because *that* is my economic argument, in a nutshell.  :-)     Redefining GNG will force literally hundreds of thousands of articles to be at risk of deletion, which before were not, and thus would create a massive market of covert-paid-editing-*clients*. Blowback, unintended consequences, etc. But earlier, User:DGG said this, "The true justification for notability guidelines (besides our desire to look like a traditional encycopedia in order to be taken seriously) is that below a certain level it descends into promotionalism, because there's nothing else to write." Then Kudpung agreed, and you didn't disagree, so I assumed that you also agreed with that sentiment Brianhe, since you were also arguing at AfD that corp-articles like Circle ought to be deleted. But now I'm beginning to think you are fine with the definition of the GNG as currently defined, you are just not fine with paid-editing, and want to use deletion as the teeth-of-enforcement. (I think that two will backfire but that's another discussion for further down this talkpage, see AFG.) Am I starting to understand your actual stance? Because yeah, I didn't catch it if you said something about the economic argument. But to me, the economics are fundamental: unless we make it too expensive for the bad apples, they will always exist. The distinction between a pharma-rep and a drug-dealer is exactly what I'm thinking of. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:44, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
You raise a good point. Wikipedia does not have any real ability sanction bad actors because their reputation is in the PR world or, for freelancers, on sites like Upworks. If we want to have any effect in the paid-editing marketplace we need to be able to reach into those places. In the discussions about Paid-COI disclosure I, and others, are advocating requiring disclosure of a paid editor's account on sites like Upworks. By having that information we can document ToU violations and go after the account/name they have spent time building the reputation of. That hits them in the wallet and is a viable deterrent. I would take this further by publishing a blacklist of PR firms which have violated our ToU and, along with accounts linked with LTA cases, simply delete their articles and SALT the names so recreation requires someone to affirmatively permit it. Call it CSD-V1 Article created by undisclosed paid editor or Long Term Abuse SOCK and be done with it. This might even get past the community after the next "big scandal", it is already being done with Orangemoody. JbhTalk 23:09, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

I think this is more along the lines of useful stuff, though it still sounds like an uphill battle of wack-a-mole and comes across a bit stalkerish/harassy. Here's a few things top of mind for me:

  • If you do a Google search on this stuff, most article-subjects will find spin and disinformation from the press and paid editing firms near the top. It would be relatively easy to create plain, simple informational pages for article-subjects on Wikipedia that would top search results for "hire someone to edit my Wikipedia page" and similar. The problem is most Wikipedia editors that contribute would make it laden with POV and convoluted Wiki-speak.
  • Wikipedia must already collect IP address and device IDs on the backend, considering we have Checkusers. The community needs a feature from WMF that automatically scans pages for edits from the same device ID, on the same article, in the same discussion, from the same device, within a short time-frame. The device ID itself could be encoded into a random, but consistent, number before Wikipedians see it, sacrificing only the tiniest amount of privacy in a very remote number of false positives - but it would have caught Orangemoody years ago and probably thousands of socks nobody knows about (from both paid and unpaid POV pushers).
  • Something like this, would not only make many SPIs less labor intensive, I think it could be done more fairly and accurately than mere humans, with a smaller rate of error.
  • We absolutely need lawyers involved. I've been in contact with the Federal Trade Commission and am still hopeful they will do something eventually. In Germany the ethical guys police the industry through unfair competition laws, but in the US, the astroturfing firms are much larger and have greater legal resources due to complacency in dealing with them when they were small. It seems possible to get an injunction requiring them to disclose their accounts and to disclose to clients that they are banned from Wikipedia, but obtaining the injunction is too expensive and does not impart a significant benefit to me. I'm currently trying to find a way to fund something like that (there are some non-profits that do lawsuits they feel serve a public good for example). Could you imagine an injunction leading to thousands of previously undisclosed accounts posting at COIN under threat of contempt of court?
  • It would be great if we had "community managers" or something similar, either through volunteers that obtain WMF grants, or directly by WMF, that organize events for local Wikipedians, try to recruit local editors, etc. and - among those other things - educate article-subjects, PR firms, etc. in their area.

David King, Ethical Wiki (Talk) 13:31, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

@CorporateM: great feedback. Would you mind if I posted this auto-checkuser feature in your second bullet to the brainstorm page? To the fourth bullet, do we know who to serve injunctions to in Operation Orangemoody? Seems like this is a general problem with LTAs. To the last bullet, we do have local events called meetups and editathons; I'm going to one later today. Do you mean something else? — Brianhe (talk) 13:39, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
Feel free to share. As to community managers, I meant something more pro-active/organized. There was a grant request a while back for a program that would educate marketing agencies on ethical practices, by doing in-person presentations, speaking at conferences, creating instructional videos, etc., however it focused too much on encouraging ethical participation, rather than promoting abstaining in most cases. David King, Ethical Wiki (Talk) 14:18, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

different kinds of honeypot

The honeypot argument, if I may just stick it somewhat-incongruously into this same place on the talkpage, is multi-faceted. A bit too multi-faceted to explain on the AfD page, so here you go, excerpts from the disambig page:

Primarily I see it as a recruitment-tool, albeit using school-pride as the motivation, not sexual favors. Wikipedia hosts an article on HighSchoolXyz. HumanAbc attended said high school, or taught there, or has a kid there, or roots for the local sports team there, or whatever. They are tempted to edit the article, to improve it.

  Simultaneously, besides being a recruitment honey-pot as the main function, the high school articles serve a secondary function: they are a type of sting operation, a trap inviting vandals to write "Mister Rogers sux" or similar things. This is helpful, because it lets us identify vandals -- in particular, the anonymous editors who vandalize school articles often use the IP range of the school to commit their vandalism, whilst goofing off at the computer lab or the library kiosk or somesuch. But see also the primary purpose of using school pride as a recruiting-tool: the average high school vandal is very likely to vandalize their own HighSchoolXyz article, and the statistically most likely person to see that vandalism, and be tempted to click 'edit' and correct it, is HumanAbc, the school-pride-motivated good-apple potential-wikipedian, exactly the sort of person we'd like to recruit. Synergy for the win.

  Last but not least, I see the high school articles as honeypot (tourism) websites -- people that are browsing around the internet, sooner or later think to check whether somebody has written a wikipedia page about HumanAbc ... and failing that, often check out the page about their sister's corporation, their local state politician, their hometown ... and their high school alma mater. Having the high school articles attracts readership, not just editorship. There is even the vague possibility that The Honey Pot has some relevance... perhaps having the high-school articles attracts more cash donations? Not sure about that one, but it is similar to the tourism-honeypot-thing. Cities often want to have a sports stadium or an art museum, and will subsidize construction thereof via tax breaks and such, because the patrons of the sports and the patrons of the arts will pump a lot of loot into the wider municipal economy: eating food, renting beds, paying parking fines, buying souvenirs, et cetera, etc. Wikipedia is a virtual municipality -- we need to entice tourists to visit (readership interest honeypot), and we also need to entice good apples to settle here (recruitment of new editors honeypot), plus finally last-n-least we need to get the bad apples to reveal themselves (vandalism sting honeypot) so the wiki-cops can block them.

  Make sense? Not positive the medium sized malls, are worth the hassle. Would depend on what the quantative attraction was for good apples, and what the cleanup costs were to remove linkspam and such. We already have the article on the town, right, and merging the mall-info into the town-article seems like it would attract the same amount of linkspam, so I'm leaning keep, because I don't see hosting the dedicated article as additional anti-linkspam-work ... hardly matters if we have to fight linkspam at the town-article AND at the mall-article rather than just at the town-article ... but I do see hosting the dedicated article as potentially able to attract new setters/wikipedians, and potentially able to attract new tourists/readership. Kind of a borderline case, though. (High schools are not borderline, by way of contrast, they are a slam dunk net positive.) 75.108.94.227 (talk) 17:11, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

  • I too see the high-school articles as a beneficial inducement to get new young contributors. These are usually rather straightforward articles, and an excellent way of starting out here, that I frequently recommend to young contributors who seem to be in need of something to write about. To a certain extent other municipal organizations might also, but there's an added factor for high schools: most long-establisheds schools have at least one or two notable alumni, and new ones will in the future. This can not be said of fire departments. Malls will of course have notable chain merchants, but we'll already have good articles on these. Sure, there will be some vandalism, but we have increasingly good filters, and vandalism is not the major threat it was 7 or 8 years ago. DGG ( talk ) 21:06, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
    • Yeah, personally I was irked for several years about the free-pass-for-high-school thing, but a few years ago figured out it was recruiting tool and quasi-sandbox-but-in-mainspace for beginning editors. I think that the mall-article might attract a *different* type of beginning editor, the type that likes shopping and chain stores, more than the kind that likes high school sports teams. But it's just a theory.  ;-)     75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:02, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
Once again, regrettably, I disagree. Can you show me a high school article that, once it's roughly built, actually has positive content added to it? I can show you a counterexample: Stadium High School. For years, I and others have been removing "my brother Jimmy is on the football team!" from the "notable alumni" section. Other than that, it's substantially identical to the version from five years ago. My own high school (not Stadium) has had nothing added in 2015 but trivial formatting changes to the infobox and the notable alumni section. Oh rats, on closer look there was a vandalism entry on the notable alumni there too. Oh well. What I think would make a better learning ground is more experienced editors taking new editors under their wing as I've briefly outlined in my new essay. We need a more positive way to socialize people than slapping them in the face with rejected AfCs. Brianhe (talk) 21:12, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
I don't understand your question, are you asking if I can show you ANY single positive contribution to an article about a high school? Sure, that's easy. So I assume you were asking something else, and I missed it. No question that the high-school articles attract their fair share of vandalism, POV edits, local-gossip-grudge-matches being imported to the 'pedia, et cetera. But the point of WP:SCHOOLOUTCOMES is that high-school-automatic-bangkeep "improves the 'pedia" because it recruits new editors and attracts more readers. Period. The contents of the Podunk High School of Nowheresville are irrelevant to this argument. Sure they're gonna be full of amateurish garbage 99% of the time, that's WHY there has to be a special wiki-tradition of 'presuming' every high school to be wiki-notable. Cause otherwise the vast majority of them would be deleted. The case being made, is not that high school articles will THEMSELVES improve the pedia, the case being made is that they are a CONDUIT which sucks people into wikipedia, and that then those people go on to improve the 'pedia ... often in unrelated articles, whilst their high school article where they initially got sucked into WP:ADDICTED, molders away neglected... and partly because it is in such sorry shape... enticing the *next* editor with school pride to click on that edit-button. Does this make sense? It's counterintuitive, but the relatively-unsourced relatively-poorly-maintained state of the high school articles is almost an advantage when it comes to being a recruiting-honeypot. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:31, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
Also, fully agree that taking editors under our wings is the correct approach. But after that, we seem to diverge quickly. See the type-one editor, which I suggest Does Exist: the editor who is against other people doing paid edits and therefore discloses, on their userpage say, that *they* will never take dirty yucky *money* to edit, as a kind of moral stance.  :-)     But personally, even though I don't take money to edit wikipedia, and don't edit where I have WP:COI, there's just no moral problem for me with people that *do* get told by their boss, hey go clean up "our" wikipedia article, it is a friggin mess, no volunteers are stepping up to the plate so I guess I'll have to shell out some cold hard cash to improve wikipedia. As long as they are, you know, improving the 'pedia, what's the problem? Good apples are not the enemy, and wiki-notable (by current GNG definition! ;-)   article-topic-corporations-and-BLPs are also not the enemy, just the dishonest undisclosed covert paid advocacy editor-socks should be our target. Stay on target, please pretty please. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:31, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

AFG

Now this is what I call a real honeypot: Avrett Free Ginsberg. Someone claiming to be a corporate officer just showed up to wikiwash the thing. I was going to AfD after their IP dePRODded it, but now I think I won't. Brianhe (talk) 14:56, 17 September 2015 (UTC)
You mean, an infosec-type-honeypot? As opposed to a recruiting-and-tourism-honeypot? Article is gone now, so I cannot peek at the edit-history, but from the WP:GOOG cache I can see that the reason for PROD was the neo-GNG which we've been IAR'ing about over at AfD, which is to say, punish any editors with COI by salting the articles of their BLP-clients: "Article created by single-purpose ad agency account and subsequently maintained by FCB (advertising agency) IP. Tagged for notability for over half a year. Blow it up and wait for re-creation by disinterested editor." The body-prose was only 118 words: intro-sentence, names of co-founders, partner-promotion in 1982, five past clients, current bizmodel, five current clients (plus a sixth redlink). Why not just depufferize, if it passes GNG? Wouldn't have taken ten minutes.
carpe diem
    There *was* some puffery, no doubt about that part, I count around a dozen words of puff, plus a sentence-fragment of PR-speak, but roughly 75% of the prose was boring-neutral-just-the-cold-hard-facts stuff. They have trade-rags as refs: one from AdAge and four from AdWeek. The barest minimum of online search turns up WP:NOTEWORTHY mentions in a third trade-rag Media Life Magazine,[11] and as a faculty-member,[12] plus two WP:42-qualifying NYT hits in 1987 and 1997.[13][14] That's just the low-hanging-fruit online sources; there is zero doubt that offline sources exist, in magazines of the 1970s/1980s/1990s which are WP:NotJustYet interwebz'd.
    Basically, to my wiki-eyes, this was an incorrect deletion, done in out of process fashion; I'm hampered by not being able to see the edit-history, so maybe I'm wrong here, and you can fill me in on the fuller picture. I fully support WP:IAR, but it has to really be an improvement-qua-improvement, not cutting off our nose to spite our face. The corp-article had several refs already, several more were easily available including the NYT in 1987 and again in 1997, there were only a couple dozen words of puffery to delete. Are you really thinking, that the best 'strategy' for wikipedia, is to just start deleting stuff vigilante-style, as a way to 'get' the paid editors... and along the way, end up punishing the *subject* of the articles, and the *readership* of the article... in the hopes that they will somehow understand that you had their best long-term interests at heart? Trust me, they aren't gonna think you are batman out to save gotham from the Really eeevil folks, I can confidently predict that the readership interested in the contents of the AFG corp-article are gonna think you are deleting stuff based on WP:IDONTLIKEIT (even the ones that have an understanding of wiki-notability and wiki-reliability will be hard-pressed to see anything but a personal application of WP:IAR in that particular deletion-process methinks).
    Deletion of wiki-notable articles is not for vicarious revenge, and the content you deleted was about 75% wiki-neutral factoids and refs. Per WP:PRESERVE, even if you thought that the dedicated article was not the best way for wikipedia to keep those refs organized, you should have up-merged into the parent-corp FCB_(advertising_agency) or the grandparent Interpublic_Group_of_Companies, which you knew existed at the time of the PROD. Are you really just seeing that loss of content, and the corresponding loss of volunteer-time which WILL be necessary to recreate the article from scratch, rather than improving a de-pufferized stub, as "collateral damage" in the great-honeypot-sting-against-AFG-employees? You are certainly not recruiting additional help for the AFG article, nor making it easier on volunteers like myself, that I can see. I understand you have a long term goal... but check your premises please.
    I've already said I won't be telling you what to do, but crikey, are you planning to just delete stuff that fails your rough working-definition of neo-WP:GNG, until the de facto definition of GNG is revised, by the brute-force expedient of deleting everything in the gap? That's not cool, and I ask that you please reconsider whether your best strategy is to come up with a new tactic, and then implement it ... or if you ought to check and see whether your new tactic, of blowing up (aka deleting content good and bad alike) articles of companies that DO pass the GNG as currently defined, is possibly going to result in blowback or unintended consequences?
    If you are thinking, right now, that to make an omlette ya gotta break some eggs... then yes, we're fundamentally going to disagree. If you are thinking right now, this is the only way to Save The 'Pedia... then please EXPLAIN how deletion-as-punishment-for-all-concerned, is the only way. And to tie in with the high-school-recruiting-honeypot, versus the blow-up-the-article-and-delete-the-baby-with-the-bathwater-to-sting-the-socks-honeypot... were you in one of those high schools where the principal would punish the entire class, if nobody was willing to come forth and say which kid wrote the four-letter word on the blackboard? Because if so, you are probably well aware that punishing *everybody* when the bad behavior was only a small subset thereof, is a poor way to run a railroad.
    p.s. If you sincerely think that taking new editors under the wing is the correct way to run the 'pedia ... and I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment ... then why didn't you AGF about the 'whitewash artist' and take them under your wing, teaching them about COI and TOU and such, instead of deleting 'their' article outside AfD? Simply because that would make you a tainted BOGO-bargain-buy? Well in that case, pass them along to me, and use AfD, or offer to draftspace them, or something. Sure, maintaining wikipedia to the NPOV standard requires that we watch out for COI, but not if that means assuming bad faith, right? Remember how we met, my friend, you are a wee bit aggressive about stopping COI... and wikipedia is not gotham city, it's just an encyclopedia. WP:NORUSH to get our final anti-bad-apple strategy and tactics worked out. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:31, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
p.p.s. I have found an editor that might have the skills to fix the AFG article, and/or merge it into FCB, that knows something about brands and agencies. Which would not be a good description of moi.  ;-)     Are you averse to 'retroactive AfD', or deletion review, or WP:REFUND, or whatever, if they are willing to fix up the stuff that used to be in the article? Usually I would just ask the prod-admin to userfy, but in this case, I have a hunch that maybe you would prefer to have some more formal sort of discussion-venue like DRV, where the question of whether this general type of no-undisclosed-coi-enforcement-teeth, can get some wider discussion? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 23:27, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
I really have no opinion pro or con. How could I? I have no idea what this proposed editor's motives are, or what content they plan to add. FYI I had nothing to do with the deletion other than noting on COIN that funny business was going on around the Interpublic articles. An admin took it from there. – Brianhe (talk) 00:18, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
AGF says you should assume their motives are good ones, and their content additions will be good faith, right? Wiki-neutrality is for mainspace, for editor-to-editor the standard isn't staying neutral it's assuming the best until proven otherwise. And, yes, I do know that you didn't perform the *actual* delete of the article, that was User:JzG per lack of a crystal-clear indicator of wiki-notability (client-list not enough I guess). But that is about all I know for sure, because as I said, I'm severely hampered by not being able to see the edit-history, or even figure out who the other involved usernames-and-anons were so as to check their usertalks. Thanks for the COIN pointer, which helps somewhat untangle the event-sequence. Still, the deletion happened before I came back to your usertalk, so I'm possibly under the incorrect impression: but from webcache'd info, it looked to me like User:Brianhe put on a PROD tag (not sure if it was the first or second such tagging), with the reason as 'created by SPA w/ COI, maintained by anon w/ COI, tagged WP:FAILN for 6+mo, WP:TNT and wait for re-creation by disinterested editor.'
    If you did NOT write that PROD-summary-sentence, then my apologies for being confused. But it sounds like, from your description ("I was going to AfD after their IP dePRODded it, but now I think I won't") that you PROD'd the article, some COI-encumbered-anon dePROD'd, then you posted to COIN and let the PROD happen whilst the COI-encumbered editor was blocked, with no AfD per WP:IAR: specifically, there was WP:DUCK suspicion of COI, so delete the article as punishment, just as was done with the orangemoody-related-articles, in contravention to the more-usual WP:PRESERVE aka bangmerge. If that's not what happened, or only partially correct, please correct me. Now, on the substantive issues, I mostly agree with the deletion-of-orangemoody-articles as being a necessary evil, but I definitely do not want to see "might be COI involved so delete" become the new definition of WP:PRESERVE. Anymore than I want to see "there are three dozen WP:RS but they are about boring money stuff so delete" become the new definition of WP:GNG.
    AFG-the-company passes WP:GNG *now* -- aka now that some additional sources have been dug up -- though I understand it *certainly* didn't pass WP:GNG at the time of the PROD and delete actions -- but even at the time, it had several nominally-wiki-reliable refs to trade-rags, right? If so, the correct non-IAR-process would have been AfD, and the likely AfD-outcome would have been bangmerge-into-existing-article-about-parent-company-FCB (or bangkeep iff NewYorker and NYT*2 were brought forward), and most definitely not bangdelete. The COI is properly handled by adding the talkpage templates, and by WP:BLOCK when required. Article-deletion of wiki-notable topics, and ref-loss of wiki-reliable sourcing into the admin-eyes-only netherworld, isn't good for the 'pedia, methinks, unless there is a *really* strong counterbalancing reason. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:01, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
Also, I've been thinking about how to reply to your Batman comment. This doesn't sit well with me. I and others who care about this are passionate, but AFAIK nobody's been killed over it. I'd rather think of it as volunteer firefighters, in a district with no professional firefighter corps. How about instead of having their motives questioned at every turn, and being raked over the coals like Jytdog is enduring now, they get some slack to do their jobs, jobs that nobody else has stepped up to do. 75108, are you volunteering to do anything for the good of the cause? Or are you here to push a pro-paid editing agenda? My cards are on the table, and I'm comfortable with the thinnest veneer of anononymity; plenty of Wikipedians and at least one reputable journalist know my IRL identity. How about yours? Who is really the masked man? The GF long-term editor, or the anon IP who has a penchant for casting aspersions while he's busy collaborating with an autobiographer who just happens to be involved in a national political campaign? — Brianhe (talk) 15:36, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
Nutshell version, of a longer reply since discarded: I'm not casting aspersions, if you believe I am, please provide diffs (or just doublequoted-snippets) so I can apologize & strike. As you probably know, every BLP-article is under arbcom sanctions, every political article is under arbcom sanctions, every 'science' article is under arbcom sanctions, and every 'medical' article is under arbcom sanctions, plus every corporation&product article is under suspicion of being written by an orangemoody-imitator. I work with Ron Schnell R-KY/R-FL because he knows the most about the topics I'm trying to improve: the article about the videogame he authored (which was saved because *I* know the wiki-policies and *he* knew where to dig up 90% of the difficult-to-locate sources), ditto for the BLP about Schnell. That's all. I work with Harry Braun D-AZ/D-GA because he knows the most about his own political campaigns, and once again, I provided the wiki-knowledge whilst the COI-encumbered autobiographer -- actual candidate not just staffer -- provides 90% of the sourcing. That's all. I'm also writing a BLP-article "for" the Cruz R-TX campaign about C.J. Pearson (on which I am hampered by NOT having direct access to the subject of said BLP-article), and have already written a BLP-article "for" the Kasich R-OH/R-PA campaign about Jack Flanagan (New Hampshire politician). I've helped improve the coverage about Bush, Trump, Christie, Jeff Boss, Mark Everson, Jim Gilmore, and most everybody else listed at the 2016 pages.
  In other words, I am 100% fair, and stay 100% wiki-neutral, and I did the same for the 2012 pages, less vigorously, and the same for the 2008 pages albeit on a haphazard basis. Why the difference in involvement? Because wikipedia is starting to screw up the political articles. In 2005 we were pretty okay. In 2010 we started going downhill. In 2015 we are having reliably-sourced-material deleted because WP:IDONTLIKEIT which Drives.Me.Nuts. And to be clear -- that's all. I have opinions about politics, sure, but I keep my politics off-wiki. Here I concentrate on sticking to the five pillars, like glue, because before I had strong opinions about politics, I had strong opinions about the 'pedia: that it is worth saving. I think there is strong tension between WP:EXPERT and WP:PSCOI, cf WP:CGTW#4.
  On the other matters you raise, we can more fully discuss the merits of your volunteer-firefighter metaphor (which *I* really dislike because it sounds like you think COI-encumbered editors ought be treated as wiki-arsonists here to burn down the 'pedia), versus my apparently-equally-flawed batman-vigilante metaphor (which *you* really dislike because -- I'm not quire sure why exactly, please elaborate, but something to do with batman having a secret-identity and wearing a mask seems to be the root of the problem). But for starters, to be fair, interpreting the batman-comment, as criticism that you are pseudonymous, is not an implausible reading, although I do swear on a stack of wiki-bibles that the Batman/BruceWayne dichotomy never entered my mind, when writing the batman-comment; I see batman as a good example of a 'realistic' superhero, who treats supervillians as ethically different from everyday citizens of gotham. That was the metaphor I had in mind. So my apologies, for tossing off a half-baked metaphor that could be misinterpreted; I intended no offense, and I do not have any suspicions that you are operating under some kind of inappropriate-secret-identity-COI-thing, or otherwise encumbered by some kind of bad-for-the-pedia-agenda, of any sort. You are a good apple in my book. (You obviously have an allowed might-be-good-for-the-pedia-agenda, per BRIANHE:WWWUPE, although we disagree about tactics & strategy there o'course.) To me, though, you are 100% acting in good faith, even though we disagree about strategy and such. In other words, I think you are very wrong but I don't think you are bad. Sorry if I gave any other impression, and if you will please give me some details about which parts made you unhappy, I will gladly strike.
  p.s. As for myself, I also have some allowed agendas, but no COI of any sort, however strictly interpreted (cf jytdog and coal-raking: he does not have any COI either in my not-so-humble-opinion ... albeit he does have more than a wee bit of a jumping-to-conclusions-and-writing-ludicrously-overheated-prose-problem[15]). I'm editing anon because I'm most definitely the masked man, prefer lone ranger to batman though. I most definitely am pro-paid-honest-disclosed-editors, for the exact same reason I'm pro-COI-encumbered-autobiographer and pro-COI-encumbered-company-employee ... such people have insider knowledge that is good-for-the-pedia *when* they are taken under the wings of experienced wikipedians like myself (and theoretically yourself). But I too, just like yourself, am acting 100% in good faith: I believe anon-participation is crucial to WP:ANYONE/WP:NLT, and I believe honest-COI-participation is crucial to WP:BLP/WP:AFC/WP:ANYONE, in roughly those orderings.
  Of course, I understand that folks like User:Kudpung disagree with me wholeheartedly, and to a lesser extent, folks like User:DGG do as well. You and User:Jytdog are somewhere in the disagree-with-me-spectrum, as well. But I see all four of you as helpful-to-the-pedia folks, no question about it; more helpful than myself, quite frankly, in terms of edit-count and such. (Doesn't make you four correct about the merits of the orangemoody-related-discussions, but wrong on the merits does not means *bad* it just means misguided.) By the same token, though, I see User:CorporateM as more helpful to the pedia than myself, and very much worth keeping, yet we lost that editor to semi-retired status, because of counterproductive coi-and-anon-related wiki-practices, recently imposed via the AN/I 'process'. Sigh. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:01, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
The example given was not a good choice: in this particular case, I don't think the term whitewash was at all appropriate The corporate editor added a substantial relevant reference, a full 2-page story about the agency in New York Magazine[16]. I have no way of actually knowing whether their PR firm suggested it to NYMagazine, but the article was written by Bernice Kanner, a writer about advertising sufficiently well known to have a full NY Obit (and therefore, by our standards, notable enough for an article). However, I'm not at all sure the other refs were more than mere notices. I am not sure how an AfD would have gone, if someone went to the trouble of adding the information in the article and made the sort of arguments that are accepted here--AfD os quite unpredictable, especially when there are contradictory policies at issue and where there is some degree of emotion involved. However, the A7 was a bad A7, and I very strongly urge JzG to revert it. The NYMag article in the refs was a claim of notability by any reasonable standard, and the contents were not G11. However, the corporate editor didn't know enough about WP to make an article which would have really shown notability in a manner that would survive the rather scrutiny likely to be encountered. I quite frankly think it unlikely that most of the paid editors around WP would be able to do this either. One or two might, and if they want to make an effective argument for paid editing, let them do their writing at AfC. I will do what I can to see their work is judged fairly, and if a Deletion Review must be brought, I will bring it, but the nature of WP is such that no one individual can decide such things. Consensus processes are inherently susceptible to tyranny of the majority, and it will always be one of our limitations. DGG ( talk ) 01:27, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
@JzG: the original mention of your username just above wasn't formatted, so you might not have seen this. Brianhe (talk) 04:15, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
No claim of notability was stated in the article, as far as I recall, but if DGG wants to restore it I won't object. It's not easy for me to do so as I am at Heathrow waiting for a flight to Texas so I only have mobile devices to hand. Admin nine on iThing rarely goes well for me. One thing though: I still hate spammers. Guy (Help!) 09:49, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
User:DGG, methink that the NewYorker ref was not in the mainspace at the time of the PROD-actions, or at least, the webcache version of the AFG-article shows no such ref. Webcache version also shows no *clear* statement of wiki-notability (some WP:PUFFERY aside -- "Bezt.Ad.Agency.Evah" does not really count as a clear indication of wiki-notability :-)
    Beside the NewYorker, the company[17] and the (co-)founder[18] have also been in the NewYorkTimes, another co-founder is faculty at NYU,[19] plus the corp get hits in three trade-rags (AdAge, AdWeek, Media Life Magazine). So I think they pass WP:42 pretty easily, especially if we presume offline sources from the 1970s/1980s/1990s are out there waiting to be discovered. Can somebody please stick the contents of back into mainspace, or into draftspace perhaps? Seeing the actual edit-history may also help me better understand why I've made Brianhe unhappy, per discussion further up this talkpage, which unhappiness was not my intent. I think this delete (and the PROD before it) was a mistake, but merely incorrect strategy and not in any way bad faith. p.s. And yes, down with the spammers, sure, but COI-encumbrance and spam *are* distinct phenomena, please don't conflate them. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 16:01, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Hmmm... I do recall adding the NYmag ref[20] recently. @DGG: is that comment above re "corporate editor" directed at me, or was there someone else adding it before? I can't review the history since the article was deleted. In any case: sadly, I have no connection at all to the company, besides reading about it on WP:COIN. -- 1Wiki8........................... (talk) 17:14, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Ping 1Wiki8, you are in the clear methinks ... although possibly User:DGG accidentally-misattributed *your* NYmag addition to the contribs of the *actual* WP:DUCK corporate-editor? The actually-presumed-to-be-COI-encumbered human is none other than anon-editor User:170.200.144.19, which is an inet-address controlled by the NYC parent-corp-FCB (or grandparent-TIPGoC?) of presently-deleted-child-corp-AFG, semi'd, see the 4th entry at WP:COIN#AFG. I believe, though I also cannot see the deleted-contribs, that the 70.200 person was the anon-editor that removed the PROD-tag from the AFG-article (and earlier either that person or another person at the same shared IP also apparently has some alma-mater-COI with respect to the student-newspaper of Binghamton U per the third entry at that COIN page). 75.108.94.227 (talk) 20:07, 20 September 2015 (UTC)
Yes, 1Wiki8, I apologize for the misidentification. And I've restored the article, with the entire history , so people can check who edited what. Possibly some of the earlier material, such as the list of major clients, should be added back. Certainly the article can go to AfD if anyone wants to take it there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs) 22:57, 20 September 2015‎

FYI

Please see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Riathamus000.

If you have any additional evidence or commentary that could shed light on the matter, that would be appreciated.

Cheers,

— Cirt (talk) 18:40, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Alternate account authentication

Brianhe.public is an authentic alternate account of mine. — Brianhe (talk) 19:01, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Latitude 47 is an authentic alternate account of mine created as an AfC experience trial. – Brianhe (talk) 17:48, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Speedy deletion converted to PROD: PP Jailbreak

Hello Brianhe. I am just letting you know that I have converted the speedy deletion tag that you placed on PP Jailbreak to a proposed deletion tag, because I do not believe CSD applies to the page in question. Thank you. Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 17:25, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

/doc subpages on navboxes ...

... are generally not a good idea, since navboxes don't usually need extensive documentation.

Template:Puget Sound Energy is a good example. Navboxes are, in most cases, much easier to maintain if the categories are in a "noninclude" section at the end (it's a proctalgia having to go to a second page to correct a category, then go back again to check it's been correctly trancluded). The main exceptions are permanently-protected templates (rare for navboxes), or groups of navboxes which share a common documentation page. --NSH002 (talk) 23:42, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Cool, I removed it. Brianhe (talk) 02:44, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Conflict of Interest

I tried to find the discussion of the alleged COI, but did not find it. Can you please send me the link to the discussion? Thank you. Harkennen (talk) 07:18, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Never mind, I found it. Should I join in the discussion to defend myself, or just let it pass? I like to write about companies, they are in the news, its easy to find references, and they are easy to understand. I want to start writing on businessmen biographies also. I found a few important people that dont have wikis. Is this going to be a problem? Thanks.Harkennen (talk) 07:24, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

@Harkennen: It all depends on what you think of other people's regard toward your editing. Obviously it matters to me, but I can't speak for everyone. I think just walking away from COIN without saying anything, would be saying something. — Brianhe (talk) 14:39, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Rc 390 top speed

I own a rc390 and clocked 182km/hr....company says it can go upto 190 after second service when they unlock the engine, cheers Don Callioni666 (talk) 14:06, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Okay, congratulations, I guess. What now? Brianhe (talk) 14:36, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia Lab at the UW Research Commons

 What: Wikipedia Lab
When: Weekly on Mondays, starting 10/5/2015 through 11/30/2015, 4:30pm-6:30pm
Who: UW students, faculty, and staff; Wikimedians; Seattle community members
Where: UW Research Commons
Focus: Women and the Sciences in October and Pacific Northwest in November; weekly topics
Wikipedia Lab at the UW Libraries Research Commons brings together local Wikipedia experts with University of Washington subject specialists and UW community members to learn about editing Wikipedia. Come contribute vital, local, and corrective content to the world's largest online encyclopedia. Come as you are with questions, ideas, or content knowledge to share!

The Wikipedia Lab will run weekly, every Monday, during fall quarter. The Lab has two thematic focuses: Women in the Sciences and the Pacific Northwest. Each week will feature a special collections librarian content specialist and Wikipedian editors. Sponsored by the UW Libraries & Wikimedians User Group

To unsubscribe from future messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please remove your name from this list. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:17, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Boutique law firm

Dear Brianhe.

I have revert the text which I inserted to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boutique_law_firm as I have made a disclosure on my user page; see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yanalfailat and the text therein is factual and non promotional.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Yanalfailat (talk) 09:40, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Catherine Corman

Dear Brianhe,

It looks like you deleted that Catherine Corman was educated at Harvard Oxford (but not that she lives in NY) because the cited Arcspace article is a self-published blog? I don't believe that is the case. It is a webzine published by a couple editors, and the article is a review of Catherine's book (that is why she is cited as the author, not because she authored the article).

This is the author of the article.

http://www.arcspace.com/content/about/

Founder and Contributing Writer Kirsten Kiser (E-mail)

And the publisher is listed on this page as well:

Publisher Danish Architecture Centre (DAC) Strandgade 27B 1401 Copenhagen K., Denmark



Thanks24.90.1.174 (talk) 19:55, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, which article are we talking about? I've been in and out of a lot of articles with issues lately. — Brianhe (talk) 20:01, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

This is regarding the Catherine Corman wikipedia article

Thanks

DYK for Counter-apologetics

Gatoclass (talk) 09:50, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Re: Wayne Chabre

Thanks for creating his article and for looking over the articles about his works, too. I am having fun creating them and appreciate the extra pair of eyes. Hoping to get around to the rest on the U of O campus soon. ---Another Believer (Talk) 03:43, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

By the way, if you have any interest in public art / sculpture, I am currently expanding Wikipedia:WikiProject Seattle/Sculpture, which is a list of outdoor sculptures in Seattle. This is a work in progress, but I hope to create some articles for Seattle's more notable artworks soon. ---Another Believer (Talk) 20:03, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
@Another Believer: That is an ambitious undertaking. I spent quite a while compiling List of public art in Kirkland, Washington. Seattle's list will be many times longer. Are you trying to make a comprehensive list? Brianhe (talk) 21:44, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes, starting with Smithsonian's Save Outdoor Sculpture survey. I've done a lot of work for Portland/Oregon, too: Wikipedia:Oregon Arts Project/Visual Arts/Sculpture (and talk page). ---Another Believer (Talk) 22:05, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Repost of KartRocket/ About the Speedy delete tag

Hello

Thanks for the speedily delete tag. But I believe the new page is quite different from the previously deleted version. I never knew about the previously deleted version. You can check the difference if you can lay hands on it. This new page is written based on fresh news resources found on the net. I believe notability is established in this case. I also believe recreation of deleted page is allowed on WP when there are usable notable references for the topic. Please consider my appeal Thanks.Rosemaryujoh (talk) 02:07, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

It looks pretty familiar to me. I don't think I will retract the speedy, thanks. - Brianhe (talk) 02:46, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

YourStory blacklisting

Hi, has the YourStory website been blacklisted from Wikipedia? Can you please share the link of discussion with me where it was decided to blacklist YourStory citation? I see a lot of pages citing YourStory articles, guess we'd have to remove them all. Mr RD 18:16, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

WP:COIN#YourStory.com has all the details. Cheers. Brianhe (talk) 18:18, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Rock formations of France etc

Please see my proposal to speedily rename Category:Rock formations in France to Category:Rock formations of France and Category:Glacial erratics in Germany to Category:Glacial erratics of Germany etc Hugo999 (talk) 13:28, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Sockpuppet detection idea

FYI, regarding the idea of automatically detecting sockpupppets. A WMF guy at the Wikiconference brought it to my attention. Said someone should submit a proposal. David King, Ethical Wiki (Talk) 14:30, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Help

Hi, I wanted to clear my doubt. I have disclosed my affiliations to How High Ventura County. However, as the page was related with Ventura County Medical Center, I also made an edit to that page. Does that comes under COI disclosure? Mr RD 21:23, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

You should probably post this at WP:COIN for everyone to discuss. It's not my issue (alone). Brianhe (talk) 22:28, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Category:Real estate companies of India

There's something weird going on in this cat, I think rival groups are fighting it out. I came across this via Raheja Developers which I protected based on an RfPP request I think, but the more I look at it, it appears to be rival paid or significant COI groups fighting each other and I can't seem to figure out what the deal is. Maybe you'd like to take a look? cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 11:21, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

@SpacemanSpiff: Thanks for asking me to get involved; your regard is appreciated. Just taking a quick look it appears that these are the articles that are churning. Many of these are probably legit cleanup; I was just scanning for recent activity. Do you agree? If so I'll start to drill down on actors.
Cheers – Brianhe (talk) 15:21, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
One more thing, if/when this goes to COIN, do you mind if I say you brought this to my attention? – Brianhe (talk) 16:49, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
@SpacemanSpiff: The dispute at Raheja Developers in January-March 2015 looks like promotion or even wikiwashing [21] on one side and GF removal of the promotion on the other side. Maybe this is what you were bringing to my attention? Since one of the editors is rather an established member of the India WP community, I wonder how to proceed. I also recommend immediate blocking of a third party, who concealed his connection to the company [22] and continued to edit after being warned he needed to disclose. – Brianhe (talk) 19:03, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
That was what took me to the cat, I didn't realize Sitush was editing it. But once there I looked around and saw DLF and Shobha and cleaned up a bit (I think DGG has done that too) and then Brigade and so on, if you look at the language it's very similar across all, so I was wondering if it was the same agency with different fronts, but then I haven't a clue about the real estate industry. It'll take me a while to get to this though, I'm running way behind on my planned activities. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 19:25, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
Regarding your comment on one or more agencies, what I've learned from my time at COIN is never to underestimate the scale or scope of the Indian PR effort. – Brianhe (talk) 19:35, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
Thank you for your tireless efforts to address the yourstory.com PR spamming and other similar misuses of Wikipedia. While this is unfortunately only the tip of the iceberg of course, your work to restrict and cleanup that problem as far as possible is greatly appreciated. GermanJoe (talk) 13:18, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
@GermanJoe: Your regard is much appreciated! Brianhe (talk) 19:35, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Raju Kapuria

Dear Brianhe, I am not a paid editor. Thanking You. (talk) 04:18, 18th October 2015 —Preceding undated comment added 10:49, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Draft article for your review

Hi Brianhe, I have saved a new draft of an article on Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) in my talk page for your review. Please let me know if this edit removes your initial concerns. Thank you. Nicksanna (talk) 16:11, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Because of my personal philosophy spelled out at User:Brianhe/BOGO, I will not review your work for you or any other paid editor. Brianhe (talk) 16:18, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Stubs and categories

Okay thanks for letting me know about the stub location. The reason I changed the location of the stub link is because for some reason its former location was removing all the text from the page. If you click the date of the previous edit it will appear like everything is normal but in actuality all the text was absent from the page when viewed in real time, thus making the page blank. It's probably because there was two spaces between the categories and the stub link.WolverineOfTheCascades (talk) 17:53, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

With this ever dramatic world including WikiDrama, here's a cup of tea to alleviate your day! This e-tea's remains have been e-composted SwisterTwister talk 07:14, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
@SwisterTwister: Virtually tasty, thanks! Brianhe (talk) 20:27, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 5

Newsletter • October 2015

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

We did it!

In July, we launched five pilot WikiProjects: WikiProjects Cannabis, Evolutionary Biology, Ghana, Hampshire, and Women's Health. We also use the new design, named "WPX UI," on WikiProject Women in Technology, Women in Red, WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health. We are currently looking for projects for the next round of testing. If you are interested, please sign up on the Pilots page.

Shortly after our launch we presented at Wikimania 2015. Our slides are on Wikimedia Commons.

Then after all that work, we went through the process of figuring out whether we accomplished our goal. We reached out to participants on the redesigned WikiProjects, and we asked them to complete a survey. (If you filled out your survey—thank you!) While there are still some issues with the WikiProject tools and the new design, there appears to be general satisfaction (at least among those who responded). The results of the survey and more are documented in our grant report filed with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The work continues!

There is more work that needs to be done, so we have applied for a renewal of our grant. Comments on the proposal are welcome. We would like to improve what we have already started on the English Wikipedia and to also expand to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Why those? Because they are multilingual projects and because there needs to be better coordination across Wikimedia projects. More details are available in the renewal proposal.

How can the Wikimedia Foundation support WikiProjects?

The Wikimedia Developer Summit will be held in San Francisco in January 2016. The recently established Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is interested in investigating what technical support they can provide for WikiProjects, i.e., support beyond just templates and bots. I have plenty of opinions myself, but I want to hear what you think. The session is being planned on Phabricator, the Wikimedia bug tracker. If you are not familiar with Phabricator, you can log in with your Wikipedia username and password through the "Login or Register: MediaWiki" button on the login page. Your feedback can help make editing Wikipedia a better experience.


Until next time,

Harej (talk) 09:03, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Notability (awards)

It seems to me that this page isn't suitable for discussing individual awards. Editors coming there, if at all they come, would not have knowledge and interest in all types of awards ranging in all countries. So should we discuss individual awards on individual country project groups and bring the consensus directly over here? Also, this common platform will see a lot of undue discussion on specific country awards from where we editors come from. What say you and @Piotrus, SpacemanSpiff, and Nagle:? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {Talk / Edits} 07:32, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

I have no preference on where the subject is discussed. I'd just like clearer standards on notability for awards to help in resolving COI issues. I've written an essay which mentions this at Wikipedia:Hints on dealing with conflict of interest problems. There, I suggested that if an award doesn't have its own Wikipedia article, winners of it probably shouldn't be mentioned in company, product, and biographical articles. John Nagle (talk) 19:05, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
First of all, an editor's talk is not a suitable place for this discussion. Please re-ask it at the Wikipedia talk:Notability (awards). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:16, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
Given the warning (?) above, maybe this should go back to Wikipedia talk:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard. – Brianhe (talk) 16:52, 30 October 2015 (UTC)
An FYI, there's this fancy "Lifetime Achievement Award" from Raindropss a four year old organization. I just despammed the advert a little, but more eyes welcome there. —SpacemanSpiff 16:33, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

5 Million: We celebrate your contribution

We couldn't have done it without you
Well, maybe. But the encyclopedia would not be as good.

Celebrate!

Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:11, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

Regarding Dillagi (TV channel)

Hello Brianhe. I noticed that you proposed Dillagi (TV channel) for deletion. You are reasoning that the article contains listing. I think it doesn't contain any listing. I have removed that AfD notice from the article as I'm dissatisfied with it. If you will nominate the article for deletion, than I'm satisfied with it. So please nominate the article for deletion. ЖunalForYou ☎️📝 15:22, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Happy Diwali!!!

Sky full of fireworks,
 Mouth full of sweets,
 Home full of lamps,
 And festival full of sweet memories...

Wishing You a Very Happy and Prosperous Diwali.
 §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {Talk / Edits} 03:53, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Send Diwali wishings by adding {{subst:Happy Diwali}} to people's talk pages with a friendly message.

Of interest

See [23]. Cheers, --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:22, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

H2 top speed.

I guess it was modified, thanks for clarifying to rv. F-16 Viper (talk) 08:17, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Deleting quoted and cited text

Kindly discuss your reasoning on the corresponding talk page before deleting text from South Norwalk article. Your opinion that a particular 'RS', which I presume means 'reliable source' is not so-- is insufficient grounds for such deletions.StephenTS42 17:19, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

@StephenTS42: The source describes itself this way (on its homepage): "Nyanglish is the world's biggest English sentence search engine! Nyanglish quickly searches practical English sentences from over 1.4 BILLION English tokens!". None of the information is attributed to any individual. There is no mention of any editorial control. This is a patent RS failure. The specific page they used [24] is obviously just a web search result, as described, without attribution. - Brianhe (talk) 10:27, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

COIN on Asselineau

Hello Brianhe, about COIN I would like to add that the policy here surely cannot be to leave bias and COI unanswered, in this case leave D0kkaebi come back with no determination of COI allowing to shine light on his somewhat civil POV pushing on the party's talk page and Asselineau's archived talk page and AfDs 1, Delrev, 2, 3, 4. The IP on COI/N who says nobody is neutral and Azurfrog (a French admin who greatly contributed to some of the main guidelines there a long time ago) is an unexperienced user with a wrong behaviour cannot be left as representing the last word of COI/N consensus, so I am sorry I had to avoid archiving, and now the question is how can something come out of this. A different question is what to do on the long term, Azurfrog's method of using only high-quality secondary sources (whose main theme is the subject of the article, with a national diffusion, etc.) looks like a good way to stabilise things, but in fact things always tend to shift towards more dubious information from short mentions with local diffusion and primary sources, due to the low-intensity militant pressure. Oliv0 (talk) 11:26, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Not interested in getting into this further, thanks. - Brianhe (talk) 11:45, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Las Vegas EDM (November 29)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by SwisterTwister was:
This submission's references do not adequately show the subject's notability—see the general guideline on notability and the golden rule. Please improve the submission's referencing, so that the information is verifiable, and there is clear evidence of why the subject is notable and worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia.
What you can do: Add citations (see Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners) to secondary reliable sources that are entirely independent of the subject.
Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.
SwisterTwister talk 08:21, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:17, 30 November 2015 (UTC)


Speedy deletion nomination of Weiss/Manfredi

If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.

You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

A tag has been placed on Weiss/Manfredi, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G11 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page seems to be unambiguous advertising which only promotes a company, product, group, service or person and would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic. Please read the guidelines on spam and Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations for more information.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator. SwisterTwister talk 07:33, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

FWIW, I noticed this article looked better when it started but even then, it still seems questionable and may simply be better restarted when better completely. Feel welcome to comment or say if AfD is better. Cheers, SwisterTwister talk 07:33, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
@SwisterTwister: Thanks for the heads-up. It's an interesting case because they have several books written about them, but at least one is apparently by or for the firm. Several notable works of architecture but I'm not sure how that plays into notability considering WP:NOTINHERITED. Let's take this one to AfD? – Brianhe (talk) 08:37, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Semi automatic detection of paid editors / socks

As you have commented on this in the past. Being discussed here [25]. For AI to work we need some good datasets. Not sure if you have a list of more? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:47, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

@Doc James: There's lots of material in COIN archives that could be gone over. Any COIN case with >10 articles is probably good fodder for training a recongition engine, if that's what you're talking about. Example: WP:COIN#EagerToddler39 is a recent one. Some other starting points for specific editors are listed at User:Brianhe/sandbox#COI and ANI.
More rich data includes the following COIN cases:
This is just going back to August; COIN archives have much more. - Brianhe (talk) Brianhe (talk) 12:38, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Orangemoody

Hate to come here for this but not sure if it warrants a request for an SPI or not. I see your name on the talk page of the article on Orangemoody so I thought I would run it by you first.

I just nominated an article for deletion - Wasaphone. Within the opening paragraph, there is a statement that the company is run by "Tom Hackwell of Armchair Committee." I followed the redlink to the article and see it was an article created by the infamous Orangemoody. I will assume good faith at the moment and trust that these articles are NOT connected by socks of Orangemoody. However, here is why I found it interesting. The creator of Wasaphone also created another article - Neil Palmer Photography. From reading some of the history of Orangemoody, I believe there were a lot of photography articles created by socks.

Like I said, not sure where to go as it is more of speculation, but thought I would run it off someone more familiar to see what to do next if anything. --CNMall41 (talk) 09:18, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@CNMall41: Thanks for asking for my advice. This looks like it is a good case to bring up at WP:COIN. You can go to that page and put a suitable subject line in the box then click "create discussion". You will get a short template to fill out. For the explanatory text I think what you posted to me above is quite suitable. -- Brianhe (talk) 09:58, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the direction. Made the comment [26]. --CNMall41 (talk) 10:16, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Exchange4media

Am not much familiar with COI and COIN and the investigations needed and resolutions thereafter. But I have recently stumbled upon the subject media firm and I have noted this down at User:Dharmadhyaksha/Promotional cases. What should be the way forward now? §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {Talk / Edits} 05:12, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I think it would be worthwhile to mention the large drawer of sockpuppets at WP:COIN. Be sure to stay within the bounds of WP:OUTING when connecting WP accounts to real-world identities. Has this person identified him or herself on-Wiki? Brianhe (talk) 11:58, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
How will I put forth the case without mentioning that the user might the same person as the employee who works there? That's the basis of the case. I couldn't find they themselves identifying it such. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {Talk / Edits} 06:40, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Don't have much to tell you, the current rules around outing make it difficult to present this kind of evidence. My best suggestion is to simply say that there is an off-wiki connection, and send what you have discovered about the real-world connection to the oversighters, who can receive such information per policy. – Brianhe (talk) 13:26, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Merry Christmas and happy new year

Merry Christmas and happy new year. (:

--Pine✉

thanks

maybe i was too quick to judge you and think that youre just a buddy of dennis bratland. thanks for the words of advice about civility, i think that i could be more polite and nice to people. i think dennis has to accept that people dont agree with him on that article. he is being very stubborn about it and should accept that everyone else is telling him hes wrong. he is trying to make a good article but he aint respecting others. the article being blocked from editing is a good thing for now, it will give everyone time to think about it. Zachlita (talk) 06:55, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

otagawa bridge

The translation on your draft article is incorrect.

Spacecowboy420 (talk) 10:57, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Orangemoody LTA

You inadvertently listed Uncle Milty as a sock and reverting their own conduct here. Can you please correct it? Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:43, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes I made a dumb cut/paste error. Altamel already corrected it. – Brianhe (talk) 22:34, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
It happens. You do a lot of good work on that page.--Bbb23 (talk) 13:45, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
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