Template talk:ACE2015

Removed some guides

@Collect, Carrite, and Tryptofish: Just to let you know that I've removed a few links from this template to guides which are not yet written. Please do re-add when they are ready for reading. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:21, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Serious guides

Regarding the current disagreement about whether or not satirical guides can be included on the template, this was discussed at a previous RfC, with the determination being, "Consensus is that any serious guide may be included at [the template], while satires and other non-serious guides should not be." If this consensus has been superseded, please link to the discussion so that we can review, thanks. --Elonka 23:50, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

@Elonka: I suggest going ahead and removing the non-serious guide since you have cited consensus for such guides to be excluded. (Plus, another editor [@Beyond My Ken:] already removed it for that reason.) I tried doing so myself, but @Floquenbeam: reverted it because of my edit-vandalism ratio, which seems to be some sort of rule he/she made up. THEowner of a l l 23:48, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

It's pretty cheap of Elonka to hang her implied suggestion for removal on the rusty nail of an RFC from the Jurassic era, and also of you, The owner of all, to actually remove a guide on that basis. 2011 was very very long ago in Wikipedia years. Also, have you actually read the discussion in question? TOOA, perhaps you were annoyed about getting your own guide removed?[1] I would agree with you there. The removal was improper and you had every right to restore it. Bishonen | talk 23:05, 30 November 2015 (UTC).

Unless I've been horribly mistaken over the years, Bishzilla's guide is and has been a playful presentation of a perfectly serious analysis. I'm really just not seeing the issue here (one way or the other). --SB_Johnny | ^talk✌ 23:11, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

It's not Bishzilla's guide in question, it's The Lady Catherine de Burgh's guide. But I've already been reverted trying to remove it, I think someone else should remove it or cite where consensus has changed. THEowner of a l l 23:44, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

• Do not try to censor those you disagree with. There's a long history of satire being used to speak the truth about politics. As an example, have a look at The Daily Show. Jehochman ^Talk 14:17, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

I think it's fine to include any and all guides; readers are free to ignore the ones that aren't helpful to them. However, I'm curious about Bishonen's comment. Is there some kind of rolling epoch that negates previous discussions and decisions on the English Wikipedia? If so, can I get an exact number of years back? I feel like this could be useful to me in other contexts. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:41, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

My researches have shown the relevant space of time to be 3.7 years. HTH. Bishonen | talk 18:26, 2 December 2015 (UTC).

In my opinion, your reply to Elonka was unnecessarily shitty in tone and deserved to be called out as such. It's perfectly fine to mention relevant previous discussions. It's also beneath you to take sideswipes at me via edit summary. I've been around long enough to know that you're better than that.

In thinking about this template a bit more, splitting the guides in an objective manner between guides that make firm/formal recommendations and ones that do not might be a nice idea. I don't know what kind of succinct label could be used, maybe "Reductive" and "Non-reductive" or something similar? In my mind, there is a substantive difference between a guide like Ched's and a guide like Carcharoth's and it may be valuable to expose that difference to readers. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:59, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I'd certainly support re-visiting the topic of voter guides in next year's ArbCom RfC. In the meantime, we should respect the currently standing consensus, and remove the non-serious guides. It's pretty standard practice per WP:DR. Otherwise what are we going to do, invalidate every controversial AfD and RM discussion that's a few years old, and bring back a free-for-all? No. Editors are welcome to "re-visit" the old discussions and check for a new consensus, but not to patently ignore old decisions. --Elonka 06:04, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Excellent point, because readers will just go look for the guides that are useful, and maybe flip through a few others if they have time. There's no real harm including more guides. Lady Catherine's was highly entertaining and did shed light on a few issues. As for the rolling epoch, there's no definite shelf life for consensus, but a discussion from four years ago is far enough back that consensus could have changed. It shouldn't be relied upon very much, if at all. Jehochman ^Talk 01:24, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

@NuclearWarfare: since it was their RfC suggestion in the first place. --Elonka 06:07, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Jehochman, Elonka, Bishonen, SB_Johnny, MZMcBride: didn't you all participate in this same discussion four years ago? I honestly don't know, because I don't know what page the discussion was held on, but I can't imagine that anything has really changed since 2011 besides who will show up to the discussion this time. I don't think anything has changed but if you all want to waste time having an RfC that's fine with me. This kind of discussion is not why I cut back on Wikipedia, but it does make it harder to return. NW (Talk) 21:23, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

In general, less Nuclear Warfare is good. Seriously folks, it's how long until the election ends and why do we want to waste time curating the guides? Just leave them be. I doubt the uninfluential, non-standard, or satirical guides will make any difference at all. I read Elonka's guide because it has a lot of useful facts, though I don't always agree with her conclusions. I read Bishonen's guide too. I read Lady's C's for entertainment. The other guides, I mostly ignore. If you pull somebody's guide, you're going to make them feel bad, for no real benefit. Are people complaining that there are too many guides? (Diffs?) Jehochman ^Talk 21:43, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Can we please stop with the ad hominem attacks, and stick with the issue? NW, the discussion was here. --Elonka 22:00, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Jonathan, there is established procedure for how ArbCom elections work. It might be unwritten, but as long as I have been on the site, it has always been "take the rules from last year, run an RFC to change things that need changing, and then run the election". We're on phase 3 now for the 2015 election, the RFC closed ages ago. Why are you bringing this up now? NW (Talk) 00:36, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

That's my understanding too. I didn't start this thread, and I had forgotten about the long ago discussion. It was decided that guides should be "serious", whatever that means, but it was never really decided who would enforce this or what sort of objective means there is to gauge what's serious and what isn't. At this point we have two days and some hours until the election ends. Why bother pulling guides now? That would just create bad will and controversy. Jehochman ^Talk 04:14, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

• Over 100,000 people were invited to vote. It would be absolutely shitty for the consensus of 30 people 4 years ago to rule which guides those 100,000 prospective voters could see. Who will be the Moderator of Guides? At this point the guides should all stay and we can review the procedure next year. Jehochman ^Talk 06:11, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Under that logic, every single ArbCom decision (which is generally made by fewer than 15 arbitrators) should be ignored, especially if it's older? I think not. Thank you for the wonderful diff though. --Elonka 06:22, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

IMO User:Elonka - your counter isn't fully equitable logic either. The only equation between "consensus" and "Arbcom" is the election of Arbcom; and even that is debatable as to whether votes = consensus. Arbcom is a standing body elected to establish procedures designed to reduce or eliminate current disruption; whereas, the RfC was a full community discussion attempting to establish a community consensus. — Ched :  ?  08:05, 3 December 2015 (UTC) (see also: WP:CCC [2]) — Ched :  ?  08:52, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Agree that ArbCom is elected by thousands of voters. The members were carefully vetted, elected and appointed. The RfC was 30 people who happened to show up in a backwater page of this site 4 years ago. For the issue in question today, I don't think that consensus is good enough to be binding. Jehochman ^Talk 14:14, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Guides which are not guides

This template should link to informative guides, but a page just saying how a particular editor voted is not a guide and is not particularly helpful to others. How about we remove those ones? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:54, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

I've removed a couple of the less helpful "guides". — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:51, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

I really disagree with this removal, and am going to put them both back pending some kind of consensus that we only want traditionally formatted guides. It is not for you to decide what is useful and what isn't. Ched and Fuzheado have both been around a long while, and the fact that their guides aren't traditional is no reason to remove. "Too many guides" is not really a problem anyway, but even if it was, reducing the number of guides from 27 to 25 does not solve it. --Floquenbeam (talk) 13:30, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Agree that both Fuzheado and Ched ought to be kept in the list. Ched's voter-guide *is* definitely intended for people who are voting (and is one of the best in my book), despite not giving any specific recommendations, i.e. naming candidates that Ched thinks voters ought to support an oppose. Fuzheado's guide suffers from somewhat the dual of that problem, in that it says relatively little about *reasons* that the voter ought to support candidates listed by Fuzheado (no opposes are given per WP:AGF which I thought was a pretty sterling gesture). Ched's guide is a you-have-got-to-think-for-yourselves type of effort, and Fuzheado's guide is a here-are-the-candidates-I-endorse type of effort. On a somewhat-related corner case, there was an earlier removal of User:Guerillero/ACE2015 from this template,[3][4] since it was really more of a guide-for-potential-arb-candidates, as opposed to a guide-for-the-voters. Maybe we should add Guerillero back (ping Peter_Damian who added it and The_ed17 who took it out), even though it was more aimed at candidates than at voters? 75.108.94.227 (talk) 21:47, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

• OK - First, I want to say Thank You VERY much IP 75 for letting me know about this discussion. I'm trying to piece this together. We have a mass email to ... actually, I'm not sure HOW many people - who are not only NOT regular Arbcom voters, but people who aren't even regular editors at all - going back how many months? So I take the time to try to inform voters of the many many issues that should be considered to vote responsibly. Now the first post to this thread of a template talk page, a page I didn't have on my watchlist by the way - Martin decides he is going to remove a few links, and pings the three editors who it may affect. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Then, you, Martin unilaterally decide that my guide should not be included because - I didn't try to tell anyone who they should vote for. AND without extending me even the common decency of any type of notification? Please explain this to me. And please spare me any condescending "oops - I goofed". — Ched :  ?  23:03, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

• Ched, you are surely welcome, as to your questions, this is what I believe is true: 107k people were mass-messaged via usertalk (opinions differ whether they would automagically get email by default, or whether they had to manually enable email-upon-usertalk, or maybe different defaults during different years). This was everybody with a username and at least 150 edits to mainspace, more or less. In *actual* practice, only about 10% of the people who *actually* voted, so far, had made no edits during the past three months... in other words, although 107k people got a note, and 2200+ bangvoted, generally speaking 90%+ of those bangvoters were at least somewhat active recently, and bothered to respond to the mass-message. (See number-crunching at User_talk:Opabinia_regalis.) So, yeah, your guide -- and the other impressively-large number of voter-guides written this year -- are very likely be heavily utilized, this election.  :-)     As to past history of this template-page, it is true Martin did remove three guides early on... HTML-commented them out actually... because they were, at the time, boilerplate stubs with little content. All three guides have since been fleshed out, and all three have been re-added. That was back when there were still only a dozen voter-guides total, and when nominations were still on-going.

  Martin's more recent removals, which turned out to be more controversial, of an additional two voter-guides, I would view as a good faith attempt at reaching consensus on what a voter-guide actually *is*. Does the voter-guide have to specify candidates by name? If so, then the guide by Ched would not qualify. Does the voter-guide have to specify detailed rationales for the recommended bangvotes, or is a bare WP:ILIKEIT / WP:IDONTLIKEIT list of names to support & oppose, sufficient? There was also a minor scuttlebutt, over a guide written by User:The_owner_of_all, who only recently became active again on wikipedia (welcome back :-)     So yeah, Martin goofed by not pinging you and Fuzheado, sure, but Floq noticed and fixed it within a few hours, so a mild trout is probably the correct sanction here, for over-zealous Template Cleansing (doubly-especially sans pings).

  p.s. There have actually been at least three other voterguides removed so far, one an attack-page deleted per BLP, one removed by the creator, and one self-reverted addition in deference to letting the voter-guide author decide about this template. Personally, I don't think there ought to be restrictions on who can write up a voterguide, though I *do* strongly wish there was a standardized format for voterguides, so that it would be easier to programmatically create guide-to-the-guides summarizations. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 23:05, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

• I really don't care --Guerillero | Parlez Moi 23:05, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Duly noted. And Thank you also to User:Floquenbeam for restoring the links. — Ched :  ?  23:10, 1 December 2015 (UTC)