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Administrators' newsletter – May 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2024).

Administrator changes

Nyttend

• JohnOwens
• Killiondude
• MelanieN
• Nihonjoe

Bureaucrat changes

Nihonjoe

CheckUser changes

Joe Roe

Oversight changes

GeneralNotability

Guideline and policy news

• Phase I of the 2024 requests for adminship review has concluded. Several proposals have passed outright and will proceed to implementation, including creating a discussion-only period (3b) and administrator elections (13) on a trial basis. Other successful proposals, such as creating a reminder of civility norms (2), will undergo further refinement in Phase II. Proposals passed on a trial basis will be discussed in Phase II, after their trials conclude. Further details on specific proposals can be found in the full report.

Technical news

• Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Conflict of interest management has been closed.

Miscellaneous

• This may be a good time to reach out to potential nominees to ask if they would consider an RfA.
• A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 15,000 articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!
• Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 9 May 2024. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:25, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Reminder to vote now to select members of the first U4C

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki. Please help translate to other languages.

Dear Wikimedian,

You are receiving this message because you previously participated in the UCoC process.

This is a reminder that the voting period for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) ends on May 9, 2024. Read the information on the voting page on Meta-wiki to learn more about voting and voter eligibility.

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. Community members were invited to submit their applications for the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, please review the U4C Charter.

Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.

On behalf of the UCoC project team,

RamzyM (WMF) 23:18, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Feedback request: History and geography request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Birmingham on a "History and geography" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name.

Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 11:30, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

RFA2024 update: phase I concluded, phase II begins

Hi there! Phase I of the Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review has concluded, with several impactful changes gaining community consensus and proceeding to various stages of implementation. Some proposals will be implemented in full outright; others will be discussed at phase II before being implemented; and still others will proceed on a trial basis before being brought to phase II. The following proposals have gained consensus:

• Proposals 2 and 9b (phase II discussion): Add a reminder of civility norms at RfA and Require links for claims of specific policy violations
• Proposal 3b (in trial): Make the first two days discussion-only
• Proposal 13 (in trial): Admin elections
• Proposal 14 (implemented): Suffrage requirements
• Proposals 16 and 16c (phase II discussion): Allow the community to initiate recall RfAs and Community recall process based on dewiki
• Proposal 17 (phase II discussion): Have named Admins/crats to monitor infractions
• Proposal 24 (phase II discussion): Provide better mentoring for becoming an admin and the RfA process
• Proposal 25 (implemented): Require nominees to be extended confirmed

See the project page for a full list of proposals and their outcomes. A huge thank-you to everyone who has participated so far :) looking forward to seeing lots of hard work become a reality in phase II. theleekycauldron (talk), via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:08, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Sorry about the weird attributions for my arguments

I got an interesting response to my comment at the JC discussion, this may have been a rather poor attempt to shield myself from that. FortunateSons (talk) 13:38, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

DYK for Jan Klán

On 15 May 2024, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Jan Klán, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Jan Klán, as a pilot in the Groupe de Chasse II/5, became the first Czech to achieve an aerial victory against the Luftwaffe while flying the Hawk 75? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Jan Klán. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Jan Klán), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

 — Amakuru (talk) 00:03, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Feedback request: History and geography request for comment

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Mughal Empire on a "History and geography" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
You were randomly selected to receive this invitation from the list of Feedback Request Service subscribers. If you'd like not to receive these messages any more, you can opt out at any time by removing your name.

Message delivered to you with love by Yapperbot :) | Is this wrong? Contact my bot operator. | Sent at 23:31, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2024).

Administrator changes

Graham Beards

• Deskana
• Mets501
• Staxringold

Bureaucrat changes

• Deskana
• Warofdreams

Oversight changes

Dreamy Jazz

Guideline and policy news

• Phase II of the 2024 RfA review has commenced to improve and refine the proposals passed in Phase I.

Technical news

• The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. T43351

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Venezuelan politics has been closed.
• The Committee is seeking volunteers for various roles, including access to the conflict of interest VRT queue.

Miscellaneous

• WikiProject Reliability's unsourced statements drive is happening in June 2024 to replace {{citation needed}} tags with references! Sign up here to participate!

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:43, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Your close at Talk:Andy Ngo#RfC: First sentence of the lead

Can you please explain how you arrived at no consensus for the proposal to add 'activist' to the first sentence of the lead? Noting that journalist was not part of the question put, going by your numbers (disregarding what you classify as indecipherable opinions) I'd note that 16 our of 27 editors supported the addition of 'activist' which gives 59.26%. I would have thought that given the high number of participants that 59.26% for the proposal is consensus? TarnishedPath^talk 07:18, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

"Can you please explain how you arrived at no consensus for the proposal to add 'activist' to the first sentence of the lead?"

Certainly!

1. First, I applied WP:DETCON which directs that consensus must be determined by "... the quality of the arguments given on the various sides of an issue, as viewed through the lens of Wikipedia policy".
2. Having determined that arguments on both sides were of roughly equal quality I, next, applied WP:NHC which directs that "If the discussion shows that some people think one policy is controlling, and some another, the closer is expected to close by judging which view has the predominant number of responsible Wikipedians supporting it, not personally select which is the better policy."
3. Third, I applied existing knowledge and experience as to the meaning of the word "predominant". "Predominant" suggests more than a mere majority; the transitive verb of "predominant" is "dominate" which, in my experience and in all closes I've both made and viewed -- and just, frankly, in life in general -- is not used to describe a mere majority.
4. Fourth, I engaged in a process of axial coding to identify thematic clusters present in the comments of respondents. These I itemized in the close summary.
5. Fifth, as I am required to do in cases in which no policy-based arguments outweigh the others (see point 1), I judged which views had the "predominant number of responsible Wikipedians supporting it". I determined 56% (15 from coded opinion 1) supported the proposal, while 41% opposed it (10 from opinion 2 + 1 from opinion 3). Coded opinion 4 was non-determinative. As mentioned, three opinions were indecipherable.
6. Sixth, having determined that the process of first resort (quality of argument) had not produced a clear outcome, and the process of second resort ("predominant numbers") would have to be applied and, having determined that "predominant" means some segment larger than a mere majority, I arrived at the conclusion that 56% (a mere majority, hence, less than a predominant number) did not constitute a consensus for adoption, and 41% (a minority, hence less than a predominant number) did not constitute a consensus against adoption, ergo there was WP:NOCONSENSUS.

"I would have thought that ... 59.26% for the proposal is consensus?" Your thought in this regard is incorrect. The essay WP:PNSD accurately explains our policy on consensus by noting that "...decisions on Wikipedia are made on the basis of consensus, not on vote-counting or majority rule". Additionally, your calculation is also incorrect. Chetsford (talk) 08:20, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

@Chetsford for my calculation I added 15 editors who said to call Ngo an activist to the 1 editor to call him both an activist and a journalist. Those 16 editors said to call Ngo an activist which was what the RfC question was. I added the 10 editors who said to call them a journalist and not a activist to the one editor who said not to call them an activist. Those 11 editors said to not call Ngo an activist, which again is what the RfC question was. I excluded the three editor who had no decipherable opinion. That's 16 for and 11 against giving a total of 27. 16/27 x 100 = 59.26% to the nearest hundredth of a percent. If policy arguments both for and against are of approximately equal value, given the high participation, I would have thought that 59.26% for and 40.74% (11/27 * 100) against is larger than a mere majority and hence consensus. TarnishedPath^talk 08:42, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

First, for reasons too extensive to fully get into here, the either/or !voter can only logically be counted as the union of two groups, as per below, when they're !voting affirmatively as opposed to !voting negatively; to apply in the way you've suggested would also demand the "oppose" camp is set at 44% rather than 40% since the proposal negated the possibility of an alternative inclusion. Though I know this can be a source of disagreement and I'd be open to being convinced otherwise at some other place and in some other time.

∣A∪B∣=∣A∣+∣B∣−∣A∩B∣
Second, for sake of argument, were I to accept the 59% figure, I would still reject the notion that threshold represents the "predominant" perspective in the way the word "predominant" is commonly used, particularly with these small numbers (27 people).
Third, and most importantly, it's hard for me to imagine a situation in which the difference between consensus and no consensus all comes down to how we classify a single !voter, particularly with regard to the fact that - as noted by WP:PNSD - decisions are not made "on vote-counting". If "consensus" is only determinable based on the outcome of the classification or reclassification of a single !voter, that suggests there is no broad agreement among the community, the very definition of consensus. Chetsford (talk) 09:08, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

@Chetsford, thanks for your time. I have no particular interest in requesting a review at WP:AN. TarnishedPath^talk 09:41, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

TarnishedPath - I have no problem if you request a review and you absolutely won't offend me if you do. I think all Ngo RfC closes end up in review in the end anyway so, if you don't, someone probably will. Chetsford (talk) 18:56, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Your edit

Chetsford, you did explain the rationale for this edit and I get where you are coming from. But, the result is that the remainder text is that “Wikipedia made decision X, Y, Z” but there is no reason given by Wikipedia why the decision was made. Could you consider restoring some of the rationale? Thank you. starship.paint (RUN) 10:03, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Starship.paint -- I totally agree with you. I'm probably going to be offline the rest of the weekend, though, so please feel free to revert me, or make whatever edits you think are appropriate and remedy this. Chetsford (talk) 18:54, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Request on 16:23:40, 23 June 2024 for assistance on AfC submission by Viv moira

• Viv moira (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:Georg Dehn (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

{{SAFESUBST:Void|

Hi! Thanks for the quick reviewing. Could you tell me in detail what is wrong with these sources? They are all secondary, partly academic, not self-published, etc. I did my best to make sure that this is the case. Please be aware that the occult community is so small that often there are no secondary or non-self-published sources at all, and that there is an open project on improving occult articles.

Viv moira (talk) 16:23, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Hi Viv moira - our policy requires a subject have WP:SIGCOV in WP:RS that are WP:INDEPENDENT. Your article has nine references and I conducted a random sample of a majority of those references: (a) two book reviews of the subject's authored texts which provide no biographical information on the subject, (b) a book written by the subject of the article himself, (c) a report [Bericht über die Menschenrechtsarbeit 2010] that includes the name "Dehn" exactly one time, in a credits page, (d) a 1608 text written prior to the subject's birth and which, therefore, could not reference him.
Having determined that 0% of the 55% of the references in the article which I randomly sampled would support SIGCOV, SIGCOV would now need to be proved on the basis of the remaining 45% (four) sources which means that probably a minimum of two would have to provide some type of biographical treatment beyond mentioning him in an index.
I next, conducted a cursory inspection of title, author, and publisher of the remaining four (4) sources and determined at least a few of the unsampled sources are likely to fail the standard of RS (for example, one was authored by a self-described "magician" and I'm not clear if the writing of a "magician" is reliable for WP:BLPs given the high sensitivity we assign to this type of article).
Based on all the foregoing, I determined it is extremely unlikely this article meets our WP:N standards. Because WP:BLP requires us to apply a sensitive degree of consideration when adding information about living people, the standard of "extremely unlikely" is sufficient, in this case, to decline the article, particularly given the great number of unsourced claims contained in the draft such as his supposed political affiliation and beliefs. Chetsford (talk) 21:25, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your genuinely detailed, neutral and mostly respectful response.

With a lot more effort (going into archives etc.) I could perhaps verify the political affiliations, which I got from his own writings (e.g. this: http://www.bildplan.de/schauraum/FABRIK/GEO.HTM , but primary source so doesn't count).

But I'm not willing to put more time into this. I have tried for almost two years now to contribute this article to this platform. I can only certify that he is well-known in the occult community, and that his work is discussed in secondary sources (even academic, which I have included) much more than is common in this domain. The ritual itself is highly relevant, even central for all the modern occult orders that were influenced by Aleister Crowley (who famously failed at attempting the incomplete version of this ritual himself).

If an article about occult work is partly rejected because one of the sources refers to himself as a magician, we are not going to find a common ground here anyway.

P.S.: Just to set the record straight - it wasn't a "credits page": https://www.gfbv.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Publikationen_Dokumente/2010/Arbeitsbericht_2010.pdf Viv moira (talk) 22:17, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

"Just to set the record straight - it wasn't a "credits page" It was a page in which the start and end of the content of the subject was the following sentence (roughly translated, since my German isn't great): "Working with volunteer Aboriginal expert Georg Dehn, we assisted the efforts of "Nyungah Aborigines" of Western Australia to save their [something] "owl rock" (?} [something]." This is used as the supporting source for "Since the 1980s, he has been advocating for the human rights of indigenous peoples." So clearly, much of this article is either WP:OR or just made-up.

"With a lot more effort (going into archives etc.) I could perhaps verify the political affiliations" The ability to "perhaps" verify something -- albeit only if it's not inconvenient to you -- won't really cut it. WP:V is one of the core content policies of Wikipedia and, unfortunately, we don't offer waivers or exemptions for occult subjects. Based on this, I'd suggest there's really no point in you resubmitting this again. This nonsense has occupied enough of the time of our volunteer editors already and it's clear further submissions are unlikely to result in the draft being moved to mainspace. Thanks. Chetsford (talk) 22:51, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Translate article

Hi, I was trying to translate this article from its Polish version, but it got declined. The original article had sufficient sources to remain on the Polish Wikipedia. Can I have assistance in finding out what other sources to add for a second revision, or could you possibly help me transfer this article to the English Wikipedia? I already translated all the text myself. KarolSnopis (talk) 12:26, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Hi KarolSnopis - I'm afraid I don't know Polish so I can't assist you. (My knowledge of another West Slavic language allowed me to understand just enough written Polish to identify that four of your sources were personnel rosters and couldn't realistically contribute to WP:SIGCOV. Because only two sources remained and there was no indication that this individual likely met our standards of WP:N based on the narrative in the body, I declined it.) Chetsford (talk) 02:48, 28 June 2024 (UTC)