User talk:Coren/Archives/2011/March

Regarding the Rod case

+1 for you not getting further involved in this Rod affair, mostly per WJBscribe, believe it or not. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:01, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Xeno motion

Re "This is a motion for the sake of... well, I can't quite figure out what purpose it's supposed to serve. It has no effect." Toning down the original language (pending the full process) reduces the perceived stigma on the person, which is a meaningful effect. IMO, the motion is a good idea. 71.141.88.54 (talk) 08:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Bridge used by everyone

"I would rather be a bridge used by everyone than be a statue." -- Nobushige Hozumi

Coren -- Have you encountered this Nikkei (日系人, Nikkeijin) poet?

With new hope.

We build new lives.

Why complain when it rains?

This is what it means to be free.

-- Lawson Inada

When you try to be a bridge to the future, it's not easy or simple; but it is a good investment. --Tenmei (talk) 18:30, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Deletion of "Beethoven's religious view"

Hello, I've looked all over for the discussion page concerning deletion of this article but can't find it -- could you please give me the link? Thanks, Opus33 (talk) 16:22, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

There isn't one per se, it's just a proposed deletion— a simplified process by which one simply opposes the deletion by removing the tag. That said, just removing the tag wouldn't fix the issues with the article and it would remain a POV fork, in my opinion; I'd probably move the discussion to AFD unless you have a compelling argument for keeping it? — Coren ^(talk) 16:26, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Hello, I started the article long ago as an attempt to keep crummy stuff off the main Beethoven page--that seemed more politically feasible at the time. I'd be happy if you put it up for deletion. Opus33 (talk) 18:27, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Off to AfD it goes[1]. — Coren ^(talk) 18:51, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

You and RH&E: see WJB's talk

You have always been an admirably frank person, and I hope I can be too in turn. I think I owe it to you to point out my concerns with your activity in the RH&E matter, and so, under the 'performance in your role as an arbitrator' clause of your user page, I respectfully direct you to my recent comment at User talk:WJBscribe. Regards, AGK [•] 12:47, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough. I still don't understand how you guys think that the fact that I've been angry at the way you (collectively) have handled the matter would affect my fairness towards Rod; but the appearance of impropriety is just as bad in the end — even if I think you're out of your gourds in this specific matter. Heh. — Coren ^(talk) 13:09, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I think the problem many of us have is that you've displayed an attitude and language that would get an ordinary editor hammered for "battlefield conduct" in an arbcom case. A little more self-restraint and humility would be well received. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 14:08, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

SBHB: Seconded. Coren: That's true; I'm sure you could probably arbitrate the case fairly. But yes, the appearance of impropriety is still important, and your apparently-strong feelings in relation to the whole matter might affect your perception. More generally, the legitimacy of the Committee's ruling in this case is affected if an editor who has voiced very strong opinions on the topic goes on to be part of the group of arbitrators writing or voting on the decision. Additionally, I just think that it'd be best for you (singular) if you were to recuse from this, because the whole thing is getting under your skin; if you were to end your involvement in the RH&E affair, you'd probably be far happier—and we want a happy Coren to be sitting on the Committee for a good while yet! AGK [•] 15:36, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

This might not have been clear, but I've recused already. Or did you expect something in addition to that? — Coren ^(talk) 15:50, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, did you? Where? My bad: I was going by this, in which you don't, I think, recuse, but do vote to accept the case (and indeed decline to recuse, in response to RH&E). No, a recusal was all I was suggesting; nothing more. Regards, AGK [•] 16:05, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh! The request page is never edited a posteriori— you want to look on the PD talk page for current active arb status. — Coren ^(talk) 16:08, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

As a clerk, I probably ought to have thought to look there :P. I hope you haven't thought I was being overly critical or pestering here or elsewhere. I'm happy with how this has turned out. Thanks, AGK [•] 16:09, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

(e/c) ... wait a minute. You're like, the platonic ideal of clerks. Haven't you suffered the ACA template enough to have it burned into your psyche?  :-)

The |PD page itself says there is only one recusal, which I took to be CHL. Color me confused. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 16:13, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

That's nothing but my having not remembered to update it. — Coren ^(talk) 16:18, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Haha, platonic ideal of clerks - I like that. I'll save that comment somewhere, and perhaps put it on my userpage when I decide if it reflects well on me ;). AGK [•] 23:24, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

CorenSearchBot potential false positive?

[2]

http://www.caldol.net/ brings me to a site about biofuels, not a military leadership site.--SPhilbrickT 01:06, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Yep. That thar be a false one, pardner. — Coren ^(talk) 01:09, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Deletion review for François Asselineau

An editor has asked for a deletion review of François Asselineau. Because you closed the deletion discussion for this page, speedily deleted it, or otherwise were interested in the page, you might want to participate in the deletion review. Lawren00 (talk) 04:20, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

False positive on Sredna Kunowski

Hello. First off, I would like to thank you for the great bot. It really comes in handy when I am patrolling new pages. I just came across a false positive on Sredna Kunowski. CorenSearchBot tagged it as being copied from here, which appears to be the results of a race. BurtAlert (talk) 21:51, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

False positive on 1F

I'd like to echo the statement above on what a great bot this is. FYI, it just gave a false positive on a new disambiguation page 1F. Interestingly, the subject on the site to which it referred was not referenced in any way on the Wiki page. I hope this helps you adjust its code in some manner. Jokestress (talk) 07:20, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Very short pages are the bot's kryptonite; some possible workarounds exist, but agreement of the right way to handle that has never been reached. I think that, last we checked, the consensus was that the more frequent false positive on very short pages were an annoyance, but better than letting cut-and-paste stubs through. — Coren ^(talk) 11:19, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Richard Gill

For Richard Gill and MHP, I have two suggestions: (1) 4.3 should be reworded to something like "Richard Gill is reminded to follow good practice and the conflict of interest guideline by seeking consensus among other editors before inserting sources he himself authored." (2) Include a FoF that shows links of him inserting those sources. NW (Talk) 01:02, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Satellite Sentinel

Hi, I can obtain approval from Satellite Sentinel to use text. To whom should I submit approval? Thank you, Nell

Please read the guide to requesting and formalizing permission to use copyrighted works on Wikipedia. In particular, you want the "When permission is confirmed" section which gives you the right procedure. Note that, in addition to copyright requirements, the article must still comply with notability guidelines, advertising prohibition and avoid conflicts of interest. — Coren ^(talk) 10:55, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Sensible comments at MHP

Thank you for these comments at the MHP arbitration, in particular, for the "least worst" comment, Arbitrators have been doing an excellent job with findings of fact and remedies relating to conduct, but are struggling with the principles. In my view the latter should be kept to a minimum for many reasons (e.g., hard cases make bad law, ArbCom should not rule on content). I hope you can convince your colleagues that such rulings are unnecessary and may be unhelpful or even damaging to the encyclopedia. Here I refer not only to ruling 11), but also to ruling 3), which is a content ruling that does not take into account many subtle issues.

There is, in my view, one principle that rules them all: it is wonderfully concise, yet poorly named and frequently misunderstood or misused. It is WP:IAR. Geometry guy 21:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Part of the point of being a committee is to ensure that we have enough diverse perspective to reduce the chance of error by oversight. My background is scientific and technical, so that particular error seemed glaring to me. But thank you, it's heartening to have one's effort appreciated once every so often.  :-) — Coren ^(talk) 21:08, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

They are much appreciated. However, I was adding to the remarks above in an edit conflict with your reply: ruling 3) as well as ruling 11) seems to me to be unnecessary, and potentially harmful. Geometry guy 21:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Ah. Well, I'm afraid we'll be stuck having to disagree on that. I agree with my colleagues that, as a generalist encyclopedia, we have to avoid becoming opaque to a general readership. It's what an encyclopedia is, and thus part of our founding principles. — Coren ^(talk) 22:38, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

We don't have to disagree: we can discuss it. Wikipedia is not merely a generalist encyclopedia, it incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. (WP:FIVE)

Guidelines exist to describe rather than proscribe, and Wikipedia manifestly does incorporate elements of specialist encyclopedias. I have often described Wikipedia as a nested family of overlapping encyclopedias rather than a single monolithic tome. It is a big mistake to constrain "the sum of human knowledge" by a traditional interpretation of what an encyclopedia should be. What we are doing here is not paper: let it shine. I cannot articulate this better than WP:MANYTHINGS, which I recommend as reading for all arbitrators. Geometry guy 22:58, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

True, to a point, but not particularly relevant to that principle I think. Certainly (as Brad noted), there are topics where "widest possible audience" means that an undergrad would struggle; that doesn't detract from the objective of keeping it as simple as possible. This is why the principle reads "For most articles [...]". — Coren ^(talk) 23:44, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I very much appreciated Brad noting the issue, but what weight do such asides carry? Geometry guy 00:00, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

False positive

Whatever algorithm caused CorenSearchBot to see possible plagiarism here needs to be extensively revised. The article I wrote is 1800 characters long and fully referenced, and yet the bot thought it might be a copyright violation of a website featuring no prose and very little information:

†Platykotta Chablais et al. 2010 (decapod)
Malacostraca - Decapoda - Platykottidae
Parent taxon: Platykottidae according to J. Chablais et al. 2010
Sister taxa: none
Subtaxa: Platykotta akaina (view classification)
Type: Platykotta akaina
Ecology: epifaunal carnivore
Distribution: there are no occurrences of Platykotta in the database
Show more details

This is patently absurd. Apart from raw classification (which is also misleading: the species has a sister taxon; see the article), all it contains is the phrase "epifaunal carnivore", which is information I haven't even included in a reworded form. If the bot can't do better than that, then its continuation may be placed in question. --Stemonitis (talk) 06:07, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

The bot's doing just fine. False positives are a natural occurrence. AerobicFox (talk) 04:12, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

But they are something to be minimised, and when the only additional material contained on a website is the binomen (how could I write an article on an organism without including the binomial name?), then a suggestion of plagiarism is clearly fatuous. My article was much longer than the source the bot thought I'd copied it from, and fully referenced, so that it is clear to all readers where the information comes from. If the bot can't understand that, then it has failed. --Stemonitis (talk) 07:33, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Is this bot working correctly?

Hi Coren. I received a message from your bot about Melchior Wathelet Jr., and honestly, I cannot figure out how it did find any similarity between my article and the website. Except for the name of the guy, I do not think there is even any identifiable group of two similar words (which is in a way surprising for a short stub on a Belgian politician). Is you bot working correctly? I mean, the false positive is so strange here, maybe it should be tweaked a bit? Cheers et cordialement. Sipahoc (talk) 21:01, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Substituting welcome templates

Would it make sense if this bot substituted welcome templates when it provides notifications to new users? I notice AnomieBOT has been coming back through and adding a subst after this bot, for example here. VQuakr (talk) 00:27, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Honestly, I've never managed to figure out when editors are expected to subst or not (well— except for the obvious cases where it's technically important that one or the other is done). In the case of welcome templates, wouldn't it make more sense making them simple to remove and not fill a newbie's talk page with several pagefuls of complicated wikimarkup?

It's not clear what purpose AnomieBOT serves in this case, really, the performance cost of the transclusion is insignificant, after all. — Coren ^(talk) 18:18, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I had to look it up, but this is discussed at the editing guideline Wikipedia:Substitution#User_talk_namespace. The justification is that it is more important to have the welcome message be static than to prevent complex markup on the talk page. VQuakr (talk) 19:34, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, that certainly gives an exhortation to subst, though by no means a rationale (or rather, I'm not sure how solid that rationale is). That said, there is no point in not substituting it if it's going to get substed anyways; I've switched CSBot do to so in the first place. — Coren ^(talk) 20:08, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

My ban

Hi, you have accused me with the following:

I've had the opportunity to say this before in past case, but I believe there is no "crime" in the construction of an encyclopedia greater than willfully misrepresenting sources: it destroys the most important foundational principle of what we're trying to do.

I have never misrepresented sources. Your accusation is completely not true. Could you please give me an example of where you think I misrepresented sources? Kehrli (talk) 05:36, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

"Co-ordinated organisations", test page in my User:GillesAuriault/Sandbox

Bonjour Coren, I would like to recreate this page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Co-ordinated_organisations&action=edit&redlink=1 which was deleted by User talk: MLauba on 23 February 2010 for CopyVio. I have put the new proposal in my Sandbox, it is a translation of a page of the French Wikipedia, and I hope there is no CopyVio this time - although, of course, I used some web data which I quote in the text and in the footnotes (inter alia, EU web, and OECD) in addition to my knowledge of these institutions, and of recent news. Unfortunately, MLauba is on "indefinite Wikibreak" (which is a pity for the Wiki community I think..), so could you have a look at my proposal or indicate a way to have it checked for acceptability? Thanks in advance for your time and help, User:GillesAuriault Gilles 17:22, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

wikigit

Hi Coren. I'm going around helping bot owners to publish the source code of their bots on wikigit, a github organization created for this purpose. I noticed you already put the source code of your bot up on your website, but two questions: 1. you didn't specify a free license for it, could you add a license statement? It would suffice to just copy the MIT/X11 or BSD License to the top of the file. 2. would you like me to create a git repository for it at wikigit, or would you rather keep it where it is and just have me link to it there? Thanks. :-) Dcoetzee 18:41, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Pokeware

Matthias Giraud is a client of Pokeware - he used the text from the company. There is no copyright infringement. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sthompse (talk • contribs) 20:00, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Are you real?

Are you real? Asdfjkl1234 21:00, 26 March 2011

9 out of 10 hedgehogs believe I am fictional. — Coren ^(talk) 02:43, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Shit just got real. MastCell ^Talk 03:27, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Dinsdale... Dinsdale... Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 12:04, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

AE sanction handling evidence

I have a question for you, on NuclearWarfare's advice. I've talkbacked Risker to this discussion as well.

I've linked a bit in my evidence that is questionable, and I don't know whether to transfer over the text of the linked page or remove the link and delete the page. The link is to User:Ludwigs2/AE_evidence. the pros and cons of it are as follows:

Reason for: The R&I mediation and associated ANI threads (not to mention the arbitration that followed) are an excellent example of the kind of bias that I'm talking about - a huge amount of the arguments that Mathsci and other editors made in that kerfluffle were personal attacks (defined in the 'ad hominem' sense trying to make editors look bad through name-calling, false or unproven accusations, dispositional assertions about their character, and etc.) on purported fringe advocates, and none of this huge mass of character assassination ever received sanctions by any admin (there were a few admins who tossed in "let's be reasonable" type comments, but they were roundly ignored). I'd personally make the argument that if admins had put their foot down and stopped all the anti-fringe rhetoric, it's doubtful the problem would have gone to arbitration - it's just that the constant needling got constant rebuttals until the situation became uncontrollable.

Reason against: I don't really want to bring up my whole problem with Mathsci again, and this evidence (as written) is likely to do that. Mathsci will jump on me for any reason he can find - he's done it a half-dozen times since the end of the R&I arbitration, popping into discussions he's not otherwise involved in to register his disapproval of me - and while I can accept that as a normal part of my wikipedia life, I don't want to exacerbate it. I could rewrite it to be less Mathsci-centric, but (sigh) he's such a good example of the problem.

Whatever you prefer - delete, revise, submit - let me know. I'd like to get this point across, but I accept that the situation has limitations. --Ludwigs2 20:59, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I cannot see the merit of these editorialising personal remarks of Ludwigs2, which are a reopening of WP:ARBR&I as well as a personal attack on me unsupported by diffs. Little of Ludwigs2's evidence was taken into account in the ArbCom case and his statements here do not agree with the ArbCom findings. During the current case Ludwigs2 has made unsupported attacks on several other users involved in the case. Here is the latest example [3][4]. In addition prior to posting this, he made this posting on Ncmvocalist's page.[5] His intent seems to be to attack me and that has nothing to do with the current case. Mathsci (talk) 21:10, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

• I just got home from a long day of work; I'll look into the matter and its context shortly after I've eaten and caught up on email. — Coren ^(talk) 23:58, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

  Ludwigs, I don't think it's useful — and it certainly isn't necessary — to raise R&I again at all. — Coren ^(talk) 03:13, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

I concur with Coren here. Risker (talk) 03:52, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you. Mathsci (talk) 03:54, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

No problem. --Ludwigs2 05:54, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

New evidence submitted

Hi, this is just to let you know that I have submitted two sections of evidence after the deadline because this evidence is based on edits that were themselves made after the deadline:

• Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling/Workshop#Hans Adler
• Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling/Workshop#Dreadstar's unblock enables continued disruption by Ludwigs2

Regards,  Sandstein  06:52, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Interesting - does this now mean that I get to submit further evidence refuting sandstein's rather wild accusation? It seems a bit odd suggesting that I'm being disruptive for something that never would have happened had he not blocked me in the first place. let me know if that's the way you want this to play out, and I'll do that tomorrow. --Ludwigs2 07:23, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Part of Ludwigs2's quite serious problems at the moment are that he has broken his promise about R&I and, in the post singled out by Sandstein, made a series of personal attacks in the case pages on a list of users, including me, with a reference to R&I. This kind of disruptive conduct is unacceptable. His conduct has also been disruptive elsewhere, with a similar unprovoked outburst. [6] Mathsci (talk) 07:46, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Ok, the irrelevant attack squad is apparently out in force now. I'm going to add my late evidence, and leave the rest of it to die a quiet death from inanity. --Ludwigs2 18:10, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Why is Ultra seksy been deleted ?

Hi I am Brian Founder of Ultra Seksy Ltd and I would like you to put back my post please, I can prove I am the owner, you can email me at brian@ultraseksy.com

Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brybrytv (talk • contribs) 21:27, 31 March 2011 (UTC)