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TraMOOC Project

How about: "highly competent partners" or "leading researchers". The spamming is not done by the European Commission, although they are kind of responsible for it, as they require projects to publicize themselves as much as possible. Often, a Wikipdia page is one of the "deliverables" of these projects. It's the project participants that make these pages. Indeed, the major contributor here is a SPA, who had another article on an EU project deleted (that one after AfD). The sourcing is decidedly weak, too (but that is not in the remit of CSD, of course). And you know as well as I do that promotional editing occurs regardless of financial motives or current interest. So, yes, this was seriously a G11 proposal for speedy deletion. --Randykitty (talk) 18:39, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

That page clearly doesn't serve only to promote or publicise an entity, person, product, or idea, and as such there's no way G11 is ever going to apply. If you think it's an inappropriate topic for coverage in Wikipedia (I have no opinion as it's a topic on which I have no interest whatsoever), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/TraMOOC Project is thataway. ‑ Iridescent 18:45, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

License attribution requirements

I'm looking for another opinion, in case I'm wrong:

Imagine that I merge an article. I copy some content from a stub into a section in a bigger article, and redirect the stub title to the target. I use "Copied to Target" for the one edit summary and "Copied from Stub, which see for attribution" for the other edit summary. Good?

Later, someone edits Target. The end result is that 0% of Stub's original content in any current version of any Wikipedia article.

Question: Can I (i.e., some admin) now delete Stub, since the current version of Target does not need the attribution/history at Stub? Or does WP:PATT's "must not be deleted" apply forever and without exception regardless of current content, e.g., in case someone decides to copy content from the previous revisions? And whatever the answer is, is this reliably known to any admin, or does the practical result depend upon who's asked? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:02, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Why delete Stub, if its title is a good redirect to Target? And if it isn't a good redirect to Target, it shouldn't've been left as a bluelink in the first place. If I were coming into the situation cold, I'd move the history into some other redirect without relevant history, and preserve attribution from there. If you're concerned about the edit summary then being wrong, well, {{merged-from}} is more reliable and flexible anyway. —Cryptic 10:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

There's been a story going around RFD that a redirect such as Stub should be deleted if the current version of Target does not mention the word Stub. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Redirects are cheap, so I'm told. Besides, anyone who is concerned that a given redirect must be deleted needs a dose of common sense to understand that the matter of a pointless redirect isn't worth fighting over. If people object to its deletion -- even if they are a band of wingnuts, trolls & POV-pushers, the best course is to drop the matter, wait for a while, then reconsider whether its still worth deleting. Repeat if needed, but best is know when to move on. -- llywrch (talk) 19:21, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Llywrch, the "redirects are cheap" thing is good in theory, but in practice has limits and sometimes it's sensible to delete redirects if they're serving only to confuse readers. Imagine we have an biography of Llywrch but not of WhatamIdoing. Further imagine that this thread somehow gets covered by the press, and User:Alice entirely legitimately adds "in 2020, Llywrch had a disagreement with WhatamIdoing about licensing terms" to your biography. User:Bob then sees this and in good faith creates a redirect from WhatamIdoing to Llywrch on the grounds that this is the only mention of WAID anywhere on Wikipedia so it's the only legitimate target. User:Carlos then comes along, correctly decides that this thread is not relevant enough to your life to warrant inclusion in your biography and takes the paragraph in question out. We'd then be left with a situation in which three editors, all acting in good faith, have led to the creation of a wholly irrelevant redirect with no clue on the target article as to why it exists, so if in future someone is writing their term paper on "the early history of WhatamIdoing", Google will direct them to your biography with no explanation as to why.

This is obviously a strawman example, but it does arise reasonably frequently in reality. For example, it comes up quite often with session musicians who are redirected to a band with whom they played or an album on which they made a brief appearance, but when it's later decided that it's inappropriate for the target article to mention someone who had a very minor role, so the redirect is left hanging. It comes up all the damn time with ultra-minor elements or characters in TV shows/films/plays/books which aren't deemed significant enough to be mentioned in the target article but are created in good faith as redirects to whatever they appeared in. (Assuming you're not familiar with the topics, would you care to try to work out the purpose of Sneakers O'Toole, O, Draconian Devil! or Paula Ann Bland?) ‑ Iridescent 19:53, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

That was an interesting exercise. (I figured out all three in less than 15 minutes because I know how Wikipedia is created & thus know where to look. I just needed a few hours to come up with an appropriate answer.) Those three examples the first two redirects reference a matter only someone who knows the answer would go looking for. (Much like wondering why Wikipedia doesn't state anywhere how many hallocks are in a flat of strawmen strawberries. Or why Tabula Hebena doesn't link to Constitution of the Roman Empire.) As for the third, IMHO that redirect is a bad solution to what appears to be a BLP-related problem.

But I still hold to what I wrote above: make your point, & if deletion of these stubs is opposed by the stubborn, foolish, or the trolls, Wikipedia is not harmed if you drop the matter & take another of the numerous problems then return much later. Patience is an often forgotten ally in these matters. Individuals in those three groups tend not to last, so when you try to delete it much later you won't encounter the same amount of senseless resistance. Drop if another crop of boneheads try to shout you down, rinse & repeat. Either garbage like this will eventually be removed, or someone will justify adding the content back. (And accomplishing the latter is far less likely than someone adding content that explains the examples I mention.) -- llywrch (talk) 07:21, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

No. You’d need to either do a dummy edit listing the unique authors of the deleted stub as an edit summary in the history or create Talk:Foo/merge attribution with a list of authors and an edit summary pointing to it. Wikipedia attribution is done via page history, which is why the template Cryptic mentions is optional but edit summary attribution isn’t. This is all of course theoretical as to my knowledge no CC license has ever been enforced in a court and they’re probably unenforceable to begin with (how do you prove damages for something you’ve intentionally made free for anyone to use...). TonyBallioni (talk) 13:41, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

But you both think that the attribution must be preserved somehow, even if the current version of Target does not include any words from Stub, right? (TonyBallioni, you'd claim that your moral right to recognized as the author has been thwarted. Not all damages involve money.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

It depends. If the old content was incrementally edited away, the current version is usually a derivative work of the merged one even if it doesn't have any words in common. If it was just reverted back out wholesale, or was never integrated into the rest of the article, deletion might be acceptable; if someone then wanted to revert to the merged version, the onus would be on them to somehow provide attribution.

Though it's inconvenient, you can still get a list of editors of deleted pages, even without admin rights, from the database dumps or from tools like quarry (example for a page I salted sort-of-recently). The edit summaries aren't there, though, so you're out of luck if the merged-from page was itself merged-to at some point and attributed via edit summary. —Cryptic 18:03, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Since past versions are still visible, though, I would think it would still be necessary to provide attribution for the older content. isaacl (talk) 18:10, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes. You need to provide attribution for everything, making a link in the page history. If the article has more than a few authors the easiest way to do this is a subpage. I did one of these methods a few years ago when one of the ARS crowd tried to game the system on some spam AfD by merging two sentences into a new article and then claimed that we couldn’t delete it despite the consensus being very clear. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:26, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Probably enforceable but as I imagine virtually all editor contributions are not registered for copyright (unless the editor is copying from their own registered, copyrighted work), only actual damages can be recovered, which means it's not worth anyone's while to sue over. However, takedown notices are cheap and annoying to comply with, so honouring the licensing terms is still worthwhile. isaacl (talk) 18:07, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah. This is more my point, it’s practically unenforceable in a way that would have a meaningful impact on a party breaching the license. CC licenses (with the possible exception of NC variants) amount to little more than “Please give me credit, thanks” wrapped in legalese. This is evidenced by the fact that there hasn’t been a single court case enforcing them to date. Sure, takedown notices are annoying, but if someone was trying to get these enforced and claim damages, they would spend more money than it’s worth trying to enforce them, making the license restrictions basically meaningless in a practical context. You might be able to get a declaratory judgement declaring someone the creator of the work, or other forms of equitable relief, but money damages would almost certainly not be awarded, which means no one really cares outside of the free culture movement.

That being said, it doesn’t change the fact that we should comply with the license for the moral reasons and the legal theory behind it. It’s the right thing to do. My point is more that CC licenses are much more moral documents than legal documents that have a chance of being enforced. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:26, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

The CC licenses, including the attribution requirement, have been sued over but not really past the district court level. However, other free licenses have been thoroughly litigated, including Jacobsen v. Katzer, which ruled public licenses to be enforceable. The lack of money changing hands in open source licensing should not be presumed to mean that there is no economic consideration, however. There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties. As Isaccl mentioned, nobody's paying the fees to register their contributions with the Copyright Office, so statutary damages probably wouldn't apply. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:56, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

In the context of individual contributors licensing out their contributions under a FOSS license, and so the compiled whole is reused under licensing from all of the contributors, I agree it's pretty hard for any individual to sue someone else for failing to comply with the license. (Which is why no one can really go after all of the self-published books on Amazon that simply grab a bunch of Wikipedia pages without providing attribution.) But the more usual case in the FOSS world is that contributors assign copyright to a co-ordinating person or organization, who in turn provides the license for reuse. In that case, with one entity in charge, violations of FOSS licenses can be pursued more effectively. isaacl (talk) 21:40, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

• I'm okay with doing the right thing just because it's the right thing to do. I don't generally need someone to threaten me with a lawsuit to get me to do the right thing.
• For context, aside from what appears to be an ongoing problem with RFD regulars never having read the RFD rules (Editor with a couple thousand contributions to RFD: "Wait, it says we're supposed to care about that? Since when?" Me: "Since 2004."), is that back in the day, people created articles about every little thing in Tolkein's famous books, and many of those got merged/redirected into lists or larger subjects, and those pages got edited and merged and split and re-merged and eventually redirected into even more general pages, and a couple of months ago, someone at AFD decided to blank [NB: not "delete"] and redirect Minor places in Middle-earth (formerly the List of Minor places in Middle-earth) to Middle-earth#Geography, and now RFD is filled with a bunch of proposals to delete these redirects because the minor places aren't all mentioned by name in the (unchanged) ==Geography== section. "Not mentioned" isn't officially a reason for deletion (that, too, seems to surprise the non-admin RFD regulars; WP:Nobody reads the directions), but I think that battle can only be won if we find a very stubborn editor who has time to post to every single RFD that this isn't a valid reason for deletion, until people learn, by word of mouth, not to say that. However, the license thing is a different kettle of fish. No True Wikipedian wants to screw up the license, and if this screws up the license, then (a) any redirects involved in a merge ought to be kept, and (b) I suspect that even the noms would agree that it's best to keep them.

It sounds like deleting these would screw up the license. But I'm not getting the sense that we're confident that any random closing admin would know this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:28, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps you should get a biggish flashing-lights notice put at the top of RFD pages for a while. I expect once the actual rules & rationales have sunk in they will be happy to adopt them. And/or target a few of the regulars & make sure they've got the thing straight. Johnbod (talk) 04:21, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

I have thought about a bot to post something like "Notice to admin: This redirect is 16 years old. Policy Says™ it's harmful to delete old redirects." With my policy-writer's hat on, the votes from some RFD regulars and the written rules are so different that I don't know which one to fix, but it does need to be fixed.

For this matter, though, I don't think it should be fixed at RFD. I think it should be fixed at WP:PATT or one of the deletion policies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:55, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh. I wasn't going to mention this here, but I see the matter of the Tolkien/Middle-earth redirects got mentioned. I raised this issue of attribution in one of the AfDs, but the point was mostly ignored. I ended up being less exercised about the attribution (though that is important) as in the fact that deletion of really old stuff is akin to rewriting 'what happened' (or making it less visible). If this makes no sense, take a look through my recent contribs (since about the beginning of the year), or see here. (For those interested, see also here and here). In the current (less fancrufty) versions of the main articles (with heroic work by one particular editor), some of the redirects will slowly get recreated and targeted where there are small amounts of information, but whether anyone cares about the edit history is less clear. Carcharoth (talk) 15:55, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Carcharoth here. I'm not too concerned with the legal aspects of attribution—realistically, nobody is ever going to take legal action over the attribution of deleted content. (@User:WhatamIdoing, I know separation of hats is a Very Important Thing, but I'm sure if you asked User:Whatamidoing (WMF) nicely she would know who to ask at Legal to get a definitive ruling on the legality of deletion in a CC/GFDL context.) What I'd say is an issue isn't the legality, but the ethical side of rewriting the early history of Wikipedia.

This is true in terms of the history of Wikipedia itself; early Wikipedia was much less sure of its boundaries and had shedloads of pop-culture articles that would now be considered either non-notable or hopelessly fancrufty. If, for instance, we delete the history of all the pages like Sandshrew, we're masking the fact that Wikipedia had a full-length biography of every Pokemon before it had an article on Chemical weapon. Wikipedia is now reaching the age where people who weren't there at the time are going to start writing papers on its history, and rewriting its history in this way hands control of the history over to the "Wikipedia was always destined to become the world's greatest academic resource and anyone who says otherwise is just jealous!" WMF ultraloyalists like this drivel.

It's also true in terms of the histories of individual editors. I'm assuming that most of those Tolkein pages were created by one or two fans back in the early days; deleting them outright, rather than preserving the histories, will distort those editors' histories, making it look like they were far less active than they actually were. (If you want a concrete example of why this is an actual problem rather than just a thought experiment, JarlaxleArtemis wrote a lot about Dungeons & Dragons before he went off the rails. Deleting outright things like this—even though it doesn't meet Wikipedia's current notability standards and serves no useful purpose as a redirect—would mask the fact that he at one point was genuinely productive and helpful, making it much harder to assess any appeal were he ever to ask to come back.) ‑ Iridescent 07:33, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Legal has outright refused to provide advice to editors since approximately Mike Godwin's departure. I'd probably have better luck asking the CC folks to write a blog post about it.

You're right that doing this on a large scale could affect all sorts of perceptions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:32, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia and weather.com (abusing Iri's talk page stalkers again :)

Reading through Jo-Jo Eumerus's Coropuna again, after all the work we've done there, and thinking of how very hard it is to write in convert-heavy and number-heavy topics, I am wondering why Wikipedia can't have something akin to, for example, weather.com user preference settings. You specify in your settings whether you want to see centrigrade or farenheit. Holy cow for having to write around all these blooming converts so we can show both! Why can't we have settings for our preferences with what to see, that hide the other? WhatamIdoing? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:42, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Probably because the folks at Phabricator will run scared at the amount of reader-facing scripting this would require. And if it's only for users, upkeep/benefit ratios are likely to be an issue. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 22:00, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Why can't it be done in general? Because Ops wants to send the same page to every (logged-out) reader.

We could probably do that for our own (logged-in editor) views via CSS. You'd probably get a Flash of unstyled content on occasion, and you'll still see everything while editing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:03, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Unless we're going to recode MediaWiki to vastly increase the number of magic words—which would create a vast number of false-positives (we'll look ridiculous if the software is generating references to Celsius 283, 11/9 Truth movement etc)—the only way to get this to work would be through linking the items in question each time to allow the software to recognise them as discrete entities in need of processing, or by forcing editors to use the {{convert}} template every time instead of just writing out the conversion. Have a read through Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Date delinking and the shit-ton (1.12 US shit-ton, 1.02 metric shit-tonne) of arguments generated there if you want to get a feeling for why opening this can of worms is unlikely to be met with much enthusiasm.

And dates are relatively simple compared to the mess that is measurement units; the world doesn't divide neatly into "metric", "imperial" and "US" measurement systems, and in some core en-wiki markets—most notably Britain—each person has their own idiosyncratic mix of preferred units (formulations like "1 metre 3 inches" or "miles per litre" aren't uncommon, and just try shopping for something like milk where the standard bottle sizes are pint, litre, 2-pint, 2-litre); if the only options are "all metric", "all imperial" etc, it's just going to annoy lots of people who are used to (for example) using stones as a measure of body mass but kilos as a measure of weight when shopping*, or miles for long distances and centimetres as a measure of short distance. Throw in the British habit of using Celsius for low temperatures and Fahrenheit for high temperatures ("the temperature is hovering around 1° so there could be some ice on the road, but there's a heatwave projected for next week with temperatures reaching 100°") and you're looking at a recipe for pissing off a lot of people very quickly. ‑ Iridescent 22:14, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
*This describes about 90% of the population of the UK, and the other 10% are recent immigrants; even devout advocates for standardising the measuring system will stare at you blankly if you give your weight in pounds or kilogrammes, but will stare at you equally blankly if you try to sell them a pound of potatoes instead of 450g.

I've been assuming it would only get used within the {{convert}} template. Doing it everywhere sounds undesirable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:39, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Even within the template, I think it would be undesirable for reasons given above. Firstly, we'd need to replace all manually-formatted instances with the template (the {{convert}} template is often substituted, since it's not as if the mile/km conversion is ever going to change and substing reduces the likelihood of hitting the template limit). Secondly, displaying both measurements is a feature, not a bug; in all the major English-speaking countries people are bilingual to some degree between measurement systems, and flip between them all the time subconsciously, and I'm virtually certain that even if we gave people the option of hiding imperial/metric/US measurements, people would switch it off almost instantly. (Even the staunchest Eurosceptic will sometimes want to use SI units for scientific measurements, and even the most fanatical metriciser will still sometimes want to see the avoirdupois equivalents to understand where the apparently-arbitrary metric measurements like 1609m or 6.35kg have come from.) ‑ Iridescent 07:16, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me of the never-ending date-delinking debacle; I get it, this would be worse. The fait accompli finding is apropos of my entire current editing experience; I wonder how often it is applied. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:17, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

A slight aside, but I don't totally agree with the wording of the fait accompli ruling even though I entirely agree with the sentiment behind it. There's a legitimate argument to be made that Wikipedia is nothing but a succession of faits accompli; people throw things at the wall, if they stick they become precedents and are added to the guidelines/policies, but if people complain and revert the changes it in turn sets a precedent for this being something without consensus, and the guidelines are eventually altered to formalize that nobody is to do it again. Until they redefined themselves as the Wikipedia Ministry of Public Morals and started poking their noses into the kind of user-interaction cases that were never supposed to be part of their remit, back in the day when "comment on content not contributors" was a philosophy rather than an empty slogan the purpose of Arbcom was to sort out those gray areas where it wasn't clear what the consensus was. ‑ Iridescent 10:31, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Yay, I now officially join the exalted ranks of "Grandmaster Editor First-Class". Maybe we should print T-shirts. ‑ Iridescent 07:38, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm sure there are already shirts :/ Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:42, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

I'll wait two years until I'm "Vanguard Editor" before I start hanging the bunting. Have you seen the T-shirt giveaway? It's one of the most peculiar circle-jerk pages on the whole of the wiki. ‑ Iridescent 09:13, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

You sent me down on memory-lane, reclining a shirt. Better read about Elke Heidenreich's Alte Liebe, - - late Valentine ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:56, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Those are some interesting pages: seeing who was nominated, who accepted, who rejected, & -- most interesting -- that none have been handed out since some time in 2018. (I guess the WMF changed the criteria for handing them out. Or ran out of money.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:29, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Article: Yale against Western Art

• Yale against Western Art
• https://quillette.com/2020/02/13/yale-against-western-art/
• I dunno who holds what views or preferences or whatever, but the only arty people I know are you, Modernist, Ceoil and Johnbod. You don't necessarily have to reply, because I'm just posting as a coffeetable-article-type thingie, as I often have to different editors with articles on many different topics... I don't really know much about art anyhow, of course. Cheers ♦ Lingzhi2 (talk) 04:05, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm only hearing one side of things, but I tend to sympathize with the article's writer. It's fashionable (and legitimate) to point out that art history courses in European countries (and places like the Americas whose culture is derived from European influences) tends to focus on European history, but that's just because that's what people in those countries tend to find interesting; I'm quite sure that if I attended the equivalent course at the Nanjing Arts Institute or the Tokyo University of the Arts the balance would be reversed. Postmodernism and deconstruction is a perfectly legitimate thing, and it's always worth looking at the wider context and at how the economy determined who could afford to commission art and consequently what the artists were making, but it isn't racist to point out for the last couple of millennia pretty much every significant development in artistic techniques has originated in either western Europe or eastern China so those are the places most worth paying attention to. ‑ Iridescent 07:12, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Sad, but I'm not surprised. For a few decades this is the way the wind has been blowing in academic art history (something I've never studied formally). They also seem to do vast amounts of theory (postmodernist, queer etc etc) especially at the start, art history (especially in English) having once been very sparing with that. Apart from the undoubted global importance of the European tradition, the main underpinning of modern global visual culture, it provides a useful narrative of development across 2,800 years, and also some familiarity with the culture & history that produced it can still be assumed, if to a rather dwindling degree. Studying say Indian art requires a good deal of background knowledge that English-speaking students will mostly lack. Johnbod (talk) 14:09, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

A couple of years ago myself, Ceoil and Kafka Liz were in Manchester Art Gallery, snd found they'd painstakingly added a seperate "feminist revision" below each explanatory sign (fairly typical example). The sheer self-important dour virtue-signalling of the whole thing (Rich white men had a privileged place in 19th-century Europe? How did I not know about this!) left me by the end thinking that actually, the Daily Mail might have a point. ‑ Iridescent 14:32, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Blimey! A temporary feature, I hope. They haven't glued them to the wall I notice. Generally, but not always, the big museums (plus of course the art trade) are bastions of old-school knowing stuff. Johnbod (talk) 14:52, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Quillette, in case you didn't know, rocks. Sure some of it is a little fluffy sometimes, but you also get stuff like Why We Should Read Heidegger, which was part of a series on totalitarian philosophers. I always like to learn new things. Me likee. ♦ Lingzhi2 (talk) 15:39, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Iridescent, I hope you're kidding. The last couple of millennia? While my (western) ancestors were busy making such important innovations as, ahem, nothing, the Babylonians built the Ishtar Gate. But sure, some guy in the Netherlands "invented" oil painting some 800 2000 years later. Except, of course, he didn't. But sure, nothing of any importance ever came out of what's now the Middle East, or India, or Africa. Good grief.Vexations (talk) 21:22, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

The Babylonians built the Ishtar Gate considerably further back than "the last couple of millennia"; I challenge you to give me an example of anything painted, sculpted, written, drawn or built in Babylon after 636 AD by anyone other than Saddam Hussein. For sure, the Nile Valley and the Fertile Crescent were the cradle of civilisation, but they then had cultural destruction at the hands of Greece, Rome and Persia; centuries of Byzantine rule (there are many things to admire about Byzantium but "artistic innovation" is not one of them, unless you have a particular fascination with minute differences in the depiction of Christ Pantocrator); a second wave of cultural destruction during the Islamic conquest, the complete destruction of Baghdad as a cultural centre in 1258; the disintegration of the Maghreb and the Turks sweeping up what was left and shifting the centre of Islamic culture to Constantinople. After the Mongol invasions, the Middle East was something of a cultural backwater; western Europe (both Christian and Islamic), eastern Asia, and India, were where the significant developments took place. "A couple of millennia" may be something of an exaggeration, but it's certainly true of the last 700 years or so. ‑ Iridescent 21:53, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Fixed the date. Of course nothing was created in Bablylon after it was destroyed. Anyway, let me know when you're in the neighbourhood; I'd be happy to show you around the Aga Khan Museum. They have some item from the last 700 years too. Vexations (talk) 00:38, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

It's been a problem definitely for decades. I remember when I was at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the late 1980s the matter of Post-Structural Literary Criticism came up -- in much the same manner that Coronavirus being an epidemic at a favored college might. At the time I was surprised how the time-honored techniques of close reading (learned thru practical experience) was being replaced by emphasis on theory expressed in esoteric & turgid language. (Yes, I'm one of those who consider Derrida & Foucalt unreadable. Based on actually trying to read both.)

I suspect one of the reason why there has been an embrace of theory over actual experience is due to cut backs in US higher education: outside STEM expertise is often a matter of critical acumen, & even those with well-developed critical skills are wrong a significant portion of the time (e.g., Ruskin's review of Whistler's art). And since there are so few geniuses in any field -- which means most people are merely very good -- most find it hard to defend their academic qualifications based on critical skills when it comes time to consider tenure. Or even being hired for a tenure-track position. However, when based on mastery of the latest Post-Modern critical theory (which is often acquired in the same manner of mathematical skills -- rote memorization), the merely good can hope to successfully defend their qualifications. Whether or not they understand -- as an example -- why Shakespeare is an important author. Beyond the hackneyed rule that if something is written in difficult language, it must be profound. -- llywrch (talk) 01:57, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Romford Garden Suburb

Hi Iri, I see you're a participant at WP:London, although I don't know how active you are there. I've spent the last couple of months writing the above with no intention of going any further than simply creating it. The page I've pasted it onto was a former redirect, as "Romford Garden Suburb" redirected to Gidea Park, and had done so since 2006. I'm not sure if creating an article on a redirected page is madly illegal, but I expect I'll know for sure when I get some officious little so and so come along to tell me that what I've done is akin to Baby farming, or something, and completely unacceptable. Anyway, in the meantime, I need to know if this, the one I've created, needs to be patrolled as a new article, or whether I'm best to leave it. There's also a DYK there, I'm sure, but I can't be arsed with that, so if anyone wants to do one, be my guest. I know that Ritchie likes writing things about London streets, so pinging him, too. Cassianto^Talk 09:16, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

I've never heard of anyone landing in trouble for creating an article where a redirect once stood. Unless the article itself was problematic (e.g spammy) or when the redirect was created from an article pursuant to AFD or a merge discussion. And these would be clearly marked in the edit history or the talk page, none of which bear any such notice in case of Romford Garden Suburb. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:27, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Jo-Jo Eumerus. Cassianto^Talk 10:33, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Bloody good article Cassianto, nice one 👍 although I see you didn't mention Rom-ford's Roman history... 😊 ——SN54129 09:35, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks SN. I'm in much debt to We hope, obviously, who had the laborious task of uploading over 100 images for the table; without her, this article wouldn't have existed. Cassianto^Talk 10:33, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

• Very nice - what the officious little so and sos will do, if you create a 45k article with no categories, is add some of those. Johnbod (talk) 16:59, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Thanks, and thanks also for the passive aggression, although you're wrong to think I created a 45k article with no categories - they existed here, before the moving around in main space. I can only assume that Ritchie's curiosity got the better of him. Cassianto^Talk 17:17, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

(I'm not really a participant at WP:LONDON—I don't think anyone is any more as that project is stone dead—but I did write what's probably the closest comparator among existing articles, so I'm probably at least vaguely qualified to comment.) Firstly, you're not going to get in any kind of trouble for turning a redirect into an article. The worst that would ever happen is someone saying that they felt the new article isn't the primary use of the term and suggeting you move it to a more specific title.

On the article, looks like good work so far. One thing that jumps out at me is the lack of any mention of ameneties—when the new development was designed, did the developers also build shop units, a church, a pub, a school etc? If they didn't, what was the impact on the local area since presumably the sudden appearance of hundreds of new residents in the area, most of whom would have had children, would in particular have overwhelmed the local school. I'd personally also be inclined to head down there with a camera at some point and get some photos of what it looks like now; a century later, some of these idealistic housing developments like Queen's Park or Port Sunlight look virtually unchanged a century on, but some of them (Wythenshawe, Becontree…) now include places that look like stock photos for "crumbling slum".

Personally, for this article I'd move the massive Architects and buildings table either into a separate subpage or into an appendix at the very end. Presumably most readers are either going to be locals who want to know the history of their area, or people researching the history of the garden village movement in general; both of these are groups who won't be interested in seeing every separate house, and for someone who only wants to read the text—or even more so, who wants to print the text—having a massive table in the middle is going to be disruptive. Having the tables as an appendix at the end violates MOS:ORDER but as long as it's justifiable no sane person is going to complain about the MOS violation—see Ceilings of the Natural History Museum for an obvious recent example. ‑ Iridescent 14:11, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I see we haven't got an article on first-thru-fourth class housing, which is a shame. ——SN54129 14:27, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

AFAIK classes of housing wasn't a legally defined thing like first–third class railway tickets, but a convenience used by urban planners and the estate agents charged with marketing the new-builds, to make it easy to differentiate between the different sizes of houses. Noel Park, for instance, had five classes of houses rather than four. ‑ Iridescent 14:33, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks very much, I hadn't thought of moving the table, but I think I will. As far as I know, there was no pub as one already existed. A church, well, no also, as that came 25 years later, in the shape of this. Shops, yes, although much further up Balgores Lane, by the station. Poor old Humphrey Repton's cottage succumbed for the sake of a grotesque 1960s bank that now stands on the site. The station, I've mentioned, although could expand a bit, but I'm restricted by the source. The only houses worth photographing are the Grade II examples, if I'm honest, as Historic England are a pretty good judge in knowing what's notable and what's not. I typical street could be photographed, I suppose, but then it's a question of which one and at what part? Cassianto^Talk 19:11, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

House on Gidea Park Estate by C. J. Harold Cooper

If it helps, we have commons:category:Gidea Park which has three modern-day photos, and photos of the park, church and railway station (do those date from the construction of the suburb?). There is also the image I've put here, of a house by Arts and Crafts architect C. J. Harold Cooper, who apparently built a number of houses (including completing 1a Palace Gate) but died young at 46. That image shows the interior layout of the house, so might be worth using if it was actually built. Carcharoth (talk) 16:45, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Carcharoth. Would there be a problem with permissions with regards to using current photos of people's houses? I note Google blur out some people's houses on their Street View service. But having said that, I've put in 64 Heath Drive, and someone lives there, but they're not exactly shy in telling anyone. Cassianto^Talk 18:39, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

There might be problems when you have people or copyrighted artworks on the photos. I wouldn't necessarily photograph the post address, either. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:45, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I can't imagine there being any legal or ethical objections to photographing individual houses, provided we're not engaged in "this is the home of Mr & Mrs Smith" captioning or the like, although I personally think it would be good practice to make sure the VRMs of cars aren't visible. Wikipedia and Commons have literally millions of images in which individual houses are visible. Certainly my Noel Park article, which is probably the most comparable article on Wikipedia to this, includes "a typical example of..." shots of the five original house designs and the postwar monstrosities added afterwards, and nobody seems to have objected. I do think that in general photos are better than drawings, as "this is what the architect hoped it would look like" and "this is what it actually looks like" sometimes have a fairly distant relationship. Copyrighted artworks won't be an issue under English law provided they're not the subject of the photo; that one we have established thoroughly, when TfL was whining about views of streets and stations that included the copyrighted London Transport roundel. ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Heh. This talk of the ethics/legality of photographing private residences reminds me of when Parrot of Doom asked me to take this photo: File:Ground floor of 46 Lower Belgrave Street (June 2012).jpg. Some will be able to guess what that was for. What is important (legally) is to be standing in a public place when taking the photo. Ethics might go further. Carcharoth (talk) 18:56, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I get what you're saying, but that address is Lucan's, if I'm not mistaken, and is infamous; the Grade II properties in Romford Garden Suburb are not infamous and are only notable for the architects who designed them. That's not the fault of the occupants, 110 years on, so it's not as justifiable using them as it would be to use Lucan's, IMO. Cassianto^Talk 19:01, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

• These look ok to use, copyright wise, as the author has released them into the PD. Cassianto^Talk 21:29, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
  • AFAIK anything on Geograph is usable by us in terms of the photographer's rights, as their licence is compatible with Commons. A couple of them like this one wouldn't be acceptable—Freedom of Panorama only applies to three-dimensional objects and "works of artistic craftsmanship" and this sign is neither, so the copyright would still be owned by either the painter who made the sign or whoever commissioned it—but I assume they're not what you have in mind. When it comes to the UK (the copyright laws of all four nations are the same) it's specifically and explicitly never a breach of copyright either to photograph/film a building or to distribute images of a building, so the only issue is one of ethics rather than law. I personally don't see any issue with photographing houses from the street provided you're not specifying who lives there or including cars/people from which it could be worked out who lives there. ‑ Iridescent 10:27, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata: how many entries?

The 6-volume set, with 250 plates

Ok, if you don't want to get involved/have no opinion about this, I understand. I am just dumping it here in case you, or any of your "page-stalkers" find it interesting.

The background it this: in 1838/39 David Roberts travelled in the Middle-East, and made lots of sketches/paintings of what he saw. 10-15 years later, these sketches were made into lithographs, and were published in the 6-volume The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, consisting of 250 plates.

These lithographs became extremely popular (to this day you can find copies in almost every marked in the ME), hence copied countless of times, and also: lots uploaded to commons. When I started ordering them on commons, I found that there were nearly 1300 copies of the 250 plates, i.e. an average of 5+ copies of each plate.

The pictures mostly come from the Wellcome Collection, Cleveland Museum of Art and the Library of Congress.

Now, I don't mind people uploading the same pictures to commons (though 16 copies of "Hall of Columns, Karnac" (see vol 5) ..is perhaps a tad much?) ...the problem is that some editors have started making single wikidata entries for each litho, say, like this, and this.

So far this has "only" been done for Cleveland Museum of Art..I am waiting with trepidation that someone will do the same, eg for the hundreds of thousands of Library of Congress items.

Needless to say(?), this comes from a GLAM-project.

I was told that this was clearly in scope of Wikidata:Notability; in that case, wouldn't each and every copy of a book from the 19century (or earlier) also be "in scope"? I could buy a set of the The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, (They go for around 3K UKP in auctions), upload 250 plates to commons, and make a wikidata entry for each of them, as part of "Huldra's collection"?

Now, I cannot see any use in this (except giving the uploader some "bragging-rights" to their GLAM-employer?)

I can see, possible, to have a copy of each plate on wikidata, but not literally hundreds, potentially thousands of copies of the same item. Comments, anyone? Huldra (talk) 22:02, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

According to wikidata:Special:Statistics they have 78 million items, so any of these new entries would be a drop in the bucket. I wouldn't consider all these subitems you mention useful so wouldn't go out and create them but I am not Wikidata's target audience so... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 22:07, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

My attitude towards Wikidata is roughly the same as my attitude to coronavirus, in that I know it exists but I have no desire ever to come into contact with it, have only a vague idea how it actually operates, and feel the only sensible course is to isolate it as much as possible to prevent it spreading until we have the ability to destroy it. As far as I'm concerned they can create entries for whatever they like, provided they take appropriate measures to prevent whatever entries they create having any impact of any kind on anything else. Pinging RexxS who as far as I can tell is the only person on Wikidata who isn't nuts, and will hopefully be able to explain what they're doing and why. ‑ Iridescent 22:10, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata started life as a central repository for the links that connected articles on the same subject in different language Wikipedias. That meant that the existence of any article on any Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia project) was sufficient to justify an entry in Wikidata. Although a single entry could cope with the same topic on multiple wikis, it couldn't cope with multiple pages on the same topic on a single wiki. Hence multiple entries would exist whenever a single topic had multiple pages on the same wiki. For example, General relativity and Introduction to general relativity have entries general relativity (Q11452) and introduction to general relativity (Q2743587). Of course, once Wikidatans extended their collection to Commons, it meant that every image on Commons became eligible for a Wikidata entry. As Wikidata is set up to only allow one page per Wiki to be linked from a single Wikidata entry, it means you get a Wikidata entry for each image on Commons, including each duplicate. After all, if Commons can have 16 copies of the Hall of Columns, why shouldn't Wikidata?

I'm not sure that can be called an "explanation", but I suppose it might give a little more insight into the peculiarities of our sister projects. --RexxS (talk) 23:29, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

So I could, say take 1000 pictures of your House of Parliament the next time I'm in London, upload them all to commons, and then make a wikidata item for each of the 1000 pictures? This sounds like complete madness to me...Huldra (talk) 23:39, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I just uploaded 923 photographs of near-identical gravestones to Commons, which presumably each have their own entry in the Commons database even if no sane person is going to create Wikidaata entities for them as well. It's not totally ridiculous to treat each photo as a separate entity although I would think it makes their database virtually unnavigable and consequently actually makes it less useful, not more. ‑ Iridescent 23:46, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I got interested in the Roberts lithos as I used them in various articles, say as-Samu, or Bayt Jibrin. If any of the graves at that cemetery is linked to an article (say, of the person in question), that that should be in the commons cat for that person. But I still cannot see any use whatsoever for, say, 16 wikidata items for the Hall of Columns.

It reminds me of certain court cases, where you flood your opponent with literally tons of info (down to the last receipt for a cup of coffee), hence making it impossible for your opponent to navigate through the oceans of info. I though the idea (at least) was for wikidata to be a help for other projects, not treating us as if we are adversaries in a court case, Huldra (talk) 23:59, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I have to say that the "sounds like complete madness" would occur to me at the point where somebody took 1,000 pictures of the Houses of Parliament and uploaded them to Commons. The 1,000 Wikidata entries would just be the icing on the fruitcake.

I see how you might feel that Wikidata was treating us as adversaries, but it's really not the case. Wikidata was designed to be as easy to add data to as could be conceived, and therefore most of the data addition is done by bots (who don't even know about us, let alone care enough to make us adversaries). The next step in its evolution will be finding ways to get all of that information back out of Wikidata in a useful manner, but there's a long way to go yet.--RexxS (talk) 00:42, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Of course none of this is ever going to happen - what will happen is that everything uploaded by the Cleveland Museum of Art (who at least generally have decent quality images) will get a Wikidata item. And eventually those from other American museums with keen volunteers. Another thing that shows no sign of happening is anybody getting any useful information out of Wikidata, which apart from the analysis of some types of WP articles (like biographies) is more of a black hole than coronavirus, sucking everything in but letting nothing out. Meanwhile Commons is totally overwhelmed by tens of thousands of high-quality museum images that are not categorized and can only be found by the most cunning of searches. Note by the way how utterly useless this one of your WD examples above actually is - it doesn't mention the artist (Roberts) at all (this is Cleveland's fault here - their metadata is often very weak), and has no links to WP, which has articles on the artist, the lithographer and the book, though not of course the individual plate, let alone Cleveland's copy. It mentions Karnak as the subject, but has no "images of Karnak" property. This is 100% typical of WD, where the bots are completely incapable of adding enough "property" fields to make the entries useful to anyone. So if anyone were naive enough to try and research either Roberts's work, or images of Karnak, through WD all these entries would very likely not be picked up. Johnbod (talk) 04:32, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

No,no, you're wrong that nobody ever gets anything out of Wikidata. The people who get something out of Wikidata are (a) the snake-oil salesmen with lucrative gigs convincing institutions that they need to be active on Wikidata, and (b) the snake-oil salesmen who make a career of convincing marketing departments (who've heard that something called "big data" is important but don't undertand what it means) that Wikidata is some kind of magic wardrobe to Data Narnia and that for a small fee they can show you the passage through. Since these are by-and-large the only people who have any interest in Wikidata these are the people who decide what is and isn't appropriate or ethical (just gonna put this here); by happy coincidence nothing they do ever is deemed inappropriate or unethical. ‑ Iridescent 09:10, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to Wikidata...this. Ffs! ——SN54129 10:58, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

No, single images are not notable for Wikidata just for being images uploaded on Commons. Even Commons categories are not notable. Here the artwork is arguably notable (I am not a part of this debate, but I see how it can be argued both ways). If there are multiple images of the same artwork, it normally should not reault in appearance of multiple Wikidata entries.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:03, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata has a notability policy? Where is this set out please? Johnbod (talk) 15:06, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

wikidata:Wikidata:Notability Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:15, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. "2.It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity. The entity must be notable, in the sense that it can be described using serious and publicly available references." - doesn't rule much out! The usual very loose WD use of language. We're all "instances of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity... that [it] can be described using serious and publicly available references". Every one of us, and our cats too. RexxS, tell the bots I want my page now! Johnbod (talk) 15:24, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

I'll tell them, but I'm not sure you want to go through the hassle Andy had. It seems that everybody manages to make up their own interpretation of that criterion (and who could blame them). My cat died, so I guess the Biography of living cats (BLC) policy would no longer apply? --RexxS (talk) 16:16, 25 February 2020 (UTC) - edit: fixed my bad link; thanks, John, for spotting it. --RexxS (talk) 16:31, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Wow! That's item 36 - Undeletion_redux. Yet I see Q15136093 is still there, with a longer entry than the Houses of Parliament. Now Andy has cleared the way for us all ... Johnbod (talk) 16:27, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Not to worry, it's only been five years since Wikidata:Verifiability was proposed. I'm sure at some point they'll decide that maybe "reliable sourcing" is a thing they should actually consider instead of just allowing people to write whatever they like about themselves. (For instance, as you and RexxS know, nothing bad ever came of MPs editing their own biographies on WMF projects, so why not actively advise them to do so?) ‑ Iridescent 17:25, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, they did get a BLP policy going a little less than two years ago. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:58, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

As for the claim that commons has tens of thousands uncategorised images, I would say that is far too low an estimate; more likely millions. And yes, categorising (correctly!) takes time: I spent nearly a month (~ 100 hours) getting those ~ 1300 pictures into the correct "The Holy Land...etc" categories. (Partly this takes a lot of time as the same pictures have been uploaded under different names, eg it is not immediately obvious that "Citadel of Jerusalem April 19 1841 LCCN2002717472" equals "Jerusalem 1841" equals "Men sitting to smoke by the citadel of Jerusalem. Coloured l Wellcome V0019270") And sometimes they are even originally wrongly uploaded (ie this has the wrong name in the Library of Congress)

And note that the two wikidata items (of the same picture) I mentioned (Q80021831, and Q80077886) were not made by a bot, but by a (paid?) GLAM-editor for the museum in question.

Are editors paid to fill up wikidata with absolutely useless stuff? To me, it looks that way.

If I look at a picture, I want info (and links) about:

• 1a: who made it (Here: David Roberts the original sketches, while Louis Haghe made the lithos.)
• 1b: what work (if any) it comes from (here: The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia)
• 2: What it depicts, (wether Karnak ...or Palace of Westminster)
• ~99: who owns the picture at the moment.

At the moment (on wikidata) we mainly get #99 (...and partly #1), as the museum in question are the ones paying the bill. And we get 0 links.

At the moment Q657415 (=Cleveland Museum of Art) has some 62000+ hits on wikidata, and of the examples I have looked at: all virtually useless, as they never tell/link to who made the art (when that is known) or what the art depict/where it comes from.

User:RexxS, I would suggest that:

• A. Wikidata:Notability needs to be dramatically adjusted, presently we could make a wikidata item out of thousands of the very same, say postcard, or other print.
• B. those who hire GLAM workers should be told not only to count numbers (of wikidata items, or of commons items), as those numbers can be absolutely useless. If their items are not properly annotated, then no-one will ever find them. (Hmm, telling them to hire snake-oil-salesmen instead might be a bit rough, but is perhaps the wake-up call they need?) Huldra (talk) 21:40, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

I doubt the Cleveland volunteers are paid, but I might be wrong. I said "tens of thousands of high-quality museum images that are not categorized", which I think is about right. See this lot for example. If you include other types, such as "mostly very poor quality images from Wiki Loves Monuments not saying what they are of" and "snapshots of me and my friends", then millions is about right. Johnbod (talk) 00:27, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Before I requested it be changed, Frost's "Una Alarmed by Fauns" was listed on Commons as "A disturbed-looking young woman is surrounded by a rowdy cro".

If you include "inappropriately categorised" and "misleadingly labelled" in "high-quality museum images that are not categorized", the figure is much higher. Commons is awash with items uploaded by paid editors, volunteers or staff members at institutions, and enthusiasts who've stumbled across a compatibly-licenced online image repository, who have hoovered up an image library without understanding the significance of the images being uploaded. There is one feverishly-active uploader in particular with a habit of just taking the alt-text as the title and not bothering to find out what the actual title is, making it vanishingly unlikely that anyone searching for the image will ever find it. (The categorisation thing can cut the other way as well, when people overcategorise images into ridiculously narrow categories that make it impossible to find them unless you know exactly what you're looking for.) ‑ Iridescent 06:50, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

"Fæ has uploaded 4,522,413 images to Wikimedia Commons" - obviously in a highly automated way. He actually does his best, more or less, with categories, and is better than most mass-uploaders, in fact than most uploaders period. His initial edit on that one did include "Categories:William Edward Frost; Thomas Herbert Maguire" which is far most than very many have. Categorizing is tedious work that requires a lot of knowledge to do properly, and they have never agreed what the structure for a big museum collection should be (despite me trying to push this many years ago), so none of them align. I don't believe there are guidelines explaining how to categorize artworks - but if there are, who would ever find them? The "ridiculously narrow categories" is a whole different area I won't get into now - some might accuse me of that, but of course they need to be linked in to as many parents as possible. Johnbod (talk) 15:50, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

(adding) @Johnbod No, the Cleveland stuff isn't the work of a good-faith unpaid volunteer; it's the work of a former en-wiki arb who now hires himself out as a paid editor to institutions. The disclosure is on his Wikidata user page. You and Huldra will, I assume, be as unsurprised as I am to see his name on this list. ‑ Iridescent 07:12, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Ah, ok. I hadn't looked at the history. Well I hope Cleveland think they're getting their money's worth. Johnbod (talk) 15:50, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

While we have RexxS here .. is there any way to import my en.wikipedia watchlist into Wikidata, so that I can actually track some of the more concerning edits on wikidata without having to jump on them the instant they are made? As it is now, I have the ability to track the edits made to articles on my en.wp watchlist, but only here. If I am busy and miss something, there's no way I can check later to make sure that idiocy isn't happening ... I know that I saw a change a few days ago that i needed to get back to but ... it's fallen off my en.wp watchlist and now I can't find it. --Ealdgyth (talk) 13:46, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Would going to Special:EditWatchlist/raw and copypasting it into wikidata:Special:EditWatchlist/raw work, or does a Wikidata watchlist need to include the Q123456 code as well? ‑ Iridescent 13:52, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

I am afraid not - one needs to have them in the format "Qxxxx" for Wikidata items. I will ask at the Wikidata Project chat, may be someone knows the answer there.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:56, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Based on my (sparse) understanding of the matter, there isn't such a software feature really. Having Wikidata edits on on your enwiki watchlist is the only way to have 'em. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:04, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

They actually proposed a viable solution, d:Wikidata:Project chat#Converting a Wikipedia watchlist to a Wikidata watchlist (courtesy pinging @Ealdgyth:--Ymblanter (talk) 17:02, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, it does work after a fashion - but the second step will give you ALL the linked items from a page - so it'll give you all the linked items for something like Adolf Hitler - which isn't viable for a watchlist of any size .... I put in half my "A" articles (about 40 articles) - and got back over 4000 linked items. Would work fine for a small watchlist here, but not so much for my almost 2000 page watchlist. I'll just do the "go to wikidata page" from my watchlisted articles... --Ealdgyth (talk) 17:30, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

How many entries? Way too many. Wikidata may have policies, but they don't have the manpower to maintain them at even the most basic level. What's the use of a BLP policy (and a notability policy) if an IP can create an article a month ago about an "actress, model, entrepreneur and author" born 20 October 2019 (sic, the date is right but this must be the youngest entrepreneur and author ever) "sourced" only to a facebook ID, and with no links to wikipages?[1], where no one touches the page at all since then? We get a new (albeit useless) page on the Trump family, and no one wonders if perhaps this already exists? Perhaps they need Cleanzen cleaning services (active in the industry sector "House cleaning, a part of good housekeeping") to clean out the mess? This ad brought to you by Public Advertising Agency. Oh well, at least when your Seat breaks down in the German city Baunatal (population less than 30,000), you know where to get it fixed. An exception? Not really, the same editor created more than 100 such pages recently, all about specific branches of one company. WP:PAID, one would presume, but who has the time to care about this on Wikidata? Need worse? There are entries for VIAF IDs... [2][3][4][5]. Not for an item (person or so) who has a VIAF ID, no, for the actual ID itself. Perhaps they can also create entries for Wikidata IDs then, and become a perpetuum mobile? Fram (talk) 14:55, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Ah, but anything which appears in any photo hosted on Commons or is mentioned on Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, or Wikimedia Commons is automatically notable. By Wikidata's standards not only my cat but my suitcase and my curtains are "notable". ‑ Iridescent 15:02, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Note the expression on the bear's face: the fear of non-notability when only half of you is visible... ;) ——SN54129 15:07, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Just going to put Q64861203 here... ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

I object to the description of that pussy as overweight. Fat shamer. It's pleasantly plump. Also my two are significantly bigger than that, not fitting into harnesses or beds designed for 'medium dog' size.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:40, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Where do you stand on this one? ‑ Iridescent 16:46, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Surely they should be allowed to take their rightful place in the category? Johnbod (talk) 16:55, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

56 images, even if most of them seem to be the same cat; I guess we've proven definitively that cats are more important than Nude or partially nude people with leaf blowers. ‑ Iridescent 17:01, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Well at least you can't call the cats "ridiculously narrow". Johnbod (talk) 18:09, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

The ridiculously narrow ones are here. ‑ Iridescent 18:11, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

I would need to do a tummy test. That could be mostly fur. I have shorthairs so there is no give. That looks like you have a couple of inches of fluff before you hit catnipple. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:17, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

File:Cat on suitcase.jpg

A hundred wikidata entries might be a bit much, even for this beauty?

A couple of notes: I think I stand by my statement about millions of uncategorised files on commons (..there are at least 50k files just in the this cat), one of the reasons is of course that it doesn't take much knowledge...or time, to upload lots of pictures, (You could spend a day, or two, uploading the 1300 pictures that it took me a month getting into the right categories.)

Anyway, I'm not really too much troubled by "over-kill" at commons, those files can be fixed (even though I sometimes feel I am working against a tsunami, trying to categorise the ME-files...)

But looking at wikidata it looks as if we have forgotten why we are here: to build an encyclopaedia. When Iridescent' cat is merit a wikidata entry, (not only that; if Iridescent uploaded 100 pictures of his cat to commons: we could have 100 wikidata entries on it?).

However much I love cats: wouldn't that be a bit of overdoing it?

Those mindless wikidata entries (which could have been made by a bot...but isn't), how on earth does this help "building an encyclopaedia"? Perhaps User:Dominic can give an answer.

NB: I am not really interested in criticising individual editors (paid, or not). I am interested in changing the rules which makes this ridiculously "bloated" wikidata possible, Huldra (talk) 23:22, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Answer to watchlist question

Sorry I've been out at the Wikipedia Education Conference all day, so I'm late to the party. I was surprised nobody had made a Wikipedia → Wikidata watchlist converter, so I've just knocked up an on-wiki one for you at Module:Sandbox/RexxS/Watchlist.

I made a demo watchlist at User:RexxS/Raw watchlist by copy-pasting a chunk of my raw watchlist into a blank page in my userspace. It has 531 entries. Some of them don't have corresponding entries on Wikidata.

I made a test page at User:RexxS/sandbox/watchlist which just contains {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/Watchlist |convert |page=User:RexxS/Raw watchlist}}, which creates the Wikidata-style watchlist from the one at User:RexxS/Raw watchlist. It has 531 entries.

It then occurred to me that it's not very useful as it stands, and that most folks would probably prefer to create a Wikidata-style watchlist that only had articles existing on Wikidata in it. So I modified the code to accept a switch that you set to true if you only want articles, |articlesonly=true.

I made another test page at User:RexxS/sandbox/watchlist2 that just contains {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/Watchlist |convert |page=User:RexxS/Raw watchlist |articlesonly=true}}. As you can see it creates a Wikidata-style watchlist with just the Q-numbers that it can find. It has 488 entries.

You can make your own by copy-pasting as much of your raw watchlist as you want into a blank user page and saving it. Lets say you call it User:Ealdgyth/MyWatchlist - spaces are okay if you want them. Then in another blank page (it doesn't matter where, you don't even have to save it if you don't want to), type {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/Watchlist |convert |page=User:Ealdgyth/MyWatchlist |articlesonly=true}}, and preview it (or save it if you want). You have to use the same capitalisation apart form the first letter, of course. You'll have the list of Q-numbers corresponding to as many Wikidata entries as it could match. That can be copied from the preview or saved page (the rendered page, not the wikitext) and pasted into your raw watchlist on Wikidata. Let me know how it goes. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 00:10, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

• First, thank you RexxS for your work on this. But I'm surprised that nobody mentioned that if you go to Preferences --> Watchlist and tick "Use non-JavaScript interface", you will automatically get all of the Wikidata changes to your watched articles right in your enwiki watchlist feed. I can't possibly be the only person who turned off the JavaScript interface for performance reasons; however, I think even if you still have the JavaScript activated, you can elect to get those Wikidata changes in your enwiki watchlist feed. Risker (talk) 01:29, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

• It's mentioned in Ealdgyth's original question way up above. The limitation of checking "show Wikidata" on en-wiki watchlist preferences is that things in the watchlist here generally drop off very quickly (if you have 100 user talk pages watchlisted which isn't an unreasonably high number, all it takes is a Signpost delivery to make earlier items drop off the list), so you have to react to changes as they happen. Transferring the watchlist to Wikidata makes it possible for her to periodically skim changes at her leisure, rather than patrol Wikidata changes in real time. ‑ Iridescent 07:07, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

• • Yay! It worked! Thanks RexxS! --Ealdgyth (talk) 14:31, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Speaking of having Wikidata entries for the same item from different institutions, people are already making multiple entries for copies of the same etching in the same collection. [6] and [7], or [8], [9] and [10] all are from the same year, with the same dimensions, but with minor variations around the actual image (larger border or so): these variations are not noted in the Wikidata item though, the only way to tell them apart is by looking at the image... The first one is already available from two other collections as well[11], [12], and the second one is available from one other collection, again in two versions[13],[14]. Oh, and by more thorough searching it also is listed from yet another collection, with a different title[15]. And look, here as well! So that's already 6 Wikidata entries for this one print. The first one as well has some more "hidden" copies[16][17]. It would seem a lot more useful to have one entry per print, and list as attribute the collections where it is housed, but I guess boosting (and boasting about) the number of Wikidata entries is more important? Fram (talk) 08:51, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

It would certainly be a lot more sensible to have one entry per print, Fram. However, as Commons allows File:Ernest Rousseau, print by James Ensor, 1887, Prints Department, Royal Library of Belgium, F. 27008.jpg and File:Ernest Rousseau, print by James Ensor, 1887, Prints Department, Royal Library of Belgium, S. II 63741.jpg – and so on for all the other duplicates – to exist as separate Commons entries, it's worth considering whether Commons ought to be taking its share of the blame for rampant duplicationism. --RexxS (talk) 13:42, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

These are at least different actual impressions (copies/pieces of paper), and given they are drypoints, which wear away very quickly, the images may vary a fair amount on close examination. But some museums, notably the Met in NY (and Walters in Baltimore), have multiple images of the same object more often than not. This can be useful for say a teapot, shot from different angles, but is generally not for flat things. Often thousands of old black & white are images are uploaded as well as new colour ones of the same things. Johnbod (talk) 14:54, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

In Town, John Ravera, 1983. There's no angle from which all three faces are visible; which is the "correct" angle and lighting conditions?

For some of these old prints, it's actively desirable to have multiple photos, as the story can on occasion be as much about different reproduction and photographic techniques as about the original. (The platinotype print at Hope (painting)#Legacy would be an obvious example.) This is still potentially relevant even with modern works; firstly because even now people are still potentially writing about differing techniques and how high-definition reproductions behave when zoomed, and secondly because you can have dozens of images of the same work from different angles and in different lighting and they'll appear quite different. (Commons is the grateful recipient of 30 different photos of this monstrosity not because I have any affection for it—I think it looks like Donny & Marie Osmond devouring a dead baby and is possibly the ugliest statue I've ever seen—but because it looks remarkably different in varying light and from various angles and I don't consider it my place to decide which is the "right" view of it.) ‑ Iridescent 15:43, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

What would be nice

When I search wikidata for "The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia", I get exactly 5 entries, while I know there are hundreds of lithos belonging to that work there. Those entries are mostly totally impossible for me to find. (Also because, as mentioned above, they have been not been uploaded with the original names.) (The only way to find them is to go to commons, and see which has a "Q"-number.)

A database with no way to (easily) access/find the entries is in reality worthless. (Even if it contain a billion entries.)

What would be nice/useful to have, is say, for James Ensor, a list of all lithos, a list of all paintings, and from those list, a link to all versions. Basically a Tree structure, with James Ensor as the root node.

Or The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia as a "root" node would have 250 "children" (one for each plate), and then people could upload as many copies they like under each of those children, again.

That would mean that the blind uploading of wikidata would have to stop (finding what to link to can take time!), but it could also mean that wikidata could become useful, and not the insane mess it is now, Huldra (talk) 23:49, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

But, as I'm sure you have realized by now, not only is that not happening at all, but no one involved with WD is even thinking of that sort of thing as a distant aim. Johnbod (talk) 03:34, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

That's how it's supposed to work. There are properties for each of those things, and they're supposed to be filled in, but many of them aren't. The hope is that people start improving the items, making them useful. (It's unclear whether that's going to happen, but it is the intention.) --Yair rand (talk) 04:15, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

With the usual disclaimer that I know very little about Wikidata, I get the impression that "how it's supposed to work" and "what it actually is" have even less of a connection there than they do at Twitter, let alone at Wikipedia. It seems to me they're at the stage Wikipedia was at c. 2008 when bots (and bot-like humans) were mass-creating pages which formally met Wikipedia's standards so were immune from deletion, but which were created with no thought for whether they made sense as stand-alone pages rather than items on a list, and whether anyone would ever be in a position to expand them, so they exist in a permanent state of uselessness to readers clogging up categories and artificially distorting the statistics. (Rakičan, Lone Tree Township, Universidad Nacional Experimental Simón Rodríguez, Moğonojoba… there are literally tens of thousands of these things left over from that era, and probably more like millions.)

Wikipedia itself has yet to get consensus on how to deal with the "it's easier to create than it is to categorize" problem. (There's still a torrent of orphaned and unread stubs pouring into Wikipedia every day, aided and abetted by assorted WMF bigwigs and local chapters who egg the crapflooders on. Since our esteemed Arbitration Committee and their tricoteuses have just hounded the person who was leading efforts to address the under/over-categorization issue off the project altogether, I assume nothing is going to change this side of never.) Given that Wikipedia—which actually does have a fairly clear scope and purpose—still hasn't managed to get a grip on the issue after 20 years, I'm not too surprised that Wikidata, where every participant seems to have a different idea what it's for and what its standards are, hasn't managed to generate and enforce a consensus.

The above is not intended as a defense of Wikidata. I still think it's such a mess that the WMF should break all links between WD and the rest of the projects, withdraw all funding and hosting, and turn it loose to make it's own way. If it's really such a valuable service that the rest of the world is crying out for, they should have no trouble getting grants on their own, and once free of the WMF they wouldn't have the inconvenience of nasty people pointing out that they're supposed to be accountable. I also doubt any of the rest of the WMF ecosystem would mourn the loss of its sneering "if you're not one of us you're vermin" culture which makes Wikipedia or Commons at their worst look friendly and welcoming—as a case in point only yesterday "if you don't know how to fix the problem yourself we're not going to help you, consider it a learning opportunity" was their answer to someone raising the same "what should we do about duplicate items?" question over there. ‑ Iridescent 10:03, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

(And while we're on the subject of Twitter, if anyone wants a case study of just why the gap between Wikidata's definitions of "notability" and "conflict of interest" and ours is unbridgeable, I give you Q56119260.) ‑ Iridescent 10:18, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes, one thing that can be said in favour of WD is that it gives a safe environment for some people, sparing the rest of us. Johnbod (talk) 15:11, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Sigh, true this. I guess I should start thinking about it this was way: if people editing WD were instead doing, say, cancer research, we would still have a 100% mortality rate from cancer, :/ Huldra (talk) 22:23, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh, we don't have that - but we do have a 100% mortality rate from life. Johnbod (talk) 22:38, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

All this is true - one aspect is that while over time various people will see crap articles, and eventually someone may well want to improve them, database items aren't meant to ever be looked at individually. The whole premise of a database is that the stuff already in there is correct and consistently arranged, and one can get on with compiling reports or whatever using it. In WD this is absolutely not the case. Johnbod (talk) 15:10, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Certain users on Wikidata are known issues (both in response to JB and Iri). That said, Wikipedia hasn't figured out civility any better, and while it might have a decent handle on notability and COI, it has issues with vested contributors. (Wikidata unfortunately has the additional issue of supposedly being an international space, which causes certain sorts like Iri's to fly under the civility-radar by claiming language translation issues). Civility is among one of the reasons I stopped contributing and handed my tools in there. --Izno (talk) 04:34, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

As I've said many times before, I think the "vested contributor" problem (and its close cousin "the unblockables") largely exists in peoples' heads. If you mean "people with a long and recognized track record tend to be treated with more respect", that's not a bug it's a feature. Obviously if I see Newyorkbrad add "also known as Poopy Face" to a biography I'll be more inclined to assume there might be a legitimate reason than if I see a redlinked brand-new account do the same, but that's not evidence of a cabal but just common sense.

IMO the whole notion that editors who've been around a long time and have a lot of friends are automatically going to win arguments wasn't a valid argument when Krimpet invented the idea of "vested contributors" 12 years ago, and certainly isn't true now. Assuming there's at least a rough correlation between the number of talk-page watchers someone has and their social circle, then going by the last time the report was run Rhaworth, Kudpung, BrownHairedGirl, Eric Corbett, Rich Farmbrough, Cirt, The Rambling Man, Magioladitis and Arthur Rubin are all among Wikipedia's 100 most popular editors. Pick one and ask how being a member of the clique of affiliated editors who tend to mutually reinforce each other is working out for them. ‑ Iridescent 14:45, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, unfortunately, for "the unblockables", there's a category for that. It was created & deleted during the Fram crisis but seems to have been resurrected soon thereafter. I get that it's a joke but an unnecessary one, I think. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:50, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Sure, but that's obviously an unfunny joke rather than a serious statement, and no more meant to be taken seriously than a listing in Category:Rouge editors or the claim that the Bathrobe Cabal secretly runs Wikipedia. Jehochman has only ever been blocked once—twelve years ago for a total of nine minutes—and clearly "been repeatedly blocked and rapidly unblocked, often for edit warring or incivility" doesn't apply. (The "unblockable" meme doesn't refer to some kind of hypothetical elite who can never be blocked; it refers to a hypothetical group of admins who are regularly blocked but immediately unblock each other. Whenever anyone is asked to provide an actual example of "current or former administrators [who] have usually been repeatedly blocked and rapidly unblocked, often for edit warring or incivility", they tend to change the subject or slink off.) ‑ Iridescent 18:18, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

That block was done by Archtransit after they obtained admin access by fraud. They were desysopped and banned. Jehochman ^Talk 11:58, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, there is actually a page for Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Creator/James Ensor, alas, when you look at What links here: the James Ensor entry does not link to it <facepalm>

I have little knowledge about the GLAM-system, but I would have thought that when a museum/institution hires a GLAM-editor, it is so that their collections should become known to a wider audience. Presently their items only link to them, ie, it has become "Navel-gazing" (as we call it in my parts of the woods), instead of "widening the horizon", Huldra (talk) 23:52, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

So, we have above the "merging is so easy" sneer towards new editors, and we have some of the most active editors on WD creating nonsense. It seems to come together in things like this merge today by a very active editor (and more importantly, a very active promotor and defender of WD through his blog an elsewhere), merging a Polish professor with a Dutch beach (added irony, the editor is Dutch): worse, the original page on the beach (natural protected area) was created by the same editor two days earlier... Fram (talk) 12:39, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Well, at least someone is reading this page. ‑ Iridescent 17:37, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

People with multiple personalities

Not only have the same picture several entries, so does people. Because Barker, William Burckhardt, (entry in Dictionary of National Biography) obviously is different from William Burckhardt Barker (British orientalist). This open countless new opportunities. Wikidata to 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 entries, everyone! Huldra (talk) 21:37, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Moors Article

Hello Iridescent. I am not here to bash, but to ask why the Wikipedia entry on the Moors is so white washed? It is a fact that the Moors that conquered and occupied Europe were black and not white looking Arabs. The images you provide or that someone posted to the entry are highly misleading and contribute to spreading white supremacy.

Even National Geographic provides images of Moors who are black. I ask that you correct the record to appropriately reflect the correct history of the appearance of the Moors. Additionally, they are credited with bringing the University system to Europe which at the time was an agrarian society that had no need for higher learning. Earlyadapter (talk) 12:35, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Earlyadapter, Iridescent did not provide images and has only two edits to the article, both minor, eleven years apart. You are welcome to contribute to Wikipedia, but images must have the appropriate permissions (that is, be free of copyright concerns) and text should be cited to reliable sources. Kablammo (talk) 12:59, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Painting of and by a group of Moors from the Alhambra ceiling

As Kablammo says I didn't write it, but "the Moors that conquered and occupied Europe were black" is an ultra- fringe theory predicated on the assumption that every Moorish source was lying. As Iberian Moors didn't follow the strict Islamic prohibition on images, we have copious contemporary pictures of what they looked like; they were of Berber and Arabic appearance with traces of West African, with a skin tone (unsurprisingly) similar to that of the present day Spanish and Portuguese. Certainly there would have been some sub-Saharan black troops in their armies, but to draw "the Moors that conquered and occupied Europe were black" would be like saying "the 21st-century US Navy is ethnically Chinese" just because there happen to be some sailors of Chinese descent. ‑ Iridescent 13:46, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Earlyadapter, it may be that many westerners in the Anglosphere assume that Moors are dark-skinned, given how Shakespeare's Othello is often portrayed. Kablammo (talk) 14:20, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Plus the traditional convention in many European cultures (most pertinently from wikipedia's point of view, English) to describe anyone of a darker skin tone than the northern European average as "black"; to a chronicler of Shakespeare's generation, a present-day Italian, Japanese or Mexican would be just as "black" as a black African. ‑ Iridescent 14:30, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Sigh. Fun fact: In Ethiopian art (& I'm including examples dating as far back as AD 900) do not show people with dark skin color. They all have white skin. However, every photo I've seen of an inhabitant of Ethiopia has dark skin, just like every other inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa. (The same thing could be said of ancient Egyptian art: most of the individuals portrayed do not have dark skin color.)

Another fun fact: The Shahara presents more of a barrier to immigration than does the Mediterranean. People have migrated from Europe & the Middle East to settle there long before the Vandals set up their kingdom in what is now Tunisia, & people have migrated from North Africa & Egypt into what is now Spain, France, & Italy long before the Romans united the Mediterranean region; all of these had children & further descendants. (And more than a few were not transported as slaves -- although this happened in both directions.)

As for the other boundary between Africa & the rest of the world -- the Red Sea -- there has been intermarriage between the peoples on either side since the human species left Africa. In fact the ancestor of the Semitic languages of the Middle East -- Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic & less familiar languages -- all had their origins somewhere near the border of the Sudan & Ethiopia.

In short, the experts who know about such things find race a misleading construct. The "swarthy South Europeans" have skin the same color as their neighbors south of the Mediterranean. The "Arabs" of the Middle East sometimes have the same skin color as the inhabitants of Northeastern Africa. And the color of people in pre-Modern illustrations are not reliable indicators as to race. -- llywrch (talk) 23:23, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Ethiopian evangelist

I wouldn't say figures in Ethiopian art have white skin; they are pretty consistently a light caramel. In Ancient Egyptian art men by convention usually have darker skin than women, and "Nubian"-type figures can be differentiated by both skin colour and features. Johnbod (talk) 00:31, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

That's my point, surely? North Africans and their descendants (i.e. the Moors of Spain and Sicily) were and are physically virtually indistinguishable from southern Europeans, and while there may have been the occasional black African among their number (the trade routes through Timbuktu and along the Nile Valley were fully open in the period in question) the idea that Moors were black in the modern-day sense is a hyper-fringe theory. On colouring in paintings, I used that Alhambra ceiling specifically because it's detailed enough to show features rather than just stylised ideal faces, and the features of all the Iberian Moors depicted are clearly those of typical Mediterranean-rim inhabitants, not sub-Saharan Africans. (The "Moors were black" thing is interesting as a case study, as it's seized on with equal fervour by white supremacists who see it as proof that Muslims are genetically 'outsiders' with no legitimate right to be in Europe, and black supremacists who see it as proof that sub-Saharan Africans took on and beat the combined forces of Western Europe, but there's no credible evidence for it. Given the level of intermixing even if the Moors had originally been black in the modern-day sense, within a few generations the influence would have been diluted down to the level where you'd need a DNA test to demonstrate it.) ‑ Iridescent 23:44, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

There’s also the fact that the Spanish in particular had a habit of giving phenotypic stereotypes to people not of the Catholic faith (indigenous Americans/heretics/Jews.) The idea of the body representing the soul was huge in Iberian spirituality for centuries, but especially in the first half of the second millennium. The idea that they would describe people they think are going to hell as “black” in documentary sources even if they look at most slightly more tan than the average person in Lisbon is hardly shocking. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:09, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Notification about a FAC renomination

Greetings,

since you did comment on this later withdrawn FAC I wanted to notify you that I've renominated it at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Coropuna/archive2. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:15, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

PS: Since you did ask about the St. Francis point, I did ask around at Talk:Francis of Assisi#Role in Andean mythology, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Christianity/Noticeboard#St. Francis of Assisi in Andean mythology and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Catholicism#St. Francis of Assisi in Andean mythology and got nothing. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:15, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

I'll have a look although I think between the PR and the first FAC I picked every nit I felt needed picking so it will probably be a straight support. It might be worth finding a Spanish speaker (ping for SandyGeorgia) to ask es-wiki if anyone there has any idea about why the locals believe a medieval Italian is living on their mountain as I can't be the only reader who finds it odd. ‑ Iridescent 20:19, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

General call-out to any TPW who's reading this page and hasn't previously had any involvement, if you have a spare few minutes can you head over to Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Coropuna/archive2 and weigh in on the St Francis issue? It's a relatively minor point regarding a single paragraph, but it could do with input from people who aren't familiar with the article to see which of the proposed wordings for the "religious significance" paragraph make sense. ‑ Iridescent 11:25, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Cesspool

A cesspool that should not be linked from the main page. Why not remove that link, maybe it will either run out of steam or become a useful internal resource like WP:RX? fiveby (talk) 22:00, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

If I were Supreme Dictator of Wikipedia I'd shut down the Reference Desk in a heartbeat let alone just removing the link from the Main Page (although realistically I doubt one reader in a million clicks on any of the "Other areas of Wikipedia" links—the main WP:RD landing page, despite being linked from the Main Page with its 23 million visitors per day, consistently gets less than 1⁄4 the pageviews of a decade-old article I wrote about an 18th-century French cannibal). Unfortunately for so many reasons, I'm currently not Supreme Dictator of Wikipedia, and making even the most trivial change to the Main Page—let alone actually removing one of the links— will just get immediately reversed unless you have an RFC behind you. If you start an RFC to remove it, I'll be first in line to support it (and I suspect Guy Macon will be second), but trying to get any change to the Main Page accepted is a fools errand since enough people will come out to complain that Change Is Always Bad that every discussion is closed as no consensus. ‑ Iridescent 22:08, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

WP:RfSDoW/Iridescent is still a redlink. I think you'd get a lot of support, perhaps you should run? GirthSummit _(blether) 23:12, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

That graph is a convincing argument we are not doing much to serve readers, especially with all the examples of OR and bickering they are met with if one actually does stumble upon the link. There should be a way to make the reference desk do this and not this. Minimal qualification for SDoW being able to write an RfC to make that happen, should be easy. Then you do get to block us all! fiveby (talk) 00:29, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Breaking the link to the Reference Desk wouldn't be anywhere near my top priority if I were tasked with clearing the cruft from the Main Page. We finally managed to eject the link to Wikinews (which at the time of writing has a mighty total of nine active editors, an impressive rise from the previous figure of two) from the In The News box itself but it's still grimly clinging on by its fingernails below the fold; likewise, the link to the (totally dead) Wikipedia:Local Embassy, the (equally dead) Wikipedia:News, and the makes-the-Reference-Desk-look-sane toxic waste fire that is Meta-Wiki are all hanging on, and of course we have the now-untouchable laughing stocks that is Wikipedia:Contents/Portals sitting proudly in bold at the top of the page. And all that is trivial when compared to the constantly updated parade of errors that constitutes DYK. Literally even Wikidata has a more sensibly-designed and reader-friendly main page than we do. ‑ Iridescent 02:25, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Meta has a lot of good people. It also has a lot of people who couldn’t make it on their home project and turned to cross-wiki or movement wide stuff. Figuring out who can safely be ignored there is an interesting task, but the project does good if you care about coordinating with other projects. Though, the real way to get anything done on meta is to know a steward or two and just talk to them about anything you need done.

The components of meta that deal with RL I will agree are accurately described by you. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:00, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Beri Smither

Iridescent's RfC begins...  ;)

Just to let you know, I restored Beri Smither just after you deleted. I was in the process of removing the PROD as you were deleting it. It was previously prod'd in the edit on 02:33, 30 October 2006. The PROD was removed in the next edit. ~ GB fan 10:24, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Ah, good to see the days of process-for-the-sake-of-process aren't dead. Yes, clearly this BLP which has been unsourced for its entire existence (there's an alleged "source" on later versions, but it's this) needs to kept becase fourteen years ago someone contested the deletion on the grounds that she was a "second-tier model". (Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL, if anyone wants to play along at home.) ‑ Iridescent 10:44, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

When we were working out how prod should work, not so long before this article was first tagged, I don't think anyone was expecting removal to immunize a page for anywhere remotely this long. I sure didn't. We were all mostly concerned removing any possibility of slow motion tag-untag-tag-untag-tag-(other side misses it on their watchlist)-delete edit wars. —Cryptic 16:00, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

No one knew Wikipedia would be around in 14 years in 2006. This is how some of our more entrenched and nonsensical policies came to exist today... TonyBallioni (talk) 05:38, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Probably more to the point, up until c. 2010 nobody thought Wikipedia would still exist in its current form in 2020. There was still a culture of permanent revolution back then in which the way we did things changed to suit circumstances and technlogical developments; all our policies and guidelines were interim solutions which nobody ever expected would become immutable commandments. (There will be some people watching this page—I can't remember who else was there but RexxS certainly was—who'll remember me demonstrating an early prototype Wikipedia redesign by the people and money behind Qwiki, which without any need for changes to the existing wikitext markup made Wikipedia about a million times more reader-friendly, with zoomable maps and on-the-fly instant conversion of any page or section into a video or spoken-word presentation; if it had been adopted the entire future direction of Wikipedia could have changed.)

There are benefits to cultural stagnation—readers are less likely to be confused by changes to the rules regarding either what we cover or how we lay things out (there's a reason the Facebook, Google and Twitter interfaces don't look significantly different than they did in 2005), and editors are less likely to be caught unawares by sudden changes in policy or practice—but it does have the unfortunate side-effect that we're stuck with the ad-hoc temporary solutions drawn up when Wikipedia had 1 million articles with 3500 active editors to patrol them, as opposed to 6 million articles and still 3500 active editors to patrol them.

Before I waste my time drawing up an RFC which will no doubt be foul-tempered, have the entire ARS trying to derail it, and be gleefully hovered over by the New Puritan tendency looking for pretexts to block people for imagined incivility and feigned offence, can anyone think of any reason why removing it may only be placed on a page a single time. Any editor (including the article's creator or the file's uploader) may object to the deletion by simply removing the tag; this action permanently cancels the proposed deletion via PROD. from Wikipedia:Proposed deletion and replacing it with it may only be placed on a page a single time within a 12-month period. Any editor (including the article's creator or the file's uploader) may object to the deletion by simply removing the tag; this action means the article cannot be proposed for deletion via PROD for 365 days. wouldn't be an improvement? It would still preserve the spirit of WP:PROD by preventing people avoiding deletion discussions by tag-warring, but would mean we wouldn't have permanently-unsourced topics of ultra-questionable notability like UniquePhones, Terence Parr or Walsden Cricket Club forever vaccinated against deletion because a decade ago someone happened to get bored and go through Category:Proposed deletion removing the tags. ‑ Iridescent 16:36, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

They can just be listed at AfD, so I don't think that meets the threshold of "forever vaccinated". Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 17:21, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Well yes, obviously, but it's a big drain on time and goodwill. Even the utterly foregone Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Beri Smither in question has this far wasted the time of the nominator, seven participants (so far), and whoever comes to close it, all of whom have to read the article, double-check the sourcing, and read the existing arguments to see if their point has already been made. Multiply that by thousands and you're talking about a significant resource drain of editor time being diverted into AfD discussions. AfD doesn't have that many active editors; if I were to go through Category:Past proposed deletion candidates and try to clean it up, then even assuming 90% of the PRODs were legitimately removed, that would still dump upward of 1000 pages into a process that's already straining at the seams. (AfD discussions regularly end up being extended for weeks or even months, just because there are so few people with the time and inclination to participate there.) ‑ Iridescent 17:30, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

My rule for starting policy RfCs is to only propose an RfC if there's already consensus for it. With the rare exception they only exist to document accepted practice or commonly held belief over the objection of a vocal minority who insists that what is obviously the consensus position is not the consensus position.

For this, as you mention, ARS would be out in force. That wouldn't sink it, but the influx of the I want to RfA after having been on Wikipedia for 2 months and I'm afraid if I'm seen as too deletionist I'll fail my RfA group after it becomes controversial would. The latter is a rarely discussed but significant factor as to why virtually any deletion-reform RfC is so difficult to pass. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:37, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Brief thoughts on a current arbitration case

Have you been following the Portals arbitration case? I recently looked over the Proposed Decision page and its talk page, and was a bit surprised at the direction it is heading in (well, headed in, as it is nearly finished). I had not thought it would go in that direction, and am wondering if this new ArbCom will surprise us all (not in a good way, really). (If you think it best to comment at the case pages, rather than here, or not comment at all, fair enough.) See also the RHaworth PD talk page, where some are saying the decision there is not consistent with what is happening to BHG. Carcharoth (talk) 11:31, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Prediction: any newly-minted admin who is also an even newer-minted arbcommer will vote to desysop as first choice. ——SN54129 16:46, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm loath to participate; BHG was something of an unofficial mentor to me when I first started so anything I say in support of her will be taken as WP:INVOLVED, and I also had a fairly foul-tempered exchange with her more recently so anything I say in opposition to her will be taken as WP:INVOLVED. I think SN54129 nails it; this is an arbcom with a disproportionate number of newly-minted arbs, who after the fiascos last year will be keen to send a "there's a new sheriff in town and he's not taking any shit from the locals" message. Thus they'll want to come down hard on someone to send the "nobody is safe and you'd better all respect our authority" message. Under normal circumstances I'd have said it would be Kudpung to get the kicking, but the supposed "evidence" page there largely consists of a mix of irrelevant recounting of personal grudges, and gibberish that reads like a drunk recounting a long and boring dream (permalink as I live in hope the clerks come to their senses and remove all the drivel), which leaves BHG as the only possible sacrificial victim. With any luck the cooler heads like NYB will talk the new intake off the cliff-edge and reassure them that there will be plenty of better occasions to play executioner, but the first couple of cases of any new arbcom are always a bit whacky. ‑ Iridescent 17:02, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Ah, I wasn't aware of (or had forgotten) that history. Thanks for the thoughts. Carcharoth (talk) 17:05, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Sadly Iri you can't have admins outright accusing people of lying and bad faith without at least providing a credible reason for doing so. And still have the expectation that they admins as a group are expected to lead by example. More cynical me suspects the voting patterns for the desysop have more to do with the individual admins experience with problem editors/admins rather than any overt "we must make our mark!" approach. Although it could be credibly argued that the lack of response by previous arbs over the years to just this sort of issue needs new blood to address. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I would also point out that in any democratic electoral process, the expectation amongst the voters is that those elected take action sooner rather than later. "More of the same please" only applies when the voters are happy with those in power. Do you think that describes the last 12 months? Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:12, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Sure, making that kind of allegation is A Bad Thing, but this is a set of circumstances where context is important. I don't understand why portals generate such intensity given that none of them have any readers. (Even Portal:Arts which is quite literally the first link on the Main Page averages less than 1000 viewers a day. As soon as you get to the portals that aren't on the main page the readership drops to effectively zero; something like Portal:Trains, Portal:Sports and Portal:United Kingdom—all top-end portals on high-interest and high-traffic topics—all consistently get fewer readers than my user talk page.) However, for whatever reason people do have irrationally strong feelings about them, and for what it can be argued are legitimate reasons; those supporting them see them as fulfilment of Wikipedia's early WP:Build the web ambitions, allowing topics that would ordinarily languish in obscurity or be dead-end pages to always have at least some incoming and outgoing links, while those against them see them as impossible to maintain and as such a permanent liability in terms of accuracy and dated statements.

The background here is that a couple of years ago the rough "don't create new portals unless there's a demonstrable demand for them" was broken by three editors using an unauthorised bot to mass-create literally thousands of portals on hyper-niche topics (anyone for Portal:Crabapples? Portal:Coatbridge? Portal:Zoophilia? Portal:Burger King? Or maybe Portal:Wang Chung (band)?) who then dug in their heels when other editors such as BHG started nominating them for deletion, leading to what can politely be described as "shitloads of pointless arguments" all over the wiki with accusations flying all over the shop. As such there's a lot more bad feeling then there usually is in such a case; sure, it's not right to call someone a liar without providing evidence, but equally we need to bear in mind that Arbcom has a long, long history of failing spectacularly badly when it comes to differentiating between genuine personal attacks, and people who've been pushed to the point of losing their temper and gotten snappy. If I were on this committee—which thank the lord I'm not—I'd be seeing this in terms of what the best result for Wikipedia is, not in terms of applying the letter of the law.

While I've always thought the "admonish" language is pointless, this is a rare case where I think it would make sense; all it needs is a straightforward "all of you, knock it off", not the de facto site ban which looks likely to pass. (Yes, no big deal and all that, but in BHG's case desysopping is effectively kicking her out, since she primarily does unsexy but necessary maintenance stuff which genuinely does require admin tools; the net result of this case won't go any way to resolving the underlying dispute over portals, but does mean that nobody will now be routinely maintaining the category trees.) ‑ Iridescent 18:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

(That's because your talk page is more interesting than any of the portals.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:03, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

(Indeed.) Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:55, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Regarding the expectation amongst the voters is that those elected take action sooner rather than later, I disagree that this applies here. Arbcom isn't the Wikipedia Parliament, they're a dispute resolution body of last resort; while theory doesn't always match reality, in theory at least any given set of evidence, brought before any iteration of the committee, should lead to the same outcome. (This is the entire basis of the perennial proposal that only a sub-group of five or so arbs rule on any given case.) ‑ Iridescent 18:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

• It appears we are indeed going to lose Bhg, which is very sad. Johnbod (talk) 03:24, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
  • Damn. I had seriously thought of telling both to drop the matter & either work on something else than Portals or take a Wikibreak back in December -- BHG was showing signs of burnout -- but since NA1k was not that active, & the matter was already before the ArbCom, I figured it was wasted effort. (Or I be told to MMOB.) I should have acted. -- llywrch (talk) 18:37, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Since I'm mentioned in this thread, just noting that I've seen it. As I'm sure you all realize, my relevant comments are on the proposed decision page. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:37, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Since I'm mentioned in this thread along with Newyorkbrad, because any kind of self-defense at Arbcom is characterised as 'doubling down' or whingeing, I'm not even watching my case and don't know what is going on there, but I would not be surprised at all if Iridescent's interpretation is wholly accurate. I am extremely saddened by the outcome of BrownHairedGirl's case (which I have read), but with most of the new committee members being 'new sheriffs in town' I can't see them listening much to the advice of more experienced arbitrators, such as perhaps those who are able to look at cases with the cold and neutral detachment of a lawyer's mind. As far as I know, and from emails I have received, anyone on that Committee who has worked closely with me in the past and who knows me personally and shared a glass of wine over dinner with me in NYC, D.C., HK, London, Oxford, Esino Lario, Paris, Berlin, or Bangkok, has recused themselves, so BHG may not be the only sacrificial victim in 2020 which has begun with an almost unprecedented number of cases against admins who appear to have fallen foul of either simply doing their job, or having been trolled and baited to the point of boiling over, and thence fallen out of favour. Woe betide anyone on Wikipedia who admits to having reached, nearly reached, or passed, their three-score-years-and-ten, you've all been around too long, are too old, probably too qualified, and the place for you is the scrap heap or the knacker's yard. And the two most interesting and intelligent places left on Wikipedia that dare to utter some home truths are this talk page and Carrite's user page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:22, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

I haven't followed Kudpung's case; I wanted to put some sort of defence and explain why a desysop is completely out of order for somebody who has led multiple RfA reforms, campaigned a good-faith fight to stop brand new users creating articles, causing the number of A7 CSDs to plummet to a manageable level, and nominated several brilliant admins (oh, and also me). I haven't followed BHG's case and don't know much about them, but I think a desysop is a serious over-reaction. I have followed RHaworth's case, however unlike BHG and Kudpung, I have met Roger on several occasions, and I'll say this: It's very easy to post online "Abusive admin - violates policy, desysop please!" but try arguing your case politely and fairly in front of the person you want to throw under a bus to their face, particularly when that person is confused and upset as to why you're doing it. I wonder how many editors here can do that? Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:48, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

... try arguing your case politely and fairly in front of the person you want to throw under a bus to their face, particularly when that person is confused and upset as to why you're doing it ... applies to every editor who is blocked. Or mistreated. By admins. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:36, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Or taken on a trip ANI and/or Arbcom based on so-called 'evidence', half-truths, and bullshit, by those having or showing a strong or lingering desire for revenge, pile-ons by those who are not even involved, and those who have demonstrated for years a general antipathy towards the corps of adminship. I have met some editors who have been cruelly desysoped who despite having been stigmatized nevertheless continue to carry out essential Wikiwork and outreach, and they are among the nicest Wikipedians I have ever had the privilege of sharing a restaurant table with. Some editors who have been blocked I would not share the same pub room with and would cross to the other side of the street if I saw them coming. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:13, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

The fact that they are amazing people in real life, great to share a restaurant table with, an absolute corker down the pub etc., doesn't mean that they aren't capable of becoming an arsehole when seated behind a keyboard. I've seen this all over the place, Twitter, Facebook etc. - people forget that there's another human at the other end of the wire and start meting out the most horrific vitriol, just because they happen to disagree on some topic or other. And sadly, Wikipedia is no exception to that phenomenon. It's human nature anyway - I've also been tempted to hurl expletives and personal insults at my fellow editors on occasion in the past, and when it's just typing stuff out and hitting send, rather than saying it to someone's face and seeing their reaction in real-time, it's so much easier to do. But thankfully I always have the good sense to step away and come back to it later. But I like to think that if I ever were to be called up on a civility charge, I would make my apologies and move the matter on. Because going before ArbCom and waving one's sword about is surely not productive. The arbitrators aren't stupid. If they look at the evidence against me and find fault, then I'm prepared to accept that and seek to improve the behaviour. That's all people need to do, and unless the original crime was particularly heinous, or there's a very long-term recurring pattern, that approach would mostly remove the need for ArbCom to apply more than a slap on the wrist. Kudpung I haven't studied your case at all and I don't know who's in the right and wrong but, if it bears any resemblance to the RHaworth or BHG cases, my advice (which you may or may not take any notice of) would be introspection and engaging whatever the issues are, seeking to address them, rather than the alternatives of (a) ignoring it completely, or (b) fighting tooth and nail. All IMHO of course, YMMV!  — Amakuru (talk) 17:40, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Driveby reply - I'll reply substantively to this thread when I'm in a position to do so - but @Kudpung, your comments here about "admins who appear to have fallen foul of either simply doing their job", "those who have demonstrated for years a general antipathy towards the corps of adminship", "editors who have been cruelly desysoped" etc seem to be another variation on your "anti-admin brigade" theory laced with what comes across as a rather creepy idea that admins constitute some kind of Wikipedia aristocracy who should be treated with more respect than the peons. Whatever the intent, talking like this is doing you no favors at all. The case against you - both at the current case and on Wikipedia in general - has as its root "Kudpung acts like he thinks he's earned the right to dish it out without having to take it", and regardless of your intent it's hard to read comments like these without wincing. Sure, there are many fine people who are admins, and many horrible people who are rightly blocked; there are also many admins who are utterly incompetent and/or deeply unpleasant people, and there are many blocked and banned editors who are worthy of respect. (The latter doesn't just include those people blocked unfairly; there are many people who are blocked for valid reasons, or even globally banned, whose opinions are well worth listening to. Even if I'm not necessarily going to agree with their views, I'd take the views of someone like Eric Corbett or Greg Kohs far more seriously than I would those of most of the self-appointed Power Users who hang around at ANI, Jimbotalk, Signpost et al.)

I disagree with Amakuru's argument above in some respects - I have a strong impression that in both the RHaworth and BHG cases the committee are intentionally overreacting to relatively trivial complaints to try to send a "we're in charge" signal - but regarding you, his general point is spot on. As far as I can see the case against you boils down to "Kudpung is an unpleasant person to be around to the extent that it creates a chilling effect on other editors". I personally don't think that's the case (with the disclaimer that I don't think I've ever had any significant interaction with you other than occasional "how can we make RFA less horrible?" threads where we've generally been on the same side), but you need to ask yourself why these allegations aren't being laughed out. Enough people are complaining - and from enough different backgrounds that they can't just be dismissed as a small-but-noisy faction being canvassed on IRC - that there's obviously some reason people are finding it difficult to get along with you. Even if you never intend to touch Wikipedia again it would still presumably be valuable to engage honestly with these people and ask "what do you think I'm doing wrong?" so you don't end up needlessly offending people somewhere else; if you do intend to stay active here, it's just basic common sense to engage with people even when you don't agree with them. As I said to Malleus long ago (advice he admittedly didn't take), it's a good rule both for the internet and for life in general that if someone complains about something you do or say, even if you think the complaint is ridiculous, to not repeat whatever it was that caused offense unless you can genuinely justify it as necessary. This case is almost certainly going to end with "Kudpung admonished", but this is one instance where for once I think it would be worth taking an arbcom admonishment seriously. ‑ Iridescent 2 22:09, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Excellent analysis and advice, Iri. Though when I read SandyGeorgia's Or mistreated. By admins., my first thought was “OMG, there is an anti-admin brigade!”

I hope it isn't improper to not ping SG here; I don't really read anything into their comments beyond “you say admins have it tough, well normal editors do too”. But the phrasing in the wider context sent my mind off into errant loops. As to why I'm here when I havent been mentioned, I was just following a link SG had placed at the Arbcom workshop.

Pelagic (talk) 13:15, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

• I'm on a bit of a break, but read through the BHG case after seeing it. See my thoughts on one of the claims. We apparently now are desysoping people for pointing out that factually incorrect statements are in fact wrong. I get the lie/falsehood distinction, but I'm honestly shocked that it wasn't pointed out that the four lying diffs cited she was correct on. Anyway, I've spent far too much time on Wikipedia tonight, and I do trust and respect many of the arbs here. I just think they got it wrong on this case. TonyBallioni (talk) 07:39, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Belated replies to all the above

@llywrch, I think it's a great shame to lose BrownHairedGirl. I think she'll be a great loss, both in terms of the unsexy but necessary work she does which isn't easily going to be replaced (I'm not exactly seeing a queue of other people lining up to clean up Special:WantedCategories), and as one of the dwindling number of people with continuous and uninterrupted experience from Wild West days right through to the Maintenance Phase, to keep the institutional memory of previous mistakes alive. That said, I can entirely see why she feels she's now not welcome; the Arbitration Committee have taken what appear to be demonstrable falsehoods about her and given them the formal status of "findings of facts", meaning that by Wikipedia convention, people will for ever more point back to them as proven fact without feeling any obligation to provide evidence. In those circumstances I'd never try to talk someone out of resigning if they felt they needed to. As we've seen in the past in numerous other cases, once someone gets a reputation as "a troublemaker", the Defenders Of The Wiki will forever more shadow their every move looking for a pretext to report them for minor transgressions, and thus create a feedback loop where the editor in question eventually either lashes out at the people following them around, consequently gaining even more of a reputation as a troublemaker, or decides that if they're going to be branded disruptive they may as well actually be disruptive and starts deliberately being disruptive. If BHG wants to go out on her own terms rather than suffer death-by-a-thousand-cuts at the hands of Sandstein, that's a totally reasonable position.

Kudpung, I'm sure my "driveby reply" above (which turned out longer than expected) isn't what you want to hear, but I do recommend taking it on board. Most people aren't particularly familiar with you, and as such are going to judge you by their first impression, and by not participating you're allowing people with a grudge to set the narrative. (This is an inbuilt problem with Wikipedia's dispute resolution mechanisms; those with a grudge set the agenda, while those defending the conduct of the accused tend to be dismissed as part of that person's clique and as such not to be taken seriously. You've done your fair share of such dismissing yourself in the past.) Yes, I generally agree with the point you're being too polite to make explicitly—that the complaints about you appear largely motivated by a handful of New Puritan types who see anyone with a different worldview to themselves as dangerous influences who need to be suppressed—but this is a collaborative project and the California/East Coast "freedom means everyone has to be just like me and anyone who disagrees with me needs to be corrected" contingent are a large enough group that their opinions have to be taken seriously. All it really needs is a one-line "if someone asks me not to do something I'll try to avoid doing it unless I can demonstrate that I have a good reason to keep doing it" undertaking. Nobody's expecting you to be at the beck and call of every crank with a grudge, but complete non-participation just unintentionally sends the signal that you don't consider anyone else's opinions to have any validity. Besides, it's not fair on Lourdes, who as things stand is your only credible defender in the workshop section and in your absence is going to become a lightning rod with everyone who has problems with you taking it out against her.

@Ritchie333, Amakuru, I don't entirely buy the "you wouldn't say it to their face!" argument in the sense in which you're using it. In the context of Wikipedia (shitholes like Twitter are obviously different) the problem with online communication isn't really the lack of face-to-face communication, but the lack of opportunity for subtle cues. If, for instance, you and I are sitting together and I say something that offends you I'll likely sense right away that I've done something wrong and either back off or ask what the issue is; in an online environment it gets taken as a deliberate affront and leads to a feedback loop of passive-aggressiveness. WAID might be able to pop up with some facts and figures from the WMF's consultation, but to me one of the major drawbacks of Wikipedia's talk setup is that because a wiki means every comment is forever, one can make a throwaway remark but it immediately becomes permanently on display to be overanalyzed, in a way that doesn't happen to forum posts, tweets etc which soon scroll off the bottom. To take Ritchie's specific example, I've never met RHaworth but I'm sure that if I did I could explain, sympathetically and without causing offense, what the problems with his approach are and what he needed to do to avoid getting into trouble. If I tried to do the same on a Wikipedia talkpage, I'd almost certainly come across as a self-important blowhard delivering a lecture, as I wouldn't be in a position to pick up the "I understand this" and "I don't understand that" cues and consequently would end up over-emphasizing things he already knew (and thus I'd come across as patronizing), and skimming over things I assumed he knew but which he actually didn't (and thus I'd come across as arrogant and elitist). Mediawiki is a powerful and underrated communication tool—there's a reason every proposal to replace it flounders and whatever the WMF may think it's not just "people dislike change!"—but it does have a inbuilt tendency to make people appear more of an asshole than they actually are. ‑ Iridescent 13:29, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

RHaworth upload in 2008. New tricks?

Hmmm. RHaworth used to come to the London meetup & I'm not so sure. He uploaded this in 2008. He looks younger than in his other photos. Johnbod (talk) 16:08, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

• (Apologies for gatecrashing. I am surprised that you had a mentor. My impression was that you were like Gandalf of Wikipedia.) I've been wanting to say something on those cases for some time, guess I'll do that here as I'm just a wiki-child compared to y'all which is comforting for some reason.

I was shocked with what was about to happen with the BHG case. I almost left a comment saying the outcome amounted to sexism (I might have if I could be sure I hadn't missed something and if I had more than BHG's username to go by), especially when looking at it in contrast with Rhaworth's case. Looks like the better-informed people realised something wasn't right, too. Instead of undertaking the trouble to review everything again, the committee obviously took an easy way out. Rhaworth lost the bit for no reason than that Arbs c/wouldn't go back on their decision to desysop BHG, for whatever reason. I finally understand why many editors were/are so critical of ArbCom. If all ArbCom does is summarise the popular tide among the case participants, I think we are better off with the clerks.

I know the two broke the rules they shouldn't have and they should have known better than to persist, but decisions are starting to look like those we'd expect on an overcrowded lifeboat while from what I can tell the project is mostly kept afloat by a few dozen highly dedicated editors at most. So much for prevention, not punishment. Usedtobecool ☎️ 15:34, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I came to Wikipedia relatively late; I arrived near the end of the massive growth spurt. (As with others like NYB and Risker, I had the advantage of arriving on Wikipedia early enough to witness its formative crises like Essjay, Siegenthaler, CBD, MyWikiBiz etc, and the writing of many of the key policies, in real time, but was still obscure and unimportant enough that I didn't get tainted by involvement with any particular side in those big early fights.) IIRC I first ran into BHG during the Arbuthnot Wars (a long-forgotten episode, but one which in hindsight was the point when the line between "someone is notable if they're covered in multiple sources" and "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information" began to be formally drawn), after which she made lots of encouraging noises during the writing of Almeric Paget, 1st Baron Queenborough. ‑ Iridescent 06:04, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Usedtobecool, I don't think ArbCom actually summarizes the popular tide among case participants. If you look over the history of cases, votes in proposed decisions frequently result in protests on the PD talk pages and these complaints do not always (and maybe do not often) lead to changes in voting that is still ongoing. But I do think arbitrators have been called on repeatedly over the years to not only be more responsive to editors' comments but also to respond more to people's comments on case talk pages.

ArbCom in the past has been criticized for not coming down more strongly in cases brought against administrators and those critiques often come up during the pre-election question periods. The perception of individual arbitrator's sense of fairness or whether they take a strong or not-so-strong line in cases of alleged admin abuse can greatly impact who receives the most votes in the ArbCom election. And really, it is the editors who care the most about these stances who take the time to vote in an ArbCom election. As the veteran editors reading this page know well, this was an unusual election in that there were more than the normal number of resignations in 2019 (5) and an increase in committee size (from 13 back to 15) which resulted in more new and returning arbitrators (11) than those continuing on with the second year of their term (4). These means that there are only 6 arbitrators who were on last year's committee serving and 9 who are new to this iteration of ArbCom.

Whether these recent cases are actually a reflection of a possible Reverse Super Mario effect or not, I'll leave to more longtime editors/admins to judge. I do know that in cases against administrators, the arbitrators are frequently stuck between giving an admonishment (which seems like too little) and imposing a desysop (which can seem like too much) and there are continually requests for there to be a middle ground option. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 16:08, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

One of the novel yet impractical ideas I've had to combat WikiBurnout is to give a volunteer each 5 years a "Get Out of Jail Free" chit, not accumulating. So when the volunteer does something that gets him/here haled in front of ArbCom, they can use it to avoid any penalties. In return, the volunteer spends some time talking with another Wikipedian they trust, who explains what went wrong & gets the volunteer to understand the issue. If needed, said Wikipedian may take some time off from Wikipedia to de-stress. (There will always be stuff to do; while there are too many portals, too much copyright violations, & too many stubs about non-notable subjects, Wikipedia won't go belly-up while you are gone for a month or three.) The whole idea this process is not to punish anyone, it's too bring the matter to a final conclusion. If the issue can be resolved without anyone being sanctioned or leaving Wikipedia, then all the better.

Of course this won't work. Too many of us long-term volunteers don't have a trusted "WikiFriend" she/he can talk with in a frank manner about these things. For example, I used to know a lot of Wikipedians in real life, but many of them either moved to another city or left Wikipedia -- or died, as in the case of Eclecticology -- leaving me with only 2 or 3 who could perform a real-life intervention. (There might be one or two more, but they live a few thousand miles away, & international phone calls tend to be expensive.) I expect I'm not unusual in this regard. -- llywrch (talk) 17:28, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

NYB will probably know better than me, as he was on the committee at the time the current jargon came into use, but as I understand it that was the original intention behind "Admonished" as a remedy; people who obviously had a history of being productive but equally clearly had done something wrong but not something so appalling they obviously needed to be banned, would be ordered to stand in the corner and think about what they'd done. It's been devalued over the years and has come to mean "there's enough of an angry mob baying for blood that we need to do something, but we can't actually find any evidence against you to justify us taking any action, so this is a compromise". It's not helped by the fact that "admonish" (a) is an archaic word most people rarely if ever encounter and are unlikely to know what it means (I've seen multiple people who are confused when a non-admin is "admonished" because they assume it's WikiSpeak for "administrator punished"), and (b) when the people who don't understand what it means do the correct thing in these circumstances and look it up, they'll find it has multiple diametrically-opposed meanings ("To exhort or urge (a person) to do something, esp. as a duty or obligation; to tell or warn (a person) that he or she should do something", "To give advice or warning, esp. by way of correction of error, or guidance as to future behaviour", "To advise or warn (a person), esp. by way of correction: to reprove or reprimand firmly", "To warn, reprimand, or rebuke (a person) for a fault or misdeed", "To recommend or urge a course of action", "To notify or remind (a person) of something","To warn (a person) of or against potential danger or future error", "To say by way of a warning, exhortation, or rebuke"[18]) and will quite reasonably not know whether the committee is ordering them to perform an action, suggesting an action they may want to consider taking, giving a "no pressure but here's what I'd do" suggestion, or giving a complete neutral "this is the current policy" reminder.

Something I suggested way back before the dawn of time—to complete uninterest—was to make the block logs asymmetric. At the moment it's possible to redact a block log (try it yourself), but doing so removes the action from the log of both the blocking admin and the blocked editor, and consequently would make it much more difficult to identify admins who were misusing the "block" button to harass editors against whom they had a grudge. Fixing it so entries remain in the admin's log for all eternity, but drop off the blocked editor's log a set period (a year?) after the block expires unless there's a subsequent block in that time and are removed from the blocked editor's log immediately should the block be determined to have been in error, would be a cheap and easy fix. It would allow genuine rehabilitation, and a genuine mechanism to address errors by admins; as things stand, once an editor has something in their block log it serves as a mark of Cain and is constantly raised as something to batter them with. (You want evidence?) The "keep your nose clean for it to be removed" would be an incentive not to cause problems; redacting blocks that didn't have consensus would kill off the "unblockables" meme, since it would be immediately apparent which editors were genuinely engaged in behavior which the community considered problematic and which had just disagreed with a member of the IRC or Discord tag teams or had the misfortune to be taken to WP:AE on a day Sandstein had decided to patrol it; and if we had some kind of immediately obvious "this action was reversed" flag in the logs it would make it much more readily apparent which admins were abusing the block/unblock functions. Of course, it will never happen; too many people get a kick from self-appointing themselves as Problem User Monitors and will resist any change that makes it harder to score a kill in their MMORPG. ‑ Iridescent 18:58, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I spent way too much time when I first started regularly editing reading old arbitration cases and more notable old noticeboard discussions (I was interested in Wikipedia history) and I thought there was an admin who was actually desysoped over changing a block log, I believe to hide an action that they took. But I think it was a good 8+ years ago I'd be guessing if I put a name to the case. It was an unusual case so oldtimers might know what I'm talking about but the name isn't really important. I only bring it up because I'm surprised with your suggestion of altering a block log as a solution to the problem of the baggage that follows an editor around. I'm not saying that it's not possible to alter one because obviously it happened but I thought it was an act that shouldn't be undertaken without a very good reason. But, I guess that's an invitation for someone to prove me wrong! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:55, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I no longer have oversight access so can't check the logs for myself, but I believe the incident you're remembering is when someone (I think Giano but I may be wrong) was blocked for such obviously perverse reasons they complained and successfully got the log redacted. Any admin has the technical ability to blank log entries and any oversighter has the technical ability to redact them completely (this is the log-redaction interface if you want to try it out on the long-suffering User:ThisIsaTest). It's forbidden by policy at the moment except in a few exceptional circumstances ("Blocked because this user is obviously a pedophile" would be an obvious example of an oversightable block log entry), but policy can be rewritten.

At the moment the primary reason we don't redact block logs even when the admin has obviously made a mistake (the admin who thought "sycophant" was a swear word is the classic case, and yes that really happened), it's deemed inappropriate to remove the block from the log even though it's detrimental to the incorrectly-blocked editor, because we need to preserve the record of the admin's mistakes so Arbcom know whether to take action against them. My suggestion was to make the log asymmetrically editable and automatically expire on one side; thus admins who've screwed up would still be unable to hide their mistakes, but people who'd obviously been blocked in error wouldn't have shit like this in their log for people to point at and say "hey, look at the length of their block log, no smoke without fire", and the promise that the block will drop off the log (while still remaining on the admin's log should it ever need to be referenced) after a certain period of good conduct would incentivize people who'd been blocked for good reason to keep their noses clean in future.

Forgive the slight statement of the obvious, but "a record is still kept of the penalty having been imposed but it's removed from your public record if an appeal rules it to have been imposed in error, and even if legitimately imposed ceases to be publicly visible after a set period of good conduct" is the way pretty much every legal system in the world (and certainly the common-law and Napoleonic legal systems which form the background of almost every en-wiki editor's experience) handles everything from penalty points on a driving license, to the impact of default on your credit rating, to outright criminal convictions. This wasn't some wacky hippy-dippy notion of mine, but an attempt to drag Wikipedia's definitions of "justice" and "fairness" into line with reality's. ‑ Iridescent 06:04, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

It was Giano, the case was named after him, and it was an outgrowth of the pedophilia userbox wheel war. I'm about 90% certain that the block log entry was expunged by a developer, Jamesday, but I can't find any evidence of this. Graham87 09:54, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm certain enough that here's a ping. I checked the server admin log archives, just in case, but no dice there, it seems. Graham87 10:07, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I can't find any hard evidence (I'm sure I read it onwiki *somewhere*), but this is an interesting thread about it. The block logs were expunged late in 2006 and log suppression couldn't be carried out by oversighters until much later. Graham87 11:43, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the thought User:Graham87, but I ceased having developer access in the summer of 2005 and it seems that the case was in 2006. If I'd still had the access and was satisfied that proper process had been followed I'd undoubtedly have accepted such a request. Proper process in that situation may have caused me to want both wiki and WMF agreement. Unlimited technical access but we were all very keen to be sure that the capabilities were used properly. Jamesday (talk) 05:00, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

FWIW, I consider Lourdes contributions to Kudpung’s case to be admirable, reasonable and well considered. Whilst I am someone who I guess is seem to be a complainant, I would hope that Lourdes does not get targeted by anyone participating in the case. Certainly it will not come from me. Anyone who does decide to hold a grudge because of this case should consider their own actions very carefully. Speaking for myself, if I see evidence of this then I will step up to oppose such behaviour.

Incidentally, thank you for your well reasoned comments given above. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 19:49, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I've certainly had issues with your earlier incarnations in the past (to put it mildly; it's not long since I described your 2010 resignation as "the Platonic ideal of a flounce") and opposed your unblock last year, but I will say I think your conduct throughout this incident has been exemplary. Assuming you were telling the truth about not reacting well to stress and wanting to keep a low profile and just get on with things (something I have no reason to doubt) it can't be easy from your point of view to have a third party drag you to Arbcom to use as a piece of evidence in an effort to get a third editor into trouble. Wikipedia could do with having more people who can grasp the concept that there are real people behind those goofy usernames, and that the appropriate reactions to someone doing something which is potentially inappropriate are "Is what they're doing actually inappropriate or am I being oversensitive?" and "I'm worried you might be doing something wrong, is there anything I can do to help?", not "Great, here's an opportunity to get someone who has a different opinion to me into trouble!". FWIW, the workshop has closed so I won't comment there, but I'm fairly certain Kudpung's those who use their claims of PSTD (sic) as an excuse for their behaviour to insult, harass, and bait admins in the hope of a reaction they can complain about, or get away with paid editing was nothing to do with you but was a reaction to this statement; you weren't on Wikipedia during the period in question so you may not be aware, but Missvain was one of Wikipedia's highest-profile paid editing scandals because even though what she did was relatively minor, she was an employee of the WMF when she was caught, and Kudpung has long been one of those arguing for harsher sanctions against people abusing their positions at Wikipedia/Wikimedia for profit. ‑ Iridescent 06:04, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind words. From my point of view, I was quite unwell at the time and I don't think I hold any grudges. I actually respect your viewpoint, though for obvious reasons disagree - it was an unusual situation. If anything, saying something directly, regardless of how difficult or hard it may be, holds my respect so whilst I'm not sure how I handled things at the time (it's a bit of a blur), I appreciate you said it to me directly.

FWIW, I'm trying to keep a low profile, though I probably put my foot in it with the NPP page patrol noticeboard. It was only later that I found out about Missvain's history, but actually if I had to do things again I don't believe I would change my position on her current work. I believe she does great work and I don't think anyone has highlighted or found that she has made the same mistake again.

In terms of the ArbCom case, I decided early that Kudpung is actually a good admin with a few issues. I kept my evidence to a minimum to note the issues and on the Workshop page I have tried to highlight his many good qualities and totally oppose him losing adminship. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 10:15, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Regarding Missvain I tend to lean more towards your position than Kudpung's, but (assuming the "PTSD" remark was directed at her rather than you, which I think was almost certainly the case) I can certainly consider his comment valid and not any kind of unreasonable personal attack. It's not in doubt that she brought Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation into disrepute—here's an example of mainstream press coverage at the time—and her comment on the case page could certainly be interpreted as "the fact that I got caught red-handed taking bribes caused me stress, so from now on nobody is allowed to criticize anything I do". To someone like Kudpung, one of whose main areas of activity for the last decade has been trying to strengthen Wikipedia's safeguards against spammers, a statement like that is inevitably going to be a red rag to a bull, while this situation with Kudpung must get resolved to ensure there are more Missvain's in the future is deflection in the extreme bordering on personal attacks.

Again, I don't know how much you missed in your absence, but there's a meta-issue here which everyone is trying to avoid mentioning for fear of reopening old wounds. A few years ago a well-intentioned project to improve coverage of women on Wikipedia caused a lot of problems; people were in good faith creating thousands—literally—of extremely poorly-written and poorly-sourced biographies under the impression that they were being helpful. This in turn caused a great deal of bad feeling, as the "Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion" policy meant that Articles for Deletion and CAT:PROD were suddenly flooded with biographies of women, giving the impression that Wikipedia was dominated by a gang of sexists obsessed with deleting any mentions of women. This in turn got picked up by the media (there's good reason to think that the reason it was picked up by the media is that elements within the WMF were intentionally and selectively briefing the press in an effort to tarnish the reputation of editors to whom they'd taken a dislike), which meant that new page patrollers who were correctly enforcing the BLP policy, and admins who happened to be working the deletion queues, got bombarded with abuse both on- and off-wiki. The net result is that seeing an editor suddenly start producing a large number of stubby biographies of women is one of the things that raises immediate red flags to new page patrollers, and will immediately prompt the patroller to start reviewing the writer's other recent creations to see if they're potentially problematic.

Mobile uploads, 2013. Only those in blue (22.9%) were deemed non-problematic.

Snapshot of problem vs non-problem mobile uploads during a week in 2014.

Snapshots of Commons statistics during the selfie-pocalypse of 2013–14. At one point, the proportion of uploads deemed problematic reached 100%.

It happens to be biographies of women at the moment, but it could be anything; it happens whenever someone tries to stimulate editing in a particular area without getting buy-in from the volunteers who have to patrol the articles. We had exactly the same issue a few years ago when the India Education Program caused us to be flooded with poor-quality stubs about India, and Commons had it in 2013–14 when well-intentioned additions of "easy upload" features on the mobile site led to the selfie-pocalypse. ‑ Iridescent 11:15, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Ouch! No, I wasn't around for this, that sounds extremely difficult for NPP members. I can't speak to Kudpung's motives other than what I've seen, but in the case of Missvain I can see how he might be suspicious of her but I really looked at the articles themselves that sparked all of this and whilst they are somewhat more obscure than other articles, each of them were (at least IMO) fairly well sourced and it was pretty easy to check their notability. I think to some degree we need to forgive past transgressions - from what I can see of Missvain, she is always going to be stained with what she did before, and I think that whilst this is understandable it's also unfair. From what I can tell, she won't ever do this again, and the material she does write is of good quality. There is nothing since she was removed from the WMF as an employee that she has done (at least so far as I can see) that would show she is going to ever participate in paid editing ever again.

In terms of outreach programs, this is more tricky. For the Women In Red program, my concern over this was Kudpung's response to GorillaWarfare's request to be called by her username when mentioned amongst a bunch of men — namely he said that he pulled out of the Women In Red program solely because of the request made by GW. Nevertheless, I can see why people would be extremely trigger-happy on articles about women. That seems like an unfortunate side-effect of an excellent project, along with the well-intentioned promotion of said project. It seems like the solution to this is to find a way to involve NPP members with any project that tried to reduce systemic-bias via article creation drives. Maybe an NPP editor of good reputation and influence might be able to find a way of helping such projects. It seems to me that we could be losing good articles on important topics if we aren't careful, not to mention the stress of NPP members going about their duties and getting abused for it :(

In terms of the PTSD comment, I don't think it is Missvain. I mentioned PTSD in a comment, but I also had private correspondence with Kudpung where I had to explain the situation to him as it was directly related to what happened to me after my mental health issues around Wikipedia several years ago. I also explained to him that whilst I'm not getting paid, I have a friend whose aquarium I help at (it relaxes me, I get to see spectacluar fish, I get given free fish and I enjoy my friend and the company of his employees) and I've needed to carefully explain to him about how he needs to contribute to Wikipedia as it is a bit of a landmine. I've also been contributing to articles on Bettas, which is really his specialty and he has an extensive library of reliable encyclopedias, magazines and books written by expert biologists about a variety of fish (see my declaration of interests). This is why I suspect that I was being referred to. If I hadn't been so concerned about getting into any further conflict with Kudpung, I'd probably have asked him to clarify if he was referring to me. As it was, I only talked about it because a diff was provided in the workshop page - personally I thought the outburst came from stress and initially I missed the "paid editing and PTSD" comment, but even when I was pretty sure he was referring to me I figured I would just let it go (hopefully, I did so sufficiently!). Chris.sherlock (talk) 11:56, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

A question about ArbCom's use of the term "admonished" came up recently and I checked the records at WP:RFAR/C. It turns out the Committee was already using this term by 2005, well before I got involved. (I was somewhat relieved I didn't introduce it myself.) Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 20:57, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

• I've seen multiple people who are confused when a non-admin is "admonished" because they assume it's WikiSpeak for "administrator punished" – So...
  • Ad-mon-ish: When an administrator is going to monitor you, but only half-heartedly, so they're going to just monitor-ish you.
  • Ad-vise: When an administrator puts your balls (or, for 10% of editors, correspondingly valued parts) in a vise.

And so on. EEng 05:46, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Remember, we have a lot of people for whom English isn't their first language who aren't going to be aware of obscure archaic legalisms (I can honestly say that I don't recall ever seeing anyone use the word "admonished" outside of Wikipedia, and it appears to have gone out of fashion sometime around the Glorious Revolution of 1689). Given Wikipedia's habit of concatenating abbreviations to create newspeak ("arbcom" being the most pertinent example here), I'm not going to judge anyone who makes the "administrator punished" mistake. ‑ Iridescent 06:19, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

It is used in US legal talk, which is probably how it slipped into Wikipedia parlance. On that note, I remember the reaction of people outside Wikipedia -- including Ward Cunningham -- 10 years ago when Wikipedia admins were described as "wheel-warring". ("I hadn't heard that term in years, not since my old UNIX sysadmin days.") -- llywrch (talk) 00:24, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

break: Rant about unconscious systemic bias

I've no doubt at all that it came from US legal usage. I've equally no doubt that "well, you should have all been aware that we're using this obscure word in the way it's used in the US legal system" is an example of the unconscious systemic bias on English Wikipedia that equates "the way things are done in the United States" with "universal cultural values", a tendency which has always been on Wikipedia to some extent but appears to be accelerating.

If you assume that every time people complain about this they're just (right-wingers who think American values are too biased towards positive action) / (left-wingers who think American cultural values are too biased towards liberalism*) / (anti-American nationalists) / (Trump supporters and/or alt-righters who see Wikipedia as non-neutral and want to undermine it) / (hard-leftists who see anything American as inherently evil)Delete according to personal bias venting, have some actual numbers:
*"Liberalism" in the rest-of-the-world sense, not the American sense.

The WMF have hidden the "editors by country" statistics (literally; the relevant link on the Wikistats page has been replaced by a red "Data no longer available" notice), but the proportion of editors in the US is unlikely to be lower than the 40% of pageviews that come from the US. It will almost certainly be higher, since "people who understand the language enough to read English Wikipedia but aren't confident enough to edit in it" will be disproportionately higher in non-English-speaking countries, let's assume that roughly 50% of very active editors are American, something which is borne out by randomly sampling (e.g.) Special:ListAdmins, Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations, Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/History#Current and former members etc.

There are six former admins listed at Wikipedia:Former administrators/reason/for cause as having been desysopped as the result of Arbcom cases in the past 12 months: Alex Shih (Taiwan & Canada), BrownHairedGirl (Ireland), Enigmaman (US), Fram (Belgium), Rama (France), RHaworth (England). In addition, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Cases/2019#2019 shows four other editors sanctioned by Arbcom in the past 12 months: Curly Turkey (Canada), GiantSnowman (England), Icewhiz (Israel*), Volunteer Marek (Poland). By my reckoning that means that (excluding switch-flipping things like emergency desysops of compromised accounts), 90% of actions taken against editors by the Arbitration Committee in the past year have been against non-Americans.
*I'm not 100% certain about Icewhiz, someone I'm not familiar with, but their userpage certainly used to have a "native Hebrew speaker" userbox.

I'm sure that the existing Arbcom aren't intentionally acting as agents of systemic bias and would be horrified and insulted at the suggestion, but I'm equally sure that this is illustrating a genuine issue. I don't (pace my comments a few paragraphs above) really believe the Arbs are intentionally trying to conduct a purge of anyone who doesn't subscribe to a specifically American set of cultural priorities and values. What I do believe is that there's some serious unconscious profiling going on and that we now have enough of a dataset to demonstrate that people who don't subscribe to a specifically American set of cultural priorities and values are both more likely to have cases filed against them in the first place, to have the case against them accepted rather than dismissed out of hand, and to have the case result in sanctions. (I don't intend to conduct the same count on the morass of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive—let alone wade in the cesspit of Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchives—but I'd be willing to bet you'll find the same pattern of sanctions being both disproportionally requested and disproportionately applied against non-Americans there as well.)

I'm not sure what we could—or should—actually do about any of this. There's a legitimate argument to be made that the whole "global project" notion is inherently unworkable (anyone remember the "how do we define offensive language?" arguments of a few years ago?) and that English Wikipedia is ultimately destined to become American Centrist Wikipedia. Unless and until that happens, our routinely defaulting to "American values" as our definition of normality, both in terms of editor interactions, in terms of deciding what constitutes a neutral point of view, and in terms of defining notability, is something that's going to keep causing problems and we're going to keep having repeats of this whole sorry episode. ‑ Iridescent 10:17, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Huh. I did try to run a statistical test on whether 5-1 has a different mean than 687-458 and this calculator believes that any deviation isn't statistically significant on p=0.05. Perhaps Opabinia regalis knows better about such calculations. Assuming that the mathematical formulations are actually relevant, of course - in my experience debating questions of bias with statistics is not that widely accepted. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:07, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

It's 9–1, not 5–1; that is, arbcom took some kind of punitive action against 10 people in the past year, only one of who was American (and that was Enigmaman, a case which couldn't have ended in any other outcome). Sure, statistics aren't perfect, but when it comes to demonstrating systemic bias they're often the only tool in the toolbox. (There are more chief executives of FTSE100 companies called Steve then there are non-white chief executives of FTSE100 companies; I have no doubt at all that every selection panel in every case could provide evidence that they made what they felt was the correct decision each time, and it's only when you look at the statistics as a whole that the systemic bias becomes visible.) There's probably someone around with statistical expertise and enough of an obsession with Wikipedia to actually bother going through 16 years of arb cases (and maybe at least sampling "blocks of established editors" in general, at Wikipedia:Editing restrictions#Active editing restrictions, and at how those with "no action" or "admonished" outcomes differ from those who get blocks, bans and desysops) to see if there's a coherent trend line or if 2019 was just a blip, and whether there's a statistically significant difference between blocks/topic bans placed by the community and those placed by the committee, but that person isn't me. (This is possibly the first time in the history of Wikipedia when anyone has ever had the chance to use the sentence "This is an occasion where it would be useful if Poetlister were around".) ‑ Iridescent 13:30, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

5-1 because I only compared deadmins to an (assumed on the basis of the pageviews) distribution of admins, not all sanctions to an assumed distribution of all editors as I can't count the latter. Statistical tests aren't just about proportions, but also about the raw numbers. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:05, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I think it might be better if you spelled it de-admins, since deadmins admits a startling reading. EEng 16:16, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Another test of the US/Non US ratio is to look at the times when backlogs such as at CSD peak and trough. As an admin who is based in London it is pretty obvious that our active admin cadre has a tendency towards being least active when most of North America is asleep. Also an interesting axis to chart this on would be age, I'm struggling to think of many admins who I know to be older than me but who could be described as uncontentious. ϢereSpielChequers 14:34, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Needless to say the WMF don't appear to make it available (for a firm who spend so much time talking about transparency, they sure do spend a lot of time hiding previously-public reports), but they'll certainly have detailed figures for activity levels at varying time periods as they need to know when to schedule maintenance to cause the least impact. If you want to watch the server load rise and fall in real-time as people wake and sleep, head on over here; thats for the WMF as a whole rather than just en-wiki, but en-wiki is so much larger than the others that the impact of North America waking and sleeping is clearly visible. There's also a clear weekly cycle in the number of active editors, for what that's worth. ‑ Iridescent 15:00, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

That's a very interesting analysis, Iri, and I think there's probably some truth in it. Certainly the issue of cultural differences came up during FramGate, in particular how the "San Francisco mindset" that dominates at WMF isn't reflective of the norms of the whole global community. That said though, I don't think it's really fundamentally the British way to shout and yell and be abusive to other people. Sure, there are some who do that, but my personal view is it's unacceptable, be it on Twitter, Wikipedia or real life. And there are plenty of examples of British admins who've AFAIK never come close to being hauled before Arbcom for civility reasons - yourself and WereSpielChequers included - so it can hardly be said to be inexorably baked into the culture.  — Amakuru (talk) 15:06, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it's really fundamentally the British way to shout and yell and be abusive to other people...well, not if they're actually British, certainly. ——SN54129 15:10, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I had a long post that EC'd with NYB below, but basically while I agree that there is a systematic bias towards the US/Canada, I'd actually argue that from the perspective of someone in North America, I've always had the impression that British editors were the most over-represented statistically amongst the highly active editors crowd. I'm not sure how accurate the pie chart here is, but I think we likely have more than 16% of "established editors" who are British. Now, while North Americans account for approximately 70% of native-speakers you're going to have them be the majority on any project that is striving to be global in nature and uses English, so there is a need to educate on cultural norms, but if we're going off your 50% assumption, that's actually less than what you'd expect from majority speaking countries. The South Asian English speakers throw off that number a bit, and I think it'd be interesting to look at figures with them included, but my suspicion here is that we probably do have less Americans as a percentage of editors than we have Americans as a percentage of native speakers. At least amongst the old guard. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:41, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

This is probably veering off topic a little, but from my personal experience the concept of "mother tongue" isn't actually as well-defined as one might think it is... List of countries by English-speaking population gives up on the native-speaker figures at a certain point, with no figures given for countries such as Kenya. I know many Kenyans personally and a good proportion of them are actually unable to give a single answer to the question "what is your native language". Many actually grow up tri-lingual, with a mixture of English, Swahili, and whatever the tribal language of their family, ending up fluent in all three from an early age. Thus the figures for the United States may not actually be as high as the 67% implied by that list above, although you're probably right that Brits punch above their weight more generally, as the "other 50%" alluded to are I suspect overwhelmingly not from the African continent.  — Amakuru (talk) 15:56, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Fair point, and the ubiquity of English in cross-language group communications is certainly a confounding variable.

Since English in the international context reminded me of this, I’ll go ahead and do the shamelessly allowed canvassing for the Steward Election, which starts tomorrow. There are some great candidates running and in my view some less than great ones, but having strong en.wiki turnout will be helpful. Stewards do a ton of heavy lifting behind the scenes, especially with CUs, and having more that are friendly to en.wiki and don’t think that it’s evil would be useful. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:14, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh, thanks for that Tony. I will have to look at the candidates and see if I can form some opinions on them... interesting that only one of them is from en.wiki. Is that the way it usually is at the Steward elections?  — Amakuru (talk) 16:22, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

En-wiki editors usually do badly in cross-WMF elections like Steward and Board, particularly if they're monoglot and not active on at least one other project. Don't underestimate how much the other wikis hate us—we have a reputation for being a pack of arrogant and aggressive louts. ‑ Iridescent 23:57, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: There's certainly a glaring omission from that list wrt en.wp's representation. Never mind the Dutch bod! ——SN54129 16:43, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

• On who edits from where, see this report in last November's Signpost. Prima facie, active (100+ pcm edits) are 42.9% from the US. Of course according to the Blessed Dr. Jess Wade MBE (aka User:Jesswade88), "90% of Wikipedia is written by white males in America" (interview on Woman's Hour BBC Radio 4, last 5 December). Johnbod (talk) 20:15, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for getting it wrong, good stats. I don't have an MBE or think I'm 'Blessed'. Have a nice weekend! Jesswade88 (talk) 22:51, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

My mistake! BEM not MBE. Johnbod (talk) 23:33, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Anything I write here will come off as apologetics for ArbCom, even though I've disagreed with several of the decisions being discussed here. (For someone who's been depicted in the press as a leader of the Committee, I cast a hell of a lot of dissenting votes.) Nonetheless, I am not convinced by that the "anti-non-American" "bias" here is too much more than a happenstance of what requests for arbitration have been brought. A statistical fluke is especially possible in an era when the Committee hears 5 cases a year (as most of you know, it used to be dozens). Also, skimming the proposed decision pages for the past several cases, it doesn't appear that the U.S. arbitrators have voted for harsher remedies against non-U.S.-based admins than the non-U.S. arbitrators; if anything, it may be the opposite (although I have to be hedge that because there are some arbs for whom I'm not sure where they're from or whether they've revealed that information on-wiki).

Returning to the word "admonish," I checked the decisions from 2005 and as Iridescent might have guessed, it appears that the word was introduced into the lexicon by Fred Bauder, who was of course an American lawyer. That said, until this conversation I have never heard anyone suggest that the word "admonish" might actually be unfamiliar to people—as opposed to being pompous or overly formal, which I have heard before. On the other hand, "wheel-warring" was a brand-new term to me when I first read it here. (When I first started looking at the Wikipedia arbitration process, the fact that a key case was captioned "Pedophile userbox wheel war" was more than a little surprising on more than one level. But I digress). Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:30, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Re-read what I wrote; despite the fact that I sometimes give the appearance of spouting a stream of consciousness, I usually choose my words carefully. I'm not alleging that the committee is (necessarily) biased; I'm alleging that the process by which cases get as far as arbcom is biased. That is, that either non-US editors are more likely to be considered so problematic their cases need to be punted upstairs to arbcom; or that the culture of Wikipedia has such an inbuilt subconscious US bias that non-Americans are more likely to fall foul of its social conventions and thus be deemed problematic; or that the committee are more likely to accept cases involving non-Americans; or what's most likely, some combination of the three. ‑ Iridescent 23:36, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Iridescent, that's an excellent study! However, where do you get the nationalities of sanctioned editors? BHG and RHaworth say so on their user pages, but Enigmaman, Rama, and Fram don't. Even besides Icewhiz I would be surprised if Volunteer Marek solely identified with Poland, as he's quite active in US politics. --GRuban (talk) 21:32, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Enigmaman was (and for all I know still is) an active member of the NYC group (NYB can confirm that) and listed himself as living in the Eastern Time zone; while I suppose he could theoretically have commuted from Canada each time it appears unlikely. Rama is conceivably French-Swiss rather than French—in 2006 he said he was then living in Switzerland, but certainly is active in Wikimédia France and organised the Paris photographic contest among other France-based events. I'm not sure what "he's quite active in US politics" particularly proves—Ealdgyth and I have between us probably written upwards of a hundred Featured Articles about England but it doesn't make either of us English—and in the absence of evidence to the contrary we can only go on self-identification; in Marek's case the "This user comes from Poland" and the "this user is a native speaker of Polish" userboxes. I find it hard to believe you really need me to waste my time finding a diff for Fram—there are probably members of uncontacted tribes in New Guinea who could write a biography of Fram by now—but for the benefit of the tape here's Fram saying "I'm Belgian". ‑ Iridescent 23:31, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you! Personally, I was born in and am a native speaker of Russian (and have the userbox), however am pretty American for most intents and purposes. So naturally tend to assume there are many like me. --GRuban (talk) 01:11, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

(ec) I knew that Fram was from Belgium, but forgot how, but it's easy. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:34, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

That could equally be read as that he's a fan of Belgian comics, rather than that he's a Belgian who's a fan of comics. The diff I give above is unambiguous. ‑ Iridescent 23:40, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

learning English, - you are right, but I didn't even see that it's ambiguous ;) - I know only one arbcase case well, and have no interest in more knowledge in the field. 4 people were named in the decision, 2 restricted, both European, 2 admonished, one European, one Canadian. All rescinded by 2016. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:50, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

• I'm going to throw out a point about actual numbers proving an unconscious bias: composition of the ArbCom, the body that actually implements bans & sanctions. Looking at the people comprising that group , of the 15 members of the ArbCom, 7 live in the US, 4 in the UK (actually 3, we have one Brit expat in Denmark), 2 in Canada, & 1 each in Australia & Germany. (I admit this has a margin of error: not all Wikipedians identify which country they live in, & 3 cases I was forced to guess where they live based on times that person was active.) This works out to 47% of the ArbCom is from the US, which is roughly equivalent to the guesstimate of the percentage of US Wikipedians -- 40%, as Iridescent stated above. The Commonwealth members at any time could unite to balance any US-bias on the ArbCom, leaving it to our German representative to break the tie.
  And may I repeat myself by emphasizing that despite how it looks from the outside, the US does not have a uniform culture to oppress the rest of the world with? My home town of Portland, Oregon is so infested by overrun by supplied with strip clubs & pot shops that one might think our political & cultural views are much closer to a Dutch city than to a fellow US city such as Atlanta, Phoenix or even San Francisco. -- llywrch (talk) 22:35, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

This is an interesting thread, and seeing llywrch's numbers one thing I do want to say is that I don't think they're quite accurate. I'll leave it to individual arbitrators to disclose (or not) their origins but they're off just based on what's disclosed on-wiki already. Another thing I thought I'd point out is that over time, I think Canadians have tended to be over-represented on the committee (relative to percentage of editors from Canada), and that's relevant to the thesis that there is a systemic bias in favour of "American" values. Outside of North America, I can see how Canadians would be lumped in with the Americans, but that wouldn't necessarily happen in North America. If one lumps in the Canadians with Americans, then while the original thesis doesn't fall apart, the numbers aren't as striking. Contrast that with llwyrch's thoughs that that Commonwealth members would balance out US-bias. Maxim_(talk) 23:06, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I count 4 Canadians. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:58, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

• I'm not certain what the specific point of this subthread is, but I'd like to say that in my opinion "admonish" is neither obscure nor archaic; it's a word the average Anglophone would learn by age 12 or 13. (Side note: If only there were a way for anyone to look up the meaning of any word, instantly.) In terms of non–native Anglophones and ArbCom/ANI: I have found over the years that when people's English or eloquence skills are lacking to any degree, the frustration that builds up from that in the context of needing to put forth one's ideas cogently in this environment tends to often come out appearing to be aggression (because they may communicate in short, painfully awkward, frustrated language that appears to be rude or as snapping at others), which leads others to perceive them as aggressive or disruptive, and the cycle snowballs until they are brought to a noticeboard and then actually branded as disruptive, which makes them angrier and more aggressive. Of course, a pre-existing propensity to aggression exacerbates that, but/whereas if an aggressive person is an eloquent native Anglophone, they tend to skate along at Wikipedia and evade sanction. Softlavender (talk) 14:08, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

• My point is that it's a symptom of Wikipedia's systemic bias that Wikipedia expects everyone not only to be familiar with a word that's as archaic as "anon" or "welkin" outside the US (the word went out of usage in British English in the early 19th century), but to implicitly understand that when it's used it's being used in its American sense ("rebuke or reprimand") which differs to the meaning it had elsewhere when it was still in use ("Advise a person of his or her duties, recommend a course of action"). With it's a word the average Anglophone would learn by age 12 or 13 you're kind of proving my point, since nobody in the UK, Ireland, Australia etc could be expected to ever encounter it except in 19th-century novels. (With regards to Side note: If only there were a way for anyone to look up the meaning of any word, instantly, go ahead and look "admonish" up in an non-US dictionary—here's the OED entry to get you started—and note that its primary meaning in every context other than the US legal system—that of telling people what they should do not what they shouldn't—differs from the sense in which it's used on Wikipedia.) I know you're still in regular contact with Eric, whom even his harshest critics would concede has an excellent grasp of the English language and its current use; ask him when he last heard the word "admonish" in any context other than Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, and if he's ever heard a non-American use it to mean "warned not to do something". ‑ Iridescent 17:02, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

• "I know you're still in regular contact with Eric". I'm not sure how or why you ever, or would ever, get that impression. I have never interacted with Eric and I stay far away from him as I don't like interacting with divas who abuse Wikipedia's civility policies simply because they are vested editors. Anyway, OED is paywalled, and rather expensively. Do you have a non-paywalled dictionary for your point? And do you assume that non-Americans only use non-American sources when they Google the meaning of a word? Since I still don't know what meaning "admonish" carries outside of standard dictionary definitions that pop up at the top of Google no matter what country you're searching from [19], I don't see any problem with it, any more than I see a problem with Americans learning the definitions of important, significant, or popular words used in Britain or in the Commonwealth. Lastly, I think "admonish" in the context of ArbCom is much better than "warn", because "warn" is a very loaded word that carries undertones of guilt and bad-acting with negative motivations, whereas "admonish" is a formal and legal word which makes no overt judgment about motivation or guilt. I think "warn" is perfect for use in areas like ANI when inveterate bad actors are being reported for repeated abuse, but ArbCom needs to use unimpeachable terms in order not to taint a person (especially a long-term valued contributor previously in good standing) more than being dragged through ArbCom already does. Softlavender (talk) 12:54, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

• Ah yes, my apologies—having double-checked through email threads I'd got you confused with a similarly-named editor. On the matter of language I don't accept your argument (which as far as I can see boils down to "if a word has different meanings in different countries, people should be forced to use the American meaning") at all. The claim that it wouldn't be an issue if common British (Aussie, Irish, Canadian…) terms that had a different meaning in the US were used without explanation by Arbcom is risible; the noticeboard would erupt with a barrage of angry Americans if the committee issued a FoF that "the allegations are pants". (To get you started, here's an American in—presumably—good faith misunderstanding the utterly uncontentious BrEng phrase "knickers in a twist" and taking great offence.) ‑ Iridescent 13:31, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

• You still haven't established that "admonish" means anything different outside the U.S. than it does within the U.S., and I never said or implied "if a word has different meanings in different countries, people should be forced to use the American meaning"; I said if someone doesn't know the meaning of any word, it takes all of 10 seconds to look it up. And it's a much better word for ArbCom cases than anything that would taint the person in question with imputed motives or guilt. Softlavender (talk) 13:51, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

• Um, we Americans have a similar saying to "knickers in a twist" -- "panties in a knot". The individual Iridescent refers to above could be considered familiar with that phrase & knew full its connotations, yet decided to find insult anyway. (His response is very similar to how my 5-year-old daughter immediately flies into a rage & starts to claim that I hate her when I tell her "No" to one of her requests. And yes, my daughter is considered to have a discipline problem by US standards. Even West Coast standards.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:17, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

  I can't resist taking the opportunity to share this. EEng 22:59, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Mapping Wikipedia

• Michael Mandiberg recently published an article in The Atlantic: "Mapping Wikipedia". This shows a breakdown of edits by country of origin, based on the geolocation of the 884M edits made to the English Wikipedia during its history. It also analyses the edits made within the US by county and finds that the strongest correlation for Wikipedia activity is with the level of religious adherence. Andrew🐉(talk) 17:28, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for that Andrew, very interesting - presumably it's based on the same WMF figures I mentioned just above. It's not colossally surprising, though I would have expected "educational attainment" to be the strongest correlation, rather than religion (which previous research has never afaik looked at). Am I wrong to think it suggests that US Latinos are relatively strong contributors? Note all this is purely about wp:en. One quibble about the presentation is that it jumps around between absolute and per capita levels too much - for example I'm sure Hong Kong has huge per capita levels. Also it would be useful to know how big the range is in absolute terms between the top and bottom % groups for "Wikipedia Editing Activity". Johnbod (talk) 17:40, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Interesting, although I wonder whether what appears to be a strong inverse relationship between Wikipedia editing and Christianity is actually a straightforward correlation between Wikipedia editing and the location of college towns. It's no secret that graduates are disproportionately represented in Wikipedia's editor base, and someone who's left home to attend college is presumably disproportionately likely to remain there after graduation rather than go back home to their flyover homes (either because once they've tasted the big city they don't want to leave, or just because there are more graduate jobs in the big cities than in North Buttmunch, Wyoming). It would be interesting to see what the pattern is like in the UK where the correlation between population density and religion is largely the inverse of the US (in the US, the cities are full of godless heathens and the countryside still goes to church; in the UK the church is dying outside the inner cities); my guess is that the correlation between religious activity and Wikipedia activity is a red herring, and that Wikipedia activity is still directly related to "proximity of a university". ‑ Iridescent 17:52, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Mandiberg's analysis seems to be a different one. It is based on the full history of edits from 2002 to 2018 whereas the WMF reports seem to start from the beginning of 2019. Andrew🐉(talk) 17:59, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

How accurate are the locations? Even if one assumes the distorting effects of VPNs isn't going to be statistically significant, relying on IP geolocation is something of a fool's errand; there's a good chance that what you actually have there is a map of where the major ISPs in the US have their default location set. (This isn't purely a US issue; any checkuser can confirm that a remarkable proportion of UK editors are shown as being at Methodist Central Hall or Charing Cross in London, or the BT exchange in Irlam near Manchester.) An absolute giveaway in the Atlantic article is the two spots of bright green hyper-intense Wikipedia activity in central Kansas, which mark the current and former default locations in the US returned when a device has tracking switched off. Plus, "number of edits" is a tricky metric; I suspect that we actually have here is "list of home addresses of current and former bot operators". ‑ Iridescent 10:13, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Logged out edits. So unlikely to be botops. Corporate networks/corporate VPNs are more likely to have a significant impact than retail VPNs... the number of people who edit from work and thus geolocate to wherever the company has its server are not insignificant. Plus registered vs. IP edits I suspect might be a very different picture. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:50, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Slightly obscure source

Hey Iri, I'm hoping you or one of your other TPSs might be able to help me track down a source for use on The Cenotaph? It's cited in various other works so I know it exists but I don't know where I'd get hold of it. The article is "The Story of the Cenotaph" by Eric Homberger in the Times Literary Supplement, 12 November 1976, pp. 1429–1430. Any help tracking it down would be appreciated. :)

(talk page stalker) @HJ Mitchell: Not me I'm afraid; but it might also be worth asking at the Resource Exchange, where they can access most archives between them. ——SN54129 12:07, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I knew something like that existed but couldn't remember what it was called and didn't know how useful it was. And thank you very mu≤ch to the lurker who sent me exactly what I was looking for! HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 12:44, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

On the move or I'd do it myself, but the TLS archive is free to access with most UK library cards. (You're looking for "news vault" not the main Times archive.) If you can't get in Nikkimaria should know someone who can, or I'll do it when I'm back home. ‑ Iridescent 2 13:05, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

HJ Mitchell, annoyingly the TLS seems to be excluded from literally every online collection to which I have free access; even the Corporation of London which is generally the gold standard when it comes to free resources for members has the TLS greyed out on their Gale subscription. According to a google search on times literary supplement archive library site:.uk, it looks like the only UK institutions offering free access in the UK are a handful of university libraries, plus for some reason residents of the London Borough of Richmond. (Carcharoth, do you still live out that way?) If you flutter your eyelashes at EEng, I'm fairly sure he has access to the Harvard Law School's online collection which includes TLS access, while membership of the New York Public Library also gives access and there's enough of a NYC contingent watching this page that one of them must surely be a member. ‑ Iridescent 16:46, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Wow, weird that so few places offer access to it. I didn't know the TLS had an online archive. But I've found what I was after now, thanks! Another lurker emailed it to me earlier but they haven't commented here so I'm guessing they don't want to take credit. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:56, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

No worries. I'm not really surprised that so few places offer access—Gale charges a fortune to libraries and presumably the TLS is an obvious thing to cut for anything other than universities with a strong literature department—but I am surprised the CoL is among those to have cut it. ‑ Iridescent 17:01, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Well, foop (I just made that word up - and having Googled it, I think I should be more careful making words up!). I was asked this question before (see my talk page here). I may in fact end up in a library in that part of London at some point next week (forgive me if I don't give the exact one), partially related to working arrangements being disrupted by the coronavirus, but I am editing in other areas at the moment, and need a break from WWI memorials articles for a while (and I think Harry has a copy now anyway?). I hope the article at the Whitehall Cenotaph won't be too unrecognisable after improvements have been made. :-) (I say this because I made a series of edits to it a long time ago) It is interesting sometimes to see the way some editors handle long-standing material in an article - my preference for something like the Cenotaph would not be to make a 'Lutyens' article of it, as if any of his memorials have a life of their own it is this one. More people will know and be aware of the Cenotaph than of Lutyens. Anyway, as I said earlier, I think the article should be available here, and maybe that is where the kind person who sent a copy to Harry got it from. Harry, did you ever see my reply here? I think you may have been away at that point. Carcharoth (talk) 17:55, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi Carcharoth, good to see you! :) I'd forgotten I asked you about the TLS piece! But yes, I have a copy now. I was working my way through Greenberg and he mentions it several times. I haven't read it yet, but will see if it contains any details not mentioned elsewhere and even if it doesn't will probably work in a few citations just to prove breadth and depth of research. Sorry if I'm a little brutal in my rewriting; articles, especially on well-known subjects, tend to accumulate a layer of fluff over the years if they're not looked after (I still spend a surprising amount of time pruning on some of my earlier FAs, like the Iranian Embassy siege (nobody cares that it's Alan Partridge's favourite siege! ;) ), and I think a consistent writing style is important. I also tend to take stuff out while I'm creating a skeleton and then add it back as I put meat on the bones. It might look very different by the time I'm finished with it, but hopefully it will contain all the information you would expect to find in a high-quality article on the subject. I have ideas for some of the later sections, like the "other cenotaphs" section for example, which may not survive in its current form but I'll do something with it; it might form the basis of the a separate article or it might end up more prose-based. There's plenty of sources on its influence, it's how we best cover that in an encyclopaedia.

On a slightly related note, Iri and TPSs might be interested one of my little back-burner projects on railway war memorials. Lutyens did two (which is where my interest started), but there were loads of them, including some quite impressive monuments. I recently brought Anthony Lambert's Britain's Railways in Wartime, published by Historic England, and it contains a whole chapter on railway war memorials, including a gazetteer of all known surviving memorials (from small war plaques to grand monuments). HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:46, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

​Move and fire—move and fire—move and fire  :) ——SN54129 18:52, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

I looked at the railway war memorials at one point, but the trouble is there's not much to say about most of them. Even the huge high-profile ones like the Victory Arch at Waterloo would end up being permastubs; for a lot of these smaller monuments it's IMO actually better from the point of view of readers that Wikipedia not have an article, as that way anyone searching for them ends up at the CWGC website which is typically more informative than anything we could do. ‑ Iridescent 18:58, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, most of them probably couldn't (or, at least, shouldn't sustain their own articles). The big free-standing ones could (and do, for the NER, Midland, and LNWR). There's also ample scope for an FA on the GWR's because of the fame of the sculptor and its history is quite well-documented in the books. But I reckon there's enough in Lambert that you could write a listicle on all the the main ones without being accused of SYNTH, and it's a subject worth covering. I'm also deep in your territory at the moment—I've been reading Wolmar for a little light reading, and I'm on The Subterranean Railway. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 21:27, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

(Your mention of Lambert set off a bit of cognitive dissonance, as Daniel Lambert is currently on the main page for his 250th birthday.) If you want a recommendation for railway books, Capital Transport's map trilogy {No Need to Ask, Mr Beck's Underground Map and Underground Maps After Beck) are all about 10,000 times more interesting than "a series of books on differing approaches to diagrammatic mapping and the social impact of intentionally distorting maps away from reality" sounds. ‑ Iridescent 21:42, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply Harry. It is the dates of the unveiling of the cenotaphs in that 'other' section (especially where there are no articles) that I should put in sources for (I should have done this at the time, obviously). What I would tend to do is put material on the talk page, rather than ruthlessly excise it. But your approach is different, so I'll dig through the page history if necessary to remind myself of older material that could be retrieved. I've put some sources in the article (Edkins 2003 and ter Schure 2019 have written case studies on the Cenotaph, though I quail a bit at the reference to the philosophy of Henri Bergson) and on the article talk page (here and here and here) including an earlier comment I made about the extensive cultural and social history (which is needed for an FA-level article here), so I'll stop wittering on here and comment more over there when I have time. Carcharoth (talk) 12:30, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

• Arid Desiccant, I've emailed you pdfs of both the original piece and some later letters to the editor, and OCRs of all that too. For future reference, to check if I can get something (online or hardcopy) look at https://hollis.harvard.edu; happy to do it. EEng 18:44, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
• I was the one who sent a copy of the TLS ref Harry was looking for as I have ready access to it. Thank you, Harry, for respecting my desire to do so anonymously. I sent it as a favour as I do NOT edit Wikipedia anymore - the bullies, obsessives, nasty trolls, POV pushers, infobox warriors, socks etc now over run the site - but I do try to give any background help I can to those I respect. Now I’m going to have seek out a friendly admin to expunge my IP address from the history here .... (Redacted) 19:33, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

I'll revdel it since you asked, but since all anyone can find out from it is "user of a major mobile network, somewhere in the UK" I think your privacy is safe regardless. ‑ Iridescent 19:39, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

{{BLP unsourced}}

Just a quickie, but do you or any TPS's know where the P&G is that a single external link counts as a source, per the above? ——SN54129 16:36, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Proposed deletion of biographies of living people: To be eligible for a BLPPROD tag, the entry must be a biography of a living person and contain no sources in any form (as references, external links, etc., reliable or otherwise). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:39, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks very much for that JJE, I think I looked every wheer except the obvious! Cheers. And apologies, Iridescent, for messing up your formatting  :) Now for some serious deprodding... ——SN54129 17:07, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Art auctions and collections

A quick art colllections and art auction set of questions for you, if you have time (or Johnbod or anyone else watching): how would I find out if the painting by Will Longstaff titled 'The rearguard (The spirit of ANZAC)', described here at the Bonhams sale in 2010, actually sold in the later auction described here (Menzies, 2017). If only the estimate is given, does that mean it either failed to sell or was sold for an undisclosed amount (OK, I see from here that it did not sell)? Also, that latter page describes a later work (Drake's Drum 1940, oil on canvas, Royal Collection, United Kingdom), but I am struggling to find that listed anywhere official such as here. If it was not on display, would it not be listed there? Carcharoth (talk) 17:13, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

The RC database is generally pretty good for the stuff I look for there (already in print catalogues), but they say: "Just under 270,000 records about objects in the Collection can now be found online. These records form a working database that we are improving and expanding on a regular basis." - I'd imagine that means they have many objects to go. Johnbod (talk) 17:24, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Johnbod. If you are still around today, is there a way to assess whether a sale price 'means' anything? Is that encyclopedic? I am thinking here of this sale in 2018. Carcharoth (talk) 17:50, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Artist's top/typical prices can certainly be encyclopedic in their biography. If you're writing about the subject, maybe not so much, though that price is high, I'd have thought. Mind you it was in the middle of the estimate range. This was the Annabel's sale & some early lots got x10 the estimate, no doubt for sentimental reasons. Look at Lots 50 & 51 (the last an Etty attrib) - maybe all your promo work is paying off Iri! And 71 - they do like doggies. Or 77, 120, 162. Mind you, there's 171. Johnbod (talk) 17:54, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Have got distracted by trying to solve a minor family history puzzle for the artist (Sir William Nicholson). On that Christie's page, I read through the 'Lot Essay' and noticed that the artist lost a son in the war. Turning to his Wikipedia page, we learn that the son was named Anthony, and died in 1918 "soon after" his mother (who died in July 1918 of the Spanish flu, just to make things sort-of-topical) - in case that tugs the heartstrings too much, we also learn that Nicholson's housekeeper had been his mistress "From about 1910 until he remarried in 1919". Anyway, back to the unfortunate second son who died in France "of wounds" (the other three children all have Wikipedia articles), we know he was born in 1897 and died probably in July 1918. There are no records for an "Anthony" Nicholson in the CWGC database, but there are three "A. Nicholson" entries, with two of them naming the parents, so the only one that can be the artist's son is A. L. Nicholson, Died 16/07/1918, 9th Bn, East Surrey Regiment, and buried in a French cemetery. However, this is one of those cases where there is no note in the CWGC records about the family, and no headstone inscription. You wonder why not. Would there be a way to confirm if this A. L. Nicholson is the correct one? Carcharoth (talk) 18:14, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

If you don't mind pestering them or traipsing out to Woking, the Surrey History Centre holds the regimental archives for the Queen's Royal Surrey Regiment (which absorbed the East Surrey Regiment). I have no experience with this particular one, but in general regimental archivists for the less fashionable units like this are generally delighted when anyone shows an interest. ‑ Iridescent 20:07, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

(adding) On the initial point about prices, I'd say prices can definitely be notable, as lows as well as highs; the canonical example would be Flaming June—now arguably the definitive piece of Victorian English art—selling for just £50. There's more of a case for it when there's a clear trend, as individual works can always be a blip; I've probably included some variant of "by the end of the 19th century the auction price of every one of his works was lower than its origina sale price" a dozen times on assorted William Etty topics as it's an objective way to quantify "people really stopped liking this kind of thing for a while". ‑ Iridescent 20:21, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Carcharoth ("and in that cruel mouth unclean / engulfed the jewel's holy sheen" - I always hope that Silmaril is not causing you too much discomfort): I believe you have been led astray by the son preferring "Anthony", or rather "Tony", which was his middle name. It seems he was "John Anthony Nicholson", a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, killed (sigh) on 5 October 1918.[20] (Sympathy slightly reduced by him boasting, in a letter home a few weeks before, of killing "quite a lot of Huns".) Buried at Grévillers, where the gravestone inscription is simply "Tony"; and the contact name was "Mr. W. Nicholson, 11 Apple Tree Yard, St. Jame's, S.W. 1" [21] Hope that helps.

Oh, and on temporary cenotaphs later replaced by stone memorials: I'm sure there are plenty of examples, but one was constructed for the August 1919 procession in Belfast (for example [22], albeit not very similar to the Belfast Cenotaph). And then that painting inspired the sculpture atop the County Fermanagh War Memorial.

Regarding value, similar tales are told about similar (and at one stage deeply unfashionable) Victorian works such as The Roses of Heliogabalus (failed to sell, bought in) and The Finding of Moses (allegedly bought for its frame and discarded). On the whole, I think I prefer An Athlete Wrestling with a Python. Lilith took a different approach. (The dramatic sky in Longstaff's The Rearguard seems to have a touch of the John Martin about it: compare The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum.) (Exit, pursued by a wolf) Theramin (talk) 21:33, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Many thanks, Theramin! Those pesky middle names... I should actually have realised that the Nicholsons were of a sufficient status in society that it was unlikely that the second son here would be a private (as the seemingly mostly forgotten A. L. Nicholson was). It makes far more sense that the second son of the artist was an officer (though it seems he was not commissioned immediately but went the route of sergeant first), and that he went to a school such as Gresham's (on the topic of coverage of school war memorials, I can highly recommend To Our Brothers by Sarah Wearne who I may have mentioned before as the author of books on the CWGC epitaphs, on which see Great War Epitaphs on Twitter), and there are plenty of sources confirming that the father lived at that address, see here for an example with a mention of Lutyens for good measure in a letter to George Clausen (also an official WWI artist).

Oh dear, I see that Clausen's daughter's fiancee was killed in the war, I doubt that will be easy to track down. Though I should have had more faith, as some more details are out there. See here:

This impersonal record of the fighting in France on 12 March 1915 from the diary of the 1st Battalion the Highland Light Infantry does little to capture the tragic consequences for families back home. One of the soldiers killed that day was the fiancé of Sir George Clausen’s daughter, Katherine.

That piece from a curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as looking at Clausen's Youth Mourning, also talks about Charles Sims and his "addition" to his work Clio and the Children. Clausen's work was also modified later. Assuming the fiancé of Clausen's daughter did die that day (and not of wounds later) there are 14 Highland Light Infantry casualties recorded in the CWGC database for that day. And after a bit of searching, we have this, which states that the painting is reported to have been triggered by "the death in 1915 of Second Lieutenant Geraint Payne, the fiancé of Kit Clausen. the artist's daughter." So Charles Geraint Christopher Payne, commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial.

Sims lost his son in 1914, it took a while to track down, but "The painter Charles Sims had a son, a navy cadet aged only 16 years; the boy John was one of approximately 750 crew killed when HMS Bulwark accidentally blew up in Sheerness Harbour in November 1914". So that would be John Sims, recorded on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial. This tale does not get any better, as Sims's mental health deteriorated and he died by suicide in 1928.

Back to John Anthony Nicholson, a picture of his grave can be seen here in the book Sassoon & Graves: On the Trail of the Poets of the Great War (2001), where the authors unsurprisingly have a fair amount to say about Nancy Nicholson as she married Robert Graves. What they say there is that the mother (Mabel Pryde) neglected her illness so as not to spoil her son's leave.

I agree about the sky in Longstaff's The Rearguard, though I do still want to try and see what Drake's Drum looks like. The exhibition in Australia was only able to bring together four paintings (the Menin Gate one, the Cenotaph one, the Carillon one and the Vimy Ridge one). Maybe someone needs to enquire at the Royal Collections about this one. I did like the comment at the bottom of the Bonham's sale page (the topic of spiritualism after World War I is strange at times):

We are extremely grateful to Diana Brooks, daughter of the artist, who points out that Longstaff and Conan Doyle both had rooms in the same building on the Buckingham Palace Road. She also notes that, in response to Conan Doyle's suggestion that Longstaff painted under a kind of spiritual influence, Longstaff is reputed to have told a group of friends that the only spirits that influenced him came out of a bottle.

On temporary cenotaphs, I have a family connection to one that was erected in Bermondsey, as my grandfather's older brother (they were teenagers at the time) had a camera and took a photo of it. It was later replaced with a permanent memorial of a different design. The temporary Bermondsey cenotaph is clearly based on the Lutyens Whitehall cenotaph (though not identical). That probably happened quite a lot. Carcharoth (talk) 11:45, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

This Is Not My Area, but as I understand it the original Whitehall cenotaph was a more simple "upturned box supporting an empty tomb" structure that didn't taper in the same way, so it would have made sense for provincial temporary cenotaphs to copy the design as a practical solution to combining "easy to build in a country where the skilled workforce was hugely depleted", "it needs to be unmissable through even a dense crowd so a passing parade knows when to salute" and "design that already has government approval so there's no risk of anyone considering it disrespectful". ‑ Iridescent 09:29, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Carcharoth, to add to the material on John Anthony, he was baptised on 29 August 1898 at Lechlade, Gloucestershire (quoting the record, he was son of William Newzane Prior Nicholson, artist, and his wife Mabel Scott Lawden Nicholson) [see Gloucestershire Archives, P197 IN 1/8: Register of Baptisms, 1833–1903, p. 287, no. 2291]. He was living with his parents in 1901 and then boarding at Gresham's School in 1911. Both censuses give his place of birth as Mitcham, Surrey. The roll of honour for the war memorial in Rottingdean, Surrey, records that John Anthony Nicholson was "Lieutenant, 48 Battery, 36th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery Died of wounds near Grevillers 5th October 1918. Aged 20. Buried in Grevillers British Cemetery F. 512" [23]. This is the original entry at CWGC which gives the father as "W. Nicholson, 11 Appletree Yard, York St, St James, SW1". His medal index card confirms his death on 5 October and gives the correspondence as "father: W. N. P. Nicholson, Esq., 11 Appletree Yard, York St., St James, SW1." If you're interested, the basics of his war service can probably be pieced together by searching The London Gazette or by looking through the Army Lists. Hope this helps. Cheers, —Noswall59 (talk) 11:01, 20 March 2020 (UTC).

The Gresham Magazine in which a short obituary is given, is here. —Noswall59 (talk) 11:06, 20 March 2020 (UTC).

There's more about him on page 29 of the samw magazine (plus a sobering list of all the school's old boys who had served in the military, and how many of them didn't come back). Thanks for that Noswall59; I found the whole thing genuinely interesting, Edwardian public schoolboys have such a bad reputation that it's refreshing to see what their lives were like beyond the braying-toff stereotype. ‑ Iridescent 11:33, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	This is for your heads up post on Van Gogh about the virtual tour bringing in a slew of new edits, I can say with confidence I do not laugh out loud a lot on Wikipedia, but this post gave me an honest out loud chuckle. Keep up the good work. Eruditess (talk) 19:03, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, although it wasn't a joke. With regards to this particular one it's no longer an issue owing to Events, but with culture topics these kind of "unique new perspective" exhibitions, books, TV programmes etc are an ongoing problem for Wikipedia. By their nature they tend to be curated/presented/written by people with firm opinions on the topic matter (in this particular case, the VVG Museum's party line that VVG's style was uniquely visionary rather than part of a broader trend on a trail already blazed by Monticelli, Pissarro and Cezanne). This then leads to a wave of good-faith edits from people who assume that the opinions presented there are undisputed fact, try to "unbias" the article by slanting it towards whichever viewpoint is being presented, and get hurt and upset when they get reverted. It's easy for us to forget just how confusing a concept NPOV is to new editors, particularly on a topic like VVG where the expert consensus and the popular image are often quite far apart and we have to try to reconcile the two. ‑ Iridescent 18:05, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

"Telling lies in a closure"

Nothing in the summary is a lie. Please be aware that aspersions are also sanctionable, though I believe that you are simply misguided in this instance. DarkKnight2149 09:28, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

We really need an eyeroll emoji… OK, if you really want to commit wikicide by going down swinging: Here is the thread (complete with your closure) at the moment I made my "your summary in no way reflects the contents of the thread" comment. Please quote for me the parts of that thread which support the following statements:

• "Herostratus has been notified that a larger case is being built against TTN";
• "There is a consensus on both sides to close" (note in particular that this conversation is on the Administrators' Noticeboard, and none of the three people suggesting closure are admins);
• "Administrators are uninterested in taking action in either direction".

If you can point me to the relevant comments within that thread to indicate that your alleged "summary" is indeed a correct summary, then we'll talk. Unless and until you can do so, then you might want to consider that digging in and turning up on my talkpage accusing me of "aspersions" and being "simply misguided" is possibly not going to end well. ‑ Iridescent 09:44, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

(adding) If you really insist on playing this game, you may also want to read WP:NACINV and consider whether current or past conflicts with an editor (or editors), and disputes on topics, regardless of the nature, age, or outcome of the dispute applies to you, in which case your closing of the thread is automatically out-of-process. ‑ Iridescent 10:07, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) First of all, I don't know who it is you think you are talking to, but I am a prolific and respected Wikipedia editor who has contributed significantly to the project over the last half-decade. So you can cut the attitude right now. I came to you to clarify the situation and even gave you the benefit of the doubt, and now here you are throwing a tantrum and demanding sanctions. If you weren't guilty of aspersions beforehand (and I don't believe that you were intentionally), this certainly qualifies. I closed the discussion in good faith, and this is not the behaviour that I would expect from an administrator.

Herostratus has been notified that a larger case is being built against TTN - This took place here.

There is a consensus on both sides to close - Both sides of the conflict agreed to a close, and I WP:BOLDly provided one. Nobody said anything about administrators. If you disagreed with the closure, the proper etiquette would have been to revert it yourself. Instead, you decided to cast aspersions and you accused me lying. When I asked for clarification on your talk page, you piled on more allegations and are now trying to spin it as an "attack". If you can't see the disruption in your behaviour, then you shouldn't be an administrator.

Administrators are uninterested in taking action in either direction - They aren't [24], [25]

I would advise you to consider your next step and act in a reasonable manner. This is just ridiculous and I'm not putting up with it. DarkKnight2149 10:42, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

This? -> 🙄 Mr rnddude (talk) 10:27, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Let's start over. I don't want to be engaged in another conflict (the TTN situation has wasted enough time and taken too much of a toll as it is), and I don't want this to drag out any more than it has to. Maybe as a passing third party, you assumed that I was being deliberately untruthful. And maybe seeing the word "aspersion", in light of your allegation, prompted you to assume the worst. Whatever it was, I believe that there were better ways to handle it than assuming bad faith, calling me a liar, and then piling on more allegations/rudeness when I tried to clarify.

If you simply reverted the closure or asked for me to explain the summary, I don't believe this would have blown up the way it did. If you have further concerns that you wish to share with me in the future, just know that I'm a lot more receptive when it's handled in a calmer/less accusatory manner. This type of overreaction turned an uneasy situation into a heated one, and I believe it was avoidable. DarkKnight2149 11:57, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) Indeed it was avoidable, Darkknight2149—by you. You don't seem to recognise, in your own behavior, that which you criticise in others. Here, for example, you are complaining that Iridescent cast aspersions, when your first post on this page arguably threatened sanctions, which was then followed by "advice" to consider your step. Another example of your auto-blindspot—yes, there is another—is at the AN/I thread itself, where having performed a non-admin closure on an administrators' noticeboard, you then claim that only administrators can revert you. Verging on the bizarre, not to say Carrollian. ——SN54129 12:20, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I never threatened sanctions against Iridescent and your assertion that I did so is a boldfaced lie. Typically, controversial decisions at ANI are handled by administrators, not you. If someone made a closure, then it's up to the administrators to decide whether or not it sticks. Rather than reverting me or confronting me in a reasonable manner, Iridescent came right out the gate with allegations of lying and threatening of sanctions. Considering that nothing in the closure was false, that in itself was a poor way of handling the situation. Then I tried to clarify the situation and reminded him that aspersions are also sanctionable, but I also assumed WP:GOODFAITH and stated that it was probably an honest mistake ("though I believe that you are simply misguided in this instance"). But then, he responds very rudely with more accusations and then goes to ANI and (ironically) claims that I'm making "spurious allegations" against him. I'm sorry, what? At this point, you would have to willfully ignorant to claim that I started the situation or that I'm the aggressor. Persistently casting aspersions in such a hostile manner is, in fact, disruptive. DarkKnight2149 12:44, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) So in other words, not a single one of the things you claimed were in the thread in your alleged summary of the thread actually appeared in the thread, you got caught out lying, and are frantically lashing out trying to throw smoke over your being caught out, and accusing me of being the one having a tantrum? (Also, not to be That Guy, but myself, Fram and Herostratus are all people on whom you may want to do some background research before trying to pull that "do you know who I am, how dare you challenge my authority" shit.) This is one of the most-watched pages on Wikipedia; I'm sure if I'm actually "throwing a tantrum", "guilty of aspersions" or any of the other lies you're making up, people won't be shy in pointing it out. If you actually have any evidence for any of the claims you're making, WP:ARC is thataway. ‑ Iridescent 12:32, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

For the last time NOBODY LIED, as has already been explained to you repeatedly. You accuse me of "throwing smoke", yet here you are still doing the very thing I called you out on. At this point, you are not only guilty of assuming bad faith and WP:ASPERSIONS, but this is beginning to border on WP:IDONTHEARTHAT. I tried to defuse the situation, and here you continuing to be royally disruptive. As I have previously told you, you are speaking to a reputable and prolific Wikipedia contributor who didn't start editing yesterday. You need to show a bit more respect than this unearned harassment. I mean, not a single one of the things you claimed were in the thread in your alleged summary of the thread actually appeared in the thread? You are being deliberately obtuse at this point. DarkKnight2149 12:51, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Darkknight2149 Clearly my warning on ANI didn't make any difference, did it? In the two posts above you have accused both Iridescent and SN54129 of being disruptive and the latter of being wilfully ignorant. I'll give you a short time to self-revert those posts, because I'm out of patience. Black Kite (talk) 13:01, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

If someone makes an untrue accusation, I am within my rights to defend myself against it. (I also don't recall calling SN54129 disruptive) Nothing I have said has been unreasonable and this is insanity. I'm distancing myself from both this thread and WP:ANI, but consider this a final warning - If Iridescent accuses me of lying again, I will be filing a report. Not six months from now, today. This is objectively ridiculous. DarkKnight2149 13:09, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

That was a poor idea. Black Kite (talk) 13:14, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

I know DK2149 is now blocked, but for the record: you are speaking to a reputable and prolific Wikipedia contributor who didn't start editing yesterday is not the point in your favour you seem to think it is, but is the reason this has ended in a block rather than a warning. We make allowances for new editors who don't understand Wikipedia's rules; when someone with 18764 edits over a six-year period ignores those same rules (and not obscure guidelines, but day-one basic principles like "don't be the closer in a discussion about yourself", "don't make threats" and "don't misrepresent a discussion in a closure"), that's a problem since there's no possible way you couldn't have known that on both the original discussion and the above thread you've been repeatedly breaking some of our basic social principles. ‑ Iridescent 14:24, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

File:"I don't know where that sock came from".jpg

That one was nominated for deletion by Jordan 1972. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:51, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Deprodded; I assume Jordan 1972 is acting in good faith and doesn't understand that files used in modules and scripts don't show up on "What links here" and "File usage" because there isn't a direct link. (It's an easy mistake to make as people are so used to files only being used by invoking [[File:Filename|thumb|alt=|size|caption]] wikitext, they forget that other ways of calling files exist.) ‑ Iridescent 14:55, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Since you uploaded that file without a clearly stated source, did you take the photo? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:35, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Obviously, hence the {{gfdl-self}} tag. Given that it's (a) taken with the same camera as my 30,000+ other uploads across en-wiki and Commons and (b) is of the same cat who appears reasonably regularly on assorted talkpages (and indeed is currently the subject of a discussion on this very page), I don't think anyone is going to raise any real doubt on this one. ‑ Iridescent 15:42, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

I doubt it, but the only way to clear a 162,046-file-long backlog is one file at a time. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:54, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Is that a backlog that needs cleaning? There's not and never has been an obligation to include a machine-readable source on files (or indeed on anything), provided there's a source and a license; we may have Wikidata's tanks massing on our border, but we're not (yet) under their occupation. Treating non-conformance to a nonexistent policy as a maintenance backlog rather than what it actually is, [[Category:Files that don't conform to a particular group of editors' personal formatting preference]] seems a little Betacommandish to me. We have enough trouble with people complaining about articles whose citations aren't formatted the way they'd personally have done it, without unnecessarily generating additional makework for ourselves. (Don't get me wrong, there are perfectly valid reasons to encourage machine-readable sourcing, but since we explicitly allow hand-formatted citations and sourcing it doesn't seem appropriate to be treating people correctly complying with policy as having made some kind of error.) ‑ Iridescent 16:37, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Gwenno Saunders

Please see WP:MOSETHNICITY - do not include ethnicity/regional origin etc in the lede. Dickie Bird was a famous Yorkshireman, he's not described as an 'English-Yorkshire' cricket umpire. Dubya Bush is not a 'Texan-American' politician etc. GiantSnowman 20:11, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

1) As you admit she's notable for being in the Pipettes; 2) please join in my post at WP:BLPN. GiantSnowman 20:39, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

She's not "notable for being in the Pipettes", for christ's sake; the Pipettes were an ultra-obscure mid-2000s band whose notability mainly derives from being the band that launched the careers of Rose Dougall and Gwenno Saunders, not the other way around. Trying to claim that Gwenno Saunders—who is quite literally a professional Cornishwoman, and explicitly describes Cornish as "my native tongue"—isn't Cornish because she was born in Cardiff is like trying to claim Boris Johnson isn't really British because he was born in America. ‑ Iridescent 20:53, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

"Cornish" is not a nationality. GiantSnowman 20:58, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

We have at least one sockmaster who would beg to differ on that point... TonyBallioni (talk) 21:31, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

@GS, "Cornish" is as much a nationality as "Welsh", which you (GS) keep changing it to so presumably have no objection to.

@TB, assuming you mean Dyksliver, while he may be a PITA, he's not wrong. While there are certainly some Cornish people who identify as English, blanket-describing the Cornish as English without qualification is roughly as inflammatory as blanket-describing without qualification Tibetans as Chinese, Basques as Spaniards or Greenlanders as Danish. We have a reasonable article on the issue at Cornish people and an awful one at Cornish nationalism. ‑ Iridescent 19:20, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Yeah. I was referencing him, and was trying to make the point you made: Cornish nationalism is very much a thing to the point that we have a resident crazy person who makes his internet persona around it. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:22, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks you

For the corrections. Yug (talk) 23:17, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

You're very welcome ‑ Iridescent 23:18, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Arbitration case opened

In 2018, you offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has now accepted that request for arbitration, and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Jytdog. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Jytdog/Evidence. Please add your evidence by March 23, 2020, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Jytdog/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.

All content, links, and diffs from the original ARC and the latest ARC are being read into the evidence for this case.

The secondary mailing list is in use for this case: arbcom-en-b@wikimedia.org

For the Arbitration Committee, CThomas³ (talk) 17:10, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

My opinion hasn't changed in the slightest from what I said two years ago. The pertinent issue here is one of Wikipedia ethics versus real-world ethics and whether something not being forbidden on Wikipedia means it's acceptable. The "Evidence/Workshop/Proposed decision/Final decision" format, with supporters and opponents catcalling from the sidelines, is singularly ill-suited to a request with only two parties and a single piece of evidence since there's literally no fact in dispute and no possibility any other evidence will be entered. It was a mistake to open a case rather than deal by motion in 2018, and it's a mistake to re-open the case rather than deal with it by motion now—all it needs is a single "Jytdog didn't actually break any rules so he can come bacK', "Jytdog is unblocked but any more shit and he's sitebanned" or "Jytdog can't come back yet as he hasn't convinced us it won't happen again" motion. ‑ Iridescent 21:27, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Also, can't the committee dispense with this "For the Arbitration Committee" gubbins you make the clerks use? They're posting notifications, not proclaiming the Annunciation or negotiating the surrender of Germany. The Mouth of Sauron routine doesn't make either the arbs or the clerks look more official, it just fuels the reputation of English Wikipedia (both in the outside world and among the other projects) as being dominated by protocol-obssessed nerds. ‑ Iridescent 21:27, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

The Mouth of Sauron routine I... I think that's the most amazing unexpected use I've ever seen of this. Thank you. —Locke Cole • t • c 01:15, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

In my mind I've always heard the voice of Darth Vader. EEng 17:08, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Vader had autonomy to make his own decisions and didn't lurk in the background only emerging when Palpatine had an unpopular announcement to make and didn't want to address the Stormtroopers himself. The "Senatus Populusque Wikipedius" posturing the arbs make the clerks engage in is something different; if they have an equivalent in movies, it would be the weedy little Royal Herald with a comically oversized horn, reading out the death warrants at a public execution. ‑ Iridescent 17:17, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

I think the Latin would be more accurately Senatus Populusque Vicipediae. -- llywrch (talk) 15:35, 30 March 2020 (UTC)