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Wikimania 2021

Since Wikimania 2021 is going to be online this year (the talks start tomorrow and run until Tuesday), I was wondering whether you and/or your talk page watchers had any views on any of it? The programme is here. There are some bits that look really interesting, though I suspect there may be parts that set some people off on various rants about various things. :-) If this isn't really the right place to talk about some of the talks, I'll look for somewhere else, but I couldn't resist pointing out the two cook-alongs... (Druken Noodles and Beef Fillet with Truffle Pomme Pureé).

And I did briefly read the Pornhub thread above and think that this would be a suitable topic for a Wikimania talk! (No, seriously!) BTW, many (maybe most) of the talks will be available to view afterwards, for those interested (click on the 'On Demand' link for an idea of what to expect). Possibly one of the advantages of the online format that the pandemic has prompted. Either that, or everyone becomes a 'conference junkie' as someone warned me, but that is another story for another day. Carcharoth (talk) 07:52, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Editing and Growth hosted a 45-minute panel discussion, followed by what turned out to be two hours of informal discussion in the Unconference space. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:54, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

I thought you meant this session (which hasn't happened yet), but suspect that you mean this session. But neither fits what you describe. Could you link to it please? Am currently having to point out some inconsistencies in the captioning approach. I do like the 'etherpad' notetaking approach. I remember that happening at Wikimania 2014, but because I didn't take a laptop to that, I didn't appreciate how that can really help in terms of, um, note-taking! That is a tech-geek side-effect accessibility thingy. Anyway, being able to watch other talks on YouTube later, with automated captioning (even if that isn't always accurate) is a godsend, really. The issue comes when people helpfully use their script (sometimes it is the inbuilt Powerpoint captioning thingy) to replace the automated subtitles, which thanks to the way YouTube's automated subtitles work, means that if there is (as there always is) an unscripted Q&A session, then you can't switch on the automated captions for the Q&A session!! Someone at YouTube didn't think that through, did they? I've encountered this several times now at various online events and conferences, and it shows how people don't actually check that something they think they have made accessible actually is accessible. *sigh* Haven't bothered trying the Unconference space yet, as I don't know if there is any native (built-in) captioning. Please don't get me started on whether people should bring their own captioning software with them, or whether the event space should provide it... At least there is some commitment to transferring the YouTube captions to Commons, as stated here. Carcharoth (talk) 08:22, 15 August 2021 (UTC) PS. In practice, with the timings being staggered due to catering to different time zones, and due to other commitments, I am catching up with most of the talks later. Carcharoth (talk) 08:26, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

I had a wander through it yesterday and wound up on a table where some WMF types were using us as a sounding board for some of their ideas. I tried to explain that encouraging newbies to help rewrite policy might not be as excellent an idea as they thought. You have to wonder at the lack of Wikipedia experience among the staffers. ϢereSpielChequers 08:33, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

What I find interesting is the way Wikimania has aspects of an academic conference mixed with business meeting-type things (and the geeky, fan-type things). I have attended some academic conferences/events online over the past year, and I am still ruminating on some of the similarities and differences. Frankly, the whole online experience this past year has been 'interesting', but I had better not get started on that. A lot of silver linings, and a bit of information overload as well. Carcharoth (talk) 08:59, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, in my day job I think that virtual meetings have mostly gone well. Wiki events less so - I look forward to the London meetup being something I can safely rejoin. Not sure about Wikimania so far - I think they have siloed it by timezone that takes out much of the geographic complexity of interactions. But I like the speed of shifting from one room to another. ϢereSpielChequers 14:05, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad that some people can attend this year, who would normally not be able to due to expense, visa restrictions, disability, family situation, etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:38, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

@Carcharoth, I meant Wikimania:2021:Submissions/Editing the Wiki Way: software and the future of editing.

@WereSpielChequers, to be fair to Peter (who has made a few hundred edits here over the last few years), the idea of encouraging newbies to help rewrite policy was not entirely his idea; he was expanding on a comment made by someone else. And while IMO it's non-functional here, it might be functional at the less developed wikis. Less than a third of the Wikipedias, for example, currently have a WP:V policy at all, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover than half of the ones that exist were in poor condition. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:33, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi WhatAmI, I wasn't naming specific individuals. I don't have direct experience as to whether it would make sense to do this on smaller wikis, though from what I hear of the failure of Citizendium, writing policies and building bureaucracy before you have content is not a strategy with a great track record. Logically you would expect people to want to develop policies after they have had experience of creating or curating content. And you can't expect those with experience of contributing to have high expectations of policy suggestions made by people who haven't yet written content. But if I had misunderstood what they were contemplating it would have been easy for them to say "don't worry we aren't thinking of doing this on large and medium sized wikis, let alone English". They didn't do that. ϢereSpielChequers 09:23, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't expect him to instantly reject any new idea; he always assumes that if someone brings an idea to him, there must be something valuable in it. Because of the way the software works, interface admins link the pages. Here, if a "discussion" opportunity were wanted, I'd consider RSN. At Wikipedias without relevant policies, a village pump might be better.

It's also not accurate to assume that only editors without experience of creating or curating content will see these tools. There are people who have made hundreds (and maybe thousands) of edits in the existing Growth tools. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:54, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

To reply to the original question, I'm really not the best person to ask; the whole concept of "virtual Wikimania" baffles me. I consider the traditional "crowd in a conference hall" Wikimania a waste of time and money which seems to exist primarily as a way for the WMF and chapters to reward True Believers with a free vacation. (As you presumably know, a couple of high-profile people whose snouts-in-the-trough scamming got too blatant seem to have closed off "covering foreign affairs for Wikinews" as the other route for WMF loyalists to get the donors to pay for their holidays.) That said, I can at least see a vague purpose in "it's healthy for all concerned for people to meet each other in the flesh and get to know the people behind the goofy usernames", even if I think the costs both in terms of money and in terms of damage to goodwill outweigh the benefits by a factor of about a thousand. I can't see any point at all to an online conference; Wikipedia is already an online collaboration platform, so all that a virtual Wikimania would seem to be doing would be taking a bunch of people all of whom are used to collaborating online via text, and forcing them to collaborate via a means with which they're not so familiar and where technological considerations exclude large swathes of people from taking part. (I live in a major city in one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, and my broadband signal can't cope with a YouTube video without buffering, let alone multi-person live videoconferencing. I very much doubt all of "those girls in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around them, but only if they're empowered with the knowledge to do so" are in a better situation.)

Besides, "having everything at once" is an unavoidable negative consequence of holding a physical conference, not some kind of ideal that needs to be preserved even if things shift online. All this multiple simultaneous stream approach does is mean that anyone interested in two events that happen to be scheduled for the same time needs to skip one out. Given that "we only have this venue for three days and need to squeeze everything in" is no longer a consideration, why not have the events one-after-the-other over the course of a week, a month, or whatever it takes? (Better yet, why not spread them over the course of the year? As I've said many many many times before, the scheduling of Wikimania is IMO an excellent example of the unconscious systemic bias of the WMF. It's invariably scheduled to coincide with the American academic year. At a stroke that means it's being held when schools in most of the northern hemisphere are on holiday and consequently parents have better things to be doing than stare at a screen for eight hours, and while it's the slack season in academia, it's the busiest time of year in numerous other industries meaning people in lines of work as diverse as catering, agriculture and law enforcement are unlikely to be able to spare the time. Now there's no longer any reason everything needs to be held at once, why not make Wikimania a rolling year-round program of events?) ‑ Iridescent 12:13, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I spent a while chatting with someone in eastern Africa about the difficulties of importing infoboxes into smaller wikis. Their internet connection seemed to be doing just as well as mine.

Wikimania is normally scheduled to coincide with the European notion of summer holidays (i.e., August), except when the host country says August is a bad time for them. I understand that most folks attend either entirely or primarily at their own expense, using their vacation time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Also, US schools are starting earlier than they did when we were kids. Unless you're within an easy day's drive of New York, most kids are either in school already or are starting this week. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:47, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Wikimania is normally scheduled to coincide with the European notion of summer holidays is what I'm saying the problem is. By scheduling it around the academic calendar, it generates an immediate and persistent systemic bias, by making attendance more difficult for people with children, people who work in industries that peak in the holiday season, students who depend on summer jobs to pay their way for the rest of the year… Plus, August is invariably the most expensive time of the year for travel and accommodation, which further rules out people for whom "spending three days in a conference center" isn't a viable use of upwards of $1000. And because all this in turn leads to a particular type of time-rich, cash-rich, no other commitments despite it typically being the busiest time of year person being the people who do attend, that leads future organizers to (reasonably) draw the conclusion that "a mix of 20-something nerds, retirees, and slightly creepy people whose life revolves around online activity" are the target demographic so that's what they plan for in future. Systemic bias is rarely a case of a cabal meeting and deciding "OK, these are the groups against whom we're going to discriminate"; it results from people in good faith assuming that their future customers/employees/service users are going to look, sound and act like their past customers/employees/service users, and planning accordingly.

While I understand that most folks attend either entirely or primarily at their own expense may be technically correct, it's a little misleading. Wikimania 2017 is the most recent for which I can find figures (for a movement that talks so much about transparency, most of the chapters are about as transparent as kedgeree) but I assume they didn't change substantially from other years. There were 144 scholarships plus 169 (!) WMFers, and 313 is less than half the total so yes a majority paid their own way, but it's not exactly an overwhelming majority.

The most shocking thing to me is Conference Revenue: $111,000 USD Conference Expenses*: $509,000 USD *excludes WMF Staff (conference coordinator) and Scholarship program expenses. If we're genuinely hemorrhaging $400,000 each time it runs even before taking the 144 scholarships and the plane tickets/hotel rooms for 169 WMFers into account, then unless I'm missing something obvious Wikimania costs the WMF $438-per-participant not including whatever's spent on scholarships and staff costs, and that's an unconscionable waste of funds. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

You've never convinced me that we have that many parents with small children anyway, but why do you think that it would be easier for parents to travel during the school year, than during the summer (when the kids and spouse could tag along for a family vacation, nobody has to get up in time for school, etc.)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:37, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

(adding) Regarding the actual contents of the talks, I can't see anything (and I mean anything) I'd be interested in—it just looks like the usual mix of "crank rants about their pet theory", "WMF-er explains that when reality and WMF press releases disagree it's because reality is wrong", and "boring technical presentation about a topic which anyone who cares about already knows". Even I were interested in one of the topics, I'd almost certainly wait until the text was published. Video presentations are useful in certain circumstances such as practical demonstrations, but if it's just a talking head giving their opinion on something, I don't see why I should spend 30 minutes watching someone read out a piece of text I could read myself in 10 (or in most cases, skim-read in 2). I've never understood the appeal of audiobooks, for the same reason. ‑ Iridescent 13:03, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm less sceptical about the value of the presentations and panels. There are ways to get value out of those, but you have to work at it. The idea of a rolling year-round program of events is a good one. What I actually intend to do (if it seems worthwhile) is spend time over the next few months or so working through the talks I find interesting (this is not quite the same as a rolling year-round program of events, as some talks will date quite quickly, but I did this for another event that took place online last year, having only just finished re-watching the talks), helping get the captions corrected (or ask for help to get them corrected), and to try and start discussions in the appropriate places about relevant bits. That last bit is a potential advantage of having the talks and the captions available (it is easy to quote from the YouTube transcripts, though that also highlights the errors in captioning).

To take as an example the 'Editing the Wiki Way: software and the future of editing' session linked above, the YouTube video is here. The transcript starts: "i think we're live peter go ahead okay um hi everybody and welcome to um editing the wiki way software and the future of editing next slide please". Even if the presentation itself might only be saying things you know already, skip to the Q&A session at the end, and it is definitely possible to get something out of that discussion. Whether that dynamic is too unfocused, or too awkward compared to discussing something on-wiki, and absolutely the dynamic is different, there is something there. The transcript ends: "oh yeah so it's gonna it's gonna cut us off here in like 20 seconds so if you want to continue the conversation um join us in building six floor two table a and remo or uh find us on the wikis because this is just the beginning of this work and um we're gonna need to hear from all different communities all over the world about how to do this well awesome and thank you to all our speakers who were just tremendous in collaborating on this so thanks everyone". (That is where the informal discussion referred to above took place.)

That gives a flavour of the event. Whether it is your cup of tea or not is another matter, and some talks I also will find too boring (or not relevant) to listen to in full, but I am hoping that a collaborative effort might highlight the talks worth bringing to the attention of a wider audience. I might be being too optimistic here, but sort of trying to draw on the best of both worlds (in-person presentations and on-wiki discussions). Sometimes the best approach if something in a talk seems worth following up is to start a discussion with the person presenting the talk. Even if that is months later. Which it will be at the rate I work through such talks! Carcharoth (talk) 14:44, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I get what you're saying, but I still don't really see it. Since by definition every participant there (whichever project they've come from) will be intimately familiar with wiki-based collaboration as a tool, why are we spending half a million dollars a year on something less efficient? Nothing you've described above couldn't have been done just as well by someone writing meta:Editing the Wiki Way: software and the future of editing as an essay and inviting any interested parties to comment on it, with the added bonuses that non-fluent speakers can read at their own pace (or read a translation) rather than being bound to the speaker's speed; that the presenter can proofread it to ensure it says exactly what they intended to say and this avoid both accidental mis-statement and the "i think we're live peter go ahead okay um hi everybody and welcome to um editing the wiki way software and the future of editing next slide please" problem; and that people who don't feel comfortable raising their hand in even a virtual crowd (either because they're on the spectrum, because they're not confident in their spoken English, or just because they're not comfortable at the thought of a roomfull of people looking at them) can still participate in real time. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Your assumption is not true. Wikimania brings in people who don't use the wikis very much. They may be part of the broader movement, rather than part of a WMF-hosted wiki-based online community. They may organize groups rather than editing individually. There are several growing communities whose primary form of communication is Telegram or Whatsapp. Also, there is some advantage to real-time communication. If there weren't, then the English Wikipedia would have considered IRC pointless back in the day, and nobody would be using Discord now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:22, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Personally, I have no use for either IRC or Discord. But that's just me. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:19, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Not just you. I use email for things like Oversight requests and sources at WP:RX, and Slack for my work on TV Tropes, but on Wikipedia I am a talkpage person. Also, I distinctly remember horror stories about IRC misconduct and drama. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:34, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

↑ What they said.

I don't think the English Wikipedia would have considered IRC pointless back in the day, and nobody would be using Discord now is making the point you think it's making—I view participation in such things as prima facie evidence of attitudes incompatible with the values of English Wikipedia. When it comes to such things as RFA, Arbcom elections etc I won't automatically oppose on the basis of participation on IRC, Discord, Wikipediocracy etc, but it will shift me from my default position of "support unless I see a convincing reason to oppose" to "oppose unless I see a convincing reason to support". Transparent decision-making open to all interested parties is one of our most fundamental values and if someone's unwilling to abide by that, why should I expect them to abide by any of our other principles? (Even those on-wiki processes that are necessarily closed, like arbcom discussions and checkuser activity, are still logged, and there's an expectation that even if they can't be made public, people without access to the logs have a right to ask a neutral party who does have access to check the record and confirm that the decisions were made legitimately.)

I'm speculating here, but if your feeling that decisions being made off-wiki is somehow a positive reflects the general attitudes at the WMF, that may go some way to explaining some of the more disastrous disconnects between the WMF and the big wikis over recent years. A consistent theme across all the recent flare-ups, be it Superprotect, Fram, the VE rollout, de-pornifying Commons, Arnnon Geshuri, MediaViewer, the zh-wiki purge, Laura Hale, the BoT term extensions, the India Education Program, or the oncoming storm of UCOC, is the perception that decisions are being taken in camera by a clique with privileged access, and thus that even if the decisions being made are the right decisions (which in at least some of those cases is at best questionable), the decisions are irrevocably tainted by the processes through which they were reached. ‑ Iridescent 10:27, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

I don't really understand the point of Wikimania. It's asking me to take a lot of my time out to talk about subjects that aren't of upmost interest to me. The London one some years back was practically on my doorstep, and I think I might have even walked past one of the venues at one point, but I was doing things that are more important and memorable in my life. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:57, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

I agree. I can see the point of the informal "we'll be in such and such a place on Saturday afternoon, feel free to drop in and say hello" meetups, or their virtual "we'll all be online at such and such a time" equivalents—it can be nice to put faces to names, and in my (anecdotal) experience it reduces online conflict when you know the people involved as rounded characters rather than purely as their sometimes spiky online personae. But that's very different to paid-for mass gatherings. To take the London one as an example, the idea that anyone would pay £50 to sit in the charmless concrete bunker of the Barbican for three days listening to things with titles like Growing the Awesome in your Programs seems to me less like a hobby, and more like a religious cult. It's particularly true when you consider that of the non-subsidized attendees most weren't just paying the £50 entry fee but were also paying hundreds or even thousands in flights, lodging and meals (pre-referendum London wasn't exactly at the top of the list of affordable holiday destinations at the best of times, and August certainly isn't the best of times) and sacrificing at minimum five days of their life to do so. (And I know I'm hammering the same nail repeatedly, but the 40% or so who get their expenses paid aren't tapping a magic money tree. The cash for those 144 scholarships and 169 WMF employees, as well as the apparent $400,000 annual gap between revenue and expenditure, has to come from somewhere and presumably that somewhere is someone else's budget.) ‑ Iridescent 09:29, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

The Sirens and Ulysses scheduled for TFA

This is to let you know that the above article has been scheduled as today's featured article for 29 August, 2021. Please check that the article needs no amendments. A coordinator will draft a blurb - based on your draft if the TFA came via TFA requests, or from an existing blurb on the FAC talk page if one has been posted. Feel free to comment on this. We suggest that you watchlist Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors from the day before this appears on Main Page. Thanks and congratulations on your work. Gog the Mild (talk) 15:57, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Gog the Mild, if it's not too much hassle would you object to pulling this? I have my eye on The Triumph of Cleopatra for 22 September to mark the opening of the Summer Exhibition (it will be 200 years since it debuted at the Summer Exhibition 1821), and it wouldn't be a good look to have two such similar TFAs within a month of each other. ‑ Iridescent 18:13, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

No, of course it could be pulled, and that sounds like a good reason. That said, I am not convinced that one can get too much of a good thing. I don't forsee a problem with both of these truly excellent articles running in consequecutive months, although I would want to make The Sirens and Ulysses earlier in August, probably the 2nd. Would that suit? Gog the Mild (talk) 18:33, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

That's fine if you don't think it would be an issue, although you may want to double check with the other TFA delegates (if you haven't already) to see if anyone else has any objections. If you do run Sirens let me know—because of its size trying to show the whole thing will be virtually meaningless at TFA image size, so I'll do what we did with Youth & Pleasure and play around with cropping and oversizing to create something comprehensible at 150px width. ‑ Iridescent 18:45, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Confirmed. Cleopatra is inked in for 22 September. Sirens for 2 August. I'll set to putting a draft blurb together for the latter for you to look over - unless you would rather do this from scratch. Gog the Mild (talk) 20:38, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

I got over excited and started. The result is here - Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/The Sirens and Ulysses/archive1. See what you think. The blurb needs trimming by a further 65-165 characters. Cheers. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:22, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

How about this as a blurb? I've copied what we did for Ceilings of the Natural History Museum and Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret, in slashing the blurb to just under 800 characters, cropping down the image as much as possible, and over-sizing what remains of the image.

(IMO this "more image, less text, and focus on the detail in the image" approach should be standard practice for visual arts TFAs. For most topics readers decide whether to click-through on the basis that something sounds interesting and hence we want as much blurb as possible, but with arts and architecture readers are going on whether it looks interesting so we want to make the image as prominent as possible and the actual blurb is secondary.) ‑ Iridescent 06:41, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

Iridescent, very good point. I shall try to bear it in mind in future. Gog the Mild (talk) 10:09, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

I'll do a similar blurb for Triumph of Cleopatra as well—are you going to slot it in, or do you want me to nominate it at TFAR so people have the opportunity to object? (If someone else wants 22 September, 19 September will do just as well; the Summer Exhibition officially opens on the 22nd but opens for previews on the 19th.) ‑ Iridescent 13:54, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

I've penciled it in on the list I'm developing for September, which means it will no doubt run on that day short of someone coming along with something more compelling for the 22nd. I've made a note about the 19th as backup.--Wehwalt (talk) 15:58, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

@Wehwalt, I've done a draft blurb for Cleopatra. As with Sirens, I've pushed the image size up and cut the text considerably. If anything, we probably ought to make the image even larger to give readers a fighting chance of making out what it's actually a picture of; it's a very cluttered painting and (unlike with Sirens) there aren't obvious extraneous elements that can be cropped out to save space. ‑ Iridescent 17:55, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

The Triumph of Cleopatra

This is to let you know that the above article has been scheduled as today's featured article for September 22, 2021. Please check the article needs no amendments. If you're interested in editing the main page text, you're welcome to do so at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/September 22, 2021. Congratulations on your work!—Wehwalt (talk) 15:14, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Corrected a typo, but other than that I've (unsurprisingly) not got any problems with the blurb. If I get time I'll try fiddling around to see if I can crop the image without losing anything important—even at the expanded image size with a reduced blurb to compensate (right) it's very hard to make out what it's actually a painting of, and on a mobile display it will just look like a pile of maggots. ‑ Iridescent 13:08, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

@Wehwalt, I've restructured the blurb slightly to crop as much extraneous detail as I could without losing any significant element, and shortening the text very slightly to compensate for the fact that the image now has a squarer aspect ratio so will take up slightly more space. (I've also ditched the "click to expand" link we used with Sirens; in that case it was important we made it clear we weren't displaying the whole artwork as I'd cropped out the key figure of Ulysses, but in this case all I've cropped out is some monumental columns and a bunch of generic Roman soldiers.) Because this is non-standard formatting you might want to double-check it doesn't cause any display issues, although I can't imagine it will since it's essentially the same approach we took with The Sirens and Ulysses and Youth on the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm. ‑ Iridescent 16:07, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

I don't know much about display issues, but it looks fine to me.--Wehwalt (talk) 22:04, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

I made a tiny edit just now, feel free to revert or improve it. - Dank (push to talk) 15:31, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. I very slightly prefer "famous for his combination of nudity and morality" to "famous for combining nudity and morality"—in this period half the artists in France were combining Deep Moral Sermonizing with gratuitous nudity, but Etty put a unique spin on it—but this is well into minor technical detail and anyone who actually cares will read the bio anyway. As with (almost) all visual arts TFAs and DYKs, whether people read it is almost totally dependent on whether they think the accompanying image looks interesting; we could probably replace the blurb with a block of lorem ipsum text and not see a significant dip in click-throughs. ‑ Iridescent 2 19:05, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Crap, I've been under the weather and just saw this, sorry. I'm not sure how to work in the phrase "famous for his combination of nudity and morality". I initially didn't make any edit because I've been trying to restrain myself at TFA for various reasons, but today I thought: there are some words that shouldn't be repeated too often in close succession, especially in TFA blurbs, and "nude" is one of them. If you like, we could drop the "containing nude figures" ... that would make it easier to work in the phrase you want. You might be asleep now, but I'll keep an eye on this page. - Dank (push to talk) 00:22, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Seriously, this is not something to lose sleep over—I doubt anyone other than me would even notice let alone care. It's fine as it is. ‑ Iridescent 08:47, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Historical maggots are people too, you know! "Safe, bro"! Martinevans123 (talk) 15:37, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you today for the article, introduced: "William Etty was one of the most influential artists in English history, was responsible for reunifying the British and European artistic traditions which had diverged during the decades-long wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and during his lifetime was considered one of the greatest artists of all time. Nowadays he tends only to be remembered as "the gratuitous nudity guy", and The Triumph of Cleopatra is why. Although tame by later standards, it both shocked and fascinated critics when it was first exhibited, and prompted Etty to spend the next 25 years repeating the "historical pretexts for people to mislay their clothes" formula. It's certainly not the most attractive or technically accomplished of artworks, but even 200 years later is surprisingly striking. (For the last century it's been on display at the Lady Lever Art Gallery; astonishingly, given what a cultural and economic powerhouse the place has been"! - I thought the infobox wars were over. I was wrong. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:31, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm not really happy with Triumph as an article, as it's fairly hard to explain it's significance (it's little-known today and not particularly interesting, but its success set in motion the chain of events that eventually led to what we consider typical Victorian art), but I think I did the best I could with what little has been written about it. ‑ Iridescent 08:47, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Long tangent about infoboxes

On the subject of infoboxes, I'm sure you don't need me to say it but I'll say it anyway: just because Arbcom lifted your formal restriction on getting into pointless fights over infoboxes, doesn't mean you should get into pointless fights over infoboxes. Nikkimaria is a very experienced and well-regarded editor, not somebody who's just wandered onto the wiki and doesn't understand how things work; if she's saying there's a good reason to follow a particular formatting style on a particular article, her opinion will almost certainly be worth listening to even if you don't personally agree with it. There are articles where infoboxes can be actively misleading or disruptive to readers—The Triumph of Cleopatra, where an infobox would mean reducing the lead image and thus making it too small for the key elements to be visible, is an obvious example today—and while I know nothing about Symphony No. 8 (Mahler) I'm perfectly willing to believe that there are likewise legitimate no-infobox arguments in this case. ‑ Iridescent 08:47, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. I didn't want to get too pointy in my linking to the discussion. All exchange with Nikkimaria was normal and fine. The war part began afterwards, with a revert to the 2010 FA status (after Nikkimaria and I had reached a state we can live with) and some comments that hurt me more than I want to admit. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:27, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

If you mean the discussion between you and Tim, I'm not sure either of you is covering yourselves in glory there—you're both trying to claim to speak for what someone else would have wanted when that someone else isn't there to give their own view. My point is that it doesn't matter—there are some stat-heavy topics like sports where an infobox is unambiguously useful, but in this case the only significant pieces of information a reader is likely to be looking for is "when was it composed?" and "when did it premiere?", and it makes literally no difference to the reader whether that information is in an infobox or in the first paragraph of the lead.

Even if there was a genuinely compelling argument in favor of an infobox, Wikipedia has 48,300,343 editors. If the need for an infobox (or the need not to have one) is that significant, one of the other 48,300,342 is going to make the case. This is the message that successive Arbcoms tried to send to you (and Andy, and Cassianto, and Tim, and Smerus, and SchroCat, and Nikkimaria…) through the timesinks of WP:ARBINFOBOX and WP:ARBINFOBOX2, and the fact that the arguments are still taking place between the same people makes me think it hasn't sunk in—if it's important, someone else will do it, and if nobody else does it that means it's not important. There are causes worth editwarring over, but a decade-long fight over two alternative methods for summarizing key facts at the start of an article is as pointless as editwarring over whether to use APA- or MLA-format citations. ‑ Iridescent 10:56, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

I don't want to waste your time, but: I didn't speculate what someone "would have wanted". I said that the someone accepted the infobox which someone else (indeed, someone else, not me, not Andy!) had created in that article 2017, and it was in place when he sadly died, so I felt offended when the FA status of 2010 (before the infobox template was even created) was restored. Should I just have swallowed that? - The last such revert (of a musical composition, - I'm not talking certain biographies which I know to avoid) was in 2018 (Psalm 149), and I had hoped it would remain the last. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:35, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Looking forward: bringing Sylvano Bussotti to the Main page was more rewarding. Part of what I focus on, which isn't little boxes. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:19, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

Recently promoted (by GeneralPoxter): Piano Sonata No. 31 (Beethoven) - state of the art in Classical music. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:43, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure if Should I just have swallowed that? is a figure of speech or an actual question, but if it't the latter then in my opinion yes, that's exactly what you (and Tim riley, and ARoseWolf, and whoever else shows up to this particular argument, and everyone else who's shown up to the countless identical arguments for the past decade) should have done. The reason successive iterations of Arbcom have always found the squabbling about infoboxes so irritating is that in 99% of cases the arguments are utterly trivial, and that 99% most definitely includes this particular instance. If someone is changing the meaning of something, or there's a concern that a particular change is potentially inconveniencing or confusing readers, that's a legitimate concern and can be something worth fighting over, but it makes no difference at all to readers whether this particular article has an infobox or not given that literally every piece of information it contains is also in the lead paragraph so there's no compelling argument for a box, and the existence of a box isn't causing formatting issues or giving undue weight to particular aspects so there's no compelling argument against a box.

It's probably worth pointing out yet again that in the Minerva skin which for better or worse (the correct answer is "for worse") is what the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia's readers now see, the reader needs to read, or at least scroll past, the lead paragraph before they're even aware that the infobox exists, since the software automatically pushes the box down to below the text of the lead. Thus to the majority of readers a "no additional information" infobox like this is literally only repeating what readers have just read, which makes putting any time into overthinking it particularly silly.

To make it clear, the above is my opinion, not official policy—as I assume you're well aware, official policy remains The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article by site policies or guidelines. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article. and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future given that no sane person wants to be the one to start any discussion about amending it nor is it likely that any proposed change would get consensus.

With that said, Any uninvolved administrator may apply infobox probation as a discretionary sanction. That user will be indefinitely restricted from: adding, deleting or collapsing infoboxes; restoring an infobox that has been deleted; making more than one comment in a discussion, where that discussion is primarily about the inclusion or exclusion of an infobox on a given article is official policy. I imagine I speak for most of the admins on Wikipedia—or at least, those who remember this nonsense the last time around—in saying that if I see any signs of "but this article needs to have/not have an infobox!" flaring up again without coherent and policy-based arguments in support of the preferred positions, I'm more than happy either to start handing out discretionary sanctions like nightclub flyers, or to drag everyone involved off to argue their case at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement. ‑ Iridescent 17:00, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough, as I have stated, walking away was best. I won't make excuses for speaking up when I did. The ones that I spoke up for know the what and why. Quickly realizing that the discussion was turning from content to intent of character it was time to shut it down and bring it back to content. Ched did so successfully. I am grateful. I trust Gerda and her introspections. She knows or will discover what she should and should not have done in this case and will be able to adequately apply it to herself. Same for me and anyone else involved. --ARoseWolf 17:42, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

ARoseWolf, my reference to the countless identical arguments for the past decade isn't hyperbole. You joined Wikipedia in 2020, so you may not be aware of just how many times we've danced around this particular maypole. Note that that's not even a list of the previous infobox RFCs and RFARs, that's a list of the previous discussions about infoboxes on my talk page despite the fact that I've never had any involvement with the infobox RFCs. (Other than acting as the neutral closer to a fairly technical RFC about whether infoboxes on non-religious biographies should include a religion= parameter, and I acted as closer in that case precisely because I hadn't previously been involved in the Infobox Wars.)

If you're going to dive into this particular rabbit-hole, it's worth reading all the case subpages of WP:ARBINFOBOX and WP:ARBINFOBOX2—in particular Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Infoboxes/Evidence—in full (even though it will make you lose the will to live, as it's tedious even by Arb case standards), to get a crash course in the background here. Gerda's obsession with infoboxes has been going on for a long, long time: at the time of writing CirrusSearch gives 6,644 different occasions some of which are false positives but most of which aren't, and as you can see from the existence of this thread the number continues to rise. If you trust Gerda and her introspections and feel she knows or will discover what she should and should not have done in this case and will be able to adequately apply it to herself, that's entirely a matter for you, but I trust you'll forgive the rest of us, who had to sit and watch the infobox catfights for quite literally years, for not sharing the feeling (and trust you'll understand why I find it somewhat ironic that this feeling is held by someone who spends as much time as you do on various noticeboards talking about the need for civility). The constant arguing may have slowed, but it slowed because Arbcom ordered her at metaphorical gunpoint to stop treating Wikipedia as a series of battles to be won, not because she had some kind of road-to-Damascus revelation that Wikipedia isn't an MMORPG where the winner is whoever can bludgeon all those who disagree with them into resigning. ‑ Iridescent 06:33, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Copyright violation?

I had used a clip from a website with footage from superman III movie, but it was removed as it was claimed to be a copyright violation. Is this a copyright violation or not? I am asking you this since you know about things like this. Davidgoodheart (talk) 15:40, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

I presume we are talking about this revert. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:28, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, obviously that's a copyright violation. Some films (mainly pre-1923, very occasionally later movies that were for one reason or anothher exhibited without a copyright notice or works that were specifically made by bodies which release works they create into the public domain) are out of copyright, but there's no possibility Superman—one of the most valuable intellectual properties there is—is ever going to have the copyright released earlier than DC can hold on to it. The very fact you found the clip on BitChute (which has a decent claim to be the most dubious website on the planet) rather than the Warner Bros or DC websites, or even a vaguely reputable video-sharing site like YouTube, should tell you all you need to know from the outset; there might conceivably be a legitimate reason to link from Wikipedia to BitChute in a few very specific circumstances, but I'm having trouble thinking of any.

You've now been on Wikipedia for eight years and have racked up almost 100,000 edits. I'm sorry to be blunt, but the very fact you're still commiting basic breaches of basic and obvious principles like "don't breach copyrights", "don't accuse living people of crimes" and "don't link to neo-nazi websites" is starting to get worrying. ‑ Iridescent 17:09, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

On a completely unrelated note, a bunch of bots have gone hammer and tongs recently on File:Old Street station 1920.jpg for some reason, despite it being kept at FfD. Did I miss something? Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 19:51, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

When bots go at it. EEng 12:37, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

They don't know or care that it's been at FFD; they just see it's in Category:All non-free media (from {{Not-PD-US-URAA}} via {{PD-UK-unknown}}, triggered by this edit). JJMC89 bot and DatBot are upset that it's too large, FastilyBot that it's also in the Category:Public domain files tree. —Cryptic 20:21, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

I wonder if those bots respect {{nobots}}. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:06, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Looking at Category:Wikipedia bots which are exclusion compliant, JJMC89 bot is listed and the other two aren't. IIRC the copyright bots are sometimes intentionally set up not to respect {{nobots}}, to avoid giving bad actors a back door to slip inappropriate content into the projects. (With somewhat less AGF, some bot operators take it as a personal insult that anyone would put a {{nobots}} template on a page, and 'accidentally' forget to configure their bots to respect them.) ‑ Iridescent 06:37, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

For the experts in due weight and current news-like topics...

...since this talk page draws a respectable amount of Wikipedia's most experienced users, I'll ask here if anyone has advice on the NPOV issue mentioned here and here. Long story short, the volcano discussed in the article began erupting yesterday and I am not sure that the article correctly conveys the risk (or rather, the lack of such) of a giant landslide/tsunami scenario. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:22, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Very quick driveby—my personal opinion is that this is one of those difficult topics where 'pop culture significance' and 'significance to experts' don't intersect. From a scientific point of view "if everything aligned just so, this could potentially fire a tsunami directly into the mouth of the Hudson' is technically possible but vanishingly unlikely and one of the less interesting things about it, and even those whose job it is to assess risk are much more concerned about potential effects on the Canaries and the west coast of Africa. But, chances are that (until this week's eruption anyway) 90%+ of visitors to the articles were people who'd seen one of the regular "the volcano which will one day destroy NYC" features (which aren't confined to the blogosphere and the YouTube cranks) and checking it out for themselves, and as such it would be a significant disservice to the reader not to discuss that aspect of things in detail. (This focus on "but how does it affect English-speaking countries" isn't unusual given that (a) this is English Wikipedia, and (b) people have a natural tendency to write about what interests them, and "the eastern seaboard of the US consumed by the waves" has more grip than technical discussion of magma flow rates. If you want another example from vulcanology, Eyjafjallajökull is 26,648 bytes; Air travel disruption after the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption comes in at 110,014 bytes.)

Ultimately this looks to me to be a hyper-specialized variation on the "…in popular culture" debate. If that's the case, then the answer is always the same; the best thing to do is to cordon off the fringery and fan service into either a clearly delineated section of the main article or a separate page, so the "I want the technical detail" and "I want the disaster-movie potential" audiences are both served without stepping on each others' toes. In that context I'd support the continued existence of Cumbre Vieja tsunami hazard even though it's duplicating chunks of the parent article. ‑ Iridescent 2 04:32, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. It seems like the article escaped from any trouble [probably a matter of the protection, though] and attention has shifted to the main Cumbre Vieja and La Palma articles. Of note, someone translated the article to Spanish. Surprisingly not to South Asian languages, judging by e.g Limalok, Wōdejebato and Lake Ptolemy my articles often get translated into these languages. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:22, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

In my experience it's usually passing FAC that triggers the translation of obscure articles into multiple languages. Even on English Wikipedia, "Articles that are FAs on other Wikipedias but are redlinks on this project" is a shortcut for finding topics which are almost certainly going to meet notability requirements and have sufficient sources (fr:Ligne 3a du tramway d'Île-de-France, if you want a quick example of an article that's FA on a different wiki with recognized and respected quality standards, but doesn't exist here as a stand-alone article). For the smaller wikis where articles are less likely to already exist, going to en-wiki, de-wiki etc and running the existing FAs through Google Translate must be incredibly tempting for anyone who wants to create a lengthy and well-sourced article whilst putting in minimal work. ‑ Iridescent 04:18, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Wow should have realised that - a bunch of my FAs were translated into French years ago, which I thought was pretty cool Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:23, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

I should make it clear that I don't have any issues with other wikis doing this, other than the fact that I have a sneaking suspicion that for something like this the translators are just running the pages through WP:CXT without checking the sources for themselves, so it means errors in the parent articles get mirrored into multiple languages, which in turn has the potential for "but it must be true, all the different language Wikipedias agree!". I don't deliberately introduce mistakes and I'm sure the same goes for 99% of writers, but I'm not arrogant enough to think I've never misinterpreted a source or unintentionally quoted an outdated source which no longer reflects current thinking. ‑ Iridescent 06:46, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Checking the existing/already cited sources wouldn't normally result in catching such problems, either. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:58, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

It would make it less likely, though, since if the translator is double-checking my source they'll at least have the possibility of spotting when I've misread something. They act of them digging out the books I've used would (hopefully) lead to them spotting sources I didn't use and wondering why, as well. ‑ Iridescent 06:25, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

I'd classify that as a "remote possibility". I wouldn't count on it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:46, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Finding new sources and questioning why they haven't been used, yes, although it's not beyond the bounds of possibility; as far as I can tell before I glazed over the Talk:Welsh Not discussion that led to the recent outbreak of war between en-wiki and cy-wiki ultimately derived from "while comparing the Welsh and English versions of this article I noticed that they were using different sources and thus reaching different conclusions" and spiralled out of control from there. Variations on "when I checked the source for myself I realized it doesn't support the fact it's being used to cite" happen all the time; on en-wiki it's usually either at GAN/FAC or when an editor decides to expand a stub, but if we started encouraging anyone doing translations to check the sources rather than just translating the article text and copy-pasting the citations, there's no reason translation couldn't provide a regular review point for verification checks. ‑ Iridescent 07:24, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Speaking of translation, I have just found out that I can't make a complete article for Ojos del Salado at User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/Ojos del Salado without at least some Hungarian and Polish sources which as far as I can tell were never translated to English. Google Translate produces a syntactical mess for the Hungarian sources that I'd be quite wary of citing, and the sources are quite long too. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:55, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

We have vast numbers of Polish editors; if you need something translated, a request at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Poland will probably find someone happy to assist, or User:Piotrus could probably suggest someone. I'm not so sure about Hungarian—the only Hungarian-speaking regular editor I can think of is not likely to be editing any time soon—but there's bound to be someone around who speaks it. ‑ Iridescent 19:32, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

I can try to help if Google Translate and WTPOLAND don't help. That said, in my experience, google translate from pl to en is very good, although perhaps the pdf formatting creates problems? Jo-Jo didn't say if they tried pl to en on GT. As for Hungary, first ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hungary? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:35, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

(adding) I forget—if I ever knew—which end of Switzerland you're from, but if you're using Google Translate I'd be willing to bet that it will work better on Polish→German than it does on Polish→English; plus I'll guess that for reasons of geography there should be no shortage of completely fluent Polish–German and Hungarian—German translators if you ask nicely on de-wiki. ‑ Iridescent 19:39, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

In my experience, the folks at huwiki are very kind, and would probably be willing to help you. Leave a note for me at w:hu:User talk:WhatamIdoing if you'd like me to ask a few folks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:31, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the offers, Piotrus and WhatamIdoing. Upon rereading that Polish source, it seems like the main claims that it could be used for are p.108 which says that the Polish expedition received widespread media attention. Since it's so long I think I'll check it through Google Translate and just ask folks to check that a given page does actually say what GT claims it does - GT may be "close enough for government work" but not necessarily so for WP:RS. As an addendum, there are two other books (?) in the Polish language here and here but given their sheer length I don't think it's reasonable to ask Wikipedians to translate them for free. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:26, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

The title of the first one is En las montañas de Atacama : memorias de una expedición polaca a los Andes. Surely that's going to be a Spanish-language work that just happens to be held in a Polish library? ‑ Iridescent 16:38, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Hrm. I posted that link w/o noticing that it was a Spanish translation of the Polish work. On the Hungarian thing, WhatamIdoing has pointed to Misibacsi who in turn has recommended a different translation service for the Hungarian sources & verified one of its translations, so I am guessing I'll roll with that. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:49, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

December 3rd Productions

I changed them back to December 3rd Productions so why changed it to December 3 Productions where you can leave where it was? 85.255.232.96 (talk) 19:45, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, my fault entirely; I do apologise. You might want to use an invisible {{sic}} or {{notatypo}} template (or a hidden text comment) to avoid other people making the same mistake; because the table is so full of dates, it's a mistake other people are likely to keep making. ‑ Iridescent 05:27, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

TFA

October songs

I like today's TFA one a composer whose name I can't remember, by "someone else". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:59, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

I have to say in all honesty that I've never heard of him. (Not that surprising; my music knowledge has gaping holes in it and tends to divide into "things I like" and "everything else".) ‑ Iridescent 14:32, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

My knowledge of music starts and stops with the titles of the music I hear - and sometimes I don't know even the names. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 16:36, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

I also never heard of him, and was quite surprised in peer review and FAC. Next in line: Frederick the Great, of whom you will have heard but perhaps not as a composer. Also by "someone else". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:47, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Today: memories in friendship. - I read your FA comments with interest, and hope for the 1.000 viewers on the DYK which could become a FA some day. It was written by Jerome Kohl who died, so an unusual case. Comments and improvements welcome. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:02, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

How do you know this?

I'm so intrigued how this is worked out each year. Please just humour me 2A02:C7F:F694:CC00:70E2:F85B:D7EB:2D59 (talk) 22:01, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

At least give me a clue what this question is about… I have no way to guess what "this" you're talking about. ‑ Iridescent 06:25, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Saw a painting and was reminded of you...

On the weekend I was at a family meal in the midlands (on sufferance, I think a 40 person meal involving kids and vulnerable adults in the UK right now is an absolutely terrible idea but I was over-ruled by the wife) in some sort of high ceilinged ex-religious building conversion, being looked down upon by Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth from about 5 feet away. At some point after Sargent's original, someone in the Terry family commissioned a reproduction and then it was eventually gifted to the City of Coventry. From there its ended up in a restaurant. I looked up the original as I wanted to see how accurate a repro it was, and the answer was 'yes, it still looks like a insane drag artist'. The facial expression looks even more crazed in the repro it must be said. Why did it remind me of you? The opener for the wiki-article has 'iridescent' in it. Sadly the colour has faded on the repro somewhat so I wouldnt have described it as iridescent. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:33, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I have a soft spot for Sargent. Yes, he was an anything-for-money low-rent Millais wannabe who would probably be completely forgotten had he not been an American painter at a time when American painters were thin on the ground, whose main talent seems to have been making ugly rich people look marginally less ugly than the reality while still keeping them recognizable enough that they could delude themselves into thinking the portrait represented the reality. That said, as with Millais every so often he did something where the technical skill cuts through the sentimentality. (Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose in particular is technically astonishing, particularly when you think that there were no colour photographs back then so the interaction of the light-sources all had to be painted from life. Given that the Tate usually hang it in the same room as Hope, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, Beata Beatrix and all the other in-your-face Victorian tweeness, it stands up surprisingly well.)

When it came to 19th-century Shakespeare, the 'insane drag artist' look definitely wasn't confined to either Sargent or Terry.

The insane drag artist thing wouldn't have been Sargent's fault. Victorian productions of Shakespeare were invariably super-hammy (if you ever get the chance to see Acting Shakespeare, particularly the part in which Ian McKellen re-enacts some of the more absurd 19th-century stage directions, I highly recommend it). Remember, no microphones or magnification back then to pick up nuances of tone; if you wanted to convey "descent into madness" to the people in the back row, you needed to look and act unmistakeably crazy. ‑ Iridescent 17:31, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

"whose main talent seems to have been making ugly rich people look marginally less ugly than the reality while still keeping them recognizable enough that they could delude themselves into thinking the portrait represented the reality." To be fair, that is an impressive talent. I think we have all seen portrait artists (and photographers) who fail singularly to manage the prime directive of "Dont make the person paying you look bad". Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:22, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

What Queen Victoria officially looked like aged 24

What Queen Victoria actually looked like aged 26

This monstrosity is my go-to example of failing to remember not to make the person paying you look bad. (I believe that at the time this was painted she had 13 small children, which accounts for the exhausted expression but not the "half ostrich half medieval doctor" appearance.)

If I ever have too much time on my hands, I always thought it would be interesting to stage an exhibition of portraiture from the late 1830s, when portrait photography hadn't yet been invented, alongside the reality of the subject's portrait photographs from a couple of years later when the fad for photography swept through Europe. The discrepancy between what artists thought they could get away with when they had no reason to think anyone would question the representation, and the reality of what the subjects actually looked like, is often hilarious. ‑ Iridescent 16:43, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Typos?

Why do you think these are typos? They are just differences of opinion. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 20:54, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't think they're typos, but this is an artefact of how AWB handles edit summaries for search-and-replace. If the replacement is on the WP:AWB/T master list the edit summary is always typos fixed, even though AWB/T doesn't just handle typing mistakes but also covers MOS violations. (As was the case here—this wasn't "a difference of opinion", this was me tidying up straightforward MOS non-compliance. "Use an en dash, or a word such as from or between, but not both: from 1881 to 1886 (not from 1881–1886);  between June 1 and July 3 (not between June 1 – July 3)" if you want chapter-and-verse from MOS:DATERANGE. You can say "he lived here 1803–1840" or "he lived here from 1803 to 1840", but not "he lived here from 1803–1840".) Unfortunately fixing this one is one of the cases where bots can't be trusted and each change needs to be manually reviewed as software can't distinguish things like serial numbers and sports seasons that look like date ranges but aren't, and the only practical tool for manually reviewing large stacks of similar-but-all-slightly-different changes is AWB despite its faults.

I agree 100% that it would be much more useful for all concerned for the summary to be replacements made: not typos fixed; quite aside from the ill-feeling it causes ("you accused me of making a mistake when all I did was use curly quotes!"), it confuses people who aren't familiar with the word "typo", see it, and reasonably assume it means "non-compliance with our typographical rules" and go on to misuse the term. Searching the WT:AWB archives for the word "summary" shows that people have been complaining that this is misleading and confusing for years. (It also insists on appending typos fixed edit summary even when it's being run on other wikis, which is why you see summaries like "erreurs corrigées typos fixed" on other projects.)

Unfortunately AWB is a volunteer-maintained tool rather than a WMF tool, so the only way to get any change made to the software is to convince one of its four developers to do it, and given my comments at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Magioladitis, I assume I'm not on the AWB developer Christmas card list. Any such request would be much more likely to be actioned if it came from you rather than me. ‑ Iridescent 07:51, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

As you're probably aware, I'm not a big fan of the MOS, and give it a wide berth, as I find it tends to be used as a stick to beat other editors with. In this case, it is indeed nice to have a consistent style for date ranges to present a uniform front to the reader and to stop editors arguing about it (if nothing else), but I don't think the typical reader is going to be confused over the word "to" versus a dash, while if they read "teh" it will jar with them and they'll either fix the typo or otherwise wonder why Wikipedia has silly typos like that. That's why I said it was a difference of opinion.

As for getting AWB fixed, I've never used it myself and I think I have just about as much credibility with getting things changed around there as you, since I wrote User:Ritchie333/Hit and run editors. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:46, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Normally I think the MOS is a complete waste of time and space, but on things like this where it genuinely is about presenting a consistent and non-confusing experience to readers rather than about imposing the personal prejudices of the MOS's owners, I think it's worthwhile. I don't go specifically hunting them out, but if they pop up as suggested fixes I'll accept them. (As I say, it needs to be approved by hand; a bot can't spot false positives like "Carlos Kickaball signed for Fulchester United in 2009 on a 5-year contract but owing to injuries only played from 2010–11 to 2012–13".). Regarding getting AWB fixed, with any luck somebody's watching this page who might be inclined to go nudge the developers. (Given how essential a tool AWB is across so many different parts of the MediaWiki ecosystem—it's not just those "using AWB" edits that clutter your watchlist, but a lot of the maintenance bots are built around it—it would actually make sense for the WMF to bring it in-house rather than continuing to depend on the kindness of strangers. I'm not holding my breath on that.) ‑ Iridescent 15:54, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

I'll have you know that Carlos was a very fine player and a deeply misunderstood individual. "And I'm much better than you, 'cos you haven't even got a whistle!" Martinevans123 (talk) 16:02, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Belated additional comment @Ritchie333 having read User:Ritchie333/Hit and run editors, I think you're being a little harsh there (at least when it comes to edits that affect the appearance of articles; I agree entirely with you when it comes to mass-spamming talkpages, or genuinely pointless edits like re-ordering the categories). Many–probably most—of the people doing these mass editing runs are either people like me who do it as something to do that doesn't demand full attention (when you see me doing it, it generally means there's a sporting event taking place which I'm interested in enough to keep watching/listening to the extent I wouldn't be able to focus on "real" editing, but not so interested in that I'm staring transfixed at the TV), or people who've just renamed a category and are (correctly) cleaning up after themselves by making sure all the pages in the old category are transferred to the new one.

While I use a separate account for these minor edits I'm aware that not everybody does, but it's hardly their fault that after 20 years of having the problem pointed out to them the WMF still hasn't separated out "minor edits" in edit counts. Looking at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits#1–1000, with two obvious exceptions there's nobody jumping out at me as being a mindless automaton only interested in increasing their edit count; most of the people near the top of the list are people I recognize as being 'genuine' editors. (If anything, I'm seeing a lot of names there whom I mainly recognize for getting into fights, and would probably benefit from being less active in the article space.)

It's also not true that Nobody (at least outside of the domain of FAC reviewers) really cares about whether the date on a {{cite news}} citation should appear after the publisher name etc. Things like that may seem trivial, but Wikipedia isn't written purely with visitors to www.wikipedia.org in mind but for reusers as well, and having everything consistent makes it much easier for people to reuse (and importantly, to attribute correctly) our articles on their own websites. ‑ Iridescent 19:54, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser#Request regarding the default edit summary. The worst that happens is they'll say no; since it's presumably just a matter of changing a single word in the code from "typos" to "changes" or "replaced", with luck there won't be any objections. ‑ Iridescent 14:53, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

• I noticed a couple of these on my watchlist recently ([1], [2]) and so looked into the details. Notice how, in the case of endless runway, the new version reads "In 2016–2017. the idea regained interest..." In other words, a hyphen was replaced by an n-dash but the more glaring error of the full stop instead of a comma was missed. This indicates that Iridescent2 was not really paying attention – presumably they were more interested in the TV show.

So, I'm with Ritchie333 in finding this vexatious. I've been using the shortcut WP:DRIVEBY lately and shall now add his WP:HITANDRUN to my repertoire. See also skiddie.

Andrew🐉(talk) 10:19, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Just to be clear, your complaint isn't that I've done anything wrong, but that during my (correctly) fixing mistakes on a page you created I didn't fix all the mistakes, and you're accusing me of being "vexatious"? You have more brass neck than C-3PO. ‑ Iridescent 05:18, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
For the record Only in death, ↑this is the tawdry reality of what WMUK tag-teaming actually looks like. Despite the more lurid conspiracy theories on some of the off-wiki sites, they're not a ruthlessly efficient cult working in lockstep to systematically distort the wiki; they're a small handful of people who occasionally meet in a Wetherspoons and cover each other's backs when they get in trouble. ‑ Iridescent 05:18, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Or sometimes continue such debates into the pub. I'm another of the London Meetup regulars, or was before COVID, but the vast majority of my edits are fixing a minor typo of the sort that a native English speaker would barely notice, though by the time they've gone through machine translation one can only wonder how "His was the lager amy, wit more solders but few calvary and no canons" would be rendered. Occasionally something looks interesting and I read the rest of the article, but othertimes I will correct one word and not look at the rest of the mess. WMUK by the way is a different British cabal, the days when there was a significant overlap between the two are long gone. ϢereSpielChequers 06:12, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

Hmmm. Given that only yesterday one of that particular group was boasting about how the face-to-face meetups are used to canvass attendees to come to their support when an on-wiki discussion isn't going to their liking, I'm less than convinced. ‑ Iridescent 16:53, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Which particular group? He mentions a meeting in 2010, but is not afaik a London meetup regular. Johnbod (talk) 01:19, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Iri might mean the London boys, as I've never been part of WMUK , and as you say not even a reg at London meetups, having only attended 2 since becoming an editor in 2008. The 2010 meetup wasn't in violation of WP:Canvas, ARS members believe in close adherence to policy. My reason for attending was just to persuade Sue (WMF exec director at the time) to authorise certain Office actions to help restore the golden age of inclusionism. Unfortunately, while Sue leans strongly inclusionist & was sympathetic,Ironholds was with her (as previously mentioned on this page) and he was able to dissuade her from providing concrete help. Though she did tell the group about the Foundation's internal research, which found deletion was the leading cause of newbies being driven away.

The other meetup was in 2019, mainly to introduce my friend Zenobia to the Colonel, as she lives less than a mile from him, and also is a big reader & donor. I was only there for 20 mins as got called away, but Zenobia stayed the whole afternoon & had a great time. I'm not sure she got the chance to meet you John as I think you were mostly talking with Lucy. Zenobia was mostly chatting with WSG & Ritchie – afterwards she was talking about them even more than the Colonel! WSG & Ritchie are also unusually charismatic gentlemen to be fair. You should come to one of the London meetups if ever you're in town Iri, they can be most convivial, us London boys aren't so bad once you get to know us. FeydHuxtable (talk) 07:56, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

At the time, Deletionists were targeting London bus routes – the Colonel brought a stack of about a dozen books to the meeting, just to show the extensive coverage that London bus routes actually receive in reliable sources. This is literally a textbook example of stealth canvassing ("the use of off-wiki communication to notify editors").

For what it's worth, I wrote a reasonably large chunk of Wikipedia's coverage of transport in London—there are 36 entries at "London Transport articles - FA quality" and I'm responsible for 15 of them—and I can hazard a reasonable guess what the books in question were. If that's the case, then it highlights the inability to distinguish between "coverage exists" and "coverage demonstrates notability" that has got Andrew D into trouble. (Yes, the arrogance and obnoxiousness has made people less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but ultimately the reason Andrew D is banned from deletion and one mis-step away from being sitebanned altogether while e.g. Dream Focus hasn't is that the latter understands that shouting "it exists!" loudly enough doesn't demonstrate notability.)

Just because some bus routes are subject to sufficient coverage to demonstrate notability doesn't translate into "all bus routes are notable". "There has been significant enough coverage of London Buses route 73 for it to have a stand-alone article, therefore London Buses route 389 also needs a stand-alone article because it's listed in the same directories even though there's nothing to say about it and it's actually more useful to readers as an entry in a broader list where they can compare it to other bus routes in the area" is an argument that doesn't stand up, but it's the same argument Andrew has been making over and over for literally more than a decade.

The attitude is completely counterproductive. It just makes life harder for those like me who tend to work on marginally-notable topics but make the effort to work within Wikipedia's rules and to explain why something that appears trivial at first glance warrants having its own article, since it (reasonably) creates an attitude among participants and closing admins at AfD that "keep" voters are likely to be misrepresenting sources. ‑ Iridescent 10:41, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Yup your transport FAs are a legend Iri, I've recommended them to folks dozens of times. Here's me back in 2009 pointing to your London bridge FAs to a US editor, as exemplars of how to spice up transport articles with human interest. You know, your sweeping & penetrating view of the human condition is something you share with the Colonel, who I like to compare to Terence. Albeit you're incomparably better at putting it down in writing. It's still stunning to recall how you only take take 8 hours to write an FA, compared to the hundreds us more average editors need even for a much less demanding GA.

To further clarify on the bus books, the ones I sampled were proper secondary sources from good publishers - not the fan boy books you might be thinking of, written direct by transport operators. The books were there to show beyond doubt the depth of coverage in WP:RS, in contrast to the claims made at AfD, thus proving deletionists are able to destroy many policy compliant articles. This wasn't to solicit input to bus AfDs, but to communicate to Sue inclusionist's desperate need for Foundation support. Across all topic classes, London buses were merely a topical example. I'm not sure I follow your other points against the Colonel, it almost feels like you're describing another editor. With your FAs I sometimes see allusions & artistry I'd missed when re-reading after a few months - perhaps this will be the case with your message here. Bye for now. FeydHuxtable (talk) 12:12, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Apologies if I'm being dense, but I've no idea who Terence is or whether being compared to him is a compliment or an insult. I can, however, safely assure you that being compared to "The Colonel" (who I imagine doesn't thank you for drawing attention to his former bad-hand account) is not something I take as a compliment, particularly given that it's just a couple of days since I felt obliged to break my usual "no redactions, no censorship" and remove some of his more incoherent attention-seeking gibberish from this talkpage. (The cabal has to keep moving to maintain its exclusivity. Lately, it might be found online in the aptly-named Discord but now we should look for more Meta on Meta. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Mondegreens has lately decreed that all users of the phrase "all be it" be investigated on suspicion of being an Owl and so you chaps of the Periphrase Patrol have your work cut out for you..., for the record.)

It's possible to write a FA from scratch in a single sitting under a very limited set of conditions, when you have all the sources already lined up, are familiar enough with the topic to judge immediately whether something is worth including and where it should go, and are already sure of the structure and formatting. It depends entirely on the topic; as a very rough rule I'd say allow about 20–30 hours, but some topics could literally take weeks or even months.

You're missing my point on the bus books; they could have come down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai, but unless they cover a specific bus route in detail, they're a complete red herring regarding notability of that specific bus route. It's the same fallacy as "Because there are some cartoon characters which are the subject of academic works and unquestionably warrant stand-alone biographies, that means a one-off character who appeared in a single scene of Family Guy for 30 seconds is inherently notable", and it's a stunt Andrew has been pulling to disrupt deletion discussions for quite literally years (here he is in 2010 trying "there are notable roads, therefore this road is notable", for instance).

I'm quite sure you do "follow my other points against the Colonel". Even if you don't personally agree, you've surely noticed that one of the most overwhelming consensuses I've ever seen on Wikipedia is that he's obnoxious, disruptive, and thinks Wikipedia's rules don't apply to him. Either you're wrong or almost everybody who's ever encountered him (including those like Ritchie333 who would normally be expected to support him) is wrong; given that within seven hours of being topic-banned he was already trying to game it I know which side I'd put my money on. ‑ Iridescent 17:47, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Your own words from one of your 2009 FA noms: Bare-knuckle boxing... A city dependent on a network of hollow elm trunks to carry its water supply... Biker gangs fighting to the death with spiked flails and sawn-off shotguns... A river filled with animal carcasses... Iron Age Celtic warriors... A gunfight between the Prime Minister and the Earl of Winchilsea... The birth of football as a spectator sport... What else could it be but another visit to the world of 19th-century civil engineering

The surpising & pleasing juxtapositions, the sense of balance, the directness, the eye catching human interest, the captivating panoply of the whole - you distilled the essence of a Terence play. He was like the boss of Shakespeare. Perhaps the reason the Bard's writing was sometimes over elaborate is that Terry had said it all before in plain language. Including (slightly mondegreen periphrased) "Overwhelming consensus is often extreme injustice." FeydHuxtable (talk) 20:24, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

On Wikipedia, overwhelming consensus by definition is justice, since mob rule is our most fundamental underlying principle. There are consensuses with which I profoundly disagree (e.g. the proliferation of multiple referencing styles, the readiness with which we're willing to publish negative commentary about living people provided it's sourced even when the negative commentary is of minimal benefit to readers and is potentially distressing for the subject, the insistence that certain topics be split into separate pages even when doing so is a disservice to readers, the way in which "civility" is generally interpreted to mean compliance with a specifically American view of what constitutes polite discussion…), but I recognize that when I'm in a minority the onus on me is to learn to live with it, or on the rare occasions when it's legitimate to invoke IAR to be prepared to explain why this is an occasion that warrants going against consensus. Andrew D has consistently and over many years refused to accept this, and instead has consistently demanded that the rest of Wikipedia change to accommodate his own personal whims. I didn't participate in the ANI thread, but I think he actually got off very lightly in that the way the thread was framed meant that only a single aspect of his disruption was considered and thus he's only been banned from that single aspect. I have little doubt that were his editing history to be considered as a whole, he'd have been banned from Wikipedia altogether; his constant aggressiveness and disruption creates a chilling effect in virtually everything he touches and I feel confident in saying that whatever benefit he brings is more than offset by the number of people who've been lost owing to his unpleasantness.

Wikipedia isn't a good fit for everyone, and our history is littered with people who were excellent writers but failed to fit in to the basic cultural expectations here. Given his propensity for dubious sourcing, I think it would be generous to the extreme to include Andrew D in this group; either way, if he's not willing to follow our rules Wikipedia isn't the place for him, particularly if as you say "several other worthy causes & projects in and around London are appreciative of the Colonel's time" implying there's somewhere he can contribute without wasting both our time and his own. Unless he gets a kick from trolling—something I very much doubt as given the time he's invested on this website I have no reason to disbelieve that he's sincerely trying to help and is genuinely confused that nobody else sees things his way—it can't be a pleasant experience for him to be in an environment where he's so consistently treated as a negative influence; if someone else wants him and would treat him with the respect he feels he deserves and that he's not getting here it would surely be better for all concerned were he to go there. (I'm sure Engole would snap him up, for instance, and as they're published under a Wikipedia-compatible license anything he wrote there could be imported here were it actually an improvement on our existing content.) ‑ Iridescent 05:40, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Could you expand on the way in which "civility" is generally interpreted to mean compliance with a specifically American view of what constitutes polite discussion? I definitely agree with the other items you listed there, but I'd never heard of something like this being an issue—likely, because I'm an American, and wouldn't have noticed. Perryprog (talk) 11:04, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Off the top of my head:

• An emphasis on "bad words" regardless of context—as has been discussed ad nauseam, quite a lot of words considered grossly inappropriate in North America can potentially be uncontentious in other variants of English, particularly UK, Irish and Aussie. (An obvious example would be that "fuck off" in BrEng can just be a generic superlative, as in "the Titanic was a fuck off big ship"—as I think I've mentioned before, there's a fairly successful local coffee chain to me called Fuckoffee which just wouldn't happen in the US);
• The fact that we tell people to "treat Wikipedia like a workplace" without taking into account that behavioral expectations are wildly different in the US than they are in most other English-speaking countries, and then get surprised when people from non-US backgrounds treat other editors like they would a co-worker. On that particular point, I can't really put it better than Pesky did here);
• A lack of appreciation of the subtle differences in writing styles between variants of English, in which typical American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) written conversation styles can appear very passive aggressive while UK/Irish/Australian/African writing can appear aggressively blunt, but while complaints about the former are dismissed as touchiness complaints about the latter are upheld as 'incivility';
• The inbuilt assumption that people misunderstanding American terminology are feigning ignorance to be intentionally disruptive but people misunderstanding rest-of-world terminology are being reasonable (this is particularly pronounced in political discussions, where some words like 'liberal' and 'conservative' literally have the opposite meaning in the US compared to the rest of the world).

I'm sure there are lots of other examples people can add to this list—Wikipedia's inability to handle cultural diversity and the fact that cultural expectations invariably default to American cultural expectations is about as perennial an issue as it gets. (Roughly half of English Wikipedia's editor base is in the US. Go through all the editors you can think of who've been blocked for 'incivility'—or just search the Arbcom case records for the word 'civility'—and tell me if that ratio is preserved. Either Americans are somehow inherently more polite than the rest of the world, or our administration has a massive inbuilt systemic bias.) ‑ Iridescent 18:04, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

I follow that 05:40 post totally and take every part to be either true or at least a valid perspective. I could try to point to a different view, but it would take a long post. Maybe its not worth more of your time. Or let me know if you'd like to discuss further. FeydHuxtable (talk) 20:16, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Now hold on just a doggone minute! If you download those figures to Excel you see the US has 21,980 editors out of a total of 59,790, which is 0.3676. That's NOT "roughly half" at all - "roughly a third" would be far less inaccurate. I think I've had to make this point here before - certainly the "roughly half" meme seems widespread. Johnbod (talk) 21:07, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Or, more than three times as many editors are American than any other single nationality. The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 21:13, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, despite the US having about 5 times more people than any other Anglophone country. What's your point, if any? Johnbod (talk) 21:16, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

As charming as ever. The point, if any, is that in any given discussion (randomly), there will be three times as many Americans as any other single nationality. So this Wikipedia will default to Amuricanese. But please, sorry to have disturbed the intellectually behemoth discussion going on. Please continue, I know my place. The Rambling Man (Keep wearing the mask...) 21:28, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

That seems a very strange way of looking at things - first past the post taken to an extreme. Btw, US + Canada (3040) is 0.418464626 of the total, giving the 42% for North America the WMF cites in various places. Johnbod (talk) 00:27, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

If we are talking about a dominant culture, it may not include all US editors. Going through the nine desyoppings "for cause" in the last three years I think there were two US editors, albeit one of them was Latino. I doubt that's enough to satisfy statisticians that we have a pattern, but given that cultural nuance and communication styles were important to some of those cases, I'm not dismissing the possibility that we have a problem. ϢereSpielChequers 09:30, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I'm not saying we don't have a problem! Some other factors:

the US editors are of course by no means a homogenous bunch, with all sorts of differences

the figures record location, not citizenship/origin etc - quite a lot of eg the 450 editors in Japan will be expats from Anglophone countries

many non-mother tongue editors don't feel confident enough with their language skills to edit text rather than images & templates, or to persist in talk discussions (I'm most familiar with the 5,500 editors from India here, but there will be others). Johnbod (talk) 16:02, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Also, non-mother-tongue editors are more likely to make good-faith mistakes, and thus more likely to end up on other people's watchlists, so as a consequence they're statistically more likely to get in trouble than a mother-tongue editor making the same mistake.

Whether it's 30%, 40% or 50% isn't really relevant. The point is that North America and particularly the US is culturally superdominant on English Wikipedia, which skews both 'notability' and 'civility' towards a particular and culturally specific set of values. (As a trivial but obvious example seeing as The Rambling Man is here, we wouldn't have the regular-as-clockwork annual "Why is the Boat Race notable?" argument were it otherwise.)

Add "what is considered acceptable and unacceptable" as well when it comes to cultural bias. You live in England; if you were on record as saying "I don't recognise race or ethnicity as a meaningful distinction", how long do you think it would take before your employer at best called you in for a very uncomfortable discussion about hate speech, and at worst summarily dismissed you? If UCoC as currently worded passes, you'll be obliged to endorse The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people if you want to continue editing here. ‑ Iridescent 08:12, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Wait, the UCOC says what?! That is really questionable at best. Isn't the whole thing about being "woke" and not seeing race something that people realized were a bad idea in the 2000's because it turns out people's identities actually are worth caring about?

On a mildly related note, I think it's worth sharing an excerpt of a talk from Audre Lorde—partly because this is something I was discussing in a class just yesterday, partly because it is somewhat relevant to this whole "ignoring race" thing: it's called "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference", and talks a lot about the idea how the differences we exhibit actually should be looked at. The most applicable bit is here: "Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation." Perryprog (talk) 12:34, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

References

It's definitely still in the current version of UCoC. As I've said before, I have no doubt that everyone involved is working with the best of intentions, but I really don't think the WMF appreciate just how inappropriate so many of their good-faith initiatives are on a global project. (WAID, before you tell me I'm exaggerating, I'm really not. In most if not all European countries "I don't believe people of different ethnicities should be treated differently" is the language of the extreme right and just clicking "like" on someone saying it on a social media site would potentially get one fired for gross misconduct. And if "repeated mockery, sarcasm, or aggression" genuinely constitutes "harassment", you've just banned 70% of the population of England and approaching 100% of the population of Ireland from Wikipedia. UCoC is entirely well intentioned, but is nonetheless a massive slab of US cultural imperialism.) ‑ Iridescent 15:46, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Icc

Current president 152.57.144.98 (talk) 06:51, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, you'll need to give me a clue… Are you on the right page? ‑ Iridescent 06:54, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Probably on the wrong page - I think they are talking about the International Criminal Court and most likely Rodrigo Duterte. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:25, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Rodrigo Duterte is the president of it?? Johnbod (talk) 13:19, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

No, but some people would like to see him being a defendant in front of it (Omar al-Bashir, the other candidate, isn't a "current" president). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:14, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

There are quite a few more likely candidates, with Xi and Lukashenko probably the most prominent at the moment, but I doubt it's actually a reference to the International Criminal Court. On reflection, I'm guessing that 152.57.144.98 is complaining that Indian Chamber of Commerce is a red link. If that's the case, then it's not something I know anything about, nor is it something I could even try to start since most of the sources are likely to be in Bengali and Hindi. (It does seem an odd omission. It undoubtedly exists, and as the new page patrollers are wearily aware India is not exactly short of people trying to create Wikipedia pages on bodies which are considerably less notable than a trade body that's existed for a century.) ‑ Iridescent 17:01, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Given that the IP is in India, then at the risk of stereotyping I'll guess International Cricket Council. ‑ Iridescent 05:13, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Whose chair, per the infobox, is Gregory Barclay of NZ. Johnbod (talk) 13:19, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Cleanup tags

Hey Iridescent, do you know which tags like disambig-cleanup should be used on a soccer player and name page respectively with non-standard arrangements please? 17:21, 28 November 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7F:38FC:A300:39CC:30EE:F972:7F69 (talk)

I suspect that the answer you seek is in Wikipedia:Hatnote somewhere. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:23, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

It really depends on what you mean by "non-standard arangements". If the question is specific to soccer, I'd recommend asking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football; soccer has particular issues with regards to disambiguation as the regional backgrounds of European teams and the tendency of Brazilian players to adopt a single name means there are often so many people with the same name that the usual name, born year format doesn't work. ‑ Iridescent 06:51, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Correction

Syracuse, NY is a city, not a town. 174.86.244.242 (talk) 14:56, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

And you're telling me this why? I have literally never edited that page. ‑ Iridescent 17:53, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

FWIW you did edit it under your alt ... Graham87 07:03, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Happy Adminship Anniversary!

Thanks… 14 years, it's depressing how little has changed—if you transported the editors of Wikipedia 2007 to Wikipedia 2021, then other than slightly laxer rules on notability and slightly more rigid bureaucracy, they probably wouldn't even notice a difference. ‑ Iridescent 08:52, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

The three biggest changes I can think of: (1) far higher expectations on sourcing, especially on new articles; (2) the spread of discretionary and general sanctions to a significant percentage of the mainspace; (3) very few new administrators for the past several years. For a gripe about the bureaucracy, see my vote comment here. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:10, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

The other one that occurs to me is the decline of AGF when it comes to newcomers. If a new account gets things wrong they're shouted at and quite often sanctioned, but if they get things right they're "obviously not a new account" and shouted at and quite often sanctioned. There was always some element of this even back in the day—remember "edits in a similar way"?—but the path is much narrower now. There are good reasons for the change (a well-intentioned but inexperienced newcomer can cause much more damage in the era of semiautomation than they could back then, and we've all had our fingers collectively burned too often by being tolerant of "new editors" who clearly aren't), but the inability to 'learn on the job' any more has changed the internal dynamics quite significantly. ‑ Iridescent 04:41, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

Ah don't be so pessimistic, it's all good. Paul August ☎ 21:33, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I think that how we use "AGF" has shifted. It used to feel more like a reminder that people who screw up are generally trying their best, but they just don't know how to do anything, à la Hanlon's razor. Now I see it used in situations that feel more like "Quit being mean to me!" I wonder, if everyone understood that "You need to AGF" means "You need to assume that he screwed up because he's stupid instead of because he's malicious", would we say such things? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:03, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

I'd agree that in modern Wikispeak, "CIR" has taken on the former meaning of "AGF", and "AGF" has come to be a generic "I have a god-given right to do whatever I like and I demand you respect it". I've noticed a trend more generally for people to quote WP:TLAs as if they were Runes of Power rather than just internal links, and to treat the exact wording of policies, guidelines and anything else in the WP: namespace (even personal essays) as immutable laws, even when doing so contradicts common sense. (I'm convinced that if I changed the wording WP:CIVIL to include "in certain cultures it is offensive for a name to begin with the letter Q, as such we do not allow usernames beginning with Q", at least some of our admins would promptly head on over to listusers and start blocking away.)

I suppose this particular cultural change is inevitable; the generation who were around when the essays coalesced into policies and guidelines is dwindling, and the next generation just sees the rules rather than the discussions that led to them being written, so misses out on the nuances and the intended meanings and instead interprets things literally. The same letter-replaces-spirit thing happens with real-world rules, from national constitutions to corporate HR policies; one could certainly make the case that it's actually a good thing if it leads to a true common law in which everything is applied equally, rather than every decision being filtered through the whims of a ruling class. (No, that doesn't mean I'm coming around to support UCOC. I still firmly believe that trying to impose rules from outside—even if those rules are completely sensible and exactly what the community would have come up with on its own anyway—will be hugely counterproductive as the backlash will mean even the sensible rules no longer get enforced because they're seen as tainted.) ‑ Iridescent 06:22, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

UCoC

If we don't impose some rules from outside, then we will continue to have a world in which some communities block editors for saying that they're gay. The choice is "rules imposed from outside" or "editors from marginalized groups get blocked". I prefer rules that say gay editors can't be blocked merely for saying that they're gay, even if the only method for having that rule apply everywhere tramples on local autonomy and has other downsides. If you prefer local autonomy, then you have to own the overtly homophobic local rules and other clear downsides as part of your choice. Reasonable people can disagree on which of the two choices is better, but we need to be clear about the harms we're choosing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:00, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

That can be a one-sentence addition to the Terms of Use. That's not what UCoC is, though; as currently worded, UCoC would make it a blocking offence to describe British editors as "European"; would make it compulsory to help someone who's made an error; would ban admins from protecting articles… (If you think these are strawmen, you haven't spent enough time with Wikipedia admins. English Wikipedia is one of the less dysfunctional of the projects, and we currently have someone blocked for six months for using the word "sloth" and famously once had someone indefblocked for 'swearing' for saying "sycophant". Roll out what amounts to "anyone can be banned if they do anything someone else doesn't like" on one of the genuinely dysfunctional sites like Commons or Croatian Wikipedia and you're looking at a full-scale free-for-all.) ‑ Iridescent 17:45, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Commons or Croation WP free-for-alls. EEng 05:55, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Putting the same rule in the TOU would still be a rule imposed from the outside. If you are opposed in principle to the idea of rules imposed from the outside, then that would also be a problem.

If your concern is that the current version is imperfect, and that you'd prefer the current verifiable problems over the predictions of doom, then that's okay. I think we've already had more editors blocked (outside this wiki) for saying they're gay than we will ever have editors blocked for calling a British person a European person. (Also: If that British person does object, shouldn't you stop repeating that label anyway? Just because that's the decent thing to do?)

I'm even more doubtful that "We strive towards...mentorship and coaching" will ever be interpreted as making it compulsory for any individual editor to help any other individual editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, you'd prefer the current verifiable problems over the predictions of doom is probably a fair description of my current position, although you'd prefer the current verifiable problems over the potential addition of further potentially more serious problems whilst still failing to address the current verifiable problems would probably be more accurate. The current setup certainly has its issues, but at least on English Wikipedia they're far less than they seem. The introduction of a death squad of "Code Enforcement Officers" reporting in turn to a shadowy committee with the power to overrule Arbcom will be a massive cultural change even if neither the committee nor the enforcers actually do anything, since the very existence of a WMF committee with the power to overrule everyone else will deliver a hefty kick to a very sensitive part of the anatomy of the delicate balance between community, functionaries, and WMF. Wikipedia operates on trust; I fail to see how any benefit is gained from taking authority away from an elected body whose members we can (and do) vote out if we think they're making wrong decisions, and transferring decision-making to a presumably self-selecting secret council operating in camera. Yes, there might be a case for imposing rules on particular wikis like Croatian Wikipedia, Commons etc where the internal governance has genuinely collapsed—and on some of the smaller wikis which have become the vanity projects of a small group of cronies who use them as mouthpieces for their own opinions—but there's a big jump from "the WMF will have the right to impose rules as a last resort" to "all editors on all projects are henceforth going to be subject to Diplock courts".

Were you around for the WP:ACPD fiasco? Wikipedia does not take kindly to having "this is your new Council of Elders" imposed on it, even when all the people on said Council of Elders are each widely respected in their own right as individuals—and in this case I'd consider it unlikely that any of the sort of people who'd volunteer to be "Code Enforcement Officers" are likely to be editors who are widely respected in their own right as individuals. (Hell, this was the talkpage on which Framageddon took place; you know how it plays out when the WMF tries to impose enforcement of its own particular interpretation of rules on English Wikipedia without having both clear buy-in from the community and a mechanism for removing decision-makers who are perceived as having made decisions with insufficient transparency, even if everyone is operating with good intentions.)

If you think People may use specific terms to describe themselves. As a sign of respect, use these terms when communicating with or about these people, where linguistically or technically feasible is straightforward, I assume you've never had any dealings with writing about or dealing with people from disputed territories. (If I adhere to the wishes of e.g. a Crimean editor who self-identifies as Russian, most Ukrainian observers will quite reasonably consider it a calculated snub if I refer to them as "Russian" without qualification. It's why we go to such extreme verbal contortions to avoid specifying any nationality on biographical articles like Gerry Adams.) I chose "British" and "European" as a deliberate example, as cases where it would be virtually impossible to comply with this particular instruction; "British", "English" and "European" are all hyper-loaded terms and there are numerous people within the UK who would be offended were one or the other to be used to describe them.

You're quoting somewhat out of context. When it comes to [UCoC is] a minimum set of guidelines of expected and unacceptable behaviour [which] applies equally to all Wikimedians without any exceptions … Actions that contradict the Universal Code of Conduct can result in sanctions … This includes but is not limited to Mentorship and coaching: Helping newcomers to find their way and acquire essential skills; Looking out for fellow contributors: Lend them a hand when they need support, and speak up for them when they are treated in a way that falls short of expected behaviour as per the Universal Code of Conduct., with 15+ years experience watching the more clodhoppingly strict-constructionist literal-mindedness of some elements of Wikipedia's admin corps, I can think of at least two admins without even trying who will use "you interacted with someone who'd made an error and you didn't help them!" as a pretext to block people they dislike, and I'm sure there are plenty of others. ‑ Iridescent 18:08, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

The devil you know is a reasonable position.

I think it is also reasonable to be concerned about whether our past approach is going to work in the future – the near future, meaning the current decade, not when we're all comfortably dead. We have the UK's new Online Safety Bill trying to protect adults from "legal but harmful" content; we have the Australian courts saying that platforms are liable for anything users post online; and then we go back to the OSB and find that the UK bill insists that platforms retain "democratically important" content, and we all wonder what will happen when the "democratically important" content is also potentially defamatory (or harmful). The platform is required to keep the content online, and they're also required to pay millions (or billions) for the privilege of doing so?

I think that the solution is eventually going to involve an international treaty, but until we get there, it is possible that we will need more than ArbCom and the Stewards to handle the problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:03, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Cookie blocks

I'll bet whatever you care to wager that the UK Online Safety Bill will have exactly zero effect. If Google abandons the new superheadquarters they've just built in central London at vast expense, it will deliver a serious kick to an economy that's already shaky in the wake of recent unpleasantnesses, and Google is not about to hand the personal details of its entire userbase to Nadine Dorries; meanwhile Ireland is certain to veto any EU legislation that might cause Apple's golden goose to lay its eggs elsewhere.

If you want a real-and-present legal issue, which I've tried to point out to the WMF in the past and always been fobbed off, I'm virtually certain that the redesigned block mechanism in recent versions of Mediawiki is just straight-out illegal under GDPR (and all the other legal systems that shadow GDPR). It used to work by just logging the editor in question's username and/or IP address and preventing editing from that account and account creation from that IP. Since this change went live it now works by secretly adding a cookie to the editor's computer, which theoretically prevents them from creating an account even if their IP changes. At some point somebody in France (or Germany, or England, or Italy, or anywhere else with "no cookies without explicit consent" legislation) with deep pockets and too much spare time is going to bring a test case; while I imagine the worst outcome would be symbolic token damages, I wouldn't want to be either the admin who placed that block nor whichever poor schmoe at the WMF has to spin "yes, we've knowingly been disregarding the law for five years" to the press. ‑ Iridescent 17:32, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

A cookie block --Tryptofish

My jaw dropped when I read the part about that cookie. That's appalling. I just double-checked my Firefox settings, and I have it delete all cookies each time I close the program. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:59, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

If you delete all cookies, you'll have to login again every time you want to edit.

I see a link in phab:T5233#3151976 that sounds like it forms a reasonable basis to assume that cookie blocks are exempted. If your concern is all cookies, rather than specifically security-related cookies, then work-me can go bug Legal about it. I don't know if this is on their list at the moment. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

I'll clarify. I allow cookies while I'm editing, or doing anything else online. But I automatically delete them when I close the browser program. I do indeed have to log-in each day. (Actually, I also delete them at times when my browser is open, particularly when I move from one website to another and don't want any tracking. If I were to edit here for a while, and then do some online banking, or vice-versa, you can be certain that I would clear all cookies and related history before switching from one to the other.) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:46, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

@WAID: IANAL and even if I was, this is an area where the test cases haven't happened so nobody can give a right answer, but it looks to me like that link in the Phab request is selectively quoting. The full text of the section in question is "The exemption that applies to authentication cookies under CRITERION B (as previously described) can be extended to other cookies set for the specific task of increasing the security of the service that has been explicitly requested by the user. This is the case for example for cookies used to detect repeated failed login attempts on a website, or other similar mechanisms designed to protect the login system from abuses (though this may be a weak safeguard in practice). This exemption would not however cover the use of cookies that relate to the security of websites or third party services that have not been explicitly requested by the user." (my emphasis).

While Legal would presumably argue that accessing Wikipedia implicitly means accepting the Terms of Use and thus "explicitly requesting" that admins have the right to plant cookies on a computer, I'm not at all convinced a court of law would see it that way—this is why when I visit even a US website from the UK or EU, I either need to navigate a "which of these cookies do you accept?" box or I get a "this site is not visible to users in your country" message if the site's not willing to sacrifice their tracking revenue. I'd still recommend that any admin based in a GDPR country uncheck the "autoblock" box if they ever block a named account; there's certainly enough gray area for someone with a grudge who's been blocked from Wikipedia to make life unpleasant for the admin in question, even though the WMF would presumably cover any legal bills. (Presumably, the cookie blocks aren't even having a significant effect, or Meta:No open proxies wouldn't be a thing. One doesn't need to have badass hacking skills to figure out that you can just check 'new private/incognito window' to bypass the block.) ‑ Iridescent 07:55, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

NOP is at least 15 years old, and cookie blocks are four years old. I don't think that the existence of a much older policy is evidence for or against the effectiveness of cookie blocks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Sure, but No Open Proxies isn't Wikipedia's equivalent of the Massachusetts blasphemy law where an archaic statute is only on the books because no reasonable authority is ever going to try to enforce it so it's not worth the hassle of a formal repeal. We're still feverishly active when it comes to blocking any IP address suspected of being an open proxy. As has been mentioned once or twice, owing to the "all routers are treated as communal to all our members so you can get a connection provided you're in a built-up area even if you're out of range of your home/work router" policy of British Telecom, the "have a communal wifi router on every lamppost rather than having each home individually wired to the network" model you get in places like Prague, the way the cellphone/landline line is blurring as 5G rolls out, the difficulty of distinguishing between an open proxy and a dynamic IP, and the fact that VPNs are being actively encouraged on every other part of the internet, our continued enforcement of Meta:No open proxies is essentially blocking entire populations.

(There are certainly plenty of occasions when I've spotted an error, haven't wanted to use my login on someone else's computer, and got the scary You are currently unable to edit Wikipedia. You are still able to view pages, but you are not currently able to edit, move, or create them. message. Presumably most of the "I've seen a typing mistake but I can't fix it" opportunity costs come from people who don't currently have an account, and it's reasonable to assume that a non-negligible proportion of potential new editors' reaction to the "you are currently blocked" message isn't going to be "I guess I'll create an account then" but "if you don't want me, fuck you", and consequently we're essentially pulling up the "casual IP editor → regular IP editor → 'this would be easier if I created an account' → regular editor" drawbridge behind us, or at least making the route more difficult to follow.)

If cookie blocks are effective, then we're causing major disruption for little benefit by continuing to enforce NOP so zealously; if cookie blocks aren't effective, then we're at worst breaking the law and at best engaging in very dubious ethical practices without even an "end justifies the means" justification. Presumably, the effectiveness of cookie blocks is fairly easily testable. Just quietly reconfigure the software to ignore the cookies for a couple of days, and see if the quantity of edits flagged as vandalism and spam varies significantly over that period. ‑ Iridescent 06:39, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

AGF and nutshells

WAID, "generally trying their best, but they just don't know how to do anything" isn't equivalent to Hanlon's razor. That adage requires that the clueless person is breaking things because they are stupid, rather than that they are ignorant but could learn. The humour is that we replace one irredeemable personal failing for a different one. Iridescent brought up AGF with newcomers, where it is better to assume they are ignorant than that they are stupid. Wrt the sanctions spreading across the project, we saw how editors who had never edited biomedical subjects before got threatened with sanctions for using the wrong sources in a Covid article. And wrt Iridescent's point about guideline history, we saw how editors could quickly be mislead into thinking MEDRS only applied to first aid advice. I'm not actually as confident that the problem is people reading the guidelines in ignorance of years of talk page discussion. The problem is often people just read the WP:UPPERCASE or the nutshell and then invent all sorts of strange ideas about what the policy means. How many people do you think came to the big RFC at Wikipedia talk:Biomedical information/Archive 2#RFC: Disease / pandemic origins. without ever having actually read Wikipedia:Biomedical information? -- Colin°^Talk 11:12, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Ah, the thing about treating the shortcut/title of a page like a summary of the page is something I've seen on TV Tropes as well. I guess it might be a more general psychological effect. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:07, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

It's not even a case of people just reading the uppercase and making up their own interpretations; we've over the years acquired a culture of oversimplification, and have only ourselves to blame. (How often do you see people say "verifiability not truth" as if it were Wikipedia policy—either because they support the idea, or as an example of Wikipedia's supposed dysfunction that such a policy exists—who have obviously not read WP:VNT which is an essay explaining that verifiability is a minimum threshold for inclusion, not a policy that anything verifiable should be mentioned, and thus "verifiability not truth" doesn't reflect Wikipedia policy?) To stick with the WP:MEDRS example, that page has an enormous This page in a nutshell: Ideal sources for biomedical material include literature reviews or systematic reviews in reliable, third-party, published secondary sources (such as reputable medical journals), recognised standard textbooks by experts in a field, or medical guidelines and position statements from national or international expert bodies. notice at the top. One can't blame anyone for interpreting that as "if you have literature reviews etc that would be ideal, but in their absence the kind of sources normally used elsewhere on Wikipedia are acceptable". rather than "if you try to cite something like the Daily Telegraph which would normally be considered non-contentious, a bunch of strangers may start threatening you with a site ban".

A piece of oversimplification that comes up all the time is the wretched Wikipedia:Five pillars essay. Because some people (including many who should know better) tend to point people to WP:5P like it was some kind of sacred text, new editors quite reasonably come away with the conclusion that massive oversimplifications like Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility are immutable fixed and non-negotiable rules, and never get as far as the actual underlying policies which explain in far more detail that (e.g.) Wikipedia editors come from a huge variety of cultures and assuming that something you personally find inappropriate is "uncivil" is quite possibly cultural insensitivity on your part and you're the one being uncivil by complaining about it. (There's a fairly successful local chain of coffee shops near me called "Fuckoffee" to which nobody bats an eyelid. As I live just up the road from Jimmy Wales—or at least, I assume I still do, I haven't seen him around for a while—I often wonder whether he gets a mini-lesson in cultural relativism every time he nips out for a flat white.) ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Break: VNT

This might be a sign of my senescence as an editor, but I remember when VNT was actually right at the beginning of the verifiability policy. At that time, it very definitely was regarded as policy (or at least as a helpful shorthand to explain how the policy works: don't claim that we have to say something because you know it's true – we need sources, and the sources trump your beliefs), and there was a very protracted discussion leading to the eventual decision to delete it from the policy and move it to an historical essay. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:58, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

As a new-er editor, it's worth mentioning this is how I've always viewed that term. (Although I've also always viewed it as a saying that arose from an essay—similar to the phrase "no amount of writing can overcome a lack of notability") This is also partly influenced by how there's a fairly often used VRT template response—originally written in 2009—named after "verifiability not truth", but it's much more focused on responding to people who are complaining their unsourced addition of someone's dating life is getting removed, or people that complain Wikipedia is biased against whatever—not people that are asking about policies in detail, of course. Perryprog (talk) 20:24, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Here's a link to what it looked like just before the change was made: [3]. (And I'll confess that, at the time of the marathon discussions, I was on the "wrong side" of history!) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:36, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Tryptofish, this was the pre-RFC version of WP:Verifiability. Even then, the wording ("Verifiability, not truth, is not the only requirement, but it is a fundamental requirement for inclusion in Wikipedia—no matter how convinced you are that some information is true, if the material is unverifiable, do not add it") made it clear that our policy was (as it remains) "don't add something just because you think it's true unless there's a source", not "if there's a source for something, add it even if you know it's not true". You'd be surprised how many people—both within Wikipedia and outside commentators—think it's the latter. (Here's someone at MIT Technology Review getting very exercised about this alleged failing of ours, for instance. And here's an absolute boatload of honest-to-goodness Reliable Sources for this being our policy.) ‑ Iridescent 20:39, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

In fact, I'm not at all surprised that lots of people still think that. That was exactly the reasoning cited for why it was changed. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:46, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Personally, I thought that "verifiability not truth" does have the advantage that it emphasizes that we are not here to squabble over someone's preferred interpretation of reality (because that's what "truth" means to many people) and that "I say it's the truth" is not sufficient to justify an edit. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:35, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Oh yes—and it's an important principle—but the point is that it's intended to be a threshold for inclusion (i.e., "we can't include it unless it's verifiable"); a lot of people think it means a criterion for inclusion (i.e., "if it's verifiable, we include it"). Quite a bit of the most vocal criticism of Wikipedia comes from people making this particular mistake, including a lot of people who should know better like Larry Sanger. The point I'm trying—and I think Tryptofish is trying—to make is that the "verifiability not truth" wording misleads people into fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of Wikipedia; thus, when we routinely use "WP:VNT" as a buzzword, it can unintentionally lead people into thinking they're being helpful when they add some random factlet they found in a newspaper, and they consequently get confused and upset when they subsequently get warned. ‑ Iridescent 16:09, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Back when there were the long discussions about ditching the phrase, I argued for exactly what Jo-Jo E. said. I actually found the phrase quite useful when I was a new editor, because it memorably, and somewhat joltingly, emphasized the importance of sourcing over personal opinion. As I said above, that put me on the "wrong side" of history, because the eventual consensus was what Iri describes. Nowadays, I think the biggest problem is not editors misusing the phrase, so much as people on the outside citing it as evidence of Wikipedia's dysfunction. Perhaps if the phrase had originally been "verifiability not belief", there would have been no controversy, although it would have been less catchy. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:06, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

That. Something like "Accurate, Relevant, Sourced and Explained" as a summary of the threshold for whether to add might not have been as pithy but would have avoided fifteen+ years of misunderstandings. ‑ Iridescent 18:37, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I am sure that would be quite memorable... JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 22:07, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Beauty! Please make that red link blue! Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:18, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

(I didn't follow the VNT business particularly.) If that were the major problem, I wonder if it could have been helped by having another commonplace following phrase (memorable, alliterative when place right after VNT, ideally rhyming if that were possible, which it probably isn't), qualifying it to make threshold/criterion distinction clear, and prominently mentioned or linked in relevant pages. ("Verifiability, Not Truth!", "...But [something something fix relevant misunderstanding]-uth!" appropriately capitalized and linked to a short acronym...) Pre-engineer knockdown phrases. --Yair rand (talk) 22:25, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

This is the website that needed to hold an earnest discussion as to whether Eating pussy should redirect to Cunnilingus or Cat meat. Trying to get something like this, that's seen as part of underlying culture, changed would be like getting an aircraft carrier to perform a three-point turn—Wikipedia doesn't do cultural change at all well. (As I've said before, I see the innate conservatism as a strength not a weakness; Wikipedia has survived at least in part because—despite the WMF's best efforts—the editor experience doesn't change substantially so people can drift in and out without being made to feel uncomfortable for not keeping up with changes.) ‑ Iridescent 05:44, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Given your previous comments on the topic

... you might be interested in Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia 1.0. The result is a foregone conclusion, obviously. Graham87 11:04, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Commented there. As you say, anything I say won't affect the outcome, but if it eventually leads to our ditching the ridiculous S-S-C-B-G-A-F "quality" scale and its equally obnoxious sibling "low,, medium, high and top importance"—both themselves foisted on us by WP1.0 "because we need to know what to include on the different releases"—the discussion will be worthwhile. ‑ Iridescent 15:44, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

I wonder if it would be possible to remove the importance ratings from the WikiProject templates and leave it to each project [WikiProject or other] to make/maintain their own ratings tables. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 21:26, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

It's certainly technically possible—the importance ratings are disabled on Visual Arts articles, for instance, and the world has not come to an end. Given the number of people who are psychologically invested in article assessment and who get a buzz from feeling themselves the arbiters of what's important (check out Wikipedia talk:Vital articles and its subpages if you ever want to see Wikipedia at its most insane), I'm fairly certain we'll never get consensus to deprecate article importance rating, even though as you presumably know, I think "importance" is a meaningless concept in the Wikipedia context since the important article is whatever contains the information you're looking for. (Despite all the hundreds and often thousands of incoming links they each have, none of the supposed "ten most important articles on Wikipedia" averages more than 10,000 views per day, and at the time of writing three of them fail the 'Tarrare Test'. Our most-read 'Vital Article', Earth, gets readership figures 1⁄3 those of Scarlett Johansson and 1⁄8 those of Microsoft Office.)

What we could potentially get consensus for is to get rid of the concept of an importance scale and just have "key topic"/"other". I still think this would be a pointless distinction for all my usual "no such thing as importance" reasons, but it would be a good first step. It wouldn't get rid of the arguments around marginal cases, the dichotomy between "what specialists in a given field consider important" and "what the general public have heard of in that field", or the argument over whether "importance" on English Wikipedia should reflect the topic's importance to en-wiki's readership or to the world more generally; but, if it got rid of the concept of "low importance", it would be worthwhile. ‑ Iridescent 05:59, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Ah yes, "key" topics. Even then the distinction might be somewhat contentious? Martinevans123 (talk) 09:21, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

To be pedantic, the importance ratings aren't "disabled" on Visual Arts articles, they are just deprecated & the categories for them don't exist. The usual suspects often add them. Johnbod (talk) 17:43, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

MILHIST and WikiProject Biography also avoid the priority/importance rating. I believe that in both cases, this was due to editors sensibly realizing that reasonable people would never agree on the correct rating for many subjects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:41, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

One of the most surreal disputes I ever saw was in the early days when Wikiprojects actually meant something, and someone tried to make Edgar Allan Poe high-importance on every Wikiproject that covered him. The argument was along the lines of:

Why have you reverted this to low-importance?

Because he's of low importance to WikiProject London.

But he's one of the most important American writers!

Exactly, he did all his writing in America, he left London when he was 11.

Well why is he of interest to WikiProject London?

Because he lived in Stoke Newington until he was 11.

Then if he's a Londoner he's one of London's most important writers, I'm changing it back.

Repeat to fade

If I recall correctly, in the end someone just quietly removed the {{WPLondon}} tag. (Personally I'd question whether Poe is actually significant at all—he probably even beats Joyce and Orwell for the ratio of "people who have a vague idea who he is" to "people who've actually managed to read more than five pages of anything he wrote"—but that's someone else's problem.) ‑ Iridescent 17:04, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

• Some articles are more important than other articles. The folks at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lewis (baseball) (2nd nomination) are probably going to determine that there isn't consensus for that statement, but I will stand by it. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 22:45, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

  Well, importance is a separate issue from notability. My own view is if there is enough on a subject to get it to FA, then it's probably worth keeping. My first reaction on seeing that AfD was "who would nominate a Featured Article for deletion?", before I realized it was the main author of the FA - apparently as a reaction to a similar article being redirected. Not quite sure what point they are making but it could backfire. Pawnkingthree (talk) 00:03, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

  "Importance" and "Notability" aren't synonyms; if I'm writing a paper on the 19th-century Players' League, Lewis (baseball) is going to be more important to me than Babe Ruth even though the notability level is different. If one takes readership as a rough approximation of importance, the non-spider readership level for Lewis actually compares quite favorably to a sampling of other niche FAs (the peculiar date range I'm using is just to avoid distorting effects from mainpage appearances or from the AFD, I'm not cherry-picking). There are precedents for FAs being taken to AFD—2012 tour of She Has a Name was probably the most rancorous, while back before the dawn of time I was the AFD nominator for Nude celebrities on the Internet. In general I'm firmly in the "if you can write 1000 reliably-sourced words that are specifically about the topic rather than fluff or background, then that topic is notable in our terms" camp (with an additional dose of "if there's a subject-specific Wikipedia rule that all articles on a particular topic be stand-alone, the article shouldn't be penalized for being short if there's genuinely nothing more to say about the topic.) ‑ Iridescent 07:18, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

  Heh, just looked more closely at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nude celebrities on the Internet (2nd nomination). All the people at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Eostrix Blocked coming out with prim variations on "we haven't had an admin-sock since Archtransit" ought to look over the histories of some of the participants there—with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like somebody set off the Sockpuppet Batsignal. ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

  I am glad I am not the only one whose sock flag went up at that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:57, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

  An RFA candidate who hasn't been involved in any kind of dispute tends to set the sock flag in me off immediately. Even the most saintly person is going to be involved in an argument of some kind just by virtue of the nature of any website with 4000+ active participants, even if they're genuinely confining themselves to the most mundane maintenance tasks; the only people who never get involved in any kind of dispute are people who are intentionally keeping their head down. It's the "internal processes" equivalent of the I don't think editors who haven't had the experience of putting large amounts of work into an article, and/or defending their work against well-intentioned but wrong "improvements" or especially AFD, are in a position to empathise with quite why editors get so angry when their work's deleted and/or The Wrong Version gets protected, and I don't support users who don't add content to the mainspace being given powers to overrule those who do boilerplate with which I used to irritate people by cut-and-pasting at RFAs; someone who's not been involved in an argument is either someone who's deliberately evading scrutiny, or they're someone who has no experience of Wikipedia's internal processes and shouldn't be trusted with any kind of advanced permission. It's totally counter-intuitive to say "people shouldn't be trusted unless they've caused a problem", but it's nonetheless true. ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

  It takes a thief. EEng 20:20, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

  Well, I think there's some truth to this in another aspect as well: it's important for the community to understand how a potential sysop responds to conflict, both in cases where it is and isn't through their own "fault". Knowing how a potential sysop is able to deal with conflict (are they amicable about it, do they let themselves get pushed around, do they try to dominate the situation, etc.) is very important when it comes to someone whose job very often necessitates some type of dispute resolution, regardless of what administrative areas one decides to work in. It's also of course important to know how they handle a situation where it seems they're the instigator or the one at fault: do they recognize their mistake, own up to it, and commit themselves to not making that mistake in the future? Or do they shift the blame to avoid looking bad? Even though not being involved in constant conflict is prooobably a good thing in a sysop, it's still critical to know how they'll handle conflict when they inevitably encounter it. Perryprog (talk) 16:42, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

  As a victim of Icewhiz (Iri, I think you're aware of the general context here, but if not feel free to poke me via email), I'm certainly glad this got caught. That being said Edgar181 almost certainly has another admin account that we'll never catch. It was very clear he was intentionally editing in a way that there would be other accounts CU could never catch, and without using proxies. There's more admin socks out there. Despite what some think, RfA isn't particularly hard to pass if you're at all familiar with how the community works and are willing to dedicate 2-3 hours a day to the project for a year, which the type of people who admin sock would be. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:20, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

  There are certainly other adminsocks out there. As I think I've said to you privately before, there's one admin I'm fairly certain is a good-hand sock but in the absence of actual beyond-reasonable-doubt proof can't do anything other than monitor. Assuming some are better at hiding, I'm certain there are others.

  That said, as I said way-back-when during the furore over Law, in a lot of these cases it doesn't really matter. Icewhiz is an unusual case in trying to get advanced permissions so he can use them to skew Wikipedia politically. Most socks are just people who've done something stupid, been blocked for it, and would rather sneak back under a new name than go through the ritual self-flagellation of the Standard Offer after which their reputation will be permanently tainted by the way Wikipedia handles block logs—in these cases, I don't see any problem with our turning a blind eye as long as the new account behaves itself even if the new account runs at RFA. ‑ Iridescent 05:18, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

  Ah, Iri. I seem to remember that one of the "debates" on my own RFA all those years ago was that I was either a really good admin candidate because I worked in contentious areas, or I was a troublemaker because I worked in contentious areas. (I also remember you changed from oppose to neutral to support during the course of that RFA.) So I do tend to agree with you that someone who hasn't really dealt with tough stuff anywhere is far less likely to be a good admin than someone who's dealt with some challenges. Risker (talk) 04:28, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

• Do you think a different system might be better than scrapping it altogether? Or at least more likely to obtain consensus. e.g. dawiki has w:da:Wikipedia:Lovende artikler before "good article" status, described as Promising articles are articles that Wikipedia users improve in order to get them ready for nomination as good articles. (according to Google Translate, anyway), and presumably everything that isn't FA/GA/'promising' is just marked as 'Unrated'. Basically wondering if there exists a hypothetical grouping that might provide for actionable article improvement, or if you think the only good idea is to scrap it all entirely? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:04, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Assessment streamlining

I doubt that what Danish Wikipedia does would be viable on Wikipedia. Officially, the structure exists here as well—the "formally assessed" article classes aren't just FA and GA, but A-class is there as an intermediate stage between the two.

Article statistics as of 11 November 2021
Quality	Importance
	Top	High	Mid	Low	???	Total
FA	1,410	2,248	2,179	1,557	166	7,560
FL	164	604	670	619	107	2,164
A	302	623	739	498	90	2,252
GA	2,763	6,412	12,827	15,746	1,646	39,394
B	14,608	28,313	45,446	46,957	17,209	152,533
C	14,449	45,185	109,694	204,871	69,705	443,904
Start	18,678	88,203	379,086	1,261,587	378,105	2,125,659
Stub	4,430	32,470	277,404	2,525,850	847,868	3,688,022
List	4,360	15,056	45,852	148,059	77,478	290,805
Assessed	61,164	219,114	873,897	4,205,744	1,392,374	6,752,293
Unassessed	116	479	1,486	15,184	409,719	426,984
Total	61,280	219,593	875,383	4,220,928	1,802,093	7,179,277

In practice, people just ignore the intermediate A-class (I've posted the full statistics as of today courtesy of our friends at WP:1.0; note just how moribund A-class is), and its main use is by WP:MILHIST as a parking area for pages they're preparing to take to FAC.

If I were building the assessment system from scratch, the categories would be:

1. Comprehensive, neutral, reliably sourced, and comprehensible by a bright 14-year-old with no prior knowledge of the topic;
2. Neutral, reliably sourced and comprehensible but not comprehensive;
3. Neutral, reliably sourced and comprehensive but not comprehensible;
4. Untrustworthy.

This realistically isn't going to happen. Too many people have too much invested in the existing setup (those 150,000+ B-class articles all have authors who are proud their work was recognized and will sulk if the recognition is taken away). Besides, even assessing the existing FA/A/GA articles against any new criteria would be a herculean timesink—Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force/Sweeps was one of the most time-consuming projects ever untertaken on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia was a lot smaller then. (The sweep took 30 months to check and assess 2810 pages. We currently have 50,000 FA/A/GA articles, coupled with a smaller base of editors who are willing to put in the thankless work of telling people their precious article no longer measures up.)

If we're going to restructure the system, it would need to be in baby steps. I'd suggest that deprecating C-class would be the obvious place to start, followed by a new set of criteria for future FA/A/GA based on my A–D scale above, leaving the existing FAs and GAs as a legacy group which we can sort out over the long term (the existing A-class is small enough that we could realistically reassess everything in it against any new criteria). ‑ Iridescent 07:38, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

If you are serious in suggesting and trying to get consensus for such reform I would be interested to help with brainstorming and preparation. I will not do it on my own though.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:55, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

At an absolute minimum, it would need all of @FAC coordinators: to agree that there was a problem, since the FA reviewers realistically represent a disproportionate number of the people with the requisite skills to carry out the necessary reassessments. While I personally would support a reform I doubt there would be the will to carry it out. Wikipedia doesn't handle cultural change well at the best of times—as I've said before, our cultural conservatism and risk-aversion is probably the reason for our longevity and in general a refusal to change to suit passing fads is A Good Thing, but oh boy does it make it hard to get necessary change accepted. And this isn't the best of times; as per my comments above, a lot of people are wedded to the existing cumbersome WP:1.0 scale because the micro-gradations between the current seven different "quality" rankings give plenty of opportunities for people to give meaningless awards to each other, and although the awards are meaningless it doesn't mean people won't be hurt and offended if we start taking their "Congratulations, you raised this article from C-class to B-class!" userboxes away. What we'd really need is to turn Meta:Universal Article Quality Scale blue and get the WMF behind it, but I can't see that happening any time soon. ‑ Iridescent 16:40, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Pinged here as a FAC coord. Generally agree that the article assessments below GA- or A-class are a waste of time and poor indication of the quality of an article. So I'd be in favor of scrapping them. I know the MILHIST coordinators require independent editors to assess articles to B-class and have specific criteria for each status, but that simply doesn't exist for most wikiprojects. A-class is awarded after a peer-review process so I oppose removing it or regrading as a different class.

IMO, the scheme proposed by Iridescent above is essentially equivalent to B = current GA class and A = current A or Featured. (t · c) buidhe 17:01, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Also pinged here as FAC coord. I'd go with 5 classes, instead of 4. GA and FA should continue to have equivalents. A-class is used as a project-specific rating, I don't think it should be eliminated without a signoff from the projects that use it. I know as a MILHIST coordinator we don't consider MILHIST A-class to be a project-wide rating, just use it as a rating for the project only. And then there's the two levels of below b-class - the difference between Battle of Cotton Plant and Skirmish at Albany, Missouri is fairly obvious and should probably be reflected in assessment ratings. As to the weight of FA reviewers that could be thrown into reassessment, FAC processes around 30-35 per month recently, and FAR maybe 10-15. There's an ongoing project to reassess older FAs to make sure they still meet FA criteria, I think the activity there would be a good model for what to expect for FA re-reviewing. It can be pretty hard at time to get people to shift energy and time from FAC and creating new FAs to maintaining/assessing older FAs. Hog Farm _Talk 17:10, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Iri, you are imo correct in doubting "there would be the will to carry it out", if only because of the colossal and wasteful amount of work required to make any changes. Personally I see very little evidence of a sub-culture with "plenty of opportunities for people to give meaningless awards to each other, and although the awards are meaningless it doesn't mean people won't be hurt and offended if we start taking their "Congratulations, you raised this article from C-class to B-class!" userboxes away." Currently the somewhat similar Wikipedia:Take the lead! contest to supply/improve lead sections is running, for only the 2nd time in 5 years, which I see as rather useful, not least in providing me with modest amounts of WMUK gold to buy books with. There are about 100 entries after 12/30 days, & the latest rules make it a very convenient way for people to get some monetary compensation for the immense harms that WMUK & WMF have apparently done them (to judge by the regular complaints here & elsewhere). Just saying. Otherwise, the relatively few editors still attempting mass-grading are mostly wasting their time, but as far as I can see in a solitary and unthanked way. I don't myself find the current system too terrible - the main problem is the grading is usually too low, and usually just based on length. Let's face it, almost no readers are even aware of the system, and not that many editors take notice of it either. Johnbod (talk) 18:59, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

I take it from a very convenient way for people to get some monetary compensation that they've finally dispensed with the fiction that their payments to editors are "to buy materials which will remain the property of WMUK"?

I doubt it. Like their £200 awards to Wikipedia:The Core Contest, when it happens, these are specifically prize pots for the judges of these contests to hand out to the winners, which they've been doing since 2012, at a cumulative cost of under £2,000 I think. How many of the other type do they actually hand out? Not many I think. Johnbod (talk) 17:28, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Mass assessment at the lower ends of the scale is very much still going on. Over the past six months, the change has been:

FA:	+217
A-class:	+122
GA:	+1,528
B-class:	+5,948
C-class:	+29,391
Start:	+79,950
Stub:	+60,080.

Whether it's actively damaging is a matter of opinion (although watchlist any of the noticeboards to which we regularly direct newcomers, and you'll see a steady stream of upset people complaining about what they see as arbitrary assessments), but the mass assessments—particularly between C, Start and Stub—are very much still with us. (Those figures obviously only capture absolute change; the actual scale of assessment and reassessment will obviously be higher.) Even if we're extremely generous in saying that an editor can judge within one minute whether any given page is Stub, Start, C or B class, add the appropriate templates to the talkpage, and move on to the next article, and that editors can devote eight hours a day to Wikipedia, that's a minimum of 720 editor-days lost every year to something that has no effect on anything—neither readers, reusers, nor other editors care in the slightest whether a given page is B or C class.

To be absolutely clear, I'm not suggesting either an abolition of article assessment or the mass regrading of existing articles. What I'm suggesting is a streamlined structure with a clearer delineation between WP:WIAGA and WP:WIAFA and with the B, C, Start and Stub classes merged into a single "has a serious issue of some kind" class for future article assessment. The ratings on existing articles would remain using the legacy system until they happened to he reassessed anyway against the new system as part of the continuing ongoing reappraisal that (in theory at least) happens over time to every page on Wikipedia. It would be no different to when an educational system changes its award structure—e.g. when England restructured the General Certificate of Secondary Education a couple of years ago to a 1–9 scale, they didn't need to reassess the qualifications of everyone with qualifications on the former scale. ‑ Iridescent 17:14, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

Switch-based assessment

In our current assessment scheme, essentially only FA and GA have gone through in-depth checks for things like comprehensiveness and sourcing quality. Almost everything else just has had quick drive-by checks (or even just application of mw:ORES via WP:RATER) that probably were done faster than in one minute, and without reading the article. Anyway, your proposed system isn't very far from dropping the manually-assigned classes and replacing them by something akin to the B-Class criteria, which in some assessment templates (e.g. Template:WikiProject Germany) are checked by individual switches that then automatically decide whether the article is classified as B-Class or not. In theory, this tells people not only whether their article is reasonably ok (that's what "B-Class" is supposed to mean) or not, but also why it isn't reasonably ok. In practice, this doesn't work, because this is far too complicated for the tiny difference between C and B, and because the parameters are stupidly named and the "what needs to be done" isn't displayed prominently on the assessment template. Part of that is connected to the historical error of having the assessment inside the WikiProject templates.

Anyway, back to your suggestion: perhaps having a few criteria-based switches (comprehensive:y/n/?, neutral:y/n/?, sourced: y/n/?, readable:y/n/?) and then choosing a "class" depending on the combination of chosen switches could improve our current system, and it wouldn't be too hard to do technically (main difficulty is getting people who will actually dare to assess comprehensiveness and neutrality). Actually, assuming that article assessment is good for something, changing the system would be a way to fix the issue that currently a large percentage of assessments have not been checked for ten years. But whether improving the system is worth it depends on what it is supposed to be used for (other than giving you a warm fuzzy feeling when you look at your top edited pages). —Kusma (talk) 20:28, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

It's largely fallen out of favor nowadays, but I always really liked the old {{GAList}} template. Its format as a series of pass/fail questions made it much easier to have "here's what you're doing right, here's where you're going wrong" conversations with far less risk of the article writers feeling we were either attacking their hard work or impugning their integrity. It also helped to focus reviewers' minds on what they were actually supposed to be checking—a lot of reviewers have a tendency to forget that they're supposed to be checking against a specific list of criteria, not "does this comply with my particular stylistic hobby-horse?". A rollout of similar processes across all the "article quality" review processes wouldn't entirely replace the human element—there would still be scope for "is there a legitimate reason to use non-standard formatting?", "what do we mean by 'thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature' exactly?, and "Under what circumstances is this particular source reliable?" arguments—but IMO rolling out a checklist approach everywhere would make things move more quickly, would go some way towards getting rid of the arbitrariness problem, and would make the tempers considerably less frayed. ‑ Iridescent 06:49, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

It's been quite a while since I've done a GA review, but I am sure I used {{GAList}} and some people who have reviewed my own nominations also do. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:24, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh, there are certainly reviewers who still use it (I said "largely fallen out of favor", not "totally"). That said, if you go to Wikipedia:Good article nominations and do a ctrl-f for discuss review (which will give you those reviews that are currently active), it's clear that:

1. Those reviewers that are still using {{GAList}}, or some other variation on the checklist approach, are very much in the minority;
2. Quite a few reviewers are serving up inappropriately-long essays as reviews rather than straightforward "here's what needs to change, here's why" bullet-points;
3. A lot of reviewers are raising issues in GA reviews that aren't actually part of the GA criteria, and are treating the process as an opportunity to push their personal preferences (akin to a mechanic refusing to pass your car's roadworthiness test because they don't like the color of the seat covers); and most importantly
4. Looking at the reviewers engaging in (b) and (c) and treating the review process either as an opportunity to showboat about How Damn Clever they are, or as an opportunity to push good-faith newcomers into complying with the reviewer's own personal prejudices and preferences, I'm seeing way too many people who should know better.

Apologies for the rant. The way in which the GA process—which was supposed to be a simplified process which could ease editors into the concept of quality assurance within a collaborative environment, and allow articles to have relatively quick and painless compliance checks without the negativity and nitpicking of FA reviews—has begun to degenerate into a bully pulpit for the GA project's self-appointed owners to push their personal prejudices is one of my major pet peeves. It shouldn't be quicker and easier for an article to pass FAC than GAN, but in my experience that's getting to be the case far too often nowadays. ‑ Iridescent 04:51, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Where's your "how to write an FA" thing?

If it's easy. Cheers, Johnbod (talk) 01:40, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

I can knock up an essay if you want, but it will probably largely be User:Giano/A fool's guide to writing a featured article updated to reflect the fact that Wikipedia 2021 is generally both nastier and more obsessed with arbitrary rules than was Wikipedia 2008. I imagine if you asked 20 people, you'd get 20 answers, since so many unwritten rules are subject-specific. ‑ Iridescent 05:37, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Mine is [suitable for academic topics, that aren't under WP:MEDRS purview, only!]

1. Find a topic that interests you, and time to work on it.
2. Find an appropriate search query for the topic. Many topics have multiple names or multiple languages, or the name is ambiguous and you need to cut out irrelevant hits.
3. Check on Google Scholar for sources. If there are too few or too many, don't bother.
4. Go through each source and see if it can be used in the article.
   • Exclude unreliable sources, GS does include WP:PREPRINTS and WP:PREDATORY journals which are not good sources. To a lesser degree, theses also aren't good sources. Be mindful of WP:PSTS too.
   • If it's a book, you can't find the full text online or WP:PAYWALLed, make a note for yourself to check a library, use WP:TWL or ask in WP:RX. Google Books isn't usually sufficient, although you can use it to determine whether a book is likely to contain substantial information or not.
   • Use each suitable source as you come across it to expand the article. If it's iffy, park it on the discussion page. Skip sources that don't add anything new.
5. See for non-GS sources. On some topics, newspapers, government websites and the like are useful. Basically repeat the same procedure as in the preceding bullets but with specialized Google searches.
6. Now it's time for a WP:NPOV check. Having read all these sources you now should have an idea of what the mainstream take on the topic is, and adjust accordingly.
7. Go through each section and rewrite to remove redundancy, bad prose and unduly complicated verbiage.
8. Write a lead section.
9. Park a {{refideas}} template on the talk page with the query strings, with "sources published after {{CURRENTYEAR}}" parameters set in the URLs so that you can update your article more easily.
10. If you did this all in a sandbox or draft, move the article to articlespace, add categories and WikiProject tags.

Note that this assumes that while Google doesn't contain all sources, it usually mentions most it not all of them.

The next article in my queue is Tupungatito and if there are no unexpected problems TRAPPIST-1. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 09:57, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

It all looks quite sound, although re points 6 and 7, unless the article looks particularly well-written already, I would often ignore what's already there and be rewriting the prose myself from scratch. Or at least only retain bits that look relevant and part of the overall balance. Most existing pages are not written to anything like FA quality.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:54, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Aye, this guide is more for writing a FA from scratch. Or when you discard most of the existing text, but careful about doing that - someone has written the existing text, after all, and they may not like seeing it thrown out. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 11:16, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

A quick recipe off the top of my head, albeit one with none of the elegance or eloquence of Giano's essay:

1. Find a topic that's the subject of at least two but no more than four books. (It doesn't need to be the sole topic of these books—for something like an artwork or a building it may well only be a chapter—but if nobody's written about it that's a red flag when it comes to notability, unless it's a genuinely new topic in which case it probably ought to be avoided anyway since it's inherently unstable and thus not suitable at FAC.);
2. Create a sandbox draft (in your userspace or offline, not in draftspace. In these early stages you don't want anyone else editing the draft; you're going to be cut-and-pasting later on and it's a PITA in terms of attribution if more than one person has edited the draft. Some editors consider anything in draftspace fair game, whereas most people respect the convention of leaving userspace drafts alone.);
3. Go through each of the books cover-to-cover adding anything that seems relevant as you go along;
4. Only now, go through Google Scholar and see if there's anything that ought to be included. If it's not in the books you used, ask yourself why it hasn't been included as that's a likely sign it's either a fringe theory or something the experts on the topic don't consider important enough to mention, and if it is in the books then those are what you should be citing, not academic papers;
5. Go through the resulting article trimming out the duplication and making sure it's not too unbalanced;
6. Go through the existing Wikipedia article (if there is one), and if there's anything in there that's not been covered in your article, import it into your draft if and only if the source actually backs up what it's claimed to say. (Prior to this stage, completely ignore the existing article, as it can introduce unconscious bias as to what weight should be given to what aspects. The important parts to cover should be what the sources considered important enough to cover, not what either you or whoever wrote the previous article thought was important.);
7. Go through the draft again, and see decide whether the sections are actually in the best order. For some topics a straight chronological approach makes sense, but for some things—particularly if they contain dull technical detail—you probably want to put the things a non-specialist would find interesting near the top, and treat the more nerdy stuff as a giant appendix after the main text;
8. Go through top-to-bottom checking for obvious MOS violations. You don't need to comply with the MOS, but you need to be prepared to explain why you're not complying;
9. Cut-and-paste the wikitext of your draft over the existing article. Don't do this until you're certain that any reasonable observer would consider your text an unequivocal improvement over the previous version or you're setting yourself up for unpleasantness;
10. Even if you hate AWB and everything it stands for, run the article through it with "general fixes" and "typo fixing" both enabled. You don't have to accept everything it suggests, but you'd be surprised how many things it picks up even on something you've proofread a dozen times;
11. If it's eligible (5× expansion and hasn't previously appeared), nominate it at DYK. Although DYK is a pointless timesink which 99% of readers don't care about, a main page appearance is a quick and easy way to get a couple of thousand complete outsiders to read your article, and they won't be shy in pointing it out if something isn't clear to non-experts and needs to be reworded;
12. Take it to FAC. I personally wouldn't bother going through peer review first; the process is largely moribund, and I find you get better results posting requests on the talkpages of people you know might be interested. Ditto for GAN; the FA process is for all its faults populated largely with competent people who want to help (and the delegates are usually quite good at shutting down the cranks), but GAN is a pure crapshoot regarding who chooses to review it, and the odds of getting a lunatic making unreasonable demands are in my experience too high to make it worthwhile.

There's probably more I've missed, but that's the formula that usually works for me. It doesn't work for topics with a lot of sources, in which case you have to decide which sources you're going to use, but for more niche topics it's a fairly straightforward formula. ‑ Iridescent 16:55, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

I'd say that's all good advice, except you should skip XII and take pleasure in what you've done without worrying about getting the little star, which isn't worth the anguish. EEng 17:02, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

It depends. Because FA gives a small but constant & permanent boost to an article's readership, if you're interested in a topic and you want it to be more widely known, it's quite an effective mechanism for getting it to a wider audience. On the general concept of "article assessment" more generally, I assume you know my opinions. ‑ Iridescent 17:16, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, I think an essay would be good, although the ones we have on FAC-writing are remarkably hard to find. I was actually thinking of the one, I think pre-packaged somewhere & produceed here, pwerhaps in the spring, using Rita Hayworth or some such star as an example, starting something like "get and read the top nine biographies...." Not important though. This is all very sensible, though I see standards have slipped somewhat re the number of sources needed (which is fine with me). Does "FA give a small but constant & permanent boost to an article's readership" - I've always doubted that. In my experience, significantly expanding and improving an article (and placing appropriate links to it) will do that (often not such a small increase either), with GA/FA status making no discernable difference, other than a main page blip. Johnbod (talk) 17:14, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

I think you're thinking of the articles SandyGeorgia wrote for the Sighpost back in the days before it deteriorated into drivel. Someone will remember where they were. ‑ Iridescent 17:19, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

What is this Sighpost of which you speak? EEng 05:14, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't think I was - never mind. Johnbod (talk) 17:22, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Drivel = understatement. Those are found at {{FCDW}}. Hope you are well SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:21, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Johnbod and Iri, I may have found where we store all of them (and I just added mine) at Wikipedia:Mentoring for FAC, which is linked in the template at the top of WT:FAC. About a year ago, I worked to try to get all of our FA-related links into one template, but per usual, my attempts were criticized, so whatever ... My guide, User:SandyGeorgia/Achieving excellence through featured content, aims specifically at medical content and was written to encourage medical editors to re-engage after a long downturn, but there is some general advice in the lower sections. (Writing a medical FA is substantially different than many other areas ... ) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:27, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Johnbod, I think you were thinking of this about Audrey Hepburn, from Iridescent to Ritchie. Vaticidalprophet 02:54, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Vaticidalprophet, Indeed I was - many thanks! 2018, my goodness! But I think it was linked to more recently. But it seems standards have slipped a little now; I blame Brexit. Johnbod (talk) 03:20, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, the only guide I can think of is Giano's. Wikipedia:100,000 feature-quality articles was for a while the only "guide" I was aware of, and I had to go off Giano's work as a model for Ludwigsburg Palace. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 17:34, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

@Johnbod: Be careful, though! Nominating an article at DYK can actually decrease its quality because of the high number of editors making good-faith edits. This is called edit creep. Minkai^(rawr!)_{(see where I screwed up)} 17:40, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Hey! Who are you calling a creep?! lol Don't worry, Iri, we know "It's your thing!!". Martinevans123 (talk) 17:44, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

That's not too much of a problem - you just have to watch them for a day or so, & be prepared to revert. FA can be worse, but the same applies. Johnbod (talk) 17:46, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Regarding Does "FA give a small but constant & permanent boost to an article's readership" - I've always doubted that, this one is empirically testable—just find an article that had already existed for a while before its FAC and look at the readership figures over time. All things being equal, FA status gives a page between 10-20 extra readers per day, which doesn't sound like much but adds up over time; for a niche topic like Droxford railway station it consistently gets roughly three times as many readers post-FAC than prior. It also makes the articles much more likely to be picked up on elsewhere by lazy journalists and bloggers, leading to viewspikes and a subsequent persisting rise in readership as people tell their friends (the most extreme example I know of, which I may have mentioned once or twice, is the manner in which Wikipedia created the Tarrare meme). ‑ Iridescent 18:38, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

The only article of mine that someone else has copied is Nevado Sajama, which was extensively "used" (plagiarized?) by an academic publication, and that's not even a GA. <rant>Why couldn't even one geologist bother to write an article about that volcano...</rant> Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:34, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, but taking an article to FAC is by definition "significantly expanding and improving an article (and placing appropriate links to it)" in almost every case. I'm saying that alone will produce increased views. If it wasn't the middle of the night I'd hunt up examples. Johnbod (talk) 04:03, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

But it's not, though. Unless the page is one that you created from scratch, expanding an article shouldn't have any impact on the number of incoming links. FA status generates a link from WP:FA, which is what creates a small but steady stream of extra visitors, adds an incoming link from the front pages of the relevant WikiProjects, and (depending on whether the topic fits their diversity-at-all-costs agenda) can make it more likely the WMF's official social media accounts publicize it. (Since FA status by definition doesn't stop anyone visiting the page but creates additional opportunities for people to discover it, it would beimpossible for it not to cause an increase in pageviews. The only question is whether the scale of that increase is significant.)

Plus obviously there's the TFA factor. As you presumably know I think the original rationale behind TFA ("Everybody thinks Wikipedia is poorly written and is obsessed with American pop culture, let's make it clear to readers that we can do high quality writing on a diverse range of topics") no longer applies and we should seriously consider replacing it with something else. That said, there's no denying that if you give it a well-written blurb you can supercharge readership on the day, and a small but not negligible proportion of those readers are subsequently interested enough to want to find out more about the topic. (See the spikes in pageviews for Etty's biography when Sirens and Cleopatra were on the main page a couple of months ago.) ‑ Iridescent 06:23, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

On the contrary, a proper expansion should include checking the appropriate incoming links are there - very often they are not, with some amazing omissions. This is something I also look at (at least a bit) doing an FAC review, though it is evident most people don't. The FA list page averages under 2,000 views per day (a good number no doubt by the FA workforce), with over 6,000 articles on it, but no doubt very catchy titles attract extra attention, and "art" is at the top of the page. Of course the main page draws extra views to main articles linked from there - this effect can be strong even for DYK - but those going to Etty's biography won't know, or I believe care or mostly notice, whether or not it is FA, and I don't see why that would add to the effect. Johnbod (talk) 20:24, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

"Art" may be at the top of WP:FA and the articles tend to have engaging titles, but most of what I do is neither art-related nor has an engaging title—I'd say with reasonable confidence that Quainton Road railway station, possibly the least engaging-looking page on the entire site, wouldn't get the readers it gets were it not on that list, for example. (Granborough Road railway station and Calvert railway station, the next stations on the line—and thus linked from the same templates and pages as Quainton Road and likely to be of equal interest to anyone who'd actually go searching for the topic—consistently get less than half its pageviews.) Remember the master list at WP:FA isn't the only place people find them; the rusty sheriff's badge also means that the page goes on the "recognized content" lists for multiple wikiprojects and the like, gets highlighted on the list of interwiki links on other projects, gets mentioned in the Signpost on the increasingly rare occasions they remember to update their list, and so forth.

My point about the spikes in pageviews for Etty isn't that the biography's an FA; you see spikes in articles linked from the TFA even if the articles in question are poor-quality stubs. The point is that when articles go on the main page, a non-negligible proportion of people who click on them are actually reading them enough that they want to find out more so move on to related articles, demonstrating that at least some readers are actually reading the TFAs rather than just clicking them by mistake, and you can—to at least some degree—make a rough guess as to how many readers are actually engaging with items on the main page rather than just clicking on them, thinking "this looks boring", and moving on by looking at the size of the spikes in views of pages linked from the article that was on the main page. It's not specific to me, I just used it as an example but you can repeat the exercise with any TFA. Here are the equivalent spikes for Charles Sargeant Jagger & James Glen Sivewright Gibson and Linn County, Kansas & Marais des Cygnes River when Portsmouth War Memorial and Battle of Marais des Cygnes were on the main page a couple of days ago, for instance. The public actually do sometimes read the items that are linked from the main page.

(TL;DR summary: at least some people do actually read and pay attention to TFA and DYK rather than just skim the first paragraph, and this is demonstrable because we can see people following wikilinks from things mentioned in the articles.) ‑ Iridescent 21:59, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Just saw this thread and it strikes me that "how to write an FA" depends a good deal on why you're writing it. If it's because you enjoy TFA or you just like to accumulate the stars, it's tempting to look for topics that allow for repeated application of an approach, or at least repeated use of a given set of resources. If you're doing it as a way of checking that you've brought the article to a high standard, the rules about references go out of the window. There's a fair amount of overlap -- if you're writing about obscure railway stations or US coins or science fiction magazines because you're already very knowledgeable about them and enjoy the process, then you're going to be able to repeat the work regardless of your motivation. But if you're doing it because you somehow got interested in the topic and wanted to see if you'd done a good a job as you hoped, then the research, writing, and FAC will look very different. In my case that would describe radiocarbon dating and ice drilling, for example, whereas the long sequences of Anglo-Saxon king or science fiction magazine FACs I've nominated could be of either type. I would guess most prolific FAC nominators have some of both types. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:44, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Huh, I have literally no recollection of writing that Audrey Hepburn thing. I'm glad to see that what I wrote now tallies with what I wrote then, so at least I'm not totally making it up as I go along. (The discrepancies are that the Hepburn one has some extra steps—like using more sources than usual and leaving changes long enough for people to object before continuing—to take into account that she's a potentially contentious topic.) I agree with what Mike Christie isn't quite saying, that the FA process is generally better off viewed as the closest thing Wikipedia has to a formal peer review process, rather than as an achievement in its own right. (Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations was a decade ago, and we've still to implement the recommended change of making WP:WBFAN alphabetical by default to reduce the "high score table" aspect. We probably ought to revisit that.) ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

For the interested, User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/TRAPPIST-1 is an example of what a draft looks like when you are between steps 4 and 5 of my list. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:27, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

For the connoisseurs of English history...

...is the claim made by this book that 1258 was the year where the English Parliament was established reasonable? Naturally, it's about 1257 Samalas eruption since that book draws a connection between the largest volcanic eruption of the last 2,000 years and events in England and it's December where I do the annual update of all my FAs/GAs/DYKs. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:44, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Parliament of England - it's ... arguably one of the possible dates you can choose. Parliament isn't something that has a foundational document like the UN so it's notoriously subject to argument about when exactly it was "founded" - but 1258 isn't an awful spot to pluck out of the possibilities. Generally the more usual date is 1295 with the Model Parliament but... sometime in Simon de Montfort's efforts is also supportable. Ealdgyth (talk) 13:15, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

That's the Oxford Parliament (1258). It's a common claim, though of course it resembled a grand mafia convention of barons rather more than modern Westminster. But it was the first English Parliament, though there were Anglo-Saxon precedents. Johnbod (talk) 13:18, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

The transition from absolute monarchy to parliamentarianism was more of a bumpy process than an event. After Magna Carta (1215) (no new taxes without consent) you need the Provisions of Oxford (1258) and then the Provisions of Westminster (1259). But the body of nobles established then looks little like parliament as we know it today. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.132.232.157 (talk) 13:21, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

The preceding Provisions of Oxford (April), and the start of the Parliament in June were not long after the eruption (probably September the previous year), & all part of a long-running political row, so I doubt any connection should be made. Johnbod (talk) 13:26, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Quite so. List of parliaments of England starts in 1236/7 but the Statute of Merton was enacted a year or so earlier. Any connection with a volcanic eruption in 1257 seems tenuous at best. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.132.232.157 (talk) 15:19, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

What they said. The English Parliament wasn't created by fiat like the US Congress, but gradually evolved out of more or less informal gatherings of landowners and the descendants of William the Conqueror's knights, and possibly surviving folk memories of the Witangemot. I find it very unlikely that a volcanic eruption had anything to do with it; the issues that pushed the baronial class into prominence were the crusades simultaneously upping the tax burden while depleting the military thus sapping the Crown's power to suppress banditry and rebellions, and the difficulties of a single monarch being ruler of both England and France and thus having to leave one or the other unattended and delegate power to local sheriffs and nobles. ‑ Iridescent 17:07, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Seems like my gut feeling was correct, there. I'll leave it out, then. The idea that the eruption influenced the Mongol empire at least has backing by more than one source. Unrelated, but interesting factoid of the day: There are mice on another volcano in Chile/Argentina's desert. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 18:07, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

You have to wonder what the mice are doing up there. It might be free of predators, but there can't be much if anything for them to eat. ‑ Iridescent 04:50, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

There are apparently algae and plants on volcanic gas vents (albeit these are better documented at Socompa) and this mouse species apparently isn't very picky with food. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:11, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

When multiple definitions exist

It seems that everyone, from scummy pseudoscience peddlers on up to mainstream academics in traditional scholarly fields, wants their thing to be called "scientific". I get it; science is respectable, and there's money there. Nobody, even the actual fine arts, really wants to be called a non-science. The stupid idea that "non-science is another word for nonsense" seems to have discredited every traditional non-science subject. Even people who study poetry have tried to claim that they are scientists: "Poetics is a science concerned with poetry as art", writes one, and "poetics is the scientific study of 'artistic' language", writes another. All scholarly fields want to be up to date and scientific.

The article Linguistics, which begins by defining the subject as the scientific study of language – complete with the link to Science – has made me wonder again whether we should avoid using that label on the non-traditional or borderline subjects. Our discussion on the talk page demonstrates that the opening sentence merely parrots what many, but not all, definitions in textbooks and dictionaries give as their definition; it is not merely a verifiable sentiment, but a word-for-word copy of a statement that can be found in many books.

However, we have also found a reference work that explains what linguists mean when they say that linguistics is "scientific": The "Four aims of the scientific approach to language, often cited in introductory works on the subject, are comprehensiveness, objectivity, systematicness, and precision." I think this contrasts with the definition at Science, which is "a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world". If you read the opening sentence of linguistics, and click through to the linked article about science to figure out exactly what's meant by calling the study of language "scientific", you will get a mostly incorrect idea. Both claim to be systematic enterprises, and possibly both are meant to be comprehensive (at least with regards to suitable subject matter), objective, and precise, but only one of them is characterized by testable explanations and predictions.

I have been wondering whether we should stop using the word science (and its various derivatives) in such cases, or at least to stop linking to the article Science when we know that the definition that's intended is more like "scholarly" or "intellectually rigorous". What do you all think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:05, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I clicked on one of the sources for the definition of science in the lead sentence of our article. Merriam-Webster included both "the science of linguistics" and "the science of theology" as examples supporting their definitions. The talk page of "science" has repeatedly discussed how it should be defined. The articles Branches of science and History of science reinforce there are multiple meanings, which have changed over time. I wonder if that lead sentence only really covers one modern usage, and reflects the difficulty of writing an encyclopaedia article about a "thing" with multiple definitions. -- Colin°^Talk 14:34, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

"The science of linguistics" is given as an example for the definition "a subject that is formally studied in a college, university, etc.". Under that definition, almost anything is "a science", including dancing, glass blowing, cooking, sewing, and wine tasting. I still don't believe that we should write "Dancing is the science of" anything, even though you can get a graduate degree in it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:04, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Whether or not the Scientific method is used is the key point about the modern definition, as opposed to the lingering older definition of just "knowing stuff". At least historical linguistics can I think fairly claim to be scientific, although actual experiments are hard to do. Theology not so much, although parts of Biblical studies touches on science. Generally literary studies people are happy enough to be in The arts, & the claims at Poetics should maybe go, not that I know much about the subject. Unlike art historians and archaeologists they don't now have an important laboratory-based wing. Adding a sourced version of some of this might be good. Johnbod (talk) 15:17, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Historical linguistics absolutely is scientific (see comparative linguistics or simply philology in its older sense), and like any discipline making hypotheses about the past can be tested against what we know of the past (there is a parallel with testing some astrophysics theories by what we can observe out there in the universe, which is another way of saying we are observing the past history of the universe as we look out further and further into space). I do like what someone put at philology:

Philology, with its focus on historical development (diachronic analysis), is contrasted with linguistics due to Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis. The contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and Chomskyan linguistics alongside its emphasis on syntax, although research in historical linguistics is often characterized by reliance on philological materials and findings.

Now, is the structuralist mode of reasoning scientific? I guess you would have to ask the post-structuralists... :-) Carcharoth (talk) 08:17, 3 December 2021 (UTC) I agree that 'scholarly' or 'intellectually rigorous' can often be a better descriptor. Carcharoth (talk) 08:20, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Arthur C Clarke wrote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I wonder if "Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from pseudoscience". From Dark matter we have "a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe...it does not absorb, reflect or emit electromagnetic radiation, and is therefore difficult to detect." From Quark we have "All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. Quarks come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Sea quarks form when a gluon of the hadron's color field splits." These advanced scientists wear white coats, talk complete gibberish, and cost the public billions of pounds. The pseudoscientists wear white coats, talk complete gibberish, and cost the public billions of pounds. Is it any wonder the general public are confused about what science is?

Consider also "scientific racism". There's that "science" word, and the article lists immensely important figures in science. At many times in history, these views were considered part of the mainstream scientific canon of knowledge and belief. I don't think scientific racism transformed from being mainstream to pseudo because of the scientific method. Its destruction came from outside of science. So I think science has more complexity than we'd like, contains more convenient beliefs than we'd like, and doesn't necessarily improve itself though continued application of the scientific method. -- Colin°^Talk 17:40, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't really agree - like phrenology, "scientific racism" claimed to be based on the Scientific method, and was defeated when these claims were disproved, a process speeded up when the Nazis were so keen on it. Most pseudoscience makes little or no claim on the public purse, doesn't it? Decades ago, I went to the main Delhi railway station to book a reservation. A huge hall on the upper floor, formerly the Third Class Ladies Waiting Room or something, had been cleared out, and some twenty computer terminals spread around, each on its own table. All pretty new then I think. It took me some moments to work out why there was a strong impression of being in a James Bond movie, until I realized that it was the white lab coats all the ticketing staff were wearing. Johnbod (talk) 17:54, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

We are getting a little off topic but... I know it claimed to be scientific (and even today there is still poor quality "science" going on) but I don't really buy the idea that it was scienced into the fringes. It wasn't just about Nazis. There were eugenics programmes in many countries, and the ideas also supported slavery and colonialism. Your Ladies Waiting Room example reminds me of that other "scientific" idea that women were inferior to men. That didn't disappear just because men scienced their way into realising women were equal. Wrt pseudoscience, this market research claims "The global dietary supplements market size was valued at USD 140.3 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6% from 2021 to 2028". That's just one portion. There used to be homeopathic hospital funded on NHS, and this is still popular IIRC in Germany. -- Colin°^Talk 19:24, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I think that "scientific racism" took hits all round: it is wrong in its factual claims and evil in its values, and most people will accept at least one of those two reasons as a sufficient reason to reject it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:11, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

My take would be that the "science" line is too blurry to have any kind of straightforward definition. To stick with scientific racism, in the context of its 19th century heyday I'd consider it a legitimate field of study. In the context of advanced animal species and particularly those species with which the 19th-century scientists were most familiar, humans are something of an outlier in not having a demonstrable strong correlation between appearance and abilities. (Statememt of the obvious, but all the scientists in the period we're talking about, between Darwin and Hitler, would have grown up surrounded by dogs, cats, horses and cattle, all of which are species for which "the breeds from different places have different physical and behavioral characteristics" is unquestionably true.) Since "people of different backgrounds behave differently" is true even now and would have been a lot truer in an era before mass travel and broad cultural mixing, "are differences in ability the result of genetic variation or purely of cultural and economic factors?" would have been a reasonable question, in the same way that alchemy and astrology were once legitimate fields of scientific study until there was sufficient scientific evidence that elements weren't transmutable and that the planets were too distant to have measurable effects on earth.

@Colin, lumping all of dietary supplements into "pseudoscience" isn't entirely fair. Certainly there's a fair share of stuff sold that won't be metabolized and just consists of people paying large sums for their pee to be a slightly different color, but there are some dietary supplements like iron for anaemia which unquestionably have genuine health benefits when used correctly. ‑ Iridescent 06:40, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

There's a supplement that makes my pee a different colour? Ooooh. But yes, I totally agree that's an unfair statistic. I'm not sure how to extract the supplements that never help; the supplements that could help but are taken by people who have enough in their diet anyway; and the supplements that are harmful. If these market data folk have ever done that kind of breakdown, it is probably locked away in one of those research publications you have to pay lots of money for. But I suspect they haven't as helpfulness isn't relevant to profit. Precedence Research claim "the global homeopathic products market size was valued at US$ 6.2 billion in 2020...expected to hit around US$ 19.7 billion by 2030". IBISWorld says the chiropractic industry is worth $18 billion in the US alone. The Large Hadron Collider cost $4.75 billion. The James Webb telescope costs $9.7 billion.

Coming back to the what is science question. You note that astrology was "once [a] legitimate field[] of scientific study until there was sufficient scientific evidence..that the planets were too distant to have measurable effects on earth". That's one way of rejecting it, but I don't think a reasonable explanation of how it might work is necessary for science. There are plenty drugs (and ketogenic diet) where we are pretty clueless about how they might actually work. The dark matter that I mocked earlier is an imaginative idea to explain why some models/calculations don't work, but is as non evidential as water memory. Wrt falsifiability, if you can't see or detect dark matter, how do you prove it doesn't exist? Perhaps someone brighter than me knows how dark matter fits into "science" vs "something we need to invent for our model to work". If the explanation for astrology is cognitive bias at seeing patterns of cause and effect that don't exist, how did it get off the ground as a science? And although we comfortably dismiss it as a pseudoscience, that debate continues in India. What is science, if millions of people think something is a science but which can't be a science according to our definitions? -- Colin°^Talk 10:47, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

I've heard of supplements who make your poop a different colour! No, don't ask me where...

Regarding dark matter, we do see its gravitational effects, I don't think it falls squarely into one of the two boxes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:06, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Pretty much any multivitamin supplement—or food boosted with B-vitamins like Red Bull—will turn your pee an alarming shade of day-glo orange, as your kidneys politely observe that unless you're living entirely on candy bars you're already getting everything you need from your diet and flush your expensive purchases straight back out of your system. Any food supplement containing senna will make your pee an alarming pink, while some more dubious supplements are laced with methylene blue (probably more for the placebo element of "it made my pee change color, it proves it's having an effect" than for any health benefit). Regarding poop, lots of things will change its color; beetroot is probably the most obvious.

I doubt that the explanation for astrology is cognitive bias at seeing patterns of cause and effect that don't exist. From the perspective of an ancient Babylonian/Greek/Chinese, I'd imagine the line of thought was along the lines of "The movements of the sun and moon have clearly observable effects on the earth. It stands to reason that the planets will also have effects although to a lesser extent as they're either smaller or at a greater distance depending on which model of the celestial sphere I subscribe to. Thus when the planets come into conjunction, the cumulative effect of multiple minor pulls acting in the same direction ought to be measurable." Add in a dose of divine design—when god(s) created the universe why did they go to the hassle of creating the stars if they didn't serve some purpose?—and astrology is a completely reasonable theory for its time. ‑ Iridescent 06:29, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm off down to Holland & Barrett to ask them for some of the blue, pink and orange wee pills. You are quite right that astrology has a physical explanation. I'd forgotten about the sun and moon. -- Colin°^Talk 11:12, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

You may be right that this is how it started. But why would astrology continue for so long? The one explanation I have is that for a long time, the main purpose of astrology was to get sucker rulers to pay for the funding of astronomy... —Kusma (talk) 12:57, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

I'd argue that you need to look at things from the perspective of the times. From a creationist viewpoint—which up until the late 18th century was synonymous with the scientific viewpoint—it was a given that everything was divinely designed. In that context, why would the creator have bothered creating the stars if they didn't have any effect? Prior to Hutton and Darwin, science was much more akin to what in the modern world we'd call taxonomy; to a Newton, Owen or Galileo for any given object/species/chemical/natural law/phenomenon the question of "what is its purpose?" was just as important as "what is it?". ‑ Iridescent 16:57, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Back to the "My take would be that the "science" line is too blurry to have any kind of straightforward definition" part of this thread:

When:

• We can verify that a word (any word, really: science, hypoglycemica, poverty, god) has been used, in a potentially appropriate way, by enough sources to make that a DUE thing to say about the subject, but
• what those sources actually mean isn't exactly what the article of that same name (e.g., Science, Hypoglycemia, Poverty, God) is talking about,

then

1. I don't think we should link to the (arguably) "non-matching" article.
2. I think we should normally describe the subject in a way that either avoids the potentially confusing terminology or explains it (e.g., Human science#Meaning of 'science').

Does anyone completely disagree? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:49, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I disagree to some extent. There's nothing wrong with linking to the "non-matching" article provided that it's made clear what the issue is. I have no problem with Astronomy linking to Astrology; the problem is how we signpost what's undisputed, what's disputed, and what's fringe. ‑ Iridescent 17:56, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I would tend to agree with the broad strokes of both takes here. Sure, a RS is a RS... but common sense dictates that some reasonable accomodation be made for differing uses of language in a S that is otherwise R. Otherwise, there are all kinds of absurd and fully-citable insinuations about Toronto being a gay city in 1897("'Tis a gay city". The Leader-Post. Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. 1897-06-17. p. 2.) or Hugh Johnson's involvement with big boners in 1940 ("Hugh Johnson". The Times Dispatch. Richmond, Virginia. 1940-09-10. p. 11.). With a term like "science" that has a generally understood definition as well as a technical academic definition, the situation seems similar to something like "exponential increase". Here we see that term used by an attorney to describe a series with two terms increasing from three to five ("Death". Springfield News-Sun. Springfield, Ohio. 2014-02-23. p. 6.). This does not mean he's a crap attorney, or that the Springfield News-Sun is a crap newspaper. Certainly, "the series [3, 5] is a clear example of exponential increase" would be a fringe opinion for a mathematician. Personally, I would try not to quote that directly in an article, but it doesn't seem prima facie absurd to do so. It definitely doesn't belong in exponential increase -- it might belong in capital punishment in Ohio -- but I think wikilinking exponential increase would be a little strange. jp×g 19:59, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Those are good examples, @JPxG. Thanks for posting them.

Using the Toronto example, I think that "Toronto was described as a gay city" would be preferable to "Toronto was described as a gay city". Or to use Iridescent's example, I think we'd want to say that "The American heavy metal band CAGE's second album was called Astrology", rather than "The American heavy metal band CAGE's second album was called Astrology". The link seems to signal that the linked article/definition is the relevant one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:37, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree with that, but I'd have no problem with "The American heavy metal band CAGE's second album was called Astrology, named for the belief that the relative position of celestial bodies affects human affairs". (Astrology isn't a great example as every reader knows what it means so defining it would be overlinking, but you get the idea. "Ozuna's third album was called Nibiru, named for the belief that a planetary body is on a collision course with Earth" would maybe be a better example.) ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't think we can safely assume that all of Wikipedia's readers are able to remember whether astronomy or astrology is the one that's responsible for fortune–cookie-type sayings. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree, but I've long since given up banging my head against the brick wall erected by the strict-compliance obsessives who enforce MOS:OVERLINK. ‑ Iridescent 05:30, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think the blatant wrongness of OVERLINK in the mobile era is finally crashing into reality. At the very least, I've never lost an argument about it at either GAN or FAC (I did fail my only foray to FAC, but not for links) and when I've discussed the issue of "if you follow current MOS about linking you're screwing over most readers" to people they've generally been receptive. On the other hand, this is mostly regarding relatively jargon-heavy topics. Vaticidalprophet 05:39, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

FWIW, I think it's wrong even for the least jargon-heavy examples. Provided we're not linking every single word, I see no problem either with linking the same thing on multiple occasions (owing to the "collapsed sections on mobile so readers don't see the first usage" issue), nor with linking things with which the reader is already likely to be familiar. I have no issue at all with "Tom Hardy currently lives in France", even though readers already known what France is and don't need it defined; readers are used to wikilinks and aren't going to have their experience disrupted by seeing one, while if even one reader in ten thousand thinks "that reminds me, I'd like to learn more about France" then we're doing them a service by including the link.

All that said, this is not a fight worth fighting. The clique which owns MOS:OVERLINK reads like a Who's Who of Wikipedia's most obsessive cranks; life's too short to spend the months of foul-tempered arguing it would take to get anything changed, even if one wasn't fairly certain that the defenders of the status quo would dig in their heels until any discussion closed as "no consensus". ‑ Iridescent 06:08, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

We got pretty close to changing OVERLINK back in May. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking/Archive 21#Proposed change: Allow linking once per section, not just in first section after lede? I don't know where the consensus eventually fell. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:40, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Funnily enough, the clique which owns MOS:OVERLINK dug in their heels until the discussion closed as "no consensus"… ‑ Iridescent 08:09, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

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So here it is. I threw in my headbands for Enterprisey and Opabinia, uncertain on the others. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 18:01, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Good god, is it that time of year already? Looking at the crop of candidates—and even more so, looking at the candidates whose terms are expiring and aren't running again—I have a feeling Wikipedia:You are not irreplaceable is about to be stress-tested to its limit. ‑ Iridescent 19:01, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Of those not rerunning, at least two will be missed. One seems to have been on the Committee ever since I can remember. There are about two expiring terms who will probably be reelected and those two have the best experience and institutional memory (don't interpret that to mean they are automatically the best arbitrators). Tactical voting is probably the best solution. If some seats are left empty, so be it. Time for a reform of the system Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:08, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

I assume every candidate other than the obvious no-hoper will clear the 50% mark, so things will carry on as normal. What we really need is an election with fewer viable candidates than vacancies. Wikipedia is inherently very conservative when it comes to structural change, which is normally a good thing in that it prevents us from following every passing fad, but has the drawback of making it harder to steer the ship away from icebergs. An arbcom with half-a-dozen vacant seats would be the signal that maybe the structures that worked in 2004 are no longer fit for purpose. ‑ Iridescent 08:40, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

It's probably safe to predict that we will go through repeated spasms of lowering the percent threshold to pass, then raising it, then lowering it, and on and on. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:36, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Or, we grit our teeth and have the conversation about unbundling which we've been avoiding for ten years. Unbundling the functions of Arbcom actually makes more sense than unbludling the admin toolkit—block, delete & protect are three tools for dealing with the same root problem, but "dispute resolution panel", "top-level law enforcement body" and "court of appeal for the interpretation of ambiguous policies" don't really have much in common other than that they're all functions Jimmy decided to divest himself of at the same time. If the job had less authority—or at least, less perceived authority—there wouldn't be the annual outburst of angst since the occasional crazy or bad actor making it through would be "legitimate representation of other perspectives" rather than "giving out powerful tools with minimal oversight". ‑ Iridescent 05:45, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps, but then we'd have to have a process for picking the members of three different high-level bodies rather than one. The election each year takes a lot of time and effort, and I don't think we'd want three of those, so we'd need to figure out how that would work. Plus the three roles you identify sometimes do overlap in a given case or situation; an ArbCom case could easily involve (1) a dispute (2) over whether someone violated a potentially ambiguous policy, and (3) if so, what to do about it. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but as always, there are these ancillary questions to think through. For what it's worth, I still believe that ArbCom, while of course still important, is much less so than in the past, for reasons we've discussed before. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 14:36, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

The process for selecting members of three bodies with limited scope would be less problematic since we wouldn't need the whole SecurePoll rigmarole if we weren't engaged in the annual appointment of the Wikipedia Justice League. Some kind of Mediation Committee to gatekeep disputes could probably just have its members appointed on the basis of "anyone who wants to join can just sign up provided nobody has a strong objection", leaving Arbcom's vestigial "final authority when all else fails" function as "an annually-elected body with the power to issue binding closures to RFCs". (Both the existing RFC process for resolving disputes over policy, and the new Wikipedia:Administrative action review, would slot neatly into this structure.) ‑ Iridescent 07:15, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Administrators will no longer be autopatrolled

A recently closed Request for Comment (RFC) reached consensus to remove Autopatrolled from the administrator user group. You may, similarly as with Edit Filter Manager, choose to self-assign this permission to yourself. This will be implemented the week of December 13th, but if you wish to self-assign you may do so now. To find out when the change has gone live or if you have any questions please visit the Administrator's Noticeboard. 20:06, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

So our solution to "NPP is currently unable to handle the flood of incoming articles" is to add more articles to that flow? Sometimes I get the feeling that Wikipedia's hive mind is attempting collective suicide by deliberately strangling itself in its own bureaucracy. ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Technically, it was our "solution" to the "RfA is broken" problem. But, I shouldn't complain as I gave my thumbs-up to that proposal. Granted, my thinking there was influenced by the impression that admins having autopatrol causes some people to escalate certain content issues - that should be handled at AN/ANI - to Arbcom prematurely. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:32, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I already said this elsewhere, but I'm annoyed enough at this change-for-change's-sake that I'll repeat it here: I suspect most of the people parroting some variation on "it won't increase the NPP workload because most admins will qualify for autopatrolled anyway so they can just be re-awarded it" have no conception of how strict the requirements are. It took me three years to meet "prior creation of 25 valid articles, not including redirects or disambiguation pages", and that was back in the days when there were still a lot of redlinks so it was actually possible to find topics on which a page didn't already exist. My most recent 25 ab nihilo page creations stretch back to 2010, and I'm more prolific than most when it comes to writing about niche topics where we're less likely already to have a page. What we're actually doing here is formalizing "people who spam Wikipedia with a flood of stubs are considered more trustworthy than people who put some thought into whether a new stand-alone page is actually a good idea". ‑ Iridescent 17:00, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

When I got my Autopatrolled, one needed 50 articles - that ought to be reinstated. This change is a token change because admins can give it to themselves and half the active admins have already done so. The idea behind it was that adminship candidates should bring Autopatrol with them to their trial of ire and thus avoid oppose votes from trolls on the lines of 'not enough content work'. The irony is that admins themselves who should know better have been caught blatantly abusing it. This change will not unduly increase the burden on NPP. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:21, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Ah. the good old days—the explanation for why the threshold changed from 40 to 50 is possibly the stupidest comment in Wikipedia's history. FWIW that threshold is not easy to reach; you and I score only 90 and 78 respectively on "mainspace non-redirect non-disambiguation page creations" threshold despite being two of this wiki's most active editors (I've created 14,650 pages on this wiki alone, but 14,572 of them don't meet the strict requirement of counting towards the autopatrolled threshold). Because it's harder to create a page from scratch nowadays (even if the article doesn't exist, there's a good chance it exists as a redirect), a lot of Wikipedia's most active editors fail to meet even the reduced 25-creation threshold; BradV, Risker, L235 for instance.

I don't see how this change will avoid oppose votes from trolls on the lines of 'not enough content work'. Typically on any given RFA where this is the case, the first such oppose is mine and the rest are "per Iridescent". (The raw boilerplate is "I don't think editors who haven't had the experience of putting large amounts of work into an article, and/or defending their work against well-intentioned but wrong "improvements" or especially AFD, are in a position to empathise with quite why editors get so angry when their work's deleted and/or The Wrong Version gets protected, and I don't support users who don't add content to the mainspace being given powers to overrule those who do.", but I try to tailor it to the particular circumstances of that RFA so I don't necessarily use that exact wording.)

The opposition has nothing to do with whether or not the candidate can be trusted with autopatrolled status, but on the fact that it's impossible to judge whether someone with little or no experience of content work (whether it be page creations, image uploading, or editing existing articles) can empathize with the degree of investment people involved in on-wiki disputes can feel over things which appear trivial to outsiders. (We have a long and inglorious history of admins who don't appreciate this, primly lecturing genuine subject-matter-experts on the fact that Wikipedia policy says their expertise counts for no more than the opinion of some guy who's just wandered in having a read an article on the matter in his local paper, and then wondering why the expert is getting angry and frustrated.) As long as admins have some kind of "judge and jury" role rather than purely maintenance functions, I think it's reasonable that someone who wants authority over people engaged on a particular task should have demonstrated some understanding of that task.

It's not as if writing a handful of 200-word stubs, or uploading some photographs of a local landmark, is particularly onerous. If someone isn't even willing to meet this minimal requirement yet they're still requesting adminship, I think it's completely legitimate of me to question both their motivation and their understanding of the fact that Wikipedia adminship is supposed to be about the maintenance of an information resource, not the moderation of a social network. ‑ Iridescent 08:13, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

I bet I can find even stupidester comments! --Tryptofish (talk) 19:34, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll start you off with my usual example of "username lacks moxy, candidate should change it to something more fear-inspiring and re-apply". ‑ Iridescent 05:28, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I hinted at this at Floq's page, but one of the main functions that +autopatrolled had for admins was that it exempted all of the maintenance pages that pretty much only admins create from needing to be patrolled in the new pages feed or in the page curation tool. Despite what some might think, we actually do have people who patrol new user pages, both admins and non-admins, and given that a fair amount of user space needs to be suppressed, it is something that is needed.

I don't really think adding a few hundred sock tags to that pool of pages needing review with even less patrollers than we have patrolling articles is a net-benefit to the project. To use myself as an example - I don't qualify for autopatrolled, but I gave it to myself anyway since no one needs to look at my sock tags. I also have pretty strong content chops as the generic functionary goes, even if I haven't done much in that regards in a few years. My having autopatrolled cuts down on work while also being low-risk from a content perspective. Though if a wiki-lawyer wants to take me to RFC/U reborn, I suppose they can have at it. TonyBallioni (talk) 06:16, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

My I've created 14,650 pages on this wiki alone, but 14,572 of them don't meet the strict requirement of counting towards the autopatrolled threshold above is making much the same point. Something as basic as "emptying Category:Expired proposed deletions and creating procedural AfD nominations for those instances which aren't clear-cut and would benefit from a second opinion rather than being summarily deleted" means creating a bunch of new pages; I can't see how it benefits NPP to suddenly have thousands of dull administrative pages dumped into their queue. (This is true for all admins; I'm not some kind of outrider. To pick on User:ToBeFree, just because he seems to be the first person making an "I never create pages so this won't have any impact on NPP!" argument at the RfC, his not having the autopatrolled right would have dumped a little over 14,000 pages into the NPP queue.) ‑ Iridescent 07:15, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Heh. 13,642 of which are user talk pages. Hm hm. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 11:33, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

I went through a portion of the NPP queue the other day, and noticed that large numbers of redirects from intra-userspace moves, and redirects from moving userspace drafts to mainspage, were in there (about a thousand in the last 30 days). I'm thinking of setting up a bot/script to go through them, because I can't think of any reason why we should give a damn about userspace redirects (unless they're something like User:Example/Worthless fraud and piece of trash child molestor redirecting to a BLP). There were about a thousand in 30 days of unreviewed pages (ot of a total queue of 8,000) -- it wouldn't be an Industrial Revolution of NPP technology, but it'd certainly count for something. jp×g 07:45, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

On that note, there are a whopping 19,851 unpatrolled userspaces in total since November 10, compared to 10,083 mainspace pages. What da...? jp×g 07:48, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Less people tend to review user space, but it has a ton of creations, because ACPERM doesn't impact it, and some of our tutorial pages suggest creating things there. A lot of it tends to be problematic. TonyBallioni (talk) 08:22, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Well there is over a thousand useless pages right there for an indefinately blocked user (who is unlikely to ever be unblocked) that someone could do something about if they felt the need to cut down the total amount. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:22, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

That editor (a) is an inveterate pusher of boundaries and (b) has a lot of very active cronies who will proxy on his behalf. Any admin trying to clean up the messes he's left would spend the next year or so being constantly dragged to noticeboards by his coterie for alleged "admin abuse". I don't think you were around for the very similar case of Betacommand, but have a read of WP:AN/B and its archives to get a feel for how such a cleanup is likely to go. ‑ Iridescent 07:24, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Actually I was around for BC/Delta but not visible. I was aware of the issues but had no real need to get engaged. Mainly because I am fairly hardline on NFCC, their actions didnt impact me so much. I think I only commented when the obvious BC/Delta sock Weriath started to ramp up the behaviour that got BC/Delta sanctioned. And even then it wasnt BC's actions that drove me to it, it was the utter blatant hypocrisy in the Admins who enabled and protected Betacommand's socking that was so disgusting. Betacommand has probably done more than any other single editor to make tolerance of problematic and disruptive automated editing lower than it would otherwise be. I could make a good argument that had not Betacommand thoroughly laid the groundwork before 2010, Magioladitis and Rich Farmbrough would not have incurred blocks relatively swiftly in comparison. Of course the extended-duration to which they were allowed/enabled in disrupting other editors, after the initial problems were identified, were similar to Betacommand/Delta/Weriath. ENWP admin corps is remarkable in its tolerance of clearly disruptive editors, while also being remarkable in its complete absence of consideration for the victims of said disruption. And this despite the fact that most of the policies and procedures are not actually written that way. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:07, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

All three of the editors you mention had one common factor: an extreme "I don't care what everyone else thinks, I'm doing the Lord's work so I can't be wrong" attitude towards their bots and scripts. It's sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that 99% of automated editing is completely uncontentious; all it would have taken for any of the three to avoid sanctions would have been either "I see what the problem is, I'll fix that", "I personally don't agree that it's problematic but if it's causing issues I'll stop", or "You're mistaken, it's not causing problems, and here's an explanation as to why". Rich had a particular issue, which even BC didn't have, in that he was actively evading the safeguards and throttles that we have in place to prevent crapflooding; I suspect that's why when the book was finally thrown, it was thrown harder than usual. ‑ Iridescent 16:07, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Io, Saturnalia!

		Io, Saturnalia!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:56, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

And the same to you! December seems to come along earlier every year. ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Songs of the season

		Holiday cheer
		Here is a snowman a gift a boar's head and something blue for your listening pleasure. Enjoy and have a wonderful 2022 I. MarnetteD|Talk 02:44, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Likewise! I do like that photo… ‑ Iridescent 07:02, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Happy holidays...

Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:34, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

And the same to you! ‑ Iridescent 04:58, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Happy Christmas!

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing everybody a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Adoration of the Kings (Bramantino) is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 14:50, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

And to you! ‑ Iridescent 14:30, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Nadolig llawen a blwyddyn newydd dda

		Nadolig llawen a blwyddyn newydd dda
		So here's some Jingle Wings and some Jingle Navidad Cubana and some Bryn and some Crickmore:Crewe just for you!! Very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:24, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

A'r un peth, gobeithio y cewch chi flwyddyn newydd fendigedig a gwyliau hapus! (Beio google os mai gibberish yw hwn, ni allaf ond siarad am dri gair o hyn.) ‑ Iridescent 14:29, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Google Translate is Still a Cucking Funt, etc. looks fine to me! Martinevans123 (talk) 14:38, 24 December 2021 (UTC) p.s. sorry about the effing and jeffing

Your reverts

It appears that I have run into this situation yet again. See everything in this diff. It appears that even though the source is public domain in other countries, most published works later than 1926 are still copyrighted in the United States. This chart appears to be the most handy guide we have. Pinging Nthep and Premeditated Chaos just to be safe. Scorpions13256 (talk) 23:26, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

This guide appears to be even clearer. Scorpions13256 (talk) 23:39, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Meyrick lived in England, the book was published and printed in England, he died in 1938 meaning his books are out of copyright in England, and the holding institution for this particular book is in England. I'm inclined to agree with the BHL where they say Copyright Status: Public domain. The BHL considers that this work is no longer under copyright protection; even if it weren't, I'm not going to start revdeleting since there's obviously zero potential that Meyrick's heirs are going to take legal action over our republishing content from a book that's undoubtedly in the public domain under English law. ‑ Iridescent 07:20, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

(Since I got pinged). No one's disputing that the books are PD in England, but the problem is that the URAA restored US copyright to foreign works. Since the WMF is on US soil, it has to go by US copyright law, as idiotic as it may be. Of course it's unlikely that we'll be sued by the estate, but whether or not legal action may be taken is not the bar for removing content that violates copyrights. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 08:11, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

As per PMC. The URAA is a complete pain and unfortunately we have to work within it. Nthep (talk) 10:18, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I see that the source says "1923-1930" so - assuming that it's a publication date and that parts of it were published sequentially - it seems like parts might be under copyright [under URAA terms] and other parts would not be. Which parts are we talking about here? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:11, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Sorry I took so long to respond. I don't have internet access until after 5:30 on weekdays. It appears that the whole thing is just one giant book on individual species of Lepidoptera. The species do not appear to be separated by year of publication. I am not sure how much of the book you have read. If we have all been wrong this entire time, I am more than willing to go through all of my past edits and request that the content come back. I always use the same edit summary, so it won't take long. Scorpions13256 (talk) 22:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

It was literally published as a series of booklets that were then collated into volumes, so the publication date changes every few pages (example example). Parts will be PD by any definition, but it's cartainly not a good use of time checking them all individually. ‑ Iridescent 05:33, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Was the book copyrighted in the United States? If so, was the copyright renewed? Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:02, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I've been unable to determine whether or not the book was published/copyrighted in the US at the same time it was published in England, so my guess is that it was not. Unfortunately, it was not in the public domain in its source country as of the URAA date of January 1 1996, so it doesn't meet the special case whose criteria is "1926 through 1977: Published without compliance with US formalities, and in the public domain in its source country as of URAA date" (see Commons:Hirtle_chart). ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:14, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I think an adminstrator may want to review what has been redacted at Keiferia chloroneura. I went through all of my old edits as I promised, and this is the only one from the same source that may have been published before 1927. All of my other removals look good. The four that Iridescent reverted were likely also published in 1925. Scorpions13256 (talk) 22:01, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Diannaa, I wouldn't normally bother you but if you're around would you mind giving Scorpions a second opinion regarding the above one? This is a slightly odd case, as the sources in question were published as a partwork series of installments and only later collated into a book, so the copyright status is literally different for individual pages of the same source. (Although this very much goes against WMF dogma, I do stand by what I said above that this is not something about which I'm losing the slightest sleep if we get it wrong. The articles have such minimal traffic that if we delete something we shouldn't we're not inconveniencing anyone, and the commercial value is so minimal that if we keep something we shouldn't there's zero realistic legal risk.) ‑ Iridescent 11:21, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Ironically, if we let the Ruigeroeland CCI sit untouched for as long as most CCIs sit, the majority of his sources will hit PD and we won't have to care. I'm not saying that's the only reason I've been ignoring it (it was something like 75 unbelievably tedious subpages long to start with), but... ♠PMC♠ (talk) 12:10, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't even call it ironic. There's more work at CCI than there is people to do it especially since MRG left; prioritising "blatant copyright violations with the potential to have genuine commericial and/or legal impact on Wikipedia and reusers" over "technical cases to do with differing copyright expiry dates between the US and other jurisdictions" would seem to be straightforward common sense. ‑ Iridescent 12:46, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

My preference is not not base copyright decisions on the likelihood of us getting caught or getting sued. I would just go by the Hirtle chart and US copyright law. In cases where we are unable to determine the copyright status, my preference is to assume material is copyright unless proven otherwise.— Diannaa (talk) 12:37, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

What was I thinking??

Thanks for reverting my G13 request. I haven't the faintest clue what I was thinking—I was checking if an old-ish SQL script I had was still working, that was the first draft I checked from its results, and because Xtools wasn't giving the "(+n months)" text, I checked the edit history and somehow assumed that October was six months ago. I've had plenty of silly mistakes in the past but this certainly is my clearest "huh?!" one... Perryprog (talk) 17:28, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

No worries at all, we've all done it. If I had to guess, the fact that the original creator has had their username oversighted from the logs (no idea why, I assume it contained contact details as I can't imagine a User:You all suck donkey dick type vandal would be creating what appear to be legitimate attempts at Wikipedia articles) confused the script into thinking it was created back in UseModWiki days before usernames existed in their current form and thus was 19 years old. ‑ Iridescent 17:39, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

It's not oversighted, it's only revision-deleted; see this (admins only, obviously), which shows it was an IP address that was hidden. In page histories the display of revdel'd info can be a bit weird. Graham87 10:59, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Well that is just plain weird. There's nothing remotely identifying about the IP; it's a generic dynamic IP in California. Very strange. ‑ Iridescent 15:31, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Huh. I've seen requests on the IRC help channel for hiding IP addresses due to forgetting to log in or just "because" (which is mildly ironic as that reveals their IP to anyone in the channel, though it's normally all helpers), and as far as I know those requests normally go through. Perryprog (talk) 18:20, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

A10

Hey, I just realized you have deleted my hours of work by a single click. I did not know such a topic was created in the past. AFAIK, WP:10 only applies to " duplicates an existing English Wikipedia article, and that does not expand upon, detail or improve information within any existing article(s) on the subject..." My creation of course included items which is not covered in the the current page. I suggest restoring my content so that we can merge the two contents. Best, --Mhhossein ^talk 03:13, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

By the way, have a blessed year. --Mhhossein ^talk 03:16, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Mhhossein see User:Mhhossein/2021 U.S.–Iran naval incident.

Iri, figured you wouldn't mind because of time zones, etc. Apologies if stepping on toes. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:53, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you Tony. I wish you a nice year. --Mhhossein ^talk 05:33, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

No problem at all—thanks Tony. ‑ Iridescent 07:56, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

New topic

Do you think the articles created by this user are appropriate for mainspace? They seem to be making a lot of them, and reverting my moves/recreating the article from the redirect when I draftify them. More on this IP. – AssumeGoodWraith (talk | contribs) 09:33, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I personally don't think Wikipedia should be hosting pages like that, but I don't know enough about tennis to judge whether this is a major enough tournament that there actually is a case for going into that level of detail. It's probably best to ask at WT:TENNIS, as the people there will know what the relevant precedents are for such things being kept/deleted. ‑ Iridescent 09:40, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi just asking a question

Hi I was just wondering what you thought of Jerry Heller if you don't mind 49.186.229.223 (talk) 08:39, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I have no idea who he is. Although mine is currenntly the most recent edit to the page, that was purely an ultra-minor edit standardizing the formatting of the commas in the dates. ‑ Iridescent 08:44, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I've used Heller (before his death) as an example of BLP issues arising in unexpected places; see "No Vaseline." Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:11, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Another question

Can n actually do this as a job 49.186.229.223 (talk) 08:41, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Do what as a job? If you mean Wikipedia editing, generally no; except for a handful of specialists who work for the Wikimedia Foundation (which owns Wikipedia) we generally block paid editors as it's virtually impossible for them to edit neutrally. ‑ Iridescent 08:44, 2 January 2022 (UTC)