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Mark Bratchers Government Project

Why did y'all hack the military JAMIE LYNN PATTERSON (talk) 00:46, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

@JAMIE LYNN PATTERSON (talk page watcher) Now, how does one hack the military? I thought that was nigh to impossible. Or maybe you're referencing an edit Iridescent made to a military-related article. I find that more believable. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:10, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

JAMIE LYNN PATTERSON, I have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. Are you accusing me personally of hacking the military or accusing Wikipedia of hacking the military and just using me as a representative? ‑ Iridescent 03:17, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

And I have absolutely no clue who Mark Bratcher is (and I Googled the name). --Tryptofish (talk) 19:09, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Malaysia Agreement 1963 bill passed

https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2021/12/15/ma63-amendments-passed Kititto (talk) 02:42, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, why are you telling me this? Have you confused me with someone else? ‑ Iridescent 03:16, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, it was passed in 1963, so it's clearly urgent in 2022. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:07, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Reading the link the OP posted, it appears that a law has just been passed amending the 1963 agreement such that Sabah and Sarawak will have a special constitutional status in future. I still have no idea how I come in to this given that I've never even been to Malaysia and have made a mighty two edits to the article in its entire history, one of which was to correct the spelling of "millennium" and one of which was to standardize the capitalization of "Christian" and "Muslim". ‑ Iridescent 12:01, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I think I've solved the mystery. I'll guess the OP has misread this edit summary, and thought I was the one doing the reverting. ‑ Iridescent 12:11, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Deletion of Roy Schwartz Tichon

Hi there,

I've noticed you deleted my article about Roy Schwartz Tichon. Before deletion I asked why was it market as a nominee of fast deletion, but with no response. Nevertheless, as formerly stated, the article was a translation of the Hebrew one, and so if you have specific notes I can rewrite it. There was by no means an intention to advertise anything. --Amir Segev Sarusi (talk) 12:54, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Hebrew Wikipedia is an independent website with their own rules (albeit one ultimately owned by the same people that own English Wikipedia). As regards Roy Schwartz Tichon, the article had no sources at all. Per very long standing policy, we don't host material about living people that isn't sourced; English Wikipedia doesn't engage in original research, but only repeats what reliable sources have said about any given topic. Basically, for us to host an article the article needs to be sourced to multiple, independent, reliable sources, and demonstrate why the subject meets our definition of "notability". (From the article as it stood, I'm not convinced; the bus line he founded is probably notable, but that doesn't mean the individual people associated with the bus line will also be notable unless they got significant coverage unconnected to the bus line.)

If you think you can bring it up to English Wikipedia's standards—which basically can be summarized as "it needs to demonstrate that sources unconnected with the subject consider the subject important, and any statement that could potentially be challenged needs to be cited to a reliable source"—I'm more than happy to restore it as a draft article to allow you to work on it in slow-time before taking it live as a Wikipedia article. ‑ Iridescent 13:03, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

So from what I understand from you, you want me to get sources in English? I have about 7 reliable sources backing it in English and plenty more in Hebrew. I can work on it tomorrow. --Amir Segev Sarusi (talk) 13:11, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

No, sources in Hebrew (or Arabic) are fine (although if sources exist in English as well the English-language ones are usually preferable as it makes it easier for other readers to verify that the sources do indeed make the statements for which they're used as citations). The issue is that everything in the article needs to be cited to those sources; the page I deleted had no sources at all, Hebrew or otherwise. ‑ Iridescent 13:14, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Amir Segev Sarusi, I've restored it as a draft at Draft:Roy Schwartz Tichon to allow you (and anyone else) to work on it without the pressure of having to comply with all our rules right away. We do need it to be sourced to reliable sources (in whatever language) before we can consider making it back into a live article—ensuring that any claim we make about a living person has a clear audit trail so readers can see exactly where the claim has come from is something we take extremely seriously. ‑ Iridescent 13:26, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for zapping that one

Not just advertising but CIR as well Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 16:05, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

(Arjunvarmaina, for curious TPWs.) Yeah—it's a bit of a shame, as I think he probably was genuinely trying to help, but there comes a limit. My limit was roughly the point when, after his autobiography had been deleted for the fourth time, he started trying to game the system by overwriting existing pages and moving them. There seem to be a lot more really clueless self-promoters than usual out and about today; I'm wondering if some site has run a "boost your SEO by getting yourself on Wikipedia!" feature. ‑ Iridescent 16:09, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

The world is full of oddities. I think they now think they are unblocked because the removed the block notice. Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 16:14, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

As long as he doesn't removed declined unblock requests, he can delete whatever he likes. If he's stupid enough to delete the instructions for how to get unblocked, as he's just done, I suspect he's probably somebody we can cope with losing. ‑ Iridescent 16:52, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm surprised any fan of the Indian Navy would want to read Navy News. But maybe they're very bored. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:11, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

There's nowt so quair as folk, my friend. Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 18:43, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Just like Bunny, of course. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:48, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I've been told/witnessed someone being told "We need an article for a verified badge on Twitter." twice now. The time I was told this, the person got frustrated with me asking questions in an effort to expose their need to disclose that they were a paid editor and ragequit.

So maybe that at least partially explains the increase of clueless self-promotors. Either Twitter actually does provide "having a Wikipedia article" as an avenue to get a verifed badge, or else there's a site lying and saying that it's an avenue. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:26, 2 January 2022 (UTC) (Edited at 22:28, 2 January 2022 (UTC) because keyboard lag sucks)

Twitter technically says "Provide a link to a stable Wikipedia article about you or your organization that meets the encyclopedia’s notability standards". Nikkimaria (talk) 22:46, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

@Nikkimaria In other words, employers of paid editors are misinterpreting that criterion for their own benefit. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:49, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I remember when they announced that there was some controversy on-wiki iirc. I don't really have a problem with it, it's about the best system I could think of -- but yeah, it leads to a few more spammers. Elli (talk | contribs) 02:10, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I looked, and guess what: Twitter actually does use our articles as evidence of notability, even linking to Category:Wikipedia notability guidelines: [1] (scroll down to the section on "Notable", third bullet point). --Tryptofish (talk) 22:48, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

It's actually relatively easy to get a verified account on Twitter. You just have to be willing to take the time and effort to impersonate yourself. Create a bunch or doppelganger accounts, post harrassment. Complain from your legit account Twitter are is enabling abuse, verified tick coming your way.... it can take some time. Think the fastest I have seen it was a couple of months. But it's easier for them to verify an account than deal with the bad press that they are enabling harrassment. If you have money to burn, bonus points for buying followers to the doppelgangers. In many ways Twitter staff are not particularly invested in doing detailed investigation. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:55, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Much as Twitter is usually (rightly) held up as the exemplar of all that's worst about Big Internet, on this occasion my instinct is to salute them for at least trying. Wikipedia and the WMF are not exactly in a position to preach to anyone else about how to square the circle between permitting anonymous posting as a fundamental principle, whilst still protecting the rights of people being commented upon, holding individuals responsible for their actions when they cross the line, and somehow separating out those comments made by people who are actually qualified to comment on a given topic from those made by impersonators or anonymous randos. (Yes, I know the bluetick doesn't mean much; someone with a verified identity can in some ways be more damaging than a rando when they're talking about something on which they're not qualified, since the blue tick gives a false veneer of legitimacy so Twitter ends up with one-hit-wonder 80s pop stars being treated as equally qualified to comment on a given topic as professionals who've spent their lives studying that topic. Still, at least Twitter are trying rather than just vaguely waving their hands and saying "crowdsourcing will make everything all right".) ‑ Iridescent 10:10, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

But I guess Twitter doesn't care about WP:CIRCULAR. If we say it's notable, they think it's notable. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:13, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

@Tryptofish Well, I guess we'll have to care and make sure we're not referencing ourselves, mirrors, etc. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:06, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

WP:ANYBIO didn't mention Twitter, last I checked... Elli (talk | contribs) 03:25, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Maybe this wasn't clear enough, but my (slightly facetious) point was that we don't consider ourselves to be a reliable source, and yet Twitter thinks that our determinations of notability are reliable for their purposes. That probably wasn't as clever as I thought it was. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:01, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Our determinations of notability—as opposed to our actual content—probably aren't a bad thing for them to be using as a starting point. Although the notability rules are arbitrary we're generally pretty good at assessing whether a given topic meets the arbitrary rules, even if the actual article on that topic is a mess. In my experience the system usually only breaks down when a particular WikiProject tries to substitute their own notability rules, leading to nonsense like Robert Murcutt. ‑ Iridescent 12:01, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

There was a discussion somewhere once—don't ask me to find it—about that. In terms of notability, we don't care at all about Twitter verification. Although they use "notability" as a filter to stop every Rag, Tag and Bobtail from applying, it's possible to get the blue tick on Twitter without being remotely notable in Wikipedia terms; likewise there are people who are unquestionably notable in Wikipedia terms who don't qualify for the blue tick on Twitter. (Every electoral cycle there's a parade of indignant former elected officials complaining that Twitter has un-verified them now they're no longer a 'public figure' by their definition, even though under Wikipedia's current notability rules they'd retain their notability for all eternity.) ‑ Iridescent 03:35, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Huh, didn't know that worked -- good to know. The main route to verification I knew of (assuming non-notablity) was to buy PR articles. There are services to get articles published in sources that even Wikipedia considers reliable. The quality sources aren't particularly cheap, though apparently you don't exactly need high quality ones depending on the niche. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 09:33, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

• In case anyone is curious, we get a ton of Arabic-language socks coming to en.wiki for "Wikipedia verification" on social media because ar.wiki shows them the door and won't let them abuse that project for similar issues. علاء is gracious enough to let us know about them when he's not crazy busy in real life, but yes, the desire for social media verification and the assumption that English-speakers won't check foreign language sources is a relatively large source of our sock spam. TonyBallioni (talk) 06:30, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

  I seem to have spent an inordinate proportion of the past week performing G11 deletions on an endless parade of Indian students posting their resumes. (If you head over to new userspace pages you can watch the stream flow in.) I get the strong feeling someone in India has recently run a "Wikipedia, the alternative to LinkedIn" article. ‑ Iridescent 17:17, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I know you and I disagree on...

...the inherant corruption level at WMUK, but it is very hard to not consider it a cesspit when stuff like this crops up. Anyone else found to be engaging in such rampant sock and/or meatpuppetry would have resulted in the entire lot being indeffed. Instead what we have is wagon-circling and quite frankly unbelieveable and not-credible excuses in order to avoid blocks. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:40, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

I dunno, is this a case for Arbcom? If private information (CU data and explanations involving them) and accusations of collusion including on-wiki collusion are involved... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:56, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

I've already commented there. I actually find the explanation plausible—I can easily see a situation where a bunch of Welsh Wikipedia types meet up socially (and hence don't bring laptops with them) but then someone brings up a particular Wikipedia page and everyone decides to have a look. However those with long memories will recall that we went through this whole "we're not the same person, we're a group of friends who happen to be interested in the same topic" stuff in excruciating detail at WP:EEML, and as far as I'm aware nothing has changed since then.

I think "this is WMUK circling the wagons" is probably a misread of the situation; other than Llywelyn2000 himself, the only person there I recognise as having anything to do with WMUK is Mike Peel and IIRC even he no longer has any connection to it. Although WMUK nominally has 500 members, that's because one needs to be a member to apply for one of their "buy this book for me" microgrants, not because it's some kind of mass movement. The actual core of WMUK is a lot smaller than people think; it's not a bloated tag-team like WMDC. (Johnbod is much better placed than me to say whether this is the case, but I'd argue that most of the well-documented problems have been precisely because WMUK is so small, it's historically been possible for a pair of nutcases to repeatedly try to hijack it for their own purposes.)

It's not particularly surprising that a bunch of Llywelyn2000's friends have turned up, since they're the ones who'll have his talkpage watchlisted and thus will have seen the notification that the SPI is taking place. One sees the same thing whenever any long-term editor is accused of anything; the closing admins know (or should know) how to distinguish between friends defending their buddy (or enemies looking for a chance to land a free hit) and genuinely neutral analysis.

I doubt this needs to go to Arbcom (or that they'd accept it), unless it develops further. Access to the CU evidence would seem to be a red herring—as far as I can tell, nobody involved is disputing that the accounts were using the same computer, and there's no secret technical evidence that could determine whether two accounts using the same computer are the same person using two logons or two people each using one logon. In theory T&S or the stewards might need to get involved if the allegation spreads into "they're also socking on cy-wiki", but that's well above my pay grade. ‑ Iridescent 15:29, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

This is all news to me, & I must say I can't get excited about, rather agreeing with HJ Mitchell (I too have met Llywelyn2000 many times, though not for some years). It doesn't really have anything to do with WMUK imo. The reason WMUK has 500 members is because some years ago the annual appeal donation online form allowed you to divert the £5 fee for WMUK membership out of your donation, making you a member. I don't know if this is still the case, but the "retention" on UK appeal donations from year to year used to be extremely high, and I imagine the bulk of the current membership arrived by that route (hardly any of the editors I speak to still seem to be members). The membership suddenly jumped to the current level. Unfortunately, one would imagine that most of these donors have never edited WP & really know next to nothing about its internal affairs (& they won't receive any enlightenment from WMUK newsletters etc). Before the AGM they get an online proxy form with the Board's recommendations, and almost all of them follow it entirely. The effect can be seen in the choices for board elections. When I was a trustee we considered this way of expanding the membership, then about 80, but nearly all regular editors, but decided not to take that route, precisely to avoid the current situation. I don't agree that the small size led to the problems - the German equivalent had a far larger membership (up to 2000?), and problems that were probably at least as bad, but all conducted in the decent obscurity of a foreign language, so they hardly impacted Anglophone awareness. Johnbod (talk) 18:21, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Apologies for snark in advance. Yes I guess it would be news to you that the Wales Programme Manager/WMUK Manager (Wales) appears to have been running a sockfarm for a substantial period of time, out of their home office which is what they describe as the WMUK drop-in. So nothing to do with WMUK at all then. Forgive my sarcasm, but this is just the last in a long line of WMUK members doing shady things (and by members, I dont mean random person who wants a discount. Remember the Shapps affair?). There are other links to users on the SPI page from WMUK, but lets just say that posting them publically would likely hit all sorts of outing rules. The reason why none of the arguments is particularly credible is that on different occasions they have directly referred to themselves using multiple accounts, have clearly been logging in and out of multiple accounts etc. In order to be a plausible you have to accept that a)multiple people were in the same place, using the same hardware, in succession. B)they have to have similar enough writing styles and idiosyncrasies that you accept different people use and/or spell words incorrectly. The first in context of teaching etc is at least somewhat plausible. The second is not. Now let me preface this next bit with something Iridescent may have forgotton (or I may have never mentioned, tbh it doesnt really come up) - that I am from the Rhondda. The idea that multiple people in Wales just happen to congregate in one spot, have the same grasp and use of English is just rediculous (see what I did there). For a start the Welsh language stats are well documented. So the concept of multiple people being *that* similar in their use of English would only hold if they were remarkably similar people, which would require their cultural, age and educational level to be near identical given the Wales population demographics. Or that they were all primarily Welsh speakers who had the same bad English teacher. It is just not remotely credible. Substantially because the Welsh education system has been significantly better than that for at least 20 years or more. The much more likely explanation, and the only one that would be entertained for pretty much any other user who didnt have ties to a chapter/affliate, is that it is one person. As it is, they have received favoured treatment, not even blocked as a CU-block, so any administrator can lift it at any time. How long are we taking bets on before someone does it? A week? Maybe a month? Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:45, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Unless there's something I'm missing, to me this is a case of an individual with their hand metaphorically caught in the cashbox, not a case of institutional corruption. As per my previous comment, I'm not seeing any WMUK wagon-circling—other than Mike Peel, I don't recognize anyone at the SPI as having any connection at all to WMUK. (A couple of people may have attended WMUK-run events, or accepted a £20 buy-this-book-for-me grant, but I wouldn't consider that a COI.) I've always been fairly critical of WMUK, which sometimes gives the appearance of being a mechanism by which people sign off on grants to each other and which has historically had something of a blind spot regarding obvious sleazeballs trying to use it for their own ends, but I think the accusation of collusion in this case is barking up the wrong tree.

I agree that behavioral evidence strongly suggests this was one person using the different logons, but that's not incompatible with L2000's explanation, if they're passing the laptop back and forth and losing track of who's logged on as who. To me that aspect of things is largely an irrelevance, since "one person using multiple logons" and "multiple people colluding off-wiki" are treated the same way in Wikipedia terms and this is certainly one or the other.

(It's unlikely but not impossible, but I can actually just about believe which would require their cultural, age and educational level to be near identical given the Wales population demographics. Or that they were all primarily Welsh speakers who had the same bad English teacher in this case. If the people involved are a group of L2000's friends, it's entirely plausible that they're all the same age, from the same area, and attended the same school, particularly if the circle of friends is drawn from the relatively tiny pool of Welsh-speakers in Denbighshire. Per my comment above, this is missing the point, since by the EEML precedents we don't care if they're the same person or not provided there's evidence of collusion.)

I wouldn't have blocked as a checkuser block either. The reason we have the separate {{CheckUser block}} block rationale with the You must not loosen or remove this block, or issue an IP block exemption, without consulting a CheckUser or the Arbitration Committee wording isn't that we deem sockpuppetry some kind of mortal sin that required special treatment, but that if someone disputes the CU evidence, only people with access to the CU tool have the technical ability to examine it. Since in this case L2000 admitted from the start that they were all using the same device, the CU evidence isn't relevant to the case, so in the event of an appeal a vanilla admin is just as competent to assess it as a CU.

Regarding How long are we taking bets on before someone does it? A week? Maybe a month?, under normal circumstances in this situation I'd accept an appeal after about six months provided there was a firm undertaking not to do it again and ideally an undertaking to stay away from contentious discussions; I'd accept an appeal sooner if there was a convincing reason a particular discussion would benefit from their input, under a strict "any more of this and you're banned for life" proviso. (What makes this not usual circumstances is that commentary like this very likely violates a strict interpretation of UCoC, and at the moment we don't yet know whether English Wikipedia is going to take a "you must not offend anyone" or a "we accept that some people's opinions are inevitably going to upset others" interpretation of UCoC once the dust settles.) ‑ Iridescent 05:21, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't see how that violates UCOC. The UCOC is about genuine problem editors, not about giving admins a stick to beat people with. There might be problems around giving extra powers to the WMF, but this kind of paranoia clouds the issue and isn't helpful. 2A04:4A43:461F:DCA3:0:0:DCD:E63C (talk)\ — Preceding undated comment added 09:48, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

It probably doesn't—the point is we don't know if and how UCoC is going to be enforced. My point is that even if it's not enforced, its existence has the potential to create a chilling effect. ‑ Iridescent 18:37, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

There were similar concerns about the Technical Code of Conduct, which was implemented several years ago (applies to MediaWiki.org, Phabricator, the wikitech-l mailing list, and in-person events). Since then, there have been very few concerns raised, and apparently no serious disputes. I think it's reasonable to assume that the UCOC will have a similar experience, but I also think it's reasonable to worry that it might not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Movement Charter Drafting Committee elections

And by the way the elections for the UCOC drafting committee (or part of it) are closing very soon (11:59, 25 October 2021), and I hope people will vote. There are 72 candidates for seven places. Their number of edits on the various projects vary between over 15,700,000 and 10! You have to find these out from the links as the table summarizing the candidates unhelpfully, if not suspiciously, doesn't give them. WMUK conspiracy theorists will be excited by two of them, and many other candidates have history in chapters, WMF committees etc. Johnbod (talk) 04:00, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Actually, that's the Movement Charter Drafting Committee, not the UCOC drafting committee. Disclosure: I'm a candidate. Wackiest election I've ever seen in my life; technically it's two elections rolled into one. Risker (talk) 04:10, 23 October 2021 (UTC) Adding a couple of potentially useful links: This one is a way of viewing the "20 questions" that all candidates had to answer. This one, drafted by Guerillero, gives basic details (including edit counts) of all candidates. Risker (talk) 04:16, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Aah, thanks - well I still think we should all vote. Amended to "Their number of edits on the various projects vary between over 1,570,000 and 10!" on the basis of the very useful Guerillero link. Now we have no excuse. Johnbod (talk) 15:24, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

That's 15,700,000. And I bet he looked at every single one. —Cryptic 16:19, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I not only can't make head nor tail of that election process, I can't even understand what a "Movement Charter Drafting Committee" actually is or why I should care who is on it (let alone why I should care enough to read 70+ candidate statements). I'm probably more up-to-speed than most with WMF jargon and with WikiSpeak in general; if I don't understand it, it's a reasonable bet that most other editors don't either. ‑ Iridescent 05:18, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I know where you're coming from. Only about 850 people from all of the wikis have participated to date (with en.wp responsible for about 35% of the voting, probably because we're one of the few projects with a watchlist notice). There will be a movement charter drafting committee because enough people said during the strategy sessions that we needed a movement charter to make it necessary for someone to draft it. And yeah, I know there aren't very many people who are interested in the strategy, either. The process by which those "someones" will be selected is excessively convoluted, and was further complicated by the forced delay of the Board elections (because nobody actually tested if the software worked!), and the necessity of having this election cleared before the next scheduled use of SecurePoll a few days after this one ends. Yeah...it's only possible to run one instance of SecurePoll at a time. Risker (talk) 05:27, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I think I am closer to understanding the meaning of life than understanding whatever the "Movement Charter Drafting Committee" is. If I am any evidence, then your "reasonable bet" seems spot on. Aza24 (talk) 05:29, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Browsing through the Meta pages, it appears that it's a process to select the group of people who will work out how to get to these supposed goals. Since We will become a platform that serves open knowledge to the world across interfaces and communities. We will build tools for allies and partners to organize and exchange free knowledge beyond Wikimedia. Our infrastructure will enable us and others to collect and use different forms of free, trusted knowledge. describes a state of affairs which I suspect most of the active participants on the four big wikis consider actively antithetical to the values of Wikipedia—I joined up to ensure topics that interested me were better covered online, not to be an unpaid intern trying to improve the effiency of the data-mining operations of a bunch of morally dubious corporations, and I assume the same is true of you—I can't see how anything other than bad feeling is going to come out of this. ‑ Iridescent 05:46, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

(Disclosure: I'm also a candidate.) Summary of the important parts: We've got one shot at making a constitution-like document that the WMF (and all our other orgs) will actually be bound by, with systems to make sure that the included rules are actually enforced. We're talking about legally-binding transfers of power, reworked systems of funds-distribution and high-level decision-making, basic requirements for our organizations, and a whole pile of new structures with various responsibilities. The Drafting Committee will run the drafting process for this, and the election ends in ~28 hours (at 12:00 UTC, no idea why). --Yair rand (talk) 07:46, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Given that this is the WMF we're talking about, surely if it looks like it's going to come up with anything that isn't in line with their agenda they'll just abolish it? (If I'm reading it right, this committee is going to have seven members elected and eight appointed. I don't pretend to be a mathematical genius but even I can see something suspicious there.) ‑ Iridescent 13:32, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Eh. It's 7 by the community, 6 selected by a committee whose members are selected by affiliates, and 2 selected by the WMF. I'm personally somewhat less sceptical of affiliate-selected members after good interactions with Shani, an affiliate-elected trustee. But I do think there's a bit too much weight given to affiliates, in general. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:11, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

As the assorted WMUK people lurking on this page can testify, the WMF has form for cutting off funding to affiliates if San Francisco takes a dislike to their management, and cutting off recognition altogether if SF takes a sufficient dislike. (It isn't some unique thing that only happens in exceptional circumstances, either; they do it so often they even have a boilerplate form for it, and the chapters who've been kicked off the gravy train aren't tiny operations but biggies like India, Hong Kong and the Philippines.) It would be a brave affiliate indeed who chose not to follow the party line. ‑ Iridescent 16:01, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

...Or maybe just reasonably self-interested, given the possibility of actually fixing those problems (see the Hubs/GC plans, which will likely take the relevant powers away from the WMF, afaict). I would guess that the affiliates would be very well-motivated to not follow a WMF line at the expense of their own interests, and to ensure that the Charter is something the community likes (to ensure that the community ratifies it in the first place, a necessary prerequisite to it taking effect). --Yair rand (talk) 17:47, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Maybe, but I'm skeptical that replacing the existing "loose collective with a central authority and a handful of local chapters which are there if you want them but which you're free to disregard" setup with a formal "WMF → regional hub → local chapter → peons" hierarchy will have any obvious benefit in most cases, other than ensuring that people in places without local chapters theoretically have at least some local representation to lobby on their behalf. Having an explicit power structure would seem to me to be likely to make it even more difficult to deal with the next Gibraltarpedia or LauraHale situation when it arises, since a hierarchical structure means more high places in which bad actors can have friends and protectors—and since WMF is presumably still ultimately going to have control of funds, the hubs will still not want to antagonize their masters. (To be clear, I agree with the WMF having its hand on the funding tap. Without some kind of central oversight, there's far too much risk that local chapters get hijacked by a small group who self-declare themselves "consultants" and start awarding grants to each other.) ‑ Iridescent 04:16, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

I think it'll be more "Global Council → hubs → chapters" than having the WMF at the top, but I agree that the risks from bad actors in the outlined hierarchy are concerning. --Yair rand (talk) 05:37, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

As long as the power and the liability end up in the same place, any arrangement is likely to work for me.

I have formed the impression that the affiliates' general goal is to get more power into their hands, while making as much liability as possible be Someone Else's Problem. I have no reason to believe that this will address any of the hard questions, like what the movement should do if (as has been proposed) large websites are legally required to take complaints about content by telephone or to suppress legal-but-harmful speech, or to prevent minors from reading pages not deemed fit for children and teenagers, or what to do if the organizations with the liability are being put in legal jeopardy by the organizations with the power, or by volunteers. Some problems can't be solved by us (the internet needs a treaty that settles the question of what to do when drawing the line here on your map is illegal under Indian laws, but drawing the line there is illegal under its neighbor's laws), but I don't expect us to solve even the problems that we could, because the solutions are unpopular. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:09, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Election compass tool

Out of curiosity, I put myself through the election compass tool, and only four of the candidates even manage to pass the 50% agreement mark. Yair rand, I don't know if you'll be flattered or horrified, but other than some guy I've never heard of from Hausa Wikipedia you're my closest match. (Interestingly Risker, with whom I assumed I'd match quite closely, comes out quite near the bottom on 38%.) ‑ Iridescent 04:39, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

You're not the first person who has said that, Iridescent. Someone on Wikimedia-L said something to the effect of being surprised how I came out low on their comparison, but when they read the responses, they agreed with most things that I wrote. I know that I found that other candidates gave a different "rating" for questions and then largely responded the same as someone else. Let's just say it's a very imprecise tool. In an election with too many candidates for anyone to seriously assess, I don't know if the compass has helped or hurt. Like I said, it's one really wacky election. Risker (talk) 04:54, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

(random tps pile-on) From idle interest I just used the election compass as well, with supports for editorial independence and decentralisation and opposes for things that smacked of One World Government. As above the top match was Yair rand and someone I've never heard of from China, with a bottom third placing for Risker who was my top voting pick in the actual election. Makes me wonder how accurate this tool really is, and its potentially dubious role in influencing how people voted. (Fwiw Yair I voted for you also: this is more about the low ranking for others than your constant top-place-getting in compass run-throughs). -- Euryalus (talk) 05:00, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Agree that the tool is very imprecise. (Interestingly, my own results have Risker as second-closest at 67%.) It's also an issue that some candidates interpreted certain questions very differently from others. --Yair rand (talk) 05:37, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

I found the tool produced quite different results to my votes yesterday, which surprises me as I made sure to read the candidate statements, which I would expect to reflect a tracker like that. Perhaps it is due to the ambiguity of eh questions, many of which I found somewhat unhelpful, with potential interpretations that could swing me from support to oppose. CMD (talk) 07:37, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

I didn't try the compass at all. I am wary of using these interpretative tools because one never has an idea how they interpret your answers. I just threw my hat into Risker's ring and called it a day. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:24, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Did the same. More than once Risker has been a rock for me and mine, and perhaps is uniquely respected. Ceoil (talk) 18:40, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

I did notice that there were a lot of questions with only one reasonable answer (like "Do you feel the Charter should be written in gender neutral language?", to which any answer other than "obviously, but since this is going to need to be translated into 200+ languages some of which are strongly gendered languages, I'm not losing sleep if something is poorly translated on Elder Futhark Wikipedia provided it's made clear than in the case of disagreement the English-language version takes precedence"). I suspect that how much weight the candidates gave to these non-questions skews the results dramatically, since everyone taking the test is presumably going to agree with every candidate on them so those who marked them "high importance" get an automatic fake advantage. (I did vote in the end, but mainly because when I looked at the full list of candidates there's one candidate who I think is genuinely crazy and who I wouldn't trust to look after a goldfish, let alone potentially influence a major information source. By the nature of the universe, if I hadn't voted that person would probably have won by one vote.) ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Rambling aside about change

The belief in Murphy runs strong in this one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:18, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Not really. If we're going by aphorisms, my attitude isn't so much "anything that can go wrong will go wrong", but "a leader is best when people barely know he exists". Wikipedia and the WMF more generally don't have a divine right to exist, any change has the potential to annoy at least some people, and anything with the potential to drive editors or readers away risks leaving the field open for Big Tech to slide into our niche. (We know from history that Microsoft and Google have both in the past had their eyes on the position we currently occupy; it's reasonable to assume the other big players do as well.) No matter how much criticism is directed towards the chaotic administration of the WMF and Wikipedia, it's still a hell of a lot better than the idea of Zuckerbergopedia. In this position, I'd say cultural conservatism (in the "opposed to change" sense, not the Donald Trump sense) and only making changes when there's a clear consensus for that change is the only rational course—"run fast and break things" can work for startups, but our great strength is that we don't significantly change either technically or culturally, so both readers, editors and functionaries can drift in and out without feeling out of place. The 3000-ish regulars on en-wiki and their equivalents on the other wikis may make the most noise, but without the swarms of casual editors we'll collapse, and if they start thinking "this place has changed since I was last here and I don't want to put in the effort to learn the new expectations" they're not easily replaceable. ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

One of the problems with requiring a clear consensus for change is that sometimes there is a clear need for change but a consensus against doing it. High-volume editors don't believe that certain problems are real, but we are convinced that our opinions are the only ones that ought to counted towards consensus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:24, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

By "a clear need for change", I mean that this is clear to all the people who actually know what they're talking about, e.g., Ops for server problems, lawyers for legal problems, affiliates for affiliate problems, people who run edit-a-thons for edit-a-thon problems, etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

And high-volume editors for high-volume editing. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:55, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

After all these years together, do you still imagine me thinking that my opinion should be limited only to subjects related to high-volume editing? ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:23, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm sure we could each write volumes about it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:32, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

But since the editors are ultimately what keeps the entire WMF ecosystem afloat, in situations where a problem's been identified but the solution is potentially going to alienate editors isn't there an onus to convince the editors that the problem needs addressing? (Or, in the case of genuine emergencies, at least to explain why the urgent action was taken and discuss whether whatever action was taken is appropriate as a long-term fix.) It might not always lead to the results the WMF think are optimal, but if the four big wikis (and in particular English Wikipedia) fall below a critical mass of editors the whole thing will just fizzle out. It does the WMF no good at all if they have a beautiful user interface and a written constitution that would make Jefferson green with envy, if in getting to that point the en-wiki and de-wiki editor bases have defected to Amazonopedia or whatever and the WMF is left presiding over a near-unusable photo-sharing website, a highly questionable travel guide, and a giant spreadsheet of insects.

Don't think editor bases aren't going to jump ship if they get sufficiently annoyed and a competitor is offering another ship to jump to—just ask Wikitravel. If one of the tech giants forked the existing content and offered $10,000 bounties for any established Wikipedia editor willing to defect to Knol 2.0, they could probably kill Wikipedia overnight if they timed the offer to a time when the editor base was already restless over something. (At the time of writing we have 468 active admins on en-wiki. It really wouldn't take much of a nudge to make us unmanageable since fewer admins would lead to more office actions which would in turn push more admins into resigning—and if English Wikipedia dies, the other projects will eventually follow.) ‑ Iridescent 11:16, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, ^ that. --Tryptofish (talk) 11:44, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm doubtful. Transitions can be ugly, but I am not irreplaceable. If I quit – if a hundred "editors like me" quit – then I have no reason to believe that another editor wouldn't appear in my place. Maybe the new ones would even do a better job of it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:28, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm irreplaceable. Your mileage may differ. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:08, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Facetious or not, I'm not convinced that You are not irreplaceable is particularly true except in the technical sense that we could hypothetically train someone to do any given task. Wikipedia's history is full of examples where the departure of one editor or a small handful has left a huge dent—a decade later we're still doing by hand what GimmeBot used to do automatically because nobody can replicate the bot, WikiProject London has gone from one of the most active groups on the site to completely moribund without Kbthompson and myself keeping things moving, etc etc etc. I assume the effect is even more pronounced on the other wikis where there's a smaller pool of active editors, and thus less chance someone else will step up to do any given boring-but-necessary job when the person currently doing it leaves. ‑ Iridescent 06:01, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh, that essay is absolutely not true in many areas. Looking at a few that I'm familiar with—anti-spam, WP:CCI, and WP:URLREQ—then there's a single person (or sometimes two or three) who if they departed Wikipedia there would be massive effects on the rest of Wikipedia, with a "replacement" likely never being feasible due both to the amount of work being done by those people and the high amount of domain specific knowledge that their roles require. Maybe for something like content creation the essay is more accurate, but that's an area of Wikipedia I have far too little experience in to state anything insightful on. Perryprog (talk) 20:49, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Indeed; to take a couple of relatively trivial examples, you only have to look at how quickly the Signpost degenerated into gray goo when the couple of people holding it left, or how chaotic FAC became after Raul's defenestration. I'm certainly not saying "relying on a few key individuals" is in any way something we should be proud of—it's frankly embarrassing that a top-ten website relies on the goodwill of a handful of people who in many cases have grossly inflated opinions of themselves—but it's where we are. ‑ Iridescent 18:50, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Under Raul, FAC did not “rely on a few key individuals”, because Raul was truly a delegator, and was always committed to building a team. When they killed the director position, the FA process degenerated into factions representing FAC, FAR and TFA, bereft of any overarching vision, dominated by egos and reward seeking, and absent any concept of community or teamwork. It’s a wreck. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:57, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that's my point. I consider You are not irreplaceable to be demonstrably false since there are cases where the departure of one individual has had a clear negative impact, and Raul leaving FA was one of them. He 'wasn't irreplacable' in the sense that Wikipedia has still survived without him, but the presence or absence of a single person can cause clear changes even though the "wisdom of crowds" dogma would have us believe it doesn't. ‑ Iridescent 06:45, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

musings on WP:You are not irreplaceable

How are Yahoo Answers, WikiTravel and Myspace doing these days? Nobody is irreplaceable, but the web is now old enough that we have clear evidence that if a collaborative site falls below a critical mass of experienced participants, it goes into a death spiral as the remaining userbase can't keep up with maintenance, the site starts looking like a mess, and that in turn discourages new people from signing up. You can already see the process beginning to take hold on Commons despite them having the massive advantage of one of the world's largest websites pushing a constant feed of potential new editors in their direction, and there's no reason to think it couldn't happen here. We can barely keep up with the spammers as it is; it wouldn't take many new page patrollers resigning for us to be overwhelmed, once we get a reputation for untrustworthiness it will be very difficult to restore credibility, and if we lose the reputation for credibility we kill the primary incentive for editors to want to work here in the first place. ‑ Iridescent 05:09, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't think the You are not irreplaceable essay is arguing about generalities. It doesn't even need to be true. Instead it is a warning to editors who think they are irreplaceable and who may indeed be widely felt to be irreplaceable and who then act like they can't be replaced/removed. Either the person ends up devoting too much time to the project that their real life and mental health suffers, and/or they behave in suboptimal ways that get tolerated (for a time) but really shouldn't be (and ultimately aren't). For the essay to work, it only has to convince the problematic editor and their supporters.

Business lore comments about irreplaceable or indispensable employees and generally they are considered a bad thing. Harshly, some even recommend dispensing with such employees as soon as you can, lest they become even more indispensable. But more positively, some offer advice on fixing or avoiding such a situation. The fact that various groups and wikiprojects on Wikipedia have had users who appear irreplaceable or whose loss killed off the wikiproject is a pathological sign. I get the message that pissing off the existing user base could be fatal but at the same time, we have to be realistic that current editors will leave for all sorts of reasons. -- Colin°^Talk 11:21, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure business is really the same situation. Businesses have an effectively unlimited pool of potential replacements provided they're willing to pay enough to recruit the right people, while "replacing someone" on Wikipedia means finding someone else among the relatively limited pool of active editors who's willing to take on whatever the departed person was doing.

The real-world analogy to (e.g.) the chain of events that led to RexxS resigning would be if the only mechanic in a small town was arrested and on his release decided he didn't like the notoriety and decided to move out of town—it might well be the case that it was necessary and there was no reasonable other course anyone involved could have taken, but it nonetheless means that the only alternatives the locals have are to make the effort to recruit another mechanic from outside, to persuade another local resident to give up their existing job and retrain as a mechanic, or to make do without and hope their self-repaired automobiles don't explode.

The aging of the 2005–08 intake means we're now witnessing a demographic timebomb as people die, resign, or just get bored. New blood is no bad thing but neither is institutional memory, and we're beginning to reach the point where we're losing too many of the people who do the unglamorous behind-the-scenes stuff—the Facebooks of the world can pay people to do the behind-the-scenes stuff, but our model means we don't usually have that luxury except in the few limited cases where the community is actually willing to have the WMF interfering and the WMF is willing to do so. Generously assuming that one editor in five hundred has both the expertise and the inclination to do something like advanced template maintenance, that means there are perhaps a dozen editors currently active who could maintain something like Module:Asbox. And we're the biggest game in town; when it comes to something like Hindi Wikipedia (which is hardly some ultra-niche project only catering to a handful of enthusiasts) with ≈20 active editors and seven current admins you're literally talking about an active editor base so small that an outbreak of food poisoning at their AGM would destroy the project's administration. ‑ Iridescent 17:41, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Businesses do not have an unlimited pool of candidates. I have been (distantly) involved in a hiring process for which we had realistic estimates that approximately 100 people in the world were qualified. One hundred people in the world is enough if you only need one coder (and we did hire someone), but it is not my idea of "an effectively unlimited pool of potential replacements provided they're willing to pay enough to recruit the right people". In other cases (e.g., historical buildings), there may be only one or two plausible candidates. Some skills are rare, no matter how much money you have, especially if you can't wait a couple of years to teach someone what they need to know.

But I think that what's different about Wikipedia, or wikis in general, is that when we can't find one of the few people in the world who know how to repair degraded copper wires in old-fashioned core memory, then we can just replace the old stuff with some modern electronics, and we can still go to Space today anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:06, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

More on irreplaceability

In theory yes, but in practice "we can just replace the old stuff with some modern electronics" isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Enacting cultural change on Wikipedia is like doing a three-point turn in a space shuttle; "if the bot that does foo goes down it doesn't matter because we'll just write another bot or learn to do it by ourselves" is a nice sentiment but doesn't tend to actually happen. In the wiki context people can't be either compelled or paid to do the things they ordinarily wouldn't do; if only one person is willing to do a particular job and that person leaves, then the job doesn't get done. (In your hiring process, you can keep upping the pay until you tempt one of those hundred people to leave their current employer. We don't have that option here; if User:Σ resigns and nobody else wants to write a talkpage archiving bot then talkpages will no longer be archived. Repeat that statement for the hundreds if not thousands of other instances where a process is reliant on a single individual.) Yes, this isn't how it should be, but it's how it is, and if this is the case even on English Wikipedia with its mass editor base, it can only be worse on the smaller wikis with only a handful of active editors. ‑ Iridescent 07:12, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Case study: GAN is dependent on a barely-functioning bot with several major known errors that the maintainer has no plans to fix; he steps in when it shits the bed entirely, which it does on about a monthly basis, and no more. This is an unusually good case, because someone is actually in the process of writing a new bot and has been since about June. He's also fitting that in between all his other on- and off-wiki commitments. I'm hoping the current bot doesn't give up the ghost completely first. Vaticidalprophet 09:42, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

On the other hand, Legoktm is the third person to operate that bot (it was previously run by Harej and Chris G), so I'd say that GA is more of a counterexample than an example. Also, re talk page archiving, that exact situation did happen back in 2013 when MiszaBot died, and somebody was willing to write another bot within a few weeks. (And, all this time, ClueBot III has been running in parallel, so the bus factor is at least two). * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 00:00, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

On the other other hand, since GimmeBot went down in 2013 then AFAIK nobody has fully replicated its functionality. In any case, bots are just a single relatively trivial example of the "a given area is dependent on a single editor or a small group" issue. (Perhaps I'm violating WP:BEANS here, but I'm sure the vandals have already figured it out; a lot of article groups are the result of a single editor with a particular interest. When that single editor leaves, there's a good chance nobody is watching those pages any longer; as long as the vandalism is plausible enough not to set off alarm bells at New Page Patrol, a vandal can go through those pages merrily changing dates and so forth, which thanks to Google's laziness in not fact-checking Wikidata will then ripple out across the internet.)

As of today we have 5082 editors reaching even the fairly minimal activity threshold of 100 edits-per-month and we have 6,416,100 mainspace articles. A static number of people maintaining a steadily growing site is unsustainable, and the only potential point of dispute is just where the breaking point is and what measures we can take to delay or mitigate it. It's not being Chicken Little when one can see incontrovertible evidence of the sky getting steadily closer. ‑ Iridescent 06:30, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Interesting point. Is this the fate of most voluntary endeavors then, even on the web? For me the continued draw is working collaboratively in an increasingly atomized world, on a project of worldwide importance (creating and preserving virtually the only remaining encyclopedia in existence of its size and scope). For me the community I have found here is also of major importance. I found very friendly help and abundant collaboration from the moment I joined (people were in much better moods then). That said, I also found a great deal of bullying in some quarters my first few years here, and had to completely leave certain editing areas to escape it. I think community and kindness are the key to editor retention, and editor retention is the key to WP's survival. When editors have a bad experience during their first couple of years, they are likely to leave. A lot of old hands are excellent encyclopedists, but they didn't start out with the skill level and skill set and learning curve they now have. I think we need to trust that well-meaning newbies of any scholarly or research bent are eventually going to be good encyclopedists, and treat them with kid gloves and much social interaction, so they will stay longterm. Softlavender (talk) 09:57, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

My personal feeling—as I've been saying with various wording since at least 2009 and probably earlier—is that Wikipedia is heading for a "flowers growing in the sewers" model, in which we give up any serious attempt at holding back the flood of crap and just concentrate on preserving and improving those parts that we deem worth preserving and improving, and on making it clear to readers which is which. (It's partly why I spend so much time banging on about making article assessment fit for purpose.)

It will mean a radical shift in mindset, but unless there's going to be either a massive boom in editor recruitment or a mass cull of stubs—neither of which seems particularly likely—a shift from a 'curators of everything' model to a 'marking what's important so readers can filter out the garbage, but otherwise only moderating when problems are actively flagged' model seems the only way to go. I'd argue that some of the other projects like Commons have already taken this route, even if they've not yet reached the point at which they'd admit it. ‑ Iridescent 16:42, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

It isn't just WMF who have to watch out. Wikipedians can be our own worst enemies when over-enforcing rules and sanctions ends up scaring away newbies. Another difference with business is that employees are largely recruited to do something the owner wants. Whereas many "jobs" on Wikipedia happen because someone decides spontaneously to do it. So it was a bonus they volunteered to edit here in the first place, and a bonus they decided to do something nobody else was doing or could do, and so we should be a bit philosophical if they leave.

As an aside, I do personally have experience of being replaced. I created the monthly Commons:Photo challenge in 2013 and ran it for a few years. When I gave it up, someone else volunteered to take over and have done so very well since. I have occasionally helped out when they go away on holiday around a month end/start, but strangely haven't needed to do that these last couple of years. On any long running project like wiki, getting replaced is probably a very healthy thing, and a measure of the activity being considered worthwhile. -- Colin°^Talk 17:35, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

This has happened to me at TV Tropes as well. Now if only I could be replaced at updating the articles at User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/article work... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:36, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

It's happened to me also, but when a process has relied on a single individual or a small group, a succession relies on there being either someone being shown the ropes beforehand with an eye to them taking over, or someone lurking in the background with the ability to take over if the need becomes critical. Even English Wikipedia with its thousands of editors has had issues in the past with processes depending on the single person who's willing to keep them running. For some of the smaller wikis where the main editor base could fit comfortably in a Ford Tourneo, the departure of even a single person could wreck the project.

Although it's long-since rambled, this thread is nominally about Welsh Wikipedia so let's stick with them as an example. Last month only five editors made more than 100 article edits and only 16 editors made more than 10 edits there. Had the WMF decided to get heavy regarding the unpleasantness mentioned in Only in death's original post and issued a global lock on Llywelyn2000 it would have left a gaping hole in the project's maintenance; had an investigation uncovered evidence of collusion which led to both Llywelyn2000 and Deb being blocked it would literally have wiped out the project's administration. Repeat this a hundred times for all the other smaller wikis in the WMF ecosystem—from the vantage point of English Wikipedia it's easy to lose sight of just how small the editing communities of all the other Wikipedias are. (If meta:List of Wikipedias is to be believed, and that's bot-updated so I've no reason to doubt it, at the time of writing there are 35 Wikipedias that have ten or fewer active editors—not admins, editors.) ‑ Iridescent 07:18, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

I live in Wales, suffice to say there are other issues which wouldnt necessarily make that a bad thing if it happened ;) You dont have to look very far on Cymru for the same issues that crop up with all the smaller wikis where the admin pool is essentially a group of close friends. But that is a result of what happens when you have a very small self-governing pool of people and no accountability. Its not a Wiki issue. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:51, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Well yeah, I don't think cy-wiki would be missed; it's a charmless mix of nationalist tub-thumping and performative wokeness. It's not a great example, though, since even the most ardent nat is used to "the Welsh-language version of this is inadequate, let's check the English version" as a part of everyday life. For something like Burmese (33 million speakers, lots of politically sensitive topics, unique alphabet so stewards have difficulty monitoring it remotely, Wikipedia has four admins) an increase or decrease in the number of editors can literally have a material impact on people's lives. ‑ Iridescent 15:34, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Next time someone asks me why I dont vote Plaid Cymru, I am using "it's a charmless mix of nationalist tub-thumping and performative wokeness" rather than my usual "bunch of muppets". Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:41, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Watching the usual suspects trying to euphemismify away any mention of extremism from Plaid Cymru provides hours of peaceful relaxation; the changes tend to stick since nobody except PC supporters cares. "Adopted a neutral standpoint" is probably the winner, although "controversial remarks" warrants an honourable mention, and to read all the tales of electoral triumph you'd never suspect that this is a party that got less than 10% of the vote at the last election. (Today I Learned that the new PC logo is supposed to be a poppy, and not as every single person assumes a badly-drawn daffodil.) ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Three admins, actually, my:အသုံးပြုသူ:အလွဲသုံးစားမှု စိစစ်စနစ် is just the abuse filter. Elli (talk | contribs) 16:54, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Clicking that link, looks like someone's Spirograph is on the blink. EEng 17:05, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Deep lolness. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:08, 7 December 2021 (UTC) p.s. sorry, I mean ငိုရယ်မောမော အီမိုဂျီ

Apparently, it's because paper was in short supply so they'd write on palm leaves, and using the traditional alphabet with its straight lines would rip the leaves so the alphabet was redesigned to be all curves. That's two things I've learned today. ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Probably explains why my Spirograph doesn't work well with palm leaves... Martinevans123 (talk) 16:15, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

How very Iechyd-dare you! ""Come home to a real fire, buy a cottage in Wales". Meibion Glynneath 123 (talk) 16:58, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

That link takes me (indirectly) to List of International Emmy Award winners. Looking over that list, I can only conclude either that someone on the Emmy panel is transfixed by RADA accents, or that the media in every part of the world not within the M25 is unspeakably bad. ‑ Iridescent 19:36, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes indeed. A travesty that Aneurin Anus and Kenny Twat have not yet been suitably honoured. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:20, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

RE 'Controversial remarks', they were indeed controversial at the time but you could probably say them now in the current Welsh economic climate with nary a remark in return (except for possibly the 'must learn Welsh' one). The impact of house purchases on rural and other remote communities is well documented, seaside purchases - buy-to-let - the inability of people growing up in Welsh communities to move into the local housing market is a big issue. COVID had an interesting effect where all the people with second homes attempted to flee the cities under the various lockdowns/work-from-home to set up down here. They didnt seem to be prepared for the anger they got from what is normally a quite placid populace. The issue with health board resources and centralised government funding is a thorny one as well. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:30, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Hmmm, it's almost as if something had happened in the last 20 years that had brought "damn foreigners coming over and stealing our jobs", "they're just parasites who use our public services without putting anything back" and "people speaking another language are a danger to our cultural values" out of the crazysphere and into mainstream conversation… (FWIW, I don't believe in "Once you have more than 50% of anybody living in a community that speaks a foreign language, then you lose your indigenous tongue almost immediately" as remotely the reason the Welsh language is in decline, or you'd be seeing Spanish extinct as a language in the US. What's killing Welsh—and Sorbian, Griko, Occitan, Breton, Romansh, Frisian et al—isn't cultural imperialism, but a relative lack of written materials (both online and paper) making it less convenient to use in day-to-day life than other languages, and speakers of the language choosing to move out of the area.)

The phenomenon you describe during Covid wasn't specific to Wales. Small towns and villages across the world were overwhelmed by people pouring out of the cities into second homes and AirBnBs, and nowhere were the locals very pleased about it. ‑ Iridescent 07:05, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Managing scale

Managing scale (scaling up, maintaining current size, or scaling down) is the fate of all endeavours. It's more upfront with for-profit projects, as they have to decide on how to allocate their financial resources. Volunteer initiatives can be more vulnerable to the availability of volunteers, and in an environment like Wikipedia that lacks hierarchy, long-term planning is very hard. There's no one responsible for it, and anything that a group of like-minded editors tries to plan for is subject to the whims of the consensus discussions of the day, and the continued participation of the editors in the group. isaacl (talk) 21:13, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

When it comes to scaling up or down, Wikipedia has additional problems that for-profit companies, government bodies, and more traditional charitable groups don't have. The traditional way for an organization to handle growth is to break up into separate operating units. Wikipedia doesn't really have that option—it's not as if we can sell the 2,038,823 biographical articles to a venture capital firm to free us up from the need to maintain them, or split the science and arts articles into separate operating divisions to ensure that problems affecting one don't spread to affect the whole. Likewise, when it comes to downsizing the traditional way to handle it is through mergers, but we don't realistically have that option either—the only other bodies that would have both the inclination and the technical ability to absorb Wikipedia are national governments and big tech, and if Wikipedia ever did go into terminal decline the Googles and Chinese Community Parties of the world would much rather kill it off and have control over its replacement, rather than try to absorb twenty years' worth of contradictory rules and interpersonal squabbles. I assume the WMF's 'hubs' plan is at least in part an attempt to address the scaleability issues, but the whole "anyone can edit" nature of the beast means there ultimately needs to be a single place for the buck to stop. ‑ Iridescent 07:26, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

English Wikipedia can't divest itself of articles, but it could take other steps to reduce churn and thus maintenance, such as protecting more articles. Traditional charitable groups at least have people directing what its volunteers do, and thus can choose to stop working on projects that they can no longer adequately staff (or provide other resources for). English Wikipedia currently requires large group conversations to try to decide what to cover and in what detail, and it's ineffective for managing scale. isaacl (talk) 20:55, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

and taditional encyclopaedias have editorial boards and editors, who decide what needs covering, and more or less at what length. WP has never had any of that. I presume "English Wikipedia currently requires large group conversations to try to decide what to cover and in what detail" should be understood in the future conditional tense - I see no evidence any such process is currently being attempted at other than an individual level. Johnbod (talk) 21:28, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

While a lot of decisions are made on an article-by-article basis—sometimes setting precedent, sometimes not—the big group discussions about how and where the margins of Wikipedia's scope are going to be defined take place quite often. You particularly see them on things like sports and music, where a change in the interpretation of "notability" or "reliable source" has the potential to cause mass deletions. Here's one that's just been opened on how esports teams (or "groups of videogamers" to anyone over the age of about 20) should be treated, for instance. ‑ Iridescent 04:45, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

There is a discussion now on how to cover fringe theories. There are interminable discussions on what standards should be used to determine if a subject should have an article. There's an ongoing conversation on how to judge the potential availability of CC-BY SA compatible photos, in order to decide if a copyrighted photo can be used instead. There was a long discussion on portals a couple of years ago, where people tried to figure out how many people were willing to actually maintain them. There are lots of attempts to establish more guidance, but huge group conversation aren't great at reaching definitive conclusions. A very small number of recalcitrant participants can stall progress, because most people really are trying to find a happy consensus that everyone can live with. isaacl (talk) 05:23, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

The huge group RFCs can still reach a result even if there are stubborn holdouts, provided they get properly formally closed and it's made clear that even those who don't like the closure are expected to abide by it unless and until they formally challenge it. For an obvious example, as far as I know my closure of Religion in biographical infoboxes is still holding and still being grudgingly abided by, despite my ruling going explicitly against the opinions of some of the most vocal members of the "IAR means the rules don't apply to me" tendency. ‑ Iridescent 17:30, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

It's of course possible to reach a result in some cases if one side is willing to push for an outcome. These days, this generally happens in cases where there is some urgent concern (say, COVID-19 coverage). Typically, though, editors don't like pushing for a result when they know it will cause significant dissatisfaction with some people, and a lot of the more ambivalent editors passing by will push for a "please just stop arguing and go do something else" ending to discussion, rather than trying to work out an agreement on guidance. isaacl (talk) 21:10, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

All too many of the people at WP, are there because they like to argue about rules and details.It's not surprising that we should atttract people who are perhaps a little stubborn and even obsessive-compulsive, but perhaps we cna figure out a way to redirect them to arguing about content. I may be heretical here, but about half our articles would benefit form a direct challenge about the relevance and basis of the content, and atr least the result would be an improved WP. In deciding such things, we need to stick to arguments based on one and only one basic principle: what makes a better encyclopedia. We won't agree, but the way forward is to recognize the disagreements, and accept that the encyclopedia will as seen by any one person, contain detailed content on things we don't care in the least about; the counterpart to that is that it will contain content about what we individually do care about. As an example, it should not really bother me if we contain detailed articles on minor football professionals or beauty contest winners, of the detailed plots of stupid video series--as long as we can have articles on the scientists and and writers and historians whom I consider important. That's why I've always been an inclusionist -- in the hope for reciprocity. DGG ( talk ) 10:18, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Notability vs appropriateness

As I've said many times before, if I were in charge the sole notability criterion would be "using genuine reliable secondary sources, can you write 1000 words about this topic without waffling or padding?". If we applied this scrupulously—and accepted that it would mean deleting some pages on things that "are obviously notable" if the sources don't exist to back that claim up—it would solve about 90% of our problems in a single stroke. ‑ Iridescent 17:51, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

A thousand words feels like too much. I'd be happy if we could write 200 words without waffling or padding. (But I'd specify independent reliable sources rather than secondary ones.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

200 words seems to me too short—the point is to filter out all the "we know this person/village/company/species exists, but there's nothing to say about it" chaff that's generated from directories, atlases etc. That said if it was a 200-word limit or nothing, I'd take the 200-word limit. Yes, it would mean losing stand-alone articles for "but this is obviously a notable topic" topics like the wonderfully-named Edmund Bastard (politician). To use that as an example, an article complying with the new rules could almost certainly be written—if he was a Member of Parliament for 25 years he'll surely have been mentioned in coverage of Parliamentary proceedings even though Dartmouth was a rotten borough in this period so the usual "we can assume he was covered in detail in the local press" argument doesn't apply. But this page is now 10 years old, other than its initial creation hasn't had a single non-bot edit that I can see, and is sourced solely to a book from 1834 called A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland. Unless and until there's something actually to say about him, this is a straightforward example of a topic where we'd better serve the readers by directing them to an entry in a list rather than a content-free pseudoarticle, with the added bonus of helping keep {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} down to a manageable size.

My thinking in "secondary" rather than "independent" is that it's easier to define, and for a change this drastic we'd want as few gray areas as possible, but that's a very minor point. ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Eh, in sciencey topics it's often not so clear what "secondary" is. There are a lot of sources that satisfy WP:PSTS but not WP:MEDRS for example. And I have always advocated the viewpoint that the intro section of an academic paper more commonly than not is a secondary source. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:32, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

It's an interesting point, about scientific publications. Although it's true that introduction sections (and often portions of the discussion section) are reviews of the literature, and thus somewhat secondary, they are always constructed to support the significance of the primary research, and therefore are not particularly independent. (Yes, peer review is supposed to at least partially mitigate that, but I can say from experience that it rarely does, unless the peer reviewer pushes to cite their own work.) --Tryptofish (talk) 17:44, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I think you meant to say that they are not necessarily "comprehensive", which is a nicer way of saying that the contents might be cherry-picked. They can be "independent" if the previous work was done by other people, no matter how biased the summary is. The problem for Wikipedia editors is that we can easily be led astray if we are too trusting of such summaries. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:38, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

It's true that they are not necessarily comprehensive, but they are not necessarily independent as well, and the latter is indeed what I meant. In other words, the sort-of cherry picking of what to emphasize, what to include or exclude, in itself constitutes a lack of independence. If authors cherry pick the prior literature that is useful in making their point, then that reduces the independence for our sourcing purposes. It's the difference between not being comprehensive simply because it's brief, and – as is the case in what I'm talking about – not being comprehensive because of a deliberate (even if good-faith) effort to present a one-sided review of past work. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:23, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure that concept fits with the way that we normally talk about Wikipedia:Independent sources. Merely agreeing with someone else/someone else's research doesn't make you non-independent of that research. If agreeing with someone meant the end of independence, then book reviewers would stop being independent every time they said a book was good (but if they hate it, they're still independent), and in the field of physics, only crackpots would be considered independent of Einstein.

I think I understand what you're driving at, but independence isn't quite the right wiki-jargon. Maybe the word we want is closer to self-serving. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:07, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I should explain how I mean this. If this discussion were in project space, I wouldn't be saying it the way that I say it here, but this is of course user space, so I'm speaking more informally. I recognize that "I have seen biased writing of introductions and discussions, so we should deprecate such sourcing" would rest too much on OR and would be somewhat inappropriate for policy discussions. But I'm coming at this (and I know what I'm talking about) as someone with decades of experience working within the peer review system and seeing what happens from the inside. You are right that "self-serving" is applicable here, but the kind of self-service going on would indeed translate into non-independence (or at least bias/POV in the source). For example, I had a rather unpleasant competitor in the specific research area of my research, and he always either wrote his papers (and even reviews) omitting any mention of the (highly relevant) publications from my lab, or occasionally would cite my work misrepresenting what it said and dismissing it. Colleagues from other institutions would roll their eyes when talking with me about it, and his work eventually went out of favor, so insiders often understood what was going on, but I'm sure that lay people would have no idea. People who haven't seen the sausage-making from the inside would be quite surprised if they knew about this kind of thing, but it's more common than the public would suspect, and peer-review doesn't work as well as it's purported to. Obviously, I'm not even close to a reliable source about that for Wikipedia's purposes, but I cannot un-know what I know, --Tryptofish (talk) 17:36, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I thought about it some more, and it occurred to me that you are thinking of independence as being "the source is independent of the other references that it cites and discusses", which is quite reasonable, and more precise in terms of the Wikipedia meaning than the way I was thinking of it (at least when the introduction or discussion refers to papers written by other authors). I was approaching it as "the source is not necessarily independent in its citing of its own publications, and not necessarily neutral in its citing of publications by others". It is reasonable for you to point out that the latter, non-neutrality in citing the work of others, is really bias but also independent in the Wikipedia meaning of the word. I didn't pick up on that until just now. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:06, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I suspect I've seen a case of dueling academics on wiki. From our POV, there's a clear right–wrong division: One of them has been socking, and the other isn't.

You doubtless remember that one of my pet peeves about people claiming "unreliability" when the real problem is undue weight. A sound theoretical structure for our policies seems to be important to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:10, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

An academic socking on Wikipedia. What a wonderful example to set for one's students. I'm facepalming, and yet I'm not surprised. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:15, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't know the context of the particular case in question, but an academic socking isn't automatically going to be A Bad Thing. I can imagine circumstances when an academic might have legitimate reasons for editing using an account that isn't linked to their real-world identity, either to prevent their opinions being given undue weight, to experience Wikipedia as a new editor as part of their research, or just to avoid giving the impression that they're trying to pull a "do you know who I am?". (Yes I'm well aware that 99% of the time none of these will be the case, and the actual reason will be "I'm the Regius Professor of Foology, your rules do not apply to me".) ‑ Iridescent 17:43, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't know the context either, but I'm fine with editing under an anonymous username, as opposed to one's real-life name, or to using a legitimate alt account. But actual socking, in the sense of using multiple accounts in order to appear to be more than one person (or to evade sanctions) is A Bad Thing (or A Bad Thing, PhD). (Foology, by the way, is a popular topic at faculty meetings.) --Tryptofish (talk) 18:39, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

This is the SPI kind of socking. I've seen at least four accounts blocked so far. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:04, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Why doesn't that surprise me… Let me guess, it's either about (a) a completely trivial point about which literally nobody other than the editor involved cares or (b) us not giving due prominence to their own recently-published book which is available in all good stores and makes an ideal Christmas gift? ‑ Iridescent 14:22, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I think it's a dispute over where the exact boundary lies between two obviously overlapping subjects. Anybody can see that the correct answer is the one that makes my area bigger and more important than your area. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:50, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus, WP:MEDRS does mention these sections: "In addition to experiments, primary sources normally contain introductory, background, or review sections that place their research in the context of previous work; these sections may be cited in Wikipedia with care: they are often incomplete". It doesn't mention the "not particularly independent" aspect that Tryptofish mentions. Independence can sometimes be a problem with a dedicated review, such as in a small or polarised field. There was a discussion recently at WT:MED which highlighted again that peer review is no silver bullet and doesn't magically confer reliability on the work. We frequently get editors assuming that everything in a "peer-reviewed journal" is peer reviewed, when in fact only a portion of the work is. -- Colin°^Talk 08:56, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

My general thinking—which may not be policy but seems to me to be straightforward common sense—is that if the paper is discussed elsewhere we should be using wherever it's discussed rather than the original as our source, and if it's not discussed elsewhere that should generally be a massive red flag as to whether it's something Wikipedia should even be mentioning. Wikipedia is, in theory anyway, a directory of topics that are demonstrably considered important by other sources, not the Grand Repository of Every Piece of Information. ‑ Iridescent 18:40, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

This is true (and as far as I can tell at least adjacent to PAG status) as a rule of thumb, but sometimes hits odd edge cases for uncommon or underresearched disorders. MEDRS is written assuming a significant and progressing body of literature; the significant majority of individual diseases are rare conditions not sexy enough for funding where you're lucky if the last literature review is from this century. Wikipedia's niche-filling role of "being the most comprehensive source on the open internet on a narrow topic" is even more important for rare medical conditions -- without us, things too weird for the NIH/NHS/WebMD types to have coherent articles about them are excluded from the general population, which is not great if you or someone you care about has just been diagnosed with one of them.

In general, a lot of discussions on the definitions and borderlands of reliable sourcing are written assuming people are working on the most controversial thing a given subject matter could cover. My participation in the Covid MEDRS discussions has mostly been trying to prevent people from, in the laudable effort to stop people from rewriting all our articles to say orange juice cures Covid, forgetting this is not most of our medical content and turning MEDRS into something that makes it impossible to write about anything in Orphanet/NORD's scope. In non-medical content, I've seen some horrendous games of telephone in the RSN-to-RS/PS-to-source-highlighter-script pipeline -- an RfC of six people where all agreed a source was apolitically reliable but two (who I happen to agree with -- its political content is a dictatorship mouthpiece -- but not enough to trump the apolitical reliability the way this did) argued it politically unreliable, the RfC was closed as 'politically unreliable', and this was translated to the source highlighter scripts as a giant red glowing "DON'T USE THIS" sign. Vaticidalprophet 19:33, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Medicine

Medicine is a special edge case, as the only significant field where the use of outdated sourcing can cause real-world consequences. The subconscious assumption underlying Wikipedia is that the ideal of a Wikipedia article is an aggregation of all the sources that haven't been superseded by something better since they were written. This works great for something like vintage automobiles, since even if nobody's written about it for five decades nobody's going to come along and discredit the theory that the Ford Whatever was a four-door saloon with a maximum speed of 122 mph. This is imperfect but works adequately for a broader swathe of biographies and humanities topics—there are a lot of niche historical topics where the most definitive references are hopelessly outdated books with titles like The Wogs Are Out For Blood, but where the facts aren't disputed so it's a case of separating the non-problematic facts from their problematic interpretation.

On medical topics, the underlying "notability doesn't expire so if it was only covered in depth in 1923 it remains worthy of an article" leads to problems, since the 'best' sources by our usual standards are often totally discredited but the discrediting doesn't necessarily itself meet our standards for reliable sourcing. MEDRS is a valiant effort to square that circle, but brings its own issues in that it's not always clear what is and isn't a medical article. (Coffea → Coffee bean → Coffee → Caffeine → Caffeine citrate; at what point on that line does MEDRS kick in? Is Heroin a medical or a social history topic? How about Bee sting?)

In an ideal world, Wikipedia wouldn't cover medical topics and we'd have a separate Wikispecies-style wiki for medicine, where we could both rewrite the sourcing and notability rules to suit the unique circumstances, and be a lot harsher when it comes to blocking and protecting than Wikipedia's rules allow. "Anyone can edit", "be bold" and "if we get this wrong people might die" aren't a good mix; a separate project where we could enforce "get consensus for any given change before you make it" and "think about whether this is actually an improvement rather than about whether it complies with Wikipedia's arbitrary rules" would solve an awful lot of problems.

The whole "politically unreliable means 'never use this'" thing is an issue that comes up all the damn time. I once had someone—and a very experienced editor from the 2004 intake to boot, not an overenthusiastic n00b—earnestly explaining to me that the Daily Mail RfC meant that the Daily Mail wasn't a reliable source for a quotation from the Daily Mail. ‑ Iridescent 06:52, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

(Tryptofish clears throat, and then says something that will be like kicking a wasp nest.) At the risk of being reviled, I'll point out that the reviled Doc James created the reviled Medicine Wiki, which is exactly a separate wiki that deals only with medicine topics and has its own content rules. (That said, I'm perfectly/painfully aware that the creation of a separate project with separate rules arose from the desire to have rules that permit drug pricing information, and that the project may suffer from too little participation, so no one needs to point any of that out to me.) --Tryptofish (talk) 23:06, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Yeah -- the project that hosts the pre-rewrite versions of all the articles I've done in the past year, so we can have permanent public-facing preservations of a bunch of outdated Starts. I became active in the post-Case/Medicine era, and I honestly can't make sense of what I've read of it (and I've read much of it). It just sounds like an archetypal case of the Infobox Phenomenon, where people tear themselves apart over issues barely noticeable outside their bubble.

On the broader point, there's simultaneously a tendency to treat Wikipedia's medical content in exactly the way you (Iri) describe, and an open question of how useful it really is. The protection threshold is de facto far lower for medical articles -- indef semis over single-incident vandalism are, maybe not routine, but I've certainly worked on articles in that situation (e.g. tetrasomy X has exactly that protection log). Ajpolino has been working for several months now on trial unprotections of many high-profile medical articles, and of the articles called out on that list as unprotected, I took a look at Healthy diet, Multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease to see none reprotected or wracked by newfound severe issues. (Oldfound severe issues are outside the experiment's scope...) The aforementioned tetrasomy X and its big sister trisomy X were unprotected adjacent to the experiment, as a procedural result of histmerges with userspace rewrites, and similarly haven't faced any issues. Vaticidalprophet 23:25, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Your point about mirroring out-of-date versions of our articles is an excellent one. What they really need over there is some kind of crawler/bot that continuously (or at least periodically) mirrors the edits made at en-wiki, rather than just staying frozen in time. (Has there really been that much time post-case? I've certainly been seeing you around a lot, and productively so.) --Tryptofish (talk) 22:02, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Jamesopedia appears to be down to just three editors. Assuming that's the case, it's a zombie project that isn't really comparable to what I'm suggesting. Assuming that SUL continues to function (and there's no reason it shouldn't) and that we make GlobalWatchlist enabled by default, any transition should be virtually invisible to both readers and editors other than on switchover day itself.

Spitballing further, we could even continue to host non-technical versions of the articles on Wikipedia complete with prominent Warning! This page is potentially inaccurate and does not constitute medical advice, do not take any action based on it! disclaimers. That would address something that's always been an issue since the earliest days, that we're simultaneously trying to cater for the target intelligent fourteen year old with no prior knowledge, and for people with decades of experience. For a handful of the most sprawling topics we already have pages like Introduction to genetics, but it's very much the exception; there's no policy basis for these pages existing, and there are only about a dozen. As things stand, the ≈20,000 readers per day visiting COVID-19 are presented with "reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification from a nasopharyngeal swab" within about 30 seconds of reading. ‑ Iridescent 07:02, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Iridescent, you are being very unfair. While they do only have three editors active in article space (Whispihistory, Ozzie10aaaa and King James), you are forgetting QuackGuru, who has created more than 20 sandboxes on e-cigarettes. Ok, now you are suggesting the splinter medWiki would be technical, presumably aimed at health professionals, and wouldn't need disclaimers. And that the core Wikipedia could continue to have lay friendly pages on cancer that were held to a lower standard and admined by people who wouldn't know a catheter from a catherine. While editors are motivated by several factors, I think having a readership is a big draw. So why would I edit a specialist publication for people who already have the information they need and know where to get it, or a non-specialist publication that is read by millions? Consider that in the UK the British National Formulary is freely available to all. And Datapharm's emc provides summary information sheets for professionals and patient info leaflets for lay patients for pretty much all drugs. Wrt drugs, what's your medWiki offering that those don't? A History section? -- Colin°^Talk 08:54, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

I won't presume to speak for everyone who originally signed up at the Med Wiki, obviously, but I can explain what my experiences have been. I signed up originally because I figure that any alternative to en-wiki is worth giving a chance, and I believed that I could help with fixing inelegant writing. (I still feel badly about not having done that.) Over time, I ran into two issues. One is that the login process over there has some problems. Logging in directly over there raises some preservation-of-privacy issues, and I'm extremely protective of my privacy. There has been a process of being logged in as part of the Wikimedia global login, but that has only worked on-and-off. Second, I think there has been an "after you; no, after you" problem: potential editors (or at least, me) see the low level of participation and wait to see who else participates, and it becomes self-fulfilling with hardly anyone going first. Early on, James and Ozzie were very busy with the mirroring (such as it was), and it felt to me like I might as well wait until they had gotten through that step. And after a while, those two problems I describe made it seem easier and easier not to bother. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:01, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Iri, what you have in red is what I have long advocated for all medicine content. That RFC failed because of how I structured it, and the subsequent worse additions by others; it would be grand if a better formulated RFC could get some sort of real disclaimer on medical content (as opposed to the site wide disclaimer that no casual reader will ever see). Search for my comment in this discussion.

You have it right on Jamesopedia, but (besides hosting the efforts of a topic banned editor) there are other issues there that need not be shared publicly. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:26, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

He was topic-banned from pricing, not from medical topics as a whole. And the purpose of the new wiki was, in significant part, to have different rules on pricing content than at en-wiki. There's an inconsistency with saying that we should spin off a separate medical wiki with different rules on content, and then treating a separate wiki with different rules that we don't like as though it were Wikipediocracy. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:31, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

I am iPad editing in the car on a long trip home from a wedding, hotspot connection, so I could be wrong, but I was fairly certain he was more broadly topic banned: “QuackGuru topic banned: QuackGuru is indefinitely topic-banned from articles relating to medicine, broadly construed.” SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:37, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Struck, with my apologies. I thought you were referring to James, but you are correct about QG. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:39, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

My writing tends to lack clarity even when not editing from the car :) :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:41, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

"Hosting the efforts of a topic banned editor" isn't necessarily a bad thing. If Wikipedia is going to have "your only rights here are the right to leave and the right to fork" as a mantra for two decades, we can't then complain when people leave and fork. I said much the same once to someone at WMF (I assume WAID but can't honestly remember) regarding proxying. "If you're a really excellent historian but you're just not able to work with others, we should help them -- go and make your own website, release it under Creative Commons license and we'll try to use some of that material, because it's just not working out" may not be formal policy, but given that it was publicly announced by Jimmy Wales to a crowd of people at Wikimania, any normal observer would assume that it is policy. That being the case, it's not reasonable for us to complain either about people who don't fit in to Wikipedia's environment going and doing their thing elsewhere, or about other people then importing things they've written. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

^Well-said, thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:41, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

(Has there really been that much time post-case? Time is a cruel mistress. Case/Medicine was opened April 2020 (fantastic timing, eh) and closed June 2020, so a year and a half ago now. I became active a year ago and have passed the >100 edits 'highly active editor' (ask the WMF, not me) bar for about eight or nine months of that.) I think both Colin's "what is medical content" (which, as it happens, was one of Iridescent's points as well w/r/t "when does MEDRS kick in" and "when do altmed DS sanctions kick in") and "why would people write for X minor publication when they could write for Y major publication with as much or more ease" are both significant points that any split would need a good answer to. Impact of writing is a huge part of why people in any field end up on Wikipedia. I've been published in "real outlets" of significant reach, and I doubt it gets anywhere near the readership of even my most damnably obscure articles. In turn, debating the borderlands of what a given subject-specific PAG actually applies to has never been simple, from much more trivial cases ("does a MOS note about how to write fractions in science-related articles apply to medical articles, and in turn is someone changing it to that format being disruptive?") to broad existential debates when people get dragged for noticeboards for flying too close to their tbans. Vaticidalprophet 19:56, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

What I'm thinking of shouldn't have any significant impact, positive or negative, on the readership for any given page; to anyone other than the actual editors, it would be a behind-the-scenes shift regarding where specific pages were hosted. If and when it became more fork-y—e.g. when articles start to exist in two versions, an introductory one on Wikipedia and a technical one on Newwiki—there would be a dip in readers but hopefully an increase in satisfaction, as we'd no longer have the "this article is too simplistic!" and "this article is too complicated!" complaints.

Again this is thinking out loud rather than a policy proposal, but if "two separate domains" and "where to draw the subject boundaries" are what's causing the problem, there are ways it could be done that would still keep the whole thing in-house. As well as expanding the use of [[Introduction to Foo]] articles (User:Encyclopædius had some thoughts once on going the other way as well, and having [[Summary of Foo]] pages, but I don't know how far he got), we could cobble together formal definitions of "High Importance Topic" and "Topic Where Inaccuracy Poses an Increased Risk", and enforce stricter sourcing/balance rules on them along with some kind of automated system to flash warnings at anyone attempting to edit pages falling into these categories… If "preserving the unity of the wiki" is the top priority, there are still ways we could start preparing for the time when we admit we can't monitor every change and need to prioritize the topics where accuracy is most important. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Would you need it to be a separate wiki (maybe with a bot updating it, or some sort of cross-wiki transclusion)? Medical articles (as chosen by consensus) could be moved into a different namespace, and the entire namespace could be protected against anyone who doesn't have a "medical-editor" userright. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:13, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

The way I'm thinking about this, if it's a separate wiki, it has separate rules for (potentially) everything. If it's this wiki, then the normal rules and existing infrastructure applies, and the main difference is that there's an extra level of page protection. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:14, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

If it stays on this wiki, it surely wouldn't need a new namespace? We could just create a new medical=yes, or even a more generic potentially_sensitive_high_readership_topic=yes, flag, come up with an agreement as to how we decide which pages are covered by it, and then restrict the right to edit that page to people who've passed an "I understand the specific extra rules regarding this subset of articles" test (either an actual exam or an RFA-lite interrogation). Call it Pending Changes Level 3. If it failed we could just quietly abandon it as we did with Flagged Revisions etc, if it worked we could potentially expand it to all the other shit-magnets like American politics, climate change, I/P etc. It could hardly be a more dysfunctional system than WP:ACDS. ‑ Iridescent 19:31, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

I think it'd be easier to keep track of a namespace than to keep track of which article gets which flags, but a "PC3" could also work, if admins didn't mind the extra hassle of protecting all the pages.

Having a separate wiki might reduce some of the drama. At smaller wikis, everyone knows everyone, and the editor who's annoying you today is very likely the editor who helped you solve a problem yesterday. You're not being annoyed by a faceless random luser; you're being annoyed by someone whom it is likely in your own best interest to maintain a functional relationship with. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:56, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

As per my previous comments in this thread my slight preference would be for a separate wiki for the reasons that you mention, although I can see good arguments for "keep it all in one place". An obvious drawback to separate wikis is that—as we already see with Wikidata and with different language wikis—there will inevitably be times when the different versions of articles disagree, and readers would understandably be confused if Google returns two different "Wikipedia" results each saying different things; an obvious drawback to keeping it on-wiki with an additional article flag would be that it adds yet another layer to Wikipedia's byzantine bureaucracy; an obvious drawback to "do nothing and carry on as we currently do" is that we know the system is already creaking at the seams and eventually the number of articles in any given area is going to overwhelm the number of editors monitoring that area, and for some topics like medicine and BLPs this has more potential to cause issues than it does for others. ‑ Iridescent 07:07, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

On breaking up Wikipedia

Back to the drum I’ve been beating for years. Medicine needs a BLP-type policy which would allow us to massively remove poorly sourced and dated content. That would address, I believe, everything Iri raises. We could effectively blow up dated and miserable medical content, because nothing is better than something poor in the medical realm. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:57, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

The problem with Doc James's if-I-can't-win-every-time-I'm-taking-my-ball wiki isn't its existence, but the fact that it mirrors Wikipedia so is always going to lag behind since if the literature changes any editor is going to update Wikipedia, but not everyone is going to update Jamesopedia (even if he deigns to allow them to create an account). What I'm envisaging is something different, in which we export the medical articles to a separate site, delete the pages from Wikipedia, and replace every internal link with a link to the relevant page on the new site, and the existing wikilinks on the medical articles with backlinks to Wikipedia. (It's not beyond the bounds of possibility; this is what we did when we moved the images en masse to Commons.) The change would be virtually invisible to readers since the only sign that they'd temporarily left Wikipedia would be the replacement of the death star with the Medwiki logo and vice versa as they navigated between pages.

Such a move would have the advantage of allowing us to have genuinely separate rules on notability, sourcing, protection and editor interaction on this particular set of articles, and (importantly) to block people from editing medical articles as a whole while leaving them still able to edit everything else. I don't believe I'm giving away state secrets in saying that WP:MEDRS is a fudge of a solution which regularly leaves good-faith editors confused and upset when they think they're improving an article, only to find themselves summarily reverted and warned even though they've been faithfully following all the 'normal' rules on sourcing et al which we've just spent ages explaining to them. It would also allow us to have a separate group of "medical admins" who've demonstrated familiarity with the particular issues affecting medical articles and thus can be appointed admins on the new wiki, without having to go through the whole "please demonstrate your familiarity with the circumstances in which deletion criterion A10 should be invoked on a userspace draft" charade of RFA.

Looking further forward, a stand-alone Medwiki could also start looking at the unique circumstances affecting COI on medical articles, where the most up-to-date information is often proprietary and the people with the best knowledge of a given topic are often directly employed by firms or organizations working directly on that topic. As things stand, we have an uneasy dancing around policy where we're often choosing either to intentionally fail to provide all the information readers are likely to be looking for, or we're turning a blind eye to the use of sources which are technically inappropriate and to editing by editors who technically should be avoiding a particular topic.

I don't expect this actually to happen any time soon, but I do think that "preserve the best of Wikipedia in separate walled-garden sites that are small enough for the admins to actually administer" will increasingly be seen as the route to take as Wikipedia proper becomes unmanageably large. As long as this line shows no sign of levelling off while this line remains flat, the question of how we decide which articles need to be kept up to date and which can safely be ignored is going to become slightly more pressing with each year that goes by. ‑ Iridescent 07:06, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Well, at least you didn't call it the King James Version. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:04, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

A-series CSD criteria aren't applicable in userspace. (Sorry, nerdsniped.) On the note of how a hypothetical Wikimedicine would permit blocking editors from all and only medical articles, it's worth noting a recent significant ANI thread was about exactly this issue. The combination of ANI's nonspecific search function with the fact the board's recent archives are absolutely screwed by "the longest thread of all time by over 200k bytes more than the next, followed by several spinoffs" gave me some issues narrowing it down, but I eventually managed to get to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1084#JCJC777, and Multiple sclerosis, and long-term concerns unheeded. It's a bit of a stretch to call the discussion resolved -- he ended up getting pblocked from the article at the core of the issue, but no further restrictions either technical or social.

As it stands, I'm not sure we can't just tban people from medical articles within the Wikipedia context. The problem is, AFAICT, more rooted in hesitation to tban people from major and wide-ranging topic areas that aren't under Discretionary Sanctions™. I recall you having a fairly negative view of Discretionary Sanctions™ -- I'm more in the "well, things aren't going to get better if we repeal it without a clear plan elsewise, I guess" school of thought, which seems vaguely on the more cynical end of community consensus -- but medicine is certainly an area where the treatment of subject matters as "either normal or Really Bad" crashes into reality. (I don't agree medical articles should work on a consensus-required format -- if nothing else, bikeshedding is such a pervasive problem for significant improvement of big-subject articles that I suspect nothing would ever get done, which for these articles is going backwards. I've had the experience of everyone who edits in a topic area suddenly coming out to give their input on a high-profile article twice over in topic areas much less contentious, and I completely understand why many people stop editing such articles entirely over it. In turn, I suspect trying to enforce Discretionary Sanctions™ in medicine, which is an unfortunately plausible outcome of making a big deal over how complicated a topic area it is to the wrong people, would have all kinds of horrible domino effects.)

BLPs might be the same, actually. They're nominally a Discretionary Sanctions™ area, but in practice, if a BLP article has that tag on its talk page it's an unusually heated one, and if someone gets a 'neutral statement not implying there are issues with your contribs' DS notice for BLPs they're probably skirting right up against the borders of an oversight block. There is probably a better way to recognize areas as sensitive without doing the same things for them you do for intractable millennia-long ethnic conflicts. Vaticidalprophet 07:47, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

I personally think discretionary sanctions are a lot of work for minimal benefit. If someone is causing problems, they're causing problems whether the article is under DS or not. Plus, unless the scope of the sanction is very specifically targeted, it's very difficult to say whether a given topic falls into their scope. (An existing DS in medicine is Any edit about, and all pages relating to, Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Since it's routine for disease/condition articles to include some variation on "traditionally people ate honey to reduce the effects but clinical trials have shown no evidence of any benefit", does that mean that e.g. Common cold is subject to the discretionary sanctions? The wording of the DS says "all pages relating to…", not "only those sections that deal with…", after all.) Plus, the DS regime is so complicated that nobody except a handful of professional wikilawyers can even remember what WP:DSTOPICS covers, let alone how each individual circumstance is interpreted. As I say, moving the medical articles to a separate wiki where the rules can be re-written if necessary and where we don't treat "anyone can edit" as some kind of Holy Writ would negate the need for most of the confusion, without having any obvious negative impact for the reader. ‑ Iridescent 08:01, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

My consensus-required comment is re. a separate project where we could enforce "get consensus for any given change before you make it". I don't think that's a useful way to edit most articles in any field -- smaller articles don't have anyone who cares to make a consensus over, bigger articles have everyone come out of the woodwork to argue minor details -- and for the specific considerations of medicine it might be even worse if bias towards inaction prevents updates or radical restructuring of low-quality articles. (I've discussed with Aza24 the issues of people bikeshedding things like, er, infoboxes while ignoring that the article they're arguing so much about is terrible.) I'm open to the idea of topic-level splits in the broad context of "this might be how we end up handling the too-many-articles-for-editors problem", but I suspect there's a lot of mid-hanging fruit with being less wildly culturally hostile towards newer editors. (Mid-hanging -- there are many, many reasons Wikipedia is a tough environment to jump into, some of which are eminently valid, others of which are not but not well fixed.) Vaticidalprophet 16:18, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Personally, if an article is in such bad shape that it needs "updates or radical restructuring" then if I were in charge we'd be about a thousand times more willing to take the WP:TNT approach and move it to draftspace unless and until it's in decent shape again. I can't imagine the WMF allowing it, though; if {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} ever does go into reverse, it has too much potential to damage the "constantly improving" narrative and frighten the horses among the big corporate donors. ‑ Iridescent 17:05, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure about that. Svwiki has been deleting articles hand over fist for the last several years (about 20–25% of all articles deleted), relevant people in the WMF know this, and AFAICT nobody thinks it's a problem at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:08, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the mass deletions on sv-wiki the cleanup following a malfunctioning translation bot, rather than a conscious "we've decided to delete these articles" decision? If so, it's not really comparable. Plus—and meaning no disrespect to the Swedish language—neither the big corporate donors nor the 99.86% of the world's population that doesn't speak Swedish has an opinion on Swedish Wikipedia. When the number of articles on English Wikipedia levels off—as it will have to do one day—it will cause a wave of "Is Wikipedia Dying?" pieces across both the specialist and the popular press, which unless carefully handled will translate directly into a collapse in donations. Nobody wants to be backing a loser, and "help us grow" is a much easier message to sell than "help us stabilize and improve what already exists" even if the latter is actually more important. ‑ Iridescent 07:23, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Nobody wants to be backing a loser, and "help us grow" is a much easier message to sell than "help us stabilize and improve what already exists" even if the latter is actually more important. This might be sellable by using a different axis for 'growth'. It's a recurring complaint that readers have little to no awareness of GA/FA status -- why not solve both problems? Certainly both processes have their issues, but introducing readers to the concept of good and featured articles, and framing improvement through increasing their numbers rather than the raw article count, might reframe the issue well. Vaticidalprophet 07:25, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Barring a major change of notability criteria, the number of Wikipedia articles added every year isn't going to go to zero ever. Even accounting for deletion of existing articles, every four or eight years we'll need a new article on the last US president to leave office, at a minimum. That and a number of tropical cyclone articles, catastrophes, dead celebrities, presidents and prime ministers of other countries etc. The annual article creation rate can approach a lower limit set by this type of "a new notable topic every year" article, yes, but I dare say that this "floor" isn't much lower than the present-day article creation rate. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:51, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

and far, far more numerous than any of these, new sports people becoming notable, and the accompanying articles on seasons, championships etc. I don't see any reason why "help us grow" can't easily be redefined as based on total text size rather than the number of articles, plus "necessary" new ones. Since I haven't done it for a few years, now might be the time to repeat my regular call for a 6 month ban on all new articles that aren't about things or people whose notability is new. Johnbod (talk) 16:09, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

How would an embargo on new articles about topics whose notability isn't new work? There are a lot of unquestionably notable topics where nobody's got around to writing the article yet—there are Featured Articles on (e.g.) French Wikipedia that are still redlinks here (example, example, example), and this is French, not some obscure language where nobody here speaks the language to translate the sources, or a niche project with more dubious notability rules than our own. For any pre-internet topic, our coverage is still full of gaping holes—half the entries on Charles Dickens bibliography are redlinks for example (and some of the bluelinks are just links to Wikisource rather than actual articles).

I'm not convinced permanent growth is inevitable. We delete 250–300 pages per day over the normal course of events, and it's not inevitable that the same number of new footballers, pop groups, charting songs etc are always going to come into existence. Even if they do, it's not a foregone conclusion that the articles are going to keep being created—statement of the obvious maybe, but those articles aren't magicked into existence. (I'm sure new netball players are achieving 'notability' by Wikipedia's definition of the term every day, but with Laura Hale ejected there's a lot less chance they're each going to get their cookie-cutter biography.) ‑ Iridescent 17:10, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Getting it to work would be very easy, since we have many officious editors who would be delighted to police it, once approved, which of course it never ever will be. Non-compliant articles should be booted in draftspace for the duration, which would be enough to quickly stem the flow. DYK etc efforts would intstead go into expanding existing articles x5 etc, which would be a very, very, good thing, and the main point of the excercise. I would be more affected than you (see above); having recently developed an interest in writing on garden history, I find our coverage full of gaping holes - Canal (garden history) was completely new, Woodland garden is a disam page for shopping malls in the Mid-West etc, Medieval garden redirects to a very crappy Monastic garden, no Wilderness (garden history), and so on. But I would be prepared to make the sacrifice. Johnbod (talk) 19:02, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I imagine it would be a recipe for endless arguments over whether any given topic is "newly notable" or not. (How would we handle an performer who'd had a song in reach #39 in the Moldovan charts in 2006 so was technically "already notable" by Wikipedia's rules, but has now just switched to Broadway or the West End and been nominated for a slew of major awards? Or something like the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which technically always met our notability requirements but where there was no need for an article prior to recent events?) What would be just about within our capabilities both to implement and to get consensus for would be an ACTRIAL-style experiment of banning creation of new articles, or the moving of drafts into article space, unless the new page meets the "non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent, reliable sources" test, with NPP ruthlessly zapping any page that doesn't meet the "prove this topic is actually notable" test. (Per my comments elsewhere in an ideal world I'd throw a minimum size requirement for new articles in there as well.) ‑ Iridescent 06:21, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Johnbod, I don't want to consider that ban until you've gotten those articles written.

I will add to Vaticidal's marketing ideas that there are two other ways to measure: to look at all the Wikipedias (vs enwiki only), and to contemplate the impossibility of counting "articles" once Abstract Wikipedia is functioning (they're probably saying several years from now, so maybe in a decade).

The idea for Abstract Wikipedia is that you "program" an article once – maybe something like "'''Subject''' (altname) = 1 category(disease([[dementia]]))" – and then you instantly have as many articles as you have languages sufficiently translated to turn that into "Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a type of dementia". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

They've been running an experimental version of that on ht-wiki for years. Based on that—and on Reasonator—I'm not holding my breath. The "anything can be broken down into data and then reassembled into text" approach can just about work in a very few cases (Johann Sebastian Bach is the one they like to show off), but anyone who thinks an algorithm can capture the nuance of even a dull stub, let alone anything complex, is talking out of their hat. The WMF has been sold a bill of goods; I doubt even Google has the capability to do what Abstract Wikipedia is promising since it's an approach that would only work if every word in every language was unambiguous and never depended on context. We instantly banninate anyone we catch using the Content Translation Tool for a reason. ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

What's at htwiki is there because I begged Moushira to make the Web team install it, and it's not the same. I suspect that Abstract Wikipedia will work just about as well as Rambot worked for US census content (speaking of which: Is anyone working on the 2020 census update?). I hear that it's meant to be modular, so that you could choose individual sections/paragraphs and write the rest however you want to.

The CX filter exists because one guy was dumping unedited machine translation from Spanish into the mainspace. I think we overreacted. Also, anybody in this discussion can use CX freely (the filter only requires EC; I've used it to create three articles), and even total newbies can use CX here if they publish their translated articles first outside the mainspace. Which is to say that any logged-in editor can use CX to translate an article, save it to something like User:Newbie/My_first_article, make nine other edits, wait until your account is 96 hours old, and then you can WP:MOVE the page to the mainspace with no further barrier. The CX "ban" is security by obscurity at best. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:08, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the mass deletions on sv-wiki the cleanup following a malfunctioning translation bot, rather than a conscious "we've decided to delete these articles" decision?

No, the bot was functioning precisely as expected: importing data into multiple wikis from any of a variety of low-quality sources in the operator's two pet topic areas of geography and species (sv.wp, ceb.wp, war.wp, andddd one other). Swedish WP simply has the manpower and willpower both to reject further additions by that bot as well as to clean up the prior additions. Izno (talk) 06:23, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Break: splitting

In essence, then, spinning out a portion of Wikipedia articles in order to manage scale, thus turning Wikipedia into a federation of communities. isaacl (talk) 16:22, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. Most of the articles would stay on Wikipedia, but those on fields where particular issues mean the vanilla Wikipedia rules aren't a good fit (medicine is the obvious one, but I could see a case for other specialist topics) would move to semi-autonomous wikis with a different set of rules. In the long term I could imagine it going the other way as well, allowing things like the biographies of fictional characters to operate in a more Wikia-like environment with looser rules on notability and sourcing—it's never sat entirely comfortably with me that we host articles like Sil (Doctor Who) that have an obvious in-universe notability but no evidence of any real-world recognition. It's worth pointing out that we already have precedents for this with Wikivoyage and Wikispecies, both of which have their own rules on style, their own inclusion guidelines and their own independent administration but still fit into the broader WMF ecosystem; this wouldn't be detonating a bomb under Wikipedia, it would be restoring Wikipedia to its original purpose while still retaining the two decades worth of accretions. (A more diffuse ecosystem might also finally provide a valid reason for Wikidata to get its act in order, as it would become an essential resource for tracking which topics were covered where.) ‑ Iridescent 16:55, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't think your medical-Wikipedia offshoot would work. It isn't clear to me if the "anyone can edit" model applies there too or some hurdle is imposed. I'm sure there are plenty folk who think some medical qualification should be required. I dread to think about a species called "medical admins", and don't see how they might be any less "scare away the newbies" than those on Wikipedia have been. MEDRS is a surprise to both lay and academic editors. The former get confused that BBC News isn't an ideal source and the latter frustrated they can't demonstrate their knowledge of the latest research by citing the primary literature. But handling that requires a degree of people skills that appears to be in short supply. We increasingly had admins who just saw MEDRS as a hammer to hit folk with, regardless of the collateral damage. I'm not sure how moving it to a separate database would change that. It really helps, IMO, that MEDRS is fundamentally just the application of core policies to an topic field. I can reject text citing a primary research paper source just citing WP:WEIGHT, for example. It helps that editors with varied interests are involved in supervising and establishing rules. Some recent medical battles were overseen by an admin who writes about children's literature.

Your proposal assumes that the split for biomedical information is article based. The high profile recent case that kills that idea is the Covid 19 origins battle, which is part political, part forensic/criminal/health-and-safety, part biomedical, etc. What would you do with Dentistry, say? At what point in that article topic and its daughter articles would you say "this should be on MedWiki"? What about Heroin? And if MEDRS was dropped from Wikipedia, we'd end up with people using biographical or commercial articles as coat racks to describe wonder therapies.

I think Medicine (or biomedical subjects generally) is enormous both in quantity of topics and variety. We have major conditions like diabetes and cancer and we have rare diseases, major blockbuster drugs taken by millions, and strange therapies that are only offered hundreds of times a year in a country like the UK. We've got minor complaints like headaches and dandruff and major killers like HIV and malaria. I'm not really sure that a wiki model with volunteer editors works for all of that. And perhaps that problem gets solved by Google, which doesn't return Wikipedia in the first page of results for many topics today. Generally, the stuff it does return is pretty good. For example, a topic that I've edited occasionally over the years is tuberous sclerosis, a 1/6000 rare disease. If I Google that then I get... the NHS with a short simple-English overview; the Tuberous Sclerosis Association, which is the UK patient organisation; RareDiseases.org which has such a comprehensive and well written article, that we might as well send readers to that instead of whatever I've written. This isn't true for every topic. And textbooks could be offered as e-books to the developing world at zero cost if there was a will to do so. -- Colin°^Talk 18:52, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

The way I'd envisage it would be for Wikipedia to have a structure more like Wikia, where "anyone can edit" still applies everywhere, but the rules vary depending on topic. It wouldn't just be for topics like medicine where we might want stricter rules; it could also cut the other way as well. (A lot of the sources we blacklist as hopelessly biased would be perfectly legitimate as a source of reviews on arts articles, for instance.) Regarding admins, my thinking would be that they'd be wiki-wide as they are now, but with the option to only be admins on a particular subwiki if it was thought more suitable, but this is currently very speculative off-the-top-of-my-head spitballing at the moment.

The suggestion SandyGeorgia doesn't quite make but implies a little way up, of resurrecting a variant on WP:STICKYPROD for "medical articles, broadly construed" would also be a good one. Slapping "either ensure this is up to date or it will be summarily moved to draftspace in a month" tags on pages would go a long way towards clearing out the crud. As far as I'm concerned, it's better we have nothing than we have either outdated or badly written content; we shouldn't be hosting pages like Poppy tea. ‑ Iridescent 19:26, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Some pieces of dated articles are salvageable, so a solution would be a hybrid between “sticky prod, move to draft space” and “WP:BLOWITUP”. That is, after you place a sticky prod and after it moves to draft space, you blow up everything except the irrefutable and well cited basics, keeping a stub or start-class article. This would basically reduce more than half of the current medical FAs to start class articles, a few salvageable paras, which I think is a just fine, even optimal, solution to some very dangerous content (for which I have long advocated we need a better and more prominent disclaimer). When Wikipedia has a poor article up, we are being irresponsible, and readers should go elsewhere for the info they seek. (IPad typing, sorry for typos and brevity.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:33, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

But even before that, why can’t I, as a knowledgeable medical editor, simply go through dated articles and apply a BLP-style hatchet to dated, unsourced, or poorly sourced content, simply removing that content, rather than tagging it for an update that no one will ever do ? Akin to the ability to delete any poorly sourced content in a BLP. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:35, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

No argument from me. As I say somewhere in the morass above, if I were in charge the sole notability criterion would be "using genuine reliable secondary sources, can you write 1000 words about this topic without waffling or padding?". If we applied this scrupulously—and accepted that it would mean deleting some pages on things that "are obviously notable" if the sources don't exist to back that claim up—it would solve about 90% of our problems in a single stroke.; as far as I'm concerned "no article is better than a bad article" is something that should be applied across the whole of Wikipedia, not just the medical topics. The reason I say the sticky prod should move pages to draftspace rather than outright deleting them is that crucially draftspace is {{noindex}}ed. As such it would render the pages invisible to search engines, while still keeping them in existence to allow people to work on them without the pressure of "if I don't fix this right away it will be lost altogether" which might lead to people cutting corners. (The cynical but true answer to why can’t I … simply go through dated articles and apply a BLP-style hatchet to dated, unsourced, or poorly sourced content is that it would be a recipe for constant edit-warring. A universally-applied expiry date system would—hopefully—not have the problem of people feeling targeted or harassed.) ‑ Iridescent 19:44, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Me three on the very important point that there needs to be a BLP-like way to purge anything that misleads readers on health-related matters. As for breaking up en-wiki into a federation of communities, we kind of come around, circularly, to whether Wikipedia is in decline, because there might be little value in creating multiple projects that would all be in decline. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:12, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

One way to try to break the stalemate of consensus not scaling upwards is to enable smaller groups of interested editors to make consensus-based decisions in a given area. Having separate wikis for each is one way to do this. Popular areas will likely continue to do fine (Wookieepedia is a very well-maintained resource), but less popular ones will probably suffer, and lose the potential of drawing from a broader, more diverse community. (If it's true that this potential is already lost in a flood of biased editors, then those areas might be a lost cause in any case.) It would be a large change in operating procedure, so there is a risk in a lot of editors opting to leave instead of learning new ways. isaacl (talk) 23:37, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Well, we already basically do this. This is my mini-rant, but since the GNG is so vaguely written to as to mean whatever you want it to mean WP:OUTCOMES has significantly more practical weight than the GNG does, regardless of what we pretend. What the GNG means in practice for a BLP is different than what it means for a 14th century religious figure is different than what it means for an MMA fighter. That's the easiest example, but Wikipedia is a website built on many local consensuses, and when you eventually have enough small decisions about the similar topics, only then will you get enough people to agree with it to actually pass a major policy change.

It's also a self-selective thing no matter how big it is: the RfA RfC is a great example of this. A significant portion of the "influential voices" on this project ignored the entire thing or ignored most of the proposal because 1) RfA being broken is not a widely held opinion by people who don't regularly participate on WT:RFA, so why should people who don't think it's broken be part of proposals to "fix" it and 2) Don't care because they're already admins.

Because of this, two of the more visible changes (RFC/U-reborn and not defaulting to autopatrolled for admins) from that RfC have exactly nothing to do with RfA and will have zero impact on it, but because the people who thought it was an issue agreed that it was one, and the people who didn't think it was an issue ignored it, they passed. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:17, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

The key difference is that local consensus is not empowered to make final decisions. Because consensus doesn't scale upwards well, there's almost always going to be some significant number of unhappy people in a larger group. The RfA RfC is an example of this. The problem of scale means it's really hard to get everyone who might be interested to participate and engage fully. So the outcomes may or may not have broad consensus support across the entire community. With federated communities, there's a possibility that each individual community can be more satisfied with its own rules than it would be now. (I think the problems of scale with consensus will still come up, but it may be easier to mitigate them in a smaller, more cohesive community. And a smaller community could well decide to use a different decision-making method, like an editorial board.) isaacl (talk) 05:52, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni, I haven't seen anything suggesting that Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct be reborn. What are you thinking of? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:32, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

I very much agree we should be more aggressive with outdated articles. In the climate change space this is a major problem too. We're playing into the cards of climate deniers by citing old research that overstates uncertainty with respect to current knowledge. I've started a a cross-wiki review on climate denial, and non-English Wikipedias are far worse, relying almost completely on pre-2008 sourcing. A lot of projects stimulate translation of new articles, rather than re-translation of existing articles.

One of the ideas I had to partially counter this, is to develop tools that display the median source age. (For WP:The Core Contest, I wrote a little offline python script to do this). On a centralised place (like wikidata?), we could put a maximum median source age per article. For instance, if a page on climate change is based on sourced with a median age of 12 years, they should typically be stubbified/draftified. For the biography of an 18th century playwriter, a median age of a 100 years may be acceptable. Femke (talk) 21:12, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Ew. Don't remind me of updating the climate change related articles. Of all the articles I had to update the past two weeks, Pacific Meridional Mode was by far the most painful. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 21:40, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

• The idea of a 'sticky prod' for a few other types of articles is not new. However, due to the creation of the BLPPROD having been the subject of what was at the time one of the messiest and most heavily debated issues on en.Wiki, no one has taken the initiative (or risk) of starting the dialogue for other sticky-prods. As RFC go, the size and participation of the BLPPROD discussion(s) has only been surpassed by the two rounds of ACTRIAL discussions that were several years apart. Although both BLPPROD and ACPERM both address the need for quality in articles, the similarity stops there. The reasons why the debates were so drawn out and garnered such huge participation were quite different. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:03, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, but these aren't normal circumstances when it comes to medical topics. The "retired, hurt feelings" departure of the two most vocal "but we've always done it this way" obstructionists in the wake of WP:ARBMED has created a window of opportunity for a more general "who is our target readership and how do we best serve them?" debate with less chance of degenerating into shouting. ‑ Iridescent 07:10, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

  There doesn't seem to be a great place to put this without seeming to point at any individual. Sorry about that.

  I am uncomfortable with the way people are talking about other editors. I think editors should be free to volunteer as much or as little as they happen to feel like, without people running them down in public for their personal choices. We can disagree about things without being ugly.

  Also, Iri, last month you were trying to convince me that I was irreplaceable, and that wonderful opportunities wouldn't appear if I (or people like me) disappeared. This comment of yours sounds more optimistic about future changes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:58, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  Normally yes, but in this particular case it's impossible to talk about that particular project without talking about specific editors, since it's literally the embodiment of a single person's vision. Discussing medwiki without mentioning James would be like discussing the origins of Wikipedia without mentioning Jimmy Wales.

  Nobody is completely irreplaceable, but equally a relatively small number of people carry an undue amount of weight. Sometimes their loss can be a positive in opening up a niche for new people and new ways of thinking; sometimes their loss is devastating and means essential things don't get done. Where on that spectrum any given person falls is probably something on which every single editor who's interacted with them has a different opinion. ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Defining “independent”

To be fair, it's also not clear in a lot of cases what "independent" is. (To bang a drum that's been banged many times before, we sometimes place an unhealthy premium on sources meeting our arbitrary rules on which sources are "better", rather than on which sources are actually most useful in a given situation. Back in the early days of Wikipedia we knowingly had an incorrect birthdate on Jimmy Wales because an independent article had got it wrong, and nobody would let him correct it because "he had a conflict of interest" and "his birth certificate was a primary source". There are some unique advantages we get from having a resident gang of weirdos with an unhealthy obsession with rules—I can't imagine anyone on Twitter voluntarily going through every page checking the copyright status of images, or a Britannica employee checking every article for the consistent use/non-use of serial commas without expecting to be paid—but there are also some unique drawbacks.) ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

The Wales thing seems like people confusing independent and reliable; a birth certificate is surely the most reliable source in this situation. My pet problem along these lines is that all scientists debunking the idea of a Cumbre Vieja tsunami are saying "a giant landslide can't create a tsunami" rather than "it is highly improbable that this eruption will cause a tsunami", even though the evidence for the former is fairly unreliable and America-centric whereas the latter is undisputable AFAIK; thus the article Cumbre Vieja tsunami hazard puts major emphasis on the probability point. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:34, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

The confusion with Wales's birthdate seems to be a question of "was he born shortly before midnight or not?" A similar thing happened with George Harrison, when Harrison himself announced in the 1990s that the date that all sources and his birth certificate had reported were wrong and he'd actually been born the night before. (It's been largely ignored though). Pawnkingthree (talk) 01:17, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

The confusion with Wales's birthdate is more a question of him being unable to keep his own story straight. Here he is edit-warring to change it to August 7, here he is complaining to the press that August 7 is incorrect, here he is complaining that we give his birthdate as August 8 when it should be August 7. The current version of the article says shortly before midnight on August 7, 1966; however, his birth certificate lists his date of birth as August 8 and cites Britannica as a source, but Wales publicly claims the Britannica entry is wrong about this. Were this Joe Blow from Kokomo, it wouldn't be an issue—we routinely remove exact birthdates from biographies if the subject doesn't want them known and there's no public interest in listing them—but for someone who's made an entire career out of being the public face of "information wants to be free" to be openly lying and obfuscating when it comes to his own information, it's at best unseemly. ‑ Iridescent 07:46, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Quality and deterioration

We see a lot of deterioration already in maintenance-heavy parts of the encyclopaedia and in some of the behind the scenes areas. As a prominent example, most portals died by undermaintenance when the original creators/maintainers left or lost interest (and most of the remaining ones have been replaced by something heavily automated). Many WikiProjects are moribund and just serve as convenient hubs for useful maintenance listings (article alerts/deletion sorting), not as places where anything much gets organised. In article space, things like the 299 German constituencies do not magically update with every election, but sometimes they go six years and two elections out of date. (We currently have an editor who has diligently updated them all, but should they stop it may again take a few years until they are replaced). The standard response is to add cleanup tags that declare this as somebody else's problem (but may help readers to filter them out as semi-garbage).

At the same time, we have a much greater emphasis on quality for new article now than we had ten years ago. I have some hope that the better sourced stuff written now will look better fifteen years from now than the unsourced crap from fifteen years ago does now. (Incidentally, the "unsourced" backlog is 15 years at the moment, perhaps another example of Wikipedia failing already). —Kusma (talk) 23:10, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes and no. The crap coming through now is superficially better than the leftovers from back when it seemed a good idea to copy-paste the 1911 Britannica (of which at the time of writing we still have 11,760), but boy oh boy are we building up a nest of problems for ourselves by not keeping up with the PR crud with a superficial veneer of "sources" that on closer inspection turns out to just be a bunch of reprinted press releases. If Kudpung is still around, he'll probably be able to put it more eloquently than me. (Back in Wikipedia Review days, among the insane drivel were some very perceptive predictions from Somey on what Wikipedia would evolve into once it passed into its maintenance phase. I always felt we never gave him enough credit for his insights because we—arguably justifiably—dismissed him owing to the crank company he kept. I once seriously proposed that provided we could convince him to sign a binding NDA not to leak sensitive information, he should be given formal observer status on any future variation on WP:ACPD; he had a real knack for spotting where things were likely to go wrong before the rest of us did.) ‑ Iridescent 17:51, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Of these two positions, I'm more in agreement with Iri's - a lot of the early stuff was/is actually pretty good, but nobody felt the need to provide references - certainly not inline ones. It's not rare for "updating" and adding crap online sources to actually reduce the quality of the article. The EB1911 wasn't that often downright wrong, and sometimes what is now left from an original complete copypaste is just a sentence or two, or even nothing - people hesitate to remove the tag, or check if anything is actually left. It's very persistent in bios of lesser Old Master painters & other artists though. Johnbod (talk) 12:08, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Many WikiProjects are moribund and just serve as convenient hubs for useful maintenance listings (article alerts/deletion sorting), not as places where anything much gets organised. Even the active wikiprojects (and I have two plenty active talks on my watchlist) are interestingly hollow -- large projects like WPMED used to have tons of subsets and taskforces. Some months back I was looking at the Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Medical genetics task force page, wondered who the current active members are, and suddenly realized I am WikiProject Medicine's medical genetics taskforce. (I also note the page is out-of-date enough that the "recently featured" article prominently advertised in an ambox has since been defeatured.) On the EB1911 note, total rips are both concerningly common still and turn up in strange places. In the last GAN backlog drive, I quickfailed Aberdeenshire (historic), which is both predominantly taken from the EB1911 and far substandard in the patches that aren't (either uncited or cited to questionable sources, and poorly integrated with the article/probably better placed in Aberdeenshire proper). Vaticidalprophet 12:21, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

That squares with my experience at Galileo Galilei, where nobody commented on my GA reassessment until Buidhe delisted it today, as well as with the deafening silence at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Pali-Aike volcanic field/archive1. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:25, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not particularly surprised at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Pali-Aike volcanic field/archive1. A lot of people hate commenting on the reviews for more technical subjects since they're worried they're just going to look foolish if they misunderstand the specialist language. Plus there's the purely practical matter that we've just come out of Thanksgiving week in the US and are now in the run-up to Christmas, and people are busier than usual. ‑ Iridescent 17:21, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet, WPMED's task forces were a failed experiment. With the exception of the EMS group, none of them ever seemed to establish a group that was active in the task force and not completely redundant to the main group's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:44, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

WikiProjects are kind of an interesting beast to me. People will often mention them, as kind of this abstract notion ("you can always go see if anyone at WikiProject Whatever can help with that!" and the like), but it's really hard to see evidence of life at any but the biggest. Today I went through all of the historical newsletters listed in the big template here, and noted their last publication date + number of issues: out of twenty-three newsletters total, there are only eleven active WikiProject newsletters. Yet there are 119 inactive. Most of them have less than a half-dozen issues (and many of them never even released a first issue), but there's a considerable number that had a long history before abruptly ceasing with no warning. My best guess is that these were the work of a couple highly involved people whose departure instantly tanked the publication. I suppose in the halcyon days of 2008 or whatever, it really did seem possible that there'd be enough people to justify (and sustain) something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Nickelodeon/SpongeBob SquarePants task force/Newsletter — 11 issues — whereas nowadays WikiProject Television has had fewer than 11 talk page sections in the entire year of 2021. It gets me to wondering, a little, if the problem with WikiProjects might just be that hundreds of them were created, either because of optimistic growth projections or because of an actual extant editor base to support them, for a wide variety of subjects that no longer have the "critical mass" of editors necessary for any kind of communal activity. With animals, for example, we have Cats (3 talk page discussions from this year), Dogs (4), Rodents (3), Cetaceans (1) — not exactly a hopping place to get perspectives and find collaborators. WikiProject Mammals, on the other hand, has 31 talk page sections from 2021: a little under 3 per month is still kind of desolate but it's a pretty noticeable improvement over 0.08 per month. I can't help but think that folding them all into one might give some chance of survival (of course, if the dog or horse or cat lovers found themselves represented in such numbers that they stood a chance of holding together their own WikiProject, they'd be free to do that). jp×g 07:29, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG, I'm one of the old hands at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council, so of course I have well-developed opinions. IMO merging projects together is a good idea. IMO one of the problems with the endless creation of WikiProjects is that people did not understand that a WikiProject is a group of people. They frequently thought that it was a categorization system ("all the articles about SpongeBob") or had irrational hopes of the Build it and they will come variety. I would cheerfully prohibit the creation of new WikiProjects unless they could prove the existence of a group of participating editors with at least 20 years' combined experience between them.

The process for merging up old WikiProjects is a bit fiddly. First, you need to ask whether the existing remnant would object to being merged (and wait for a month or so to see if you get an answer). Then there's a mess about merging templates and pages. It would probably be worth it for about half of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Merging Wikiprojects is quite fiddly, and quite hard to get help on. I've been working for awhile to try and upmerge Template:WikiProject Philippine History to be a taskforce template for Template:Wikiproject Tambayan Philippines, but the coding is not obvious. The task force system should provide an easy way to consolidate Wikiprojects without immediate disruption, but a system to do so hasn't developed. There was for example consensus to fold some Wikiprojects into WP:WEATHER in 2020, but it does not seem to have yet happened. CMD (talk) 08:01, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis, did you already ask for help at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council? I'm not sure who's active with the banner templates (the banner template is the hardest part) these days. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:02, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I did, in addition to a few other places! It's in [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 25#Help merging a taskforce template into a Wikiproject template|the archives now. I think it's moved, if slowly. CMD (talk) 09:18, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

I see you've also already asked for help at Template talk:WPBannerMeta#Merging one banner into another, which was going to be my next suggestion. Hmm... I might have to use my brain today after all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:41, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

On some occasions, even the dead WikiProjects are worth keeping around. Something like WP:WikiProject London Transport is completely moribund, but still has a useful purpose in that a post to the talkpage will appear on the watchlist of a lot of people interested in the topic so it makes sense for announcements. They can also serve as a ready-made neutral space in which to hold contentious discussions without all the usual look-at-me types who hang around the Village Pumps making uninformed comments. ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Only 22 active editors are watching that page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:01, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

And I find I'm one of them - anything useful from me in that area is not to be expected, I'm afraid. Johnbod (talk) 15:29, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

It's still 22 (or 21 anyway) more than nothing. Experienced editors know the right people to ask and the right places to get a particular comment seen, but no good faith new editor is going to know who to speak to. WT:LONDON has only 25 active watchers at the time of writing, but there's nowhere else a new editor could have asked a question like this and got an answer. Since these project talk pages take essentially no effort to maintain and occasionally serve a useful purpose, then IMO they should be kept around even if we delete the portals, taskforces and all the other accoutrements of an active wikiproject. ‑ Iridescent 07:34, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

• I’m actually very much ‘around’ because I have to use Wikipedia many times a day as a reference work, but I’m trying very hard not be be proactive and to resist even stopping to correct a typo when I see one. I've even taken this talk page, the last vestige of sanity on Wikipedia, off my watchlist. Nobody is irreplaceable, but in a volunteer environment even if it is just changing the flowers in the church for mass on Sunday or managing hundreds of other volunteers, if it's something you saw needed doing, everyone is quite happy to sit back and let you do it for ever - you get taken for granted. So when I felt I had done as much as I could for NPP and handed the reins over, it’s probably just a coincidence that it’s been an organized chaos ever since and it just ended up getting me in trouble for continuing to help out.

Nobody ever wanted to realise how important NPP is and they still don't. With over 6 mio articles, the encyclopedia has gone way beyond the point of non return for cleaning it up and radically pruning it of all the crap and nonsense. The 50 or so active registered New Page Reviewers out of the 750 hat collectors can't even handle the daily flow - WP:ACPERM somewhat stemmed the tide but it is already nearly 4 years ago, the spammers and scammers have caught up and it's time to think of something else. Since March last year I just make the occasional comment and add a vote to major RfC and elections because every single vote is important - especially if it means trying to obtain some form of proper Arbcom for the future generations. Those events are rather rare and I'm really only there to rubber neck. When the current ACE is over (God help us when the results are published) I will be seen again a lot less until the next firework show or Framgate. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:27, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I know the feeling; I'm also virtually absent nowadays, other than monitoring my own talkpage and responding to questions.

I agree that we've almost certainly passed the critical point where New Pages Patrol can no longer keep up with the new pages and the combination of Recent Changes patrollers and Cluebot can no longer keep up with vandalism. Moreover those are both backlogs where once they've built up, they'll never be cleared, since reviewing old changes is difficult and thankless. I already said it further up this thread, but it bears repeating—Wikipedia is heading for a "flowers growing in the sewers" model, in which we give up any serious attempt at holding back the flood of crap and just concentrate on preserving and improving those parts that we deem worth preserving and improving, and on making it clear to readers which is which. I have a feeling that where we end up will be the article mainspace becoming a de facto draft space, and some kind of beefed-up and much more public-facing assessment process to flag "this is a page that's actually monitored for quality".

It does not escape my irony detector that this is the Nupedia model which failed first time around, but for all our faults we're in much better shape to run an assess-and-flag process now. The Meta:Internet-in-a-Box people are already doing such a "hide the drivel and only display the pages that have actually been checked" exercise for the medical articles, and as far as I know it's yet to cause the world to come to an end. ‑ Iridescent 04:37, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I've joined the not really here but I was visible enough at one point that for some reason people still listen to what I say club mainly through real life circumstances (all good), and like Kudpung I made a name for myself originally in NPP and by getting ACPERM through.

This would be a better discussion over drinks at a bar, but as I'm a few thousand miles away from both of you, here goes: while I agree with both of you we've past various points of no return on quality control; I also think we've somewhat aged to the point where it matters less in practice, even if I'd prefer it was still maintained: in our early phases, having low quality control just to get stuff in was important; you need content to drive views. When we were in our mid-development stage, the quality control began to matter more: if you want to be the default source of knowledge, people have to take you seriously. We've now become the default source of knowledge for the world, which means that we have relatively well developed articles on most of the subjects people care about, and while I'm sure the three of us could think of any number of niche articles that are currently trash that could be developed into something better because there is abundant academic sourcing, their mere existence isn't a threat to our credibility.

On the NPP front, this has a corollary: because most of the articles people actually care about already exist, the public isn't going to notice that we have hobbyists creating articles on relatively unknown serial killers for fun. They're also not going to notice the flood of Bollywood advertisements or no-name tech start-ups with paid articles because they're things no one is actively searching for. Our success in becoming trusted has oddly enough become our best defense at staying trusted — no one is looking for the shit articles except WPO and the like to make points.

In my view the biggest threat to the project in terms of credibility with the public is the paid stuff, where I'm more with Kudpung than you Iri, but since becoming a CU I've become less intense on it than I used to — mainly because the CU data makes it abundantly clear that it's just a bunch of freelancers doing gigs for the same client and not an Orangemoody-esque type operation anymore. There's really not all that much we can do from a functionary perspective to deal with it at this point. My solution has been for the CU team to wash its hands of it and return it to the "regular" admins as enforcement through existing non-WMF policy since most of the paid article spam is obvious and can be deleted and blocked on those grounds without anything private. Regardless: if the extent of the paid crap became known to the broader public, it could cause a credibility crisis. It hasn't yet because the inner workings of Wikipedia are opaque enough despite being completely transparent that it wouldn't be worth a journalists time to figure out when there are more headline grabbing stories. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:41, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

We still have our fair share of incoherent drivel even on the core topics people care about. (Home and Man are both total gibberish but are about as core topic as it gets; we also have gems like Performing arts, Injury, Western Europe, Manufacturing, Human behavior… Wikipedia is often a lot better at covering the smaller topics, where it's actually possible to read all the relevant literature, than at high-importance topics like these, or even smaller topics where the story is convoluted enough to make it difficult to give due weight (Spoon, anyone?). ‑ Iridescent 06:26, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, we agree on that, but oddly enough, I doubt people are actually looking to us for information on those things. It's topics like Lenin and Taylor Swift, to use both of our favourite examples, that we excel at in terms matching public interest with quality content. We do have a lot of niche articles that are phenomenal, but that really isn't where many readers look all that much. It's the narrower topics on specific events/people that are well known that we get good-enough content that also has a lot of page views. I don't really think we're in danger of those types of article deteriorating, which is why we still have credibility with the public. No one's reading articles on 17th century conclaves, much to my dismay... TonyBallioni (talk) 06:41, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

To pull out an example from that list, Manufacturing is getting 35k views a month, so clearly someone is looking at it. (Swift and Lenin both get much, much more -- and I concur more overall with the "Wikipedia is big enough to take a lot of hits" model -- but that's not chump change.) That said, the article has also improved quite a bit in the past year due to the return of the Core Contest, which is probably our best bet at getting improvements to those kinds of articles. (Speculation on the level of dysfunction involved in the nth-biggest site on the internet and the canonical modern reference work getting improvement to its core topics primarily through fifteen-odd people competing for a share of £250 once a year is...not invalid.) Vaticidalprophet 06:54, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

The niche topics do sometimes flare up unexpectedly and unpredictably, either because a previously-obscure topic makes the news or because they get mentioned in the media or on a celebrity's social media. All it would take would be an HBO drama set in early 18th-century Rome, and you'd get the pleasure of scraping the Randies off of 1724 papal conclave. (As I've said before, I'm not too concerned about the quality of articles like Taylor Swift and Lenin. If Wikipedia shut down tomorrow, readers could find out just as much from whatever took its place at the top of the Google results. It's the less familiar topics where Wikipedia is important; to me it's more important that we cover Vice Squad than that we cover The Beatles. It's why I'm not concerned no matter how bad Manufacturing is, since anyone who actually needs to know can find better-quality sources with no difficulty.) ‑ Iridescent 06:58, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I actually agree with all that. I suppose my main point is that from a credibility standpoint, we're really not at risk so long as the things that are most regularly viewed are at a sufficient level of quality, which I think they are. So long as we can maintain that, I'm not really all that worried about us returning to the 2005 public perception of the project. Doesn't mean that all the other things you mentioned aren't important, just that we have enough goodwill from Lenin and Taylor Swift to make up for the papal conclave articles that are copy/paste from out of copyright anti-Catholic polemic tracts available for free online and a sprinkling of hobbyist blogs as sources (which is what they were before I gutted most of them 5 years ago...) TonyBallioni (talk) 07:20, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think we're on the same page. This is what I mean by "flowers in the sewers"; as long as the things people actually want to read are adequate, we need to stop worrying so much about trying to clean up the torrent of sludge beneath. ‑ Iridescent 07:43, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Gatekeeping & NPP

Yes, Iri, your spot-on irony is accurate, and I couldn't agree more with TonyBallioni (Hi, Tony, I was kinda wondering where you have got to, you've been rather conspicuous by your absence!). There is even growing corruption within NPP itself (or perhaps the sleuthing is getting slightly better?) WT:NPR has become a dynamic venue since I began it a couple of years ago, but like everywhere else now, it's all talk and little action; their November backlog drive didn't work out as they expected either. Some possible solutions would be to upgrade ACPERM to Extended confirmed, and, based on ORES, to have bots or filters take on more of NPP: automatically declining stubs and/or articles with only one source and tagging stuff flagged as spam or COPYVIO automatically for PROD or CSD. Not to be confused with AfC, but simply a 'Sorry, your submitted article does not yet conform to our minimum criteria for inclusion. Please read the advice on your talk page, then Your first article, create the article in your sandbox, and when it's ready, submit it to AfC for review. There's plenty of help to be had, don't hesitate to ask at the Tea House'

The biggest challenge to all this however, is that there is an excruciating entrenched reluctance by the WMF for years to create a proper landing page for new users. Not to mention the boring Wikipedia skin which is about as interesting as the monochrome test card on pre-colour British TV. It's certainly not due to a lack of funds. There is also a huge amount of negative (but possibly unintentional) publicity for Wikipedia - do you remember that old episode of Lewis where Supt. Innocent says to Lewis "C'mon, Robbie, if you believe everything you read on Wikipedia you'll believe anything. You're a detective, do your own research."

Like Tony says, however, not everyone goes for a swim with the bottom feeders in a sea of effluent, some of the sewage doesn't get noticed, and it's even less searched for. Yes, I guess your right: 'flowers growing in the sewers'. Another problem is that this has now become more the South Asian Wikipedia in English and some of it needs forking off, at least into a Bollywood Wiki. BTW, did you read the alarming new demographics stats about Birmingham? Only 25 miles from my home town, oh, and that's where RexxS lives, shame I can't pop in for a pint...

There is a distinct apathy setting in on Wikipedia towards governance and maintenance work. I have horror visions of it looking like Tchernobyl, abandoned and overgrown with weeds in a few years time - not exactly what I would want for something I spent the equivalent of 2 years full-time work on as a volunteer. All this drafting of UCOCs and grand plans for the future are only attempts to disguise the fact that everything is far from rosy, and an excuse for the WMF to spend more money on themselves and their friends. Even on The Signpost the editorial team is now almost suffering from burnout, or so it seems, and the periodical is only a shell of its former self. Maintenance work? No one wants to do it. No one clambering to be an admin. A tiny bunch of (mostly) unsuitable candidates for Arbcom, meaning we'll have to put up and shut up with what we can get rather than what we want or what is best for Wikipedia, and low turnouts for most other policy debates. Top marks for Barkeep49's arduous RfA reform programme though (at least they are stripping the toolbox of Autopatrolled - ironic really as pointing out a case of that was one of the things that lost me the bit). The successful parts of the reform still won't encourage more candidates to come forward and it won't improve the toxic nature of the process either. Hardly likely anyway with Arbcom's modern trend to line up admins like plastic ducks in a shooting gallery - new admins will be lambs for the slaughter; the malevolent elements of the community are almost certainly being even more encouraged to sift through admins' histories to dig up any and enough dirt to provide us with more sleazy entertainment. I've taken to having the occasional peek at WO. There seems to be a hard core of rather unpleasant people there and what they don't know, they simply make up. Totally immature, hardly surprising most of them are blocked or banned (or still socking away). I dunno why Beeb bothers with the place (or Ritchie333 for that matter). It's simply got Beeb some flack on his re-bid for arb. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:40, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

As one of the people running the backlog drive -- and someone who's watched the NPP project over the past year or so -- we were really, really hurt by the loss of a few of our top reviewers. At least, we were hurt numbers-wise. One of the reviewers, who I will not name here, did not exactly have the reputation for doing good reviews, moreso doing a lot of them. While losing them really hurt the backlog, I think it's safe to say the level of quality control they performed was iffy at best.

This brings up a somewhat existential question for the NPP project: can we really trust the reviewers? Sure, everyone says they've read the guidelines -- and they've been vetted -- but it's a difficult task that different people will have different ideas of how to do right.

At this rate, we might have to consider whether it should be required for people to create their first N articles in draft-space (perhaps require ten created in draftspace before they can create in mainspace, then require fifteen more before autopatrolled). Drastic but I don't see how else we get out of this. And creating in draft-space would pressure the iffy-promo articles to be less bad, whereas in NPP they can slip through by virtue of being a total pain to review. Elli (talk | contribs) 08:08, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

The problems with "actually-mandatory draftspace" solutions are manifold. The big issue is that "we don't have enough maintainers" is not an issue solved by putting up more barriers upfront to crossing from 'person who idly fixes a couple typos' to 'Wikipedia editor' -- and we are already absolutely full of upfront barriers (like the fact everyone who's been editing for less than a year is assumed to be either a CIR case or a sock). If we want more maintainers, which is an integral half of the "too much to maintain and not enough maintainers" issue, it needs to be much easier to make that jump (and to make the other, first jump of 'person who doesn't edit Wikipedia at all' to 'person who makes nonzero edits and doesn't see them reverted on sight'). "Put up more upfront gatekeeping" is a common solution out of desperation, but it's a death spiral, because the people turned off by the upfront gatekeeping don't replenish editors. There's a tie from here to the fact basically every editor cohort since the early 2010s on has had much worse retention than their predecessors. Vaticidalprophet 08:25, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough with that, just one more active editor is worth a decent amount of editor effort for the ROI. Where would you find the extra 200 somewhat-active NPPs we need though? (assuming one article per day is a reasonable amount for one to do) Elli (talk | contribs) 08:32, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Tricky problem, isn't it? I do my best (I'm not going to ping my latest attempted recruit to something this inside-baseball at his current point in Wikipedia editing, but he's happily translating a zhwiki article right now). I think there are reasonable places to pick up the slack both in recruitment and in not producing a billion things volunteer editors shouldn't have to deal with. One of the mid-hanging fruit of the latter I've been thinking about lately is a failure in the opposite problem (WMF and WMF-adjacents trying too hard to recruit and falling flat on their face) -- every time the m:Wiki Education Foundation program runs, NPP, DYK, and GAN are all flooded with no-hopers. It...would for various reasons be difficult to convince the people involved to get rid of it...but it makes up such a horribly disproportionate amount of issues when it's in full swing that I really struggle to see that the benefit it offers outweighs the strain it puts on those systems, even before accounting for low-quality edits to existing pages. Vaticidalprophet 08:43, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Wouldn't that just put more pressure on AfC by keeping the amount of garbage constant and routing it elsewhere? There are about three thousand drafts awaiting review right now -- it seems to me like it might be more effective to screen out garbage by something like an account age or edit threshold for accounts making submissions. jp×g 08:26, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG: well, most New Page Patrollers would likely switch to doing AfC. And it's a lot easier to decline crap at AfC than get rid of it at NPP. Elli (talk | contribs) 08:32, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

More gatekeeping has never hurt the content-building, ACPERM proved that outright, especially if one reads this thread from the top where it has been clearly described that all the essential traditional encyclopedic stuff has already been written and is being quietly maintained by true specialists and academics without the shite that populates ANI. No one is interested in the mixtapes Mike is making in his garden shed in Macclesfield.

Like I keep banging my drum: NPP is the most important single process on the en.Wiki, far more important than AfC which is still not an official system of quality control, and it also has its own issues of corruption. What doesn't get treated there can gladly evaporate automatically at G13. We know it, and DGG, WSC, Barkeep49, and Primefac know it, even if there is the occasional rare gem that can be salvaged. There are a few suggestions above, and there is a project for discussing it all at WP:NPPAFC. I could probably clear a lot of the backlog out myself single-handed over the Christmas break, and correctly, and start a well formed RfC argument for changes if I wanted to, but I'm hardly going to bust a gut helping out this time round. FWIW and the thanks I'd get, I'm more likely to end up doing a complete runner like RexxS did 😉 Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree on that (the importance of NPP). Ultimately the entire WMF ecosystem is based on public trust in English Wikipedia. I sometimes get the feeling that the WMF don't appreciate that if we get a reputation for being full of PR garbage, the donation streams will dry up and all the shiny new projects will need to be abandoned—our only real asset is our reputation and if we lose it, it will be very difficult to get it back. It would be do-able just about—some kind of sticky prod deal where we ruthlessly delete pages unless someone can provide a reason to keep them, as we did for unsourced BLPs way back before the dawn of time—but I assume I speak for everyone in saying it wouldn't be a fun experience for anyone involved. ‑ Iridescent 18:06, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

More on quality

Part of me wonders if it might be easier to just have two separate queues of article creation (with two separate sets of criteria for submissions): one for companies, bands, TikTokers and entrepreneurs, and one for literally everything else. An article about a historic church or a Roman senator goes to the normal queue (with 50 pending submissions in front of it), and an article about a turnkey, just-in-time provider of scalable solutions and disruptive technology leveraging AI and cyber to provide value-add insights goes to the other queue (with 5,000 pending submissions in front of it). jp×g 09:02, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I was unironically about to suggest that, yeah. I think our Big Problem is trying to kid ourselves about what the actual inclusion guidelines necessary for Wikipedia are -- specifically that we want articles that don't suck, regardless of what Some Guy's Essay says we're supposed to want -- such that our current attempts to shove every square peg into the round hole of 'notability' are mostly just flailing. A companies-and-entrepreneurs stream (whether as a dedicated part of AfC or NPP, a "you need to go through AfC specifically for this", or whatever else) would solve a pretty sizable array of our inflow problems. Vaticidalprophet 09:06, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I thinks that's all to complicated for the moment. The biggest problem is that there is a lot of talk at NPR but nobody is coordinating it, that's where you need to start. The venue is WP:NPPAFC, and it's time to give Iridescent his talk page back and for me to enjoy the rest of my Sunday (what's left of it) and watch the snooker final. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:10, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

If AfC continues to have several thousand drafts and NPP continues to see almost five digit queues, perhaps it's time we discuss broadening our criteria for speedy deletion or increasing the purview of our various notability guidelines. For a technical approach, we could start disallowing the creation of pages that lack an external hyperlink (unless they're redirects) to force (mainly new) editors to at least try to find one source. I'd also not be opposed to raising the permission to create mainspace articles to EC, but then we'd just end up moving the problem to AfC, though as many people have said above, it is a lot easier to kill an article in draftspace (whether that's good or bad is subjective). Anarchyte (talk) 09:21, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

That's all been discussed above (start at the top of the thread), and it's good to see some support for it, but the place to discuss it is at WP:NPPAFC. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:54, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

This will send the ironymeter off the scale entirely, but what you're proposing (a second track for pages with a potential COI, which only get moved to mainspace and indexed after they've been reviewed for sourcing and neutrality) is pretty much exactly the MyWikiBiz proposal of 2006, which led to sitebans flying around like confetti and ill-feeling that still hasn't fully dissipated 15 years on. I'd support it, but as long as Jimmy Wales is on the board you can guarantee the WMF will find a pretext to veto it; admitting he was wrong is not something Jimmy handles well. ‑ Iridescent 17:47, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think many of the NPP and AfC reviewers do work on two streams--the most likely articles and the worst first, and then all the mediocre. But I am one of the very few people looking at AfCs about to be deleted , and I find I can rescue perhaps 5 to 10% of them. That is, I can mark them for rescue--I can't myself fix more than a few or I would never keep up. But I do look at every article on an academic or possibly notable organization or general topic--if I can understand it. Nothing important in the fields I look at is going to get lost by expiring G13s while I'm still able to do it. I don't like our concept of notability, as I've been saying for years, but I know how to work around it.

I emphatically do not think our quality is deteriorating--most of the existing junky promotional articles are the old ones; most of the weakly sourced bios have been here for years; most of the coterie POV general articles were started very early on. I think this is due to 3 factors--fewer volunteers come here nowadays without the intent of doing some actual work; we are much better at detecting coi and promotionalism ; and, most important, an immensely greater amount of material is available on the internet--and even paywalled material from many sources through the WP Library. DGG ( talk ) 10:37, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Agree with DGG that net quality is still rising. But I'm curious about the current state of the Wiki. I hear people talking about defunct portals, and Wikipedia:RFA by month shows RFA currently as quiet as it has ever been. But Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits shows that we are still above the editing levels of the late 2014/early 2015 minima. I have to wonder where all that activity is. Do we just have loads of people quietly beavering away in mainspace and sticking close to their subject? Or just a growing proportion of editors with a COI focusing on the articles about their school, business or charity and otherwise keeping their heads down? To respond to Vatricidal and Kudpung, there is a big difference between retention of editors who start by creating new articles and those who start by improving an existing article. Twas always thus, the minority who start by wanting to add an article get short shrift, and though I'm pretty sure a high proprtion of them are spammers or have a broader view of notability than we accept, I do believe we lose some good newbies in draftspace. The bigger picture re editor recruitment and retention has been the shift of a large proportion of internet usage to smartphones and tablets, and the WMF decision to optimise the mobile platform for readers rather than editors. I know there has been some work done to make the mobile platform less editor unfriendly, but the days when mobile was less important than PC access are long gone. In the US Mobile access to websites is now twice that of PCs. It doesn't take more than a cursory look at recentchanges to show that we are largely a PC based editing community with mobile edits a small minority. I don't know to what extent the WMF is keeping an eye on such things, but if total editing volumes dropped back towards levels last seen in the 2014 minima I would hope I wouldn't be the only one sounding the alarm. Whether its adding a tablet view to the mobile and desktop ones, or making the mobile view more editor friendly, or using fundraising style banners to recruit volunteers to do some editing, there are ways in which we could turn more of our readers into editors. And if the community started to appear to shrink again we'd need to. ϢereSpielChequers 11:22, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I'd be very surprised if we don't see a rapid drop fairly soon. The editor levels and editing activity levels have been artifically inflated since March 2020 for obvious reasons; at some point, workplaces and schools will be fully reopened and we're not going to have the free gift of people bored at home with nothing better to do. (If you—or WAID—or anyone else with the power to get changes through the WMF's sclerotic bureaucracy—wants a fairly easy free hit, just reconfigure {{citation needed}} et al to display a "this is potentially problematic, click here to fix it" popup which when clicked shows a mini-tutorial on how to add a reference, format text, add an additional statement, or whatever else the "problem" template in question indicates needs fixing.) ‑ Iridescent 17:47, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think Ed already built what you want. See phab:T211243. When they finally solve the two-parser problem, I believe it will be possible to offer this tool in read mode. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

That's pretty much what I mean, although what I envisage is that the "clink here to fix it" is displayed by default in read mode, rather than the reader having to click on the [citation needed] to bring up a dialog box. ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Election results

Looks like the results are in. Risker made it, I don't know anyone else in that group and the only one that stands out is Li-Yun Lin and that's only because of the "Jamie" before it. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:36, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks - actually (after chance conversations with two people in the know on these matters) I think I voted for all of these except my compatriot (among my 17-odd votes). Wierd election - only 1018 votes, and one winner (Ravan) only got 20 votes in the first round. The 2nd round was a damp squib, as none of the 3 people eliminated had received any votes at all.... Risker was ahead from the start with 59 votes, and had 101.65 by the time she was elected in round 35. Now where's my swingometer... Johnbod (talk) 21:34, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm struck by how few votes there were (even allowing that the numbers are first-ranks). It also looks like (though I only looked quickly) that some of the appointed members were eliminated from the voting pretty early. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:29, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Other than Risker I've only heard of one of those who made it, and that's someone I'd have put a "strong oppose" next to were such a thing possible. The fact that the WMF announcement itself seems to carry the implication that anyone wanting to engage with this process be obliged to join Telegram does not exactly fill me with confidence. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I've run across most of the community-elected folks, and I think it will make a reasonably balanced group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh dear. It took me a bit too long to realise that this was not an ArbCom election, but something else. I think I need to re-lurk again (and resist the temptation to read any other thread on your talk page!)... Carcharoth (talk) 02:55, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't have known any of this was going on were it not for this thread, and I still don't understand exactly what this election was about or how it worked. Ultimately, however the WMF like to bleat about every project being equal, the reality of the WMF system is that English Wikipedia is the sun, German, French and Spanish Wikipedias are the planets, and all the other projects are asteroids. Ultimately, although they may nominally be in charge the only rights the WMF has over English Wikipedia are the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn, given that we have the clout to ignore anything with which we disagree. As such, it doesn't really make sense to think of the four big wikis as "parts of the WMF" in the same way that Wikispecies or Frisian Wikipedia are. ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

... And Commons is a black hole. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:56, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

For the record

Those with an interest in WMUK (either pro or anti) probably ought to be aware of Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard#"One rule for them another for us" at Wikimedia UK. (My personal view, FWIW, is that this looks like a series of good-faith mistakes rather than any kind of smoking gun, although all those thought the sourcing here was acceptable for a BLP should certainly have known better; if I'd seen a page like that created by a new account I'd have flagged that account as a probable paid editor without blinking.) ‑ Iridescent 07:18, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

I lack entirely any good faith anymore when it comes to *organisations*. But that shouldnt be surprising to anyone. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:08, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

If it had been one of the usual suspects I'd agree with you, but this looks like straightforward cockup rather than conspiracy. The editor in question has only 300-ish edits across the entire WMF ecosystem and only 55 to English Wikipedia; it seems completely plausible to me that someone whose only significant experience with WMF sites has been on non-public-facing sites like Meta and WMUK's wiki—and who's presumably watched people like Fae and Mabbett getting away with worse for years—wouldn't appreciate just how bright a red line COI now is. ‑ Iridescent 17:50, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

The first part is correct, I think, but I very much doubt she's heard of Fae, and very possibly not Mabbett either, & that she's put in any time at all watching anything on English Wikipedia. Most of her few edits to articlespace are I imagine responses to the subjects of bios complaining to WMUK about this or that. Johnbod (talk) 18:09, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Given that she's obviously read the "Controversies" section, I'm fairly confident she's heard of Fae… (For what it's worth, I very much doubt … that she's put in any time at all watching anything on English Wikipedia is in my opinion not exactly a testimonial. Her job description includes "Ensure appropriate consultation and engagement with volunteers and the Wikimedia community in the development of the charity's work"; for anyone at a local Wikimedia chapter, let alone the CEO, not to keep at least a weather eye on their language's Wikipedia seems to me akin to appointing someone to the board of a TV network who doesn't own a television.) ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

It wasn't intended as a testimonial. Rupert Murdoch has apparently never watched a tv programme in his life - otherwise an unlikely comparison. Calouste Gulbenkian, holidaying in the Med, once asked the captain of his yacht what that very large and very very long ship in the distance was ..... Johnbod (talk) 19:14, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

FWIW, "Rupert Murdoch doesn't watch television" is an urban myth; he quite regularly comments on shows he's watched. (If nothing else he's certainly watched The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, given that he's spent the better part of the last year complaining about it.) Indeed, if this FT article is to be believed (and the FT is usually absolutely scrupulous about fact-checking since even their most trivial comments can potentially affect markets), the reason Britain has the dubious prospect of talkTV (British TV channel) to look forward to is his being stuck in lockdown with nothing on TV he wanted to watch. Quite how he made the leap from "there's nothing worth watching on at the moment" to "what the world needs is more of Piers Morgan", I leave as an exercise for the reader. ‑ Iridescent 05:25, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Say what you like about Piers (and I do regularly, I loathe the man) he does create watchable television on a fairly regular basis. But I am in the minority of people who actively try to watch people with opposing views because I already know what my 'side' thinks about an issue. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:44, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

He does, but for the wrong reasons. Just getting viewers isn't enough, advertisers want to know why people are watching; not many companies want "petulant attention-seeker" to be a value customers associate with their product. (I'm not sure actively try to watch people with opposing views because I already know what my 'side' thinks about an issue really relates to Piers Morgan. He doesn't really have a 'side' as such other than whichever way he thinks the wind is blowing.) ‑ Iridescent 07:48, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Deletion of TheoTown

"12:24, 5 January 2022 Iridescent talk contribs deleted page TheoTown (A7, G11. I appreciate that the author says it's being expanded, but we're not going to host unsourced advertorial in the interim.) (thank)" ...Can you elaborate? How's it advertising? If that's advertising a lot of video game pages right now are advertising. Not exactly debating, just want you to elaborate so I'll know what I need to put in when I try again. Anpang01 (talk) 12:31, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I've temporarily restored it to Draft:TheoTown if you genuinely believe it's salvageable. Don't try to move it back to article space unless and until it's referenced to reliable independent sources, demonstrates notability in Wikipedia's terms, and is fully neutral. Wikipedia is an academic project, not a trade directory. ‑ Iridescent 12:45, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Iridescent: How is something fully neutral? It seems neutral to me. Is this ok? I tried to be as neutral as I can, while not messing up the content. Anpang01 (talk) 02:14, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello? Anpang01 (talk) 05:01, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

"Fully neutral" means you give due weight to both the positive and negative coverage of it, and don't cherry-pick positive reviews and material written by fans rather than impartial observers. (If the reviews don't exist, or there is no external coverage, than the topic's unsuitable for coverage on Wikipedia in the first place.)

The version of your draft as of right now meets neutrality requirements in the strict sense that it has no "reception" section at all, but it's still failing to meet the most fundamental requirements anything needs for it to be covered on Wikipedia. As I've already told you, it needs to be cited to non-trivial coverage in independent reliable sources. Not your own research, not anything written by the publisher, not anything written by the fan community; by external authors—e.g. coverage in specialist gaming magazines, coverage in the mainstream press, coverage on well-regarded review websites.

See Flower (video game), Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward or Oxenfree to get an idea of what we're looking for in an article about a videogame (or go here and here and browse the articles listed there), to get an idea of what we're looking for in the coverage of a videogame. We're not a gaming website, and we're not particularly interested in intricate details of gameplay; what we're concerned with is what makes the game noteworthy, so we're more interested in the development history, the critical reception, and any impact it's had on the industry or on subsequent game development.

It's a long page, but I very, very strongly recommend reading Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Video games, which has been developed over many years by the people who write gaming articles as a general set of rules to try to follow on what to include, what to avoid, and how best to write it. If you have specific questions, or if you want neutral observers to look over your draft article to make suggestions, you're much better off asking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games than on my talk page, as any post there will be seen by any editors who are currently active and interested in writing about videogames. ‑ Iridescent 09:35, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Anpang01 (talk) 11:59, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

ACE2021 stats

There is a kind of election analysis here (not of the candidates, but some stats and coloured pics) of the process that may be of interest. Comments welcome on the talk page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:32, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

One thing I will say is that the "page views of guides" is misleading. The huge spike in pageviews of TRM's guide on the 16th, for instance, won't reflect a sudden surge of interest in him on that day, but the fact that he made a lot of edits late on the 15th and throughout the 16th, so those people who had the page watchlisted would have refreshed it on multiple occasions as it kept popping up on their watchlist and they re-looked to see what had changed. If you want an actual picture of how much cut-through each of the guides had, you'd need to pester the WMF to release the relevant unique page views data. ‑ Iridescent 08:23, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. I don't think it matters. I'll include that in my analysis though. The WMF is never very helpfull so I won't waste my time on that. I'm doing this to try and gain an impression as to how effective the voter guides are at influencing the voting. Probably like at RfA, such stats don't mean much due to the small sample size. Much better would be to find out what experience the actual voters have like we did at WP:RFA2011. At first blush it looks as if the real regular editors (names that are familiar to me) voted later than on the first day stampede. A very high % of the voters do not list en.Wiki as their home Wiki; I wonder if that means anything. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:47, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

I am pretty sure that at many elections (RfX and Arbcom) experienced editors take their time to investigate and/or see what things crop up before throwing in their votes. After all, a first day vote is just as effective as one cast on the last day. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:56, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Election Results, with my predictions and comments. I think that between them, the voter Guides probably had a significant impact. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:20, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

1570 votes, about as usual. Only 2 got 50% supports (of the total), one only just. Johnbod (talk) 03:38, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

• Don't really think the guides do much. I'd actually be interested to see what the result would be if we decreased the advertising next year. I only voted for 4 people this time. First time I couldn't get to a full slate. I know a lot of the older names I talked to couldn't either. We'd probably have gotten 8 even without the bot, but I think we would have had several one-year terms. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:42, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  It's impossible to measure, but my instinct is that since the mass-mailings began the guides do have an effect. Prior to that the only people participating in the election were by-and-large people already familiar with the candidates, and if not then they were familiar with recent policy changes, arb cases etc and thus could interpret the candidates' statements and "how would you have dealt with this?" questions. The mass mailings invite a lot of people to participate, many of whom have probably not heard of the candidates before and most of whom probably aren't particularly keen on reading vast reams of text.

  This year, the "candidate statements" page alone clocks in at 4600 words, while the Q&A to the candidates comes in at 66,600 words. For reference, the whole of Lord of the Flies clocks in at under 60,000 words. In that context, I'd be more surprised if there wasn't a strong element of "I feel it's my duty to participate since I've just had this mailing telling me how important it is, but I haven't the time to read all that, can someone please tell me how to vote?" going on. We know this happens with real-world elections after all or candidates wouldn't spend so much time trying to get positive media coverage and celebrity endorsements, and if people aren't going to do their own research on elections that are going to have a genuine material effect on their lives and the lives of everyone they know, they're unlikely to do their own research on elections where the only issue at stake is the internal administration of a website. ‑ Iridescent 06:45, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'd actually be interested to see what the result would be if we decreased the advertising next year. I only voted for 4 people this time. First time I couldn't get to a full slate. I know a lot of the older names I talked to couldn't either. Well, I only got 2 and both were elected so... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:17, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  My qualifications for opining on the significance of the guides are that: (1) I wrote one of the guides, and (2) I have absolutely no empirical evidence, and am purely guessing, and so I might just be pulling this out of my nether regions. I think the guides have some effect, but they are not necessarily decisive. I also think that some guides are more influential than others. I'm sure that there are users who look at the guides, find some of them useful, and dismiss other guides as bizarre and worthless. Based on what seems to have been the conventional wisdom before the results were announced, the biggest surprise was that Beeblebrox came in as low as he did. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:25, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  The figures for Beeblebrox look pretty much in line with similar candidates in the past. He got the level of support one would expect; if you (plural) are surprised he didn't do better, I think you're not taking into account how many people he's annoyed who will have actively opposed him this time around, rather than just sit on their hands and leave him in 'neutral' as one normally does with "not my cup of tea" candidates. I personally think a lot of the concerns are an overreaction, but his self-appointment of himself as Wikipediocracy's ambassador to Wikipedia unquestionably struck some nerves in a way that e.g. Izno's involvement with Discord didn't even though the latter is arguably more problematic. Note how few "neutral" votes he got compared to the others. (Even if one discounts the "participant in a hate site!" hysteria, there are purely practical concerns over having an Arbcom member who will probably have to recuse from anything potentially controversial. There's a legitimate argument to be made—I've made it myself in the past—that the people who do best as arbs are the bland candidates you've barely heard of rather than the vocal and high-profile personalities.) ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, I think that's a good analysis, and it may reflect significant numbers of voters making informed decisions independently of the guides. Or maybe using guides to inform themselves, and then voting as they choose instead of voting the same as the guide writers. (For instance, I supported Beeblebrox with some reservations based on the things you described, and people who read my rationale may, perhaps, have been influenced to oppose while ignoring my personal conclusion.) --Tryptofish (talk) 18:41, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'd say more likely, there was a general trend to support based on the guides, but 357 people were sufficiently annoyed with him to actively oppose. Consider that even if you completely discount the Wikipediocracy stuff (which I'm sure did have an effect), he's responsible for 6000 blocks plus a fair few "lock him up and throw away the key!" comments on ANI and at Arbcom, and at least some of those blockees are going to have friends. ‑ Iridescent 19:16, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  "Izno's involvement with Discord" is interesting, given that 5 of the 8 elected this year (WTT, Wugs, Cabayi, and Enterprisey, besides myself) and another 4 of 7 in the other tranche (Bar, L235, Eek, and Cas) are also present to various degrees where most have been at least since last year's election, never mind the dozen or so previous and exiting arbs. (And I think maybe all the clerks?) Clearly Wugs and I are the ringleaders of the cabal, though, if you were to go by who got questions about the topic this year. :^) Izno (talk) 23:22, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  I wasn't the one raising it; you'd need to ask Joe Roe why you two were singled out while other candidates weren't. I don't know if this was the case with you, but I know from previous elections (and from being around long enough to remember the legendary WP:BADSITES debates) that this kind of situation isn't usually a binary "participation in off-wiki sites is automatically bad" situation. It's a complicated set of variables regarding the nature of the site, the nature of the specific discussions participated in, the nature of the comments made, whether there a potential involvement in attempts to circumvent or sway on-wiki consensus, whether even if there wasn't, there's a potential for accusation of potential involvement in attempts to circumvent or sway on-wiki consensus, and whether there's a perception that the individual concerned has tried to cover up some or all of their off-wiki activity.

  My personal position, which I don't think is any great secret, is that except when it's done for legitimate and genuine technical reasons—"if you're having difficulty logging on to Wikipedia contact us via IRC", "this statement on Twitter is factually incorrect, this is what actually happened", "I need to speak to a now-banned user about something they once wrote, doing so on Wikipediocracy is more open than via email since at least it leaves some kind of audit trail in case people want to know exactly what was said"…—it should be a fairly hard-and-fast rule that the more hats a Wikipedia functionary is wearing, the less they should engage in anything off-wiki except when there's a genuine privacy concern in which case the off-wiki discussion should take place in a venue that's genuinely restricted and which nobody else can sign up to. There's very little legitimate reason not to have discussions in public, particularly when other users are being discussed, and even when nothing remotely untoward is going on the very fact of discussions taking place that aren't publicly visible to everyone has far too much potential to create the perception that something untoward is going on. (If there's nothing problematic, why isn't the discussion being held publicly on-wiki where everyone can see it and where there will be a record of it if anyone questions or challenges something that was said?) It's taken us years to shake off the "Wikipedia claims to be egalitarian but actually has a two-tier system in which those who are members of off-wiki cliques get preferential treatment" reputation and we still haven't entirely done so, and the continued participation of high-level functionaries on IRC, Discord, Wikipediocracy etc (and the continued existence of Arbwiki) just reinforces that perception even if the functionaries in question aren't actually doing anything wrong. ‑ Iridescent 20:14, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  One wonders also about email communications. I know, hypocritical from me since I, Joe Roe, Rosguill and Seraphimblade came up with the close for Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mass killings under communist regimes (4th nomination) via email. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:35, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  Email (and face-to-face or phone) seems to me to be a different kettle of fish to IRC et al. There are quite often genuinely legitimate reasons for a specific conversation not to be made public: privacy matters, legal concerns, and sometimes just plain "can I get a second opinion on this before I go public?". Where I think off-wiki discussion groups cause problems is the potential for them to be perceived as an "insider" clique with the potential to distort consensus, even if they're not actually engaged in any kind of corrupt practices in reality. (It's not exclusive to online channels either. Some of the worst offenders for back-channelling and tag-teaming are some of the individual chapters whose members can be relied on to turn up in lockstep to support each other.) As regards something like Discord, Wikipediocracy etc, my advice to anyone involved (speaking very much in a personal capacity) would be "before you post the comment you're about to post, could you give a convincing explanation if challenged as to why you're not making it on-wiki?". ‑ Iridescent 07:00, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  If you plan on doing cross-wiki work, IRC is also useful because of the stewards channel and access to steward. It also provides live logging of every steward/WMF action via steward tools, which is useful from an accountability standpoint (The Fram situation was noticed on IRC before it was on-wiki because of the live logging.)

  I'm no fan of the Discord and really have never been, but that's more to do with the social dynamic than anything else. I've described it as the worst of #wikipedia-en ^connect, which I quit years ago for the social dynamic, even while still being active in the functionary channels on IRC. Comes off to me as a bunch of young users trying to cozy up to admins. That's both annoying and somewhat creepy. That's not just a Discord problem though, -en on IRC had it for years as well. I think what probably makes it come off worse on Discord is that a bunch of younger people already use it, versus IRC which is an ancient technology that required an extremely minimal degree of familiarity to figure out. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:28, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  How could the Fram situation have been noticed first on IRC? The blocking would have popped up on the watchlist of every person who had Fram's user/usertalk page watchlisted the moment it happened, just by the nature of MediaWiki software. The ban was enacted at 17:41 and I made the complaint that eventually spiralled into WP:FRAMBAN at 18:01; it's not what one could call a significant lag. ‑ Iridescent 07:45, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  Short version: the block didn't show up but the desysop showed up immediately in #wikimedia-stewards ^connect because it was handled on meta via the user-rights interface there. That specific situation aside, the stewardbot IRC feed is the easiest way to see what's actually going on re: changes in user rights via meta or with global locks on accounts, since those don't show up on watchlists on a local project, and there's really no reason to check your meta watchlist most of the time. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:39, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  As one of the ones bringing up the discord thing in her guide - I'll clarify that it's not the existence of discord that gets my goat - it's the fact that the discussions on discord are treated as if they are not at all connected to wikipedia and that while in some cases they can influence events on wiki, there is no accountablity for statements there. I use discord constantly throughout my day in my "day job" and I KNOW how it works. Things are almost always visible and searchable ... even if you're not on/in when something is stated. And almost all discord participants know that things they say are "logged". But yet, while the wiki-discord channels can be used to sway discussions on wiki, the fact that they are used that way ... can't be used on wiki as evidence of misbehavior/swaying/etc.... this is just wrong. I'm not going to ding people who use discord - but I did call out the folks who contributed to what I see as a problem. In some ways, it's worse than the old IRC-no-logs-days... because you CAN go see the crap that gets slung around but some folks seem to want to treat it like the old smoke-filled-backrooms of American politics. BLECH. So much for the wiki-way! Ealdgyth (talk) 17:58, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Standard questions and political compasses

• I was thinking about whether a few standard broad questions could help voters identify candidates – like left/center/right or "taxes: too high/too low/about right?", for real-world legislators. However, I'm not sure what the questions would be. It depends on whether voters feel like they are voting for someone to represent them/their views, or if they are looking for someone who is good at problem solving and conflict resolution. In the former, you'd be asking for political views, such as enwiki-vs-WMF/chapters, and in the latter, you'd be asking questions like "Have you ever, or will you soon, take a formal training program on conflict resolution?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:32, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  There was a discussion on this topic at WT:ACE2021#Compass. Izno (talk) 23:23, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

  My thoughts are already on the record on compass tools. I think for Arbcom elections it would be even less useful. Arbcom isn't the Wikipedia Parliament and arbs aren't representatives, and except for a few very specific questions like "under what circumstances do you feel people should be given second chances?" I can't see how candidates' views on internal wikipolitics are relevant. What one is looking for in Arbcom elections is "is this person going to give participants a fair hearing?", "how will this person react to attempted bullying and bluster?" and "will this person be able to work with the rest of the committee?", and none of those are attributes that can be given a mark-out-of-ten and placed on a scale. ‑ Iridescent 06:22, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  I think that asking questions about second chances, fair hearings, bullying, teamwork, etc. (and not about internal politics) would help editors discover that these qualities were important in ArbCom members. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:56, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  Maybe, but what's being discussed is the possibility of an "electoral compass" tool, not whether it's appropriate to ask questions of the candidates, and I don't see how this would translate into any kind of "how should I vote?" tool. See my comments in the #Election compass tool section a couple of threads up; with the arguable exception of second chances (where there are legitimate grounds for dispute between "turn a blind eye" and "banned means banned"), none of these are issues on which candidates are going to have differing opinions. No candidate is going to say "well, I'm all in favor of bullying", and although they might give different answers as to how it should be tackled and whether it's an issue that should be dealt with at the community, the arbcom, or the T&S level, there's no easy way to score that into a format which a machine can translate into some kind of grade. (You see the same problem with the "real" Political Compass test, where all the questions are written with the very atypical politics of the US in mind and consequently even avid hardline authoritarian extremists in Europe come across as centrists, because there are so many questions to which anyone no matter what their political views would give the same answer. As an experiment, I just tried answering all their questions as best I could in character as Priti Patel—arguably the most right-wing politician to hold office in the UK in postwar history—and scored almost dead center at 1.13/10 "right" and 2.46/10 "libertarian".) ‑ Iridescent 16:24, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  The US political compass is also written in such a way to make everyone think they're a libertarian. It's not actually a tool to see where you stand. It's a tool to make you believe you're Ayn Rand. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:34, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  They also have some really whacky "analysis". To take the last UK election as an example just because it's one where I'm familiar with all the parties involved, the previously-mentioned Plaid Cymru—who literally have "To ensure economic prosperity, social justice and the health of the natural environment, based on decentralist socialism" as their stated primary objective after Welsh independence itself are shown as almost dead centre, while the Conservative Party—already by that time under the live-and-let-live and state-subsidies-all-round governance of Boris Johnson—are shown as more right-wing than even the actual extreme-right-wingers of UKIP (and also further to the right than Donald Trump). The UK still fares better than Germany, where apparently the only party in the entire country that isn't "authoritarian" is (checks notes) the remnants of the East German Communist Party. ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  I took it again in the first time in years just to see where I fell. Answered it all accurately. I'm apparently a hardcore libertarian. Which is odd, as I'm definitely not a libertarian by any reasonable use of the term. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:13, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  I just took it answering it all accurately as myself, and am apparently an ultra-leftist libertarian (7.25 left, 2.36 libertarian), which is news to me. I think that what's going on with the "libertarian" thing is that they treat 'libertarian' as 'the absence of authoritarian', and they have a preponderance of questions where any reasonable person—whatever their politics—is going to answer "that's not the government's business".

  To TPWs, there is (for once) actually a point to this rambling sidetrack. These "political score" tools have years of experience (TPC has been running for over 20 years) and are working in an area where huge stacks of books and research papers have been published into the best ways to measure and interpret political sentiment. If they're unable to given even rough approximations of an accurate reading, what is the likelihood that a volunteer writing a tool as a hobby, or a WMF dev ordered to write such a tool, is going to come up with something that can interpret the often contradictory responses of Arbcom candidates? (As Kudpung points out in his essay linked in the OP, many of the questions this time round were so garbled and vague that it's literally impossible to compare the candidates' responses. I can say from experience that this is not a new phenomenon this year.)

  Dubious tools aren't so much of an issue in real world elections, since the overwhelming majority of voters won't be using them so any distorting effect will be drowned out. In the context of Wikipedia/Wikimedia elections, where there's a small electorate most of whom won't have even heard of most of the candidates, anything that misleads even a handful of participants is potentially going to have a significant distorting effect on the outcome. (I take any voter guide that doesn't have a huge "THIS IS JUST MY PERSONAL OPINION!" disclaimer with a major pinch of salt for the same reason.)

  This is why I opposed and still oppose mass mailings to people who haven't explicitly requested they be added to a "notify me of Arbcom elections", "notify me of RFAs", "notify me of all Requests for Comment in a given area" etc mailing list, and oppose secret ballots in the Wikipedia context, even though opposing either seems counter-intuitive. Participants who aren't either already aware that there's an election/RFC/RFA going on or people who've asked to be notified, are in general not going to be familiar enough with the candidates/issues to make informed choices, and not going to be people who'll want to put in the effort to read up on all the background. At RFA/RFC the open voting goes some way to allaying that, as the "here's why I'm supporting" and "here's why I'm opposing" are all laid out in detail so even if one's unfamiliar with the candidate or unfamiliar with the issue it's possible to get a feel for what the issues are. I know mine is a minority opinion, but I honestly do believe that Arbcom elections worked better when they looked like this as a collection of RFA-style support/oppose comments where it was actually possible to see who was supporting/opposing whom and why. ‑ Iridescent 06:35, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  Yes, that's what they're doing, and they're also wording the questions in such a way as to make you select the options that will increase your libertarian score. Using myself as an example — I don't think the students at the local university should be arrested for smoking pot. I think that's a position most people in the United States would hold. That says nothing on my overall views on drug policy, which are not anywhere near what the libertarian fringes want. The compass takes a question meant to encompass drug policy; gives you an option (should possession of marijuana be criminal) that even right-wing states have adopted or de facto adopted, and then uses the response to move you further down the libertarian spectrum. There are a fair amount of questions that take answers that the majority of Westerners, even in the United States, have the same opinion, and then they take your response and move you down into the lower two quadrants. It's an obvious bias of the compass.

  Relating it to Wikipedia: I could write a compass test that has people agreeing that a banned user should be an arb and that NYB is a fringe lunatic, just based on how I worded the questions. That's an extreme hypothetical, but you know as well as I do that the type of people who would be writing ACE compasses would also likely be the people with axes to grind. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:22, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  Likewise e.g. the homosexuality question; I'd be fairly confident in saying that the majority view in conservative America is "personally I think it's sinful but the government has no business interfering, this is for God to judge", which according to the compass tool would be "libertarian".

  We already have the questions they used to construct the compass tool for the movement charter elections, so I imagine anything here would be similar. Any compass tool not created by 'consensus' will just be denounced as illegitimate, but if we create a tool by consensus than as you can see we'll just get a mixture of platitudes and whoever happened to be drafting the questions trying to force candidates to endorse their pet projects by putting them in a situation where they'll find it hard to say "no".

  I suppose if the existing committee (or a commission of recent former arbs) drew up a list of questions they felt would be genuinely relevant to the people who'd be taking over from them, that might work, but could reasonably be accused of being a mechanism for entrenching bias. In fact thinking about it, if I remember I might suggest something similar when they hold the RFC on how to structure next year's election; if all the candidates got asked a bunch of standard questions from current or former arbs at the beginning of their Q&A page it would at the very least mean they had some sensible and relevant questions to start with before they had to engage with the annual parade of cranks and grudge-holders. ‑ Iridescent 18:10, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  There used to be a set of standard questions for arb candidates, which grew longer each year; you answered those questions yourself in ACE2010. (You also answered more than the usual quota of non-standard questions, such as "if you're both elected, how will you be able to coexist on ArbCom with Newyorkbrad after what you wrote about him on Wikipedia Review?", which you dealt with well.) A couple of years later, the standard questions were deprecated in favor of just having the individualized ones, although typically most of the "individual questions" are posted identically to each candidate. A short set of standard questions isn't a bad idea, but whoever might prepare it should be sure to look up the reasons the prior set of questions was dropped. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:40, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

  According to recent polling, 70% of the general public, and 55% of Republicans support same-sex marriage, up from 35% and 17% in 2009. The same is true for marijuana. Scorpions13256 (talk) 00:07, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

  I'm not sure I even realized those were standard questions, rather than just a section for "one-off questions the questioner had chosen to ask of every candidate that year, rather than just addressed to a particular candidate". (As regards Wikipedia Review, in light of my comments about Discord above in this thread, I hope you'll note that the day the election results were announced I immediately withdrew from WR and never touched it again. I do actually practice what I preach.)

  The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of a set of pre-formatted questions to be answered by each candidate as part of their candidacy process, the same as we currently do at RFA. It would give candidates space to expand on their initial statements without cluttering the candidate statements page, would pre-empt people having to ask the questions we know are going to be asked every year, and as previously mentioned would reduce the problem of the first (and thus most visible) questions each year quite often being variations on "what is your opinion on insert obscure issue which nobody not actually involved cares about?" and "do you agree that the existing committee is hopelessly corrupt for blocking my friend/not blocking my enemy?". ‑ Iridescent 07:00, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

  I like your sample question ("What is your opinion on <insert obscure issue which nobody not actually involved cares about>?"), and I hope that something similar will someday appear as an example in a help page.  ;-)

  Writing the software is the easy part; it could be done in a spreadsheet.

  Finding questions that correctly divide groups is harder. If you don't do that correctly, then your tool will either give the same results for everyone, or it will produce essentially random noise. This is a solvable problem, though it would probably take resources (e.g., a couple of hours' each from many former ArbCom candidates to "playtest" survey questions) and professional-level skills in survey writing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:10, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

More election thoughts

This is very much thinking out loud rather than any kind of even partially-formed plan, but in this context I'm not sure dividing the group is the issue. In the context of arbcom elections we're appointing—or at least trying to appoint—people with the ability to dispassionately assess a situation rather than a policy-making body. As such, what the questions to the candidates ought to be about should primarily be about how people react when they're placed in a situation where whatever they do is going to make people unhappy, and about whether people can be fair when asked to reach a decision about the conduct of people they know. There are some genuine 'political' issues involved in arbcom elections—I mentioned "where do you stand on the 'turn a blind eye' vs 'banned means banned' spectrum?" and "how many second/third/fourth chances should someone be given and under what circumstances?" but most of the issues affecting arb candidates aren't the type of issue that lends itself well to a spectrum. (Even if we did try to place candidates on a numerical scale for issues like "are you likely to be biased in cases involving people who hold views with which you disagree?" and "are you likely to give undue weight to the opinions of your friends?", we'd end up annoying a lot of people.) The "compass" approach might be valid for elections to things like the WMF board, where successful candidates are potentially going to influence policy, but for arbcom elections I'd say the purpose of standard questions would be more to create a managed environment for the candidates to give an impression of themselves, rather than for people with competing views to write manifestoes. ‑ Iridescent 04:56, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I think that you want to divide the group, e.g., into people who can dispassionately assess a situation vs those who can't, and people who will cope when their friends turn against them vs those who won't.

Another possibility would be to require candidates to do some basic training first. The obvious problem with that is becoming better informed about the work might result in very few people being willing to stand for election. How many people would do this, if they understood up front that it's a time-sucking experience that will lose you half your friends and make Wikipedia completely un-fun for the next three years? WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:11, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

We do try our best to stop candidates going into it blindfold; you can't add your name to the candidates list without being confronted with assorted dire warnings like You are running for a seat on the Arbitration Committee. This is a position that is extremely demanding on time and energy; please run only if you desire to contribute to the encyclopedia in this difficult role. and Candidates should be aware that they are likely to receive considerable internal and external scrutiny. External scrutiny may include attempts to investigate on- and off-wiki activities; previous candidates have had personal details revealed and unwanted contact made with employers and family. We are unable to prevent this and such risks will continue if you are successful.

Being informed about the nature of the work isn't really an issue, since anyone who can convince enough people to support them in the election is almost certainly going to be someone who already understands what Arbcom does. (They'll also almost certainly be admins, or at the very least have had long dealings with admins, so will at least be familiar with the back-office workings of Wikipedia and to some extent the WMF.) The issue is more that time pressures select for people who are inclined to act as arbs largely full-time rather than trying to remain active as editors as well; the constant dealing with the worst of people selects for people with a particular thick-skinned mentality (and has a tendency to instil an us-v-them attitude); and the way the elections are structured selects for people who are good at telling people what they want to hear without offending others, not necessarily for people who are good at doing what's necessary even if it means offending others (and creates an additional pressure against re-election of arbs who've made necessary decisions that inevitably antagonize half the participants in a debate).

It's part of why I'm so keen on seeing Arbcom's remit split up and redistributed across a few smaller committees rather than one big one. If we had different people tackling different tasks rather than a single group doing everything, it would be less of a commitment both in terms of time, and in terms of exposure to crazy people. If it genuinely only took up a couple of hours a week, candidates were able to specialize rather to be experts in everything (we don't expect members of the Bot Approvals Group to be experts in assessing the notablity of roads, why do we expect people appointed to an alleged conflict resolution body to be able to interpret Checkuser results?), and one wasn't automatically signing up to an inbox full of incoherent threats every morning for the next five years, we could attract a broader spectrum of people rather than relying on recruitment from within an ever-shrinking professional political class. (Remember the fuss a couple of years ago when we fell below 500 active administrators for the first time? As of today that number is on 465.) ‑ Iridescent 05:54, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

(belated addition) How do the projects that don't have an arbcom or other form of central politburo handle things? Yes most of the other English-language projects have turned into case studies in corruption, but presumably that's not the case at all the other language Wikipedias. (Or is it?) ‑ Iridescent 09:27, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

The different projects have a wide variety of different approaches. The first thing to say is that most are far too small to sustain any kind of bureaucratic effort. All of those either don't have enough users to develop serious disputes, hash it out among themselves (often off-wiki), or beg for help at Meta-Wiki if things get out of control. One advantage to a small community is that the person causing problems today is the person who solved your problem yesterday, so there is less black-and-white thinking about individuals. Also, since you know the individuals better, it's also more feasible to use negative reinforcement effectively. People can tacitly agree to completely ignore certain comments from an individual and go on with the conversation as if the person never even commented. This is much harder to do in a large group.

Of those communities big enough – there are maybe 25 wikis that have more than 2K registered editors each month, fewer than 10 that have 10K, so there aren't that many in this group – only a few actually have an active ArbCom. Some split it up the work into multiple processes, (e.g., admin recall is separate from a discussion about blocking or topic-banning people). Many of these communities are still small enough that what you might call the Identified patient is just one person, so processes really can treat these as individual problems rather than group problems. After all, if only 1 in 10,000 people are likely to forcefully support some unusual position on wiki, then most communities won't have one of them pushing that opinion, much less two of them. If a handful of experienced editors band together against the one, then that small group will win. I suspect that more wikis have an informal cabal of long-time, well-respected admins than a formal ArbCom. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Merchandise giveaway nomination

A token of thanks Hi Iridescent! I've nominated you (along with all other active admins) to receive a solstice season gift from the WMF. Talk page stalkers are invited to comment at the nomination. Enjoy! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk ~~~~~

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:50, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

The likelihood of my being seen in public in an "I 💖 Wikipedia" t-shirt is roughly equal to the likelihood of my trusting the Wikimedia Foundation with my name and address. That's quite aside from the dubious ethics of donor funds being spent on freebies to admins, or on any editor—let alone any admin—accepting said freebies. Removed my name from the list. ‑ Iridescent 09:28, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Do you not want people in public knowing you edit Wikipedia? I've worn my "This user edits Wikipedia" shirt to plenty of public events and the worst it's gotten me is a guy asking me to write an article on his band. (understandable position wrt the WMF, I got my shirt as a gift so I can't really speak to that-- I guess I'm eligible for a second shirt through this program?) Elli (talk | contribs) 09:55, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

In general, I can't imagine any circumstances in which anyone in England could ever get away with wearing a Wikipedia t-shirt except in a few very limited contexts such as trade shows and computing events (and even then I'd be reluctant, given the disdain in which the rest of the computing world holds the WMF). As a general item to wear out and about, I'd put "I 💖 Wikipedia" only slightly below "Morrissey fan club" in terms of the likely reaction. (I live in a hyper-hipster area, and could probably just about get away with it as people would assume it was meant ironically, but it would still be akin to a "please spit in my drink" sign.) Plus, the t-shirt designs are spectacularly ugly—this one in particular looks like a still from an alien's colonoscopy. ‑ Iridescent 10:24, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

But it's always nice to have something clean tucked away just in case. And Happy New Year, too! Martinevans123 (talk) 10:38, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

And to you… Yes, at some point in the next couple of years the Hoxton tendency are going to face a quandry as to whether to dig out the t-shirt they've been keeping in their drawer for the past 30 years in anticipation of a single day, given that the (ahem) connotations have changed somewhat since the 80s. ‑ Iridescent 10:42, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I feel like I'm hopelessly out of the loop here, then; in the social circles I'm in in the US, Wikipedia is generally viewed quite positively (except for a few on the political fringes). "Maybe not always reliable but usually pretty useful" is the general sentiment I get. And computing people seem to like it more, not less, than the general public. The shirts do promote Wikipedia, not the WMF, though... Elli (talk | contribs) 10:45, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) That's very sincere Elli. I think there really is a big culture split between US and UK. Over here, as Iri says, Wiki-geeks tend to be viewed with mildly contemptuous disdain. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:52, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I think the gap being gestured at might be as much or more generational, perhaps. My country's social context is closer to the UK on the US on most axises (if not necessarily by much these days, globalisation being as much Americanization as it is), but Elli is of my age cohort, who are people who never lived in a world where Wikipedia didn't exist. (One of the complex impacts of Wikipedia's gerontocracy is that the culture is driven by people who don't have an intuitive grasp of the fact Wikipedia is a Last Survivor. The archetypal "intelligent fourteen-year-old" today was born 2007/2008 and has decent odds of having never seen, let alone read, a paper encyclopedia.) Vaticidalprophet 10:55, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Haha. Woman (peeping around door): Are you an encyclopedia salesman? Salesman: No madam, I'm a burglar, I burgle people. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:09, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I concur with Martin. I don't think it's a generational thing; someone walking around 20 years ago in an "I edit the Dorling Kindersley Definitive Visual Guide series" shirt, or someone 100 years ago with an "I edit Pears' Cyclopaedia" badge, would be treated with equal disdain. The UK in general and England in particular has anti-intellectualism fairly firmly hardwired into the culture.

Specifically regarding Wikipedia, in the US there may be a better awareness of how the sausage is made. Here, I'd guess that at least 90% and probably closer to 99% of the public are unaware that Wikipedia is user-generated and see it as just another questionable American media company data-mining its readers and pushing right-wing propaganda. (I can't back that up with actual data, but I can back it up with very consistent anecdata, given the number of times I've seen people genuinely shocked when the "edit" tab is pointed out to them. It's part of why I think the obnoxious fundraising banners are necessary even though the money isn't needed—they serve to remind readers that Wikipedia isn't just another Facebook or Sky but is at least trying to be independent.) To my eyes, wearing an "I Edit Wikipedia" t-shirt would in most circumstances elicit the same effect as walking around with an "I work for The Times" badge. ‑ Iridescent 11:14, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Australia is nastily anti-intellectual, but then I did flee to the big city the first moment I could and presumably live in all kinds of unusual social bubbles. Most people seem to find it an interesting hobby when I bring it up, although the "do they pay you for that? why not?" question is horribly inescapable from anyone older than me; my own cohort don't tend to ask as much. (It is I suspect the counterpoint of the pro-banner argument -- and I'm weakly pro-banner on the whole -- which is that the people who know a little bit more about the sausage-making than that, but only a little, assume in turn that the money goes to the production and maintenance of articles.) I definitely find your anecdata plausible otherwise, to the point I've used it as an example when people are trying to gauge "how much do readers know about Wikipedia's internal maintenance?" ("nothing"). Most of the people I've encountered who've had non-zero experience with editing themselves are Americans on the internet, although most of them also seem to be nursing some grudge from 2005 that I'm expected to either hold the solution to or listen to their pitch on how to fix every internal problem with Wikipedia over. Vaticidalprophet 11:25, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

"When I bring it up" is probably the key phrase there; you're controlling when and to whom the topic is raised. I'd imagine that even in the relatively cosmopolitan big cities of Australia, an "I 💖 Wikipedia" tshirt out of context would get the same kind of reaction as an "I 💛 Mark Zuckerberg" or "I 💛 Rupert Murdoch" t-shirt, while in smaller towns or outback villages you may as well walk around with an "I collect vintage bus tickets" badge or a hand-knitted "Bring Back Battlestar Galactica" jersey in terms of the likely reaction. ‑ Iridescent 12:03, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

As if anyone is as much of an anorak as that. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:09, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

If you ever want reassurance that no matter how many vintage porcelain telegraph pole insulators you have in your shed there's always someone nerdier than you, visit the London Transport Depot Open Day. The depot itself is surprisingly interesting, but the market stalls that congregate—all of which have signs like "Original 1930s tram timetables of Austria"—are jaw-dropping. ‑ Iridescent 12:14, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, when a (Northeastern US-based) friend proposed nominating me for a shirt giveaway my response was "I can't imagine wearing it in public, but I guess I could use more pyjama shirts". (I did not end up getting a Wikipedia pyjama shirt.) My thoughts there, even in Melbourne, were closer to the "too nerdy to possibly wear unironically" end than the "political controversy" end -- I at least have the sense people tend to be aware Wikipedia and Facebook are in some sense different even if they couldn't articulate how, if indeed perhaps for no other reason than the huge honking "We're a nonprofit that relies on donations" banners everywhere all the time, but the corollary of that awareness is it strikes me as pretty far towards the "handknitted Battlestar Galactica fan shirt" end of the spectrum even for someone raised in a pretty nerdy household. (On the banners note, were you following the issues with this season's set? They ended up being pulled because there were so many more complaints than normal.) Vaticidalprophet 12:24, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I suppose the second surprise of the dayyear for me is that there's a non-trivial number of Wikipedians who would mind being seen as nerdy in public. Perhaps another cultural difference? Elli (talk | contribs) 12:27, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

If I only have so many weirdness points, I have better things to spend them on than Wikipedia shirts 😛 Vaticidalprophet 12:29, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

(@Elli) Despite its justified reputation for violent crime, in my experience the US has far less of a culture of casual violence than the UK or Australia. (Every American who comes here for the first time—including me—is shocked the first time they see the "would you please stop beating up ambulance drivers?" posters in pub toilets.) Here, "beating up students" and "beating up posh people" are both relatively regular pastimes, and a Wikipedia t-shirt would be taken as a signifier of both. When I say I can't imagine any circumstances in which anyone in England could ever get away with wearing a Wikipedia t-shirt I don't mean it as a fashion statement.

(@Vaticidalprophet) They go through the fig-leaf exercise of "pulling the banners in response to concerns" then quietly putting them back a couple of days later every year. Usually the moment comes either when people complain about Jimmy Wales's face and they pull the banners then reinstate them without him, or people complain that the banners are 'impersonal' so they pull them and reinstate them with that increasingly-dated photo of Jimmy gurning at the camera. ‑ Iridescent 12:48, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

About the beating up of ambulance drivers/students/posh people, to what extent is that the conduct of a small and violent (and perhaps idle) subpopulation, versus an all-too-widespread conduct of large swaths of the population? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:28, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I'd say not much, although if you analyzed the stats you'd probably find a rough correlation between earnings, education, social class and propensity to get into fights. It's hard to over-emphasise just how much more alcohol-fuelled the culture of these islands is compared to that of the US. ‑ Iridescent 07:23, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I hadn't known about this, and I find it quite interesting. I'm guessing that it also correlates with soccer oh, no, I mean football, don't beat me up! fandom. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:14, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Last year was a record for teenage homicides in London, equalling 2008: "27 were stabbed to death, two were shot and one died in an arson attack." But I suspect very pf those few involved alcohol. And of course, London is a bit of a special case. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:29, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

The teenage homicide rate is an outlier—those are mostly targeted attacks linked to gang turf wars over drugs (or mistargeted attacks where a gang has mistaken someone completely uninvolved as being member of a rival gang). Despite all that "at a record high" you're still far less likely to be murdered in Britain than almost anywhere else in the world. ‑ Iridescent 03:16, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

I've come to see gurning Jimmy as a Talk page enhancement. But in my experience, yes the Wiki t-shirt has little catwalk value. "Wiki Queens... sachet away!" Martinevans123 (talk) 13:14, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

This time's issue was that the banners were...ostentatious...even by usual standards -- they were putting them in the middle of articles, screwing with TFA formatting, repeating them more often than usual, etc. I'm not logged in on mobile, so I got them while browsing there, and they definitely made trying to read anything a headache even in that relatively muted form (the screenshots I saw of desktop were even worse), in a way I don't recall from any prior year. The post-return mobile ones are nicer. Vaticidalprophet 14:29, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Actually, any type of activism (including political activism) is considered much more positively in the US than in Europe.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:18, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

That's definitely true; volunteering to staff a phone bank or hand out flyers wouldn't raise an eyebrow in the US, but in Europe (in the broadest Atlantic-to-the-Urals sense) it's seen as akin to trainspotting as something only a hardcore of true believers would do and even fewer would admit to doing. There's probably a long, complicated explanation to do with an ingrained mistrust of mass movements following fascism and communism, with sharply different attitudes towards the roles of the state and religion, and with the way so many well-intentioned European movements end up being tainted with nationalism. Whatever the reason, even relatively successful and high-profile movements (at all parts of the spectrum) tend to have a very few actual activists, and those who are active tend to stay fairly quiet about it unless they're a dedicated spokesperson. (Even the UK Conservative Party—probably the most successful and influential political movement of all time—is down to fewer than 200,000 members, and most of those are very elderly and just haven't bothered to cancel the membership they took out in the 1960s rather than actual activists.) ‑ Iridescent 11:43, 1 January 2022 (UTC)I

Greetings from a lurker on this page. My activism in the U.S. consists of little more than a collection of t-shirts -- including one from Wikipedia. I wear them fearlessly. My favorite t-shirt features a photo of Geronimo and several of his warriors carrying rifles. The caption is: "Fighting terrorism since 1492." (I imagine several people now looking up "Geronimo" on Wikipedia to see who the hell he was. Is that an accurate characterization or is Geronimo a household name around the world?) Smallchief (talk) 14:01, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Big down under too, of course. But it's them pesky Cherakee Injuns you gotta look out fur... Martinevans123 (talk) 14:24, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Good song and video. I recall the New Christy Minstrels fondly -- 60 years ago.Smallchief (talk) 16:12, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Haha, I don't quite go back that far. But yes, Oldies but Goodies lol. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:46, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I'd think that at least in the core "Five Eyes plus Ireland" anglosphere, most people would have at least a vague idea of who Geronimo was, even if they were hazy about which tribe he belonged to, the exact period, and what exactly he did. (I suspect that if pressed, the most common answer you'd get would be "the guy who fought Custer".) Ditto Germany, where for reasons nobody has ever understood there's an enduring obsession with the American West. ‑ Iridescent 14:18, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Like this? Kablammo (talk) 16:07, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

If you ever want to see weirdness personified, visit Pullman City (surprisingly, a redlink at the time of writing). Germany is a strange place. ‑ Iridescent 16:33, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I know a fair bit more about the US than most people who haven't lived extended periods there, but my understanding of Geronimo is pretty hazy. Not nonexistent, but pretty hazy. The supposed skull-stealing might be better-known than any of his life's accomplishments. I find it difficult to gauge the average non-US-Anglospherian's level of knowledge of the US -- I once tried to explain where an exchange student friend from Arizona was from and, after grasping at straws that it was "in the desert near California", got "where's California?". Vaticidalprophet 14:29, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

To be fair, even Anglospherians' knowledge of other English-speaking countries is fairly hazy; stop a hundred Brits or Aussies and ask them to point to Washington DC on a map and 90 of them will get it wrong (ask them to point to Canada on a map and probably at least half will get it wrong), and ask Americans to name a famous Australian who isn't either a musician or actor and you'll be met with baffled stares. Even when it comes to their own countries' history, most people's knowledge is very hazy unless it happens to be something they learned at school; I'd bet the majority of the English population would be completely baffled if asked who won the Battle of Stamford Bridge or who George Hudson was. ‑ Iridescent 15:13, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Here in Switzerland, the news usually assume we know that California is part of the USA; I don't remember if they expect viewers to know what Colorado is. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:33, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

(butts in and carefully avoids speaking to any of the main issues) re: Pullman City, see Native Americans in German popular culture#In the 20th century; another article by Serten/Polentarion, a wiki-friend I very much miss. (bows out) Yngvadottir (talk) 04:11, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

The UK news—with the exception of the BBC, which is aimed at an international audience so has a tendency to explain everything—tends to go the other way; an assumption that everyone knows where every single place in North America is even when it's some deeply obscure village which even people in the same state haven't heard of, but explaining even the most basic "Belgium, which borders on France" aspects of European geography. (This doesn't extend to Ireland, where the UK media typically has it as an article of faith that all their readers will be familiar with terms like Teachta Dála and Taoiseach and with the precise location and the precise locations and constitutional status of obscure border communities.) ‑ Iridescent 15:41, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

• (Generic response having read all of the previous replies) I'd say most Americans know that Wikipedia is user generated, but still have no real clue what that means. I've used I'm an administrator on the English Wikipedia as a fun fact in those annoying "get to know your peers" type calls for years and the most common response is "What pages do you administer?" and then when I explain that I primarily work in deterring abuse by crazy people on the internet via IP addresses their eyes glaze over. A shirt wouldn't be looked down on here. Wearing volunteer t-shirts around isn't quite normal, a bunch of orgs do it, and the WMF thinking of having these t-shirts as a way to publicize editing is certainly within the US norm for NGOs (and I'm not just talking about the West Coast type. It's pretty popular even in middle America for people to give out free t-shirts to volunteers.)
  On the anti-intellectualism point; I think one of the funniest things is the US is our self-perception on this related to the rest of the Anglosphere and Europe. If you talk to left-leaning Americans, the idea is that the US has a strongly anti-intellectual place and that Europe and the UK holds intellectualism in an extremely high regard. Europe and the UK being a perfect paradise where people (read: politicians) care about race relations and science is a pretty huge trope in the US. The US certainly has its issues on this type of thing culturally and politically, but there are some ways where culturally we are very much more open to it.
  Rounding back to the Wikipedia t-shirt example; I suspect if you wore it in one of the more stereotypical "redneck" areas of the US, you'd get a lot of questions and then the end result would be "Man, you sound really smart. That's pretty cool", at least that's been my experience having heady discussions with people who are stereotyped as not caring about education, etc. in the US. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:44, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  Having come from one of those stereotypical redneck areas myself, I endorse that. Americans tend to be much friendlier when it comes to strangers than people almost anywhere else. (If I saw someone in the UK wearing a charity t-shirt, my thought wouldn't be "oh, it's someone who volunteers for that charity", it would be "yet another chugger, better get ready to tell them to fuck off", and I suspect I speak for the entire country if not the entire continent on that.) ‑ Iridescent 17:37, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  On the anti-intellectualism point; I think one of the funniest things is the US is our self-perception on this related to the rest of the Anglosphere and Europe. Yeah -- this is fascinating! The "shitty America/perfect Europe" trope seems to have blunted somewhat years ago when the migrant crisis and rightist swing was in the headlines, but the US's handling of covid probably made it worse. (Not that anyone came out of that covered in glory, but it seemed to reignite a lot of anti-American sentiment amongst my offline and online social bubbles both.)

  It has interesting interactions with the way both Americans and elsewhere-Anglospherians (and increasingly everywhere-ians as Western and American culture is exported; at one point most of my peers were Indonesian or Singaporean and it held) treat the coastal cities and "America" as fundamentally different places. The more British-tinged parts of the Anglosphere tend to have strongly non-aspirational cultures (social climbing as sin rather than virtue) in a way antithetical to many American cultures; it's plenty common for people who feel stifled by them to dream of living in the-version-that-exists-in-one's-head-of $major_american_city in a way that would be treated as ridiculous if expressed as "living in America", despite the fact it is. (Of course, just as many such people in Australia want to live in the version of London that exists in their heads.) The reality, as you note -- people are people, and are often shaped by such different forces to the ones they stereotype.

  I've wondered a lot about the consequences of different cultural attitudes towards aspiration/social climbing/whatever term best applies to Wikipedia's internal administration is. The traditional transnational complexity is about differing civility attitudes (I recall recently reading an editor going by his real name insisting people call him "Dr. Lastname" rather than "Firstname" or "Lastname" and finding it fascinating how our senses of civility were so different -- in my own context that demand felt about as rude as I suspect being called without a title felt to him), but I've wondered if it might be compounded by the calls being made disproportionately by people from a specific subset of that. I recently noticed how many of the former arbs I know the nationality of were specifically Canadian, which was interesting. Vaticidalprophet 17:45, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  This is going to sound weird, but a lot of it has to do with the accent. Americans assume anyone who talks with a British accents is well-educated, even if they're just a local sports star who can barely read. All Europeans in film are portrayed with British accents, so Europeans are associated with the RP in the popular imagination because of Hollywood. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:00, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  FWIW, unless you're hanging around with a lot of BBC newsreaders or Old Etonians, anyone you hear in the US talking with a "British accent" is almost certainly hamming it up for the cameras. When Americans meet genuine English, Welsh and Irish people speaking with their own accents (Scottish they can generally recognize even though it doesn't usually sound like stage Scots), nine times out of ten they think they're Australians. ‑ Iridescent 18:44, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  Things have spread considerably in recent years. Even at the Aunty Beeb Mothership, and especially with nasal Bradford Chris on Any Questions. Even Zeb can get rural! Martinevans123 (talk) 21:29, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  Interesting observation. Where I'm from its usually the other way around (Americans confuse Aussies for being British.) I agree with your general point though. I was more saying because of the US perception of intelligence with British (read: RP) accents, and Hollywood's decision that people who live in Madrid and Salzburg speak English with perfect RP accents, that has a certain influence on the way that many Americans perceive the continent. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:53, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  Americans also think that anyone speaking with a French accent must be good in bed. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:19, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  France has a particularly broad disconnect between "how it's perceived by people who've never been there" and "what it's actually like". The psychological shock felt by tourists expecting to find a charming and beautiful country filled with attractive people eating delicious food and then stepping off the Eurostar into the hellscape of the Gare du Nord is well-documented; we even have an article on it. ‑ Iridescent 08:29, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  Yes, Gare du Nord is a beast. It has 36 platforms and is "the busiest railway station in Europe by total passenger numbers" (or was in 2015, anyway). But it's about a thousand times better than it used to be. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:51, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  It's always interesting hear despatches from the parallel universe some 15 miles away! I have been given several Wikipedia t-shirts over the years, but unfortunately none in my size, so I can't speak to that. However, I have for several years used a Wikipedia over-the shoulder bag (given by none other than Sue Gardner at some event) as my normal day around town bag. This has a big jigsaw globe logo on the big flap (white on black), but no text - not very conspicuous perhaps, but certainly visible. I've only ever had a couple of comments from strangers, somewhere between friendly and puzzled. If I take my light Wikimedia Polska bag to the local shops I might well get enthusiastic comments from Poles. The equivalent Wikimedia UK one has never provoked any reaction (any more than the one that suggests I'm a cancer researcher). Johnbod (talk) 17:26, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  "Scenes you seldom see": WMUK not provoking a reaction ranging from disbelief to outrage  ;) SN54129 — Review here please :) 17:44, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  On this page, certainly. Johnbod (talk) 17:51, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  I'm still trying to find a place in my brain to accommodate the idea that "Americans also think that anyone speaking with a French accent must be good in bed." Haven't tried, and hope I never will be able to bear witness to that particular generality, that this American doesn't share. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:49, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  It's the ones with big noses you've got to look out for... Martinevans123 (talk) 17:59, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  Sorry to have pained your brain, Sandy! But a lot of Americans (present company excluded, of course!) have uninformed stereotypes of unfamiliar accents denoting stuff that familiar accents do not. (Then again, a lot of Americans think Trump was a good President, and a lot of other nonsense.) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:32, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  French Donald? Phew, what a thought. But, breaking news.... not fake dandruff!! Martinevans123 (talk) 20:55, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  Actually, that would be Marine Le Pen. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:06, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Booth's map of London, 1889

  Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.

  Very poor, casual. Chronic want.

  Poor. 18s to 21s a week for a moderate family.

  Mixed. Some comfortable, others poor.

  Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.

  Middle-class. Well-to-do.

  Upper-middle and Upper class. Wealthy.

• @Johnbod, the existence of those two parallel universes has been a documented feature of British (and Irish) cities for over a century, as for complicated reasons to do with transport infrastructure, tied housing and migration patterns neither US-style "rich suburbs, poor downtown" or European-style "rich centre, poor suburbs" took hold to the same extent they did elsewhere. Even in the most picture-postcard areas or the shiniest glass-and-steel business districts of any of the larger cities, you're never more than a few minutes walk from a crime-ridden dump.

  The differential rates of casual violence between the US and UK are a matter of record. While the homicide rate in the US is crazy high compared to pretty much anywhere else in the world outside an actual war zone, you're much more likely to be the victim of low-level crime in the UK than in the US. There are some cheery figures from the UN here to be starting with; obviously one needs to make allowances for differential rates of reporting, but the cultures of the US, UK and the rest of Western Europe are similar enough that there's unlikely to be major differences. ‑ Iridescent 11:04, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

• Well the captions there certainly need updating - the international "vicious, semi-criminal" classes have largely taken over the London brick zones, and the "fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings" group can hardly be dominant anywhere in the areas shown. Johnbod (talk) 17:38, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

• Another question that I'm curious (and ignorant) about: how effective (or not) are the police and the legal system at keeping a lid on the low-level violence? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:10, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

• In general I'd say the English police (I can't speak for the other Home Nations) work to much more of a fire-brigade model than their equivalents in the US; offences are reported over the phone where possible, and aside from a few hotspots the concept of "patrol officer" no longer really exists. Remember that between 2010 and 2019 the police and court budgets were slashed every year—one of the quirky differences between US and UK politics is that in the UK, the left demand an increase to the police budget. ‑ Iridescent 03:16, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Overrepresentation of Canadians

• I've been thinking about the t-shirt issue, myself. Personally, I rarely wear anything that has a logo of any kind in public, unless it just can't be helped (e.g., the logos built right into trainers). Having said that, I have a really wide-ranging series of "Wiki" related t-shirts, including a couple "I edit Wikipedia" shirts, a special long-sleeved one given only to participants in a certain project, Wikimania t-shirts of various styles and colours, a couple of hoodies (one too small, one mountains too large), etc. I thought about where I wear them outside of Wiki(p/m)edia events; the main answer was that they're usually worn underneath something else (long-sleeved shirt in the summer, coat and/or sweater/hoodie in the rest of the year, with the rare exception of a couple whose designs aren't obviously related to Wikipedia unless someone is close enough to read the small-print words (obviously discouraged in this pandemic era). I generally consider them "work clothes" (eg gardening, housework). And given I'm retired now, plus the fact that most people have eliminated most social events in the last couple of years, I'm generally not going much further than a walk around the neighbourhood (in the winter coat or summer long-sleeved shirt) and haven't for the last 22 months.

  As to the disproportionately high number of Canadians who have served on Arbcom...well, anyone who's lived in Canada since the 1960s has been raised in a far more varied cultural milieu than most people in other Western countries, with the exception of some very large cities like New York, London, Hong Kong. So it doesn't surprise me that Canadians are seen as being more "neutral" about anything with the possible exception of hockey. (True story: "Hockey Night in Canada" is broadcast in English, French, Punjabi, at least one indigenous language, and occasionally other languages. The Olympic hockey finals are broadcast in at least 10 languages that I know of...) So yeah. Risker (talk) 21:27, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

  I'm certainly not going to go through Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/History#Current and former members counting—although this being Wikipedia I'm sure we can find someone who would—but are Canadians really particularly overrepresented, or is it just that "American and British" is the default on en-wiki so one notices the Canadians, Australians etc more? Those arbs are all—obviously—drawn from the pool of active editors, and the active editor breakdown for last month was 2000 US, 780 UK, 340 Canada, 260 India, 240 Australia, 110 Germany, 100 Philippines, 690 long tail of others. Assuming that some people who are actually Canadian will be showing up as US because they're editing from .com/.org/.net domains rather than .ca—and assuming that the figure for India is misleadingly large as a fair-sized proportion of that 260 aren't going to be fluent speakers so are effectively disqualified from Arbcom—I get the feeling the proportion of Canadians is roughly what one would expect it to be. ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

  At an http(s) level, connections are made from an IP address, not a domain name. For most connections this means the IP address will be allocated by the user's ISP, and since these are generally country-specific, although someone might appear to be editing from another province/state in which the ISP also operates, the country is typically correct. The big caveat, though, is editors using VPNs or through other means are tunnelling their connection through another location (including, say, multinational companies who route their Internet traffic through centralized access points). isaacl (talk) 23:47, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

  Based on those numbers, there is less than one 1 highly active editor for every 100,000 people in the developed English-speaking world (1:85K UK, 1:100K Australia, 1:110K Canada, 1:160K US). If ArbCom participation is proportional to activity, you would expect to see more UK folks and fewer US folks than you would from a random selection of people in the world. (I've omitted LMICs, because "people" and "people with internet access" don't track as closely.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:31, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

  although this being Wikipedia I'm sure we can find someone who would Can't resist a challenge. WAID's numbers are actually a bit higher than I would've thought, but the nationalities track as I expect. I can't buy diversity as a sole explanation for any potential Canadian overrepresentation -- Australia is more or less Canada-size and over half of the population are first or second generation immigrants (and the Special Broadcasting Service reports in 74 languages), and my quick 'not actually going through and looking at all the numbers' on the arb list leaned towards my intuition Australians are at least less represented comparatively than Canadians. Vaticidalprophet 17:35, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

  I agree on diversity—the US and UK are arguably the two most ethnically-diverse countries in the world so it wouldn't make sense for diversity to explain any Canadian overrepresentation. (If anything, diversity ought to lead to under-representation, since it increases the proportion of residents who are likely to be active on non-English sites instead of here.) ‑ Iridescent 18:44, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

  I don't know. It might depend on which groups you count. If you are counting immigrants and the native-born children of immigrants, that's about 25% of the US population. It sounds like Australia is much more diverse than the US on that score. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:16, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

  Possibly, although "diversity" is also a function of where the immigrants are coming from and patterns of assimilation—someone fresh off the boat who's fully bought in to their host culture is functionally equivalent to someone whose family has lived there for a thousand years, while some communities can still be very distinctly culturally separate from the local culture even if they've lived there for generations. (Immigrants don't walk around with "immigrant" labels. One of the unexpected side-effects of Brexit was that for the first time it provided an accurate picture of UK migration patterns (as non-citizens had to register that they were currently resident in the country to be granted the right to remain) and it was discovered that the immigrant population was double what anybody thought.) ‑ Iridescent 08:03, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

ANI response

I edit conflicted as you closed the thread [2] ... may I add my defense anyway ?? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:39, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

• It's curious that Nutez failed to notify me of this thread, as they similarly failed to notify others per the instructions at WP:FAR, even as they continued editing and the FAR Coord, Nikkimaria asked Nutez to do so. I would not like to think that Nutez was intentionally poking me, since I am the editor who always verifies the notifications at FAR.
  But looking on the bright side, I suspect that we have seen progress on Wikipedia since 2012, when male editors could refer to respected female editors as bitches, Wicked Witch of the West sending out her winged monkeys, and accuse other female editors of hate mongering for a neutral notification of a now blocked user engaging in serial falsification of references. I don't think those kinds of misogynistic posts would fly today, and they were shocking even then. I rather foolishly (but brashly and proudly at the time) called out the assholery in all caps no less; I had not engaged in any such behavior before that, and have not done it since. I hope my little contribution towards highlighting misogyny on Wikipedia (for which I was fully prepared at the time to be blocked) made a wee bit of difference. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:39, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Feel free to add to the ANI thread if you want; as the subject of the thread you're entirely within your rights to do so. My closure wasn't any kind of formal "nobody else is allowed to comment" closure—I only closed it to prevent other people wasting their time checking the fake diffs, and combing through your recent contribution history in case the OP had just made an error with the diff and you actually had done something problematic. (One of the wearily well-documented problems with Wikipedia noticeboards is that as we don't have a formal "closed without action" marker. Thus spurious threads end up wasting a lot of time since each admin coming afresh to the complaint sees that no action has been taken, and concludes that that's because they're the first admin to see it and thus they have a duty to investigate it now they've been made aware, so we end up with 20+ people all reading the same nonsense trying to figure out what's actually being complained about.) ‑ Iridescent 16:30, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks, Iri; since you don't mind, I will add that response there (lest the "assholery" be drug up again in the future), and I have notified Nutez of this thread. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:34, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  "Misogyny from a male editor" doesn't really paint the full picture. What you actually mean is "Misogyny from a male 'Audience Engagement Content Strategist' at the Wikimedia Foundation". ‑ Iridescent 17:44, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  "Holey Moley, more WMF assholery." Chuck Hoolery 123 (talk) 17:57, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Lovely. Well, I like to think he was just a kid then, and it didn’t occur to him that it wasn’t OK to go around calling women bitches, witches and hatemongers (right after we had a civility arbcase). I never knew if putting the shoe on the other foot got the point across, even with the all caps, but in hindsight, I could have said instead, “How would you like it if someone called you a churlish prick”, which would have been more comparable to what he was condoning and covering up with hate-mongering bitches and witches content. I do think that such a situation would not happen today. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:05, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  I can't recall all of the particulars of this incident and so I'm not really able to do anything more than guess about what I was trying to achieve in those diffs. I'll just say it should be abundantly obvious that ten years ago I was in a very different stage of life. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 22:14, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

  As I imagined, The ed17; sorry that it was drug out again, such that I felt I had to defend and explain the context for my own ALL CAPPED assholery. Happy New Year, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:28, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

  Ooh, "Bitches and Witches", sounds very modern to me! Martinevans123 (talk) 18:14, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Who knew I would go down this rabbit hole for using the words darn and heck ? What a strange world … SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:18, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  Darned rabbits! Martinevans123 (talk) 18:37, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  If I were stretching AGF to near breaking point, Nutez's previous account says that they're a Norwegian-speaker with limited English. Dropping "darn and heck" into Google Translate for English→Norwegian renders faen og pokker; re-translate that Norwegian→English and it comes back as "fuck and heck". If he's relying on translation software for unfamiliar words, I could just about buy that "darn" and "heck" may not translate properly, and he genuinely believes that he's being sworn at. (I'm singularly unconvinced by this—most Norwegians have a decent knowledge of English, and these aren't hyper-obscure terms we're talking about—but it's just about plausible. We did once have a case of a virtually fluent English speaker getting very upset at the phrase "get your knickers in a twist" because he thought he was being accused of wearing women's underwear; the reason book translation is such a lucrative gig is that idiomatic English is an absolute nightmare to translate without messing up the nuances.) ‑ Iridescent 19:01, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  I just want to know why they don’t do notifications :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:07, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  When I'm editing Wikipedia, I'll wear what I like.... if you don't mind! Martinevans123 (talk) 19:09, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  He certainly isn't the first and won't be the last. The "you must notify everyone" warning that's shown to people starting new sections at ANI could practically be designed to be ignored—everything from the font to the color scheme is almost designed to say "you can skip this part". ‑ Iridescent 19:12, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

  I see what you mean :) Norwegian: interesting. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:38, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

I tried giving SandyGeorgia an ANI notice, but got in an edit conflict with an admin censuring me. The Google translate theory is funny though: on my talk page you recently wrote bullshit, which I don't consider to be particularly civil. If I put that particular 8-letter word into GT (English→Norwegian) it comes out as "tull", which re-translates to English as "nonsense". In that case it works in your favour, so I shall not complain. Slightly amusing is it, nevertheless. Anyway, I'm done here – it seems like you had a lot of fun at my expense. Nutez (talk) 11:38, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

You posted at ANI at 11:25 UTC; no admin posted at User talk:SandyGeorgia until 16:59 UTC (and that wasn't to "censure you"). This is a wiki and the histories are preserved for anyone to check; for the second time, if you're going to tell lies tell lies that aren't obvious and easily-checked fabrications. ‑ Iridescent 11:49, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

You sure? On my screen it looks like Nil Einne posted the ANI notice 11:36, i.e. only ten minutes after I created the section at ANI. Nutez (talk) 12:07, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Nil Einne however isn't an admin. And I think it's generally expected that the person who makes a report also notifies its subjects. More substantively, though, nine year old edit summaries are not a good grounding for a complaint and it doesn't seem like Sandy made any questionable edit summaries after your post on their talk page - or at least you didn't link any [which is also your responsibility] Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:17, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

I didn't know that, I just assumed that they were, since they intervened so readily. I got into an edit conflict with them several times, both at ANI and on User talk:SandyGeorgia, so I gave up in the end. Nutez (talk) 12:21, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

It's not expected only admins will intervene at ANI. Also there is zero point notifying someone twice. So once you saw that I had notified SandyGeorgia there was no reason to notify them anymore. You could have offered an explanation or apology for failing to notify them. I'd note that I while I have a tendency to edit my posts. I did not do so either at SandyGeorgia's talk page or ANI so it was impossible for you to get into an edit conflict with me more than once on either page. I did make a followup on ANI mentioning that pings weren't sufficient, 50 minutes later. If you were still trying to notify SandyGeorgia nearly an hour after you posted, that's largely a you problem not an us problem. Nil Einne (talk) 12:29, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You see, edit conflicts do happen (even here). It is correct, I was trying to add more evidence and decided to edit [my] post or post something more before giving the notice, but I got in an EC with you, and lost my hope.

I'm letting you know as it doesn't look like the thread starter is going to.
— User:Nil Einne 11:36, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

It seemed to me that you simply assumed that I wasn't going to post an ANI notice ever. Nutez (talk) 12:35, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Also, I don't particularly cherish the you-vs-us language. That's why I assumed you were an admin, talking to a non-admin like me (in-group/out-group). Nutez (talk) 12:41, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

This comment gets to heart of the issue:

Also there is zero point notifying someone twice. So once you saw that I had notified SandyGeorgia there was no reason to notify them anymore.
— User:Nil Einne 12:29, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

That's exactly what I thought; hence, I thought the job was done. Nutez (talk) 12:41, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

This is all a sidetrack to the fact that this all stems from you accusing SandyGeorgia of writing incredibly vile edit summaries, laced with profanity and anger but have yet to provide an example of a single one. Here's every edit SandyGeorgia has made for the past six weeks, which I've wasted a few minutes of my life I'll never get back checking, and I can see no sign of any of these supposed vile edit summaries. Unless and until you can provide even a single example of one of these edit summaries, don't expect any of this to be taken seriously. ‑ Iridescent 12:46, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

(EC) You said an admin posted, but I'm not an admin. And while my comment at ANI could be considered "censuring" you, but it's unreasonable to call my ANI notice such. Yes I did offer a brief explanation to SandyGeorgia of why I was posting when the thread had nothing to do with me. I consider this reasonable when I'm notifying someone because the thread started did not do so, so whoever I'm notifying understands I'm just posting because someone else did not and it's otherwise nothing to do with me. It did occur maybe you just decided to edit your post or post something more before giving the notice, or maybe were just very slow. Hence why in both my comment at ANI and on SandyGeorgia's talk page I implicitly acknowledged the possibility maybe you were just slow. (In most cases it's been long enough I don't bother.) I'm not sure why it took you so long to post an ANI notice since AFAICT your next post at ANI was a reply to me so I see no sign why it would take 8+ minutes for you to do so. But in any event, from what I saw, this is the first time you even mentioned you had planned to post an ANI notice but got delayed by 8+ minutes, indeed your previous comment seem to suggest you thought a ping was enough. So personally I have no problem accepting you just got very delayed, you also need to understand why none of us knew this is what happened. Nil Einne (talk) 12:23, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Thank you all for your help in dealing with this. And thanks again, Nil Einne, for notifying me. Iri, I feel for you, having to review my edit summaries for six weeks :) I hope you enjoyed the Cyclone/Tornado CCI, and that you noticed me "sheesh"ing myself when I couldn't get an sfn right at Sherman.

Not an admin, above my pay scale, so pardon me (and please enlighten me) if I get the WP:CLEANSTART aspects of this wrong. I am (almost) wishing the thread at AN/I had just stayed open, so the full extent of the behaviors could have been examined there. I doubt that El C was aware of having blocked the editor before, when the falsifications about me were called out.

Is this not an example of just why we have CLEANSTART? Nutez/Gertanis/Eisfbnore are the same editor, operating three accounts, who has now revealed that they came at all of this to pick up on their almost ten-year-old grudge.[3] As well as apparently stalking my edits, and possibly failing to do the FAR notifications for some pointiness. (When I said I just want to know why they don't do notifications, I was referring to FAR, not ANI.) In an attempt to buttress the lies about my edit summaries, they dredge up a nine-year-old issue (because ... the only time I have ever used that kind of language), unnecessarily dragging Bish, Nikkimaria, J Milburn and everyone else back through this old business. Perhaps part of why they did not respond to Nikkimaria's request to do the FAR notifications (another grudge?). And then Nutez blames me for bringing in The ed17, when it was Nutez who did that.[4]

So, again, not an admin, but why is this person allowed to operate three accounts, from which they revisit (and misrepresent) their nine-year-old grudges? Nutez was still editing as Eisfbnore in 2020. A lot of admin time was wasted at ANI, not to mention the issue with The ed17; that time might not have been misspent if anyone had known at the time of the post that this was nothing more than an old grudge (or two, or three) from an editor who seems to be stalking my edits, and possibly also has an issue with Nikkimaria. We might want to examine whether they should be nominating articles at FAR at all, along with whether they should continue to stalk my edits. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:38, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

As long as the accounts are flagged as belonging to the same editor, we don't have a problem with that, as there's no intention to deceive and they're not trying to distort discussions by participating in one discussion as two different people. (Whenever I have any kind of bulk editing to do, I do it from my other account, as I'm trying to stave off the day I hit the 600,000-edit mark and the standard tools stop working.) It's not particularly uncommon when someone forgets their password to just abandon the account and start a new one—unless you've registered an email address for them to send a password reset request to, the reset process is truly painful and relies on your being able to contact someone IRL who can verify your identity. It looks like the point may be moot, in any case. ‑ Iridescent 17:53, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Editors who "retire" often re-appear. And the Nutez account was not flagged as Eisfbnore (nor was Gertanis). And they did use the new account to deceive, ala, to cover up the grudge motive for the fabrications about my edit summaries. What am I missing about CLEANSTART application to the case? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:57, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

My mistake, I saw that Nutez was flagged as an alt-account of Gertanis but not that they hadn't mentioned that they were also Eisfbnore. It really depends on whether it qualifies as Changing accounts to avoid the consequences of past bad behaviors, which is what makes the sockpuppetry policy kick in. My strong inclination is to leave it and see if the retirement sticks; past experience strongly suggests that if we just ignore retired editors once they've gone they tend to stay retired, but if we take any kind of action against them they see it as a declaration of war, and I'm not wildly keen to be the midwife to another Mattisse unless it's unavoidable. If they come back and continue to use multiple accounts, or continue to resume editing articles or topics in the same manner that resulted in a negative reputation in the first place, we'll re-judge then. ‑ Iridescent 18:03, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Not to mention that what the clean start policy means changes every 1 January when a new batch of arbs comes in (and now is the time that they're traditionally most active.) That's not a criticism of the committee, just that right to vanish/clean start then coming back and acting like a jerk tends to be one of the more contentious block/unblock type things the first quarter of every year. The policy is written so vaguely that an admin could probably justify blocking any clean start and not be abusing their discretion, but that also isn't really the intent of the policy. What it inevitably turns into is 'what does the person who has the misfortune of reading the multi-paragraph appeal think the clean start policy means.' And that changes in approximately 1.5 hours. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:27, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I’ve been a victim of that phenom as well … with an arb who left the committee under not the best of terms. I think Iri’s advice about how to handle this one is sound. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:34, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

To what Tony's (correctly) saying, also add that in many cases it's genuinely impossible for anyone not in a tiny circle of functionaries to assess the validity of either a clean start or an alt account. The circumstances are quite often either "I have a reputation for troublemaking but I want to show that if people aren't aware who I am I don't get in to trouble and thus that people are targeting me rather than finding genuine problems with my edits" or "My main account is tied to my real-life identity and I want to set up a separate account to edit a contentious topic which I don't want my family/employer/government connecting to me, even though that will mean my operating the two accounts simultaneously". In those circumstances exactly what's been agreed, when, and with whom has to be kept secret since declaring it publicly will blow the account's cover; and by one of the Iron Laws of Wikipedia, it can be guaranteed that if and when a problem does arise, the arb who handled that particular negotiation will be on vacation. ‑ Iridescent 09:48, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I make a point of never bearing a grudge for more than 15 years. But then I only started editing in 2007. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:09, 31 December 2021 (UTC) p.s. can't speak for my begrudging threadbare socks, of course.

I thought we should round this out with some humor from the Master of the Edit Summary. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:53, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

"Discussion tools" gadget

This is your predictable reminder that anyone who's tired of edit conflicts on talk pages can go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures, turn on "Discussion tools", and probably never see another edit conflict (while using those tools) for the rest of the year. The devs did some magic to resolve nearly all edit conflicts (literally to the point that they now get complaints because it doesn't edit conflict, and some editors wish that it did). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:43, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

I just turned it on, but I personally don't like it. I guess it depends on what you're used to but as far as I can see, it forces you to make replies in a tiny window, with an absolutely incomprehensible mystery-meat toolbar that's missing most of its features.  ‑ Iridescent 17:04, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

How often does an experienced editor like you actually use anything in the toolbar? (I even type wikitext tables from scratch, which I understand is a little extreme. But really: bold, italics, formatting, links? I doubt that anyone on this page regularly resorts to a toolbar button instead of just typing a few ' or [. Type the @ symbol if you want it to search for the person's name to ping, and I think you can safely ignore the toolbar. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:12, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I use the toolbar while editing articles pretty frequently, not that I'm a content editor. The toolbar for discussion tools has all I need, though. But I think I'm pretty experienced. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 21:17, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

As you (WAID) possibly remember as I led the complaints when the WMF tried to get rid of it, I use the extended 2006 toolbar and don't understand why anyone in their right mind wouldn't as I consider it an improvement in every way on the current default. Specifically on talk pages, I use it all the time for those elements that are slightly more of a nuisance to type: nowiki, strikethrough, super- and sub-script, small text, and (especially) hidden text. Yes they're all in the "wiki markup" drop-down under the edit window, but that (a) adds an extra step as one needs to navigate to the right menu then select the right item as opposed to just a single click in the toolbar, and (b) as with everything else using drop-downs is a PITA to use on a phone, tablet, or any other mouseless interface. ‑ Iridescent 07:48, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

What I mostly remember about the removal of the 2006WTE was that the interface admins at the German-language Wikipedia had a couple of weeks' notice, in German, on their designated local noticeboard, that they needed to copy and paste a fix into their site to prevent their local version of CharInsert (NB: CharInsert is not actually part of the 2006WTE) from breaking. They didn't do it, so their CharInsert tool broke when the 2006WTE was removed. As a result, about a hundred dewiki editors descended on the annual community wishlist (a process that always has a minimum of six months' delay for voting and planning) to demand that the 2006WTE (NB: not CharInsert) be re-installed instantly.

I use keyboard shortcuts for most formatting, but my Mac overrides the keyboard shortcut for strikethrough. Fortunately, I don't need to use it very often. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:52, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

What I remember is arguing with you (in your WMF capacity) because you didn't believe anyone on en-wiki was actually using it. Keyboard shortcuts are great in theory but have the same problem the fancy new toolbars with dropdowns have; they presuppose you're using a keyboard/monitor/mouse setup, which is the case for an ever-decreasing proportion of editors each year. If we had a mobile interface that wasn't an absolute piece of shit it wouldn't be an issue, but as long as we're forcing anyone using an Ipad, Surface, or any other touchscreen device to use the desktop editor if they want to do anything substantive, the design of the desktop editor needs to take users of mobile devices into account. (This is the point where I page Cullen328.) ‑ Iridescent 18:34, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

I am working right now, so I will just link to my 2015 essay on this subject. Cullen328 (talk) 20:29, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Mass formation psychosis deletion

I'm curious what this redirected to. Readers will be interested. See [5] for instance. ~Kvng (talk) 20:23, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

It redirected to Robert W. Malone. If the phrase genuinely becomes associated with him in the long term it's potentially a valid redirect, but redirecting it on the basis that he used the phrase once a week ago is IMO not a valid use of a redirect. (If we're going to have it as a redirect—which I'm not at all convince we should—it should be to Mass psychogenic illness.) ‑ Iridescent 20:46, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I think Mass formation psychosis and Crowd psychosis should redirect to Mass psychogenic illness. I was unable to find Mass psychogenic illness searching for Mass formation psychosis or Crowd psychosis. It doesn't appear to be on the nose but it's a better toehold than the search results were giving me. ~Kvng (talk) 21:17, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Or maybe Misinformation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:43, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

If anyone wants to recreate it, feel free. If there's any possiblity that someone will actually find it useful, it might make more sense to have a formal discussion at WP:RFD to get a broader input as to what it should point to. (I know RFD has a bad reputation and a lot of people avoid it, but give it a second chance; the disruptive editor who made the whole place so unpleasant has now finally been sitebanned and the tone of the place is about a thousand percent more civilized.) ‑ Iridescent 08:07, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

And someone's recreated it… I won't re-delete it since the fact someone's restored it means it's obviously not an uncontentious deletion, but I really don't think having a phrase redirect to whoever happened to be the last person to use the phrase publicly is the way to go. ‑ Iridescent 13:39, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

The target is Robert W. Malone#COVID-19 which I think gives better context than Mass psychogenic illness or Misinformation (I'm not sure this was a serious suggestion). ~Kvng (talk) 17:16, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm not convinced—it's a term he used on a single occasion, it's not as if it's his catchphrase, and the whole thing seems to me equivalent to redirecting Girl in Africa to Jimmy Wales. It's not something over which I intend to lose any sleep; we're not talking a high-value link which is potentially going to mislead a lot of people. (The Robert W. Malone page is currently a case study in undue weight, however; more than half of it is about a single brief interview.) ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Adan Santiago Goc-ong Igut at WP:RFPP

FYI, looks like it was actually deleted twice, unless I'm misreading the deletion log. Not arguing twice is enough for salting in this case, though. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 21:01, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

The claim was "Repeatedly recreated"; it was only recreated once (hence two deletions; once when the original was deleted, once when it was recreated). I know it's a nitpicky thing, but one of my pet hates is people exaggerating the scale of a problem at Requests For Whatever to try to get admins to carry out actions they wouldn't normally countenance. ‑ Iridescent 05:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Please keep an article on English Wikipedia

Hi,

Please can you keep this article on English Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genard_Hajdini as is about a famous Albanian Instagrammer and YouTuber which has reputation.

Thanks A TUZI (talk) 07:54, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

A TUZI, if you want us to keep this (or any other) article on Wikipedia, the article needs to comply with our rules. It needs to demonstate that multiple reliable sources that are independent of the subject have written about that subject, and every fact in the article that could potentially be challenged is cited to a reference so our readers can see where the information came from. The rules look complicated, but can be summed up as "we ony repeat what independent sources have said". When it comes to biographies of living people, we enforce the rules particularly strictly, as there are ethical and legal consequences if we get anything wrong about living people.

I can see that there's now a discussion page at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Genard Hajdini. That discussion will remain open for a week, and will determine whether or not the page is kept. You—and anyone else who feels the page should be kept—need to explain why this is a topic Wikipedia should be covering, and why the article as is stands is of an adequate quality to remain on Wikipedia.

As I don't speak the language and know nothing about him, this isn't a topic I can really help with, I'm afraid, but basically what you need to be doing is demonstrating significant coverage of him in sources to which he's not himself connected (that is to say, other people writing about him), and sourcing the article to that. ‑ Iridescent 09:08, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

International Academy of Science, Munich

Hi! By "No eartly way is this a G4" you mean that you looked up the old deleted text, and the new text is substantially different / better, or what? What is "eartly"? Wikisaurus (talk) 19:19, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

WP:G4 only applies in cases where a newly-created page is a sufficiently identical copy of the page that was deleted. In this case, the page that was deleted in 2010 had virtually nothing in common with International Academy of Science, Munich other than the title; as such, there's no earthly way G4 applies. Speedy deletion is for unambiguous cases and nothing else. (Indeed, Administrators should take care not to speedily delete pages or media except in the most obvious cases is written Wikipedia policy. If I had deleted this, it would be a straightforward case of admin abuse.) ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Ok, thanks, I nominated it for AfD! P. S. In ruwiki it is rather different, as we delete even completely new and better articles on the topics which were deemed unnotable before :) Wikisaurus (talk) 19:47, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Loveness Shilili Makoleh

Born: 26 March 2000 197.213.39.251 (talk) 07:08, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Iridescent, do you know why you've been receiving so many random posts like this from IPs or very-low edits accounts? It seems to be increasingly more recently. Is it from AWB editing or something? Aza24 (talk) 08:08, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

It's because of how the MediaWiki interface handles deleted pages. Over the vacation period the deletion backlog got crazy high, so I've recently been clearing out industrial quantities of well-intentioned inappropriateness, blatant spam, and outright crazy. A lot of new accounts don't understand user talk pages and since we abolished OBOD way-back-when, tend not to even notice the "you have new messages". Hence owing to how MediaWiki works, when the creators of the pages in question go back to their creations they see the "this page was deleted by _____" message, reasonably assume that they're supposed to click the link in that message since "click the blue link to find out more" is one of the few things everybody knows about Wikipedia, and end up on the user talk page of the deleting admin. Because they saw the admin's name specifically mentioned in the deletion log, they quite often assume that the admin in question is personally responsible for patrolling the pages on that specific topic and thus that they're the best person to direct any particular comments, queries and suggestions to.

If I can identify what they're asking about I do try to either answer their queries myself or steer them towards the best place to ask, since they're generally approaching me in good faith assuming that because mine is the name that was listed, I'm Wikipedia's designated point of contact on the topic. As regards this particular one I have no clue—I assume they're asking me to correct a birthdate but we've never at any point had a page called Loveness Shilili Makoleh and the OP has no previous contributions (deleted or otherwise) so I can't even start to figure out what they're asking me to change. ‑ Iridescent 09:35, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

You need a medal for all those deletions (looked), at least because I know you read first what you delete to be sure. But I know you don't care much for bling, so let's make do with a belated Happy New Year ;) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:57, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, and the same to you. (Yes, I always do read them before I delete them to see if they're salvageable. An awful lot of NPP-ers tend to be a trifle overenthusiastic with the deletion tags—I suspect I'm annoying quite a lot of patrollers with how many deletion requests I'm declining, but I take a very strict definition of "unambiguous spam", particularly if it's in {{noindex}}-ed draft- or user-space.) ‑ Iridescent 10:04, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Decline away! After all the energy I invested in NPP I'm still disappointed about the quality of patrolling. But I'm out if it. It's up to them to get their act together. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:07, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Nas

Info in Nas article states he married Kelis in 2005 but the infobox says 2003. Her article and infobox both say 2005. Can you edit Nas infobox to match article by changing 2003 to 2005? Thank you. 2600:1702:2A40:3E40:A8B4:5297:6A38:665C (talk) 13:16, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

This one isn't straightforward. The wedding was announced in 2005 and that's the date in most of the sources, but their divorce papers allegedly say the ceremony actually took place in secret in 2003. It really needs input from an expert; I'm not really comfortable changing it unilaterally myself in either direction, even though it's clearly wrong to have two different dates without explanation. It's almost certainly best to raise this on Talk:Nas. ‑ Iridescent 19:57, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

I see. Well, I don't care that much, I honestly almost didn't want to send the first message, so thanks again anyway. 2600:1702:2A40:3E40:DD81:2EAA:8E4A:13D5 (talk) 23:26, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Draft:Kshitij Vedi

Yes, you're missing something. Premjeep was globally locked as a Thematrupal sock 12:51, 15 January 2022. You reverted the G5 at 14:43, 15 January 2022‎, nearly two hours thereafter. Even the CentralAuth indicated a CU block on the Commons at 12:02, 15 January 2022, by me, a CU. CU results are valid across projects for SUL accounts. Эlcobbola _talk 19:57, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Yo

Can you create a page for Angry Blackmen Angryblackboi (talk) 04:25, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I know nothing about them other than the name, I'm not the one to ask. For us to host an article on them, it needs to be sourced to what other reliable sources have said about them, which isn't always easy especially for the more underground and less commercial acts. (There's a guide at Help:Your first article which is worth reading.)

Bands and performers are usually quite hard to write Wikipedia articles about, unless it's someone like the Beatles or Kanye where there are actual biographies published for us to work from. Wikipedia articles need to be neutral, but most of what's written about bands is written by fans and isn't really usable as a source for us. It's why Wikipedia's articles on even fairly big names usually either suck (e.g. Ghostpoet) or don't exist at all.

A lot of people who work in promotion think having a biography on Wikipedia is important, but Wikipedia isn't usually particularly suitable for biographies of living people. The rules on neutrality and sourcing mean the articles tend to be really dry and boring; our "anyone can edit" rule means fans and promoters can't gate-keep the articles; and, because Wikipedia is quite heavily mirrored, if someone adds something critical to a Wikipedia page it will get repeated all around the world.

In my opinion Wikipedia is rarely a good place to write about anyone living; if you're connected with the subject it's impossible to be neutral, and if you're not connected with the subject they're unlikely to be grateful since Wikipedia having an article means the top Google hit on their name is a page over which they (and their promoters, manager, publisher…) have no control. I'd always advise any act or any fan of an act to avoid creating a Wikipedia article about them; Wikipedia is great for writing about historic topics, but usually doesn't do current events or living people at all well. ‑ Iridescent 05:17, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Speaking of Angry Whitemen & BLPs, Sir Max Hastings had a section in The Times "Notebook" (diary, page 30) yesterday with a good moan: "...when I once telephoned Wikipedia to correct some ridiculous errors in my own entry - even about such things as how many children I have - they declined to accept this intervention as legitimate. They said that I must produce citations and evidence from others. "But surely I know the facts of my own life", I exclaimed. They refused to budge. The errors persist, presumably until I employ image managers." Johnbod (talk) 17:31, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

(EC) Does he say how many he thinks he has in that times piece (I aint subscribing to find out)? Because the article currently says 3 (1 deceased) which tallies up with his own website biography. The caveat there is of course that it says "he has two grown-up children". He may (very sensibly) be omitting any reference to minor children. That bio btw appears to be what is regurgitated by almost all other sources, so wikipedia cant really be blamed for listing 3 if there are more, which are not mentioned anywhere. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:03, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

No, that would make it too easy! Johnbod (talk) 20:46, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

This from the month prior to his eldest son's death indicates 3, but 2000. I suppose theoretically in the last 20 years he could have had another child (or adopted etc). But surely it would have been heard about. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:13, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

The Daily Telegraph (of which Hastings was editor for years) has long had a particular grudge against Wikipedia. Peter Hitchens's time as a Wikipedia editor is one of our more surreal episodes. ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

...fairly big names... I guess on the one hand any multi-time Mercury Prize nominee could be called a "big name", but on the other hand I tend not to associate the term with having fewer pageviews than a 1970s Bowie attaché who never found independent success, an obscure tabletop role-playing game notable for being unbelievably bad, or a genetic disorder with twelve recorded cases. Which could be why the article is lame. (Of course, all pale in comparison to an 18th century French cannibal, etc., but Tarrare becoming a huge meme is a bit tough to predict in advance.) With regards to the object point and to Angryblackboi's request, I'd note to him that all of these issues tend to go about quintuple for music BLPs, both for the previously mentioned reason (our sourcing rules don't interact well with much music writing) and because "fans can't gatekeep it" doesn't stop them from trying as well as they can. I've been watching drama about Nicki Minaj spill out across noticeboards and content review processes for several months now, and I don't pay any attention to her in the rest of my life. Vaticidalprophet 17:57, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Nicky Minaj is something of an exceptional case. She was one of the first minor celebrities to spot Wikipedia's potential as a self-promotion mechanism (with predictable consequences), and her biography has always been more of a battlefield than is usual. (She also tends to use the tactic of deliberately spouting nonsense in order to get her name in the papers, meaning there's a lot of drivel about her in normally-reliable sources.)

By "fairly big names" I'm not talking the A-listers—while it may be a doctrine of Wikipedia faith that PR staff are agents of evil, they do perform a valuable unsung role in keeping the worst of the crap off the biographies. The mid-tier of people who are respected/acclaimed within a scene (the BBC 6 Music Now Playing Bot thoughtfully curates a ready-made list of exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about) are the problem. They aren't big enough either to have high-quality journalism written about them which we can use, or an army of fans who have the page watchlisted and will keep the worst of the nonsense away, so we end up with pages that initially rely on press releases just so we have something to say about them, that then rapidly degenerate into either adoring puffery or libellous allegations because nobody's watching them, and which are undeleteable because the usual suspects turn up quoting Wikipedia:Notability (music) and parroting "AfD is not cleanup".

(The same is true of all biographies of living people. If I had my way we'd have blanket protection and a request-an-edit process on every BLP, be it someone who had a song reach number 35 in the Gabonese music charts in 1963 or the Emperor of Japan. But, we are where we are; "anyone can edit" is a mantra both among the WMF bigwigs and the "it worked fine in 2003" faction that disrupts any serious discussion on reform until it inevitably closes as no consensus. Add "fixing BLP" to the ever-growing list of problems that won't be fixed until either the status quo literally becomes unsustainable, or the Board of Trustees get dragged into court. It took the Siegenthaler incident to get even the most basic protections added to Wikipedia biographies, and those protections take all of five seconds to work around for anyone who wants to get a defamatory comment onto the wiki long enough for Wikidata and Google to pick it up and it thus to become "the truth".) ‑ Iridescent 18:37, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Tamzin's dark joke about it is a hypothetical biography beginning "John Smith is a French-German or French-Austrian serial rapist". I'm sure there are several actual BLPs fitting that exact description. I think automatic semi-protection for BLPs is one of those "silent majority" ideas that many-most people support at least casually and simultaneously many-most people have no desire to fight the vocal fringe on in a PAG-writing discussion (see also: reasonable COI rules, reasonable NFCC rules). Although in the wonderful Venn diagram overlap of two of those, I recently saw an idea lab proposal of "what if we intentionally made ugly photos of BLP subjects under non-free licenses and used them in articles so the subjects would send us freely licensed images?", so there's still some really 'interesting' stuff out there. Vaticidalprophet 18:48, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protection, sure, though that might incidentally prevent many subjects from correcting misinfo in their BLPs. I read Iri's comment as supporting full protection, tough. It's not particularly hard for someone to get autoconfirmed after all, and I'd say a lot of libel has been added to BLPs by autoconfirmed users. Elli (talk | contribs) 18:51, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Pro-tip; if you want libel to stick, you don't add it to the BLP, you add it to something dull and unwatched. Instead of editing Elli to say Elli murdered a child in 1997, you edit Strool, South Dakota to say In 1997, Elli murdered a child in Strool. Google will pick it up just as well, and there's a reasonable chance the statement will remain in the article for months if not years. ‑ Iridescent 19:00, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

We do just fine on our own sourcing terrible photos of BLPs. I'm sure you're right about the silent majority, but unfortunately the vocal minority includes Jimmy Wales (if there aren't errors on celebrity biographies, how is he going to get those phone calls from celebrities which he can then boast about?) so unless and until we finally manage to get rid of him, his acolytes will always stymie any meaningful attempt at reform. As with most significant change, it will most likely only happen on en-wiki when one of the other wikis which isn't watched as closely from SF (in this case probably German Wikipedia) makes the change and the world doesn't come to an end. ‑ Iridescent 18:55, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I have a two-sentence rant on my userpage: We should not allow BLPs about people who do not unambigously meet GNG, as established by references that are actually in their articles. Any BLP subject who is not frequently discussed in the media should be able to have their article deleted on request. It exists only in that form because I don't think that will happen anytime in the next 5 years (minimum, realistically more than 20), so I don't see a point in writing an essay on it or something. But since we're on the topic of drastic BLP reform, I'll note the three examples that led to me reaching such a drastic conclusion.

1. My aunt is the subject of an SNG BLP. It was clearly written to turn all the links blue in some table of award winners. No real research into her as a person; for instance it fails to note that she is the sister of another bio subject. For years it was a magnet for petty vandalism. I removed the vandalism, but was afraid to touch this sentence, which someone from a D.C. IP address eventually removed. It had sat there for four years, a result of someone importing a labor dispute onto Wikipedia—undue and unsourced.
2. I spent seven weeks studying Hebrew with this guy named Robby Bostain. At the end of the ulpan he mentioned in passing that he was a basketball player. "Like, for fun?" "No, professionally." So I've checked in on his BLP occasionally over the years. I noticed at a point that it described him as "American–Israeli". Now, when I knew him in 2014, I'm 99% sure he wasn't an Israeli citizen and wasn't trying to work toward such status. I felt uncomfortable removing content based purely on my own OR... even if the content was unsourced and so there was no RSes I'd have been standing against. I {{cn span}}'d it. I'm sure in 15 years someone will come along and either source or remove the claim.
3. A friend of mine reached out to me saying that her boyfriend was being deadnamed in his mother's article, but was not yet out to the press. Now, there's a case where the article is clearly notable, but the personal life section violated WP:BLPNAME like seemingly 50% of articles. I offered to remove it. She was worried paparazzi would notice the removal, and the deadnaming persisted. (Ironically, after he came out someone did remove his name... And then someone else added his much-younger sibling's name, which I removed.) Perhaps nothing could be done at that point, but I mention it as part of a complete picture of the state of minor claims in BLPs.

• [Honorable mention] And then we have the case of Vonderjohn (talk · contribs), who for five years, across three articles, using three accounts, repeatedly inserted claims that two specific non-notable living people were terrorists and pimps. Some of those edits were reverted; others were not; and some were even reinstated. This also wouldn't be covered under my modest proposal, but again, symptomatic of a larger problem, and gets back to what Iri is saying about Strool.

From this I reach the conclusion that the wiki model is incompatible with documenting low-visibility living people, at least at this scale. When the Web was tiny and the "Google test" was a good way to establish notability (and I still occasionally stumble on spam from people who figured out how to play that game before it was cool), maybe things were different. But we are now the world's first-choice reference work, and we need to accept the ethical duties that come with that. Which include a duty to the people we write about. Some editors just need to accept that some names are going to be unlinked in their tables or football players and daytime screenwriting Emmy winners. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 20:12, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

The wiki model is incompatible with documenting low-visibility living people—this, absolutely. To be honest the wiki model isn't particularly good at documenting low-visibility anything, as the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing relies on every page having multiple people watching it; it's just that it's more of an issue when it's actual people's actual lives at stake, particularly since these borderline biographies are exactly the cases where people are more likely to create the articles in the first place.

On the specific case of Robby Bostain, while it obviously shouldn't be in the article without a source "Israeli citizen" is probably correct. Israel (along with Ireland) is notorious for handing out citizenship to any pro athlete with a vague connection, in an effort to boost the pool of eligible players for international tournaments. It's very plausible that anyone who was playing professionally in Israel and qualified through a Jewish relative would have been given citizenship routinely, if only for their own convenience at being able to use the fast immigration lane when entering and leaving the country. ‑ Iridescent 07:44, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Nico Krijno

Argh. You deleted Nico Krijno per G12 as an "unambiguous copyright infringement" while Fram and I just had a dispute on the talk page, and it does not seem you read it. The last version of the article does not fulfill G12 criterion where there is no non-infringing content on the page worth saving since NONE of it was infringing any copyright. Please restore the article. The only alleged copyvio were two closely paraphrased sentences in version 1 that I removed immediately. No such user (talk) 17:27, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

(Partially) restored, although I'm singularly unimpressed and Fram is entirely correct. You're not a new editor; I see no possible AGF explanation for an absolutely blatant copyvio like that. ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

(adding) On looking more closely, I'm even less impressed that an established editor appears to think these constitute reliable sources. I won't AfD it myself, but I'd imagine the chances of it surviving AfD are zero. (For the record, "Wall Street International" is a Montenegrin fashion website, and nothing to do with the Wall Street Journal.) ‑ Iridescent 18:21, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

In return, I could ask how an experienced admin like yourself would not know that G12 does not apply if the article has substantial content behind the copyvio. And calling two copied plain-vanilla sentences "an absolutely blatant copyvio" is a bit rich. Yes, it was careless, but I had not expected I would have Fram on my back (we know Fram). Now, can we tone down the rhetorics and resume AGF mode?

For the record, I created the article after having seen his illustrations in The Atlantic, and later in the Guardian so after some research I was surprised we didn't have an article about him. I may be naive, but I sincerely believed WSI was some kind of WSJ's magazine edition, in a similar manner as the NYT magazine is to NYT; it certainly does have visual cues in that sense and I did not dig deep beyond my article of interest. And the remaining sources surely look like mid-grade art magazines. And he's also featured in Het Financielle Dagblad (paywalled), briefly at Italian Vogue so I'd imagine the chances of it surviving AfD are far higher than zero. No such user (talk) 20:20, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

It's (correctly) been deleted as blatant spam (by someone else), so the point is moot. Even disregarding the copyvio situation, I don't understand how someone as experienced as you could possibly have thought that was an appropriate article on any topic, let alone a BLP—that kind of "cobble together what we can from press releases and hope it sticks" is the kind of thing we see from interns at PR agencies, not from experienced Wikipedia editors. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Let's review the facts: I have no COI on the topic. The man is a photographer whose works were featured in The Guardian, The Atlantic and Vogue. The article was short and indicated his style, very brief biography and list of exhibitions; it was not a great read indeed, but back in the day it was an acceptable first stub. The sources were all online art magazines; except for his home page none of those qualifies as a "press release", and all are independent from the subject. I won't go into each, but one was a long interview with the subject in Aperture (magazine) (est. 1952); interviews are tricky but this one is clearly independent and demonstrates notability. It may not have been a great article, it may not have passed an AfD, but a CSD it was not. Is a CSD tag by Fram a honeypot for admins or what?
Anyway, I've had enough of admin-shopping; the last I will ask you or Jimfbleak is to userfy the text for me. No such user (talk)

No such user, even if you don't have a COI, the initial editor, User WHATIFTHEWORLD certainly did, I've now indeffed that account Jimfbleak - talk to me? 19:32, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Jimfbleak: Judging only from logs, WHATIFTHEWORLD created the article as a copyvio in 2015, and it was speedy-deleted immediately. I created the article from scratch in 2022, independently, unaware of its prior history (which should not matter anyway). I maintain that the last version, authored solely by myself, was not eligible for WP:G11, quote, This applies to pages that are exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to serve as encyclopedia articles, rather than advertisements. While far from perfect, I fail to see what was advertising in the latest version. No such user (talk) 19:45, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

re at AfD

Just in case you did not notice, I replied to your accusation that I was some rando making shit up when it is you who is not following deletion policy; at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Frank Cogliano (2nd nomination). Ben · Salvidrim! ✉ 06:46, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

As I'm sure you know perfectly well, "Once there is an objection or a deletion discussion, a page may not be proposed for deletion again" means we don't summarily delete pages that have been kept at AfD or for which a deletion discussion is currently ongoing, not "Because there was unanimous consensus to delete a piece of obvious spam at AfD previously, the existence of that AfD means that should the page subsequently be recreated the recreation is automatically immune from deletion". As I said at the AfD, you're perfectly within your rights to remove the {{prod}} template—policy is that proposed deletion can be objected to for any reason, not for any valid reason—but don't pretend you're doing it for any other reason than to waste time. ‑ Iridescent 16:04, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm sorry, did you even read WP:PRODNOM?

“ 3. Confirm the page is eligible for proposed deletion by checking that:

• it has not previously been proposed for deletion.
• it has not previously been undeleted.
• and it is neither currently being, nor has ever been, discussed at AfD/FfD.

” — WP:PRODNOM policy

That appears painfully unambiguous to me. Any article that has ever been the subject of an AfD is not "immune from deletion" as you claim, but it is immune from PRODding. It can still be speedily-deleted (via G4 if substantially similar to AfD-deleted version) or re-AfDed. Ben · Salvidrim! ✉ 20:36, 18 January 2022 (UTC)