Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2023 November 17

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November 17

Cory Markum

Is Cory Markum notable. MagicalPrince863 (talk) 01:35, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

MagicalPrince863, whoever Cory Markum might be, here, in this discussion thread, present the URLs of what you consider to be the best three web pages about them. Each of the three must be reliable and should describe or discuss Markum in depth. -- Hoary (talk) 01:54, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

If you need to ask if someone is notable, the answer is likely to be no. The only source that I could find is here, which is definitely not WP:GNG territory.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 08:20, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Page mover/swapper needed here!

Whoever page mover and swapper you are, please help close the move on Talk:Cancer Minor (constellation). 112.120.56.105 (talk) 07:01, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

 Done Tollens (talk) 07:03, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Why my edits are getting removed?

Please help me understand the reason behind my contributions being undone. Kashley79 (talk) 13:01, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@Kashley79: Assuming you're referring to Eleanor McEvoy, I will say that this revision is justifiably removed. Wikipedia is not a platform for promotion, and phrases like [...] has sprinkled his magic on Eleanor McEvoy's enchanting song are inappropriate. The other things are minor but potentially annoying to other editors without investigating any further. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 13:13, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@Kashley79 People have left some helpful (if generic) messages on your talk page in an attempt to let you know why your contributions are being undone. Have you read them? ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 15:56, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Oldest article with only one editor?

I was wondering what the oldest (mainspace) article is with only one editor, when I realized I don't even know how to get a list of the the articles with only one editor at all... Ideas? Naraht (talk) 13:29, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Naraht, WP:RAQ would probably be the venue I'd ask about this. Folly Mox (talk) 14:05, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Asked there, got a response that it would require an almost complete table scan of the 1.2B table of edits and may not even give the right answer due to the spottiness of edits kept in the first year. Consider the request dropped.Naraht (talk) 18:23, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Good idea. It would probably have been about a village in some remote corner of the world, population 73, where nothing ever happened, ever. Or a footballer who played once for a team which managed to get into League 4 for one season. Or a species of minute sea snail, discovered in 1981 and noticed by one scientific journal in 1995. And that's assuming that it didn't contain duplicate words like 'the the', in which case the grammar gnomes would have been swarming all over it, and then there's the :categories obsessives, and and and - such an article just seems unlikely to be of surpassing interest. MinorProphet (talk) 01:03, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

G11 an extremely stale user sandbox?

Hi, and hope you're well. Does User:Gurudev Bapji/sandbox qualify for WP:G11? Thanks in advanced! Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 15:04, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

If I found that tagged for G11, I would decline it. Several factors that would go into my decision include:

• The draft is in a user sandbox, not main space, and not even draft space. I give more leeway to userspace drafts, thought will still delete blatant advertising no matter where it is found.
• The subject of the draft is deceased. I feel G11 is less applicable to deceased individuals and defunct companies than to living persons and companies that are still in existence. That said, G11 can still apply to deceased individuals where living persons still have a financial/emotional/whatever stake in promoting them.
• The draft doesn't read to me as exclusively and unambiguously promotional. It's obviously written by an adherent of the faith the subject founded, and would need heavy editing to be neutral enough for mainspace, but I do think there are usable parts of the draft if someone was inclined to write an actual article about this person.
• This particular draft is about a spiritual leader. There is a mainspace article about the denomination he founded. It seems to me that the mainspace article about the denomination is a slightly more useful vehicle for promotion than a userspace draft. This seems like something to keep an eye on - the mainspace article is orange tagged for potentially being written by someone with a COI, having neutrality problems, and needing secondary sources. If this draft were to appear in mainspace I may have concerns about a burgeoning walled garden written by people with a COI on this topic, but as long as it's just hanging out in userspace I don't think it's an issue YET.
• I do see that the account that created that userspace draft is blocked for sock puppetry. If this were tagged for G5, I think it would be more likely to be deleted than under G11.
• The page view analysis indicates that, before yesterday, this was getting less than one view a day. If this is a vehicle for promotion, it's not a very successful one.

Overall, my assessment of this is mostly harmless. I would decline a G11, and not bother with a G5. I'm not interested enough in diving down this particular rabbit hole to adopt the article and try to research and rewrite it. I would just ignore it. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 15:51, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Gurudev Bapji is blocked indefinitely. Bazza (talk) 15:57, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, as I noted in my response above. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 16:07, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

I had a feeling something like it applied and just wanted to make sure. Thanks for the thorough response! Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 16:59, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Window Dressers

Somone named Johnny Lamberti continues to add his name under notable Window Dressers which is a fault statement. He is an unknown and only tried to add his name for his own monetary purposes. He is not notable, famous or has nothing to do with window dressers. Please look into this further and stop him from adding his name to under Notable Window Dressers. Tinkerbell4444 (talk) 15:58, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Courtesy link: Window dresser.

I took a look, and I see it's been added and removed a few times this month, along with someone trying to add "and FAMOUS" to the section title, but I don't think the level of disruption is high enough for page protection. However, if the issues keep up, feel free to request semi-protection of the page. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 16:13, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Moreover, I feel like that article has succumbed to a common issue, where the list of examples is longer than the rest of the article. Unseen character is another article that has long had that issue. Perhaps we should consider spinning the examples off into a List of notable window dressers. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 16:17, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Most of the entries on that list are for people who aren't notable (e.g. Diane Arbus's father) or who are notable but not for being a window dresser ( e.g. Armani, Bailey, Barr). Someone with more time and patience than me needs to go through the list and trim it ruthlessly. Maproom (talk) 16:58, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

List of unseen characters had around 600 examples when it was redirected in 2007. Unseen character only has around 30 examples. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:38, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter I've opened a discussion on Talk:Unseen_character#Spin_off_the_examples?. I will correct you though; the version that was redirected after the 2009 AFD only included 2 examples. The version that was deleted in 2007 after the second AFD for that article had around 600 examples and approximately zero sources. The first AFD in 2006 resulted in a keep, and that version was very similar to what was deleted a year later. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 17:57, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

I said "in 2007". PrimeHunter (talk) 18:46, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Right, but it wasn't redirected in 2007, it was deleted then. (The history was restored during the 2009 AFD). ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 19:07, 17 November 2023 (UTC) Not that this is that important

Removing infobox map

Does anyone know how to suppress the appearance of the map at Protector Shoal? It is not really good. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:23, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: |mapframe=no. It's not documented but I looked at the code of {{Infobox seamount}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:47, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus, if you click on the "expand" box on the map it expands to show the location off the coast of South America toward Antartica, so the map is quite useful. StarryGrandma (talk) 19:40, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

"Thank" error

I receive an error when attempting to send thanks for the edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Thanks/1184320747 . When I click on that button the error is " [1bf58c78-5069-4ae2-a993-5a96d846dd51] 2023-11-17 19:30:16: Fatal exception of type "Error" " . TOA The owner of all ☑️ 19:30, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

I doubt if anybody here can help much - I suggest asking at WP:VPT. ColinFine (talk) 19:55, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@The owner of all: Special:Diff/1184320747 is an edit by an IP (unregistered user). IP edits cannot be thanked since IP addresses can change and be shared. Where did you see a link to make the thanks? It shouldn't be there and I don't see it in the diff, page history or user contributions. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:53, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

I did not see any link. Rather, I used the target URL from a different link but changed it to the number for that diff, which ended up being a valid page. TOA The owner of all ☑️ 19:42, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

harv error

Could you please tell me what 'harv-error' is or means? Someone already told me, it is an automatically generated tag; the tag appeared on this edit, 7 Nov 2023 (Hamas), an edit still troubling me. The editor who made that edit could not tell me what 'harv-error' is; a helpful colleague adviced me to look on the list on page Special:Tags, but on that page, 'harv-error' is one of the very few tags that is not being explained at all. --Corriebertus (talk) 22:17, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

It has to do with formatting citations. On Wikipedia, we sometimes use 'Harvard-style short citations' for when we want to cite a given work inline, but don't want to repeat the full citation over and over, so we generally put the text we're referencing in one place, and then have multiple short citations that can point to different pages in that source, for example. That error just crops up when someone writes a short citation that doesn't point to a source document provided elsewhere in the article, or when someone accidentally changes the article so that existing short citations can't find the document they're pointing to anymore. See Wikipedia:Citing sources and Template:Harvard citations. I hope that makes sense. :) Remsense聊 22:24, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Corriebertus, you can see exactly how this particular error was corrected here: the error was caused by an editor adding a full citation with the author's name in a single parameter, then later someone tried to use {{sfn}} on it, only using the author's surname. Even little things like a misparameterised value can cause these templates to emit an error. Folly Mox (talk) 00:40, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you! --Corriebertus (talk) 12:58, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

The general bias of Wikipedia to the left

I asked this question from Jimmy Wales when I got an email from him to renew my subscription to Wikipedia. I got a generic answer from Sandra Hust that says that Wikipedia strives to be neutral in the information that is put out. The article referred me to this page to follow up on my question. If this is not the right place, please direct me to the right place. Wikipedia is a very valuable source of information and I would like to contribute to you but I would like a satisfactory answer to my question. Here is what I wrote to Jimmy Wales:

Wikipedia does a valuable service in providing free encyclopedic information to the public. But help me understand why your editors are so biased to the left. You claim to be neutral in your editing but like NPR this is clearly not so. Just look at your description of the democratic congressman and senators compared to the republican ones. As an example, Marjorie Taylor Greene is referred to as a far-right congresswoman with a lot of negative comments, but AOC is referred to as progressive with a lot of positive comments. Tell me whether any of the democratic congressmen or senators are referred to as far-left.

Harris

174.20.20.235 (talk) 23:33, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Read Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. Wikipedia does not aspire to be 'neutral' with regard to some imaginary absolute standard, and nor does it define 'neutrality' as sitting on some imaginary centre point between the two major political parties of a particular country. Instead, it attempts to represent, fairly, the balance of opinions in relevant published sources. Accordingly, if the consensus amongst those qualified to judge is that the US congress and/or senate contains far-right representatives, but no far-left ones, Wikipedia is going to say the same thing. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:04, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Harris, please see Overton window. Wikipedia may appear biased to the left from an American point of view, because the US is biased to the right from a whole world point of view. That's likely the disjoint you're noticing. Folly Mox (talk) 00:44, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't even characterize it as an America vs. World Average dichotomy, because there are plenty of media environments/averages of such for given countries that are pulled far to the right, to whatever degree we can use that as an axis.

I would just point to what was said above to the OP: if Wikipedia has a certain bias, the lion's share of the reason for that is because the body of what we broadly deem to be reliable sources has that bias. And, frankly, I doubt you would be able to point out a flaw in those criteria themselves, because they have comparatively little to do with ideology as you're defining it.

Go back to the university publishing houses and take it up with them I guess, because we are intentionally not the source for these issues, and will not be able to "fix" them. Or donate to a wiki that only writes off of sources you deem to be sufficiently neutral. It is very unseemly to whine about donations you've made after you've made them, as if the purpose for you making them was to grant a ticket for the subsequent whining. Remsense聊 00:53, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Harris. Check out the Signpost from 6 November 2023 and the article How English Wikipedia drove out fringe editors over two decades which contains a lengthy overview of academic research on the subject. Buster7 (talk) 02:33, 20 November 2023 (UTC)