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"Arbitrator" user group[edit]

So, the Wikipedia:Non-administrator Arbitrators RfC over a month ago did in its closure feature a rough consensus in creating an "Arbitrator" usergroup for arbitrators, but the closer indicated that it would need some development and further discussion. So, now it may be time to discuss how to implement that - assuming that the close still stands. Noting also this revision regarding one possible setup and whether it would be acceptable to the WMF given that it involves sensitive permissions.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:50, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

If I recall correctly, this would not be a foundation problem - provided that any access granted follows the same requirements (community approvals, identification, etc) that is already in place. Creating a new usergroup is fairly easy. We would need to decide what permissions are actually required for the group, see example list of all available permissions here. Users can belong to multiple groups, and their permissions merge. So for example, the new group could be granted the ability to view deleted and oversighted (deletedtext and viewsuppressed permissions) without the ability to also delete or oversight the pages. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:30, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

This would require the user to ALSO be an oversighter, administrator, etc to gain the additional permissions. This may open the discussion to limit or expand the permissions someone gets just for being on the committee. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:32, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Also, by default new groups would only be able to have membership changed by stewards - and if bundling portions of oversight or checkuser the foundation would likely still require this. If they will have equal to or LESS permissions than administrators, then we could also request that our 'crats be able to update the group. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:35, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Among the concepts proposed in the RfC was to give this group solely the "view" privileges (that is by my assessment, abusefilter-hidden-log, abusefilter-log, abusefilter-log-detail, abusefilter-view, abusefilter-view-private, browsearchive, checkuser-log, deletedhistory, deletedtext, spamblacklistlog, suppressionlog and titleblacklistlog), although editprotected may also be useful if arbitrators have to work within protected pages. And yes, such a group if it includes the "sensitive" permissions (here suppressionlog and checkuser-log and some abusefilter permissions) it would need to be added/removed by stewards only; if not requested by the WMF, the folks in Phabricator will likely ask for it since non-steward granting of such permissions has created issues in the past.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:34, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I pruned duplicated items that are already in "users", etc - so this could be a request such as:

• Create a new group: Arbitrators

Include permissions:

abusefilter-hidden-log

abusefilter-view-private

browsearchive

checkuser-log

deletedhistory

deletedtext

spamblacklistlog

suppressionlog

titleblacklistlog

viewdeletedfile

viewsuppressed

— xaosflux ^Talk 22:08, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Now, a prime question is - is this moot? Since ArbCom is the deciders of who gets CheckUser and Oversight - if they are going to just assign themselves the permissions then there is no need to include that stuff in here. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:10, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

If memory serves, some arbitrators have stated that they won't use this full "requestable" permission set, so a more narrow set may be useful. Plus, I am not sure if the OS and CU rights entail all the permissions mentioned before, which may matter in case of a non-admin being elected to ARBCOM.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:27, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Purely from the perspective of programming and security, it makes sense to have a group for arbitrators. Membership in this group begins when their term starts, and ends when they leave. If an arbitrator gets CU or OS, they may keep it beyond the end of their term, or remove it early. In theory an arbitrator might not have sysop access, or might resign sysop after being elected. We should disentangle the roles so that each hat works independently of the others. Jehochman ^Talk 22:44, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Please identify the problem before offering a solution. Why would an arb need all these permissions? Arbitration always takes plenty of time so why can't other arbs provide information that an individual may not be able to access? In an emergency any sensible arb should quickly act on the advice of respected users with the permissions, with a review to follow. Do arbs frequently need to study deleted pages and such like? Johnuniq (talk) 00:56, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Do they really need another 'feather' ? I think the voting was done without any user there having any knowledge on how this would be done. Sometimes certain rights are removed when not used such as OS/CU so how would you go about doing that? for example a sitting arbie, AGK lost his CU/OS rights for inactivity but he is still an arbitrator, so would the stewards remove his "bundled" arbitrator right when he isn't active? It would be silly to bundle multiple rights into one cannister especially for a group which will never have more than 15 members at any given point....I think only large groups, or groups that can allow for more users should have their own special usergroup (the only exception is the founder rights ofcourse)..This might need another discussion..--Stemoc 01:48, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

AGK did not lose his CU/OS access by inactivity, as you can see here. Also, as said here sitting arbitrators are not subject to the (local) inactivity policy. As for deleted pages, yes, I do remember a number of cases where deleted evidence did play a role.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:50, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

@Johnuniq If we ever elect an arb who is not currently an admin then yes they would need access to deleted and indeed oversighted edits. If they had to rely on other arbs to check deleted revisions and decide which were appropriate to show them as evidence then we would have two classes of Arbs. I would prefer that only those who had been elected as admins were deleting, restoring, blocking and unblocking. But all arbs need to be able to see the same evidence. ϢereSpielChequers 10:29, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

In reply to User:Jo-Jo Eumerus's comment of 18:50, 30 December 2015 (UTC) at the top of this section: Unless the Arbitration Committee or at least a significant minority of that committee ask for such a feature, I think we are putting the cart before the horse. In any case, if and when a majority of the committee ask for it, as long as it only affects members of the committee and it doesn't give them rights they don't already have, it should be done as "routine maintenance" without further community input. The only reasons I can think of for the community to discuss this is if a significant minority of the committee would like this or if it would be an actual "upgrade" in permissions beyond what the community has already given them. I don't see evidence of either one of these conditions being met right now. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:34, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Pretty sure we need a community consensus before any user right will be created. I remember that the developers in Bugzilla/Phabricator require a community consensus for such things, an ArbCom request is not enough.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 13:59, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

From a logical point of view, I agree with the concept of creating a usergroup specifically for ArbCom members, namely:

• Permissions necessary for an arbitrator to do the job can be issued directly to the group as opposed to needing to add a given Arb to perhaps two or three groups (sysop, oversight, checkuser - as required). By the same token, at the expiration of their term, it's only one group to take that arb out of instead of having stewards/crats lookup what group(s) the former Arb had and removing the others
• Through use of $wpAddGroups, $wgRemoveGroups and $wgGroupsRemoveFromSelf Arbs can add/remove specific groups to other editors (class examples: CU/OS)

Just my two cents (keep the change)

Dax Bane 01:33, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Arbitrators cannot add or remove people from usergroups. When arbcom appoints someone as e.g. a checkuser, they make a request for a steward to add the user concerned to the checkuser usergroup. Likewise when permissions are removed for inactivity, a request is made to the stewards for the permissions to be removed. This will not change if the arb usergroup is created. Thryduulf (talk) 13:17, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, Arbs currently do not add/remove other editors from groups, but if a group were created specifically for arbs then why not give them limited ability to do so? Dax Bane 20:32, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

As far as CU/OS go - these require additional foundation requirements (identity verification) in ADDITION to the request of the local arbcom. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:37, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Point taken Dax Bane 00:39, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Didn't we already determine that Oversight Access allows for access to view deleted content, and that an ArbCom election was considered RfA-identical enough to meet the Foundation requirement for Oversight access? Therefore the Admin bit is not necessary to view deleted content, if the Arb were given Oversight access? (Note this was never tested practically, but as per before, I would be willing to drop my admin bit for a few hours to try it out, if we wanted to know what one could and could not do for sure.) The CheckUser log access is of little value as it provides little information, also keeping in mind that not all Arbitrators are CheckUsers (by choice). If we had a non-admin Arbitrator, they could be provided Oversight Access, and have all of the tools necessary without creating a new usergroup (plus the ability to revision (un)delete and revision (un)suppress, but not to delete an actual page). I think this is a solution looking for a problem. The idea of creating a new usergroup, for a hypothetical non-admin arbitrator that may or may not get elected in the future, when really all we have to do as give them a single permission, that they are already entitled to. --kelapstick^(bainuu) 02:35, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Oversighters have all the required permissions to view deleted revisions without the admin flag (though oddly enough not the ability to delete pages, which would be required for some suppressions), and according to the global policy could be appointed by arbcom without being local admins. In terms of a need for the group, maybe? Some projects use one for arbitrators, others don't. If the group had CU or suppression log viewing abilities then it would need to be granted from meta by stewards, but if it just had the ability to view deleted revisions and the like then it could be granted locally by bureaucrats.

I'm not convinced of the need for such a group myself. You can just give arbitrators an admin flag for their tenure, if need be. Ajraddatz (Talk) 02:45, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Arbcom elections and RFA look at very different things. I would be surprised if the community elected an arb who couldn't be trusted with the block button, but it is entirely possible that we could elect an Arb who we wouldn't trust with the delete button. ϢereSpielChequers 19:35, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Promising articles[edit]

So I was looking up some things for a trip to Denmark I'm taking later this year, and was looking at Frederiksborg Castle. I figured it wasn't in bad shape, and I saw the star next to to the Danish language version. I clicked on that and was shown an unusual icon next to the article header. So naturally I clicked on that out of curosity and then ran it through the auto translate to discover that the Danish Wiki has a "Promising article" level in addition to Good and Excellent (our Featured). The summary it gives is as follows [1]: "Promising articles is a project in which Wikipedia's users improve the existing articles, with a view to preparing them for nomination as good articles. For an article can be considered as a promising article, then it must be at a reasonable level. Assessed an article promising so is the lowest rating of three possible ratings on Danish language Wikipedia. Items which are rated as promising, has still some significant gaps that need to be improved before they can be assessed as good articles. See the requirements for a good article for an overview of what is expected of realistic possibilities for improvement of promising articles."

As far as I can see, this has never been discussed at the Village Pump for the English language Wiki, apart from back in 2010 when someone from the Finnish Wiki was looking to create inter-wiki links for them. So I presume this is on the Finnish Wiki and the other Scandinavian ones too.

There is some duplication between this and some WikiProjects B class assessments - but this allows for a cross-project accumulation of articles which are ready to be worked up to GA status. I would think it was appropriate to have a few differences in approach should this be implemented - I wouldn't add an icon onto the main article page itself, but keep it strictly to a talk page thing. Furthermore, I think that should it be implemented, then it must have the requirements for improvement to GA incorporated into the new template as well as the general index page as well. There isn't much point without that or else it simply becomes a new indexing system for B class articles, which we completely don't need. Thoughts? Miyagawa (talk) 16:19, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

The old/rarely-used-today A-class is a quasi-approximation, although these are frequently better than a GA. "Good article candidate/nominees" are probably the closest project-wide label. Some wikiprojects have lists of articles they are collaborating on to raise to GA status, but until the page is officially nominated as a GA candidate, it won't have and particular marking.

Even GA-nominees just have markings on the talk page, not on the article page. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 00:47, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Similarly if the project has a full Stub/Start/C/B/A/GA system, that's pretty good as identifying various levels of quality. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:52, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Put Any Wikipedia Article on a Timeline[edit]

Well we have finally accomplished our task of giving anybody the ability of putting most of Wikipedia history on a timeline, at:

http://wikitimelines.net

Look at this website on the largest computer screen that you can get your hands on. We eventually would like to create a timeline of all history. This was a massive undertaking. For right now, you can add and delete any Wikipedia article you want from this timeline (just click the green "Add" button). Any and all 4 million of them, any 6 at one time. Instructions are included under the heading "New user message". Do you think this would be a good history education tool? From elementary to the collegiate level? I know I would have loved to have a tool like this when I was taking European history in college.

And you can (eventually) put anything on this timeline. Medical histories, legal documents and project plans. Even whole books! The potential is endless.

There are still some bugs and other foibles we are working on, but it is pretty stable now.

Thanks Jeff Jroehl (talk) 09:52, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Wow, that's neat! Maurreen (talk) 05:17, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@Jroehl: This is a great tool and an amazing bit of coding from what I understand of the NLP paradigm. Kudos!

I do have a simple feature request I hope you will consider... Allow the tool to accept a Category: namespace URL like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:20th-century_physicists. Parse the page HTML to extract only those items that match the CSS parameter .mw-category a:link and build a list of pages to add to a timeline. You have not mentioned if the tool has an upper limit for number of articles per timeline but if there is an issue there just cap the HTML parser to the first NNN a:links with NNN being the max allowed.

Alternatively, extract a single-level of all links from any given article page such as en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element, limiting the extract to only those links inside the mw-content div. This would allow users to see the relevant timeline for a given article. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 12:41, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@Koala Tea Of Mercy: Thanks! I will look into the category issue. It sounds like it might have some potential. The timeline, as it is right now, is extremely complex over a whole host of reasons. One issue of (potentially) timelining whole categories, is the fact that the human eye can only distinguish a limited number of colors. For simplicity sake, we are only utilizing 6 colors. Therefore you are only allowed to have 6 articles on any one timeline, at any one time. It is theorized that this could go to 20 colors. Search for "The Tableau 20 colors" for a discussion on that. There are dozens of "feature requests" we would love to add to our curious timeline contraption. I have a long list. We just don't know if investing more time in this tool is worth the effort. Is it really that interesting? If we could get more adoption and interest, we would attempt to add a whole host of new features. Basically, it all comes down to marketing. And since we are relatively unknown people, this is very difficult for us.

So, unfortunately, we are stuck, after 5 years of development. It is called "The real world" we have to deal with. But we are optimistic!

Thanks Jeff

Jroehl (talk) 04:48, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

I hear you man, living in the real world would be so much easier if it didn't intrude into our online life!

A thought on the color issue. Take a lesson from sailors and use color combinations. If your timeline bar is just 4 pixels tall that is enough to do two contrasting colors as a pair of horizontal lines (=======, example red on top and yellow on bottom). This alone will dramatically increase your color options. You also could do other color combos like 4-pixel tall, 3-pixel wide diagonal stripes (//////////).

Just an idea. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 10:02, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

@Koala Tea Of Mercy: Actually, you are correct, the 2 color lines would greatly expand the potential color combinations. Why didn't I think of this? I thank you for this tip!

Jeff Roehl Jroehl (talk) 10:12, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Button to turn links in article text black[edit]

It would be nice to have a button somewhere that changes the colour of all the links in an article black, for readability's sake. Found this while searching for the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_AD#Changing_link_color

In Firefox there is the Read mode -button built into the browser that really helps with reading long articles, but afaIk no such thing in Chrome. I know Chrome has similar things as extensions, but it would be nice to provide the functionality to all users.

91.152.109.7 (talk) 03:30, 24 January 2016 (UTC)J

I proposed that in May 2014, here. No traction. (I was fairly new then and didn't know that this page or WP:VPR would have been a more appropriate place to pose something like that. But I'm pretty sure the outcome would have been the same.) ―Mandruss ☎ 09:21, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Go to any article, then click on the "Printable version" link on the sidebar. How does this differ from your desired goal?--S Philbrick(Talk) 20:36, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

If the ugliness of the printable version doesn't appeal (and why would it?), there's the option of developing it as a User script or/then a Gadget if not adopted as standard MediaWiki GUI or specifically added as a Wikipedia extra feature.

A relatively simple matter of adding "the button" (somewhere) and a little CSS to instantly switch the hyperlink color [sic] back and forth. fredgandt 10:44, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Add importScript( "User:Fred_Gandt/subdueLinks.js" ); to your common JavaScript page to have the basic functionality you require. The button will be just below the Wikipedia icon at the top of the left navigation panel. It might not be perfect; it was slapped together ;-) fredgandt 11:46, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

@Fred Gandt: Works great, nice work! It preserves the links while turning them black, and does so without re-rendering the page, which was the best I hoped for in my above-linked proposal. The only improvement I can conceive would be if the button were kept on-screen at all times, regardless of where you are in the article (for that matter, the entire left sidebar should act like that, and should be independently scrollable if it's longer than the window, but that's a different discussion). No idea of the feasibility.
My preference would be for it to be an unconditional thing, since it could then work for unregistered users/readers (including the OP in this thread) and registered ones who don't know anything about gadgets, etc. But I expect that would receive the same opposition that I got in May 2014, which was basically that it sidesteps and masks the real problem, that there are too many links. For now, I'll pass your solution on when I see someone ask for it. ―Mandruss ☎ 12:06, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

I started a related thread at: WT:Tools/Editing tools#Tool to turn links black. ―Mandruss ☎ 13:10, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

@Mandruss: I use importScript( "User:Fred_Gandt/navigationUI.js" ); to affect the navigation UI in ways that amongst other things fixes the position of the left panel. It's pretty trivial to separate out the code to have that functionality without the rest (which is not trivial). See my sandbox for several useful (IMO) scripts (documentation is sparse).

I appreciate that IPs can't use these, but then they can always create accounts ;-)

For this (OP subject) to be added (more or less) for ALL users, it would be simplest (but not bestest) to just make the printable version less fugly, which is easy and requires no scripting (just CSS). fredgandt 19:12, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

As for the sidebar, I was speaking in terms of all Wikipedia users, not just myself. It's not worth doing just for myself. After 30 years in mainframe computers, about half of that in software, I can't get used to the idea of all this unlimited personal customization of the Wikipedia UI. Most of this would be pejoratively called "hacks" in the world I come from. The more of that there is, the harder it is for us to help one another with problems and questions, or to even "speak the same language". To some greater extent we need to live in the same Wikipedia world, in my opinion, even if that means settling for less than what we see as the ideal.
I appreciate that IPs can't use these, but then they can always create accounts - Hmmm ... where have I heard that before? ―Mandruss ☎ 19:35, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

@Mandruss: Some of us are vision and/or color-impaired and need the ability to customize. I remember those mainframe green-screens (and amber-screens) and I for one am glad that we have evolved beyond them and embraced color as a tool for communication. Of course you can always tinker with your own WP "common.css" file and make all link types on all wiki pages black for you. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 10:13, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the comments. The point is to be able to easily switch links between blue and black at will. Sometimes one wants them blue, sometimes black, depending on the situation. Such a button would not force anything on anyone, it would only make easy switching available to everyone, including unregistered users/readers and those who aren't comfortable with fiddling with their local configurations (as I've indicated, my interest here goes beyond my own personal needs and preferences). If the button were never clicked by a user, nothing would change for that user. ―Mandruss ☎ 17:13, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Localization Project: Units, Dialect, Pronounciation[edit]

How about an add-on which can localize pages by default, for easier reading. A Wikipedian could set a locality, and articles would appear with the date/time format, and automatically convert units of measurement to the local standard. It could be taken to the logical extreme, and replace regional language variations (colour vs color), IPA vs US Customary phonetics, as well. Obviously, this functionality would be off by default, but it could ease barriers to understanding. Article or section tags could override the preferences (on scientific articles as an example). The function would also display a warning somewhere, that the page is being automatically localized, and block editing until the function is turned off.

This would help mitigate issues surrounding what version of English an article was started in.  superβεεcat  21:17, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

We can get round this by stilted writing, but we cannot compensate for other authors prose. This becomes really irritating when you are administering Wikipedia in a school, as you are insisting that your clients use correct English for assessments and exams. We have the {{convert}} to process numbers- but when it comes to words we have been abandoned. The first priorities are the page titles. eg Artificial fibre redirects to Synthetic fiber which then links to other fiber pages. The second priority is the section heads, and the spelling in the wikilinks. Then we can start looking at the text.

Personally I would default on the ip-address location, which could be over written by cookie, which could be overwritten by the users personal preference.

I think we should start by implementing a partial system, then users could opt in for a dictionary lookup system to get over the pants-trousers, sidewalk-pavement faux amis, which could be driven from Wiki-Data. I can see that this will transport over to de: who also have problems with swiss German, fr: with fr-be and the multiple varieties of es: Just a few suggestions. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 21:35, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of your "partial system", this makes a lot of sense to me. How does a project like this begin in earnest; a more concrete proposal for village pump? - superβεεcat  20:03, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

It's worth noting that several years ago, we had date-format autoconversion; it was turned off after a 3:2 vote. Personally, I think the number of semantically ambiguous variant words is so rare that this kind of complexity is much, much more trouble than it's worth - we'd get untold numbers of false positive conversions. (How does the system know which pants are pants, and which are trousers? Do we need to mark up every instance of a potentially translateable word?) Andrew Gray (talk) 20:27, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Draftprod[edit]

There have been numerous debates about deleting stale drafts, including expanding G13 or just removing the idea altogether (see VPP's attempt). On the one hand, people argue that no one's old drafts should ever be deleted in favor of editor retention. On the other hand, people argue that they would like to go through and triage places like Category:Stale userspace drafts so removing things will help (currently at 38k or so down from a high of 46k). What do people think about a proposed draft deletion process? It's basically like PROD in mainspace but much more highly restrictive and lengthy. It would cover both draftspace and userspace drafts. I think it could even overrule the need for G13 and cover WP:AFC as well as well as keep MFD from the current flooding of undisputed deletions it currently has. There would be a couple of rules here.

1. First, only a draft that itself hasn't been edited in six months can be considered.
2. If it's in userspace, following WP:STALE, the original creator and the editor's who space it is in (if they differ) must not have edited anywhere for at least one year.
3. If the deletion is proposed, it would go into a category similar to Category:Proposed deletion for at least one month at which time any one can remove the proposal for any reason whatsoever. This is similar to the 5 month notification of Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions with a month before G13.
4. After a month with no deletion, an admin can then decide if it's worth deleting.

I also tag draft with WikiProject so I imagine we can have WP:ALERTS for these draft prods similar to Prods so projects can see if there's anything of interest. Any thoughts? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 05:40, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

One thing that I'm just throwing out there, is to even have some sort of autodelete, if something is not touched in over a year, and then it's tagged by the bot, and then it's not touched for another month, it should just be deleted. We don't need any intervention. Otherwise, it might (not sure of the backlogs) cause admin headaches. Regardless, we do need to do something. I like your idea, it has safeguards in place so that somewhere along the line users can catch it and edit, and more than enough time elapses to delete. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 06:48, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Prod has an autodelete in some ways. I'm not sure more is needed. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 07:11, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

since this idea lab, I think we should allow moving to article space even when marked. Another use is to copy some content and then redirect. Also I prefer two years of creator inactivity before dispatching or prodding. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:24, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't think it matters why people deprod them. Prod allows for any reason. If you're deprodding to move into your userspace, to move to articlespace, to merge a bit and redirect it, to move into draftspace or simply because you think more time is needed like Category:AfC postponed G13, that's fine with me. We could probably added a deprod counter if people wanted to, but there's always still MFD if people think the draft is actually problematic or shouldn't be extended but postponements of two years repeatedly are not unheard of. Even then I say that anything that is prodded this way can be immediately restored via WP:REFUND so this kind of merges the AFC system into the wider universe of drafts. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 09:52, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

• I think there must be some content-based criteria. For example: Has no independent sources; Has no claim of notability (would not pass A7). Simply being old is not enough to auto delete. Alternatively, or additionally, there should be a way for an auto confirmed editor to review and approve a draft as having merit and substance. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:10, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

  A rescue squadron could use any reason they like to deprod and use the content. I don't know what problem deleting the drafts prevents though. Perhaps there could be a limit of 1 per day per nominator to save the rescurers from too much stress. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:23, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

  I suspect it will start like Prod did, with people prodding, people joining and creating rescue squadrons to review and deprod, with some accusing them of being over the top, with some accusing the others of being too deletionist, and over time, a balance will form. As noted above, this would basically make G13 and the AFC system moot and I think we have a good balance there of drafts going to G13 deletion, drafts not going there and basically people on both sides arguing the other one is wrong. G13 currently doesn't make additional content-based criteria, so I don't see a need. It's just the idea lab here so I just want to throw it out there. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:35, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

  I think it sounds like more work than it is worth. A negative cost-benefit. Unlike the massive quantity of worthless drafts created by AfC, userpages are not mostly worthless. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:40, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

  I know it's a lot of work but I think it would be helpful in terms of the potential benefits that come from bringing these drafts to the sunshine so to speak. Also, because deprodding is a one person review, it's more akin to a community vote and community veto than the current MFD set-up. One huge advantage I would imagine would be if the alerts system for projects uses this. An alert would notice that a draft was subject to draft prod (like here and would then archive that title for the project for all eternity. If someone, say years later, was thinking about a subject, they could scroll through the alerts article and at least see the title and possibly ask for restoration. That I think would be helpful for certain places like projects on various television shows, or the math project where there's a lot of stuff out there that can always be written but it's often a matter of WP:TOOSOON or just having lost that person with the interest in it. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:49, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

  But drafts aren't usually tagged with project templates or placed into categories, so how would the wikiprojects know? ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 12:47, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

  In the chance they are. It's a lot of ifs on whether it's useful. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:49, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. This is a nonsense solution to a non-problem. There is no need to delete a single draft. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.170.45.98 (talk) 04:42, 13 February 2016 (UTC) Struck comment by banned user. — JJMC89 (T·C) 21:41, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like a somewhat complex plan to make deleting old drafts and problematic user pages easier. How can we make it happen? Legacypac (talk) 06:47, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose.  What is the problem being solved?  What is the purpose of arbitrarily moving a draft from Draft or User space to delete space...other than to prevent building the encyclopedia?  There are different issues for userspace, draftspace, and AfC drafts.  For "inactive" drafts in draftspace, the age of inactivity is defined by the work capacity of those working on the inactive drafts.  Unscintillating (talk) 07:06, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
• Strongly Oppose. Several years ago I helped a Freshman student at my community college work on an new article for WP. By the end of his first year he had several KB of content. During the Fall semester of his 2nd year his class load was pretty heavy and he wasn't able to put in much time even to do the research, let alone the editing. At a request from his family for some quality time he did not do any academic work during the holiday break. Again in the Spring semester he was wrapped up in his Thesis so he ignored WP. For virtually 9 months he did not work on his article at all. Then, just before the start of the next Fall semester he sent me an email with a URL asking me to review the WP page and apparently during the summer break he had become a WP editing machine. I learned later that he had to actually start from scratch because while he was "away" his article had been deleted. My point is that there are many possible valid reasons most of us can't even imagine for why an article could sit dormant for an extended period of time. Now that WP has created the Draft namespace there is no good reason to go deleting articles just for being stale. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 08:06, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Was that an article or a draft? If he created an article and it wasn't "complete" (i.e. didn't qualify) and it got deleted after nine months without his involvement, is that really anyone's fault? This also is nothing like this situation too. If you're talking about a draft, that's fine and all but we use six months for G13 and the current method is through MFD so it's not like people aren't going to discuss deleting these right now and even then I'm still fine with restoring anyone's drafts if they return (a quick browse through their deleted contributions will solve that). In contrast to MFD where you have to essentially form a majority to keep each draft, a prod-based approach only require one person in opposition and not more. On many levels, this gives more chances for a new user than the current schemes. However, if you do stop editing for some period of time (currently I'm proposing a year, not just a summer break), is it wrong for people to look over your stuff to blank/adopt or even delete it? I think everyone agrees that there is some time after which we just assume you've moved on. The discussion at WT:UP had one person propose five years and we've had MFD discussions involving 9-year-old drafts but one year seems to be the majority viewpoint here. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 01:00, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Found 235 false synonyms on Wikipedia[edit]

The redirect pages "Sooglossus sechellensis" and "Tachycnemis seychellensis" both link to Seychelles treefrog. The problem is that they're two different species, belonging to different families of frog—Sooglossidae and Hyperoliidae respectively, where as the article only refers to one of these.

I've found 235 candidate "false synonyms", similar to this pair, listed here:

• User:Beastie Bot/Redirects to same title

I generated the list based on data from the IUCN Red List.

Is there anyone interested in joining the project to either help go through these individual entries or to help coordinate the effort? —Pengo 13:37, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Pinging Legacypac who has been going through frog redirects on an entirely different issue, but might be interested in this. LP - these two are not Neelix redirects, but others may be. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:14, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't think it any of the redirects have been added maliciously. The example appears accidental based on common name (or similar scientific names), while many others on the list reflect changes and disagreements in taxonomy. —Pengo 01:30, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

As to the Moose (one of the articles listed there), Wikipedia says that the moose is one species, Alces alces; yet other sites (such as http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/818/0) ssay that the moose are 2 species, the other one being Alces americanus. If the other classification is listed in significantly many sources, even if not up to our expectation of reliability, then we should have such redirects to make it easy for readers of these other sites to find information on our site. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 18:47, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

I wasn't trying to say all the redirects should be deleted, just that they need to be checked. The North American moose isn't so bad, but perhaps there should be some indication in the Moose article that Alces alces americanus is sometimes elevated to species and that there is debate around it. Amethyst-throated sunangel includes this kind of discussion, for example. I suspect many other redirects are listed for similar reasons, but some are simply wrong, such as the Seychelles treefrogs example I listed at the start. Also I suspect there are many cases where we should consider splitting articles if more recent authors consider them separate species, and in some cases it might be worth creating a subspecies article regardless. Is anyone interested in actually going through some entries in the list and annotating them or cleaning up the articles? —Pengo 07:10, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

It would probably b easier to find someone willing to do so, if you split these up by general groups - no reason that deer, flowering plants, frogs and doves need to be on the same list (you could at least sort it into orders based on the redirect target); and no reason to expect a single user would be likely to be knowledgeable enough in the entire tree of life to do a good job ob the whole thing. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu

Yep. I was going to do that before posting to various WikiProjects. —Pengo 21:16, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘An other issue (not with species, but with higher level taxons) is that some times, the species doesn't have its own article, so in stead tsomeone created a redirect to a higher level taxon. A perfect example of this would be Tuatara. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 06:21, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

I filtered those ones out and listed them separately under the "Link to higher taxa" heading. The main list is only of species-level pages. —Pengo 02:43, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

By the way, if anyone's interested in learning more about the project this has come out of and lending it some support, I've added Beastie Bot to IdeaLab. I'd appreciate any participants or endorsements. —Pengo 01:30, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

Bibliography of Reliable Sources for Parapsychology[edit]

Hi, I've created a bibliography of reliable sources for parapsychology, curated to aid other wiki editors who are editing articles in this controversial area. I am inviting comment on this bibliography, and would welcome your ideas on where to best place this resource within Wikipedia. It can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Annalisa_Ventola/Sources_for_parapsychology. Annalisa Ventola _{(Talk | Contribs)} 17:49, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

User:John Carter has produced User:John Carter/Reference sources and User:John Carter/Reference works. Also, there is Wikipedia:WikiProject Parapsychology/Resources.

—Wavelength (talk) 13:34, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Where would I post/discuss an idea for an offline tool?[edit]

I have an idea for an offline tool that would help analyze the evolution of an article's contents. This could be helpful when trying to identify orphaned refs and other accidental damage to content. I am aware of WikiBlame but that really is not adequate for what I am considering. Among other things that tool requires separate online searches and is sometimes rather cryptic in its logic for selecting edits. One of the key items my idea would require is a way to download the full (sans admin deleted material) edit history log and files of a single page so that it could be searched rapidly offline for complex strings using regex routines. I believe this would actually reduce the WM server CPU load when working with older and larger articles. An important thing to note is that I am proposing an analysis-only tool, not an offline editor. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 20:37, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Are you trying to recruit a team of programmers? Just need some guidance? All of our content is already openly available, so nothing is preventing you from taking the data and doing any analysis you want. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:46, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

I need some technical advice on stuff like "dumping" the history files, and would appreciate any information on prior similar projects, both to avoid re-inventing the wheel and to see how others have approached offline work with wiki data. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 20:56, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

To be more specific on the "technical advice" what I mean is that I know about WP:DD but I am not familiar with XML. I know how to code HTML, some PHP, some Delphi, BASIC/VB/VBA (I know, don't say it) and I am currently learning Ruby ... but I am willing to learn other languages for text parsing (I have heard Perl is good for this) if needed. Ultimately right now I want to know basically three things:

• 1. How to download/dump the full set of history data for a single page only --- in the most WP-server friendly way possible.
• 2. Understanding the dump file format enough to be able to extract the log data to create a standalone log file in text or HTML.
• 3. Understanding the dump file format enough to be able to extract each edit into a separate plain text file of wikitext just as would be seen in the Edit window on WP.

With those three things I can start to work on this project in my spare time. After I get the basics done I would love to open it up to anyone who wants to help. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 21:26, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

You can always download an xml dump of all or certain articles (using Special:Export), but this will give you quite a bit of information. If you have a program that can sort through it and pick out what is useful for you, then great. I'm not sure if more condensed information exists unfortunately :( Ajraddatz (Talk) 02:50, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw Special:Export. I am unfamiliar with XML but if I have to learn it I will. It just slows the process down a bit, but then again I am in no rush to get this done. If there are any opensource XML "extractor" programs out there that I could examine it might be helpful. Like I said, just trying to not reinvent the wheel if someone has already built one. Thanks Ajraddatz! Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 03:37, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

XML interpreters seem common. --Izno (talk) 12:19, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

@Koala Tea Of Mercy: if the export gives the same structure as the total DB dump, the text will be almost exactly the same as you find under "edit source". The only difference is that certain characters like &, >, " are replaced by their html code (&...;) because the xml tags use the characters. Every page starts with page tag, title, namsepace, and pageID, after that you get all the revisions. For IP edits the contributor tags will only contain ip /ip tags with the address. The structure is self-explanatory: Here's the first and the start of the second revision (most text of article replaced by ....):

 <page>
   <title>Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein</title>
   <ns>0</ns>
   <id>102865</id>
   <revision>
     <id>379324</id>
     <timestamp>2002-10-12T19:26:02Z</timestamp>
     <contributor>
       <username>Baldhur</username>
       <id>28358</id>
     </contributor>
     <model>wikitext</model>
     <format>text/x-wiki</format>
     <text xml:space="preserve">Mölln is a town in 
 ....
 ....
            there are several monuments to him in Mölln.</text>
     <sha1>omx4jn6qc49d5agkvseqpwzxc77t11a</sha1>
   </revision>
   <revision>
     <id>986158</id>
     <parentid>379324</parentid>
     <timestamp>2002-10-23T12:02:58Z</timestamp>
     <contributor>
       <username>Baldhur</username>
       <id>28358</id>
     </contributor>
     <comment>coat of arms</comment>
     <model>wikitext</model>
     <format>text/x-wiki</format>
     <text xml:space="preserve"><div style="float: left;"> 
 ....
 ....

You can download the full dump, it contains all versions of all articles, and other namespaces as well. The 7z files are about 110 GB in total (don't take the bz2 files, they are ten times as big). Compression rates are very high, starts at 200+ for the first files, drops to less than 100 for the last ones (fewer page revisions so less redundancy). Total data is more than 10 TB, but there's no reason to extract them all at the same time, the zip files contain complete pages (all revisions). The pages are stored in order of ID, the name of the 7z file gives the range of IDs included: example: enwiki-latest-pages-meta-history6.xml-p000623996p000656933.7z contains 623996 to 656933. I've got the October dump, has 37433981 pages (articles, redirects, user talk, article talk etc..). Prevalence 01:12, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

The idea is to create a tool that anyone can use for analyzing a single article. Downloading 110 GB -- a feat that only a small percentage of the internet has the ability to do quickly -- every time you want to work on the latest revision of a single article is counter productive. I need to convert the XML back to wikitext. What I want to do is create a tool that stays in the same language that users are already familiar with, so that when they go back to edit the page (remember that this is not an editing tool I am designing) they know exactly what to look for. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 19:23, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Ah, ok, I thought you meant a tool for people who wanted to analyse edit histories (for a study for example), rather than a quick search tool for normal editors. In that case the export seems the only option, using one or more POST requests with offset and limit parameters to get all the revisions. For the wikitext of the revisions you take the content between <text.. > and </text> and replace the html character references for <, >, ", and & with the characters themselves, (I think it's only those), see HTML#Character_and_entity_references. And for the log data, you only need what's between the timestamp, username (or IP) and comment tags. Minor edits will have a <minor/> tag. But you'll know all that already if you tried the export. Size is something you'll have to calculate yourself. Well, good luck. Prevalence 08:02, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the information Prevalence. Sounds like maybe the export files and all those XML fields aren't as complicated as I thought they were. This is not a high priority project for me, but there are times when I run across an obvious text remnant (usually a broken citation or sentence fragment) and I want to find out when it was broken and what was there before the breakage. Currently there is no easy way to do that. Hopefully if I can get this working it will allow me (and others) to focus on a key string of text (the remnant), find out when it entered the article, and then follow it via an animated text display through the article's history to see how and why it was edited over time, in order to either rescue or remove it. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 09:51, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Problem is, the export files grow very fast. Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein is a small article, 2,980 bytes, 110 edits, the export is 300k. For an article like E. E. Cummings, 4029 edits, page size 37 kBytes, the export is 110MB, and its for such large articles that one would use it most I assume. Prevalence 12:37, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Fission Strategy 'editing Wikipedia for nonprofits'[edit]

Hi. I've recently read an interesting pair of articles by a specialist marketing company named 'Fission Strategy' on how nonprofits can edit their Wikipedia page (or hire FS for their expertise in doing same). They're here and here.

I find them a bit concerning, since they don't mention any of the guidelines for editing an organisation's own Wikipedia page (I think WP:COI, WP:NONPROFIT, WP:PROMO WP:USERNAME and WP:COPYVIO are the big ones in this area), and just suggest putting up a page as "necessary recognition of the credibility and work of your organization." Would anyone be up for sending them an email or reply of some kind mentioning this to them, if only so if they can't say they didn't know about it? Let me know if any thoughts. Blythwood (talk) 17:41, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

I too find these blogs/ads problematic. To be sure, they are not as problematic as those of PR companies for commercial organizations, but they are trying to put in PR for non-profits. I can think of 2 or 3 possible responses:

• Wikipedia's communication department sends them a polite notice, stating what the problems are and asking them to include some more info.
  • If the communication dept won't or can;t do this, then individual editors should. This may bombard them with some conflicting advice, but they might deserve a bit of bombardment!
• Perhaps a small project to help small non-profits do it right. I'm sure I don't have the time to do it on my own, but if others want to take the lead on this, I'd certainly join in.

A word about my POV or biases. I think it's fair to say that I've been among the most active Wikipedians working against abuse by paid editors. I also have worked with WP:GLAM with helping non-profit galleries, museums, etc. getting good coverage in mutually beneficial areas. I have had a bit of concern with GLAM focusing on very large museums, I prefer smaller organizations, and even prefer making the Wiki editor - the person who will make the best additions - the focus of the project rather than the sometimes big corporation-like GLAM institution. I do think WP:GLAM has moved a bit in my direction.

Maybe the proposed new project, say WP:Non-profit organizations, could coordinate with WP:GLAM? I'll ping a few folks. @Blythwood, Wittylama, SLien (WMF), JSutherland (WMF), and Slim Virgin:

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:20, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the thoughts. I have to say, I'm not too interested in setting up some project you don't have time for and I don't have time for, more about looking at this case. The guidelines for COI editors are clear: it's just that this company doesn't seem to be aware that they exist. I'm thinking more in terms of a basic response to this. I might take it to COIN, since they name some companies they work for. But at first glance while I can see some editors on those pages that might be undisclosed promotional editors none of them seem to have been active too recently. Blythwood (talk) 20:54, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

• Just a note that it appears the screen captures on the second blog page were made between 03-FEB and 10-FEB of this year (based on the Edit History screen capture, this diff, and the blog's own date of 10-FEB). Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 00:32, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi @Smallbones:

Sorry for the delay. I spoke to a few of my colleagues at the Foundation, and it sounds like this might be more appropriate for my colleague on the legal team @Jrogers (WMF):. Pinging him for his thoughts here. Thanks. SLien (WMF) 19:47, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Following on that, I took a look at their pages. I agree it would be nicer if they explained about some of the conflict policies, but I wasn't able to tell from their site if they're doing anything wrong. They don't throw up any red flags like promising to keep their clients confidential or otherwise saying that they don't disclose their work. I think in this circumstance, it would make sense for a user to email them with a "hey, just so you know" type of email, and if it ends up escalating or it's discovered that they're violating the Terms of Use, then WMF can take another look at it. Also, sorry I'm being somewhat vague about what we'd do here. I'm hesitant to commit because even though it's distasteful, I don't really think it's wrong for people to use promotional language on their own blog to try and get business as long as they follow the rules when they're working on Wikipedia. But having said that, I don't want to say we'll do nothing because it's fully possible that more info could come out linking Fission to a paid editing problem and then we might end up helping. But at this point, I think a message from a concerned editor is the best next step. Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 20:12, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Better responses to people who want to know how to add an article about their organization[edit]

I don’t know where to else to put this but I’m looking for ideas so this seems like a good spot.

Multiple times every day someone writes to Wikimedia (fielded by OTRS agents) asking how they can add an article about their company to Wikipedia. We have a canned response, which takes a lot of words to send the message “don’t”. Many times that answer is sufficient and we do not hear back. In some cases, the person writes back and says we’d really like to have an article, and I see our competitors have articles so how can we have an article?

I know the official response is that there is a place to request an article. I can’t bear to tell them this is as it is my understanding that the request article list is a blackhole. I’ve never heard of an article being developed from that place but maybe someone can give me better news.

I also know that if their competitors have articles the odds are very high that those articles exist because someone ignored the COI policy. I could ask for names of the competitors track the article down search for proof that it’s the COI violation and remove that article, but that’s a lot of work and doesn’t accomplish the goal.

Our official answer is that if they are notable eventually someone will write about them. That answer may have been satisfying a decade ago, when there was a realistic chance a highly notable organization would get an article in short order. Most of the highly notable organizations all have articles, and we are left with marginally notable organizations. The likelihood is that it will be years if ever before someone chooses to write an article about this organization, even though it may be technically eligible.

I don’t like sending them to Wikipedia:Requested_articles because I believe it is a blackhole. I don’t like telling them to just wait, because I suspect the wait may be years. It is very hard to tell him that it is just too bad maybe they will have an article when they know there are articles about less notable competitors.

Anybody got some better ideas?--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:12, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

If they are newish and growing then wait and apply for awards might well be all that is needed. If they are a long established not particularly high profile organisation then I would suggest they release some appropriate images on Wikimedia Commons. Current and former CEOs, notable board members and other publicity shots are welcome though they have to be openly licensed. There may well be things related to their business where images and even video might well be of value; Good quality images of "notable board member xxxx with CEO yyy of redlinked organisation" are worth having and may well bring them to the attention of editors. COI is a very different issue on commons. The other thing you can suggest is to make sure they have a comprehensive "in the News" section on their website showing when newspapers and magazines have written about them. ϢereSpielChequers 16:14, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

• I wonder if pointing these folks to AfC would be a better way to handle these requests. AfC does accept submissions by editors with a conflict of interest. However, seeing as I don't work on AfC review we need input from AfC regulars about this idea as well.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:16, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

  AFC? That would be cruel. ϢereSpielChequers 16:22, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

  Surely less cruel than Requested articles... At least at AFC it's a thumbs-up/down and resubmission as necessary. RA is indeed a black hole. --Izno (talk) 16:42, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

• I have, in the past, written articles from topics that I found on Requested Articles, but back in 2006 it was much easier to navigate. Recent attempts to find something there to write about have lead nowhere. It's no longer easy to find the oldest requests, the way it's broken by broad and then narrower topics is confusing, and most of the suggested articles just aren't stuff I'm interested in writing about. There's got to be a better way. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 18:05, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

  Yes, the Requested Articles section could be greatly improved. I think it should provide a separate discussion page for every suggested article, wherein editors can post feedback, note investigation attempts, tag the discussion for tracking, provide closure information, and show a history of when it was posted and by whom. We do this for Afd; why not for article requests? Praemonitus (talk) 17:51, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

  That sounds like a lot of work but might well be useful. (after posting this, I decided I ought to actually look at the page, and see this is done to some extent, although more could be done).--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:45, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

  That sounds gosh-darn like WP:AFC to me. --Izno (talk) 12:25, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

  Why would you think that? WP:REQUEST is not WP:AFC. Praemonitus (talk) 18:00, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Sphilbrick I have been experimenting with different messages sometimes in OTRS discussion and beyond. I too would like to sync with messaging from others. I never use the standard OTRS message without deleting the "requested articles" bit. There is no sense in which it is reasonable or fair to send anyone there, except to tell them that the process will not work if they engage it.

Sometimes I say "I know of no instance in which an organization has had a positive experience editing their own Wikipedia article. So far as I know, no one in the entire Wikipedia community since 2001 has ever seen such a thing go well for the company. If there is a success story, I have never seen it, and I have looked and asked others what they know." Sometimes I say, "The Wikipedia community recommends against this and I am not aware of any good advice on the matter existing anywhere." Many times I have said, "If you are thinking about editing Wikipedia, first start by editing in your field of expertise but in articles that are unrelated to your organization, projects, and products. Wikipedia needs more experts developing general content." I am sure I have told that to 1000 company representatives and so far as I know, for all the years and times that I have tried that, not even one has ever followed through and edited anything other than their company article.

I would like to turn the conversation about paid editing away from what is theoretical and possible and start giving statements that are practical. Sending people to "requested articles" is not practical, nor are the other available paid editing support channels and processes. At [[[Talk:Louvre_Abu_Dhabi#Requested_edits]], for example, a respected organization has requested edits and paired them with sources. No reply since July 2015. The request is formatted as requested, but still, there is no way a volunteer could easily process this request. It would take 2 hours at least, and probably more. I do not think it is fair to advertise support forums that have a known multi-year backlog at best. Somehow, we should raise the bar for making requests and communicate that Wikipedia requires much more preparation and development from the side of the requester. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:00, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it is very discouraging. I had hoped someone might tell me that requested articles wasn’t the blackhole I feared it was but I think I was right. I love the concept of requested edits, but the execution is failing miserably. I have attempted to work on some of the requests, but as you note on many occasions it would take a substantial amount of time to properly research. I was tempted to characterize this type of work as “mind numbingly boring” which I think is accurate but it doesn’t tell the whole story, because I find myself spending several hours each week working on tasks that would be characterized as “mind numbingly boring”. I know other editors also work on things that might be characterized that way, so it might be helpful if we could tease out what is different about the mind numbingly boring tasks which are not getting done.

I know there is a strong consensus against paid editing, but this is one area in which I think it could be cautiously introduced. If we could find a way to fund editors who are willing to work on some of the multiyear backlogs (request edits, requested articles, CCI) perhaps we could clean up some of the backlog. And it isn’t just that there is a backlog, it is that well-meaning individuals want something (an article in Wikipedia) and our best advice is to tell them to do something that is almost certain not to work.--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:00, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

This discussion prompted me to look at wp:Requested Articles ("RA"), and I find myself at least as interested in drafting one of these requested articles and submitting it to AFC, in this case for a nonprofit (whose request helpfully included multiple sources and mentions of awards already), as I would be in choosing an AFD in which to !vote, like I and others very often do. "RAs" could be revamped to be operated more like AFD, which attracts participants and tracks status of requests. Consider the following just-drafted navigation template ({{RequestedArticlesByTopic}}) comparable to {{AfDs}}, one of AFD's promotional signs/tools. This has been adapted partway (so far) for RAs:

The date groupings are red-links but the categories link properly to "RAs" of those types. Maybe groupings of requests could be done by week or month? If requests were processed by separate pages like AFDs are done (and like drafts for AFC are handled), those pages themselves could be categorized by dates and by topics sensibly to allow browsing like for AFDs, and each could eventually be converted to article drafts and submitted smoothly into AFC (or categorized as impractical/resolved negatively), perhaps with automatic notice provided back to the original requestor giving the resolution. Requests are like pre-AFC draft items. Currently it's virtually impossible to figure out when any specific request was made and I don't see how requests are turned down, at all.

I notice the topic categories in RAs are similar to those in AFDs (both have "Biography" for example); perhaps the correspondence could be tightened up. Certainly the AFD category for Biographies could sport a suggestion that the RA category should be looked at, like new {{RAsuggestion}} displays:

and so on. These cross-links would be very small steps towards redirecting editors' attention currently given to AFDs (fundamentally destructive of Wikipedia community fabric IMO), towards more positive RAs. :) --doncram 06:39, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

I just saw this and wanted to chime in because I am apparently one of the few success stories to come from RA. I have created an FA, three GAs, and over 25 other DYKs from ideas I found at Wikipedia:Requested articles/Sports since I began editing in 2008, so it is possible to find gems that have not been mined. One of the real issues with RA is that there are so many articles there, many of which prove to be non-notable. It takes a skilled content editor to wade through the many topics of unclear notability to find something or somebody that belongs in the encyclopedia, along with time to search for sources since none are usually provided in my experience at the sports RA page. If I may offer a suggestion, it would be to sort the business RAs by type of business, if such a thing can be done. The sports RA page breaks potential articles down by sport, with subpages used often. I always find this system helpful, as it allows me to focus on the sports that I am most interested in and the ones that I've seen coverage gaps in before. The business RAs page does not seem designed to help content creators find articles of interest to them, and looks more like a directory than anything. The one good thing about it is that many requests have source links, but some of them are probably self-promotional in nature, so one still has to do Google searches and the like to ascertain notability. Perhaps a system in which comments are offered on requests (as mentioned above) would be useful. Giants2008 (Talk) 13:19, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Statistics Website[edit]

Hi, since 2011 the website wikiscan.org calculates statistics for French Wikipedia. The project is to transform it into a multi-wiki site with a dedicated site for every Wikimedia wiki with more than 100,000 edits, actually it would make more than 300 sites. I plan to apply for a m:Grants:IEG to achieve this big transformation and also add a multilingual interface with an English version and other improvements.

In summary, the site provides two main types of statistics:

• Statistics by dates, for every day and every month for the wiki history, and for the last 24 hours:
  • Most active pages according to several criteria (number of users, edits, revocations, size changes and pageviews when it's available), examples with fr.wp: 1 February 2016, January 2015, January 2015 on archive.org (when pageviews were active, visible in the first column).
  • Most active users according to the number of edits, logged actions, revocations and size changes. Examples: 1 February 2016, January 2015.
  • General statistics over this period: total number of edits, edits for each namespace, article creations, deletes, blocks, etc. [2] [3]
• Pre-computed statistics for each user, this allows to quickly view the page even with many edits, for example a bot totaling about 2.5 millions edits [4]. A classic edits counter can take more than 2 minutes to load as many contributions or fail [5]. The downside with pre-computed statistics is that last changes may take longer to be considered, on French WP it's actually between one and two hours, for English WP it will probably be more.
  • Approximately 30 statistics are calculated: total edits, creations, talk namespace percent, number of days and months with at least one action, the overall diff, the number of small or large changes, estimated time spent doing edits, etc.
  • These statistics are available for the total and in tables for each year and month.
  • There is also a chart by month and a pie chart by namespace groups.
  • A table summarizes these statistics for all users [6], sortable for most statistics. The same table is envisaged for each year and each month.

Would you interested in an English Wikipedia Wikiscan ? the site address would be http://en.wikiscan.org. It is also planned to support other projects like Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc. --Akeron (talk) 18:09, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

User:Akeron, looks useful! Fences&Windows 09:25, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

• Yes. I was thinking of this very concept myself today but more from the point of view of "how many visitors has this page had?" but the other statistics would also be interesting to see how much a particular topic was corrected over time. kk (talk) 23:52, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

NPOV Welcome Template[edit]

Where do I go to propose a change to the NPOV welcome template? As currently worded, the template mentions NPOV but focuses on RS, and I'd like to propose a bit of re-wording there. Rklawton (talk) 14:07, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

@Rklawton: On the template's talk page. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 14:42, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks. I didn't know how to find it. Rklawton (talk) 14:49, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Few ideas[edit]

Here are few ideas just to think about. It is not meant to be ever implemented. Just ideas.

• User recieves notice ring if someone proceed the conversation in which he participates, no matter he is not literally mentioned in future posts ({{Ping}}).
• (±123) Page size change in bytes when you preview the page. Easier to decide whether or not to mark a minor edit.
• Slideshow button if <gallery> by default as in Commons
• Edit section0 link by default
• Special:SpecialPages would need interwikis
• Activity light bulb at signature, for example --Example (talk) 15:06, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Categories[edit]

Categories [ edit ]      Show in columns      Sort by alphabet 1879 births | 1955 deaths | 20th-century American engineers

• Introducing "sectioncat". For most users that would be the easier way to edit categories.
• Options to show categories in columns and/or sorted by alphabet order. The article of Albert Einstein currently (as of March 2016) has 71 categories. The average reader is hard to find the desired category. Maybe even better idea is to show categories in columns by default, as in "What links here" pages and many other lists.

Advanced search options (layers) for admins[edit]

Often I miss one of the following options.

Search

Layers      Live pages      Deleted pages      Past versions      Content      Titles      Redirected titles      Code      Summary

Namespaces      (Article)      User      Wikipedia      ...

--Janezdrilc (talk) 15:56, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Some of those options are already available as search parameters (for everyone), e.g. intitle:, insource:. Searching deleted pages and/or past versions would probably be tough, and should probably be a different special page entirely (though WikiBlame covers searching an individual, known page's past revisions somewhat). Searching for redirects would presumably require a special search parameter, because currently search surfaces the target page if a redirect matches a search. Some of the rest … would require the suggestions to be more concrete; does "summary" mean "searching the edit summary field"? {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 17:48, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Searching within deleted pages is borderline technically feasible and probably won't happen. Searching in past revisions is probably not feasible performance-wise for the same reason. Searching for deleted titles on a different special page is hopefully coming soon. MER-C 05:29, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

That's great. intitle: and others actually are layers that I had in mind. Maybe they just have to be put in the form of »    « (as above in the table). It would be much more user friendly. --Janezdrilc (talk) 11:18, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

BLPCAT, mental illnesses, and learning disabilities[edit]

I'm seeking input on how to address a few related issues. I'll try to be brief and clear. My goal is to come up with a coherent proposal to post at WP:VPR, but I need some assistance.

Area of issue

• Addition of mental illness and learning disability categories to BLP articles.
• Stand-alone lists of people with mental illnesses and learning disabilities.

Concerns

Mental illness and learning disabilities are highly stigmatized and labeling people with them should be done with the utmost diligence. WP:BLPCAT specifies extra stipulations for categories for sexual orientation and religion in that people must self-identify as a specific identity to be categorized as such. However, there is no such specification for or even guidance for mental illnesses and learning disorders. Given the stigma involved, inappropriate categorization can be tantamount to libel. Unlike categorizing based on other stigmatized labels such as criminality, there's no easily accessible public record of definite rulings. These diagnoses, like most medical diagnoses, are private in nature.

BLPCAT states that "Category names do not carry disclaimers or modifiers, so the case for each content category must be made clear by the article text and its reliable sources. Categories regarding religious beliefs (or lack of such) or sexual orientation should not be used unless the subject has publicly self-identified with the belief or orientation in question, and the subject's beliefs or sexual orientation are relevant to their public life or notability, according to reliable published sources."

The WikiProject Autism page also states that "The explanation at WP:OCTrivial is worth noting: 'Avoid intersections of two traits that are unrelated, even if some person can be found that has both traits.' For example, celebrities are usually notable for reasons other than being gamers. So while Stephen Wiltshire really is notable for being an autistic artist, people in occupations like dentistry or aviation are not.'" (WP:AUTISM#Lists, categories and templates; thanks to Permstrump for pointing this out).

This issue has arisen a few times the past couple days with people adding such categories to biography pages (e.g., edits by Discott, edits by Pol9, and this discussion on Doug Weller's talk page), as well as finding some stand-alone lists such as List of people diagnosed with dyslexia and List of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Concerns over this issue have resulted in AfDs.

Quandaries

My first thought (as mentioned on Doug's page) was to suggest individuals must self-identify with a mental illness or learning disability for a category to be applied to their BLP. Doug Weller raised the reasonable point that (1) not all mentally ill and learning disabled people understand/comprehend their diagnosis and (2) many would reject such labeling. This got me thinking about how to deal with the issue. For example, if someone is diagnoses by a court as having a mental illness, would we be in the right to label that BLP with the category, even if the defense presents experts who disagree? Below are some questions I'd like input on and my thoughts on them.

To summarize, I think I'm learning toward suggesting that people should need to self-identify to be categorized as having a mental illness or learning disorder. I would propose editing BLPCAT to include them, but wish to hear input first. Thank you. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 22:43, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Quandary 1[edit]

How do we deal with self-proclamations without evidence of an official diagnosis?

I'd err on the side of trusting the person, but only if they specifically claim to have X disorder. I think we'd do the same for other illnesses like diabetes or cancer. While self diagnosis of mental illnesses and learning disorders might be more common, in the spirit of WP:TRUTH I'd rather reflect the person's comments and be wrong than disregard their statements. Categorization based on statements like "I was a hyperactive kid" are not sufficient and constitute WP:OR. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 01:06, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

This sounds fair. I would also advocate erring on the side of the person in question. I also agree that it should be explicate explicit so something like "I have dyslexia" is okay.--Discott (talk) 15:41, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

The premise of this discussion that mental illnesses are not like other (real?) illnesses is disturbing, including that "Mental illness and learning disabilities are highly stigmatized" ... well that is not necessarily so in general, and it is a culturally bound determination as well.

• Treating a condition as if it highly stigmatizing is reinforcing the idea that it is shameful or morally bad or whatever. There are some conditions that, in some cultures and some time periods, have clearly been stigmatized, but there is a whole range. Reflecting something about me and how/where I grew up I suppose, I perceive there to be no stigma whatsoever associated with dyslexia, for example. And let us suppose that there "should" be no stigma associated with it. If Wikipedia has to explain that dyslexia is awful, or is widely perceived as dirty in some way, to defend why BLP mentions of dyslexia are to be treated as horrible in many many BLP articles, well then Wikipedia is itself promulgating the conception that the condition is dirty. Of course a historical general perception of dirtiness can/should be described appropriately in the article about dyslexia, but it would unduly perpetuate the presumption if the matter is treated as if dyslexia is dirty everywhere else it is mentioned in Wikipedia.
• There is a biological/genetic/physical basis to many/most of what some might term mental illnesses. If mental illnesses are conditions that are affected by psychology, by situations, then add stress-related disorders like ulcers, and add heart attacks, and add cancer and just about every other "real" illness--in which attitude and psychology do matter in effectiveness of treatments--to the list of "mental" illnesses. Probably religion and sexual orientation are both also partly physically determined and partly situationally. Unless there is some clear distinction proposed that I don't see yet, this discussion should be about all medical disorders, not just "mental" ones.

Back to official diagnosis: we believed Nancy Reagan when she said she has breast cancer; we don't require copies of doctor reports. Likewise for Barbara Bush having Graves' disease, for Howie Mandel having ADHD, and so on for for notable dyslexics or notable heart attack survivors etc. --doncram 20:45, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Doncram: A point I struggled with and alluded to. There are other highly stigmatized medial conditions (like HIV/AIDS). My reasoning for starting at mental illness is that most (if not all) of it is stigmatized whereas most medical conditions are not, or at least to a lesser extent. The split is not in my view of mental/physical as different but rather in what I see as the difference in society's reaction to them. I didn't want to "jump the shark" by going straight to all medical conditions, but you and Opabinia regalis both mention it so I might include medical conditions in general. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 22:00, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

• In my view, it needs to found in a reliable source - one with a reputation for fact-checking. Listing something as a fact in WP's voice that someone says about themselves is not OK generally. If the NY Times reports that Nancy Reagan has breast cancer, that is one thing. If the dailymail reports that Kelly Osbourne says she has misophonia, that is another. Jytdog (talk) 21:33, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
• I think that we do, and should, deal with self-proclamations of any medical condition the same way that we would deal with self-proclamations of other personal information. If it's both plausible and reported in a reliable-for-general-news source, then we accept it and give WP:INTEXT attribution: "Shirley Temple announced that she had breast cancer during an interview on television". If it's dubious, then we might omit it or phrase it more circumspectly: "Bob claims to have Fake Disease, which is not widely recognized as a medical condition". WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:14, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Quandary 2[edit]

What sources should be trusted regarding reported diagnoses?

Anything with direct quotes from the person or interviews with them (e.g., [7]). No gossip rags or reports from loved ones. Such reports might be mistaken or amount to outing the person (more of a concern for highly stigmatized mental illnesses). EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 01:06, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

I would expand the range of trusted sources to trusted medical bodies and professionals. On the issue of reports from family members I am a bit more uncertain. On one hand I agree that reports amounting to outing should be avoided. I suspect this might be the root cause of the discomfort I expressed on my talk page about needing a blatant proclamation of the individual in question having dyslexia before they can be categorized thusly when it should rather be the case that they be comfortable being 'out' about having the condition before it is reflected on their article page. This issue gets more complicated for me when talking about people that died before their status was diagnosed, recognised and/or testable. In some cases it is well known by people close to them that X person in history struggled with Y symptoms which are consistent with a known status/condition and that condition is hereditary and that person's family wants to make this status known to fight stigma about that condition/status. And, of course, all this is in a form that can be regarded as a trustworthy reference.

I must admit that for something like dyslexia (a regarded as a learning 'disability' (a term I strongly dislike as I feel it is a perfectly natural status but one that the educational establishment is prejudiced against in a way that produces a sort of structural discrimination that is similar in some sense to how structural racism operates, I prefer the term learning 'difference')) might be viewed very differently to how mental illness is viewed. Mental illness being regarded as something to be treated whilst approaches to learning disabilities is more controversial as to weather or not it is something to be treated (like a medical condition), adapted to, or catered for (like it were a natural human condition some people just happen to have). This is why I feel there is a good chance we might have to have two very different conversations about mental illness and how we approach it and learning disabilities.--Discott (talk) 16:24, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

the dyslexia article might offer some insight on this question(What sources should be trusted regarding reported diagnoses)...IMO--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 14:15, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

• reliable sources that fact-check. it should not pure self-representation. Jytdog (talk) 21:34, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

  @Jytdog: What about in light of WP:SPS and WP:ABOUTSELF? We often treat individuals as experts on themselves. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 22:05, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

  such sources containing self-reported diagnoses are questionable under any number of the exceptions to ABOUTSELF. Jytdog (talk) 22:14, 9 March 2016 (UTC) (redact to clarify Jytdog (talk) 14:13, 11 March 2016 (UTC))

  That's true but then the same can also be said about medical diagnoses, as they are also not always correct. I am comfortable with treating both as reliable sources.--Discott (talk) 12:48, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Discott. I don't know what you mean about "I am comfortable with treating both as reliable sources." "A source" is the actual newspaper article or other report in which the diagnosis is made public - the thing we put in the citation. What are you talking about when you use the word "source" there? You ~seem~ to be talking about "the person who says they have the disorder", which is not a source. Or maybe that was just a momentary slip/confusion caused by my slop[y writing above, which I have now redacted for clarity .. anyway please clarify. Jytdog (talk) 14:05, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Jytdog. Both medical diagnosis and self-reported diagnoses. You are right about the 'source' issue, for clarity sake I should have rather said "I am comfortable with either type of diagnosis" mentioned within the RS.--Discott (talk) 14:23, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

with that i agree. i think high quality sources will generally treat self-diagnoses very gingerly, unless they have support of a known diagnosis. yes. Jytdog (talk) 14:30, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

• I think that we should accept the same sources that we would accept for other sensitive personal information, e.g., Alice said that she is pregnant, Bob announced that he is engaged to be married, Chris Celebrity said that he is having financial problems, etc. We're not trying to prove that anyone was correctly diagnosed; we're just trying to be responsible enough to not report something that they didn't claim. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:19, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

  Very good point, I agree.--Discott (talk) 12:48, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Sure, and as always, conditional on the relevant policies and guidelines being applied. WP:NOTNEWS, WP:NOTGOSSIP aka WP:SOAPBOX, WP:UNDUE,etc. Editorial judgement matters, as always. Sure. Jytdog (talk) 14:08, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Quandary 3[edit]

Should we label people who have been diagnosed (e.g., in court) even if they reject the diagnosis or label?

Again, I'm erring more toward the side of self-identification here. For court cases, we rarely present an entire court case and without know the full context of the case we may misconstrue the facts. As BLPCAT states, "category names do not carry disclaimers or modifiers" so I'd rather leave such information for the body of the article. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 01:06, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

I largely agree but also feel there is also some nuance here. On one hand 'outing' of others is not something that should be promoted or done. On the other hand (as I briefly outlined in my responce to Quandary 2) if the person is dead and the person's next of kin/family want it to be known to fight stigma about the diagnosis/label then it should be allowed. If the person is alive and rejects the diagnosis then their word should be accepted for one of or both of two reasons. One being moral the other being that they are more likely to be an expert about them selves.--Discott (talk) 16:34, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

It was pointed out in a related discussion that a medical diagnosis in court itself may be disputed, that there can be opposing medical viewpoints. If the condition is disputed, then a higher standard of consensus that the condition really is present would be necessary to include the person in a list or category of persons having the condition. A person also does not get a free pass, in life and after life, to disassociate themselves from something they perceive to be negative, just on basis of their false assertion that they did not have a given condition, when there is overwhelming evidence that they do have the condition. What I have in mind are some cases when prominent persons died of AIDS denying that they did and denying relatedly in these cases that they were gay, and everyone knew the truth, and post-death the family immediately issued statement that they in fact were gay and did die of AIDS. --doncram 20:58, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Doncram: The best example of what you are looking for that I can think of (who really should have a Wikipedia page too, I work on that) is Peter Mokaba^[1], a South African politician who denied the very existence of HIV and died from it. I agree with you that a person does not get a free pass because it is "something they perceive to be negative". I also agree with Jytdog that what is most important is reliable sources.--Discott (talk) 12:40, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

• It is not relevant. it doesn't matter what LPs say about themselves. It doesn't matter what advocates want about anything. We rely on reliable sources. And they should be high quality if the LP contests it, for everybody's sake. Jytdog (talk) 21:35, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

  @Jytdog: Can you please expand on how you see this as advocacy? From my pov, this is about adhering to WP:BLP and addressing how categorization is done with respect to it. We have precedent for changes based on religion and sexual orientation. I see this as a logical extension. Please note that my "quandaries" are just issues that arose while I was thinking of this. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 22:03, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

  above, discott mentioned making decisions about what advocates might want and it has come a few places in this thread. Jytdog (talk) 22:12, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

  Discott appears to have said "family/next of kin", which feels rather different from "advocates" to me. But let's be clear: to the extent that some LPs and advocates go to a lot of trouble to get their claims published in reliable sources, it does matter "what they want", because "what they want" affects the contents of the reliable sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:25, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

  What I am saying with regards to the "family/next of kin" statement is that a statement from such as source should be considered as reliable. Family is rather different from 'advocates', a family might advocate for X but that is largely irrelevant to my point which is that the next of kin/family is more likely (although not always) be a more reliable source on that person than most other sources. So for example George Paget Thomson and his father Joseph John "J. J." Thomson or William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg, their family/decendents openly acknowledges that they had dyslexia as we can learn from this reference. Now this particular reference might be problematic because it is a blog entry, that is fair enough, but assuming it were not a blog entry but say a newspaper article then I would say that it would be reliable enough to add as a source on the matter on Wikipedia.--Discott (talk) 12:40, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

What discott wrote was the person's next of kin/family want it to be known to fight stigma about the diagnosis/label then it should be allowed.. That is advocacy. It has no role to play in Wikipedia (except something we constantly have to keep pushing out of WP as advocates keep coming here grinding whatever ax they have to grind) . Yes of course if the diagnosis is described in reliable sources we can use it here. What matters is that the reliable source reported on it. Why they found it significant enough to investigate, we don't much care. Going down that road of "what the family wants" is going down the wrong alley. Jytdog (talk) 13:42, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jytdog: that is a fair point.--Discott (talk) 15:57, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Quandary 4[edit]

Should we extend this to other contextless cases like infoboxes, navigation templates, and stand-alone lists?

Yes, BLPCAT includes those as areas its applies to. Because of lack of context, they should be treated similarly. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 01:06, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed--Discott (talk) 16:35, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

• These are not all the same thing. Infoboxes are terribly divisive and in my view the less we put there, the better. If they are "known for" this, then OK, however. The other things are case by case. everything needs reliable sources tho. Jytdog (talk) 21:37, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jytdog: Not the same thing, but BLPCAT does extend to them explicitly. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 21:43, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

What is "this" to be extended? I don't concur that excessive "kid-glove" treatment should be extended anywhere, given that "kid-glove" treatment is possibly/probably the wrong way to go over-all.

And, if it is acceptable to identify in a person's article that they have a significant association with a given medical condition, then I believe it is absolutely okay to include that in lists, categories and so on. Completely frivolous characteristics (or intersections of characteristics) are not allowed to be categories; what I mean are cases where it is reasonable to say the condition is significant, perhaps the same as saying it is a defining characteristic for the person (e.g. that they have put themselves forward as an advocate related to the condition, or that everyone credits the condition as being the cause for their career success, or similar). Given the substantial association, then Wikipedia cannot pretend we do not identify someone as having X, by not including them in a list and by not including them in a category. What, do we want a Wikipedia-critic website to be the one that provides the list that Wikipedia is too squeamish to present? Either we do say person A has dyslexia or we do not. It is a false, patronizing-like idea that we can "protect" persons by not including them freely in a list or category while we do describe it (even "out" them on it) in their own article. Just assume that there will be a Wikipedia-critic site that does serve up the list if we do not, like there have been sites that serve up deleted articles (some on notable, well-supported, deserving topics) and that otherwise strive to keep Wikipedia honest. So then it makes sense for Wikipedia to do the list or category. --doncram 22:32, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Doncram: I agree with you here. This is not meant to be kid gloves, just a clarification to BLP protections already in place. That doesn't mean we won't categorize or list people with, say, dyslexia. Just that we'd only do so under certain conditions similar to how we already do with religion and sexual orientation. I can see how this might appear to be "kids gloves" though. I'll have to think about thow to address that perception (it's certainly not my intent). EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 22:48, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Quandary 5[edit]

What about other illnesses or disabilities?

I'd like more input on this. I can reasonably see this issue extended to all medical diagnoses, including disabilities. For now I'm focusing on mental illness and learning disabilities given their heightened stigma, but would like to hear voices on this issue too. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 01:06, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

As a person with dyslexia I feel I can only really comment on that one condition/diagnosis so I am also very interested in hearing what others have to say about other (or even the same) conditions/diagnosis/disability/illnesses.--Discott (talk) 16:38, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

• The WP:WEIGHT of such content gets depends on what sources say. Advocates of all kinds may want to highlight X about someone because they are an advocate about X. That is not what we do here. We are guided by RS. Jytdog (talk) 21:38, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
• I wouldn't go quite as far as doncram did above, but I do think there's an issue to be explored here. There's a certain degree of tension between the very understandable desire to be sensitive to the heightened stigma of certain conditions, and the practical reality that doing so may in fact reinforce the stigma (or at least reinforce the perception that there is a robust and well-grounded difference between mental illnesses and other medical conditions). My preference would be that any policy changes about categorizing BLPs be applied to all medical conditions. Opabinia regalis (talk) 21:48, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Quandary 6[edit]

How do we know if a mental illness or learning disability is notable enough to warrant categorization as mentioned in BLPCAT?

No clear line here, but I think if RS discuss it in context of the person's career it would be notable. E.g., Octavia E. Butler had dyslexia which would be notable for a famous author. But simple coming out statements by people might not be sufficient. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 01:06, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Good question, I feel that as a rule of thumb it is notable but also that this is not a binary issue as there are different degrees to which a person might be effected by the condition in question. So the acute porphyria of King George IV which played a major role in this life is clearly noteable. Whilst a minor stutter during childhood (to make up an example) or delayed linguistic development might not. Where that line is very hard to say. If it had a significant impact on the person in question's life or is something they are explicit about then I feel it should be regarded at notable. What passes for a "significant" impact on a person is a more difficult thing to work out and is something that will in many cases largely be left to the judgement of the editor editing the page in question. What guidelines might we make help people make that judgment call? Hard to say. Should we make such guidelines? Perhaps, I assume so but cant say for sure or with any conviction.--Discott (talk) 16:57, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Just to clarify, I am advocating for a rule of thumb that errs on the side of notability.--Discott (talk) 16:59, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Let's use Channing Tatum as an example. There is no shortage of coverage referencing statements he made in this NYT interview. During this one interview, he did talk at length about the impact ADHD and a learning disability had on him as a child. We can verify he made those claims about himself, because that link is the original source reporting on the interview and it's a reliable source. There are tons of hits if you google "channing tatum ADHD." HOWEVER as far as I can tell, this is the only interview he's given where he talked about it. It's a human-interest PR piece for Magic Mike 2 though. It's a nice piece and maybe I'm a sucker, but I buy it, but it's still a crafted PR piece. My point is that the notability on the topic is more of a reflection of the notability of the NYT article, not a reflection of how often he's spoken about it. I think it deserves one sentence that says, he talked about his childhood struggle with ADHD and learning disabilities in a NYT interview. The end. When you google it, though, there's so much circular referencing that it would be easy to assume he made this a major campaign, when in reality, he was promoting a movie about a male stripper and his PR person told him to say something that would be endearing. I fell for it hook like and sinker, don't get me wrong, but it's not like he's the world's #1 ADHD advocate now. Permstrump (talk) 22:10, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

About Channing Tatum, I don't see the talking "at length" or the talking at all. What the NYT Style Magazine article says is, in full: "As a child he struggled with A.D.H.D. and dyslexia, was prescribed stimulants and did poorly in school." That is without detailed support, actually. There is not even a quote from Tatum supporting the idea that he had ADHD. Neither the New York Times as an organization or the author of the Style magazine article have any credibility bound up in supporting that. Tatum could easily deny that he had ADHD. I saw in another source that was used in the List of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder article (since dropped from the list-article by me) that Tatum said merely he "was put on" Ritalin, notably omitting any assertion that he did in fact have ADHD. We're not disagreeing. This one does not meet any reasonable standard for saying that he has had ADHD, or that he self-identifies as having had it. --doncram 22:04, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree with the comments so far. I think we might need to do major clean up of categories though. A lot of articles are tagged for non-notable cases. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 21:35, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

• depends on what RS say about the given subject. Jytdog (talk) 21:39, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

doncram, re: About Channing Tatum, I don't see the talking "at length" or the talking at all. At 2nd glance... hmmm, not so at length. I'd read a lot about Channing Tatum that morning. :) But you make good points about the exact wording in the NYT article. I didn't even pick up on it and I thought that's specifically what I was looking for. Tatum said merely he "was put on" Ritalin, notably omitting any assertion that he did in fact have ADHD. I think it's a good example of why more explicit rules would be helpful. I don't think anyone is maliciously adding stuff about ADHD to Tatum's article. Those journalists are sneaky, even in RS. PermStrump(talk) 09:07, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

This is what WP:EGRS says about it at Disability, medical, or psychological conditions:

1. People with these conditions should not be added to subcategories of Category:People with disabilities or Category:People by medical or psychological condition unless that condition is considered WP:DEFINING for that individual. For example, there may be people who have a speech impediment, but if reliable sources don't regularly describe the person as having that characteristic, they should not be added to the category.
2. Categories which intersect a job, role, or activity with a disability or medical/psychological condition should only be created if the intersection of those characteristics is relevant to the topic and discussed as a group in reliable sources. Thus, we have Category:Deaf musicians and Category:Amputee sportspeople and Category:Actors with dwarfism since these intersections are relevant to the topic and discussed in reliable sources, but we should not create Category:Biologists with cerebral palsy, since the intersection of Category:Biologists + Category:People with cerebral palsy is not closely relevant to the job of biologist nor is it a grouping that reliable sources discuss in depth.

This is further reinforced by the WikiProject Disability Style guide's advice about invisible disabilities:

There are many social reasons why a person who has an invisible disability may wish to conceal their disability and pass as non-disabled. One who is successful at this is considered able-passing, while one who is unsuccessful is considered visibly disabled. Intellectual, sensory, mental or sleep disorder disabilities tend to be invisible and allow passing, while physical disabilities are more difficult or even impossible to conceal. Able-passing people have the option to later come out or disclose their disability, a process that is analogous to coming out as gay. Sometimes disabled people are outed without their permission. Such outing should never be done on Wikipedia - see WP:AVOIDVICTIM for further guidance.

IMHO this is sound advice. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:20, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Quandary 7[edit]

1) What terminology should we use to label the diagnosis if the person self-identifies using colloquial, outdated, offensive or inconsistent terminology? 2) And at what point does the use of non-existent or conflicting terminology call into question the reliability of the claim? And which label should we defer to? Permstrump (talk) 18:35, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

1) In most cases, I think we should use the same language the person used to self-identify, and use direct quotes if their statement wasn't technically correct. For example, if the person is quoted as saying, "ADD," I will restrain myself from changing it to "ADHD, predominately inattentive type." If the person says "dyslexia," Discott, IMHO we shouldn't change it to, "learning difference." Exception: I’m tempted to say it’s better to change the verbiage to use person-first language though. So if the person said, “I’m ADD” or “I’m dyslexic,” we should write, “He/she has ADD” or “He/she has dyslexia.” 2) I just don’t know. If you look at Adam Lanza, it’s a hot mess. This piece in the Courant says, “Details of a three-hour exam that Adam Lanza had in 2006 with another Yale Child Study psychiatrist, Dr. Robert A. King, were released for the first time Friday…. According to the police files, King said that Adam Lanza "displayed a profound autism spectrum disorder with rigidity, isolation and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and communications." Lanza was also diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder.” A psychiatrist that actually evaluated Lanza is quoted as saying he diagnosed Lanza with profound autism, but there are tens of thousands more sources that quote his mom saying he had “asperger’s” with no mention of the changes. Google shows 57,300 hits for ”adam lanza” asperger’s -profound, but only 17,300 for ”adam lanza” intext:profound. In this case I think it’s appropriate to neutrally address the discrepancy b/c despite the disproportionate coverage, 17,300 mentions of “profound autism” is still notable. That might not always be the case though. I could imagine some child star with estranged parents who completely contradict each other when they talk to reporters, but only one side received wide coverage. That kind of scenario could present a legal issue if the parent with notable coverage actually had their parental rights revoked or something.

Side note, I think a policy should direct people to choose the wording very carefully so the BLP doesn’t inadvertently make it sound more official than the celebrity did. So if in a few interviews the person said, “I’m bipolar” or “I have bipolar,” and never alluded to seeing a doctor or therapist or being formally diagnosed, the article shouldn’t imply that the person was “diagnosed” with bipolar. Permstrump (talk) 18:35, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Interesting quandary... I think it might be a good idea to put category descriptions that say something like "This category is for people who have publicly stated they have condition X or are reported by reliable sources to have had it." I'd rather not try to bifurcate the categories into "diagnosed" and "self-identified"... too much hassle and would seem to diminish self-identified claims. And I doubt we'll ever see official definitely diagnoses from living people anyway. This is why I prefer relying on people's own words. But I do agree we need to make sure we don't categorize someone who flippantly says "I'm schizophrenic some days. You know, where I'm all active one hour and tired the next". That's just colloquial (and improper) use of the term. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 21:34, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Permstrump: I am not advocating for us, here on Wikipedia, to refere to something like dyslexia as a "learning difference." Wikipedia is not the sort of place for that sort of advocacy which is better done in a different space. I was just expressing a strong preference of mine as a side note to a different point. Highlighting the overall controversial nature of these sorts of terms and definitions around these terms.--Discott (talk) 12:56, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

• we can count on high-quality RS to use appropriate terminology, and that is what we follow. Jytdog (talk) 21:40, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Yes, but what about when they don't? (See Adam Lanza example above.) Permstrump (talk) 22:54, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Right. So that is a super high profile case of a very messed up kid, in a messed up family. And the media is indeed going to be filled with all kinds of garbage. That will take a lot of work, reading what the best sources have to say, and applying editorial judgement and care to come up with encyclopedic content that captures "accepted knowledge." Accepted knowledge there is unlikely to have a black and white answer (we may never know what disorders he actually had) The negotiation among editors will be very difficult because people who are are just "interested" will be involved, as well as people with all sorts of advocacy issues (anti gun control, pro gun control, autism advocates of various stripes, etc). It makes the editing work harder, but it doesn't change the nature of it. Jytdog (talk) 13:54, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Peanut gallery[edit]

Anyone have a suggestion about the best format for responding? I think this thread could get really long, really fast and then it might be hard (for me) to follow the conversation as it branches out to EvergreenFir's different bullet points. From a writing perspective, it would be nice to make a separate comment below each point, but that might make it confusing from a reading perspective. Idk... maybe I'm overthinking this? I think what I'm trying to say is... will it irk people if I comment inline like I'm tempted to do (perhaps in a different color) or should I lump my response it all together at the end? :) Permstrump (talk) 23:25, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

@Permstrump: I'm fine with whatever. I can number the bullet points if that helps? EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 23:32, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

It's discouraged to insert comments within a different editor's comments; it makes it more difficult to see who is saying what. I'd make a separate subsection for each bullet point, with EvergreenFir's sig at the end of each bullet point. I suppose you could just add the signatures and omit the extra subsection headings, but the former seems like better organization to my ADD brain. ―Mandruss ☎ 23:56, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Anyone is welcome to refactor as they see fit for formatting. Didn't really think about that part, sorry. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 23:59, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

@EvergreenFir: Ok, I took a shot at it. I think you should ungreen ({{tq}} is generally for quoting previous comments by others), and add your sigs to each. ―Mandruss ☎ 00:07, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@Mandruss: Done! EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 01:06, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Muy bueno. ―Mandruss ☎ 01:13, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@Mandruss: Perfect. One more peanut gallery comment (jk I'll probably think of more questions, but this is at least my last one before I leave work)... I thought EvergreenFir's use of green was nice for reading, because it was easier on the eyes than a block of black text, but I've never seen anyone use green for quoting. A) People should do that more. I'm going to make it a new habit starting now. Thanks for teaching me something new! B) Is it "uncouth" to use different non-green colors or does it only let you use black & green for actual comments and the pretty colors are only for usernames? In general, I've been wishing there was a way to make it more obvious where one person's comment ends and the next one begins. The indentations are kinda subtle and then people always mess it up by accidents anyway. Makes it hard to skim. Permstrump (talk) 01:23, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

If there were any guidance on that, it would be at WP:TPG. That page discourages "excessive emphasis" at WP:SHOUT, but the word "color" or "colour" does not occur on the page. Absent any guidance against it, you could try it and see if anyone gripes; maybe that would result in some nice instruction creep added to SHOUT. My take is that good use of indenting (see WP:THREAD) and signatures does the job, and, judging by the fact that I almost never see anyone else using colors, the community agrees with me. ―Mandruss ☎ 01:34, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, use of color seems to be reserved for {{tq}}. Perhaps consider installing BeeLine Reader, Permstrump? Might help. Mandruss thanks for the formatting help. Now to wait for comments. I'm always wary of suggesting changes as pushback seems inevitable even on the most benign issues let alone a policy change. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 01:45, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Sorry, people. The last thing I meant to do was create a whole new quandary, but I wanted to expand on something Discott brought up in Quandary 1, so blame Discott. /s Permstrump (talk) 18:40, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Happy to take that at blame. :-) --Discott (talk) 13:00, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

• Insufficient evidence I am not convinced that this is a practical problem worth addressing. I agree that the issue is raised regularly but I would want to see someone collect a few troublesome example cases before we developed a general rule. The most common "quandary" that I see is not listed here, and that is "an editor insists on adding information without the backing of a reliable source". Wikipedia requires that information come from reliable sources. Insisting on reliable sources resolves most of these supposed quandaries in most cases, because the only common problem I see is lack of reliable sources. Again - I would like to see edge cases when WP:RS is not working, but no such cases are presented here. It would be worthwhile to resolve all of these issues if we had a few cases to which to apply them, and from which we could develop a general rule. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:46, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Blue Rasberry, I assume the most common one you mentioned isn't on the list because, regardless if people follow them, it's already clearly covered by existing rules. These are some things that have come up, but aren't addressed clearly/explicitly or aren't addressed at all. I will pull together some examples though, because I think that's a good idea. Off the top of my head though: List of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Permstrump (talk) 15:23, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Blue Rasberry: There's been issues of recently as I mentioned in the beginning. I'm sure I could find more if you feel that I need to show more reason for updating policy. IMO, the real reason to address this is more fundamental and not in response to poor editing. Rather it seems to be an oversight. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 21:27, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@User:EvergreenFir, I notice you citing WP:BLPCAT, but nobody has yet mentioned WP:EGRS which actually expands on BLPCAT, which is just a summary. The WP:WikiProject Disability/Style guide also has some advice. (BTW Nobody thought to notify WikiProject Disability about this topic.) Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:00, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Dodger67: Thanks for pointing out EGRS! I did forget about that. It will help if/when I move to the proposal stage. As for notifications, I didn't notify anywhere about this since it's just in the idea lab. If there were no comments I likely would have started drumming up comments. But lack of notification wasn't meant to be a slight by any means. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 21:27, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

In addition to your posting on Disability, I posted requests for comment on the Medicine, Categories, and Biographies WikiProject talk pages. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 21:42, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, since we're talking about it, I guess I should mention that when I saw Roger (Dodger67)'s comment on WP:DISABILITY in my watchlist, it reminded me that I had wanted to leave a note about this thread and also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder on WP:PSYCH, so this morning I posted at WT:PSYCH#Categorization of people with mental illness and other disabilities: Comments requested, but it didn't occur to me to mention it here. Permstrump (talk) 22:51, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

GERMHDS[edit]

@EvergreenFir, Discott, Dodger67, Jytdog, WhatamIdoing, and Doncram: I just had a moment of clarity, so I pinged usernames that looked familiar out of the recent edit history just because this thread has gotten long and less active over time. (My apologies if I missed anyone or included anyone by accident.) Somewhere ITT Roger (Dodger67) brought up that WP:EGRS covers disabilities and psychological conditions, which is a good starting point, but its current wording is insufficient for a few reasons that I think discussion here can/should address. (FYI from now on, when I say “disabilities,” I’m also referring to psychological conditions)… Per WP:EGRS, there’s a different standard for including disabilities than for religion, sexual orientation, etc (explained below). EGRS is the only place where you can find that information. None of the other policies that summarize or link to EGRS mention if disabilities are an exception to the rule. In fact, they don’t even mention that disabilities are covered under EGRS at all, which isn’t intuitive considering EGRS only stands for “ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality.” This makes finding the policies regarding disabilities unnecessarily hard to find. It also means that we don’t get the same level of clarification on how different policies specifically apply to disabilities, the way we do for other EGRS attributes. For example, BLPCAT says (abbreviated):

Categories, lists and navigation templates

See also: WP:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality

Categories regarding religious beliefs or sexual orientation should not be used unless the subject has publicly self-identified with the belief or orientation in question, and the subject's beliefs or sexual orientation are relevant to their public life or notability, according to reliable published sources. Caution should be used with content categories that suggest a person has a poor reputation (see false light). For example, Category:Criminals… These principles apply equally to lists, navigation templates, and Infobox statements that are based on religious beliefs or sexual orientation or suggest that any living person has a poor reputation.

1) It does not specify if the same principles apply to disabilities or even mention that disabilities are addressed separately under WP:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality. It's not safe to assume that everything covered under EGRS follows the same rules because, according WP:EGRS, the inclusion criteria for categorizing people by disability is WP:DEFINING, which is a much higher standard than “relevant according to reliable published sources.”

2) On the other hand, while WP:EGRS does specifically address disabilities, it only talks about categorization of people with disabilities and doesn’t specify if WP:DEFINING also applies equally to lists, navigation templates and infoboxes as BLPCAT does above for other EGRS attributes. Once again, this is not a safe assumption because according to WP:NONDEFINING, “In cases where a particular attribute about a topic is verifiable and notable but not defining, creation of a list article is often the preferred alternative.” (My emphasis.)

3) On top of that, EGRS and BLPCAT don’t apply to main articles, where the general rule of thumb is only that the content should be WP:VERIFIABLE and WP:NOTEWORTHY. For BLP’s it’s supposed to err on the side of privacy, but IMHO that's too subjective to be sufficient for private health information. Considering EGRS and disabilities are exceptions to the rules for categories, lists, etc., it makes sense that they should also receive special consideration within the main article, but as far as I know, there’s no clarification of how EGRS and disabilities should or shouldn’t be evaluated differently than other facts included in the body of an article.

TL;DR: It’s clear that per WP:EGRS, people should only be categorized by disability if the disability is DEFINING. It’s not clear which rules apply to naming people’s disabilities in lists, navigation templates, infoboxes, or within the body of main articles.

Proposals

1) Change the acronym to GERMHDS (gender, ethnicity, religion, mental health, disability, sexuality) or create 2 separate policies, one for EGRS and another for MHDs. Add links and summaries about how to treat disability and mental health conditions at least everywhere that EGRS is currently spelled out and add some example scenarios involving mental health diagnoses and learning disorders, etc. (P.S. I'm opting for MH instead of P for psychological, to avoid the awkwardness of the acronym DP.)

2) WP:DEFINING should be the inclusion criteria for people with MHDs in categories, lists, navigation templates and infoboxes and that should be clearly stated.

3) As far as the body of main articles, I’m not sure exactly how the inclusion criteria should differ for GERMHDS, but IMHO it should be held to a higher standard than even material that could suggest a poor reputation. Why? Because in the US, an Invasion of Privacy lawsuit can be brought under the publication of private facts. The release of personal medical information falls under the ‘publication of private facts’ category. Unlike lawsuits for defamation, the truthfulness of the facts disclosed is not a defense in an invasion of privacy case. And also unlike defamation, the plaintiff does not have to prove special damages, meaning no actual harm must be proven in order to prevail. Unlike defamation, where compensation is confined to actual injury, for invasion of privacy, damages are extended to presumed or punitive damages. Invasion of Privacy is a willful tort which constitutes a legal injury, and damages for mental suffering are recoverable without the necessity of showing actual physical injury. Technically, the law protects you if you publish information already exposed to the public eye and especially material obtained from publicly available court records, but personally, I wouldn’t want to have to hire a lawyer just to make that case. PermStrump(talk) 03:17, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

I'd suggest changing MHD to DMH, if it's to be used. It's not meant to be read as "mental health disorders" (or "mental health disability") but people are likely to remember it that way. Better with D for Disability first (DMH) for clarity, IMO. --Hordaland (talk) 08:20, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

The ==Disability== section was proposed in an RFC. It was added in July 2014, and the page was sensibly renamed to Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, and disability at that time. Then there was a move-war with a WP:RM that was closed as no consensus for anything. The next attempt to address it seems to have been unsuccessful – quite like the old joke about asking four people for advice and receiving five opinions.

The result is probably that everyone got tired of pushing the rock uphill and forgot to deal with things like whether or not this new advice had been properly integrated into other advice pages. Since you're interested, then perhaps you'd like to WP:PGBOLDly update the BLP policy and other pages to include the word "disability". WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:54, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, I knew I had seen old threads about this! But I couldn't remember where and wasn't able to find them again when Evergreenfir made this post. I might consider being PGBOLD enough to at least add the word disability to the links if I thought what EGRS actually says about disabilities was a clear and comprehensive explanation for most questions that might come up. <sigh> PermStrump(talk) 05:23, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

You've got to start somewhere, and a good place to start is helping editors find the guidance that we're already giving them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:32, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing and Permstrump: Thank you both. I'm sorry I've let this sit for a few days. Plan to get to it soon. Wanted to leave it up for at least a week before moving on, but then life happened. I'm curious about making it medical stuff in general though. There were a few comments about that. Any input? We can do PGBOLD, but want to be ready for what I assume will be a slog through dozens of comments (usually how things work... just look how much it too to update HARASS...) EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 05:03, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

EvergreenFir: I think medical stuff in general makes sense. It actually already says "disability, medical or psychological condition" but I overlooked the "medical" part. The other day on WT:MED someone posted a link to an RFC asking if someone needed MEDRS to say a fictional character's diagnosis: Talk:Electromagnetic hypersensitivity#Request for comment. The people who responded seemed to think it was a given. Maybe there's been discussion in that project about this exact thing before. I'll try to look around for stuff over the weekend. PermStrump(talk) 08:08, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't make any generalizations from that discussion. There's significant skepticism as to whether anyone is truly "hypersensitive" to electromagnetic anything. (There are a tiny number of people who claim to be, just like there are a tiny number of people who claim that cotton fibers on their skin are caused by infection.)

Evergreen Fir, start by making the smallest possible change you think would be helpful. That might be something as small as changing a link to "EGRS" to "EGRSD". One baby step at a time is the way to go. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:00, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Incorrect implications and terminology[edit]

This section is defined as being about mental illness and learning disabilities. Points refer to autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. These are neither mental illness or learning disabilities.

If you want to include these two conditions in your discussion, then possibly an appropriate catch-all term would be "mental conditions."

By the way, it is disputed especially whether autism is a disability or even a disorder. I believe both conditions are deemed by the medical community to be disorders, but that whether any given condition is a disability depends on its effects on any given person. Maurreen (talk) 03:20, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

"Possibly resolved" parameter for cleanup tags[edit]

Random brainwave: A big issue with cleanup tags is that they can be applied to newbies' articles, discouraging them, in particular because they feel that they can't remove the tags themselves (not knowing how Wikipedia works).

What if we added a parameter to cleanup tags allowing people to mark individual cleanup tags as (potentially) resolved, which could then be reviewed by experienced editors not afraid to remove them?

Go ahead, tear the idea to shreds; I haven't critiqued it internally myself. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 16:59, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Not a fundamentally bad idea, but it pushes metadata into the main namespace for a potentially-longterm tag, which is typically viewed as undesirable. --Izno (talk) 17:25, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Good point, though … if it's inside the markup used for the tag itself, all that this change would represent is an expansion of "metadata" that's already in the main namespace (the tag itself). I mean, ideally, article tags would be external to article content, but until/unless they change structurally, giving them an extra parameter seems harmless. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 00:35, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

We could maybe have an input box on the message templates with a prefill text of "tell me if you think I've been fixed". Any entry into that box would fill the parameter causing the review category to trigger. How many spam edits might that cause though? --Izno (talk) 13:07, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree there is a problem, but not sure about the solution. Better would be to replace the cleanup tags with hidden categories. Removing a category that no longer applies is more intuitive and lots of newish editors do learn about categories. ϢereSpielChequers 18:36, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Cleanup tags serve important purposes as a) warnings about potentially flawed content and b) calls to action to improve Wikipedia. I don't think I can support replacing them with categories, unless categories were able to emulate the display of maintenance tags in the first place (not something they can currently do). {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 00:35, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

That's a WP:PEREN suggestion which never finds consensus. As it is, I think having hidden the maintenance categories may have done Wikipedia harm, since that was another entry point for an unlogged-in editor, or a newly-logged-in editor (who hadn't fiddled with his preferences to display hidden categories), to find things to change. --Izno (talk) 13:07, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

@Nihiltres, I accept that some tags such as unreferenced serve as warnings, but many, including orphan, uncategorised and dead end are simply maintenance matters. I'm all for calls to action, but if we want to recruit newbies with calls to action we should simply change the appearance of the edit box every few weeks. It isn't clear whether maintenance templates attract more newbies to fix them than they deter. ϢereSpielChequers 23:46, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

See this proposal where I outline my idea for a way to resolve this problem. I hope editors will contribute there, as well-received ideas at that location may make it onto the developers list of projects.--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:42, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

WikiPolls[edit]

As a sister site, WikiPolls feels as though it could be a good idea, but, first, I would like to explain what it is and see whether there are issues to be repaired:

WikiPolls in my idea is a sister site which anyone can edit and wherein users can post their own topics such as "What World War subject is your most favorite? [Button]—World War I...[Button]—World War II...[Button]—the hypothetical World War III" for users to answer by selecting choices and then clicking on the "Vote" button. Of course, it would be hard to find topics by just searching for their topic names and entry names, so tagging them with words such as "World War" would help making searching much faster, and, to avoid giving in false polls or altering users' initial votes, users would have to vote in order to see results. Also, we would obviously not want to have polls such as "Which Wikipedia user is worse?" and even "Which of the following is the worst terrorist?", for that might otherwise make likers feel upset from seeing negative results after voting, and we especially do not want controversial entries such as "For whom do you want to win after the 2016 elections?", for that can skew general people's votes into getting apparently bad leaders.

This is only an idea, and I am only looking for suggestions. Gamingforfun³⁶⁵ (talk) 02:29, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

why would I want to go there?

btw, this is the wrong place. If I remember correctly you should put this on meta--Dixtosa (talk) 04:49, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

I was suspicious that it might have been that place where it belongs, but it was hard for me to tell (EDIT: Additionally, it was made harder because I have accidentally visited MediaWiki on the bottom-right corner of the page layout instead.), and the rules did not say that I must not do that, but, regardless of what I have said, I shall relocate this topic. Gamingforfun³⁶⁵ (talk) 09:19, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Even though the official rules for submitting sister project ideas do not exist here, which is very misleading, what do you think of polls? Now, just forget the WikiPolls project for now. Gamingforfun³⁶⁵ (talk) 09:44, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Sister sites are required to have an educational or informational purpose. This doesn't seem like a good fit on those grounds. It might be popular at some other site, though. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:05, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Such as Wikia, and where is the requirement? Other than that, I am sorry that I had given a lousy idea like that and therefore shown my medium amount of ignorance. Gamingforfun³⁶⁵ (talk) 05:05, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

The proposal would belong at meta:Proposals for new projects. See mw:Category:Poll extensions for existing MediaWiki extensions but it doesn't sound like a project for the Wikimedia Foundation. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:53, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Are all wiki sites required to be educational in the conventional way that the encyclopaedia is? Presumably not or there wouldn't be ideas for alternatives and have just seen a mention of a wiki poll idea. This may simply be a relatively conventional market research of some sort that people could choose to be involved with instead of the invasive ones that often appear on computer screens as advertisement in some excuse that the owner didn't pay for the software. I am hoping for something I can use as I choose to help evolve and never pay for software as it was invented very many years ago and we are all part of the process. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markostri (talk • contribs) 20:49, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

All WMF-sponsored wikis are required to be "educational" due to the foundation:Mission statement. The m:sister project committee only accepts projects that are compatible with the movement's general principles (freely licenced, spreading free knowledge, BLP rules), vision and mission statement. They don't have to be "educational in the conventional way", but they do have to be "educational". m:Proposals for new projects lists several wikifarms that are happy to host non-educational projects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:46, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

IDEA: Priority watchlist[edit]

I'm sure this has been floated before, but it would be helpful for active editors who patrol tons of pages to be able to set up watchlist groups or at the very least, to be able to flag certain pages as high priority. A practical application for this, would be in the monitoring of pages that have seen recurring vandalism recently. Or if you have open talk page discussions you need to monitor, you could flag those pages with priority, and they would be displayed more prominently on your watchlist, either being colored differently, or being placed at the top. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 17:05, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

This is probably blocked by the number of bugs of the sort "Watchlist code is suck", but it seems like a pretty neat idea. In the meantime, you can create a subpage at e.g. User:Cyphoidbomb/Priority watch, add a list of prio links, and then use Special:Recentchangeslinked. --Izno (talk) 17:29, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:User scripts#Watchlist - Evad37 [talk] 21:54, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I tried to "thank" Evad and Izno on the page history for teaching me something new, but I accidentally I thanked them for comments they made in other threads, so now I'm posting my "thanks." Thank you too, Cyphoidbomb, for bringing it up. :) PermStrump(talk) 00:10, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

Idea: Automatic Welcome Message for New Registered Accounts[edit]

I have an idea that any time that a new account is registered, a welcome banner should be automatically posted to the new user's talk page. Currently welcoming new users is voluntary by other editors. The reason that I am making this suggestion is that this seems like the most friendly way to address a problem (or related set of problems) which is the lack of knowledge by new editors of Wikipedia's complex rules, or specific actions by new editors that are against the rules of Wikipedia, but where those rules are not obvious and the new editors are acting in good faith. I haven't reviewed the multiple existing welcome banners recently, and so am not recommending that a specific one be used. However, the policies and guidelines that need to be mentioned clearly include neutral point of view, reliable sources, verifiability, conflict of interest. the rule against edit-warring, no personal attacks, and civility. There should also be an explanation of the difference between article space, draft space, talk space, user space, and Wikipedia space. Many new editors don't know the difference, and make mistakes, such as submitting user page drafts as articles (or even thinking that their user name has to be that of the other article which they are here to create). There should perhaps also be a mention that the creation of new articles is difficult and that new editors are invited to edit existing articles, and that, if they do want to contribute to new articles, they should use Articles for Creation. (That is the consensus among the regular editors at the Teahouse.) There may be other policies and guidelines that should be mentioned. The key to the idea is that any new registered account should get a welcoming message that is also informative, and, if read, may reduce some of the good-faith violations of the rules. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:43, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

This is a WP:PEREN proposal. --Izno (talk) 17:46, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't see my particular idea in the list of perennial proposals. Please provide a more detailed link. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:54, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Having just looked at the 20-link welcome and the 60-link welcome, the 20-link welcome isn't detailed enough and the 60-link welcome is more detailed than necessary. A 40-link or so welcome, with a few comments, would be good. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:54, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Where is it listed in perennial proposals? Even if it is listed, I would like it discussed again. There are too many discussions at the Teahouse that just result from not understanding. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:54, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

WP:PEREN#Use a bot to welcome new users. SiBr₄ (talk) 17:58, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

On some other language wiki's I get that the first time I edit. I always think that a bot or automatic welcome in a language I don't understand is meaningless. But if it is a real person talking to me, then I take notice! There are a heap of links already too many things to read when you first edit Wikipedia. A welcome message with links just adds to that. However if there is a specific message related to the first edit, that will be far more helpful. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:38, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

• Terrible idea, and I despise the other wikis that do this. If I'm registered here and I visit a page in another language, I am "registered" as a new user on that other language wiki. I then receive a welcome message in a language I don't understand. I usually replace it with a soft-redirect back to my en-wiki talk page. Except for the time that the Arabic wiki posted a welcome message, and with the whole right-to-left thing, I had no idea how to type in the damn redirect messages. I expect Arabic speakers would have the same struggle on an English page. So, hell no. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:36, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Oiyarbepsy, the solution recommended to me is to type the code in a plain text editor, copy it, and paste it into the window. And when brackets and punctuation jump around, ignore them – or at least preview it before you decide that it's broken. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:50, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
• I agree that we shouldn't welcome people unless they edit. However a welcome after the first edit would be a good idea. But ideally not one of the unwelcoming rule heavy welcomes. I'm testing Template:Welcome training - a different approach based on telling people how to do things and steering them towards non bitey activities. ϢereSpielChequers 20:58, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
• I definately think we need to make editing advice and help (not to mention a basic introduction to how things work here) easily available to new editors from the moment they join. On the other hand, being welcomed by an actual person is very meaningful. Perhaps making the "Help" link (currently in the left toolbar) more prominent for new users could make the first few days less scary. Anyways, just my few thoughts. Happy Squirrel (talk) 02:57, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Markostri comment[edit]

I hope I am writing this in an appropriate place and, as a lot of my work has been relatively idea based, I guess I am. As I am also relatively new to creating text on Wikipedia it is important to me that I understand what I'm doing and where I am writing it. In an arts environment I was asked if art was important and replied "no but everything is interesting" and have been somewhat shy of the word "important" ever since as I was happy with what felt like a balanced answer. What I think is important is personal choice and Wikipedia has existed for me to simply check some facts that I was relatively unsure of and, though I don't know everything, I have not seen anything that I thought was clearly wrong, though with some ambiguous / disambiguation it may be easy to arrive on a page of different interest or meaning. To me this just the nature of language, mine being mostly non American English with various European phrases and double or even opposing meanings are part of a learning process as all languages have influenced others. I think I may be deviating from my idea though and one contributer suggested it may be unlikely to work but on first being presented with the option to edit / contribute I looked, almost at random, at what subjects I could work with and found some to locked, either for fear of vandalism or perhaps the content was considered complete. As a creative person I often think that nothing is ever truly complete and as artists are often noted for mischievous behaviour where graffiti, once considered mindless vandalism, is now viewed differently and perhaps legitimately capitalising on an aesthetic has undermined it's original intent. I was also advised a while ago that certain aspects of celebrity lives where often open to misinformation and, though I've worked in that area myself in terms of day to day documentation of various artists, I have not noticed any that where not related to obvious conspiracies amongst theatrical fantasy and the effects of fame. I'm not sure my idea is complete today as page to collect and discuss vandalism giving rise to some fictional fame may already exist. I made a comment several days ago about the future being of as much interest as the accurate documentation of the past and am equally interested in what is happening now. I am possibly being a bit too vague before lunch now but hope this is of some interest and look forward to substantial proposals. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markostri (talk • contribs) 12:25, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

• @Markostri:I honestly have no idea what you are trying to tell us. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:32, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I just received a message saying that someone had no idea what I was trying to tell you. I'm not specifically trying to tell anybody anything today but am simply trying to work out the best way to add content with some understanding of what is considered notable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markostri (talk • contribs) 15:45, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I contributed to this page earlier and my idea was a little incomplete as I am still introducing myself to the process whilst consuming modest amounts of tea somewhere near the pump. There seem to be some administrative issues that I'm still relatively unfamiliar with and assume they may be related to decisions on the relevance of the subject to the words provided. If anyone has noted my comments and suggestions on the constructive rather than destructive effects of visual and audible arts amongst languages I would be interested in contributing to an ideas based forum that may be of some evolving value. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markostri (talk • contribs) 14:27, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I think this has been very productive over the last few days as I've found a place where I can expand upon some ideas. Beyond simply enjoying writing as an activity it is helpful to receive feedback of any sort, even if the person that provides it appears to have no idea of what I am expressing because I'm not always sure either when the proposal is still only collaboratively experimental. Some writing within a fine art context can become so conceptual that it almost renders itself meaningless, whether deliberate or intentional to gain some affected intellectual effect. Either way the purpose of my decision to accept the option to contribute to Wikipedia was to start with some introduction to myself, which I am doing by sharing a writing style that was sometimes critisised for a lack of punctuation. My response to that was to exhibit large blocks of text without any punctuationat all as it had the potential for a pleasant aesthetic and was obviously mildly reactionary and slightly pretentious, as is often the function of art, a comment and necessarily a criticism. The purpose of an encyclopedia is obviously to tell people about things in an informative way with some notable accuracy and I notice some rules of expected conduct regarding self publicity and promotion. Obviously we may all have user names on many Internet sites and my birth name is not uncommon. If I choose to look up others with my name, some of them appear to be more notable than me for doing similar things. Rather than wonder why this has occurred I know why it has occurred and have no particular issue with it, beyond considering Wikipedia to be more interesting than Facebook for example, both of which auto capitalise on my keyboard today. Facebook has probably become the most popular place for self publicity and I may be stating the obvious whilst showing some bias in electronic media. I personally would not be bothered if Facebook, Twitter or many other social networking providers decided they'd have enough and disappeared tomorrow but I would miss Wikipedia more, though I don't often use it either as I try to work with what I already know. If I was trying to tell anybody anything with my recent words it is an introduction to myself and look forward to more suggestion. The issue of vandalism arose when I looked to see what was accessible for me to edit. Obviously if I write total nonsense about anything it will probably get noticed quite quickly and it is not my intention to test the system unless it is of value to humans or robots. I'm not always familiar with computer shorthand, programming or slang but I guess a bot is a robot. This has been writen by me and I presently classify myself as human.

• @Markostri:Whether things are notable is summed at notability. In short, if there are verifiable, reliable and independent sources, it's typically okay to write about it here. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 19:39, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Consensus Talk Index (CTI) idea[edit]

Moved from WP:VPR to here in WP:VPI since this is the place to incubate new ideas apparently. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 06:33, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

I noticed an AN/I topic today where a user is making all sorts of claims of other users making-up fictional rules but ultimately says "[show] where these consensus talks happened. Show them and this all goes away. But you can't. Because they don't exist.". Now I do not have a dog in that fight so I am not going to offer any opinions on the user's claims in that specific case, I raise it here as an example only. I myself have in the past been involved in debates where someone says "consensus exists" but cannot point to any discussion(s) that created that consensus -- OR -- they point to the entire history of an article (or a topic) with thousands of edits going back a decade and say "go find it yourself". I have also seen many newbie users ask why? only to be sent to the WP:massive-alphabet-soup-library and told to "go read this".

• I think it is always reasonable that when someone asks for proof of consensus they should be able to be shown the process details by which said consensus was reached.

• I think it is always UNreasonable to tell a user to go read ten years of archives if they want to know how consensus was established.

• I think it is unproductive to have users unable to know exactly why we do things a certain way.

When the US Supreme Court wants to understand a specific law often they look back to the Congressional archives in order to understand what the lawmakers were thinking when they enacted a given law. I am quite sure they have an index to find those relevant discussions.

What I propose is an area of WP where consensus talks can be easily documented and searched through. Structured similar to any number of multi-subject areas of the encyclopedia's back rooms, I envision wikilinks like WP:ConsensusTalkIndex/Infobox soap character#marriage details which would go to a page with one or more simple lists of links pointing to the various talkpage discussions that supported (and an optional section for talks that opposed) the rules. Descriptive summaries could optionally be included below such links to help the reader find exactly what they are looking for.

I think this part of the encyclopedia should NOT have talk pages (other than one for the rules/design of the area as a whole) since it is not for debate but for indexing only. Debates should stay on their own relevant policy pages and never be intermingled in the index.

I realize that such a set of pages will be huge in number and will take years to backfill, but in the end I think it is well worth the time to help users both to understand the WP consensus process in general and also to understand the specific concerns that led to various specific rules. Ultimately such a set of pages could be incorporated as wikilinks into any policy or guideline pages, essentially becoming reliable sources for our own policies.

Comments? Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 01:29, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• Weak support because I like the idea, but as you said, it would be a pain in the rear to do. I'd like to see other editors' comments. Fritzmann2002 19:19, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• Agree. IMHO a discussion that results in worthwhile consensus should be reflected somewhere in WP:Policies and guidelines (Koala aptly calls it WP:massive-alphabet-soup-library, but the size of it is a subject for another day). Conversely, every rule policy or guideline should have a link back to the discussion(s) that produced the present wording. WP:PG is the authority. If a discussion didn't result in a policy or guideline, or change thereof, it's irrelevant, even if it arrived at consensus. Similarly, apart from the most basic ones, if a policy or guideline isn't an outcome of consensus, it shouldn't be there. — Stanning (talk) 14:46, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

• Weak support But let's try to keep it simple. I could think of a simple tag added with a discussion that lists a link in an archive drawer box at the top of that specific talk labelled with something like "Closed discussion tagged as consensus" or similar. That would still put some of the burden with the editor asking for evidence (as each talk may have tagged multiple consensuses) but also with the people referring back to ancient consensus (they should have tagged it as a consensus discussion once ended); while it is also not too much high-tech / rule creapy. Arnoutf (talk) 15:40, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
• Good idea Wiki has been around long enough that we can no longer rely that someone will remember how it happened, or that you could even find that someone if they did. I think the approach may be to have a history subpage to policy pages, explaining how the policy got to be what it is and where stuff was discussed. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 03:35, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose - First, if an editor asserts a community consensus but can't point to it, their assertion should be completely ignored. It often happens that they are mistaken; in some cases they are, semi-consciously or merely through wishful thinking, distorting the outcome of an earlier discussion. Such assertions must be verifiable.
  But this does not address the whole problem. I could point you to a 3-year-old RfC that supports my position, but that's not enough. The result of that RfC may have been superseded by a later discussion; or, there may be another consensus that more specifically pertains to the question at hand. Only a thorough survey and analysis of all related discussion can really show the current consensus as it applies to a given situation. And who has the time and energy to do that?
  But I don't think we need a new "thing" to solve the problem; it already exists. We call it guidelines. All we need to do is summarize the consensus in existing guidelines, or create a new one if appropriate. When a consensus is superseded, we should simply modify the guidelines. The guidelines, not talk space discussions, would represent current consensus on anything of significance. A method could be devised to point from the guidelines to the supporting discussions. This would tend to protect and provide verifiability for the guideline, serving the same function as citations in articles. (This is not to say that a guideline could be removed simply because it lacks this kind of verifiability; that would be going too far, at least at this stage of the project's maturity.) ―Mandruss ☎ 13:12, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Why WP guideline pages alone are not sufficient for understanding concensus.[edit]

Mandruss above said; " I don't think we need a new "thing" to solve the problem; it already exists. We call it guidelines." I must profoundly disagree with that comment for two reasons:

• 1. A guideline page tells you what has been decided, but not necessarily why. Usually only the actual consensus discussion tells you anything about the why such-and such was decided that way (in most cases). Yes, a well written guideline usually has self-evident logic but not always. Pages like WP:NOT became necessary because users needed to understand both the what and the why of our inclusion/exclusion rules.
• 2. Guidelines do NOT exist for all consensus decisions. Maybe they should but they do not. This is especially true for less-than-WP-wide rules (topic-based, article-based, etc).

Rather than take my word for it I have an {{sarcasm mode on}} "easy" {{sarcasm mode off}} challenge for anyone reading this idea discussion. Let's call this a test-case for why we need an index to simplify the frequent "show me where this was decided" debates.

Please find the "already exists" guideline OR any clear & definitive consensus discussion on the following: 

There is a blanket topic-centric rule that is ironclad (see def#2) to the point of being a quasi-policy. That rule is "Anything from the British Raj era is not reliable" for use as a source in articles under the WP:WikiProject India umbrella. Period. End-of-discussion. Game-over. Any article content using references of sources written during the British Raj era are summarily removed from such articles. Why? Because consensus says so. Maybe this is a good guideline, I do not know, but it caused me a lot of pain trying to discover the source of such a blanket rule to the point that about a year ago I self-imposed a topic ban and refuse to edit any India related articles ever. Koala Tea Of Mercy (KTOM's Articulations & Invigilations) 14:49, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Higher than autoconfirmed for moving another user's talk page?[edit]

Just saw a user (who I've commented on WP:AIV about) who moved the user page and user talk page of the user who reported him on AIV. Obviously a sockpuppet, his first 10 edits were garbage on a sandbox page. Should an autoconfirmed user be able to do this sort of thing?Naraht (talk) 18:15, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

This sounds like a loophole in WP security. Why would anyone below admin (at least) have a valid reason to move a user page? If no requirement, shouldn't be permitted. — Stanning (talk) 18:51, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

@Naraht: It's the kind of thing that could be stopped with an edit filter, but only if it was a widespread issue. If this is one of the only times this has happened then I don't see that we need to spend much time worrying about it. Sam Walton (talk) 20:02, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

I've seen it a few times now. Not wide spread, but quite disruptive when it happens. Frankly I think moving any page should require than just autoconfirmed... number of socking vandals love to move multiple pages and it requires a lot more than just clicking Rollback to fix it. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 20:11, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

While it is true that vandals and name-warriors can move articles disruptively, there are far more innocent issues for moving than there are bad-faith ones. A bad move can always be undone and move-protected by an admin. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:34, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

In the AFC review process, sandboxes are moved to draft space, and accepted draft are moved to article space, routinely. One can implement a move privilege and can that privilege to reviewers, but it should not be administrator-limited, because very few of the AFC reviewers are admins and very few of the admins are AFC reviewers. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:34, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm not talking about moves in the entire user and user talk space, *just* the main ones for each users...Naraht (talk) 04:20, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

But that is only very rarely a problem, and there's no point in adding function for rare problems. Adding this would be feature creep. DGG ( talk ) 04:29, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

How about using an edit filter to prevent this, and revoke the user's autoconfirmed status? The fact that it's rarely a problem doesn't mean that it shouldn't be added. There should be no need for a non-admin to move another user's page. — Omni Flames (talk contribs) 01:46, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

There are sometimes good reasons, e.g. moving drafts made on user pages like [8]. If bad moves is a rare problem then let's not use server and programmer resources to stop them at the cost of obstructing good moves. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:59, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

While this could be done with the edit filter, the 'remove autoconfirmed' option isn't enabled on the English Wikipedia at present. Sam Walton (talk) 23:07, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

banner invite for more info[edit]

Going through the works of famous people I noticed that most of them (who are alive)don't seem to contribute to their own pages. (eg.: date of birth, portraits,etc.). So I propose a banner invite. For example: banner: "The following purpose is only for encyclopaedic purposes and is subject to it as such. We request 'famous' (link: WP: noteworthy) people to donate the portraits of famous people or themselves, and pictures, recordings, etc. of their works to wikimedia, and also to help editors edit their page. They may even give a vocal reading of their own names or perhaps the whole article (if they wish to). The invitation extends to the people who helped them get there to help contribute to their pages and articles related to them." 117.216.27.218 (talk) 05:08, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Definition of a stub and automatic removal of stub templates[edit]

At the moment there isn't really a set definition of a stub. WP:STUB has a very vague description of one, and also states that different editors follow different standards. I think we should create a a definitive number of characters that make an article no longer a stub. Probably somewhere between 500-1500 characters. Once this is decided, a bot could be used to remove stub templates when they no longer fit the requirements to be a stub, so that stub tags could be consistent and accurate among articles. Thoughts? — Omni Flames (talk contribs) 02:54, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

500-1,500 characters (a.k.a. bytes) make about four or five paragraphs and also about five or six references. A better number might be 3,000 or over. Gamingforfun³⁶⁵ (talk) 05:21, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

@Gff365: Ah, you're right. Perhaps 2000-2500 bytes would be a more appropriate measure? — Omni Flames (talk contribs) 07:36, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I am looking at articles such as PlayStation World, and it is currently 3,531 bytes long, yet it in my opinion still constitutes a stub article. I would like to change my mind into saying that around 5,000 bytes might work better. Gamingforfun³⁶⁵ (talk) 19:11, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

That is not a stub, it has multiple paragraphs, an image, references. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:15, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

The reason that page has that many characters is proabably because of all the templates. But I agree with Graeme Bartlett: that's not a stub. — Omni Flames (talk contribs) 22:55, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I think a very short article with multiple sources can be a start-class article (or even C), while a somewhat longer article filled solely with unsourced plot info can be a stub, especially if it doesn't make use of sections. I don't think it's a good idea to base the idea of "stub" entirely around character-count, as I'd much rather see people trying to write good prose than useless trivia in order to get to start-class. I don't think a hard limit is a good idea. ~Mable (chat) 17:17, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

• Comment I've posted a note about this discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Stub_sorting#Discussion_at_Idea_Lab, where the stub experts can be found. PamD 20:48, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
• WP:STUB#How big is too big? says "there is no set size at which an article stops being a stub" and includes a link to the Croughton-London rule, which is a useful way of putting a perspective on it. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:26, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
• Agree with the above. Stubness is not about characters. It is about meaningfull content in proportion to what there is to know about a topic. Short articles about obscure yet important historical persons may give all available information, while adding the contents of the phone book to a further empty article on a major city would not elevate such an article above stub level. (NB I realise this is not the best example as phone books are listed among what Wikipedia is not, but I hope the idea gets across) Arnoutf (talk) 14:13, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
• The term 'stub' has become a justification to junk up the bottom of many articles with those ugly stub templates. Any criteria that expands the range of articles to receive those templates is not an improvement to Wikipedia. Likewise, an article shouldn't need more than one stub template; the categorization can go within the template itself. Praemonitus (talk) 20:16, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
• WP:AWB has a byte-length definition of not-a-stub, and I believe that's the only (semi-)automatic method for removing stub tags at the moment. The number chosen is rather generous, to err on the side of caution. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

BlacklistedWords Gadget[edit]

I have been thinking about a possible gadget for blacklisting certain words and, once rendered, replacing them with {...} until one clicks on them. This would be great so that we, unprepared and therefore not expecting for the worst, would have to read text such as bad words but only be shown click-to-show {...}s. When the gadget is activated, users can type in which words to be blacklisted during the process of rendering source of articles' "Edit" pages into readable texts on their main pages. Has anyone ever unwillingly, possibly non-willfully stumbled upon offensive text? Then, that would be why my idea is here, but it is just an idea, so, perhaps, thoughts would be welcome here; I want to see how many people would actually be interested in it and whether there are flaws in my idea. Gamingforfun³⁶⁵ (talk) 04:58, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps you can do this with a style sheet. But I think on Wikipedia it is not much of a problem, as most vandalism is stopped at entry, or rolled back rapidly. Manual patrollers will want to see the bad words! Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:38, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

The edit filter generally stops anonymous and new users (our primary vandals) from adding content containing certain bad words - primarily the words used for vandalism. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 18:52, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

This is difficult, especially as a word can have a rude meaning in one culture and an inoffensive one in another. Then there's the case of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front - every year or two I go through articles linked to what could be an acronym for that organisation...... I think we are best off here with a combination of edit filters etc to deal with inappropriate use of such words and the principle of least surprise otherwise. I've tried using one of my tools to keep an eye on the use of certain rude words, and got rid of some vandalism and embarrassing typos, but the false positives make this difficult. There really isn't a word so rude that it won't appear in lots of song titles. ϢereSpielChequers 09:16, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Hiding possibly offensive words is similar to hiding possibly offensive or disgusting images, which is basically never done on Wikipedia. Just take a look at this essay: "In original Wikipedia content, a vulgarity or obscenity should either appear in its full form or not at all." This may similarly be covered by this essay as well, as hiding offensive images or text is little more than a disclaimer before you look at it. Relatedly, there's no good way to decide which words are and aren't considered "offensive", due to double meanings and cultural differences. ~Mable (chat) 09:26, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Also useful to note, there do exist browser extensions that allow one to filter the text rendered in a similar way to what you're describing, though I don't think it is possible to "replace" text while editing, as we're basically working with a text form. I'm not interested in that anyway - if you don't like working with offensive language, it should be easy to stay away from that and not remove vandalism yourself. ~Mable (chat) 09:31, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

At one point I wrote a user script to black out potentially-offensive text in articles, that should have a very low rate of false negatives. But it's not configurable and is subject to false positives. ;) Anomie⚔ 10:54, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

A 2016 Elections page for the US[edit]

There should be a uniform, simple way for voters anywhere in the US to get their info and for helpers to help others to get their info would be a powerful thing. This way could be a Wikipedia US voting info page, which leads a person to voter registration and polling place info for their zipcode.

We need this yesterday, so if someone or some group wants to do this, please cover the upcoming states first.

A 2016 Elections page for the US
– which links to pages for zipcode ranges
– which link to pages for individual zipcodes
– which link to pages for polling places by 9-digit zipcode

Each polling place page has

• info on how to verify registration and which party primaries you are eligible for
• info on how to register
• a link to the voter registration web site, phone number, etc.

Encyclopedant (talk) 06:01, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Sometimes, I do feel like it is difficult to read a politician's beliefs and promises from a biographical page; I'd love to know what the actual political differences are between politicians. This kind of information presented more clearly would result in informed voting. I don't like the idea of having an "Elections page" on Wikipedia featuring information such as zipcodes, voting dates, phone numbers, etc. That clearly falls under what Wikipedia is not, and though such resources should exist somewhere, Wikipedia is not the place for it. Furthermore, that idea is very US-centric for a world-wide encyclopedia. ~Mable (chat) 07:48, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

• User:Encyclopedant, Ballotpedia is probably closer to what you're looking for. There are also numerous organizations in the US and elsewhere that provide the type of information you're looking for. Maybe some partnership with ballotpedia or another organization where our articles about candidates and elections link there, possibly? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 13:23, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Speech Synthesis of IPA String?[edit]

How feasible would it be to see up a Wikimedia speech synthesis tool that will provide an audio rendition of an IPA encoding? I.e. provide, say, an inline (small) speaker icon that can activate a speech synthesis app to speak the IPA string. If that isn't feasible, then an alternative would be to have a bot generate a .wav file using a good speech synthesis package. Praemonitus (talk) 15:57, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

This is the sort of thing that Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility might be able to help with. Some users, such as Graham87 (talk · contribs), use screen reader software with a speech synthesiser. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:38, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

There's a Text-To-Speech proposal at m:Grants:IdeaLab/A "Listen" Button. In general it comes down to high quality closed voice fonts or lousy quality open voice fonts. The Web Speech API uses the native TTS which means high quality voice fonts for Apple iOS/OS X and Google's Android/ChromeOS, a range for Microsoft OSes, and speak'n'spell quality for Ubuntu. — Dispenser 17:19, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I can't find the discussion, but I'm pretty sure this was floated somewhere and someone pointed out that even the IPA symbols can be too ambiguous to be rendered using speech synthesis. Graham87 01:38, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Do you know if the ambiguous cases form a small fraction that can be hand corrected on a per article basis? Or is this a pervasive issue? Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. Praemonitus (talk) 19:17, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

I can't but fervently support this proposal. Maybe the idea should be raised also at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Language and linguistics and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia technical issues and templates (just add {{rfc|lang|tech}} at the top of this section). Ersaloz (talk) 13:51, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Except that RfCs are not held at Idea Lab - see the box at the top of this page. This page may be used to decide what the exact proposal should be - once we have determined that, we can start a formal RfC at WP:VPR. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:22, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Isn't there already a template that does this? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:01, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

"Donate resources, not money" -- Wikipedia should never ask for money. More: It should never accept money.[edit]

I propose that "donate resources not money" and "moneyless Wikipedia" should be among the main principles that govern how Wikipedia works.

All that Wikipedia should ask for, and ALL THAT IT SHOULD NEED (!) are resources: contributors' time, knowledge and computing/storage resources of their computers. Computers of regular users could be utilized, too. This way, the main operating cost (being, to my understanding: maintaining servers and assuring bandwidth) could be nulled out. Perhaps not quite trivial, yet - I'm fully convinced - fully possible and feasible it is to restructure the workings of Wikipedia so that it will never need any actual money to support its functioning.

There are already several Proposals on "Distributed Wikipedia" (https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wikipedia), "Distributed Infrastructure", "P2P Storage" etc. which mention technologies such as Git (distributed version control) or BitTorrent, so there is no point for me to write more on that.

The very point that I only want to make is: both technological solutions (Git/torrent/ ...numerous others) and physical infrastructure (all our computers, tablets, etc. connected to the Internet) already exist and may be made available for free, starting today. And each new Wikipedia user, tomorrow and the day after, will bring new (computing) resources with him/her -- so any increase in demand for content will immediately be outbalanced by the supply of storage and hosting services that comes with it.

Converting to such moneyless "Distributed Wikipedia" will require some serious work, but this work can (AND SHOULD!) also be carried out under the principle of "donate resources, not money" -- e.g. as an open source, community driven IT project.

Btw. holding that belief was recently my very reason not to contribute any money to Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TarniPL (talk • contribs)

Do you understand just how expensive in terms of both money and storage space it is to host the fifth-busiest website on the planet? The database alone consists of 12 terabytes of data for English Wikipedia alone, not counting images and files and the 25 terabytes of data hosted on Commons, every bit of which needs to be made immediately available to millions of people at a time, while simultaneously being kept secure from corruption and external threats; the central hardware necessary to run a project like this distributed globally would be considerably more expensive, probably by multiple orders of magnitude, than the existing banks of servers. This is not going to happen. ‑ Iridescent 12:31, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

• A little bit of Economics 101: Money is resources. There is no difference. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 13:19, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
• Some of the things that we need are only available for money. Lawyers and domain name names being just two examples. If we encourage people to give resources rather than money then we get into the complication of domain names that are owned by volunteers who are paying for them and allowing the movement to use them. Lots of our readers are willing to give small amounts of money. So many that money is not a big problem for the Foundation. These sums are mostly so small and from so many people that we are financially independent. Yes there will be thousands of donors who give a few dollars this year and don't next year, but that isn't a problem, especially if other readers decide to donate. We do sometimes have problems with bigger donations, but we have enough small donations that we don't really need the big ones. Where we do have a problem is when we depend on someone for resources. For example a key part of our antivandalism software was unavailable for a weekend a few years ago because the volunteer whose server it ran on needed that server for something else that weekend. An important step in the collection of stats for the museums and archives who have donated pictures goes through a volunteers server and that formed a bottleneck as the reporting requirements out grew the capacity of the resources he donated. It is nice when people donate resources, and we do make some use of that. But we shouldn't kid ourselves that "never ask for money" was a viable option. Or that a preference for accepting resources wherever possible would give as much independence as we now have. Or that as many people would be willing and able to donate the right bit of technical resources as the pool of people willing to donate a small sum of money. ϢereSpielChequers 13:57, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

43[edit]

I'm working on an admin hopeful version of WP:42. I could use a bit of a hand with the name etc. Cheers. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 08:36, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

So, what do you think? Would it be MfD fodder or would it be acceptable to the community:

Please say at User talk:Anna Frodesiak/43

Anna Frodesiak (talk) 08:37, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

IDEA: Watchlist indication/activation from other users' pages[edit]

This is a problematic editor that I have to watch a little more closely in my capacity as a gnome admin, because I suspect him of sockpuppetry. While scrutinizing his edits I added a bunch of articles he's edited to my watchlist. It occurs to me that it would be helpful if I could add pages to my watchlist directly from his contribution history, instead of having to open each article and click the star. It would also be helpful if I could see in his contribution history which articles we have in common.

I can see this being used in a pernicious way to stalk other editors on Wikipedia, so maybe it makes more sense for admins, although I know a lot of power editors who might also benefit from this. Thoughts? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 02:01, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

As to your wish to compare lists of articles edited by different users, we do have this tool. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:07, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

The watchlist is already so crowded as to be confusing and difficult for many users, but this seems like the kind of thing you could run a userscript to do. (Bonus: you could turn it off when you didn't need it.) Maybe ask at WP:VPT to see whether any of the script-savvy folks agree with my guess that you could do this in userscript? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:05, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Od Mishehu, thank you for the tip, although I think you misread my request. :)

WhatamIdoing, your point is noted about the crowded watchlist, but I'm proposing functionality that would enable me to add articles to my watchlist directly from another user's contribution history. With sock operators, for example, it's necessary to follow them to other pages. Often they have niche interests, so if you start watching pages they are interested in, you will often be led to their socks sooner. I'll ask at VPT, though, to see if anyone can think of a quick solution. Regards, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 03:40, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction; that was sloppy of me. Perhaps some might disagree, but I think that Special:Contributions isn't quite as crowded as Special:Watchlist. It looks like a good script writer over at VPT is interested in this, so you may be able to try it out before long. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:59, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Research announcement: Learning from article revision histories[edit]

I'd like to announce an IEG proposal I'm working on titled "Learning from article revision histories". The basic idea is to develop some web tools for studying article revision histories which would allow, for instance, people to compare historical versions of articles or particular sections. I know there are a number of diff tools available, but as far as I know, there is currently no way to easily put a particular diff up for a vote from a survey of editors. I say "as far as I know" because I'm relatively new to Wikipedia, and it's likely I'm not the first to ask some of these questions. My hope is that tools like this could be used to make editorial oversight easier, and facilitate community involvement when disagreements arise. But the tools I'm proposing are only useful if they are addressing a real need, and I admittedly don't know much about the frequency of disagreement among editors. If you have some comments about whether disagreement is a actual problem that should be addressed, please consider leaving your thoughts on the talk page for the proposal.

Evoapps (talk) 20:52, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

You might want to look into Wikipedia:Labels, which can be used to score/tag individual diffs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:08, 8 April 2016 (UTC)