Moved from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers § Applicability of ENGVAR

Editorial control

An interesting comment, and a point I think worth some discussion. But perhaps a bit of a tangent to the discussion here. Could we explore this further at, say, your Talk page?

As to the key point here: do you still stand-by your statement that "WP:LOCALCONSENSUS is all fine and dandy when consensus is actually reachable"? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:53, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Begin new material. Ping: J. Johnson.

Re: 'Could we explore this further at, say, your Talk page?' – Sure. As I recall, it was about the notion that regular editors at an article should have more control over what it says than anyone else. (Actually, I included all that material in the collapsebox above.) It's "your go" for rebuttal on that thread.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:45, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I'm going to take a little time for a good review. BTW, the ping - {{U}} - didn't work, it's not clear why. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:11, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging seems very brittle. Been trying different templates to see if some work better. I think it may have something to do to proximity to a new sig by the poster.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:43, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

On LOCALCONSENSUS versus CONLEVEL

The main reasons that MOS and all our other guidelines on content exist are because the CONLEVEL processes frequently fail to produced usable results, leading to interminable conflict on a particular issue, or broader conflict between clusters of editors on the same issue, that are not resolved until addressed in a site-wide manner with broader input from the editing community. This really has nothing to do with MOS in particular. It's how all our policymaking works, it's why WP:RM exists, it's why WP:RFC exists, it't why all the WP:XFDs exist. You can denigrate these as "centralization" all you want (though you seem to only do this with MOS) but they're centralized by definition not by some kind of authoritarian conspiracy. They're centralized for the same reason your liver cells are centralized in your liver instead of randomly distributed throughout your body, and for the same reason your friends are centralized at your house when they come to your party, and are not still sitting in their own living rooms.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:45, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Centralization" and "freedom"

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style § Proposal: Disable giant quotation marks in mainspace; deprecate pull quotes in articles

As cofounder of various wikiprojects and a participant in lots of them, it's not like I'm unaware of or can't understand topically "local" desires for micromanagement of style issues. I really do get all of that. It just does not work here, for the same reason that having writers randomly make up their own styles in the Enclopaedia Brittanica, the New York Times or the journal Science would be a huge FAIL. Every other professional-grade publication in the world has a house style to produce consistency for both readers and writers/editors. I already provided an "your right to swing your fist ends when it hits my face" refutation of the "freedom" argument, over at WT:MOS, but that might be less distracting to go over here. Might even just move it here.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:45, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

My thanks for your impressive work in assembling the background discussions. I think there are several concepts here worth a good discussion (which is why I have taken some time with this), which might take a little work to disentangle, but they're all related to CONLEVEL.

I must immediately clarify something which seems to be hitting a nerve with you (and I don't wish to do that!). You seem to feel that I am "denigrating" certain policies as "centralization", that I see centralization as "authoritarian conspiracy", and that I take the MOS to be some kind of "shackle" on editorial personal freedom. Please! You have mis-taken my views; I am a lot more nuanced than you may have teken me. E.g., I am sure you understand that insisting on across-the-board adherence to some decision (however and where ever made) implicitly reduces the "freedom" of individual editors to decide differently. This is a classic centralization vs. decentralization situation. But please note: I am not saying "centralization is always evil". I have said that it is not always good, and I am sayng that it is not always necessary, but I am not opposed to centralization where it is proper or necessary. (Nor even in some cases where it is merely convenient.) I allude to these other views because others hold them, and I think they need to be addressed, but I am not asserting them.

I would also disabuse you of any notion that I am any kind of "MOS opponent ... bent on its dissolution". Not at all!! I favor having the MOS; my efforts are intended to improve it.

And I am running short today, so must return later. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:56, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'll keep all that in mind. But MOS opponents in favor of total or near-total decentralization definitely exist, so keeping your views distinct from their make take some careful wording (I don't mean with me, but in general). It's similar to the factor by which editors in favor of some kinds of adminship reform become difficult to distinguish from opponents of the adminship system existing, unless they write very precisely about what they see the issues as and what solutions they'd support for what problems.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  09:23, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What you refer to attests to how how touchy many edtiors have become on these matters. I generally try to be precise in what I say and avoid ambiguity. Though it is often wasted effort with some who don't pay attention, and annoying when people who haven't paid close enough attention run off in a totally irrelevant direction. And it is frustrating dealing with those inexperienced in critical thinking. Which is why we meet here instead of at WT:MOS.

BTW, I should probably also mention that this "shackling" effect of centralization is not unique to the MOS, and clarify that I did not raise it in order to bash the MOS. I raised it because it is pertinent to the development and application of the MOS. To the extent I am bashing any parts of the MOS it is in order to make improvements of those parts.

My view of how consensus is applicable at different levels follows from the appropriateness of allowing discretion – that is, the freedom to make decisions – at different levels.

There are some decisions, such as affect the organization directly, which should be not only decided at the top (centrally), but are properly excluded from being re-decided or modified at any other levels. These include legal matters such as copyright and libel. In such matters ordinary editors and even admins have no freedom to do otherwise, and this is proper.

There are other matters not so critical that WMF gets involved, but are left to "the community". While I think some invocations of "community" are improper, yet there are matters (such as uniformity of appearance) properly decided at this level. But it should be noted: there has never been any decision where the entire community was involved. Decisions on this level are invariably by a small group of editors (perhaps a dozen, rarely more than a score) who, as you said, "care enough to participate". They are NOT "the community", but, lacking objection (ratification by WP:SILENCE), such decisions are accepted on behalf of "the community". This is reasonable, because not everyone can, nor (given general lack of knowledge, experience, interest, etc.) should, participate in every decision. Even if (or especially if) everyone was equally competent and interested in deciding a matter, it would still make a lot of sense to have a many sub-committees handling a few decisions each than everyone trying to decide everything.

All of the above I grant. But it is proper (and necessary, in that no bureaucratic apparatus can do it all) that some decisions are made at the lowest level, by individual editors. These are usually where something is dependent on some aspect of the subject, and therefore cannot be done properly without some comprehension of the subject. Neither the "community" at large, nor even groups of editors "that care" generally but lack specific familiarity, should presume to assess matters where they lack necessary knowledge. This is where I say de-centralization is most proper. It is not permission for anarchy, it is respect for the knowledge and assessment of others (when the exist) who are best informed on some point. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:24, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@J. Johnson: Agreeing with much of that. I'm going to editorialize a bit; this is kind of a draft essay (probably two essays) rather than an argument against you, for the most part.

While of course I agree that, e.g., WP:OFFICE matters can't be dealt with in a decentralized manner, it doesn't automatically follow that everything that does not rise to that level must be decentralized as subject to "local" control. There are several reasons for this, the two biggest being that a) WP has a strong interest in consistency (not just of styling of text in articles, but of application of rules and best practices generally), because this entire project is the largest cat-herding exercise in history and will run off the rails in many ways if not funneled productively; and b) WP has a strong interest in strife reduction, such that the vast majority of the time it's better to codify a "this has already been consensus-decided previously, so do what we already did" rule/guideline/example – when it is feasible to do so because the decision can actually be generalized without "reader-hateful" results – than remain silent on it and allow the debate to re-re-re-recur, page after page. And there are more long-term-stategic, project-survival reasons I'll touch on later.

External authors writing about Wikipedia have observed that the entire place, top to bottom, is run by whoever bothers to chime in at any given moment; this applies top to bottom. So our apparently shared perception in this regard is confirmed by reliable sources, as it were. That doesn't mean that centralized decision making about WP:POLICY (in the broad sense, including guidelines) is a bad thing. If often actually is not the case that a change with a small consensus sticks; such things often get reverted/overturned, and for many processes we have counter-processes expressly for this purpose, e.g. WP:MR to undo bad WP:RMs, and WP:DRV to undo bad WP:XFDs, etc. So there doesn't seem to be a general problem in this regard; we have proof against WP:FACTIONs doing short-sighted things that do not actually reflect the larger community's values (even if that defense has a few holes that have to find and patch from time to time). It's remarkably successful (the only comparable example is probably the free software movement, which is actually possibly more effective because it's a meritocracy; while "anyone" can contribute in theory, not literally "everyone" can in actual practice be a part of GNU/Linux and the like, because incompetence will get you kicked).

Obviously, some things are local decisions; the bulk of our editing is case-by-case application of site-wide norms, and not-so-common WP:COMMONSENSE and (again) competence. We end up with a usable "product" because of the site-wide rules. Given the same five sources, you and I would write superficially very different new articles, but if we're both good Wikipedians, an analysis would show that they cover the same basic points, use the sources in the same ways, have a comparable balance and focus, and follow a similar style, even if every phrase in ever sentence is different. (If the topic is controversial or very complicated, they versions would diverge more the more this is true, with additional input by other editors pushing them toward equivalence over time; the norms would later be reinforced – almost forced – by the GA/FA processes.) Centralization of best practices where feasible is what makes this possible.

Where problems arise is when (most frequently in the case of a lopsided PoV to push, and for MoS-related issues, it's usually a "specialized" one), concerns for "local" control that would be valid for some content editing matters ("I'm a subject-matter expert", "this issue is complicated and needs special treatment at this article because of the facts surrounding this particular topic", "things are just different when it comes to this culture", etc.) are misapplied to something else that is not a local matter, but a site-wide one: style issues [a new one every other day]; how to use sources [see WT:MEDRS right now for a bizarre case of "we want to use press releases as secondary sources" special-exceptionalism]; different civility standards [see WP:RFARB for ongoing e-cigarettes case in which it's seriously being argued that years of flamewarring should be allowed to continue, on some WP:ITSUSEFUL basis]; arbitrary special pleading exemption from sourcing standards [see huge thread atop WP:VPPOL for never-ending demands for transgendered subjects to have history rewritten for them so that their "deadnames" are never used in articles about their lives before "coming out"]; and on and on.

It most often does not come down to anything like "groups of editors ... [who] lack specific familiarity, should [not] presume to assess matters where they lack necessary knowledge". It takes no special knowledge other than of WP policy/procedures/norms to apply it properly to any topical situation that arises here. The world's foremost authority on rocket science does not know better than anyone else, by dint of that expertise, how to best style an article on that topic for WP's audience, how to best behave when editing it, how to best apply sources by type and value to it, etc. Such an editor may well be able to identify sources that, in their content or the reputability of their authors/publishers are less or more reliable, which real-world programs are collaborative vs. full of know-it-alls who may be initially behave differently here, and whether particular styles are more commonly found in journals on that topic; but this doesn't translate in to a change of rules or how we decided them. (As as side point, per WP:5P, actually all editors should "presume to assess matters" to the best of their ability, or nothing would ever get done; we cannot tag every page with {{Expert}} and wait around. We trust that consensus will sort it out, and that if we collectively err, experts will fix it later.)

To return to MoS stuff: We bend over backwards to try to satisfy demands to follow actual real-world standards (especially at WP:MOSNUM) in various fields, but it takes a lot of experience and attention-paying to separate genuine claims in this regard from improper abuse of WP as a WP:SOAPBOX to push something that does not have real-world acceptance [see WP:BIRDCON for the canonical example]. A "respect for the knowledge and assessment of others ... who are best informed on some point" is very frequently demanded where it does not actually apply. It's the "We're experts on X so everything involving an article on X should be under the control X wikiproject" fallacy (which is ridiculous on multiple levels, not just the ones covered here). An even more insidious version of this is the "I wrote most of this article, so you have no business coming in here and messing with anything" fallacy, which is quite rampant and patently un-wiki. If I could undo anything at all about WP:POLICY I would undo the three (I think) places that guidelines default to a "first major contributor" cutoff, and revise these to something not tied to the editor but the edits, e.g. "state of the article when it stopped being a stub" (but in pithier wording). I think an unbelievable amount of future problems would be forestalled with such a change, but I haven't worked out how to approach it yet.

Anyway, the fact that WP is run, at every level, by those who show up to make the decisions means that local control by self-declared experts will not, cannot work, and demands for it are illegitimate. Besides, we can't actually verify credentials anyway; one of WP's biggest scandals was a "trusted" admin who lied like a rug about academic and professional credentials, before WP had learned to be both skeptical of credentialism and of admins, and exerted a lot of control over a particular content area. One consequence of this is that the Dunning Kruger effect (to which no one is immune – see PS at end of that) occasionally leads to bone-headed decisions by gaggles of cluebags wading into a discussion they are not really competent to assess correctly. This is a necessary and very much lesser evil than allowing self-declared expert factions to set up fiefdoms here (more so than they already have). Such WP:RANDY errors are swiftly corrected when the actual experts notice and revisit the issue.

PS: See lead item on my user page; fiefdom projects are ready-made for hostile takeover by real, no-shit, serious professional/paid/agent PoV pushers representing external entities hell-bent on warping WP coverage to suit their PR/propaganda goals. The WP:BIRDCON thing was actually another case in point of this (the project was effectively taken over, quite rapidly, by hard-core pushers of one organization's wanna-be "standard", and they then started trying to spread that pseudo-standard (only about birds) to cover all lifeforms in all WP articles, such that even "Cougar"/"Mountain Lion" was being capitalized (and this disruptive campaign was spearheaded by an admin, who is still an admin). I am not kidding; see its talk page archives, where fans of the forced capitalization blatantly lied about sources). Similar story at bottlenose dolphin. At one point every single rodent species article had been WP:FAITACCOMPLI-moved to capitalized common names. So were all the primate ones, despite an explicit real-world convention against capitalizing primate vernacular names! It was directly comparable to the Franciscan order quietly taking over the WikiProject Catholicism, bending it to Franciscan-only will, and then for 8 years or so, warring to impose Franciscan stylistic and titling norms on all religion articles. This kind of extraneous WP:ADVOCACY and WP:NOTHERE wikipolitical warfare is a constant threat here; the e-cigs ArbCom case has evidence of four different advocacy camps PoV pushing that entire set of articles. So, yeah, I'm definitely a supporter of "centralized" solutions to things that thwart this kind of abuse of WP resources as a platform for agenda enactment, and more generally for strife reduction of all kinds. Occasional flareups of anti-centralization strife are a sniffle compared to the fatal epidemic we'd have of article-by-article deathmatches without the centralization.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  17:25, 16 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That is going to take several days to digest! But looking forward to it. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:17, 16 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I was afraid your reaction would be "WTF? TL;DR!" Heh. I think there's the germ of both a WP:Centralization essay, and (with other material elsewhere) a WP:Propagandizing essay in here, after logicking it all out and then compressing it sharply into an outline, then working that into prose the average reader would digest. (The Prop. one would need to merge with similar pages, or just be formulated as improvements to one of them, e.g. WP:Propaganda or WP:Advocacy.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:02, 16 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Nah, I'm quite good with long, provided it's worthwhile. But I have been rather distracted, so still chewing. (Lots of that log-kicking.) Of course, if all this was obvious there would be no need to sort it out, so of course it takes work. :-0 ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 17:50, 19 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@SMcCandlish:. Getting some serious distractions, but will offer a partial response. Subject to revision.

Re WP:OFFICE: strictly speaking that is only about measures where WMF feels the "normal site/community process(es)" must be shortcutted. "These edits are generally temporary measures to prevent legal trouble or personal harm ....". Also: "Neither this policy nor actions taken under it override core policies ...." This is a very minor instance of central action in respect of specific situations. What I have in mind is where "the office" (Jimbo or WMF) decides or determines a policy, such as the Wikimedia:Terms of use, WP:Non discrimination policy ("The Wikimedia Foundation prohibits discrimination ..."), prohibition of "non-commercial" images (per Jimbo; see also WP:FAQ/Copyright), and so forth. This could also include external matters, including legal.

Where you say that what is de-central need not be "local": yes; that is a key point of my argument. It is very important to note that while "central" and "centralized" can pertain to matters handled solely at the "center" (or, in a hierarchical organization, at the top), de-central, or not-central, does not mean solely at the bottom: there are multiple middle levels. In brief, it is not a binary either-or. Also, "local" does not necessarily (or at least, properly should not) mean at the periphery or bottom; it means only place (from the Latin locus). The connotation of bottom arises because the "place" most people initially consider is that closest to them (their 'neighborhood"). But "local" can be applied at any level, and properly so. This includes practically all of the "community" level stuff. A good part of my concern is about editors at one level trying to control or preempt discussions at other levels. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:18, 23 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note to self and WP:JAGUARs: I conceded on two different things in the same debate, pretty much back-to-back: [28] [29]

I sometimes wonder if I should concede points more often. Am I stubborn? But when I review the day's discussions, I find that I generally don't comment without a clearly conceived rationale for what I'm saying (the first example is an exception), and I don't seem to have any difficulty reversing myself, or being shunted into a third option, when I'm clearly wrong, there's a better approach, or I missed something (as in the second example). Still, it's good to spot-check oneself for collaborative collegiality from time to time.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:14, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Dictatorship of the proletariat. Legobot (talk) 00:01, 8 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style § IMOS's own overuse of "U.S."

SMcC, I just saw this edit and the edit summary rationale for it: [30]. Based on your rationale, I reverted the change. A majority of American style guides, the U.S. government, the legal professional and most U.S. newspapers continue to prefer "U.S." over "US," the latter largely being favored by non-American media and British and Commonwealth style guides. If you want to make these changes, please discuss them on the MOS talk page first. I believe you will find that significant percentage of our fellow American editors -- especially those who are informed about American style guides and media usage -- will disagree with your take on this. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:42, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You misinterpret the point. It has nothing to do with what is or isn't dominant usage in American publications, but with whether MOS should follow its own advice about inconsistent, mixed usage on the same page. I resent your "especially those who are informed about American style guides and media usage" jab. I own probably more style guides than anyone within a 2,000 mile radius, including ones you've probably never heard of, and I don't just cherry-pick media usage data I like, but actually break it down by market segment, etc. (NB: In this regard, American legal usage and U.S. government usage are the same market; the American legal system, like the U.S. military, is an extension of its government.) That said, there are now two threads open about this at WT:MOS, separated into the two distinct issues (MOS following its own advice, and whether what MOS says needs revision).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:02, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Snježana Kordić. Legobot (talk) 00:01, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Moved to WP:Administrators' noticeboard/Indicents#Threats, aspersion-casting, etc. by Doc9871

SMcCandlish, reverting your arbitrary, one-man consensus rewrite of an essay that's been here for years is not "disruptive".[31] I can direct you again to WP:CON or WP:EW, but that would be pointless, would it not? We are not going to ignore the rules in favor of a ridiculous thing such as this. Your content does not have consensus, and adding it in repeatedly against consensus is edit-warring. Doc talk 03:02, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to stay away from dramaboards, because they're not productive uses of time here. Please see WP:WRONGVERSION. Who prefers what title and content version at that article right this moment isn't germane; the move and the content change were made in a single administrative closure of that RM. You and someone else are challenging it, and two three admins have told you at that discussion that trying to revert it while the WP:MR is in process is disruptive and counterproductive.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:59, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You and others are hijacking due process here, and it will all come out in the wash. Doc talk 06:22, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Did you happen to notice how my last revert of Softlavender [32] actually led to them endorsing my opposition to the move?[33] You probably missed it. Do you think it was because I somehow intimidated them? Or do you think that maybe, possibly, you could be wrong here? No of course not. How silly! I bullied Softlavender into submission. Doc talk 08:41, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You're mischaracterizing. She thinks there wasn't actually consensus for it, and that it should be reopened, or that the essays should be split. This is very different from your position, that consensus runs the other direction and that it's all "p.c. bullshit". And it's not your RM. No one is endorsing your noise there; you rather, are endorsing the motion by the MR filer, as is Softlavender. I'm skeptical I have anything further to discuss with you here.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:39, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Found this: [34] Decided not to post it at the article talk, per your excellent advice about DFTT, but figured you'd still be interested in it. I think this letter sharpens the horns of the dilemma in that Mayr denounces racism but actively promotes "positive eugenics," and I suspect therein lies the rub; we view them as one and the same today, at least philosophically. Offering no particular solution or advice, just food for thought. Montanabw^(talk) 04:50, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It wasn't an uncommon idea in the era (and, in different terms and forms remains one). No one likes the word "eugenics" now (I feel sorry for people who actually call themselves "neo-eugencists"!) because of its association with some really bad ideas and actions (not just Nazis, but all kinds of things like coerced sterilization in US prisons, etc.). But prenatal screening, gene therapy, GMOs, and a lot of other modern "stuff" are all essentially applications of the same idea. Historically and culturally, it's not right to portray Mayr as racist; he was just a product of his time, using the language and science of the era. In 1971 not that many people had heard the word "eugenics" outside academia (it was actually Star Trek in 1967, in the episode "Space Seed" that probably did the trick, but it was watched 100x more in syndication in the mid-to-late 1970s and the 1980s than when originally aired. :-) So it wasn't unreasonable for Mayr to use the term in 1971 and intend to limit it to a notion of "positive eugenics", i.e. the use of genetics to help humanity, even if it's a term we'd say "WTF?" about today. By way of analogy, when I was a child, it was normal and kind of respectful to refer to African-Americans as Negroes (cf. United Negro College Fund), but the word today is considered racism-laden. Same goes for "Oriental", "women's lib", and various other terms that have taken on a negative connotation (while some have gone the other direction, e.g. "queer" has been adopted as a positive self-label in the LGBT community).

I do really think we should avoid any further discussion of Mayr at that page, and how any of the Race (biology) article is thought/hoped by some people to relate to racism in humans, for now, because the page obviously has one goblin under the bridge already. Talk:Race (human categorization) has way more watchers so if such stuff is shunted there it'll be handled better there. I'm trying, when I get time, to nail down Race (biology) in strict, zero-OR, just the facts style, field by field, and encouraging more of same (e.g. the new birds thread). If the article is sculpted to be precise as to how the word is used in biology, any attempts to worm in human racialist stuff will stick out like a sore thumb. I think this will take months, but so be it. It will probably be hazardous to try to include much if any material about how early use of the word in biology was commingled with Victorian views of humans and misused, until the "what this means in science today" material is nailed down really tight. I do think the article should cover that eventually, or at least mention it, but the more I look at it, the more the history section of the human categorization article might be the best locus for it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:33, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

And I wish you good luck! "as to how the word is used in biology". Yes, this is precisely the goal. But everything depends on sources. One book by Mayr tells more about this subject than a lot of other sources you might be able to find on the internet. My very best wishes (talk) 15:45, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ranters and philosophy pundits on teh Interwebs aren't reliable about Mayr, but Species problem indicates that his model of how to define species is being questioned. He's a reliable source for one definition of species, but not all of them, nor for his being better. He's not a reliable source for how "race" is defined with regard to people today (no sources more than a few years old are). He may or may not be a reliable source for how "race" is used as an informal taxon, if he said anything about that, but that's not what we're quoting him for. Ultimately we can probably replace the Mayr references at Race (biology) with a "here are the modern, conflicting approaches to that question" material, cribbed from Species problem and Species. We only need to touch on that issue.

The real question for this article is "how is a race, in the biology sense, different from other things, like subspecies, variety, forma, subsection, etc." (some of these are only classifications in botany)? This question's answer will differ based on the four classificatory types of races (physiological, geographic, etc.). My next task on that front is nailing down the difference between "physiological race" and "forma specialis" in botany. One source so far hints that they're effectively synonymous but used in different contexts. I can observe from use in papers that the former is used with non-latin names, e.g. "race N1" and is not used as a part of a taxonomic name (though it may follow one), while the latter is used as part of the scientific name and only with latin names (e.g. Frumiosus bandersnaticus f. sp. pacificae), yet is still officially considered "informal" by the ICN (and thus surely by the ICNCP, though I have not checked yet). But this leaves unclear whether the same exact population can have both kinds of name or whether they're used exclusively, or used overlappingly such that a specimen might have both, but both would not necessarily cover all specimens covered by each. Need an actual explanatory source on that, not just extrapolating from observed usage, as it's easy to engage in OR doing that.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:01, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously, that's a good idea to collect as many different RS as possible about race in biology. However, to my knowledge, these views by biologists, including textbook definitions of races and species are rather similar to the views by Mayr (if you can prove me wrong with sources, that's fine). In addition, I have never seen animal "races" used anywhere except population genetics and evolution, unlike "strains" and "subspecies" that are widely used for biological classification. Once again, you can prove me wrong by collecting more sources. So, good luck! My very best wishes (talk) 16:48, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Done that already. The mycological/phytopathological use has nothing to do with population genetics or evolution, but host species. Species question already illustrates (with sources) that biologists are divided on the matter, largely along cladistic lines.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  17:22, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, this is not done. The cases you included have everything to do with population biology and evolution. In particular, this your source tells in abstract that "The usefulness of race identification as a guide for the grower in selecting appropriate cultivars is limited because changes or shifts in the pathogen population are common." Actually, this is also one of the reasons why race is not very useful for biological taxonomy. My very best wishes (talk) 18:43, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I decline to argue with you about this, other than to point out when the source tells us that genetics played no role in how they classified these races that's the exact opposite of proof that it's an evolutionary biology matter. I know how to write an article on a biology topic. I have no interest in satisfying you or anyone else in particular, only finding sources and writing proper encyclopedic material based on them. You have a clear agenda to push; that's a WP:POV problem. Assumptions are one thing; I've had to revise my own substantially on this very topic, because the term has much more currency in more fields than I thought it did; but I have no time for your WP:IDHT games.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:06, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm comfortable with using Mayr for limited purposes of Mayr can do best, as SMc noted, though newer sources and more updated analysis is best. As a person over 50, I can tell you that mainstream eugenics discussions did predate Star Trek, as literature of the 50s and early 60s (which I was still reading during education years as reference sources and such...) did discuss it a great deal ... law cases such as Skinner v. Oklahoma hit during World War II, yet we still have not explicitly overturned Buck v. Bell either. So the importance of very careful sourcing cannot be overemphasized. Montanabw^(talk) 19:18, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Right, right. I was thinking "among the non-university-educated unwashed masses".  :-) Re: Buck v. Bell: SCotUS generally won't reverse itself unless given a novel case to work with that lets them doublethink their way around the precedent system, to put it critically. We'd need to have new negative-eugenics laws to test in court. I'd just as soon leave Buck v. Bell alone, ha ha, as long as possible, than see a new wave of forced sterilization laws. What's going on these days is that inmates, especially women, and especially minority women, are "offered" free sterilization in exchange for things, or just browbeaten into it during their incarceration. A Puebloan woman I know in New Mexico (who did not opt in) said they were especially pushing Native American women prisoners to go under the knife, as if trying to just "ethnically cleanse" by way of reducing the available mothers in the population to below a sustainability threshold. Have heard of similar crap in Arizona. But it's "voluntary", see? [sigh].  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:18, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Which is why we still need lawyers and the ACLU. Not a colorblind society yet at all. Montanabw^(talk) 21:44, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. True proof I'm a centrist: I'm a card-carrying member of both the ACLU and the NRA. Heh.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:47, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Clearly. I'm not "up" on how to do WP:SPI these days, though. I haven't filed one in years.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:38, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Update: Figured it out, opened the case.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:54, 16 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

 – Answered.

Hello. I wanted to ask about WikiGnomes as I see you display the icon and do work in this area. I really enjoy reading articles on Wikipedia over a wide variety of subjects, and when I find typos, grammatical errors etc like to correct them. Is there criteria necessary in order to join this group as it seems like an area I could be of service in? Thank you in advance, 79616gr (talk) 23:55, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@79616gr: None at all! You can just add the {{User wikipedia/WikiGnome}} userbox to your user page, or add the category directly ([[Category:Wikipedian WikiGnomes]]). And you don't have to self-identify as a gnome to do this stuff anyway, it's just a nice "show of solidarity". There tends to be a slight bias against editors who work on improving content rather than adding new content, so it's nice to take a step toward erasing that.  :-) If the changes are truly minor, like fixing typos, it's good to use the "This is a minor edit" feature below the editing window so people's watchlists don't get hit with trivial changes. You might also be interested in WP:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors for a more organized approach to improving articles more substantively.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:32, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that. I'll be adding the icon and will check out the the Guild. 79616gr (talk) 13:47, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Most welcome.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:53, 16 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Unresolved

 – Still need to do this.

Haven't filed a MW bug since they quit using Bugzilla. from HT:CS1. -> You can log in to Phabricator using your MW name and password. Filing a bug is simple: hit the plus sign in the top right, select "Task". And the rest should be easy. --Izno (talk) 00:44, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

See also mediawikiwiki:Phabricator/Help/Reclaim_Bugzilla_and_RT_accounts for after you've logged into Phabricator the first time. --Izno (talk) 00:47, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Izno: Thanks. I had difficulty creating an account there last year, due to some kind of database problem they were having, and never did try to resolve that after giving up at some point. Will try again.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:25, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

 – Commented.

Formal merge proposal There is currently a merge discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red#Formal merge proposal. As you are a member of WiR, this is a courtesy notification in case you want to join in the discussion. Thank you. Rosiestep (talk) 02:51, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Unresolved

 – The rDNA one can't be fixed w/o source work.

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SMcC, per WP:TPO, "The basic rule—with some specific exceptions outlined below—is that you should not edit or delete the comments of other editors without their permission. . . . Never edit or move someone's comment to change its meaning, even on your own talk page. . . . Cautiously editing or removing another editor's comments is sometimes allowed, but normally you should stop if there is any objection.

I have objected twice to your refactoring of my comments, and you have continued to re-organize the main MOS discussion page, including my comments, to your own liking. Hatting the lists of other editors, while not hatting your own, appears to be some sort of attempt to gain an advantage in the present discussion. Re-ordering/refactoring the comments of other editors, after their objection and contrary to WP:TPO is edit-warring in contravention of the talk page guidelines. TPO could not be more clear, and I have quoted it above for your benefit. Please do not continue to do it. Thank you. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 12:04, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Again, please do not re-factor other editors' comments. I am now respectfully requesting that you revert your own edit: [36]. You are relying on WP:REFACTOR, an essay. The talk page guidelines specifically state: "Cautiously editing or removing another editor's comments is sometimes allowed, but normally you should stop if there is any objection." I have raised my objection firmly and politely to your refactoring of my comments. Per WP:TPO, please revert your change and restore the original order of the MOS talk page thread. Thank you. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 12:11, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Again", see WP:REFACTOR. It's explicitly permissible and encouraged to perform that kind of refactoring. This is not a "normal" case because you are revertwarring (destructively, eliminating intervening edits) to preserve unproductive confusion between two different conversations. Please just drop the stick.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:21, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

PS: The very reason I reverted my hatting and refactored instead was because while the hatting was justified – your lists were totally off-topic in the thread in question – it occurred to me that it would look like suppression. I therefore merged the source list into the relevant thread and put yours first. Any insinuation of bias is pretty silly.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:26, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Again, you are relying on WP:REFACTOR, which is an essay. The talk page guidelines per WP:TPO state "Cautiously editing or removing another editor's comments is sometimes allowed, but normally you should stop if there is any objection." SMcC, you have been around long enough to understand the difference between a guideline and an essay, and your reliance on the essay is misplaced in this case, as you well know. The specific guidance of a guideline trumps conflicting advice of an essay every time. You know this already. Again, please revert your refactoring/reordering of comments to which I have firmly objected per the talk page guidelines. Thank you. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 12:29, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Again" this doesn't qualify under "normally". How many times do you want to have the same argument on how many different pages? You do not own your posts here. When they're disruptively confusing, its perfectly legitimate to refactor them.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:39, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe ask for WP:3O. If it's just utterly intolerable to you to be refactored even when you're posting in the wrong thread, I guess we can hat both threads and start all over again, but I think that would be a total waste of time and effort. In the interim, please stop deleting other people's posts in mass reverts just to get your way. What rationale would you have for purposely reducing clarity, muddling one thread beyond recognition, and reducing the other to half the material it should have? Do you not realize that by forcing your sourcing lists into the wrong thread, you're making yourself look like you're intentionally disrupting the one thread, while you're also incidentally stripping your own position out of the thread where it matters?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:33, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Again, you are relying on WP:REFACTOR, which is an essay. The talk page guidelines per WP:TPO state "Cautiously editing or removing another editor's comments is sometimes allowed, but normally you should stop if there is any objection." Now you're wikilawyering. You have refactored an entire talk page thread, and inserted additional editorial comments after refactoring, apparently with the intention of making the restoration of the original talk page thread as difficult as possible. The order and meaning of comments has been altered by such refactoring. I have timely, firmly and repeatedly asked you to stop refactoring my comments. You rely on an essay, which you know is trumped by the guidelines. I am not "disrupting" anything. Please restore the original thread. Thank you. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 12:49, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Copy-pasting the same material over and over again is not constructive. There is no "trumping" here because "normally" does not mean "always". WP:COMMONSENSE does not permit you to completely mangle two threads and totally delete others' posts in the process just to get your way.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  13:12, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

SMcC, it seems self-evident that you are "playing to the stands" and attempting to build a case for others to read in your talk page comments here. In light of that, I will be as clear and concise as I can. Ignoring the clear advice of the WP:TPO guideline is not constructive, and 95 out of 100 Wikipedia editors would have the common courtesy to drop the stick when another editor objects to the refactoring of their talk page comments. I have repeatedly quoted the relevant portions of WP:TPO, which you apparently did not know existed before this discussion, for your benefit. I am sorry that you find my repeated citation of the talk page guidelines -- the governing guidance on point -- to be objectionable and/or unconstructive. I find your hatting of other editors' lists of relevant references, followed by your complete refactoring of an entire MOS talk page thread to your own liking, highly objectionable, inappropriate and clearly contrary to the quoted passages of WP:TPO. The word "normally" means "normally." There is nothing unusual about the MOS talk page thread that makes it "abnormal," and your attempted wikilawyering of commonly used words is also objectionable, and, well, just plain weird. During your refactoring of an MOS talk page thread, you also inserted several editorial comments, which you now characterize as "deleting others' posts in the process" when your refactoring of the page was reverted. Because you inserted these comments in the midst of your refactoring -- quite possibly intentionally for this reason -- you left the objecting editor with no choice but to remove them. If you would like, I will revert your objectionable refactoring and group your intermixed editorial comments in a separate section for your benefit and to do with them as you like. When you inserted them in the midst of a refactoring to which another editor had already objected, you did so at your own risk.

SMcC, the Manual of Style is no one's private playground. Its talk pages are the province of every Wikipedia editor who wishes to bring their concerns about style issues there for discussion. Common courtesy, and, yes, common sense should suggest to you that refactoring the MOS talk page comments of other editors is problematic, especially in a discussion to which you are an involved party.

In the ordinary and well-understood precedence of Wikipedia policies, guidelines and essay, essay form the bottom rank of guidance. As an experienced editor, you know that guidelines trump essays every time when any conflict arises between their guidance. Wikilawyering the word "normally" does not help your case, because there is nothing unusual in this talk page thread -- other than your attempt to dominate this MOS discussion thread. I would suggest that you begin by respecting the opinions of your fellow editors, and make your case(s) as best you can without being disruptive. Also, please be mindful of what Shakespeare once said: "brevity is the soul of wit"; try not to say in 4000 words what might be better said (and better understood by others) in 40. Regards. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 14:07, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How am I "playing the stands" by ensuring that your material gets top-billing in the thread in which it's actually relevant? Deadhorsing this into the ground with a text wall (in which you lecture me about brevity!) that just reiterates in longer form what you already said isn't going to sway me. WT:MOS certainly is not anyone's personal playground, so stop treating at your own, for commingling unrelated issues and making a mess out of discrete discussions. You do not actually own your own posts here. Browbeating me with your belief that guidelines always "trump" essays, when the real issue is your attempt to spin "normally" into "invariably" isn't productive. I'm very obviously not the one wikilawyering here; you're the one posting about "jurisdiction" (the word here is "scope"), and trying to make precedence arguments that WP:POLICY is pretty clear to not exist here. Essays that have over a decade of consensus on WP are just as much a part of WP's consensus on best practices as are guidelines, they're just a different kind of document; as another example, WP:AADD is widely relied upon by XfD closers as reliable guidance. PS: I'm just going to ignore the accusation of bad faith ("quite possibly intentionally for this reason") on the assumption that it's just unclear to you that such refactoring is not and never has been controversial. This is the first time I can recall a dispute about it arising in something like 5 years, and I do this regularly because it's helpful to everyone to not have commingled, confused topics trying to discussion unconnected issues.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:45, 12 August 2015 (UTC) Expanded 15:03, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I know why it was rejected. What is it with you re-re-re-stating the same thing over and over? I am moving on. This tendentious niggling of yours keeps interrupting my work. Drop the stick, drop the stick, drop the stick.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:35, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Good. Just to be clear on the definition of the word "niggling," it's niggling when I correct your misuse of the word scope" and provide a link to the Mediation Committee policy page, but it's not niggling when you mistakenly attempt to correct my proper usage of the word "jurisdiction?" Did I get that right, or did I misunderstand you in some way? And, yes, I am laughing out loud as I type this.

And while we're "niggling," here's another correction of your various assertions above, directly from the text of Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines:

Policies have wide acceptance among editors and describe standards that all users should normally follow. . . .

Guidelines are sets of best practices that are supported by consensus. Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. . . .

Essays are the opinion or advice of an editor or group of editors (such as a WikiProject) for which widespread consensus has not been established. They do not speak for the entire community and may be created and written without approval. . . .

Despite various essays to the contrary, the generally accepted precedence of policies, guidelines and essays is usually pretty clear. Anytime you want to promote WP:REFACTOR from an essay to a guideline, it's that away for an RfC on point. Cheers, Mac. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 16:33, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ah! Good point. WP:POLICY has changed since the last time I studied it; my bad. Once upon a time it indicated that any page that accurately encapsulated consensus should not be ignored, including key essays, and information pages (Help:, etc.). It's a shame this has been lost. Re: Niggling: Also a fair point. I shouldn't pick at your legalisms while complaining about nitpicking. I don't think you understood the "jurisdiction" point though; it's not how WP normally conceptualizes this, even if you can find one page to the contrary (aside pages about actual law, and aside from WP:Arbitration; ArbCom uses it because it's explicitly modeled on a court). But WP:RFM does not use this word, WP:MEDCOM and WP:Mediation Committee/Procedures do not mention "jurisdiction" anywhere. Nor does the "Request for mediation rejected" notice below. Nor does the rejection message at the request I made, nor do any of the following: WP:Requests for mediation/Guide, WP:RFARB, WP:3O, WP:DRN, WP:ANI, WP:PNB, or even WP:AE despite it being ArbCom's enforcement. The use of "jurisdiction" outside the context of ArbCom on WP is rare, and it's rare for a reason: The community can determine consensus anywhere it wants to; it usually declines to do so when things are out-of-scope (a.k.a. off-topic) for that page, but no one speaks of "jurisdiction" around here unless they're lawyering. So go ahead and laugh at how clever you are for finding an exception (that could easily be edited right now to say "scope" instead of "jurisdiction" and actually produce a page that better reflects WP's actual operating principles). I just find it sad, but true to form given the nature of this overall dispute, that you're more interested in WP:WINNING on a technicality than being on the right side of things in the bigger picture.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:37, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• No, Mac, let's be crystal clear: it's not about "winning," it's about courtesy. When you say that another editor only cares about winning, it is insulting on at least two levels: (1) first, it's a direct ad hominem attack on the validity of the other editor's argument, i.e., ignore the editor's argument because he is not serious; (2) second, it's an implied ad hominem attack on the other editor's integrity, i.e., they don't care about the substance of the argument. Neither is true here. In the past, you once said that I engage "sport debate," an endemic problem with attorneys in online forums (or words to that effect); that's insulting on three levels, including professionally. I can't with any certainty know whether you intend to be personally insulting when you make such comments, but it's not an unreasonable inference to anyone on the receiving end. If you don't mean to be personally insulting, then I suggest you not make such comments in the future, and I know that your own arguments will be better received substantively and with greater courtesy by others. That's the Golden Rule in practical application. And to be perfectly clear, I am not spending time on your user talk page today because I enjoy the witty repartee; I am quite serious now, and I am not LOL'ing.

• Now for the courtesy part, Mac. Talk page comments are one of the most personal things we do on Wikipedia. Comments are how we interact with others, how we make our arguments, and by and large how other editors evaluate our intelligence, logic, literacy, strength of argument, and personal credibility; apart from our article edits, our comments are how our fellow editors come to know us. By re-arranging my comments, separating them from the supporting lists I had taken the time to compile, and then adding a confusing and not entirely accurate introduction to them, you stripped them of their context and minimized their impact. By burying the lists with your own, you minimized the impact of the fact that 85% of the top 20 major dailies in America are quite consistent in their use. And I'm pretty sure that violates one or more of the basic criteria of the REFACTOR essay, too. I wouldn't presume to tell you how to refactor another editor's comments, but it would have been far less aggravating to me if you had not separated my comments from the supporting data that supplied the comments' empirical support and context. That said, you could have avoided the entire episode by extending one simple courtesy to me: you could have simply asked first, and I would have had the opportunity to share the substance of the preceding sentence with you. If you had extended that simple courtesy, I would have accepted less than my ideal resolution because that's what people often do when they are being courteous to each other.

• As for the "niggling," Mac, yes, it is petty, but let's remember that I'm not the one who started the needling over definitions. If you object to being needled about minor points, I have a suggestion: don't do it, and you will receive far less of it in return. Personally, I think jurisdiction is a far better and more accurate choice of words, but that's not really the point. Don't needle others over minor points if you don't want to be needled in return. Again, another simple extension of the Golden Rule.

• And, finally, the idea that an essay trumps the guidelines is misguided. Well, heck, I'll leave that alone. You seem to agree with me now, so there's no need to belabor the point. And I believe I've answered the substance of your question below, with the second half of my second paragraph above. Contrary to what you seem to believe, Mac, I'm really very agreeable. Treat me with a modicum of respect and common courtesy, and don't mess with my talk page comments without asking. Sort of like: "Greetings! I'm a real person, like you. Collaboration improves when we remember this about each other." Easy-peasy. I might even come to appreciate your sense of humor over time. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 20:02, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Taking these in order (and thanks for taking the time to respond calmly and in detail).

1. I'll take all of that in the honest spirit in which it's offered, and give no return criticism or rebuttal on this point other than to say a) that much of what you've posted in this entire debate has appeared like sport argument to me, commingled with unreasonable ire that's clouding whether you getting your way is more important than the threads being sensible for everyone else; and b) I don't recall making such a generalization about lawyers. I spent a long time (almost a decade) surrounded with attorneys I respect a great deal, every working day, and noticed a rather consistent pattern of debate technique that is effective in courtrooms and brief but not conducive to a meeting of the minds. I don't think lawyers are bad or stupid or mean, they just tend, though occupational habituation, to a style of argument.

   So, that said, I will apologize in several ways, albeit without false confession or simpering attempts to emotionally manipulate you with handwringing: I'm sorry if I've come across as just trying to be offensive. I'm not. Constructively critical when it seems necessary. I do concede that a reference to WP:WIN or a similar page can seem like an accusation, even if I mean "see if something on this page seems familiar in this context and might change your approach". Maybe I should try being that pedantic, but I don't want to come across as one of those "civil-attack" types. I'm not passive-aggressive, but excessively genuflecting language tends to come off that way. I'd rather be seen as a jerk than a Wormtongue, if it comes down to being frowned at either way. I also apologize for not taking your objection as seriously as I could have; it seemed totally pointless argument-for-its-own-sake at the time. It wasn't out of malice, but sheer disbelief that you'd want to keep the two threads mingled in such a way for any legitimate reason. And I apologize for niggling at you about niggling. And I admit fault for not having double-checked my assumptions about what the WP:POLICY page says these days; I had trusted that it was more stable than it seems to be (and I'm surprised by this, but that's another matter).

2. Taking all of that at face value, too, I disagree with a few points though not all of it. I accept that you feel this way about your comments. In my experience here that level of proprietary sentiment is unusual, and I don't share it at all. As long as people don't change my meaning or just delete my point, they can do what they like to refactor for forking threads, moving stuff around, collapse-boxing off-topic material, or long lists of stuff, or whatever. If someone incidentally changes my meaning, or (e.g.) moves my !vote to a discussion section, I'll just go in and fix it while also trying to respect their intent, which was probably structural or "on-topical". This is really common. I refactor pretty frequently, without objection. It's just standard operating procedure, and especially routine when moving back-and-forth blather from RfCs and the like into Discussion sections below them. (So feel free to refactor the intro you think isn't accurate! If I signed it, you can take the sig off; don't care.)

   "Impact" is where we might have a more serious sticking point: The impact of your dump of sources on the thread into which you put them them was negative. It was totally off-topic and probably would have derailed the entire thing. It came shortly on the heels of reverting me on some other MOS page (with an edit summary about off-WP usage, not MOS's own internal consistency), and leaving a user talk message for me that implied I was ignorant and unread. (What was that about courtesy again? Reread what you wrote above and apply it to yourself, too.) The implication of your revert edit summary was that there should be a consensus discussion about this, so I opened one at the main MOS page. That thread is about whether MOS should be consistent with itself and not use "U.S." since it's also using "UK" and other non-dot country abbreviations. I even clarified this with A numbered list of the actual relevant question and asked which you were objecting to, and you didn't respond.

   I expected a quiet, civil discussion to ensue about this very narrow question (and maybe whether MOS should use "US" on MOS pages than mention "UK", but use "U.S." otherwise, or whatever – matters that actually pertained to the thread. You effective hijacked it, whatever the intent, into an irrelevant discussion about what the usage is in mainstream American journalism, as if "should we delete 'U.S.' from MOS's advice?" was on the table (and again accused me of ignorance among other insults; see "courtesy" material above again). You agreed yourself that it would be good to review what the sources are doing (this is a "what should MOS advise for articles?" matter). So the obvious (to me, and I think to most editors) thing to do is separate these threads, for two independent reasons, of topicality and of centralizing content. You'll note that I have nowhere said "Dirtlawyer1's actual plan is probably to just to derail the original conversation", an accusation of bad faith (though that's what the effect would have been). Contrast this with your direct insinuation that me going on with more editing while doing what seems to me to be a routine refactor was for the purpose of thwarting you, and see "courtesy" again. Heh.

   Agreed: "you could have avoided the entire episode ..." Noted! I'm just not used to people objecting to topic forks this strenuously, but it will probably change my approach to this. I do also agree with most of the points of the "Comments are how we..." material, even if I don't think it equates to "never refactor" (and maybe you're not even saying "never refactor", but it has seemed that way.) I agree that "85% of the top 20 major dailies in America are quite consistent in their use" is an important point and I'll even go bolster it. I'm being surprised by my own results so far, and had not entered into this with an expectation to find usage this split, with news publications so heavily "U.S.", but dictionaries (so far - more to go through) so heavily "US", and style guides so split (so far, again). I'm not sure how putting this fact and other sourcing material in the thread about sourcing minimizes its impact, instead of leaving it the thread where it's off topic and the only impact it has is to confuse that thread, but my point in saying this isn't to WP:WIN myself, just asking for an explanation how this can be so (related to the question I was asking earlier).

3. Conceded, other than about "jurisdiction" being better. It's a word we don't use here except in reference to ArbCom and external law, other than one page at ModCom, where it appears to be a copyediting error.
4. I've never suggested that an essay trumps a guideline. Rather, the question of "trumping" doesn't exist here, in my view. The guideline says "usually" for a reason, and that reason is given in detail at the essay. If the essay said "never" or "do not", then it would be a trumping matter (well, the essay would just get MfDed). An MfD of that essay would be a snowball keep today, because REFACTOR is SOP. On agreeability/respect/courtesy: Same here, actually. And on the upside, you've gone up many notches in my view by taking the time to talk through things like this; when discussions of this sort happen, I and whoever often end up much better understanding each other and not getting into conflict later (had similar experience with Noetica before the Admin Who Should Not Be Named pissed him off so much he quit the project). What I hope (besides less conflict in the future, of course) is that, for this particular matter, you can adjust your own material (or the intro, or whatever) as you think is needed, without re-mingling the threads, or reintroducing the out-of-band stuff about "American journalism does 'U.S.'" to the thread about MOS being self-obeying. I really did: undo my collapseboxing out of a realization that it would look one-sided (before you said so); refactor the material to make two productive threads, not to try to deny you a voice in either of them; try to keep your material together, other than replicating a small bit of it, with "..." after it, where originally posted; put your sourcing first, out of respect for it having been posted first, having been moved, and representing the prevailing view; do the refactor at all because the unrefactored topic split leading with my own material made it look like I was denigrating you for having included it in the other thread instead of neutrally forking the topics; and finally genuinely approach the second thread from a fact-finding perspective (I've been altering my own conclusion bullet points as I go). You've been so angry with me these attempts at conciliation have apparently been invisible.

   I agree with you that at the very least the American press and TV usage is mostly "U.S." I'm also amenable to more facts showing it is dominant in other areas; maybe my data so far on NOTPAPER news sources, and even the tech press, is actually skewed; I had not spent much time gathering that, since I was mostly looking for paper-related websites. I'm being much more programmatic about the style guides, dictionaries, etc., cracking a book at time (was going to add Blue Book/Red Book next, which is of course "U.S."). My main motivation in this regard is not having "special exception" rules without very good reasons, because they generate ire, GAMING, calls to revolt, "gimme my own exception" demands, and "MOS should be sourced word-by-word" proposals, etc., etc. If we make an exception it should be for defensible rationales based on periodically reality-checked evidence (on the talk page, not by citing stuff inline in the guideline). See my IEC prefixes posts lately at WT:MOSNUM in the same vein. But I wasn't actually going to open that discussion at all until probably 2016, and didn't expect anyone else would want to either, except maybe for the One Who Wants to Source Every Word of MOS.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:32, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've asked you this question three times, on two pages, in different forms. Still awaiting an answer.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:37, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I know it may be hard for others to understand, but I contribute to Wikipedia in between actual work for pay. For me, it's a hobby, not a full-time job, and absent some sort of crisis, I think we both know that the paid job should always come first. You've been busy this morning, and your various activities have occupied a good bit of my job and hobby time, but I will try to get you a reasonable answer to your question today. Hopefully, that's fast enough for you. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 16:33, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Fine, of course (though I wonder how WP equates to work time). My point isn't that I demand an answer. I consider the entire issue moot, frankly, and a waste of both our time. If you show up later still pressing this, I would then expect an answer since it's central to this whole [non-]issue. This is a conflict between "what talk pages for, whom they serve, and how" and "Someone demands to never have their posts here touched". I'm pretty sure I know what the community's rede would be on which of these concerns has precedence. The fact that WP:REFACTOR (a {{Wikipedia how to}} page, not an opinion {{Essay}}) has been non-controversial for over 11 years tells us pretty clearly. WP:TPO tells us it is permissible to sometimes refactor posts; WP:REFACTOR tells us when and how to do that. The refactoring I did fulfills all four of the criteria at the top of that page, and as a "POV" matter it actually strengthened the prominence and relevance of your own material. Cf. WP:Don't spite your face.

If this is not really (as it seems) coming from a "don't you dare refactor me ever" standpoint, and is really something more along the lines of "I think the American news writing sources I dug up, which are at the top of section below, also mean that MOS should also use 'U.S.' whether we advise this in articles or not", how hard would it be to just add that statement to the thread? If you're thinking that, even further, "MOS should say to always use 'U.S.' in American WP:ENGVAR articles", or even "MOS should say to always use 'U.S.' in articles", that would be a separate proposal, probably best done as an WP:RFC, and probably advertised at WP:VPPOL since it would affect at least hundreds of thousands of articles.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:01, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

DRN

Disregard

 – DRN was the wrong venue.

Formal mediation has been requested

Disregard

 – RfM was also the wrong venue.

The Mediation Committee has received a request for formal mediation of the dispute relating to "Refactoring dispute". As an editor concerned in this dispute, you are invited to participate in the mediation. Mediation is a voluntary process which resolves a dispute over article content by facilitation, consensus-building, and compromise among the involved editors. After reviewing the request page, the formal mediation policy, and the guide to formal mediation, please indicate in the "party agreement" section whether you agree to participate. Because requests must be responded to by the Mediation Committee within seven days, please respond to the request by 19 August 2015.

The request for formal mediation concerning Refactoring dispute, to which you were listed as a party, has been declined. To read an explanation by the Mediation Committee for the rejection of this request, see the mediation request page, which will be deleted by an administrator after a reasonable time. Please direct questions relating to this request to the Chairman of the Committee, or to the mailing list. For more information on forms of dispute resolution, other than formal mediation, that are available, see Wikipedia:Dispute resolution.

Restart

@Dirtlawyer1: Instead of framing this in terms of whose interpretation of what page's wording is right, let's try a completely different approach. What benefit for reader-editors of WT:MOS do you see in re-moving sourcing material about "U.S." vs. "US" usage, out of the thread to which it pertains (what MOS should advise in this regard, based on real-world usage today), and back into a thread to which it does not pertain (whether MOS needs copy-editing to agree with its own advice, regardless what that advice is)?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:55, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Shit (disambiguation). Legobot (talk) 00:02, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

 – Answered.

Hello, SMcCandlish. You have new messages at Samtar's talk page.
Message added 00:05, 14 August 2015 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.[reply]

Samuel Tarling (talk) 00:05, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Moved to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure § Administrative

An editor has asked for a discussion on the deprecation of Template:English variant notice. Since you've had some involvement with the English variant notice template, you might want to participate in the discussion if you have not already done so.—Godsy^(TALK_CONT) 07:10, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

 – Commented at TfD.

Template:Shoutbox sidebar has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:55, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

Hi, Mac. I just saw your RM thread posted to Alakzi's user talk page. I would be grateful if you would just delete it. Alakzi has been blocked for a week for incivility, etc., arising from the conflicts over several essay RMs in which he has been involved. Anything we can to help pour oil on the waters, we should do. Posting to his talk page about heated RM discussions in which he cannot participate for another week is not going to help reduce the emotions involved here, and that have led to the present debacle. Can you see your way to agreeing with me on this one? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 19:55, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It shall be so. I wasn't really trying to prolong an argument with him, or prolong his argument in that MR, but just move a discussion off the MR page. If he can't/shouldn't participate for now anyway, might as well self-rv.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:02, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Mac. This whole thing with A may have just taken a turn for the weirder. You may want to read Floquenbeam's post at ANI. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:24, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Will do. I actually have started checking into the background dramahz, and agree a little that the 5-hour closure on the userspacing move was excessively short and looks like a supervote. But in a sense that's just PR + bureaucracy, as an argument, since it's very, very clear it would have continued to snowball. A. was definitely being WP:POINTy as well as seemingly irrational (or maybe it was just failure to parse), tagging for speedy deletion as an attack page the SPI page that exonerated him from sockpuppetry. It's puzzling, really.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:34, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Fixed

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 Done

 – Commented at RfC.

Hello Stanton. I was wondering if you could take a look at Talk:Stuart C. Lord#Uncalled-for reversion. From looking at the sic template history, you may be able to shed some light on the hide=y parameter in the sic template. Drmies, clever fellow that he is, bowed out of the discussion, but I'm still tilting at windmills. If you want to respond here instead of commenting on the article Talk page, that's fine - whatever you think best. Or you could just stay out of the whole thing if you wish. Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 21:55, 16 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The para. is used to have the template be invisible. It's used that way to prevent editors or bots from "fixing" things that are not really typos (or are, but are in quotes), but where we don't want "[sic]" to appear in the article, e.g. because it's not needed, will seem PoV, etc.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:22, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Miss Cleo. Legobot (talk) 00:01, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Declined

 – Twice.

The placement of your recent comment under Support (Yes, deprecate the template) in the revisitation of the English variant notice deprecation makes it look like two separate people have supported the deprecation. It would probably be best to move your recent comment just beneath your original one, indented. Then even someone merely skimming the conversation would be able to see that they were made by the same person. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:31, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't post a !vote in either case, just a procedural objection and a clarification of intent. Both clearly signed, and labelled as to what they are. Edit summary clearly stated I refuse to !vote in an invalid, forum-shopping pseudo-RfC. The comments there are not numbered, just bulleted. I don't want to indent the clarification because it's more important than the original post (which I would have just replaced, but someone else !voted based on what it said). A claim of impropriety would be silly and look foolish.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:22, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they're bulleted, but people count them anyway. Someone just entering the conversation will scroll past and think that four different people support deprecation instead of three. At least remove the bullet point so that it looks like a response to the previous person. That's what it is, anyway.

You're so vigilant about propriety yourself that you've brought up votestacking. This would show that you hold yourself to similarly strict standards. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:18, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's standard operating procedure to add additional, later notes with Clarification:, Comment:, Update:, etc., etc. No one but you has any problem with this. It's been this way for at least a decade. You're confusing numbered, actual votes (like RfA) with RfC comments. They're different. There is no impropriety here, and no one will ever think there is one. And it doesn't matter anyway. No one can tell MOS:ENGVAR editors that MOS:ENGVAR editors did not deprecate this misapplication of MOS:ENGVAR. The only result of this canvassed forum shopping is going to be to either confirm the deprecation, or to produce an extremely questionable counter "not-deprecation" that can be weighed against the deprecation at TfD. Finally, my Clarification is of the entire thing not of my own comment, and is not a response to the prior person at all (I didn't even read their comment); I'm speaking about the nature of deprecation and of TfD, because everyone in the oppose section is panicking and making incorrect assumption that they were lead to by the opener of the discussion. Please stop pestering me about this trivia.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:31, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well you've clearly heard me out, but if you're going to complain about being "pestered," remember that Godsy's as convinced as you are that he/she did nothing wrong, and you've made very vocal accusations of improper behavior and bad faith that are far less gentle than the requests I've made here. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:41, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Godsy knows where WP:ANI is and is welcome to try to make a case that I've abused his honor or something, while the community examines his WP:PARENT actions in detail. Given that the matter is already being discussed on one Administrators' noticeboard page, my assumptions are that he's smart enough to know how WP:POINTy it will look to open a redundant one, and that it would WP:BOOMERANG. It's not your job to raise Godsy's complaints for him; he's already verbally defended his actions in multiple places. And has been missing the point in doing so. This isn't about whether he's nefariously intending to shop, canvas, and thwart consensus (I even said "regardless of the intent" myself), it's about the result; this is a disruptive attempt to immediately overturn a consensus discussion on the basis that he (and people he thinks would back him up) didn't get to chime in. It's a classic example of what not to do. I'm surprised this has not already been shut down. If it were an RM right on the heels of a previous RM it would have been shut down instantly. Same goes if it was an AN discussion seeking to overturn a just-concluded ANI discussion or vice versa, and so on. The only reason this is still open, I suspect, is because no one G's an F about these stupid templates, or pays any attention to misplaced and mis-formatted RfCs in VPPRO.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  17:03, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

PS: Proof of the votestacking is in the votes: No one (or nearly no one – I'm not going to monitor it hour-by-hour, though I checked again recently) is commenting but the canvassed parties. Q.E.D.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:15, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Mac, I need a little help locating the pertinent MOS section on point, which generally advises against the use of one-sentence paragraphs and/or very brief sections and subsections with separate headers. I found it three or four weeks ago, but cannot locate it again now that I need to reference it. I would be grateful for any help you can provide. Thanks. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 18:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Dirtlawyer1: No prollem:

• WP:BETTER: "Paragraphs should be short enough to be readable, but long enough to develop an idea. ... One-sentence paragraphs are unusually emphatic, and should be used sparingly. Articles should rarely, if ever, consist solely of such paragraphs. Some paragraphs are really tables or lists in disguise. They should be rewritten as prose or converted to their unmasked form."
• MOS:LAYOUT: "Very short or very long sections and subsections in an article look cluttered and inhibit the flow of the prose."

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:33, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

• Thank you, MAC. That's exactly what I was seeking, although I remembered a somewhat less detailed version of WP:BETTER. I was always taught to avoid single-sentence paragraphs, except when doing so for emphasis on rare occasions. Or as one composition instructor said, "You get one of those per semester." Sad to say, but many of our backwater articles consist entirely of one-sentence paragraphs. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:32, 17 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

YW. I think it mostly comes from writing outlines, and then never getting around to expanding the outline. Partly also from junior high school English comp lessons ("one topic per paragraph"), and a bit also from later palimpsestuous insertions/deletions. WP does have way too much of it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:37, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

http://evolbiol.ru/ancestor/ancestor.htm#082 222.237.12.104 (talk) 11:50, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I have that one. Might be worth a few citations, but mostly at Race (human categorization), not at Race (biology).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:56, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

One of my favorite Wikipedia observations is the caption of the top image at User:Beyond My Ken/thoughts. Cheers! bd2412 T 17:42, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the first sentence of it, but I spend enough time on policy and talk pages to disagree with the second part. Many edits are internal, not public-facing, but nevertheless necessary. If the statement were revised to pertain to edits to articles in particular, I'd agree with it. When people change article text for PoV-pushing, to revert someone they don't like, or other lame-ass reasons, instead of to improve the content for present and future readers, yes, it is counterproductive.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:33, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Aren't your internal edits ultimately intended to bring about benefits for the readers? bd2412 T 18:05, 19 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What about this conversation? :-) Only in the most abstract sense does it do so (i.e. by increasing communication between editors in a tiny way, that might theoretically improve collaboration on some user-facing edit in the future).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:45, 19 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Apology for not enough care at Talk:Podosphaera fuliginea. I got frustrated with trying to follow the details and having them not match, and did not give attention to the usernames. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:37, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@SmokeyJoe: Oh, thanks, and no worries. Honestly, I get frustrated at the amount of conflict you and I get into over interpretational and procedural matters, especially since we so often agree on them, too. I've been trying to work this stuff out with various people, and you were on my list of those to approach in that regard, so might as well start now. :-) So, I apologize, too, for the snappish point-by-point response. Working for a decade surrounded by (and writing with) lawyers has tended me toward nit-picking and over-analyzing, and I know it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:18, 19 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes, in trying to be clear, I can be very blunt. Yes, I sensed some frustration, it was unexpected, I was expecting you to be in more humour. On your part, I never sensed point by point responses as snappish of offensive, especially as the points were valid. The other failing I have is commenting only half engaged. I'll try better. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:25, 19 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I shall be mindful, too.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:08, 19 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject China. Legobot (talk) 00:03, 20 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

... Jayaguru-Shishya isn't watching [37], or he'd mass-revert you, forum-shop for an admin to scold and DS you, demand that you enumerate and justify every change, and argue endlessly about who shouldn't have reverted who and whose job it was to open the discussion. EEng (talk) 16:57, 20 August 2015 (UTC) Good work, BTW. Most of the <! -- --> notes you're engaging are ones I put there about two years ago‍—‌good to see someone finally noticed.[reply]

Well, I don't antagonize J-S. Level of interpersonal conflict seems to have a lot to do with how apt people are to revert. As for "finally noticed", this is hint that HTML comments generally don't work very well for this sort of thing.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:41, 20 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Antagonism had nothing to do with it. He didn't know me from Adam when he started mass-reverting. As far as I can tell the Html comments are working very nicely, in that an intelligent editor has appeared to resolve most of them, which I couldn't do myself. EEng (talk) 23:34, 20 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well, as you saw, some of your edits in that spree were controversial anyway. As for the second thing, my point is that it might have taken 5 years for anyone to get around to your HTML comments, or someone might have just deleted them. It's blind coincidence I'm bothering to try to resolve them. Lots of editors just delete them as "noise" if the issue appears to be unresolved for a long time. "Take it to the talk page."  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:15, 21 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

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 Done

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Ten Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for ten years or more.

Best regards, Sarah ^(talk) 01:00, 21 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I manually added myself the other day. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:04, 21 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Disregard

 – I was already long in this discussion.

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Legobot (talk) 00:02, 23 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's happened again, just so you have an example of my recurring whine on the topic: saying "race" instead of "breed". (This time, apparently a French translation). Just sharing the pain. Montanabw^(talk) 23:20, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That's arguably a correct usage, though perhaps an archaic and/or confusing one. It's not talking about breeds, but about distinct semi-feral populations within a landrace/type. I'm skeptical that modern English-language sources would prefer "race" in the context of mammals, though. After a month of looking around for sources, I'm mostly seeing "race" used in mycology/phytopathology, ornithology (not too often), entomology, and caudatology so far; it seems to be avoided for mammals these days (this was my impression when I started, from prior schooling, and it's been reinforced by not finding modern sources so far using it for mammals, just ones that go back many decades). In your article in question, it would surely be permissible to replace "distinct races" with "distinct populations", or "distinct variations". At a guess, it might even be two landraces within the type, but that's a specific enough claim a source would be needed for it. Labelling them "breeds" would, too, though, especially given that the sources tell us these are only somewhat-managed, semi-feral populations. That seems to contraindicate "breed".  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:39, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's a landrace, so same diff (landrace breed, feral beed, standardized breed), the point is it's clearly not a species or subspecies... and in the context I've seen it in othe articles (PSanish and German examples out there I've mentioned at various times), they use it to mean "breed". I think I used the phase "group" or "type" in my fix, the term seems to actually cover a body type as much as anything, not unlike pony. Montanabw^(talk) 20:26, 25 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Should work.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:29, 25 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Mac, please take a look at the use of flags in the 2015 World Aquatics Championships. Perfectly justifiable under the present language of MOS:ICON and all other versions of the guideline that have existed in the last 6 years. While permitted, it's also self-evidently excessive and visually overwhelming. When we were arguing about the use of flags in sports articles, I always said that it was ridiculous that editors were arguing against a single 7mm flag icon in the infobox of an Olympic gold medalist or other national sports team member. Well, we're past that now, but the truly excessive uses of flags continue in many corners, and many of those excessive uses were always permitted. I've been doing best to curtail the secondary use of flags in swimming articles (geographic locations, host nations, non-national team swimmers, etc.), even while reinforcing the legitimate use of flags for national teams and their members. I'm looking for logical rationales to limit the excessive uses while maintaining the core uses.

Anyway, I'm thinking out loud and I'm not looking for an immediate answer. Think about it, and let me know where your spit-balling takes you. Thanks. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 03:26, 26 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to agree on that one. The use in the table makes sense, because it helps people find the data they're looking for. In the list below the table, it seems to serve no purpose but confusing decoration, and actually makes the list harder to read. Not sure what codifiable principle emerges from that, though.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:56, 26 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I wasn't expecting that.Curb Chain (talk) 05:06, 26 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Trying to use that feature more. It's helpful for reminding people that small cleanup edits are often of value. Also good as a "no hard feelings" gesture if someone you've had a disagreement with does something you agree with. And it's useful for quietly agreeing with a WP:SPADE post without dog-piling onto it. As well as the obvious use for thanking someone for big, difficult content work, of course. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:13, 26 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Joseon. Legobot (talk) 00:02, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

Hello, SMcCandlish. You're invited to join WikiProject Today's articles for improvement, a project dedicated to significantly improving articles with collaborative editing in a week's time. Feel free to nominate an article for improvement at the project's Article nomination board. If interested in joining, please add your name to the list of members. Thanks for your consideration. North America1000 08:16, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'll think about it, but it's not really my style. I tend to single out problematic stubs, not stuff that needs to be pushed a little to reach GA/FA. I have respect for that work, but it's "sexy" enough of a lot of editors focus on it, while hardly anyone works on really weak stub articles that could but do not yet have much encyclopedic value. I'd rather make a "2" into a "6" than an "8" into a "9".  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  09:09, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, thanks for considering it. The project has gone through some recent changes. We previously worked on several articles weekly, but after talk page discussions, we whittled it down to one per week in hopes to maximize participation. I'm also a fan of expanding stubs, performing this type of work from time to time. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 09:27, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Might help if there were a way to "subscribe" for notices of certain topical ones (biology, music, whatever), but maybe that's too much infrastructure for something that happens once a week. I dunno.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  09:48, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You can subscribe to receive project notices, which includes the weekly selection, at the project Notifications page. However, it is not topical in nature. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 09:51, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

OK; seems a good compromise. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:09, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your input, and for the notifications sign-up. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:11, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:12, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

...and for joining the project (missed that initially). Cheers, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:13, 27 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Deferred

 – Fixed to the extent possible; flagged for later correction.

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Lets talk I'm good.

b — Preceding unsigned comment added by Babbitholed (talk • contribs) 03:51, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

About what?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:16, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

I changed the bolding format of your post at RM a moment ago. You can either revert or modify. --George Ho (talk) 06:09, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Right-o.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:16, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You are invited! → World Virtual Edit-a-thon on Women in Leadership ← Come and join us remotely!

World Virtual Edit-a-thon on Women in Leadership Dates: 7 to 20 September 2015 The Virtual Edit-a-thon, hosted by Women in Red, will allow all those keen to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Women in Leadership to participate. As it is a two-week event, inexperienced participants will be able to draw on the assistance of more experienced editors while creating, translating or improving articles on women who are (or have been) prominent in leadership. All levels of Wikipedia editing experience are welcome. RSVP and find more details →here← --Ipigott (talk) 09:31, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Template talk:Nazism sidebar. Legobot (talk) 00:01, 31 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A Old Colony Mennonite family observing the practice of plain dress Hello, SMcCandlish. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Plain dress Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Historic house • Soufflé Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: EuroCarGT (talk) 00:10, 31 August 2015 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI • Opt-out instructions[reply]

"Greetings! I pretend to be honest but mindlessly follow WP's ad populum model of truth. As such I edit known falsehoods into articles, such as "orthodox" race beliefs based on demonstrable academic fraud. Being a collaborator improves when we remember this about each other. I also call people who disagree with my nonsense "trolls", pretending they are winding me up insincerely, for want of any valid points." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.92.221.62 (talk • contribs) 04:48, 31 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That an "interesting" view of my editing, approach, and thoughts, but wrong on every point, and ill-informed. There is no academic fraud you've demonstrated. I have not edited any known falsehoods into articles. If I were to do so, it would be to attribute them to those who made them (if the views were notable enough to include), and then refute them, also with attribution to those who have published the counter-arguments, per WP:UNDUE. If you read what I've posted at Talk:Race (human categorization) (an article I don't really even edit except trivially, just do sourcing for that others can use as they will), you'll see this clearly. I label as trolls those who engage in trolling, like changing people's statements on their talk pages in an attempt to piss them off. Doesn't work on me. I find your antics silly and amusing, your anger misdirected, and the point you're trying to make unsupported and unsupportable, but feel free to try. If it's you who has been leaving me links to places like Conservapedia or whichever it was, I don't care. Whatever point you are trying to make with them, a) I already understand it, being well aware of the master-race rantings of far-right groups, and b) Wikipedia doesn't care what the "anti-Wikipedias" publish anyway, since they are user-generated content we can't use as sources. Cite some real sources. Show us reputably published reliable sources presenting real research.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:21, 31 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

[Note SMcCandlish clearly wishes to discuss so I request the usual suspects do not censor his talk page]

You mean Rightpedia? There are plenty of references on that page Sir. The patent falsehood referred to is Lewontin's fallacy, described as responsible for the "orthodoxy" you mention. Is it not a fallacy? I can go into more detail. A "troll" is defined as someone writing entirely to annoy his opponent for fun, rather than someone who is correct trying to correct his opponent, possibly with a derisive and mocking tone. 175.124.157.54 (talk) 14:05, 31 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't trust Rightpedia (or Conservapedia, or Metapedia, all of which might as well just merge) to do proper research. They have no equivalent of WP:NOR and WP:NPOV, but are all on an explicit mission to push an American conservative right-wing viewpoint, cherry-picking their (largely unreliable) sources and excluding any that contradict them. We still can't use Rightpedia, etc., as sources no matter what sources they cite, because of WP:UGC. I have no problem, of course, with people citing some of the same sources here, if they're actually WP:RS, and are being used within the bounds of NOR, WP:UNDUE, etc. Undue weight is often the issue here. The fact that one guy, A. W. F. Edwards, published one paper criticizing Lewontin is unlikely to be significant enough to include at the race-related articles, but it might be significant enough to mention at the article on Lewontin (it surely already is, but I'm not interested enough to go look). If a lot of stuff has developed from Edwards's paper since its publication (in actual peer-reviewed journals, not ranty political blogs), maybe there enough "there there" to either include counterpoints to Lewontin at race-related articles, or remove Lewontin from them, or whatever, as the case may be. My own posts at Talk:Race (human categorization) included critiques of Lewontin (and critiques of those critiques), but it's not my personal WP mission to work on that article or related articles; I really don't care much. I did sourcing to address a then-ongoing controversy, nothing more. You're coming from the viewpoint of a detractor of the ideas behind the uneasy and increasingly challenged consensus in the life sciences against biological human race, and you imagine me to be a supporter of those ideas. I'm not. I'm an observer of the fact that external RS tell us that it's an uneasy and increasingly challenged consensus in the life sciences, and of what the pro and con arguments are with regard to the rationale for that consensus and for the challenges to it (the one coming from medical research is particularly weak because they keep changing their definitions all the time, and can't tell the difference between "race", "ethnicity" as a politician might define it, "ethnicity" as an anthropologist would define it, and "ethnicity" as people self-select on questionnaires that often have pigeonholing problems, and so on). Pestering me personally about this is a waste of time. I have other fish to fry. Where you and I do seem to differ is you appear to be convinced that "race is a social construct" is some lie, and that race is definitively biological. You seem to be on a mission to have WP say this. But the evidence doesn't support this, and it's not WP's job to prove or disprove it anyway, but to report that the RS tell us it's a consensus, what the challenges to that consensus are, and what the challenges to those challenges are. What the sources do support, in my view, is that the question is both complex and kind of pointless. There's a lot going on, that ranges from some traits being particular to certain populations for unknown reasons; other traits being particular to any population that has lived for tens of thousands of years within a particular latitude range or other environment despite being geographically isolated from one another; certain traits being tied to other traits regardless what population they arise in, others not so; evolutionary psychology evidence that we innately want to define people in a racial way (i.e. the social component of race itself may have a universal biological underpinning that it separate from race but determinative of why the idea is so ingrained); conflicting evidence on race and IQ tests; a lot of evidence that IQ tests are culturally biased and thus don't tell us anything useful; confusion between the ethnicity-related concept of human races and the biological, taxonomic use of the term; and add a dozen other things here. As a conceptual model, "human races" is nearing the end of its usable lifespan, if it's not already a zombie, staggering along on autopilot because it science-dead body is being animated by politics and sociological patterns. You can shake your fist at me individually all you like, but it won't change anything.

Trolling: Your definition is one definition. It's not the one we use here, which more broadly includes antagonistic editing designed to get attention, generate controversy, anger people into off-topic responses, or otherwise disrupt business as usual. On WP it's most often done with some particular PoV purpose in mind, not simply for "fun". It's about constructiveness vs. nonconstructiveness. Whether you genuinely find the trolling fun or not is immaterial; if its effect is just pissing people off unnecessarily, without much chance of improving the article, then it's trolling.

I wouldn't be surprised if your posts here get reverted anyway, because you're indeffed (if you really are Mikemikev; I've had my other suspicions), and using IPs to keep posting. I don't really care either way. Your mission is not my mission and doesn't relate to my interests.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:41, 31 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Asian Pacific American Women World Virtual Edit-a-thon

Dates: Friday-Sunday, 4 to 6 September 2015 Location: Worldwide/virtual Sponsor: Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center "The Smithsonian APA Center invites you to attend the 2nd annual Wikipedia APA an editathon for cultural presence, which will be held during the month of September 2015. We are thrilled to invite you to Wikipedia APA, an editing event for improving and increasing the presence of cultural, historic, and artistic information on Wikipedia pertaining to Asian Pacific American ("APA") experiences. The second Wikipedia editathon dedicated to APA content, this project will occur as physical events during September 2015... as well as remotely, with participants taking part from all throughout the world." Facilitator: Women in Red (WiR) Did you Know that 15% of the biographies on Wikipedia are about women? Not impressed? WiR focuses on "content gender gap". If you'd like to help contribute articles on women and women's works, we warmly welcome you! WiR will be hosting one of this world virtual edit-a-thon. The 3-day event will focus on improving Wikipedia's coverage of Asian Pacific American women and their works (books, paintings, and so on). For more information and to RSVP: → click here← --Rosiestep (talk) 03:23, 1 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Probably mostly outside my editing range, but it jogs my memory to update articles like Pan Xiaoting and other women cue sports player articles from Asia, some of which probably haven't had much attention in several years. I guess most of them are not Asian-American, though, aside from Jeanette Lee (pool player), which I already was updating a bit the other day.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:40, 1 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Just wanted to thank you for your comments here. Very decent of you and I appreciate that you took a solid and neutral look at the situation, then called it as you saw it. Montanabw^(talk) 04:28, 1 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

NP. I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:35, 1 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Just noticed the user got indeffed. Kind of a sub-optimal result, but the overall pattern seems unconstructive enough that I guess it's a reasonable enough response. Would have rather seem a community close with the probable topic and interaction bans. An indef like this, especially given that the user has socked before, almost certainly means they'll just create another account and be even more recalcitrant. If the account is effectively "dead", there's no incentive not to just restart, while if the account is just a bit restricted, there's an incentive to get in better graces and keep the account going. Oh well.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:22, 1 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Unresolvable

 – This sort of back-and-forth argument, over a dispute that was already moot before the discussion began, is a waste of time.

Are you okay? You've been reading a lot more problem into posts than is actually there for weeks, both with me and with Curly. Did something happen? Not offended if you delete this. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:42, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fine. What's happened is my patience with tendentious editing, civil-PoV, and slow-editwarring patterns has finally reached a limit. No one who is doing problematic things thinks they are. One cannot self-assess whether one's behaviors are problematic, since it's others who perceive the problems. One who will not listen to others when they raise objections about the problems one is causing, is doomed to keep causing problems until people's tolerance for the behavior pattern runs out.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:23, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

Hello!

First, on behalf of WikiProject X, thank you for trying out the WikiProject X pilot projects. I would like to get some anonymous feedback from you on your experience using the new WikiProject layout and tools. This way, we will know what we did right, and if we did something horribly wrong, we can try to fix it. This feedback won't be associated with your username, so please be completely honest. We are determined to improve the experience of Wikipedians, and your feedback helps us with that. (You are also welcome to leave non-anonymous feedback at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject X.)

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Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you, Harej (talk) 17:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Scanian dialect. Legobot (talk) 00:02, 3 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

For edit-warring on WP:MOS and several other pages related to your fight with User:Darkfrog24 over quotation styles, together with your pattern of long-winded, aggressive filibustering on the related talk page and noticeboard threads, including incivility and personal attacks [42][43] and displaying at least as much "IDHT" as the behaviour of the other party you complained of, I am imposing a topic-ban from WP:MOS and related discussions on you for a period of two months. This is done under the provisions of the discretionary sanctions rules for the MOS topic area, and in light of the previous sanctions and warnings you received in that context (quote from a DS ruling in 2013: "SMcCandlish is prohibited from making bad faith assumptions about other participants; strongly advised to avoid commenting on contributor, particularly with regard to WP:NPA and WP:CIV; and encouraged to keep his contributions to a reasonable length"). For the avoidance of doubt, under the "widely construed" rule, the edit-war in article space at Quotation marks in English is included in this sanction. I would have imposed a similar sanction on the other party, except that I can't find evidence the necessary "alerts" have been given to them. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:30, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]