Deletion of Zaeem ahmed page that I created[edit]

Hello admin, I have created Zaeem Ahmed biography page, which has been deleted after my contest. But, I have created the page with no promotional intention or I don't have a relation with the person. I take a mission to create missing profiles of famous persons from Bangladesh. that was my first step to do. But now that page has been deleted. Please retrieve the page. I tried my best to follow the specific guideline by Wikipedia, but I don't know why you deleted the page. Please retrieve the page otherwise I will be very sad and that might be my last editing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Foyjul90 (talk • contribs) 08:50, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Foyjul90, Wikipedia doesn't publish original research; we only host neutral articles that are sourced entirely to independent reliable sources. (That is to say, the only thing we do is summarize what other people, who aren't connected with the subject, have published about that subject.) This is particularly true with biographies of living people, as there are both legal considerations regarding potentially defamatory content, and considerations about giving undue weight (positive or negative) to particular aspects of somebody's life. The article I deleted at Draft:Zaeem Ahmed was very obviously not neutral—it contained lines like From this vision he is continuously developing innovative ideas and making the work easier for every level of employment. Plus, almost all of it was entirely unsourced; although it had three references, one of them was his own company's website and thus unusable on Wikipedia, and the other two were both only used to cite the statement In, 2020, he was elected as Chairman of EC of Prime Bank Bangladesh Ltd.

If you genuinely feel you can write a neutral and sourced biography of him, I can temporarily restore your draft page so you can work on it further, but as it stands it's not an appropriate page for us to be hosting on Wikipedia, even as a draft. We take our policy on biographies of living persons very seriously, and we can't host unreferenced material on living people, even as a draft, for anything more than a very brief time while someone is working on it. ‑ Iridescent 09:03, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the explaination. Please restore the page temporarliy, so that I can make the changes. It will be very helpful for me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Foyjul90 (talk • contribs) 09:10, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I've temporarily restored it at Draft:Zaeem Ahmed to allow you to continue to work on it. As per my previous comments, you'll need to provide citations for every claim made about him (and the citations need to be to independent sources) for Wikipedia to host it.

If you haven't already, I very strongly recommend reading Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons and Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Writing a new article from scratch is probably the single most difficult thing to do on Wikipedia if you're not already familiar with our rules, and biographies are the most difficult type of new article to write. ‑ Iridescent 09:16, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

One more thing, I have seen Mr Fazle Kabir's page, which has reference link from his own organization (Bangladesh Bank) and other newspaper site links, which are like same to my page. So, how that wokred? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Foyjul90 (talk • contribs) 09:41, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Usually it means English Wikipedia has 55,230,977 pages and only a few hundred editors active at any given time, and thus things slip through. That said, in the case of Fazle Kabir it looks like the only citations to his own organization's website are for non-contentious statements. (Citations to newspapers—provided they're genuine independent coverage rather than reprinted press releases—are acceptable, although be wary of using them as newspapers aren't always great at fact-checking.) Basically, anything you say you need to be able to show where you got it from, and if any statement is potentially contentious you need to show that the source it came from is reliable. ‑ Iridescent 09:52, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Technically, non-independent sources are acceptable, but only if they are used in very limited ways. Most of the article must come from independent sources. A non-independent source could be used to fill in some common detail that you can't source any other way (e.g., how old he is, or whether he is married).

@Foyjul90, if you are looking for good examples to follow, then you might want to look at the handful of articles listed at Wikipedia:Featured articles#Business, economics, and finance biographies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:38, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I have found that my Draft page has been published here : https://en.everybodywiki.com/Zaeem_Ahmed . Is it from Wikipedia? and they are mentioning that they took the article from Wikipedia, but this page has not been published yet. And, for the page, I tried my best to find some newspaper sources but did not find them. Can you publish the page with the mentioned source and I can edit that in the future when I get any updated news source about him. Foyjul90 (talk) 03:18, 8 January 2022 (UTC)Foyul90 Thanks for the clarifications. I am working on the draft page to make the page eligible to approve. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Foyjul90 (talk • contribs) 09:55, 2 January 2022 (UTC) WhatamIdoing I have not get any reply from you. Please let me know. If the above mentioned website is associated with Wikipedia, then please publish my page. If not, then please publish my page in wikipedia, so that if any source I found, I can add. Please help me.Foyjul90 (talk) 10:04, 11 January 2022 (UTC)Foyjul90

@Foyjul90, I'm not WhatamIdoing, but I can confirm that site is nothing to do with Wikipedia. Because the moment you press the "Publish changes" button on Wikipedia—whether it's on an article, a draft, a user page or a talk page—you consent to the By publishing changes, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL agreement that appears between the editing window and the "Publish changes" button. That means, once something has appeared on Wikipedia—even if it's deleted from Wikipedia almost immediately—any other website can use that material for whatever purposes they choose; there's a huge industry dedicated to copying material from Wikipedia. Unfortunately, in most cases we have absolutely no control over what other websites (or paper books) do with our material; the only time we can really do anything is if they're not complying with our licensing terms by making it possible to find out who the authors who wrote the originals on Wikipedia were.

As per my comments further up this thread, your page is already published on Wikipedia at Draft:Zaeem Ahmed. "Draft" doesn't mean it's not published; it just means it's not indexed by search engines, to reduce the risk of readers searching for information coming across a page that isn't yet compliant with our rules. (This is particularly important for articles about living people, owing to the legal implications if we get something wrong or give an incomplete picture.) We won't hold on to the draft forever—we usually delete them if nobody's worked on improving them for six months—but you're free to work on it at your own pace to bring it up to our standards regarding independent reliable sourcing ‑ Iridescent 19:52, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. I will keep updating this page — Preceding unsigned comment added by Foyjul90 (talk • contribs) 04:37, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@Foyjul90, I see that you haven't edited Draft:Zaeem Ahmed in the month since I restored it. Are you still planning to work on it, or do you want me to re-delete it? If you're still planning to work on it, that's fine; our usual practice is to keep draft articles for six months. However, when we know a page about a living person is potentially problematic I don't really like keeping it unless there's a reason to do so. ‑ Iridescent 06:52, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users[edit]

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:13, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

A question: (I know I'm talking to a bot but I assume someone who knows the answer will see this and answer without the circumlocutions I'd get if I asked on Meta, or at least point me to where I can see the answer without having to wade through pages of Wikispeak.)

If this is being done for legal reasons (even though nobody seems able to point to the law in question), is there going to be some kind of easy-to-read and easy-to-share breakdown of which aspects will be legally enforceable, which will be policy but not legally binding, and which will just be recommended practice? There are massive gray areas here as far as I can see that would have the potential to get people working in complete good faith into serious trouble on-wiki, and even into serious trouble IRL if the legal concerns are actually justified. "This string of IP edits backing the position of User:Alice in her dispute with User:Bob all appear to come from the place Alice has already disclosed she works" and "most of the disruptive IP editing on this topic comes from a single country or region" are both fairly common statements, but without clarity it's not clear under what circumstances Legal will back admins and under what circumstances they'll throw them to the wolves.

I'm not trying to be negative—even though I'm not convinced by the legal argument I can see ethical reasons for masking IP addresses—but I get the feeling this is about to unintentionally ignite a firestorm of "admin abuse" claims and it would be better for all concerned if we knew where we stood beforehand rather than making up the policy as we go along in response to individual cases. (It would also help admins decide whether the potential liability is worth the risk. If WMF Legal honestly believe that in future I'm potentially putting myself at genuine legal risk just for doing routine admin activities, now is probably the time for me to step down.) ‑ Iridescent 12:02, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Rumor has it that I'm not a bot, but there are some things I've seen that I think are relevant. The Portuguese WP responded to this by simply banning IP editing, requiring registered accounts, full stop. In the various links in the bot post, I found an analysis of the results of that, by the WMF themselves (don't ask me where, but it's someplace in there). Surprisingly for the WMF, they concluded that it worked out well, and are actually recommending that other wikis try it. The numbers of active editors actually increased after the ban, as did the number some measures of non-bot content edits, as IPs apparently decided to register accounts. At the same time, the number of reverts and the amount of vandalism decreased. My guess is that a ban will happen here too, especially when more en-wiki people start realizing the kinds of problems you described – better to just side-step all the problems and not have to worry about it. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:51, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

The report is at meta:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Impact report for Login Required Experiment on Portuguese Wikipedia; most of the underlying statistics are at https://analytics.wikimedia.org/published/notebooks/AHT/ptwiki_dashboard.html Vahurzpu (talk) 17:54, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, the WMF is requesting several more projects sign up for IP-ban trials. Of course, you could easily construe that as still being opposition -- they're explicitly putting out feelers for "ptwiki might not be representative", which is to say "it might be detrimental to other projects". From the talk, eswiki, fawiki, and fiwiki are all interested in participating. eswiki would be particularly interesting -- while nothing else really quite compares to enwiki in scope and influence, it's one of quite few that comes close and could be a better model for us than ptwiki is. (Of course, the WMF rejected it for exactly this reason.) Vaticidalprophet 18:12, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Skimming that talk, it looks to me like they're intentionally trying to find projects where it will fail, so they can say "We're not going ahead with this", and seem a little put out that pt-wiki actually seem to like it. Surely the sensible way to test whether it would work on English Wikipedia would just be to switch it on for a month and see what happens? ‑ Iridescent 18:36, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I facepalmed at the thought that WMF would reject it (but it would of course be par for the course). But I see that they rejected it only for the purpose of doing a monitored trial. Eventually, projects will decide for themselves what to do, and it wouldn't be the first time if we (en-wiki) have to tell the WMF to butt out. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:40, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

That said, we don't have a great track record of telling them to butt out when they have their minds set on something. I note that MediaViewer and Vector are still the defaults, VisualEditor continues to be pushed, and it took about 10 years of arguing to get them to remove the Flow tanks from our border. "Anyone can edit" is such an article of faith at the WMF, that some of them will never be persuaded that "anyone can still edit, they just need to set up an account" is more use to everyone concerned (including the editors themselves) than IP masking. ‑ Iridescent 18:48, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I really can't argue with that. On the other hand, we are largely at their mercy when it comes to the software on the servers, but we can adopt the policies that we want. (Although I'm making assumptions about the eventual consensus of a discussion here, where the track record isn't good either, especially when it comes to change.) I see a situation where, if the community establishes something via a duly-conducted RfC and WMF tries to tell us no, it would look more like the response of the community and ArbCom to Framgate. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:55, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Just clarifying for myself, it's only articles that IPs are prevented from editing on ptwiki? I see one ptwiki editor's comment was translated as "IPs now do a bit of fun on the contact pages, but it's a side effect that I see no escape from." To me it seems like if IPs can still make edit requests and join discussions, that's pretty darn close to "anyone can edit". —valereee (talk) 19:57, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

It looks like they switched IP editing off completely except between April and July. By "contact pages", they probably mean their equivalent of the "I'm having difficulty creating an account" page, which would obviously need to either be editable by IPs or have a very clear mechanism for submitting requests via email with a reasonable expectation they'd be read. ‑ Iridescent 20:13, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

That would be my impression also. The reference to "contact pages" was in a comment by a single editor, and it's a translation from "páginas de contato". If anyone watching here reads Portuguese, it would be good to know what the phrase really refers to. (Google Translate, which of course is even more reliable than our articles (not!), treats "contato" and "discussão" as two different things, but...). --Tryptofish (talk) 20:26, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Doing the unscientific experiment of looking at pt:Especial:Mudanças recentes, it looks like there's zero IP activity at all now and a greater proportion of edits by new, redlinked accounts than we get here, which is exactly what I'd expect. If there is any Portuguese-speaker happens to be watching this page, to save wading through Meta the phrase who's translation we're questioning is Certamente não foi uma decisão que tomamos com prazer, mas minha lista de páginas vigiadas nunca andou tão pacífica, e olha que ultimamente eu nem tenho conseguido olhá-la o tempo todo como uns meses atrás. Os IPs agora fazem certa farra nas páginas de contato, mas é um efeito colateral do qual não vejo escapatória., if anyone wants to have a stab at translation. ‑ Iridescent 21:39, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Wow...that looks so peaceful. :D —valereee (talk) 22:00, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

The open question is whether it's peaceful like a library, or peaceful like a cemetery, or, if you prefer, like the dying towns in rapidly depopulating rural areas.

Most of us made our first edits as IPs. Making those few encouraged us to create an account. If we couldn't make those first edits before creating an account, how many of us would be editing today? Nobody knows. I would not wish to bet Wikipedia's entire pipeline of future editors on a short-term experiment. I'd rather see a multi-year, multi-site crossover study, in which places prevent logged-out editing, see what happens, re-enable logged-out editing, see what happens, re-block it, and so forth. And when we get to this wiki, I think I'd like to see ways of decreasing IPs without shutting them off all at once. Maybe you can make your first edit without an account, and you need to register after that? Or only IPs from certain countries need to register initially?

Also, the rate of IP edits varies substantially between wikis. Being an IP at the English Wikipedia is not at all the same as being an IP editor at the Japanese Wikipedia. The social meaning is quite different. Being an IP at jawiki seems to produce more of a "comment on the content, not the contributor" or maybe "good deeds done in secret" feeling. There seem to be editors there who haven't registered an account because they are actively trying to avoid having a reputation/identity. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:21, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Regarding I would not wish to bet Wikipedia's entire pipeline of future editors on a short-term experiment, can I point out that this is pretty much exactly my position regarding most WMF-imposed changes (you described it as you'd prefer the current verifiable problems over the predictions of doom a little way further up this page). I don't see that switching IP editing off on en-wiki for a month, with a clear "after three months the experiment will end, the status quo will be restored, and we'll look at the positives and negatives" sunset clause, falls into the same "this change is irreversible so if it does go wrong, we're gambling with the future of the entire site" area as something like UCoC. The absolute worst-case is that we lose three months' worth of new editors.

Without some kind of experiment on one of the big wikis, we'll never be able to make reasonable calls about whether the opportunity costs of losing potential new editors cancels out the editor time wasted from cleaning up after IP vandalism. (My personal guess is that it won't be an issue. You and I joined back in the day, but the generation joining up now are very, very used to being asked to create accounts on every website. I suspect we wouldn't even see a particularly drastic drop in traffic if we demanded people create accounts to read Wikipedia.) ‑ Iridescent 18:38, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

I think that it's sensible to start with the mid-sized wikis, partly because pilot tests help you figure out what questions to ask. I also think we need each of the big wikis to run their own experiment, with start and stop dates. I also think that there might be good reasons to do this multiple times, to flush out the dedicated-long-time-IP editors and actually be able to see the new/future generation, rather than the ones who have been editing for years. Also, the effects aren't over when you flip the switch, because people will remember that you now have to create an account, and that will linger.

I have some concerns about it in practice. The power imbalance between old and new generations of editors is significant, humans are short-sighted, and we love personal convenience. This is IMO what we should do, but I am not sure that we will actually do it. (If anyone's the contest about when the "It's been so nice without so many newbies trying to edit, so don't switch back even though we all solemnly agreed that we would switch back" RFC will start, please put me down for 29 days before the planned end of the experiment.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:28, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Oh, I have concerns about it in practice. As I've said to you many times, we don't really understand the internal dynamics of Wikipedia or why the system hasn't fallen apart when every instinct says the model shouldn't be viable. The reputation of English Wikipedia is ultimately the primary asset of the entire WMF ecosystem, and IMO we should be very averse to any tinkering with it since we can't predict the consequences and if we damage our reputation it will be very hard to bring it back. (I know the WMF couldn't admit this, but the other reason it's sensible to start with the mid-size wikis is that if we screw up Ukrainian Wikipedia etc it won't have any significant knock-on effect, but if we screw up English Wikipedia then the whole 200+ wikis unravel.

That said, I still think it's worth a time-limited experiment. Even if it reduces the raw edits-and-editors numbers that's not automatically a bad thing—it's perfectly possible that 5000 editors free to do constructive work would be better than 6000 editors spending a significant chunk of their time patrolling, reverting, and checking watchlists. Without an experiment, we'll never know. ‑ Iridescent 07:36, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

We already know what will happen if we have a smaller number of editors doing more content creation instead of a larger number editors reverting, because that already happened. What will happen is that experienced editors will worry about the decline in the number of editors, the number of admin candidates, and among their personal vandal-fighting acquaintances. This is what happened when Cluebot took over most of the simple anti-vandal work in 2007. Even though the number of active editors leveled off about a decade ago, some editors are still repeating these stories from 2009 as if they were true today.

So we will (I predict) get fewer active editors, specifically among the dedicated anti-vandal types, because there will be (I predict) less actual work for them to do in their preferred areas. Some of them will quit/become inactive rather than become article writers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:03, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Meh. We're never going to run out of busy-work to do for people who like gnoming type things; I racked up 3200(!) edits yesterday standardizing the internal use of en-dashes and hyphens on date ranges within articles and barely scratched the surface, and anyone who thinks registering accounts will actually eliminate disruption—as opposed to just reduce it to a more manageable level—is welcome to head on over here and click links at random. It's not as if Commons—which has always been an IP-free zone—is one big happy family all working together for the greater good. I'm generally extremely conservative when it comes to making any kind of change to how Wikipedia operates, but I still think the experiment is worth trying. ‑ Iridescent 18:23, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

We had no shortage of gnoming needs in 2007 when Cluebot made anti-vandal patrolling less fun, and we still lost a huge number of editors who did anti-vandal patrolling. I don't think that humans are interchangeable here. If your idea of fun is to revert a bunch of poop vandalism, then when that doesn't need to be done, you find a different hobby. You don't start replacing hyphens with en dashes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:33, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Did we though? I was there at the beginning when high-speed vandal-fighting became a thing—indeed, I'm largely the reason the reversion tools require the rollback permission to use—and I don't remember mass resignations over ClueBot. The volume of manual reverts dropped since there was less to do, but I can't think of any regular editor who wept salt tears because there were no new vandals to revert.

Statement of the obvious perhaps, but if there is genuinely such a thing as an editor who is only able to contribute a single particular type of edit, and we no longer have a need for that particular type of edit, why should we be concerned if they leave? If a change genuinely does bring an end to 'poop' vandalism, then mourning the editors who do nothing but revert 'poop' vandalism seems like the Wikipedia equivalent to complaining that since the invention of the automobile there are fewer blacksmiths around. ‑ Iridescent 17:54, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Just because people don't write resignation manifestos doesn't mean that they didn't stop editing, or reduce their participation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:17, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing True, but neither is it always a great loss when someone reduces their editing, or even stop entirely. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 03:44, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

RadiX has helped me translate bus tickets from Portugal before. Tks4Fish is less useful at bus ticket translating, but probably knows a thing or two about pt.wiki. And both of them happen to be stewards so they're also fluent in meta-speak. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:20, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi TonyBallioni! Thanks for the ping.
@Valereee, Iridescent, and Tryptofish: IP editing is banned at ptwiki for all namespaces, with an exception for the Help namespace and all associated talks. So, you can't edit WP:AN as an IP, but you can edit WP Talk:AN and so on. The Help namespace is now the place where IPs can report problems, or ask questions, or whatever they need. The final vote to decide that was held here, from September 4, 2020 until October 4, 2020. As for that quote, its translation is very accurate, and represents well what is being said in Portuguese.
I'm happy to answer any more questions you may have, just ping me to ensure I'll see it. Best, —Thanks for the fish! ^{talk•contribs} 17:27, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Hm. Well, I'd support not allowing IP edits to articles. I've been more and more concerned about mobile editors IP-hopping. I just can't see how we're going to keep up. But I'd support allowing IPs to still make edit requests and participate in discussions. Until the IP-hopping becomes too disruptive. Which I suspect it will. I had to semi the talk for a Hong Kong-related redirect a while back, it was unbelievable. —valereee (talk) 21:59, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

At this point, I may be investigating more than you really wanted, but I also see here that an AbuseFilter was used to "turn off editing for IP editors". I don't see anything to indicate that it was namespace-specific, but there's probably someone watching here who knows about abuse filters. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:07, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Ah, thanks! I assume it's possible to turn off IP editing to articles but allow it in other namespaces? —valereee (talk) 23:07, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't know how filters work. In principle, one could semi-protect all articles and no talk pages, but it would obviously be near-impossible to do that manually. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:20, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Another idea: perhaps just have the userright to see IP addresses be automatically assigned to editors with extended confirm and de-assigned to fully blocked users? This can be done with an adminbot.

I anticipate there's going to be drawbacks to this I haven't thought of that will be inevitably bought up (because Wikipedia is like that), which is fine. However, this will solve some of the ethical issues with fully exposed IP addresses while limiting the ability to see full IP addresses to users that can (hopefully!) be trusted with that. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:57, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

If the WMF is correct in saying that this change is in response to a legal concern, extending the view_ip_address userright (or whatever they end up calling it) to everyone who's extendedconfirmed wouldn't meet their legal obligations. The reason so many apparently random permissions are restricted to admins isn't necessarily because admins are some kind of super-user; it's that the RFA process provides a legal figleaf under US law as they can say "see, we've made a bona fide effort to ensure that access to potentially sensitive material is restricted to people who've gone through an in-depth vetting process". ‑ Iridescent 09:56, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Hmm. Your reply has me thinking, because you are, or at least could be right. I have a few thoughts.

1. The phrasing "norms and regulations" is a bit odd. Perhaps it's easy to translate into other languages. However, it does lead to the question "Norms? Whose norms? Not ours." I realize this is a bit of a derail, but that's how my mind works.

2. An adminbot shouldn't assign the userright, in your opinion. All right, your reasoning makes sense.

Perhaps people should be given the IP sight userright if they seem to know better than to harass people.

Example: I think I have the autopatrolled right because an admin looked at my account and decided I could be trusted with it; I've only created articles if you think like a computer. Now, if I were to, for example, start uploading copyrighted spam, I'd (rightfully!) have that right taken away. However, I know better than to do that.

My thought is basically "Do we really need to only give out this right only to anti-vandals?"

3. I wonder which law is requiring the WMF to make this change. Is this communicated anywhere? If not, why not? Also, if it's not a US-based law, maybe they can only mask IPs coming from the country requiring it. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:24, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

From recent edits I can see WhatamIdoing is currently reading this page, who when she's at work is Community Relations, Wikimedia Foundation. You could always ask, although it looks like throughout this the WMF have been a bit cagey about exactly why this change suddenly needs to be made now after 21 years. ‑ Iridescent 19:54, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Done.

This isn't really directed at iridescent specifically, but towards everybody participating and following the discussion. Let's remember that people who work at the WMF are human. If whatamidoing doesn't reply at all, I'll assume she can't/isn't comfortable answering because of the dynamics at the workplace. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 21:02, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

FWIW, WhatamIdoing did reply, if anyone cares to watch the ensuing discussion. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:04, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Tryptofish and Valereee: AF is currently used as a "last measure" of sorts. The way the IP editing ban has been handled is through partial blocks for the most common ranges that edited ptwiki, and whatever is outside those ranges is then caught by the AF. You can see here the block log for the user that blocked most of the ranges. Anything that starts with {{Deslogado| means a block made to handle the ban. Best, —Thanks for the fish! ^{talk•contribs} 17:36, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Tks4Fish, thanks from a fish! --Tryptofish (talk) 21:26, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Turning off IP editing via the AbuseFilter is a privacy violation for good-faith editors. (Because the filter trigger is logged, and the account creation is logged, and if you line up the two logs, you have a matching list of registered editor's IP addresses.) It should not be done. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:07, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

True, although that's also exactly what happens with CU logs. FWIW I think the privacy concern angle is hugely overblown; if you live in a dictatorship where the secret police stalk your history then you should probably work under the assumption that the security services know who you are anyway, and for 99% of editors the most your IP address will show is "subscriber to a big telecoms provider in whichever country everyone already knows you live". ‑ Iridescent 18:42, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Or, you know, if you're a new editor, and you're editing from work, and the IP address resolves to your workplace, and you don't really want someone to ring you up at work and ask you about your COI problems. Most people who are editing from home might fall into "subscriber to a big telecoms provider" category, but that's not true for everyone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:35, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Surely if someone is editing from a workplace and has a conflict of interest, we want to know? That Congressional filter exists for a reason. ‑ Iridescent 07:39, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing If someone really, really wants to find out where your COI lies, they just have to look for the tell-tale signs of COI editing, no IP address needed. What you described is stalking behavior, if done without consent. The risk of being victimized is predicted mostly by being around people who victimize other people. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 09:41, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

It's not necessarily stalking. When there's a particularly large volume of seriously inappropriate editing from a particular IP or range, there are circumstances in which it's appropriate to contact abuse@provider, and if the provider happens to be the person in question's employer then that unavoidable ends up with the link being made IRL. I would say that I think it's almost always a very very very very bad idea for anyone other than the WMF themselves to do this precisely because the editors on the receiving end of it do see it as stalking; at least one of our longest-term WP:LTA cases is a direct result of an editor taking exception to their employer being contacted. ‑ Iridescent 09:55, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

ArbCom certainly seems to consider ringing someone up at work to talk about their COI editing to be a ban-worthy offense.

Also, I suspect that if some stranger who saw your posts on a website phoned you out of the blue, a normal person would probably consider phoning the police next. You don't have to live in a dictatorship with a secret police service to want a certain amount of privacy. Nobody should have to deal with people contacting them to say "I know where you live, I know where you work, I know where your kids go to school". This has happened to admins here, and we should not make it any easier for it to happen in the future. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:10, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

It's complicated. I'm aware of the case to which you're referring in which someone was banned for calling someone's place of work. I'm also aware of the case in which a then-member of Arbcom contacted a disruptive editor's employer to let them know he was disrupting Wikipedia from their systems. (I won't name names in public to avoid stirring up old hostilities, but it's not a great secret.) The area between "inappropriate contact" and "legitimate method of preventing abuse" isn't at all black and white. ‑ Iridescent 18:28, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

User:WhatamIdoing and Iridescent: I think I might've accidentally contributed to thread drift by bringing up stalking, but it seems part of the 'big picture' point was discussed. My concern is, with IP masking, it's still possible to know where you work, etc. through social engineering, which makes things even more complicated. What I'm trying to say is that IP masking can give a false sense of security. However, apparently this is ultimately being done to bring the WMF into compliance with some sort of law, not because of privacy concerns, so maybe that's a moot point. --I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 21:05, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

I recognize that I'm known to by weird, but when I get a message that says "because X and Y have changed", I don't generally assume that it means "only Y" or "exactly one specific Y". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:37, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Legal was made aware of this and sent a message to ptwiki, see APalmer (WMF)'s contribs there, and was "fixed" by this edit. The situation was then considered resolved by the team. Best, —Thanks for the fish! ^{talk•contribs} 14:45, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

For what's it worth, I read in the Signpost article that a lot of the internet in Portugal goes through only a few IP addresses, which doesn't necessarily apply to the English Wikipedia. Not that I disagree with the concerns about IP masking expressed, but if this is correctly interpreted and remembered, then perhaps we should acknowledge the difference in cirumcstances. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:46, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

That might be true of Portugal but it's certainly not true of Brazil which in pt-wiki terms is where the action is; Brazilian IPs tend to be ridiculously dynamic and someone can go through multiple IP addresses, in a few minutes. For Wikipedia's purposes "everything gets routed through a few IP addresses" isn't functionally particularly different to "every time you connect you get a different IP"—they both translate to "we can generally only identify a range rather than a specific address so any block inevitably has collateral damage". ‑ Iridescent 09:34, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Ah, perhaps I misremembered slightly. Like you said, it's functionally the same. Either way, if you have to risk collateral damage every single time you block an IP, blocking all IPs make sense. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 21:08, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Break: unbundling, long-term IP editors[edit]

• I said my piece some time ago, but feel bound to repeat that while I don't really understand why someone wouldn't want to register an account, it's none of my business. I asked one long-time and much trusted IP editor, and their response did indeed have to do with avoiding edits building a reputation. I've been told by another long-time IP editor that there are half a dozen such people on en.wikipedia. (Both of those formerly had accounts, which they abandoned.) But more basically, my own experience has been that IPs make many, many constructive edits every day, including vandalism reversion. And assuming otherwise is the worst kind of ABF, because we have no way of knowing how many individuals are involved. Suspending unregistered editing would be the worst thing we could do in response to this latest WMF interference; it would be deeply unfair, and would be cutting off our own noses to spite our faces. IANAL, but people who open the edit window without logging in already see a message that their IP will be visible (and those who choose to do so but have privacy concerns are surely aware that there are registers of IP ownership); they also have a CAPTCHA shoved at them, so are already inconvenienced; would it not be a better idea to beef up the warning about publicly revealing one's IP, perhaps copying one of those forms I frequently have to click concerning whether I will allow cookies, which I presume are in response to the same privacy laws? In any case, whatever the WMF goes and does, even temporarily disallowing IP editing would be a slap in the face to some of the most industrious maintainers of the encyclopeadia, distinguished precisely by not seeking praise for their help, and we wouldn't get some of them back.

Putting two things together that I think belong together; I don't think it's just because of Cluebot (because Cluebot can be fooled, like any AI, and tendentious editing, which bots can't really deal with, is at least as much of a problem as vandalism), but the project will always attract people with a gatekeeping/law-enforcement mindset, and I see no sign their numbers have diminished. Only now in addition to the vandal-patrol shooting gallery, they can go into policing whitespace using automated tools (recent thread about that just came to an end at AN), they can opine at ANI and other community processes, they can hunt for people seeking to make new pages about businesses or business people and denounce them and draftify their pages, after a while they can qualify for NPP or AfC and enforce personal standards there. The project is so large and discussion has become so important that there is an entire ecosystem of such opinion-based activities and approval of them. Quite apart from the minefield of which kinds of gnoming are beneficial and which are churn (like adding "located" to multiple articles or pre-emptively adding archive URLs for all the references, to give two examples of activities that some may regard as useful and others regard as annoying). I trust your judgement in your copyediting runs, but there are editors who mistrust mine, and some folks' "gnoming" is disimprovement. There's little glory in adopting a genuine misspelling and periodically cleaning it up, or in adding good sources to articles marked as needing them, or in responding to other tags in a thoughtful way, and we've all seen the results when someone instead makes wholesale changes to the English variety or date format or slots in user-generated content as references, or even starts churning out stubs based on some directory, all things that look flashier. A new right to see partial IPs for vandal-fighting purposes will attract busybodies just as all the other new hats like NPP and AfC reviewer have. That will happen, and choke off some good editing while further encouraging the patrol mindset, even if we don't respond by curtailing IP editing. Yours, Cassandra. (Yngvadottir (talk) 02:47, 9 January 2022 (UTC))

@Yngvadottir I agree wth you; IPs often make good-faith edits, and sometimes they're actually competent in doing so. On the other hand, this might be forced through by WMF Legal anyway. Perhaps if admins gave the IP sight right to everyone they trust with it, the problems with this situation will lessen somewhat. In fact, personally, I'd find it unacceptable if the WMF didn't allow the community to set its' own guidelines about who to give the right to. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 03:28, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Assuming that this is genuinely based on legal concerns, you'll probably be disappointed when it comes to I'd find it unacceptable if the WMF didn't allow the community to set its' own guidelines about who to give the right to. As regards the viewdeleted userright—which is probably roughly analogous in "access to potentially sensitive material"—WMF Legal has consistently been adamant that there needs to be a true vetting process in which potential candidates for the right come under genuine scrutiny. (This is why attempts to unbundle the admin toolset always fail; the level of scrutiny they insist on for a hypothetical WP:Requests for Viewdeleted process is just as intense as the existing RFA, so there would be no benefit to there being a separate process.) I'd be very surprised if the same wasn't the case here; the whole point is to allow the WMF to say "we've done our genuine best to restrict access to this information only to those who genuinely need it". ‑ Iridescent 06:17, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

If the WMF is going to let admins assign the userright, with literally little/nothing else, not letting the community decide on guidelines is going to be essentially unenforcable. I wonder if there's going to be an RfA-like process or something. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 06:38, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

The most recent precedent I'm aware of for a "limited access to sensitive information" userright was Wikipedia:Moderators/Proposal. On that occasion, the WMF's ruling was that it would only be permitted "on the condition that the selection processes for moderators remain exactly the same as that for administrators- using the same criteria, operating on the same page." (their emphasis throughout). Although that was a decade ago it's unlikely their position will have changed significantly. Assuming it hasn't, then it would be counterproductive to create a new userright—it would by design be just as hard to get as full admin rights, and would have the additional perverse outcome of making it harder for editors to become admins since some people would say "run for IPviewer first and see how that goes", meaning candidates would need to jump the RFA hurdle twice. (It could conceivably reinvigorate the RFA process both by drawing more people to the page and by demonstrating to potential candidates that the "bearpit" reputation is something of a myth and that scrutiny isn't something to be scared of provided you've nothing to hide, but I'm not sure it's a gamble I'd want to take.) ‑ Iridescent 07:08, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

It's certainly not a gamble I'd want to take!

I do recall a discussion on the unofficial discord server where people seemed amenable to not only having the userright unbundled, but having it given out almost to the extent that rollback is given out. One justification behind this is that people accidentally uncover vandalism on a frequent enough basis, even if they don't 'work' in anti-vandalism, that most people would actually need it if they can prove they can be trusted with it. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 11:40, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

To be frank, that says more about how detached the Discord clique are from reality than anything else. It's clear from the page linked in the OP that regardless of the specific law, this is in response to privacy concerns and potential security risks, and that what the WMF has in mind is something more akin to the existing processes for Checkuser; that is, that even most admins won't have access to this new userright. If anyone seriously think we're going to be handing it out like rollback, they're going to be sorely disappointed—reading between the lines, next time the situation arises when a Wikipedia user gets a knock on the door from the secret police,* or a stalker turns up at an editor's home or workplace threatening them,^† the WMF wants to be able to say "We did all we could to stop editors' identies being made identifiable". If we're handing out the userright to anyone who racks up a few hundred reverts on Huggle, we may as well just keep the IP addresses visible in the first place. ‑ Iridescent 13:06, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
*This does happen.
^†So does this.

(As I recall, only a couple people were envisioning it as a rollbacklike, one of who was a very new editor and the other of who isn't someone I put stock in the PERM views of.) From following the earlier convos on Meta, my thought is that the WMF came in with a "this is a functionary right and most admins won't have it" take, got massive pushback, and wound up with this weird compromise that different people are reading completely different things into. (Unsurprisingly -- it's trying to account for both wikis where "community process" is something like enwiki RfA and ones where it's something like, say, Wikivoyage RfA, and the WMF being the WMF is focusing way more on the latter than the proportion of actual editors account for.) In practice, I assume most big projects will end up banning IP editing rather than try finagle an RfIPV process if that's actually what the WMF is demanding, for exactly the sorts of reasons you note. (On the RfA gamble note, right this moment there's a persistent account-hopping AC-gaming vandal whose hobby is placing giant "This user was rejected by the community" notices on the userpage and talk of recently failed RfA candidates, so we're just leaning as far as possible into antipathy now, I guess.) Vaticidalprophet 13:20, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet, I guess I have a different recollection. I think I joined the conversation later on.

Also, community process? Like, what sort of community process? A RfP/A one, where I have seen editors come in with concerns about the rahter or not someone should have the right, or an RfA one? I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

The unwillingness of WMF to provide more detail is going to make it very hard to figure out a process. Do they expect the community to decide by shooting in the dark, or is there going to be some initial form suggested? There is a huge gulf between the weird compromise Vaticidalprophet mentions where it is an edit right available to "Editors who partake in anti-vandalism activities" (ie. everyone?), and something which requires "anyone who has access to the right...to acknowledge in some way...the process to gain access is likely to be something less complex than signing the access to non-public personal data agreement." That CUs will have to "opt-in" also feels a bit bizarre. As this process has gone on, I've begun to lean more towards the feeling that as privacy laws and norms have apparently developed in a way that no longer accommodates IP editing, it may be better to accept that instead of creating a new fiddly process that will take up both community and WMF time and may end up with the same result. CMD (talk) 21:55, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't remember the last time I needed to know any editor's IP address. Obviously, people calculating range blocks have different needs, but I don't seem to need that information. I'm apparently in the top 0.002% of all editors ever by activity, so even highly active editors do not always need to know other editors' IP addresses. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:29, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

No-one always needs to know, always needing to know is an unreasonable bar. However, they can come in handy, for example in helping assess the possibility of proxy block evasion. We have useful tools that I assume will be made inoperative by the masking, making quality control more difficult while making disruptive vandalism easier. CMD (talk) 08:53, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that. It's rare to need to know, but on the rare occasions you need to know, you need to know. I don't see how IP masking could go ahead without a whole slew of unpredicted consequences—I'll throw you "what do we do when someone blocks a disruptive IP who turns out to be on one of the sensitive IP ranges because the admin just saw them as IPUser:Anon9383418, and the WMF is suddenly deluged with queries from journalists?" as a starter. ‑ Iridescent 20:00, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I know this is rhetorical, but to this specific use case, Filter 958 will still tag them with a "Congressional edit" tag next to the edit. That's assuming edit filters will still be able to see underlying IPs (the issue was raised on talk, the WMF didn't officially reply but I find it hard to imagine them implementing IP masking in a way that causes all of our IP-related filters to break). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:03, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't think that I've ever personally needed to know an IP address. It's sometimes fun to find out what part of the world someone is editing from, but "it's sometimes fun" isn't really a need.

@Chipmunkdavis, can you name any tools that you think might break? (I'm looking for just a suspicion of problems. I'm not asking you to do any extra work.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:00, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Alongside the edit filters and rangeblocks, which I assume are being accounted for, we have bots than handle open proxies and the toolforge IP checker, which has apparently already seen its development ended because of the masking proposal.

It might not be possible for technical reasons, but I've just had a thought following Iridescent's ponderings of a limited-time experiment, as to whether the new system can be implemented parallel to the existing system for a period. That is what would really allow for a grasp of the new system. CMD (talk) 08:09, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@CMD, are you thinking that IPs in the logs would display both the IP address and the masked address for a while, to get people used to the new system? An immediate drawback that springs to mind would be that if they're using an algorithm to generate the pseudousername, it would create a big database for any wannabe hacker to try to crack how to calculate the IP, and even if they're using a true random number generator, all the usernames would need to be reset at the end of the side-by-side period to avoid creating a "poor man's checkuser" database of every IP that had edited during that period along with its corresponding mask. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it's yet another thing to be added to the "we need to plan for this before we start making changes" pile. ‑ Iridescent 07:34, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

If the masks are not by IP but by cookie, then my expectation is that the name is random and therefore not based on the IP. I also suspect that means that the username would not be linked to the IP but to the device (or specifically to the device browser session; I feel most people don't clear cookies that often unless it's a built-in feature). The issue of linking the anonymous mask to the IP would still be there, but that doesn't seem any more revealing than the current system, and in any case a cookie reset feels like something that should be relatively simple to accomplish. CMD (talk) 08:16, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

If that's the case, it opens even more of a can of worms. Wikipedia may be based in the US, but it operates in a lot of jurisdictions where putting a cookie on a user's computer without their explicit consent is a criminal offence (and we're not talking a few minor territories with outdated legal systems, but core markets like Germany and the UK). If we force cookies onto machines without consent we're going to alienate a lot of people once they figure out what's going on, and if we don't use cookies then we're back to square one.

See here for some of my previous thoughts about the WMF's lax attitude towards cookies. IANAL but I find it very hard to imagine that the claim that "The exemption that applies to authentication cookies […] can be extended to other cookies set for the specific task of increasing the security of the service that has been explicitly requested by the user. This is the case for example for cookies used to detect repeated failed login attempts on a website, or other similar mechanisms designed to protect the login system from abuses (though this may be a weak safeguard in practice). This exemption would not however cover the use of cookies that relate to the security of websites or third party services that have not been explicitly requested by the user." applies in these circumstances would fly, since someone making an edit to Wikipedia can't reasonably be construed as "explicitly requesting that cookies be placed on their device". Masking isn't as much of an issue as regards Wikipedia editors as cookie blocks, since they won't be applied by individual editor so there won't be the issue of (e.g.) a France-based admin blocking a France-based editor and thus breaching French law by putting a cookie onto their device without consent, but I certainly wouldn't want to be the person in the WMF office on the day the European Commission notices what's going on. ‑ Iridescent 11:51, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I am not personally advocating the system (such complications are why I lean towards feeling that if IP editing is going to be a huge headache, it may be time to move on rather than twisting into knots around it), but it seems like this is the system the WMF is moving forward with. Starting from the assumption that WMF will continue down this path, a test in parallel seems like a good idea. It may even help bring potential non-technical complications (such as legal issues) to light. CMD (talk) 13:15, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

If IP editing is going to be a huge headache, it may be time to move on rather than twisting into knots around it sums up in a sentence what I've just spent about 10,000 words trying to articulate. I don't want to disable IP editing and I think "IPs are all vandals and we should be glad to see them go!" is a profoundly wrong position, but if the only way to keep IP editing is by erecting a hugely complicated bureaucracy, one needs to ask if it's worth the hassle. ‑ Iridescent 16:59, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

It would actually be a significantly easier and less bureaucratic hassle to just block IP editing by geographical IP range. The legal issues with IP's being classed as PII are not new ones after all and almost entirely apply to the EU/UK (and a few select other locations) that put someone's IP (regardless of it being dynamic or static) into that class of personal data. This smells like a wide-ranging tech project that has got out of hand in order to find a solution for something that is not that complicated, resting on a flimsy business case. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:23, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

If restricting IP editing only in those nations where the legal implications arise would actually solve the legal problems, that would be an excellent solution, and probably the best of our options. Disallow IP editing from those nations where IPs cannot legally be displayed, so that we don't have to deal with the resulting mess, but continue as usual everywhere else – that sounds perfect to me! (My only question would be whether those places that don't want their residents' IP addresses posted in public would also prohibit our posting other IP addresses in public. I can also think of a possible complication if someone in the prohibited countries tries to IP edit while masking their true IP with a foreign one; I don't know if our edit filters already preclude that, or whether the laws make an allowance for it.) --Tryptofish (talk) 19:02, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@Only in death and @Tryptofish We could, in theory, even let people use closed proxies to IP edit. The complication there might be that I'm not sure if the WMF is 100% on board with that. And, of course, if this is an American law (possible, though more probable that it's the EU/UK), any editing via proxy IPs would be a moot point, anyways.

If only we had more information. Both in terms of "how many IPs edit constructively nowadays" and "Which law is requiring this?". I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 02:18, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

We're only assuming this is in response to a law. It's not impossible that the WMF has been spooked by the idea of government goons tracking down people who've made edits that have fallen foul of governments. One would think that if that were the case they'd be heading towards prevention rather than masking—I'm sure any security agency worth its salt already has an admin account on their respective language wiki—but you never know. ‑ Iridescent 14:23, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I guess that particular question of mine is more "What happened?", because I don't want to speculate about that. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 21:29, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Assuming for the sake of discussion that there is some sort of law (or proposed law) behind this, although the US has a surfeit of goons (and morons), the legal concerns about online privacy are very much more likely to be EU/UK. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:33, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

@Tryptofish Agreed. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 23:48, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

It may be pure coincidence, but my comments about "government goons" isn't plucked from thin air. If one looks at the timings of exactly when privacy jumped to the top of the WMF queue after 20 years on the back burner, it's suspiciously close to the long tale of woe documented here. ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Yikes. As far at this discussion is concerned, it's probably best we acknowledge this could be all a coincidence, but it's still scary to think about the timing. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:11, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Long aside about registration and tracking[edit]

@Yngvadottir, I'm agreeing with you. I know there are certainly long-term editors who now mostly run dark as IPs, including some formerly very high profile accounts (I'll use Keeper76 as an example as he's previously outed himself as doing this so I'm not violating anyone's privacy, but I'm aware of others). There are also people who've never bothered to register an account at all (although that's a lot less common nowadays; there are more things one genuinely does need an account for than there used to be).

However, as I understand it the status quo is not an option, and the only two possibilities going forward will be (a) suspending IP editing and requiring registration, or (b) a masking system in which we continue to allow IP editing but every IP address to edit Wikipedia will be assigned a randomly-generated pseudo-username.

Registration isn't as complicated as it was when you and I joined; Special:CreateAccount nowadays literally takes ten seconds. To me there's a reasonable argument that (b) will be less useful and more confusing—both to the IP editors and to the rest of Wikipedia—than requiring registration. (Aside from anything else, there's an obvious issue that while the concept of "IP address" is fairly easy to explain, masking IPs under pseudo-usernames will lead to a situation where some usernames are automatically shared while other usernames are auto-blocked if we catch them being shared, and we'll forever be having to explain the situation to good-faith new patrollers.)

I'm not arguing that we should ban IP editing. What I am arguing for is that, since IP editing in its current form is going to be banned come-what-may, it would be a worthwhile experiment to test whether the impact of a total ban would actually be as bad as predicted, and to do so before we go to the effort of: setting up an elaborate structure of masked pseudousernames; a new userright and a corresponding WP:Requests for ViewIP rights process and noticeboard; figuring out how to handle the inevitably increased workload on the checkuser corps; a logging system that will grow like Topsy (since we'll presumably need to log who viewed which IP and when, for the purpose of the inevitable leak investigations); coordinating how the pseudo-usernames will interact with SUL and whether the identities will be preserved across the WMF ecosystem or freshly-generated on each site; working out how rangeblocks will work in a world when only a select few can see the ranges; figuring out how to handle sensitive IP situations (since unless an admin has the new viewIP userright they'll presumably no longer see the "warning, you are about to block the US Department of Homeland Security" warning); working out how unblock requests will work if most of the admins are unable to see why the IP in question was blocked in the first place… ‑ Iridescent 05:52, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't remember registering, or even how many times I edited as an IP before doing so; too much water under the bridge :-) But I'm aware of that "only if it's exactly like an RfA" statement, although I didn't realize it was so long ago. I don't think they've thought it through; I think it will be an absolute clusterfuck, hence my emphasis on our not reacting by disallowing IP editing; but I'm sure it will be like template editor used to be, automatically given to admins, since blocking and unblocking are core functions. If they do keep the option of vandal-fighters getting the right, the one good thing that would come of that is we might be able to broaden the Arbcom election pool on that analogy. But I don't think they know what they're doing and no, I don't trust their legal analysis either. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:03, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree that it will be an absolute clusterfuck, which is precisely why I think the experiment of requiring registration is worthwhile. If it doesn't cause significant damage, then it's a mechanism by which we can avoid the clusterfuck. (The stats from Portuguese Wikipedia are difficult to interpret, as the switch was flipped in October 2020 in the middle of the pandemic so it's impossible to separate out which changes were a result of shifting computer usage patterns. What we can see, though, is that the rate of registration went up implying that the previous IP editors were at least in part willing to make the switch, and most importantly the raw activity rate didn't drop substantially, implying the project didn't become a moribund backwater and there wasn't a mass resignation of previous vandal-fighters who now had less to do, but that the existing editors just shifted their activity elsewhere.)

I don't trust WMF legal analysis either, but I'm assuming in this case it's credible. You know how much they hate directly intervening on en- and de- after how badly they've had their fingers burned the last couple of times. Something has obviously seriously spooked them.  ‑ Iridescent 09:22, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

You might recall I asked WhatamIdoing about which specific law is requiring the WMF to do this; she delegated the task to someone else, and I haven't yet gotten a reply.

I assume they're busy enough that a lack of reply is understandable (and also, I'm curiously being just a bit nosey), so I'm being patient. In fact, this is the first time I checked for a reply since the question was delegated. However, I have to admit that witnessing previous WMF-caused drama contributes at least slightly as to it occured to me to ask the question. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 11:55, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

If you haven't already seen it, meta:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation#Legal risks won't answer your question but will at least make it clear they're not going to answer. ‑ Iridescent 14:24, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I think the problem here is that people see 'legal risks' and think the risk is for the user. Yes having your ip visible is a risk, but its not a legal risk. All of the legal issues around IP's are to do with recording, storing, and access to a piece of information that is classed as personal. The legal issues of which fall squarely on the WMF and people who they allow access to that information. Which is basically every volunteer who has a sufficiently advanced permission to view certain information. So understandably the WMF does not want to clearly explain what the legal issues actually are, because they would then have to get into specifics about things like checkusers/admins etc being data handlers under UK/EU law and thats a can of worms they dont want to open. There are two issues here: It is risky to expose your IP in the modern technological climate unless you are sufficiently aware, and there are (due to things like GDPR and other legislation) new legal issues for the WMF and volunteers. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:13, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

There's certainly theoretically always been a legal risk for the editors as well in the sense that if you make an edit that's actually illegal, having your IP address visible makes it relatively easy for the authorities to track you down (as your provider is almost certainly based in the same country as you, whereas the WMF can wave away non-US subpoenas). For most editors it's not an issue as it's an "if you've done nothing wrong you've nothing to worry about" situation, but I imagine things might well look different to an editor in Minsk or Hong Kong. It's not impossible that the WMF have developed a sense of morals and are trying to protect users rather than cover their own asses, particularly after the recent shenanigans on Chinese Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 15:17, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, any long-term IP editor is far more likely to quickly register an account than abandon editing Wikipedia altogether. I'm sceptical about the benefits of IP editing to be honest. We don't have good recent data on their net value. Data from the first few years of Wikipedia's existence, such as that c. 2005 study people quote (in 2022!) isn't convincing, as Wikipedia isn't in the same part of its lifecycle. While there is a lot of constructive stuff, there is also a lot of nonsense, and that's excluding all the nonsense from IP editors that gets blocked by filters. As for the patrol mindset, I think it's an illuminating experience to see junk edits roll in on Huggle, or to look at a niche edit filter's logs and see all the bad edits (including subtle vandalism, which IMO is more harmful than blatant vandalism) that gets by patrollers. The reverting of such edits is certainly an essential and valuable task. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:06, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Exactly. We're not going to run out of disruptive editors, for those who like reverting—and unless and until there's some kind of experiment on one of the big wikis, we'll never know whether or not there's a net benefit to allowing IP editing, since all the data is either hopelessly out of date or based on too partial a dataset to be meaningful. To be honest, I find it really hard to believe that a significant proportion of the "I've spotted an error and decided to fix it" section of unregistered editors will be deterred by the few seconds it takes to complete one of the simplest forms on the entire internet. ‑ Iridescent 18:37, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader "Data from the first few years of Wikipedia's existence, such as that c. 2005 study people quote (in 2022!) isn't convincing, as Wikipedia isn't in the same part of its lifecycle."

I'd like to see recent data myself. It's what would convince me that we need to require registration, if there is truly a CIR/vandalism issue among IP editors, because I have more doubt than Iridescent above that people would fil out any form at all, regardless of simplicity.

I frequently welcome people on huggle. I've went through a period where I kept getting had complaints from people who IP hop by accident that they keep getting welcome messages from me. If it bothered them that much, you'd think they'd register an account as directed by the welcome message...they didn't. I've more recently been thanked by an IP for the welcome message, because it has a line saying that it's okay to edit Wikipedia unregistered, before, of course, explaining that there are benefits to an account. The editor interpretated that as saying "Oh, it's okay to continue editing unregistered."

Basically, people aren't going to give themselves a username and password to do a drive-by edit, whether a drive-by copyedit/other minor edit or vandalism. Most IPs don't plan on returning, so of course they wouldn't. We should only turn off IP editing if there's data supporting it would reduce vandalism without having too much of an impact on good faith edits. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:05, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Re I'd like to see recent data myself, the only way we're going to get that is by the experiment of temporarily turning it off on one of the big wikis. We literally have no way to know what the effects would be; it's perfectly plausible (although I doubt it's likely) that it could even lead to an increase in editing, if a significant fraction of the former IP editors thought "well, I've gone to the trouble of creating an account, I may as well have a look round and consider getting more involved".

Thinking aloud, there are other things we could do to mitigate any negative impact of enforced registration. The Free Culture hardliners would scream blue murder, but it might be worth seriously looking at integrating invisible account creation with Big Tech. Most people regularly create accounts on other websites without even realizing it by using the "sign in using Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple" options (seriously, check the cookie and password files on your browser and see how many accounts you've created on various websites over the years without even noticing), and provided we kept a "no, I'm not happy connecting the identities, I want to create an account manually" option there's no reason other than ideological purity why we couldn't do the same. These companies all rely on us to power their fancy data-mining operations and smart devices; they'd likely bend over backwards to help if they thought it would potentially improve our accuracy. ‑ Iridescent 20:35, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Honestly, if people only had to push a button to create an account with their initials surrounded by a couple of random words and letters, it would probably remove nearly all obstacles to drive-by editing in away that IP editing currently provides. Of course, there's enough Free Culture hardliners (and more so, they're loud enough) that this might never happen, but one can dream.

I was talking more about data surrounding how many IPs vandalize vs. how many are constructive enough to not get reverted by the undo button, Cluebot NG, or an anti-vandalism program. Of ocurse, there might be issues with accuracy, since sometimes even blantant vandalism gets missed by everyone and everything. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 21:36, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

That reply wasn't to me, and I have no credentials as a Free Culture hardliner, but integrating invisible account creation with Big Tech is an appalling suggestion. I have no Facebook and no Twitter (to name only two) for several very good reasons. The WMF may receive massive amounts of lucre from Alphabet in exchange for unspecified services, but I hardly endorse that, and what most people regularly do is neither a justification for promoting self-identification (the same goes for the WMF's promotion of real names, unforgiveable since Gamergate even though some Internet sub-cultures have always preferred them, and then periodically wonder why they have so few women members, and there are of course many groups other than women who are at risk if they reveal their civil identity) nor respectful toward editors who have chosen not to log in. (And of course the cherry on the turd sundae would be that anyone who'd made that link between accounts would then have to rely on WMF security to protect their social media passwords. Poor schmucks.) Yngvadottir (talk) 22:08, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Regarding relying on the WMF to protect social media passwords: authentication is still done entirely on the servers of the third-party site. The WMF servers would not store anything that could be used to log into other services. isaacl (talk) 00:13, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

All it would be is "this device is already logged in to service A as user:Foo, so we can take it for granted they're also user:Foo on service B". Unless you're living a hyper-paranoid existence with no Microsoft, Apple or Google operating systems or browsers installed and every privacy setting cranked up to max, your computer and even more so your phone are already quietly signing you in and out of websites and services multiple times a day without you noticing. (Install Tor browser on your computer, go about your life as normal, and see how many times you get asked to log in to websites that normally just let you straight in, and how many sites somehow no longer seem as personalized to you.) ‑ Iridescent 05:18, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't want to give unnecessary information, but recall that I have never had a smartphone :-) I'd better bow out before I get down in the weeds about "anyone can edit" and how the WMF have perverted it, but will throw in this caveat about editor numbers: I'm sure a significant number of "editors" are Smiley/Hillbillyholiday and a few others. Sorry to have interrupted. Yngvadottir (talk) 09:05, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

That's always been the case; back in the day a fair few editors were Poetlister and Shalom. I strongly suspect the "number of real people" figure as a proportion of "number of active accounts" has remained fairly steady since "the editor base" in its present form took shape circa 2006 in the wake of Siegenthaler. (Before that, "regular editor who's just never bothered to log in" was much more of a thing.) What's probably shifted is the number of active editors who are actively on the make—getting placement on Wikipedia is much more valuable now than it was back in the days of MyWikiBiz—but even then I doubt the fraction is particularly significant.

Even if you don't have a smartphone, then unless you have some kind of Linux/Tor configuration on your computer you almost certainly have far more accounts on assorted websites than you're aware of. It's just an artefact of the way the internet operates. (If you're using any website that's free or clearly charging below what it costs to operate—and you can't see an obvious "donate" link or a "funded by the Foo Foundation" banner—then you're the product.) As long as there's a clear and obvious alternative route available for people who aren't comfortable with it, I see no issue at all with this or any other site having a "sign in using Google" link. ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

More likely you have tracking cookies than an account, though from a privacy perspective, it just means all the tracking of your page visits can happen without the benefits of your having an actual account. isaacl (talk) 21:25, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Yup, I have cookies up the wazoo, and lots of pesky boxes asking whether I'm ok with that because of where I'm located, and lots of experience clicking "Don't sell my information" and then being unable to read the content; something similar on the edit screen when one is not logged in is what I am suggesting, as a non-lawyer, as an alternative to what the WMF has decided to roll over us with. But one more comment in response to poor Iri, whose hospitality I am really abusing here; I'm told that row of icons, for Facebook, Google, Twitter, et al., all transmit users' data to the relevant corporations when they land on the page, whether or not they click; maybe that's only for the users who have accounts, but I suspect it's tracking that doesn't require an associated account. If that is so, I deeply resent the implication that I should let Alphabet, Meta, et al. associate my Wikipedia account with everything else they know about me. That is a flagrant privacy violation and people who don't mind logging in using such companies' services having the warm fuzzies of seeing a familiar icon in no way mitigates the damage of that connection being made. For me and for anyone else who may not want that. The WMF has a cozy financial relationship with Alphabet and who knows what else, but they can piss up a rope with their "just tell us your real name so you can get into a meeting with other editors off-wiki! It'll be fun and social!" and "just tell us your real name so we can send you a T-shirt!" and "If you don't tell us your real name we won't know you are one of the protected classes of people we say we care about, and not just one of those randos on the Internet", and if they endanger all of our privacy by installing cutesy buttons on the log-in page, they may not care that it might endanger someone or some people, but I do. Yngvadottir (talk) 03:18, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

If the image is being served from the third-party site, then your browser will send a request to it. If sending third-party cookies is enabled in your browser, then any cookies from that site will get sent, which would allow for tracking. If you have not disabled sending referrer information, then the URL of the page that has included the image will be sent. If the image isn't being served by the third party, they won't know anything about it. isaacl (talk) 04:44, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

From what I've heard, the common/default/recommended by the advertisers code to create that row of social media icons really does enable tracking, and that's why WMF Legal says that code must not be used on any WMF-hosted site. It is possible to link to such sites (and even to use their icons) without enabling tracking. Several smaller wikis have done that.

Of course, since we let any registered editor write whatever Javascript they want for their own accounts, or to use anyone else's code, then it's possible for anyone to post all sorts of privacy-violating code on wiki. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:11, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the third-party sites that want to track you will give you code snippets that load images from their sites. If the WMF doesn't allow any image loads from external servers, then Yngvadottir's concern won't come to pass just by the inclusion of links (as long as you don't click on them).

Regarding Javascript, it's user-beware: they're responsible for the code they add, as it will potentially affect their security and privacy (though not anyone else's). isaacl (talk) 16:47, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Unless you're an admin, and you decide to paste a cryptocurrency mining script into commons.js. Just hypothetically, I'm sure. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:00, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

If you're doing that, you're better off doing it on one of the smaller wikis. The userbase might be smaller, but you're likely to get away with it for much longer. On the WMF ecosystem you're unlikely to get away with it for long whichever site you target, but I suspect that on other MediaWiki sites that don't have the same setup of internal admins and external stewards watching for problems, often have an even less technically competent userbase than we do, and are run by companies who don't have any particular interest in what goes on provided nothing happens that will get their own management in trouble (naming no names) one could scam them pretty much indefinitely provided one didn't get too greedy and draw attention. ‑ Iridescent 06:31, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Sure; your original post just said "any registered editor", so I didn't get into all the potential security holes that admins or interface admins can exploit. isaacl (talk) 05:30, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Turning off IP editing isn't the only way to get recent data. We could just replicate the old experiment. With WP:ORES classification data, it should be even easier to do than it was back then. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:21, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I was thinking and talking about just that, and you just stated it more clearly. Thank you I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 03:47, 10 January 2022 (UTC) (typed more clearly at 04:24, 10 January 2022 (UTC))

As I've watched the progress of this discussion, it occurs to me clarify something. I'm not in favor of disallowing IP editing as a general position. But I'd support disallowing it in the specific new situation of the change being put forth by the WMF, because of all the (unnecessary, as I see it) complications that would arise in administering the new system. I'm happy to have IP editors, but I won't be happy with the problems that will arise with assigning masks to the IP addresses.

And that said, I'd like to broadly question the long-time assumption that having more editors is always good, and having fewer is always bad. That assumption underlies the idea of a wiki with crowdsourced editing, and it's become something of an unquestioned principle onsite. But there's nothing wrong with subjecting orthodoxies to critical thinking from time to time, and sez me this is one of those times. I recognize that there can be a big problem if there are too few people to accomplish needed tasks. But as long as tasks can be done, with some redundancy and with enough involved people to keep eyes on all sorts of things, it probably is not the case that we should set a goal of always increasing the editing population, and treating any decline as cause for concern, the way a for-profit corporation would always want profits to be increasing. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:32, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm not in favor of disallowing IP editing as a general position. But I'd support disallowing it in the specific new situation of the change being put forth by the WMF, because of all the (unnecessary, as I see it) complications that would arise in administering the new system. I'm happy to have IP editors, but I won't be happy with the problems that will arise with assigning masks to the IP addresses. This, exactly. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't be supporting a ban on IP editing, but if the only alternatives are "ban on IP editing" or "create an elaborate bureaucracy of multiple access levels and new user rights, new processes for granting those new permissions, and new processes for how the data is handled", then banning IP editing seems the lesser of two evils.

The growth point is true to a point. It's true that a thousand good people is better than two thousand bad ones, and it's valid to say that a focus on raw numbers says very little about the health of the site. What's different is that unlike a for-profit company, we have constant expansion built into the model, so either the number of editors or the level of automation needs to rise steadily just to keep up with routine maintenance. (To go back to banging one of my regular drums, the constant expansion is not a good thing no matter how many press releases the WMF put out to the contrary. We have between 3000 and 10,000 active editors depending on how you measure it; at the time of writing we have 54,939,037 pages. This isn't sustainable.) ‑ Iridescent 05:27, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I tend to define the number of active editors the way that the software does, which is 132,402 at the moment.

When a community is very small, and the "bad" editor is merely semi-competent, then more is likely better than less. Ten teenagers will get more done than a lone expert. The teens might mostly write about pop culture or toss a few sentences together about whatever they're studying in school, but what they produce has a significant chance of helping people, either because people were looking for a list of all the songs on the latest album, or because they wanted a couple of sentences and the external link at the end of the page. But when the community is very large, IMO skills begin to matter more (both social skills and content skills). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

That figure is because the WMF redefined "active editor" to "at least one edit in the past month", which isn't particularly useful. On the WMF's old (and still very generous) definition of "active editor" as "any account that's made five edits in the past month", I make it 39,052 active non-bot accounts, while the old "very active editors" count of people making 100+ edits in the last month is at 5004, near the lower end of the range it's sat in for the last two years. ‑ Iridescent 05:30, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree that 10 is better than 1. However, it may not always be the case that 11,000 is better than 10,000. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:36, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Loveness Shilili Makoleh[edit]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nas[edit]

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

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

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

Yo[edit]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tamzin's dark joke about it is a hypothetical biography beginning "John Smith is a French^{[1][2][3][4][5]}-German^{[6][7][8][9][10]} or French-Austrian^{[11][12][13][14][15]} serial rapist^{[failed verification]}". I'm sure there are several actual BLPs fitting that exact description. I think automatic semi-protection for BLPs is one of those "silent majority" ideas that many-most people support at least casually and simultaneously many-most people have no desire to fight the vocal fringe on in a PAG-writing discussion (see also: reasonable COI rules, reasonable NFCC rules). Although in the wonderful Venn diagram overlap of two of those, I recently saw an idea lab proposal of "what if we intentionally made ugly photos of BLP subjects under non-free licenses and used them in articles so the subjects would send us freely licensed images?", so there's still some really 'interesting' stuff out there. Vaticidalprophet 18:48, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft:Kshitij Vedi [edit]

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

Nico Krijno[edit]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

re at AfD[edit]

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

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

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

“	3. Confirm the page is eligible for proposed deletion by checking that: it has not previously been proposed for deletion. it has not previously been undeleted. and it is neither currently being, nor has ever been, discussed at AfD/FfD.	”
— WP:PRODNOM policy

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

Hello[edit]

Hello Administrator. Im User 애국심 존중. I Think Brawl stars Editers are violated Policy WP:NOTGUIDE. Please Protect or Delete Brawl Stars. Thank you. 💻HACKER (talk) 05:36, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

I hate Article What violated Policy 💻HACKER (talk) 08:38, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) @애국심 존중: The video game is notable, so we will not be deleting it on the grounds of WP:NOT. If you believe there is gamecruft in the article, you could either try to fix the problem yourself or begin a discussion on the article's talk page. Anarchyte (talk) 10:09, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

@Anarchyte: ok 💻HACKER! 👻GHOST! (talk) 11:22, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree with what Anarchyte said; I don't think WP:NOTGUIDE means what you think it does.When we say "we are not a game guide", it means we don't include insructions for specific aspects of gameplay (so we can say "the player must pass through a grue-infested maze", but not "north, north, east, south, east is the fastest way out of the maze without being eaten by a grue") and that we don't include list games indiscriminately regardless of notability. For a topic like this, which is demonstrably considered important by multiple significant reliable sources, it's entirely appropriate that Wikipedia covers it. ‑ Iridescent 10:50, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

How people get to and leave pages[edit]

Whatamidoing has posted this tool on the Medicine Wikiproject talk page, which shows how people get to a page and where they go afterwards. Figured that people were interested here, since we discussed how people read pages before.

I find it interesting how many people are leaving to read Proxima Centauri b and TRAPPIST-1h even though it's not linked from the lead. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 20:07, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

IIRC (I remember seeing the research but I can't remember where it was), there's usually a near-perfect correlation between how far down the article the first link to a topic appears and how many readers follow the link. I suspect TRAPPIST-1 is giving distorted results because so many people are going to come to it while working their way through a list that the other entries on that list will rank highly even if they're not linked at all; it's hard to imagine someone interest in one without being interested in the other even if they're not explicitly linked.

(Pet peeve alert: as far as I'm concerned this is evidence that navboxes should go back to being where they used to be at the top of pages either in the spot now occupied by the infobox, rather than hidden away at the very end where readers never see them unless they're intimately familiar with Wikipedia's internal quirks and know to scroll to the end then uncollapse the references section to see them. If the bulk—or at least a significant proportion—of a given article's readers come from and are leaving to "other page on a closely related topic" rather than "pages linked in the lead", then to my mind it's an obvious service to the reader to make the links to closely related topics easier to find, regardless of how much it annoys the infobox obsessives.) ‑ Iridescent 11:12, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Iridescent, I agree with your mini-rant; unfortunately, the brains that maintain Wikipedia tend to have a genuine need for sameness and have things Just So, both for better and worse. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:44, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that non-editors use navboxes enough to justify the effort of creating, maintaining, and arguing over them. They're not visible on the mobile site (half the page views), but nobody complains about their absence. I do think that regular (i.e., frequent) readers know where to find them, just like some people scroll straight to the ==External links== section. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:23, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

My own case of "this tool confirms my biases" is that see-also sections are underutilized. (See also: the amount of AFT responses that were "this should be in the see-also section" for which the writers complained that the links were already in the article -- where readers evidently weren't noticing them.) Vaticidalprophet 00:40, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

"See-also sections are underutilized" is almost certainly an artifact of the difference between the desktop editing and the mobile viewing experience. In desktop view, "See also" is very visible; it follows on immediately from the text, and the strip of white alongside it created by the way the software handles lists acts as a de facto pointer towards it. In mobile view, it's for all practical purposes invisible. (The same goes for references. I'm quite sure most of our mobile readers don't even aware that Wikipedia articles have bibliographies or reference sections.) ‑ Iridescent 05:27, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Other way around: they're underutilized by editors, who insist links can't be repeated there from the body and otherwise restrict them to being a dumping ground for marginal links, while that tool consistently shows them as one of the main ways people navigate to and from articles. Vaticidalprophet 06:51, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet I think Iridescent is talking about readers and you're talking about editors. If true, you guys might actually agree with each other. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 12:58, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I think we're on the same page; I agree that most topics should have a set of useful links. In my ideal world we'd combine "See also", navboxes and succession boxes, and have it much more prominent; as per JJE's initial comment, even without any research it's obvious that people reading one article on Wikipedia are highly likely to also be interested in articles on related topics, almost certainly more so than the kind of things we usually bluelink (e.g. someone reading Cheddar cheese would probably be better served by a link to Cheshire cheese than by Annato, Protected designation of origin or Brexit, all of which are among the most prominent current links in the lead). ‑ Iridescent 13:09, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I'll probably never understand why the mobile version removes all usergenerated navboxes other carefully chosen links and replaces them by three AI-generated "links to related articles". I mean, three prominent links instead of fifty navboxes is sane, but the results seem quite random: your example Cheddar cheese links to List of British cheeses (makes sense), Joseph Harding (makes some sense), and Little Derby (really?). Boris Johnson gives us Tim Montgomerie, Endorsements in the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election, and Mayoralty of Boris Johnson.

Now I'm not sure letting humans edit these links would be a particularly good use of our time, but I think we'd probably do a better job. —Kusma (talk) 17:34, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

My opinion on that enforced "three semi-random links" feature is here (in which you get the added bonus of the Dear Leader admitting he wasn't even aware it happened). You'll be unsurprised, I imagine, to learn it was pushed through by the WMF (this was the RFC that led to "consensus").

If it's throwing up seriously goofy choices, you can manually override it by putting {{#related:Article1}} {{#related:Article2}} {{#related:Article3}} somewhere on the page to manually force the three articles it displays. (I imagine at some point an enterprising spammer or more-intelligent-than-usual vandal will spot the obvious problem here…) ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I basicly agree with WhatamIdoing. Imo navboxes are mostly a little niche some editors (very often efl ones not confident of their ability to write text) have adopted with rather too much enthusiasm (often after they ran out of infoboxes to do). Many articles had three or more long ones - they are generally much too long and indiscriminate. Obviously in art articles they are a special curse, as one needs images at the top, and if not maintained many articles have several desk-top screens worth of very general navboxes at the top. Template:History of Greek art is one of the most annoying - it isn't terribly likely that people reading an article on an ancient Greek vase will suddenly want to go off to Munich School, unless curious as to what the hell that is doing there. It is revealing that no one so far has as much as mentioned categories, which remain the best navigation tool, if readers but knew it. Johnbod (talk) 18:20, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I think for general readers categories are usually too indiscriminate. Because of the way they diffuse, unless you're familiar with the quirks of Wikipedia's classification system they'd probably be more likely to confuse than inform. You know and I know why Roald Dahl isn't in Category:20th-century British writers, but a reader looking for him in there would probably come away thinking they'd uncovered a glaring omission. (Even if the reader was semi-familiar with Wikipedia's quirks, thought "aha, Dahl was born in Cardiff so he'll actually be in the subcategory Category:20th-century Welsh writers", they'd still not find him.) ‑ Iridescent 18:28, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that, though biography categories are often the worst, if only because they're so big. Actually I don't know why Roald Dahl isn't in Category:20th-century British writers - oh, ok, I do now, because he's in 3 sub-cats like Category:20th-century British novelists. But equally he's not in any navbox templates except for his own two, like most non-politicians/nobles/office-holders, and Template:World Fantasy Award Life Achievement, which won't lead many to him, I think. Johnbod (talk) 04:08, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I begged someone to pull numbers on logged in vs logged out page views for me, because I also thought that cats were unlikely to be used. However, I was (somewhat) wrong; most of the page views were from logged-out people. Whether enough more were from logged-out/readers is not clear to me, but there were a lot more readers than editors looking at those pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:53, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Well that's good to know. Johnbod (talk) 04:08, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, do we have statistics on whether the logged-out readers are using the categories? Whether they're actually using them as a navigation tool, or just wondering "what is this thing at the end of the article?", clicking it, and then closing the browser tab or hitting the back button, would obviously have an impact. (TL;DR: what proportion of the logged-out readers opening a category, follow it by clicking on another entry in that category?) ‑ Iridescent 16:56, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

No. I only asked for page view information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:03, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Like this? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:46, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

That's not quite comparable; no sane reader is going to use Category:Holocene for navigational purposes, as it's so all-encompassing—e.g. Big Mutha Truckers 2: Truck Me Harder is directly in the Holocene category tree. (Holocene → 21st century → 21st-century fads and trends → 2000s fads and trends → 2000s toys → PlayStation 2 → PlayStation 2 games → Big Mutha Truckers 2: Truck Me Harder, if you're wondering.) For the more niche-y categories like Category:Discus throwers, "go to the category and look for the specific subcategory you want" is a more practical way for readers to resolve "I'm trying to figure out if Wikipedia has an article on a particular obscure topic, but I can't remember the name or I'm not sure exactly what name the article would be under" situations. (For this specific example, the answer is clearly "no"—the category rarely gets more than one pageview per day.) ‑ Iridescent 07:07, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Munich_School shows that most people who clicked on a link in Munich School (which is a small minority) during the last month are headed to biographies for two artists, whose names are in the middle of fairly long lists of names, with no discernable reason why those would be chosen instead of any of the others. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:36, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

See also https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Le_Bistro/25_janvier_2022#De_l'influence_d'une_palette_sur_la_diffusion_de_la_connaissance

As I've just discovered this, I have not yet figured out whether putting a navbox in "A" causes people to click links in the navbox, or if it makes people more likely to visit "A" itself (e.g., perhaps its search ranking goes up because it has more links in it?). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:11, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

That's easy enough to test—just find an uncontroversial and relatively obscure page that gets a steady but not exceptional stream of readers, remove the navbox, and see if there's a change in the traffic. You probably want to use an undisclosed sock to conduct the experiment, since if you or I—or any (WMF) account—do so then people will know that the page in question is the subject of discussion, and will go to see what the fuss is about. If I recall correctly—and I may not recall correctly as it was years ago—when Neelix went on his spree of creating navboxes it didn't have any obvious impact on either the pages he spammed the navboxes onto or the pages linked in the navboxes. ‑ Iridescent 19:31, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

STICKTOSOURCE[edit]

I am seeking the wisdom of the collective. The context is a discussion mostly about sex/gender in one of my sandboxes. I don't think you will want to read it; at the moment, it is approximately the length of As I Lay Dying but even less intelligible.

Here is the story:

Imagine that you are reading a scholarly source, which you want to use to source for a substantial part of an article. The scholarly source gives a technical term for a group of people (e.g., "46 X,Y males"). After that, it uses a common word (e.g., "men") to describe this group of people.

• Should editors be allowed to pick which term they want to use? If so, are there any unacceptable reasons for choosing one vs the other? (For example, "Sure, you can pick any term used in the source, but not if your choice goes against the community's value of _____"). A sub-question here is whether choosing a less-common term is a violation of UNDUE.
• Should editors be allowed to use a third word (e.g., "genetic male") that isn't in the cited source, but that any person with basic familiarity with the subject matter would agree is a synonym/matches the intention of the cited source? Is it a violation of NOR to use a synonym? (Assume that this synonym wouldn't be disputed, except that an editor feels that it's on the wrong side of including/excluding trans people.)

I would particularly be interested in what you all think should happen vs what you think would happen. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:09, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

OK, I'll go first:

In general I'd always stick to the term general readers are most likely to understand ("men"), but include an explanatory footnote the first time it's used ("In this article the term 'men' is used to mean…"). WP:UNDUE is a distraction; the issue is that Wikipedia articles should be as comprehensible as possible. Editors should be allowed to choose which term they want to use within reason. If they insist on using a term which it's not reasonable to assume readers will understand (if you have a long memory, you may recall the editor who insisted we use 'decollation' in place of 'decapitation' or 'beheading' because it was 'technically more accurate'; as far as I'm concerned this is no different), or where there's a reasonable potential that the use of the term will lead to confusion, then no; likewise, we shouldn't be using neologysms like womyn-born womyn if we can avoid it unless it's unavoidable.

Analogy is sometimes risky but in this case I think it's valid; to take a less hot-potato topic, would you insist on our not using the word "train" to describe the image to the right because technically it only constitutes a "train" if at least two separate vehicles are coupled together and this particular model was built as a single long unit? Unless there's a very good reason not to, we should always be using the terminology readers will understand, not the terminology the subject specialists use.

I would have no issue with synonyms that aren't in the cited source provided any reader would understand what you meant by it (or you explained how you were using it if there was any potential for confusion); it's no different to the way music articles will mix up "song", "composition", "piece" and "work" to reduce the repetition. Even on a hot-button topic like trans issues, I don't think there's an issue provided you acknowledge that you're aware of the issue ("In this article the term 'men' does not include trans males because…").

All things being equal, what should happen is probably no different to what would happen. You and I have been jaundiced by long exposure to problematic areas, but in general the vast majority of Wikipedia editors understand that we're writing for readers and not for ourselves. Trans and gender identity issues on Wikipedia were poisoned for a long time by one particular crazy who would try to turn everything into a fight, but that editor (and their socks) was kicked out some time ago now and touch wood the out-kicking appears to have stuck. I suspect that as long as you're willing to explain what you've done and why you're doing it in a particular way, most people whatever their personal preferences are going to be reasonable. ‑ Iridescent 05:21, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

In my opinion, this partly goes to editorial judgment about whether or not the choice of language is contentious. If the choice of words is just a matter of professional technical language in the source, versus readability for our readers, it's fine to focus on what is most helpful to readers, and not sweat the OR details. But if it's something like whether to call something "terrorism" or "a riot" or some technical term used by the source, it's probably best to use the exact term used by the source, with attribution. So if it's "XY males" versus "men", it's fine to go with "men", but if the context is something specific about trans people, then editors might need to be more precise. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:01, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes. Plus there's our old friend ENGVAR to consider. It isn't such an issue on sex/gender as that's an area where words have pretty much the same meaning everywhere, but in some areas like ethnicity and nationality what seems like the most straightforward terminology can be very confusing. ("Less than 1% of the Chinese population is of Asian descent" and "3⁄5 of the population of Europe live in Europe" both make sense in BrEng, albeit anyone actually using either in print would likely be fired for inexcusably sloppy writing.) Even on sex/gender, I'll be willing to bet that at least some of the terminology which appears perfectly acceptable and non-contentious is considered grossly offensive by someone, somewhere. ‑ Iridescent 15:22, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

That's a good example. One of the complaints about the choice of sex/gender words is that there is more than one meaning for the words. We could adopt a rule that says "Strictly observe the sex and gender distinction" (I wouldn't recommend such a rule myself), but even if we adopted such a rule, that wouldn't make the sources strictly observe the distinction.

The community has a lot of experience with how to describe people who are nationals of one country but not ethnically/racially associated with that country's history. In some respects, this should be no different: just as Chinese person could indicate that the person is a "citizen of China" or a "person of Chinese descent" (and often means both), then woman could indicate that the person is a "adult female human" or an "adult human with a feminine gender identity" (and often means both).

A couple of years ago, I attempted to convince editors that Woman should say that different definitions existed (e.g., psychology, biology, sports, law, feminist scholars). The idea was rejected. I have wondered since then whether some opposing editors thought that admitting to the existence of different definitions would undermine gender identity as the One True™ Definition. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:44, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I doubt anyone would argue against the words "XY human" unless they were in the fishbowl of sausage makingWikipedia editing. Only the unreasonable would argue the fact that genetic humans were being talked about if the article is written clearly. I suspect only Wikipedia editors and a few others care about policies like WP:STICKTOSOURCE. The people reading our articles would be grateful if we were more accurate than tabloid media, and wouldn't be as detail orientated as we are. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:37, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

@I dream of horses, I can imagine a lot of people arguing against "XY human". Can you imagine anyone saying "I went to the store yesterday, and this XY human was complaining that the lines were too long"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:47, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I thought we were talking about scientific (or "scholarly") articles where primarily the genetic configuration matters. Did I misunderstand? I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:51, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

That's actually a good example of another way that context is important. An article about genetics might well be a place where the "XY" terminology would be preferable, but it would be undesirable in a page about sex differences in the prevalence of a non-genetic medical condition. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:43, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

@Tryptofish Exactly. In the context that WhatamIdoing was talking about, I might use they/them pronouns and "person" if I was remembering to not assume gender. But we're talking about genetics, and so it makes sense to be clinical. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:47, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Oddly, I didn't make the same assumption. WAID's OP says it's a scholarly source that says "XY" the first time and then says "men" after that. There's obviously something genetic about the source, but I don't know how focused on genetics it might be. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:52, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

5α-Reductase 2 deficiency[edit]

@Tryptofish: Perhaps it'd help to have access to the source (which, granted, may or may not be possible, a lot of medical sources are woefully paywalled). Not all XY people have, for example, penises or two testicles, and gender affirming surgery isn't the only reason why that would be. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:58, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

(No need to ping me, I watch here.) Yes, it would depend on the source, and the context. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:00, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

That particular example was inspired by 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency, about which scholarly sources refer to the affected people as:

• 46X,Y males
• 46,XY individuals
• genetic males
• karyotypic males
• males
• men
• females (usually in the context of women's sports; cf. Caster Semenya)
• women (ditto)
• girls (usually in reference to gender of rearing)
• male pseudohermaphrodites

This is an intersex condition. Affected individuals are believed to be female at birth, but most develop male external anatomy during puberty. Many of them transition their social gender during puberty as well. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:30, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing In that circumstance, "intersex" makes the most since. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:33, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I can see problems with "intersex"; it's such a vague term that we'd need to keep a constant "on this occasion, by 'intersex' we mean…" running commentary.

As a more general point, remember that although we tend to give more leeway on highly technical topics we're writing for people with wildly different levels of background knowledge. (Although it's fair to say nobody without a fair amount of background knowledge is likely to search for "5α-Reductase 2 deficiency", it's perfectly possible that someone could land on the page via Special:Random or via an internal link.) To the hypothetical "bright 14 year old with no prior knowledge" or "girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her but only if she’s empowered with the knowledge to do so", a term like "46,XY individuals" may as well be written in Japanese. It's no good holding endless RFCs to determine the perfect terminology to use on each and every occasion in the article, if it ends up making the article so incomprehensible that we end up having to do what we did at Introduction to gauge theory / Gauge theory and write an entirely separate version of the article for the benefit of people who don't understand all the jargon. ‑ Iridescent 18:31, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

For me, it helps to know that the example page is specifically 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency. This is a page that I would regard as both (1) highly focused on genetics, and (2) dealing with contentious issues of sexual and gender identity. I'm not bothered by the 46,XY terminology, because it's explained via a blue link at the beginning of the first (Presentation) section of the main text. I think it's necessary to use technical, genetic language for most of the page, because "men" or "women" are oversimplifications and misleading. But there is an interesting exception to that: in the Society and culture section later on the page, it talks about "four elite women athletes", and that's the correct way to say it. "Women athletes" are a thing in the same way as "college athletes" or "professional athletes".

As for gauge theory and related physics pages, that's a pet peeve of mine. I've complained repeatedly that they are written for physics grad students, and not general readers. The response I get is that mathematics is the only way to describe it precisely enough (not really true, if one has sufficient writing proficiency), but I just don't have the motivation to argue with that. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:04, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

5α-Reductase 2 deficiency is the source of my example. However, the primary reason I'm asking is because of the number of new editors who are editing traditional topics in women's health, such as Pregnancy,[1][2] Breastfeeding,[3] and Premenstrual syndrome[4][5], in ways that are usually accurate and verifiable (though not always).

If this turned into a big dispute, the main options (that I can see) are either an IDONTLIKEIT argument or an ostensibly policy-based argument. I am not sure how, exactly, we would make policy-based arguments. Would editors accept that NOR's "Rewriting source material in your own words while retaining the substance is not considered original research" includes using words that have multiple meanings (e.g., "women") when one of those meanings matches the substance? Is there a valid DUE argument against a choice of synonyms?

We don't seem to have a policy that requires editors to write brilliant prose with a minimum of technical jargon. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:27, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing It's probably impractical to poll people who have 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency themselves, but has that been done by any other organization? I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 04:23, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

So far as I know, the answer is generally "men". I don't see an issue with using "men" in the article.

This is generally a topic that frustrates me; much of my medical writing brushes right up against both it and the absurdly wide definitions some advocates use of 'intersex'. (I got consensus to remove the "notable people" list from Klinefelter syndrome composed of serial killers and transgender porn stars, but I have not yet successfully removed things like trisomy X or XYY syndrome from our various decentralized lists of intersex conditions, because no matter how many people agree you only need one dissenter to edit-war.) Fundamentally, it is neither an accurate description of most people in a cluster nor even particularly friendly to the cluster's exceptions to fold and spindle language here. (Diffs like that PMS one always amaze me -- someone who carries around the belief that every person with XX chromosomes menstruates clearly isn't being trans-inclusive, because one of the whole points of medical transition in that direction is it stops someone from menstruating!) The intersex disputes I sometimes get wrapped up in are genuinely confusing to me, as sex chromosome aneuploidies have no meaningful association with either physically ambiguous genitals or cross-sex gender identity, but they rage on while I just try to improve the damn articles. I dread the day I go mad enough to try fix the KS article and spend the rest of my life reverting people trying to add that it makes you gay. Vaticidalprophet 05:38, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

IMO a key audience for the 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency article is parents of affected children, so "men" is probably the wrong age group. A majority, but with a sizeable minority, socially transition and identify as men after puberty.

I assume that the PMS editor, whom I suspect of repeating these same edits for more than five years now, is trying to include non-binary, female-bodied people who are not doing any sort of hormonal transition.

It sounds like KS needs a well-sourced statement along the lines of "There used to be a myth about KS making people gay, but it's not true". Addressing the subject directly tends to discourage people from putting falsehoods in an article. Otherwise, the article has a lacuna, and nature abhors a vacuum. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:52, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

This is totally outside my area so I don't know if the sources have been subsequently debunked, but here's a paper in Nature reporting Regarding sexual function, significantly more men with KS than controls reported being homosexual or bisexual, for what it's worth (albeit it looks like a relatively small sample). ‑ Iridescent 18:28, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Taking a look, yeah, that's four gay XXY men and one gay XY man, and eight bi XXY men with three bi XY men -- not really the sort of thing people are thinking of when they try to posit Klinefelter's as some sort of Intersex Condition that makes men More Womanly. In fact, both are much lower than the current estimates of bisexual orientation amongst young adults.

This shades into OR, which is one reason that article will probably suck forever (because the sources to make it not suck don't exist), but there are two big confounders here. The first is that sex chromosome aneuploidies have basically negligible diagnosis rates compared to their prevalence -- KS is much higher than most, which is to say about a quarter of men with it are ever diagnosed in their lifetimes. Because the presentations of them are so mild, people only tend to get diagnosed if they have unusually good reasons to suspect they might be, and historically having any sort of sexual habits that diverge from sociocultural norms (including but not limited to homosexuality) has been a major driver for that.

The other is that they're all fairly strongly associated with various common forms of neurodivergence, and those absolutely do have associations with non-heterosexuality, completely independent of anything to do with chromosomes. Autistic adults are very strongly less-likely-to-be-straight as a group, for instance, and autism rates are elevated for all of the major sex chromosome aneuploidies. "KS makes you autistic, and autism makes you gay" might actually be an accurate statement, but it's definitely not the one people are picturing when they have the original thought. Vaticidalprophet 02:35, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Is there a policy about "We should respect the identity of most people with a diagnosis, with a footnote that there's inevitably going to be exceptions?" Probably not, but I'm starting to realize that's my opinion in this specific situation. It seems like most people with this particular hard to spell diagnosis start out in life identifying as girls, and then identify as boys/men after puberty, so maybe the article we write should reflect that. Not startling parents would be a secondary priority.

Then again, perhaps there's a bias that's preventing me from being reader-centered; if most of the people reading the article are parents, perhaps we should think about their feelings more. I acquired multiple diagnoses in childhood and adolescence (not anything that would bring up a debate like this, but still). I was also a pre-teen/teen with a very narrow interest in disability and medical information. I spent a lot of time looking up medical information and about disability rights activism online. I'm imagining about how I would want my disabilities written about if a similar debate came up for anything I'm diagnosed with, but a difference audience would feel respected with a different terminology. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:45, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

We have a rule that says we prefer individuals' self-identification over society's gender assumptions. If you don't contradict society's assumptions, then (due to an absence of higher priority information) we go with society's assumptions (meaning: editors don't need a tweet from Queen Elizabeth about her gender identity to refer to her as "she" in an article).

We also tend to prioritize gender over sex. We tend to write that heart disease is the leading cause of death in "women", not in "biological female adults". However, I'm not sure that the reason for this stylistic preference has anything to do with the sex/gender distinction. It could be entirely about a desire for non-technical language.

In the case of 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency, IMO the solution is simple: we refer to "genetic males"

The wording of your first sentence ("respect the identity of most people") could be read two ways. Should we:

• respect the identity of the majority ("breastfeeding women"), or
• respect the identity of as many people as possible ("nursing parents")?

I am curious what you think of these choices. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:56, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

In this specific example, I'd always avoid "nursing", as it has far too much potential to be misunderstood. Particularly in a medical context, I'm certain a significant proportion of readers would interpret it as "parents caring for a child who's ill or disabled". In the more general case, I'd tend to go with "respect the identity of the majority" provided it's made clear why we're doing so—in an area with so much nuance it's never going to be possible to come up with a wording that pleases everyone, so we sometimes need to accept that whatever we say is going to annoy someone so our goal should be to cause the least offense. ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

MOS:JARGON thoughts[edit]

We might not explicitly have a policy that requires editors to write brilliant prose with a minimum of technical jargon, but we do have a widely-publicised and well-followed guideline of

Some topics are intrinsically technical, but editors should try to make them understandable to as many readers as possible. Minimize jargon, or at least explain it or tag it using {{Technical}} or {{Technical-statement}} for other editors to fix. For unavoidably technical articles, a separate introductory article (like Introduction to general relativity) may be the best solution. Avoid excessive wikilinking (linking within Wikipedia) as a substitute for parenthetic explanations such as the one in this sentence. Do not introduce new and specialized words simply to teach them to the reader when more common alternatives will do. When the notions named by jargon are too complex to explain concisely in a few parenthetical words, write one level down. For example, consider adding a brief background section with {{main}} tags pointing to the full treatment article(s) of the prerequisite notions; this approach is practical only when the prerequisite concepts are central to the exposition of the article's main topic and when such prerequisites are not too numerous. Short articles, such as stubs, generally do not have such sections.

which is essentially the same thing in slightly fancier language. (We also have Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable even though that's so well-hidden nobody knows it's there or pays much attention to it.) ‑ Iridescent 05:22, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure that the usual disputed words (men/males/people/individuals) are considered "technical". The biggest problem isn't people trying to repeat "46X,Y make" throughout an article; the biggest problem is people wanting to use common words that have multiple meanings. Is this men like gender identity, or men like biological sex? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:54, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

They're flip sides of the same coin. Either we use a term which is understandable by readers but open to misinterpretation, or we use a term knowing that at least some readers aren't going to understand it at all. Personally I'd go with "genetically male" and "externally male", with an explanatory footnote the first time each is used to explain precisely what we mean by the term on this particular article. As long as we explain why we're using a term which may not be some people's preferred term, there shouldn't be too much of an issue. (Yes, the Faes of the world are going to argue, but to be frank they're going to argue whatever you use.) ‑ Iridescent 18:12, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

So if we phrased it as a principle, it might sound something like this?

"Sometimes editors will have to choose between a word (e.g., men) that is understandable by readers but which might be open to misinterpretation due to multiple meanings (e.g., people with masculine gender identities vs biological adult males) and a word (e.g., non-intersexed 46X,Y adults) that is not understandable by most readers. In such cases, it may be helpful to primarily use the simpler word and to explain in the article which meaning is intended."

Does that sound about right?

In terms of practical implementation, editors might add a footnote that says "In this article, men means..." or a parenthetical note that says something like "seen in men (i.e., in non-intersexed 46X,Y adult males)" or "seen in premenopausal women (i.e., biologically mature female humans, regardless of gender identity)", probably at the first reasonable opportunity in the article.

If I gave that advice to an editor, and it resulted in the "wrong" terms being used, what would you expect the wikilawyers to say about it, other than my "practical" examples sounding remarkably extreme? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:38, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Both the wikilawyers and the identity-politics-warriors (on both sides) are going to complain whatever you do, so put them out of your mind. What to consider is which position best serves readers. My personal feeling in this particular case is that "46 X,Y" is going to confuse too many people, "intersex" is too ambiguous and "men" would need too much explanation, so the least worst solution is "physically male"/"genetically male" (with an appropriate explanation at the first available opportunity), even if they're not the preferred terms in academia. ‑ Iridescent 19:44, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I'd be careful of WP:CREEP. But then again, I stay away from MOS. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:51, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm no fan of the micromanagementy In the case of coursed instruments such as the twelve-string guitar, courses should be separated by dashes, and string notes adjacent, so the twelve-string guitar tuned to octave G tuning is eE–aA–d′d–g′g–bb–e′e′ in Helmholtz notation parts of the MOS. That said, just because it's absurdly overspecific and some people have a tendency to give it way more significance than it deserves, doesn't mean the whole thing is invalid. Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Technical language may be a highfalutin' name, but the whole section could be summarized as "be comprehensible", which as far as I'm concerned is far more important than any one of the alleged "five pillars". ‑ Iridescent 22:15, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Sure. I didn't mean it very strongly, just sort of had a reaction that it was trying to spell out stuff that's just, well, come to think of it, not comprehensible. But don't mind me, if I don't like MOS, I probably don't like lichen either. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:19, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Manuals of style in the real world exist to stop arguing about stylistic choices that are often arbitrary. The problem on English Wikipedia is that its consensus-based decision-making process is a poor fit for making arbitrary choices. isaacl (talk) 22:30, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

But if we can agree on something to write down, that actually addresses the problem, it does tend to reduce the size and intensity of subsequent disputes. "Hey, I can see where you're coming from, but Wikipedia decided to do it the other way" can stop problems. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:59, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

This is Wikipedia, not reality. In my experience, it just shifts the debate to a different venue, where instead of engaging in endless pointless disputes about what to do in a particular situation, the style warriors and POV-pushers just engage in endless pointless disputes about why the policy ABSOLUTELY MUST be changed, or why it shouldn't apply to a given page. You presumably don't think the 2000 pages (at the time of writing) of archives of arguments over the precise wording of the Manual of Style (and those are only the ones with a Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/ prefix, not the discussions that took place on wikiprojects, article talk pages, Village Pumps, Wikipedia noticeboards, off-wiki mailing lists, etc) represent a project working well? ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Words to watch#Close reading of LABEL, which is your bog-standard WP:PGCONFLICT problem. Policy A and Guideline B say to do this; Guideline C says to do something different. But we must make Guideline C continue to say the wrong thing, because when it says the wrong thing, I can use it to force editors to do the right thing. When I want them to include in-text attribution, I tell them to follow C; when I don't, I tell them to follow A and B. Very simple, and the whole thing will fall apart if you make all the rules say the same thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:08, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

As with so much else that's wrong with Wikipedia, it ultimately comes down to:

1. We're operating under an underlying set of rules that were drawn up for a niche hobbyist website inhabited by a small group of bros who all knew each other and all had similar values;
2. The rules that are appropriate for a small group of people with a shared background, shared social circle and shared values,—and where even the most serious mistake has almost minimal real-world impact—aren't appropriate for a major institution where mistakes can have immediate and serious real-world consequences;
3. Because "we've always done it this way" is so entrenched and because there are vocal groups who have something to lose as a consequence of any change, it's virtually impossible to fix the problem even when everyone knows it's there.

I wouldn't hold my breath. At some point we should really be having serious discussions about whether "Assume good faith" and "Ignore all rules" are still appropriate 20 years later and on whether we should start considering a formal written constitutional mechanism for how and when to impose bright-line hard limits on editorial discretion even though it will mean imposing apparently harsh sanctions for breaches of trivial rules as the only way to force people to follow them. ("If you don't agree to use unspaced en-dashes to hyphenate page ranges within citations, you will be blocked".) Unfortunately that would likely be the most heated and foul-tempered debate in Wikipedia's entire history, so few sane people would want to take part and we'd end up with a written constitution drafted by the sort of crazy people who hang round WP:ANI, Meta, WT:MOS et al, and which the broad editor base would (rightly) ignore. ‑ Iridescent 07:35, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Thoughts on "Assume Good Faith"[edit]

Amusingly your rotating picture at the top is "Arbcom assuming good faith" for me at the moment... AGF is one of the most abused guidelines there is, and routinely abused by long-term established editors as they wikilawyer. Its an excuse for bad behaviour. The reality is that if your contribution and noticeboard history shows a habit of being misleading, expecting people to give you the benefit of the doubt in similar situations is just idiotic. Likewise when you have a topic ban from say, religion broadly construed, and get caught repeatedly, expecting people to AGF whatever bullshit is the latest excuse... frankly ABF would be far more productive in the process of resolving problematic behaviour. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:49, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I personally think that AGF is inappropriate for modern-day Wikipedia—the idea is nice, but what was suitable for a website with a dozen editors and a few hundred readers doesn't scale. We know that we're under constant attack from spammers, vandals and POV-pushers; when I see User:Widgetomatic adding reams of cut-and-pasted press releases to [[Widgetomatic]], I'm not going to operate on the assumption that this is all some fantastic coincidence and I should consider whether a dispute stems from different perspectives, and look for ways to reach consensus, whatever policy says.

With regards to your specific example, it's not so cut-and-dried, and I personally hate the "broadly construed" wording even more than I hate "admonished". To stick with your example of "religion, broadly construed", if either Arbcom or the community imposed such a sanction it would be because the editor in question was disruptively editing articles on theology, or changing people's religion in biographies without appropriate sourcing. Under the "broadly construed" wording, it would technically be a breach of the sanctions if the editor in question subsequently corrected a "cathlic" mis-spelling, or if a place formally changed its name, they (correctly) renamed the category to reflect the new name, and in the subsequent bulk search-and-replace of [[Category:Buildings in Bombay]] → [[Category:Buildings in Mumbai]] (or whatever) they happened in passing to make utterly non-controversial and unquestionably appropriate edits to the local church/mosque/temple. (It would even technically be a breach of "broadly construed" if they were consciously trying to avoid breaching their sanctions and went to someone else saying "I'm unable to directly edit pages on churches (or whatever), I've done everything else but can you do those particular pages", because in mentioning those pages they'd still be talking about "religion, broadly construed".) You can guarantee that in these circumstances there will be some wikilawyer type who will be scrutinizing their edits, eagerly waiting to point out "See! They edited an article on religion, broadly construed! BAN THEM NOW!!!". Sanctions on Wikipedia—be they anything from ultra-niche topic bans to full-scale global locks—should always be about preventing disruption, not about point-scoring. ‑ Iridescent 16:27, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I think that when you see someone adding cut-and-paste information from what's apparently their own press releases, you really should assume good faith – namely, you should assume the person genuinely believed that these self-promotion efforts would help Wikipedia, and then you should prevent them from providing any more such assistance. I don't see the point of thinking that such efforts are meant to harm Wikipedia. They did harm Wikipedia, but it's more like a clueless but friendly neighbor who "helped" mow your lawn and accidentally killed several plants in the process. He meant well, and now we have to clean up the mess. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:39, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Nah. Some, certainly, but head on over to Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as spam at any time when it hasn't been emptied for a while, and it's obvious that a significant proportion are outright spammers.

For over 30 years, [company] have been providing exceptional bareboat yacht charters in the tropical paradise of the Whitsundays. There is plenty of activities to be enjoyed, both offshore and onshore this includes swimming, fishing, snorkeling, bushwalking, exploring the islands, and kayaking. No license is required for a Yacht Charter in the Whitsundays. You will just need to have sailing experience and be competent in handling a sailing vessel. You can be a captain of your own adventure.

and

[Videogame includes] Over TEN types of enemies and hard-fought bosses Find your strategies to fight each of them off. Prepare yourself for the fight of your life.

and

At [company], we aim to disrupt the local market with cutting-edge technologies and solutions. Innovation is not a lavish term that can be used to describe businesses, but it’s the action or process of innovating and that’s what we do at [company]. Our approach is unique. We enable our customers to take control of their data across the broad, leveraging existing investments to increase visibility and provide actionable insights. [Company] provides an operational optimization that utilizes the previously under-utilized data. Thus, we offer a range of products and services to accelerate our partners journey from data to well informed actionable insights. Our team members are passionate about being part of a company that can solve actual tough problems and create innovative solutions to help our partners. We believe in taking the best idea regardless of the owner of the idea as we have a flat architecture, where our people can be fearless and feel empowered to always do the right thing.

are all among pages I've deleted just in the last few days (and those are just the first three I looked at, I could give you a dozen more in less than a minute), and I'm most definitely not among Wikipedia's most active admins.

I know you're wearing your Wikipedia hat rather than your WMF hat currently, but the consistent apparent inability of the WMF to appreciate just how high the volume of spam that the Wikipedia community has to deal with has become—in particular the strain the ever-rising volume of spam puts on the ever-shrinking groups of new page patrollers to do the tagging and admins to do the deleting and blocking—is to my mind an entirely valid criticism of the WMF. Regardless of what the intentions of the WMF actually are, it often gives the impression that it doesn't care how much of a problem paid editors cause, provided they keep on creating new accounts and thus keep the sacred {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} figure artifically inflated so the engagement figures continue to look good on the glossy reports. ‑ Iridescent 22:57, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

The thing about AGF...the first word is "assume," meaning when there's evidence either for or against good faith, it no longer applies and you should be able to be able to act according to the evidence. At least, that's my approach to it. Unfortunately, I'm aware other people are more rigid. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 00:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

"You need to assume good faith about me!"

Dunning–Kruger effect is linked on almost 600 talk pages, so apparently we are reaching good-faith explanations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:56, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Don't be a dick (the OG wording, not the bowdlerized "don't be a jerk") is linked on 1191 talk tages. People's reserves of good faith aren't infinite. Yes, fans of a product or person can in good faith think they're being helpful by copy-pasting press releases or the subject's own website, but that doesn't extend to people writing obvious ad blurb like The company is known for its quality service and excellence in customer service. The company provides excellent services in Website Designing, Mobile App Development (Both Android and iOS), Search Engine Optimization, Branding Services, UI/UX Design, Package Design and Label design. The company reached its zenith by its dedication and superiority in services. who are clearly just trying to use Wikipedia as a SEO tool. (Seriously, don't underestimate how many spammers are out there. And those are just the freelance sock-farmers, not the in-house PR people.) ‑ Iridescent 06:02, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

WMF vs Wikipedia[edit]

Since there's (hopefully?) no Wikipedia:Template limits on this page, I just want to highlight an Iri keeper here, that pretty much sums up why and how the WMF has made editing so unpleasant for the relatively few editors who actually write content (something they don't seem to acknowledge or value):

• I know you're wearing your Wikipedia hat rather than your WMF hat currently, but the consistent apparent inability of the WMF to appreciate just how high the volume of spam that the Wikipedia community has to deal with has become—in particular the strain the ever-rising volume of spam puts on the ever-shrinking groups of new page patrollers to do the tagging and admins to do the deleting and blocking—is to my mind an entirely valid criticism of the WMF. Regardless of what the intentions of the WMF actually are, it often gives the impression that it doesn't care how much of a problem paid editors cause, provided they keep on creating new accounts and thus keep the sacred 132,402 figure artifically inflated so the engagement figures continue to look good on the glossy reports.

Where the "rest of us" stand in relation to the phenom Iri explains has become more and more clear over the decades. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:05, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

The WMF ... is a gravy-train for folks. It no longer is meaningfully in touch with the main source of its gravy either - lets face it, en-Wiki is the engine that keeps that gravy-train moving, not all the feel-good crap the WMF keeps slinging money into. When I get discouraged, though, I do something like look at the page views for ... The Holocaust, and realize that getting things right MATTERS. Since I cleaned that article up in August 2017, there have been 17.4 million views, and at least they are getting a reasonably accurate article. So, I keep plugging away here ... not because of, but in spite of the WMF. I'd be a lot less cranky about the WMF if they actually supported their editors (and I don't consider the insanity that is the UCoC to be the support that is most needed for editors). If various WMF folks who are reading this REALLY want to support the editors - here's some things they could be doing - (1) spend a bit more supporting the projects on the community wishlist (2) get some folks who actually resolve bug issues with the software (3) get competent developers to do the mobile side stuff so we don't have the issues with it (4) cough up some more money for grants to editors for sources (5) expand the wikipedia library - I'd kill for access to Routledge, Boydell, etc. More academic press access would be a gift from the gods. (6) Get wikiEd to stop being stupid. Of course, none of these things will ever happen - we'll just keep stumbling along... Ealdgyth (talk) 15:37, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I'd like to endorse this. And add Elsevier and GeoScienceWorld to the pile, too. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

A me-too in the endorse department. (Not that the WMF cares in the least what I think.) There's a saying that "you treasure what you can measure", that is usually applied to dysfunctional organizations that measure something that seems good but misses the real point. Here, the WMF is measuring those sacred engagement numbers. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:01, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Ealdgyth and Jo-Jo Eumerus, the "better TWL" of those is actually doable. TWL is going through an expansion driven by an actual human being you can have a genuine conversation with about the process (rather than some faceless bit of the WMF). You can tell Samwalton9 (WMF) that you want X added to TWL, get a human response and an email from a human to the relevant wing of the thing you want added, and you can ask him what the process of adding something to TWL is like (and why it's sometimes quick and sometimes drags out forever) and he'll tell you. There have been new TWL additions in the past couple days. Vaticidalprophet 01:33, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Vaticidalprophet - it's true, we're continuously trying to expand The Wikipedia Library. We just added Wiley and re-enabled Cochrane. We're also now in the process of reprioritising all our outstanding requests so that we can continue pitching the program to more publishers. We just had a new team member join who is taking the lead on this. Let me know if you have any questions :) Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 15:03, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ealdgyth, just gonna put meta:Wikimedia Foundation salaries here. As of 2019 when the figures stop being made public, the ED of the WMF paid herself roughly twice what the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom earns (US$218,410 at todays rates), but at least had the decency to only value her own job at 97% of that of the President of the United States. (I'd also draw readers' attention to the "cost per employee" figure, and ask if these figures bear the least resemblance to any real-world employer you've ever seen.) ‑ Iridescent 16:10, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Um, the entire tech industry? Glassdoor announced this week that the median base salary for tech workers in the US was $145,000, not including "other compensation" or "employee benefits" (which average 30% of total compensation in the western US). If the median base salary is $145K, then total compensation would be expected to run around $207K. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:14, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't think you're making the point you think you're making. Since—as the WMF never tires of telling us—Wikimedia is a global movement, there's absolutely no reason for all those jobs to be in the most over-heated market in the world. Even in Central London, the second most over-heated market in the world, the equivalent figures are roughly half what they are in the US (which is why Google and Apple are both currently engaged in building London offices the size of small cities), and if the WMF were willing to move some functions to India, Africa or even Eastern Europe they could literally reduce costs by orders of magnitude. (Just to put this in perspective, in 2019—the last year before the pandemic drove salaries down—the median compensation for chief executives at the UK's hundred largest charities was £155,000, and these are billion-dollar operations like Save the Children and Oxfam, not relatively minor players like the WMF.) ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

But only US staff are "employees", and therefore only US compensation appears in that column. The non-US staff (a little less than half the total staff?) get reported on a different line.

Because of differences in tax and healthcare systems, it's really difficult to compare employee compensation across countries. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:32, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

I got a t-shirt (which I gave away), while acknowledgement of the value of the few contributors who keep highly viewed articles accurate and representative of "Wikipedia's best work" remains abundantly absent, to the point of mockery of our efforts. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:26, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia, the few contributors who keep highly viewed articles accurate and representative of "Wikipedia's best work" is something to which the WMF is never going to admit. People like you keep Wikipedia accurate. Readers verify the facts. is official Wikimedia Foundation dogma, to the extent that it's almost the first statement on the WMF's public-facing website. There are some honorable exceptions at the WMF who have actual experience on the wikis, I think that in general most of the people there collectively genuinely believe that it's The Wisdom Of Crowds that writes and maintains everything as opposed to individual people, and that consequently losing ten experienced subject-matter experts is more than mitigated by recruiting eleven new editors, even if those new editors are vandals, spammers, or just good-faith new editors who don't do anything more than make three edits before they get bored. ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

And we know that all too well. Why we leave is not a mystery; why we stay is. I have largely reduced my editing to two areas: those that make a difference in the real world (faulty medical information and POV warriors), and those that are fun (right now, that is FAR saves). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:24, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

• The example I always use when talking about the sock policy is that if there's one user that creates 10 serial accounts within the span of 90 days, makes a few hundred edits a piece, and then abandons them to "clean start" or whatever you call it, its inherently disruptive and more likely than not is an LTA who changed ISPs or moved. At some point, the creation of a new account every 10 days becomes disruptive in itself if you get involved in the social aspects of either the community or content creation, and I also don't have enough good faith left in me to believe that someone with a legion of serial accounts isn't under an indefinite block on 1 or more stale accounts. (Also, I'm sure you know this but noting it for the record so no one digs this diff up out of context, the policy specifically says the list at ILLEGIT is non-exhaustive and I'm not advocating anyone be blocked outside of policy.) TonyBallioni (talk) 03:21, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

  I agree with you, although there are exceptions to I also don't have enough good faith left in me to believe that someone with a legion of serial accounts isn't under an indefinite block on 1 or more stale accounts. I know of at least one very high profile editor who would deliberately switch between accounts every few days "because it's technically not sockpuppetry if I'm only using one account at a time", and who appeared to genuinely believe he wasn't violating even the spirit of policy let alone the better and seemed genuinely hurt and confused when he was called out for it. That particular case dragged on for literally years. ‑ Iridescent 06:40, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

"After a while, it gets wearisome and demotivating"[edit]

Regarding you should prevent them from providing any more such assistance, the problem is it can be hard to get to that point, as some editors invariably turn up saying they did similar things at first, and now they're super klewful editors, so you should spend a lot of your effort to help the editors in question. There are many who seem to expect conciliatory editors to invest significant time to work with unaccommodating editors. After a while, it gets wearisome and demotivating. isaacl (talk) 08:15, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Isaacl: After a while, it gets wearisome and demotivating.

That above quote is probably how every retired editor, whether or not they leave a paragraphs-long retirement essay, feels when they finally decide to leave for good. Concerning. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 08:31, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I very much disagree. In most cases, the reason is just "it got boring". The big divaquits are more noticeable, but the overwhelming majority of former editors are people who just gradually drifted away, and most of the rest are people who left owing to lifestyle changes (ranging from "I got a new job which doesn't give me time", to "I got a new hobby", to "I have medical issues which leave me unable to concentrate", to "I've moved to China", to "I'm dead"). Because none of these people leave big notifications on their userpages or rambling manifestoes on the admin noticeboards as they leave, one doesn't notice their disappearance until one goes to ask them a question and notices they haven't edited for six months, or (if they're admins) the bot flags them for inactivity and desysops them. ‑ Iridescent 14:58, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Life changes seem to make a big difference. High-volume editing requires lots of time, and when you go from "bored student" to spending 50+ hours a week at work, married, with a baby, that really cuts into time for editing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I am not so sure on that, Iri. Every time I have quit editing, it has been because I found something better to do because of my disgust at onsite issues, and those almost always point to the WMF or site administration. That's similar to what I most often hear from people.

One thing I am really curious about is the group-think that resides in WMF circles. I don't know if it's worse than in other similar endeavours, but it seems so, and it seems to matter not where an editor started-- everyone who comes under the WMF umbrella seems to succumb. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:22, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't think you or I are particularly typical. For most editors, even fairly active ones, both the WMF and the on-site administration are largely a vague presence in the background of which one is vaguely aware, rather than something that has a significant impact on day-to-day activity. Because you and I regularly run up against areas of active dispute, it's easy to forget that most editors are just working away largely undisturbed on whatever their preferred topic happens to be and don't keep getting dragged into arguments. When people in that position leave, it's generally either suddenly leaving as the result of a change in circumstances, or gradually drifting away either because they're getting bored, they feel they've said all they have to say about their preferred topic, they're beginning to feel unappreciated, or some combination of the three. (To put it a bit more bitchily, the first hundred or so entries at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits#1–1000 reads like Who's Who of Wikipedia's Ongoing Disputes, but then you get into a long tail of people you probably never heard of because they never get into arguments.)

On the group think at the WMF, I don't know, but I would have thought it's fairly self-reinforcing. The WMF has two fundamentally incompatiable roles: their official job to "empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally", and their self-appointed job as a political lobby group. I'd assume that anyone applying for any kind of job there who didn't agree with the political advocacy side would be unlikely to make it onto the shortlist (and even if they got the job, wouldn't last long); when you rinse-and-repeat the same cycle of reinforcement over 20 years, you end up with a group all of whom share that particular niche world view, even though it's completely unrepresentative of either the participants on the wikis or the world in general. ‑ Iridescent 06:50, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

"broadly" vs "reasonably"[edit]

Regarding one aspect of the above discussion, I once tried to change the wording to "interpreted broadly but reasonably." I was voted down because "reasonably" was "too vague." Newyorkbrad (talk) 08:31, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

You of all people should know that Wikipedia institutionally doesn't do "reasonably". Unless a rule is spelled out in minute detail, people will find "technically this doesn't apply in these circumstances" loopholes and brandish them triumphantly. (See also "technically that's a guideline not a policy", "it's not explicitly mentioned" and "I've seen someone else do it and not be sanctioned so applying the rules in my case would be unfair".) If Wikipedia does have a collective consciousness, it's the consciousness of a tax avoidance accountant. ‑ Iridescent 14:50, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Newyorkbrad: the problem with "broadly construed" is that there is no limit to "broadly". I could find a link between polar opposites for no other reason that they are polar opposites. I applaud your efforts and bemoan that your common sense has fallen on deaf ears. Iridescent is absolutely correct: "institutionally" doesn't do "reasonably" and WMF is clueless on that front. Buffs (talk) 21:59, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

To be fair, it cuts both ways. Without the 'broadly' it provides too much scope for "technically that isn't covered by the ban" wriggling. To stick with the original example of a ban from "religion, broadly construed" it could potentially lead to endless "technically Buddhism isn't a religion because it doesn't require the belief in a particular god or set of gods" style arguments. By the time someone gets to the stage where we're enacting topic bans, AGF no longer applies and it's reasonable for us to assume that they're at least potentially going to try to push the envelope. ‑ Iridescent 08:07, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Then "reasonably construed" should be the standard. If in doubt, they should ask for clarification. From the religion example, "broadly construed" could be used to attempt to ban a user who edits Vince Lombardi's page just because he went to a parochial school before coaching. I was personally blocked via discretionary sanctions based on "broadly construed" when neither the edits in question nor the subject even pertained to the ArbCom-approved discretionary sanction allowances (later overturned for that very reason). Buffs (talk) 22:33, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

@Buffs Alas, as iridescent says above:

[...]Wikipedia institutionally doesn't do "reasonably". Also, I have a rant inside me that our entire society doesn't do reasonable, but that might derail the conversation. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:50, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

My Wikipedia institutionally doesn't do "reasonably" isn't just (or at least, isn't entirely) my being bitchy. On a site with a userbase as diverse as Wikipedia's, there will always be disagreement over what constitutes "reasonable". Treating Vince Lombardi as 'religion, broadly construed' because he went to a parochial school sounds ridiculous, yes—but if an editor who's banned from 'religion' is making huge numbers of minor edits to the members of Category:Alumni of religious educational institutions, does that fall under "reasonably" if the edits in question don't themselves pertain to religion and are undoubtedly legitimate and non-disruptive, but it's obvious that the editor has only chosen to target this particular topic as a way to push at the limits of their topic ban? I won't name names—there's no point dredging up past unpleasantness—but I can think of quite a few cases of editors deliberately nibbling at the edges of topic bans when the wording of the ban is ambiguous (it's why we have the "broadly construed" wording in the first place).

(One could even argue that since we know Wikipedia has a significant number of editors on the autistic spectrum some of whom may genuinely need rules spelled out explicitly, that wording like "reasonably" breaches California's discrimination laws. Such a case would IMO go precisely nowhere—the concept of Reasonable person is well-established in US law—but I can easily imagine the WMF getting tied up in knots over the potential bad publicity.) ‑ Iridescent 06:25, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Given the attitude prevalent among US football fans, Vince Lombardi may, in fact, be a religion. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:32, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Tryptofish: isn't wrong, but they keep saying "cult" like it's a bad thing...

Long aside about high-functioning autism[edit]

There's a recognizable cycle of "problematic editor who happens to be autistic kicks at the edge of a sanction constantly; sanction is extended to a point that makes this impossible; editor declares that because they're autistic they didn't understand this was unacceptable; the very large population of autistic editors who are not kicking at the edge of sanctions death-glare through the computer screen". Looping back to where we started, it's a real messy situation for AGF. (The really tricky part is that because high-functioning autism diagnosis more or less did not exist before the past twenty years or so, most people the term could be applied to don't apply it to themselves, so sorting by who actively discloses gets all of demographic biases/"people pulling out all the stops before a sanction" biases/"people willing to disclose stigmatized personal details to a community that smells weakness like blood" biases.) Vaticidalprophet 06:41, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

To be cynical, a self-diagnosis of "high-functioning autism" is rapidly becoming the new ANI flu. I've lost count of the number of times someone who's never previously either mentioned autism or displayed the slightest sign of it, suddenly announces "I'm autistic!" when facing sanctions like it's Wikipedia's equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail card. As you say, it doesn't fool the admins and all it does is antagonize the genuinely autistic editors who manage to get on perfectly well without playing the "how far can I push the envelope?" game. ‑ Iridescent 06:51, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

The thing I find weird about it isn't spuriousness; to put it one way, in no case where I've been familiar with an editor's pre-existing behaviour has it come as a surprise. (I'd expect most non-problematic autistic editors not to display the slightest sign of it onwiki. An environment where "intense interest in and knowledge of niche subjects, preference for written communication and information-gathering rather than face-to-face, video, or spoken/auditory, and the willingness to go catch up on a lot of background on your new favourite topic" are basic survival minimums is going to have a lot of built-in accommodations for things that correlate with those even if it was never consciously intended to have them.)

It's the very weird auras that surround everything. More-than-occasionally people running cover for a problematic editor have tried to use it as a mitigating factor without that editor necessarily wanting it; in one case, I remember someone diffing an incredibly backwater discussion months before to ANI and horrifying the editor who hadn't intended his disclosure of it there to end up elsewhere, eventually trainwrecking the thread.

The eventual consequence is most discussions of neurodivergence on Wikipedia end up in the context of sanction discussions, which to me seems to be of a kind with how most discussions of women or ethnic minorities et al on Wikipedia are in "the community is broken because Demography" discussions; the intersection of "this is an environment where other people only know what you tell them, and not only do you not have to tell them anything, but it's near-impossible for them to find out things that are integral parts of your IRL daily life if you don't tell them because the structure hides it" with "it's very important to create detailed demographic profiles so we understand our systemic biases" fundamentally doesn't work, with this issue as with any other, and people have very good reasons to want to preserve the "I don't have to tell you I'm X" part and damn the latter. I need to use fewer semicolons. That's a 153-word sentence. Vaticidalprophet 12:55, 10 February 2022 (UTC) Addendum a few hours later, because I assumed it was assumed here of all places but a reread is ambiguous: this is a criticism of the demography obsession, not a support of it. Vaticidalprophet 15:57, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

"[Whichever group I'm a member of] deserves special treatment!" discussions have been a part of Wikipedia since the very beginning. It's a probably-inevitable result of the combination of a culture of anonymity in which people can claim to be whatever they want, and a well-intentioned managerial class who collectively feel diversity can excuse even obvious obnoxiousness or incompetence. (Most of our regular sockmasters and spammers have long-since noticed this and play to it.) ‑ Iridescent 18:35, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Here's a thought: Maybe the "self-diagnosis" isn't a genuine self-diagnosis. Maybe it's from someone who can pass as the majority (that is, pass as a white, cis-heterosexual, abled man), or at most, passes as the majority-except-autistic. They also tend to be professionally diagnosed as children. It would seem that the form of discrimination these men face come in the form of low expectations from literally everyone, including their parents and the school system, causing them to be irritating at best and harassers (often sexual harassers) at worst when they grow up to be adults. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 03:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

London Wikipedia meetup

Maybe in the case of younger editors, but—despite the "group of children" stereotypes—the active hardcore of the Wikipedia editor base splits disproportionately towards the over-40s. (In my experience, the image to the right is fairly representative.) As Vaticidalprophet says a little way further up, the concept of "high-functioning autism" is a relatively new concept (it was popularized circa 2001) and is also not recognized as a legitimate diagnosis by either the World Health Organization nor the American Psychological Association. A typical active Wikipedia editor couldn't have been diagnosed as a child, since when they were children the diagnosis just didn't happen. Yes, there will be some cases in which a medical professional has used HFA as verbal shorthand to explain things to a patient (or parents), but in most cases—both on Wikipedia and IRL—when someone describes themselves as HFA it's because they've self-diagnosed on the basis either of a self-adminstered AQ test, or because they've read a list of symptoms and thought "hey, that sounds like me". ‑ Iridescent 08:10, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps my use of Discord has skewed my perception of the demographics somewhat. However:

1. Professionals using HFA as shorthand is common enough that I personally don't see it as a 'red flag' for self-diagnosis, though perhaps I might think that the diagnosis pre-current edition DSM.
2. Some people with autism like myself would be disinclined to attend Wikipedia meetups. I feel the need to overemphasize that this, of course, doesn't apply to everyone with autism, but perhaps I don't have to in this particular conversation.
3. Can you imagine, as a kid or teen, trying to convince your hypothetical parents, who hypothetically don't edit Wikipedia, to a Wikipedia meetup? Some parents would probably do it, especially if their kid has trouble socializing but my parents would've, at most, done it once, looked around the over-40 men-dominated crowd, and never done it again; more likely, they wouldn't have done it to begin with, not understanding why I'd be interested.
4. I was once informed by a couple of oversighters that children sometimes edit in a surprisingly grown-up fashion; they'd know better than us, since they have to oversight disclosures of childrens' ages.
5. I was using a broad defination of "adult". There are 20 year olds who would've been diagnosed as having ASD level 1 during childhood who might describe themselves "high-functioning", then there are 80 year old who are forced to self-diagnosis due to autism clinics not accepting new patients over 21, and then there are people around my age who might've been diagnosed as having "HFA" at the age of ten-or-so.

Believe or not, though, I do partially agree with you, that's there's at least a possibility that there's an over-enerepresentation of a crowd older than I in the "active Wikipedian" scene. I just think there' more age diversity than what I think you think there is. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 08:50, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

That picture above is from a London meetup in 2016, I don't think I look particularly old in it compared to some of the others, and I'm sure I'm not one of the two eldest in the shot. My first meetup was in the same pub eight years earlier, I was clearly one of the two eldest attendees on that occasion. I.E. my experience is that the average age of the London Meetup attendees has been rising by much more than a year per year.. No comment as to how many autistic Wikipedians who I've met at a London meetup, but I concede the probability that as we've accumulated a regular cadre of greybeards so we've have become a less attractive option for those under forty. Question is, is it the whole community that is greying, or just the part of it that likes to meet in pubs? ϢereSpielChequers 10:29, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Not all Wikipedians are too old for an ASD diagnosis, just for the record. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:07, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus In fact, if there's evidence that symptoms started before the age of two, there's no age limit to diagnosis. This evidence might simply be a parent or older sibling corroborating the fact that the symptoms are, for all intents and purposes, lifelong.

Of course, school or medical records from childhood are more ideal, but they're both are likely to be thrown out at some point. Sometimes, memories are all you have.se, good luck getting that evidence gathered when you've outlived your family, or if your family has a poor memory for things that have happened decades ago. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 11:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC) (typo fixed on 11:29, 11 February 2022 (UTC))

Just ignoring the "autistic people who fit X demographic characteristics grow up to be either annoying or rapists"... HFA in and of itself certainly didn't pop into existence in the 2000s -- the "undiagnosed autistic dad" is an entire meme, and certainly many middle-aged people without autistic children of their own to spot the characteristics have them too -- but diagnosis is biased; becoming significantly less so, but adult diagnosis itself tends to depend on having children or grandchildren who are identified as such. WRT meetups, I've seen prior discussions of that here that lean towards the "older people and men are more comfortable at them for time/money/context/etc reasons, which in turn creates a cycle where younger people and women don't attend because they're the odd ones out" that sounds plausible enough to me. What stands out to me in the editor base as a whole, when I know ages, isn't that it represents particular age groups unduly but that it doesn't -- that it's an unusually flat curve. There are heuristics for individual subsets of editors, but they don't necessarily work either; I can think of at least one case where I assumed based on all the demographic correlations that a given editor was probably old enough to be my (23) parent or grandparent and found out they were younger than me. Vaticidalprophet 12:38, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

It didn't pop into existence in the 2000s, but the cultural change in thinking around it very much did. That particular change, in which it suddenly became something which people would boast of with pride, we can date precisely—it comes from an article Wired published in 2001 called The Geek Syndrome which made a garbled argument that there was a genetic link between autism and ability (as opposed to the far more likely "people who have difficulty in social sitations are statistically more likely to have time to spend studying"), and tied in almost perfectly with the Randroid "some people are just born better" crankery of the clique who were building what would become Big Tech. ‑ Iridescent 06:50, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet Maybe I wasn't communicating the nuance clearly enough, perhaps I'm a bit hypersensitive after a particularly weird and rude interaction with a new editor who was pulling WP:OSE about a bizarre fringe theory, but I wasn't attempting to do a #YesAllWhiteAutisticMen, but was talking about a subset of them. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 13:14, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Some people are autistic; some people are jerks; some people are both; some people are neither.

I think if someone said "I'm bipolar, and it makes me screw up on wiki", we'd point to Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not therapy and send them on their way. We should probably be a little more willing to do the same for people who say "I'm autistic, and it makes me screw up on wiki". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

I've come to hate NOTTHERAPY, not so much for what it actually says, but for how it's typically invoked, which is as a facile thought-terminating cliché in response to anyone acknowledging that their mental health affects their editing. Which, if nothing else, is just a great recipe to punish people who are honest, since I think we could all armchair-diagnose certain users who choose not to disclose anything about their health. I wrote User:Tamzin/Guidance for editors with mental illnesses a while ago in an attempt to present a healthier way to look at mental health, focusing more on what the exact circumstances are in which an editor's mental illness becomes a liability to the project. If someone's misbehavior is the result of mental illness, in many cases that's better than the alternative, because it means they have a realistic chance of working through it... whereas if someone has reached adulthood and is just a complete jerk, and there's no condition influencing that, then most of the time they're gonna stay a complete jerk for life. Personally, I did make mistakes as a newer user that had to do with being bipolar and otherwise neurodivergent. Then I got on meds and worked through some stuff, and while I'm far from perfect, I can't think of any mistakes I've made since my return to editing that have been because of mental illness.

The main problem with people trying to blame their mistakes on autism, bipolar disorder, or anything else, is that if your condition really is that serious, the rest of us have certainly noticed, and so if there was any extra AGF to give you, it's already been spent. It's one thing if someone's explaining a miscommunication by saying "Oh, I'm sorry I misunderstood. I'm autistic and sometimes don't catch subtleties." But when it's "I'm sorry for blowing through every second, third, and n-plus-oneth chance I was given and never listening to a word of advice. I'm autistic"... well, it may be the case that autism is to blame, or it may not be, but either way competence is required, and I don't think one needs to bring out the specter of NOTTHERAPY to say that. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:03, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

I agree that it's cruel and inappropriate to cite NOTTHERAPY in that context. On the other hand, it can be useful when someone (for reasons unrelated to personal diagnosis) acts out in a way that is disruptive. It's sort of like, just as one should not disrupt Wikipedia to make a WP:POINT, one should not disrupt Wikipedia to get something out of one's system. In other words, don't make your off-site problems become other editors' problems. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:17, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

I think it can be appropriate to cite NOTTHERAPY in the very specific situation of someone saying "Please let me keep doing this disruptive thing. It's like therapy for me!" Which does happen from time to time. That's why I made my third guiding principle in that essay "Don't let your mental illness hurt Wikipedia", which I feel is a more constructive way to frame things than "Wikipedia is not therapy". Because, like, do we actually care if people are editing for their own therapeutic benefit, if they're doing a good job? Or do we really mean "Don't editing Wikipedia badly for your own therapeutic benefit"? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

I suspect that NOTTHERAPY was created specifically because of people editing Wikipedia, doing a poor job, and begging for extra chances to continue doing a poor job (although hopefully a slightly less-bad job).

I have wondered occasionally whether it ought to be renamed "Wikipedia is not occupational therapy". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:32, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Actually, occupational therapy isn't therapy about workplace mental health or how one occupies oneself. It's about dealing with daily tasks after a disability. For example, how to put on one's socks when one is no longer able to bend over far enough to reach one's feet. (No reference to WP:SOCK intended.) It differs from physical therapy in that it focuses on how to master new ways of doing things, as opposed to regaining the physical ability to do so. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:23, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Also: practice using a computer, practice following directions, practice interacting with people, practice setting schedules and goals, practice coping with anxiety, etc. OT services aren't just about the obvious ADLs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:22, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@Tryptofish, having gone through occupational therapy myself in childhood plus a short stent when I was 19, WhatamIdoing is correct. A lot of the occupational therapy I did as a kid dealt with typing, handwriting, and sensory intregration. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 23:04, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Both of you are, of course, correct. My use of the phrase "daily tasks" was poorly chosen, although daily tasks are certainly part of it. What I intended to convey is that it is not about how one occupies one's mind, and that it differs from (while being closely related to) physical therapy. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:51, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Right, I don't disagree. How you experience systemic discrimination can affect how you're a jerk. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:49, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Tamzin for the link to thought-terminating cliché. I had been looking for a name for that sort of thing. Can I reword your opening sentence more generally to "I've come to hate WP:UPPERCASE, not so much for what it actually says, but for how it's typically invoked". A line in that article -- "Person 1 makes claim Y. Claim Y sounds catchy. Therefore, claim Y is true." -- also seems relevant. These shortcuts get used to make some point, which may deviate somewhat or entirely from the what the guideline text actually says, but they are catchy and have authority merely for being WP:UPPERCASE, so end-of. There's an awful lot of pressure on the shortcut label or guideline/essay title. -- Colin°^Talk 13:12, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:UPPERCASE shortcuts have legitimate uses, the trouble is when they're used wrongly. For internal communication between people who already know what they mean they're perfectly sensible—it's a waste of my time and yours if I type out "this has been referred to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment" rather than "WP:ARCA". The problems come when we use them to people who aren't familiar with the system—to new or newer editors, it just looks like we're talking a weird private language as a means of confusing them. ‑ Iridescent 06:50, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

We're all on the spectrum, that's why they call it a spectrum. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 20:09, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@MZMcBride We're all socially awkward sometimes, but that doesn't mean everyone is on the spectrum. It's kind of like how we'll all experience back pain, but that doesn't mean everyone with a little back pain is "a little pregnant." I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:40, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I think that depends on how you define "the spectrum". If you're talking about the whole spectrum of human experience, then we're all on it. When you're talking about only the spectrum of autistic people, then we're not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:03, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I mean, you're technically correct, but I've encountered that saying enough times to understand what was being said by @MZMcBride; they most likely meant the autism spectrum, not the human one. It's often feel-good puffery along the lines of "God won't put you through what you can't handle,"; well-meaning but ultimately useless. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:48, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

You've got mail[edit]

@AnkitS9212, I've replied on this one occasion. As per my comments in that email, I will not reply further to you off-wiki unless it's regarding something which genuinely needs to be discussed off-wiki; Wikipedia discussions take place on talk pages and are publicly visible for a reason, to allow other people to see why an action has (or hasn't) been taken. ‑ Iridescent 12:57, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Iridescent:, found your mail in the Spam folder. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you having explained the mistakes we have done due to our lack of knowledge. As mentioned, please recreate our page Intellipaat as a Draft so that we can work on the same based on your comments and suggestions. Assuring that we will use Articles for creating the page and add content that follow all the guidelines of the community. Thanks a lot.--AnkitS9212 (talk) 11:32, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Iridescent:, could you please create the page as Draft so that the content can be re-worked on and uploaded correctly? Waiting for your update.--AnkitS9212 (talk) 09:00, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Recreate deleted page in Draft for rework[edit]

Hi @Iridescent:, found your reply in the Spam folder. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you having explained the mistakes we have done due to our lack of knowledge. As mentioned, please recreate our page Intellipaat as a Draft so that we can work on the same based on your comments and suggestions. Assuring that we will use Articles for creating the page and add content that follow all the guidelines of the community. Thanks a lot. — Preceding unsigned comment added by AnkitS9212 (talk • contribs) 11:00, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I am not Iridescent, but AnkitsS9212, please note that we don't like accounts which are run by more than one person. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:03, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus:, the account is not run by multiple people. not sure what context you are referring this in.— Preceding unsigned comment added by AnkitS9212 (talk • contribs)

Sorry, I took the "we" and "our" as evidence that you are a group account. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:56, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

That was in context to the article. Accumulation of data and content for the article involved multiple people. Account is only managed by me.--AnkitS9212 (talk) 13:03, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

AnkitS9212, this is going to sound slightly cryptic but it's because I'm intentionally wording it thus so as not to breach WP:OUTING. There's something I told you to do in my reply to your email, and unless and until you do so I'm absolutely not restoring the article, either as a draft or otherwise. This isn't my personal preference or point of view, it's a Wikipedia rule.

What I will say, is that looking at the deleted page (admin-only link here; if any other admin wants to check and see if they disagree with me) there would be very little point in restoring it. We don't accept promotional content in Wikipedia articles, even in draft-space, so even if I restored it we'd just remove all the PR-speak, and as far as I can tell removing the promotional content would reduce it to Intellipaat is a Bangalore-based e-learning platform..

Writing a new article from scratch is probably the single most difficult thing to do on Wikipedia—even editors with years of experience often struggle with it—and companies, particularly new companies, are probably the single most difficult topic about which to write. Except for the most non-contentious facts such as addresses, the information in Wikipedia articles needs to come from source independent of the subject, and for new and emerging topics the books generally haven't been written yet so there aren't any appropriate sources to use. (Even when the sources do exist, it's unlikely the company will be grateful to have a Wikipedia page about themselves. Wikipedia pages need to give a balanced and neutral view of their topic, which means that if a Wikipedia article exists on a company one of the top search results on that company will be a page faithfully documenting every scandal, every faulty product, every significant criticism, and all with no ability to control it since people employed by or with a connection to the company are effectively prohibited from editing the page in question.) ‑ Iridescent 16:48, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Cubiculosporum koronicarpis Kraft 1973[edit]

Cubiculosporum koronicarpis Kraft 1973 has been recreated. I can't see if it is different from the copyvio version you just deleted. In any case, it should be deleted or draftified. Abductive (reasoning) 03:56, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

It is slightly different, but not substantially so. I personally think it's a copyright violation, but it's borderline enough that I'd like to get a second opinion rather than re-delete it—these "material from multiple sources" pages are never entirely straightforward. This talkpage has hundreds of watchers; can someone not previously involved take a look at this and see what you think? (Previously deleted version here, admin-only obviously.) ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Addition of Wikidata infobox to [Etty painting with long title][edit]

You know how Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed has that "bad even by Wikidata standards" item that's off by a decade for its creation, et al? Yeah, someone added a Wikidata infobox. On the bright side, he had the foresight not to compress the image. On the less bright side, it survived August to January, or about five thousand hits of saying it was painted in 1820. There's been a lot more infobox discussion lately than I'd firsthand seen before; as someone who wasn't there the first few rounds, I'm really hoping this isn't another. Vaticidalprophet 12:25, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I think Fram will like that the Wikidata image was retrieved at 25 July 2108. I didn't realize that Wikidata could time travel... Now corrected. That said, it still claims that the painting had its inception in 1820, sourcing it to the enWikipedia article which gives no such date - 1820 is only mentioned as a year where Etty exhibited paintings Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:01, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

It looks as if that was the standard version of the infobox (which for some unfathomable reason has a "Wikidata" parameter which doesn't get displayed and should be removed), not the "/Wikidata" version, and that someone populated it by hand but with the Wikidata stuff (or is this what happens when one substitutes the /Wikidata version?). Anyway, looking at major art works with the /Wikidata infobox, we have e.g. The Last Supper (Leonardo), which give different dimensions than the one in the article (or the one shown by the picture), as they have the measurements for the painting + the upper lobes, not the main painting; and the year "1490s (Julian)", which is in the article 1495-1498 (no need for the Julian of course). Could be worse, Bull Palette has the "year" "4th millennium BCE (Julian)", which widely differs from "4th millennium BCE (Gregorian)" presumably. Portrait of a Knight (Maíno) is dated 1613-1619 in the article, precisely 1613 in the infobox, and 1618-1623 at the Prado site[6]. Lucretia (Artemisia Gentileschi, Los Angeles) is in the collection "Unknown, J. Paul Getty Museum". Oh well, could be worse; L'Après-midi à Naples has the beautiful location "National Gallery of Australia, France". Don't get me started on silly precision of dimensions (Bathsheba (Gentileschi)) or why we would want accession numbers in the infobox (crucial information at a glance!). Fram (talk) 14:00, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Infoboxes and Wikidata. What could possibly go wrong? We really need a "Wikidata should be presumed to be always unreliable, and no information may be imported from it without being independently verified by a reliable source and cited to that source, and anyone not doing so should be treated no differently than we'd treat anyone else repeatedly adding uncited content" policy—if Wikidata is actually as great as they claim then they should already have the sources, so it should be no issue. The chances of that happening are, appropriately enough, about as likely as seeing pigs on the wing. ‑ Iridescent 16:49, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

I'd be interested to see whether it is even technically possible to get the Wikidata item for B. Traven right. The first choice to make is whether to treat B. Traven as a person or as a pseudonym of various other people (with various degrees of certainty for the identification). Wikidata just lumps everything together (including two "sourced" dates of birth). —Kusma (talk) 17:35, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I'd have thought the way to go would be to treat him as a de facto fictional character rather than try to shoehorn him in to 'biographies'. Looking at the state of the article, I'd say how Wikidata treats it is the least of its problems. ‑ Iridescent 18:21, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

The German Wikipedia accepts Hauschild's version as gospel, so for them B. Traven is a real person. —Kusma (talk) 20:57, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm not going to try to second-gues who's right. I have no knowledge of the topic, but it sounds like "he was probably a real person but possibly didn't exist" and "he probably didn't exist but was possibly a real person" are both defensible. We have a surprising amount of experience with this situation when writing about figures from antiquity or religious texts; the only thing that's atypical here is that he was active within living memory. ‑ Iridescent 23:04, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

MEDRS being re-interpreted in cite journal documentation[edit]

Iri, you and I have discussions about how the citation templates are managed going back about a decade. Now this has impacted MEDRS, and if the recommendations on a backwater page of the project are enacted, we'll be citing medical content to the laypress. I am wondering if your thinking on how things happen at those pages has changed.

Following on the latest update to the citation journals, WP:MEDRS is being re-interpreted by a number of editors on the talk page of a help page of a citation template. Background and discussion starts at:

• User talk:SandyGeorgia#Apparently someone's been dicking around with the citation templates again

I recommend reading that long discussion on my talk, as the RFC that led to this was problematic, although there was sensible input from User:Thryduulf, User:Nikkimaria, User:Fram, and others.

Now, more concerning problems are unfolding at:

• Help talk:Citation Style 1#Lay-url

where the discussion is heading towards a re-interpretation of MEDRS to provide for citing medical content to the lay press-- a discussion that belongs at WT:MEDRS. The "RFC" did not endorse this change that affects MEDRS.

On my talk page, disgruntled editors are suggesting we need a noticeboard where others can be made aware of citation template issues before they are rolled out and generate thousands of error messages. I don't think a noticeboard will be effective, because one of the problems in interacting with the citation template editors is getting through the technical lingo to understand what they're saying or proposing. I think we need instead some restriction placed on their ability to make broad changes without a WP:CENT or talk-page notified discussion, where the proposals are hopefully written in plain speak before they go up. But we need some way to address these problems, as they've been happening for as long as I can remember. I was about to help a friend start converting their FA to sfns, and after they saw the latest mess created by the citation template editors, they said, "thanks but no thanks, I'm sticking with manual citations". I had manual citations at Tourette syndrome for over a decade, to avoid precisely these problems. I converted last year, and now here I am. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:03, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

You know my thoughts. As far as I'm concerned we should have a unified citation format to which we can add specialst fields to deal with edge cases like MEDRS and legal citations, rather than the upwards of 3000 different citation templates we actually have coupled with countless personal-preference hand-formatted citation formats. Unless and until we rationalize the system, discussions like this about individual cases are just a deckchairs-on-the-Titanic exercise. Even the infobox people are making serious steps to clean up the zillion different variants of {{infobox person}}, and if even they can appreciate that template proliferation is a genuine problem rather than an academic exercise to discuss, surely on something as fundamental as "how do we make sure readers know where our information comes from?" the rest of us should be able to come up with something. ‑ Iridescent 16:49, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Iri, I raised this more about the interpersonal dynamics that affect that area of editing-- something you and I used to discuss eons ago. Things like this. My stance on the interpersonal issues has softened, yet the issues continue. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:26, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

This obviously comes with the usual "just my personal opinion, not policy" qualifiers. It looks to me like the dispute here is a reflection of the ongoing split between "content editors" and "technical editors". Because you have two competing viewpoints, both of whom can legitimately say they have policy on their side, there is no right answer here. I may be wrong but I've had the feeling recently that the line between "reader-facing editors" focusing on readability and accuracy and "editor-facing editors" focusing on internal functionality has got a lot sharper in recent years than it ever used to be. There used to be a lot of people like RexxS, Anomie and Gimmetrow—even Merridew—about, who had their feet in both camps and could act as intermediaries between two groups of people acting in good faith who had completely different visions, but most of them have left or drastically reduced their participation—the only person in this position who still comes to mind is Enterprisey, and because he's currently on Arbcom it's not reasonable to ask him to take an active position on a dispute that has such high potential to turn into a wheel-war should people get fed up with discussion and start unilaterally locking or deleting the templates.

Let me take the opportunity to once more bang the drum I've been banging for more than a decade. Although nobody likes "add another layer of bureaucracy" as a solution, Wikipedia needs and always has needed an elected committee, separate from Arbcom, with the authority to issue binding and enforceable closures to Requests for Comment. In situations like this—where there are two possible solutions, both of which have reasonable arguments to be made in their favor, both of which have a degree of support, and where compromise isn't possible because we genuinely need to go one-way-or-the-other—the consensus model doesn't work. As it stands, the only ways this kind of situation get resolved are "whoever shouts the loudest wins", "the WMF imposes something" or "it degenerates into a full-scale conflict and eventually enough people either get blocked or resign in disgust that the 'winner' is whoever's left standing", and none of those are exactly ideal. ‑ Iridescent 06:52, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

A Wikipedia that ends like Reservoir Dogs? Cool. "You block me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize"... and the last guy standing can pump out 100 stubs on English cricketers a day in peace :) SN54129 08:38, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

This is exactly the way this kind of thing usually plays out. If you ever want a really dispiriting experience, dig through the history of infoboxes, the chain of events leading to and following Raul654's resignation at Featured Articles, or if you really want to go back in time the Userbox Wars. ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Iridecent: Just so I'm clear...when you say "technical editors," you mean/are including WikiGnomes, not (or at least, not exclusively) people who code templates, maintain bots and stuff, right? If so, it's the first time I've heard of "technical editors" used in that context, so I just wanted to double-check what you meant. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 08:51, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

No, I mean by "technical editors" what is normally understood (on Wikipedia) by the term: the people who primarily work on bot design, template markup, Lua modules etc. To oversimplify slightly, the dispute SandyGeorgia is talking about is an argument between a "people who focus on Wikipedia technically functioning smoothly and consistently" who want a particular set of templates always to behave in a consistent manner, and "people who focus on Wikipedia articles being as informative as possible" who want to ensure the output of the templates is as accurate as possible, even if it means them being formatted idiosyncratically on some articles.

As I say, both groups are in the right; the problem is that years ago when standardizing Wikipedia's citation formats wouldn't have meant manually re-formatting c. 5 million articles (at a conservative estimate), we couldn't agree on a standard and collectively kicked the can down the road, so we now have around 3000 different citation templates—all of which are equally 'correct' as far as policy is concerned. Changing the design of any one of these templates cascades down to affect the output of thousands and in some cases millions of articles, but because there are so many of them it's impossible for anyone to monitor them all. ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

One would hope that we'd be as reader-centric as possible; alas, the difficulty of change along with the difficulties you've already mentioned could very well result in no change happening. I hope I'm proven wrong. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:37, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but there's no clear definition of what "reader-centric" means in the context of the display of information, and we've spent the past 20 years fudging and dodging the issue of whether Wikipedia is ultimately a giant dataset formatted as 6,453,617 pages, or a collection of 6,453,617 individual articles from which information is extracted individually either by humans or by scripts. Is it better for the reader:

1. to have information formatted as consistently as possible so they know exactly where to look for it, even though it means that potentially readers will see misleading statements without their accompanying explanations, and that having a totally standardized approach to what is included/excluded potentially gives undue weight on individual articles, since "what's normally important" and "what's important in this specific case" don't always overlap; or
2. to have information written as accurately as possible so readers aren't misled, even though it means that potentially readers will be confused as a piece of information isn't in the place they normally expect to see it so they assume it isn't included, and readers who are just looking for a particular piece of information will have to spend more time looking for it since there isn't a single standard way in which the information is formatted (and the side issue that not being consistently formatted makes it harder for algorithms to extract information from Wikipedia pages, meaning such things as Google Knowledge panels and Wikidata are more likely to show incorrect data)?

As I was alluding to in my reply to SN54129 above, this argument is a very very very well-plowed furrow on Wikipedia. As you may know, the Infobox Wars began with a thread on this talkpage so although I wasn't involved with them myself I was very aware of all their twists and turns. As far as I can see, this is exactly the same "is it more important to be consistent or to be accurate?" question, just transposed from the top of the article to the bottom. ‑ Iridescent 05:46, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

This obviously comes with the usual "just my personal opinion, not policy" qualifiers. It looks to me like the dispute here is a reflection of the ongoing split between "content editors" and "technical editors". Because you have two competing viewpoints, both of whom can legitimately say they have policy on their side, there is no right answer here. Thanks for spelling out the reasons why I have conflicted feelings on this particular issue. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

This is something that I think gets overlooked by a lot of Wikipedia editors: consensus decision-making is only effective when the participants have strong alignment in goals, but as a group grows in size, its members rapidly have diverging aims. One is not more right than the other; they just prioritize different things and thus weigh choices differently. That's why organizations generally use either straight voting or some kind of hierarchical structure to make decisions. isaacl (talk) 15:24, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. Since there are a lot of legitimate reasons not to use straight voting—it would both cement Wikipedia's reputation as Californiapedia into immutable reality, and lead to open season for sockpuppetry, for starters—some kind of Govcom is the only way to cope over the long term, even though everyone instinctively grates at a hierarchical structure. The thinking behind WP:ACPD was in some ways both valid and ahead of its time; the issue there wasn't that such a committee wasn't needed, but that the existing Arbcom so blatantly tried to stack it with their friends that it ended up tainting the entire concept of "governance committee" for a decade. ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

I admit I've never quite understood the "3000 citation templates" argument—my impression is that the vast majority of them are wrappers that fill in a few parameters on some other template, usually from the CS1 family. There are a few other established styles (Category:Citation templates not conforming to an established style suggests about 5), of which I think I've seen CS2 and Vancouver in the wild, and of course hand-formatted by citations of no particularly consistent style. So the changes being debated here to the CS1 Lua module in practice bubble up to most of those 3000 templates. Choess (talk) 21:47, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

A lot of them are but a lot of them aren't. There are plenty of frequently-used templates like {{cite court}} which are either completely independent of Citation/core, or have so many addenda tacked on that they may as well be. Even with the ones that purely are wrappers, a well-intentioned change to one of them can still have very confusing effects on the reader experience; since it's unlikely any given article is only going to use a single citation template throughout, changing the way one of the wrapper templates outputs will have the knock-on effect of making the reference formatting inconsistent on every article on which that template is used. ‑ Iridescent 06:00, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

FA Mentoring request[edit]

Do you have time to Mentor on an FA? Buffs (talk) 03:40, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

My editing is probably too intermittent at the moment to do 'true' step-by-step mentoring—at the moment, due to real life I tend to operate in bursts of frenetic activity lasting a few days, punctuated by disappearances with little or no warning. If you let me know the article in question (I'm assuming Texas A&M University), I'm more than happy to engage in an informal (or formal, if you prefer) peer review, and I assume assorted talkpage watchers would be happy to do likewise. Assuming the page in question is Texas A&M, you really want to prod User:Karanacs to see if you can coax her out of semi-retirement if you've not done so already. Someone like the Rambling Man might be a good bet as well, as you really want at least one person involved to be someone with a lot of experience writing FAs but with absolutely no interest in or knowledge of the topic, to see it it actually makes sense to people without prior knowledge.

(Higher education is a subject area where Wikipedia has something of a problem, as there's not only an endless flow of well-intentioned current and former students and faculty members trying to 'improve' the pages, there's also usually a steady drip of Wikipedians In Residence encouraging all kinds of inappropriate conduct. Of the six people I'd really trust to write—or help in writing—a high-quality neutral article two are indefblocked, two are retired, and two are dead.) ‑ Iridescent 16:47, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

A nod to Lord Palmerston there perhaps...? "Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business – the Prince Consort, who is dead – a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it."  ;) SN54129 17:40, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I'd be happy with a formal peer review as-able. I'm well-aware of the problems with Higher education articles, but the A&M page is in way better shape than most. It was an FA until VERY recently and I've been maintaining the page for over a decade. While I'm irked at the ill-defined process and lack of actionable feedback, failing to at least attempt the process as requested would simply be unnecessarily obstinate.

I've worked with Karanacs before (we're both A&M grads) and, until just a few days ago, she'd been offline since 2020. I'd prefer not to bug her at this point, but I may ping her later. Let me know when you want to begin. Buffs (talk) 17:27, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Easier if you just let me know when you're ready, and I'll go through it top to bottom. Given the circumstances, my inclination would be to review it with nitpicking turned up to max—essentially as if it were already at FAC. ‑ Iridescent 07:11, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm ready whenever you are. On a scale of 1-10, if you could turn up the nitpicking to a 17 it would be appreciated. Feel free to make said notes in whatever forum you deem fit and just let me know. Buffs (talk) 22:26, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Speaking of maximum nitpicking, can I ask for one of TRAPPIST-1 too? <puppy eyes> Among other things, I am looking to write something that is at least understandable to laypeople. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 17:52, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

I'll do it as soon as I get the chance. Because I'd prefer to review it in one sitting—it makes it easier to spot inconsistencies that have crept in if one reads it top-to-bottom in a single sitting—it may not be for a few days. ‑ Iridescent 23:00, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm sure it's probably not high on your priorities...any ETA? Buffs (talk) 17:22, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Real world permitting, hopefully Friday, otherwise next week. Will try to do it by the 25th (i.e. next Friday) at the latest. ‑ Iridescent 18:07, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Draft:Process-based therapy[edit]

Hi Iridescent. Re Draft:Process-based therapy, I haven't properly looked at the draft author's rewrite after I tagged for CSD because of copyvio, but I'll trust your decision. However, I wonder if you noticed that it was changed after the CSD tagging, and whether CRD#1 revdel on the pre-rewrite versions is appropriate. — Bilorv (talk) 16:33, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, agreed, and thanks for pointing it out. I think it very unlikely that draft will ever be salvageable—even if there's a legitimate article to be written, it would almost certainly be easier to write it from scratch—so in six months I imagine the draft will be auto-deleted regardless. ‑ Iridescent 07:18, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Hollmania[edit]

What do you think? Johnbod (talk) 05:01, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

My personal opinion is that it's massively undue weight. Holl is about as forgotten as it gets (and was a generic Victorian hack, not someone like Walter Scott or Frederic Leighton who's out of fashion now but is still a major topic of study because of their influence). I'm reluctant to start reverting myself as I consciously try to avoid giving the impression that I'm the owner of the topic, but I have a feeling someone's going to need to quietly undo the whole thing. For Art of the United Kingdom, Victorian painting or Social realism to have dedicated sections on Frank Holl is roughly equivalent to Culture of the United States having a dedicated section on Mork & Mindy. ‑ Iridescent 06:40, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

My thoughts too - I'll reduce rather than remove.. Presumably he's big in Canada, or something... Johnbod (talk) 17:40, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

At a guess, someone's been to the Van Gogh Museum, seen that VVG collected him (which is true), and drawn the mistaken conclusion that Holl was a much bigger deal than he actually was. (Because of his day job in a saleroom, VVG accumulated all kinds of prints and etchings which happened to evoke a passing interest. He also had fairly dubious taste—if "being admired by Van Gogh" was some kind of mark of greatness, the works of Adolphe Monticelli wouldn't all be hidden away in storerooms.) ‑ Iridescent 18:04, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

No doubt - I've warmed to him somewhat after seeing this one! Johnbod (talk) 18:33, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

As you presumably know, I do have a soft spot for that kind of late 19th century sentimentalist tosh. Yes, they're irredeemably kitsch and usually hideous to modern eyes, but there's a genuinely interesting story in how artists (both visual and written) made that sudden leap, over such a short period, from "our job is either to document the world as it is, or to show examples for audiences to aspire to", to "the world is a horrible place, here's something completely contrived and unrealistic to take your mind off it". There's a direct line of succession between "The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint. Their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul" and Mamma Mia!.

Personally, I'd say this one approaches Peak Victoriana. I imagine even Lady Lever would have dismissed it as overblown tat. ‑ Iridescent 06:20, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

A three month ban is fine with me[edit]

If you want to give me a three month ban fine, I feel really bad about all this. I honestly thought that I was valuable to Wikipedia as people have of often commended me for my work. Davidgoodheart (talk) 17:08, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

For the second time, read the proposal in which nobody except you is talking about banning you. As I said there, the fact that you're either too lazy or too incompetent to even read the proposal when you're the topic of discussion, makes me think that maybe we should be talking about banning you. ‑ Iridescent 17:14, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

In the bars of Dundalk[edit]

...they talk of little else  :) ^{w/ acknowledgments, Marshall Hall}  :) SN54129 17:08, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm sure this is what the WMF had in mind when they imposed extended-length edit summaries on en-wiki. (Yes, before a (WMF) account delivers me a lecture, I'm aware there was a genuine technical reason to do with non-Latin characters being double-counted.) ‑ Iridescent 17:44, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

It was the blast of culture—even if only of kitschy Victoriana—into the desert of ANI that caught my attention :) SN54129 11:43, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

As someone who thinks in run-on sentences, I appreciate this accessibility feature feature imposed by technological limitations. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:41, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

2018 Thai panther poaching case[edit]

Hi. I remember having re-written the few opening sentences of the article, so at least those should be free of copyvio issues and work as a possible starting point for a stub. Could you please check for salvageable content, trim down to that, and restore what's left? Thanks. --Paul_012 (talk) 14:08, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

As far as I can tell looking at the history, your only contribution (other than a couple of technical edits regarding categorization, naming, and standardizing curly/straight quotes) was A high-profile case involving the [[poaching]] of a [[black panther]] and other protected wildlife took place in [[Thailand]] in 2018. It involved a group led by '''Premchai Karnasuta''', a Thai business tycoon, in the [[Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary]] in February 2018. There isn't really much to build on there; it would probably be easier to start from scratch. (It's not possible to selectively restore the history; the very first edit was a cut-and-paste copyright violation, so the copyvio is present in every version of the history.) The four sources used, if you want to use them for rewriting the article, were [7], [8], [9] and [10]. ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. That's pretty much what I needed. --Paul_012 (talk) 02:03, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

New article up. Could you please check for categories I missed and restore the talk page? Thanks. --Paul_012 (talk) 10:12, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

 Done ‑ Iridescent 17:00, 15 February 2022 (UTC)