THC Science

I don't like the idea of getting pings over someone putting a box on my page that says I did nothing wrong while vaguely insinuating that I did, so I'm just parking these here instead.

~~{{ds/aware|ap|gg|a-i|blp|mos|tt|ipa}}~~

Update 18:24, 25 October 2021 (UTC): You know what, screw it. Keeping track of which to list is more trouble than it's worth, and I don't need any one-hit immunity. I'm aware of all of them. Even the weird ones like the Shakespeare authorship question or Waldorf education. If anything, I'm more likely to think something is a DS topic when it isn't, than vice versa.

WikiLove and WikiHate[edit]

Defender of the Wiki Barnstar from Joshua Jonathan[edit]

	The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
	Absolutely deserved for uncovering the Swaminarayan-sockfarm. A lot of work is waiting, but you did great! Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reply

Thank you so much, Joshua Jonathan. It's funny, it started just as this weird feeling based on the RfD !votes... We get weird !vote patterns at RfD all the time, usually when a number of non-regulars wander in and don't understand how the forum actually works. The weird thing, though, was that they did seem to get the basic premise of RfD, but were still !voting for a conclusion that made no sense. But still I didn't have that high an index of suspicion, and also I was rather busy, and was this closed to dropping it. But instead, kind of on a whim, I asked Blablubbs to take a look. I was only suspicious about the four who'd !voted consecutively, and I was frankly surprised when Blablubbs turned up evidence tying not just all four of them, but Apollo too. I had no previous exposure to this topic area, and didn't know any of the players, so I really though I'd just be dealing with a few SPAs, not someone with 2,000 edits and PCR.

I think it was also Blablubbs who first suggested Moksha as part of it, as we looked at other players in the topic area. Then I found the comment from the Swami sock accusing them, and there went the next few hours of my life, digging through a history that grew more and more horrifying as the behavioral similarities mounted. I've really never seen something that elaborate fly under the radar, except reading early (pre-2010) ArbCom cases.

It's a shame we'll likely never know exactly how many people were behind these six accounts. My personal hypothesis is that it was six people who knew each other off-wiki, with one, perhaps Moksha, ghost-writing some talk-page comments for the others. (If true, that would mean they were done in by that one person's micromanagement, which is a funny thought.) But that's just my guess.

So thanks again for the barnstar. :) I kind of hope I never get this particular barnstar again, though, at least not for the same kind of thing. Mass gaslighting is a demoralizing thing to work against. I'm happy to go back to just dealing with vandals and spammers. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 06:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Goat from EpicPupper[edit]

Thanks for giving me that SPI idea, and for the guidance that came with it!

🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk, FAQ, contribs | please use {{ping}} on reply)} 03:21, 26 June 2021 (UTC)
[reply]

Replies

TIL I can win a goat just by being too lazy to write an SPI myself. ;) Guess I should have been careful what I wished for in the above section when I said I only wanted to deal with normal socks. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 03:25, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@EpicPupper: Oh, and, I forgot to say: You did great! -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 03:51, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Again, thanks so much :) 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk, FAQ, contribs | please use {{ping}} on reply)} 03:54, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Barnstar of Diligence from L235[edit]

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	Hi Tamzin, I'm Kevin. Thank you for your diligence on the Moksha88 SPI; had it been a less thorough report, it may have been overlooked or neglected, especially after the negative CU results. We're lucky to have had you looking into this. KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 06:15, 27 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reply

@L235: Thank you—for this barnstar and for your own diligence. I was worried that someone would look at this and see it as too complicated, and as involving blocks that were too likely to cause drama, and just punt on it and leave the whole topic area still in disarray. As someone who's always favored making lots of small improvements over a small number of big ones, it's rare that I get the chance to look at something and say, "Here's a way that I really, noticeably, made the encyclopedia better through one single effort." Which I hope I'll be able to say here, depending on how the POV cleanup goes.

As I said to JJ above, I just hope that I don't run into another case like this for a while—both because I (perhaps naïvely) hope to never see anything so egregious, but also for the sake of my sanity, and the sake of whichever CU is crazy enough to take on that case. :) So again, thanks for all you've done here. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 17:04, 27 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Civility Barnstar from Sdkb & Writ Keeper[edit]

	The Civility Barnstar
	Without getting into the messy question of whether or not the other editor's professed ignorance is plausible, I think it's clear your calm, non-judgmental efforts to explain why their comments were offensive have been helpful and appreciated by all. {{u\|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:25, 29 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I definitely second this. Your essay is excellent, as well. You're doing the (proverbial) Lord's work, and with much more patience than I. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 23:07, 29 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Further kind words

Thank you both. <3 While I don't think of myself as an incivil person, I'm not sure this is one I ever expected to get.

As someone who both likes to assume good faith and has a low tolerance for bigotry, I always see this kind of thing as a win-win: If the assumption of good faith was correct, then we avert more hurt feelings; and if it doesn't, then people can't plead ignorance the next time. I'm glad that this appears to have been the former. "Lord's work" is a compliment I'll happily (flatteredly) accept, be it meant proverbially or literally. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 00:11, 30 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I see great minds think alike. I wasn't aware of the incident that led to the creation of your essay prior to today, and had only created mine in response to seeing "he/she" a lot around here. I must say you articulate it a lot better than I do, though! Patient Zero^talk 04:11, 1 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'd just like to thank you as well for your well written essay. I hope this essay helps inform future editors and, in doing so, reduce the instances of misgendering. Isabelle ^🔔 02:45, 7 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism warning from Nosebagbear and whomever most recently edited this page[edit]

Hello, I'm Tamzin. I wanted to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions have been undone because they did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use your sandbox. If you have any questions, you can ask for assistance at the Teahouse. Thanks. Nosebagbear (talk)

Block me if you must, but you'll never catch my socks!

(They're very cozy slipper-socks with like a stylized dog face on the top and then little fake ears on the side. Very cozy socks. AND YOU'LL NEVER CATCH THEM!) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 13:28, 8 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, people from the future. Confused why your name shows up here? See here. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 05:18, 25 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Outrageous abuse of power by Tamzin[edit]

I have unreviewed a page you curated

Hi, I'm Tamzin. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Opposition to human rights, and have marked it as unreviewed. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

(Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:08, 17 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Outrageous, Tamzin. I demand you resign your patrollership. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:10, 17 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Pinned discussions[edit]

Some of these discussions are collapsed because no one's commented in a while. They're still open discussions, though! If you want to reply to something, just remove the {{cot}}/{{cob}} tags around the discussion.

Editing principles (Topic: Neurodivergence)[edit]

Initially ran 4 May 2021 to 7 May 2021. Featuring Vaticidalprophet and Elli. Collapsed but still open to new comments.

Just noticed the new one. It's an interesting one, and a matter I've thought about how to phrase. I suspect myself a lot of neurotypes odd in the general population are the default baseline on Wikipedia, but there's only so many ways you can say it without sounding like you're insulting someone (and I freely admit I can be less careful and more flippant with my word choice than you often are, certainly when I'm in the ANI peanut gallery). I've noticed there's an unfortunate correlation between editors who freely disclose neurodivergence and editors with significant competence issues, and I've wondered what consequences it has for the project as a whole in terms of interacting with people who are more clearly not working on neurotypical principles than our already high average -- though, of course, many disclosed neurodivergent editors are substantial and obvious assets. Vaticidalprophet 04:01, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, something I'd been thinking about for a while, and felt spurred to put into words after seeing an exchange on your talk page actually. As to correlations, there's a bias there, right? In terms of who wants/needs to disclose. If an editor quietly chugs along writing articles, doing gnomish work, etc., without ever getting into any conflict, then why would they want to disclose something that could subject them to ridicule or at least passive discrimination? (And there's editors who rack up 100k+ edits while barely touching anything metapedian.) Whereas some editors realistically have no choice: If they don't disclose, they may be treated as intentionally disruptive; whereas, if they do, they might at least "downgrade" that perception to CIR. Just like a person who is mild-to-moderately hard of hearing may be able to not disclose this fact in a workplace if they don't want, whereas a deaf person really has no choice in most contexts.

I'm active in a number of spaces online that are majority-neurodivergent. (I'll claim the label "neurodivergent" without comment on the label "autistic".) They all have to deal with the issue that, in such spaces, people are more likely to be sensitive, and also more likely to offend by accident. In the context of a collaborative project one can broaden this to a greater likelihood of people stepping on one another's toes. What strikes me is that these spaces' main advantage in contrast to Wikipedia is that they're honest with themselves about what's going on. Conduct decisions are made with the presumption that the participants' motives may not have been what you'd infer of a neurotypical person. Hence my new personal rule.

That said, it's not like there's easy answers here. Several years ago an openly autistic admin was desysopped for discussing violence against another editor in a way that was intended, by all accounts, to come off as mean but not as a true threat. It was an unambiguously desysoppable offense (although I'll admit I didn't take that view at the time). And yet, I think a lot of neurodivergent people can relate to making a joke that made perfect sense in their own head but came off very differently to their audience. (To be clear, I don't think that they raised autism as a defense, and I don't want to imply that their misconduct was "because autism", but at least the general circumstance is one that neurodivergent people tend to find ourselves in.) What's the solution there? I don't know. There's an overlap between statements that are reasonably insta-indeffable or desysoppable, and ones that a neurodivergent person can make without intending it to read that way. And if that's where we're starting from, how do we handle all the more minor cases?

So that's why I added this personal rule. Feel free to make any wording changes that preserve the meaning, if you think they'll make it less prone to misinterpretation, since it's just such a difficult thing to discuss, walking a tightrope between what could be perceived as being anti-accountability and what could be perceived as ableism. But regarding what you said about ANI: I think the best thing we can do about these topics is discuss them when there's no immediate reason to discuss them. If everyone's thinking about a specific editor when they discuss the topic, that will color their opinions.

P.S., not to come across as talking down to someone only a few years my junior, but a lesson I learned in my first wiki-life, reflected in the second paragraph in my userpage: The best thing you can do for your wiki-mental-health is avoid any page where the word "indef" gets thrown around. -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 05:08, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

To open in response to your last comment: well, a lot of people are scared of ANI, but I'm scared of political articles, and I'm sure I've seen you edit those. 😛 We all see different hotspots.

I'm definitely familiar with what you say about knowing it, or how different it is to be in an environment where people openly discuss that moderation and norms are shaped by neurodivergence, as opposed to the weirdly "everyone knows but no one knows" Wikipedia environment. I'm unsure if it's possible at all on Wikipedia to change the latter to the former, simply because we (in the societal sense) currently conceptualise neurodivergence as a product of diagnosis. Even for things like autism (and I concur, with hangups and caveats that are all frankly well outside the scope of what I aspire to discuss onwiki, with the "will claim neurodivergent, will pass without comment on autistic" identification here) where there's a relatively robust self-advocacy community, it's still in some ways reasonably and in some ways not treated as offensive to tag someone as autistic who hasn't been tagged as such in a medical context, and plenty of things I'd very much like to have robust self-advocacy communities outside of medicalization do not. There's an age factor here, in that a lot of the core editor (and especially content-writer) base is from age cohorts where a lot of what's diagnosed now wasn't, for better or worse.

As for Ironholds, well. I'm familiar from the "read about it after the fact" perspective with that case, for whatever that counts as familiarity. I don't think the behaviour I read was at all appropriate, and I think it's reasonable to expect an admin of any neurotype to know that. Simultaneously, the thing that really interests me about that case (using 'case' here in the broader sense rather than the ArbCom term of art) is the "seven RfAs" bit, and seven RfAs is characteristically autistic to me, for both good and ill. It shines through as both the way one can ascend past a lot of the mental limitations allistic people self-ascribe, and work tirelessly towards the pursuit of a goal, and simultaneously the way one can just not know when to quit.

To circle back around to ANI, I've been thinking about it because it actually did come up there lately, and in part due to a thread I'd created; the subject of that thread was...outed? as autistic by linking to a diff he'd written at a much smaller venue by a well-meaning party partway through, and he clearly wasn't happy at all about it. At the same time, in a different thread, another disclosed autistic editor suggested the reason a third party might have been acting in the problematic way that got him brought there was that he could be autistic, and the readers of that thread interpreted it as a personal attack on the subject. The discussion is worthwhile reading (and my comments in it reference a third, related case where an editor was clearly in severe distress over being a thread subject in a way that nearly went very poorly indeed, and where some of the reopening comments trying to address it were imo atrociously worded). Vaticidalprophet 05:31, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, it's actually those ANI threads—including a remark you made about how many/most editors at least have subclinical "symptoms" of autism (scare quotes mine)—that first got me thinking about this topic. Just because I never comment there doesn't mean I don't stay up to date on the latest drama.

I agree that there's a cultural/generational issue here, and such things will always be a challenge for an international, intergenerational project. A norm like tone-tagging (beyond the common "/s") could do a world of good, but I think it'll be at least a decade till you could get a majority of editors on board with something like that. (Not like, making it mandatory by any means; just instilling it as a norm.)

The other day, in the course of saying something about Wikipedia, I explained to my partner what deletionism and inclusionism are, and she'd said something like, "I hate to tell you, but I think I'm an inclusionist." Today, shortly after sending my last message here, something suddenly hit me, and I said to her, "Wait, what makes you think I'm a deletionist?" To which she said, "Because you need everything to be just a certain way." I'm guessing you know the kind of "certain way" she meant.

And it occurred to me that you can pretty easily predict how drama-heavy a particular area of the wiki is going to be by just how strongly people need it to be a certain way. There's a reason I refuse to touch any edit that has anything to do with categories. There's a reason that the major topic area with the worst-written articles is, by far, math. And you can call the tendencies that beget this "neurodivergent", or just... "particular"... And those particularities carry over to administration too. Ironically, I would argue that the very resistance to change things in a more overtly neurodivergent-embracing direction is itself of tendencies that, in many cases, fall into what I'll again call "either neurodivergent or just very particular." ANI being a mess of massive walls of text is the way that Makes Sense, so that must never change, no matter how flawed it is. For Wikipedia to stop being hostile to newcomers, we'd have to restructure some things that are The Way They Should Be, so I guess it'll keep being hostile. And so on and so forth.

As to Ironholds, to be clear, I didn't mean to make it seem like a "wink wink nudge nudge" thing which case I was referring to; rather, I was trying to use it as a general example since, as I said, once you get into any one specific case that complicates the analysis. (Mx. Ironholds is, incidentally, a researcher and commentator on autism issues these days, though they're no longer active here. And yes, that's an off-wiki identity still linked on their userpage, before anyone says anything.)

Back to your point about the ANI threads: It'd be nice to have an essay as a companion to WP:CIR (maybe WP:Idiosyncratic editors) that discussed how best to handle competency issues in ENDOJVP editors but stopped short of saying "All of these editors are probably autistic." I know you followed the somewhat tragic tale of the now-3X'd SoyokoAnis (talk · contribs). I'm certainly not going to try to diagnose her with anything, but in the threads about her there was clearly a lot of dog-whistling and subtext, as there is basically anytime CIR comes up with an adult native English speaker, because, yeah, CIR is usually about language/culture, age, or neurodivergence. Perhaps it would be nice in such contexts to have a diplomatically-worded essay to point to that nutshells to: "Some editors interact with the world in very different ways than others. Maybe this is for neurological reasons, or maybe it's just how they are." and then... And then what? Then a conclusion drawn from that, but I'm not yet sure what that conclusion should be. (And not that in her particular case there would have been a different outcome necessarily; just that it allows for more honest discussion.) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 06:50, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, Soyoko. I admit to less sympathy to her than you or Elli (who was my main point of contact with her saga), but that's not to say a lack of it. She didn't scan to me as adult (and, as someone who first edited as a young child, I suspect some of our current policies about not disclosing the ages of young editors might actually be counterproductive -- but that's another issue...), with the consequence I was mostly viewing her CIR issues through the lens of youth rather than neurodivergence, but I can't exactly say the latter was never a consideration. It did stand out to me that the RfA candidate she insisted on nominating was a disclosed autistic editor.

I know of two essays currently about specific neurodivergences. I can't pretend to like either of them. I'd happily MfD WP:AUTIST, where its every word strikes me as Making Things Worse, if I thought that proposal had a chance in hell (I've already spent my nominating-bad-essays-and-failing points for the month). There might be something useful in its bones, though; it apparently hit someone's sense of "this is me" enough for WP:OCD to be based on it. Vaticidalprophet 21:11, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes, thanks for the ping to this interesting discussion (hope I'm not barging in too much).

Wikipedia is... an interesting environment, I guess, for neurodivergent people. Given, well, the way the site works, I think it's likely to attract them (what normal person spends their free time writing an encyclopedia for free?) Most people find the whole concept entirely foreign.

As for Soyoko, yeah, I think it's likely a combination of some type of neurodivergence and youth - neither of which are incompatible with Wikipedia, but if someone with them makes wrong assumptions about how the site works... it's not gonna be fun. Hell, looking at my first edits, I'm surprised I didn't get many warnings, given how terrible they were.

I dunno. This is kinda a ramble because I'm not sure exactly what I should say here? I guess, "be kind" has mostly worked for me - and is what, I think, worked for getting me on the right track. Elli (talk | contribs) 01:37, 5 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Elli: I do think that Wikipedia's generally moving in the right direction on all of this. As I said to SoyokoAnis, I really doubt she would have been extended as much AGF back when I made this account (2012), which is one thing that made her situation extra frustrating. Then again, one still sees cases where if CIR issues aren't resolved after the first or second attempt at intervention, someone just hits the block button. I recently saw one of my least favorite things, a "Sock of someone or other" block. They're used as an excuse to say "We can label this intentional disruption rather than CIR because they're probably socking." Somewhere between begging the question and a thought-terminating cliché. But still, overall, progress, yeah. (Also thanks for dropping in to this chat.

)

@Vaticidalprophet (but also still @Elli): I don't know if I'd agree with deleting WP:AUTIST, but I do think it misses the point. Partly because it's hard to describe the "honeypot" effect without resorting to stereotype. Partly because it's hard to describe autism itself without resorting to stereotype. But the essay manages to cut too much slack to neurodivergent editors while still not giving neurotypical editors particularly good advice about how to deal with us; and the advice it does give isn't very helpful when most neurodivergent editors are not open about it (if they even know themselves), and applying the label speculatively is, as you've said, a thorny issue.

So, seriously, if you (either of you) would be interested in working on an essay with me, I think there's room for improvement in the neurodivergence essay category. I'm interested in the idea of something that isn't explicitly about autism, but rather, without outright saying so, says "We're all at least kinda autistic here". I'm thinking of a title like WP:Needing things to be a certain way. In my mind, the essay would start out with something like, If you edit Wikipedia, that means you see a need for things to be a certain way. Quite likely, your first edit was noticing that something was incomplete or incorrect and fixing it. But why does it matter that the world know that the Third Amendment has been incorporated against the states in the Second Circuit but nowhere else? Why does it matter whether "Ljubljana" is spelled correctly in an article about baseball? Because things need to be right. All of us, to some extent, see things this way. And then go on to discuss how this applies to things like WP:CIR, WP:CIV, WP:TE, WP:POINT, and WP:RGW. And then give actual useful tips that can be applied to all editors, not just ones with autism userboxen. Stuff like:

Accept that Wikipedians are more likely than most people to have strong opinions on "little things" like punctuation or reference style. To you, they might be small, but if those things are important to the way things need to be for someone, they can become very personal.
Someone's view of how a conversation should work may not be the same as your view, or indeed, as the view of society at large. In particular, certain editors may value straightforwardness as a virtue significantly more than others, often based on a feeling that conversations are simply meant to work that way. This should not excuse incivility, but understanding this may help to reach constructive solutions in conflicts.
It can be very hard for Wikipedians to let go of something they are passionate about, even when consensus is against them. If this leads to someone becoming disruptive on a topic, then even as you nudge their focus elsewhere you should be respectful of their passion. And whoever comes up with a way to gently keep editors from returning to these passion topics will have averted the indefblocks of countless mostly-constructive contributors.

Wouldn't be the whole list, just the first three things that come to mind. In neurodivergent terms these are "sameness"/general particularities, communication issues, and special interests, but framed generally it's just a lot of the stuff we see all the time on Wikipedia. -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 06:47, 7 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Awful joke (Topic: Adminship)[edit]

You're not funny, but here's something that's definitely not a laughing matter - why aren't you an admin yet? Once you're back, I'm sure there's plenty of people who'd nominate you ~TNT ^(talk) 19:01, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW I agree entirely with TNT. Definitely something you should be considering :) firefly ( t · c ) 19:17, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No doubt about that. When I've seen your talk page comments I have always been really impressed and feel like someone with those skills would fit perfectly in the role of an admin. --Trialpears (talk) 19:24, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I already am an admin, on the very prestigious testwiki and testwikidatawiki, thank you very much! No, but in seriousness, thanks for the kind words, y'all. I had this conversation with Tavix and Ritchie333 a few years ago, and think I was right to not take either up on his offer then; I don't think I was quite ready. Despite having been around a while, I feel like I only came to really understand Wikipedia in the past year. And, to paraphrase John Wick, people keep asking if I'm ready to be an admin, and yeah, I'm starting to think I'm ready.

As I've said before, I consider my account's rename last October to be a soft clean start (~~redlinking to remind myself to write that~~ wrote it!), not because I necessarily had anything to be ashamed of, but just because I didn't really like the person I'd been. My philosophy with this has been that I wouldn't speak much of past accomplishments, and in return would ask people not hold past failings against me. (The failings may well be more numerous in my mind than in reality, but either way.) I couldn't really ask the latter of RfA voters, so I'd be willing to run at least partly on my pre-User:Tamzin record, but primarily I'd want to run on my work in this incarnation. Work I'm very proud of, but which I feel is a bit incomplete, and a bit short-lived.

Excluding this mental health leave, which is thankfully coming to a close (which is good because I've been itching to fire up AWB and fix the 170ish articles that mislabel a Swedish source (ISO 639:sv) as being in Northern Sami (ISO 639:se)), I've been continuously active since January, so I think I'd want till at least this coming January to build up a bit more of a recent track record, as well as show my commitment to maintaining a reasonable activity level, especially given that I was almost completely inactive from March of 2018 through September of 2020. I'd also want to wait till I've done a bit more quality content work and gotten 'zinbot approved at least for the task I've already coded for it and hopefully for a few others. But I'm reasonably confident that I can get all that done by January.

On that note:

In general, yes. I'd like to run, shooting for January.
To the person who recently emailed me offering a nomination, if you're reading this: I'll get back to you presently about what that might look like (a.k.a. try to talk you out of it ;) ).
@Firefly: We all know you're overdue for adminship yourself, and you've been active again about as long as I have. Wanna flight it up? Can flip a coin on who goes first, or run at the same time.
I'm always very worried about echo chambers and groupthink, so if anyone's reading this and thinks they'd be landing on the oppose side of things or would be on the fence, please feel free to let me know your concerns, here or by email, so I can either adjust my parameters of what I should do before running, or at least draft a good response to a potential tough question.
@TheresNoTime: I'm the funniest person you've ever met, and you know it. :P

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 08:08, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I’m immensely flattered that you think I’m qualified to run! I would definitely be up for an ‘RfA flight’ as and when the time came - assuming I could find anyone silly enough to nominate me and they thought I was ready around the same time. :) I absolutely echo point 4 of your post and invite anyone with concerns about my eventual suitability to let me know. Mostly though I’m just glad you’re up for running! firefly ( t · c ) 18:27, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You already know you could get a nom today =) --Trialpears (talk) 18:47, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Trialpears, I do, and for that I am greatly appreciative :) firefly ( t · c ) 20:19, 5 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't mean to be a buzzkill but I'm still bearing the scars of my own RfA and that was six years ago this week. It was brutal. My advice is

a) make sure that those people who believe in you are aware that you are having an RfA...some people don't look at their Watchlists and may not even know that an RfA is happening;
b) start an RfA at a time when you feel strong and can be present 100%. You shouldn't respond to every criticism but you'd be surprised how often an editor starts an RfA and suddenly becomes busy and disappears from Wikipedia for a few days. Those are never successful. You have to be present;
c) Stick with it through the entire week. There is generally a burst of support at the beginning and then the opposers show up after a few days. I think there are some editors who would be admins right now but they withdrew their nomination after the critics began speaking up. But unless it's an unexpected tidalwave of "No"s, the close votes can go back and forth and it could turn in your favor if you hang in there and don't throw in the towel.

Just a few ideas for anyone considering an RfA. Right now, it looks like you have a lot of support! Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:08, 9 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I can see that that sweet-talking hasn't done any good, so let me try a different approach. I'm getting tired of having to do stuff for you. If I nominated you, would you actually refuse the nomination? -- RoySmith (talk) 23:17, 26 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

* ears perk up at RoySmith's idea * Vanamonde (Talk) 00:30, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I have a fairly non-trivial COI here, but can you please hurry the heck up and run before the end of 2021 Tamzin? This has been a slow year, Eostrix notwithstanding, and we could do with another Blablubbs-esque RfA.... ~TheresNoTime ^{(to explain!)} 01:21, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Not really related, so taking it to your talk page (Topic: Gendered pronouns)[edit]

Initially ran 26 October 2021 to 30 October 2021. Featuring Hijiri88, Ezlev, Aerin17, and BDD. Collapsed but still open to new comments.

Arrgh... it's been a while since I thought about gendered words (e.g. pronouns, "man/woman", "waiter/waitress") that reflect the person's latest expressed gender self-identification as reported in the most recent reliable sources, even if it does not match what is most common in sources (ref) in relation to contemporary Japanese popular media personalities. English-language "reliable sources" focusing on Japanese popular culture tend to be sub-par (one of the sources initially cited in relation to Utada's gender identity proactively used singular they without any request from Utada to do as much, and also seemed to be conflating non-binary gender identity with same-sex sexual orientation...), and Japanese-language sources are extremely unlikely to make as big a deal out of it as English ones because of how the Japanese language works.

Japanese doesn't use pronouns anywhere nearly as much English, because content that is implied from context (as the referents of pronouns almost always are) is usually omitted: the Japanese for "I ate it" isn't "Watashi-wa sore-o tabeta" (literally "I it ate") but rather "Tabeta yo" ("Ate sentence-terminal-particle") and "I met her" isn't "Watashi-wa kanojo-ni atta" but rather "Atta yo"; "I ate it" or "She ate it" in Japanese would only specify the subject if it were in response to the question "Who ate it?", and even then "she" would necessitate a separate indication of who the girl/woman in question is, such as pointing, which is rude. (Needless to say, the Japanese version of Utada's website doesn't use any pronouns where the English version uses "she" and "her".) I actually recently found out that both the "Japanese words for he and she" that I learned in my beginner Japanese class were recent coinages based on English/French, the "word for he" being a redefined word classical Japanese pronoun that originally referred a person or thing that is far away from both the speaker and the listener, and the "word for she" being the same word, in the classical Japanese equivalent of the genitive case, with the noun "woman" attached after it. This kind of development would not be possible, needless to say, if personal pronouns were as entrenched in the actual Japanese language that people spoke every day as they are in English or French. I suspect this is why "pronouns" aren't really a thing on Japanese Twitter (etc.) like they are in America and Europe: it's my impression that a not-insignificant percentage of American pop-stars have their pronouns listed in their Twitter profile, and this percentage probably skyrockets when one only counts those pop-stars who have stated a gender identity other than cisgender male or female, but with Japanese pop-stars (even those who also hold American citizenship and live in Europe, and "occasionally tweet in English"), the former percentage is probably close to zero and the latter may be higher, but as far as I'm aware Utada is the most prominent case at the moment, and...

So yeah, it looks like the Utada case is going to be solved by a consensus of editors based on the fact that sources affiliated with the subject use a particular pronoun pattern, but if more Japanese (etc.) pop stars, voice actors/actresses, live action actors/actresses, video game producers, etc. with anglophone fan-bases and extensive coverage in English-language blogs and "reliable sources" that are little more reliable than blogs, start coming out as non-binary, gender-fluid, etc., a discussion might need to be had about how the MOS passage you quoted applies to such cases. A huge hullabaloo was made about a decade back about whether personal websites (or websites maintained by publicists) should take precedence over academic publications with regard to MOS:JAPAN#Modern names (with reference to whether long vowels should be marked), which I think kinda missed the point there (if we take URLs or copyright information on Japanese-language websites into account, we get people named "Sakaguchi Jun'ichirō" being identified as "Sakaguti Junitiro" just because the webmaster created the URL based primarily on how Japanese text is input on a keyboard).

But I suspect that, when it comes to gender identity, personal/official websites should definitely take precedence over third-party sources that often pass for "reliable" in pop culture articles, no matter how many such sources there are or how recent they are compared to what we assume to be the latest update on the personal/official website.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:27, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, I should thank you for your positive input on the Utada page! :D Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:27, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Hijiri88: I think we often run into a problem of overly generalizing Anglosphere gender norms to other cultures. What you're saying about Japanese language and culture is very interesting; I don't speak any Japanese, but I speak French, and even in that language relatively close to English, many English-centric assumptions prove false. The whole relationship between social gender and grammatical gender is different when applying any noun to yourself contains an implicit statement of your gender. (It's also, incidentally, the most frustrating part of transitioning when you don't speak the language often enough to form new habits. I've gotten weird looks once or twice for calling myself américain rather than américaine.) One can see a bit of that disconnect going on at Talk:Claude Cahun, where people are struggling with how to apply the subject's gender expression in French in the 1950s to an English-language article in 2021.

I'm not sure there's an easy solution to it, though, because this problem runs deeper than just Wikipedia. For instance, without taking a side on the issue of the term Latinx, I'll observe that a lot of the debate in the U.S. about it seems to come from people who are not familiar without how gender works in Spanish. A lot of English-speakers tend to expect our concept of "my pronouns are ______" to extend to languages where gender is more complex than just third-person pronouns and the occasional "son"/"daughter" situation. And that includes RS—many of which, as you allude to, barely even understand the concept of non-binary gender to begin with. So we get screwed over by the RS, and then by people who read them and then make good-faith changes based on their bad takes. The complicated pronoun situation I've been most involved in has been that of James Barry (surgeon). There's no language angle there, but nonetheless his article's been done a great disservice by the surfeit of articles in somewhat reliable sources saying "You'll never believe what this empowering lesbian, forced to crossdress, accomplished" or "You'll never believe what this pioneering trans man accomplished".

Which gets us to the awkward sourcing question: Generally, someone's gender identity is the sort of thing we'd want very high-quality sources for. At the same time, we don't want to misgender someone just because major RS have been slow to pick up on something. Ellar Coltrane started taking they/them pronouns long after leaving the spotlight, and for over a month our article on them sourced their pronouns to their Instagram bio, till they got a brief write-up in a newspaper we could use instead. Given how many long-dormant BLP stubs we have (another rant for another time), there are plausible scenarios where a self-published source or suboptimal-quality source could be our only reference on someone's pronouns for decades. Not to mention people who are only mentioned in passing in articles. I've been in the news a few times in my life, mostly when I was very young. In the past I've been mentioned in mainspace, although I currently am not; but if someone were to re-add a mention of me, to get my name and pronouns right they'd have to cite like... a blog post I wrote when I came out, I guess? That's not exactly ideal, and would be weird to see alongside a cite to a major RS, but it's preferable to just getting people's pronouns wrong.

At some point we're probably due for an RfC on when, if at all, it's acceptable to use they/them pronouns in cases of ambiguous gender. I don't really want to be the one to start that, though. :D Anyways, this is turning into a ramble, but thanks for dropping by and sharing your thoughts. (I designate this a talkpage-watcher-friendly thread, by the way; interested to know what others think.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 05:43, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Arrgh. Your James Barry example made me think of George Eliot and even more contemporary women writers who used male or "ambiguous" pseudonyms (or variations on their real names), such as D. C. Fontana. By the standards of some modern popular media, we should be calling them all transgender men or at least gender-fluid, except that we're lucky enough to have good documentation of the actual reasons for their hiding the fact that they were women. Ironically, the same is essentially true of a certain living author (who I won't name, but I think you can probably guess who she is), whose views on non-cisgender rights have turned out to be somewhat questionable. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:37, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Hijiri88: This is as much me thinking aloud as anything else, but I'm going to ping you so I don't feel like I'm talking to myself. :) (Not to say a response is unwelcome, by any means, just that this may not really be written like a response to your own points, and you could be forgiven for not having much to say in response.) Oh I'll also ping BDD—with the same caveat—since he expressed some interest in this topic at Talk:Claude Cahun.

The way I see it, we have four categories of cases where pronouns aren't as simple as "just say what they want":

Unknown identity, where the person's story does not involve participating in any gender-segregated activities. It was surprisingly hard to find a good example of this (since for most historical figures we can infer gender based on segregation), but after looking around in Category:Unidentified people I did find Italian Unabomber as an example—someone we have no interviews with, no profile of, etc.
Known identity but unknown gender identity. For many articles we don't explicitly know someone's gender identity, but there's a general precedent that we take fem-presenting AFAB as presumptive evidence for she/her and masc-presenting AMAB as presumptive evidence for he/him. This is imperfect, but it's probably the least bad approach. Issues arise in three cases:
1. Subject has indicated no gender presentation at all. E.g., picking another at random from that category, Neuroskeptic.
2. Subject has presented in a way too inconsistent to draw any non-SYNTH inference from. E.g. my favorite example, Thomas(ine) Hall... I swear not just my favorite because Thomasine and Tamzin are variants of the same name.
3. Subject's gender presentation differs from that associated with their gender assigned at birth, but they have made no statement regarding gender identity. There's tons of living people like this, but BLP forbids us from documenting it in most cases. It thus comes up more often with long-dead figures like James Barry.
Known identity, but ambiguous or inconsistent gender identity. Ruby Rose, Sophie Xeon, Vi Hart, and Alexis Arquette all come to mind, as does Utada Hikaru—in each case a different kind of ambiguity or inconsistency. (Often, as in the cases of Rose and Arquette, this may be someone who is genderfluid, and it may well be that they see no ambiguity or inconsistency but the sources reporting on them did.)
Known identity and gender identity, but it is unclear what pronouns should follow from that. Especially common in non-binary Westerners from before Stonewall who went on the record about their gender, like Claude Cahun or the Public Universal Friend.

In #1, #2.1, and #2.2, I think it's really author's preference (à l'EngVar) whether to do they/them or avoid pronouns. I think readers understand the concept of the gender-ambiguous they, given that it predates the singular-personal-pronoun they by several centuries. The important thing is not defaulting to he/him or she/her based on stereotypes. On #2.3, I've made clear my view at the Barry RfC that MOS:GENDERID should apply there the same as anywhere else: Binary presentation should be met with the corresponding binary pronouns unless there's clear evidence that the person did not identify with that gender (or, for more modern subjects, that they did not want those pronouns). On #3, I think we should default to not changing pronouns unless the subject requests it, because anything else would be presumptive, and shouldn't "compromise" on they/them. Avoiding pronouns sometimes might be the least bad option; sometimes we also just have to figure, if this person really cared that much, they'd probably reach out and ask us to change it. For deceased subjects like Xeon and Arquette, all there really is to do is follow the final statement, at least as best we can manage (bit complicated in both cases). And on #4, I dunno, I'm not opposed to they/them pronouns for someone who explicitly eschewed gendered pronouns in their lifetime like the Public Universal Friend. But they're almost the exception that defines the rule. The vast majority of people covered under #4 did refer to themselves with gendered pronouns, and I think we need to follow people's final wishes even when we suspect they might have preferred some modern option.

K, that was a lot. Respect to anyone who's read to the end of this. Responses welcome, but, as noted before, this was as much thinking aloud as anything else. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 04:19, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, Tamzin, if this is what comes out when you think aloud then you should think aloud as often as you feel the urge to. (When I do it, it doesn't end up nearly as... coherent.) I think the categories you've laid out here and your explanations of how you think they should be handled make a lot of sense – this is definitely something I want to come back to and read more closely when I have more time. ezlev (user/tlk/ctrbs) 05:12, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I see your 2. and I immediately think of ancients of whom we know some details but nothing that makes their gender (or at least biological sex) clear. Hieda no Are and Junia (both long assumed male but now widely considered by specialists to be women who were misidentified as a result of linguistic ambiguity) are interesting cases, but there are others who don't even have names, such as "the X poet", where X is the name of some work of literature written, or likely written, anonymously. A number of authors of Japanese literary works are assumed, based on their content or style, to have been written by male authors (court nobles proficient in literary Chinese, Buddhist monks, etc.) or women (members of the literary salons serving this or that empress, or more often than not just Takasue's daughter), so I guess in English they can be referred to as "he" or "she" once these authorship theories have been elaborated upon. (Needless to say, this is quite unrelated to the distinction between biological sex and gender identity, which I believe was not widely recognized until recently. I'm pretty sure throughout most of human history biological sex was of interest for the purpose of carrying on family lineages and gender identity -- or, indeed, sexual orientation -- didn't enter into the equation.) As for 2.3, it'll be interesting to see, if Wikipedia lasts as long, how our little encyclopedia will deal with such cases once such subjects have passed on and BLP no longer applies. Probably have to have an RFC in each article. 😅

As for 3., I think that, as a general rule, the "traditional" pronouns/determiners may be best, unless and until they specifically state that they don't like it, since it can probably be safely assumed that in such cases no one will find this usage either awkward or hurtful. (There do seem to be people who, for their own reasons, think anyone with any of these gender identities "should" use specific pronouns, but I don't think they can be assumed to find it personally hurtful, I'm pretty sure such people are a negligible minority even within the LGBTQ+ rights community, and I suppose they will probably eventually be outright rejected by said community for advocating a position that runs completely counter to said community's goals, similar to those who believe anyone with a particular sexual orientation should disclose said orientation publicly to "create awareness", as though public awareness were anywhere near as important as the feelings of the individual[s] in question.)

4. strikes me as particularly ... well, outside my area of interest and expertise. Japanese poets before c.1880 referred to people as kore if they were "near" and kare if they were "far away", so the idea of pronoun preferences based on sex or gender would have been completely alien to them. Modern Japanese is a bit iffier since late 19th-century literati, in translating European literature (into what essentially amounted to a new, artificial literary language) took that word kore and used it to translate "this" (or "it"), kare to mean "he", "him", or "his" (Japanese uses postpositions to mark the subject, object, and possessive/genitive), and kano-onna (the genitive form of kare and the word for "woman", literally meaning "that woman") to mean "she", "her" or "hers". Since Japanese doesn't actually use pronouns very often, especially when speaking of people (it's quite rude... I think the same is true of English, at least because it implies you have not taken the effort to learn a person's name), this new Europeanized style was comfortably adopted into the standard Japanese written language, and consequently the spoken language, and now scarcely a century later Japanese gender-minorities are being told by non-Japanese-speaking netizens that they "should" use gender-neutral pronouns in English... "Ironic" might not be the word for it, but...

Anyway, kochira-koso sorry for the long rant! ;-)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:55, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! You probably don't know me, but I watch your talk page and saw this interesting discussion, so I thought I might share my thoughts if you don't mind :)

It seems to me that the hardest cases are the ones where the subjects are long deceased, and the issue is trying to translate their gender expression at the time they lived to how we might classify them today. The discussion goes something like, if this person were alive today, they might be considered a [something, e.g. trans man], so one the one hand that means we should refer to them with [e.g. he/him pronouns], but on the other hand, we shouldn't press terms upon them that they didn't use to refer to themself. Of the ones mentioned above, the ones that stand out to me are James Barry, Thomas(ine) Hall, and Claude Cahun. (The same problem applies to historical people whose sexual/romantic orientation was unclear, but it's easier to avoid making a statement one way or the other when you don't have to deal with pronouns.)

Modern people, on the other hand, tend to declare what their preferences are for pronouns, and the question is just how to interpret that. For example, Vi Hart indicated that they have no preference and do not care which pronouns they are called by, and Rebecca Sugar stated clearly that she uses both she/her and they/them. It seems like these kinds of cases ought to be more straightforward, though evidently nothing is straightforward. Aerin17 (t • c) 22:29, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Shoot, I forgot one! (This is an addendum to my own rant, not a reply to Aerin17, whose post I appreciated but don't think requires a reply; indentation is to visually distinguish my own comments from Aerin's.) Sometimes an author will self-identify as "a man", or "a woman", or "the mother/daughter/wife of Such-and-such". (I won't pretend there isn't a gender disparity in the examples selected here; there is, but that's just because unfortunately most of the relevant examples are women whose identities are only known in connection to their male relatives.) So we know their gender (insofar as, with the ancients, we usually have no choice but to assume gender aligned with biological sex) but practically nothing else. Given that, as far as I am aware, none of the languages Japanese between around 800 CE and around 1400 CE could have been familiar with had gender-based third-person pronouns (Chinese, like Japanese, nowadays has a fairly arbitrary distinction in the written language between "he", "she" and "it", but this seems to be recent, and Sanskrit -- which some of the Japanese Buddhist clergy may have had some limited awareness of... -- ... might distinguish the three?), I don't know if any of them would care if they knew that centuries after their death people were talking about them in a language distantly related to Sanskrit and using strange pronouns that classified them by their gender, but I think such questions, regardless of how interesting they might be for some folks with unusual hobbies might be, are probably not all that important as far as we are concerned, since all of them are also very much dead. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:54, 28 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping. I started writing a few comments, but ended up like a writer in a cartoon, constantly tossing drafts into the trash. I largely endorse your four-part division above. Surprisingly, I am more inclined to accept they/them for #4. It is possible, but unlikely IMO, that such people would reject they/them pronouns today. And ultimately, we have to make some assumptions about such people—the use of he/him and she/her very much included. --BDD (talk) 21:08, 30 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Pipe trick[edit]

Thanks for including the link! I didn't know it existed before, and I believe it will be very helpful moving forward.

While I'm here, I 100% agree with controversial opinion #3.

BilledMammal (talk) 00:56, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

toki![edit]

mi lukin toki pona. epiku! QoopyQoopy (talk) 01:45, 21 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@QoopyQoopy:

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:00, 21 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I meant that I saw toki pona on your old signature and I thought it was cool :)

I am, by the way! Nice to see another toki pona speaker on Wikipedia. QoopyQoopy (talk) 02:03, 21 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@QoopyQoopy: Ah. You dropped an "e", then. ;) Well cool, say hi on the server sometime. I'm wan Tansin—ken tonsi li ken jan there. Also, if you aren't aware of https://wikipesija.org, check that out! I'm not too active there atm, but it's a fun project, with a long-term goal of getting WMF backing. Which is a long shot, but would be really cool. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:11, 21 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How to best use WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE arguments?[edit]

Howdy! Sorry if this is not the right place to go; however, I've come across your work in RfD before and I ended up stumbling upon your user page and saw your opinion about BLPs and I also fundamentally agree. There was a recently closed AfD that closed at keep where WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE was part of the discussion. I came across it not long after it closed and I was seeing some argue that WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE should generally go through WP:VRT, which makes sense; however in this instance, there was an edit, removed from the page, from who I credibly believed to be the subject of the page. I had some evidence for this, but the AfD had already closed by the time I had gathered the information as to why I think the person was legitimately the subject. I guess my question is, is there a good way to invoke a WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE argument at AfD without having to go through WP:VRT. I think that lots and lots of people to whom WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE apply likely don't understand the procedures of wikipedia and an edit that can very likely be attributed to the subject specifically requesting deletion should probably be taken as a valid. I apologize if this has turned into a bit of a rant; I just was not entirely sure where to go and seeing your opinion on BLPs, I thought your talk page would be a good place to go. I do not plan on taking the AfD to WP:DRV, so I am hoping this does not count as WP:Canvassing. snood1205^{(Say Hi! (talk))} 23:36, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you![edit]

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	Thank you Tamzin for your diligence in dealing with my issue Marvelcanon1 (talk) 03:56, 4 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Marvelcanon1! Just do remember what I said about copyrights, okay? :) I see that you're doing some good work in a topic area that we are really lacking in content on, so I would hate to see something like that become an obstacle for you. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 20:35, 4 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

RfD[edit]

Thanks for your !vote and thoughts on the OmniScriptum RfD. I wouldn't mind splitting the imprints and the authors into separate nominations (though with the caveat that there may be some that could be either), but I'm not sure how to split them into smaller groups – I could try to separate out the possibly-ambiguous ones, but that would still be a judgement call that wouldn't necessarily avoid "keep some, delete others" !votes. Do you have any specific thoughts on how they could be divided up? (Asking here to avoid clutter and potential confusion.) – Arms & Hearts (talk) 11:56, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Arms & Hearts: Well, some could be put in pretty big bundles, like the 10 "Just Fiction" variants. Others—I know this is a drag—it might be better to just nominate one at a time. But it's what 1234qwer1234qwer4 and I have done with redirects with extraneous quotation marks. It's what I have done with "<city> <sport> Team" redirects (which I need to get back to doing, actually). There's a benefit to the itemized/lightly-bundled approach, which is that if there's a clear consensus after a couple RfDs that redirects of a certain kind should be kept, then you can skip them as you go through the list. Sometimes RfD works on a bit of a common law model in that way. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 20:24, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this – I've withdrawn the RfD and will take this into account when renominating. The first thing to do, though, will probably be to determine whether there's a consensus for the list and extensive table of imprints recently restored to the article. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 19:45, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

RK777713 SPI[edit]

Hey, I don't know if the ping didn't go through or if you're just exhausted with the situation (which I would totally understand), but I've added yet another suspected sock to Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/RK777713 if you'd like to take a look. I'm letting you know because I feel you're the only clerk who is already familiar with the relevant background. Throast (talk | contribs) 16:02, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Throast: Indeed no ping. Pings have to be on new lines with a new signature (defined as whatever matches ~~~), so this didn't send one. See Help:Notifications and Help:Fixing failed pings. You can set Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo to notify you when a ping succeeds or fails. Anyways, thanks for letting me know; will look when I'm able to. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 16:10, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

thanks[edit]

Thanks for the reminder about tagging redirects like Enthusiasts when manually adding them at RfD, guess I forgot that one! And your setindex at C12H18BrNO2 looks just fine. Cheers, Mdewman6 (talk) 19:24, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reverted edit[edit]

Hey Tamzin! I noticed you reverted my edit to Among Us. My apologies for not reading the citation, I had assumed you were basing it off of the bracket but I see that you were really basing it off the citation. Would it be alright if I removed the link since there currently is not an article for the Navy's esports team? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 14:45, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Blaze Wolf: No worries. We all make mistakes. As to the link: Per WP:REDLINK, such a link should be kept unless you think that the Navy team is non-notable. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 15:01, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Taking a quick look at a google search. It probably is notable. However I'd rather not work on creating a page for it right now. I'm planning on working on the draft for the new Kirby game that comes out if my undeletion request is fulfilled since I think that will become notable in due time (and I honestly prefer working on articles for video games). ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:04, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Blaze Wolf: And it's perfectly fine to not work on it. But the beauty of redlinks is that they serve as a reminder to anyone reading the article that that's something we should have an article on but don't. So if not you who creates it, perhaps someone else will. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 15:08, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Understandable. I just don't like seeing redlinks in articles as it invokes the feeling of incompleteness (even though articles are never complete) and bothers me. However per WP:REDLINK I'll leave it. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:10, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Also, not asking you to fulfill the undeletion quest but do you know how long it usually takes for an undeletion request to be fulfilled or denied? I'm doing my best to be patient although I see other undeletion requests below mine being fulfilled while I"m waiting for mine to be answered. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:18, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Blaze Wolf: I'm not too familiar with REFUND, but your request appears to be the oldest pending one there that doesn't have a reply, so I doubt it will be too much longer. Maybe one of my admin talkpage watchers will take note of this and take a look. But it'll happen sooner or later, one way or another. We're all volunteers here, and all that jazz. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 15:23, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Alright thanks for letting me know. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:24, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Blaze Wolf: the feeling of incompleteness You are aware of WP:WIP? Most articles about logic topics give me heavy cringing, and I expect this situation will persist for years to come. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 12:32, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Supression of the truth[edit]

Not interested in my talkpage being a battleground for other editors. If you have outstanding concerns about each other, please take them either to ANI or, if issues persist past the point you both became aware of WP:GENSEX, to AE. Concerns about me can likewise be taken to either venue. Thanks. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:07, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AAmy_Schneider&type=revision&diff=1067346318&oldid=1067333003

plus you leave the NOTFORUM comments of your friends. You are all total self-serving hypocrites. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.161.8.90 (talk) 03:15, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wavered on whether to remove CreecregofLife's initial reply, but decided it was (somewhat) relevant to the first message in the thread. The relationship between the terms "woman" and "trans woman", in a discussion of a trans woman's article, is a valid topic of discussion. If your response had been, "Trans women should be discussed as a separate concept from women in general", well, I would disagree with that, since it's inconsistent with our own articles Woman and Trans woman, which define trans women as a subset of women, but I don't think it would go against WP:NOTFORUM for you to say that. Your comments, however—and equally CreecregofLife's comments in response to you, which I've already spoken to them about—diverged deep into gender politics without any attempt to tie things back to the article, and thus I removed them.

For what it's worth, I've never interacted with CreecregofLife before that I can recall, and I'm not sure what gave you the idea that they and I are friends. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 03:32, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t even believe there was an article that both of us have edited recently enough to notice because I hadn’t even seen your name before this, so it’s an especially weird assumption. They’re sounding combative, like they think there’s a conspiracy against them. Coming up with any reason to keep up their biases, no matter how little logic--CreecregofLife (talk) 03:37, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Cree, thanks for proving my point. You're the one with the biases. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.161.8.90 (talk) 13:34, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As I note at the top of this page and in an editnotice, I reserve the right to enforce strict civility norms on my talkpage. Please stop sniping at each other. Thank you. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 13:50, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I was just making observation, not sniping.--CreecregofLife (talk) 14:53, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Same for me, as a note, he's the first one to accuse of bias. 70.161.8.90 (talk) 00:52, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Talk:USS Southerland (DD-743), Talk:USS Vesole (DD-878) & Talk:USS Stickell (DD-888)[edit]

Hello, Tamzin,

When doing a page move, please leave behind a redirect if there are pages that redirect to the page being moved. Not doing so left some broken redirects in these cases. If you leave a redirect, then the helpful Wikipedia bots, like Xqbot, can change the redirect target, as they did with the article redirect page here, to point to the new page location. Or, before you do a move, you can always check to see if there are redirects to the page and change them manually yourself to point to the new page location if you don't want to leave a redirect. Broken redirects show up on the Broken redirect page which is updated every six hours. They can then either be corrected by an editor or admin or a bot will eventually delete them. But it can be simplest to deal with them when a page is bring moved rather than afterwards. The bots are pretty efficient at changing redirect targets after a move if a redirect is left behind to guide them.

Problems can be really bad when a popular page gets vandalized through a bad page move, the bots immediately move all of the redirects to point to the new, bad title, and when the bad move gets corrected, if a redirect isn't left, then all of the existing redirects are broken and can be deleted. Of course, that didn't happen here but I encourage page movers to leave a redirect behind after a move unless they are sure there aren't any existing redirects to the page being moved or unless they decide to correct the redirects themselves.

Thanks for all of the many areas where you help out! SPIs, RFDs, noticeboards, I seem to run into you at so many places on the project. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 18:52, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Liz! Thanks for bringing this to my attention. These actually weren't suppressredirect moves in the standard sense, but rather pageswaps where one of the two articles didn't have have a talkpage. The pageswap tool doesn't handle those redirect creations automatically, and I was supposed to do it myself, but must have neglected to. Thanks. I'll get on that. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 01:29, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi[edit]

hi Aojconnor (talk) 13:15, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Aojconnor: Hi! Anything I can help you with? Did you check out The Wikipedia Adventure yet like I suggested? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 13:18, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Xudun[edit]

Hi, I was wondering why the Xudun, Somalia page hasn't been moved to Xudun yet? I don't believe there are any issues that would prevent this move from happening. Thank you. Subayerboombastic (talk) 03:40, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Subayerboombastic: It's a bit of a complex situation, especially since there's two proposed targets, and I'm guessing some admins have looked at it, have been unsure of whether it should go to a full RM or not, and decided to leave it for someone else. We're all volunteers here, so it may take some time. If you would like to just start an RM now—just click the "discuss" link—that might be the better way forward. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 03:42, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Tamzin: That makes sense. Alright, I'll do that. Thank you. Subayerboombastic (talk) 04:56, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, I dont mind.[edit]

Thanks for the correction. Venkat TL (talk) 10:55, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

RE: Would there be interest in a bot that makes a "watchlist" just for recently-edited pages?[edit]

OMG YES! El_C 14:31, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

-- TNT (talk • she/her) 21:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Watching my watchlist gets boring at some hours of the night. wizzito | say hello! 02:45, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@El C, TheresNoTime, and Wizzito: Well, currently item 1 on my big-project wiki to-do list is some content work (gasp! I know), and item 2 is the second round of 'zinbot automatic patrol circumstances, which I got consensus for months ago but still haven't run with, but this is item 3. If anyone else would like to take a stab at it (hint, TNT), what I'm thinking of is something like:

{{User:'zinbot/Secondary watchlist
|source_page = <!-- Watch all pages linked from these pages, emulating Special:RecentChangesLinked for them. Separate by newline. --->
|source_user = <!-- Watch all pages edited by these users in provided timeframe. Separate by newline. -->
|user_days_back = <!-- How many days back in a user's contribs to follow. Default: 7. -->
|user_edits_back = <!-- How many edits back in a user's contribs to follow. Default: 200. -->
<!-- Either of `user_days_back` and `user_edits_back` can be set to None, as long as the other has a value -->
|namespace = <!-- Name or number of namespace(s) to watch. Use 0 for mainspace. Separate by commas. Default: All. Prefix with - to mean "everything but" -->
<!-- Days back, edits back, and namespace can be overridden per source page or source user, by appending a # and then `days=`, `edits=`, or `namespace=` to the entry. You can also use a `prefix=` parameter. -->
|always_watch = <!-- Will be watched even if not covered by the above parameters. E.g. Your own talk page, AN/I, etc. ... -->
|never_watch = <!-- Will be ignored even if covered by the above parameters. E.g. your own talk page, AN/I, etc. ... -->
|update_frequency = <!-- A number in minutes, or "auto". At "auto", the bot will update as frequently as possible, with the understanding that after each update you are moved to the back of the queue for updates, and the bot only edits once every 10 seconds. -->
}}

Thus mine might look like

{{User:'zinbot/Secondary watchlist
|source_page = User:Tamzin/spihelper log
               User:Tamzin/XfD log
               User:AnomieBOT/TPERTable <!-- Open TPERs -->
               Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion # namespace=4 prefix=Redirects_for_discussion/ <!-- Only watch active RfD subpages. -->
               User:Mz7/SPI case list <!-- Active SPIs -->
|source_user = Tamzin
               'zin is short for Tamzin
|user_days_back = 2
|user_edits_back = None
|namespace = -Category, File <!-- I don't really edit these namespaces -->
|always_watch = User:Tamzin
|never_watch = Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents
|update_frequency = auto
}}

That would render as {{Special:RecentChangesLinked/{{FULLPAGENAME}}/links}}, while a bot would update the /links subpage in accordance with the {{{update_frequency}}} value.

Should be pretty straightforward to set up, when I get around to it. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 03:34, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"hint, TNT"—thank you but no -- TNT (talk • she/her) 03:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wait, what do I do? You're not my mom/s! El_C 04:56, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We had a confirmation that two of the stable accounts were socking, NOT the two that seemed to be mistakenly conflated[edit]

Hi Tamzin, and pinging @Dreamy Jazz:,

I'm looking over this recent sock discussion here, and I think a mistake was made. People seem to be conflating two separate accounts here - different ones than the name change issue. The first two accounts that were tag-teaming disruptively on the article,

Kimballofficial->Historynerd224 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log)
Historyisbuff (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log)

were confirmed by Dreamy Jazz / Checkuser to be the same user, running two accounts to disruptively edit the Nulhegan article. I was about to block them as socks, but was waiting to see if one of the checkusers brought in more evidence. Even if checkuser hadn't confirmed, their SPA, tag-team disruption on the Nulhegan and other Abenaki articles was clearly co-ordinated and, per WP:MEAT, they can be treated as a WP:SOCK drawer.

The later commentary that came in later, about Historynerd224 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) being "the renamed Kimballofficial" seems to have led to people mistakenly conflating the wrong two accounts: Historynerd224 with Historyisbuff. But look at their contribs - they are different accounts. The namechange doesn't affect the Historyisbuff socking. We still have two accounts confirmed as a disruptive sockmaster. I'm still inclined to sock block those two. - CorbieVreccan ^☊ ☼ 21:03, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@CorbieVreccan: I understand that Kimball/Historynerd is not the same account as Historyisbuff and is CU-confirmed to them. But CU confirmation doesn't necessarily mean that a blockable violation of WP:SOCK has occurred. My decision to close with a warning was based on the explanation that Historynerd gave on the SPI talkpage, which I copied to the "Comments by other users" section. They're claiming they created the Historyisbuff account separately for technical reasons and weren't trying to come across as two different people. That seemed plausible enough based on my reading of the composite timeline, and, per Dreamy, the CU evidence neither confirms nor denies that narrative, so I thought it made more sense to very cautiously AGF and let them off with a warning, with the understanding that they won't be given the benefit of the doubt if it happens again. Even if I didn't believe that, the standard close here would probably be a few days' block for the master, indef for the sock; and since blocks are meant to be preventative, not punitive, and this warning seems to prevent future socking just as well as a block would, I didn't feel a block necessary. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:21, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Tamzin's decision to close with a warning regarding the socking per AGF. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 02:19, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

SPI[edit]

Hi Tamzin - hope you are well. Thanks for your work at the Cambria Math SPI case - much appreciated. Thanks! Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 10:23, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Lugnuts: Thanks! It was a funny thing... I just happen to have on my watchlist the two pages they decided to typo-fix, and was about to go give them the standard newbie lecture on being careful with that sort of thing, when I got the sense they reminded me of someone. Glad I went digging. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 10:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

SPA[edit]

Hi Tamzin. First of, thanks a lot for your efforts, much appreciated. I'm sorry to disturb you, but I'm not sure if I should file a CU request every time a new SPA pops up, when there is little evidence on its connection with CY. But the last time I filed a CU on Activisto (talk · contribs), even though there was not enough evidence at the time, that account eventually turned out to be a sock. Now there is a new account of Charlemagne768 (talk · contribs), who started an edit war in AA related article. Should I go ahead and ask for a CU, or it is better to wait for now? Grandmaster 13:19, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Grandmaster: In general, one shouldn't file an SPI just on the suspicion that an account is a "sock of someone"; I would probably decline a check in this case if you filed. If you're reasonably confident that this is CY or one of a few other sockmasters, it would be okay to file under one and say "this or one of the others"—this comes up a lot with caste-warring sox, who are often indistinguishable from one another without CU—but I don't see this as a clear match to the CY M.O. We can't just check every new account with a particular POV and file it under a sockmaster who happens to share this POV, after all.

Which isn't to say that this definitely isn't CY, just to say that I don't think I could endorse a check. Now, sometimes when a new account pops up that doesn't look new, a CU will just check them, as allowed by WP:NOTFISHING (the alleged sockmaster is unknown, but there is reasonable suspicion of sockpuppetry). However, there is intentionally no dedicated venue on-wiki to request such a check. A number of CUs watch this page, so perhaps one of them will be inclined to check the account. But if the account's first edits are to edit-war in a DS area, your better course of action might be just handling this through standard EW/DE/DS routes. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 01:41, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. {{noping2}} to do the same thing as {{user}} but without pinging. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 01:42, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much, I will take this into account. Have a nice day. Grandmaster 08:38, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

SPU[edit]

		..D
		Writ Keeper has given you a potato! Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!

@Writ Keeper: Aww, someone broke the chain. Oh well. This did make me chuckle. (P.S. what on earth did you use to add this that caused it to have {{{param}}}s in it? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 06:20, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

LA Confidential sources[edit]

I looked online for sources for those reviews and couldn't find them. Those newspapers don't appear to have archived their movie reviews. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Just Another Cringy Username (talk • contribs) 06:06, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Just Another Cringy Username: I tracked down a cite on Google for the Tribune quote, which is enough to make me think that the other two quotes are probably legit, and, per WP:SOURCEACCESS, a statement shouldn't be removed just because it's hard to verify. I'll take a deeper dive later for the other two quotes, and, if I find the reviews in question and the quotes aren't in them, will remove the quotes. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 06:18, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How did you find it? Just by doing a search? Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 06:26, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I couldn't find it when searching the quote either for whatever reason, but a search for chicago tribune "l.a. confidential" book did the trick. Second result. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 06:28, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Funny, I did the same thing and didn't get a result. Maybe it's because I use Duck Duck Go?

On another topic, so using "sir" as a term of respect is a thing? I remember hearing about it in The King and I, but that isn't exactly a reliable source. Would certainly explain the cringy notes I used to get when banning spammers as a Reddit mod. ("Oh dear sir where is my mistake sir? i did not do a spam sir!") — Preceding unsigned comment added by Just Another Cringy Username (talk • contribs) 06:52, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page stalker) It's fairly antiquated in the central Anglosphere (outside of the UK, and even there relatively circumscribed). It is, however, the default term of respect in much of South Asia, and enwiki has a very large South Asian editing population. (My stepmother taught business law at university for a semester a few years ago and has a story about being referred to as "honoured Madam" by an Indian international student.) This can result in some culture shock between editors of different nationalities, as one group is a very low-honorifics culture and the other much more regimented, and enwiki in turn was built on the "flat hierarchy" assumptions of the former and is an unfamiliar environment to people normed on a far more deferential social context. Vaticidalprophet 06:58, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes, probably a difference between search engines. As to the rest, well, Vati said part of what I was going to say. I don't think high-honorific culture versus low-honorific culture is the only difference, though. I was raised with Southern etiquette norms, and, if interacting with a stranger IRL of clearly binary gender presentation, will normally address them as "Sir" or "Ma'am". But that norm doesn't translate over to the Internet for me, and doesn't seem to for most Americans from parts of the country where this is the norm. I wonder why Americans who use honorifics in person tend not to online... This seems like something Wugapodes would know.

So, while it may sound strange to our ears, I think it's important to respect different dialects of English with different norms, which is why I give people an alternate honorific to use if that's what they're more comfortable with. The main reason for my note, though, isn't anything about my own gender—it doesn't really trigger any gender dysphoria in me to be called "Sir"—but because I want people to consider the subconscious bias likely at work when they decide to call me "Sir". Often it's people who I'm in some position of authority over, either formal authority like at SPI, or informal authority as an experienced member of the community, and I get the impression that they're assuming that power == male. And I get it, we've all made that kind of assumption occasionally... But we all could benefit from catching ourself when that happens and meditating a bit on those biases. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 07:11, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My back-of-the-envelope explanation is that United States Americans (with significant regional, ethnic, and racial variation) are highly egalitarian to the point of erasing power differences (Wilentz 2002). An example would be the US ideology of "middle class". Americans are highly likely to self-identify as middle class even if that is not true because doing otherwise would contradict that egalitarian myth (Martin 2017 and Shenker-Osorio 2013, but see Cao 2018 for critique). The use of honorifics is similar in that it makes explicit differences in power. By using "sir" or "ma'am" I admit that you have power over me which in US contexts can be a face-threatening act and so is avoided. There are notable exceptions most of which occur in non-white, US sub-cultures. The US Black diaspora has a tradition of using honorifics for community elders (Italie 2019) which seems related to the history of racial power dynamics in the US South. Honorifics were frequently withheld from Black US Americans (Davis 2006, c.w. racial slurs), and so their use within the community is both a recognition of the racialized power dynamics imposed on Black speakers as well as a method of resistance by requiring the use of honorifics by those who would not recognize their hard-fought gains in cultural power. — Wug·a·po·des 19:32, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Wugapodes! That's very interesting. So... My one remaining question, then, is why is it totally normal for me (and many other Americans of Southern, Mid-Atlantic, or Midwestern backgrounds) to say, "Excuse me, sir, you've double-parked in front of my car," but totally alien to say, "Excuse me, sir, your edits go against MOS". It's not a difference in register, because I'm generally more formal in my online speech than in real life, and yet use honorifics less. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 03:48, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think in that situation, you'd be using "sir" ironically. I've heard it used that way in situations where there's an unearned power imbalance. It's subtle, but you're almost trying to get them to check their privilege. "I want you to realize you're abusing the power you have over me." Just Another Cringy Username (talk) 23:39, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Just Another Cringy Username: Well I was just giving that as an example. It could also apply to "Excuse me ma'am, is this seat taken?" or in some social contexts "I'm doing well, sir, how are you?" Neither of which I would say analogous versions of online. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 01:49, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A cup of Tea![edit]

	A cup of Noon Chai
	TheAafi invites you to have a cup of Pink Tea with him as he feels you are one of the hardworking Wikipedians; and Pink tea would help you relieve yourself. ─ The Aafī ^{^(talk)} 11:31, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If this was possibble! I admire your works on the platform, and mostly those at the RMT. ─ The Aafī ^{^(talk)} 11:33, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@TheAafi: Well pink has always been my color, and I woke up at 2 PM yesterday and am trying to power through till like 6 PM today, so yes, I'll gladly accept. I hope it's strongly caffeinated. :) I enjoy seeing you around as well. sips. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 11:44, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@TheAafi: Update: I have drunk a medium Dunkin' "chai" in honor of this gift. I am guessing tastes nothing like the drink in the image, as Dunkin' beverages have a weird ability to all taste the same by the time you're done drinking them, no matter what you ordered. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 16:51, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I feel honoured imho. The chai (tea) I offered is salty in nature. 😌 ─ The Aafī on Mobile ^{^(talk)} 16:54, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. This definitely was not salty. More sickly-sweet. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 17:04, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you![edit]

Hi Tamzin, sincere thanks for your contributions to Draft:Casa Ruby. I had lost some steam after trying to clean up at Ruby Corado (which still has quite a lot of unsourced BLP, promotional language, and general style issues). I think the Casa Ruby draft now meets WP:NORG and could be moved to mainspace as a stub, but I'll take a pass at it sometime this week to make it a bit more substantial. And of course, any further help at these articles is greatly appreciated. Thank you again, Politanvm ^talk 18:08, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Politanvm: Well, like I said, I was glad to see someone's working on it. Casa Ruby strikes me as the kind of organization that, were an article on it to land at AfD, at least one person would !vote delete simply because people are bad at understanding the significance of local organizations in cities they're not from, but which would be kept in the end. They're probably the second-best-known LGBTQ-oriented nonprofit in one of the largest cities (with one of the most notable LGBTQ communities) in the country, and I think the sources bear that out. Another paragraph or two and I think it should be good to go as stub-bordering-on-start. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 18:36, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you![edit]

Good morning Tamzin! (or afternoon, or evening, depending on your location) I wanted to send a quick thank you for the detailed, thorough explanation you gave to the SPI case I opened here. I was on the fence about submitting that case, but at the time it did seem suspicious and the timing was especially noteworthy. In the future, I'll be sure to take everything you mentioned into account before I submit those cases to SPI. I appreciate it again and I hope you have a great day! Spf121188 (talk) 13:10, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Spf121188: Thanks for your kind words. For what it's worth, there's a lot of cases I clerk that probably didn't need to be filed, and this wasn't one of them. It was a valid borderline call between socking and not. There's a fundamental tension at SPI between the encyclopedia's need to be free from disruption and editors' right to not be mistakenly blocked, and so in this case I went for the compromise that doesn't see anyone blocked but also doesn't vindicate anyone.

Where I get grumpy is when someone files an SPI because, say, over the course of a few weeks three accounts have added content to a politician's article pushing a common political POV. An SPI where the only evidence is shared POV is problematic, and sometimes can even be offensive. (Recently I request a case's deletion because it essentially boiled down to "All three editors are pro-India", which I took as a dog-whistle for "All three editors are Indian".) But in this case the compact timing of the edits distinguished it from the kinds of case I'm talking about.

While I have you, not sure if you saw my little clerk edit, but do be careful typing IPs out by hand. As it happens, the IP you mistyped is actually blocked as a webhost, and I was rather confused for a minute what was going on. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 13:24, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

OH my... Looks I transposed some numbers on that, my apologies! Another thing I'll be very careful with moving forward :) Thank you again! Spf121188 (talk) 13:29, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Subtropical Highland Climate[edit]

I just wanted to thank you for your review on the Subtropical Highland Climate section of the Oceanic Climate page. It's certainly appreciated! G. Capo (talk) 16:35, 8 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

RMassist[edit]

Regarding {{RMassist}}, sorry for not getting the /subst. I knew about /subst, but have used them so rarely that I didn't think about it at the time. I actually did cut/paste from the previous one, but then removed the user part, as the time/date would be wrong, expecting it to add them back. Sorry, sorry, sorry! Gah4 (talk) 22:04, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Gah4: No worries! Happens. 99% of cases like this, fixing it would be as easy as someone else adding the subst: for you, but this happens to be a case where the subst'd templates output depends on details of the diff it was added in. If it makes you feel better, Here's me forgetting a subst in a TPE-protected template. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 22:06, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I remember when I first saw it, and noticed the subst:, and thinking about how rare that was, but then not thinking about it the second time. There are so many templates, like {{cn}}, that later on get changed, that I didn't think about how it works. I should remember next time, which I hope isn't soon. Gah4 (talk) 22:19, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Requested off-wiki"?[edit]

Hi. I just noticed this summary. Who requested the move off-wiki (and I am wondering why when it's not something that needs to be)? Ss112 06:23, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page stalker) it seems fine to me, as it's the only EP on Wikipedia so far with the title "Devil". A bit weird for someone off-wiki to request a move, though wizzito | say hello! 06:24, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I'm fine with the move, in case that wasn't clear. I just wonder why somebody did this off-wiki. Ss112 06:42, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Ss112: The user who turned the redirect into an article asked in the unofficial anglophone Wikimedia community Discord if someone could make the move for them. I assume they did so just because it's faster than WP:RM/TR. As a matter of Wikipedia not being a bureaucracy, I'm generally willing to action any off-wiki request for a noncontroversial use of advanced permissions, but as a matter of transparency I note it in my edit/action summary if I do so, unless it's something really trivial like reverting blatant vandalism. Due to a rather absurd RfC consensus, I'm not allowed to give you a link to the brief public discussion, because that's somehow considered a "private" discussion even though anyone who verifies their email to Discord can join the server and see it... But I am allowed to tell you how to find it, so, if you would like to see the request, you're welcome to join the community server and search for can someone move. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 06:49, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, didn't even know Wikipedia had an (unofficial) Discord! Don't use Discord, but good to know in future I guess. Thanks. Ss112 07:43, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Social media in the fashion industry cleanup[edit]

Remember when we cleaned up this article? Yeah, another student revamped it and it doesn't look so good. wizzito | say hello! 01:18, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sadhbh O’Neill (politician)[edit]

Regarding Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2022_February_5#Sadhbh_O’Neill_(politician), Sadhbh_O’Neill_(politician) should target the section 2022_Dublin_University_by-election#Candidates, where Sadhbh_O’Neill now correctly directly targets per the AfD, right? Cheers, Mdewman6 (talk) 23:53, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Mdewman6: Thank you so much for catching that! So sorry about that.

Fixed. (I managed to also screw it up at Talk:Sadhbh O’Neill § Protected edit request on 12 February 2022, but RL0919 seems to have caught my mistake.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 00:14, 13 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Great! I was confused by all the double redirects too (was it even a triple redirect?), as in my comment at the RfD, that you clarified with your close. Anyway, seems everything is in order now. Mdewman6 (talk) 00:19, 13 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

One thing that may have added to the confusion, which I only noticed after closing, is that both redirects discussed are both curly-quote variants. Thankfully Sadhbh O'Neill was already targeted properly (also fixed by RL), and I created Sadhbh O'Neill (politician) to match the redirect that was under discussion. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 00:24, 13 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The thing you changed of mine[edit]

Dear,Mx tamzin

I am so sorry i wrote those things i am no longer going to edit anymore any way. Iam so sorry i disrupted everything and i don't really know how to edit so if i ruined youre page again i am so so very

sorry sincerely, 2603:8081:500:BA70:5DF9:DD05:ED28:D6DD (talk)

As long as you stop vandalizing, that's what matters. I'm glad to hear you won't do it anymore. If you're willing to contribute constructively, Wikipedia would love to have you. Just please read Wikipedia:Neutral point of view first. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 04:55, 13 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

P.S., use ~~~~ at the end of your comments to sign. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 04:57, 13 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

New message from Aloha27[edit]

Hello, Tamzin. You have new messages at Aloha27's talk page.
Message added 16:17, 15 February 2022 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.[reply]

Hi. The only other information I've been able to come up with is the EIU comparing the two editors in question. https://sigma.toolforge.org/editorinteract.py?users=Geo+Swan&users=173.66.134.81&users=&startdate=20000101&enddate=20220215&ns=&server=enwiki&allusers=on Regards, Aloha27 talk 16:17, 15 February 2022 (UTC) Aloha27 (EDIT) I do not believe that the indeffed editor chiming in on a 3RR case regarding an IP editor to be in any way coincidental. Have a good day! [reply]

A barnstar for you![edit]

	The Special Barnstar
	Swiftly cleaning up information in ongoing events and making sure that everything stays factual and also just being a great person -- 𝒥𝒶𝒹𝑒 ^(Talk) • 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓎/𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓂] 00:44, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

MikePlant1 SPI[edit]

Hi Tamzin,

Just wanted to let you know that I've reopened the MikePlant1 SPI with potential new socks. I am aware that you are also a SPI clerk and that you recused yourself from this given you recused yourself as AfD filer, so this is FYI only. Pilaz (talk) 15:36, 4 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

SPI query[edit]

Hello, Tamzin,

You seem to have an encyclopedic memory of sockmasters. Wasn't there a sockpuppet that focused on radio stations in the Philippines? So is new editor Jairus 123456789 but I don't know what SPI case to post about it. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:40, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Liz: I have a good memory for sockmasters, but even I can't keep track of everything about TV and radio in the Phillipines. Perhaps Sammi Brie can be of assistance? If she doesn't know, I can dig deeper tomorrow. Special:Contributions/Jairus_123456789 rings a bell for me too. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 02:53, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, thanks for pointing me in the right direction! Much appreciated. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:57, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Merchandise giveaway nomination[edit]

A token of thanks

Hi Tamzin! I've nominated you to receive a gift from the WMF. Talk page stalkers are invited to comment at the nomination. Enjoy! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 09:13, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Rate limit[edit]

You mentioned getting some sort of rate limit error with User:Suffusion of Yellow/batchtest-plus.js. I was unable to reproduce this; I was able to test the last 2000 hits of filter 614 without getting an error. Can you tell me what sort of message you saw? (Also User:MusikAnimal has this ever happened to you?) Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 19:57, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I have not! But as an admin I have the apihighlimits permission so I probably wouldn't have ran into this anyway. — MusikAnimal ^talk 20:59, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@MusikAnimal: Hmmm. What's weird is that I can't find any limit on abusefiltercheckmatch. Is there a hard limit on POST requests for the entire API? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:06, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Suffusion of Yellow: An API limit was my best guess of the cause, based on having worked with the MW API before; what the actual error said was simply "HTTP error: HTTP error" (or something to that effect). Maybe a momentary connection issue on my part? There was no obvious way to tell the script to "try again", so I couldn't really tell what was happening; dismissing the notification and clicking the "continue" button just threw the same error. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:20, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You can always start over by scrolling to the top, and clicking "Test" again. Otherwise, there's no way to try just the ones that failed. And @MusikAnimal:, I was possibly able to reproduce this by trying to send 500 (!) requests at once, instead limiting it to 10 concurrent requests. At least after a while I started getting HTTP 503 errors. I hope I wasn't actually breaking something. In any case does logstash show what kind of error Tamzin was getting? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:53, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it most likely is in Logstash. If Tamzin can tell me roundabouts when exactly they saw the error, I should be able to find it. I'm not sure how it will help, but I'm happy to try! :)

I've definitely hit errors before using Twinkle's batch delete/protect on a very large list of pages. I don't recall if they were 503s specifically, but it was apparently something general to the action API seeing as I had the apihighlimits permission. I too am surprised Tazmin ran into this. Maximum 10 concurrent requests should be safe. — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:14, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@MusikAnimal: Would have been shortly before Special:Diff/1077004232. When you look, please don't judge how often I check my own contribs. ;) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 23:04, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Tamzin, if this happens again, try adding window.batchTestPlusMaxConcurrentRequests = 5; (or even a lower number) to your common.js. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:04, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, update. @Suffusion of Yellow:

Exact wording is "HTTP error: error"
Pressing "cancel" and then "test" again caused the error to recur. I tried that several times. One time a single entry did get the red X while all others stalled. The other times were stalls across the board.
Console reveals the following errors are happening cyclically:
```
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 ()
VM704:1 Uncaught (in promise) SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0
VM705:1 Uncaught (in promise) SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0
```
The VMXXX numbers go up each time. That unexpected token <... Is it possible the API is giving the standard HTML error page instead of a more specific JSON error message? I have to handle that edge case in 'zinbot at api.py#L52, and it's come up from time to time when something was just very broken in an API query. Note that there's no network activity, so the cycle is the console repeatedly trying and failing to parse something, rather than repeated 500 errors, despite the console messages making it seem that way.

Reloaded, tried again, this time got to see in the console how it starts.

GET https://whois.toolforge.org/w/68.199.96.217/lookup/json net::ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES
ipExtWHOISInline @ index.php?title=User:GeneralNotability/ip-ext-info.js_&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:63
(anonymous) @ index.php?title=User:GeneralNotability/ip-ext-info.js_&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:77
(anonymous) @ index.php?title=User:GeneralNotability/ip-ext-info.js_&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:76
fire @ VM1462:544
getHits @ index.php?title=User:Suffusion_of_Yellow/batchtest-plus.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:171
await in getHits (async)
(anonymous) @ index.php?title=User:Suffusion_of_Yellow/batchtest-plus.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:213
dispatch @ load.php?lang=en&modules=jquery%2Coojs-ui-core%2Coojs-ui-widgets%7Cjquery.ui&skin=vector&version=29pq7:70
elemData.handle @ load.php?lang=en&modules=jquery%2Coojs-ui-core%2Coojs-ui-widgets%7Cjquery.ui&skin=vector&version=29pq7:66

And then that's what it looked like each time before the "Unexpected token" messages this time. Not sure why it's different, but definitely more helpful... something about the interplay with User:GeneralNotability/ip-ext-info.js, then?

Setting window.batchTestPlusMaxConcurrentRequests = 1; didn't stop it, although this time I also spotted the console message

Access to fetch at 'https://whois.toolforge.org/w/50.250.32.193/lookup/json' from origin 'https://en.wikipedia.org' has been blocked by CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.

So... Too much demand with the two extensions running at once, and then batchtest-plus failing to parse an HTML error message? Something like that? Courtesy ping GeneralNotability. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 06:32, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

IP mask[edit]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Unregistered editing already has many problems, for example identities used by multiple people and inability to handle them. There are many reasons to turn it off period, although arguably "casual edits" may outweigh them.

IP masking solves none of them, turns from 1 to 100, and adds more. Not just because there needs to be information on who can find them for governments schools etc but also because it is not IPs, but ranges, which don't exist. They're all seperate. Plus, the "IP unmasker" is just CheckUser but for unregistered editors. So there's one group for those -- but registering lets you hide from those but move to another group? What nonsense is this?

Plus, they want to use not just IP based but session based. Meaning there's no need for proxies anymore, you can just make a browser extension that gives you a new identity. Maybe I'll make one.

IP masking cannot stand. This just takes the many problems IP editing already has and scales them up even more, but without really solving anything other than people who don't read a banner. Tamzin, please help stop this IP masking. Even if you become an IP unmasker, and I become an IP unmasker, and every editor becomes an IP unmasker, that's a ridiculous system that shouldn't have to exist in the first place. Having to run a CU on pretty much everyone always?!?! Just disable unregistered editing.

P.S. My IP address is 162.248.94.163 - there's no need to OS it. Feel free to run the rDNS entry as well, it's naleksuh.com. Naleksuh (talk) 23:59, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Naleksuh: As you know, I waive any privilege against non-pseudonymous off-wiki statements being quoted or referenced on-wiki. However, that does not mean that I'm generally comfortable with using my talk page to continue off-wiki discussions, for the simple reason that I affect different demeanors and even put forth different outward personas in different spaces, and it's hard to juggle multiple demeanors and personas at once. I often like to analogize things here to a workplace setting, so, this is a bit like being asked in a meeting, without warning, to elaborate on something I'd idly mused about at a get-together over the weekend.

For talkpage watchers who are curious as to the context, I expressed a general feeling that IP masking will either be implemented well, or it won't be and the community will riot until it's better. That's not so much an opinion on IP masking as an opinion on the WMF and the Wikimedia community. My actual opinion on IP masking is "Legal has made its mind up, so let's do this right." -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 00:51, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

WikiLove and WikiHate[edit]

Defender of the Wiki Barnstar from Joshua Jonathan[edit]

Goat from EpicPupper[edit]

Barnstar of Diligence from L235[edit]

Civility Barnstar from Sdkb & Writ Keeper[edit]

Vandalism warning from Nosebagbear and whomever most recently edited this page[edit]

Outrageous abuse of power by Tamzin[edit]

Pinned discussions[edit]

Editing principles (Topic: Neurodivergence)[edit]

Awful joke (Topic: Adminship)[edit]

Not really related, so taking it to your talk page (Topic: Gendered pronouns)[edit]

Pipe trick[edit]

toki![edit]

How to best use WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE arguments?[edit]

A barnstar for you![edit]

RfD[edit]

RK777713 SPI[edit]

thanks[edit]

Reverted edit[edit]

Supression of the truth[edit]

Talk:USS Southerland (DD-743), Talk:USS Vesole (DD-878) & Talk:USS Stickell (DD-888)[edit]

Hi[edit]

Xudun[edit]

Thank you, I dont mind.[edit]

RE: Would there be interest in a bot that makes a "watchlist" just for recently-edited pages?[edit]

We had a confirmation that two of the stable accounts were socking, NOT the two that seemed to be mistakenly conflated[edit]

SPI[edit]

SPA[edit]

SPU[edit]

LA Confidential sources[edit]

A cup of Tea![edit]

Thank you![edit]

Thank you![edit]

Subtropical Highland Climate[edit]

RMassist[edit]

"Requested off-wiki"?[edit]

Social media in the fashion industry cleanup[edit]

Sadhbh O’Neill (politician)[edit]

The thing you changed of mine[edit]

New message from Aloha27[edit]

A barnstar for you![edit]

MikePlant1 SPI[edit]

SPI query[edit]

Merchandise giveaway nomination[edit]

Rate limit[edit]

IP mask[edit]

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