Wikipedia talk:Administrators' noticeboard

Admin on mission...

Unofficial anagram of ANI

"Wikipedia:CESSPIT" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Wikipedia:CESSPIT and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 October 14#Wikipedia:CESSPIT until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Levivich (talk) 20:25, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Talk pages for archives

See Wikipedia talk:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1111 -- the {{section sizes}} template at the top of this page is helpful for navigating the current page, but we do not have this benefit while trying to find something in archives. I have messed around a little in userspace when trying to find specific threads, but it occurs to me that other people may find themselves in the same situation; I propose, therefore, that I do a run and put the section sizes template on the talk pages for archives. A preliminary review shows that there are precisely ten extant talk pages, almost all of which contain just a couple comments (which would not be removed -- the section sizes header would just sit above them, as it does here). Here they are:

An example of what I'm talking about can be found at Wikipedia talk:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1111. jp×g 08:00, 29 October 2022 (UTC) jp×g 08:00, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Could you clarify please - are you wanting to add {{section sizes}} to every ANI archive talk page, or just these ten? As a note, I've un-transcluded those pages, since I don't think it is necessary. Also, to ask the potentially dumb question - what does this template do that the ToC on the primary archive page not do (other than give the sizes of the sections)? Primefac (talk) 08:09, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

I would support this (for either these 10 pages or for any page -- As long as it were by default collapsed). It's essentially an index of each page, included on each page. It has the sizes per-sub-section and per-section and it helps verify the overall Byte-size of the page, which is also useful for archive maintenance and finding where to manually archive something to maintain, for instance, a 100k limit. I really like this idea. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 12:43, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

If it's just the ten pages, I don't think anyone needs consensus to do that (be bold and all that). If it's all 1k pages a bot should probably deal with that. I still don't really see how it's all that much more beneficial than the ToC (especially since the "page size" thing is kind of controlled by bots these days) but don't take that to mean I'm strictly opposed. Primefac (talk) 12:54, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Does anyone know why I got a notification saying that jp had mentioned me on this page? I don't login that often these days, so maybe I am missing something here, but it seemed a bit strange. Carcharoth (talk) 22:04, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

I think it was an accidental transclusion of the above linked archives page. Happy to have you here! :) — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 22:40, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

• @Primefac:: Well, depending on people's reaction, my ultimate proposal was going to be that I take an hour in AWB to create the full thousand pages (if everyone clearly thought this was dumb, I would just drop the issue). I wasn't sure if something like this really requires consensus, since none of the pages apart from those ten even exist to begin with, but I figure it is worth trying to get at least something before just barreling through through with the whole thing. I'll make a couple for the most recent ones and then I guess I will wait around a bit to see if anyone here says "don't do them all, that is stupid". jp×g 09:09, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

In the meantime, I've made them for the most recent twelve archives (1100, 1101, 1102, 1103, 1104, 1105, 1106, 1107, 1108, 1109, 1110, 1111, 1112). jp×g 14:23, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

As I said earlier (and I promise it will be the last time I do) I don't see the point, so while I fall into the "don't do them all, that's a waste of your time" camp, I'm not going to stand in your way if you find it useful (and don't mind spending an hour of your life on it); it doesn't really affect me at all. Primefac (talk) 14:30, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Okay, it has been a month, and nobody has had anything to say about this being a bad idea, so I'm going to go ahead and let 'er rip. jp×g 00:06, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Regarding ip issue

Hi. I noticed a closed post on the noticeboard, titled "Re RFC that is malformed and misleading". I skimmed through it and I noticed that in a link provided by the ip there is an edit war going on in the page List of chief ministers of Tamil Nadu. I think it could be worthwhile to see what's the situation there. Thinker78 (talk) 03:54, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

It doesn't have to be like this

It is pretty obvious that ANI is a cesspit, and I probably don't need to repeat the benefit of making ANI a more chill and welcoming place. It is also pretty well known that there has been a lot of failed initiatives to reform this place, and they all ended up with "ANI is inherently like this, so it isn't a fixable problem". But I don't think that's the case, and that's because the user actions are mostly motivated by the environment, not by the people that discuss in the ANI. This is why social media is so toxic/dumb/unreceptive/unreasonable, even though an average person is well, average.

Just like making social media less toxic is not an impossible task, so do to is making ANI less toxic. The trick here are to remove dark patterns that inadvertently incentivize bad behaviors and nudge people to make constructive discussions. Here's are a few suggestions on how to do it, without any use of administrative powers, redesigning of MediaWiki and Wikipedia, change in Wikipedia culture, etc.:

1. Use neutral wording when describing the issue. We know how to do this since we are Wikipedia editors. This is already an implicit assumption, but if everyone does so it would create a social pressure to be constructive. One suggestion is to allow other editors to make the topic header more neutral. Simple, but can be very effective.
2. Keep the header short and intelligent. People are currently treating it like those 40-pages terms of service page and at the bottom there's a tick mark for you to just skip the whole thing. The current header has a noticeboard banner and a 15-lines long notice all vying for attention. In fact, in my opinion this is a classic case of a dark pattern. Why not make the banner more useful for long-term and newcomers alike?
3. Remove those gravedancing, "good block" impulsive comments. It does not contribute to the discussion, nor helping the blocked user from not making the same mistakes again and helping administrators to better detect the same kind of issue. It only makes the users to become more aggressive. Doing so would also force comments after the sanction to be constructive.
4. Encourage editors that give professional and receptive responses by thanking them. I think that this is already a good practice in ANI, but why not do that more often? It would be like giving a comment upvotes/likes but without the nasty effects of them.

I certainly do believe that my suggestions are incomplete, but I hope that it is a step in the right direction. What do you think of my ideas? CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 16:52, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

At the root of the problem is that the English Wikipedia relies on consensus agreement to make decisions. For example: I don't think your first sentence uses neutral wording in describing the issue. What's the next step? Do we spend time on a meta-discussion on how to word the first sentence? Regarding thanking editors, I do think it's helpful to provide feedback with the thanks feature or on the user's talk page. But I'm not sure it can have the type of widescale effect you're envisioning, because it's not readily visible to others. For instance, how do you know that it's not being used as often as you think it should be? It's not that easy to check.

What it comes down to is that a large proportion of the editors who like to discuss these matters favour having unmoderated discussion forums, out of concerns of the moderation being unduly restrictive. A change in culture is only going to be possible if there is agreement on a way to enforce it. isaacl (talk) 18:14, 24 December 2022 (UTC)