User talk:Iridescent

My first arbitration

My second arbitration

Archives [Jan 06‑Oct 07] [Nov 07‑May 08] [Jun 08] [Jul‑Aug 08] [Aug‑Sep 08] [Sep‑Nov 08] [Nov‑Dec 08] [Jan 09] [Feb‑Apr 09] [May‑Jul 09] [Jul‑Oct 09] [Oct 09‑Apr 10] [May‑Jul 10] [Aug‑Oct 10] [Nov 10‑Apr 11] [May 11‑Apr 13] [May 13‑Apr 15] [May‑Aug 15] [Sep 15‑Jan 16] [Feb‑Apr 16] [May‑Jul 16] [Aug‑Sep 16] [Oct‑Nov 16] [Dec 16‑Jan 17] [Feb‑May 17] [Jun‑Oct 17] [Nov 17‑Jan 18] [Feb‑Jul 18] [Jul‑Oct 18] [Nov‑Dec 18] [Jan 19] [Feb‑Apr 19] [May‑Jun 19] [Jul 19] [Aug‑Oct 19] [Nov 19‑Jan 20] [Feb‑Mar 20] [Apr‑Jul 20] [Aug‑Oct 20] [Nov‑Dec 20] [Jan 21] [Jan‑Mar 21] [Apr‑May 21] [Jun‑Aug 21] [Sep‑Dec 21] [Jan 22] [Feb‑Mar 22] [Apr‑Jul 22] [Aug‑Nov 22] [Dec 22‑]

How do you get such a forum-y talkpage?

Just curious, as someone who is often bored and interested in talking about Wikipedia-stuff, how did you get so much discussion ending up here? Was it intentional, or did it just kinda happen, and if so, why? Elli (talk | contribs) 06:11, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

There are many many interesting meta conversations that happen here. And speaking of meta, crossreferencing meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Drafting committee here. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:01, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: interesting. Does that need more applicants? Elli (talk | contribs) 10:13, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

meta:Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultations/Enforcement is what resulted with regards to enforcement. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:20, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Why did I feel the need to actually read that waffle? Seriously, they should just rename it "WikiProject Find A Pretext To Close Down Croatian Wikipedia" and save time. On the plus side, it looks like the fears that it will lead to a Great Purge are unfounded; this is all very much at the "as a last resort we may need to issue an admonishment" level. ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

• What do you guys think? Should I apply? The teaser is: "Do you care about safety, inclusivity, and friendliness in the Wikimedia movement? Are you interested in the guidelines and policies that guide it? Do you have any experience with how they are applied?" I mean, there's no one that can hold a candle to me on that last point. EEng 14:24, 6 April 2021 (UTC) In all seriousness, maybe I should do it. Ha, ha! Just kidding!

  Fram might beg to differ... Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:34, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Trauma-informed lens

Yeah, but do they have Experience applying a trauma-informed lens and working within anti-racist and anti-oppressive frameworks? EEng 14:42, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I personally think the sensible thing to do is completely ignore UCOC since it's certain to fail. (It would probably be difficult to come up with a set of conduct rules that are equally accepted in towns 30 miles apart, let alone cultures on opposite sides of the world. The only way to come up with a set of conduct rules that would be equally appropriate in Beijing, Baghdad, Belfast and Berkeley would be to make them all such obvious things like "don't post credible death threats" that there would be no point codifying them in the first place.) As far as I'm concerned any engagement with it will just encourage them, but if we have to go through the motions of having the discussions, we could do worse than have someone like you who's been on the receiving end of Wikipedia's warped definition of "civility"—I'd assume the discussions will attract mainly the self-appointed Moral Police types and it would be good to have someone constantly reminding them that all the "problem users" they're trying to manufacture pretexts to purge have real people behind the stupid usernames. ‑ Iridescent 19:41, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

UCoC implementation meeting: [1]. The result: [2]. Seriously, why don't you join the committee and I'll be a sort of ex officio historical exhibit. EEng 21:31, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultations/Roundtable discussions, if anyone's interested. ‑ Iridescent 2 14:04, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

I like that it's on Zoom rather than on a talk page. I know, MediaWiki talk pages are rather primitive, but still. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:17, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

The disadvantage there is the loss of historical record. What wiki software is very good at is "who said what, when did they say it, and what was the exact state of the discussion at the point they said it so we can see if an apparently inappropriate comment made sense at the time?". For something contentious like this, preserving the historical record of exactly who said what is important, otherwise it makes the inevitable "but nobody objected at the time!", "nobody from the Foovian community was consulted!", "I pointed out that (problem down the line) was going to happen and you told me there was a mechanism to deal with it!" etc arguments much more difficult to resolve. How many times have you seen Wikipedia issues dissolve into rancourous back-and-forth because a group agreed a party line off-wiki, or Arbcom issued a decision without making the thinking that led to it public?

Using Zoom also brings its own issues with it. We can reasonably assume that everyone in a Wikimedia discussion can access MediaWiki with no difficulty, but not everyone has access to Zoom. It's a bandwidth-hog which people on metered connections are understandably reluctant to use; it's also a rather dubious firm to which significant numbers of organizations block access from their networks for security reasons. (We're not talking a handful of paranoid cranks who think the gummint is comin' for their guns, but "if they don't trust it there's probably a good reason not to trust it" organizations like Google. I'm hardly in charge of nuclear launch codes, but it's nonetheless in my current contract of employment that I not access Zoom from any device on which I have or may in future have work-related material, and I'm not about to buy a separate device just so I can join a WMF meeting.) ‑ Iridescent 18:43, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Note to self to avoid using the word "like" for sarcastic statements.

I am sooo looking forward to the day where all the repeat exams are over so that I can go back to article writing... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:16, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

I've been more-or-less absent from anything substantive on Wikipedia for 18 months. I don't feel I've missed anything. ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Antwort

Regarding the original question, this page isn't actually as forummy as it appears; although there's a lot of discussion on it, it you look at it it's almost always directly relevant to Wikipedia, rather than a general chatroom free-for-all. The reason it's so active (as far as I can tell) is the combination of a number of factors:

1. I've written enough to be reasonably well-regarded (even if not necessarily one of the top editors) on a wider range of topics than most of the active editors, which has put this page on the watchlist of a lot of disparate people from the "content creation" part of Wikipedia;
2. I was briefly on the arbitration committee, which put this page onto a lot of people's watchlists from the "inside baseball" part of Wikipedia;
3. I was involved (albeit tangentially) with some of the discussions around the relationship between the various WMF projects, which put this page onto the "broader meta issues" aspect of Wikipedia;
4. I've been an admin for a long time, which has put me on the watchlist of a lot of people who at some point came here to complain about an admin action I took and who never bothered to take me off their watchlists.

1–4 mean this page is on the watchlist of more people (627 at the time of writing), from a broader cross-section of the wiki than is usual, and as such comments on this page are more likely to attract the attention of other editors who might feel inclined to reply. That in turn leads on to:

5. Because this is a user talk page rather than a WP:-space page, it means it can be moderated to a much greater extent. I can discreetly remove potentially offensive comments and unfunny jokes to a degree that would cause uproar at an 'official' noticeboard, and on the rare occasions it becomes necessary can issue "any further posts from you will be reverted on sight" bans which would require a week of drama to apply at something like the Village Pump. (It also means I can turn a blind eye to socks and banned users to a degree which would never be allowed in WP-space, if I think they have something useful to say);
6. Likewise, because this is a user talk page it's largely subject to real-world standards of civility rather than the warped WikiSpeak definition of the term. People aren't going to be punished or have their posts redacted for making comments that happen to disagree with whatever the wiki-orthodoxy happens to be this week, and are going to be quickly shown the door for being obnoxious; the exact opposite of the situation on Wikipedia's official fora;
7. Although there are a lot of people who don't particularly like me, I have very few outright enemies on-wiki and have rarely become involved in the player-vs-player nonsense; as such this is a page on which most editors feel reasonably comfortable commenting both to me and to each other.

5–7 mean that in effect this page serves as a kind of neutral embassy; people who openly loathe each other and for whom commenting on each others' talkpages would be seen as a provocation can talk to each other on this page under the polite fiction that they're actually talking to me, while die-hard antis who'd never deign to legitimize the establishment by communicating directly with (e.g.) Arbcom or the WMF can post here in the knowledge that the relevant people will see it.

As well as these broader reasons, there are also a couple of more prosaic ones:

8. I've been around long enough to remember the traumatic events of 2007-ish which formed the modern Wikipedia community, but not so long that I was actively involved in them (the same also goes for a number of others in a similar position like NYB), so I can generally comment reasonably neutrally if people want to know why some particular thing is done in a particular way;
9. I do my best to give a full and honest answer to any reasonable question, rather than just a gobbet of "See WP:RGJGIOJF, WP:FJDKGRFI & WP:PEFJIESU" gobbledegook, so I've built up a reputation as someone to whom people come with questions;
10. (Boringly but relevantly) Because the nature of my real world life means I quite often disappear at very short or no notice for quite long stretches, the archiving is (usually) set to a month rather than the more usual 7–10 days to make sure questions don't disappear before I've had the chance to answer them, so stale threads hang around longer than usual and make the page look longer than it is.

It's worth pointing out that although this talkpage is the current one with the "secret backroom where the cabal meets" reputation, it wasn't the first and it won't be the last. When I arrived, User talk:Keeper76 was the place Those In The Know hung out, to the the extent that it got its own WP:AN/K redirect); the talkpages of Giano, Bishonen and Malleus all also had similar status at some point, as to a lesser extent do that of NYB ('lesser' because he tends only to get questions about Wikipedia's administration rather than the more general mix of questions I get asked) and EEng ('lesser' because a lot of editors find his entourage incredibly annoying and don't want to get involved with them) and probably others I'm not even aware of, and at some point the traffic on this page will die down in the same way it has on all the others. ‑ Iridescent 19:41, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Replies to reply

My talkpage is one of the secret backrooms where the cabal meets? That is so, so sad. You have disparate people – I have desperate people. EEng 13:17, 8 April 2021 (UTC) EEng 21:43, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

It certainly is sad. We all know it's more like a dark and dank cellar. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:21, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

And I always thought it was the wonderful Arbitration Committee and administrator artwork at the top of the page that drew people here. :-) — Ched (talk) 20:56, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Pretty sure the (lovely) artwork rotation is what convinced me to scroll down the page when I first arrived, so perhaps there's genuine substance to that point. Aza24 (talk) 05:44, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I need to refresh those at some point, the current bunch have been up there too long. (At least two of them have been in the rotation for over ten years.) Maybe I'll just replace them all with cats. ‑ Iridescent 08:51, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Sounds good, but only if they're cats by Giacometti :) Aza24 (talk) 15:35, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Will they be siamese cats or ragdolls, though? Elli (talk | contribs) 15:38, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the in-depth answer! (didn't mean to imply the page was fourm-y in a policy-violating way, just that a lot more discussion happens here) Elli (talk | contribs) 06:05, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

One of the quirks of 2020s Wikipedia which was unanticipated by the people of 2000s Wikipedia was the extent to which significant discussions now tend to take place on user talk pages. It's not a healthy situation—it acts as a barrier to entry to newer users who are obviously going to be unaware of all the "WikiProject Horses is moribund but all the horsey people watch User talk:Montanabw so if you have a question about a horse article ask it there and someone will answer" situations—but with hindsight it was an inevitable consequence once we collectively began to be obsessed with conforming to arbitrary rules in project-space. ‑ Iridescent 08:51, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I've always wanted someone to publish a Guide to User Talk Pages, giving recommendations on which talk pages to read and why. @Iridescent: Care to offer yours? Paul August ☎ 10:28, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Mmmmm, but in my experience, with one or two exceptions, the owners of the best ones usually end up site banned! Which does tend to limit dialogue. Giano (talk) 10:31, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps, but which ones (and why) do you read? Paul August ☎ 10:56, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@Paul August, way back before the dawn of time we did try to compile a directory of "users whose talkpages would be a good place to ask questions about particular subjects and who are active enough that they're likely actually to answer". It proved imposible to maintain, and it always fit a little uncomfortably with Wikipedia's whole ethos to be essentially arbitrarily declaring some editors to be super-users.

@Giano, Wikipedia:Database reports/Most-watched pages by namespace#User / User talk hasn't been updated since 2017, but it at least gives a snapshot of which talkpages had a lot of people watching them four years ago (it's misleading, as a lot of the entries are just for admins who deleted a lot of pages and consequently had people coming to them to complain, rather than editors who had a lot of conversations take place on their talk, but it at least gives an indication). The only names I recognise as being sitebanned and people whose talkpages were genuinely busy are Eric (who was more of a deliberate wikicide than anything else) and Cirt (whose ban I don't think anyone would argue against). All the other names I recognise as having talkpages where a lot of people would go to ask actual questions—DGG, Bishonen, Moonriddengirl, NYB, Raul & Sandy, Kudpung, The Rambling Man, Dennis Brown etc etc etc—may no longer be as active as they once were, but aren't actually banned. ‑ Iridescent 11:13, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@Iridescent: Well I wasn't thinking of anything like what you've linked to above (wow). I'm more interested in the personal opinions of knowledgeable editors like you (or the other readers of your page) saying which pages they like to read (and why), like a list of favorite books or movies. Paul August ☎ 11:49, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

That’s very interesting, and some names of people I hadn’t realised has disappeared. Giano (talk) 11:20, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

"3000 active editors"

(edit conflict) Looking at WP:HAU: ah, schedules approximated via timezone, because "writing an encyclopedia for fun" is presumably strongly correlated with having a totally normal schedule that's best predicted by what huge continent covering multiple timezones someone lives in. I remember you saying quite a few times that night shift employment is common amongst heavy editors?

I picked up pretty early "you have to go to user talks, not wikiprojects", but it's certainly not the most intuitive imaginable thing. It also has weird interactions with stuff like canvassing and talk page spamming. (I'm starting a newsletter; my options are apparently to advertise it either on moribund project talks, or directly hit up individuals I think might be interested, and both of these are fundamentally flawed.) "3,000 active users" is a number that rolls around my head a lot, because the consequence is one of the most important websites on the internet is, essentially, a small town, with accordant weird institutional quirks like "you have to know people to do anything, and the obvious institutions are mostly traps". The specific everything-is-hidden structure also induces cross-culture project shock -- I'm not sure if I find it weirder that every way to interact with the Wikivoyage community is on its sidebar, or that none of the ways to interact with the Wikipedia community are. Vaticidalprophet 11:27, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

It is really like a small town, isn't it? It feels big and intimidating, but there's just a lot of.... emptiness, devoid of people. The actual people are the same. Like Wyoming, or Vermont. Hey, could be worse - see literally any other wiki. Elli (talk | contribs) 15:24, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

The "3000 active editors" figure is misleading, as it's not always the same 3000 people but a mix of people drifting in and out, with an average of 3000 active at any given time. The analogy would probably be more akin to something like an airport, with a small handful of people who are present day-in-day-out, but the majority of people in constant flux. The social dynamic between the two is very different; in a town everybody knows each other, but a large part of the social driver behind Wikipedia is about interaction between people with very difficult levels of experience and ability and the misunderstandings that result. ‑ Iridescent 06:45, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm reminded of the quote in Crocodile Dundee ... "Gosh, seven million people, all wanting to live together, New York must be the most friendliest place in the world." Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:03, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

I think it depends on what you call "active editors". 140,000 registered editors made an edit in the last month. Typically, about 5,000 editors make more than 100 edits in the last month, and 10,000 average more than one edit a day. The number of "highly active editors" has been pretty steady for the last decade, with a dip here or there and an increase during the pandemic, but still averaging around 5,000 editors. (I think that the oft-quoted 3,000 number was based on the number of people making more than 100 edits per month, but the old stats site didn't count all edits, so those numbers were artificially low.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:18, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I don't doubt that the 3000 figure is an artefact of the old Wikistats site, but but but… If you filter out the bots and limit the count to people who've edited actual content pages—which one could certainly argue is a more accurate measure of the number of "real" Wikipedia editors—then prior to the recent rise, the "active editor" count fluctuated fairly consistently within the 3000–3500 range. ‑ Iridescent 16:38, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I wonder how it decides whether to count an editor as being "content" or "non-content". The numbers seem to add up, with no indication of duplication, but which one am I?

I don't think that we should say that people who spend their days at AFD or the ArbCom pages aren't "real" Wikipedia editors. Or, depending upon how it handles deleted edits, imagine someone whose edits are mainly using Twinkle to tag an article for speedy deletion. That can generate a large number of non-content edits, and the edit to the mainspace might not be counted. But would a New Page Patroller not be a "real" Wikipedia editor? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:51, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

If only there was someone here who worked for the Wikimedia Foundation and could ask… The documentation for Wikistats is opaque and incomplete even by WMF standards, but when it comes to deleted contributions it looks like it used to count all edits deleted or otherwise, but in April 2020 the counter ceased to count deleted edits towards totals in order to eliminate a discrepancy between the old and new counter, and all the totals were retro-recalculated at that time. Anything based on editcounts is going to be misleading to some degree—people with multiple accounts will be double-counted, people with a "one big edit" editing style will be undercounted compared to those who do a string of smaller edits, and all the totals will be artificially skewed by people running bots and scripts on their main account. (Plus of course we're only counting edits on Wikipedia itself; someone editing Wikidata or Commons isn't going to show up.)

All that said, we probably do have enough data to generalize that the English Wikipedia community at any given time consists of around 10,000 regulars and a long tail of ≈50,000 long-term occasionals, with 3000–5000 people actually active at any given time. (FWIW, yes I would say that people who spend their days at AFD or the ArbCom pages aren't "real" Wikipedia editors, although maybe less so in the case of AFD since one could argue that deletion is technically a form of editing. If nothing you do has any effect on what readers see, you're not an editor you're a game-player. As you know, a deeply disproportionate number of Wikipedia's problems come from people without 'skin in the game' whose experience of Wikipedia editing is either outdated or nonexistent but nonetheless feel they have the right to tell other people what they should be doing.)

If a new page patroller genuinely has an editing pattern such as you describe, where they're racking up huge numbers of deletions but no other edits, let me know who it is and I'll remove the relevant userrights. New Pages Patrol and Recent Changes are about spotting potential issues and fixing them, not Wikipedia's equivalent of Space Invaders with an objective of zapping as much as possible; somebody who's doing nothing but hover over Special:NewPages tagging pages for deletion is somebody with a serious attitude problem. Even such a person would still show up as an active mainspace editor, since a significant proportion of their deletion tags would be inappropriate and consequently show up as "reverted mainspace edits" rather than "deleted edits" in the logs. ‑ Iridescent 07:01, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Is clicking the big blue button in the mainspace the only way to be a "real" editor? I'm not sure that a simple edit to an article is more "real" than the edits I trigger, indirectly. I've written a lot of content-related policies and guidelines over the years. I provide advice and information to other editors. When other people make edits because of how I've helped them or to comply with the rules I've written, I'm still having a significant effect on what readers see. If the only thing I did was to help others improve articles, would you start considering me a "fake" editor? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:04, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

If you made no actual edits yourself, then yes. I'm well aware (possibly more aware than most) that there's a huge They Also Serve factor on Wikipedia and that there's an absolutely vital rear echelon holding the whole thing together, but I'd look very askance at someone trying to rewrite content guidelines or policies, attempting to advise other editors, or any other "here's how you should do things" activity if they didn't have any relevant experience themselves. I don't think this is an unreasonable view on my part—if I went over to somewhere like Wikidata and announced "I've never actually edited your site, but here's a list of changes I think you should make" they'd be quite within their rights to tell me to do one. ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Enforced sabbaticals

I've long had the view that longstanding editors ought to take sabbaticals every now and then to recharge themselves. In my case, I had no reason to believe Wikipedia would be at all affected by my absences - and indeed it wasn't. So an average number of editors with a general turnover makes perfect sense; a static number would be quite worrying for the reasons just stated. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 10:56, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Radical idea: mandatory admin sabbaticals: a 3-month tool-break required in every 3rd year of adminship. Breaks are needed! I found it was good to remember the kinds of things I could not do without the toolset. It would also help identify areas with heavy bus factor. –xeno^talk 12:19, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

For better or worse, we have a sense already of where the heavy bus factor is. More hands in AE may be good; three months of "AE without El_C" shock treatment, on the other hand, sounds like the kind of thing that kicks off the spiral that kills the site. Vaticidalprophet 12:43, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I have to say I agree more with Xeno than with Vaticidalprophet on this one. As those with long memories may recall, I was (AFAIK) the first to put my money where my mouth was and say "desysop me for a year so I don't risk becoming part of a ruling class", and found it definitely worthwhile. (I haven't done it recently as I haven't been adminny enough to run that risk—and would oppose making it mandatory for the same reason—but it's definitely helpful for admins to experience Wikipedia without the unconscious deference.)

With regards the More hands in AE may be good; three months of "AE without El_C" shock treatment aspect, a process being dependent on the presence of a single person to function is a process that's dysfunctional beyond repair and we want that process to be exposed so we can get rid of it and figure out how to replace it. We have long experience to demonstrate that what pushes various parts of Wikipedia and the broader WMF ecosystem into mini-death-spirals is when that part of Wikipedia/Wikimedia relies on a single person or small clique of people to function; look at the history of any once-active but now-moribund process or website and nine times in ten you'll see someone declaring themselves "co-ordinator" shortly before the collapse. If AE is really so dependent on the presence of El C that it can't function without him, then the results of any AE decision involving anyone with any kind of relationship with El C (positive or negative) is by definition going to be seen as biased, which taints the whole process.

(On the topic of AE, to bang a drum I've long been banging I find the whole AE process both distasteful and illegitimate, and would urge every editor and especially every admin to completely disregard it. If Arbcom want somebody blocked or sanctioned, the arbitrators can damn well block or sanction them themselves, rather than trying to keep their hands clean by farming out the dirty work to a self-selecting posse of self-appointed WikiPolice. If on the other hand it's a more general conduct issue that's too trivial for arbitrators to bother themselves with but which happens to fall into an area affected by an arbcom decision, it should be taken to a more general noticeboard where genuinely neutral observers—rather than the handful of weirdos who follow WP:AE plus the friends and enemies of those involved who happen to have seen the notification on their talkpage—can discuss the issue. I don't think it's any great secret that I think the entire Arbcom model is hopelessly outdated and should be ignored until it drifts into irrelevance, but for as long as it still exists we should at the very least not be allowing them to operate their own parallel "super-ANI" for incidents involving people against whom a simple majority of Arbcom members have at some point taken a dislike.) ‑ Iridescent 16:22, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

No editor, admin, functionary, or arbitrator is irreplaceable. Nature abhors a vacuum. If there's actually a need, someone will step in. Kudpung and I ran NPP for a while. It's still going after we became less involved. CAT:CSD, WP:SPI, CAT:RFU, and many other areas have had their irreplaceable significant personalities come and go over the years. Someone always steps up. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:59, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

To a point. Nobody is essential, in the sense that we can always work around somebody's absence, but there are certainly aspects where the presence or absence of one or two individuals makes a significant difference. Compare Featured Articles before and after Raul was present to bang heads together when discussions got too meandering, or how WikiProject Greater Manchester went from hyperactive to moribund in a matter of days once it lost the three or so people who were driving it. Not to mention the ever-increasing reliance we have on tools which are dependent on the goodwill of their author(s); you only need to look at how old some of the tickets are on Phabricator to see what happens when something becomes dependent on a handful of people and none of that handful are active. ‑ Iridescent 23:19, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

What I know is that when I was active on the Russian Wikipedia, my main admin activity was cleaning up AfD. I was doing that for a couple of years, and the backlog during that period was at most two-three weeks, sometimes I managed to reduce it to zero. I left that project ten years ago, and the AfD backlog has been steadily growing, now it is over a year long. Does this make me irreplaceable? Certainly not. The community allowed the AfD backlog to grow because apparently it did not consider it important, and nobody volunteered to step up. Two or three admins can easily clean it up without overworking. Note that the community there is big enough, it is not like a project with three active editors and one suddenly leaves. Did my presence make a difference? Looks like it did.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:24, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Oh, definitely; you only have to look at Commons:Admin backlog (currently at 75 months) to see what happens when a handful of admins was holding things together and that handful has subsequently lost interest or left. (I imagine Wikidata is going to start seeing serious fallout from the departure of RexxS fairly soon, as well.) What I'm saying is that projects as important as Commons or Russian Wikipedia shouldn't have any process that's dependent on one person; if the ru-wiki backlog is building up to an unacceptable level, then it's time to start looking at how to replace the process with something that will actually work. (Off the top of my head, some kind of super-WP:PROD where anyone—or perhaps anyone with a certain minimum edit number—can close AfD discussions as delete, and pages so tagged go to a holding category for a month. During this period, any admin—but only admins—can remove the deletion tag if they think it's been applied in error or if somebody has raised a legitimate concern; otherwise, the pages are automatically deleted by bot.) ‑ Iridescent 13:51, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I fully agree that it is unhealthy for a big community when some crucial processes depend on a small number of users. However, it happens, and the communities often can not respond to these situations.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:13, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

To be fair I do think a good bit of the problem with categories for discussion there isn't just about admins but about the fact that the discussions don't get enough input to really have a consensus to close to. Elli (talk | contribs) 17:40, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

No, the main reason is actually that there are no clear policies describing categories, which opens broad possibilities for groups of users from all corners of the Wikiverse to lobby their interests.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:01, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, that too - a 72-month backlog clearly has many problems contributing. Meanwhile, categorization at Commons is... crazy. Categories for each time displayed on a clock? For each ship by identification number? It's for people who were sad their categories at enwiki got merged and still wanted to play around with them (admittedly, I have created many categories too, but I feel like mine are slightly less ridiculous). Elli (talk | contribs) 18:26, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, as an example, I uploaded this file a long time ago. It is a painting of a larch, and I was just watching how people were adding and adding categories describing the larch, until they (finally?) converged to commons:Category:Larix decidua (illustrations). On the other hand, as soon as it does not take my time, I do not mind. I am not using these categories, and I do not find them useful, but apparently some people do. The real problem is illustrated by this discussion, where a group of users tried to push a fringe spelling, did not want to accept any of the two reasonable options they were offered, painted pretty much everyone who did not agree with them anti-Belarusian chauvinists, and it took six and a half years and a reasonable admin to close this discussion. An unreasonable admin, who are plenty on Commons, could just agree with them, because they had a numerical advantage.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:49, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

You don't even need to be an admin to close CfDs unless you close them as delete - the backlog is so large, they just want people to close them, tbh. Elli (talk | contribs) 20:49, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

> I am not using these categories, and I do not find them useful, but apparently some people do.

Less than some Commons editors believed, apparently. BTW, Search is changing at Commons. You can see the new version if you are logged out or in a private/incognito window. Go to Commons, type something in the search box, and see what you get. Apparently click-through rates on the search page (which indicate that people are finding what they want) are way up in the new system. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:08, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: well yeah, structured data is clearly the ultimate solution here compared to categories which just poorly imitate that (the trend being "put something in one category, then put that category in all the relevant categories"). Structured data does that better. Well, it could do that better. The whole model is a mess and I don't like thinking about it too much. Elli (talk | contribs) 22:51, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

I believe that the story was that "everybody" knew that searching for categories was the right way to find content on Commons. It appears that "everybody" was the same "everybody" that teenagers say is going to the party this weekend, i.e., "almost nobody".

I am not immune to this way of thinking; the main difference is that when I tell my story, I sometimes remember to preface it by saying that this is how I do it, and that I'm not normal. (In this particular case, of course, I'm one of the "nobodies". According to my web browser's history, less than 5% of my searches on Commons involve categories.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:17, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

Searching for categories on Commons doesn't work because the category structure is so haphazard, and haphazardly named too, plus they are only half-filled. You have to find a relevant file and then see what categories it is in. Structured data won't work because the majority of files have little or no data, or the wrong data or in the wrong language. Plus (thanks to Fae) all you get on most natural searches is 400 pdfs of old books (unless you know to exclude these). Johnbod (talk) 02:23, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

The new search looks pretty, but their relevance algorithm still needs work. As an example, I just searched "Cambridge University"; I'd expect pictures of things like chapels/churches, a couple of the colleges' buildings, a few logos, and maybe some rowing. But Commons gives me a few dozen images of (presumably) the same cricket match...? Compare to Google's results for the same term, limited by site. Using categorisation or structured data is probably not the solution, it's too difficult and infeasible to maintain. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:18, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

@Xeno: Now THAT is an idea I could fully Support. — Ched (talk) 15:45, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Analogies-a-go-go

• Just mentioning in passing that whenever someone asks me of good places to take the "temperature" of the project (often WMF staff, particularly newer ones), I start off by saying "first, watchlist Iridescent's talk page." I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head in your assessment of the reasons for its popularity: diversity of comment, limited moderation (but at the same time, participants whose comments generally don't need that much moderation), and the lack of "official" status that allows users to let their hair down a bit. I've often thought this page was the most informative one on my own watchlist; I don't even bother with a lot of the supposedly more "important" ones like AN, ANI and Jimbo's page. Heck, I even strip off the majority of arbcom-related pages (except for those that directly affect me). Risker (talk) 03:34, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Said slightly differently: it's the page where people who either wrote the existing major policies or will write the future ones discuss what is going on. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:12, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
    • "The Congressional bar as opposed to the debating chamber" might be a more accurate analogy; your (Tony's) description makes me sound like I'm operating some kind of Masonic lodge. Risker's comment makes me mildly curious and regretful that @action=info only gives the number of watchers, not the names (and yes I know there are good reasons why we don't allow it). ‑ Iridescent 16:49, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
      • I wouldn't compare active participants on this page to congresspeople, but I suppose that sounds less sketchy than my description :D TonyBallioni (talk) 20:05, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
        • "Cop bar as opposed to the police station" maybe. (Although I'm not sure [comparing] active participants on this page to congresspeople is as far from the mark as you'd think. By my reckoning in this thread alone I count three former arbs, two WMF staff including the one with the unenviable task of trying to persuade the wikis to eat the shit sandwich being prepared at m:UCoC, four of those I describe above as having "the talkpages where Those In The Know hang out", and admins with a combined total of 79 years of +sysop status. Back in the old days that sort of group would have had Wikipedia Review screaming that they'd uncovered Wikipedia's equivalent to Bohemian Grove.) The important difference is that it's open and transparent, and not some smoky backroom where plans are cooked up out of sight. ‑ Iridescent 23:01, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

          You know, y'all should be nicer to him. If you'd lay off him, I could make him do an extra tedious project instead of me this month. (Legal's updating the language of the Privacy policy to say things like "payment account number" instead of "credit card number" or "applicable law" instead of "law". Extension:Translate is not my idea of fun.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:19, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni, re: I wouldn't compare active participants on this page to congresspeople. In my area (USA), I'd consider being called a congressperson very insulting. Perhaps even bordering on NPA, so I'm slightly leery of your description is. :-) I suppose location is key here. — Ched (talk) 23:12, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I agree. That's the joke I was making. Let us not insult the participants here by comparing them to members of the United States Congress. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:27, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

dang, and here I am wanting to be the first congressperson to edit Wikipedia without violating policy! Elli (talk | contribs) 04:18, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Just chiming in here to agree with everyone else that I watch this page partly because Iri's and my editing interests overlap occasionally but mostly because it's the best way to quickly get up to date on what's going on in project space and what actually matters and, of course, to add 12 years to Iri's count! ;). I have a long watchlist which includes AN, ANI, ACN, and most of the pumps, but I find the heat-to-light ratio there off-putting. Also, I enjoy the tangents and in-jokes here that would quickly be shut down elsewhere. Sometimes they're more enlightening than the original topic! HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 20:56, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll chime in too, because just looking here today, I learned for the first time about Tarrare et al. and Wikipedia:Wikipedia records, and these are the kinds of things that I love to learn about from Wikipedia. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:54, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

If you like "weird 19th-century stuff", can I put a word in for Pig-faced women? It's not as salacious or offensive as it sounds (just a crummy name; PFWs are just a folklore motif, the name is akin to mermaids being called "fish-bodied women") but I find it astonishing that people even in well-educated countries were still believing this obviously lunatic idea almost into living memory. It also has some of Wikipedia's most surreal illustrations, and the sentence Once shaved, the drunken bear would be fitted with padded artificial breasts. Daniel Lambert is also an impressive feat (if I do say so myself) of writing in the "neutral to the point of dourness" Wikipedia house style without losing the innate weirdness of 18th–19th century culture. ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I'll just chime in too and add my pile-on to the reasons others have stated above. I really am semi-retired from this Wikipedia. In my pre-desysop times, I had 36,000 pages on my watchlist. On 1 March 2020 I deleted all but my article creations from the list and one talk page–this one. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:09, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I watched this page because I heard there were good posts here, and boy, has it delivered on that promise. Thanks for making posts, everyone! jp×g 08:48, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

As one of the evil banned users you mention I don't have a watchlist, but this is one of the pages I always look at. There's no better place to take the pulse of what the people behind the scenes at Wikipedia. 92.40.168.74 (talk) 11:21, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

April 2021

Hello. Regarding the recent revert you made to WhatsApp: you may already know about them, but you might find Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace useful. After a revert, these can be placed on the user's talk page to let them know you considered their edit inappropriate, and also direct new users towards the sandbox. They can also be used to give a stern warning to a vandal when they've been previously warned. Thank you. Firestar464 (talk) 06:23, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Something does rather give me the sense Iridescent is aware of templates. Vaticidalprophet 06:26, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

...and Iridescent didn't even make that revert. — J947 ‡ ^{message ⁓ edits} 07:19, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

And another oldie but a goodie from the vault: WP:DNTTR — Ched (talk) 08:39, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not in the "never template a regular" school of thought (I've given templates with a bit of personalization for, say, repeated bad speedy tags that were received as well as could have been by their recipients), and my position on the 'open question' mentioned by the lead of that essay is that giving them to newbies is itself problematic practice, but I can't hide my amusement at giving someone who's been admin for over a decade a template targeted specifically at introducing new users to templates. Vaticidalprophet 09:07, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree with the WP:DTTR essay; I have no issue with templates in their proper place, and as far as I'm concerned "the regulars" are precisely the people who are aware that Wikipedia has a lot of semi-mechanical processes and should understand that it's not practical to write everything out personally. Where I do have an issue is with sloppy editors who dish out inappropriate and incorrect templates, since if they're given to good-faith new editors they can quite often cause that editor to retire in either confusion or disgust. In light of that, Firestar464, would you care to try to explain why you've given me a {{Uw-warn}}, and why you've linked to a page on which I've made a grand total of two edits in my entire 15 years here, neither of which were reverts? ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Never mind Iri, there's no shame in being a pesky noob. Welcome to Wikipedia. We hope you'll stay. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:22, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I've found that writing my own templates that don't look like warning ones tends to work better - for example, about section heading capitalization (is there a warning for this? dunno, but this is something I run into far more often than uh, not knowing that user warnings exist) Elli (talk | contribs) 19:18, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

@Elli: I've been thinking of writing some of those in my userspace and using them as custom templates with Twinkle, but I don't think there's any way to make them progress automatically, or be easy to select (the way that Twinkle will detect a level-2 template and auto-select a level-3 template). Is there any way to set them up to work the way the others do? jp×g 22:13, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG: ...Twinkle does this? Elli (talk | contribs) 22:14, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

 Self-trout SORRY! --Firestar464 (talk) 01:13, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Does warning vandals actually reduce vandalism?

I saw you mention AN/K: I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve considered redirecting WP:AN/IRI here (only stopped by the tenuous hold that was kept on even the historical record of the former).

Has there ever been any kind of testing done to see if "a stern warning" to vandals actually reduces further vandalism rather than inviting it?

I always wondered if I’d ever get hit with this template, since I’ve anecdotally found that a simple revert and no warn is usually more effective. –xeno^talk 03:11, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

@Xeno, I don't think anyone's tested it. I don't think that we've even gotten as far as figuring out what percentage of talk page messages get read by IPs and newcomers. Since most newcomers don't make a second edit, it probably looks like the warnings "work". I think that the closest we've come is the usability project that re-wrote some of the uw- templates about a decade ago (mostly to make them sound less like stern warnings). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:06, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

If they're using the mobile app, the percentage read by IPs is zero. But yes, I tend to do the same as Xeno - revert and no warn (unless it's a serious issue), and only warn if it's repeated. Black Kite (talk) 01:28, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Given the way that many mobile phone providers handle IP addresses, then "zero" might be the correct approach. Maybe 1% of users will edit (ever). If you have a dynamic IP and it gets reassigned between editing sessions (i.e., more frequently than average), then basically all of the messages would end up reaching a non-editor. But for an occasional editor, even a typical length (often at least several days, with maybe 10% using the same IP for a whole month, but "normal" varies a lot between countries) is likely to result in someone (or no one) getting your message. This is a consequence of our decision to use regular wikitext pages as the primary basis for communication.

As a side note, because of the apps' history (they originally required editors to create an account), there are more registered editors than IPs editing from them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:51, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, though the fact that registered editors have only made 22 edits in 20 hours today in usertalk and articletalk using the apps suggests they don't know where they are either. Black Kite (talk) 19:08, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I see 33 talk-page edits by IPs and logged-in editors during the last 24 hours on the two apps. I wonder how that compares, as a percentage, to IPs and newcomers on the mobile site. I can't imagine trying to edit wikitext on a phone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:12, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd be fairly sure that warning vandals has at least some impact, in sending a "don't bother trying, we're watching you" signal. It would be easy enough to test—just set all the Twinkle templates to go to dev/null instead of the user talk page for a couple of days, and see if the vandalism rate rises—although I can't imagine the WMF being very keen to try the experiment. I'm very confident that the impact of warning templates is minimal compared to the impact of rapid reversion; if vandals see their handiwork disappear within 10 seconds every time, it removes the incentive.

There are some regular editors who edit primarily via phone—Cullen328 is one I know of—but AFAIK anyone doing anything more complicated than the occasional typo fix just uses the desktop site on their mobile device, which is why the WMF's insistence on overriding cookies and forcing editors onto the mobile site even when they've selected "use desktop site", unless they go through a complicated rigmarole of selecting "show desktop site" in their browser and manually deleting .m from the URL of whatever page they're on, is such a constant source of complaints. ‑ Iridescent 10:43, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

The vast majority of casual mobile editors have no idea that the fully functional desktop site works just fine on modern smartphones and have no idea how to find it and try it. It is really a sad situation. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 16:18, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I think they also help with Wikipedia's inclusivity (I think it was Yngvadottir who said that our broad inclusivity is Wikipedia's biggest strength, and I fully concur) when people who at first glance seem totally useless are given a couple of chances before getting the boot. That gives folks the confidence that you don't need to be perfect right from the get-go to participate.

Editing by phone is a leg pain. I don't try except for the most trivial stuff and Commons uploads. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:09, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes—and the better-worded templates can also serve as a gateway into the pages which explain how Wikipedia works. Quite a bit of disruptive editing is actually people trying in good faith to make Wikipedia better and not understanding our rules. (Yes, we have the "About Wikipedia", "Help" and "Learn to edit" links in the sidebar, but none of the three is exactly comprehensible to anyone who doesn't already understand the jargon, and certainly not for editors whose English isn't fluent.) Sure, most disruptive edits are just people messing around, but in at least some cases if you explain (even just with a template) "I've reverted your edit because we can't accept unsourced claims", the editor will come back later with a source.

Template messages also have a secondary practical purpose in making it clearer who reverted the edit, so if there's a mistake—or at least, if the reverted person thinks there was a mistake—they know who to query it with. (Everyone, no matter how experienced, will at some point flag a valid edit as vandalism, or incorrectly tag a page for deletion. New editors are unlikely to know how to check page histories; if they see themselves being reverted and want to challenge it, then unless they receive an "I reverted you" message they're very likely to raise it on the article talk page rather than with a specific editor. Unless the article talk page is a very high-traffic topic like Talk:Joe Biden, then chances are nobody will see any comments on the talk page—but the new editor will probably assume that the fact they were reverted means someone is watching the page, and feel insulted that their good-faith question on the talk page isn't answered. I know I sound like a broken record on the subject, but it's very easy to forget just how counter-intuitive everything about Wikipedia is both for absolute newcomers, and for people who are used to other user-generated websites.) ‑ Iridescent 15:07, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, Jo-Jo Eumerus; I'm rather surprised the claim needs attribution :-) In that line, I suspect people vary in their reactions, including depending whether they come back any time soon to see that they were reverted (though I believe e-mail spammage when one's edits are reverted may now be a default setting for newly registered editors, which would encourage thinking of it as an unexpected and possibly hostile act, since the disclaimer above the edit window is easy to miss and for all I know, not visible in the disastrous smartphone apps), and depending what other online places they haunt. Not all new/driveby editors who do react react as if they took us for a social media site. More broadly, I agree that template messages show useful links—for those not using the disastrous smartphone apps—and also identify someone to engage with, although a significant number of vandalism patrollers are using automated tools and may not even remember the basis of their decision or engage in good faith with a new editor when they respond more or less emotionally to the revert. They also of course provide a trail on the editor's talk page when reconstructing their trajectory as an editor. Broadly speaking, while mindful of Ritchie333's WP:HNST (and having just been reminded of Chiswick Chap's WP:How Wikipedia looks to newbies while searching for it), I like (or liked, when I was active) to use the templates. I trust the experienced Wikipedians who worked hard to word them clearly and fairly, trust that's reflected in their being used by ClueBot and in WP:AIV almost always requiring them to have been tried. I used to find a significant amount of vandalism was indeed "messing around", such that applying AGF, reasonable people might differ as to whether it did fall under our definition of vandalism: stuff like adding oneself or a friend to the list of alumni of a school, or the sad case of CejeroC, who was overriding infoboxes using a model they got from somewhere and in so doing, again and again introducing an invalid parameter, and presumably because they were using a mobile app—but for all I know it's a language problem—their non-responsiveness has led to discussions at AN/I and elsewhere and to blocks. I'm quite attached to Uw-test1 and Uw-joke1, and for good faith attempts to do what we're here for such as adding plot summaries copied from IMDb, expansions by overwriting with text from, for example, the Encyclopedia of Bangladesh or Memory Alpha, or even uploading and adding someone's photo from Facebook, to things like Uw-unsourced1 and Uw-copyright-img.

However. Since we can't read the person's mind, including knowing whether they even know about copyright or have a grasp of what an encyclopaedia is—they weren't a big thing in my schooling, so I'm quite ready to believe some schools in some countries never had them, and we've played a significant part in driving the standard ones to the brink of extinction so that I suspect few schools have them nowadays—and since Wikipedia is indeed an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit (I believe I'd have to register to edit Wikia, and I know I'd have to jump through hoops to edit at, say, heimskringla.no or the Skaldic project, both of which appear to be Mediawiki instances), I am aghast at people starting the talk pages of any but obvious vandals with a naked warning template. That does communicate a message of hostility. ClueBot appears to still leave a blank line at the top when it creates a user talk page, and I've always assumed that was for a welcome template, and I almost always slot in my welcome template at the top following that pattern and what I consider best practice. It's part of AGF and treating people like humans. We even have special welcome templates for unconstructive users and for specific cases like those who aren't giving references and those who appear to be editing with a conflict of interest. Nowadays I have to check the welcome template first, because the WMF has changed the default to a tiny thing that just leads to their intro pages and videos; it looks like boilerplate to be ignored. And someone was in good faith changing the others to wrappers for that worse than useless thing, and I can't be sure all those changes got reverted. But my default is Template:Welcomeh; I like the comprehensiveness and logical layout, so the recipient can choose what to look up, and I like the section header because everything else on their talk page will have section header. I'm alarmed that the 5 pillars page is less informative now; I'm not sure what's happened, but I believe it used to link in an obvious way to explanations of each pillar, and although I know you roll your eyes at the pillars, Iridescent, I think they're a good way in for new editors. I doubt the question posed at the start, whether warning templates deter effectively, can be answered; not only do people differ in what they were trying to do, and whether they understand the English of the template, or bother to read it, or even know it's there, but they may come back as a different IP or under a different user name (many people take a long time to realise we don't like them having more than one account) after a short or a long period. But since the institution of the Teahouse, I have deplored the change that came in with it to not welcoming people and instead leaving it to the Teahouse bot and leaving the explanation of how we do things to the Teahouse hosts, and even after it became apparent that that and the Wikipedia Adventure were indeed not working as our sole means of orienting new editors, the tradition of giving people welcome templates has not been revived. I believe that's a major source of our problems with well-intentioned relatively new editors, and while I understand the theory behind DFTT, it conflicts with AGF, BITE, and fundamentally with CIV in my understanding, which is "treat fellow editors like human beings", and does make our warning templates appear like "You're PWNed". (/hobby horse) Yngvadottir (talk) 21:58, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

My estimate is that about 15% of new editors actively respond to being given templated warnings, there's a roughly even mix of "productively engaging" and "trolling/harassing the person issuing the warning" among those. For the other 85%, I don't know how many stop on their own and how many keep going until they get blocked, nor am I willing to guess how many read the warnings. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 17:28, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

In my experience, a lot of vandals get bored very quickly and stop of their own accord even if completely ignored, and a surprising proportion have a moment of conscience and self-revert after a few minutes (probably mostly people who want to test if "anyone can edit" is actually true, and are horrified at what they've done when they realize it actually is). I still think template warnings are the least worst option. Even if only one in a hundred reads them they don't generally make things worse (the worst that generally happens is the vandal starts writing abuse on their own talk page, which nobody else will ever see; it's rare for them to actually start following the warner around), and if it puts even a handful of people off then it's paid for itself in terms of wasted time. Plus, the templates provide a routemap in for the handful of people who think "I've had my fun, now let's do something serious"—a not insignificant fraction of Wikipedia's editors started off as kids goofing around. ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

WP:5P sidetrack

My problem with the Five Pillars essay isn't its existence—I agree it's useful to have a summary of key policies which new editors need to know—but with the wording. To me, it gives a false impression that a selection of arbitrary-chosen policies are "the important ones", which potentially lulls new editors into thinking that as long as they abide by those five policies, they can treat everything else as just an advisory guideline. (Lord knows I see enough variations on "How was I to know that wasn't allowed?" as a defence.)

I also feel it makes even fairly experienced editors think that these five policies are somehow "the non-negotiable core principles" and thus puts people off questioning them, when in reality our only non-negotiable core principles (unless you count this meaningless set of platitudes) are that our purpose is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally, and the six founding principles. (I could make a case that Maintaining room for fiat to help resolve particularly difficult problems is actually the most important principle of all—arbitrariness isn't an aberration when it happens but has with good reason been intentionally built into all our processes from the start. You won't find even a hint of it at WP:5P which gives the impression that Wikipedia runs purely on consensus; we then blame editors when they take that at face value and get confused and upset when told they can't keep trying to re-litigate decisions.) ‑ Iridescent 15:53, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

because the WMF has changed the default to a tiny thing that just leads to their intro pages and videos that was actually done by the community, see here ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:28, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

So that's the background to the well-intentioned attempt to turn them all into mere wrappers. I think that's a good example of a discussion with relatively few participants overriding broader consensus; although welcoming has fallen into such disuetude that I may be wrong and the preponderance of those who still do it may have changed their minds in favour of that kind of vague handwaving. I am happy to see that after the kerfuffle at AN/I that I saw, those of us who use them have our detailed welcome templates back. (Not to mention past recipients; or do I have substitution/transclusion the wrong way round?) We increasingly expect newbies to familiarise themselves as soon as possible with all sorts of rules and guidelines, from "Don't use allcaps and bold for emphasis" through "ping correctly and not too much" and "The intro is a summary of the article" to "Source everything you add even if you've seen unsourced stuff, but don't use certain newspapers, don't use search links, don't use 90% of YouTube, don't use any social media, don't use publish on demand books or those from a list of publishers that you will have to learn by experience but may be a mainstay of your school library, and be prepared for battle if you use a thesis or dissertation" and "maintain the same citation format and variety of English, even if you've never encountered either before, while avoiding bare links, inline links, and editing in quick succession to format the reference because it will hammer someone's watchlist, which is one of the mysterious red links at the top of your screen". Yet we rarely give them a way to look up any of this stuff. Oh, and "The wiki process is about people who may have widely differing backgrounds and skill sets collaborating to improve articles", but "Any change you make to something someone else wrote counts as a revert, and reverts are very bad, even if they do not exceed 3 within a 24-hour period, and even if you believe your change is beneficial. Also, a whole raft of articles are under super-sekrit protection discretionary sanctions, which means you can't revert more than once or WHAMMO." Welcome to Wikipedia. (All quotations my own wording.) The least we can do is give them an indication of where to RTFM. (Or try to; some will never realise they have talk pages.) Yngvadottir (talk) 01:47, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Two other details for Yngvadottir: While {{Welcome}} is purely a volunteer creation, {{Uw-test1}} is one of the templates that the WMF re-wrote back in 2012 (before my time there, but I remember seeing the discussions here).

Also, I'm pretty sure that the only reason ClueBot leaves a blank line at the top of a new page is because the MOS says that All Good Editors™ add a blank line before adding a new ==Section heading==, and it was easier on the bot's volunteer creators to always add a blank line instead of adding it for existing pages and skipping it when creating a page. It has no effect on the rendered page, and someday, the servers might even start stripping it before saving the page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:08, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm prepared to believe you on both; the WMF has not always been a juggernaut bureaucracy that sees itself as running the projects and is largely staffed with non-editors. But if the servers strip that blank line, I'll take it as yet another instance, albeit small, of WMF meddling in a damaging way. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:47, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't think a juggernaut bureaucracy that sees itself as running the projects and is largely staffed with non-editors is entirely fair. In my experience, in most cases the WMF consistently tries to avoid responsibility for making difficult decisions, even when the governance of projects is clearly breaking down and order being imposed from above would actually be of benefit.

Largely staffed with non-editors is also a bit unfair—sure, there are a lot of people with no apparent editing experience on their bloated staff roster, but a lot of those are in things like engineering and accounts where they haven't been recruited for their Wikipedia experience. There still seem to be plenty of people with Wikipedia experience in the editor-facing jobs (WMF job titles are written in a particularly impenetrable form of West Coast Newspeak, so you sometimes have to click through on things to see that e.g. a "Talent & Culture Officer" isn't actually an editor-facing job despite the name). I also assume that a non-negligible proportion of the people who don't have a Wikipedia username listed are actually just people who are in fact editors but want to keep their work and private lives separate.

I could certainly argue the case that the WMF hiring people who are also active editors has a destabilizing effect on the communities (incentivizing people to take actions they think will curry favor with a potential employer is just as much a conflict of interest as straightforward paid editor, and—as was demonstrated rather spectacularly in 2019—an editor holding a position of authority creates serious practical and ethical problems as well as a vicious chilling effect if their conduct is called into question). I could also certainly argue the case that there's no obvious correlation between editing experience and whether someone will do a good job at the WMF; for every Moonriddengirl or Keegan there's also an Ironholds or Kaldari. ‑ Iridescent 06:57, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I was trying to be polite. But I must insist on the point that that is how they regard themselves. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm (as you know) no fan at all of the WMF and am entirely willing to think the worst of their motives (I know you're already aware, but for the benefit of any TPW that doesn't know the back-story I was the person who made the original complaint that led to Framageddon), but I do think you're being unfair here. Certainly there are some who give the impression that they think working for the WMF entitles them to act like Wikipedia's management, but since 2019 none of them dare show their faces on the big wikis. Yes, there's a lot of big talk on Meta about a theoretical right to impose rules, but the WMF know as well as I do that if they actually tried it they'd immediately lose 75% of the core editor base and be left hosting an empty shell which—without admins and recent changes/new pages patrol to maintain it—would degenerate into a mess of spam and libel in about eight minutes (cf #How to kill a wiki a few threads up). In reality, for all the hype about UCoC it will either be so anodyne nobody could possibly object to it, or User:Xeno (WMF) will have to try to convince people here (and at minimum de-wiki and Wikidata as well) to accept it—the WMF aren't going to be stupid enough to try to impose a substantive change on one of the big Wikipedias against consensus for a third time after seeing what happened on the first two occasions. ‑ Iridescent 18:56, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

UCoC is a small part of it. Last I heard they were still forging ahead with this based on this, where such pronouncements as "The focus on mainstream, Western-idea of academic-based knowledge limits the inclusion of other ways of knowing or presenting knowledge" caused pushback but the entire exercise was a display of what they believe is their authority over the projects. I do believe entrenched bias is a problem in the project, but I refuse to grant any authority to that organisation to determine what it is or enforce remedies over the people who do the work. And that appears to be most of what they see as their aim: see their recent mission statement, their desire to steal the name of our project in rebranding ... and we won't get into the changes in the composition of the Board or the suspension of Board elections, because the Board is in any case a rubber stamp (and could hardly be expected in any case of challenge what is presented as the raison d'être of the organisation). As I say, I was being nice, conceding that there was (presumably) a time when some WMF staffers worked on committees with fellow editors to improve something identified by the community as a need. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:59, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir, I think you're being unfair. This story, from where I sit, sounds like this: "Several years ago, there was a committee of 10 people who don't work for the WMF plus one WMF board member and two WMF staff. One of those two staff members has been editing Wikipedia since 2005 and is a volunteer admin here at the English Wikipedia plus at five other wikis, so he's hardly some outsider who doesn't know anything. The committee talked to a bunch of editors and did some research, and they made a lot of suggestions. Some of the suggestions drew some justified criticism [at least, my criticism of it was justified ;-)], so those suggestions got dropped from future rounds, and the reason I can't link to them in the final recommendation is because the idea has been rejected. But I still blame the WMF for even letting that independent committee, which was made up of 77% non-WMF folks, make that recommendation."

The WMF did not pre-screen the committee recommendations. Some non-starters could have been tossed if they had, but the point behind having independent committees is that they get to say what they want, and not what you want them to say. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:22, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Maybe I am. Perhaps it is possible to sponsor a whole process to come up with ways of rejiggering the projects while realising one's organisation doesn't run the projects and therefore has no right to change how they operate. See also owning the aims and statements of the 5P article below. Maybe it is possible to want to control who participates in a volunteer project—one with guaranteed anonymity—without claiming control over that project. I don't think so, though. I am required to assume good faith of those WMF employees who edit here. As a volunteer, I am not required to accept the WMF as my boss regardless of how pure their stated intentions. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:21, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Movement Strategy wasn't the WMF's idea. It was the affiliates' idea. That is presumably why it is called "Movement Strategy" instead of "WMF Strategy". The affiliates said that having a written strategy in which everyone formally agrees that we're all going to _____ makes it easier for them to get external grant funding.

Also, since one of the main outcomes could be summarized as "the WMF should have much less control over everything", I think you're going to have to pick either the view that the WMF was secretly in charge of all the outcomes, or the view that the WMF thinks that it is and should continue to be in charge of everything, but not both, because "we're in charge of making us not be in charge" seems unlikely whenever humans are involved. But perhaps that's just me being cynical and depressed about humanity again. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:25, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

WP:5P sidetrack (part II)

So what do you think of this 5P rewrite proposed by some academics? Johnbod (talk) 03:10, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

The rewritten principles look interesting, though there's not a whole lot that you could copy over (unless admins are going to start blocking trolls for being "discursively irresponsible"). However, I think adopting their #5 would probably help address Iridescent's concern: people might be justly irritated if you break a norm, and norms carry considerable weight, but they don't necessarily have to be followed when unreasonable. Vahurzpu (talk) 03:52, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

I am inclined to think that that rewrite is a bad idea. For one thing, "epistemically and discursively responsible " reads like Chinese to me. For the other thing, what is an "objective community "? People who happen to share my preferred POV? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:01, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes, you need a High Californian dictionary for it. Johnbod (talk) 13:06, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

It looks like all five are active un-improvements to me; "Wikipedia is an encyclopedic process" is meaningless ("an encyclopedic process" could just as well mean we divide everything alphabetically), "Wikipedia is written by an objective community" and "The integrity of Wikipedia is a function of the size and breadth of its community" are Berkeley platitudes, "Editors should be epistemically and discursively responsible" is gibberish, and "Wikipedia is norm-driven (rather than rule-governed)" is a straightforward lie. (Plus, obviously, it doesn't address my "what makes these five more important?" objection.)

While I'm generally more than happy to assume that anything emanating from the WMF should be treated with deep suspicion, if we're going to have a brief set of core principles I genuinely don't see why we can't just use

1. Neutral point of view (NPOV) as a guiding editorial principle.
2. The ability of almost anyone to edit (most) articles without registration.
3. The "wiki process" as the final decision-making mechanism for all content.
4. The creation of a welcoming and collegial editorial environment.
5. Free licensing of content; in practice defined by each project as public domain, GFDL, CC BY-SA or CC BY.
6. Maintaining room for fiat to help resolve particularly difficult problems.

which does a perfectly adequate job of summing up what Wikipedia is about, and has the added advantage of being the only policies where People who strongly disagree with them are nonetheless expected to either respect them while collaborating on the site or turn to another site is written into policy across every WMF site meaning they're unambiguously enforceable without the endless "but IAR means I can ignore this if I don't like it" or "but this isn't how I'm used to doing things on other projects" whining. ‑ Iridescent 14:21, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

written into policy across every WMF site -- what about ptwiki with #2? I don't think there is such a cross-project unambiguous enforcement even for the Big Ones (ptwiki is definitely not a microproject that might be half-expected to be doing something bizarre). Certainly the different places that projects draw the lines of "how many exceptions, if any, can you make to having everything on the site be free licensed" alone is a point of consternation. And then there's inescapable disagreement even within projects about the interpretation of certain guiding editorial principles. 5P's conflation with policy is a bit lame, but people apparently use it to fill some kind of void, and I'm not sure what else that void can be filled with (my response might be 'nothing, you don't need to rank every policy in order of Objective Importance', but this doesn't scale). Vaticidalprophet 14:40, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

You'd need to ask the WMF (probably WAID but it might go all the way up to board level) what they're going to do about pt.wiki and their unilateral declaration of independence, as that's well above my pay grade. (I would imagine they'll take the pragmatic route of waiting to see if it works, if it fails then framming those behind the proposal, and if it succeeds then claiming it was their idea all along—but good luck getting anyone to admit that.) "A capacidade de praticamente qualquer pessoa poder editar (a maioria dos) artigos sem se registar" is a global policy across Portuguese-language WMF sites and as such is still official policy on Portuguese Wikipedia just as much as "The ability of almost anyone to edit (most) articles without registration" is on English Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 14:52, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

"Waiting for research results" appears to be the only answer I can get right now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:49, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I meant to say earlier: I sincerely hope nobody gets frammed again, ever. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

@Markworthen has made two attempts at writing a summary of that paper, and I was just telling him that "The integrity of Wikipedia is a function of the size and breadth of its community" means "biased people create biased content". I believe that "epistemically and discursively responsible" means that they want editors to have epistemic responsibility (do good research, including actively seeking out information and views that have been overlooked in the past) and to intentionally make space for voices that are being excluded. I haven't figured out how to translate "objective community" yet.

I do think they're correct about the English Wikipedia being norm-driven; there are things that we do because we always do that even though the rules technically discourage them, and things you can't do because we don't do that, even if the rules permit them. We can't really be rule-governed when IAR is one of the rules, or when some of the rules contradict other rules. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:23, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Sort of, but I don't think it's particularly, and certainly not to the extent it should be considered a "pillar". Despite popular perceptions of Wikipedia as a free-for-all, IAR is more of a cultural symbol than an significant part of Wikipedia's culture. In my experience, in reality if anything we usually take the written rules more seriously than they deserve, not less—if Wikipedia has a problem it's not that there's an aristocracy who make up the rules as they go along (some of the usual malcontents like to talk about "unblockables" and "super-users", but when you ask them to actually point to an example they tend to change the subject), but that we spend too much time deliberating the minutiae of every little rule. (I know I keep heading to the same easily-available barrel when I feel like shooting a fish but seriously, try imagining what Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style looks like to a normal person.) I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing—I'd certainly prefer overdependence on bureaucracy to the alternative of ending up as a "anyone here know what policy is this week?" mess like Commons. ‑ Iridescent 12:50, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

If you are interested, here are the two attempts at summarizing the article:

Feminist critique of Wikipedia's epistemology

2nd draft

WhatamIdoing and Talpedia offered excellent critiques of both attempts, some of which you'll find on the respective talk pages.

I still believe it's an important article with valuable insights for Wikipedians, but it's so dense that translating the academic phraseology into practical examples eludes me. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 16:03, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I read the abstract and quotations on your 2nd draft page, which Iridescent linked above, and what is most unclear to me is the "feminist" bit; I'm not prepared to read it to track down the answer, but they appear to have elided in their summary the step(s) whereby they went from "insights derived from feminism" to "generalised identity politics" to "promotion of participation by all marginalised communities". That said, the bits you have on that page are clearer to me than some other jargon I've read, and from my perspective, hostile to the project. By explicitly replacing the objective of creating an encyclopaedia with the objective of widening participation, they lose the point of why we're here; that starts with replacing "is an encyclopedia" with "is an encyclopedic process", which is intended to include those who may be uncomfortable with the idea of an encyclopedia, but means the project becomes goal-less (not to mention intentionally opening up for unending debate what an encyclopedia is; in practice, up to now we define it by doing it, which is effectively pretty damned inclusive). The replacement of "free content" with a statement about the inclusivity of the community that was implicit in their Pillar 1 and should have been a phrase there lays us wide open to copyright violation and its legal repercussions. I understand their repudiation of the principle of NPOV but if we do not have such a statement, we do not have a single project, but a collection of blogs. My first guess at the meaning of their "objective community" wording was that it was an attributive adjective: "a community with an objective", but I see that their explanation is worse than that: a community that collectively defines its notion of objectivity. That's worse than the steam-rollering of "fringe" views that we have now, I suspect they talked themselves into a Klein bottle. Especially since they removed the objective, the result would be fragmentation. (Why am I thinking of EEng's "diffusing conflict"?) I would have liked to see a good suggestion for CIV, but "epistemically and discursively responsible" appears to mean "responsible both in their interactions and in their writing", which is so anodyne as to be useless in any area of conflict. And conflict does happen. I bow to Iridescent's wealth of experience and superior logic regarding #5, although how consensus is interpreted around here makes my head spin, so my initial response was that they have this one right. Perhaps the key is that "Ignore all rules if the alternative does not benefit the encyclopedia" is different from "There are no firm rules". So anyway, what do I know. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:47, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

This is very much getting into the long grass, but I see the 'feminist' angle as a good-faith misunderstanding of Wikipedia. There's an entirely valid movement in academia that argues that history, and the corpus of knowledge more generally, is written from a male viewpoint, and that genuinely neutral writing needs to take into account the views of women and of under-represented communities more generally.

However, that's not what Wikipedia means by "neutral point of view" (representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic). When we talk about NPOV, we mean that we're neutrally reflecting the current state of academia, not that we're neutrally reflecting objective truth; if the majority of books and papers on a given topic focus on white men, then if our coverage of that topic isn't similarly focused on white men then we're not doing our job properly. In an ideal world we'd rename Wikipedia:Neutral point of view to something less open to misinterpretation like Wikipedia:Reflect current mainstream consensus, but realistically it's been 20 years and that ship has long sailed. ‑ Iridescent 07:37, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps NPOV is the most important page to fall victim to "people just read the title/shortcut without actually looking at the contents". Certainly gives BLP1E a run for its money. Elli (talk | contribs) 21:54, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

"Notability" is probably the one that's most often parrotted without actually being read and understood. ‑ Iridescent 15:23, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Aye. Sooo many people think it applies to content rather than articles, to sources etc. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:30, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

The proposed replacement for the third pillar seems bizarre, at best, unless I am missing something. "Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute" is not even the same type of claim as "The integrity of Wikipedia is a function of the size and breadth of its community". The first version is a concrete statement that the content is licensed freely, that nobody owns it, that you don't have to pay anyone for it, that you can modify and redistribute freely, that everyone has an equal right to participate, et cetera. To me, this seems like the major advantage of Wikipedia over traditional encyclopedias; I think it's cool that poor people can read the highest-quality writing on any subject without a subscription plan, and the fact that anyone in the world can benefit from my writing here is the main reason I do it. The proposed replacement seems to focus entirely on deciding who can edit the project, and disregard the free licensing altogether; when I saw this in the summary, I thought it was simply an oversight in summarization, or a failure to convey the paper's nuance. So I looked up the paper itself... which says absolutely nothing about free licensing, and even says "the third pillar retains an inappropriate focus on content". For this reason, it's difficult for me to take the paper seriously (while I'm sure a Microsoft-owned encyclopedia project could do wonders for diversity, I certainly would not write articles that children in Pakistan had to pay $5.00 per month to read). jp×g 06:50, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

I think that they are using the term "Wikipedia" to mean the people and processes rather than the content. I believe that most of the people who frequent this page would use the term "the community" instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:33, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

• Any rewrite of 5P should recognize and respect the validity of tree pronouns. EEng 07:30, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

• This bizarre episode, in case anyone's confused by the apparent non sequitur. ‑ Iridescent 07:48, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
• This descendent of Ash and Elm resonates with that. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

You're probably right that that's where they're coming from. (The resemblance was obvious to a certain San Francisco-based organisation's pronouncements from about a year ago.) But it's a surprisingly simplistic and frankly clueless approach to be labelled "feminist". Yngvadottir (talk) 08:31, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Break: NPOV, notability, and WiR

I think (emphasis on 'think') that "A Feminist Critique of Wikipedia’s Epistemology" is shorthand for "A critique of Wikipedia's epistemology using the analytical tools which developed from the feminist movement", rather than "Speaking as a feminist, this is why I think Wikipedia is wrong".

I assume the Death Star globe represents Wikipedia, and the gratutious nudity represents Commons.

The misunderstanding of Wikipedia which I reference above, which I think is what's going on here, is a fairly common one. For the past 30 years it's one of the absolute givens of every field of study at every level—whatever one's political viewpoint—that the internet and the flow of information are the current drivers of cultural, social and economic change. Unless you're very, very familiar with how Wikipedia operates, what its rules on sourcing and more particularly on proportional due weight are, and why they came to be that way, then it's totally counter-intuitive that the website which to most people is a symbol of progressiveness and the freedom of ideas (see this monument on the Polish-German border, and note the familiar-looking globe; because we get so used to seeing Wikipedia/Wikimedia as a bunch of people squabbling over minutiae it's easy to lose sight of just how deep the cultural impact of this website is) should have deference to established wisdom, resistance to new ideas, and an unwillingness to engage with any idea outside the academic mainstream, literally hard-wired into its most fundamental processes. ‑ Iridescent 18:56, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

You are right on the impossibility of renaming Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, but we can still clarify, in that policy, the misunderstanding you've pointed out. Paul August ☎ 00:50, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

replacing the objective of creating an encyclopaedia with the objective of widening participation, they lose the point

I don't think so.  They believe that Wikipedia's volunteers are richer, whiter, more western, more educated, and from more industrialized, more individualistic, and more democratic societies than the overall world population.  (We all agree with them.)  They believe that biased people create biased content.  (Number of featured pages supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Football: 274. Number of featured pages supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains: 111. Number of featured pages supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red: 8. Number of featured pages supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Parenting: 1. Maybe they're right?)

Given these starting beliefs, if you want a less-biased Wikipedia, then you need to widen participation.  And that means, among other things, seeking out, encouraging, and supporting newcomers.  There are a lot more non-white people, a lot more women, and a lot more people who don't speak English natively with good internet access in 2021 than there were in 2001, or even in 2011.  A random internet user has a higher chance of being different from "us" now compared to 10 or 15 years ago. If, on the other hand, we take the traditional California approach of pulling up the ladder behind us, we will not ever have a less biased group, and we will always struggle to create less biased content.  Widening participation might get us better content in the end.

Iridescent, I agree with your interpretation of the title. Feminist research has a couple of unusual models, such as working as a waitress in a diner before writing scholarly articles about how difficult it is to be a waitress in a diner. And that brings me to the other point: this wasn't written by a "them"; it was written by an "us". Amanda Menking is User:Mssemantics, who has written half a dozen articles. "We" think there are problems that could be ameliorated by widening participation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:21, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Very well said WhatamIdoing. :0) Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 04:46, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

More or less what I said above, then. I would not normally bother to respond to such assumptions and insinuations about the people who actually do the work here for which the WMF takes the credit. But this is potentially extremely damaging to the project I love. (Not to mention hurtful and damaging to real editors, and real readers who have come to depend on us.) Because it very much does stem from a mindset of control. And our strength is indeed our diversity in pursuit of a shared goal. I'm sorry, Iridescent. Yngvadottir (talk) 08:21, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

The remit of Women in Red is specifically biographies of women which are redlinks—that is, by definition any person in their remit is a niche subject in whom no Wikipedia editor had shown an interest for 20 years, and thus sources are unlikely to exist; it's something of a surprise to me that there are any featured articles in their remit let alone eight. Plus—uniquely among WikiProjects since the unpleasantness over Esperanza—WiR is a membership organization, so someone like Alice Ayres whom I took from redlink to FA doesn't qualify because I'm not a member of their little gang. A better comparator would be the 191 FAs covered by WikiProject Women's History oder the 100 FAs covered by WikiProject Women.

I'm not at all surprised that WikiProject Football has 274 FAs. Unless and until one lives outside North America, it's hard to appreciate just how culturally significant football is. Assuming the usually-quoted figure of 4 billion people following football is even vaguely accurate (which it probably is; the TV audience for the World Cup is consistently 3+1⁄2 billion and not everyone has a television or will be off work or in a suitable time zone), football fans considerably outnumber women. Football articles (and sports in general) also have an advantage in Wikipedia terms in that many of the sources come pre-collated; if I want to write biographies of every player who played for Mansfield Town in 1953, all I need is the 1953 Rothmans Football Yearbook and The History of Mansfield Town F.C. and a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done for me, or to put it another way if I have the sources to write a biography of one player, I also have the sources to write the biographies of all 15 of his team-mates. (The same thing is true of your other example of trains; if I've gone to the trouble of getting the sources to write the history of one station on the Chicago Green Line, I can almost certainly use those same sources to write the history of the other 29 stations on the same line.)

I know "Wikipedia is biased" is an article of faith at the WMF, but I'm still unconvinced that it's anything other than an artefact of Wikipedia reflecting real-world sources. The historical record is always going to include more male than female biographies since there were so many professions which were either formally off-limits to women (military, politics, religion…) or de facto off limits since they required professional qualifications and women were forbidden or discouraged from studying those topics (engineering, visual arts, medicine…). If the number of biographies of women on Wikipedia started to approach the number of biographies of men, I'd consider that in and of itself as evidence of a seriously problematic systemic bias. ‑ Iridescent 06:59, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

All very true, but in practice WiR, like WMUK & other organized initiatives, tends to take an "inclusive" approach, & if Alice Ayres is not claimed for their trophy cabinet, it is probably mainly because it predates the project. And there are still wierd notability gender differences. A post at WiR talk recently drew my attention to WP:NRU - what about that? Johnbod (talk) 15:37, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Long aside about rugby union

(With the disclaimer that I think rugby union is the most incomprehensible and unwatchable sport I've ever seen so am not particularly well-qualified to comment) Assuming you're referring to the fact that male rugby union players have a lower bar to automatic notability than their female counterparts, I'd say that's fair. These special notability guidelines aren't "these are topics we consider important", they're just Wikipedia's internal shorthand for "the people who write about this particular topic and are familiar with the sourcing know that these are topics which will have been widely written about and for which it's reasonable to presume that enough sources will exist to write a substantive article". Rugby union isn't one of the sports like tennis or running where men and women are competing at the same level and get similar levels of coverage; the men's game is a major sport in those countries where it's played, but even in the Union heartlands like New Zealand and Wales the women's game is a niche event played mostly to tiny audiences. (As of 2019—and presumably still current given lockdowns—the all-time record attendance for a women's club match was 4,542.) The special notability guideline doesn't mean "anything that doesn't meet these criteria isn't worthy of mentioning", it just means "the onus is on the author of the article to provide sources as we can't take it for granted that the sources exist". ‑ Iridescent 15:45, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

With regard to sports notability, I remember that when I was a new and naive editor, I expressed concern over the differing notability standards for biographies of sports people as opposed to academics (silly me!). When the regulars at WT:NSPORT sat me down and told me what's what, they didn't base it on there being more source material. Instead, they based it on the view that there are a lot more readers interested in the subject. (Actually, having come to see how frequently we get spammy self-promoting bios of junior faculty who think having their own page here will get them tenure, I now like having WP:PROF set the bar high.) --Tryptofish (talk) 18:26, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Someone might have said that, but it's not true (at least officially); the wiki-dogma for the reason we allow Special Notability Guidelines to exist is that they're topics which can be presumed certain to be sourceable. "If the article does meet the criteria set forth below, then it is likely that sufficient sources exist to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article. Failing to meet the criteria in this guideline means that notability will need to be established in other ways." in the specific case of sports, if you want the official chapter and verse. ‑ Iridescent 20:00, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't dispute any of that, but it's definitely what they said. Perhaps it's comparable to a Freudian slip, revealing what those particular editors really think. In fairness though, I believe they were not so much trying to explain policy to me, as to explain in a broader way why consensus has been the way that it is. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:16, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I think the peasants are revolting over that one, though, and the NSPORT crowd may not be able to hold the line forever. Johnbod (talk) 00:34, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I hope so! --Tryptofish (talk) 17:05, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

They've been revolting for a long time; the worst offenders like the pre-MCC-fire cricket biographies that just read Smith (first name unknown) was a cricketer who played at least one match for Essex in 1804., and the pornographic actresses who'd technically "appeared in over 50 films", have mostly been got rid of, and the tanks are marshalling for the final battle over schools. I wouldn't get your hopes up for gender equality in how Wikipedia treats sporting biographies any time soon—when it comes to sports, the imbalance isn't some kind of systemic bias on Wikipedia, but the fact that Wikipedia is reflecting what people choose to write about. It's just a straightforward fact that there are some sports where the men's game attracts significant coverage but the women's game doesn't (and a few like men's netball where the reverse is true).

There's a legitimate argument to be made that special notability guidelines shouldn't exist at all and every topic should have to prove its own merits. (I'd support that for biographies—if we don't have enough sources to write a reasonably full and balanced account of someone, we shouldn't be writing about them at all—although not for things like airports where we know with good-as-absolute certainty that they'll be documented in detail somewhere and it's actually useful to readers to fill in the gap even if the article is just a one-line stub.) As long as we still have SNG, though, I don't see any issue with men and women being treated differently when it comes to sports. Wikipedia's purpose is to reflect sources, not to act as agents for social change, and "some topics get more coverage than others" is objective fact; complaining that men's rugby union and women's rugby union are treated differently is akin to complaining that we deem every individual song recorded by the Beatles worthy of a stand-alone article but we don't do the same for Hawkwind. ‑ Iridescent 05:28, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Along those lines, I'd very much like for NPOV to directly say that all articles must reflect the views of independent sources. We do not write articles (of non-trivial length) that "fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint" when we write articles based entirely upon what the subject's own website says about the subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:35, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

I certainly agree with the principle there, and I'd go further to say that we shouldn't be using the subject's website (or subject's publications) at all other than limited use as a primary source and clearly labeled as such. If sources independent of the subject say something we should be using the independent sources instead, and if no source independent of the article subject considers something worth mentioning, we almost certainly shouldn't be mentioning it either. (I'd make an exception for some totally uncontroversial facts like publication dates.) It won't happen; if were to enforce a ban on people using either article subjects' employers or the article subjects' own writing as the main sources for their Wikipedia biographies it would fatally wound too many showpiece projects like Women in Red. ‑ Iridescent 13:51, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

A long aside? Shame on you Iri, for that pointy disclaimer! I've always seen your Talk page as less of a moshpit and more of a ballet lesson. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:41, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't think that sort of ban would bother Women in Red. The usual discussion there sounds more like "I can only find four lengthy articles about this woman, so maybe I should give up on this subject" than "Hey, I can just copy her CV off the website." Such a rule would gut many NPROF and FLOSS software articles, though. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:42, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Break: underrepresentation

Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography has 1,477 FAs. If WikiProject Women has tagged 100, then the math suggests that we have something in the vicinity of 13 FAs about a man for every one FA about a woman. I'm not convinced that is entirely due to the combination of no sources and historical discrimination. I think that a more significant factor is that we just don't want to write those articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:25, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm female, wife, mother and have always disliked being told that I have to write about any of those. I mean, honestly, who want to write about parenting if the entire day is about parenting? This place is supposed to be an escape and I never thought I had to write about women. Of the FA biographies I've written a couple have been about women i.e Murasaki Shikibu but as many are about men. There's no rule that women can't write about men, or literature, philosophy, medicine, art, mathematics, etc. but for some reason we persist in insisting that women have to stay in their corner. I reject that premise. Maybe I'm not the only editor who feels that way? Victoria (tk) 23:48, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

WAID, you're not comparing like-with-like. Biographies only get tagged as falling under WikiProject Women when there isn't a more suitable sub-group to put them in ("it isn't a non-diffusing category" in WikiSpeak). As well as the 100 biographies with the "generic women" tag you also need to count all those "Women writers", "Women's tennis", "Women scientists" and everything else that comes up when you type "wom" into the search box. By the "we only have 100 FAs on women" argument, sports are one of the most under-represented topics on Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 15:22, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I've re-run the numbers. Based on this Wikidata query, there are 214 FAs at enwik about women. Based on this Wikidata query, there are 1188 FAs at enwiki about men. That is approximately 15% women and 85% men. Repeating the same query for GAs, I get 5,307 GAs about men and 1,157 GAs about women, which is 18% women and 82% men.

I don't think that an inability to source articles is the sole reason for that big of a skew. I think that a significant factor is that we just don't want to. As Victoria says, who would want to write about parenting if you're doing it all day? (This presumably explains why I've written half of Baby food and a non-trivial amount about preschool education; I might not have been willing to do it if I were making baby food or trying to get kids into a preschool.) Similarly, if you feel like you spend your whole day "doing" womanhood, then maybe you wouldn't want to write about it for fun.

I agree with her that writing about women shouldn't be women's job. My point is smaller than "who should", and is only to say that the job isn't being done to the extent that it reasonably could be. The Swedish Wikipedia's numbers, BTW, ring in at 30% of FAs and 20% of GAs being about women. If the sources exist for them to have 30% of their FA-quality biographies to be about women, then the existence of sources isn't the only reason why we are producing so many more FA-quality articles about men than about women. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:47, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

To be honest 18% doesn't appear unreasonable to me. Consider that we have upwards of 2000 years worth of soldiers, politicians, actors, sportsmen, clergy and all those other fields that have historically been legally off-limits to women (and still are in many cases). On top of that we have huge "largely closed" topics like the visual arts—AFAIK the first woman to be admitted to art school was Laura Herford in 1860 and without both the training one receives at art school and the contacts one makes there the arts are virtually impossible to break into, there's a handful of noteworthy artists prior to the 1860s but they're near-exclusively either the super-wealthy who could hire private tutors and pay to hold private exhibitions or they were the friends and family of eminent (male) artists. On top of that we have the issue that such things as maternity leave are relatively recent concepts (only introduced in 1975 even in the relatively progressive UK, and still not in place in 42 of the 50 US states) meaning women are more likely to leave the workforce early and consequently are statistically less likely to have the opportunity to do something notable.

If Swedish Wikipedia's biographies are 30% female that's almost certainly an artefact of there being a disproportionate number of their FA writers being interested in writing biographies of women, rather than them having a different view of notability (I'd be willing to bet that if you were to get a copy of the Directory of Notable Swedes or whatever their equivalent of the ODNB is, the figure will be a lot nearer our 18%).

On English Wikipedia WP:FA reflects what the small pool of people who write FAs find interesting to write about, not some kind of objective super-notability, and I'm willing to bet the same is true in Swedish. Unless the gender breakdown on Swedish Wikipedia shows that 30% of all their biographies are of women, then the fact that 30% of FAs are on women is just reflecting a bias towards women among the handful of editors who write FAs in Swedish, and it's no different to the fact that English Wikipedia has more FAs on the annual Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race than it does on the Olympics. ‑ Iridescent 14:37, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

• According to Humaniki, 21.4% of biographies on the Swedish wiki cover women. This compares with 18.86% on the English wiki. So the difference is pretty small in relation to the stats on FAs or GAs.--Ipigott (talk) 06:00, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

• Extrapolating from statistics on small wikis is always something of a fool's errand, as their editor bases are so small that the interests of a couple of people can have drastically skewing effects. Looking at sv:Wikipedia:Utmärkta artiklar, Swedish Wikipedia has only 350 FAs across the entire project. With a sample size that small, the 30% figure is essentially meaningless. Since presumably anything that meets en-wiki's sourcing requirements is also going to meet sv-wiki's sourcing reqirements, all it would take is a Swedish-speaker with an interest in a particular subject to translate (e.g.) the 109 FAs English Wikipedia currently has on coins into Swedish and it would give the impression that Swedes are utterly obsessed with currency designs. (This "editor interest" effect obviously exists on English Wikipedia as well—we have fifteen times more FAs on William Etty than we do on Vincent van Gogh—but when a project has only 118 active editors it only takes a couple of people to have a drastic impact.) ‑ Iridescent 06:30, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

18% of biographical FAs might not be completely unreasonable, but it's not what we have. Our number is 15% – roughly one in seven FAs about people are about women and six out of seven are about men. I don't expect the split to be 50–50, but I do think it would be reasonable for it to be closer to 3⁄4 about men than to the 6⁄7ths that we currently have. Even the British monarchy, an officially male-dominated institution, has only been three-quarters men in recent centuries.

I don't know how to get a count of all articles about women. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:33, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

From Wikidata, via something like this: "only 340,072 of our 1,803,111 biographies are about women" - that's updated about weekly. There's another page that says 353K "female items" on enwiki. Perhaps this will include racehorses. User:Ipigott and others will know. Don't bother to discuss female %s without reading (at least large parts of) the "Female vs. male in sports" section in this old WiR discussion. All the factors Iri lists are true, but dwarfed by the effect of sports biogs. The most relevant % is that for BLPs excluding sportspeople, and that must be over 30% female by now (the demelzeh figures seem to have stopped being compiled). 30% for female BLPs seems a defensible figure to me. Johnbod (talk) 02:26, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

(That WiR discussion was held back when She Who Must Not Be Named was still bot-flooding sports bios, so any statistics quoted there are going to be skewed.) I can believe we might be reaching 30% women when it comes to non-sport biographies of living people, but if the figure started going much above 20% for non-sporting biographies of dead people I'd start to get concerned. Even excluding the skewing effect of sports, the combined effect of 5000 years' worth of religion, politics, the military and academia acts as a massive anchor.

It also occurs to me that if the WMF are successful in putting the grow the community around the world sloganeering into action, as we eliminate Wikipedia's white/western bias it's likely to push the "historic biographies of women" figure right back down again. Most cultures have a worse record than Europe (and European colonies) when it comes to documenting people other than members of the male ruling class (number of women named in the Quran: one).

WAID, Even the British monarchy, an officially male-dominated institution, has only been three-quarters men in recent centuries is technically true but is somewhat misleading. The British monarchy is a relatively recent institution and only twelve people have ever held the job; you could equally accurately write it as "the UK has only had three female monarchs in its entire history". (To save some other pedant the trouble, "officially male dominated" is no longer the case; male-preference primogeniture was abolished in 2011.) ‑ Iridescent 05:32, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

This is true. I never got why there was so much focus on the percentage - you can just as easily get that up by deleting men as you can writing about women. The percentage of notable women we have articles on - while much harder to quantify - is a more important metric (and I think quality > quantity here, too). Elli (talk | contribs) 16:05, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes, and that. If our figures are deviating significantly from the proportions in assorted Directory of the Great Figures of France type books, then we potentially have a problem, but "winners of the Distinguished Flying Cross are more likely to be men" is just straightforward fact. Besides, I really don't get the "there are lots of badly sourced BLPs on marginally notable men—we need to write a huge stack of badly sourced BLPs on marginally notable women to make up the numbers!" argument. ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Comparisons between wikis

If the WMF were able to get big-enough sample sizes, I'd bet some interesting comparisons could be done between the Wikipedia language versions to see what things correlate with differences in the percentage of women editors. It would be interesting, for example, to see whether the wikis with a higher percentage of female participants have a higher percentage of female biographies. I asked about this at Meta but only got a partial answer, probably because the small sample sizes in the editor surveys complicate things. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:29, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

See my "extrapolating from statistics" comment above. Once you get outside the big four, it's hard to exaggerate just how few active content editors most of the Wikipedia's have—to pick a few "major but not global" languages at random, we have 49 active editors in Romanian, 49 in Bengali, 4 (yes, four) in Swahili, 20 in Malay, 7 in Tagalog, 32 in Danish… In that context statistics will be virtually meaningless, since all it takes is a small handful of male or female editors to leave to completely shift the gender balance of the editor base. (For the purposes we're talking about here, "editors active on content" is the only metric we care about, not the broader editor base, since they're the ones who determine what does and doesn't get representated.) ‑ Iridescent 06:54, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

And those are the "very active" 100 edits pcm figures, giving 3.5 - 4k editors on enwiki. It's probably different on tiny wikis, but how many of enwiki's lot actually write text to any significant degree? 10% at most I'd say, & I could believe 5% or so. Johnbod (talk) 15:23, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Smaller projects definitely (ime) have fewer people who just sit around in projectspace, because the projectspace institutions aren't big enough for shitposting on ANI to constitute an entire wiki-career. Other forms of "contributing without writing content" are smaller too -- fewer AWB users, fewer templates to fiddle with, fewer deletion discussions. The biggest non-content workload on small projects is anti-spam and anti-vandalism, and the "vandalfighter vs content creator" division of labour is much weaker. There are some interesting questions to raise about how big the big four/small-mid project gap is talking about people who write articles. Vaticidalprophet 15:40, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Those links I've posted above are on the (editor_type)~user+(page_type)~content+activity_level~100 metric, not the raw (activity_level)~100 you more typically see. As such, they're only measuring accounts which are non-bots (or at least, not registered as bots) and are actively editing in the article mainspace. Obviously the software can't discriminate between someone making "genuine" content edits and cleaning up a bunch of typos, but it does at least give an indication as to the numbers who are engaging with each project's articles.

Vaticidalprophet, I think you may have a rose-tinted view of other projects (or a jaded view of this one). The ratio between "editors who are active in content space" and "editors who are active behind the scenes" on English Wikipedia is virtually identical on Romanian, Bengali, Swahili… The only project I can find (other than the really tiny ones) that doesn't have a roughly 2:1 ratio between content editors/non-content editors is Wikidata, and by their nature they're not really comparable to 'true' wikis. ‑ Iridescent 16:15, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

I think you may have a rose-tinted view of other projects (or a jaded view of this one) -- to be fair, I wouldn't be surprised :) Maybe the glasses are that my other project is closer to 3:1 than 2:1? Non-Wikipedias seem to have somewhat different ratios on the whole, including the largest (for whatever that's worth) ones, even noting Wikidata as an outlier (on which I agree). Of course, somewhere like Wikivoyage the underrepresentation discussions people are having are different ("we need better coverage of non-Western countries" rather than "of women"); do Wikisource, to pick out a not-totally-moribund !Wikipedia and for additional fun the one I freely admit to not understanding at all (and where the ratio is very content-skewed), worry about their coverage of those same two issues? I do admit to being genuinely surprised that smaller Wikipedias can maintain so much projectspace-ing, though, because the institutions for it are just so much weaker. Vaticidalprophet 16:26, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Role accounts and shared accounts

The "active editor" idea also assumes that the people making the most difference are people who make 100+ edits in a month. In several developing countries, editors often work as a group or in a club. Articles may be written offline, and having just one edit per article, to post the final version, is not unusual. Also, there's more of an idea that it's the group that matters, and not the activity of any individual. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:48, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Statement of the obvious perhaps, but what you're describing is explicitly banned on English Wikipedia (and AFAIK every other WMF project except in very limited circumstances on Commons), and anyone caught doing it—or who admitted doing it—would probably be summarily ejected by your own colleagues at T&S if the local admins didn't block them themselves. ‑ Iridescent 06:04, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't think that school clubs are banned anywhere in the movement, and I'm sure that people caring more about whether their club continues than about whether any individual person stays in the club is something that no policy has any business addressing at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:10, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

"Editing histories must represent the contributions of a single individual, and as such any evidence of an account being shared with others will result in the user being ordered to stop and blocked if they fail to comply" is a very, very long-standing policy. (Technically, by the letter of the law such a thing is allowed if there's a single person who has sole access to the account and who takes responsibility for every edit made with it, but I doubt such an argument would make much headway at SPI.)

There might well be community consensus to support such a change if one could make a persuasive argument in support of it (and if Legal didn't veto it), but it would be a major cultural change and as such would need to dot the i's and cross the t's of every step of community consultation. (There would also be practical issues around implementing it, since we'd need to figure out some way of notifying every admin that policy had reversed, as well as deciding how we deal with admins who weren't aware of the change in policy and in-good-faith blocked a role account.)

Because of your day job, I would think it would be treated as a declaration of war if you tried to make such a change yourself even if you were working solely in a personal capacity. It might be worthwhile suggesting it at one of the Village Pumps and/or on Meta to gauge the level of support—"block role accounts on sight and block shared accounts after a single warning" goes back to the Before The Dawn Of Time era, and it may well be that its continued existence is just a case of this-is-what-we've-always-done and that you could get a consensus that what was appropriate in 2003 isn't appropriate in 2021. ‑ Iridescent 06:26, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

We don't have a policy that says you can't draft an article (or an edit) offline. We don't have a policy that says you can't ask your friends to check your work privately before you publish it on wiki. There is a significant gap between editors often work as a group or in a club (what I said) and multiple humans using the same username and password on wiki.

Shared accounts are already allowed at some wikis, including Commons and the German-language Wikipedia. I think that the last time I saw a discussion on it, it was because someone blocked a GLAM institution from making some unobjectionable edit. Most editors didn't see any value in having a reliable and official way to communicate with the organization (e.g., to ask for more images), and following the written rules, without considering whether those rules were serving them well, was important to them. The end result was that the museum staff retreated to dewiki and Commons, and left us to our own devices. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:06, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Shared accounts are not just allowed on dewiki, there is actually a procedure how to officially register (shared) organisational accounts. When these accounts start editing here, we block them, which must be quite frustrating after them complying with (some other) Wikipedia's rules. Personally, I'd rather have political parties make edits through accounts such as User:FDP Thüringen than via anonymous accounts for every single intern, but it seems hopeless to change the policy here at the moment. —Kusma (t·c) 10:18, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

As it currently stands the situation described by WAID (multiple people collaborating on something off-wiki but a single person uploading it) is forbidden here except in a rare hypothetical in which the person doing the single annotates it to clarify exactly who was responsible for which parts. (There are legitimate reasons for en-wiki having a greater degree of attribution paranoia than anyone else. As the site which most of the world considers the Wikipedia we make a much bigger target and get much more scrutiny than even the other big wikis like German Wikipedia, and because we have so much more of a reach than any other language version—or any of the non-Wikipedia WMF sites—we have to be much more mindful of the fact that we're operating across 200+ territories and could potentially unintentionally fall foul of their copyright codes.) The situation described by Kusma (an account belonging to or operated by a body corporate rather than an individual) is flat-out block-on-sight banned.

There might well be consensus to allow shared accounts and role accounts on English Wikipedia if someone wants to draft a proposal and go through the hassle of steering it through RFC. En-wiki has a lot lot lot of cultural inertia; often (for reasons I've gone into many times) this attitude makes a good deal of sense since we don't really understand why we're successful when on paper we shouldn't be and in that context don't fuck with the formula is a perfectly valid position, but sometimes it genuinely is just a case of "this is an arbitrary decision somebody made in 2002". The situation WAID describes, we probably should keep banned—even if the legal concerns around attribution are completely overblown, it's atrociously bad practice—but I could certainly make a case that allowing political parties, corporations, museums etc to operate clearly-declared accounts would actually increase transparency.

Although I'd support this change if somebody wants to draft the RFC, I do not intend to be the one to draft it myself. I was there for the MyWikiBiz argument and frankly have better things to do with my time than submitting myself to another barrage of "zOMG you want to ALLOW PEOPLE WITH A CONFLICT OF INTEREST TO EDIT you need to be BANNED FROM WIKIPEDIA for the SAKE OF THE CHILDREN" abuse from the WMF and from every wannabe who thinks that by hassling whoever made the proposal they're simultaneously currying favour with the WMF and Defending The Spirit Of Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 14:14, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

This may be a little off topic, but I saw the section title on my watchlist, and I am incapable of hearing about shared accounts without complaining about it again. One of the things that soured me on Wikipedia the most was the experience of watching an elderly husband and wife contribute using a shared account - productively as far as I could tell, although it wasn't an area I was familiar with - and make the fatal mistake of commenting on a talk page that they were a couple. They promptly got beat over the head with our Vital No Arguments Allowed Shared Account Policy, and after a lot of attempts to get them to just stop saying it out loud, and attempts to get people to just for God's sake turn a blind eye to it, they got blocked indefinitely because they didn't want to contribute if they weren't part of a team. Not like one cruel admin enfocing it, but a consensus from several admins that this was important and required action. That really clarified for me how many people are in this for the joy of forcing other people to Follow The Rules. (It was long enough ago that I don't recall all the details of who was involved, so apologies for this overly-simplistic generalization if someone reading this was one of those admins.) I do not share Iri's pseudo-optimism (or, re-reading you last paragraph, maybe even pseudo-optimism is too strong) about being able to change this with an RFC. I think it is now received wisdom that anyone attempting to share an account has evil intent by definition. --Floquenbeam (talk) 14:44, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

I have optimism that there might be a consensus to allow account sharing, possibly with some kind of WP:Requests for role accounts approval process. I have pessimism bordering on certainty that there would be a barrage of obstructionism from people who don't like the idea, and that any RFC to get such a process in place would be bad-tempered and would have enough "we've always done it this way" opposition that it would get bogged down in "no consensus".

There are probably some people who get a kick out of forcing others to Follow The Rules, but I think it's much more a case of some people having feeling the rules are much more sacrosanct than you or I do. (Cases like the one you describe may be relatively infrequent—I'm sure a lot of people are doing it but have the sense to keep it quiet—but how often do we see accounts blocked as "potentially compromised" just because someone happened to leave themselves logged on and their children thought it would be funny to play around? As you know that one comes up so often Arbcom even has a written protocol on it.) The other situation that comes up all the damn time is when someone corrects an clear error in an article with an edit summary like I am Chief Product Engineer for Acme Widgets and can confirm that we didn't start making the Widgetomatic 3000 until 2017, not 2016 as currently stated, and gets promptly reverted and blocked Because Conflict Of Interest.

While I think this is an obviously perverse outcome each time it happens, I'd say that assuming the reverters and blockers are doing so because they get a kick out of enforcing rules is what one might call the Somey Fallacy; the idea that Wikipedia is dominated by a clique of basement-dwellers who give meaning to their pointless lives by playing at wiki-cop. In my experience, the Defender Of The Wiki types tend either to burn out quite quickly or to get frustrated that they're not getting the respect they deserve and go away of their own accord. Most Wikipedia admins and editors I've encountered (and I've met an awful lot) seem to be perfectly well adjusted people who are genuinely trying to help; when you see them enforcing a seemingly perverse rule it's perfectly possible that they also disagree with that rule, but feel that when the rules are the result of community consensus it would be inappropriate to only enforce those rules with which they personally agree. (To take a fairly trivial example, I've spent more of the past year than I'd like changing "covid", "CoViD" and "Covid" to "COVID". I think this is absolutely ridiculous—yes, it's technically an acronym for "COrona VIrus Disease" but I've literally never seen anyone outside Wikipedia write it in all-caps. However, I do think it makes us look sloppy and unreliable for us to mix-and-match variations on the same word so I think it's appropriate to standardize, and since 'we always write it as "COVID"' is what was agreed upon than it's not a legitimate invocation of IAR to refuse to accept that.)

We've spent so long reciting "Assume Good Faith" like it's some kind of mantra, it's easy to lose sight of its real meaning. It doesn't just mean "don't automatically assume something is vandalism just because it looks wrong", but "when something happens that you disagree with, whoever did it was probably doing it for what they considered a good reason". That goes even for the obvious abuses of power; you've seen enough arb cases to know that in most cases even the people who were clearly being inappropriate thought they were doing the right thing and are genuinely hurt and surprised that action's being taken against them. Looking at Wikipedia:Former administrators/reason/for cause, you have to go back to 2016 before you come to an admin-abuse case where one couldn't make a credible "they genuinely only did it because they thought they were doing what the rest of us wanted" argument. ‑ Iridescent 15:55, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Multiple people collaborating on something off-wiki but a single person uploading it is not forbidden. The license only cares about copyrightable contributions, and there are ways to collaborate without copyright being a factor. You could have a situation in which I write the first sentence, you write the second sentence, etc., but you are far more likely to have a situation in which I write everything and you correct my grammar and spelling (which is not copyrightable), or I write everything and you tell me that it's not ready and I need to re-write it before I upload it.

(What are you reading? It's all caps at NPR, Nature, Lancet, Scientific American, CFR, Reuters, AP... My news feed is running about 6:1 in favor of all caps at the moment, with the notable US dissidents being The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:27, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

It must be one of those transatlantic differences. Here, picking a batch of respectable media outlets and looking at the most recent article to mention the disease in question (Financial Times, BBC News, The Times, New Scientist, Daily Telegraph, RELX fka Reed Elsevier, The Grauniad) invariably treat it as a proper name ("Covid"). It doesn't seem that I'm cherrypicking either; running a google.co.uk News search on "covid",* every single result with the exception of Sky News (the UK arm of a US media organization) does the same.
*I don't know if that link will work outside the UK—Google can be a bit overenthusiastic about trying to serve local content even when one specifies that one's intentionally searching a different national version—but if you don't believe me just ask anyone else in the UK to click the link and they'll see the same search results.

This is unsurprising as "Covid" is the form used by the OED, which tends to be what every UK and Commonwealth style guide falls back on if there's any dispute. Covid, n.2. Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈkəʊvɪd/, /ˈkɒvɪd/, U.S. /ˈkoʊˌvɪd/. Origin: Formed within English, by clipping or shortening. Etymon: coronavirus disease. Etymology: Shortened < coronavirus disease (more fully coronavirus disease 2019: see Covid-19 n.) < coronavirus n. + disease n. The disease Covid-19; (also) the coronavirus which causes this. Frequently as a modifier, as in Covid case, Covid crisis, Covid patient, etc. Cf. Covid-19 n., to annoy the OUP by quoting an OED entry in full. (For reasons best known to themselves, they have separate entries for Covid and Covid-19, but both go with "uppercase c, lowercase everything else".) The only significant UK allcaps holdouts I can find on an admittedly very quick skim (other than "British in name only for historical reasons" publications like Nature, Britannica and The Lancet) are the governments themselves, all four of which (and their respective NHSs) are consistently sticking with either "COVID19" or "COVID-19".

It doesn't seem to be another example of post-Brexit Ourselves Alone exceptionalism on behalf of the UK, either. I'm seeing the same pattern in other English-speaking parts of Europe (Irish Times, Gibraltar Chronicle, Cyprus Mail, even Russia Today…). ‑ Iridescent 07:25, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

However, Google Scholar has far more COVID-19. Perhaps it's an academic vs. nonacademic difference? COVID-19 is an acronym but it has become very common that perhaps its common spelling changed. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:35, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

I've tended to assume that it's an academic/medical vs common-usage difference - I tend to (outside of Wikipedia) use COVID(-19) as that is the actual name of the disease, although I entirely appreciate that "Covid" isn't going to be confused with something else. ƒirefly ( t · c ) 07:44, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

I think it's an English variant issue. The UK press tends to title-case pronounceable acronyms, such as "Aids" and "Ofsted". WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Bias on Wikisource

I doubt bias (or the appearance of bias) is such an issue at Wikisource. Wikisource only deals with public-domain texts, and I assume even the most devoted culture warrior would concede that because of where the printing presses were and who was likely to be published, the majority of texts published prior to the early 1900s were texts written by and for white European and American men. Plus the barrier to entry on Wikisource is much lower than anywhere else; if I feel Wikipedia is lacking in coverage of a particular topic then I need to spend a minimum of hours and quite likely days, and quite often some of my own money, finding sources and reading them, and then spend further hours and quite likely days writing the article; if I feel something is missing from Wikisource I go to Project Gutenberg and press ctrl-c.

I freely admit that I see no conceivable point to Wikisource's existence; by their very nature everything on there is something somebody else is already doing a better job of hosting. Their most-viewed-pages list makes some eye-opening reading, incidentally—not just for what people are reading, but for how few readers they have. Just to put those numbers in perspective, those are their figures for April 2021; over the same period, this talkpage—which is busier than many but is still not exactly Donald Trump—had 11686 pageviews. (I'd be willing to bet large sums that the supposed 53,433 pageviews for Constitution_of_the_Republic_of_South_Africa,_1996 are a software glitch as well; allegedly every single one of those views was via the mobile web interface, which I consider less than wholly credible.) ‑ Iridescent 17:06, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

As an occasional Wikisource editor: just because some other source has a scan doesn't mean that some other source has a readable text. There are plenty of lesser-known works that Project Gutenberg hasn't transcribed, and might only exist online in a poorly-OCRed or not-OCRed scan somewhere. Scans are only equivalent if you can easily read the script and have no need of copy-pasting. (I won't object to the low viewership ― that is a legitimate critique) Vahurzpu (talk) 17:21, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I understand that—I've (very) occasionally uploaded something like The Long-Nos'd Lass to Wikisource when I want to direct readers to a source text I've mentioned in an article but there isn't a decent-quality version online. What I don't see is how it's any benefit for us to be hosting—at presumably non-inconsiderable cost in time and money—what's essentially a content fork of Project Gutenberg, rather than the WMF coming to some agreement with them to just have a single PD text repository, in which they'd get the benefit of our editors' experience in checking their badly-OCR'd scans, we'd get the benefit of not having to spend time maintaining Wikisource, and the public would benefit from having all these things in a single place. We still have far too many vestigial projects that are the remnants of someone at some point deciding that the WMF's job is to try to replicate Google. ‑ Iridescent 17:31, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Break: Esperanza aside

the unpleasantness over Esperanza is there a write-up about this somewhere? (also, nice FA) Elli (talk | contribs) 12:09, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-02/Experanza is probably the best Cliff's Notes on what happened, while the 'official' version of events is at WP:Esperanza. The deletion discussion itself is at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Esperanza which in turn links to the endless deletion reviews, while the original failed deletion proposal is at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Esperanza/Archive1. ‑ Iridescent 14:19, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

From what I've been able to tell, the whole Esperanza kerfluffu was one of many battles fought over social content on the project, including the infamous Bathrobe Cabal. A lot of people were mad about the use of Wikipedia as a chat site or social network, which I guess used to be a common concern. This seems strange and antiquated now (certainly you don't hear of people trying to do it much anymore). I have wondered about this before, and the best I can come up with is that it was probably the product of a very different time online, in which your identity was much more compartmentalized on individual websites, and social media hadn't become as pervasive a form of interaction. So that making a Facebook group for you and your Wikifriends, for example, was a less appealing option than simply making a page in projectspace to hang out on. That's the only thing I can come up with. Or perhaps the flashy green "e"s in everyone's signature were the first steps of a route not taken; to this day, most people have plain text signatures, maybe with an unusual color or a text-shadow, but one can imagine a world in which we all had avatars. jp×g 21:41, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

I vaguely remember that there was actually a failed proposal to add avatars to signatures. I'd have a hard time tracking it down and linking to it, but I definitely remember opposing it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:53, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't call it one of many battles fought over social content on the project in any way. We did—and still do to a lesser extent—have issues back then with people who'd heard about Wikipedia but weren't very familiar with it, and assumed that we were to text what Myspace was to music and posting inappropriate material. (The Bathrobe Cabal wasn't an example of this; that was a private joke among a group of very experienced Wikipedia editors.) The problems with Esperanza didn't have anything to do with excessive socialising, though; they stemmed from (well-founded) allegations that the group was run by a self-selected group of leaders who would hold discussions off-wiki so as not to leave an audit trail, and then announce decisions as a fait accompli and use the sheer number of their followers to bludgeon decision-making processes. (Back then WP:EEML hadn't happened yet and our rules about tag-teaming and off-wiki coordination were a lot hazier.) The current WP:Esperanza page actually has This essay serves as a notice to all editors that existing projects must be open and transparent to all editors at all times, not to be overly hierarchical lest they meet a fate similar to that of Esperanza. as its first sentence; the page is worth reading in full if you're interested in such things, as the "nobody here is better than anyone else" that came out of the deletion debate did mark a genuine turning point in Wikipedia's internal culture. ‑ Iridescent 16:06, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Off-wiki discussions were normative in Wikipedia's early days, and they are very common in the smaller-but-growing projects now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:47, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

They were (and still are) common, but there was never a time when truly off-wiki discussions (as opposed to the official public mailing lists) weren't hugely controversial. Just consider how many RfAs have been torpedoed over the years when it transpired the candidate was active on IRC. For budding wiki-historians who really like sorting aging dirty laundry, this blast from the archives is also well worth a read. ‑ Iridescent 16:30, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

(adding) @Tryptofish, I think that was during the discussions around LiquidThreads and Flow, and in that context there's a certain logic to avatars. Discussions on websites that still use Flow can be quite hard for humans to parse when they get above a certain length; posts are unsigned and instead have the author's name at the top, and it lacks the ability of Wikitext to insert visual clues like signatures and after-the-fact internal section breaks. In that context, "would it be helpful to have additional visual clues as to who is saying what?" was a legitimate enough avenue to explore. ‑ Iridescent 05:37, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that sounds right. I remember it also including some "but it works well at Wikipedia Review" justification for it. (rolls eyes) --Tryptofish (talk) 17:07, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

(Just pretend I switched accounts to post this.) With the work that Editing has done on the Reply tool and custom sig limits, we might be able to get a note added to each section about how many people are in a discussion. Imagine that you encounter a wall of text, and that the top (next to the [edit section] button?) it says "2 editors" (or "20 editors"). It'd give you an idea of what to expect in the discussion, and maybe even an idea about whether you would want to join the discussion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:09, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd think it would be more useful if the header listed who was involved in the discussion. Raw numbers aren't much use, but being able to see at a glance "every person involved in this discussion is crazy so I won't bother reading it" or "normally I'd consider this a boring topic I wouldn't bother with but I see a lot of people I respect here so it's probably worth my time" would be quite useful. ‑ Iridescent 16:34, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Listing all the editors' names would take up a lot of space. Is it worth it? Or should work-me ask the designer to come up with a space-saving solution? Maybe it says "20 editors" and you click/hover to find out all the names? Display "Alice, Bob, and 18 others"?

(Everyone's views are welcome. I'm also hoping that we'll get a relative timestamp, so that I'll be less likely to answer questions from "yesterday, but eleven years ago"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Notifications opt-outs

I would assume we'd make it an opt-in gadget, so new and casual users—who don't know who these people are and don't care—wouldn't see it. Editors could choose when to enable it as and when they felt they reached the point that the utility of having it outweighs the additional clutter. It would be no different to the script/gadget I activated at some point (right) that gives every page a "how busy is this page, how many readers does it currently get, and if it's an article what quality has it been assessed at?" executive summary at the top that lets me see right away if I'm about either to waste my time editing a page which nobody will ever read, or to edit a highly active page where whatever error I think I've spotted has likely already been discussed. ‑ Iridescent 05:51, 2 May 2021 (UTC) 55 notifiers and 18 other messages!? That's a lot. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:49, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus, I prefer User:PleaseStand/userinfo.js for talk pages, because I usually want to know how long it's been since the person last made an edit. But that could be useful on non-user talk pages. (Work-me is down to only 64 Echo/notifications to go. Volunteer-me usually has about five. 55 in the red zone would worry me unless they were mostly from the script that sends you a notification every time you ping someone, to say whether the ping went through.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:53, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

The 55 notifications (which is low, they're both usually at the 99 mark where the counters stop incrementing) aren't particularly interesting; roughly 50% "User:Foo sent you an email" where I'm already aware the email has come in because I've seen it plop into my inbox, and 50% notifications that I've been reverted somewhere. I keep most of Echo switched off as (for reasons I've gone into many times before) I think the culture of pinging and snitchtagging it created is toxic and corrosive and a decent contender for being the most destructive of all the well-intentioned bad ideas the WMF has ever had. I do keep the "Email from other user" still on as the mail app on my phone sometimes fails to notify me of incoming messages so it serves as a fall-back in case I miss something. I also keep "Edit reverted" on because from the admin perspective one sometimes needs to see if someone is removing warnings and I don't feel like watchlisting a zillion IPs talkpages on the off-chance, and there's no way to only have "edit reverted on talk page" as an option without also getting a string of pings for "someone undid your correction of a minor typo". ‑ Iridescent 06:25, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

And that is my cue to shamelessly put in a plug for WP:RNO. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:31, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

And that's my cue to shamelessly endorse RNO. It's made my editing 37.86% happier and 42.3% less stressful. EEng 06:33, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Same here; if you genuinely care about something, then watchlist it, but you don't need either to know nor to care that someone's undone your correction of "targetted" or "honourary" even if it means that Something Is Wrong On The Internet. Admins who are actually active as admins need to have it switched on, but even then it doesn't mean anything more than that you should idly check it every couple of weeks to see if there's anything in there you actually care about. ‑ Iridescent 10:22, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Did that default get switched at some point? I don't remember unchecking such a box, and I've never gotten a revert notification (and it's not for having never made a reverted edit). Vaticidalprophet 05:01, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Looking at DisplayNotificationsConfiguration, "reverted" was enabled by default for existing accounts but disabled by default for new accounts. Your account creation (2 April 2016) was this side of the magic date of 30 April 2013, so you didn't get it turned on by default. (I suppose I can see the logic; new editors are very likely to have good-faith edits reverted, and the WMF would prefer they see an explanation either on their talk page or at least the edit summary, rather than a bald "your edit was reverted" notification.) ‑ Iridescent 05:31, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
(adding)That also solves a mystery which has long puzzled me; why some people complain about being flooded with spam emails from Wikipedia. For new users—but not for existing users—the default for both article-linked and mention is set to "notify via email". I suppose if I'm stretching slightly I can just about see a logic to it—the WMF is obsessed with keeping up editor numbers, and they presumably assume that if an editor just created an account to work on a particular page and then abandoned Wikipedia, then if they get notifications every time someone links to that page it might tempt them to come back and at the very least possibly give them the warm fuzzies that somebody had noticed their edit—but I'd personally guess that the number of people who get upset and annoyed at the barrage of emails outnumbers those people about ten-to-one. ‑ Iridescent 05:45, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

I just realized that RNO used to say that, over time, the default settings for notifications have changed, so whether or not one needs to elect to opt out depends on the date when one's account was created. But someone removed that, and I had missed that edit until now. I've put some of it back. I can certainly understand how that could have been confusing. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:40, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Break: Donna Strickland

Eh, Wikipedia as a whole community imparts its own biases by inclusion or omission, even if neutrality is adhered to on an article-by-article basis, so I think it's fair to identify problems there and propose solutions. The bigger question is how much those efforts matter if the wider source-making context remains as skewed as it is, essentially missing the forest for the trees. I suspect the issue of "garbage in" is the more pressing one versus "garbage out", but I have fairly low expectations that's going to meaningfully change anytime soon. For all its faults, the community has waaaaay more cognizance of its blind spots than the press. I couldn't find a single pundit covering the Donna Strickland case that reflected on the fact that they hadn't considered her worth writing about until she had a Nobel and a tech issue on Wikipedia to cover. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 21:35, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

And one of the early versions of that article was deleted as a copyvio, which should probably be documented some place prominently for all of the PROF advocates to consider. Academics do engage in self-promotion on the English Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, Donna Strickland is not exactly in my research field, but she is close to my research field, and I have a bit of expert knowledge here. She got a Nobel Prize for her PhD work together with her PhD supervisor. This is really a great work, which developed a technique now widely used in across all condensed matter physics to probe short time scales. However, she was just lucky to be that PhD student to realize a great idea of her supervisor. Sure, she takes a credit for this, but probably another PhD student would do just as fine. And she has basically not done much after a PhD. (I am on my home computer and this is why I am a bit careful without having access to Science Citation Index - well, she probably has done something, but she failed to consistently deliver at the level even close to her PhD work). She has decided to stay in academia - she could have decided to go to industry and would have been difficult to trace by now. However, she ended up in a second tier university and has not been promoted to the full professor level until the day she got the prize. And this is exactly the same reason why she did not have an Wikipedia article about her. Well, she might have had one if someone checked the citations - but nobody did, and citation count would have been the only good argument to keep the article. And usually we do not consider a person notable on the sole basis of their PhD work - unless they engage in self-promotion as for example this guy. And this is pretty much how researchers see it, I am not an exception. I am happy that Strickland got a Nobel Prize, but I do not think we are going to hear this part of the story told by media. (I am writing this from my own account because this part of the Wikiverse is not searchable, but if somebody quotes it and it goes over the internet I might be in trouble).--Ymblanter (talk) 11:04, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

That's about right, but it was decided (retrospectively) that having been President of the Optical Society also made her notable, but none of the non-specialist editors involved at the time picked up on the significance of this. She was also not, when the Nobel called, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, which would have been conclusive for notability. I wonder if they got the same stick in the media that WP did? Perhaps she never applied to the RSC, as she later said in the press she had never applied for promotion at her uni. My mean steak makes me wonder if she would have got the Nobel if she had been male. Johnbod (talk) 14:39, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway scheduled for TFA

This is to let you know that the above article has been scheduled as today's featured article for May 22, 2021. Please check that the article needs no amendments. A coordinator will draft a blurb - based on your draft if the TFA came via TFA requests, or for Featured Articles promoted recently from an existing blurb on the FAC talk page. Feel free to comment on this. We suggest that you watchlist Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors from the day before this appears on Main Page. Thanks and congratulations on your work. Gog the Mild (talk) 20:58, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

I've done a major rewrite of the blurb, as I think the proposed blurb was giving undue weight to Huskisson's death when it was actually just one in a string of fiascos on the day. This is a tricky one to convey in under 1000 characters, as the significance of the day isn't so much what happened on the day (interesting though it is) but the fact that press coverage of the accidents, riots, breakdowns and general screwups brought steam power to public notice, and the inquest into Huskisson's death setting a precedent that deodand need not apply to mechanical accidents, between them inadvertently causing the Industrial Revolution.

Be prepared for it to potentially attract more than its share of crazies on the day. Anything involving the history of Manchester attracts an offshoot of the 'traditional counties' weirdos pointing out that because for boring reasons to do with ecclesiastical boundaries Manchester technically wasn't a city until the 1850s despite its size, and insisting on removing the word; putting it on the main page will probably be like flypaper to them. ‑ Iridescent 15:09, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Maybe there's something in Manchester's water that causes all that cray-cray. EEng 06:51, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Seafood for one, Sir? Martinevans123 (talk) 09:20, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Everywhere in England and Wales attracts the "use the boundaries defined by William the Conqueror, any change is an attack on our ancient liberties" whackoes, even the most obscure—see the history of Rainham railway station (London) Rainham railway station (Essex) Rainham railway station (London) Rainham railway station (Essex) Rainham railway station (London) for instance. Manchester has always been particularly problematic—it's a genuinely polycentric city of which one small part was arbitrarily chosen to give its name to the whole, and the people of Salford, Wigan, Bolton and all the other cities which comprise Greater Manchester are not silent about the affront. Plus, the modern county was carved out of parts of what were traditionally Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire; in US terms, the government telling the people of somewhere like Saddleworth that they're now a part of Manchester is roughly akin to ordering Hoboken to start referring to itself "West New York City". If your (EEng's) comment was intended as a dig at particular Wikipedia editor(s), it's almost certainly mis-targeted. We have—or at least had—a lot of people who write about Manchester, but that's because as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the focal point of 80s and 90s popular culture, and the current home of most of the UK's media and a lot of major museums, it's more interesting than most places and almost anyone writing about 19th- or 20th-century English history will end up writing about it virtually by default. The reason you see so many photos of Manchester meetups is that its location in the centre of the UK at the junction of the east-west and north-south road and rail networks makes it a convenient place to meet, not because it's full of Wikipedia editors. "The Manchester Cabal" only ever existed in Jimmy Wales's paranoid delusions—Eric is Scottish, I'm American living in central London, RexxS is Brummie, and the same goes for virtually everyone else he's accused of being part of the Vast Manchester Conspiracy over the years. ‑ Iridescent 14:47, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Ah yes, dear old Eric, with his endearing "Glasgow Kiss from Trafford"... Martinevans123 (talk) 15:20, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

• Ah, so in the same way that User talk:Drmies is the English Professor Vacuum, a clever device whose by-design total lack of any English professors generates a negative pressure that sucks English professors into Wikipedia, you have a Manchester Wikipedian Vacuum, an area where there are not actually any Wikipedians. Ingenious. I tried turning on the Engineering Professor Vacuum with Ira O. Baker, but the pump broke. Uncle G (talk) 15:24, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
• "RexxS is Brummie" - I'm not sure he would concur, or accept the description. He's certainly from somewhere around those parts, but perhaps the local Bolton or Hoboken equivalent. User:Kudpung would know. Johnbod (talk) 16:03, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

• Sandwell IIRC. I confess that of all the big UK cities my knowledge of Birmingham is the haziest; I'm not entirely sure where "Birmingham" stops and "Suburb of Birmingham" begins. ‑ Iridescent 16:16, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

• As an American living in... America, please let me ask: Does "Brummie" mean "from Birmingham"? (If so, I'd love to see someone try it in Alabama.) --Tryptofish (talk) 17:12, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

• Brummie=from Birmingham, Manc=from Manchester, Scouser=from Liverpool. ‑ Iridescent 16:10, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

• Thanks. Scouser... good greif. Sounds like something related to scabies. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:40, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

• Enjoy!! Martinevans123 (talk) 19:39, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

• Scouse is a particular type of meat-and-root-vegetable stew which was particularly associated with Liverpool. For boring reasons to do with soil types, rainfall patterns and transatlantic trade, potatoes were cheaper in the northwest of England than in the rest of the country, so in Liverpool and Lancashire the traditional staple dishes are potato-based rather than the wheat- or bean-based staples found in most of England. It's not as disgusting as it looks. ‑ Iridescent 06:09, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

• RexxS comes from the Black Country (most famous export is probably Slade), which is about equidistant from Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and isn't generally known as "Brummie", despite Reeves and Mortimer putting Slade in a faux-sitcom with actual Brummies like Ozzy Osbourne and Roy Wood. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:01, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

I know one editor who was from Manchester, but he has since moved. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:15, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

There are a few—Sitush, Deskana and Parrot of Doom spring to mind—but they're much rarer than you'd think. To listen to some of the more paranoid elements you'd think the Wikipedia editor base consists of a few hardy individuals bravely holding the line against the Manchester swarms. ‑ Iridescent 16:10, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

It looks built up. Surely it must logically be in the Greater Manchester Built-up Area? ☺ JzG is helping me with some proper train stuff. Uncle G (talk) 18:44, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

• (talk page stalker) Errrm. Greater Manchester came only 142 years later? I must be one of the crazies in waiting. Martinevans123 (talk) 08:15, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
  • You need to read Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography#New articles on built-up areas. Putting everything into algorithmically-generated areas from 2013 is the modern way. Witness Royal Leamington Spa Built-up area (AfD discussion) and Alfreton/South Normanton Built-up area (AfD discussion). Your idea of geography is just so last century, and obviously unofficial. Built-up areas are told to you by the government, you know. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 09:00, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
    • Ah yes, silly me. Thanks for disabusing me of that painfully decrepit notion. Patiently awaiting Ault Hucknall Built-up area. Last Century Martin 123 (talk) 09:12, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
      • Those AfDs could serve as exhibits in the Museum of What's Wrong With Wikipedia. (I note that none of the "keep, it might exist" people are providing anything so trivial as a single source that actually uses the term as evidence.) Claiming that (e.g.) Warwick is part of the "Royal Leamington Spa Built-up area" just because it happens to be nearby despite the two having completely different histories, cultures and administrations is akin to claiming that Minnesota is a part of Greater Canada. ‑ Iridescent 15:00, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
        • It did get me to spot that we didn't even know that we did not have double town/town couple, which in stark contrast is a well documented geographical concept. I either need to submit this to User talk:Drmies or add it to User:Uncle G/Missing encyclopaedic articles. Uncle G (talk) 15:24, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
          • We do have Twin cities, which is essentially the same concept (although some of the examples are decidedly whacky; I guarantee nobody in history has ever called Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Gateshead, or Lafayette, Indiana and West Lafayette, Indiana, "the twin cities"). The whole concept is so amorphous I suspect it would probably be impossible to write without being riddled with original research as to what constitutes "twin cities"—Greater Manchester directly borders Merseyside (thanks to urban expansion along you-guessed-it) but suggest to any Manc or Scouser that the two constitute a single entity and you'll be laughed out of town in the former or be beaten unconscious in the latter; ditto Birmingham and Wolverhampton, San Francisco and Oakland, Gibraltar and La Linea… And that's before we get on to trying to explain Westminster or Las Vegas. ‑ Iridescent 16:12, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
            • No, it isn't the same thing at all as a double town, nor is a double town the same as a twin town. A double town is not two cities that grow into one another, and in fact examples of double towns aren't necessarily touching each other. A double town is an old market or port town that pairs with a newer residential or industrial town that grows beside it. For more, including that we do not have bridge-head towns either, see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 April 18#Category:Market towns.

              Yes, this is indeed how Wikipedia goes wrong. Editors are so enamoured of the easy copying and pasting of statistics from databases, from the GNIS or from U.K. computer-generated places as here, that the actual topics get missed entirely. Around 100,000 "unincorporated communities" and "villages" in several countries, and these "built-up areas" in the U.K. and we are struggling through lists like User:Hog Farm/Missouri attention needed to discover creeks and with Pohick, West Virginia which turned out to be Henderson Hall Historic District and (originally) named after the Pohick that the Hendersons came from.

              Amusingly, I just re-read an old 2003 mailing list post by Jimmy Wales on the very subject of someone coming along and mass-creating 100,000 articles.

              Uncle G (talk) 17:07, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

              • So are you talking about something like Lincoln or Edinburgh where the old core of the city was within fortifications but a second commercial centre developed in a location more accessible by road and boat with them ultimately growing together into a double-yolked entity, or are you talking something like Liverpool/Manchester or Los Angeles/Long Beach where a port and an industrial city are physically separate but so commercially dependent on each other that it makes sense to think of them as a single unit? I'm still not convinced it's a significant concept—virtually every city of any size is an agglomeration of multiple existing settlements growing into each other and whether they get treated as a single entity or as multiple entities which happen to border is usually as much a function of local politics as anything else—in practical terms there's no logical reason for most of New Jersey not to be considered part of NYC, or not to have a Greater Greater London stretching from Dover to Oxford. ‑ Iridescent 16:38, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
                • On that last point, I'll draw your attention to the charmingly-titled London Ashford Airport, which is not particularly near Ashford, let alone London. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:09, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
                  • 100km isn't insanely unreasonable—anyone who's ever tried to get from Frankfurt–Hahn Airport to anywhere they actually want to go would consider it small beer, let alone the middle-of-nowhere Paris Vatry Airport. At least the unlamented Mirabel is no longer with us. ‑ Iridescent 18:51, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
                • Now, now! Weren't you the person just despairing of the people who ignored sources and went by their own ideas of how the world worked? ☺ You have William Page and Arthur E. Smalles explaining this, as I cited. You can also easily find Norman Pounds writing about them, and Ray A. Kea discussing African proliferation of double and even triple towns in The Cambridge World History. Uncle G (talk) 16:22, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
                  • I reiterate I'm still not convinced it's a significant concept; urban geography is a field with such a long history one can find pretty much every theory imaginable. It would probably take me less time to source and write a Wikipedia-compliant article on the belief that urban development takes place along ley lines. ‑ Iridescent 15:24, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
            • Enjoy that Drmies has the in-depth biographized William Simmonds of Gloucestershire who hides behind the two-sentence statistics database cricketer, at User talk:Drmies#Puppetteer report, too. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 17:59, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Steps in Scotland

• Scale-and-platt (AfD discussion)

This is of course scale-and-platt staircase, not the title given. Given that George Scott-Moncrieff called it "new fangle" in xyr Edinburgh, perhaps your Manchester Wikipedian Vacuum might turn its eye towards architecture in Scotland, what century exactly this "new fangle" came about, and how come Patrick Stewart built some at Scalloway Castle (Howard 1995, p. 75). I don't remember that particular episode of ST:TNG myself. Uncle G (talk) 16:22, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

• Howard, Deborah (1995). Scottish Architecture: Reformation to Restoration, 1560–1660. Architectural history of Scotland. Vol. 2. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748605309.

With the disclaimer that Scottish architecture is well outside my area, as far as I can tell this is just an archaic Scots term for what the rest of the world would call a standard straight flight of stairs. If that's the case, then it's certainly not "modern" in any possible sense of the term—"a straight line of steps cut into a hillside or rockface" is a feature that literally goes back to the paleolithic. Even if we're going for a narrower definition of "freestanding straight flight of steps with an open space beneath", that at the very least goes back to Roman insulae; it's just the natural evolution of "a ladder leading to a hole in the ceiling being fixed into place to stop it wobbling".

I would guess (emphasis on guess) that "new-fangled" in the context of Scottish architecture refers to straight flights instead of spiral or turnpike stairs becoming common in Scotland for the first time at the very tail end of the Middle Ages. Medieval Scotland was permanently in a state either of war or of preparing for war, and land wasn't scarce compared to southern England or continental Europe. As such, most buildings tall enough to need staircases would have been built as defensive fortifications (or at least as defensible residences). In the context of pre-gunpowder warfare, a spiral staircase, and particularly a spiral staircase enclosed within a stone tube, is by far the most practical design. There's no straight line-of-sight for an attacker below to loose a bowshot at a defender above, horses will refuse to climb spiral stairs, one can't build up any kind of momentum for a charge up a curve, provided there's an enclosing stone wall to the staircase there isn't space to level a spear, and the design forces anyone climbing the stairs to do so no more than two or three abreast. As such, a handful of defenders at the top of the stairs hold off even the most determined conquering army pretty much indefinitely until the food ran out, all the while firing off arrows at the beseiging army camped out below. (This isn't unique to Scotland; tall buildings with curved stone staircases are a common design feature of medieval fortifications across Europe.)

In that context, a straight flight of steps is an explicit statement of confidence; it's essentially using architecture to say "I'm such a big deal, I'm confident nobody would dare attack me". In the late 16th century period we're talking about, with Scotland politically stable, the marriage of James and Anne negating the risk of Norse attacks, English victory over Spain putting an end to the imminent prospect of Catholic invasion, and everyone on both sides of the border aware that the Union of the Crowns was inevitable, it would have been the first time for a millennium when the primary concern of Scottish architects wouldn't have been "how do I prevent invaders burning this building down?".

As I say, this is all off the top of my head rather than from any specific knowledge. This paper (which I can't find freely available anywhere and have no intention of paying £25 to read, but some TPW will probably have access to) will likely have what you're looking for. If you're after more specific material on Scottish architectural history, Wikipedia has (or at any rate had) very good relations with the Scottish GLAM sector—User:Sara Thomas (WMUK) should be able to point you towards the relevant museums and archives. ‑ Iridescent 16:28, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

FYI, that paper is available through WP:TWL's EBSCO access (part of the bundle), under Academic Source Complete. Vahurzpu (talk) 16:42, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks—I keep thinking that I ought to sign up to TWL, but I don't do enough on Wikipedia any more to justify it, and I find there's relatively little on there that I actually need which I can't easily get elsewhere. Despite the good intentions I don't really like the basic premise of TWL; IMO academic papers and news media are both in general bad things to use as Wikipedia sources. In my experience, for most topics except very recent developments, if it's covered in a book then the book is a better source to use, and if it's not covered in a book then that in itself is a massive red flag that the academic paper or news story is probably not something we should be including. Newspapers in particular are virtually never appropriate for anything other than direct quotes and "this is how it was received at the time" commentary. It appears to me that TWL by its nature points readers towards potentially inappropriate sources, potentially biased sources that don't necessarily make their biases clear (to bang one of my regular drums, Wikipedia has a long-standing problem with "but this was published by an academic press so it must be true!"), and sources which are behind paywalls and consequently difficult for most readers to verify and to read in context. ‑ Iridescent 18:34, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

If you have 500+ edits, 6+ months editing, 10+ edits in the last month, and no active blocks (which I suspect is true of virtually everyone who frequents this page), you can just log in and start using many of the sources. I never filled out an application. Also, while the Library Bundle (the subset of TWL that you don't need to apply for) is pretty academic-journal focused, there are some academic books available through it. Vahurzpu (talk) 00:21, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

That's worth knowing—is this a new feature? I remember TWL as requiring all kinds of "I solemnly swear that I have a genuine need for this source" oaths before they'd let you in. I still stand by my basic objection about it encouraging editors to use inappropriate sources out of context—unless one really knows what one's doing it's very hard to weigh the validity of academic papers. (It's why for medical articles, where Wikipedia unintentionally promoting crank theories has potential real-world consequences, we have such a strict focus on review articles and textbooks even though it means the articles aren't up-to-date with the most recent writings.) ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, it's pretty new. I think an email about it was sent to anyone who had previously had a TWL subscription, as I did. Graham87 05:51, 19 May 2021 (UTC):

I still stand by my basic objection about it encouraging editors to use inappropriate sources out of context—unless one really knows what one's doing it's very hard to weigh the validity of academic papers. That's why one had to always consult ALL sources related to a topic, except these that are facially unreliable. JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 10:55, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

• You can't consult all the sources if you can't afford them, and Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library means that a lot more editors can afford to consult paywalled sources.
• I don't think that anyone consults all the sources. It's not physically possible for any human to read all the sources on some topics (e.g., Cancer). Life's literally too short, even if you "only" try to read everything in books and academic journals published during recent years.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:00, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes, the belief, or suspicion, that all sources need to be read or at least consulted is part of the syndrome that drives FAs to cover smaller and smaller topics, and part of the reason why our articles on microtopics (that nobody much reads) are in most areas far better than our articles on broad topics that get hundreds or thousands of views a day. Johnbod (talk) 02:57, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

FACR says only "thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature".

I wonder whether the bigger problem is that on general subjects, everyone thinks they know what they're talking about, whereas on niche subjects, it's more obvious to us that we don't. Any Wikipedian likely knows (or at least believes) a hundred things about cancer, but few of us will know anything about a minor hurricane in 2011 or a train station in the middle of nowhere. Even if I made an exhaustive survey of the relevant literature for cancer, I would expect half a dozen editors to say that it's putting too little attention on the detail that happened to catch their fancy when their relative was diagnosed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:48, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Trust me, "an exhaustive survey of the relevant literature for cancer" has fallen well outside human capabilities for some time now. Even oncologist specialists in a single broad cancer type have difficulty keeping up. But in any case, a WP article would have no room for 99.9% of it, & it would not meet WP:MEDRS in any case, mostly because it's primary. When I took Pancreatic cancer to FA some years ago, I had a few quibbles/complaints from medics & researchers, but I don't remember any from patients or relatives. Not nearly enough to put me off improving much-read articles. Johnbod (talk) 14:36, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps that would be an issue - I've seen people trying to add insufficiently weighty details to articles before. Me, the thing with broad topics is that I don't like writing articles on topics unless I can read all the sources that discuss the topic. And that becomes more time consuming the broader the topic - as of this edit African humid period has 3290 sources in Google Scholar alone. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:39, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

There's also two purely practical issues.

Firstly, relatively obscure topics are paradoxically typically easier to source; if a person has only been the subject of three biographies we can just say "Alice says this, Bob says this, Charlie says this", whereas for someone like Charlemagne it may be easier to acquire a big stack of books covering the minutiae of his life, but it then entails a long exercise in "which aspects do we leave out so as not to make it too long?" and "how are we going to address each of the instances where the sources disagree?".

Secondly, and probably more importantly from Wikipedia's point of view, the topics that get tens of thousands of page views may be more significant than the topics that get fifty page views, but they're also much less stable. Volcano gets 110,000 pageviews per month while Coropuna gets 500, but every passing IP feels the need to add their commentary to the former (sometimes good faith, sometimes less so) all of which needs to be constantly checked if it's not going to deteriorate into grey goo, whereas the only people likely to edit the latter are people who have something useful to add.

(As I've said before, I think that in general the concept of "core topic" is a misconception. To me the important topics are those where readers can't easily find reliable coverage elsewhere; Israeli–Palestinian conflict may currently be our highest-viewed non-pop-culture article, but it would inconvenience precisely nobody if we were to delete the page completely and replace it with Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) ‑ Iridescent 15:25, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

We've never agreed on the question of what you call "core topics", so I won't go there, but my experience is that even very highly viewed articles are pretty stable once done properly - the ones that are evidently a load of crap compiled by a multitude of people with little knowlege of the topic are the ones where "every passing IP feels the need to add their commentary". Readers are pretty good at detecting the difference between the two types. And very often instability is entirely concentrated on a sentence or two, or even a single word, normally in the lead. For biographies it will be usually be nationality, dates or places of birth or death etc. The rest goes untouched for years. Plus highly-viewed articles are generally highly-watched articles, so don't need in fact to be constantly checked by the main editor. Johnbod (talk) 16:40, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps it depends on the discipline, but not all academic topics are covered with books. Also, I've often seen that since books take a lot longer to produce they tend to be outdated rather quickly. In particular, in the geological or climatological articles I have written relying on books would leave us with outdated stubs.

On the other hand, it's true that academic papers can be a problem when they are used shortly after publication, because they don't have much feedback yet. When I do my yearly update of all my articles, finding articles that corroborate or contest earlier research is one of the key aspects. I actually feel a little guilty at having authored Cumbre Vieja tsunami hazard for these exact reasons.

Totally agree on newspaper articles, though. Aside from the same "recent" issue as academic papers, in my experience newspaper articles tend to oversimplify stuff and are generally less reliable than more specialized sources. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:24, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus, how long (weeks? months?) does it take you to do your yearly update of all your articles? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:30, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

About three full days, i.e a week or so. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:35, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Newspapers are useful in a few specific contexts—they're a quick-and-easy way to demonstrate that people at a particular time thought something was worth writing about even when you don't have a specific source that says "In 1897 this topic was considered important". I can't think of any context when they'd be appropriate for actual facts—as far as I'm concerned if a topic is so new that no legitimate sources yet exist, it's not a topic Wikipedia should be covering at all. (If I ran Wikipedia, I would quite happily have articles like Donald Trump oder Syrian civil war end circa 2018 with a "for information after this point try Google".) ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

That reminds me that I probably need to go back to Uturuncu and Cumbre Vieja tsunami hazard and add some references to newspapers discussing them, as they have received attention in the non-specialized press. My main concern would be that folks might take this as a licence to use them as sources, which I don't think they are reliable for. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:35, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

I think you should go and have a look. The basic no-questions-asked offering of The Wikipedia Library is not "JSTOR plus newspapers" but also several academic publishers including chapter access to some books, tertiary sources like the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and tools that help you find other sources like Oxford Bibliographies Online. We do have a bias towards easily available online sources. But I don't think TWL makes that problem worse, rather the opposite. Verifying articles and reading everything in context is difficult without access to an excellent library, and TWL helps to solve that a little, at least for editors.

As for newspapers, I think quoting from the original articles is a good thing to do when combined with a reading of secondary sources (that are often based on the very same articles), and reduces the propagation of transcription errors and misunderstandings when lazy people just copy from each other. (Disclosure: my article that relies most heavily on newspapers is 1886 St. Croix River log jam). —Kusma (t·c) 08:56, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

Newspapers are fine for that kind of use, in conjunction with secondary sources to say "this is what was reported at the time". For something uncontentious like the logjam there isn't really an issue—there's not a risk that we're going to be giving undue weight to a pro-log or anti-log position—but just look at how those same 1886 newspapers are treating the Government of Ireland Bill, the Carrolton Massacre, the formation of the Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et l'Industrie, or the defeat of Geronimo, and you'll understand why I have deep reservations on treating contemporary news reports as impartial sources.

If I ever come back to any significant degree I'll have another look at TWL, but to be honest I doubt I'll be back to any greater extent than occasionally dipping my toe in to maintain skin in the game. ‑ Iridescent 15:03, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

I think one reason to have a look around is that when you know what's available in https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/users/my_library/ you can send other editors there to get what they need. It's probably easier to say "Go to TWL and look it up in Oxford Art Online yourself" than to do it for them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:50, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

That link tales me to a page which reads—in full:

The Wikipedia Library Card Platform

You have not agreed to the terms of use of this site. Your applications will not be processed and you won't be able to apply or access resources you are approved for.

My Library
Instant access 0   Individual access 0

You have no active proxy/bundle collections.

with no apparent "accept the terms of use" button to make it go away—there's an "Apply" button, but that just leads to a list of publishers which in turn is topped with the same You have not agreed to the terms of use of this site. Your applications will not be processed and you won't be able to apply or access resources you are approved for. warning. I imagine if I directed any users who weren't already members to it, they'd be more confused than when they started. ‑ Iridescent 05:52, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

It may be being blocked by your browser/popup/adblocker. You should get a popup that walks you through a TOS acceptance. I just tested it on firefox with uBlock at a quite low level and it worked. Only in death does duty end (talk) 07:51, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

Or maybe you need to start at https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org, where you should find a blue "Log in" button. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:31, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

Nope—that takes me to a different page (see right) but still with no "logon" button. The big blue "My library" takes me to the "You have no active proxy/bundle collections" page I mentioned before, while "Apply" takes me to the page to apply for specific resources (AAAS, Adam Matthew, Al Manhal etc etc etc) not the general library bundle. (I have—eventually—figured out that if I click on "terms of use" and scroll all the way to the end of the very long document that pops up, there's an "I agree with the terms of use" check box that needs to be ticked, but realistically it's not reasonable to be expecting newer editors who aren't familiar with WMF developers' "always put it in the least obvious place" quirks ever to figure that out.) ‑ Iridescent 15:48, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Since your username shows in the upper left corner of that page, I suspect that the reason you weren't seeing the button to login is because you were already logged in. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:53, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Yup I know I'm logged in—my point is that despite being logged in, I can't access any of the things I'm logged into. (As I say, I've eventually worked out that after logging in I then need to click "terms of use", scroll to the end, and tick a checkbox before I can see what the library contains, but for anyone unfamiliar with how WMF developers design their sites that's totally unintuitive; I'm sure most readers will just get to that error screen and assume the site's gone down. ‑ Iridescent 15:51, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

@Uncle G: @Iridescent: ah hello :) Feels like something that the Scottish Civic Trust might be able to advise on / point in the right direction, happy to enquire with my contacts you'd like - drop me a line if that's helpful - [email protected]. Sara Thomas (WMUK) (talk) 11:18, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Nice to hear from you—hope all going well with you! ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Long TFA and short notice

Vertraut den neuen Wegen (trust the new ways) written thinking of RexxS and matching the pic seen here "Everything old is good ..." ;)

Thank you today for Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, introduced: "Don't let the rather dull sounding title put you off, or give the impression that this is a dull piece about a formal ceremony. The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway is right up there with Siege of Vienna and Storming of the Bastille as a true turning point in world history, and in terms of the history of engineering is as core a topic as Wright Flyer or Transistor. Before 15 September 1830 the nations of Europe were rural, quasi-feudal economies in which most people rarely travelled more than a few miles from their birthplace unless they happened to be pressed into the military or were persecuted into fleeing their country, and unless one happened to work for a few experimental collieries or textile mills, one would not only pass one's entire life without ever seeing a non-animal-powered machine, one would likely not even understand the concept of "engine". Within 20 years of the L&M's opening, Britain was a democratically-ruled industrial and military superpower, Manchester was the focal point of the world economy, and the rising nations of Prussia, Russia and the United States were coming to see the implications of being able to move large numbers of armed men at short notice to any point on their borders, and larger numbers of the land-hungry poor into the more empty parts of their lands.

All this is fairly well known—chronologically-arranged "history of the industrial revolution" displays usually begin in 1830, and Rocket is the first thing one sees on entering London's Science Museum's showpiece Making the Modern World gallery—but the actual events of the day are generally glossed over in histories. In reality, the opening of the L&M wasn't the triumphant unveiling it's generally presented as; it was a complete fiasco. Six and a half hours after they were due, four of the eight locomotives used in the unveiling limped back, after a day of death, rioting, mechanical failures and general incompetence, including the death of one of the guests of honour. The disasters of the day led to the event being far more widely reported than would normally have been the case for a corporate opening ceremony, and what stuck in the minds of newspaper readers around the world wasn't the chaotic lack of organisation or basic design flaws; it was that there were these new things called "machines" which were cheaper and faster than horses/peasants/slaves. A significant chunk of world history after that point can be traced directly back to the events of this one rainy autumn day in Lancashire."! (which so far is the record in intro length)

The infobox wars are dead, see? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:46, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

The infobox wars are dead in the sense that the Thirty Years War is over; the "make a desert and call it peace" approach may have brought it to a halt, but a fight ending because there's nobody left to fight isn't any kind of victory for anyone involved, particularly somewhere like Wikipedia where we can't afford to lose one editor let alone the at least half-a-dozen we've lost either wholly or in part because of—lest we forget—a dispute over how to display numbers. (It does occur to me that Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway is a good example of an article that clearly wouldn't benefit from an infobox.) ‑ Iridescent 15:25, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

I think they are over in the sense that nobody tried an infobox for that article, nor any other that I remember, this year, which is good. - I hope some will come to see that and return. - See my talk today, - it's rare that a person is pictured when a dream comes true, and that the picture is shown on the Main page on a meaningful day. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:29, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

With a little more time: I haven't called it peace, and I don't think it is, and I wish it was. What can we do?

What I saw of the disputes - which is a limited view, I missed the first seven years, and see only my limited topics, classical music and opera - told me that it is not about how numbers are displayed, but that some believe the numbers should be displayed also for those who for whatever reason are not served well by prose, - also.

1. In the specific case of {{infobox opera}}, that meant not only adding, but removing the "operas by composer" sidebar. In 2021, the last of those sidebars was deleted, and - in the edit linked to above - an infobox inserted, not by me.
2. In the specific case of classical composers, we still have many composers where principal editors believe an infobox doesn't summarize a creative mind sufficiently, as if there was any claim an infobox should do that. Does the lead? I often doubt it.
3. In the specific case of actors, I am not interested. I wonder why people leave the project because an infobox was uncollapsed, but what could I do?

Did you know that I had a bet that Richard Wagner would have an infobox by 2020, and when 2020 came I didn't care any more? Instead of the time-sink of disputes, I write "my" daily little article, and the last time one of these infoboxes was questioned was Psalm 149, in January 2018. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:38, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

"My" article today: Theater am Aegi, translated from German by LouisAlain. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:41, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

The original Infobox War—the one between advocates of "every page should have an infobox", "the default should be that pages have an infobox unless there's consensus not to on a particular page" and "whether a given page should have an infobox is a matter for the people who wrote it" has ground to a stalemate, ironically with exactly the same consensus as before the five years of arguing about it. The various smaller scale arguments and proxy wars ignited by it are still burning as brightly as ever—to take a single but fairly representative recent example which I've been doing my best to ignore, read Template talk:Infobox station/Archive 4 and tell me Wikipedia is now free of people obsessively arguing about what should display in the top corner of the page. ‑ Iridescent 15:51, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

I said many times I missed the original war - and and am not unhappy about it. I noticed it for opera, it was heated and wordy, and it's over, or let's say not burning dangerously. When reviewing I often ask, for operas and their singers and composers: "How do you feel about an infobox?" (having understood that it's an emotional thing), and the typical answers are "yes, done", or "I am am not against them but have no time to make them". Haven't heard "no way as long as I am in control the principal editor of this article" in a while. Could that be an example? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:29, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

ps: happy that in the unabridged conversations of Opabinia regalis, at least the cat of artificial mockery survived ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:39, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

TFA for Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway

Remembered GAing that one; amazed it was more than 10 years ago. Nice to see it on TFA.--DavidCane (talk) 13:07, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

• I saw it on the Main Page and just knew it had to be one of yours - read and enjoyed it very much - thanks for a great article. - Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 17:00, 22 May 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks! 51,000 views on the day, which is very respectable for a TFA on so dry and (relatively) niche a topic—and associated leaps in views for various other topics mentioned in it, implying that people were actually reading it rather than just clicking on the link and deciding it looked boring. ‑ Iridescent 15:24, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

GFDL

Hi! You uploaded these files as GFDL:

1. File:Cats clawing couch.jpg
2. File:Cat dozing on cushion.jpg
3. File:"I don't know where that sock came from".jpg
4. File:Cat on suitcase.jpg
5. File:Nominations Viewer screenshot 22 Mar 19.png
6. File:Happy wet cat.jpg

If there a reason you added GFDL for these files and not cc-by-sa-4.0 for example? --MGA73 (talk) 15:08, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

Context for confused TPWs. Vaticidalprophet 15:35, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes I also wrote about GFDL there but per Wikipedia:Canvassing I did not want to link to that proposal :-) --MGA73 (talk) 17:51, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

I hope you add a license that's better suited to visual media like the suggested {{Cc-by-sa-4.0}}, Iridescent. File:Cats clawing couch.jpg is cute. (I imagine them saying "It's not what you think! We were having sex, not ruining your couch!") — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 10:04, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I am not Iridescent, but I'd imagine since these are all {{esoteric file}} picking a licence practical for reusers isn't a high priority. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:06, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia exist only for reusers. Commons only exist for reusers. Reusers do not care if the file is located on Wikipedia or on Commons. They only care about the license (okay I know some ignore licenses and steal everything online but they should care). --MGA73 (talk) 10:30, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus, these are good candidates to become c:Category:Wikipedia lolcats if they had a license better suited to visual media. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 11:43, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

@TPWs, if anyone's wondering why so many people on the other projects complain that Commons is a failed experiment that's been overrun by a pack of Free Culture cranks, I direct you to this thread. (For the benefit of anyone coming late to this conversation, the "files that exist only for reusers" in question were a handful of old mobile snaps of my cat, not the Pentagon Papers.)

@Vaticidalprophet, regarding this edit summary this isn't some innocent new user who's accidentally stepped off the path; MGA73 has been pulling this "you have dared to upload a file to a site other than Commons, even if it's obviously an esoteric file that serves solely to illustrate a specific point in an en-wiki discussion IT MUST BE ASSIMILATED BY THE HIVEMIND" crap quite literally for years now. With specific reference to the history of this talkpage, here's a fairly obvious example. ‑ Iridescent 15:24, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

I helped with the GFDL proposal, and I am indeffed on Commons. I don't care if an esoteric file is kept local or if a local copy is kept because the uploader prefers that. GFDL is just not a suitable license for visual media. It saddens me that you have deleted these images. There was no need for that. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 16:18, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

@Iridescent: I ask because I would like to know. Not because I want to attack anyone. It is as simple as that :-) --MGA73 (talk) 12:32, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

If Commons were ever to commit to respecting {{Keep local}} and {{Do not move to Commons}}, then we wouldn't have this issue. Since that's about as likely as a hundred pieces of toast all landing butter-side-up, then the only way to stop the "esoteric file posted to en-wiki → Commons copies it → deleted on en-wiki as a duplicate of Commons → because it's an esoteric file of no encylopedic value it's deleted on Commons → whatever it was intended to illustrate is left unillustrated" cycle is either constant vigilance and repeatedly reverting the bots, or this kind of defensive licensing. It's certainly not ideal, but as things stand there really isn't an alternative. (Statement of the obvious perhaps, but even though GFDL isn't a good license to use for images because it makes it more difficult to republish, in all of these cases that makes no difference whatsoever since nobody would ever have a legitimate reason to republish them. It's not as if future historians are one day going to publish The Complete and Unabridged Correspondence of Opabinia Regalis and will now be forced to spend years arguing over what "We don't want anyone getting hot-headed" was a reference to.) ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Now hold on, are you saying my talk page archives aren't critically important historical documents??

I haven't been around much in a while, I hadn't noticed they were gone. Poking through my watchlist at lunch and was surprised to find my name! Pour one out for the esoteric file kittens. Opabinia regalis (talk) 20:14, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Did you know …

• … that if it takes one editor this long to clean up GNIS rubbish in Category:Unincorporated communities in Clay County, Kentucky, we will have a truthful encyclopaedia once more, no longer telling the world that Plank is an "unincorporated community", in about 137 years?

I did it to get some grasp of the scale of the problem. Uncle G (talk) 21:12, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

If I Ruled The World we'd have some kind of WP:Requests for damnatio memoriae process for these walls of bot-generated pseudoarticles (Category:National Register of Historic Places by county, I'm looking at you). Unfortunately we don't and—as with the mass archive dumps on Commons—there will always be sufficient people who'll say "but a small percentage of the editor in question's contributions are legitimate, so we have to go through everything manually otherwise it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater!". Since that's enough to get any proposal closed as "no consensus", and none of the people proposing we review all everything manually ever seem to be very keen to volunteer to do the job themselves, the crap just continues to build up. The only way I've found to cope with it is to take a "flowers grow in sewage" approach and just ignore the dross and concentrate on things that are actually salvageable. ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

RFA reform

Since I've issued a challenge of sorts to WT:RFA (see [3]) figured I might as well post it here in case any of your stalkers actually have good ideas for reforms. I think you're in the "it isn't actually broken" camp with me, but there's a pretty diverse group of people who comment here, so interested to see what people think. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:27, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

and here I was thinking that this talkpage would, for the first time in months, not have a massive RfA-related thread. Elli (talk | contribs) 23:35, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

We wait until the last one has dropped off before starting a new one. We like to keep Iridescent in a state of barely concealed frustration.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 07:25, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I’ve been on hiatus for the last few months. Missed the last thread so I suppose I had to make my own. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:14, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Actually no, you started the last one. It just became so massive that it only dropped off on May 26.-- Pawnkingthree (talk) 16:58, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Lord. I must be going insane.I forgot I’d been on this topic before here. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:00, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

That's the only reason I made my comment xP Elli (talk | contribs) 17:19, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Here's my take: If and when copyright, BLP backlogs (or other can-actually-get-us-in-serious-trouble problems, not merely a backlog of a deletion queue) become so large that that we start getting lawsuits, takedown requests, people complaining to journalists or even just the WMF coming down on us. Then we can say that RfA is broken and we need to fix it. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:13, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, that’s basically my take too. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:14, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't think avoiding lawsuits is the standard we should hold ourselves to. There are open CCIs older than some of the editors clearing them. Elli (talk | contribs) 17:01, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

You mean like how we have to wait until Miami and Shanghai are under water before people start doing anything about global heating? That's depressing. —Kusma (talk) 22:21, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, the point is that humans generally are not good at taking pre-emptive action. See the history of pretty much every tragedy ever - there is almost always plenty of warning ahead of the event. I am not sure that Wikipedia can do better. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:45, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Humans are fine when it comes to taking pre-emptive action provided that (a) it's demonstrable that there genuinely is a problem; (b) it's clear what the action needed to address the problem is, and (c) most crucially, it's demonstrable that the costs of the pre-emptive action are undoubtedly outweighed by the costs of ignoring the problem. (Depending on where exactly in Switzerland you are, there's a good chance you can look out your window right now and see the avalanche-control forests your government is busily planting; and since I think you're younger than me, there's a good chance the words chlorofluorocarbon and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane mean nothing to you.) Generalizations about humanity don't scale well to Wikipedia, though; when you have a hardcore of only 4000-ish participants, there's always a reasonable possibility that no matter how important the job, none of that 4000 will want to do it. ‑ Iridescent 15:26, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, both of these mean things to me but that's because I am an aspiring scientist, not because I am that old. I dunno about your age but I am sure it's considerably higher than mine. I don't think most people bother with doing the c) analysis until after it's happened. And if de:Schutzwald is to be believed the forests are not pre-emptive action. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:00, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Discussion that's actually about RFA reform

In my opinion the only "broken" bit of RfA are people's unnecessarily high standards. There's so much oversight of admin actions that immediately ruling out anyone that doesn't have five years of tenure, over 20000 edits, and an FA to their name is counter-productive. All an admin needs to be is knowledgeable, experienced, and competent. If they can demonstrate this after being "only" here for a couple of years, fantastic. With this said, there definitely needs to be a balance. I'm sure all of us can think of half a dozen overzealous editors that would jump at the opportunity to be a Wikipedia administrator; think of the bragging rights! We have to manage to keep these editors around while they gain maturity before they'd ever manage to pass an RfA, and perhaps that's where the true problem lies. RfA wants/needs a cohort of people that enjoy editing, have the maturity to not be a nuisance, are at least slightly well-known, doesn't have a controversial past, understands what we're here to do, and wants to devote more of their free time into a project that would function fine without them. Unfortunately this cohort just isn't that big despite Wikipedia being the 13th most popular website. Perhaps it's because the community is steadfast on being aggressive to anyone that doesn't make the perfect first edit (but don't be too perfect or people will suspect you of socking). RfA isn't the problem, it's editor retention. Anarchyte (talk) 16:51, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Anarchyte took the thoughts out of my head pretty much - particularly the final section about biting people who don't fall within a narrow window of "competent, but not too competent". I've seen people who have thousands of edits at other Wikimedia projects (so are quite obviously not socks, simply people who have learnt analogous processes) get snarky comments along the lines of "how did you find (e.g.) MfD by your third edit?", to say nothing of those who edit as an IP before registering. On the other hand, 'biting' of genuinely naive newbies seems to be far more prevalent than I remember it being in years' past - although I recognise that this may well be flawed memory on my part. I entirely agree that we should focus on retaining productive, community-minded editors, and reducing arbitrarily high standards at RfA. I know Vaticidalprophet is looking at something to do with how well standards correlate to actual RfA passes (apologies Vati, I can't recall the specific thrust of your research, just the outline!) and am looking forward to seeing some data as and when. firefly ( t · c ) 17:02, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I appreciate that from a probability perspective based on past history, a new editor with a high level of understanding of Wikipedia's processes is suspect. But it's a pity that the reward for newcomers behaving exactly as many editors would recommend—read a lot of discussions and guidance to become familiar with Wikipedia culture before diving in—is to treat them with suspicion. isaacl (talk) 20:43, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

About the high standards, there's a circular problem. ArbCom has gotten so good at desysopping, that they have started making desysops that have been extremely controversial. So if the community lowers its expectations, and passes more admins at RfA who only go on to get the boot from ArbCom, then ArbCom has to decide whether or not to lower their standards. And if they do become more reluctant to remove sitting admins, then the community will become more skeptical of passing anyone who might not work out. Which ArbCom will see as a community expectation that admins must be held to a high standard. Which the community will see as a reason to relax RfA standards. And around and around it goes. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:14, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm not personally concerned about this particular feedback loop. The arbitration committee evaluates an administrator's behaviour based on alignment with policies and community expectations. Commenters at an request for administrative privileges can cast a wider net, since they're looking for indications that future conduct will align with policies and community expectations. The community might choose to be more forgiving (or strict) in what they consider to be reasonable indications either way, but this doesn't mean it'll change its expectations for how administrators should act. A priori there's no reason to expect the arbitration committee to think that community expectations have shifted, just because more (or fewer) RfAs are passing than before. isaacl (talk) 22:32, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

That's true, of course; I was being a bit arch. But it is true that I have seen RfA supports based on "no big deal" arguments that ArbCom can always desysop, as well as opposes based on it supposedly being too difficult or time-consuming to go to ArbCom. And I've also see some Arbs say that they supported some desysops because of how they perceive what the community wants. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:39, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Long aside about an individual case

I'm starting to cast doubt on the validity of my rant (in the last RFA thread here) on how opposers are treated at RFA. Considering some of the opposition on Vami's RFA right now—I'm bewildered to say the least. Aza24 (talk) 18:32, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Everyone hates oppose-badgering until they see what opposes look like. (Contra: everyone loves oppose-badgering until they go in that column.) Vaticidalprophet 18:34, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, well, in the past I've seen plenty of opposes that I considered legitimate but treated unfairly. Honestly it might be too big of a mixed bag to generalize but the truth of your statement & contra is so accurate that it's revealing. Aza24 (talk) 18:38, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

It also depends on the oppose, and on whether the "badgering" is actually badgering or just asking for clarification. I've occasionally been convinced to retract an oppose be someone disputing it and pointing out a fact of which I wasn't aware, and I've certainly seen plenty of opposes which if I were the closing crat I'd discount for providing insufficient reasoning. (Part of the reason I have a reputation as a serial opposer, despite opposing very few RFAs, is that when I do oppose I always try to provide a detailed reasoning; that in turn leads other people to quote me in their own opposes, so RFA regulars are used to seeing my name in the oppose section.) ‑ Iridescent 15:52, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni I assume you already know my position: before you start making proposals for reform, you first need to convince me it needs reform. I don't think the RFA process is broken, and I think most of the people who claim it's broken are just repeating what they've been told—that is, people have got so used to parroting "RFA is horrible and even highly qualified candidates fail" that they assume it's true, which in turn puts people off applying. My usual challenge to the "RFA is broken!" people stands; go to Wikipedia:Requests for adminship by year and give me a recent example of RFA being a broken process. (I don't mean "someone failed when I think they should have passed"—I can give countless examples of those as well as vice versa—but "someone failed despite the opposition being unreasonable" or "someone passed despite being clearly unsuitable".) There's a legitimate argument that should be had about deadminship processes, but that's a different matter and it doesn't make sense to treat them as a single entity unless we're going to go down the route of bundling RFA and reconfirmation.

@Aza24, I'm looking at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Vami IV#Oppose and nothing obvious is jumping out at me (other than an oppose from someone with 216 mainspace edits, and "people not understanding the process and making uninformed comments" is the price we knew we were signing up for when we created the all-editors RFA watchlist notification). The other three lines of opposition—"overly zealous about copyright", "putting a self-described extremist into a position of authority potentially has a chilling effect on other editors" and "command of English isn't adequate for a position where one has to explain complicated decisions and where in doing so one will be perceived as a public face of Wikipedia" are all legitimate enough grounds for opposition regardless of whether one personally agrees with them or not. ‑ Iridescent 15:52, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Well the climate of the RFA has changed rather quickly now. When I commented above there were only three opposes, and the one I was primarily referring to was the first—which spawned quite a bit of discussion and has been withdrawn anyways. I still find serious issue with opposes on the grounds of the political aspect (isn't it great when people speak for wikiprojects they have no connection to?), but those on copyright and/or inexperience I can at least see as stemming from a legitimate concern. Aza24 (talk) 20:51, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

My thought, as someone who knows Vami quite well, in response to "come back in six months" is "do you seriously think he's ever going to run again if this fails?". Vaticidalprophet 20:57, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

As someone who has repeatedly turned down offers to nominate me for RfA , and still will, by the way, not wanting to run again isn't a tragedy. In fact, given how stressful RfA is, it could well be a reasonable response depending on the particular person. We all have different tolerances for stress.

The real tragedy is if someone would, hypothetically, be chased off the project from a particularly uncivil RfA, a sure sign that RfA reform should've happened long ago. But, to my knowledge, this has never happened. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 01:33, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

There have certainly been "I never wanted to be an admin anyway" flounces in which an unsuccessful RFA candidate resigns from Wikipedia, if you count that. On the "RFA is uncivil" meme, I reiterate my comments back in February; if one is going to claim that the process is routinely failing then the onus is on the person making that claim to supply some examples of the process failing. Wikipedia:Unsuccessful adminship candidacies (Chronological) is public data; if the supposed unwarranted opposition and unnecessary rudeness is happening, there should be no difficulty finding some examples of it, and even hypercontentious RFAs like Fram 2 remained civil throughout. (On the other hand, Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship does have a well-deserved reputation as a cesspit, although it's calmed down somewhat since the glory days of Kudpung, Malleus and Chillum ranting at each other. I suspect that at least some of RFA's reputation for rudeness and arguments comes from people remembering a particularly foul-tempered exchange on a page with "Requests for adminship" in the title, but forgetting exactly where it was.)

Not naming names so as to appease the Great God AGF, but I'm confident that at least some of the instances where an editor disappears immediately following RFA are a result of the sockmaster deciding there's now too much scrutiny on that account. Given the number of adminsocks we've caught (Pastor Theo, RickK, Archtransit, Law just off the top of my head) it's foolish to think there aren't others floating around which we haven't spotted. ‑ Iridescent 04:46, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, I don't think RfA is evil -- and am currently trying to reassure several other people whose first experience with it is this waking nightmare of one -- but even putting aside the current one, which is still hopefully on track to succeed and so not quite an example of an unfair RfA in win-loss terms (although certainly in ethical terms), I can definitely name an example. Vaticidalprophet 05:18, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm obviously not a neutral commentator when it comes to that one, having posted quite a lengthy oppose, but I'd consider that a textbook example of the RFA process acting as it's supposed to; a candidate initially seemed non-problematic, some people raised concerns, and even though the candidate was still on course to pass they decided the honorable course was to withdraw as a significant number of participants had concerns. There are 60 opposes there, and on an admittedly quick skim I'm not seeing any that are illegitimate. There are some with which I don't agree—I've never agreed with the WP:NONAZIS essay except in specific cases where an extremist's presence on Wikipedia is creating a chilling effect—but it's hardly some kind of fringe position. ‑ Iridescent 05:49, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

It's no "a functionary called the candidate a criminal and multiple parties public-logged out-of-context Discord messages to paint the candidate as a racist", but I can't really look at it and confidently go "yes, this had exactly the right outcome for the right reasons", even though I agree the withdrawal complicates matters. Which kind of makes it difficult to discuss 'failed RfAs' in general -- a lot of fails are people who pull out where it's unclear what the outcome will be. Speaking more broadly, I can definitely think of cases where I agree with the outcome but think the actual positions that led there were horrendously off-base. (Though I still note both of these are much better than the current one.) Vaticidalprophet 06:02, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Apologies if this is a statement of the obvious, but a significant proportion of the readers of this talkpage—if not an outright majority—are old-school Wikipedians/Wikimedians and/or active functionaries (either formally or informally), for both of whom open and transparent consensus is a genuine core principle, not just one of those buzzphrases people skim over without reading. As such this is definitely not a talkpage on which "people should be allowed to bitch off-wiki without their comments being made public"—which appears to be the line you're taking—is an argument likely to gain much traction. (If the Discord messages are out of context then fine, provide the context.)

My personal opinion, but one which I think is fairly widely shared, regarding IRC, Discord et al:
There are numerous occasions where privacy concerns or legal issues mean discussions need to take place off-wiki; there are some technical and cross-wiki areas where off-wiki discussions make sense and technical limitations mean for one reason or another the discussions can't be open; there are a few areas around editor recruitment and broader outreach where private off-wiki discussion is necessary; and there are a handful of situations where it's genuinely necessary for someone to take part in the private fora of something like Wikipediocracy to correct mistakes or explain why a particular action was taken. Outside the areas where there's a demonstrable need for discussions to take place in private, I consider participation in discussions about Wikipedia within private (in the sense of "not readable by anyone who cares to look") fora to be prima facie evidence of unsuitability to hold advanced permissions on Wikipedia. (The TL;DR summary would be "if you've nothing to hide why are you hiding, if you do have something to hide why should we trust you, and in either case if you're not comfortable holding discussions publicly why should we allow you to participate on a website which is all about public discussion?".) ‑ Iridescent 14:50, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Personally I take a simpler approach to people which has rarely been proven wrong in my experience, and thats that people do not substantially change over time. Oh you get the occasional reformed person, but they often have profound and obvious changes in their behaviour, associations etc. The majority either stay the same or become more entrenched. What they do sometimes become is better at hiding/masking their views, usually as a result of unpleasant incidents, but they do not really change them. Frankly if someone has been a self-declared fascist in the past, making less-than-complimentary public statements about political topics on a widely logged and visible platform does not do a lot to convince me they have changed in any meaningful way. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:07, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, what fundamental property are you measuring? If you're measuring "political beliefs" - I'm sorry, but I highly doubt that - most people I know have played around with ideologies in their younger years that they've come to disagree with and (usually) regret.

If you're measuring "tendency to jump to extremes and post hot takes", well, I'd say that's a bit harder to change. But what the takes are about certainly do. Elli (talk | contribs) 21:03, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

I'd refine it a bit; people who have extreme / odd views as a teenager do have the possibility of growing out of it by the time they reach adulthood, though beyond that the odds are low beyond some extraordinary deus ex machina to trigger a life-altering change. To give you a personal example, in 1992 aged 17 I supported the Conservative Party at the election (I was a few months too young to vote), and thought The Sun's "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?" was funny. Come the next election, I'd grown up, started work, realised what self-dependency was and met people further down the privilege ladder than myself, and have never felt that way since. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 22:11, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

A phase of youthful extremism isn't unusual—a phase of "I've realized the world isn't fair, and these guys have a solution!" is practically a cliche, whether the dabbling be with evangelical religion or political extremism. (The mainstream political parties of the world are crammed full of former Trotskyists—and not just the usual suspects like Jeremy Corbyn and his circle, but die-hard rightwingers like Jeane Kirkpatrick.) In terms of more general drift, "people become more drawn to small-c conservatism as they get older" is absolutely demonstrable fact—the older someone is, the more likely they are to vote for whoever represents the status quo. (IIRC the age of 47 is usually the magic number at which people switch from "we need change!" to "keep things the same!". If people's positions stopped shifting after the age of 18 or so, you wouldn't see political adverts in newspapers.) There's also the obvious point that the definition of "extreme" depends very much on where you're watching from; Nigel Farage would fit squarely into the mainstream of US politics, and there's very little in Political positions of Bernie Sanders that would raise an eyebrow if it were said by Angela Merkel or Boris Johnson.

That said, as I understand it this doesn't directly relate to the recently-withdrawn RFA at hand, where as far as I can tell the issue wasn't a youthful phase but recent views. The waters are murky because so much of the evidence is hidden so I'm seeing it through the prism of how others are publicly discussing it, but from what I can see the problem here was that the candidate had recently expressed the opinion that he considered particular ethnicities and nationalities to deserve death. If that's the case, then we're not talking a reformed character who made some mistakes in their youth but someone who's either woefully detached from reality or genuinely evil, and in either case that's not someone we want on Wikipedia let alone in a position of authority where the public will potentially see them as the public face of Wikipedia. (In purely practical terms it would be virtually unworkable for someone in this position to be an admin. Even the most apparently uncontentious decision could and would be challenged if it transpired that one of the parties involved was a member of one of the nationalities that "exist to be killed".) ‑ Iridescent 19:00, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Iridescent, hi, fun talk page by the way, I'm wondering about your interpretation of the sentiment that was expressed on the Discord and then raised as an issue at the RfA. If I remember correctly, the phrase deserve to be killed was used metaphorically by the candidate in the context of the oppressor. It's unclear to me how you got from that to thinking that the candidate considered particular ethnicities and nationalities to deserve death. Since this isn't related to RfA reform, feel free to respond in a new section or on my talk page (or not at all). ezlev (user/tlk/ctrbs) 19:26, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) In my opinion those remarks have been somewhat distorted as they passed through the RfA grapevine, although I wasn't a participant in the original discussion and didn't see them live. As I understood it, the argument being made was that oppressed groups were justified in using violence to resist their oppressors. In particular, the full wording of the "exist to be killed" comment was "oppressors exist to be killed" (my emphasis) - not any specific nationality or ethnicity, but the general concept of "oppressors". Whether or not one agrees with the concept of violent resistance to oppression is a different discussion, but I really do not believe him to be either detached from reality or evil. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 19:41, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

@Iridescent: I must reply to this statement, because I have already been called a criminal and smeared off-wiki as a "german fascist" while my RfA was in progress. To believe I could be such a thing is to spit in the faces of everyone who saw enough good in me to support my candidacy, and especially my nominators. For what it is worth, I do not believe nationalities and ethnicities should be killed. I oppose the governments of nations such as Turkey and Azerbaijan, the United States and Saudi Arabia, Israel and Myanmar, for their participation in, and denial of, genocide and ethnic cleansing. I would be the most shameful hypocrite for believing such a thing. Where I suspect that insulting and hurtful hypothetical comes from is Friendly reminder that Palestine and Northern Ireland are struggles by a colonized oppressed against their colonizing oppressor. This is a belief that colonized people can legitimately use violence to persist as a people against a colonial power, not a belief that a people should be erased. I have wept bitter tears thinking that people could think I am such a monster, or still a fascist. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 21:59, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Too many people in the RFA were happy to villain-ize you so they could feel better about themselves. For god's sake, a bureaucrat happily said they wouldn't vote for anyone who voted for Trump—I mean, am I just supposed to look past that?? Clearly, the process is gradually skewing away from "would this individual make a good administrator" and even those in the highest "positions of power" are happily admitting it. Aza24 (talk) 22:39, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Meh, out of all the objectionable things said there, I don't think the "I wouldn't vote for someone who voted for Trump" is that unreasonable. Vami didn't vote for Trump, though, so it's not even particularly relevant here. Elli (talk | contribs) 04:26, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Broadly speaking, yes, that specific objection is reasonable for a random editor to have inasmuch as any political objections are (I think "oppose, candidate disagrees with me politically" when that disagreement isn't an impediment to their editing is atrocious, but consensus does not currently concur). Narrowly speaking, that specific objection is absolutely not the way I'd have characterized that !vote overall, considering it was accusing the candidate of active fascism. Even more narrowly speaking, we're talking about a crat, and RfBs have failed for less. (To be clear, that's the "candidate can't be objective about X" objections, not the "those are some real unusual supports" objections, which Iridescent is perfectly familiar with considering he wrote the main one -- excluding all the latter still gets below RfB pass mark.) Vaticidalprophet 04:30, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

I wasn't a fan of that !vote overall, I just didn't have an objection to the part of it most people are complaining about. Elli (talk | contribs) 04:33, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been clearer. My real objection is the fact that people are even introducing things like that as factors for Wikipedia adminship. We're *just* an internet encyclopedia and I don't see why political matters such as that should ever be even near relevant, unless there is direct examples of it being a negative thing. Aza24 (talk) 05:40, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

The main issue with Donald Trump is that he had/has a tendency to believe in and promote theories that are completely at odds with both (a) the due WP:WEIGHT in reliable sources, and (b) easily verifiable fact. And not only that, but as I understand it a sizeable majority of the people who voted for him also believe those theories. And this covers topics including last year's presidential election as well as climate change etc. What we don't need is editors attempting to skew our pages away from the presentation of these topics the way the world's reliable sources present them, and I would see that as a potential matter of concern to at least be considered. There's certainly no reason to ipso facto reject Trump supporters from being editors or admins and, as Ritchie says below, things like "I like his economic policies" or "I always vote Republican even though I dislike Trump personally" would be fine. Even someone who believed the election was "rigged" but showed no evidence of bringing that belief into article space would probably be fine. I guess I'm basically agreeing with you, and I did reject the opposition to Vami on political views, but just noting that "direct examples of it being a negative thing" is something that could potentially occur. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 13:46, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

That Acalamari is a bureaucrat is completely irrelevant; when a bureaucrat votes in an RfA they are taking that hat off and casting it purely as an editor, as Acalamari made clear at the time.-- Pawnkingthree (talk) 13:10, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Crats are a group of nineteen exceptionally trusted editors whose de facto role is "someone who is unusually trustworthy about RfA". Trying to distinguish admins acting as admins from admins acting as participants in ugly disputes is itself a recurring issue (see: half of EEng's block log). Crats are another level entirely, because what their role means is so wrapped up in the broader discussion, in a way that isn't true for admins. Vaticidalprophet 21:18, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

I think it's a lot more than half of his block log. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:23, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

I went for a conservative estimate. Vaticidalprophet 21:25, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Vami IV, I'm going to play Devil's advocate for a second and suggest that Iridescent wasn't directly accusing you of wanting ethnic cleansing or anything like that. Rather, I think he was trying to explain what other people thought you said in the RfA, which is not the same thing cf. "The waters are murky because so much of the evidence is hidden". I know Iridescent well enough to know that while he can occasionally call a spade a spade, he generally does so politely and in a way that will make people stop and think, and he's not one to throw out character assassinations without a strong body of evidence. I also know from your reaction to this that's it's very clear you had no intention of ever suggesting such a thing.

Regarding some of the comments like "Nobody who voted for Trump should be an admin" ... there's a world of difference between criticising Trump the person, people who voted Trump "to pwn the lame-ass libtards" and the guy who said "I don't like Trump, but I thought his economic policies were the best so I voted for that". At least the latter of those is a viewpoint I can respect, even if I don't agree with it (largely because I think Trump is such a compulsive liar and a thin-skinned narcissist I wouldn't believe any economic policies he comes out with to be at all believable). And provided anyone in the latter camp can separate their personal view from the neutral point of view required by the project, there isn't an issue. I guess it's possible that the "pwn the libtards" group can do this as well; I just think somebody who uses that as a rationale to vote for someone probably hasn't got the required temperament and collaborative drive to last at Wikipedia very long. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:12, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

I think it's reasonable to not trust someone who would overlook such glaring character flaws simply for their own financial benefit. Elli (talk | contribs) 11:46, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

I still don't think at all that the worst part of that !vote was "I won't support Trump supporters". Vaticidalprophet 21:25, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

@Ritchie, my comments followed a lengthy rant on why I consider participation in non-public fora to be evidence of poor judgement in the context of Wikipedia because the lack of an audit trail means comments can be taken out of context and the very act of participation leads external observers to reasonably assume one has something to hide; and my comments were very carefully hedged with every variation on "going only on what's visible" in the thesaurus. I would have hoped it was obvious from context that my point is that because Vami IV was ill-advisedly engaging in potentially contentious discussion off-wiki, it made it much more difficult to refute the combination of allegations and insinuations that he's an anti-Semitic IRA-supporting cryptofascist; if the discussions had taken place on-wiki or in a public forum it would either have taken about 10 seconds to paste a link to demonstrate that the comments had been taken out of context, or one sentence to challenge the accusers to provide a link if he'd never made the comments at all. (If I'd thought he was an anti-Semitic IRA-supporting cryptofascist, I assure you I'd have been making the point in the oppose section of the RFA—which right up until it was withdrawn was on course to pass—and not in an inside-baseball sidetrack on my talkpage.) ‑ Iridescent 06:15, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

Aside about voting patterns and age

@Iridescent: It's a minor point that has nothing to do with RfA but you said: "people become more drawn to small-c conservatism as they get older" is absolutely demonstrable fact. Not quite. It's actually a highly debated topic in political science, where people argue over either life-cycle or cohort effects on political alignment and voting patterns (a central problem is, if most people just become keen on the status quo when they get older, then how does change happen?) A lot of ink and time has been spent on the topic from theoretical and empirical points of view – some key texts are introduced here. I'm not sure where I stand. A lot of people do abandon support for political extremes as they get older, though I also expect that most young people don't support extremes in the first place but do adopt certain core values which might be different from earlier generations (mediated through class, gender, religion and their own life experiences). Anyway, total aside. —Noswall59 (talk) 15:06, 10 June 2021 (UTC).

Don't mind the aside, I considered making it too! It's a fun question. I probably do tend to the age-mediated effect solely because it matches with everything else we know about the aging process across generations. Vaticidalprophet 21:25, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

There are obviously cohort effects—the gross oversimplification is that people have a tendency to vote against whoever was in power when they were in their late teens, and the "I remember what a mess Thatcher/Carter/Hollande made, I'll never support that party again even though it no longer bears any resemblance to the party they led" effect also has an impact. It's also muddied by the fact that for historic reasons a lot of the most significant work on long-term tracking of individual voters has taken place in the UK, and UK politics is characterised by parties significantly and repeatedly changing what they stand for (the Conservative Party has often the group pushing hardest for radical reform), by people voting in terms of class or geographical loyalty rather than self-interest, and by people voting on purely local issues in national elections. All that aside, I don't believe anyone seriously disputes the basic point that under-40s tend to support "redistribution and personal freedoms", over-60s tend to support "security and stability", and something happens between those ages to flip enough people to have a statistical impact. (The 2019 United Kingdom general election was the worst result for the Labour Party since 1935; if the votes of retirees had been discounted, Jeremy Corbyn would currently be 18 months into building the Workers' Paradise.) ‑ Iridescent 06:15, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

Requesting some article expansion help

Greetings,

Requesting you to visit following draft articles.

• Draft:Ex-Muslims
• Draft:Amina Dawood Al-Mufti

Pl. do help above with some article expansion if you find topics interested in.

Thanks and warm regards

Bookku (talk) 02:58, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

For Draft:Amina Dawood Al-Mufti, I can't really offer any comment, as this isn't a topic about which I know anything. What I will say is that—even in draftspace—in the absence of absolutely reliable sourcing this is a spectacularly defamatory biography of a living person (assuming the article subject is still alive, as there's no death date or mention of her death).

Ex-Muslims is really a matter for experts on the subject; "anyone can edit" doesn't mean "everyone should edit everything", and this is such a delicate topic that it really needs to be left to subject matter experts. While there are precedents for similar articles (e.g. Lapsed Catholic), I'm personally not convinced this article in its current form is really clear what its scope is. Is it about people who have explicitly renounced their former faith, about people who are culturally Muslim but non-practicing, about people who are nominally Muslim but don't follow any Islamic teachings (I can walk through any park in England and see people with a bacon sandwich in one hand and a bottle of white cider in the other who'd still tick the "Muslim" box on their census form), or some combination of the three? Whichever it is, the scope needs to be clearly defined. As I say, I'm not really convinced that we need an independent article on the topic—we don't have an equivalent Ex-Christians article, even though that's likely of more interest to English Wikipedia's readers.

As has been pointed out on the various talk pages already, it's also not clear how this differs from Apostasy in Islam. It also seems to give hugely undue weight to a handful of specific recent examples rather than being a genuine overview of a topic which goes back over a thousand years—as just a single obvious example, the Moriscos and Mudéjar (and indeed Spain itself) aren't even mentioned. ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 7 June 2021 (UTC)