User talk:Iridescent: Difference between revisions

An administrator "assuming good faith" with an editor with whom they have disagreed.

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‑]

On researches and talk-pages

Some months ago, I came across a WMF-research project that sought to build a tool to help editors and administrators deal with incivility in uniform ways. Among the aims were also to design a system that automatically flags certain behaviours as civil or uncivil. The stuff about Study 2 (specifically), is worth reading........:(

Luckily, the research concluded a month ago, with the observation ....what the language of incivility is continues to be a difficult question to answer.......recommend against building any kind of automatic detection tool to deal with incivility.

Incidentally, it simultaneously observed (on another locus):- .....the NPOV policy was sometimes used to prevent women from writing articles, or articles from being written about women. According to our participants, many editors view men's point of view as inherently neutral, while women's point of view is inherently biased. This, (in turn) leads them to state that policies are (mis)used by editors to silence others, particularly women, or to prevent speech about women.

WMF-researches have produced some brilliant out-of-the world observations in the past and it does not help that, I am yet to come across any case where somebody was invoking NPOV and imparting excess scrutiny to certain edits just for the very-premises of an woman editing an woman-subject. And, the proclaimed-prevalence of the community-thoughts that a part. gender is inherently biased, seems too weird. On the other hand, I might be missing some fundamental point or they are oversimplifying stuff or they might be basing their observations on some quite-outlying article; ('GG-stuff' maybe?)

Any ideas? ∯WBG^converse 17:42, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

I can't think of any examples of anyone—individually or collectively—actively discriminating against female subjects; if anything, we tend to relax the notability rules a little more in recognition of the fact that historical biographies of women can be harder to source. There does seem to be an attitude among a small but still statistically significant faction of editors that "she was a woman so anything she did probably wasn't important", but not really enough to skew decision making to any great degree. There is a meta-issue in that historically women were excluded from a lot of occupations and consequently had less opportunity to engage in activity that would make them notable in Wikipedia terms, but that's a bias only in the sense that reality is biased and we need to reflect reality; I consider things like Welsh Wikipedia's boast of having equal numbers of male and female biographies to be evidence of massive systemic bias on their part, since it's a straightforward statement of fact that there are more men than women in the historical record.

To be honest, this "research proposal" just looks like someone with an axe to grind rather than someone with a genuine concern, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the long-term cranks who occasionally try to piggyback their pet grudges onto legitimate discussions about gender coverage is somehow involved. (More specifically, I suspect this proposal had "find a pretext to block Eric Corbett" in mind, and Eric's effective resignation means the WMF have no reason to take it any further.)

As with virtually every piece of research that comes out of the WMF, you can safely ignore it; in my experience WMF-sponsored research invariably consists of the researcher and/or the WMF deciding what conclusion they want to come to, and then cherry-picking facts to support that conclusion. If anyone doesn't feel that's the case here, I'd urge them to have a look at the questions which were asked which are blatantly leading; there's literally no way that pseudo-research could have come to any conclusion other than "everyone on Wikipedia is rude". Reading the conclusions, I don't see anything there other than generic "I found it upsetting that someone had an opinion that differed from my own" snowflakery. (That may be an artefact of the conclusions being badly written rather than the evidence not existing, but certainly if they're going to come to the conclusion that incivility is rife you'd expect them to provide some examples. It's always been my experience that the people who shout loudest about how everyone else on Wikipedia is being rude to them, go strangely silent when asked to provide an actual example of a fight they were involved in which they didn't start.) ‑ Iridescent 18:14, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Paging SlimVirgin who might know more about this than me; I've been ignoring the GGTF and their associated projects since they went off the rails a couple of years ago. ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Also, going to put this here, since until just now I certainly wasn't aware of it. ‑ Iridescent 19:41, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

I was reminded of your comment here about there being more men than women in the historical record (an obvious point that I've belaboured as well in the past) when looking over: Clerk of the House of Commons (which nearly had a woman in the role recently). I ended up there because the Speaker and his ilk are in the news at the moment. I wonder if much can be made of the red-links Archibald Milman, Thomas Lonsdale Webster, Horace Dawkins, Barnett Cocks, David Lidderdale and Richard Barlas? The first I tried (Horace Dawkins) wasn't that promising. Barnett Cocks looks more interesting (depending on what people find interesting). We have an article on Thomas Lonsdale Webster's son: Thomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster. Carcharoth (talk) 17:09, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

In general, it probably wouldn't be possible (or worthwhile). Clerk of the Commons is a respected position, but ultimately 99% of the time a rather dull functionary role, and there won't have been much written about most of them other than routine announcements. I'd see it as akin to judges; some of them are obviously extremely notable because of their involvement with high-profile cases or decisions that set major precedents, but they don't have intrinsic notability in the way that MPs do.

To draw a parallel with the railway station thread above, elected representatives are railway stations and clerks are bus stops. It's reasonable to presume that even the dullest politician has been the subject of significant coverage during his or her election campaigns and as a spokesperson on issues affecting their constituency; the same presumption doesn't hold for clerks, and consequently if they're to have a Wikipedia article the significant coverage needs to be demonstrated and can't just be assumed. ‑ Iridescent 17:41, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

All very true. Though in practice, there may be more articles than expected. I moved on to look at Clerk of the Parliaments (House of Lords) and found we have articles on every holder of that position since 1788 (there have been 20 in total since that date). Many of the earlier ones were elected politicians or members of the Lords or otherwise titled or became a baronet, which explains some of the more obscure ones having articles. There are stubs such as the current holder of the post: Edward Ollard. The other more recent ones seem OK, if not that interesting to read (Beamish stands out for his Mastermind connection). Michael Davies (parliamentary official) has some family history and the line: "He was also the first Clerk to have relied on email and had a laptop at the table." Going further back: Henry Badeley, 1st Baron Badeley, John Shaw-Lefevre, and George Rose (politician) are the best-developed articles of the bunch, but all due mostly to their other activities/roles/titles. Such lists of holders of roles do give a definite sense of how things have changed over time as many distinguished roles become less so as institutions and society changes. Carcharoth (talk) 14:05, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

To draw a further parallel with the railway station thread above, the clerks are probably an even better example than railway stations of a group where a single list would be of more use to readers than a category full of stubs. Expanding the existing list at Clerk of the House of Commons#List of Clerks of the House of Commons such that it had a one- or two-paragraph biography of each entry would be useful to readers as it would allow them to draw their own conclusions as to how the roles and responsibilities of the job had changed over the years, while avoiding the WP:SYNTH issue we'd encounter if we tried to write an article on how the role has changed. ‑ Iridescent 18:36, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

That might work, but lists can be difficult to do that way sometimes. Do you have an example that can be pointed to as the 'right' way to do this? Changing subject completely, while trying to find another article on someone of the same name, I came across Anne Phillips (geologist) and Anne Phillips (field assistant), with a merge tag on them since August 2018. Not that long, but feels like it needs more attention somehow. Shouldn't be that difficult as the latter article (shorter and written later) only has three citations to a source not used in the earlier article. It probably does need a little bit of care, though. And the correct attributions, as always. Carcharoth (talk) 12:57, 19 January 2019 (UTC)

The "right way" would depend on the topic in question as to exactly how such a thing would be formatted. My go-to example of the kind of list I mean would be Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway#Stations, which allows the reader to skim through and compare the six largely similar buildings, while avoiding the necessary repetition of the 'background' sections of stand-alone articles. (It also means Church Siding—a lump of mud at which trains would occasionally stop to pick up milk cans—can have its existence appropriately noted, without the need to create the pointless two-line stub Wikipedia's "one station, one article" approach theoretically mandates.) List of paintings by Gustav Klimt is a good example of the same thing done with a table rather than a bullet-point approach; the paintings that are significant enough to warrant their own article get a brief summary and a link to their own article and consequently don't unduly overshadow the other entries, and there's enough information about all the entries—those with an article and those without—that readers can get an idea of the similarities and differences and of the themes Klimt painted.

In my opinion, because Wikipedia writers are so used to the "follow link, skim the article, go back to what you were reading before" workflow there's a tendency to forget that most readers don't behave like that, and either read the article in full without following links, or follow a link but don't return to the former page; as a consequence, I think we have a tendency not to include as much explanatory information on lists pages as we should. Treat the entries on a list article as you would the list of nominations if you were writing an article in the local paper on a commendation or awards ceremony; at minimum, each entry on the list should contain enough information so the reader can decide "is this person/building/painting somebody about whom I'd be interested in learning more?". (I know I sound like a broken record on the topic, but the reason there's currently a 300kb thread about this up above is that I firmly believe much of the Wikipedia editor community is too firmly fixated on appearances, and forgets that our only function is to try to ensure readers find the information they want and are made aware of other information they may find useful, not to comply with arbitrary policies on what is and isn't appropriate regardless of whether it affects utility to the readers.) ‑ Iridescent 15:25, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

{adding} List of extant papal tombs is a good example of a well-designed stand-alone list. Sylvester Medal is a biographical list with what I'd consider an appropriate level of detail. My general rule when it comes to the appropriate level of detail on Wikipedia is "does the page contain enough context that someone reading a printout of it would understand it?". ‑ Iridescent 07:49, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Regarding your appraisals of proposals at the village pump

This reply

an absolutely batshit crazy notion of how Wikipedia operates, founded on the fundamental misconception that "the more dispute resolution is taking place regarding a topic, the healthier that topic is

Made me feel alienated and a little down for at least ten or fifteen minutes. After the fifteen minutes were up, I felt sort of dirty, as if I'd committed a crime for which I'd been begrudgingly let off the hook by a sullen policeman. As active Wikipedians we all know the well tested method of avoiding/veiling personal comments by prefixing derogatory phrases with, "Your contribution on this page is a complete butt wipe; with short legs... and a squint". Unfortunately for the recipient of such comments, they aren't significantly different from just being insulted.

Furthermore you've slightly misconstrued the purpose of collecting marketing data, which is to gauge the effects of ongoing initiatives, i.e. if we are collecting lots of data (d) while doing this thing (a) and we changed (a) slightly to this thing (a.1) did that have an effect on (d)and if not/so should we keep going with it or can it for something else.

Yes it would allow for intervention or for people to take notice of problematic areas, but the main thing would be to simply have the data and compare its change over time with the introduction of new initiatives to improve community experience. Essentially, if we are going to have experience focused initiatives, it would be good to have some way to gauge their effect. My idea was a shot at addressing that.

Thanks nevertheless for chiming in. It's always good to get feed back even if it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Edaham (talk) 05:47, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

That will be your proposal which has managed to generate a rarer-than-hen's-teath unanimous consensus that it's a terrible idea, from a group of people who normally never agree on anything? If you don't want people accusing you of being an outsider trying to parachute in to impose your own views of how Wikipedia should operate, without the slightest consideration for how Wikipedia actually operates, then the onus is on you to:

1. Explain what it is that you consider a problem (looking at the background to your proposal, it seems you may have been misled by the existence of the official-looking "Community health initiative on English Wikipedia"; this is an small clique at the WMF—not Wikipedia—that exists to push a particular agenda, not any kind of official part of Wikipedia and certainly not a group whose views enjoy a significant degree of support on en-wiki);
2. Explain what you mean by "unhealthy talk page", since as per the comments of damn near everyone at VPP, you've announced a solution to a problem without even suggesting what the problem might be. If there's a lot of debate and argument on a talk page, that's not a sign of "ill health", it's a sign of Wikipedia functioning as it's supposed to function, as people are thrashing out their differences on talk rather than by edit-warring. If a talk page hasn't received a single edit for five years, is that a sign that the talk page is "unhealthy" or a sign that the article is so well written that everyone agrees there's not a problem? If the article has 35 talk archives and is under DS, is that a sign that the talk page is "unhealthy" or that the regular editors of the page are talking through the issues in detail and are working within Wikipedia's agreed processes to deal with those people who do cause problems?;
3. Provided you can demonstrate that there are such things as 'unhealthy talk pages' (doubtful) and that such things are causing problems (very doubtful), explain why this is a problem about which the rest of us should give a shit? (I guarantee that if I were to poll any group on en-wiki as to what they considered the major problems confronting the project, "unhealthy talk pages" wouldn't make the list; I equally guarantee that if I polled non-Wikipedia-editors and asked "what do you think are the main problems with Wikipedia?" the same would be the case);
4. Assuming you can convince people that "unhealthy talk pages" are an issue, explain why you think anonymous upvoting/downvoting of the page with the results visible only to admins—which as I understand it is your proposal—would solve the problem. As Wnt has explained to you, both aspects of this—allowing truly anonymous action without a publicly visible log of who said what, and having results visible only to a tiny elite rather than to anyone who has an interest—are fundamentally incompatible with Wikipedia's basic values of accountability and equality; consequently the burden is on you to explain why this proposal is so important it would be worth abandoning some of our most fundamental ethical values for;
5. Explain how and why this differs from the Article Feedback Tool, and what safeguards you envisage to prevent a repetition of what may not have been the biggest fiasco deriving from an attempt by the WMF to impose their ideologies on Wikipedia, but was certainly in the top ten.

Ultimately, the reason we have the Village pump (idea lab) → Village pump (proposals) → Requests for comment progression isn't purely a love of bureaucracy on our part, but a mechanism for allowing ideas to be drafted reasonably fully before formal discussion starts, while preventing half-formed ideas from wasting the time of the community and of their proposers. Especially in your case, as an editor with only ≈1000 mainspace edits and a list of interests which raises an immediate red flag then when you come to us effectively saying "Hey, I know I have less experience with Wikipedia than any one of you, but I'm here to tell you that you've been doing it wrong for eighteen years!" the onus is going to be on you to make the answers to 1–5 above crystal clear from the start.

There's a wrong and a right way to do these things, and the right way is definitely not to bypass the Idea lab phase completely, jump straight in to the formal proposals phase with a proposal that doesn't specify what problem you're trying to solve or how you propose to solve it, reply with sneering obnoxiousness when your proposal is challenged and then try to dismiss it as banter. If you don't like being accused of promoting a batshit crazy idea, demonstrate to us that it's not a batshit crazy idea; some examples of these mythical "unhealthy talk pages" you claim exist, and an explanation of why these pages are so problematic that a "flag this page to a moderator as inappropriate" button (which is what you're proposing however you dress it up) would do such a good job of fixing these problems that it would justify jettisoning two of Wikipedia's core values to put it in place. ‑ Iridescent 13:21, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

I did say that about limiting visibility of the results, but I didn't complain about "truly anonymous action", which isn't something I was thinking of as a problem there. My concern was that it was low-commitment action where casual first impressions and prejudices count much more than careful evaluations, simply because people can submit them so much faster. My vote was "unlikely" rather than "no" because in theory there is some use for the idea of just having a wish-someone-would-take-a-look-at-this button, but in a case like that there's no need for statistics or votes; you just want one person to have had a look sometime at the talk page to see if it's 500k of racist diatribe on somebody's ethnic background. But that is bound to happen anyway, or else the page is truly not read at all in which case it truly shouldn't matter; we're just talking about making it easier to tell somebody at the cost of making it harder for the somebody told to know what the problem is. Unlikely, not impossible though -- just don't lock up the results of whatever the tool is! Wnt (talk) 13:56, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Yeah—if the results were visible to everyone and it were possible to see who had participated (if not everyone's actual vote) it would be less problematic. Without at minimum the ability to see who had participated, there's no way to tell if the dozen people all downvoting Talk:White pride are the usual rabble of white supremacists or people with genuine concerns; with the results restricted to admins, we'd be creating an de facto batsignal for a self-selecting elite of power users. However, without anonymity and with the result publicly visible, I don't see how this tool would serve a purpose at all, since it would just replicate "I see this as problematic" on the talk page. ‑ Iridescent 14:08, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't really see what this tool would do on Talk:white pride - on one hand, the page has every appearance of civility; on the other, it is made up of a FAQ and a bunch of people asking the FAQ questions over again because the article lays it on a bit thicker than necessary. I mean, it's one thing to say that the "white pride" slogan or idea is tarred by association with the historical abuses of white racism, without trying to argue that it is absolutely and fundamentally different in essence than other "race pride movements", or to ignore their own potential for abuses under the wrong circumstances. But how do you measure that in a survey? Is it unhealthiness whenever a talk page has a "FAQ" imposed on it, simply because you'd think on a healthy talk page you don't need one? Even if you do measure "unhealthiness", the opinion and reaction will be all over the map. And I imagine whoever tries to put their hand in any hive like that one is going to get multiply stung. Wnt (talk) 02:10, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

I read your reply briefly and am reading it again in detail while checking the links you included.

Quick questions: Is there a problem with habitually reverting POV pushers on fringe articles, which is what I often do here when I log on and check my watchlist. The articles in question are subject to quite a lot of good faith edits, which aren't really needed and when one ends up on my watch list, I usually end up checking the contributions of an IP user trying to whitewash the "alt right" article, for example, then check their contributions and find out that they've also done the same thing to another similar bunch of articles. I then go across and revert changes on those articles and they end up on my watch list too. The same thing happens with things like reiki and acupuncture. Am I harming my reputation here by doing this?

• I don't think any of the (stub) biographies I've created (mostly when I was just learning to put articles up) are unverified but I will go back and check them all. I went back and checked: The phrase "created without verification" there refers to the fact that I didn't submit them via AfC. I was a new user at the time and didn't understand that verification would be understood as something else. The purpose of the notice was to let a page reviewer know that a new user had published an article without putting it through the submission process
• Thank you for telling me about the relationship between WMF and Wikipedia. You are right that I looked at a banner, which was displayed on Wikipedia and went off and spent a lunch break sitting down and scratching the head a bit and my idea is what I came up with. It isn't telling people what to do when a relatively inexperienced user answers a call for ideas in answer to a banner plastered over the front page of the encyclopedia. Maybe you can talk to them about this case, because it seems to have generated the type of issue you are talking about. I honestly don't think I'm sneering or obnoxious, and am slightly taken aback that that's how I was received. I do tend to get nervous when rebuked and try to deal with that by making what I believe to be comical remarks. It's more out of fear than anything and I do it without thinking. I'd like you to at least consider the possibility that people of a certain disposition might find it unnerving and difficult to objectively continue the conversation, having received your initial reply. I understand that you have probably had previous experiences which justify a certain amount of brusqueness, and I also don't want to double down on what you have pointed out as unwelcome behavior on my part, but I would like to be treated fairly, I am a person and I can be a bit erratic (as many people can) when put under pressure. An apology is forthcoming on my part.
• I think you deserve a bit of feedback about how the experience rolled out, because while you might not think it (or me) very important, there's lots of people knocking about who feel the same way (I've been contributing over at editor retention recently). I'll give you an analogy in the hope that it will maintain a bit of light warmheartedness, but also because the analogy is a snug fit for what I experienced here.
  • Possibly based on personal experience: imagine if you will a young man, having been told to help out with some household chores, makes the mistake of attempting to fold a duvet while his wife is watching. Of course he gets it wrong, that's not how duvets are folded, is it? The duvet is then grumpily unraveled by his wife while he forlornly chews on his thumb and is berated not only on the subject of duvets, but also on a reasonably long list of household related infractions he has committed in the past. I'm not a story teller, so take a moment to flesh out the details, add some background music and perhaps a cat looking on smugly from a corner (we had a cat). It's not a soul crushing experience, but it wasn't pleasant really to be honest.
• I owe you a debt of gratitude for taking it time to talk about the situation in such detail. The effort you went to to explain your point is about the only thing, allowing me to differentiate the experience from being summarily sacked. My aims on Wikipedia are long term. Right now I don't have much to write about on the article space, but one day I might. I'm quite interested in the editor retention page at the moment and have been having a bit of success there in a discussion about welcoming people. In the future I might want to write articles regularly. Do you think it's OK to maintain a presence here in the meantime and contribute where possible?

Edaham (talk) 03:08, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

@Wnt, I wouldn't really consider it unhealthy that a talk page has a FAQ imposed on it, unless the FAQ is being abused to mean "questions we refuse to answer"; there are some topics where the same question is inevitably going to be asked repeatedly in good faith. The canonical one would be Muhammad; no matter how we approach the matter of images, there will either be a steady stream of people asking "why are you including images purporting to be of him even though they add little encyclopedic value (since they all date from centuries after his death so give no indication of what he actually looked like) and potentially offend significant numbers of readers?" or "why are you not including images purporting to be of him, since there's at least a slight utility to readers of knowing how he's been represented in art and WP:NOTCENSORED means even the slightest utility should outweigh any potential offense caused?", and it's not a good use of anyone's time to constantly repeat the same arguments for and against.

There are plenty of other examples of genuinely frequently asked questions where the waste of time involved means it would be actively damaging to Wikipedia to relitigate the debate each time the question is asked, ranging from political hot potatoes like: "Does Ireland refer to the island or the country?", "Is the capital of Ukraine Kiev or Kyiv?" or "Should China point to the PRC, the RoC or a disambiguation page?", to the benign but repeatedly time-wasting discussions like "Should Heavy metal music mention Led Zeppelin?" or "I read in (insert newspaper/website with poor fact checking) that glass is technically a high-viscosity liquid and the slow flow explains why some windows are thicker at the bottom than the top / that the word 'Easter' derives from 'Ishtar' / that the monarch needs to sign every British Act of Parliament before it becomes law (or its corollary, that lesbianism and/or prostitution were never banned in England because insert name of monarch didn't believe that such things happened and nobody dared contradict them) / that bees are essential to the food chain and civilization will collapse without them / that Vikings wore horned helmets, why is Wikipedia not mentioning this fact?".

While I initially thought that while upvoting/downvoting is contrary to fundamental principles, there's still a good case for a one-click "this page is problematic!" button, the more I think about it the less convinced I am by that, either. Without context, anyone investigating the reports generated by such a button would need to read the entire talkpage to see what was and wasn't problematic. Consequently, what we'd actually need is a new noticeboard so people reporting potentially problematic pages could explain what it was they considered a problem. Such a noticeboard would probably grow like Topsy—we have only c. 3500 active editors, and those who have both the experience and the inclination to moderate such things form a very limited subset of that number—and would also mean the creation of yet another bureaucracy. Improbable as it is to use the terms 'WP:ANI' and 'efficient' in the same sentence, the present "if there's a serious issue post a notification at ANI asking admins and experienced editors to assess the situation, if the issue isn't serious enough to justify that it's almost certainly best to let it work itself out" setup is actually probably the most efficient way to address this.

@Edaham, regarding Is there a problem with habitually reverting POV pushers on fringe articles?, it all depends on what you mean by "habitually" and "fringe". If you're making more than three reverts to a page in any 24 hour period (regardless of whether it's three unrelated edits you're reverting) and the material being reverted isn't blatant vandalism, then you're automatically a problem editor by definition. If you're not hitting the three-revert limit, but nonetheless find yourself regularly reverting material from the same page, particularly if you're reverting material added by multiple editors, then there's a reasonable likelihood that you're part of the problem rather than part of the solution. If you're reverting material on the grounds of being 'fringe' and you're unable to point to the discussion on Wikipedia in which it was decided that the material you're reverting is inappropriate for Wikipedia, then there's an extremely high probability that you're the POV-pusher. NPOV doesn't mean we don't include fringe viewpoints, it means we don't give undue weight to fringe viewpoints, and what constitutes "undue weight" is something that generally needs to be discussed.

The relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia is a complicated and troubled one. They ultimately own the servers and retain the technical ability to overturn Wikipedia consensus; they also do a lot of valuable work in terms of maintaining the MediaWiki software on which Wikipedia runs, of acting as a central mediatory body between Wikipedia and the sister projects, and of lobbying and fundraising for Wikipedia. However, their goals and methods are often wildly out of sync with those of English Wikipedia; in particular, they have a long history of accusing the Wikipedia community of being unduly aggressive or discriminatory and then failing to provide evidence when asked to justify these claims (I repeat my earlier challenge to provide a few actual examples of "unhealthy talk pages"; here's the list of the most active pages on Wikipedia which is usually a good indicator of pages with a lot of back-and-forth, to get you started), and of trying to enforce ideologically-driven changes on Wikipedia against the will of the community. Consequently, when something like Wikipedia:Community health initiative on English Wikipedia appears, throwing around accusations against the current Wikipedia community while providing very little evidence to back up any of their claims, we're going to ask for them to actually provide some evidence that the problems they claim to have identified actually exist before we start expending our limited time and energy trying to fix them.

Community Engagement Insights/2018 Report/Support & Safety—the survey on which they're basing these particular claims—is worth reading in full. Their claims are based on a sample of just 251 people—one assumes a largely self-selecting sample as those who feel they had a complaint to make were presumably more likely to respond—and there's what appears to be some very selective cherry-picking going on in order to back up their "we need to get rid of the Wikipedia community and recruit a new one that's more amenable to our agenda" position.

All of the above is obviously just my personal view (albeit one I know is widely shared on English Wikipedia). User:Whatamidoing (WMF) is the WMF's de facto ambassador to Wikipedia, and can give you their side of the coin if you're interested.

Regarding Do you think it's OK to maintain a presence here in the meantime and contribute where possible?, the answer is "a qualified yes". While obviously everyone's who's willing to help is welcome, ultimately Wikipedia exists solely as a delivery mechanism for its content. Every namespace other than articles and files exists solely as a support mechanism for those two namespaces. "Anyone can edit" is a core principle (we all had to start somewhere) and applies to the back-office functions just as much as to the articles, but someone with little experience of working with Wikipedia content is likely to get themselves into trouble if they involve themselves in complicated discussions about the organization of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is almost 20 years old now, and many of the contentious decisions regarding its administration have already been discussed repeatedly for years; when someone with relatively little experience in the actual business of creating or curating Wikipedia content is telling experienced editors that they've been doing it wrong for years, it can come across as armchair-quarterbacking. WP:Skin in the game is a redlink, but it probably shouldn't be, as "if you don't like what we're doing, show me how you could do it better" is latterly becoming something of a core concept in Wikipedia's internal dynamics.

(TL;DR summary; yes, by all means stick around and we're glad to have you, but always bear in mind that Wikipedia is an educational project, not a social network, and the 'health' of the articles, files and data always takes precedence over the 'health' of the community.) ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

I’ve generally found myself being thanked for my edits by consensus forming editors on talk pages for having reverted fringe content and right-wing nonsense. I’ve been doing that long before I had a registered account (for as you say, over a decade). My concern is that you or others might speculate that I’m one of the people who supports those notions. I have absolutely never exceeded 3rr (to a fault sometimes) even when reverting obvious (to me) vandalism, preferring to take things to the talk page. It usually takes me a button push to revert things and then twenty edits on a talk page (per comment), correcting typos, comments and phrases, which I want to say more clearly, which explains the discrepancy.

I don’t know what a quarter back is or what the redlinked reference means. I’ve been in Shanghai for sixteen years and came from the UK so if those are references to America’s sports or recent pop culture I won’t get them.

I’ve been very carefully reading what you told me about the wmf. It stands to reason that en-wiki should have a degree of autonomy and that there might be a bit of push from either side. Can you visualize that through correctly polling, and then presenting those results to correlate them with various initiatives, you could actually compile the evidence necessary to demonstrate that en-wiki is doing what it needs to do to address discriminatory issues and problems with aggression. Forgetting for a moment my entire proposal, anything to do with “health”, I can see several areas where market research might give a better impression of how things are progressing here. 1) you have the number of users to make research data valid 2) implementation is easy 3) There’s lots of things with which the data can be meaningfully correlated.

I’ll give you an example. At the moment I’m making some suggestions at editor retention. My suggestion is to add a question to the welcome temple, “Can you tell me a bit about your interests and the areas you want to edit?”. My reason for suggesting this is 1) its nice to invite conversation 2) if answered the editor can then pass on the new editor to relevant wiki projects. Supposing you were to poll a group of editors on their user experience, before during and after the introduction of such an initiative. A positive change over time would be quite a useful bar of soap in a sock to anyone who claims people aren’t doing enough to increase hospitality, for a start. Having made the proposal, and thought about your responses, these are the lines along which I’m now thinking. Therefore, seeking out and identifying “unhealthy” pages, or defining what that means might not be a useful exercise. What I think is probably more useful is to hypothesize areas where data might correlate if you took a problem and addressed it with some initiative. From a long term point of view article content and community satisfaction aren’t really separable in terms of importance. They’re mutually supportive in many ways. I can see why wmf might be concerned about “health”, I can also see how as outsiders, they might be likely to come up with some heavy handed or less than helpful ideas. FYI I wrote this in a hurry, I might come back and edit it if you haven’t replied. Edaham (talk) 06:19, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

If you genuinely don't know what an Armchair quarterback does or what Skin in the game means, you'll be glad to know there's a website where you can look these things up… If you'd prefer them in BrEng, substitute "backseat driver" and "stakeholder".

I think you're vastly overestimating the size of the Wikipedia community if you think polling a self-selecting sample would give meaningful data. The headline 48,112,090 figure for the number of accounts represents everyone who's ever registered an account, even though most of those accounts have either never edited or not edited for years; the actual size of the active Wikipedia community is c. 3500. (The raw data on editor participation and activity is here, if you want to verify this; the column labeled ">100" is the one you want to be looking at as those are the editors who are actually active, rather than just poking their noses in occasionally to keep an eye on their particular topic of interest.) A sample would by necessity be self-selecting; we have no means to compel people to participate in surveys. It's well documented that self-selecting participants give the answer they think the questioner wants to hear, and the people who'd choose to participate in surveys would naturally over-represent people with strong opinions (either the "Wikipedia is the greatest force for good of modern times!" fanbois or the "Wikipedia is an irredeemably malignant force and it's a duty of all good-thinking people to disrupt it by any means necessary!" Hasten the Day hardliners). In addition, because of the limited size of the community small shifts in editor participation can have relatively significant effects on Wikipedia (I can rattle off any number of instances where the comings or goings of just a single editor has had a drastic impact on Wikipedia's coverage of a given field; not just niche topics, but core fields like "paintings" or "England").

Ultimately, market research techniques intended for analysis of broad trends by teams of professional researchers, or of a professional workforce whose employees work full time and can be compelled to answer the questions, are at best going to be of limited value, and at worst actively disruptive, when applied to a small community of enthusiasts. (If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, start at Wikipedia:Research and follow links; remember that we've been one of the highest-profile websites in the world for well over a decade now, and almost everything one can think of in terms of research has already been thought of.)

Take your example of adding questions to the {{welcome}} template. We have roughly 5000 account registrations each month; assuming one in ten of those replies to the questions, that makes 500 replies. Every one of those 500 editors will then get offended if they go to the trouble of answering the questions and nobody follows up with them; assuming there are at most ten active editors at WikiProject Editor Retention who actually have the inclination to do the heavy lifting,* that commits each of those editors to engaging in-depth with 50 editors each month; even in the first month that will be a huge time-sink, and assuming the editor-retention aspect is successful it will create a compound-interest situation in which after six months, each of those ten editors will be de facto mentors to 500 editors apiece. To put that in perspective, this talk page is one of the most active pages on the entire project and it takes a significant chunk of my time just responding to comments on it, but even I have only 500 watchers and most of those are passive; to engage simultaneously with 500—or even 50—editors would be a full-time job, and anyone trying to actually do so would burn out within days.
*A big "if"; in my experience, WP:ER consists less of people with a genuine interest in why editors come and go, and more of people who've lost arguments kvetching about how it's Just So Unfair that nobody on Wikipedia appreciates their genius and threatening to leave unless we immediately accede to their demands.

Likewise, I think you're working under a misapprehension regarding WikiProjects, if you feel passing on the new editor to relevant wiki projects would be a good thing. There are perhaps a dozen Wikiprojects that are actually active; what you're actually proposing is that unless the new editor's interests are military history, trains, medicine, videogames or a few other topics that have active projects, new editors be directed to dead talkpages where their questions will go unanswered, and consequently frustrate them even further. The existing system—in which new editors edit an article in which they're interested, and consequently come to the attention of other editors with an interest in that topic who engage with them as to what they're doing right and wrong, all the while being nudged towards The Wikipedia Adventure to get a feel for how the technical aspects of Wikipedia work without causing a nuisance by experimenting in the mainspace—isn't some arbitrary system we've made up from whole cloth, but the project of two decades of evolution and experimentation regarding what works and what doesn't. ‑ Iridescent 08:01, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

I think introducing new people to wiki projects isn’t a great idea. Introducing new people to experienced people is a good idea. Sending someone to a project is pot luck. Taking the time to introduce them to a person who made the most recent few edits to their area of interest (or the closest fit possible) is probably better, and that’s what I’ve been suggesting. I agree with you about some of the passers-by at ER. I’ve seen some grumbles in the short time I’ve been there. I however, think its quite a good idea to think in the direction of strengthening new users - so at least there’s one new person there to join those who take it seriously. Regarding your thoughts on marketing data, you’ve certainly highlighted some pitfalls. In a project with no deadline however, I think its worth exploring further, if perhaps more tentatively. Edaham (talk) 15:30, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

As the "caretaker" at WP:WER I like to roam around and search out comments that may be helpful to discussions that are ongoing at WER. As an off-shoot to one of those discussions, User:Edaham presented an idea that may have potential. He briefly mentions it above and it is in the very genesis stage. I wonder if I might "cherrypick" some of the discussion above as they relate to Edaham's idea and incorporate them at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Editor Retention#Discussion about a New WER Welcome. Also, mostly all of the kvetching done at WER is not by members since most members are no longer active participants in the project. The remaining few do what we can to steer discussions toward a purpose beyond complaining. ―Buster7 ☎ 17:26, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Slightly adjacently, you going to run out of Eddies sooner rather than later  :) although that does somewhat tie in with Iridescent's point about a dislocation between the number of editors / and the number actually participating I suppose. ——SerialNumber54129 17:52, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Yes, of course. I don't mean to denigrate people like you and Dennis, who are genuinely trying to help, but I think it's reasonable to say that the drive-by attention-seekers posting variations of "if Wikipedia continues claiming that there's no evidence to support my crank theory I'm going to resign, you're the Editor Retention project so if you don't force everyone else to do what I say you'll have failed in your duty" gives a false impression that the project's much more active than it is.

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month

The number, and viciousness, of internal squabbles is a fraction of what it once was, and the decline in editor numbers has ended (see right). Despite the WMF's sky-is-falling hyperbole—which is based more on Jimmy Wales's crackpot Civilination project and his determination to 'prove' that Wikipedia is a hostile environment so he can justify spending donor funds trying to solve the alleged problem, than on any objective evidence of problems—Wikipedia is fairly calm compared to the Sue Gardner/Lila Tretikov era when there was a genuine possibility of open civil war and forking.

The primary driver of editor retention problems nowadays isn't the nature of community interactions, but that improved writing standards and more complicated formatting have made the learning curve much steeper than it used to be. VisualEditor was supposed to address this, but the disastrous mess the WMF made of the launch alienated most of the existing editor base who consequently refused to adopt it, and as a consequence we now have a two-tier community of pre-VE editors who see Wikipedia in terms of markup, and post-VE editors who see Wikipedia in terms of text, talking past each other and getting annoyed with each other because neither group understands the other; in addition, because VE editors find the back-office areas (which still function in wikitext) hard to engage with other than by means of automated tools, they're de facto ineligible for adminship as they find it hard to demonstrate experience in admin areas, cementing the gerontocracy of the 2006–08 intake. (The WMF is aware of all these issues, but after the Flow, MediaViewer, Superprotect and VE debacles they're not likely to attempt to impose another cultural change by technical means without community consensus, and whenever the community are given the opportunity to state their priorities they remain stubbornly wedded to bikeshedding and deckchair-arranging, probably because the WMF's "everyone is equal" mantra gives equal weight to the views of people from tiny moribund projects as it does to people from the big Wikipedias and from Commons.) ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Don't worry; those of us still trying to shepherd the formation of new ideas are well aware the project is essentially moribund. I have to take care not to be overly pessimistic and quash newcomers, while at the same time trying to prepare them to not be disappointed if their proposals don't progress the way they had hoped. Although I'd state the underlying problem differently than you—I'd say that continued growth in the number of new editors is more likely to come from those who aren't interested in using wiki text—the net conclusion is the same as you stated: the wiki text editor is a barrier. And supposed consensus-based decision-making traditions stalemate change, since a small number of vocal editors can dissipate focus and prevent agreement. The editor retention project can't address the real systemic issues, but I hope it may be able to find some small ways to encourage editors. isaacl (talk) 19:31, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

And the upset editors are fun, as we get upset editors complaining that the project isn't stopping other upset editors from making their invalid complaints on the project talk page. isaacl (talk) 19:36, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

I think we're on the same page; I'd agree that the wikitext editor is a huge barrier, and in an ideal world it wouldn't exist. Unfortunately, even when VE is working perfectly—which will probably be some time around the year 2168—it will still be fundamentally incompatible with wikitext, as even when it's outputting material that looks fine the underlying code it generates looks like a soup of markup codes. (Moving files from a WYSIWYG word processor like MS Word into a code-based application like the old WordPerfect had exactly the same issue.) In the very long term, we should probably be thinking about the feasibility of getting rid of wikitext markup entirely, but I can't imagine there ever being a consensus for that. In my experience, the other huge barrier is that the minimum standards are higher; back when this was a "good article" new and newish editors could start writing and not worry about getting the formatting and referencing right provided they weren't completely screwing up, but nowadays we jump on editors for not including references or for getting the formatting wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't be doing that—making sure editors learn early on that verifiability is non-negotiable is important—but it must be fairly dispiriting for someone who's always prided themselves on their writing skills to be slapped down by an anonymous stranger on the internet for failing to comply with some arbitrary rule in WP:MOS. ‑ Iridescent 20:08, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

As most of you must know, Dennis is retired. He makes a visit every now and then but we can't convince him to stay. isaacl and I do what we can to keep the doors open and the place relatively tidy. All are welcome. Drop in. Nominate someone for an Editor of the Week award. ―Buster7 ☎ 23:41, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

If you want a serious albeit possibly contentious proposal, monitor WP:RFA for people who are being shot down in flames but aren't obvious NOTNOW cases. Assuming most of these people go into the process assuming they'll pass, it must be a fairly rude awakening to discover that the majority of your peers consider you either untrustworthy or incompetent. The same could also be said for people who are having their work ripped to shreds at WP:GAN/WP:FAC. "You know that thing you're really proud of and worked really hard on? We think it's crap" is always going to hurt, regardless of how many polite words it's dressed up with, and some of the regular reviewers aren't known for sugar-coating at the best of times. ‑ Iridescent 00:38, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

I agree that the referencing in wiki markup is a problem. My articles use the {{sfn}} system - save for some older creations such as Coropuna - and I don't recall a single newby or inexperienced user getting it right when they try to edit them. Not one. Even an admin had recently difficulties on one of my articles. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:54, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

See #VE and referencing in the megathread above. Because VisualEditor can't handle {{sfn}}, and we (probably correctly) push new editors towards VE rather than inflict wikitext on them from the outset, new editors can't get it right when they try to edit them, even if they wanted to. As I may have mentioned once or twice, I strongly believe the benefits of introducing a single citation format would be worth the significant hassle its introduction would cause; whatever system we came up with we'd get used to it fairly quickly, and we'd no longer need to have the "oh don't be put off by our having 2000 citation styles, you're only expected to be familiar with the twenty or so that are in common usage" discussion, which invariably makes Wikipedia look ridiculous. ‑ Iridescent 21:05, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't see the community ever having a consensus to deprecate Harvard-style referencing. When you have lots of references to a few books and want to attribute page numbers to your citations, it's clearly better. When most of the references are to web pages, it's clearly worse. It might be possible to get down to those two options, though. Of course, even doing that would piss off a lot of editors who have maintained their sacred cows of reference styles for years. power~enwiki (π, ν) 21:28, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

• AIUI, the WMF's position is that, on a scale of decades, we cannot have healthy content in the absence of a community to maintain it. "Threats to community health" should be understood as "Things that might result in Wikipedia being useless or worse once all of us are listed at WP:OBIT" (or permabanned, because a third of us will eventually develop dementia, which is ultimately incompatible with editing).
• In re "a sample of just 251 people", I believe that this work is largely being overseen by someone whose election to ArbCom is listed in the subpages at WP:200 – a page that appears to exist because this community thinks that having 200 self-selected editors support anything is significant.
• As for the opinions they expressed, it doesn't necessarily matter whether biographies of women are scrutinized more thoroughly than biographies of men. In some respects, it only matters that some editors believe that they are. People who believe that, in practice, a BLP about a businessman requires three decent sources to avoid deletion, and that the same article about a businesswoman requires five to avoid deletion, will not submit articles about women for whom only three decent sources can be located. I believe that this has been the experience of many of the regular participants at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:02, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

"Someone whose election to ArbCom is listed in the subpages at WP:200" and a tenner will get you a pack of fags. The community most certainly does not think that having 200 self-selected editors support anything is significant, the handful of people who update that page think it's significant. (Of the twelve successful RFAs in the past year, eight had over 200 supports, and RFA has always had a much lower participation base than Arbcom elections.) The page in question doesn't list its authors, so I can only guess who the "someone whose election to ArbCom is listed in the subpages at WP:200" was, but assuming it's FloNight—who got 205 supports ( FloNight's last 500 mainspace edits stretch back two years and I see no particular reason why the opinions of someone who's almost completely disengaged from Wikipedia should be given any kind of special attention)—I'll point out that if you're genuinely impressed by such things I got 465 supports in an Arbcom election, and I don't see the WMF rushing to add me to the payroll. (This was back in pre-mass-mailing days when such a level was actually unusual; nowadays every single candidate—including the one who was in the process of being desysopped for gross incompetence while the election was taking place and the candidate who was running on a platform entirely based around pies—got over 400 supports.) Even if you do as Wikipedia:Times that 200 Wikipedians supported an ArbCom candidate does and limit it to old-timers, the 200 club contains some of Wikipedia's most notorious cranks and weirdos.

Regarding it doesn't necessarily matter whether biographies of women are scrutinized more thoroughly than biographies of men. In some respects, it only matters that some editors believe that they are, I don't believe this and to be honest I don't believe you believe it either. People make up all kind of shit, and people believe all kinds of shit, but we go by data not speculation. There's an equally if not more prevalent opinion that Wikipedia is dominated by a left-wing elite; it doesn't mean we explicitly go out of our way to loosen the standards for people writing about right-wing perspectives. People can believe that, in practice, a BLP about a businessman requires three decent sources to avoid deletion, and that the same article about a businesswoman requires five to avoid deletion all they like, but if they can't provide any examples of this actually happening we shouldn't be taking them any more seriously than the people who complain that we deleted the autobiography of their garage band but haven't deleted The Skids. ‑ Iridescent 20:11, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't know if you see it the same way I do, but I see these as "examples of this actually happening": Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Clarice Phelps, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cody Claver. They're both trending keep, but one has way more sources/notability than the other, and one is under much more scrutiny than the other (IMO). ^Leviv_ich 21:08, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Women explains why one of them has more participation than the other. It's probably the most closely watched deletion list. FWIW, I'd like to see the statistics, but because of projects like WiR and the delsort list, I my gut instinct is that it is actually harder to delete an article on a female biographical subject than a male biographical subject because there is a conscious effort to try to fix the problem of underrepresentation (not saying that is a bad thing.)

The larger issue is that there are less articles being created on notable female subjects than there should be. On that front, you can also go into things such as the fact that our authors write on what interests them.

For example, my main space work is largely 19th century Canadian educators and things related to dead Catholic clerics. The latter are all male by definition, and the former is overwhelmingly male. Even if I were to make a conscious effort to try to increase coverage in these areas, it would be extraordinarily difficult. When you're dealing with a volunteer worker population, these are problems that you are going to have, and solving them is difficult. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:20, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

No, Tony, it isn't a problem. The project is supposed to reflect reality and the reality is that there are vastly more notable men than women, for reasons related to history. That is why a recent proposal was made to relax the notability requirements for women, fundamentally in an attempt to rewrite history and falsify a balance. I'm sorry but it isn't a bandwagon I am prepared to jump on because it is social engineering. - Sitush (talk) 21:26, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree with a lot of what you said, and you’d never find me supporting lowering the notability criteria. What I was trying to convey was that there likely are a significant number of women who meet our guidelines for inclusion but haven’t been written on, in part because sources are often harder to find if they do exist and in part because the generic Wikipedia editor tends to focus on subjects or eras that are male dominated. I think recognizing that we have a blind spot there is fine, but I also don’t think we should overreact by changing notability guidelines, etc. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:44, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I've seen the other way, that (excluding sports, where borderline cases tend to follow SNGs) biographies of women generally get less scrutiny. It's possible that WP:NFOOTY impacts enough biographies to sway the overall stats. The arguments to keep for Clarice Phelps are egregiously WP:ILIKEIT - if She's exactly the sort of STEM role model we need and notability ... is not a policy are the best arguments to keep the article, perhaps it should be deleted. There doesn't seem to be any claim that she had an important or well-documented role in the "discovery of element 117". power~enwiki (π, ν) 21:28, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@power~enwiki, I'd argue that even when it comes to the notorious WP:NFOOTY—probably the poster child for a problematic notability guideline—the whole "if they played in a professional league, they're inherently notable" thing actually causes systemic bias towards female biographies. The argument for the guideline is that football is so high-profile a sport, that anyone who's had any kind of pro career, even for lower league teams, can reasonably be assumed to have been the subject of significant media coverage, even if we don't currently have those sources. This is a defensible position when it comes to the men's game—even benchwarmers who rarely actually play tend to have been written about somewhere, and one can reasonably say that the occasional edge case who slips through is a price worth paying to avoid litigating the notability of 100,000+ biographies of minor figures separately each time. It's not one can say about the women's game; for whatever reason, no matter how much publicity gets thrown at the women's game it's stubbornly failed to capture the public imagination, and the media tends not to even recognise its existence. (In England—the country where the footballing authorities have arguable done the most to try to promote the women's game—the winners of the men's FA Cup pocket £3.6 million; the winners of the women's FA Cup get £25,000; as with all sporting contests, the prize money is a direct reflection of TV revenue and as such a direct reflection of public interest.) However, we stubbornly apply WP:NFOOTY, meaning we continue to host biographies such as Bonnie Horwood and Emily Simpkins where the most the sources do is demonstrate that the people in question exist. ‑ Iridescent 20:17, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

I think in the context of football biographies. NFOOTY may not be biased against female biographies, but what it allows people to do is rapdily and semi-automatedly create sub-stubs on footballers - 95% or more of whom are men - which when the overall proportion of male biographies is ~83% is going to bias all of Wikipedia to have more male biographies, simply because it is easier to create a biography on someone who played one match for Micronesia than a more notable woman for which one has to actually find the coverage for the article to survive AfD. Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:48, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

That's an interesting point. The imbalance in the notability guidelines does seem to contribute to the article gender gap because so many male athletes (hundreds of thousands apparently) have a stub. I got a kick out of Oak Ridge tweeting Phelps's profile a few hours after the AfD was closed. Leviv ich 20:25, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

The imbalance is probably more an artefact of the systemic imbalance of history. Given that for most of history in most cultures, many professions were completely closed to women—most importantly from Wikipedia's point of view politics, visual arts, sports, the military and engineering/architecture, as those are all fields with a high churn rate at the top of the profession and consequently a higher rate of people being notable in Wikipedia terms—complaining that the historical record in Europe, China, the Islamic world and the Americas—which between them constitute the bulk of Wikipedia—overrepresents men is like complaining that History of France overrepresents the French. Even the ODNB—which does explicitly have lower notability standards for women in an effort to address the gender gap—has a lower percentage of female biographies than do we. ‑ Iridescent 11:11, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

"I don't believe this and to be honest I don't believe you believe it either."

If it weren't true, then Bess Adams wouldn't be a redlink. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:42, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Give me a clue who Bess Adams is or I can't judge whether your point is valid; Wikipedia has never had an article by that title, and Googling "bess adams" doesn't throw up anything obvious. If the sources don't exist, then by definition the name on Wikipedia will be a redlink since we exist only to reflect the sources. ‑ Iridescent 10:54, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

• As a follow-up to the above discussion, editors may be interested in Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)#Proposal - NFOOTY#2 - raising the bar and Wikipedia talk:Notability (people)#PORNBIO. Leviv ich 01:10, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

• That's a windmill it's not worth your while tilting at. Any attempt to rein in the wilder excesses of the Special Notability Guidelines will inevitably fail, since the "but my pet topic is so damn important the usual notability rules shouldn't apply" block votes, combined with the surviving "anything that can be proven to exist should have an article" ARS-holes canvassing each other, means the best you can ever hope for is "no consensus" in which case the status quo remains. It will take the ever-rising article-to-patroller ratio leading to another Siegenthaler incident, and the WMF overreacting and enforcing stricter inclusion criteria as an office action, before you'll be able to get anything significant changed when it comes to the topic of Wikipedia's bloat.* Witness how many people who should know better are automatically assuming that when it comes to the gender gap, the only question is "how do we get more biographies of marginally notable women?", not "why do we need all these biographies on marginally notable men?". ‑ Iridescent 12:13, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
  *Or the much considered but never actually happening formal split of Wikipedia into separate "quality over quantity" and "every grain of sand on the beach" sites. Don't hold your breath for that; Wikipedians have been trying that literally since before Wikipedia existed—the Nupedia/Wikipedia schism happened before Wikipedia went live—and the "enforce minimum standards" site is inevitably the one that fails, as the learning curve for new editors is steeper and the broader scope of Wikipedia's "occasional flowers growing in the sewer" model means it's always larger and consequently appears at the top of the search results. ‑ Iridescent 12:19, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Bike Shedding and Deck Chair arranging

Where do you get all these idioms? How can I have got through life missing all these. Thanks for armchair quarterback by the way. Edaham (talk) 10:34, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

From the articles we have that discuss these idioms, perhaps? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:21, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Yep, "see also", Law of triviality. ——SerialNumber54129 17:28, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Beautiful story about an an animator at Interplay Entertainment working on the game battle chess. I'm surprised the term "pet ducking" hasn't come about, since it has a nice pun built in around the idea of ducking a pointless redrafting, by including a readily apparent and easy to fix blunder. Edaham (talk) 02:35, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

"Armchair quarterback" entered the language in the 1950s, and is now standard idiomatic English, gradually replacing the earlier equivalent "armchair general"and "armchair critic" which have been idiomatic English since the 19th century; I would imagine its rise correlates pretty much exactly to the spread of televised football. ("A person who thinks he knows how to direct affairs in which he is not taking part. In a similar sense one talks of “back-seat drivers.” has been the definition in Brewer's since at least the 1920s.) Variations on "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" first appeared in the 1970s and again have become a standard enough part of English that "Titanic" is now implicit. "Bike-shedding" is a slightly more niche term, and is used primarily when discussing collaborative decision-making by people with varying degrees of competence in the field in which their decisions are being made; however, Wikipedia is one of the canonical examples of collaborative decision-making in which the decision-makers have varying levels of competence and experience regarding the topics on which they're making decisions, and as such the phrase is firmly embedded within our own idiolect. "Duck feature" is indeed a term used by programmers for exactly this kind of intentionally unnecessary sacrificial software feature (the notion that it originated with Battle Chess is entire apocryphal). ‑ Iridescent 15:23, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Here's a reasonable little talk about C. Northcote Parkinson and "bikeshedding": [1] Martinevans123 (talk) 15:32, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

For ye fellow lovers of Jimmy Wales

Talk:Mark_Dice#YouTube_subscriber_count might be interesting also apparently today is "mess with the ledes of controversial American political figures" week for him [2]. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:42, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

First I've heard of either person. Guess I just have little time for crazy white men. *shrugs* ceranthor 21:56, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) How often does this happen? ^Leviv_ich 23:47, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

He doesn't interfere in the BLPs of his minor-celebrity cronies as often as he used to since the Rachel Marsden farce, but it still happens more often than it should. (IMO, this is mainly because he's finally developed the self-awareness that any other editor who displayed his level of incompetence would have long since been site-banned, so he tends to stay out of article space altogether.) The most notorious recent case was probably his unilateral over-ruling of this RFC because he "thought it would be fun", although in terms of disregard for policy this was probably even more blatant. In my experience the problem with his editing isn't so much him trying to push a POV, as that he meets people at showbiz parties and makes rash promises to clean up the articles on them. ‑ Iridescent 2 00:41, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

The best way to emphasize that I have no special editorial power is for me to engage in ordinary editing. And to the extent that my editing has a higher degree of influence than that of some others, this is also a very good thing. You can’t make this up. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:05, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm glad it isn't just me who thinks Jimmy lacks the necessary level of competence to be editing BLPs (or indeed, Wikipedia in general). Nick (talk) 14:16, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

I hate you, TonyBallioni. I came to this page purely for the purpose of posting exactly that quote. Bishonen | talk 15:41, 1 February 2019 (UTC).

We're all picking up on the same words. As I've recently intimated on the Dice talk page, he needs at least a ban from BLPs. I'm not sure that voluntary would work, and I'm not sure what effect it would have on his own talk page activities because I don't look there, but this arrogant, incompetent bullying and even editing has to stop. That he dresses it up in nice words and has slavish followers here calling him "Mr Wales" makes no difference: fine words butter no parsnips (explanation [here for those unfamiliar with the phrase). - Sitush (talk) 16:46, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

​​​​Thinking about it, sending Jimmy off to spend more time with his money would be more trouble than it's worth unless he does something so egregious that the board steps in to stop him bringing Wikipedia into disrepute. (Since this didn't do it for them, I'm not sure if anything would.) It's probably reasonable to assume that he's too arrogant to accept any kind of voluntary restriction. (Yes, I know he accepted a voluntary restriction on the use of admin tools, but that was very much a last-ditch effort to avoid being defenestrated altogether, and the present-day community is far less bolshy.) Given that he can rely on a clique of sycophants and a payroll vote of WMF staffers and high-profile editors who've been bribed to support the WMF position no matter how perverse it is recipients of "research grants", any community based process is going to result in "no consensus".

Consequently, the only mechanism by which he can be removed is WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Role of Jimmy Wales. However, that puts the decision in the hands of a few people who are susceptible to pressure; if such a case were ever filed, you can expect the arbs and parties would all receive midnight phone calls pointing out that Jimmy being banned from the website of which he's the public face would be news, that while the WMF has firm rules about doxxing external media aren't bound by them, and that such is the love of the WMF staff for the Great Helmsman that they can't guarantee that their staff won't be so seized by righteous anger that they leak the names and addresses of anyone who posts or votes against Jimmy. (When it comes to apostates, the WMF has a long history of this kind of back-channel nudging, winking, offers-you-can't-refuse and suggestions that jumping is better than being pushed; I'll take the opportunity to add another plug for GorillaWarfare's Wikimedia timeline of events, 2014–2016 as a case study of how the foundation operates when it turns on its own.) Given that the committee buckled when push came to shove on the matter of the relatively obscure PotW, I think that when it came to sanctioning the highest-profile editor in Wikipedia's history the committee would almost certainly blink first. ‑ Iridescent 2 09:18, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes. A site ban is out of the question, (though, if the media ever cared enough to look through Jimmy’s contributions, that Larson edit might make headlines and force board action... white washing the lede of a white-supremicist who made a threat on the life of the POTUS and who wants to decriminalize child sex abuse based on the request from an IP on his talk page is beyond “questionable”)

A BLP ban would be somewhat easier than the case you laid out WP:AC/DS exist and while it would be a mess of a controversy, getting it overturned would be fairly hard at a noticeboard, and I doubt the Ordinary Editor with Great Influence would want a case request because all of his mistakes would be on display for the media. It’d still be a hot mess, though. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:01, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

(unlurks) Discretionary sanctions would be the way to go if you want a low-drama way of solving an immediate problem. A community discussion would never come to a consensus, because it's not necessry for participants to know what they're talking about or to do anything other than toe the party line of adherents and detractors. An arbitration caase would be less of a shitsshow, but you haven't got a good enough casus belli to get ArbCom to accept the case. But DS, by design, are easy to impose (one uninvolved admin noticing a problem and deciding to act on it) and not easy to overturn. Of course, if you actually want to force the issue with a constitutional crisis, an RfC or arbitration request would certainly accomplish that, if nothing else. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 17:26, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

@HJ Mitchell: I agree. That's why I gave him the DS alerts. Bishonen | talk 17:33, 2 February 2019 (UTC).

When I think "admin imposes sanction against Jimmy" I certainly don't think of "low-drama" - I think of a 20 heading sprawling ANI thread from hell (where people propose everything from repealing AC/DS (irregardless of the fact that doing so is, of course, only up to the committee) to desyopping the admin imposing the sanction to banning Jimmy), finally ending when someone files an WP:ARC request against the admin imposing the sanction (because remember, even if the Ordinary Editor with Great Influence doesn't want a case request, other people can file one), plus discussion on meta regarding it, and probably some media coverage which would occur even if Mr. Ordinary Editor doesn't contest the sanction in any way. I actually don't think that's exaggerated in any way, because even if no media picks it up, there's twitter, and just it being the talk of the 'pedia/wikimedia would be enough to cause a massive amount of drama.

There would basically be no way to impose a sanction against Jimmy without a case request being filed at the very least (because anyone can file a case request, there will always be at-least one person who will do so). Though I agree that a DS sanction actually could stick if done properly and with a careful reasoning (I imagine the committee being very reluctant to overturn the sanction - they may be able to get away somewhat with boilerplate "admin discretion" comments - unless it was poorly done), but not without accompanying drama. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:27, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Anyone up for enacting that Nike slogan? - Sitush (talk) 18:31, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

If an admin had good cause and enacted a fairly narrowly scoped ban, I don't think there would be be quite that much drama, as long as procedure was properly followed and the admin properly explained themselves (and assuming of course that they have diffs, post-dating Bish's notificaation). It's the same with any enforcement action: if you can show poor conduct, preferably a pattern of it, preferably followin warnings, and the sanction is procedurally correct and proportional to the problem it seeks to address, the sanctionee really has nowhere to go. Somebody could start a broader discussion about the role of the founder or discretionary sanctions, but there are only three ways to overturn a discretionary sanction (other than the enforcing admin changing their mind): consensus of uninvolved admins at AE, clear consensus of uninvolved editors at AN, or successful appeal to ArbCom. If the admin had cause and followed procedure correctly, ArbCom won't touch it (for better or worse, they only consider whether it's a reasonable use of admin discretion); AE will side with the admin (because they wouldn't want sanctions they'd imposed overturned just because the editor is a VIP™); and AN will turn into an almighty shitstorm 20 pages long and so dense that no clear consensus could possibly emerge from it). Meanwhile there'll be the usual pitched battles between the sycophants and detractors on his talk page, with people calling for Jimmy to give up his postion and others calling for the admin's head but nothing ever comes from discussions there anyway. That's assuming he decides to appeal it; he has sensible people whispering in his ear—whether he listens to them is a different matter. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:55, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Jimmy may well have sensible people whispering in one ear, sadly it's the people who are whispering in his other ear that are the root cause of this smallish clusterfuck (and pretty much all the other clusterfucks Jimmy has managed to generate). If a DS based ban was to be enacted, it would need to explicitly ban Jimmy from editing the biographies of anybody he has had prior contact with, either online or in person. That would actually benefit Jimmy and should be begrudgingly appreciated by his sycophantic followers, as it could prevent 'famous' people from making contact with and using Jimmy solely to get the co-founder of Wikipedia to beautify their biographies. Nick (talk) 20:21, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Those of us who are privileged to volunteer at OTRS and #wikipedia-en-help are counseled not to make edits on supplicants' behalf, but instead to give them advice on how to contribute productively to the encyclopedia. In my experience this has been helpful advice, and I expect it would be better for the project if Jimmy followed the same. Bradv🍁 20:34, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

@Galobtter and HJ Mitchell: I agree with Harry’s analysis here, the next time Jimmy makes an mistake with regards to BLPs (which he will within the next year) because of the over a decade of examples of him abusing his position to let his friends and/or assorted nutjobs with larger Twitter followings than him write their own biographies in violation of NPOV and a host of other policies, a full BLP ban would never be overturned at AE or AN.

It would also never go to ArbCom because Jimmy would realize that when the Washington Post realized he was whitewashing the biography of Nathan Larson, someone in their backyard, it would result in at least two headlines (one when they became aware of the case, and one when it inevitably ended with him agreeing to an arb enforced BLP ban.) This diff would be present in any case as it’s pronably the most significant recent diff. Then you’d have all the other assorted diffs of him doing crazy stuff on BLP articles that would be on display for the entire media to analyze in their articles. He’d realize that his cocktail party circles are more valuable to him than his ability to edit BLPs but having no minor-celebrity friend-BLPs to edit. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:58, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

I think the only way to know is if it happens, but I feel like both you and HJ are assuming too much rationality and sanity (from everyone) than can be safely assumed. Does he even realize how the edit to Nathan Larson would be viewed as "whitewashing" and not "enforcing BLP"? I feel like if he did, he wouldn't have made that edit. Then again, self-interest can make everyone see clarity, and Jimbo does subscribe to the the "rational self-interest" philosophy. Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:39, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

That. Never underestimate how worked up Wikipedians can get about even the most trivial things; if someone did try to impose sanctions on Jimmy and he contested them—or just announced he was going to ignore them—it would more than likely lead to a full scale crisis. Within his next half-dozen mainspace edits he'll almost certainly breach the discretionary sanctions of which he's now been notified. The pool of admins who relish being pilloried in the media as Wikipedia's regicide is limited at best, and even if he is blocked the chances of him just unblocking himself—or of one of his sycophants unblocking him—is very high, and that would force everyone to take sides and usher in a week of chaos and wheel-warring between royalists and republicans. ‑ Iridescent 2 16:28, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

That outcome could be seen as somewhat ironic, given the latest issue (Dice) is arguably about someone who is a "disruptor". - Sitush (talk) 16:42, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Fwiw, I can think of a certain German admin who would have no problem applying escalating AE blocks for every mention of a BLP on his talk page if there was a TBAN... TonyBallioni (talk) 17:41, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Ha, I had the exact same thought re enforcement - I was thinking, if there is a TBAN, who exactly would be willing to enforce it and block Jimbo .. ah. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:57, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Really shows that he thinks "ordinary editing" is puffing up biographies based on twitter requests. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:49, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Rachel Marsden farce Oh wow "Let's actually do this right now because the last thing I want to do is take a break from fucking your brains out all night to work on your Wikipedia entry :)" Mr. Wales wrote. Certainly couldn't make that up either. That adds some context for me; seems like he does more than "meet" the minor celebrities. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:49, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Just gonna put Jimmy's full contribution history here, and see if anyone else can spot the "power-dressing uptight young women who are attractive if you like that kind of thing in a Lydia from Breaking Bad kind of way", "washed up minor celebrities, particularly those with some kind of connection to the moral cesspit that is Tony Blair" and "settling decade-old scores" triple themes. (Since it's well-established that deliberately editing articles likely to be of interest to other editors in an effort to unsettle them and to send the message that they're being watched constitutes blockable harassment, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a plausible good-faith explanation for Jimmy's apparent interest in the ultra-obscure local Utah radio station KOHS.) ‑ Iridescent 2 20:27, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Wow, I must add your talk page to my watchlist, I never realised it was so interesting. Funny but true story about Ayn Rand. In what feels like a previous lifetime I was an undergraduate at Yale. This was probably my 2nd year so I was 18. I was in an odd freshman/sophomore stream based around integrating courses and my philosophy course had invited Rand to lecture in a large lecture hall. I was sitting beside our the tutor for our tutorial group, a grad student. I was bored out of my mind and took what might have been a leaflet about the talk, made a paper airplane and tossed it. My tutor just grinned at me. Anyone who takes Rand seriously is not to be trusted. Doug Weller talk 13:58, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I recall reading Atlas Shrugged, which was a fairly hellish experience but it's always beneficial to read widely as well as deeply. On completion, it was less of a shrug then a shaking of the head from me. She's very influential among whacko libertarian circles, though - past long-running edit wars here on subjects such as the Mises Institute have often had her at their heart. I've always struggled to see what the attraction is, but perhaps that is because I am one of those people who would probably not even exist if its ruled the world (it's not a philosophy that is particularly helpful to disabled people - nightmarish, in fact). - Sitush (talk) 14:42, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Heh. - Sitush (talk) 14:47, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Something that sometimes gets lost in general coverage of Wikipedia, which tends to treat Wikimedia in general and en-wiki in particular as some kind of well-intentioned giant hippie commune, is just how loopy its founders were. Nupedia (and consequently Wikipedia) were created not as some kind of idealism about shared knowledge but as an attempt to boost traffic to Jimmy's low-quality porn site. (This is what Bomis looked like, for anyone who's not aware, and if you think I'm cherry-picking here's their front page on the day Wikipedia was launched to the public.) The "all work together for the common good" ethos ultimately came not from some kind of "from each according to his ability" idealism, but squarely from Jimmy's "the gubmint's a comin' to tek mah guns" Randroid/ultralibertarian dingbattery—his earliest edits are eye-opening.

Incidentally this page on Nostalgiawiki, written before Jimmy and his supporters started to rewrite history, is well worth a read. ‑ Iridescent 2 16:20, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Wow:

...it would be astounding to discover that NRA members murder people with guns more often than non-NRA members. The demographics of murders (the vast majority of which have prior criminal records) and NRA members are wildly different. The vast majority of serious criminological research supports exactly the opposite conclusion from your other hypothesis, too: having guns easily available in a community has no correlation with crime in that community, and in fact, laws which have liberalized concealed carry have been shown to significantly reduce crime...One big difference between pro-gun people and anti-gun people is that pro-gun people tend to be much more involved with the issue, and to therefore have all the facts and figures at their quick disposal.

[3] ^Leviv_ich 16:45, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I'll see you that, and raise you this, which manages to combine spamming his own website, questionable notability (her notability derives from a 2002 appearance on Howard Stern, which at the time was yet to happen) and an unsourced BLP. ‑ Iridescent 2 16:58, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

• Hands up everyone who has been banned from Jimbos talk page? Oh just me then.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:00, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

• #MeToo. His command of the English language wasn't good enough to appreciate that saying someone is hysterical is not necessarily a gendered attack. But it was going to happen sooner or later anyway because I'm from Manchester and therefore must be bad. - Sitush (talk) 20:11, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I have a lot to answer for in turning Manchester into some kind of den of the iniquitous, but I'll answer to a higher authority than Jimbo, that's for sure. Someone like the guy who empties my bins for instance. Eric Corbett 19:52, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

There are enough new faces here that it's probably worth reminding people that Jimmy once got on the stage at Wikimania and openly canvassed the attendees to hound you off Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 22:02, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

"Toxic personality" is a phrase I've only ever seen on Wikipedia. Strange how someone who doesn't know the first thing about me feels confident about analysing my personality and encouraging others to share in his analysis. Eric Corbett 00:58, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Jimmy can't really be blamed for that one; "toxic personalities" (and their spin-off, toxic workplaces) are staples of the American "anything bad that happens is someone else's fault, anything good that happens is because I deserve it" movement. Remember, among the California techies and English minor-public-school types who constitute Jimmy's social circle, all that New Age crap isn't as discredited as it is among the rest of us. ‑ Iridescent 09:28, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

I've definitively seen "toxic personality" on 2010 TV Tropes, so yeah.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:19, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

• Leviv and Iri... those diffs do not inspire much confidence... ceranthor 14:08, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

• In slight defense of the man, those diffs date from the time when Wikipedia was basically a glorified chat-room, and before it started appearing at the top of search results (and consequently, what was and wasn't appropriate wasn't so much of an issue); when he made his "more guns means fewer shootings" and "visit my porn site!" comments, Wikipedia had 202 registered accounts and 12,000 articles. What I certainly do feel is relevant is that his comments in the early days—before he knew people were watching him—show his true nature instead of the Saint Jimmy, Saviour of the Internet and Leader of the Civility Crusade persona he's been trying to project since c. 2005. (There were some very strange ultralibertarian cranks at the highest levels in Wikipedia's early days. I can't directly link as it would violate our policies on linking to inappropriate sites, but I can suggest you google the phrase If the child doesn’t want it, is neutral or ambiguous, it’s inappropriate.) ‑ Iridescent 12:44, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

• Hey, I wrote some stupid shit 20 years ago, too. The stuff I did was even worse. ^Leviv_ich 09:26, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

• Well yes, almost everyone did or believed something stupid when they were young, but you and I aren't publicly describing ourselves as being the public face of freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them (direct quote), or consistently avowing that we still hold true to the nutty positions we once toyed with (as Jimmy does with Rand), and trying to present ourselves as the last line of defense in the battle for free speech whilst simultaneously being the public face of this censor-anything-that-might-trigger-anyone bunch of whackadoodles. ‑ Iridescent 22:00, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

• Am I the only admin who has never even set eyes on Jimbo's talk page? -Ad Orientem (talk) 01:54, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
  • I avoid it as much as possible... Not on my watchlist, but poke around there on occasion. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:59, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

interesting thread. Are there scripts to parse and compile lists of Jimbo’s or other users posts by category? Edaham (talk) 05:30, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I don't know how one would even start going about that, since individual threads don't have any kind of metadata attached that would allow a bot to sort by categories. This bot will generate an index for talk page archives, but that's not very useful as the thread titles are rarely informative. If you genuinely have a "I wish I could find out every time cheese has been discussed on Jimmy's talk" query, your best bet is a straightforward prefix/keyword search (or just enter your search term in the "search talk archives" button in the archive-index box at the top of talk pages, which will construct the search query for you). Searching an editor's contribution history for mentions of a particular topic wherever that mention may be—as opposed to searching their talk page—is theoretically possible but would overwhelm the servers and probably get your IP banned by the Foundation as an emergency measure; if you wanted to do this routinely you'd need to query a database dump rather than the live wiki. (You can obviously do a keyword search for every time topic and username appear on the same page, but that will throw up a lot of false positives.)

I wouldn't bother looking at Jimmy's talk page expecting anything enlightening. It serves primarily as flypaper to trap problem users—one of the side-effects of Jimmy's "I invented Wikipedia!" lies is that those who are unfamiliar with Wikipedia take him seriously, and consequently hang around at his talkpage delighted to be conversing with such a genius, while those who are actually familiar with Jimmy tend to see him at best as Wikipedia's creepy drunken uncle at the christmas party who only escapes being thrown out into the cold through a sense of family obligation. (It's been said many times before but it's worth repeating; if any other editor were to display the levels of incompetence and arrogance as Jimmy, they'd have long since been banned as a textbook WP:NOTHERE case.) ‑ Iridescent 10:11, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I was thinking about article space eg: all posts BY USER / in MAIN SPACE / CONTAINING category:BLP for example

also when you write the word lies you can link it to this essay. I actually didn’t know that there was a code conduct, which covers general lying, but it’s my habit to select keywords from posts and prefix them with wp: just to see if there’s something written on it (there usually is) Edaham (talk) 13:20, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

That would definitely crash the servers, and wouldn't be allowed on the live wiki; as a concrete example I have 219,070 non-deleted mainspace edits, and I'm by no means among Wikipedia's most active editors. If you wanted to do such a thing you'd need to download the all-revisions database dump and work from that, but be aware that it takes up around 40 terabytes of disk space and you're looking at days, or even weeks, just to download the file. ‑ Iridescent 13:33, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Why would I want to link to an ancient personal essay? Don't treat the WP: prefix as some kind of totem; unless it has a "policy" or "guideline" box at the top, the stuff you find there has no more authority than any given editor's userpage. ‑ Iridescent 13:35, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

The whole policy-v-guideline-v-essay thing is super confusing. If you go to WP:V (a major policy), the second heading is "Role" and the {main} hatnote there points to Wikipedia:The difference between policies, guidelines and essays (an "explanatory supplement" which, as a {main} spin-off from a policy, falsely suggests it is, itself, a policy), which says: "Misconception #7: Policy pages outrank guidelines, which in turn outrank essays. This is actually true in some cases, but not always." It strikes me that that's true, because some essays are followed as if they were commandments (WP:DUCK, WP:DENY, and frankly many others). But how can it be after 18 years there still isn't clarity on whether a policy trumps an essay or not? Leviv ich 16:24, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Why wouldn't an explanatory supplement to a policy page also be policy? I note you reference DENY and DUCK...of recent interest, perhaps?! :p :D ——SerialNumber54129 16:32, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

That tool exists. See Jimmy's edits to BLPs. A link to someone's BLP edits is actually included in every PERM request (and RfA). (there's also a second tool specifically for BLPs that allows ignoring semi-automated edits). Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:03, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I thought it might! Many thanks. Re the essay link, I thought the irony was obvious Edaham (talk) 15:36, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I've actually been very (veeeeeeeery) slowly working on an offline took that would allow searching of the text of a user's contributions. I figured I could make it an online tool when I'm done. Sorting edits by categories (including arbitrary defined-at-runtime categories) was one of the intended uses. But to be honest; I'm kinda lazy when it comes to this stuff, and forgetful to boot. So if anyone here really wants that tool, all you gotta do is ride my ass about it for a couple weeks. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 15:52, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago

Awesome

Ten years!

--Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 00:04, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

... before I even joined ;) - Thank you, especially for this talk page! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:30, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

[4] ‑ Iridescent 21:51, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

But not [5]...?  ;) ——SerialNumber54129 19:58, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Page restore

Hello Iri! Could you (or anyone following here) please restore a very old page at User:SandyGeorgia/Chavez sources? Thanks! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:30, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: done Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:43, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you so much, Casliber. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:05, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Football clubs and spoofs

Not really related to the WP:FOOTY discussions elsewhere, but I have been assured that Streatham Rovers F.C. is a genuine football club. It is even mentioned on the page for Streatham in an addition made 2 years ago, so it 'must' be true... I am very sceptical (see the parody Twitter account and various articles), but then I realised I could ask here and you or others watching your talk page would be sure to know what is going on here. :-) Courtesy ping to User:Crookesmoor who added that information to the Streatham article. Carcharoth (talk) 14:52, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Conversation.

"Do you live in Streatham?"

"Yes"

"Are you a crackhead?"

"No"

"Tough shit man"

:) ——SerialNumber54129 15:08, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Hoax; the local teams for Streatham are Crystal Palace and Dulwich Hamlet. If you look at their alleged address on Google Maps it's clearly someone's house. Even if it did exist, it would be so obscure we wouldn't mention it; there are 20,000 pro and semi-pro teams in the English pyramid, 19,500 of which have no more notability than the local branch of Greggs. These plausible looking parody websites are a pain in the arse—Southend News Network is a particular problem as they look so convincing. (If you have a very long memory, you might remember the editor who insisted that Cooper Brown must be a genuine person because otherwise, why would he be writing in the newspaper?) ‑ Iridescent 16:50, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

In fact, screw it; Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cooper Brown. ‑ Iridescent 17:11, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

I like Southend News Network, but then I know it's taking the piss. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:16, 15 February 2019 (UTC)