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About: your eloquent summary of what does and does not improves this project

Hi DGG, or if I may be so bold, David,
You wrote at WP:AN/I Archive691: <block quote>There is more than one valid way of working here. Some people prefer to create only high quality articles, even though they may do very few of them. Some prefer to create many verifiable articles of clear notability even though they may not be of initially high quality. As this is a communal project, I think every individual person is fully entitled to do whichever they prefer, and the thing to do about people who prefer otherwise than oneself is to let them work their way, while you work yours. The only choice which is not productive is to argue about how to do it, rather than going ahead in the way that one finds suitable.</block quote> Many editors include a statement about their attitudes to editing on their user pages. I am not one of them, that is until I came across what you wrote. I would really like to include this on my user page. While I can add anything at all I like to my user page subject to WP:USER PAGE, I nevertheless ask for your permission to add the quote. OK with you? I'm fine if you decline this.
--Shirt58 (talk) 12:37, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Of course. DGG ( talk ) 21:04, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure I've seen you reference this essay

WP:TALKINGSOFASTNOBODYCANHEARYOU. Is my memory that faulty? I can't find it, and it's possible the syntax isn't precise. Did you use this a sort of irony? I seem to remember you used the link to represent bullying behaviors. I'm seeing one such user who seems to be wanting to turn the entire AfD process on its head by using such a technique. BusterD (talk) 11:48, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

I have sometimes used pseudo-links like these as a statement for their own sake, without writing an actual essay. I remember saying something like this, but I can't find it. I think this one was TALKINGSOMUCH... -- but I can't find it either. As for the problem, I've commented pretty extensively at AN/I: , and will comment at the RfC also, But please don't confuse the reasonable message, with which I am in agreement -- that Deletion Policy is overbalanced towards deletion, and one step towards rebalancing it would be to require some version of WP:BEFORE -- with the unreasonable way it is being over-expressed. DGG ( talk ) 23:23, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, David. I was a debater in school before "talking so fast" became the current style. I feel anything which games the system deserves appropriate response in order to keep the system sound. I appreciate your valid concern about deletion procedures being over-weighted toward one outcome. Thanks for your valuable comments in those forums. Be well. BusterD (talk) 23:37, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Ah yes, I had forgotten that context. And so was I, in college--a very valuable experience, especially in facilitating the sort of intercampus experiences only the athletic teams otherwise gave occasion for. But the stimulus is interesting: if I take a turn at NPP, the amount of junk turns me for a while into a deletionist before I catch myself and stop being so unfriendly to all the newcomers. If I take a look at AfD, the number of unwarranted nominations makes me want to give a similarly snappy and unjust response to all of them, with the less than rational thought that if I argue against all of them, maybe there's a chance the good ones will make it. Several good inclusionists have run into trouble here falling into such temptation. DGG ( talk ) 23:58, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

basic rules about professors

All full professors at major research universities have sufficiently demonstrated that they are recognized experts in their subject to meet WP:PROF,and that WP:PROF is an alternative to WP:GNG. This is not a formal rule, but almost all AfD have had this result, except in fields where people here have doubts about the rigor, such as Education. (Major: in the US, Research Extensive in the Carnegie Classification + schools of similar rank; elsewhere, similar level). The rationale for this is that this is the basis on which people are promoted to such rank at such universities, and their judgment is more reliable than ours.)

For those at lower level institutions, this is not automatic, and the judgment goes by individual cases; the rationale is that in such institutions people are often promoted to this rank based on lesser accomplishments or for other qualities than being a recognized expert in their subject.

For Associate professors, automatic notability is not generally accepted, but is determined case by case. AfD results vary, but imho are usually reasonable. Personally, I think it could be extended to them on similar grounds, but this has not had consensus. ("Associate" = the US rank, and corresponding ranks elsewhere)

For Assistant professors, and corresponding ranks outside the US, it similarly goes case by case, and almost all AfD results have been "not notable". I agree with this.

Additionally, in the humanities most full professors in the highest level universities-- ,-- have written two or more books that have reviews in RSs for notability, and thus meet WP:AUTHOR. In the very highest level universities, this applies to Associate professors also. In other fields, where tenure usually depends on articles, not books, this doesn't work as frequently, but it sometimes does. Similarly, in the fine arts, many people at various academic levels will qualify by WP:CREATIVE.

For that matter, if one argued on the basis of the GNG, we could find for almost anyone who has published one or more important papers that the 2 or more of the papers referencing them contain substantial discussions of their work. This would require examining the actual papers, as the mere fact of being cited does not necessarily or even usually mean there is substantial discussion of the work. If I really tried, I could probably find this for many people even at the post-doctoral level. As this result is contradictory to most people's intuitive feelings on the appropriate contents of an encyclopedia (as distinct from a faculty directory), it shows imo the uselessness of the GNG in this subject. Before the WP:PROF standard became accepted, I did use it when it matched my intuitive view. If we return to GNG-worship, I will go back to using it.

Where the GNG is used here appropriately , is for people at any level whose work happens to strike the fancy of newspaper writers. I don't consider most such people notable as academics, but since the public will read the news accounts and want some objective information, it's reasonable to have the articles here. (I have sometimes objected to isolated news accounts as being based on PR if it seems really counter-intuitive). DGG ( talk ) 17:39, Apr 24. 2012

Admin review

Which brings me to my pother point. When I was a new admin, I half expected someone would be assigned to follow me around for some time, just to make sure I was understanding the rules correctly. Either that didn't happen, or they were very, very quiet. (I'm even more surprised it isn't SOP at OTRS, but that’s a different issue.) I think we should have a more formal review system for new admins. I know there's the ability to check with someone else, but I'd like to see something more formal.

Having made my point, I'm not sure it belongs on the thread at this time, because my suggestion isn't going to help the problems that are being discussed at the moment, so maybe I'll think some more on it, and formalize a proposal later. Maybe after getting some thoughts from people like you.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 22:26, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

You are quite correct--I was oversimplifying. Sensible new admins do only the ones that are totally obvious while they are starting--it must be very discouraging to have people revert your first admin actions, and I've seen that happen. And it is true that I will make a point of checking speedy nominations others have thought it wise to pass by, and AfDs that people don't seem to want to close; I know some others do just the same, which is how we keep long lags from developing. But I had in mind also a few long term admins who actually do decide almost all equivocal cases as delete. To expand on what you have said , in a direction of my own,

I have occasionally checked a new admins deletions if I think from the RfA there is likely to be some problems, and I suppose others do similarly. But I do not know if any people systematically reviews the admin logs the way people do new pages--if anyone does, I've noticed no sign of it. The only thing I've seen checked systematically is the very long-standing page protections. It might be a good thing to do. The AfD closes are very visible, the prods have been checked by several people before they get to the top of the list, but speedies and blocks and unblocka and protections and unprotections don't get looked at, unless someone suspects a problem. I have sometimes thought of doing it, but I have always stopped, because, to be frank about it, I don't want to see the errors. I can't pass over a clear error I do see, and I am fully aware that some admins use the tools beyond the proper limits. Some of these are my friends, & I can mention it to them from time to time quietly. But for obvious reasons most of the ones I would disagree with are by people I often disagree with, with whom relations are often not all that friendly. I don't want to spend all my time quarreling and navigating sticky situations; though I may get the errors corrected, it is not likely to improve mutual relations. (I am also aware that I too make both errors and borderline interpretations, & I suppose I even sometimes interpret things the way I would like them to be, & if I have any enemies here, I do not really want to encourage them to audit me with the utmost possible rigidity. I expect I could be able to very well support my interpretations, but as Samuel Johnson put it, nobody however conscious of their innocence wants to every day have to defend themselves on a capital charge before a jury.

When I started here, I wondered how a system with a thousand equally powerful admins who could all revert each other could possibly exist. I soon learnt the subtleties of wheel warring--there were some major arb com cases on it during my first year here which pretty much defined the limits. But more important, I also learned that even the more quarrelsome spirits here understood the virtues of mutual forbearance--and that even the most self-sufficient people do not really want to look publicly foolish. Our balance is I think over-inclined to protecting the guilty if they are popular enough, but it is not as bad as it could be, or as it often is in human societies. DGG ( talk ) 03:25, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I smiled at your closing comment. I had the same, thought, although for the project as a whole, rather than just the admin function. I'm more recent to the project because, when I first heard about it, a few years before actually joining, I thought about the model and decided it couldn't possibly work. Oddly, I still feel that way, intellectually. If there were no such thing as Misplaced Pages, and I heard a proposal to create, my instinct is that it will fail miserably. I actually can't quite put my finger on why it hasn't failed.SPhilbrick(Talk) 12:52, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

"What DGG says"

David, that was great. Thanks! Drmies (talk) 20:03, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Deletion review response thank you / Tutoring newbies on how to do online research

I left a thank you for your response — and unrelated question(s) — here. Another thing that maybe we agree on is the importance of knowing how to do research. I really like Misplaced Pages's Search Engine usage guidelines and tutorial, and have tried to link to them from Misplaced Pages:Article titles — because I think it's important to research usage when deciding the best article title, best category title, or the most appropriate term to use — but my attempts to link to this have been repeatedly reverted by people who think they own anything related to the MoS. Likewise, for the same reason, I have been unable to add links from Misplaced Pages:Article titles to the regional MoS guides. The article on category naming conventions also does not explain how to search existing categories or link to the above article on how to use search engines to research the best category title, either. Maybe you have some advice or ideas on this? LittleBen (talk) 13:51, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

I discovered in my first year here that there were some parts of Misplaced Pages where despite my interest in the subject, for one or another reason I was unlikely to be very effective. Prominent among these were the MOS and categorization. I am a little concerned with article titles, and in that field, fundamentally I disagree with you -- I think the best article title should be the clearest and fairest, and counting ghits or the equivalent is usually irrelevant. And to the extent I understand categorization debates the problem there is often finding a sufficiently clear wording to encompass the desired set of article. I think the MOS is a little more rational than it was 4 years ago; if I were doing it, I'd limit to to pure matters of style, which does not include choice between article titles, just such matters as whether to use singular or plurals. But in questions like this , your opinion is as valid as mine, and there is no point in arguing the issue here--neither of us is "right". DGG ( talk ) 23:56, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

My main question was aimed at getting your opinion on "Tutoring newbies on how to do online research". You don't seem to have answered this, but maybe this is something that Kudpung is more interested in than you are. My comment on article titles was related to this: there seem to be many people creating new articles without adequately researching if there is an existing article on the subject already. Part of the problem is that Misplaced Pages Search, by default, only shows if there is an article title that is an exact match to the search term; it does not show if there is a category that matches the search term. If it did, it would be far easier to find related material. It is difficult to work out how to search categories. Terminology (e.g. article titles and category titles) is often inconsistent for this reason. Just one example: There are Web browser engine and List of web browser engines articles, but there are nine Comparison of layout engines (XXX) articles, and the category is Category:Layout engines. I don't understand your reference to counting ghits, and don't understand how my viewpoint disagrees with yours. LittleBen (talk) 02:25, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Incidentally, I got another response on the Deletion review thread that pointed me to a discussion here that may interest you. LittleBen (talk) 02:23, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I apologize for not covering everything. The WP search function is not the problem; if it does not find an article, it suggests searching for the term. Perhaps the page could be revised to suggest that first, rather than as an alternative to making an article. I think there has been some previous debate on whether it should initially search for the term rather than the article. I also have seen it said that by the standards of other search engines, it could use some sophistication. About 1/3 of people come here from Google etc., and though those search engines rank article titles at the top, they also include articles with the term anywhere. But the Google search engine is, deliberately, getting dumber and dumber; it is no longer possible to use the "+" character as an intersection, and Google Scholar has removed the limit to subject field possibility in advanced search.

Many apparently duplicate articles are created deliberately as a POV fork, others in the mistaken belief that WP includes essays on very specific term-paper type topics. Many are simply naive, as when someone submits a two sentence article on something where we have extensive coverage.

I think teaching people to search properly is a part of research, but the main result of its failure is not the duplicate articles, but the unreferenced articles. Way back when Google was new and exciting, we librarians used to impress the students by showing we could use it more effectively than they could. (The secret is partially cleverness and experience in selecting search terms, but mainly just persistence--something like 90% of users stop at the first page of results--I will if necessary scan through even a few thousand. I have found that people learn by experience better than didactic instruction, provided they are alert enough to pay attention to what experience shows them. Certainly we should do a better job teaching beginners, but the way I think works best is to show them one at a time how to do better. A person learns best when one individual person shows them how to fix their errors and misconceptions, and this is not done by templates. Besides Kudpung & myself, very few NPPatrollers or even admins take the trouble and patience. It's too much for a few people--we need everyone who is able to do it. We progress not by discussing how to work, but by working. DGG ( talk ) 03:38, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree that we progress not by discussing how to work, but by working. You seem to be better at that (more productive) than I am ;-) But sometimes it's more scalable if we offer others the opportunity of learning how to do the work (not specifically thinking of Tom Sawyer ;-). Thanks and best regards. LittleBen (talk) 04:23, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

FYI - user warnings

As suggested. :) I think our next step is making sure that the code is correct, and then we can start implementing. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:48, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. It was suggested by several people at Wikimania that we quickly make similar changes in level 4 and 4im, and then consider whether to combine levels--that part would need an rfc. The easiest way to go now would probably be to go to three levels, by combining 2/3 , to avoid having to rewrite the level 1 warnings. DGG ( talk ) 21:54, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Library portal

I just accepted the AfC submission for the Library portal article now in mainspace. Since I noticed in the past that you're a librarian, posting this article here for your perusal, if you have the time or interest in checking it out, improving it, making any corrections, etc. Regards, Northamerica1000 05:17, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for referring this to me. As you realised, this required subject knowledge. It's a valid topic, but even after your cleanup, still needed extensive further editing for conciseness and removal or original research; there were obvious indications of the origin of this as an essay or term paper. I did one round; I will do another later. DGG ( talk ) 07:25, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for checking it out, and for the improvements. Northamerica1000 08:32, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Essay about Misplaced Pages

Hi DGG. I checked out your user page mini-essays - very interesting. Would you be available to talk about Misplaced Pages some time? I am writing about the philosophy and sociology of Misplaced Pages. 109.145.120.77 (talk) 07:22, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

certainly. Please make an account, activate your email from preferences, and email me from the email user link in the toolbox on the right. DGG ( talk ) 15:00, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks - I created the account and set up email. I will mail shortly. Hestiaea (talk) 15:14, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Iwill get back to you, probably next week. things are a little busy. DGG ( talk ) 19:31, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Bibliography of Encyclopedias

You are invited to join in a discussion at User talk:Dr. Blofeld#Bibliography of encyclopedias over my plans to develop a comprehensive set of bibliographies of encyclopedias and dictionaries by topic. I hope you see the potential of such a project and understand that while highly ambitious it will be drawn up gradually over time.♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:58, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Rising above the mediocre

What you said here was very interesting. "I do not think a community editing project where anyone can edit will ever rise above mediocre quality. Our goal should be to not come below it--above is unreachable. The greater the degree of summarization, the more skilled the writing must be. Even among the scholarly societies, many more are capable of specialized writing than of general introductions."

I would agree personally with that. Summarising a comprehensive subject is difficult, as it involves both a comprehensive knowledge of the subject itself (rare), and good communication skills (less rare, but not frequent). But it surprised me you say that because you seem to be one of the main defenders of the Misplaced Pages 'ideology', i.e. the idea of 'epistemic egalitarianism', the idea that a 17 year old has as much to contribute as a professor etc. Do you see any conflict between the view you expressed above, and your belief or faith in Misplaced Pages? Interesting Hestiaea (talk) 08:26, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't call it by such monumental terms as "faith and belief"; my hope and expectation for Misplaced Pages is that it will be a good and useful general encyclopedia. Some aspects of it are already very good, and can be excellent: comprehensive scope, up-to-date coverage. Some will be very good, and are quite good already: accuracy, referencing and cross-linking. Some will I hope become good, though they have problems at present: freedom from advertising and bias. Some will never rise above mediocre: the quality of the writing, including their detailed style. Some of all this is characteristic of a large scale community project: comprehensiveness, timeliness, lack or bias, linking. Some are special features of the people gathered here and they way they work: objectivity , accuracy, referencing.

The intention was for WP to be at the level of the average college student. Many 17 year olds are at that level, some considerably younger in fields with no special academic pre-requisites. Certainly the high school and junior high school Wpedians I have known in Wp circles have been working at a mature level. I learned this freedom from agist bias from my parents, who treated their children as rational beings who would learn more if given the opportunity. Here, we give them that chance. Children should be treated as adults as soon as they're ready, when it does not risk their safety. This is a very safe place, compared to others on the web. And it does not affect our own safety, because when there are errors, there are thousands of people to fix them.

As I said elsewhere, there still remains the need for an encyclopedia of higher academic quality. Most high school students would not be able to participate significantly, but neither would most adults. And a great many of those with advanced subject degrees I have known in my career would not have the necessary skill at comprehensive comprehensible writing. Scholars too need to be edited, and complicated works do best with skilled organization. It can be more efficient to have questions settled by editorial ukase. But not always: as you know, I joined WP and Citizendium at the same time, resolved to go with the one that made more progress. DGG ( talk ) 16:18, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! BTW I wasn't aware of your involvement with Citizendium.

I don't altogether agree with your comment about academic quality. I don't think articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy would be suitable for WP. What is needed is well-summarised and well-explained articles on difficult or general subjects that would be accessible to anyone of high school age (15-18) and above. The Misplaced Pages article on Being and the corresponding SEP article are both unreadable but for different reasons. The WP article, as you will appreciate, is a rambling dog's breakfast of uncited original research (plus some glaring factual errors). The SEP article looks pretty accurate to me but just goes off into the clouds ("Anti-Meinongian First-Order View") once it gets going. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is better for a general audience but is incomplete. Hestiaea (talk) 09:15, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

You have mail!

Mugginsx (talk) 15:38, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Milking the bull

In working upon this topic, I observed that you had a particular interest in list of proverbial phrases. When I get a moment, I plan to make some bold edits there as it seems to have gone quiet. Just letting you know in advance... Warden (talk) 14:12, 23 February 2013 (UTC)~~

we perhaps should talk first. The main thing I think it needs is citations. I could put in a few dozen/hundred quickly. then of course it needs articles on all or most of them--that part I do not want to do. DGG ( talk ) 15:51, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Quick question: Outlines

In my work on public relations I came across this article Outline of public relations, which seems like a massively extended See also section of the PR article. Should I AfD it as a fork? CorporateM (Talk) 15:33, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

It's intended as such, essentially as a table of contents, like Outline of physical science, and many others: see WikiProject Outlines and Portal:Contents/Outlines. They are more systematically arranged than th text format of a general article, which requires reading, not scanning, to find specific topics. They are more article oriented than Portals -- see Portal:Philosophy, but more general than Indexes & Lists such as Index of standards articles or Glossaries, such as Glossary of US mortgage terminology . There's also a combination page type: Portal:Contents/History and events-- click "see in all page types".

It's a good question whether we need all of these systems of organization. We've tried others: a systematic organization based on List of Dewey Decimal classes or Library of Congress Classification or Misplaced Pages:Outline of Roget's Thesaurus, and yet others have been proposed. I think the overlap more than they ought to, but we'll never get agreement on which to concentrate on. Personally, I very much like the Outline of... structure, and would support it over the others. I believe that's the current tendency, also. Ideally everything would be indexed according to the two library systems also, because they're familiar--not that they're any good--especially LC, which was designed to match the structure of a US university curriculum in the first decade of he 20th century. There is no viable one dimensional way to organize knowledge--the alternative is some sort of Faceted classification, whose construction and use can get really complicated. There's even a totally different approach--to have no classification or indexing of any sort, but rely on free text implemented as we implement the see alsos, and the hyperlinks, as anything anyone thinks related, with no systematic organization. Or the extreme of having everything be a free text search.

Perhaps however you are asking whether every item on that particular outline you mentioned belongs--that's for discussion on its talk page, or whether other things should be added, in which case boldly add them. Or whether the whole outline is biased in some way, in which case, discuss it. Only if it is irretrievably biased or confusing should it be deleted.

Categories are a necessary complement--they are self-populating, but eliminate the possibility of saying anything about the individual items. I use them very heavily for what I do, which is, upon finding a problem article, finding others that are likely to have a similar problem. They should also do very well for finding term paper topics. They will be more effective as subject guides when we implement category intersection in a simply and obvious manner. (And there's the related Series Boxes, those colored boxes at the bottom. I dislike them--they're visually awful, and are used frequently to express or dispute a POV. But they do serve nicely to indicate missing articles.

Quick question, long answer. See chapter 17 of Misplaced Pages the missing manual for a longer one, oriented towards categories. DGG ( talk ) 18:29, 16 April 2013 (UTC) .

Library resources box

DGG, I and I expect others would appreciate your continued attention at the talk around user:JohnMarkOckerbloom's Template:Library resources box. There is a deletion discussion about this at Misplaced Pages:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_30#Template:Library_resources_box. There was an article about this template in The Signpost in March, and some external press in other places.

This seems like a big issue which could set a precedent for how the Misplaced Pages community interacts with libraries. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:24, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

category intersects

Since you've mentioned wikidata many time, I thought you'd be interested in this: Wikipedia_talk:Category_intersection#A_working_category_intersection_today. We could use it as a band-aid while waiting for wikidata to spin up. Also w.r.t your votes - I think that whether we use the proposal i made above, or wikidata, simplifying the categories *beforehand* will actually make things easier. None of the categories i've proposed deleting could not be recreated through an intersect - but for now they serve to ghettoize and are against the guidance for ethnic cats.

Anyway, regardless of what you decide on the CFD votes, I'd really appreciate your input and help on the cat intersect proposal. cheers --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 05:25, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

I have almost always supported ethnic subcategories. People look for articles in these fields, often to find subjects for school papers. I in general agree with maintaining the categories in the meanwhile, but I'm not sure its worth arguing about them for the present, considering the degree of opposition. As I said there is that intersection will remove the entire need for the discussions.What we need most to keep are the categories from which the intersections will be constructed. (Defining and organizing the root data is a harder problem--I find some of the current Wikidata proposals a little too casual. Adding data fields as one thinks of them is not as good as a systematic ontology.) DGG ( talk ) 15:02, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

category intersection

You mentioned this in a few CFDs. Mind swinging by and giving your thoughts here, on a possible band-aid while awaiting wiki-data? Wikipedia_talk:Category_intersection#A_working_category_intersection_today? --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:52, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Quick question

I noticed you (and other admins) often tag pages for speedy deletion, even though you can delete them yourselves. Is this out of personal preference for wanting review by another admin or is there some guideline or unspoken rule that calls for review by at least two different people? Ramaksoud2000 00:36, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Most of us think it better that two people see the article. I am capable of mistakes, and I know I occasionally make them, because people are not at all reluctant to tell me--sometimes I will have missed something, or not understood, or just gone too quickly. Even for the utterly obvious, there's the possibility of carelessness or sleepiness, or just frustration at having been seeing so many totally unsatisfactory articles. I doubt anything requiring human judgment can be done at less than 1% error. I've deleted over 12,000 articles over the 7 years I've been doing this. and that would have been 120 wrong deletions, and potentially 120 good editors lost to WP. But with someone else checking, that makes it only 1 or 2 in the whole time.

In fact, I've argued that this should be absolutely required, but there are cases where one must act immediately, and it's been difficult to specify exactly the exceptions. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Oh ok, thanks. I agree with you. I was just curious. Ramaksoud2000 01:47, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I appreciate that there are times when you must act immediately, such as WP:ATTACK and WP:OUTING and possibly other situations. Do the admins have a tool that makes it easy for admins to "delete (or WP:REVDELETE) now, and list the page for review by another administrator ASAP" and if they do, to most admins who make "unilateral deletions" use this tool? davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:04, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) There is no rule that admins can't delete anything on sight, but tagging and leaving for a second admin to delete is a good, unwritten practice that most seem to observe. Most of us will of course delete blatant COPYVIO, attack, and vandal pages immediately and some other cases of obvious nonsense. However, admins don't actually make many mistakes with their deletions, so 'delete and review later' by another admin would be redundant. I've deleted around 3,000 pages and only restored 20, and those were userfications. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:15, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

I define 1% as "many" if one thinks of the cumulative effect over the years. If everyone who had a reasonable case stayed and complained, yes it would work, but most don't. There's also the definition of "error"-- does it mean an article that would pass AfD, or an article that with enough work might possibly pass AfD, an article to which the speedy criteria did not apply, but would end up deleted anyway The 1% is for the first two classes; for the third, it's more like 5%. In any case the error rate will depend on the type of speedys. I tend to look at the ones that have been passed over for a few hours. I only really know about my own errors, and of course my rate may be unusually high because I may be unusually incompetent. Some years ago I did intend to audit speedies--the reactions I received from admins involved in the ones I challenged persuaded me it was not the route to effectiveness here, and tolerating injustice in this was the way to be more useful overall. (There was 1, & only 1, admin who did change their practice in response to my comments.) I think I will decide the same about the G13 AfCs. DGG ( talk ) 20:57, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Current projects 7-3

I was reading through your current projects listed on your Userpage, and I was curious about 7-3; how would you first define what an "established editor" is? Autoconfirmed? 50 edits? Consensus? Anyhow, I liked 7-1 and 7-2 (and 7-3, just curious about the details). Please let me know when you put this in front of the community at large or if you'd like any help! Happy editing! --Jackson Peebles (talk) 06:49, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I really should revise these. The problems at WP change over time, and so do my interests. I am a little less concerned about articles directly, and more about how we deal with editors, I no longer object to using A7 for organizations, and I'm less concerned about the misuse of speedy in general. Since I wrote that 5 years ago, there has been a greater degree of consistency in speedy deletions generally, and in fact with deletion process generally. But more important, as WP becomes important, we are under increasing attack from people and companies who wish to use us for promotion, to the extent that very strong measure are indicated. Many of the A7 company & organization deletions also qualify as G11, and often as G12, copyvio. Their authors have no interest in contributing to an encyclopedia, but want publicity for their enterprises, and a greater percentage of them are paid editors. I have come to think at AfD that for borderline notability, we should also consider the promotional nature of the article--the combination of borderline notability and considerable promotion is reason to delete--but since that's a matter of judgement, it's a question for AfD, not speedy.

I am still willing to restore articles if anyone intends to work on them, and I'm always surprised at the few admins who aren't, I'd now say, not "established editor" but "editor in good faith", & when there's actually a chance of improving the article. In practice it's usually clear enough--and a good faith editorcan even include the rare paid editor who wants to learn and conform to our standards. The problem is a more practical one, of people finding out about the deleted articles. But this is related to what I see as the main current problem:

in the advice we give new editors. too many people rely on the templates, either in New Page patrol or AfC. In any case where there's a reasonable effort , it is really necessary to explain specifically either what is needed, or why it's likely to be hopeless--and by specifically I mean showing that one has actually read and taken into account the particular article. I don't always do this myself--there are simply too many articles to deal with them all carefully--but I try to do it if there's a likely prospect of improvement, in either the article or the editor. But most patrollers and reviewers patrol or review using insufficient care or the wrong criteria.

I'm currently not that much specifically trying to save individual articles, or even to teach individual new editors--I'm trying to use my experience to help the people who work with new editors do it properly. At this point it's not a question of changing our rules, but the way we apply them, and changing the practices and expectations of the people who apply them. I tend to do this as Idid 5 years ago with speedies--I can't check every article submission, but when I see inadequate advice, I can follow up with that particular person. ` DGG ( talk ) 23:15, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Request for input in drafting potential guidelines

Hi. There are, at present, no particular clear guidelines for religious material here, or, for that matter, guidelines for how to deal with ideas in general, particularly those ideas which might be accepted as true by individuals of a given religious, political, or scientific stance. There have been attempts in the past to draft such guidelines, but they have quickly been derailed. I am dropping this note on the talk pages of a number of editors who I believe have some interest in these topics, or have shown some ability and interest in helping to develop broad topic areas, such as yourself, and asking them to review the material at User:John Carter/Guidelines discussion and perhaps take part in an effort to decide what should be covered in such guidelines, should they be determined useful, and what phrasing should be used. I also raise a few questions about broader possible changes in some things here, which you might have some more clear interest in. I would be honored to have your input. John Carter (talk) 22:09, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

SIgns of promotionalism

For anyone watching, there are some internal signs of promotional-style biographies for businessmen that are almost always copyvio as well (besides the obvious giveaway of a statement of how important the company is, and especially a statement of how important their duties were in previous positions in the firm.)

Headings that use <big> instead of our formatting

Placing the education at the end, with a final sentence of about spouse and children.

Not giving the positions in chronological order, and often not including earlier positions except the one just before coming to the firm.

The corresponding signs for academics are slightly different, depending on whether they're done by a central office or by the individual. For senior administrators they characteristically include multiple junior executive positions and in-university awards. For any faculty, if the individual wrote it, it will often includes full details of all publications however minor; if the central office, it will omit most exact titles, especially for journal articles. DGG ( talk ) 01:39, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Local interest topics again

Hi DGG, a while back I asked you for your position on local interest topics. I think you may have forgotten about it. Could you see if you can find the time to give it another swing? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:32, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

As before, the problem is maintaining them free from promotionalism. The more local the organization, the more likely it is that any available sources will be essentially press releases. for example, I've got this problem in my own neighborhood, Boerum Hill: there are a number of interesting creative projects of various genres, as well as some fascinating stores, all with good coverage in the fairly respectable local paper, but that paper will essentially write an article on anything in the general area, and will say more or less what the proprietors tell it. (The paper's political coverage I do trust, and i could use it to justify articles on every city councilman and community board member in the Brooklyn, not to mention the losing candidates, but I don't want to push it against the consensus they aren't notable ) So Iwait until the NYTimes or at least New York covers something in a substantial way--New York may be a bit of a tabloid sometimes, but it isn't a PR outlet. I love local journalism. I even read it when I don't know the area--it shows the way people live, in all their variety. If we could maintain the articles, I might want to do it.

The best hope for this is a local wiki. The attempts at a local wiki in NYC haven't really taken off--there are insufficient people in any one neighborhood who understand, and the ones that exist tend to be dominated by the real estate agents and local attorneys. Or possibly something built around Open Street Maps--that sort of a geographical interface makes sense. Or a combined wiki, Misplaced Pages Two, still maintaining NPOV and sourcing, but not requiring notability and not all that strict on promotionalism.

actually, I'd like a three way split, WP, the general encyclopedia; WP 2 for local content, and WP+, for academically reviewed material. Citizendium offered promise for that third part, but it 's manner or working drove off too many of the good people. I in fact joined it as one of the original group of expert editors, but I didn't get along with Larry, and if you didn't support him, there was no place for you there. DGG ( talk ) 06:22, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your responses. Reading what you say, and thinking about my own experiences, the problem here is that local newspapers are reliable on some subjects, but aren't necessarily reliable on all subjects. Because of that, we have no objective measure on how useful inclusion in a local newspaper is as a measure for inclusion in Misplaced Pages, and some organisations and individuals will take advantage off that to inject their self-promotion in to Misplaced Pages, so you prefer to rely on other sources that make it easier to draw a clear line. Is that roughly it, or am I just filling in my own perspective? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:50, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

I prefer to rely on other methods than using the GNG to make it possible to draw a clear line. Decisions under the GNG come down to the details of what counts as reliable especially with respect to the key words "substantial" and "independent." Depending on what one wants to include or exclude, questions of what is a RS for notability purposes can often be rationally argued either way. But I've learned to work with the GNG, since it is unfortunately still the rule and likely to remain so.

And our key problem now is dealing with promotionalism. It's hard enough to deal with it in articles on major organizations--our standards for what we've accepted before were incredibly lax, and probably 90% of the articles on commercial and non-commercial organizations need to be rewritten. I'm reluctant to start including any thing that would add to the problem. DGG ( talk ) 00:43, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Edit description

Thanks for your edit description here, it's much nicer and more informative than the usual form message that gets left. --TKK 00:32, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Deletion of EDP Energias do Brasil

Hi, DGG. I agree that the reason for deleted (creation by sock) is valid and serious. However, I have understandings that this is usually used for newly created articles, not for articles which have been for years and have been edited by number of other editors. Is there any other reason for deletion in addition to G5? The company itself is notable, so maybe you could restore the last version to my user space and I will clean it up before recreating? The problem with Edson Rosa's socks is that if we delete all articles what they have created, we should delete most of articles about Brazilian companies (and also some others from other countries). And it is impossible to stop his current editing as he uses dynamic IP from the Sao Paolo region. Beagel (talk) 07:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree that that is a consideration, but it should also be weighed against rewarding socks. If they know that the articles they create will remain, no matter how they create them, we keep the incentive for others to pay socks to continue to do this and it is getting way out of hand Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppet investigations/Morning277--I am One of Many (talk) 07:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Right. It's not impossible to stop the current editing. If we manage to remove all the articles now present, and continue to remove them as they get submitted, then there will be no incentive for that editor to continue. It's the only defense we have. (I did not previously think this way, but the problems we have now been finding are so severe, that they threaten the objectivity of the encyclopedia, and it's time for emergency measures. I agree there's a problem about removing such a large body of content, and the articles should be rewritten. Perhaps the time to rewrite them will be a little while in the future, once we get this editor to stop--and to rewrite them without any of their work in the edit history. I can certainly make the material available to use the references as a base for such rewriting, but perhaps it would be wise to wait. I see only one alternative solution, which is to require identification from editors, and that is such as drastic change in our principles that it is not yet time to propose it. It would be a serious compromise in our mission, but it's a better alternative than permitting promotional editing. We would lose truly open editing, but we'd still have an encyclopedia. DGG ( talk ) 07:42, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

note: I have come to re-evaluate the question of the articles by this particular editor. They seem for the most part unequivocally useful, and often just what we would do ourselves if we were adding content on these topics. I'm unsure how to handle this, and my opinion varies. Some other sockfarms have been very different, with promotional articles on sub-notable companies. 'DGG (at NYPL) (talk) 21:16, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Anthologies

G'day DGG,

Thanks for your comment We normally accept inclusion in anthologies as notability , which as well as being a welcome contribution to that particular discussion interests me more generally.

I agree we should, but is this documented anywhere? I can't find any explicit mention in guidelines or policies or help pages, but perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong places.

Or, are there other notability discussions where inclusion in anthologies has been cited as evidence? I don't lurk on AfD currently (I used to but WP:RM seemed to have a greater need) so I'd have missed them.

Any help appreciated. I'm vaguely thinking of proposing some sort of tweak to notability guidelines to better cover hymnists, and don't want to be reinventing the wheel and/or generating useless instruction creep. Andrewa (talk) 03:55, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

we've routinely used this for poets and writers of short stories, and for short stories themselves-- see for example Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Mouse (short story), where it was used in a negative sense, deleted for not being in anthologies. I don't know we've used it in this context before. There was an explicit guideline once somewhere; I typically have the sort of memory that always remembers if I've seen something, but not necessarily where or when. Actually, I consider this an exceedingly broad criterion, but so is NBOOK, and in consequence NAUTHOR. . DGG ( talk ) 04:54, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Quality of new articles

Hi David. This year's conference was small (and slightly disorganised), but because it was small it was an excellent opportunity to press home some of the issues concerning the quality of new articles - and controlling the quality of the patrollers and reviewers. It was possible to meet and have in-depth discussions with the enablers and developers who (I belive) are now finally aware that these issues should be a Foundation priority. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:09, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

well, I hope you post some details about who said what, so we can hold them accountable this time next year after they will have done nothing useful,

But actually, it's not their fault, but intrinsic to the current stage of WP: there are three simultaneous factors: 1/ the more people rely on WP, the higher is the demand for quality 2/ the more important WP gets, the harder is to to maintain quality, because everyone will want to use WP for promotion 3/ The longer it is since we started , the earliest people with the most enthusiasm will have moved on to other things and it will no longer be as exciting for those who join now. None of these three factors can be alleviated by anything the foundation does, or that we can do here at WP.

The hope, is that we will get a new generation of editors, who rather than trying to play with something new, are people who want to produce something as useful as they can make it, without the casual attitude the pioneers did about actual quality and freedom from promotionalism. if we can do that, deficiencies of infrastructure will not matter. Good people with the right approach to the right goal can master any system. DGG ( talk ) 03:49, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Well said, though it is not the quality of new articles that should mainly concern us, but that of old articles. Hope you are all having/had a good time. Johnbod (talk) 04:20, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Opinion

Dear Sir. Long time no greetings! Thanks in advance for your view on this Jimsteele9999 (talk) 00:59, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

we have always accepted an entry in Gale's Contemporary Literary Criticism & their similar series as notability , even if they call a figure minor. The article is in need of some cutting, which I will do tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 04:42, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

THanks for the reply. I guess I'm missing something, because he's not coming up on Gale, and mentions in NYT, etc. are not substantial. Jimsteele9999 (talk) 00:02, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

I will double check that, probably tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 22:39, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Sir, thank ye in advance.Jimsteele9999 (talk) 01:00, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Just to let you know

You have been (indirectly) mentioned here: Wikipedia_talk:Canadian_Wikipedians'_notice_board#Notability_is_defined_entirely_by_presence_of_reliable_sources.22.3F.3F.3F_-_Reply_to_Bearcat (I know you are busy - so I am pointing you to the middle of this very long text). XOttawahitech (talk) 22:32, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

actually, it's the whole general question I find of interest, & therefore I commented at considerable length myself DGG ( talk ) 23:13, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

notability check

Hi David This artist’s entry needs to be rewritten, https://en.wikipedia.org/Sophie_Jodoin, but as it has the notability flag, does someone other than myself need to review it? The artist is very well-known in critical art circles and in art school set, but not in the commercial sense. Her work illustrated the 2009-10 season brochure and eighteen posters for the Théâtre français at the National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa where it was also exhibited. It won the award for documents at the APPLIED ARTS Design & Advertising Awards Annual 2009 (Toronto). She has had solo exhibits at these public galleries: Richmond Public Art Gallery, British Columbia, Musée d’art de Joliette, Québec, Ottawa School of Art, Ontario, National Center, for the Arts, Ottawa, Ontario, Maison des Arts de Laval, Laval, Québec, Connexion Gallery, organized by University of New Brunswick Art Centre, Fredericton, New-Brunswick,McClure Gallery, Visual Arts Centre, Montréal, travelled to Nanaimo Art Gallery, Nanaimo, B.C, and solo exhibits in Montreal and Calgary and group shows in Praque and New York with commercial galleries. She also has been a guest lecturer at art schools in Montreal as well as:Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Fontbonne University, St-??Louis, Missouri, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, Minnesota, North Park University, Chicago, University of Calgary, Alberta, Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh. There are also biographies of her on university sites and she mentioned in the entertainment section of several newspapers http://www.richmondreview.com/entertainment/159955635.html . There are also about ten favourable critical reviews from Canada's top art journalists. There is no hurry for a reply if you are on vacation. Thanks HeatherBlack (talk) 14:37, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

If you want to rewrite it, there is no reason why you should not do so: anyone may and should improve an article, if they do it properly. If you do so, and think you clearly meet the objections posed by a tag, you can remove it. If you remove an otability tag and someone wants to challenge it, the best way for them to do so is at AfD . The best information, as always, is not just exhibitions, but artwork in the permanent collection of major museums. If this cannot be shown, major reviews are desirable. A long list of appearances in group exhibitions in my opinion adds little: I would limit it to the few most important. I'm not sure being a guest lecturer means anything unless it is a full term appointment, not an occasional lecture. DGG ( talk ) 00:50, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks David, I think I have a better idea now. So if I look at the "notability for artists" criteria "The person's work (or works) either (a) has become a significant monument, (b) has been a substantial part of a significant exhibition, (c) has won significant critical attention, or (d) is represented within the permanent collections of several notable galleries or museums.", there is in fact the following hierarchy with the possibility of 4 or 5 being challenged as "open to interpretation":

• 1. critical attention and museum collections with a list of "notable works" at each institution
• 2. critical attention and government distinction/awards, art at expo pavillion or Governor General's Award or the Order of Canada
• 3. critical attention and peer recognition ie elected member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art (RCA)
• 4. critical attention outside region, regional museums, plus newspaper bios, interviews
• 5. critical attention outside region, regional museums, plus minor awards

Is this a reasonable assessment? I'm finding that these take me a fair bit of time to do, so I appreciate your input. Thanks HeatherBlack (talk) 14:45, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

• You're trying to be rational. But the only practical definition of notability is what the consensus at a particular time considers important enough for an article in WP: it's an entirely empirical standard: whatever succeeds. Most of the rules are ambiguous & ill-defined, & we are in any case under no obligation to follow them. People at WP are not good at making fine distinctions or balancing multiple factors. Considering the various degrees or rationality and knowledgeability of people who engage in discussions, simple rules of thumb are better. It doesn't help to pass a formal standard if the net effect is not convincing. The goal is for a subject to be what I call "undoubtedly notable ", notable to the degree that no reasonable person who understands the field will challenge, or even better, obviously notable, that any one challenging it will not be taken seriously by anyone.

Having multiple works in major museums is in practice sufficient. Having these works get independent critical commentary is even better. For the sort of work that doesn't typically get into museums (such as street art or architecture), awards and commentary and official recognition are the equivalent.

The practical difficulties for the sort of articles you've been writing are 1/whether the museum is in fact a major collection, rather than the sort of civic collection which is not particularly discriminating with local artists 2/ whether the critical discussion is in fact substantial and independent. A museum's description of its own collection is not independent, unless the level of scholarship is universally recognized. Almost no commercial gallery's description of anything is reliable. Too many articles here depend on such descriptions, & it would be very easy to challenge them. (The classic example is the degree to which the association with Duveen might cast doubt on Berenson's objectivity). 3/ (which I think you recognize)--no provincial or municipal level award is meaningful. DGG ( talk ) 00:53, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Got it! I'll go back and improve the ones that I've already written. Thanks again HeatherBlack (talk) 20:34, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Notability

Hi DGG, You've nominated several of my articles for deletion or speedy deletion. I'm always careful to write neutrally and cite everything that I write. Obviously, I think the topics that I choose are notable, but you disagree with me on some points. I find the notability guidelines to be somewhat vague, so if a topic has enough information written about it in newspapers, magazines, or similar media to create a short article, then I go ahead and create one. Is there some other measure or guideline that you're using to determine notability? Are there a certain number of sources that you look for, or does a magazine need a certain amount of circulation? Guidance is appreciated. Thanks, HtownCat (talk) 17:52, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

I rather expected to hear from you, and I've delayed nominating further articles until I could see your response. There are two separate but linked problems in articles about organizations, their leaders, and their products: notability and promotionalism:

The basic problem of promotionalism is that WP is addressed to the potential readers, giving them the information they might want to know upon seeing mention of a subject (for example, at the most basic, where is that company and what does the company do?, or which organization is that & what do they advocate? ). A promotional article is addressed to a prospective user or purchaser or supporter: This is what we do, and here is why it is valuable that you buy our products or support our endeavors. Encyclopedia articles are characterised by plain description, promotional ones by praise, or the sort of detail one would need only if one is considering a purchase. Promotional articles are intended to give a favorable image of the company, such as describing its ostensible social purposes or community contributions.

the basic problem of notability is deciding whether something is worth describing in an encyclopedia at all. It doesn't correspond to importance in the world, but to whether it should be included in WP--we can;t after all judge the world, but we must decide what we want to put in our encyclopedia. . In a few cases we go by a general decision--for example, the decision that all named populated places are appropriate for articles. In some others, we go by outside evaluation: for example, that a holder of a distinguished professorship at a major university is notable, or someone chosen to compete in the Olympics. In many cases, there are no such firm standards, and we go by the WP:GNG, the general notability guideline, which requires substantial coverage by multiple independent third party reliable sources. (some people say this is the only real standard, and everything else is just an assumption of what will meet it). the key words there are "substantial" , "independent" , and "reliable." A substantial source is more than a product listing, or a mention of an event taking place, but a significant discussion, such as a full product review. How substantial it must be is of course a matter of judgment, which is decided by consensus at WP:AFD. An independent source is one not derived from the subject--not the subject's web page of product literature, or what its principals write, or the press releases the put out. A reliable source is one using editorial judgment, rather than simply publishing press releases or gossip. Again, these terms are matters of judgement to be decided at consensus.

In all but extreme cases. nobody can predict accurately how consensus will go--I will nominate an article for deletion if I think there is a substantial probability that it will not be considered suitable, --but even after 7 dears of experience at it , sometimes I am wrong, either because I made a misjudgment or because the community wishes to interpret things differently. The community decides, and another administrator judges what the community has decided. Guidelines are necessarily subject to interpretation, and what really matters is how the community decides to interpret them--after all, we make our own rules collectively, and we can decide how we want to use them , and if we want to make exceptions. The best way of learning this is to observe afd discussions on similar topics, to see what arguments succeed, and what the practical standards are.

Some things are deleted immediately, by the concurrence of two administrators, rather than an AfD. One relevant example is blatant promotionalism, which is an article so much devoted to advertising or promoting something that there appears no way to fix it without rewriting. (As an admin, I have the technical ability to do it without concurrence, but I rarely use it unless there is some immediate hazard, such as libel or copyvio) . We also immediately remove articles on people or companies where it seems obvious on the face of it there is no possible indication of any importance or significance, --a much less demanding standard than actual notability,. Again, normally two admins will concur in this. If such deletions are seriously disputed in good faith, most admins will reverse the decision and send the article to AfD for a community opinion.

I said there was a connection between the two: A key reason we have a notability standard is that for most things that are not notable, there is nothing much to say except directory information or promotion. It is critical to WP that it not become a mere directory or a place for advertisement--we want to provide information that people can trust, so we require sources and objectivity and some degree of significance. There are many other places on the web for advertising, and google does very nicely as a web directory.

There are additionally some factors that can affect how people here view an article. We tend to regard an attempt to write simultaneous articles about a borderline notable company, its products, and its executives likely to be an attempt at promotion--it is much better to have one strong article. Also , it is considered possible that someone writing articles about a wide range of barely notable subjects may be doing so as a paid editor. We do not absolutely prohibit this (though many people here would like to do so), but we strongly discourage it, because it is extremely difficult to be objective about what one writes with such a strong conflict of interest. If by any chance you are such an editor, I can explain to you how best to deal with it so as to get the articles accepted--I am one of the relatively few admins here who are willing to assist paid editors who come here openly in good faith and are willing to learn our standards. 'DGG (at NYPL) (talk) 21:29, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your detailed response. If I am not completely sure whether a subject is notable, should I submit it to Misplaced Pages:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation?

I really thought I was careful about keeping promotionalism out of my articles. I would like to improve them, if given the chance. Is there a way that I can edit the deleted articles and then submit them for approval to be posted? I've read something about restoring articles to a userspace, but I'm not sure what the procedure is for that. I absolutely do want to contribute quality articles and nothing that other editors might view as promotional. Thanks for your help. HtownCat (talk) 20:02, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I will take a look next week. You should first check if there are good references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, because otherwise a rewrite is useless. DGG ( talk ) 04:19, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

update

With regard to Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Emad Rahim, did you see "Is wikipedia for sale"?

Apparently Emad Rahim paid a PR firm to manage his wikipedia article.

Rahim paid Wiki-PR $1,500 over two installments to create a page for him on the site. “After reviewing all of my information assured me that my profile would get published on Misplaced Pages without any problems. We wrote a short bio, included quotes and links to credible sources, publications, employment history, and a picture.” At first he was happy with the result, but within two weeks the page had come to the attention of other Misplaced Pages editors. Email exchanges show the extent to which Wiki-PR spun and obfuscated the issue. On July 17, Rahim emailed the firm after noticing that his page had been marked for deletion for not being notable enough. CEO Michael French replied, “You're covered by Page Management. Not to worry. Thank you for your patience with the encyclopedic process.”

So, how much does being outed as someone who paid to selfishly subvert the wikipedia add to his notability? Geo Swan (talk) 17:35, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Can one become notable for not being notable? Interesting concept... Peridon (talk) 18:00, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

we have had some AfD discussions on people & organizations whose notability arises in large part because of either criticism or attacks they have made upon WP; results vary--my own view has consistently been that as part of NPOV we should always in case of doubt be careful not to remove information about those who don't like us.

But in this particular instance, this is a person who has without malice towards us made the error of hiring a firm whose practice it is to evade the principles of WP; This would fall under BLP policy. This is minor negative information, not relating to whatever actual notability he might have. Even if he were to have an article, I would not include this material--it's a basic BLP policy that we do not include the misdemeanors of basically private individuals, let alone use them as the basis for notability. DGG ( talk ) 00:29, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

• Okay. Thanks. Geo Swan (talk) 00:46, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Your comment

at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC for AfC reviewer permission criteria was excellent and what we obviously don't want is poor reviews being pushed on to NPP where the reviewing isn't any better or faster. Based on comments from Foudation staff (whether posting from their WMF account or not), software help is unlikely to be forthcoming from MedWiki and I think our volunteer programmers at AfC are quite capable of finding a local solution of some kind or another. It just needs the community to decide on a simple set of of permission criteria instead of attempting to re-debate the whole thing, or completely missing the objective of the discussion proposal. I think, based on the discussion, most of which is objective, I'll start a straw poll there on some of the realistic suggestions. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:23, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Rick DePiro

The search terms on the reward board are actually excellent leads for promo articles that need cleanup. I've been working down the list. For this article, a "Media appearances" section is promotional and most of the article is unsourced. It could be cut in half. I noticed there is an active disclosed PR rep on Talk from A&R (which I use to work for about 10 years ago) and I wish to avoid the usual accusations of sniping other COIs. That narrative is apparently convincing to at least some editors. I'll keep working down the search results, but thought you may have an interest in cleaning up this one. CorporateM (Talk) 13:53, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

I am not comfortable working in that field, because I know so little I cannot tell if what I cut out is unimportant, or whether when I rewrite, I have rewritten correctly, But I too have been looking at articles previously advertised there. DGG ( talk ) 19:09, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Library holdings

Hello DGG! Thank you for your note at my talk page, I appreciate the feedback. I will look at those articles you listed this weekend and do some cleanup on them. I'll also try to be more mindful of promotionalism in the future. I'm curious about your technique of judging notability by library holdings, as in the Jedediah Bila AfD - it seems useful especially for pre-internet authors. Do you use Worldcat to find that information? How many libraries do you think are necessary for notability? --Cerebellum (talk) 01:51, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

I use WorldCat most of the time. But WorldCat requires interpretation for 5 factors: First, it covers mainly US and Canadian libraries, with a lesser coverage for the UK and Australia and New Zealand, a very scanty coverage of Western Europe, and little else, so it requires careful interpretation when used elsewhere. Second, it covers almost entirely English language books, for in the US only the largest academic libraries buy anything else. Third, it covers current holdings, so what libraries had 50 years ago is not represented, so for older books of shorter spans of interest such as popular fiction it requires correction also. Fourth, how many titles count for a book to be likely notable depends on the type of book-- mainstream novels and important nonfiction are much more represented than esoteric subjects. I go by the experience of having looked for many books of all sorts, and one can do the equivalent by comparison with books known to be notable. (I have sometimes used comparisons to say that a work is or is not a major work in a field) As a fifth factor: editions must be combined to get a true picture, and the way libraries report holdings this is not always easy. As a result I usually report holdings as approximate figures. For major current works in popular interest academic subjects like economics, a notable book would have at least several hundred. For experimental fiction that fits no standard genre, only a few dozen libraries might buy it, but it can be just as important. For fan-oriented books on games, libraries usually buy very little, because they get outdated very quickly. For some of the kinkier sexual topics, libraries don't buy at all. A scattering of small libraries often indicates author gift copies.

The official WP standard is book reviews. But library holding correlate nicely with book reviews, because libraries buy largely on the basis of such reviews, especially for public libraries.

Outside the US, holdings can be gotten from the catalogs listed at WP:Booksources But none have nearly the depth of coverage in their own countries that WorldCat does in the US. -- but there is the very powerful consolidated search facility of Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog at . DGG ( talk ) 03:41, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Response to proposed deletion of Kavi Workspace page

DGG, thank you for your attention to the Kavi Workspace page. I have removed the proposed deletion notice, but I will of course abide by whatever decisions are made. I have reviewed the guidelines for creating Misplaced Pages content at some length and feel that I have a solid grasp of the principles. In creating the page, I have tried to emulate and be parallel to other software product pages linked from List of collaborative software. Many parallel pages seem also to lack significant levels of notability, or refer simply to articles generated by press releases or commercial web sites. Projectplace (software), Telligent, and ProtoShare are three of many examples. I have reviewed Misplaced Pages:Notability (organizations and companies). Do you have recommendations for how to proceed? Thank you. MisterPendrake (talk) 19:46, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

many parallel pages ought to be deleted also. Not all, of course--it depends on the importance of the company, now or in the past. we measure that here by references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, print or online, but not blogs or press releases, or material derived from press releases. For products like this, the most convincing references are substantial independent signed product reviews in publications of acknowledged responsibility and authority, (but not mere notices or announcements). If you can add them, the article is not likely to be deleted. Otherwise it probably will be. If I (or anyone) think that they have still not been added adequately in a few days, I will nominate the article for discussion at WP:AFD. The consensus of the community as expressed there about whether it meets the guidelines will decide, as judged by some other administrator. Good luck with it--I hope you are able to show it notable by our standards.

Of the pages you mention, one seems to be adequately sourced, and two less adequately, but I (and possibly others who may happen to see this) will take another look at all three of them. A great many insufficiently notable articles have been aded in the past, and we ought to remove them if they can not be improved sufficiently.At the very least, we do not want to add to their number. DGG ( talk ) 20:20, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. In lieu of signed product reviews in publications, I submit that the product page earns its notability on the basis of its use. Specifically, it is used widely in the US standards development community. Good examples of entities that rely on the product are the OASIS Open organization, INCITS, and many other ANSI-accredited organizations. The smooth functioning of these organizations and their consensus-driven output relies on the product. While the product does not warrant mainstream press, it does warrant the attention and participation of a large number of technical professionals who use it daily to conduct committee work that results in important American standards. Can this level of participation justify inclusion?

I am seeking parity with other product pages. To explore the comparison further, Sharepoint is a collaboration environment which underlies a large range of business activity, some of it important, some not. As a part of the Microsoft portfolio, it garners large amounts of attention. But as a product, it is not inherently any more important than any other development environment. In the case of Workspace, it is a niche product performing a specialized function in an activity generally considered important to the US economy. I submit this line of reasoning for your consideration and ask that it be entered into the debate. Is there a more direct way to do that than here on your talk page? MisterPendrake (talk) 04:42, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

This is WP, a community project, that has no way of expertly judging anything.. WP was built on the principle on relying on what other publications said, those that do have expert editing. If they cover something in a substantial way we include it , and we include what they say. It was almost universally thought 12 years ago that in the absence of such expertise a reliable encyclopedia could not be constructed. Nonetheless this seems to have worked, worked much better than any of those who started it, or anyone else for that matter , would possibly have imagined. It is not the only way to make an encyclopedia, but it is the way this particular one is being made, Those who have chosen to work on it, almost all of us volunteers, are fundamentally determined to see it through--to see how far we can carry this concept.

To avoid expert judgment of our own, we avoid considering intrinsic importance. Other publications in the world do, and we rely on them. I sometimes get impatient at the apparent indifference to common sense and the occasional inconsistency that the implies, but I have to acknowledge that it does seem to work. Even were you to persuade me otherwise, all that I could say is that it would be necessary to start another encyclopedia on a different principle. Neither I nor anyone here would want to take the chance of compromising what we have done with our current way of working, for we have done collectively something which nobody ever thought ordinary humans collectively could accomplish. I dreamed of this as a child, and it is amazing to see it accomplished only half a century later in my own lifetime. .

We do not try to meet every need; we try to meet the needs of those who find what we are doing worthwhile. Among the people whose needs it does not meet are those who seek recognition or publicity for what has not yet been recognized in external reliable sources.

So much for the rhetoric. You come here to ask my advice, and I would not be honest if I did not give you the most accurate advice I can give about what will happen here, based upon my seven years experience working primarily with incoming challenged articles. Regardless of your desires or mine, the article will be deleted without the sort of sources people here consider necessary. I've told you what they are. if they're not here by monday, I will do what I am supposed to do , and list the article for discussion.

I am not going to go into a debate and say things other than I think. I shall say it does not seem to meet our guidelines, and let others argue as they will and decide what to do with it. You can enter what you like into the debate, but I don't think anyone has ever succeeded with an argument along your lines, and I have seen hundreds of people try. It may be much less than your merits deserve, but it's what will happen; the experience of others is the best predictor. DGG ( talk ) 06:40, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your help about "How to do it and avoid deletions"

Blueena (talk) 04:58, 4 January 2014 (UTC)Though most of the articles I've created are being proposed for deletion, it's really happy to receive your message about "how to do it and avoid deletions". The message includes many detailed suggestions and I believe it must have taken you a lot time. Once again, many thanks!

WP: Exhibitions

In light of the increase in GLAM projects internationally, I'd like to start a new WikiProject, WP:Exhibitions to help coordinate activities around major museum and gallery exhibitions. If you are interested in the project, please contact me here or on my talk page. I'm hoping to establish guidelines for creating, editing, and tagging articles on major exhibitions and to begin improving articles in this area of Misplaced Pages. OR drohowa (talk) 19:42, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

See conversation at User talk:OR drohowa#WP:Exhibitions for my convo with JohnBod on this Project. Hoping for more responses also on the various other WikiProjects I posted on asking for comments/support.. OR drohowa (talk) 18:25, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

I am fresh out of wiki kittens; please accept this cake as a thank you for your support, kind words and thoughtful comments during my (now withdrawn) RfA. What doesn't kill me... Cheers, Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:25, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Question regarding notability: Young Australian of the Year award

Hi DGG, I noticed you recently nominated several articles for AfD (for example Poppy King), citing mainly that the Young Australian of the Year Award does not confer notability. I would like to know what you base this argument upon? The recipients of this honour are selected by the National Australia Day Council and endorsed by the Australian Government in exactly the same way as the main award. The presentation to the winner is made by the Prime Minister of Australia at the same nationally televised ceremony as Australian of the Year. The recipients are also VIP guests at the Flag raising ceremony alongside the Governor-General of Australia and Australia Day ceremonial activities. Based on the criteria for nomination for the award, many of the recipients are already notable enough to have attracted national attention prior to receiving it, and winners will almost always be the subject of ongoing national media attention. As an Australian who lives in Canberra, the only outward difference I can see between Australian of the Year and young/senior Australian of the year is the age limits for these categories and one less televised speech at the flag raising ceremony. Looking at the deletion discussions, it appears a large majority of other editors also feel the award is highly notable, if not as notable as Australian of the Year. Dfadden (talk) 22:55, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Three lines of argument: First, most of them have done very little by the time of the award, thought about half have notable careers later. Many of the awards of of the human interest variety-- "how remarkable to do something of that so young" , where the notable section is "so young" but the achievement otherwise unremarkable. Second, I consider that material for tabloids, not encyclopedia, and I have consistently opposed accepting "human interest" except on a greater than national scale, as a basis for coverage in WP. Third, we have consistently not accepted youth championships in almost anything as notable, nor youth awards in any field at all. Even what I regard as the most famous of all--indeed possibly qualifying for being famous at an international level-- the Rhodes Scholarships, are not accepted for notability.

I would on the other hand be perfect willing to see a broadening of our notability policy across the board, including such aspects as youth. We're not paper, and as long as we can exclude promotionalism , there's no real limit to the depth we can cover (that's our problem will small companies, or locally important professionals--if we included them, the article would inevitably be promotional , or at least look like they were. this level. When we broaden coverage, such thing as youthful importance could be included. When we accept participation in a division I American College football game as notability the way we do professional football, and accept such things as the Rhodes, I'lll accept these also. WP can cover a broad as field as people wish it to, but there should be some degree of consistency.

The degree of fuss made at a ceremony is not notability. The ceremonies should be included, and they are, in or articles on the awards. It would seem perfectly reasonable to do as we do, and include all the names.

I nominated the ones I did as a test to see what the community thinks, when one attracted by notice as being totally unremarkable. The consensus will decide, and based on what they do here, I will continue or let it be. I do not regard myself as the arbiter of notability -- the community does what it wants to do. Thre are many areas where I would prefer the consensus to be different, but once I know that I do not spend my time in fighting them. I only make suggestions, and sometimes, like now, simply try probers to elucidate the standards. DGG ( talk ) 00:17, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

I appreciate the response, and respect your consistency in applying the same standards. I think in this case however (and granted my objectivity may be clouded by a subconscious patriotism) this is more than just a youth award. Nominees have to do something considered exceptional by both the community at large as well as the Australian Government to be considered eligible and while age is certainly a qualifying factor, the achievements are more often than not notable in their own right. Certainly, I reject any parallels to junior or reserve grade football players who are undeniably good at what they do and entertaining to watch, but are rarely motivated beyond self-interest to succeed at football - one of the criteria for this award is that the achievements are not self-serving (Poppy's case is not the strongest example I admit, but she identified a niche market and creating domestic employment and growth in any industry otherwise dominated by foreign interests - indeed she profited from the venture, but in doing so benefitted others and the National identity. Her age and the fact the company later failed are separate issues). With the articles in question it is more a case of them being poorly written and referenced so as not to highlight why they recipients achievements are notable, and I can see why you would challenge them. But as you said, the Misplaced Pages community will decide the standard that should be applied. Dfadden (talk) 01:06, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

You said that "the achievements are more often than not notable in their own right," and I certainly agree that at least they sometimes are. In those cases, I would support notability, and consider the award as a contributing factor--but not the same automatic factor the adult award does. DGG ( talk ) 04:23, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

C)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Professor Michael Nimier

Dear DGG: When I found this page at first I assumed that this was a notable professor and started to look for sources. The first one I found was . Does this make him more or less notable? —Anne Delong (talk) 03:17, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

More so, but it will be rather tricky to write a proper article. As you will see, I've started rewriting, but this is one of the situations where it will be necessary to verify the degrees claimed, as no trust may be placed in their web site. DGG ( talk ) 02:56, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Thomas Straub

Dear DGG: I came across this old Afc submission, but I'm not having any luck figuring out if he's notable. Want to try? —Anne Delong (talk) 19:33, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

nor am I sure. Some of the various Swiss business schools and their faculty are difficult to judge. I think this needs a more general discussion, and I am trying to decide whether to send to MfD, or accept and send to AfD. It will get more attention at AfD, but doing it that way is a rather unusual route. DGG ( talk ) 05:17, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

User:Wjpierce3/sandbox

Restored as requested, the creator basically just kept reposting the same text. Good luck Jimfbleak - talk to me? 04:57, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

in process of rewriting

Advice on a bold endeavor

Recently I came up with an idea that is fairly bold. I want to create a sub-encyclopedia within Misplaced Pages where articles that might not meet WP:GNG, but have multiple independent third party sources, can be retained. Has such an endeavor been attempted and do you think this will garner support? Valoem 18:32, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

It would have to be done as a supplement or superset of WP, because I doubt we'd ever approve putting it within enWP.

I've proposed a similar enterprise:

What I suggest is a 'Misplaced Pages Two - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring WP:Verifiability, and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Misplaced Pages, and the upper levels of a good deal of what we do not let in.

It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. It would include every ball game in a season.

This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists would have this material out of Misplaced Pages, the inclusionists would have it not rejected. Newcomers would have an open and accepting place for a initial experience.

But it would be interesting to see a search option:

Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the notable (WP)?

Anyone care to guess which people would choose?

Your proposal is more limited because of the multiple independent sources requirement. If you interpret "independent" as we do to exclude press releases, and keep the reliable and "significant" sourcing requirement, it would have only the content that meets GNG, but is excluded for some other reason. This would include subjects excluded by those Special notability guidelines that are interpreted as additional requirements beyond GNG, and also those excluded by whichever parts of WP:NOT you thought unnecessary, such as NOT NEWS. If you do not require "reliable" sources with "significant" coverage, it would also include subjects with only directory information. This is a relatively limited body of material, I worded my proposal to ask only sufficient sourcing to show WP:V, which need not be either multiple or independent.

The problem both proposals still would have is promotionalism. Though NPOV should eliminate it, in practice we also need WP:N to remove the fundamentally advertising entries.

And a great deal can be done within existing rules: WP:N, NPOV and NOT depend a great deal upon interpretation, and some interpretation is unavoidable, because various parts of these and other relevant guidelines contradict each other. If all provisions are interpreted as broadly as possible, it comes near to not having any limitations; if as narrowly as possible, the result closely resembles a traditional encyclopedia. DGG ( talk ) 20:17, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Sound good, I couldn't have said it better myself. For inclusion in this subset, I am requiring at least one RS and two non-RS, or 5 independent unreliable sources. A restriction where only editors with special privileges such as reviewer, autopatrollers, and rollbacker can create new articles may be necessary. The article can be quickly deleted if it is unsourced, or has only primary sources to prevent editors with COI or promotional intent on creating an article (though restricting the type of editor should prevent this). I understand that this is a very ambitious proposal whose ultimate goal is to protect certain articles which fail AfC or AfD but pass WP:V. It seems inefficient to delete an article forcing a new editor to start from scratch. I was going to usurp the user name Omnipedia for this purpose. I think the best option going forward is to start a WikiProject on this! But just to clarify nothing like this has been attempt before, correct? Valoem 20:52, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

I don;t really like counting references of various sorts to determine notability. Refs. are not divided between RS and non-RS, but there's a spectrum;there are sources reliable only for WP:V but not for /m== notability; sources reliable only within a field; sources reliable, but not for negative BLP; the special characteristics need for WP:MEDRES; sources reliable depending on who wrote the particular item; sources where one source alone is unquestionable notability in some but not all fields; sources reliable only for local events, and vice-versa; primary sources that speak for themselves and those needing interpretation; specific parts of articles on fiction that can be sourced from the works themselves, and those that cannot; and so on. Similarly for all the other necessary characteristics--even copyvio is not black and white in all cases.

More important, I don't want to rely upon sourcing for determining notability , but rather upon the actual characteristics of the subject where possible. Some of this is already accepted here: the Schools compromise, WP:PROF, politicians, athletes, popular music; aircraft accidents; geographic features; even news events. we're starting to accept it for companies listed on stock exchanges, for some exchanges, as music charting depends on some charts but not others. I would expand this to every situation where we can find a logical separation that corresponds to the actual criterion, which is what we want to include for a particular subject field. I would prefer to accept a very limited role for the GNG as a backup, I see a continual trend in this direction over by 7.5 years here, and it is very satisfying. It's not that this leads to wider inclusion--in some fields the effect is the opposite. The virtue is that it avoids debates, especially debates whose result is dependent not on the facts or the merits, but the work people put into the argument, and upon who shows up to talk about it. We only make good decisions either when many people are involved, or where it is in practice left to the specialists.

As some particular points: first, passing AfC is not a determination based on actual criteria of its own, but rather on whether the article is likely to accepted at AfD, because if it isn;t there is no point to it. There is no reason anyway to have a special standard, since anyone who pleases can bypass afc, and about as many people do so as wait until it is accepted (that's why there are relatively few complaints about reviewing compared to the number of bad reviews). Second, the question of keeping potential drafts around for people to work on is a different one from the entire question of the level for accepting articles. It has not been solved. I tried very hard to limit G13 to those subjects which would never m,ake acceptable articles or where what is written would be of no help whatsoever, but I failed. I hope though the actual standard for using G13 rather than postponing may take some account of this. The Drafts namespace has some potential to let us rethink this. Third, I would not attempt to do what I have suggested (or what you have suggested) within WP. I do not want to change our basic way of working, but rather just adjust it. We have a project here successful beyond the wildest imagination of anyone, including those most devoted to it. Fourth, I especially would not change WP in general to accommodate any particular sort of article even those I have my heart most set on. The better way to go about this is by gradually adjusting interpretation. Fifth, the basic need for another project is not a wider inclusiveness--the web itself does rather well for that--the ned for something to be formally published in order to be disseminated has vanished over the last 20 years. Rather, the basic need is for great reliability and intellectual sophistication. The WP model only works for this either when many people are involved on something they are about, or where it is in practice left to the specialists. At the same time I joined WP I joined Citizendium, intending to work in parallel. Unfortunately the leadership there made it impossible (and I judged WP the better environment with the greater potential). I'd love to start again. Just as with much greater inclusiveness, I think this best done outside WP as a fork., Sixth, the need for restricting article creation is real, and it's not just creation that will be affected, because there are multiple often exploited possibilities for perverting the nature of an article. At some point I think we may be forced to choose between the two incompatible principles of "anyone can edit" and NPOV. I'd go for keeping NPOV--without anyone can edit we will be limited, but without NPOV, we're not even an encyclopedia. I doubt the WMF will permit this within WP, and I think this our greatest overall threat. It's this that may force a fork, I would estimate in about 4 or 5 years. DGG ( talk ) 02:10, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Wow, that's quite a response! It's no coincidence that I completely agree and have felt this way since I registered. I've noticed every editor has an inherent bias toward one topic or another. My recent DRVs (Dieselpunk, The Halal Guys, No call, no show) and AfD's have highlighted such occurrences. In fact my current DRV with UFOs is an example of such, JzG voted a IDONTLIKEIT as a reason for deletion completely disregarding my sources. Editors seems more content on removing information than actually researching as the latter is easier. I've always found this to be counter-intuitive to what we are trying to create and have registered the user DeepWikipedia (which I cannot use) as a method of storing articles where the AfD seems political rather than academic. Eventually, this may realize into something more ambitious, for now a simple guideline for inclusion can be defined. This guideline is based not on sources, but discussion.

Any article currently deleted, but has survived at least one AfD (no consensus included) is eligible for inclusion.

Many of these articles resurface regardless and at least adherent to Misplaced Pages guidelines in article structure, to retain their information for further improvement seems lawfully beneficially to the super objective of this encyclopedia. My personal guideline are similar to yours, must be NPOV, V by RS. Notability is an organic guideline that is ever-changing so to follow it strictly can be complex at times. WP:TOOSOON and rules as such can be redundant.

Recently I noticed crusades against entire genres when a guideline for inclusion is raised far about the GNG requirements. For me to even pretend this benefits Misplaced Pages is impossible. This user space can be an area for those articles in the event when guidelines are lower. Does such a task require approval from WMF? Thanks for the input! Valoem 22:07, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

It is reasonable for the coverage of different areas in WP to be different. It reflects the interests of its contributors, who are predominantly early adult males, and the subjects they are primarily interested in will be covered more heavily. But it also reflects the interests of any relatively organized group of hobbyists (or conceivable academics) who are prepared to work on articles. There are also limitations due to sources: in some fields, there are no easily available free sources in the internet,which is all most of the contributors use. But even for more competent research, there are fields with no printed sources at all, and fields which where they do exist, but are thoroughly unreliable.

Your question, however, is about prejudice in different subjects. WP does have some overall biases: the users are predominantly secular moderately liberal technologically interested people, and subjects which are not taken seriously by this group will have difficulties. This is a problem in many areas: the traditional humanities, business and industry, radical politics, religion, are all under-represented. This will only be solved if it is solved at all by broader participation.

The notability standards in different fields are different, for the nature of notability in different fields is intrinsically not really comparable. The GNG was seen as the equalizer, but is has become recognized that the density of sources can lead to undesired results when measured by either common sense, or the general desires of the contributors. Used literally as the only standard, it will give an extremely large coverage to what is in the newspapers, which is largely the major sports and some forms of popular entertainment. Even those very interested is such subjects by and large have come to agree that it needs to be somewhat modified. The straightforward way of dealing with it, as I mentioned above, is abstract standards, which we use is some cases. The other way is by manipulating the interpretation of the key words in the GNG: significant, reliable sources, independent. This permits both flexibility and room for endless argument. This is be used both to correct for our biases, and to reinforce them. We get the result we collectively want: we make the rules, we decide on the interpretation, we judge the exceptions.

I support such modifications when they yields the result I want. Sometimes it does, sometimes not, sometimes to a limited extent The decision process can use improvement: at present the practical operation of the consensus method favors the stubborn and clever. We need to concentrate more on the true meaning of consensus, which is a solution that everyone can live with, not necessarily a compromise. One of the things anyone must agree to live with is that their preferences will often be rejected. If the community wanted to cover UFOs more, it would adjust the interpretations accordingly.

The area that concerns you is pseudoscience. WP most certainly has a bias against pseudoscience and fringe, and I personally share it. An encyclopedia is a device to provide information about the world, and is intrinsically linked with a rational approach to subjects. But the way we manifest this outlook has some problems. In my view, the way to properly deal with these subjects is to deal with them thoroughly: if they are explained properly, people will understand their nature. But some WPedians would rather limit the degree to which we cover them, in the apparent hope that people will therefore think them inconsequential. In my view, the presentations should be unbiased, which necessarily relies upon presenting the subject in its own light, as well as that of its critics. Some WPedians here oppose this, apparently thinking that people will come to the wrong conclusions if the proponents are allowed to speak for themselves. Some WPedians even want to label the articles right at the top, so people will start reading with the appropriate view. Taking the position that the criticism must be highlighted to ensure a scientific point of view represents an irrational fear that a logical and balanced presentation will be misunderstood; it represents a distrust of the ability of the scientific method to convince people, to stand on its own without artificial rhetorical assistance. Arbcom has to some extent supported the positions I deplore, and all I can do is try to prevent them from being applied with full rigor. But there is good reason for some degree of caution, and it was those good reasons which motivated arbcom: without some protection, the articles can become dominated by the true believers, who can form a group of editors with no desire for balance, and who in some cases utterly reject the use of logic and science as a method of proof. Most such groups now have greatly reduced influence than they did 7 years ago, possibly to some extent by bending the rules, but to a greater extent in at least some fields by the greater participation of rational interested people. .

You are arguing in a way that I cautioned you against: altering the basic rules in order to favor your subject, or to keep it from disfavor. There will be no support for this here, and even I would support it only outside WP. The only approach that will deal with prejudice here is the gradual effort to convince people to apply the rules a little differently, with the recognition that success is not likely in the short run.

User space can legitimately be used to preserve articles, but the consensus is that it can only been done if there is some prospect of improvement, and for a limited period (6 months seems to be standard) The approach for those who wish to favor their subject beyond what the community will support that is normally suggested here is already in existence: Wikia, but this of course makes the material much less prominent. The WMF would not interfere is we wanted to keep rejected articles longer, except to the extent they were copyvio or BLP or extreme promotionalism. Their role is to enforce the core values,not the details. Some of us think they have not gone far enough for some of these values, other think they have sometimes gone too far into detail. My own view is that they need to take action about promotionalism , but have been too prescriptive about fair use and some elements of blp.

The difficulty then is convincing the community. I think the people here think in general that the indefinite preservation of such articles would primarily benefit promotionalism and autobiography, and I share that view. DGG ( talk ) 17:23, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

I think you and I have each said enough about this for now, and I'd like to close the discussion. DGG ( talk ) 18:56, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for the effort you put into the close at WT:MOS#Bird common name capitalisation. There were a lot of words to read and to write. Keep up the good work. SchreiberBike talk 03:57, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. It was a sprawling debate that'd been going on in multiple forums for so long it's hard to get a complete sense of it without a lot of reading. Thanks for putting in the time and thinking it through.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼  04:00, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Hear, hear! A very generous donation of time to get your mind round a long-long-long meandering debate with loads of distractions, and very brave to tackle one where people feel so strongly. I think you did an excellent job. --Stfg (talk) 10:14, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Right, you're off my Xmas card li- As much as I hate the result, I appreciate with the time and effort put in to possibly one of the most detailed closing rationales I have read. Despite apparent appearances to the contrary, I do support the idea of a global Manual of Style and conformity and am content to abide by the decision. Agree with the idea of some sort of bot to enact this. Cheers, Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:28, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

I would have preferred a different outcome, but your arguments were really well-done and respectful to all positions. Kudos for you. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:26, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

• Thank you, DGG. You've put a very contentious issue to rest, and probably for good. As ever, I'm flattered when people think I'm you. --BDD (talk) 16:16, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

A very most excellent example of gentle mop-wielding, though I am sure that some members of the species Gallus domesticus minoris will consider that the end of the Misplaced Pages is nigh. Guy (Help!) 19:41, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Ditto, I just wanted to thank you as well although I followed the discussion from a distance (I think it had more than enough active participants). Admins can get a lot of flack but when one takes on settling such a sprawling debate, knowing that no matter what one decides, there will be some very unhappy editors, I can only say thanks. And providing such a thoughtful rationale (rather than a sentence-long decision), is admirable and helps the decision "stick"...ambiguity would have only resulted in further challenges to your decision. Instead, if individuals do want to overturn this decision, they know that the burden of providing evidence resides with those wishing to change the status quo, and there has to be a substantial case to do so. Liz 19:14, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

I am hoping that you won't need to clarify that the consensus finding doesn't only apply to birds, but you might; there's a (smaller and quieter) camp who want to always capitalize moths/butterflies and dragonflies, and another in favor of doing the same with common names of British (and I think Australian) plants. The debate may have focused on birds, but that focus should be scene as license to capitalize non-bird species common names.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼  08:39, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Paradigm shift from transformative to informative learning

I have some misgivings about this, but since you appear to accept that it's neither WP:OR (my deletion) nor a G12 copyright violation (1 May deletion by a different admin), I have, of course, restored. Cheers, Jimfbleak - talk to me? 05:29, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

BTW, thank you for your closing of the capitalisation debate. It's not the outcome I would have wanted, and the fifth pillar is looking increasingly irrelevant, but I think you handled the closure very well. Jimfbleak - talk to me? 12:54, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Advice on UFO sightings in outer space

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/UFO sightings in outer space (3rd nomination)

As an editor whose opinion I value, I was looking for some advice on this AfD and how to proceed. Despite snowing through DRV it turns out the reverse is happening at the AfD. The community seems to have an issue with this article which I am not following. The article has been accused of WP:SYNTH and OR, all claims are cited, I am unable to see any OR, and the article jumps to no conclusions. None of the opponents have specified any specify OR or synth. The information was juxtaposed which as far as I can tell is what SYNTH is not. The sources despite what I am seeing as mainstream have been denied. My goal was to document the reports of sightings of unidentified objects in space not suggesting they are extraterrestrial in origin.

Per WP:NFRINGE,

A fringe subject is considered notable enough for a dedicated article if it has been referenced extensively, and in a serious and reliable manner, in at least one major publication that is independent of their promulgators and popularizers. References that debunk or disparage the fringe view can be adequate, as they establish the notability of the theory outside of its group of adherents

Regardless of a hoax or not I am see significant coverage including two prominent skeptical analysts James Oberg and the Condon Report, as well as coverage from numerous reliable sources. Are there any serious issues with this article I am missing, or is the AfD based on IDONTLIKEIT votes? Valoem 18:07, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Valoem, I will take a look. But i find it helpful if when someone asks me to look at an ongoing discussion they do not tell me what to look for. I try as best I can to just look as if I came upon it from scratch and ignore the suggestions, but I can't help being influenced by them subliminally. DGG ( talk ) 23:12, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Having made my comment, I think your evaluation of the reason for deletion is perfectly correct, but motives are not a helpful argument. DGG ( talk ) 23:20, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

I thank you so very much for your opinion. I always trust your judgment for or against my position. I will never have any issues if you disagree with me in the future as I find whatever you say insightful and educational :). Sorry to take more of your time, but I noticed that user LuckyLouie has essentially gutted most of the article. Correct me if I am wrong, but while we cannot use primary sources to establish notability, we can use them to expand the article, is his removal of sources policy? I also believe the tone of this article has changed and is no longer NPOV. He claims that these sightings are completely disproved when sources state otherwise. He has removed some cited first hand interviews with astronauts and I feel this version should be restored. I feel the same about this separate issue. Valoem 16:29, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Issues have been resolved and consensus has been reached! Once again thanks for all your help. Valoem 19:46, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Russell Targ

Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering about including an article subject's papers? I thought that we generally do not include a list of papers published except in the article body when a particular paper is specifically discussed as per coverage in a reliable independent source? There is also some discussion about COI issues on the talk page. Anyway, hopefully I won't drag you into any conflict or morass (what is the plural of morass?) but I saw it on my watch list and was wondering about the policy on published papers. You seemed a good person to ask. Thanks. Candleabracadabra (talk) 23:04, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

In dealing with an academic, we usually list all their books, and, if in a field where notability depends on published papers, (optionally) their most important papers. generally judging by citations. This is a special case, where it is necessary to show that he has credibility as a scientist, regardless of the quality of his work in parapsychology. I'd add citation data, and leave them in. I would especially leave in the papers relating to parapsychology that were published in mainstream journals. More important, we should be presenting his work, including what other people think of it, but not with a POV of trying to debunk it. I think the manner of inclusion of his views on Geller prejudicial. The opinions of others about Geller belongs in the article on Geller, not here. Please copy to the talk p. if you think it helpful DGG ( talk ) 23:29, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Interesting. Thanks. Leaving in "most important papers" certainly creates a large gray area. There was some discussion of citations on the talk page, so I will leave those already involved to resolve the issues. The citation numbers also seems a potential problem, because doesn't it depend a lot on how popular a particular subject is? I realize popularity is a measure of influence, but I'm not sure it's the only one? And it would vary on the subject field wouldn't it? For example the more esoteric or specialized a subject area the lower the citation numbers one would expect to find.

Anyway, I appreciate your insights and thank you for taking the time to share them with me. I'm going to think on it and stay out of that discussion.

As far as presenting a subject's work and including criticisms of it without trying to debunk a person's views and work seems to be a rocky road when it comes to "fringe" subjects on Misplaced Pages. I can see both sides of the argument. I think at the very least that subject's views should be explained straightforwardly from his or her perspecitve first. Often things are picked out (cherrypicked) to make them look silly or text is larded up with pejoratives to smear people with unpopular views. Anyway, more to think about. Thanks again. Candleabracadabra (talk) 23:40, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

An example of my last point would be the use of the term denialist and denialism. I think it's fine to note that someone is viewed as a denialist if it's well sourced. But just saying someone "is" a denialist seems clearly wrong and biased. It passes a judgment and presents a subject in a way that's clearly non-neutral. Someone who believes in God may well think that atheists are denialist. I understand the word has a particular meaning and application, but my point is that just because someone has an unpopular view does not mean they are in denial. They may just believe in the minority view and evidence supporting it. Certainly there are semantic games used to win arguments. I don't think we should be a party to them although we can certainly present them. Was Galileo a denialist for being convinced that the sun was the center of the ppsolar system]]? His views were not popular at the time. Or at least that's the legend. I know there were others before him.. Anyway, have a nice eve. Candleabracadabra (talk) 23:50, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, this can be a narrow line to walk. Personally, I agree with what you say: I prefer to avoid characterizing people in single terms if the meaning or implication is negative. I think it's fairer just to state the facts of what they write or say, and leave it at that. There are usually nuances and qualifications involved. If the the term is widely used, the fairest thing is to use a quotation, and make clear the qualifications & bias of the person being quoted I would like to say, only quote from a neutral source, but for some topics there is no neutral source. DGG ( talk ) 03:26, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/Jews_and_Communism_(2nd_nomination)

You are invited to join the discussion at Misplaced Pages:Articles_for_deletion/Jews_and_Communism_(2nd_nomination). Thanks. MarkBernstein (talk) 21:59, 9 May 2014 (UTC)Template:Z48

the opposition to this and the other parallel "Jews in .." articles that were deleted is so opposite to everything I hold important in the world, including the idea of a NPOV encyclopedia, that I can only with difficulty participate in these discussions. I have elsewhere ascribed it to the desire to hide the significance of Jews in the world to avoid arousing the anti-Semites. It is not possible to logically argue against fear and irrationality. DGG ( talk ) 02:30, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Just a note

I don't think I did justice to your very acute wake-up comments at the AfD, particularly striking because, in the drift towards uniformity, you took a stand marked by complete independence of judgement. Deeply appreciated. When I read, particularly,

There is no reason why anyone--in particular any Jew --should find anything shameful about the association of Jews and Communism in Russia, except the inability to foresee the future.

I thought of Vasily Grossman's outstanding Life and Fate, which manages, other than the direct horror of the context, to write astonishing vignettes that embrace all the complexities of identities, Kalmuck/Tartar Jewish swept up in the Communist cause, with, among comrades, the various prejudices, ethnic/antisemitic, coming to the surface, only to be talked out. 2% of the officer class of the Soviet forces that effectively won WW2, despite our films and lore, were Jewish. The great vice of superficial eyes is to judge with the facile wisdom of hindsight while ignoring the hard and sometimes tragic options fronting real people in earlier generations (it's true, for me, also of 1948). After the trench warfare attritions and military command's quasi genocidal military tactics in WW1, choosing to be Communist was one of the few ostensibly rational or ethical options left, something events in Italy and Germany in the succeeding decade could only reinforce. Thanks, anyway, and sorry for this soapy intrusion.Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

You may appreciate in connection with the novel the edition of his wartime notebooks,A Writer at War : a Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. For another account of the appeal & disappointment of Communism, see the final volume of Victor Klemperer's diary, The Lesser Evil DGG ( talk ) 19:47, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Gravity R&D

A second opinion on Gravity R&D would be good (I'd deprodded it). Same problem as Wevorce? Or a different one? Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 20:27, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

same fundamental problem, with the additional questions of whether runner up for a prize is significant information, and whether a prize for "best startup" or any similar wording has any significance beyond "not yet notable." I have often brought up these two factors in dealing with an article on a firm that might appear to meet the GNG if looked at without considering what information is being reported by the source; they have sometimes been accepted as reasons for deletion. My AfD at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Wevorce is an attempt to open the general question of the applicability of the GNG to small companies. Soon after I came here I once made the naïve keep argument: "it meets the GNG. Why do we have the rule if we're not going to use it?" and the article whatever it was got kept. I've learned better since then; the question is whether WP has learned also. DGG ( talk ) 00:53, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. :) Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 05:57, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Gravity can be deleted under regular GNG rules, because all the sources are primary, including the awards (see my views on awards as primary sources here) Wevorce is clearly notable in my opinion. DGG, I think this is more in-line with your set of arguments. In this case the PR agency that wrote the Misplaced Pages page and secured the corresponding media coverage specializes in hiring journalists that write feature stories and shop them around to someone who will publish them as-is under their own byline. So it is impossible to confirm if the sources are truly independent as required by GNG, because there is legitimate reason to speculate that they are actually written by the PR agency, despite the byline. In this case, since there is actual evidence of this practice, my instinct is to delete all the corresponding articles as a matter of erring on the side of safety. CorporateM (Talk) 15:41, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Devaka Fernando

Thank you for your comments about the style of this page. It is the first page I wrote on wikipedia and English is not my first language. I would appreciate some assistance about how I can respond to your comments. The subject has emigrated from Sri Lanka and the page was intended to record his services to Sri Lanka and information was taken from newspapers and medical journals etc. Thank you for your assistance. Fattutor (talk) 02:00, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Having looked at the page again I see why it seems like a news release. your comment was very helpful. I have done some editing and would like some feedback if you have time to do so. Hope you find it sufficient to justify removing the tags. The high school stuff is pretty important in Sri Lanka ( in the country sometimes more than the academic notability!!!!)

I would be grateful if you could give some feedback on some of the other pages I created. Fattutor (talk) 03:07, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

I would also like your view on where the balance between 'name dropping' and linking to other wikipages should be drawn? Fattutor (talk) 04:59, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

I'll get there tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 05:14, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Fattutor,sorry for the delay. As I think I said before, the details of his high school career are irrelevant, and probably the details of his college career also. That some of his teachers or coaches or coworkers are notable does not by itself justify naming them, especially if they are not related to the major part of his notability. We only list the top 3 or 4 papers, as judging by citations. DGG ( talk ) 06:13, 24 May 2014 (UTC) .

Thats most helpful. I take your point about colleagues and relevance to notability in terms of an encyclopaedia as opposed to a news paper article. I guess thats what lists and categories should do without clogging up the main page. I have written pages on several such academics and logically your advice requires that similar changes need to be made in all of them. I will try try the Sri Lanka group for further advice.

Looking through the article and supporting references as well as the linked in profile closely again it appears that the university posts are honorary and he's a clinical doctor. I appear to be wrtiting about someone who is not an academic in the Anglo-American sense by being a full time Faculty member but a professional with an academic affiliation to Faculties of Medicine, Health care management, Health informatics and Health policy etc Should I list the most cited paper in each area to a maximum of 4 or 4 in each? The links to researchgate and googlescholar give the full list anyway so listing too many is probably unnecessary.

Thank you for giving up time to give advice and guidance as I have found reading your Talk page very useful. Fattutor (talk) 08:17, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

William B. Helmreich

I think this scholar at CUNY (also known as William Helmreich) is notable, and should have an article. What do you think? Bearian (talk) 16:58, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

apparently yes,based on his books; was a draft started somewhere? If the page was deleted, I can't find it. DGG ( talk ) 19:43, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

I'll start a draft this month in my sandbox. Bearian (talk) 16:11, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Pur (brand)

I rarely disagree with you, but here is one. I deprodded the article. Bearian (talk) 19:37, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

I'll recheck it , to see if I want to take it to AfD . DGG ( talk ) 19:43, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

That's fair. Bearian (talk) 16:10, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/School-based family counseling

I've invoked WP:TNT at least once a month in the past year, but this is far from the worst I've seen. Bearian (talk) 16:26, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Carbone Smolan Agency

Hello DGG. Finally, I have had the opportunity to return to my draft of Carbone Smolan Agency and edit and improve it. Thank you for placing it in the IMPROVEMENT section so I could do so without reentering all the footnotes. When the story was pulled in February some of the comments/critiques were that it used too many footnote references and "dropped" too many names.

I was also advised to remove some of the superfluous quotes from the principals of the firm and, in general, watch that I do not get too promotional. As I wrote earlier, I am a design journalist and write for a number of magazines including Communication Arts, a 55 year old publication based in Menlo Park, CA. I know these people but will not take compensation from them for doing this feature profile. I am ready to get back into the scrum and work with you and any editor to help me get this article suitable for publication on Wiki. I believe I have answered most of the concerns but I suspect more will be raised and I welcome them.

When you have time, would you review and give me your toughest critique. Please note: many of the references in the feature article are from design industry publications and from the American Institute of Graphic Design, the guild that guides our business. To those unfamiliar with those publications, they might seem obscure but all are well respected in the business of design and advertising. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration. Porterwritewiki (talk) 21:19, 28 May 2014 (UTC)porterwritewikiPorterwritewiki (talk) 21:19, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

In a few days. DGG ( talk ) 05:33, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Help with something?

Hey DGG- I was wondering if you could help give your input in something I'm trying to propose. Basically what I'm trying to do is add something to WP:NOT about articles claiming their topic to be the first of their kind, a pioneer in a specific field, or so on without any coverage to show that this accomplishment is automatically notable. Some of the arguments I've made in the proposed section come across a little vague and I've done a little TL;DNR in the comments section trying to explain what I'm trying to get across: basically that we've had a lot of people whittle down genres and accomplishments to where it's easy to claim that they're first but not show anything to verify that it's notable or even really true. It's at Wikipedia_talk:Arguments_to_avoid_in_deletion_discussions#Another_argument_to_add.3F, if you're interested. You're fairly concise in your arguments so if you could find a better way to phrase this and make it clearer, I'd be all for it. I know it could sound contradictory to some things in places such as WP:AUTHOR, but mostly it's just that I'd like something to point people towards when they say that someone should be kept without having the coverage to prove their claims about being a rare example or pioneer in their field. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 15:09, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

it is a matter of judgment in any particular case, and judgment around here is spectacularly inconsistent. I'm particularly concerned about the articles relying on first of a particular nationality or in a particular locality to do something. Perhaps the best approach to this is the one you suggest: it can be a very difficult thing to prove, and even ordinarily "reliable" sources like newspapers are not very reliable about this. I'll comment. (But where there is no source at all, it's easy: WP:V prevents us from including the claim at all.) DGG ( talk ) 01:39, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

demonstrating Keith Dowman's notability

You wrote the following about the submitted article on Keith Dowman:

Comment: Actually, the listing of multiple works published by the subject is a reasonable indication that the subject might be notable. What is needed to establish it is evidence that the works are regarded as important. The key criterion applicable here is WP:AUTHOR DGG ( talk ) 18:17, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

... which is great. Mr. Dowman is cited and footnoted constantly. For example, i just checked five random books on Tibetan Buddhism and all of them either/or both listed Dowman in their bibliography or footnoted him. Misplaced Pages itself cites Mr. Dowman over a 100 times. i don't know what to add to the article that isn't contrived to demonstrate that he is frequently cited and therefore notable. Please help? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drugpa kunley (talk • contribs) 08:30, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, but, Drugpa kunley, the way we do it is by references to published reviews of the book or to specific published statements about the importance of the book by recognized authorities. The article must stand on its own. DGG ( talk ) 15:22, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Okay, so for example, Natural Perfection: Longchengpa's Radical Dzogchen contains a glowing foreword by Namkhai Norbu, who is, as a retired well-published professor of Tibetology and as a 'master' recognized by Tibetan Buddhists authorities, one of the greatest living authorities on Dzogchen and Tibetan Buddhism in general. Wouldn't that by itself be enough? Or wouldn't the fact that Mr. Dowman has collaborated with Tarthang Tulku, also a highly regarded Tibetan Buddhist teacher (to name a couple) also be enough? Or the fact that he gives seminars with Claudio Naranjo, which i did not mention in the article because it didn't seem germane to a descriptive article on Mr. Dowman? The nature of writings scholarly books within spiritual disciplines with the specific aim of addressing practice rather than academic understanding is that, by definition, they don't tend to be reviewed by academics. Other than writing prefaces and forewords, notables like Namkhai Norbu, Tarthang Tulku or Claudio Naranjo do not tend to write book reviews or publish statements about the importance of books.

The first one is usable; if you have an exact reference, quote and pages. It's not definitive, because people tend to say nice things about their friends in forwards. The other two are helpful, but don't actually add much. "Collaborated with" can be true for a very junior colleague. I jointly published with my doctoral advisor, but that does not make me notable.

On a broader matter, the difficulty in getting suitable sourcing for people in many spiritual traditions is a very real one, and I think we do tend to be very flexible in such cases. Add what you can, and I will look at it. DGG ( talk ) 19:50, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

i have added what i could. Thank you so much for your help. Here is the link to the page...https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Keith_Dowman Should i go ahead and resubmit the page, or can you check it first?

−

There's one more thing. It's our rule that every statement in the article must have a source. For the basic facts of his life, it can be his own website, but for the key aspects of notability, it should ideally be a third party source written by someone else. Some of this will not be possible in this case, but some of it is. Try to do as much as possible. If nothing is referenced , someone is fairly certain to object to the article. Then let me know, but it will be Monday until I can get to it DGG ( talk ) 01:39, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Pius Cheung

"who called it" what? You left a sentence unfinished at

cleaned. I'll need to fill it in later. DGG ( talk ) 19:36, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Also, would you consider archiving some of the old but un-archived material above? – Fayenatic London 18:16, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

it was much worse, but it will get a little shorter. DGG ( talk ) 19:36, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Questionable notability page for WikiProject:Women Artists

Hi! Here you go Misplaced Pages:WikiProject_Women_artists/Notability_concerns. SarahStierch (talk) 19:21, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Hey!

Hi, David,
It was a pleasure to meet you, face-to-face, and hear your presentation. Are your slides posted on the Wikiconference page? I'm really interested in the stats you shared about the state of AfC in 2007 vs. 2013. I think it's so important to be aware of the changes occurring on Misplaced Pages as it evolves over time in order to gain an accurate long-term view of where things are headed. Thanks again! Liz 22:03, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

RE: Wink

Hi, I've added more information about the request deletion at Talk:Wink_Technologies. I believe it will address your concerns. Namely, the references that seemed to indicate notability do not support the content in the article. What prompted the deletion request was the reference in the "Significance" section - it does not even mention Wink. As I removed the reference and started to rework the section, I realized there wasn't a good replacement to demonstrate any significance at all.

I'd be happy to just fix the problems and update the article as I had originally planned. I just didn't want to go through the effort only for somebody to say "Hey, that doesn't look very notable anymore!" Please let me know how to proceed. Thanks, Wieldthespade (talk) 23:34, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Your input at the Michael Wines section of WP:BLPN would be appreciated. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:15, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Michael J. Kuhar

Hi, I had been communicating with the subject of this article on OTRS before you accepted it and moved it from AFC to Michael J. Kuhar. He just wrote to me expressing surprise that the article is now in main space.

I was wondering, on what basis did you accept this? It's basically an unsourced bio article. Every single source listed is something the subject himself published. The article lists zero independent coverage by reliable sources as required by WP:BLP. Therefore, it seemed quite unready for publication in main article space.

I'm curious about your rationale, and also whether you agree it might be a good idea to move back to AFC. ~Amatulić (talk) 14:44, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

• Seems to easily pass WP:PROF. I've fixed a couple typos, added a couple facts and sources. It needs work, but I don't think notability is at issue here. BLP does require facts are verifiable, and that contentious facts are verified, but anything contentious without a cite can just be removed. Dennis Brown | 2¢ | WER 15:39, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

• "Candler Professor of Neuropharmacology" passes WP:PROF, and all that is necessary is for it to be proven,and the university web site is enough to prove it.I accepted it on that basis, assuming, correctly , that the rest of the sourcing could easily be added from the sources given. They're apparently uncontroversial plain facts, and the sources are good enough for plain facts even in a BLP. Further, I see no reason why the subject might want this removed, and he is in fact so distinguished that I would not apply the optional clause of BLP. One possible factor might be the desire of those working at a center doing the research he does to mask their identity, and I accordingly edited the lede slightly. The family sentence is uncited, and tho it will probably be in a who's who or other directory, which is good enough for that detail, it's personal so I removed it. The awards are surely in his cv, a sufficient source, which is probably on line and needs to be found, but is trivial. I also did some copy editing--the writing was a little promotional. Parts of his career are very public, and if he wanted to obscure his identity he wouldn't do that. (But if there is some other factor I do not understand, please communicate with me off wiki--I'm also an OTRS volunteer. DGG ( talk ) 16:09, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

The AfD discussion at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/RedHack

I know you have taken an interest in the activities of User:Mr. Guye. I have tried to make meaningful contact several times with this user. But he just gets more experience using tools without developing judgment. Could you take a look at RedHack, the AfD at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/RedHack, and the response to a plea from the article creator at User Talk:Mr. Guye? I know this is a strange article, but... - Neonorange (talk) 02:52, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

I commented at the AfD . DGG ( talk ) 23:41, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/E. Arumugam

One more professor. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:09, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

this particular individual would not I think meet WP:PROF, so there's no point keeping it around. He seems to be a routine university teacher. I listed for G13. DGG ( talk ) 05:01, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

SightLife

While I agree that awards for "best companies to work for" are not the type of thing that I would normally think about putting in a Misplaced Pages article, having that kind of baggage doesn't make an article's topic non-notable. Given that a reliable independent source lists SightLife as becoming the leading US eye-bank in 2009, you might want to reconsider Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/SightLife. --Bejnar (talk) 23:52, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

of course it implies nothing about notability one way or another; it does however imply something about promotionalism. Incidentally, what has been the status since 2009? DGG ( talk ) 01:15, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

I don't know, a four page case study by an independent researcher, a lawyer, published by a reliable publisher (Wiley) should add some weight to significant coverage. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the research, Norton focused on the global aspects of SightLife and not on the US market for their traditional services, so I don't know what has happened since in the US. But according to Non-Profit Times their number of employees went from 80 in 2012, to 92 in 2013, to 107 in 2014. So they seem to be growing. --Bejnar (talk) 03:12, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Oren Laurent

Tried to request for undeletion but that was the wrong page. Could you undelete (and protect if necessary) solely for the purpose of redirecting to the subject's company, Banc De Binary, and of having the article and talk history available? I know this would be a controversial request if I were someone badly behaved, but I'm trying to keep up with all the rules. I emailed BDB and got a reply back and so have been describing myself as "possible COI" but I don't know that that helps any given the history described by Tokyo girl 79 about this request. I don't know that DRV would overturn a result simply for redirect and history. Okteriel (talk) 06:21, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

If not, please say no, so I can decide where to turn. I suspect the article and talk histories will have data useful to improving the BDB article, as Black Kite has asked us. Okteriel (talk) 18:12, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Articles for creation#AFC Backlog Drive

Hey DGG, since you gave that talk at WikiConference USA, I think my recent post to the WPAfC talk page is relevant to you. I offer some concerns about how reviews are being done and whether the processes we've instituted are really doing the work we want them to do. Blurpeace 19:31, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

I did comment, tho perhaps I may have been a little over-enthusiastic. DGG ( talk ) 03:43, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Links to archives

Hallo David, the editor with the poorly-chosen username KCL Archives (talk · contribs) added a lot of links to collections of the papers of subjects of articles - the first example I found on my watchlist was Bowlby. Dormskirk (talk · contribs) has reverted all of these, with edit summaries "Please do not add links to your own organization (see WP:ELNO)" and "‎ (per WP:LINKSPAM)".

Two complications:

• after the poor choice of username was pointed out, it looks as if the same editor has been editing as IP 137.73.18.77 (talk · contribs)
• and their boiler-plate text for additions says "The paper of ..." rather than "The papers of ...", even in a case where it's 158 boxes of papers (example.

My reading of WP:CURATOR and Misplaced Pages:Advice_for_the_cultural_sector is that archivists etc are positively encouraged to improve the encyclopedia by providing External Links to their resources where "the link gives readers critical information uniquely relevant to the topic": a major repository of a subject's papers seems to me to fit this description.

What do you think? PamD 23:23, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

The usual practice is that we permit and encourage this if the collection is the main collection of papers about the subject, but not if it is only incidental holdings. This means each instance needs to be evaluated separately,and it also means that boilerplate additions are not generally a good idea. I would recommend that new editors doing this make the suggestion on the talk pages of the articles, but I think editors who have done enough work here to be trustworthy could do it directly, and that would include official Wikipedians in Residence.

They should go in the EL section only if there is a full online summary or at least description to link to--otherwise the better practice is to add them to a separate section, such as Archival sources. It does help our readers to know where the principal archival records are. If used to document a specific point--and the published summary is sufficiently full to actually document it--they could go as references. Pam, can you check them or do you want some help? I'm a little busy, as the G13 notices will indicate.

Incidentally, it seems almost impossible to explain to people why our username policy prohibits corporate names, and I have come to think we would do much better to accept the French and German WP policies of permitting them, after due authorization thru OTRS. For now, I'd advise the ip to consider something like "John at KCL archives" , which we consider acceptable. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Wise words, all to be agreed with, and I have myself occasionally added links to interesting archives. In this case, where dozens of similar links to the one archive were added in a short time, it is hard to imagine that each one was given the careful consideration required. Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:26, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

yes indeed. But sometimes it happens that they were done justifiably, since the new editor does not realise that doing so is extremely imprudent. Still, we need to check each of them, because it is still possible they might all be relevant. . DGG ( talk ) 08:49, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

A justification for making an honest mistake, I see. But despite that, I think the observations we have made are correct. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:26, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

The links are to specific collections of papers within the archive, not just a general link to the archive. But they are badly formulated - typo of "paper" for "papers", and no link to the collection itself at Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. I would like to offer the enthusiastic editor (most recently editing as 137.73.18.77 (talk · contribs)) some advice so that they can enhance the encyclopedia by adding appropriate links. One I've looked at was 158 boxes, but another couple seem to be only a couple of documents, so not all the links seem worthwhile.

Is there advice anywhere general on linking to archives like this? If not, could I ask which would seem to be better, taking John Winthrop Hackett as an example:

(a) The text sentence "Hackett's papers are in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, London." (with a ref to the description at http://www.kingscollections.org/catalogues/lhcma/collection/h/ha05-001) (a1) in the "Legacy" section, or (a2) in a new "Archival sources" section

or

(b) "Hackett's papers in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, London." as a bullet point (b1) in new section "Archival sources", or (b2) in "External links"? PamD 13:49, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Possibly of interest

If I remember rightly, you're at the Lincoln Center library? Would you be interested in helping us get an article on Benjamin Steinberg? He has an NYT obit (which I cannot read in full right now; I'm hoping they will let me see it in July) and a short AP obit, and according to his daughter there is oodles of material at Lincoln Center. See User talk:Yngvadottir/Archive 6#My father, Benjamin Steinberg; Xanthomelanoussprog and I gave her some help with Symphony of the New World and that led me to the conviction that we need an article on him. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:17, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Ill get to it , but it may be a week or so. DGG ( talk ) 18:21, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

It can definitely wait that long :-) She mentions her intention to be at the library during a week in July. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:23, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

) 

Want to collaborate on an essay for Misplaced Pages space?

Spotted your remark that it took about 6 months to learn to edit here, and was inspired to start an essay, Getting through the beginning stages of editing .... Want to collaborate on making it into an essay for Misplaced Pages space? Djembayz (talk) 10:42, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

I'll take a look--- of course, i meant it takes 6 months to learn most of the aspects of not just editing, but of working here in general, including effectiveness in discussions. DGG ( talk ) 23:09, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Jubilee USA page deletion - Referred by User Hoary

Hi- I'm trying to re-establish the Jubilee USA Network wiki page which was deleted earlier this year. It's a legitimate organization currently getting a ton of news coverage. I wrote a few paragraphs here to get it started, but as I'm pretty new to Misplaced Pages, I don't know if I'm doing it right. The user Hoary told me to place show this to you as you were somebody who authorized the deletion. I really appreciate your time and help!

Here's what I've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/User:AndrewHanauer/Jubilee_USA

Thanks!AndrewHanauer (talk) 01:14, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi- Checking back in. Was the draft I wrote ok? Does it need work? If so, what? It is just a small segment, but I feel it is unbiased and accurate and only cites the org's website for things like internal structure and mission statement. After it gets up, I'm happy to keep working on it more. Thanks!AndrewHanauer (talk) 13:11, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

How's this? https://en.wikipedia.org/User:AndrewHanauer/Jubilee_USA AndrewHanauer (talk) 14:35, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Simin Meydani

Hi, DGG. I came across this professor. Maybe you'd like to check it out. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:39, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

notable. h = 60 at least, many articles with over 100 citations.--as you know, I do not use h by itself as a discriminating factor, but when field is taken into account, it does serve as a rough screen. The reviewer has been consistently declining articles on academics as non-notable without checking the citations to their work, which is of course the primary and usual basis for notability under WP:PROF, . But there are problems, which prevent immediate acceptance. . The major one is that some of it is is a copypaste from their web site, and the rest reads as if it were, so it will need rewriting.

"Senior scientist" is sometimes an ambiguous title, but in a good university, it often represents the equivalent to full professor, so it always indicates the need to check. (& she is that also).

However, it is already in WP , under a different form of the name Simin Nikbin Meydani. Unfortunately, it contains the same faults, including the copypaste mentioned above. I've taken care of it. My experience is that it almost always pays to check with a search inside WP before doing work on an article. The frequent and very understandable response to bad reviewing is to just rewrite it directly into mainspace ; unfortunately, people sometimes do just the same after rejection by good reviewing. When I started working on afcs, I checked every plausible submission good or bad just in case an article was in mainspace, but I stopped for lack of time. It should really be built into the system as an obligatory first step. The problem is that one cannot count on an exact match, so it's going to be very tricky to do it with an algorithm that would find all cases. People do better for situations where there is possible ambiguity, but where are the people to do the work? DGG ( talk ) 17:57, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Sloane Citron

You had restored this AfC after it was deleted under G13. HasteurBot tagged it again since it has been six months since you restored it. Did you still want to check on this one? -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 04:56, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. The wat I do these, when a first review a 6 month old article,

a) in the few times it is good enough for mainspace as is, I just accept it, usually doing a little touch-up for WP style. (my standard here is 70% odds of passing afd, a little higher than may reviewers) )
b) in the few times it just needs minor changes, I make them and accept it.
c) in the 20% or so of times it seems likely to be notable with major improvements, i postpone it.
d) In the majority of times it does not seem at all likely, I let it get deleted if nobody else decides to rescue it
e) Int a considerable number of times it merits speedy deletion as promotional, copyvio, or so on I list it for deletion.
but unless I think it obvious that there must be an existing article I have not usually been checking for that, though I ought to. If I did, another significant number could be deleted as duplicates--with perhaps 1/4 of them justifying deletion of the mainspace article also.

When the 20% postponed drafts come up again, along with those other people postponed, I {like others) adopt a stricter standard to avoid too many repeated postponements:
a) if there is any reasonable chance a minor fix will make it 50 or % likely to pass afd I pass it. When it's that borderline, the community should have a chance to decide.
b) if it looks fixable but not worth fixing, I let it get deleted
c) Otherwise I either postpone it again or make some partial improvement so it will at least look better.
but, again, if I decide to fix & accept, it often turns out that the article was already in mainspace,where it may or may not need deletion or major improvement.

That in fact was the case here. I decided to fix it adequately, only to find that while the reference format had been fixed, the article was even more overwritten and promotional than the draft. I've tagged it accordingly, and am considering whether to work on it.

The only real way to properly deal with drafts that need improvement is to notify the relevant Wikiprojects and workgroups. It would be trivial to notify not just these postponed drafts but all incoming drafts--the mechanism exists for newpages, called WP:Deletion sorting --but the people programming afc have for unspecified reasons not adopted it. DGG ( talk ) 19:55, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Update It does work for Draft space--Wikproject Physics is using it. DGG ( talk ) 01:36, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Michael Hanna

The problem as I saw it is that the article was essentially a prosified version of a résumé, which as written (a) didn't even make any substantive claim that its subject actually passes any of our notability rules (which as you know require more than mere confirmation of existence), (b) was completely unreferenced, and (c) to all appearances the article subject created it himself, and then detagged it himself when another editor quite correctly tagged it for {{autobiography}} and {{notability}}. I'd be happy to sandbox it if someone can demonstrate that viable references actually exist with which it can actually be turned into a real encyclopedia article instead of a misplaced LinkedIn profile, but actually salvaging it as a keepable article is going to require a lot more than merely toning down one or two slightly promotional sentences. Bearcat (talk) 13:23, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Bearcat, any of these are reasons for deletion; none of them are reasons for speedy--please undelete. Speedy does not require proof or likelihood of notability, just indication of some significance, and head of UCL's neurology unit is an indication of importance. Unsourced has been specifically stated many times as an insufficient reason for speedy deletion; Autobiography similarly is not reason for speedy. Being based on a linkedin profile is not reason for speedy . Unsatisfactory does not equal speedy, only unsatisfactory because of the reasons at WP:CSD. If you want to use afd after I've cleaned it, use afd. DGG ( talk ) 22:25, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

As written, the article entirely correctly qualified for speedy under both G11 (unambiguous advertising or promotion) and A7 (article which did not make a substantive claim of notability), and I am not changing my mind on either of those points. You're correct that COI/AUTOBIO are not in and of themselves reasons for deletion in isolation, but those aren't the reasons I pulled the trigger — I did so because the article's basic writing tone was not encyclopedic in the first place, and because the article lacked even the slightest hint of sourcing to support even the slightest hint of a notability claim that actually passed one of our basic inclusion rules. And if the COI/AUTOBIO problems are true of an article which also meets one or more of the criteria that are reasons for speedy deletion, then they do constitute extra confirmation that the intent of the article was fundamentally advertorial rather than encyclopedic. They're not the reasons for deletion, but they do constitute corollary evidence in favour of the criteria that were the actual and stated reasons for deletion. As I said, I'm perfectly willing to sandbox it, but I am not willing to simply restore it to articlespace wholesale in its current state. Bearcat (talk) 22:47, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Bearcat, This is the first time in 7 yrs I've asked a fellow admit to revert a speedy, and been refused, tho certainly some have restored, and then gone to AfD for a community opinion. (I do want to make clear that I am not arguing it's a viable article at present, but just that it isn't a speedy.) I'm so surprised that I've looked further, and it seems that you have been frequently going by your own interpretation of "corollary evidence" instead of the actually deletion policy. Before I decide how to follow this up, I want to give you a chance to look at the other examples on your talk page. DGG ( talk ) 04:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Firstly, I did restore the article to draft space so that it can be worked on, so I'd thank you to avoid the assertion that I've refused to cooperate. But the article, as written, is a prosified version of a résumé which would require a fundamental rewrite to become properly encyclopedic in nature.

And I'm completely comfortable that nearly all of the deletions you singled out on my talk page were completely consistent with CSD as written. Asserting a topic's existence is not the same thing as asserting its significance — if it were, nothing would ever qualify for A7 at all — and all of the articles in question asserted existence but failed to assert significance, and/or were promotional in nature.

For starters, Cousin Matty did not assert (or source) its subject to be a "significant performer", but rather simply asserted his existence as a radio host on a single local radio station and then immediately devolved into a morass of unverifiable POV descriptions of his program ("fun", "energetic", "zany", etc.) which did constitute "advertising/promotion" — and nothing in the article actually constituted any substantive assertion of significance at all.

Similarly, I'm struggling with your certainty that Dollar Business is published by a "major" publisher — the company didn't have a Misplaced Pages article by which I could verify how "major" or "minor" it was, so I searched on Google and learned that the company was founded only one year ago and The Dollar Business is its only holding in any form of media. That doesn't make it a "major" publisher, but a small startup — which left me with only "this magazine exists" as a notability claim. And Uniiverse, too, completely failed to make any substantive assertion of significance — it documented the company's existence, certainly, but nothing in it rose to the level of asserting significance at all.

Like Hanna, Chattarji was a prosified version of a résumé, not an encyclopedic article about him; Stritesky was a literal résumé; and Carvalho was barely more than a résumé section — and the posting of résumés does fall under advertising/promotion. I most likely would have let all of them go if they'd been formatted differently than they were, but all of them had clearly promotional objectives that fully met the standard of requiring a fundamental complete-from-the-ground-up rewrite to become even remotely appropriate for inclusion in an encyclopedia.

I will grant that I deleted the school under the wrong criterion — I apologize for overlooking the fact that A7 excludes schools, but in reality it was actually still speediable: because it failed to make any mention whatsoever of where the school is located or what school board runs it, and absolutely nothing at all linked to the title, I had absolutely no way to identify where it could be redirected to. And for all of those reasons, it still qualified for speedy under A1 (insufficient context to identify the subject). If you feel strongly enough about it, I'd happily restore it just to redelete it A1 instead of A7, but it was fully speediable as written.

I mean, you're certainly free to disagree with me about whether something should be speediable or not — we're not all going to agree about anything on here, I know that. But the fact that you have a different opinion doesn't inherently mean that my reading was objectively wrong — I still don't see how any of the articles you singled out made substantive enough assertions of significance, as opposed to mere existence, to have made them nonspeediable. Bearcat (talk) 23:30, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

{U|Bearcat}}, I appreciate the detailed answer; please have the patience to read my reply--this is a disagreement, not a quarrel. I want to wait until tomorrow to look at them all again before re-examining details, and perhaps you are right that there is no point in analyzing them further between us. I am personally not concerned in the least about any of the articles, actually--they are just examples. .I was initially mainly concerned that you seem to be using a different standard that I think is outside the range that admins use here, but of course there is a straightforward way of settling this, which is DelRev. To some extent, each of us obviously using a somewhat different standard--despite attempts at precision, the CSD standards have a considerable element of judgment, and in any case I doubt any of us has a less than 5% error rate.

I have become somewhat more concerned that you do not take the customary measure that decrease the effective error rate: not to delete single-handed except on vandalism and the like (and for some technical deletions); assuming the nominator, not being an admin, has a 10% error rate, it decreases the errors to 0.5%, and I think it's futile for any WP process to aim at better.

I have become much more concerned now that I have realized you do not inform contributors before or even after. (again, this doesn't apply to vandals necessarily, or people making bad jokes, but I think it does have to apply to everyone else) Maintaining good relations and encouraging even initially unsatisfactory new contributors is the single most critical factor under our control to preserve WP. Very few people whose article is rejected ever tries here again (except of course the determined trouble-makers)--few even complain about the rejection, which at least gives us a second chance, they just go away , but most of them could be kept if we dealt with them better--and the first step in dealing with them better is to talk to them. What would anyone think of a person or organization that throws away your applications or submissions without even acknowledging or telling you?

Way back, my motive in becoming an admin was to deal with incorrect deletions, and I said so at the time. I've mostly been doing deletions myself unfortunately, DGG

Self/vanity publishing

David, could you perhaps have a look at this? Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 14:40, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

I commented, and will follow it up. DGG (at NYPL) -- reply here 19:20, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Other COI edits

I am working on responding to each of the pages. For here I wanted to research what you said about features only in promotional articles. All three other articles I've found in the industry have the same feature! I could use your advice on what I should do, if I have a potential COI in the industry. It's important to me that similar industry articles be handled similarly, but I don't want to make that too important.

• this edit does not show direct evidence of COI, although User:Shiply was created 2008 and active 2011.
• yes, this edit shows evidence of COI, and User:Tompey should be blanked.
• this edit shows mixed evidence; but earlier I searched requested articles and didn't find the alleged page referred to ("Creation of the uship page as requested in 'requested articles/internet'"), so that's significant.

Perhaps I should be more jaded and say that you're right, such statements themselves are evidence of a promotional article no matter what? Founding stories are automatically unencyclopedic unless the company is big, maybe. Can you please give Anyvan, Goldgenie, Shiply, User:Tompey, and UShip the same scrutiny you gave the articles I wrote for, as I did not want to take any edged weapons to them myself for obvious reasons? Frieda Beamy (talk) 16:40, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

You will probably find at least 100,000 promotional articles in WP , or 2% of the total. They exist for two basic reasons: First, our standards in our early years were much lower, and not all of the poor quality work done then has been revisited; in particular, a change occurred over the period 2010-2013 in large part as a response to the great increase in paid editing once our growing importance had become generally recognized. Second, many problems have simply been not noticed even for current articles there's about a 5% error rate in screening submissions here, in both directions (it used to be worse--when I came here in 2007 it was at least double. It ought to be lower, but given the wide community of people who participate, it may never get much better. After all, everyone has a non-zero error rate. My own is about 1% that I know of, so it's probably 2%. Some people do better, either because they work only on cut-and-dried decisions or in a limited field where standards are very solid--or because they're geniuses at what they do.

there's also a frequent situation, where an otherwise good article may have one bad section, and people have passed over the problem with the bad section, in order to concentrate more on removing the weaker articles. Sometimes such a section is added afterwards, and unlike new articles, we have no good method for reviewing such edits, It has sometimes happened that a promotional editor, after failing to get their promotion in the initial article, has managed to insert it afterwards; we remove such material when we notice it, but we do not always notice it. We tend to concentrate on detecting and removing downright vandalism in edits, not the insertion of subtle bias. And, inevitably ,we pay more attention to the most important articles; it is perhaps the most noticed weakness of WP that manipulation of the less important ones cannot easily be prevented.

Sometimes :origin stories have actual evidence; sometimes they are of such importance that they pass into legend, regardless of their accuracy (a traditional example is the myth of Newton's apple)--so they can sometimes be appropriate.

I noticed the other articles on firms in the industry, & intend to work on them. (I normally do check for related articles on the same subject or by the same editor) The similarity is indeed striking, considering they are all competitors. There were some you mentioned I had not noticed, and I will work on them. DGG ( talk ) 21:15, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, honestly. Here's just another thing, and don't feel a need to work on the following: I looked again at , and I find that this source is used about 130 times in mainspace, but it also features in about 60 deletion and spam discussions, and there's only one really useful link after wading through that. I judged this SEO aggregator site as unreliable twice now but who can argue with 130 other editors? Such is the tragicomedy of our situation. Frieda Beamy (talk) 03:18, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

This one is worth following up. it probably is also appropriate for putting on our blacklist. You've just shown one reason why we rely on new people joining; they will see things others have been missing. DGG ( talk ) 05:31, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

POV Mess

Hi DGG. At your convenience could you take a look at Persecution of traditional African religion. I think there is a strong argument for notability, but the wording of this article strikes me as terribly essayish/agenda oriented. I am seriously considering sending it to AfD but would like a second opinion before taking any action. Thanks... -Ad Orientem (talk) 21:46, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

It's of very low quality, but aside from the title (I might word it as "Interaction" not "Persecution", but that could be regarded as euphemism) I don't think that POV is the main problem, nor even the essay nature, but rather the superficial use of sources and the drawing of rather doubtful conclusion (perhaps Islam is more compatible than Christianity with African traditional religions, but it needs fuller evidence.) And the listing of 3 or 4 specific conflicts at the end greatly underplays the problem--that part is a good example of the way many WP articles are written by the addition or accumulation of random facts. I'm certainly willing to use afd to remove promotional junk so a better article can be written, but this is merely low level competence. Taking a wider look, many other general articles on the overall topic seem inadequate also, tho not as inadequate as this one. Taking things as a whole, our coverage or religion is perhaps our weakest area: the articles tend to be either inwardly focussed for various small groups going into disproportionate and uncritical detail, or superficial and condescending general treatments. Removing this article won't solve the problems. DGG ( talk ) 01:03, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the 2nd opinion. I just noticed that the article's creator also self reviewed his own article and gave it a B(!) rating. This is a mess. The only question in my mind right now is if it's fixable in its current form. -Ad Orientem (talk) 01:30, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

I think it is--the overall organization is OK, and the books seem like suitable refs. The problem is that doing it right will take some actual work in a library. DGG ( talk ) 05:14, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Joseph A. Petry

Hmmm... what's a "Clinical professor"? —Anne Delong (talk) 03:00, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

In medicine, a clinical professor is someone who supervises the students in their education in the medical facilities, where most of the upperclass education takes place, but not a classroom teacher. In other fields it's analogous--someone supervising in a legal clinic or the like. In this case, presumably finance laboratories or practicums. It is not in the least of the same implications of notability as a regular faculty position. It tends to be given to relatively important local practitioners. Most senior medical specialists will be at least Assistant Clinical Professors in one med school or another. For his individual notice the publication list: he actually includes what amounts to a course syllabus. No rational chance of passing afd. In mainspace, I'd consider it almost an A7. DGG ( talk ) 07:51, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, DGG, How about this one? Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Roshdi Rashed? —Anne Delong (talk) 13:55, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Definitely Notable. Emeritus professor at two famous universities. Multiple major prizes at anational and international levels. Editor of a leading journal in his field; editor of major encyclopedia; Author or editor of several dozen academic books, some translated int o multiple languages--I see besides the expected French, English, and Arabic, also Spanish , Italian, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish. I moved it to mainspace. Meets WP:AUTHOR, and several criteria of WP:PROF. That this should have been not accepted initially is a little surprising, even for the lack of understanding of the humanities so prevalent at WP. DGG ( talk ) 19:05, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Ali Riaz

Hi DGG - Not sure about this one... —Anne Delong (talk) 00:26, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

just looking at library holdings, he's almost certainly notable at least as author. The article needs some extensive revisions, which I started. The revisions are enough to defer it for 6 months, & I'll get it fixed on the next round if it doesn't get fixed sooner. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility

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	For tireless devotion to temporarily restoring articles being considered at deletion review -- RoySmith (talk) 15:30, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you

I just saw a note that you contested the prod of the Talk:Capt. William Bull Tavern. I thank you for that! I've been going about researching different properties and making a bunch of Good Articles in the process, bringing all that I am able to find with my research to bear on these types of articles. It may be small now, but I'll likely have it at Good Article Nominations before too long. Thanks for halting the deletion of a notable and (very much historic) property, I probably would not have been able to recreate it easily if not for your action. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 21:56, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Review

Hi DGG, if it isn't a bother, could you take a quick look and review - Robert E. Olds, Joseph P. Cotton, Marcus M. Haskell, Osgood T. Hadley and Henry A. Hammel These are my first five article creations, I'm in the process of creating rest of the missing Civil War recipients of the Medal of Honor. There seems to be quite a backlog at New Page Patrol. Regards,  NQ  talk 22:19, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

1 point: in addition to saying in a general note that the material is copied from the US govt site, it's best to indicate by quotation marks exactly what has been copied--is it just the quotation in the box? then add it in the footnote there. DGG ( talk ) 02:28, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Only the MOH citation is copied verbatim from the Public domain material. The general note added is a template {{ACMH}} . I am not sure there is a parameter to include exactly which portion is copied.  NQ  talk 02:40, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

I will find a way to do it. DGG ( talk ) 02:51, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

NPP

I have often thought that a possible set of criteria of competency to patrol new pages should include:

• 500 edits to main space and/or holder of 'Reviewer' and 'Rollback' flags with an established record of accuracy.
• 3 months tenure
• No CSDd or PRODed own creations.
• A demonstrated level of maturity when communicating with other editors.
• A declaration that they have reqd qnd understood WP:NPP and WP:DELETION

Implementation:

A list such as the AfC reviewer list. Anyone adding their name to the list and not meeting the ctiteria will be removed and asked to stop patrolling. Any patrollers patrolling without issue over the preceding 12 months to be grandfathered in.

getting there:

Perhaps an RfC could bring forth such measures, but I rather fear it would not be supported by Foundation staff whether or not they edit under their staff or volunteer accounts - we've had such issues before.

--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:34, 22 August 2014 (UTC).

the jurisdiction over whom we give permissions is our own. We can implement this ourself via an admin board--it doesn't have to be a formal user right. We are indeed dependent on them for the implementation of a new right, and frankly, I'd rather not ask them for that--I think the rights matrix is too splintered already. This is nowhere near as basic as the right to submit a new article, which was the problem you allude to where they objected.

It doesn't much matter what level we choose, we can adjust it later. Difficulty in deciding such detail has defeated many good proposals in the past. The point is to implement some level to establish the principle. For simplicity I suggest it be the same for AfD and NPP. DGG ( talk ) 05:21, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

Thanks for your help! Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 10:45, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

About WikiProjects

Quoting you from wikimedia-l:

I completely agree with Liam that the way forward in many areas is with the Wikiprojects. They need further development, but I'm not sure how much of this requires additional software, rather than additional active participation. We should learn from the most successful, such as military history. (or chemistry or medicine) They're a self-organizing feature, with the advantage of not requiring funding or help from the foundation. Some have however on enWP become somewhat of a closed circle, immune to community views to the point of trying to maintain guidelines the community does not support .he remedy for this as for essentially everything else is increased participation.

I personally like WikiProjects because they should be, in theory, the point of contact of a newcomer with people who have deep knowledge in the relevant area.

What software would WikiProjects like to see? Should I open a call for software suggestions at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject? (I personally thought of enabling Extension:Dynamic Page List for them to view fresh category members, but it is supposedly a large load, while Lua can't do that either. I am not very happy about using JavaScript user scripts or gadgets for this, although that could be a last resort.) --Gryllida (talk) 05:43, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I cannot speak for Wikiprojects in general, or even for the wikiprojects of which I am a member. In general terms, my personal opinion -- one I think is very widely shared-- is that the role of Wikiprojects should be in organizing the creation and improvement of articles and the encouragement of good editing in their field. They have a key role in proposing relevant guidelines, but all final decisions and all enforceable policies and guidelines must always be the responsibility of the whole community.

The immediate question is the role of Wikiprojects in the screening of new articles and article drafts, and the education of new editors. My personal opinion, and one I think is shared by a number of others working with new articles and new editors--is that the only practical way of dealing competently with the large amount of material is to organize the work by Wikiproject.

To do this, I do not think we need any additional software, though we could use some modifications in existing software. The necessary mechanism for the allotment of articles to workgroups is already available at WP:Deletion sorting, though the algorithms (and perhaps other elements) would benefit from adjustment and simplification, and some minor modifications are needed cover draft space.

My own position-- and I do not know how widely it is shared--is that this should replace the current AfC and Draft procedures. Perhaps some new programs and procedures will be necessary, but I have not devised a fully developed workflow--the person closest to having a proposal for this is Kudpung, and I am very likely to follow his lead in this. Some of the existing AfC templates are procedures presumably will need to be adapted to work with Article Curation, but this depends on the proposal. The principle software change I think we we need is to remove the AfC procedure entirely, except for processing the articles currently in it.

This is not a technical problem, but one of convincing individual people here to do the necessary work. I am not thinking in terms of adding procedures or programming--I am rather thinking of removing many of them. Sometimes small amounts of well-devised mechanical devices can facilitate work, but WP has been much too dependent on a ridiculous number of complex and overcomplicated ones. At present the amount of overhead in many WP processes, including AfC, impedes rather than facilitates work. I manage to do my work there by ignoring much of the structure, often replacing the automated unhelpful notices with my own personally tailored and individualized messages. It's not that I would want to institutionalize my preferred wording--I think all explanations of to new editors should be written from scratch for the specific article, explaining things in terms that are accurate, directly applicable, and likely to be understood. This takes much more work than applying prebuilt templates, but it is the only way to give good results.

It has been years now since I have made a formal policy or guideline proposal. I just do the necessary work, and try to teach others likewise. Like any teaching there is a role for technology, but technology is not the limiting factor. I do not want to downplay the pleasure I feel at of your request; I have often wished I had the time to do some such work myself. What automation is needed should be done much better than it now is, and any assistance there will help. Though we're not currently at that point, I want to keep in touch. DGG ( talk ) 06:22, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I've already said what I think about project participation on AfC and why it doesn't work at WT:AFC this morning. Most project and/or their members however, are not aware of lots of little gadgets that help them keep control and overview of articles within thier remit. I do this for the WP:WPSCH and for the WP:WORCS projects. They provide me with real time dedicated watchlists and notifcations if they are edited or tagged, but apart from major project such as MuilHist or Medical, I think most other projects are very much less active. Even at WP:WPSCH which is one our largest projects, it's only really the project coords who are watching anything and we certainly don't have time to dedicate to the 1000s of school articles that need attention - the best we can do is intervene when some clueless patrollers wrongly tags them for deletion or send them to AfD - and sometimes even that can take up several hours a day. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:58, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

The way to deal with inactive projects is to combine them, until they reach a reasonable level of activity, and to active try to persuade people editing in the area to take a role in screening I think we could probably mange to cover about 2/3 of the submission with active projects. . But essentially Wikiprojects is only one way of dividing it up by subject, and any similar way would work equally well. The present afc system--and NPP is not set up to do this. Myself, I tend to prefer NPP because it gives enough context that Ican go through a select the ones I am likely to be competent or at least interested in. With AfC, it's impossible *except for the special situation of pages declined for a subject -specific reason, such as not meeting WP:PROF, but that doesn't help with new submissions. So in working with them, I think that I necessarily spend too much time dealing with things others could do better, and don;t get the opportunity to deal with what I know. (It's not primarily a question of knowing subject specific notability guidelines or howe we apply them, but rather of knowing how to most easily improve an article in a particular subject.) DGG ( talk ) 08:54, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure about merging projects, even largely defunct ones. That would be a matter for the projects themsleves to decide and another leg in the AfC malady to be amputated first, and it would probabl;y take years. On the other hand, the beauty of the NPP system software is that it provides via it feed and curation overview all the background of the article, what's wrong with it, and about the creator and possibly what's wrong with him/her too. The actual use of the system from the point of view of the patroller is that it does permit the patrollers to be immediately selective over what they want to patrol. The only downside is that most patrollers lack the required experience and only go for the low hanging fruit. Indeed, they do little else than add Orphan tags (because that's easy because the software has already told them) and tagging for deletion. They imagine that some magic fairy is going to fly past on a broom and do the rest of the cleaning up. She doesn't come of course, leaving fully indexed articles alive in mainstapce for months, or even years until someone finds them and does something about them.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:50, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

You are right that the context provided by NPP/page curation is enough to select articles to review. Some however will need specialists in areas where nobody is checking. The Wikiprojects' role is to get qualified people to look at the list of incoming articles. At least the ones with active projects can be dealt with that way--my estimate is about half. Half the rest is easy, leaving 1/4 problems for generalists.

However, the indexing problem for incoming junk is a significant one, that's the point of the draft workspace. A single feed of incoming articles cannot eliminate it. I think the initial hope was for it to be done in the first few minutes, but that's proved impossible. I do not know how to deal with this, except to delay indexing for a day or two for everything until reviewed--and that is very likely to be resisted, even possibly by the foundation. DGG ( talk ) 04:03, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Discussion about AFC templates and workflow

I remember, in early stages of the AFC script rewrite, I tried to convey some thoughts on semi-automation, more comprehensive reviews, etc, on IRC; Theopolisme had mentioned that such ideas need a redesign of templates first. I'm asking others to consider doing it, now, in here. Please have a look. --Gryllida (talk) 05:45, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I saw this after I had written my reply above. I'll follow up tomorrow. But my first reaction is that I would rather work with no templates at all. There is no way for mechanical messages to handle this, because no matter how good they are, the important thing is not to be mechanical. DGG ( talk ) 06:25, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Detecting copyvio

My approach to copyright is not to rely on google, but to check the person's web site, and any other posssible relevant external link or reference. In particular, many universities use noindex on the web sites, or on the portions of it which is a people directory. DGG ( talk ) 16:42, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Draft:David E. Sellers

There multiple ways to solve such a problem. Yours leaves the copyvio in the edit history. Since this is a draft article with a single author, there is no problem with deleting the draft, having the author get the text refunded via email, and then have them report it without the copyvio. There is also no problem (if the editor logs in before it is deleted) having them make an edit to restore a version before the decline was made, with the copyvio edited out, and then revdeling the in-between versions.

Either way both preserves attribution, and removes the copyvio from the edit history. You way leaves it in. I've been scanning large numbers of draft articles for copyvios, and G-12'd over 100 of them with various levels of problems. Out of the half-dozen or so admins who've taken action on them, you are the only one with this particular solution to the problem, and the only one who seems happy leaving the copyvio in the history. Revent 16:55, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

The choice of which way to solve problems of copyvio is not purely a question of administrator idiosyncrasy, but involves many factors.

The general principles are found in both WP :COPYRIGHT and WP:Deletion Policy and its subpages. First, Deletion policy is that "Reasons for deletion subject to the condition that improvement or deletion of an offending section, if practical, is preferable to deletion of an entire page)" and "If editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page" Section 3.1 for copyright violations says "remove the violation if possible, or edit the page to replace its entire content with {{subst:copyvio|url=address of copied material}}. For blatant, whole-page copyright violation, you can simply tag it for speedy deletion with {{db-copyvio|url=...}} after checking that there are no non-copyvio versions in the page history." Second, with respect to copyvio, WP:CSD says it applies to "Text pages that contain copyrighted material with no credible assertion of public domain, fair use, or a compatible free license, where there is no non-infringing content on the page worth saving. Only if the history is unsalvageably corrupted should it be deleted in its entirety; earlier versions without infringement should be retained. For equivocal cases which do not meet speedy deletion criteria (such as where there is a dubious assertion of permission, where free-content edits overlie the infringement, or where there is only partial infringement or close paraphrasing), the article or the appropriate section should be blanked with {{subst:Copyvio}}, and the page should be listed at Misplaced Pages:Copyright problems. " Third, at WP:COPYVIO, it says "Handling of suspected violations of copyright policy depends on the particulars of a given case" It then says "If you have strong reason to suspect ... some, but not all, of the content of a page appears to be a copyright infringement, then the infringing content should be removed, and a note to that effect should be made on the discussion page, along with the original source, if known. "and " If all of the content ... a copyright infringement or removing the problem text is not an option because it would render the article unreadable, if an older non-infringing version of the page exists, you should revert the page to that version. If there is no such older version, you may be able to re-write the page from scratch, but failing that, the page will normally need to be deleted. "Fourth, looking at WPRevision Deletion, one of the permitted uses is for "Blatant copyright violations that can be redacted without removing attribution to non-infringing contributors. If redacting a revision would remove any contributor's attribution, this criterion cannot be used. Best practices for copyrighted text removal can be found at Misplaced Pages:Copyright problems and should take precedence over this criterion." The word "Blatent" is obviously open to interpretation, but a small paragraph copied from the persons website is not "blatant".

:I interpret this as follows:

I. removing a whole article because a nonessential part is copyright is not supported by policy. None the less, policies have some flexibility, and admins sometimes do that, and I have done something a little like it on occasion, based on the phrase in G12 "when there is no non-infringing content worth saving". If the articles is inherently promotional, I generally delete saying both G11 and G12, and I think of "entirely promotional" in a more more flexible way when there is significant copyvio. For articles, I'll sometimes do the same with A7/G12. For draft where A7 does not apply, and which the person has been repeatedly submitting without improvement, I'll try to find some reason. I will be more flexible in helping those.

II. As a general rule there is no reason to revision-delete, as look as the copyvio text is removed from the current version. It is not even permitted unless the violation was "blatant".

I intend to pursue both of these issues elsewhere (with some of the admins, at WT:CSD, and, for any worth the trouble, deletion review); the primary fault is with deleting administrators who exceed policy. From a quick look, some of your deletion nominations seem reasonable, some less so. (It's fair to tell you I intend to look more carefully at all of them, past and future) I just deleted one where the essential material was in fact copyvio. I follow policy, and I try to use a middle-of-the-road interpretation. DGG ( talk ) 00:58, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I'll try to respond to this in bits, since you wrote a lot. First, you say that it's not a matter of administrator idiosyncracy... it shouldn't be, but unfortunately it is. I've talked with several administrators about going this, and gotten varying responses depending on who I was talking to. I'm just trying to help with the backlog by dealing with the huge number of copyright violations, and other easy speedy declines as I see them.... it's not my favorite thing to do, and honestly, I would rather be working on other things, but I'm trying to help, and I'm talking with other people as I do so, not just randomly deciding what I think is right.

To be honest, though, I think your interpretation of what is a 'blatant' copyright violation is, as you describe it, far too lenient, and based on your interpretation of Misplaced Pages policy rather than the legalities. Not that I am claiming to be a copyright lawyer, but yes, a single paragraph copied verbatim is blatant copyright infringement, and it's illegal. Even a single sentence can be a copyright violation, if it is verbatim, or if the rewording is minimal (like changing a pronoun to a last name) and preserves the structure of the original. "Blatant" in this context means, or at least should legally mean that the copyright violation is obvious, not that it is extensive. If a sentence is phrased in a way that is 'creative', as opposed to one that is the only obvious way to make the statement, then you can't simply copy it. It's wrong.

You need to read, very, very carefully, the last paragraph of WP:COMPLIC, and the Misplaced Pages article on Substantial similarity. To be specific, "Under the doctrine of substantial similarity, a work can be found to infringe copyright even if the wording of text has been changed or visual or audible elements are altered."

You are right, however, that I have probably G-12'd drafts that 'could' have had the material removed, and as it stands now, after more discussion with other admins, I'm actually being more lenient about doing so. This has nothing to do with your understanding of if it's 'blatant', though, it's merely that my previous 'suspicion' that an attribution stated by a hyperlink in the edit summary is sufficient to fulfill the CC-BY-SA licensing requirements is correct, and so the problem can be 'fixed' by an edit followed by revision deletion. Previously my understanding was that such a deletion would have to be done after the 'author' made an edit, so as to preserve attribution, but with links in the edit summaries that's unnecessary. I'm now only G-12ing things where there would basically be nothing left after removing the copyvio, or where the text would be useless, and instead getting them fixed by revision deletion.

Your idea that leaving the copyright violation in the edit history is ok is simply wrong, for a couple of reasons. One, the copyvio could be restored by a later edit, and second, the WMF distributes database dumps that include edit histories. Distributing them with included copyright violations is just as illegal as leaving them visible. I suggest that if you think I'm wrong here that you ask a WMF lawyer. I'm quite certain you'll find I'm not.

As far as you 'reviewing my CSDs more closely,' I have no problem with that, and have in fact said before that I hope that admins do look at them closely before actually deleting them. Not that I doubt my ability to tell what is a copyright violation, but everyone makes mistakes. If some admin is just approving G-12 CSDs without looking at them, they should be yelled at. Revent 17:31, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Notability requirements for Professors

According to Misplaced Pages:Notability (academics) just being a full professor is not enough to meet notability requirements. Which is why I tagged the article. Eeekster (talk) 00:29, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

A7 is for no indication of importance. A full professor may of may not be notable, but that someone is a full professor, or even an associate professor or assistant professor) at a recognized university is a good-faith indication of plausible importance, which is much less than the standard for passing afd. See WP:AFD and extensive discussions on its talk page for the distinction. As for actual notability, I'n working on the article--I think he probably is, but I have to check further before I comment at the afd you started. DGG ( talk ) 02:41, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Carita Feliz

Hi, would welcome your views on this article, which was likely written by an undeclared paid or COI editor. Thanks. Logical Cowboy (talk) 03:17, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I listed in for G11. (G11is a little impressionistic, and I don't like to delete using it unless another admin agrees. FWIW, this seems characteristic of one particular paid editor I've noticed who cannot distinguish between its and it's. DGG ( talk ) 04:43, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Hmm, and what do you think about this promotional article Zealand pharma? There is a funny trio of "new" accounts editing these, as well as Lars Kolind: Isabellalo1904, Team sunshine, and Free4fear. Note that all three of these articles, Carita Fariz, Zealand pharma, and Lars Kolind, are about Danish people/organizations. I would bet you 5 p that the three accounts belong to the same person. Logical Cowboy (talk) 22:40, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

You have done an excellent job of removing the fluff from Kolid, who is clearly notable enough to be worth the work. (The enWP is an apparently close translation of the Danish WP, and Isabellalo1904 just added an appropriate reference). Zealand Pharma might be notable; Carita Feriz is almost certainly not.It's worth spi, but I don't have patience for their procedures. The moral is that someone notable does themselves a disservice by using a paid editor. I may be coming to agree with a position I previously did not like: paid editing should be prohibited outright, whether or not disclosed, and whether or not we can catch all the offenders. I also am starting to think that our standards of notability should be raised in most fields, which will be best done by abandoning the GNG for objective criteria. And our standard of promotionalism should be stricter, by more exactly defining and limit what is appropriate content. But the first step in any case is to energetically remove what does not meet even our current standards. DGG ( talk ) 04:55, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Apocrypha

On Dec 12, 2012 you added a tag "out of date" to the above article. You did not, however, deliver any explanation or reason on the discussion page. It would be useful to know if you think this tag still applies or can be removed and if it still does WHAT you think is out of date. It's always useful when adding a maintenance tag to explain why you do. Things that may be obvious to you probably aren't to others. ;) --Maxl (talk) 09:45, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

What was out of date was the use of only 19th and early 20th century sources. They are reliable only in a historical sense, for there have been enormous changes in our knowledge of the period since then for the Christian and Jewish apocrypha. Speaking only of data then unknown, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have contents very relevant to both of these, had not even been discovered. The only use them, or of studies based on them, is in the article is as a see: reference. And these are only the best known: there have been other major new discoveries of documents from the period. Interpretations are not the same either. There has been over a century of work by hundreds of scholars of various persuasions since those older encyclopedic sources were written--perhaps the best know are Frank Moore Cross and Cross andElaine Pagels. There have been many recent books of the formation of both the Christian and Jewish canons. I assume there has been similar increases in knowledge of other religion's texts, though I have no knowledge about this. There was also a failure of attribution: it was not specified in the text what parts were copied from which particular of these older source-nor is it even clear from the edit history.

I see the current version is very little better including the lack of use of texts found in the 20th century (though two of them were at least mentioned, & one general book was added as a source in two small places)-- and the continuing failure of attribution.

I greatly regret not having had time to work on this. I will in the next few months either do the basics, at least for a bibliography, or find someone who can do this.

I am copying this to the article's talk page. DGG ( talk ) 14:53, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Tajja Isen

Hey, Dave, I was wondering if you'd help me with an issue. Almost two years, I added and improved this article but within days, an IP (who I suspect is the subject or at least someone connected) removed a lot of the information. Now I understand removing it because you don't want the information to be seen but removing sensible stuff like the producers and replacing with "is still working on it" stands out to me. Some searches yielded nothing to suggest she has actually released it now. I hadn't actually noticed this until tonight as I haven't been as active as I used to be and I kind of forgot of this article. I added the information because it shows she comes from an educated family including musically. I also suspect it may be the subject because they removed a bit on a rejected audition. Care to weigh in? SwisterTwister talk 04:18, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi, I simply want to remind you not to forget me and have this thread be pushed to the back. SwisterTwister talk 03:54, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I'lll get there. DGG ( talk ) 04:04, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

AfC vs NPP

I really liked your comment on the Signpost article. It made me see things from a perspective I had hitherto ignored. Perhaps if all Drafts were fed into the New Pages Feed, but unindexed as they are now, and clearly show up as 'Draft', the current AfC squad might migrate to the NPP feed. Of course, this would open up the drafts to also being reviewed by NPPers, but this might not necessarily be a bad thing. At least the AfC submissions that are clear cases of unmitigated nonsense could be swiftly dealt with by CSD or summarily nuked by admins on patrol. And the AfCers might get some new found joy by seeing what crap arrives live into mainspace and helping do something about it. --KudpungMobile (talk) 11:46, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

KudpungMobile The flipside is that NPP would have to be trained on which standard operating practices they have to supress and which ones they have to add to the pile for pages under the umbrella of AfC. Hasteur (talk) 12:42, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Hasteur, I don't believe NPPers need to be trained in anything other than reading their own very complete modus operandi - something that AfC does not have and desperately needs. DGG puts forward some very valid arguments for such a merger, while I still believe that perhaps cloning and adapting the NPP software for the use of AfC is also a solution worth considering. At least both solutions would radically put an end to the constant talk about and development of palliative scripts which appear to be the major affliction at AfC - I sometimes wonder whether AfC is a playground for programmers or is simply heading towards a social networking venue such ss the WP:CVU/A became until we forced its closure and replaced it with a clone of an existing off-the-peg solution (naturally after also considering merging it with a sister project). KudpungMobile (talk) 21:44, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Hasteur, we inevitably need accepted operating practices, and it will be better to have one set of them than two. There are several aspects: First, the standards. There is only one part of dealing with new articles where we have almost-universally accepted standards, Speedy, and it takes constant effort to keep admins and other editors following them; acceptances at both NPP and AFC are very idiosyncratic. (And of course any standard relying on group consensus in individual cases as with AfD will inherently have considerable randomness and inconsistency.) Second, the procedures: a problems of both NPP and AFC is that the existing reply patterns are too rigid, especially with the insanely ineffectual AfC templates. (And the key advantage of NPP is its reliance on Huggle, one of the few procedural things here that really work well) On a purely technical basis, I find it usually better to go outside the system at NPP (the only thing I really need NPP for is the display of new articles to patrol), and sometimes at AfC. (in fact, the only reason I even use the AfC system instead of editing and moving draft pages directly is the need to keep the categories up to date to avoid confusing others). With respect to communicating, the use of fixed rather than personalized help will always prevent truly effective assistance -- but this has to be balanced against the difficulty of leaving the assistance totally freeform, especially to relative beginners. I do not want to discourage the social interaction element in keeping new users, provided it be social interaction about Misplaced Pages--the part of AfC when people come to ask questions is the most valuable part of it. It has the further benefit of making visible the answers people give, and see who among those answering is in need of instruction themselves. I personally do not like elaborate training schemes, but apparently some do--they are best run the way some people run the preparation for adminship, as an entirely separate process. Nor do I downrate the aid possible from clever programming--but this aid is best given within the context of WP in general, like Huggle, rather than scripts for elaborate procedures, like the incredibly kludgy new method of placing AfC responses on the submitter's page, repeating every possible choice in the template, but displaying only one.

there is a place for forms: some situations are sufficiently straightforward; and even a need for them: most really impossible material can be best dealt with in a uniform way for enforcement purposes (I therefore always use the standardized user warnings and block notices). And, Kudpung, I think it extremely dangerous to leave removal of material to single admin discretion--the speedy deletion system should be used, because almost all deletions need review by a second person. DGG ( talk ) 23:53, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Ahron Daum

Dear DGG: You made some changes to the above draft in February, but another user had already copied the content and created a mainspace article at Ahron Daum. Would you consider reverting your edit so that I can history merge the two? —Anne Delong (talk) 16:16, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

the article that was created is so over-laudatory that the simplest thing to do will simply be to edit it. Please Leave it to me; Rabbis are a little tricky for various reasons, and I will need to consult about the Yiddish version. DGG ( talk ) 00:13, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by tricky - the history merged edits just go in invisibly underneath the mainspace article edits to preserve the attribution. It's only a technical change. I am happy to leave any editing of the mainspace article to you, since I had no intention of changing it. —Anne Delong (talk) 01:07, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

DGG: You've been continuing to edit this draft after I pointed out that the same text has been copied into mainspace. Am I missing something? I'd like to history-merge the old edits to show who really created the text, but if you don't feel that's appropriate, it should at least be deleted. —Anne Delong (talk) 15:41, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Catharine Savage Brosman

DGG, this one seems notable. I didn't find a University bio, although her papers are at Tulane University. I fixed up the list of publications, but the format seemed to include tabs, which may mean it was copied from somewhere. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:18, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

The form it was submitted in certainly makes it seem like a copyvio--the thing to pick up is a structured format that is different from ours. But there is no copyright in a list of publications, though usually whatever is submitted here needs some improvement. The part that worries me is the Critical Reception paragraph. I think we need to check the actual bio in contemporary authors--it's accessible online fairly easily through many public libraries. Fairly complete rewriting may be needed, but the reception section is too extensive in any case. I have been using inclusion there as proof of notability, without any challenges. It would be a useful activity to go systematically thru the whole thing, adding a stub for everyone. DGG ( talk ) 00:08, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Interesting to you, maybe! I like a little variety, myself... —Anne Delong (talk) 01:01, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I said useful, not interesting. If it were interesting, I'd have done it long ago. DGG ( talk ) 03:08, 10 September 2014 (UTC).

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Edward Stabler

Hey, sorry to be a pest, but here's another one.... —Anne Delong (talk) 00:58, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

this one will need some work. No matter how many you send me, it is not being a pest; it is, rather, a helpful collaboration, because I can not possibly pick up all of these myself--and before you started, it sometimes felt like that.. What we need around AfC is a few more people who work as carefully and intelligently as you do. DGG ( talk ) 03:11, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, I am trying to work through the G13's but there are too many if I also try to fix up the ones I find. Last month, by the time I went through and improved the ones I'd previously postponed, I only had time to check the new ones beginning with A, B, C and D! Luckily, Rankersbo was very busy checking the rest of the list, and several other editors were picking off a few here and there and nominating hopeless ones for deletion to save us time. If you want to catch more of these professors, maybe Rankersbo would be willing to refer some to you. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:44, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Ideally of course, I want to catch everything that has potential for an article. I find it ironic that I actually helped propose G13, but I never imagined it would be used indiscriminately. I concentrate a little on academic faculty because I am so familiar with the RW and WP situation that I both know what can be rescued and can easily do the rescue. And because I want to help correct the imbalance in our coverage. DGG ( talk ) 14:22, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, frustrating as it is to see so many drafts being deleted, the problems caused by what would by now be 100,000 or so badly written, copyvio, promotional, BLP violating, etc. pages being picked up by mirror sites and then by Google was a real problem for Misplaced Pages's credibility and still is to a lesser degree. Try typing the word "Professor" into THIS and you will get over 1000 hits, and this doesn't count the more recent ones in Draft space. It's hard to believe that there are still more than 3000 of these old drafts to check each month. I thought that it would ease off when the backlog was gone. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:52, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

With each pass through the older drafts I remove the weakest, and promote the strongest; the ones that are left (sometimes I defer again, usually I just make a small edit, or a first pass at removing some inappropriate material, or removing the earlier of the multiple versions that new contributors keep adding instead of modifying the first one) are the borderline ones that will be hardest to deal with. The alternative, of making one pass and dealing definitively with everything, is impractical because of the time needed to fix an article. The practice of many other G13 reviewers, removing everything that cannot immediately be fixed, loses too much; the practice of some, removing everything regardless, is in my opinion wrong altogether, but I can not effectually combat it except by trying to get there first.

There are a few key changes in practice that would make dealing with AfCs much easier: First, decreasing the number of resubmissions by trying to make it unambiguously clear that a subject that fails notability will not be accepted. Second, detecting and removing the ones that are already in mainspace (tho of course we often must then handle appropriately an unsatisfactory mainspace article) This could be automated--we already detect moves into mainspace that duplicate an article--this could be instead done at the first edit, or automatically by bot over the whole backlog.. Third, as as been asked for many times, detecting copyvios at the very beginning. This too can be partially automated, and should be, again possibly by bot over the submissions as they are entered, though manual checks will always be needed, and automatic removal is impossible because of reverse copyvio and partial copyvio.

Using a single stream of NPP instead of prior AfC, would permit using A7, would eliminate the duplications with mainspace, and an automated copyvio check on everything submitted at NPP would be a good idea. As discussed above, the problem with a single stream is that we will still need to deal with and review a draft workspace. 16:47, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 14#New articles being created when a draft is in progress for a discussion of suggesting to those creating new pages in mainspace that they check for a draft in progress. Jaydiem's two suggestions, the second on easier to implement that the first, should cut down the number of duplicate articles; however, changing such an important function would need a proposal and strong consensus AND a techie to carry it out. —Anne Delong (talk) 17:04, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I see that particular problem differently. I think it is not common for user A to make an article on the same topic as user B's draft. Rather what a time sequence like this usually represents is the user B copies the material into mainspace under the same or a different user name after the draft is declined, either because he tries to evade the decline of an unacceptable article or almost as likely realizes that the decline was unintelligent. But the sequence I see most is that user A makes a draft ignorant that an article on the subject already exists. We do of course need a simple way of directly searching drafts; we also need a check for near identical article topics, because a very common response to rejection of either a draft oran actual article is to make one under a variant title. Most of these that we pick up is by the chance of the same person seeing both of them and remembering. DGG ( talk ) 21:49, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Maybe it's because I go through so many drafts, but I have come across many cases where I have had to throw a draft away because I took too long and someone started from scratch (not copied from the draft) and made a new article. Also, using the Misplaced Pages search engine will find variations in titles because it does a search of all text, whereas an algorithm that just compares titles from various namespaces will miss a lot, as you pointed out.

When someone types a title into the search box, there is no way to know if the person was planning to create an article or was just searching. If searching, we want the process to remain undisturbed. If the user intends to make a page, however, we want some increased functionality. A combination approach:

(1)Those making a draft should be warned about a mainspace article, and those making a mainspace article to be warned about a draft. An algorithm that checks and adds a line such as "There is already a mainspace article with that title" if it's a Draft, or "There is a draft under development about this topic at TITLE", if it's a mainspace title. This should be straightforward. Preventing the creation of one if the other existed would be quite controversial.

(2)Editors should be able to easily find a draft under development on their topic. A button beside the "Advanced" button that says "Check for a Draft in progress" and then searches only draft space for the exact phrase (but not just in the title) that is already in the search box should do it. —Anne Delong (talk) 10:42, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Luis Herrera Cometta

Dear DGG: This one was declared notable at Wikiproject Physics, but no one was interested in working on it. —Anne Delong (talk) 20:59, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Request for copy of deleted Geist (company)

Hello, DGG,

I'm a relatively new editor to Misplaced Pages, and have elected to work with WikiProject Companies. Would you be willing to send me a copy of the article on Geist (company)? Voceditenore recommended I contact you as the nominator of the article for speedy deletion. I am not the creating editor, but I had done some copyediting and bare html conversion before it completed the AfC process. I had a brief exchange with the AfC reviewer, here. The article was deleted soon after approval: 12:01, 27 July 2014 Randykitty deleted page Geist (company) (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion). I would just like to improve my abilities to revise promotional content/language and edit for NPOV. Thanks for considering this request.

Cheers! — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 17:22, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Grand'mere Eugene. Sent., but I don't really think there's potential for an article--my email will explain why. Ideally, the person you're officially supposed to ask is Randykitty--the deleting admin has the responsibility, not the editor who nominated it. DGG ( talk ) 04:07, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks very much. I agree there is too little to salvage the article, and upon re-reading it now with a few more months editing on Misplaced Pages I can see why it was deleted. Since the first AfC editor's comment had been the need for copyediting and attention to references, I worked on those tasks rather than NPOV, you know, the classic silk purse out of a sow's ear problem? I do appreciate your thorough notes, which I found very helpful.

There are too many requests on the WikiProject Companies site, and I am working on being more selective about which ones I support. Most are obviously wretched dross, and only a very few are reasonable prospects. I may need to find some other ways to contribute. Cheers! — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 05:46, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Felicia F. Campbell has taught for 50+ years at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Hello DGG, hope you are well. Draft:Felicia F. Campbell is another one that I cannot accept, but don't feel wholly comfortable declining either. Perhaps if you have a look, likely notability either will be apparent or not. Don't worry about the appalling formatting; my personal approach in such cases is, if I think notability is clear by one guideline or another, just accept it and put a copyedit template on it. The Guild of Copyeditors has not complained yet!

Thank you again for your help. Arthur goes shopping (talk) 00:57, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Arthur goes shopping; yes, she's notable, President of a national association. The article submission reads like a press release but there's no direct copyvio from the refs. This is the sort of article I consider so likely to be a copyvio from somewhere that I would rewrite it somewhat. And for this sort of article, I can rewrite so quickly that I will do so. (And, like you, I generally do not think it necessary to fix bad formatting, but I personally fix the worst of it sometimes). I'll get to it tomorrow, either as draft or aticle. DGG ( talk ) 02:44, 12 September 2014 (UTC)r

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Alina Somova

DGG, I see that you were working on this; however, since then there is Alina Somova. (This is another example of the problem I mentioned in an earlier thread, with editors not realizing that a draft article exists.) —Anne Delong (talk) 12:42, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

In this particular scenario, first we unreasonably rejected an article on someone unquestionably notable, an article translated directly from the frWP, complete with its adequate though inexact references. Someone else then wrote an article essentially from scratch, with a few acceptable references. The question now is how to merge them, In this case it will be simpler to just retranslate from the frWP and also from an independent version at the ruWP with a more detailed listing of roles. DGG ( talk ) 05:46, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, simpler for someone, maybe. My French isn't good enough for accurate translation, and I can't read one word of Russian. I was just giving you a heads-up so that you wouldn't waste time editing the draft. I bow out gracefully at this point....—Anne Delong (talk) 12:56, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Stale AfC , recreated directly in article space

Hello, I am not sure what should be done with Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Teodoras Daukantas. The user had gone ahead and created Teodoras Daukantas directly in article space. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 22:47, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

TheRedPenOfDoom, I see nothing wrong with the article. As a Minister of government, he's clearly notable, and the article has sufficient documentation, tho not expressed as formally as we would ideally like it. It's considerably better than the AfC submission, so the afc process was successful in getting a decent article, even if the procedure used was a shortcut. I've redirected the afc to the article. (It could equally well simply be deleted, since the new article is essentially independent--we don't really have an unambiguous procedure for this.) DGG ( talk ) 09:22, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

thanks, I was not sure if there was some standard merge / redirect / delete that was followed.-- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 12:17, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

If it is clear it's a precursor, we sometimes redirect to the article talk. If they're independent and the text can be used to fill in the article, we can merge in one of several ways. There's no standard. DGG ( talk ) 15:23, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Jews in Carthage

Hi DGG as a professional librarian and serious researcher what do you make of the discussion at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Jews in Carthage? Thanks a lot, IZAK (talk) 07:33, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Benefit of doubt

DGG thank you for your comment at ANI and deleting the mess I created sir. It was not intentional. However, I want you to give me a benefit of that as regard the saction you suggested at ANI. I really have passions for this project. I don't want to lose my privilege to NPP (I should not be topic banned). That is the area where I had been very active sir, and am not doing bad in that area. At times when people tried to defend themselves out of fustrations they could say something very odd. That's responsible for such comment at the talk page. It was out of fustrations. Please do anything to help me. Give me a benefit of doubt sir, I promise to adhere strictly to all policies. Thanks. Wikicology (talk) 19:39, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I hope you do improve, which is why iI did not suggest a block at this time. But until you do improve, you really should not be advising other editors, or approving their work. DGG ( talk ) 21:40, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Drowning in spam and other pre-cooked meat substances

Yay, you rock! FYI this is how I found this stuff. And much, much more. I really don't have the bandwidth to keep this up, even just the tagging, so I'll gladly take all the help I can get. (And before you accuse me of hounding, please read this.) --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 18:45, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I, like you, frequently follow a trail of bad edits,or bad article, using any means available. I've been aware for some time that most of our articles on US non profit organizations were copyvio, promotional, or both, except sometimes when they were the product of a good editor or group of them trying to exhaustively cover a particular geographic area. (And I say US, because the UK has a higher proportion of good editors doing just that, and elsewhere I can't as easily judge sources) My personal impression is that most of them are not from an editing collective of some sort, but the spontaneous work of the individual organizational public relations people, all of whom work in a similarly bad pattern & imitate each other. The worst of them are at universities, who seem to selectively employ the PR incompetents, and that's where I've been concentrating.

If anything I'm doing is interfereing with attempts at detecting particular puppets, let me know, privately. If you want an opinion,ask as best suits the case. I don't check spi unless there's a special reason.

I'm not sure of the best strategy. I don't usually tag, just fix the worst of them as I encounter them, aiming at particular features: I usually remove anecdotal accounts of how they got established, officers other than the ceo, and lists of branches. I will oftem nominate for deletion organizations limited to a small area or within a particular larger institution; there is rarely anything worth merging. Another possible strategy I'm considering is a general stubbification, but that will end up looking like directory entries. (A rather radical possibility is to change policy and accept directory entries.)

Except for universities, I'm not going to concentrate on this--my general strategy here is to work on a particular track for a short period to try to make an impression and leave some examples, and then deliberately move on. It lessens the frustration at not being able to fix everything. DGG ( talk ) 22:38, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

What concerns me most is this combination:

• The overwhelming majority of these articles were created by SPAs.
• Most of the article created by SPAs were introduced fully formed as the creator's very first edit (precocious to the extreme).
• Some of these SPAs have eerily similar editing styles.

--Dr. Fleischman (talk) 00:27, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

In my experience, most organization's PR agents put in a full article at first, because they write it off line. But yes, there is at least one very characteristic & inappropriate style element. question I wanted to ask you, should we remove things like that, or leave it there for the spi? To make sure we're talking about the same thing, I'd need to email you. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm mulling it over. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 21:20, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Are you serious?

I create the side-bar and don't work on the damn thing for 30 minutes when all of a sudden I'm marked for deletion for no reason other than the fact that I hadn't substantiated my content.

SO then just because I said I was doing this on behalf of a FRIEND that you delete my post. I have no clue how to write in code, or whatever it is that wikipedia uses so when I try to make a page it takes me a while. I take a break, eat some food, can't edit anymore. Some prick has marked me for deletion, as if he's doing God's work. I requested access to I could fulfill the content, and now I find that all my work has been deleted by the hands you of you.

I have administrative access to the site. I am running their content. I am in full disclosure knowledge of the activities of this company. And yet, because I only made the side bar and said I am making this for a friend that it deserves to get deleted.... I am confused, angry and irritated. I feel like someone just keyed my car while I've been shopping at the grocery store.

So what am I left with?

.

Nothing, but sand. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Holdawg (talk • contribs) 05:27, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

OK. I've restored it, and marked it as under construction. This will give you a day or two to finish--after that, you'll have to use AfC. Please make sure you have good sources for notability-- seeWP:CORP for the standards. Remember that what counts are documented accomplishments--noble intentions unfortunately don't count. What is needed are in-depth published independent product review. User reviews should not be included. the website lists "featured in" and give a number of media--these need to be true news stories, not advertisements or press releases or mentions. Good luck with it. DGG ( talk ) 06:04, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Public art

Back in March, 2013, you added an {{essay-like}} tag to the public art article, and it is still there today. I was going through the cleanup category and came across that article and tag and at a quick glance I don't see major essay-like issues with the article. The inline references tag still is an issue, but when you get some time, can you take another look and decide if your tag still applies to the current form of the article, and possibly comment on the talk page of the article about what you feel the article needs to improve? Thanks. Neil916 (Talk) 19:39, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Organization for Understanding Cluster Headaches

I declined your request to speedily delete Organization for Understanding Cluster Headaches because it previously survived a deletion discussion. – Philosopher  00:58, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

my apologies for missing that. My fault for not checking. I'll probably take it back to afd. DGG ( talk ) 01:16, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

GhostTunes

Hi there. You deleted a page for GhostTunes, which is like deleting the page for iTunes. It's an online music service. It's new, but it's legit, and I sourced articles from both LA Times and USA Today about the new service and its offerings. Tried to keep it factual and not press-releasy because that's not the intent. Just wanted a page up about it as a legit online music service company, in much the same way iTunes has a page. Please advise me on what we can do to restore the page and/or what I did in error. Thanks! FavreisGod (talk) 15:44, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

it may be legit, but it read a little as an advertisement for Gareth Brooks. I restored it , but it will need rewriting. I suggest it might be better not to have an album of his as the illustration. It would also be a very good idea not to give specific pricing information. I'd suggest you improve it quickly, because it is very likely to be challenged further. DGG ( talk ) 17:11, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Postponing G13's

While I can understand and respect one postponement, I can hardly see justification in a second postponement when nothing happened with the first one. Both articles that you "postponed" for the second time have been inactive for nearly a year and a half. I see no reason to keep them unless you're actually going to edit them? Dusti 19:32, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

The reason is that it takes time to expand articles. There are at this point only about 4 people doing this for apparently abandoned AfCs, and it is not all that easy for us to keep up. My current practice in dealing with A13 is that as I go through the list of vulnerable articles, I leave about 60% to be deleted, accept about 10% without the need for any but cosmetic changes because they already have a good chance of passing AfD, fix another 10% sometimes including total rewriting and then accept them, and defer the remaining 20%. When I encounter them a second time 6 months later, I do something similar, Thus the old ones to reconsider decreases 80% every 6 months, reducing the number to a very manageable amount. (BTW, do you have any particular G13 in mind?)

If more people worked on them, there would be no need to keep deferring. As it is, over the last year, it has gone from initially 2 of us substantially working on this to about 4, so it is possible to make progress. If you cared to join, there would be 5, and you'd have helped solve the problem. The basic policy for deletion is that salvageable content should be salvaged, and deletion is the last resort.

I've been in this position before. Six years ago, I was the only person regularly checking PROD before the last minute trying to rescue articles--everyone else was, ignoring policy, just letting them be deleted. That's no longer the case--a number of people work with it and admins deleting at the end are quite careful. When BLP Prod started, I was the only person trying to rescue them. That situation is better now also, though not as good as it should be (I had to give up working on sports and entertainment figures because of their number, although I found I could source most of the ones I tried) . Progress can be made, though it is true that it can sometimes be discouraging . What is most discouraging is people telling me to give up on it, that the problem is too big to be solved--no problem is too big to be solved by attrition, and the recruitment of others who see the signs of some progress being made. DGG ( talk ) 22:58, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I see - and I now understand. What might be better is leaving a comment on the ones that you (or someone else) plans to actually work on. The notes I've seen are potentially notable, needs more work, etc. etc which seems like a reviewing comment. That, combined with the declines, gives the impression that they've been declined, no longer edited, etc. I'd be interested in potentially joining this cause. Seems a little more fun than NPP and AFD work ;) Dusti 00:21, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Notable academic or not?

Can I have your opinion on this AfD if you don't mind? Thanks. --Why should I have a User Name? (talk) 18:23, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I need to consult on this one DGG ( talk ) 22:49, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Sylvie Collection

Hello. You recently deleted a page for Sylvie Collection, a known jewelry company, for G11 spam. I was hoping to get the content back so I can make the necessary edits. Do you have any suggestions? I would assume I shouldn't link to the Sylvie Collection website for the celebrities, but what else could be improved to avoid deletion? What specific areas sounded promotional? I made sure to link to known Jewelry industry sources as well as credible fashion sources like Women's Wear Daily. I tried to take inspiration from the format of Sylvie Collection's competitors here: http://en.wikipedia.org/Tacori and https://en.wikipedia.org/Ritani

Thank you. Cody sharp (talk) 14:14, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Cody sharp, I think the 2 articles by other editors that you mention do verge on promotionalism, and also show dubious notability. Some aspects of yours show the promotionalism even more strongly, such as the list of celebrities who wear the jewelry. What I'm going to do is restore the article with that part omitted it, so you have a chance to improve it. I'll get to the other ones also. DGG ( talk ) 19:10, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Hi, are you still serving as WIR there? Was a project page ever set up? In any case, please update outreach:Wikipedian in Residence. I'm a WIR too now, so it's useful to know of past experience. :) Nemo aka Federico Leva (BEIC) (talk) 15:45, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Derk-Jan Dijk

Hi, me again - I have added a bunch of secondary sources to this one, but it still has some primary ones, although I removed some others if I found a secondary one that seemed to apply. Should these just be left out? The secondary sources I found aren't as specific. —Anne Delong (talk) 17:18, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

I did some additional editing, and more is needed. The book you used is more reliable than it appears--it's Yale Univ Press, & I changed it to indicate. DGG ( talk ) 05:45, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Request for guidance on Malt Shop Memories Cruise article issues

I'd like to take a second stab at creating an article on the Malt Shop Memories Cruise, which you speedy-deleted under rules A7 and G11. It's one of seven interrelated articles that I've posted over the last few days, which together (IIRC) are my first attempts to create articles from scratch. Maybe that was ambitious, but the topic is a multi-faceted one. At any rate, I'd like to address the problems, and would appreciate some feedback on how to do it.

A7: No indication of importance (individuals, animals, organizations, web content, events)

I didn't realize that a statement of importance was necessary, and I've fixed this in the other articles. But, for the Malt Shop Cruise and the longer run viability of the other pieces, I want to be sure that I adequately state their importance.

Music cruises are music festivals in ships. These are huge, regular assemblies of talent. They got my own attention when family friends attended the Jazz Cruise; when I looked into that cruise, I found a whole field of performances that was under the radar (or, at least, mine).

As I understand it, the cruises should meet notability guidelines because (1) they are major assemblies of talent in their genres, and (2) draw large numbers of the public to be involved. If that doesn't meet notability guidelines, what distinguishes the cruises from the land-based concerts that are documented in their own Misplaced Pages articles?

G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion

Being familiar with Misplaced Pages spam, and understanding the limitations of my source material, I did make an effort to keep my tone neutral. Was this a matter of the substance, rather than the tone? I looked for models, and found long-running Misplaced Pages articles on music cruises: Shiprocked and Jam Cruise. How do these differ as to promotion?

Potential overall solution; pros and cons

I originally considered covering all these cruises in one large article. However, when I drafted it, the article was huge and therefore difficult to navigate. It seemed more sensible to break it out into hubs (Entertainment Cruise Productions and wikifying previous information in Time-Life) and spokes (the various cruises), thereby allowing users to get as much or as little depth as they wanted. What is your thinking on that?

Thank you for taking the time to advise on this. —Matt Stevens (talk) 17:44, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Shiprocked and Jam Cruise are hardly stellar examples of neutral articles; in fact, they stand a good chance of being speedily deleted themselves. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 21:16, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

I've looked at it again--I think that you do indeed make an adequate demonstration of possible importance. My deletion under provision A7 was therefore mistaken. But notability is considerably more than just a show of importance. and whether this will be considered actual notability will be up to the community, and decided in an AfD discussion--and it's hard to predict what would be decided. Notability here is decided primarily on the basis of sources--reliable third party published sources that provide substantial coverage. They have to be more than routine notices, and not press releases or based on press releases. If you have such sources, you probably will be able to write a satisfactory article that will pass AfD. Without then, it still may pass, but it's much more doubtful.

I think the key problem here, besides sourcing, is promotionalism. The usual way of thinking about it is that it needs to be addressed to the general reader, not to a potential client or customer. An article that is sourced only to the subject's own website, and that talks primarily about the performers who will be present on the next cruise, would generally be considered promotional--it's essentially indistinguishable from an advertisement.

Looking at the other articles,my opinion is that the other articles on the individual cruises are promotional in the same manner, and if my attention had been called to them, I would have deleted them. I could do this still, but I think it would be fairer to wait a few days; if they are not radically improved, I probably will list the entire group of individual articles for deletion as promotional to see what the community thinks. For consistency, I have restored the article I deleted also. so they can be considered all together.

The overall article on ECP is much stronger, primarily because it also talks a good deal about past seasons, which makes it more of an encyclopedia article and less of an advertisement. However, it too has only sources that are derived directly from the company. This needs to be corrected.

The problem about sourcing this entire set of articles is that most sources will basically be reprinted press releases. for example, the article on Soul Train Cruise in USA Today, seems to be indistinguishable from a paid advertisement. It would help very much if you could find true after-the-fact review articles that do not primarily reprint what the company representative tells them.

In general, the usual advice is to first establish an article on the main subject before trying articles on the more specific ones. This is especially true when introducing articles at the same times on a large number of specific closely related subjects. such as this. The manner in which you did this would normally raise the question of whether you have a WP:Conflict of Interest. However, I see you have done some significant work of a number of unrelated topics spread out over many years, so you certainly have the benefit of an assumption of good faith. DGG ( talk ) 21:36, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, DDG--I appreciate your advice. I understand how third-party sources help to assure impartiality. So, I'll look to find broader sourcing on these topics. Offhand, I think there's likely to be a deeper pool for the longer-running cruises than there is for the more recent ones. (Ironically, if they're well-run--that is, no shipwrecks or salmonella or anything else that stimulates independent news coverage--they could manage themselves right out of article eligibility.) I have no idea what's available about the parent company, but it looks like they've carved out enough of a swath that there should be something. —Matt Stevens (talk) 22:29, 25 September 2014 (UTC)'

Your comment about shipwrecks and salmonella is indeed true: sometimes subjects are more infamous than famous. Organizations seeking to promote themselves on Misplaced Pages should be wary: not only does it violate Misplaced Pages policy but it can also lead to some nasty unintended consequences. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 22:50, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

FWIW, both Shiprocked and Jam Cruise were G11 speedily deleted (two different admins, neither one was DGG). --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 18:01, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, my initial fix on what's viable, based on what existed when I started, is rapidly eroding! If it turns out that this idea isn't workable, then so be it. But having done this much work, I'm going to try to straighten it out, based on the feedback I've gotten. (And, damn, it's harder than I thought, although picking what turns out to be a marginal topic by WP standards has not made it easy on myself.) I have to say that I'm really impressed with the support that's available. I did not expect help on this scale when I took up the template's offer to seek it from the flagging editor. Learning by doing doesn't provide the tidiest syllabus, but it's certainly a high-quality course. Thank you, Dr. Fleischman and DDG. —Matt Stevens (talk) 21:23, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Sure thing. It's a steep initial learning curve for everyone (myself included). You're a good writer, so with a little more familiarity of our neutrality and sourcing guidelines you could be an excellent contributor. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 21:39, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Request on 13:41:57, 29 September 2014 for assistance on AfC submission by Lboniello

• Lboniello (talk · contribs)
  • User:Lboniello (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Hey, thanks for processing my request for the kioware page on Wiki. I completely respect that I need to add more resources in order to make it notable, but I was wondering what the threshold is? I've seen other articles in the same category with fewer (and less notable) resources, and I have submitted no fewer than 3 news sources (RFID Journal, American Library Association Magazine, and Kiosk Marketplace) discussing kioware kiosk software, as well as 2 research papers referencing the software as part of the study. Can you help me to determine what else would make the references meet the threshold you are looking for? Other software products with fewer references - and less notable references - have made the cut. Examples include: Webconverger and Netkey (notice most of the references are from Kioskmarketplace, which is one of the kioware references). Would adding notable clients be helpful (mirroring what Netkey has done)? I appreciate the response and just want confirmation so that I can be a better Wiki editor! Lboniello (talk) 13:41, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

response forthcoming tomorrow DGG ( talk ) 04:42, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Eric T. Hansen

Dear DGG: I notice that you have commented on this submission. I found that there's an article about him at the German Misplaced Pages, but it doesn't seem well sourced. —Anne Delong (talk) 15:07, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

that's the way the deWP sources things. Despite it, their standard of inclusion is at least as stringent as ours, and their level of accuracy is higher. They see to work on the principle that if enough is given for the intelligent reader to understand the importance, it's sufficient. In most cases, it's enough to go one. I accepted it, tho it needs some more fixing. DGG ( talk ) 23:29, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Request to recreate article on Dr. Philip A. Flournoy

Dear DGG: I recently submitted an article on American Physicist Dr. Philip A. Flournoy, which was immediately deleted. I contested the deletion, and my reviewer suggested that I recreate the article, adding in more justification for the importance of the topic. But my reviewer (user St170e) also requested I get permission from you first before recreating the article. Our discussion thread on St170e's talk page is here.

So I'm contacting you to see if you're OK with me recreating an enhanced version of the article. Thank you for your consideration! --Rflourno (talk) 17:41, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Judging him as a scientist, he must meet either the WP:GNG general notability guideline, or the WP:PROF special guideline for researchers. The GNG requires substantial third party independent published sources about him that are not press releases or based on press releases, to show that others have recognized his importance. WP:PROF requires evidence that he is considered an authority in his field--that page explains the various possible criteria. Citations to his work are an important factor. I see several of his papers cited in Google Scholar , with fairly substantial citations. and I see a few citations to his patents there also. It might be possible to use these as the basis for an article. Being awarded patents is not considered a sufficient indication in either standard, though patents that can be shown to be substantially exploited can help. It is relatively difficult to show notability for scientists in industry as compared with those in the academic world. To supplement the citations, it will help to be able to demonstrate membership in national organizations;;, but what would prove notability is prizes or distinctions at a national level, such as Fellowship (not mere membership) in the American Physical Society. Otherwise, the material does not show indications of notability . Directing a division of researchers at DuPont is not notability either. Opening one of the first Computerland franchises is not notability. The only thing in the article that might come near is "Dr. Flournoy evolved and employed unique trading algorithms that generated consistently solid yearly returns for his clients regardless of overall market performance" But this has to be shown by third party published sources, not by mere assertion. Write the article as suggested. With the citations, it will not be speedy deleted, but the community will judge it at a discussion at WP:AFD--results there are unpredictable. DGG ( talk ) 00:56, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your guidance! I will drop back and see if I can gather more publicly-noted evidence of distinction for the physics work; if so, I'll rewrite and re-submit. Thanks again! --Rflourno (talk) 14:03, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

User Vdhillon and copyvio

You reviewed some articles for speedy delete yesterday by Vdhillon (talk · contribs). He has a very long history of copyright violations, both images and text. The latest I found was 2 days ago. I'm not convinced there is a lot of hope for this editor. The only edit to his/her talk page was to add {{bots|deny=DPL bot}} this month. I see a lot of work however by this editor and it would be nice to be able to keep him. Any suggestions? Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 20:45, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Dougweller,

I am happy to learn and continue to contribute. I do not mean any deliberate harm, if you see my track record over last few years, I have been contributing consistently and in fact sometimes I am frustrated that you guys delete hours of my hard work. Seems I still am on learning curve and there is a way to go before some of my edits and posts are good enough without being butchered. Please advise me, where can I look/read (quick read in a central place) to quickly come up to speed and comply.

Also, I do not understand the issue with me not having much entries on my talk page (where do I find it? is this edit/comment itself is my talk page? thanks) and whats the significance of writing talk page entries? I want to understand why is it needed, when all I want is enhance the wiki entries that I am reading (my way of repaying to others while I am learning from wiki on topics) or create new entries when there is a gap. Please help me come up to speed and make me understand significance of some of these things and how to avoid issues Thanks. Vdhillon (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

response forthcoming tomorrow. DGG ( talk ) 04:39, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/European Conference on Visual Perception

Dear DGG: There are thousands of references to papers that have been presented at this series of conferences, but I can't seem to find anything independently written about the conferences themselves. Maybe you have a better idea where to look?—Anne Delong (talk) 13:58, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Conferences are a problem I've been meaning to work on. There are only a very few conference series in the world for which there are truly substantial third party references, but there are many of great importance: the situation is similar to journals. In practice, tho we don't word it that way, the effective criterion for journals is that papers there are highly cited (as measured by the impact factor from Journal Citation Reports). This can apply to conferences also. The difference is that for most conferences, the papers there are preliminary results and not rigorously peer reviewed & therefore not highly cited as compared with journal papers by the same authors. There are two classes of exceptions: ones where the papers are major review articles in the field, and ones in engineering where they are the basic means of publication. I'm not sure about this one. Ido not think it is one of these exceptions, and I think the publications are mainly just abstracts, as is common with many conferences. I would need to check, & I cannot do it this week.

But personally, I would include in WP articles about all journals used as references here, and all major conference series, however, I doubt this would have consensus. The compromise solution is therefore to write the articles about the sponsoring society and have a section on the conference. That is probably the best thing to do here.

The main thing I think we want to avoid is writing articles on individual conferences in a series. This would amount to our being a nonselective index or bibliography. DGG ( talk ) 23:45, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

OTRS at ANI

If you feel a dead horse is being beat feel free to leave me a note on my talk page. If you think my five point summary warrants address please post to ANI. I appreciate your input there and at FTNB. I also appreciate the work of OTRS agents. Best. - - MrBill3 (talk) 00:56, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

The OTRS question is a very difficult one, involving the basic principles of WP editing, and I intend to pursue it. I've made a comment yesterday atMisplaced Pages talk:Volunteer Response Team, , and I will comment on the AN/I page. I think a major strategic mistake was made in the discussion, not distinguishing the actual edits made from the claim of privilege in making them. DGG ( talk ) 03:24, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

I now consider this issue in the hands of those with more experience and knowledge and will now be mostly adding a "editor at large" perspective if I see fit/a need. I prefer to return to content development and research (while keeping an eye on EW and vandalism). On an unrelated note WP Library has given me access to Cochrane, BMJ, OUP and HighBeam if something would be helpful from one of these drop a note on my talk page. Thanks for your time and attention addressing the OTRS issue and for all your contributions to the project. Best. - - MrBill3 (talk) 14:22, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I think a policy require COI disclosure is needed and have posted in a number of venues. - - MrBill3 (talk) 05:31, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Updating Genpact page on Misplaced Pages

Hi David,

I hope I'm writing to you in the correct manner. If not, please instruct me how to do so.

Thanks so much for your help on updating and protecting the Genpact page on Misplaced Pages at https://en.wikipedia.org/Genpact.

We have more proposed edits to the page. A few are noted in the Genpact Talk Page at https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Genpact including more references in the History section, and more countries with references in the Locations section.

We would also like to create a few more sections including many references. The new sections would be: 1) Company Timeline (Including Acquisitions) and 2) Services and Vertical Industries Served.

Our major competitors have very similar sections on their Misplaced Pages pages.

Thanks in advance for your help and guidance.

Sincerely, Christian Wzt5zb (talk) 16:16, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Many pages on business organizations at WP are excessively promotional, and have not yet been corrected or deleted. We do not want to add to their number. (You mention a comparative page; I've taken a look at it: my impression is that it needs substantial improvements.) Keeping that in mind, and referring to the list of proposed changes on the article talk page, (1, a list of acquisitions is appropriate content, but it would be better to write it as a paragraph than a timeline. Timelines are in general to be discouraged as non-encyclopedia style, better suited to corporate presentations. (2) "with the goal of enabling outstanding efficiencies." is meaningless jargon. All changes in corporate structure have that intent. (3)For the sections on services and vertical industries, please propose a paragraph; it should not be overly specific or detailed. (4) As you say, " in BPO and IT outsourcing, stakeholders like to see countries of operation" That's exactly why they don't belong here. Encyclopedia articles are not written for stakeholders, but for the general public; content directed primarily to those who are current or prospective investors or clients belongs on your web site or other sponsored publications.

I'll make some of the changes. DGG ( talk ) 01:07, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks David. We appreciate you and will propose paragraphs soon.Wzt5zb (talk) 02:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi David, I have proposed more edits/paragraphs for the Misplaced Pages page on Genpact at https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Genpact. I tried to include several references but the Genpact/Wiki talk page wouldn't allow me to post them. How should I share them with you? Thanks for your help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wzt5zb (talk • contribs) 20:20, 9 October 2014 (UTC) Wzt5zb (talk) 20:24, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi David, I would like to request your assistance on a few things. 1) As per your direction, I proposed edits to the Genpact talk page for Recent Acquisitions, Partnerships and Joint Ventures written in paragraph and encyclopedic/factual fashion instead of bullet points, with many neutral references. The result was Wiki editors turned them all down. Please check it out at https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Genpact. How do we get this right for you guys to publish more content on the page? It's becoming very time consuming and frustrating, writing, pulling references to no success. Genpact competitors have way more information than Wiki is allowing Genpact to post. I find this unfair. Check them out at https://en.wikipedia.org/Tata_Group. Can you please help? I'm willing to do whatever is needed to work with you/the Wiki process. I'm trying here. 2) You said for us to remove any timeline related text and provide a link to it on the company website with that content. I proposed this edit with the result of Wiki editors rejecting it as well. How can we get more information posted on the Genpact page? 3) The page also has a box on the top that says the article has major issues. I've tried to follow the process you/Wiki have described to update the Genpact page. How do we get the negative marks removed from the top of the page? Thanks for your assistance.Wzt5zb (talk) 20:47, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi David, Can you please help with the requests above?Wzt5zb (talk) 19:44, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Wzt5zb

1. I did remove most of the box,as much of it has been dealt with in the current version. That one of the major contributors has COI is a statement of fact which will remain.
2. if the request is to insert a list of locations, another editor agreed with me that it was unsuitable. I have no right to over-rule the consensus of other editors, even if I disagree with it. And in this case, I agree.
3. As for your requested edit on acquisitions, are you seriously asking to include a section beginning "Genpact continues to enhance its capabilities and expand globally through acquisitions, partnerships and joint ventures." ? Try writing a version without advertising, and I'll consider it. So me useful steps to take in rewriting are: avoid adjectives to the extent possible, use the company name as little as possible, and eliminate business jargon like "onboarding."
4. As for comparisons, Tata Group corresponds more to the original GE, of which Genpact is a split. The relative size and importance of the two is disproportionate by two orders of magnitude: Tata is 50 times the size. I think I've said this before. Making sure all competitors large or small have the same depth of coverage is not the policy of a NPOV encyclopedia.

 DGG ( talk ) 21:01, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I will try again to propose neutral content.Wzt5zb (talk) 19:40, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi David,

Can you please revert the Genpact page on Misplaced Pages to what we had previously – just a few days ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/Genpact

Someone reverted the most currently made edits, that were implemented and approved by you. Someone added defamatory remarkings including (It treats its employees very badly and there is undue office politics leading to very high attrition rates.) Can you please remove?

Also the top section only included: This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. This article relies largely or entirely upon a single source.

And the citations have been messed-up to include broken links, that were previously working.

Also, can you please add another layer of security? This is about the third time the site has been vandalized.

Thanks so much for your help. It's much appreciated.Wzt5zb (talk) 05:41, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, wzt5zb Christian

Hi David,

It appears the Genpact Misplaced Pages page has been marked for speedy deletion. Can you please advise on how we can avoid this scenario?

Thanks for your help. 8.19.113.13 (talk) 15:28, 31 October 2014 (UTC)Wzt5zb (talk) 15:31, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Any luck on advise on how to avoid speedy deletion of the Wiki page covering Genpact?8.19.113.12 (talk) 21:15, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

There is no likelihood that the article will be speedy deleted; for it to be deleted, it would need to be nominated for our WP:Articles for Deletion process, which asks for a community decision. Such discussions are hard to predict, but I would imagine that it would be kept. What the article does need is some further improvement to make it look less like a company web page. My advice to to remove the minor awards , or to find some way of condensing the presentation. DGG ( talk ) 08:24, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Academic

Hello. Do you think Gu Su is notable? Got his books in the library? --Why should I have a User Name? (talk) 18:28, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

the books are in very few US libraries, but Worldcat isn't helpful for Chinese libraries, and even if I could find the necessary sources for that, I couldn't read them. He seems to be a full professor at one of the very best Chinese universities. DGG ( talk ) 21:19, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much. --Why should I have a User Name? (talk) 21:34, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

After Saturday AfD

Thanks. That was a real unpleasant mess. I'd like to think it's over but I doubt it. I see Shrike has added a discretionary sanctions notice, which might help. Dougweller (talk) 17:03, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

DGG (with apologies to Doug) I'm going to revert your close though I suspect that the article will end up being kept. Your rationale for the close does not address the main concerns raised by me and by Nishidani (POV pushing COATRACK) - 2 of the 3 delete !votes, and I'm surprised by that. Also, avoiding passioned debate is not a reason for an early close - especially since the discussion so far hasn't really been disruptive. Anything concerning the Israel Palestine issue and Islamic intolerance is complex and we should not hastily try to shove stuff under the rug just to keep things pleasant. --regentspark (comment) 17:15, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Add. The note in the section below reassures me that I'm not wrong about this. Best w. --regentspark (comment) 17:16, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

RegentsPark, you are a participant in the discussion have no right to do this.See my comment below. I restored my close. I warn you about the arb Sanctions. DGG ( talk ) 17:19, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

No worries DGG, I suspect the article will be kept anyway. But, for the record, your close is, to put it politely, a poor decision. You've closed a complex discussion with quite a few delete !votes as SNOW. You haven't addressed the substantial delete reasons. And you're invoking IAR in anticipation of disruption rather with any actual disruption. --regentspark (comment) 17:31, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

• I think it was unfortunate with an early close here. The topic is very sensitive and a thorough discussion very warranted, imo. For myself, I had been briefly involved at the talk page when the AfD started and was still considering if and how to vote. There may be more than me that have chosen to take some time to think. The article has been much expanded since the AfD started, but I think the quality of the expanision is somewhat; it currently for instance uses Bat Ye'or as a source; she is very controversial. The phrase, when used by Muslims, is a very hateful expression and can even be interpreted as genocidal. The existence of the phrase can then of course be used by others who have their own motivation for portraying Muslims or Arabs as evil. This doesn't mean that we shall censure it if it is truly notable for a stand-alone article; but it means in my opinion that we ought to have a very careful evaluation of notability and the quality of the sources. Regards, Iselilja (talk) 17:09, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

I fail to see why the motivation for using the phrase is relevant to notability. If the afd had continued, I think that a number of people would very soon have been blocked for violation of the arb remedy. I wanted to prevent it. there's a good suggestion on the article talk p. for rewording the lede paragraph. DGG ( talk ) 17:17, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

First of all; Snow close is after all an exeption and I simply don't see this as such a clear-cut case where it should be used. As the point of motivation for using the phrase: I think we should take especially care in considering notability for topics that typically is misused by hate groups etc. While not a totally good parallell, the article "Jews and communism" had some of the same considerations. There were a few sources on that topic; but it is more often a topic that is misused by Anti-Semittic persons, and in the end the article was deleted. The Saturday/Sunday article is not stable and hasn't found its form; many of the sources are mentions in passing of the phrase; one of the sources is as I mentioned Bat Ye'or, something many will consider similar to using knows Anti-Semittes as sources for a controversial articles about Jews (The barnstar you got below comes from the editor who inserted her as source) . Regards, Iselilja (talk) 17:49, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

• (talk page stalker)I think that rational discussion would arrive at the conclusion that the phrase itself has enough provenance and notability to merit a Misplaced Pages article, but that the content needs to be very carefully worded and sourced. As such, may I suggest that any efforts that would have gone into the bureacratic black hole that the English Misplaced Pages can become (more often than not) instead be directed to sourcing and polishing the article to decent quality. -- Avi (talk) 17:26, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

+1 to Avi, I believe the noteability of the articles topic is proven, and WP:Snowball was quotedcorrectly. Iits important to take care of wording and usage, which is more inside the arab christian community than in Muslim slogans. Serten (talk) 17:38, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

I certainly agree that a rewrite is indicated, as i said a little above. I'm going to leave further discussion to others. I mentioned this at ANB, as I am not experienced with some possible ramifications of this. DGG ( talk ) 17:54, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

DGG, I think your decision re this AfD was premature, and the note you left on my Talk page, according to the advice/request by user IZAK, is frustrating. I don't think I need to stress how sensitive this issue is. Again, we are having Israeli/Pro Israeli editors citing Israeli/Pro Israeli sources to claim the existence of an ARABIC Proverb and interpret it to mean Muslims will kill Christians after they are finished with JEWS. All this with no single material evidence. These same users come to vote en masse against the deletion of the article. How silly does that sound!!! There is a flagrant Conflict of interest here.

Those editors have ignored an important meaning for this phrase in English, used by the Church to refer to the torture and crucifixion of Jesus on Saturday and his peace on Sunday. Cheers. Amr ibn Kulthoumعمرو بن كلثوم (talk) 20:32, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

User:عمرو بن كلثوم The phrase would be "After Friday comes Sunday" as the alleged crucifixion is agreed to have been on a Friday. Dougweller (talk) 20:49, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

User:Dougweller, here you go. Another example was mentioned by user Nishidani. Amr ibn Kulthoumعمرو بن كلثوم (talk) 21:30, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

The Christians call it Supersessionism, no prob. Serten (talk) 01:33, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Everyone is agreed that it's an vicious ethnic/religious slur, apparently designed to evoke times even more violent than the present. I hope the revision of the article will clarify things further. FWIW, I warned other people also. Don't assume anything about my views on NE politics--you will probably be wrong. I do not edit in this area; I almost never even comment. DGG ( talk ) 21:55, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Du erhältst einen Orden!

	Der Gute-Laune-Orden
	I liked your sorta quick and dirty approach on the Saturday Night special ;) Serten (talk) 17:33, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

To merge or not to merge

Dear DGG: The Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST), Mohali submission was declined with the suggestion that it be merged with Indian Institute of Nano Science & Technology, and you have commented sort of in agreement. However, I am not sure that these two schools are related, and in any case it appears that the second one doesn't exist yet. They are in different parts of India. I am not sure about the notability of an "Institute" in the first place. What do you think? —Anne Delong (talk) 11:50, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Indian Institute of Nano Science & Technology does not seem to actually exist. I listed it for PROD as "No evidence there is such an institute. Articles are about IISc, which has a Centre for Nano Scieience and Technology, established 2010;, whereas this was only planned in 2012. I'm not sure about Mohali either--I listed it for G13. I think I probably read this a little carelessly. DGG ( talk ) 14:31, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

07:17:37, 6 October 2014 review of submission by Clairefenton

• Clairefenton (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:Holt Lloyd Lnternational (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

I would like to know why this has been rejected and how I can improve it? Clairefenton (talk) 07:17, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Avoid adjectives of praise, and don't talk about someone's "philosophy" to help vehicles run better and last longer. After all, it's the intent of every automobile product manufacturer. Don't talk about which brand name products it sells; don;t claim something like "true global reach for a company with 154 employees. Additionally, everything needs documentation from a third party published source, and from more than the company website. And instead of adding more advertising and immediately resubmitting, fix it first. Frankly though, I doubt that no matter how well you write it that the company has have what is required to show notability: the necessary references providing substantial coverage from third-party independent reliable sources, not press releases or mere announcements.

Even better,. what we really need is an article on the principal company, the UCI-FRAM group, which I think is undoubtedly notable, but not the minor subsidiaries. DGG ( talk ) 14:46, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Draft:Tiptree sneeze

You seem to have said that Draft:Tiptree sneeze needs to have more lasting interest to achieve notability. I did include the fact that the video went viral and resulted in the creation of parody videos (which also went viral). I'd like to have more input on what I should do. Thanks.Qxukhgiels (talk) 13:20, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

you might wait to see if it lasts more than a year, and especially if someone writes about it in something more substantial than a newspaper or a TV news program. I'll put it in mainspace if you like, but I'll nominate it for deletion and I estimate it has less than a 50% chance of survival. Of course, afd is unpredictable. DGG ( talk ) 14:36, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Request on 20:33:48, 9 October 2014 for assistance on AfC submission by Crash2341

• Crash2341 (talk · contribs)
  • User:Crash2341 (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Hi. I submitted an article for creation for Louis A. Lehr, Jr. It was declined on October 6, 2014 stating "This submission appears to read more like an advertisement than an entry in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia articles need to be written from a neutral point of view, and should refer to a range of independent, reliable, published sources, not just to materials produced by the creator of the subject being discussed. This is important so that the article can meet Misplaced Pages's verifiability policy and the notability of the subject can be established. If you still feel that this subject is worthy of inclusion in Misplaced Pages, please rewrite your submission to comply with these policies."

My question is that all the materials provided were reliable published sources and nothing I created. Can you please explain why it was declined even though the sources I provided were independent, reliable sources, i.e. the Chicago Tribune?

Thank you in advance for your help. Crash2341 (talk) 20:33, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

an article on him might be possible; but this one goes into great detail on his major trials, material which is duplicated almost word for word in the article on the law firm. I note that the article contains "The Illinois Bar Association News noted that during the proceedings Judge Becker expressed “an admiration and appreciation” for Lehr’s “marvelous sense of humor and light touch and for their leavening effect on this most contentious of all litigation.”" While true, this is not suitable for an encyclopedia,and including it shows considerable doubt about your purpose.

You seem to be editing almost exclusively articles connected with Arnstein & Lehr, LLP, often to insert there name as the attorney for some particular business. Most of these are excessive detail and have been reverted by various editors, including myself.

I call your attention to our rules on WP:COI, conflict of interest editing. If you are editing on behalf of the firm, either as an employee or a consultant, you must say so. DGG ( talk ) 23:25, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

have been reverted by various editors, including myself.

I call your attention to our rules on WP:COI, conflict of interest editing. If you are editing on behalf of the firm, either as an employee or a consultant, you must say so. DGG ( talk ) 23:25, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Steven Z. Pavletic page

Dear Sir,

recently you deleted an article we have started to upload onto Misplaced Pages, for physician "Steven Z. Pavletic". It was marked as "Unambiguous advertising or promotion" which should be fundamentally rewritten. We fully understand your position and would like to amend this text, so that it satisfies the minimum requirements for Misplaced Pages. Since this will be a similar page for "Steven Z. Pavletic", we are contacting you as instructed in order to receive feedback on how to proceed. Please let us know soon! Thank you and best regard, DarkoDarko1983 (talk) 15:02, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Steven_Z._Pavletic&action=edit&redlink=1

Question for you: is "we" a single person, or a firm. if you're a firm, only individuals can edit here. In any case, if you are a paid editor editing on behalf of someone else, whether an employee of the individual or , it would seem, as an external consultant, you should not write the article in mainspace but use the WP:AFC creation process of writing in draft space first, and submitting it to see if it will be accepted.

A WP article is expected to be a plain description intended for the general public who might want to know about the subject. It must not be primarily addressed to prospective clients or supporters or employers. It therefore must not praise the person, or contain material supporting his cause or advocating support for the medical speciality in which he works. It must also have references providing substantial coverage from third-party independent reliable sources, not press releases or mere announcements. We already have an article on GHVD, and you need not repeat it.

In terms of notability, the criterion is WP:PROF. The fundamental criterion there is that he is an authority in his field. This is normally shown by citations to his work, and there are sufficient. Therefore, it will be possible for an acceptable article to be written. The question is, who should write it.It's a serious question whether a paid PR person can possible reorient their thinking to what is needed, as the purpose of WP is so very different from the usual purpose of PR. Only a PR person would even think of including the quote you used about him from Nola, and I cannot believe any individual would include it if they were writing the article.

Personally, I wish we had a rule that nobody could ever write about themselves, or their organization, or any person or organization who paid them to write anything. We don't have such a rule. But I sometimes have said in giving advice, "when the subject becomes sufficiently notable, someone else will write about it." Another administrator here tends to responds with a phrase like, "for decency's sake, please wait until someone else thinks he's important." DGG ( talk ) 18:39, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

Dear Sir,

thank you very much for your quick response. Indeed, your reply was helpful and we have significantly modified the article "Steven Z. Pavletic", which will be posted using the WP:AFC creation process of writing in draft space first - thank you for drawing my attention to this.

To answer your question, I do not represent a firm, but am a private citizen who volunteered to help post this text written by another colleague - not Steven Z. Pavletic!

In any case, we assure you that that the prior and the modified version of the text, in particular, has been drafted objectively and in good faith, and we hope that it is now more in the "spirit" of what you are looking for.

I look forward to your feedback on the latest version of this text.

Thank you and best regards, Darko Kerić — Preceding unsigned comment added by Darko1983 (talk • contribs) 06:39, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

article

Hi DGG, please provide me the content and copy of the deleted Article - 'Balkrishna' on my email address - swabhimaanishalini@gmail.com.Shaliniaggrawal (talk) 07:36, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Stephen M. Sheppard

One more distinguished professor for you, DGG. I added a Google Scholar Report, which is rather low. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:16, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Basic cleanup steps for professors (and much of it applies to all bios):

1. Remove all "Professor", "Prof.", "Doctor" and "Dr.", Ph.D, or M.D except in the lede sentence or as actual titles of positions or degrees. For every use of first name alone, substitute the last name. For every use of full first and last name, substitute the last name, except in the lede sentence or if needed to avoid confusion.
2. Then, for every use of the name more than once a paragraph at the most, substitute "he" "she" or the equivalent.
3. remove all adjectives of praise: famous, renowned, prestigious, world-wide, transformative, seminal, ground-breaking, etc. referring to either people or institutions or discoveries; even "well-known". In all of these, nothing needs to be substituted.
4. Consider replacing "expert" with "specialist". Replace "across" with "in" or, if documented, "throughhout" Remove all similar jargon. "
5. "best-selling" etc. needs to be justified by a third party quotation. Just remove all these throughout the entire article, or add a {{Fact}} "First" similarly needs a third party source.
6. Move the most important factor of notability to the very first phrase of the first sentence where nobody can miss it: not "A.B., an expert in something, who has taught at Wherever for 23 years, is the Distinguished Professor of" , to "X, the Distinguished Professor of ... at Wherever, is a specialist in something....
7. Remove complicated sentences of birth place and date to the section of biography. The lede sentence should just have the dates, eg: "(born 1945)"
8. If they have written books and work in the humanities or history or Law, or any field where books are the main factor of notability, remove journal article section entirely. If there's a section on conferences, etc., remove it in all cases.
9. The list of degrees received and dates is critical information. It goes in a section labeled ==Biography==, right after the lede paragraph. If you find it at the end, the article was unmistakably written by a press agent, and will need careful checking for copyvio.
10. In fact, the likelihood of copyvio is so great that I usually prefer to rearrange or alter most of the text.
11. Books need to be sourced to Worldcat, not Amazon or the publisher. Bio facts are sourced to the person's official page at the university. These should all be formatted as references, so there will be a conventional reference list DGG ( talk ) 20:16, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Just noticed this useful list. One comment (in case you've got this chunk of text ready to paste in elsewhere in future): in point 7, about dates, I think the standard format for the lead sentence is "(born 1948)" not "(b. 1948)". Your point 6, about moving the main claim to notability to the very start of the article, is really important - so many poor articles start by telling you the subject's parentage or other irrelevancies so that you have to plod through a lot of verbiage to find any assertion of notability. PamD 14:07, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

fixed, though perhaps even just the date is clear enough for everybody. thanks. (as for 7, press agents writing an academic cv tend not to realise what we consider the key factors. Hidden in the last paragraph among society memberships, will sometimes be "National Academy of Sciences". DGG ( talk ) 21:06, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Howard B. Gist, Jr.

I hope that I didn't cause an edit conflict. Bearian (talk) 20:36, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

no, but the ed. has been restoring some of the detailed material about his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, which I removed once more. But I discovered hidden in the article what we do consider clear evidence for notability: he was President of the State Bar Assn. DGG ( talk ) 03:52, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Draft:Joe weller

I have left the tag in case another admin thinks differently, but I am not happy to use WP:CSD#G2 test page to delete a page like this, which though an obvious no-hoper was submitted in good faith. Unless we can agree a speedy on the lines of "Draft page with no hope of ever becoming encyclopedic", I think things like this should just be left to moulder until G13 sweeps them up after six months. JohnCD (talk) 17:01, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I kinda agree with JohnCD. I deleted few of DGG's G2 nominated drafts but skipped several, some of which were far more developed than the hopeless Draft:Joe weller. I'd avoid tagging as G2 in draft space, unless it is really just editing experiments with zero information content. jni _{...just not interested} 18:34, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

RHaworth deleted it, but though I will on rare occasions use IAR at speedy, I know he is considerably more ready than I or almost any of us are to do so, so his view and mine about this particular case may not be representative of consensus. I have for many years sometimes used G2 for situations of this sort in mainspace rather than A7, to avoid sounding insulting about people who are just playing or don't understand WP, and I carried it over to this one. I don't want to call it vandalism. There is of course an alternative to avoid waiting 6 months, which is to use MfD. I'm trying to think of a way of wording it for speedy, possibly limited to BLP.

I'm trying to experiment a little with the various possible cases of Draft space articles--our way of handling them is not good, and I am not yet able to propose a comprehensive alternative--except to put everything in main space automatically--but we would still need some way of providing a place for people who need time in good faith to develop an article and would benefit from the potential input of having it on-wiki. DGG ( talk ) 04:25, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, RHaworth is a master of skillfully applying IAR to speedy deletion we all less experienced article deletioners should learn from and hope to emulate :) I see the problems you are dealing with and need for a polite not-bite-newcomers solution. G2+IAR is indeed better than G3 here. Maybe one solution could be to change the new CSD U5 to cover any "hopeless autobiography or userpage in wrong location" cases in AfC-domain as well? jni _{...just not interested} 19:31, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Academics: Articles in List of Works

I'm puzzled by one change you made to Janet Zollinger Giele. You deleted all scholarly papers from the list of her works with the breathtakingly sweeping edit summary "we do not include articles." Is there a Misplaced Pages policy / guideline / discussion to that effect? I couldn't find one, but my search skills may not be good enough.

Misplaced Pages:Notability (academics) specifically mentions an academic's scholarly articles. It would be strange if they shouldn't be listed in the article when they can form part of the body of work that establishes notability. Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Lists of works encourages complete lists of works. And featured articles about academics often include articles in lists of works (Ben Gascoigne, Marcus Ward Lyon, Jr., Barbara McClintock, Gerard K. O'Neill, List of works by Joseph Priestley (broken out presumably because of length), and Alfred Russel Wallace, to name a few). How does that jibe with your experience? Worldbruce (talk) 21:12, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

I hadn't finished my revisions of the article; I normally revise an article over a series of days to have a chance to think about what I'm doing. I think some of the material in the article is excessive--I would normally turn the references from the book reviews into footnotes and considerably shorten the amount that is quoted. I was even before you wrote considering adding back some of the papers--I often realize after a bit that I've curt too much in the first pass. If you want to add them now, go ahead & I'll look at them more carefully.

I have always considered that MOS lists of works is primarily concerned about literary authors. My general practice is that for most academics in fields where the notability depends primarily on published books, I just list the books; for those in fields where notability depends primarily on papers, I list the 3 or 4 most cited papers (or those otherwise the most important) & any books. Most other editors here specializing in academic bios do similarly. That doesn't prove we're right, of course.

More generally, the depth of coverage of an article should be proportional to the importance of the subject. This of course is a matter of judgment. Giele is a very important sociologist, but I don't think she could really be classified as world-famous in the sense of being well-known to people outside the subject. At the extreme, consider making excessively detailed articles about minor subject as promotionalism, and people who insist on keeping such details have sometimes had their articles deleted at afd.

For the other articles you mention, I think some of the lists a little excessive, and in some cases not well chosen. But some of the people, like McClintock and Wallace, are actually world-famous.

With respect to separate articles for scientists: Priestley is not only a scientist, and a list of works for him as a separate article might be a justified exception, & I suppose if it makes sense for his minor religious and political works, his scientific ones should be included also. The lists for Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Glenn T. Seaborg, and Thomas Hunt Morgan include books only. I don't see that we have such an article for Einstein or Newton; it would be justified for them if anyone. DGG ( talk ) 01:23, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Fair enough. I wouldn't have been so taken aback if the edit and summary hadn't been so broad. I won't second guess you as your work is in progress. It's certainly possible that the selected articles section needed to be more selective. It may even be the case for Giele that her books are a sufficient description of her published works. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing something, and that Misplaced Pages does include an academic's articles (at least in some cases and to some degree). Worldbruce (talk) 07:28, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Hello, talk page stalker here. Funny you should be asked this question; a similar one was put to me a little earlier. We seem to agree. I do have some qualms about this, though: while I think that a list of articles is unnecessary, for photographers I happily leave (and even create) lists of (mostly minor) exhibitions. Why the latter but not the former? (Do I perhaps have a double standard here?) -- Hoary (talk) 09:05, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Notable?

Georges Abrial: No sources here. No sources in French Misplaced Pages. Regards. --Why should I have a User Name? (talk) 19:56, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

It should be extremely easy to add sources, and I see there are some at the ruWP article DGG ( talk ) 23:53, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

General advice, repeated here so it will be visible:

Please don't be deterred by the bureaucracy here. This is after all a very large enterprise, with thousand of people working independently at the same time with almost no formal coordination, almost no supervision, and very little training. to help deal with it, a number of formal conventions have been established. Unfortunately, the sort of people that like to work here are exactly the sort of people who are not very skilled at drawing up formal conventions or procedures, and the net result is a mass of partially contradictory instructions and rules, some important, some not; some enforced, some not. The response to a rule that has proven impractical is usually to add several supplementary rules, rather that to revise the original, and after 11 years, it produces quite a jumble.

Some of us find it fun to manipulate the rules to get a reasonable result. But the true purpose of working here is to build an encyclopedia, and I will normally try to get to a reasonable result as directly as possible. Some people though insist on their interpretation of the rules regardless of the result, and I have also become rather experienced at countering them in their own frame of reference when necessary. As I'm pretty much an inclusionist on most topics, I tend to concentrate at AfD and AfC.

My advice is to concentrate on providing good sourced articles. If you want to learn process, don;t be afraid of making errors. There's no other way to do it, because you need to learn not the letter or the rules, but the way we use the and the accepted boundaries. DGG ( talk ) 17:53, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Kilroy was here —ATinySliver/ 19:44, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

About your contribution to the Monmouth College article

Hi DGG,

Thanks for the many edits you have posted to the Monmouth College article. You’re pretty much the first person who has given so much help. I am learning from your comments how to be more neutral in tone. I was unclear from your comments whether you intend to further edit (from where you left off) on the article. Do you plan to do more? If so, would the tag at the top of the article then be removed or is still more editing going to be necessary to remove that tag?

I also have a question about your edits to the sentence regarding U.S. News (near the top of the article). The problem with simply saying that the college is ranked as 165 out of 248 national liberal arts colleges is that the average reader doesn't know that there is a lower group called the regional liberal arts colleges which has many hundreds of members. Due to this lack of understanding, the common reader probably thinks that Monmouth College is in the lower half of liberal arts colleges overall when the opposite is true when the regional ones are included. So, I was looking for a way to describe this that isn't too promotional. That’s why “Tier 1” of the national rankings was mentioned previously. Any advice? Rami.shareef (talk) 19:01, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Rami.shareef; I'm not finished--I usually revise an article over a series of days. Ratings are a problem--you are to degree correct that both factors need to be considered, and I am not yet satisfied with my wording. I think the solution is not to try to discuss ratings in the lede--the need for compact statements makes it hard to express. Those of use checking these articles are starting to move the entire ratings section near the bottom, usually just before the notable people. Why not try that and I will take a look. Once I've got you started, you should be able to continue yourself.

I should mention that these problems are not at all unique to your article--I think somewhere between 95 and 100% of all our university articles need major improvement, sometimes much more than this one. What attracted my attention to Monmouth was the copyright permissions for the multiple other pictures--I think it would be a major mistake to include them. I see from the article that the school is particularly distinguished in chemistry, so having a chem lab picture might be one that does make sense--but you should use a much more eye-catching picture than the present one, showing something really unusual to make any impression. DGG ( talk ) 19:31, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

DGG;I have tried to finish out the article in a way that I think is more consistent with what I have learned from your more neutral tone. I also moved the rankings later in the article along with putting the US News info at that location. I thought I might put back the original text and see what you thought of it in that place. If too long, the Tier 1 description might be reasonable also. Is this along the lines of what you recommend and if so, has the “megaphone” problem now been resolved sufficiently to remove that tag from the top of the article? Any other recommendations?Rami.shareef (talk) 22:00, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

DGG;Since I have performed many edits to the article and so have you to move it to a more neutral voice, I intend to remove the megaphone banner and thought I should let you know in case there were other specific areas you wanted worked on.Rami.shareef (talk) 06:01, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Rami.shareef, I think you've done a pretty good hob of it; I removed the "news release" tag. While the article is still someowhat more promotional than it would be if I were writing it, it's not more promotional than the usual university article here--almost all of them need some improvement. I would suggest you try to see if the ratings section can be condensed a little further. DGG ( talk ) 09:01, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Eyes needed please

Eyes needed please on Gernatt Family of Companies and Talk:Gernatt Family of Companies. An editor has taken the time to trim some of the bloat of the article, and what's left is not very notable. Another editor has brought up the notability issue on the Talk page, but the discussion has been aggressively and voluminously hijacked by the article's creator. Could you take a look and see if a notability tag (or an AfD) is in order? Thank you. Softlavender (talk) 22:06, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

I took a look. The way to decide notability is to bring an AfD and see what the consensus is. DGG ( talk ) 04:50, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Draft:Mark Nelson (scientist)

Hello again, DGG. I see that you commented on this submission. I added some book reviews and replaced a primary source. Is it acceptable yet? —Anne Delong (talk) 16:04, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

working on it. DGG ( talk ) 02:32, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

solid, 2007 to 2014

The Working Man's Barnstar

Thanks, really, for your longterm solid participation in wikipedia, including in generally under-appreciated support area contributions. I found myself "thanking" you for a recent AFC action, and i realized i still appreciate your really decent comment in an AFD long ago. Your comment was positive about a topic that I had worked on, but especially struck me as professional and was helpful in allowing me to see that Misplaced Pages can be a decent place. That editorial processes can work and have reason prevail, even amidst the crazy randomness of an environment where "anyone can edit". That was in 2007 when i was just getting started, and it made a difference. Thanks! --doncram 14:32, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Draft:David De Cremer

Hi DGG. I see that you commented on this submission. I moved his own publications from references to their own section, and found some proper references to his positions. It's still pretty promotional, though, but I'm not sure what should go. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:56, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

I cleaned up further & accepted, though iI intend to work on it further. ; this is an example of where it is easier to simply remove promotional sections than rewrite them. DGG ( talk ) 05:42, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Talk:The Scientific World Journal

David, both sections on this talk page could benefit from your input. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 10:28, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

commented there. DGG ( talk ) 16:39, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Books, gah!

Gods, some respected publishers perpetrate expensive junk.

(Sorry, had to vent somewhere.) -- Hoary (talk) 23:50, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

A request for your time and consideration

I've made an appeal to the AN board that has gone unattended by an uninvolved admin for some time. It's become rather stale and I'd very much like a resolution one way or another. I sought you and two other editors out because I've appreciated your judgement in previous instances. Please understand that this isn't an appeal for your help, that's neither appropriate nor especially constructive. Instead I simply want this matter attended to by competent people who can impart a measure of finality at WP:AN. I'll totally understand your declining to review my appeal but I hope you'll consider giving it some of your time, even if it's to refer another administrator. GraniteSand (talk) 12:48, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

GraniteSand, perfectly reasonable to ask for added participation, and I have commented. DGG ( talk ) 18:13, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

My appeal has become embarrassingly stagnant. My next step is an appeal to ArbCom. You've made a statement that you'd be interested in such an action but I'm not clear on your position. Is there anything I can do to facilitate your participation or should I simply notify you when I assemble the appeal there? GraniteSand (talk) 09:49, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you

		The Articles for Creation barnstar
		This is for your considered contributions to the process, all of which are delivered well. I do not always agree with you but I appreciate your voice and actions. Fiddle Faddle 18:32, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

deletion Vector NTI

Dear DGG,

You deleted Vector NTI before I could react (7 days is definitely too fast for occasional writers). It's an important bioinformatics package used in molecular biology. Because it's a specialist topic it probably appeared unimportant to you but to the thousands of people working in this area it's not. For me this is the point of the Misplaced Pages that it can contain specialists articles that would be culled in a book like the Britannica. Please reactivate or at least send me the text, so I can move it to a less restrictive wiki.

All the best, --— J.S. 06:52, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Since it was deleted only via PROD< you're entitled to have it restored, and I undeleted it. But there two serious problems that must be addressed. The first, is that it must be written in paragraphs , not as an outline. The second, is that you need references providing substantial coverage from third-party independent reliable sources, not press releases or mere announcements. It's not the specialist nature of the topic which is a problem, it's showing its notable via others than the developer writing about it. We go not by what the inherent nature of something is, but by what the world thinks of it-- see WP:N for an explanation./ DGG ( talk ) 07:22, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Sergey Sangalov has become eligible for G13. HasteurBot (talk) 01:30, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Peter Marshall has become eligible for G13. HasteurBot (talk) 01:31, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Sol Biderman Collection

It looks like it was an "edit-athon" meant to promote/advertise a university library collection (probably to get more funding from donors?). See Misplaced Pages:Meetup/Nashville/Vanderbilt Edit-A-Thon 2014. But sure, I have added merge tags and contacted the page creator. Probably a good idea to expand Jean and Alexander Heard Library with it, though it really ought to be referenced.Zigzig20s (talk) 03:10, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

It was an editathon, which, as most library or university based editathons do, worked on topics for which the library has special collections to support. That's just what we've done at the ones I've been involved in at Princeton and NYPL and Columbia. The trickiest part of these sessions is finding topics that are sure to be considered satisfactory and that can be completed at the session. This particular topic was not wisely chosen--they should either have done it on the individual or on the Special Collections in general. Your suggest for how to proceed is exactly what I was going to suggest. DGG ( talk ) 06:11, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

What happens if no one responds to the merge request?Zigzig20s (talk) 04:18, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Paid editing - over 20 accounts

There's over 20 accounts (plus some IPs) at Misplaced Pages:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Bert_Martinez, some of which are unblocked. There may be more as I haven't followed all the links. May be worth escalating/ widening the cleanup effort. Widefox; talk 00:47, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

there seems to be adequate work on this already. , but I'll keep in touch DGG ( talk ) 00:59, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

20 50. Widefox; talk 22:38, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/A Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution has become eligible for G13. HasteurBot (talk) 01:30, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Start of Phyillis Wise page

I see that you started the page for Phyllis Wise Oct 15, 2014. What happened to her original page? I can't find anything about it in the deletion history. Want to know why her page was deleted and how you came to start her current page. JKIDM (talk) 17:00, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

I work very frequently on academic subjects, and frequently work on university articles. I started this page because I saw her mentioned in news reports, and in the article on the University, but found there was no existing article (nor had there ever been). Heads of universities should have articles on wikipedia, and so should all members of national academies such as the Institute of Medicine. There's a section that to be added, and I intend to add it. I am indeed aware of controversy that should be covered there, and it is tricky to do this properly, so I postponed it. I do know how to do it right, with proportionate neutral coverage, and I meant to get back to this sooner; thanks for reminding me. DGG ( talk ) 17:25, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

New Misplaced Pages Library Accounts Now Available (November 2014)

Hello Wikimedians!

The Misplaced Pages Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for:

• DeGruyter: 1000 new accounts for English and German-language research. Sign up on one of two language Wikipedias:
  • English signup
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• Fold3: 100 new accounts for American history and military archives
• Scotland's People: 100 new accounts for Scottish genealogy database
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• JSTOR: 100+ remaining accounts for journal archives

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Misplaced Pages projects: sign up today!
--The Misplaced Pages Library Team 23:25, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

You can host and coordinate signups for a Misplaced Pages Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).

This message was delivered via the Mass Message to the Book & Bytes recipient list.

Charleston Conference

David, I'm currently attending my first Charleston Conference. Nearly everyone I talk to here about Misplaced Pages mentions you. Chuck Hamaker sends his regards. Best, The Interior (Talk) 23:04, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Klaus F. Riegel

Dear DGG: This person seems to be an active researcher. Is this page worth keeping? —Anne Delong (talk) 14:54, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

yes; I'll clean up the referencing and accept. DGG ( talk ) 07:32, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Shemford

Just wanted to check if you still intend to restore the page (as you mentioned on my talk page) czar ♔ 01:25, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, unless someone else decides to do it. in the next few days DGG ( talk ) 07:25, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

G13 Eligibility

Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Medicine (journal) has become eligible for G13. HasteurBot (talk) 01:30, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

05:56:14, 15 November 2014 review of submission by Ynsomnyak

• Ynsomnyak (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:Marisa Matarazzo (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

hi I can't find any notes as to why this was declined please let me know what I need to do to get this into the correct shape Ynsomnyak (talk) 05:56, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

replied on your user talk page. DGG ( talk ) 19:17, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

Race Of Rememberance

Hi DGG, you recently declined an article I created and the reason you gave was "Submission is about a film that does not meet notability guidelines" This would be exceptable if my article was actually about a film! It's not... This leads me to believe you never actually read it? I also noticed that in the advice part where I can check rules and so on linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:MOVIE Can you please advice as I cannot make it meet you're film notability criteria, because it isn't one. Just to help it's about a charity motor race, how it made history. Jimmy b 1984 (talk) 09:33, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

Of course it's not a film, but an event. I reverted the review. My error seems to have been a slip of the mouse to wrong line in the drop down list, before I realized there is no prebuilt line for an event. Why the script was not programmed with buttons like Twinkle I do not understand, but then I do not understand most of the design decisions for the AfC scripts, such as why the material placed on the user talk page is not previewed.

As for the article, I have my doubts that it is notable, but it might be. A reasonable chance is all it takes to pass AfC, so I'm going to accept it, and anyone who wants to challenge it can do so. DGG ( talk ) 19:29, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

St. Joseph Parish

I just checked the online archives of Western New York Catholic, the newspaper of the diocese of Buffalo, and don't find any sources in it to establish the notability of the topic either. I'm not sure how far back the online archives go however. John Carter (talk) 18:32, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks John for your diligent searching. Could you repost your comment at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/St. Joseph Parish, Gowanda, New York? As there is an AfD in progress that is probably where further discussion of the merits of this article belongs for the time being. Thanks again! -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:52, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

DRAGA design

Thank you for your comments. The fact that I am being paid to create this article has nothing to do with its content. If that fact is the only reason to reject the article, then could it be submitted by someone else? JB, DRAGA design, Oakland, CA USA 20:07, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for reviewing and accepting the Jon Mills (psychologist) article as a stub

I would be grateful if you could provide some specific tip(s) about how to improve the quality of this article or indicate which features of it make it a bit weak. I find just reading the generic explanations of the quality criteria, it is hard to know which issues relate to my particular article. PhilPsych (talk) 15:53, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Recently deleted article on 27 year Jail sentence of Sholom Rubashkin

I will repeat what I discussed in the talk page - The article by far passes the WP:GNG guidelines since there is "Significant coverage" that "addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content" and the "secondary sources" are all highly "reliable" and ""Independent of the subject".

I was just asking for a few days to complete this article. but you deleted it around 2 hours after I put it up.

This specific topic is well covered by 10's or 100's of reliable sources. Much of what is in the sources have nothing to do with Sholom Rubashkin. It does not belong on his article. I could discuss many examples with you.

I brought 5 sources that are all titled on the jail sentencing of Rubashkin but there are so much more.

2010 New York Times --Sentence for Plant Manager

2013 Huffington Post -- Rubashkin Case: A Mockery of Justice - This discusses general problems with the justice system.

2012 Huffington Post -- Sentencing of Sholom Rubashkin - which discusses and relates the general sentencing guidelines in the justice system.

2010 Wall Street Journal Rubashkin Gets Stiff Sentence - which also speaks about Jewish community response.

2014 Jerusalem Post -- holds barred: Why Pollard and Rubashkin are rotting in jail

Why is this topic not notable despite the sources on this sentencing and that relate this case to the general justice system? I still want to build the article and show you how it will look but I don't want to waist time if you will anyways remove it as soon as I post it.Caseeart (talk) 04:00, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

If they are not in the article on him, you should add them there. Complaints that the sentence he received represented anti-Jewish views can be reasonable content there in a section on the sentencing. I would think If you post it again I shall delete it and protect it against recreation. BLP splits like this are unacceptable. If you want to discuss this, I suggest the BLP noticeboard. DGG ( talk ) 04:14, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

• It is not about Rubashkin. It is about the Jail Sentence which some of the sources point out that they have nothing to do with Mr. Rubashkin rather with the Justice system or with his religion. There are many such splits in wikipedia here are the first few examples that came to my mind Barack Obama, Speeches of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama, Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008 since these topics were well covered.etc. etc. I was thinking of renaming the article something similar to Response to 27 year sentencing of Sholomm RubashkinCaseeart (talk) 04:47, 17 November 2014 (UTC)
• What do you say about the attack style BLP article Sexual abuse cases in Brooklyn's Haredi community which is about the Haredi Judaism. I was going to propose deletion but I see that it survived deletion twice (primarily because of one experienced user)? Caseeart (talk) 04:47, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

P.S. I don't want to get off topic but you mentioned editing Sholom Rubashkin. I am not sure how to do that since the article is a big mess. It was widely edited during his trial with major POV pushing primarily by negative editors (one main editor John Nagle is now facing a defamation lawsuit , 2 other heavy editors have a track history of placing poorly sourced negative material on any article that covers Religious Jews. It is a big mess and difficult to work on.Caseeart (talk) 05:09, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, we've made exceptions for major historical figures, and presidential campaigns, because of the huge amount of material. It's a practical necessity. He isn't one of them. (even so, personally I think the BO endorsement by OW somewhat questionable). I think the better analogy is Leopold and Loeb, where we do not have a separate article about the trial. And we only have one article about Jonathan Pollard, or Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

the deletion I did has no relation to more general matters, which should be discussed elsewhere. POV editing is, unfortunately, an inevitable curse of a open content encyclopedia. Normally in such cases people on each side of the issue accuse each other of undue POV editing; I suspect both sides may often be correct. I would have done what I did regardless of any background considerations.,

My advice remains to ask for other opinions at BLPN. It the most even-handed thing I could possibly say. The thing to do if you disagree with me is to ask me to reconsider, as you are reasonably doing; if I maintain my position, discuss it elsewhere. I think I'm unquestionably right in this, but I'm hardly the best judge of that. DGG ( talk ) 09:54, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

I guess when I will be able to get around to it. It is spending a lot of time which I don't really have now. (it's not like I am being given a choice in the matter). But I do want another opinion about the attack style BLP Sexual abuse cases in Brooklyn's Haredi community which is on Haredi Judaism? Caseeart (talk) 04:43, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

that is a different issue. Since it mentions individuals, perhaps the BLP noticeboard would be the place also. You can just present it for discussion, and let the discussion follow its own course to see what people say. DGG ( talk ) 09:03, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Copyright checks when performing AfC reviews

Hello DGG. This message is part of a mass mailing to people who appear active in reviewing articles for creation submissions. First of all, thank you for taking part in this important work! I'm sorry this message is a form letter – it really was the only way I could think of to covey the issue economically. Of course, this also means that I have not looked to see whether the matter is applicable to you in particular.

The issue is in rather large numbers of copyright violations ("copyvios") making their way through AfC reviews without being detected (even when easy to check, and even when hallmarks of copyvios in the text that should have invited a check, were glaring). A second issue is the correct method of dealing with them when discovered.

If you don't do so already, I'd like to ask for your to help with this problem by taking on the practice of performing a copyvio check as the first step in any AfC review. The most basic method is to simply copy a unique but small portion of text from the draft body and run it through a search engine in quotation marks. Trying this from two different paragraphs is recommended. (If you have any question about whether the text was copied from the draft, rather than the other way around (a "backwards copyvio"), the Wayback Machine is very useful for sussing that out.)

If you do find a copyright violation, please do not decline the draft on that basis. Copyright violations need to be dealt with immediately as they may harm those whose content is being used and expose Misplaced Pages to potential legal liability. If the draft is substantially a copyvio, and there's no non-infringing version to revert to, please mark the page for speedy deletion right away using {{db-g12|url=URL of source}}. If there is an assertion of permission, please replace the draft article's content with {{subst:copyvio|url=URL of source}}.

Some of the more obvious indicia of a copyvio are use of the first person ("we/our/us..."), phrases like "this site", or apparent artifacts of content written for somewhere else ("top", "go to top", "next page", "click here", use of smartquotes, etc.); inappropriate tone of voice, such as an overly informal tone or a very slanted marketing voice with weasel words; including intellectual property symbols (™,®); and blocks of text being added all at once in a finished form with no misspellings or other errors.

I hope this message finds you well and thanks again you for your efforts in this area. Best regards--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC).

       Sent via--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

My experience is that many of these indications are at most merely cause for checking further or even usually innocuous: many editors routinely use the plural, or an incorrect tone, because they do not understand the requirements of Misplaced Pages. We're a unique type of communication, and what seems natural to us will seem very artificial to others. Some editors with a degree of skill are capable of writing error-free drafts, even in their initial edits. Many writers on commercial subjects use copyright and trademark symbols here because they are accustomed to use them in other writing, and do not realize our style is different. Many people, especially those preparing the drafts in a word-processor, use smart quotes either as a learned routine or as the default setting of the software; some programs automatically correct to this if not set otherwise. Use of vague terms of quantity and weasel-word expressions is common in all forms of writing and permeates the encyclopedia; the need for exactness is not obvious. Promotionalism should be rejected, but promotionalism is not always copyvio. The world is full of promotional writing, and people simply imitate it. Indeed, Misplaced Pages is full of promotional writing, and well-intentioned people may not realize it is not wanted. DGG ( talk ) 04:53, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Hal Furman

Hello DGG, I've added a lot more news articles from more reputable sources (NYT, Washington Post)) that are more focused on Hal Furman. I believe that the article should now meet the standard of notability. Please let me know if there's anything further I can do. thanks! (User:Eafurman)

I'm going to approve it, on the basis that the level for approval is a likelihood of passing afd. In this case, the likelihood is probably a little better than even. You could improve the article by using a fuller format for references: see WP:REFBEGIN, but that would include the author and title of each item, the printed source if any, and the online link--even if the online link is behind a paywall. If it is, it will help to give some indication of the extent of coverage--the objections is likely to be that the NYT refs gave him a mere mention. There are two places where specific references are definitely needed--I marked them. The claim for his role in the creation of Build America Bonds seems quite indirect; unless he specifically is given credit in a source, it might amount to Original Research, which we do not do. I'd fix these quickly--it is usual for articles on candidates who do not win elections to be nominated for an afd discussion. And be aware that we have feeling of skepticism against articles with an obvious conflict of interest. DGG ( talk ) 07:25, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

RfC

As you participated in a previous related discussion you are invited to comment at Misplaced Pages:Administrators/RfC for an Admin Review Board. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:58, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Rami Rahim

New CEO of a $4.6 billion tech company, Juniper Networks. There are quite a few sources that include some information about him, however he is not the subject of most of the articles, which are generally about the resignation of the prior CEO.(example) There are also a few trade press articles from before his CEO appointment.

He doesn't quite technically meet notability requirements, because he is not the subject of multiple in-depth works and I therefore advised them to wait, however I am now doubting my advice because I started just throwing together a page on him and found I could write a decent short piece using only one primary source and I have a hard time reconciling with the CEO of a company that big not qualifying (many prior Juniper CEOs have pages).

I come seeking your input. I have a COI. CorporateM (Talk) 14:01, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

My personal view is that the GNG is culture-bound, both in the sense of being much easier to meet for developed nations, much easier to meet for most WPedians if relating to US & other English speaking countries , and very much easier to meet in certain fields than others. We have partially corrected for it by making additional requirements or using a very strict interpretation of Reliable Sources for some areas where it's absurdly easy to meet, such as popular entertainment, or major sports.We have more controversially adopted the concept of "presumed notability" for some areas where it is particularly hard to meet, such as early Olympic athletes, and high schools, and dealt with other areas by using a very lax interpretation. The only area where we use a completely independent standard that I am aware of is WP:PROF, and even here an argument for implied GNG can be constructed (and in my opinion what helped establish WP:PROF was when I & some others began using the concept of RSs being references in other papers--an extraordinarily lax standard for even Assistant Professors in science).

We do have a presumed standard for public companies: NYSE or equivalent. We could perfectly well adopt a presumed standard that the heads of such companies are presumed notable also.

We can & do adopt by various means whatever standard matches the material we collectively want to include, and rejects the others. The problem in this area is the general suspicion that almost all WP articles on organizations are promotional and edited --edited very poorly-- mostly by those with a coi. Since it is extremely likely that the smaller the organizations we accept, the more prone to promotionalism, I doubt very much in the present situation that there would be support for a looser standard for any aspect of this subject area.

What makes it more difficult in this case is that there happens to be coverage for executives at the company for who we would ordinarily not have articles. I have just nominated some of them for AfD-- see Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Mark Bauhaus]] and the adjacent nominations , and I am considering the others. I also plan to nominate the template Jupiter leadership Team for deletion after at least these first articles have been removed.

As for other executives, it is not unreasonable that there be more information for those who have served longer, than for those just appointed. My own view is that in this situation, combination articles can be effective solutions. DGG ( talk ) 20:13, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Yup, they mentioned there were some other executive pages, but I haven't looked them up yet. I agree that in most cases only the CEO page is warranted, if even that. They mentioned some of their execs were famous in their field, but I was skeptical and haven't looked it up yet. I'm left with a rather unclear answer about the Rami question though, as I was basically just going to abstain or contribute based on whatever you suggest. At first it sounded like you were suggesting common sense criterion that we would want a page on any CEO of a multi-billion dollar public company, but then you also mentioned such non-GNG-types of notability criterion were unlikely to be accepted for business topics, or was this referring just to company pages? CorporateM (Talk) 15:12, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Mark Friedman

If this above gets deleted, I think you should move Mark Friedman (author) over to its name. --brewcrewer (yada, yada) 05:09, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

thanks for the alert! DGG ( talk ) 06:53, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Speedy deletion

You refused a speedy deletion for Marc Lore, and removed my tag, on the grounds that the article "does have a reference". I still can't see it. Please reconsider; this is a totally unreferenced BLP. RolandR (talk) 11:30, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

"In 2000, he was named one of Britain's top ten "new high-tech entrepreneurs and whiz kids" by The Sunday Times Magazine of London." This is not exact, but it is a reference. The best thing to do at this point is to try to find the exact citation. DGG ( talk ) 11:34, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Really? You think that a claim that a newspaper behind a paywall made a statement on an unspecified date in 2000 counts as a reference? How is anyone meant to locate this? And by the way, I have done a Google search, which finds no evidence of such an article; searching for "Marc Lore" and "Sunday Times" turns up just 13 results, all of them either clones of our article or Lore's own PR. I repeat, I don't see how you can regard this as any sort of reference, since it seems impossible for anyone to confirm this. RolandR (talk) 11:42, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

take it to afd. That 's what it's there for. Someone with a subscription will find the ref., & then we can discuss if its sufficient. DGG ( talk ) 19:03, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

University of Minnesota Food Industry Center

Your A7 speedy was challenged on the talk page on the grounds that this is an educational institution. I don't know how widely that A7 exemption is generally considered to spread, but since there is a doubt here I have replaced the speedy with a PROD. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 17:56, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

A Department of a school is not an educational institution. Nor is a research center. And this particular one does not award degrees. I usually see no point in converting a challenged speedy to a prod, because it is inevitable that this too will be challenged, if the editor understands our procedures. But if it is, I'll watch for it, and use afd. DGG ( talk ) 19:01, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes (I admit, not often) if the PROD reason is explained clearly enough, the article author gets the point and does not challenge it. We'll see. JohnCD (talk) 20:13, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Agreed. Sometimes they even ask for it to be deleted. That's even been known to happen after just a notability tag. Any way of getting the original editor to do the work properly is worth trying. DGG ( talk ) 22:08, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Years in Monaco, Iceland, etc.

I am surprised by the fact that you feel there is "no reason not to keep potentially useful structure" when it comes to the articles I flagged for deletion last week. While I agree that the frameworks are indeed "potentially useful", as it stands now, there is no content nor any usable links within the articles I flagged. As I see it, I could create an article tonight about Films in the year 2066, and while it will no doubt prove to be useful several decades from now, that doesn't mean that the page is necessary, or even useful, now. I feel these empty frameworks are similarly useless, at least as things stand right now.

Anyway, I have no intention of flagging the pages again, but if you could shed any additional light on why you feel these pages are worthwhile, I would definitely be interested in reading. Cheers. 209.90.140.72 (talk) 03:33, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

You couldn't construct an article structure about films in 2066 because there is not yet possible for there to be any content. But there is probable content for the material here. It is in my opinion not ideal to make a structure in so much detail initially, because at least for some of these, there is unlikely to be content for most of the years, and longer time spans are appropriate. (the standard rule for when a year in .... list is appropriate is when there are at least two items for the time period.) DGG ( talk ) 03:41, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Fair enough. I definitely think instead of years, the contents should be combined into decades, scores, or in some cases, centuries, for countries with a lack of historical content on Misplaced Pages. But more than anything, I was curious about your mindset, and I appreciate the response. 209.90.140.72 (talk) 02:47, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Brooklyn Melodies Music Centre

Hi Mate, saw you proposal for deletion of Brooklyn Melodies Music Centre. While the school is the only one in the region teaching classical western music and dance, I see it as an error on my part to create it without properly looking into the notability part. I am not contesting the deletion as I feel Misplaced Pages is not a loser by losing the article. Thanks for brining the subject up for discussion. Cheers!!--jojo@nthony (talk) 06:27, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

RfA question

Hi DGG, I think you're missing a wikilink in your second question asked at my RfA. I'm confident I know which draft you're referring to but I thought you might want to fix the link before I answered. Thanks, Sam Walton (talk) 23:17, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

done. My apologies. DGG ( talk ) 01:39, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Draft:Zach Williamson

Hey DGG! I've noticed you sometimes tag articles for speedy deletion even though you are yourself an administrator. I think this is an excellent practice, at least when you're at all unsure, as it then takes a second set of eyes to make the judgement call. As you've probably noticed I do the same from time to time :) However, I have to wonder why with something more serious as a negative unsourced BLP you didn't take it upon yourself to perform the deletion? — MusikAnimal 02:24, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Actually, I clicked the wrong line of Huggle. I'm so used to tagging, that I did it automatically. DGG ( talk ) 02:29, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Request on 13:17:49, 24 November 2014 for assistance on AfC submission by Vicechairmanoffice

• Vicechairmanoffice (talk · contribs)
  • User:Vicechairmanoffice (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Dear DGG,

This is in reference to the article submitted for Mr. Raaja Kanwar, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Apollo International Limited, it is noted that you have declined the article. For your kind information Mr Raaja Kanwar has been recognized by Honrable Prime Minister of India for his contribution in Digital India apart from other achievements and contribution in his career. Hence I am unable to understand rejection of the article unless recognition from Prime Minister is not a notable achievement.

Could you be kind enough to guide me to improve the draft so that it can be published at the earliest.

Regards Ashu

Vicechairmanoffice (talk) 13:17, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Whether the article will be kept in WP does not depend on me, but if I move it to mainspace at this point, it would probably end up getting deleting after a community discussion. I think it likely that he is notable, but it needs to be shown by references providing substantial coverage from third-party independent reliable sources, not press releases or mere announcements. There is at present only one usable source, which is the Hollywood Reporter profile. It is one of a group of profiles, and is mainly letting him talk and say whatever he wants to, but it does contain a statement from their writer about his importance. We do not give much weight to testimonials from government officials, but in any case it needs to be shown by a newspaper or magazine article, not just stated. This is true of the other awards also--they cannot be proven from the company website, but from 3rd party sources.

Furthermore, you may have partially copied some of the material from your company website. This not permitted. You could donate the material to use under a free license , according to WP:DCM, but it will be much easier to rewrite, because the manner of writing is that of a press release praising him, not a neutral encyclopedia article. You cannot use such phrases as "Testimony to its success and promising future," in an encyclopedia--this is advertising.

When you resubmit, it will be looked at again. DGG ( talk ) 17:14, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

18:49:53, 24 November 2014 review of submission by Xnicholasf

• Xnicholasf (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:International Systems Engineering Day (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Xnicholasf (talk) 18:49, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello, thank you for your feedback. I do appreciate it. I've certainly learnt a lot about Misplaced Pages article writing over the past few months. I am a little confused about the review and decline to publish. The past few attempts to submit were only met with the comments on "notability". I did not have enough references to from objective sources. Days of The Year has since made reference to it, and as such I have included tis reference in here. I have not previously been told the article is written like an advertisement. In fact, I largely used the same format and writing style as System Administrator Appreciation Day, which has been accepted and published. I am happy to re-write the article, I just want to make sure I am indeed doing the write thing to avoid another decline. Thanks again.

It's written to advertise the program, and even gives the facebook & linkedin pages. But quite apart from that, it must have references providing substantial coverage from third-party independent reliable sources, not press releases or mere announcements , to show its notability. "independent" means unassociated with the organization. If you have them, try to rewrite the article so it describes the event, not describes what a systems engineer does. We already have that information. I will check the other page you mention to see if it has similar problems. DGG ( talk ) 22:12, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

19:07:38, 24 November 2014 review of submission by Blsolbjor

• Blsolbjor (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:Arthur Obermayer (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Blsolbjor (talk) 19:07, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Arthur Obermayer already has a Misplaced Pages page in German (https://de.wikipedia.org/Arthur_S._Obermayer). The English language submission was intended to expand on that which is contained in the German version. Would we be better off having our submission translated into German and then added to the German version?

I apologize for the confusion. I was lazy, and I used the default template for the response, and it does not meet the situation.

The English language version is in fact the better--the German one talks too much about the accomplishments of his relatives, However, there is material there that should be aded: The Federal Cross of Merit is relevant; but I can not figure out why he would be given the prize by the ACS unless he has in fact written a book--but that does not appear in either article.

There are two actual problems. First, the English language WP is very strict about references for biographies of living people. Every statement in the article needs a reliable source. The bare facts of his life can be taken from his web site, but everything else needs a third-party independent published reliable source, not press releases or mere announcements. German or English, print or online are all OK. Ideally they should reference every sentence or significant group of facts in a paragraph.

A related problem is that we do not include praise, or claim a significant role in something unless there is actual evidence from a 3rd party Reliable source--this includes phrases like "a leading role in..." unless there's a source for the phrase. You can't really call something "novel" unless a third party has said so. You can;t say " been working closely with Sen. Ted Kenned" unless there's a published source.

The material on the Rubrik's Cube does not belong in this article. He didn't invent it. He was the President of a company where someone on the staff invented it, and that's quite different.

As matters of style, we do not write . If WBUR has a p. in WP, and it does. we link to it ]. If an organization does not, you still cannot use the external link format in text, but much either list in external links, or give it as a full reference. Otherwise it looks as if we had an article.

Let me know here when youre ready, and I will re-review it. DGG ( talk ) 21:47, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

AFC FYI

FYI: Your runaway { was breaking the AFC gadget when I was trying to clean the page . Hasteur (talk) 20:47, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

yes, an extra { would certainly do that. sorry. DGG ( talk ) 20:54, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of my page Elly Barnes (educator)

Dear DGG, I am clearly not the only one on this page who is slightly frustrated, trying to learn to use Misplaced Pages and trying to listen and apply feedback provided only to find my page has been deleted. I had already re-worked some sections of it and did not receive a warning it had not been amended enough. I added new content and am prepared to re-work as necessary. It is not my intention to violate copyright! I understand the need to be factual and cite sources, you are right I applied some promotional aspect (although this was written by me, no one else) so I am requesting that you restore my draft page and I will amend before resubmitting. Thank you. Julie JulesatEducate&Celebrate (talk) 22:21, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

We cannot leave copyvio in until you rework it; it must be removed. When you have a new version, resubmit it.If you let me know , I will look at it immediately DGG ( talk ) 23:07, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Dear DGG, I have indicated I am happy to rework it, it is not in the public domain yet but in draft form. However my whole draft page has been removed, including picture and other information not in violation of copyright. Are you saying I have to re-write the whole page from scratch? I already had feedback from another admin that indicated some of the amends I had made were satisfactory hence continuing to make similar amends and resubmitting. Or do I need to re-write the main aspects and then you re-load the draft page? I do want to get this right but I will not be happy if I have to start all over when I have been responding to feedback, marking my edited changes and making amendments in line with wiki protocol. JulesatEducate&Celebrate (talk) 23:51, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

The article is still present in the page history for use as reference.. My advice is to start a new draft article as Draft:Elly Barnes (the education qualification is not needed as she's the only one of that name in the encyclopedia), and work on it there. Various people have various ways of handling copyvio: some admins would have already deleted the entire page. DGG ( talk ) 23:57, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of pet games articles

I am certain this is not the first time I have seen these pages (or variants thereof) created in the past few weeks, each time by a throwaway account. For example, this one was created two days ago . Is there any way this can be investigated further? Altamel (talk) 23:52, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

We could proceed to a WP:SPI Sockpuppet investigation, but I have already blocked the accounts, and also the ip addresses used. That's usually enough. I'd wait for a third one, and then you should post it there--it might be possible to block an entire range, but I don;t know whether we save that for even worse abuse. I don't usually work on these. To determine the right range, it takes a Checkuser, which I am not. I'll keep an eye on new pages for the next day. But if you see it first, let me know. DGG ( talk ) 00:01, 25 November 2014 (UTC)