Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:42, 6 May 2015

Precious again

quality standards
Thank you for quality articles such as today's Aylesbury duck, for patiently trying to reach the best possible quality, for understanding the difference between "ownership" of an article and responsibility for it ("People familiar with the topic are more likely to know of problems regarding it" isn't a blasphemy against the spirit ...), for presenting yourself not in userboxes but in dialogue, - repeating: you are an awesome Wikipedian (7 February 2009, 29 January 2010)!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:19, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

A year ago, you were the 517th recipient of my PumpkinSky Prize,

Thanks, although if I'm going to be remembered for something I'm not sure Aylesbury duck would be the one I'd choose. That one's so boring, even the vandals didn't bother with it. – iridescent 10:57, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Same for BWV 172 ;) - What would you want to be remembered for? - I put mine in my user's infobox, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:03, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

In terms of articles, Biddenden Maids, Daniel Lambert and Pig-faced women for (I hope) showing that it's possible to treat really peculiar topics sensitively without engaging in "hey, look at this weird thing!" posturing; Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway for (I hope) explaining why something 99% of readers will never have heard of was a genuinely world-shaking event with consequences that are still affecting all our readers' daily lives today; Battersea Bridge and Hellingly Hospital Railway for showing that it's possible to write on a dry technical topic without going into "the 4-4-2 Manning Wardle tank engine was fitted with twin reciprocating camshafts" nerdiness; and Halkett boat for bringing those wonderful drawings to a wider audience.

In terms of Misplaced Pages meta-issues, as one of those who fought to show that there isn't a clear dichotomy between Good Misplaced Pages editors who toil tirelessly for the greater good, and Evil banned users who circle the project like a pack of wolves (or if you prefer, Evil drones who slave for Jimbo's self-aggrandizing machine, and Good fearless rebels who dare to challenge the established order and are blocked by the evil cabal), back when the us-and-them mentality was far more entrenched than it is now.

In practice, I know damned well that my Misplaced Pages tombstone will read 'Coiner of the phrases "Indefinite means undefined not infinite" and "Without content Misplaced Pages is just Facebook for ugly people" ', with a brief footnote of 'only person ever to be expelled from Arbcom'. – iridescent 11:29, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, for explaining and for treating really peculiar topics sensitively! - I wish you were on arbcom! Some seem to wait for me to appeal my sanctions, - but how can I appeal to people who didn't look and understand in the first place? - In practise: I'm in the info-box, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:52, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

I've been sanctioned by ArbCom as well Gerda but it bothers me not at all. I've never even considered appealing, and I very much doubt I ever will. Where's the fun in prostrating yourself before a bunch of sanctimonious windbags? Eric Corbett 12:09, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

It doesn't bother me too much, the restriction to 2 comments in a discussion is even a true blessing, which should be handed out more generously. I only said that I seem to be expected to appeal. No, I won't. My sanction is so ridiculous, example: I wrote more than 90% of Richard Adeney, but I am restricted not to add an infobox because I didn't literally "create" it = turn red link to blue. I had simply forgotten that I hadn't done that, this was in 2009, I only remembered the work I put in. Even more ridiculous is that my police bothers to follow me, revert me, and write a warning. Could some merciful soul perhaps restore the infobox? This is not a composer, there's no controversy on musical artists, - it's just ridiculous. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:03, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Actually there is, but that's beside the point: you're expected to either appeal or stick to the restriction - doing neither is not an option, and helping you to do neither is no mercy. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:32, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Did you hear today's music, lonely hearts club? When I started the article on Neill Sanders I had no idea that he played the famous horn calls. I gave him an infobox recently, and also several of his colleagues. One was reverted, per my restriction. Does it make sense? (The restriction leading to inconsistent treatment of articles, I mean.) Would it make sense to appeal a restriction that doesn't make sense with the very same people who passed it? No. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:07, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Break: tunnels and civility

Thank you for the tunnel, - hoping for light at the end ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:41, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you... I will put my hand up and admit that Tunnel Railway is not the most exciting article on Misplaced Pages, but it's as interesting as a barely-used hole in the ground is ever going to be. (What's the significance of the lambananas? With the greatest of respect to that fine city, as symbols of hope go Liverpool city centre wouldn't be top of most people's lists. Except for Hope Street, I suppose.) – incredibly toxic personality 10:11, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the signature. Great idea! - The lambananas are my signature: picture taken by a missing admired editor. You may remember reading in the Signpost that I translate for editors not wanted here, - in this case I took the picture and send it around the world, a little effort fighting toxic atmosphere. --incredibly toxic personality --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:28, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Unless you've done something to earn his wrath, I don't think "incredibly toxic personality" was aimed at you. Although he's very carefully avoided naming names this time round (understandable, in light of what happened last time he started attacking people he disliked by name), to the best of my knowledge Jimmy Wales's "toxic personalities who allegedly produce good content" are, in roughly descending order, Bishonen (undoubtedly top of his list), Giano, Eric Corbett, Thekohser, Wehwalt, every person listed here, Alison, Rlevse and myself, and I'm not sure the latter two are significant enough to make it onto the list any more.

As regards the issue at the root of this, my thoughts haven't changed since I proposed this rewritten civility policy back Before The Dawn of Time (my bolding of the key points):

The civility policy Misplaced Pages ought to have doesn't need a novel; it needs three short paragraphs:

• "Misplaced Pages's editors are expected to avoid, unless necessary for editorial reasons, the use of language which can be reasonably expected to offend a significant number of Misplaced Pages's readers. Misplaced Pages's editors are also expected to avoid the use of language which can reasonably be construed as belittling another user, unless such language is necessary for editorial reasons (e.g. warning an editor who is repeatedly introducing serious errors and refuses to accept reasonable explanations as to why their changes are inappropriate). Once an editor has had it drawn to their attention that another editor considers their conduct unacceptable, that editor should either cease the behavior in question or explain to the complaining editor why they consider the conduct reasonable; if the editors are unable to agree on what constitutes reasonable conduct, wider community input should be requested to determine consensus on the issue. If an editor continues unnecessarily to use language which has been determined to be offensive to significant numbers of Misplaced Pages's readers, or which is widely considered to constitute the unnecessary belittling of another Misplaced Pages editor, sanctions may be imposed upon the editor in question.

• Likewise, if an editor repeatedly accuses another editor of inappropriate conduct after such conduct has been deemed appropriate by the broader community, and continues to make such accusations after the fact of it being considered acceptable has been drawn to their attention, sanctions may be imposed to prevent the editor in question from continuing to make vexations complaints.

• Other than in exceptional cases in which a given editor's continued activity has a realistic potential to cause serious damage to the English language Misplaced Pages or serious damage to public perception of the English language Misplaced Pages, blocks and other sanctions will not be applied for breaches of this policy, both in the case of users using language considered to be uncivil and in the case of users considered to be making vexatious complaints, prior to community discussion about the appropriateness of such sanctions."

While I'm sure there are excellent reasons why this wouldn't work, I've yet to hear one—this is basically a Bradspeak description of the way people interact in the real world.

@Newyorkbrad, Risker, Roger Davies, and Jimbo Wales: why and how has WP:FIVE somehow been elevated with no apparent discussion to some kind of Misplaced Pages Constitution, rather than an intentionally vague personal essay for people trying to explain Misplaced Pages to outsiders who disliked the word "dick" in the original WP:TRIFECTA? It still has the prominent "This is a non-binding description of some of the fundamental principles, begun by User:Neutrality in 2005 as a simple introduction for new users" disclaimer on the talk-page, but people who should know better (including Arbcom, Jimmy Wales and the WMF) have taken to quoting it as if Larry Sanger had brought it down on stone tablets from Mount Nupedia. (Presumably the Bomis Babe Engine provided the burning bush) – incredibly toxic personality 16:26, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Your remark inspired me to add an {{essay}} template; surprised it lasted nearly an hour. Aren't people watching closely? Apparently it's "long established as policy". Hmmm. No {{policy}} template, I see. I should perhaps add one. Bishonen | talk 21:22, 13 August 2014 (UTC).

Surely "...to make vexatious complaints"? Ben MacDui 17:21, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

'tever. You're probably the first person ever to read it that far. – incredibly toxic personality 18:53, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Apparently, Jimbo's ill-informed and fatuous comments were met with:

• Wow.
• Okay.
• Wow. Um, I thought I was going to be pushing an agenda here. Apparently I'm fulfilling my role as symbolic monarch by speaking the thoughts that bubble up through the community."

I find this most revealing: I always thought those that attended such functions as Wikimania were slightly odd, at best geeky (who else would choose to stay in a chain hotel Clerkenwell); however, now we know, they are not just odd, but a troop of trained performing, clapping seals. Living in Britain must be a complete ordeal for poor Jimbo; one can't help wondering if he ever mixes outside of his charmed circle of Wikipedians, but yes, of course he does, he's tres chummy with that well known paragon of good manners Alastair Campbell. Enough said. Giano (talk) 20:23, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps those shrinking violets who claim to work in a perfectly civil and harmonious workplace that I certainly don't recognise would find it instructive to spend some time observing Campbell in his: "Campbell admitted to his liberal use of profanities in the workplace". Eric Corbett 21:27, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

• I'm quite sure, Eric, that we are both mistaken. Surely Jimmy would never be friendly with anyone known for their profanities; no matter how influential they may be. Jimbo would publicly deplore such a person.........wouldn't he? Giano (talk) 21:59, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

(outdent) I'm not sure why your "Five Pillars" question was aimed at me specifically. When I ran for ArbCom last time, which incidentally was the last time, I was asked about it, I said that it was a good essay that summarizes goals and aspirations, but spoke in broad generalities. I don't think I've ever personally cited it or based a decision on it, though I've voted for principles in which it was cited. The idea that we can resolve complex disputes by pointing to what is a "pillar" or not is an oversimplification. Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:28, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

• I don't know why you pinged me, either. In fact, I'm a bit annoyed that you did. You and I spoke (in person) some years ago about the phenomenon of people who have essentially divorced themselves from the project but occasionally show up being snarky to those who stick it out; back then, you didn't have very high regard for this sort of nonsense. You could well have taken advantage of the fact I was within a brief trip to whine at me in person over this past weekend - a couple of hundred other people did, in some form or another, although I'll admit some had nice things to say as well - but instead you take a sideswipe at me, and several others, for something I had nothing to do with. I have no idea why you're going around naming names that nobody else named, and I think you owe some people an apology. Risker (talk) 02:34, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

(To Brad, Risker and Roger) I wasn't pinging the three of you as holding you responsible for the change (although I can see in hindsight how it would look that way), but in your capacity as Misplaced Pages's institutional memory. The decision to formalise WP:FIVE must have been taken somewhere.

(To Risker specifically) I still agree on the topic of people who leave Misplaced Pages but still hang around bitching from the sidelines. (You may have noticed my complete absence from Wikipediacracy et al.) I was briefly back yesterday because Bencherlite emailed me to let me know Tunnel Railway was scheduled for the main page, and the long post above was a reply to Gerda's post. It's hardly a secret that I've believed for a long time that Jimmy Wales's opinions have become divorced from the broad mass of editors to an unhealthy degree. – incredibly toxic personality 08:51, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

We-ell, let's have an RfC hug-fest. I've set one up at Wikipedia_talk:Five_pillars#What_is_this_page.3F and asked neutrality. Let's ask Jimbo too. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:58, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Cas, given recent events involving RFCs that have been created at the spur of the moment to "answer questions" that only a few people have asked, and with the expectation that the outcome would be binding on the entire community, if not the entire Wikimedia global community, I'm going to say this isn't a good idea. In fact, I'm going to say that using an RFC in this way is pretty much a terrible idea. Having looked at the RFC you've started, frankly I can see no good outcome for it. People who treat those pages as guiding principles, policy or just some thoughts that were drafted in ancient times are going to continue to do so. There will be insufficient response to the RFC to consider its outcome binding. RFCs for project-wide issues have been largely ineffective since about 2008. Risker (talk) 15:15, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Risker disagree - to fob it off as Set in Stone comes across as patronising. Leaving these things open for a month or more and advertising. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:39, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not saying anything is set in stone. I'm saying that the recent history of RFCs to determine policy and similar site-wide issues has been ineffective; they're no longer discussions but instead have become votes that are then supposedly considered "consensus". Iridescent answered his own question in his link; it was rhetorical, not really an actual question, and I think it somewhat presumptuous to act as though this is a burning issue that requires resolution with a full-scale community-wide RFC. Not even Iridescent thought it was a big enough deal to raise the matter on the talk page there. Moving to an RFC when there really wasn't anything being disputed is rather absurd. Risker (talk) 04:13, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

What is the page then? People throw it around like the ten commandments and yet the page obsequiously says it's not a policy. It goes without saying that once there are more than about four editors one has to review quantitative rather than qualitative aspects of consensus. Folks over there are using some words...and if the discussion ratifies what people want then all well and good. The RfC is then acting like a bit of introspection. No harm in that I think. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:41, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I do admit to cheering from the sidelines when I heard the rapturous applause that the Daily Mail was a very untrustworthy source of news. Ritchie333 14:41, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

What could Jimmy possibly have against the Daily Mail? Don't get me wrong, I agree with him that the Mail is only a reliable source for stories about itself, but he's hardly an impartial observer—and that's quite aside from the barrage of abuse the Mail has subjected his BFF Lily Cole to. (Cole obviously has a soft spot for unusual characters with beards. Although the painting appears to be of Lion-O from Thundercats.) – incredibly toxic personality 15:20, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

(outdent) In my capacity as "Misplaced Pages's institutional memory" ... I don't remember. (I probably didn't notice it was happening at the time; I've always focused, however ineffectually, on problem-solving, rather than "policy" in the abstract.) Make of that what you will. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:43, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Possibly explains why you've voted more than once at ArbCom to have me banned. Policy be damned, let's get rid of the "problem". But the real problem is that you've never actually recognised what the real problem is. Eric Corbett 23:17, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

(ec, I'm too slow) I believe, that if "incredibly toxic personalities" is used in the name of kindness, generosity, forgiveness and compassion, we do have a major problem to solve. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:19, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

ps: I agree that the term was likely not meant for me, but I don't want to see it applied to any editor or group, - I love my recent label "Fräulein Kriminelle" (my talk). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:22, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

In a general sense, one could quite easily make the case that the most toxic personality on WP is Jimmy Wales. Eric Corbett 23:26, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Eric Corbett, I've never voted to ban you. More than once I've voted against banning you. I did, regretfully, vote to exclude you from one aspect of project governance (RfA), for reasons discussed in findings in that case. You would at liberty to seek modification of that restriction if you were prepared to participate in that process in a less acid-tongued fashion in the future (and I use the subjunctive because I anticipate you would have no such intention). Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:42, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I apologize to everyone. That last sentence contained far too many consecutive prepositional phrases. I cringe when I reread it myself. Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:03, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

As you correctly anticipate, I have absolutely no intention of appealing anything, ever; in fact I've never even bothered to appeal a block. The RfA process is what it is, and nothing I nor anyone else can say would be likely to improve it now. Eric Corbett 00:35, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

"The optimist feels we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is so." And with regard to RfA we have few remaining optimists. Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:42, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

That sums it up nicely for me. Eric Corbett 00:44, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't want to see the term applied to any editor, which includes JW. --Fräulein Kriminelle --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:58, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Neither do I, but he who lives by the sword dies by the sword ... what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander ... and all that jazz. Eric Corbett 00:42, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Iridescent, for today's Quainton Road railway station, with a lot of background. - As for "optimist": "hope" is the first word I kept on my talk, placed there by a user who is now a candidate for arbitration ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:04, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

And thank you—given that when that one's sister article ran it prompted a huge burst of shouting from someone who appeared to think I was part of some huge unspecified conspiracy to get undeserving articles featured, it went remarkably smoothly. (Possibly because it's such a specialist topic, all those with an interest in it had already read it.) – iridescent 11:28, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for another "saga of well-intentioned incompetence" today, and that phrase! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:40, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you... (Although, this is an article that if I had my way would never have existed) – iridescent 18:22, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Texas Revolution

Splitting this into subsections as it's getting a bit unwieldy

Comments from Carcharoth and replies

Monuments and memorials

Thanks for the notification about this. I'm probably not going to be able to help with that (digging into archives is something I have ambivalent feelings about), but I will keep an eye on the discussion in case something crops up and I can help after all.

While I am here, I know you are not around much these days, but could I ask for your opinion on a couple of articles I've been editing and/or reviewing recently (or in some cases thinking about editing)? Carcharoth (talk) 06:45, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Sure, ask away.

As regards Texas Revolution, go with Karanacs rather than myself. I'm looking at this very much as an outsider. (I still feel that it currently presupposes too much background knowledge for a general audience, but it's certainly not something I'll argue over.) – iridescent 06:14, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Heh. Where do I start? :-)

• My interest got caught by Arcul de Triumf, and I left the following queries on the talk page: . I'm kind of wondering where to go from there. I tried WikiProject Romania and MILHIST, but nothing yet. I could ask the article creator (who is still around - I always forget to do that) or work from the Romanian Misplaced Pages (ro-wiki) article and ask the creator of that article (who speaks English according to their user page). But I'm pondering how much effort that would be...
• Another arch that caught my attention was Arch of the Sergii (mainly because I was actually in Croatia in 2014 and visited Pula and saw and photographed it for myself). I did this, but again am not sure where to go from there. It feels like lots more is possible, but quite what I'm not sure.
• I then did stuff over on Commons relating to WWI memorial images in France. That is a story going back years, but if you look at this it should give you an idea. I'm going to come back to that later, but it needs a goodly chunk of time to pull links together.
• I then added pictures of graves to articles: . It reminded me of the discussion we had about photography in a certain cemetery... I may visit more cemeteries and do more photography, so I'm pondering how useful this sort of thing is.
• I then added pics I took at Villers–Bretonneux Australian National Memorial (the annoying thing about that trip is I made a basic error and had the camera on the lowest resolution setting and didn't realise that until the end of the trip). From that, I stumbled across Cross of Sacrifice which has had a really nice upgrade (but see next point).
• If you have views on the discussion on the talk page (see Talk:Cross of Sacrifice#Excessive background?), that would be great. It kind of ties into what you said above about background for the Texas Revolution article. I did an edit here (on a different article) that is the sort of 'removing excess background' that I was talking about. It is something I've not seen much of before, where editors new or new-ish to a topic write lots of background and duplicate what is in other articles. Trying to get the balance right there is harder than I realised.
• There is a very minor thing at Talk:Gibraltar Cross of Sacrifice#Error regarding original location, but that shouldn't be a huge problem. I just need to be more patient for replies (I had forgotten how slow things can be on Misplaced Pages sometimes).

That was more than I had intended to write... Feel free to ignore the bits that don't catch your interest and/or split out to sections with proper headers. Carcharoth (talk) 09:11, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Hmmm. If only Misplaced Pages had some kind of mailing list where one could go to canvass all the East European editors…

Romania and Croatia

• On Arcul de Triumf, you're on your own—I know virtually nothing about Romania. You might want to try asking WikiProject Ottoman Empire as well, given that anything built pre-1878 would have been Ottoman in origin. I know this is heresy against the Misplaced Pages ideal, but I'd question whether expanding this on en-wiki would be worth the time and effort, since people with an interest in the topic will overwhelmingly be Romanian-speakers, and the ro.wiki article looks in fairly good shape.

  Statement of the obvious: Romanians in Britain get a lot of (mainly undeserved) bad press, and if you pop in to The Romanian Cultural Centre in London andThe Romanian Cultural Institute London (they share a building) or write to them I imagine they'd fall over themselves to help once you explained that what you were doing could get something positive about Romanian culture on the front page of English Misplaced Pages.

• On balance, you are probably right here. I will likely let this gather dust on the back burner. Carcharoth (talk) 00:42, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

• Don't take my words as gospel on this; there's a reasonable argument (indeed, one I've made myself many times) that Misplaced Pages's key strength is its ability to highlight material which is of limited interest. Besides, one never knows what's going to suddenly become of public interest—Broadwater Farm was a spectacularly low-traffic page (it even had the distinction of being sneered at on Misplaced Pages Review for its obscurity at one point), until it suddenly came to public notice in 2011 (and those viewing figures don't count all the newspapers and websites which ripped it off verbatim in their "background" sections). – iridescent 16:27, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

• I don't know who to speak to about Roman ruins in Croatia, but I agree there ought to be a lot out there. It might be worth asking the authors of Diocletian's Palace if they know of anything.

• Maybe. I suspect there is less out there than you might expect. Carcharoth (talk) 00:42, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

• It may be worth asking people with an interest in Italian history and architecture, if you haven't already. At least some of them are presumably going to take an interest in Roman architecture in general. – iridescent 16:27, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Commons and images

• At the risk of sounding like a Misplaced Pages Reviewer, I long ago came to the conclusion that Commons and their over-zealous admins cause far more problems than they solve and strongly agree with the statement at the top of Giano's user page. There is zero possibility that the CWGC (or its American, Russian etc equivalents) will object to Misplaced Pages hosting images of war graves and memorials, unless you're planning to rearrange them into the shape of a giant cock-and-balls or something—the party line of both CWGC and the War Graves Photographic Project is that hosting photographs of war graves online helps preserve the memory of those who served should the cemetery be damaged or fall into disrepair.

  You might want to consider asking WMF or WMUK to consider a formal partnership with the WGPP—it would be a popular (and publicity-generating) cause, would hopefully give the money to hire locals to photograph the graves in cemeteries abroad, and would have no obvious downside for either party. (The WGPP would benefit from Misplaced Pages's ability to rustle up a legion of enthusiastic amateurs and to deal with the technical issues of hosting huge quantities of high-resolution photographs and making them available on a worldwide scale, the WMF would have the chance to get its name associated with something respectable for once, and riding the current poppy-tinged tide of popular sentiment couldn't do Jimmy's angling for an honorary KBE any harm.) If it hasn't been done already, this is probably also an area where that bot that hoovers up free-use images from Flickr on a given topic would be useful.

• Interesting. Commons is OK if you know how to approach it. My basic thesis is that they apply the precautionary principle too readily (mostly when they are unsure or don't know what is really going on) and they should in those cases defer to WMF-paid copyright lawyers to say whether the precautionary principle should be applied or not. The way the precautionary principle is currently applied actively works against building encyclopedic content.

  As for making contact with/partnering with the CWGC and the WGPP, I've considered contacting both but not done so yet. I met CWGC people twice - once at an editathon at the British Library (I never followed that up properly) and more recently (last year) at a lecture at the London School of Economics given by David Reynolds. I've not contacted anyone at the WGPP yet.

  I may, once I've summarised things a bit more, go that route of suggesting some form of partnership. Carcharoth (talk) 00:42, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

• In my experience, which is admittedly four years out of date, Commons tends to be a game of roulette as to whether you get an ultra-cautious admin who deletes anything you can't prove you own the copyright to, or an information-wants-to-be-free True Believer who refuses to delete something even when that would obviously be appropriate. My feeling has been to upload everything on en-wiki, and if Commons want it as well they're free to make a copy.

  IIRC Johnbod, who's already reading this thread, is something big at WMUK so might be able to advise at how feasible the idea is. – iridescent 16:42, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Grave images

• My personal rule-of-thumb for gravestones is only to include them on Misplaced Pages articles when they illustrate something more than "this is where the subject of this article is buried". Alice Ayres's grave is a good example—the fact that a housemaid from Southwark gets a headstone four times the size of anyone else in the cemetery says far more clearly than words that the people of the time obviously considered this person A Big Deal. If you're photographing headstones, TWGPP will probably get better use from the photos than Misplaced Pages, as well as the obvious benefit of not having to deal with Commons admins; in my view, while I'm sure there are plenty of hard-working and dedicated yadda yadda, Commons has taken over from Wikiversity as en-wiki's penal colony.

• Did you notice that I was in that cemetery taking photos? :-) I took one of the memorial over the grave of Alice Ayres (I had looked this up before going there and knew you had taken the photo and written the article), but didn't bother to upload it. Still in good condition. The grave picture I did upload was of the grave marker for George Manville Fenn. Carcharoth (talk) 00:42, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

• I imagine the Watts Gallery probably ensure Ayres's grave is kept tidy. If you've read Postman's Park or List of tablets on the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice, you'll know George Frederic Watts had something of an obsession with Ayres. Isleworth is quite a nice cemetery, although it's position directly under the windows of the local hospital seems somewhat tactless. The East London Cemetery is also a good one, if you're grave-hunting—it doesn't get the visitors the Magnificent Seven cemeteries get, but has just as many of the great and good of Victoriana interred there. The greatest in the world for photogenic graves is undoubtedly Recoleta Cemetery, which includes my personal favourite "what the hell was the undertaker thinking?" monument, the Tomb of Liliana Crociati de Szaszak. – iridescent 16:42, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Back to the actual point: what is an appropriate level of background information?

• As you can probably tell from the Texas Revolution page, my views on background information veer towards the hyper-inclusionist. My personal opinion is that every Misplaced Pages article, particularly on an individual landmark or building, should be understandable by an average reader without having to click a single hyperlink. A lot of people, particularly when they're abroad and don't want to use mobile data, will either print out the Misplaced Pages pages for the places they plan to visit or save them onto an iPad for offline viewing. My personal feeling is that people in this situation who've made a special trip to Ypres to visit the cemeteries, should be able to get at least a basic understanding of (for instance) the fact that the IWGC had only just been created so didn't have a standard set of monument designs. (To repeat a point I was trying to make—badly—on Talk:Texas Revolution, readers of Misplaced Pages pages are international and things which seem completely obvious to the author often need to be explained to readers. To Americans, in a country where the dedication of a 19th-century military cemetery is taught to every child and where United States national cemeteries have existed since 1867, that the concept of "military cemetery" was only introduced to Britain in the 20th century will seem wildly counterintuitive, given that Britain and its predecessors were fighting wars for fifteen centuries before the US existed.)

  Yes, including background means repetition between articles, but my view is that every Misplaced Pages page ought to be able to stand alone, even though it means in some cases like Chiswick Bridge there will actually be more material on the background than on the topic itself. The "it makes the articles too long!" argument doesn't wash with me; people on desktop PCs have no problem scrolling past material they're not interested in or clicking on the TOC, while the mobile app only shows one section at a time so people who don't care about the background can jump straight to the meat-and-two-veg.

  Note that my opinions of the appropriate amount of background are decidedly not reflective of policy; you probably remember that guy a few years ago who got most upset at how much repetition there was between Brill Tramway and Quainton Road railway station. You might want to canvass the views of other people with a Misplaced Pages background in writing articles on landmarks, monuments and tourist attractions to see what the current consensus among them is on how much background information should be included. In fact, given Misplaced Pages is ripping off Facebook, poorly has the new facility to "ping" editors, I can do it for you—Eric Corbett, SlimVirgin, Bencherlite, Giano, Victoriaearle, Bishonen, Julia W, Ceoil, Wehwalt, Jimfbleak, TonyTheTiger, Johnbod, Dr. Blofeld, and anyone else still watching this talkpage four years on, do you have any opinions?

• That is, um, a lot of people you pinged. :-) I'm guessing half of them are glaring at you for doing that... I'm all for including background detail, but you have to get the balance right and also consider how broad a topic is. If you read in full through Cross of Sacrifice and Commonwealth War Graves Commission you will see the extent of repetition. Stone of Remembrance is an article that doesn't have the extensive background. Would you put something that is 6-7 paragraphs long explaining the IWGC in all the CWGC memorial and cemetery articles? There are hundreds of them. My rule of thumb is that you need a good reason to go beyond a paragraph or two of introductory material before starting the article proper. The other thing is that the more you repeat, the more the introductory texts in different articles will slowly diverge over time. It is best to keep it short and factual, giving basic background, and not over-complicating it. I can go into more detail on this, but I do fear that reading all the main CWGC histories (which was one reason I was able to write the review I did here) has made me a bit oblivious to what may or may not be obvious to people coming cold to the topic (see also the recent addition to Talk:Cross of Sacrifice). Anyway, enough of that. It is writing long replies like this that takes away time from other stuff! (which is not to say that I'm not grateful for your thoughts, it's much appreciated). Carcharoth (talk) 00:42, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

• A lot, but a carefully selected lot; they all have a history of writing or photographing topics which people with little prior knowledge of the field are likely to want to look up, which is the issue at hand here. Besides, this talkpage was still one of the hundred most-watched user pages as of the shutdown of toolserver last year—most if not all of them would have seen this discussion pop up on their watchlist anyway.

  I still think the repetition is necessary, even if pruned back; someone visiting the military cemetery at Kohima will have no reason to have read the article on Ypres, and you can't presuppose that they're familiar with the IWGC, changing attitudes to the use of mass graves, the thinking behind standardisation of designs and so on. How about keeping it, but dumping it down into the footnote section? That way you get to explain the background for those who don't know, without cluttering the article for those who do? The article on The Morticians Who Must Not Be Named is a good example of this; the footnote section is a huge slab of background material on the reasons for the rise in the popularity of cremations, compostable coffins, Saint Edward the Martyr, separate burial traditions for Anglicans and Nonconformist churches and so on—this is all necessary to the narrative, but it's not reasonable to expect every reader either to know or to care. – iridescent 16:57, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Memorial tablets to the British Empire dead of the First World War

• Jumping back up here (as the section below seems to have veered off into art history and iconography). I recently got round to going back to an article I wrote around this time last year. I'm not entirely sure about the way I've handled it (I added a whole load of transcriptions), and sorting out the layout for images and text drove me up the wall several times, but I'd be interested in your views on it. It is still WWI memorials, but a relatively obscure part of that topic: Memorial tablets to the British Empire dead of the First World War. There are still bits to do around the edges, though I may not take it much further than where it is at the moment. There are good examples in there of bits that could be explained a bit more, but I'll let you see what you think. If that is too long to digest at one sitting, and you have an interest in poetry, see what you think of "O Valiant Hearts" - not an article I wrote, but a poem/hymn that I only found out about from writing other articles. WWI poetry (a massive topic) is another area I'd like to get back to/more involved with. Finding the time is difficult, though, for both reading and writing (and photography!). Carcharoth (talk) 02:10, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

• @Carcharoth: That's a whopper… I can see good reasons to keep it as one long article rather than four or five short ones, but if you go to FAC (or FLC, depending on how prose-y it ends up), then have your defence ready for the inevitable "each section needs to be its own article!" shrieking. On a topic like this, I don't think it's possible to go into too much background detail—sure, most readers will be military history buffs familiar with the background, but you're also going to get readers in France who've stumbled across them and want to know the significance of what they're looking at. This would be a good case, IMO, for shoving a big gobbett of "Dominions were quasi-independent countries which shared a monarch with Britain and fought alongside the British in WW1 suffering a lot of casualties" background down into the footnotes section, in the same way that Daniel Lambert uses the footnotes to explain the difference between a 19th-century English gaol and an modern American jail. (Is this table really complete? I get that the Westminster and Amiens memorials are the memorials for the entire Commonwealth, but it seems odd not to have local versions in Australia, South Africa, India and New Zealand at the very least. It also seems odd for Vancouver to get one, but not Montreal, Ottawa or Toronto.) As a quick aside, you mention that the London and Vancouver ones were amended in 1945 to add WW2—in the case of those that didn't update the existing memorial, did they install a separate monument?

  Although it violates the MOS in pretty much every single way, I think List of tablets on the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice might be a good general model to follow—that big sortable table of images looks unwieldy, but means people can sort the images themselves by date, artist, location etc, and thus have an easier time if they want to compare the contrasting styles of the designers, or see how the design principles evolved over time.

  The first thing that strikes me on O Valiant Hearts is "if the author only died in 1954 than this is a cut-and-paste copyvio". It's not something I know much about, and the prose section is too sketchy to offer an opinion. WP:POETRY is moribund, but the classical musical project is quite active regarding religious music at the moment, if you can weather the inevitable 60 megabyte argument about how the article should be formatted.

  Of all Misplaced Pages's regulars, the two who are probably best placed to answer questions about English religious poetry are, for reasons with which you will be wearily familiar, not currently in a position to comment here, but you know well enough how to get hold of them should you want their input.

  Incidentally, the local council has finally lost patience with the LNC soap opera and nationalised Brookwood Cemetery. – iridescent 12:59, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Duplication of information & religious symbolism

I don't see anything wrong with relevant repetition. For example, I wrote three kinglet FAs which had sizeable overlaps in terms of taxonomy and behaviour, but each has to stand alone, so the repetition is not only warranted but essential. The amount of background is more difficult, just don't assume that readers share your interests or your nationality. You may need technical stuff later, but if the lead is too difficult, or assumes a national shared consciousness, you will lose your audience. And looking below, I've found several errors in the OED too Jimfbleak - talk to me? 16:30, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

• Don't necessarily assume the CWGC is correct and Prioryman is wrong. Even the most reliable of sources can make mistakes (I've spotted some glaring howlers in the ODNB in my time). I take it you're aware that any significant involvement in Gibraltar-related articles is liable to prompt a rabble of weirdos you thought you'd heard the last of when you left Arbcom to start following you around being annoying again. – iridescent 12:49, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

  I agree with Jim. Anyone who looks at the Pendle witches and the Samlesbury witches will see significant repetition, but without it the articles, especially the Samlesbury one, would make little sense. Eric Corbett 16:46, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

  Me too, and the OED is very iffy on art history terms, many recent imports in the 1880s, whose meanings had not settled and whose entries are yet to be revised -my favourite is this (last para). But you have to strike a balance, and lazyness plays a part. One could go nuts on the iconography of standard religious scenes in paintings, but I tend just to cover what is individually distinctive. Johnbod (talk) 10:00, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

  Heh, does the laziness extend to not signing your posts, Johnbod? :-) I'm just dropping back over here to say that having those standard designs of the Cross of Sacrifice and Stone of Remembrance for the war graves cemeteries really makes for a constant distinctive look to those CWGC cemeteries, but each one looking different in its surroundings. I pulled together 40 examples at Crosses of Sacrifice (Commons page). The thought briefly flits through my mind as to whether it would be possible to do an (illustrated) list of the several hundred (over 400 after WWII) in the UK, or even of the 1000+ in France and Belgium. Then I realise that doing something like that would take a long, long time. Then I remember that they actually built 1000+ of the things... (not to mention the graves themselves). The way you do anything with large numbers involved is to get lots of people to do it, or to take a long time to do it. Carcharoth (talk) 03:03, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, just forgot. Johnbod (talk) 10:00, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

• I would imagine the WGPP has photos of all the Crosses of Sacrifice, even if they don't have all the individual graves yet, and might be willing to release them into the public domain if someone asked nicely. This might be one of those occasions where Jimbo Wales is actually useful for once—people who'd have no hesitation telling anonymous internet users to piss off might be more amenable when asked nicely by Saint Jimmy of Wales, star of stage and screen and patron saint of new media.

  @Johnbod, I'd say it depends on who's likely to be looking at the painting. Someone looking at the Misplaced Pages articles on Bartolomé Bermejo altarpieces can reasonably be assumed to know the basics of Christian iconography; someone looking up Beata Beatrix (my, that's a crappy article for such a significant painting) is much more likely to be someone who's attending a PRB exhibition or who thinks the poster would look nice on their wall, and thus more likely to need to be led by the hand through what the significance of each element is. Something like Guernica, where it will be of interest to a world-wide audience who can't be assumed to have even the vaguest knowledge of either the Spanish Civil War or cubism, literally needs to have every single element pointed out and explained. – iridescent 17:13, 20 January 2015 (UTC)

I was thinking more of say Fra Angelicos, Filippo Lippis or Giottos, which are very likely to be looked at by people who don't know much of "the basics of Christian iconography" (whatever that means for today's youf). For traditional stuff I prefer to write up the iconography by subject, though one knows few follow the links. Johnbod (talk) 01:27, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

OR alert! I'd say the minimum a reader needs to know in order to interpret traditional Christian paintings are (a) the stories of the nativity and crucifixion, (b) the significance of the cross, (c) how to tell the infant Jesus from the infant John. It's reasonable to assume any reader will know (a) and (b); yes, there will be some readers who don't know even these basics (how many Brits couldn't describe the most basic tenets of Islam or Buddhism?) but it's not reasonable to include "the cross formed by the two sticks in the Madonna of the Yarnwinder is an allusion to the cross which Jesus was nailed to prior to his death and resurrection, providing the central miracle to the biblical narrative around which all other elements of the narrative of sin and redemption revolve" just to cater for this minority. The symbolism of flowers and animals, I'd leave out even though most people can no longer interpret them without help, as incidental to the main theme, other than in those cases like the early PRB where showing off the artist's understanding of symbolism is the purpose of the work, or something like The Ambassadors where the incidental symbolism is nowadays the part of most interest.

On a slightly broader note, I think the amount of required background varies according to the context in which people are likely to view the building/artwork/monument etc. Something like Statue of Liberty or Christ of Saint John of the Cross is going to be seen by a lot of people who know it's somehow significant but have no idea why (true confession; to this day I have no understanding of what the significance of the Liberty Bell is, despite having been told dozens of times). In these cases, it's reasonable to include more background information than would normally be expected IMO. – iridescent 14:15, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

I'd stick in the first bit of the Yarnwinder stuff at least. But even the most basic narrative scenes often have a good deal of complexity. I do a "wiki Christmas card" most years, for DYK on 25/12. This year Adoration of the Magi (Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi) which has plenty to chew on (and a little OR at the end) & I see now I diod more general explanation than I remembered. The Crucifixion, or the surrounding figures, need quite a lot of explanation. I've done Nativity of Jesus in art but the crucifixion will have to wait until I break both legs, although I've nibbled at the edges with Swoon of the Virgin and Ecclesia and Synagoga. Johnbod (talk) 23:30, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

@Johnbod: I may make a brief return to Misplaced Pages to tidy up some of the 19th century painting articles. I don't particularly like them either as artists or as people, but for something like The Mill (Burne-Jones painting) to be a redlink, or for The Last of England and Ecce Ancilla Domini to be a 500-word stub and a 330-word stub respectively does not reflect well on Misplaced Pages.

I know why Misplaced Pages's coverage of the 19th-century arts has such gaping gaps in it, but it doesn't make it any less of an embarrassment, given how thoroughly Misplaced Pages can cover Big Brother and Pokemon, that The Fighting Temeraire has a shorter article than USS Defiant, or that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is four times (!) longer than The Pickwick Papers. At the time of writing, the entire "plot" section of East Lynne—a three-volume behemoth which was one of the most popular works of the entire 19th century (and, until J K Rowling, probably the most successful work of fiction written by a woman) and which is notorious for having one of the most convoluted and complex plots of all time—is 54 words long. – iridescent 12:59, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Well that would be great. As usual on WP, the situation is much worse at the higher "topic" level: Victorian painting, Victorian poetry (2 paras in Victorian literature) - but then again Elizabethan literature. Aaargh! I touched up The Fighting Temeraire & I think it does an adequate job. Mind you, I've spent part of the afternoon at the Ashmolean's Blake exhibition, & Category:William Blake almost takes on the trains, boats & planes brigade. Johnbod (talk) 02:17, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

PS, of course HMS Temeraire (1798) is also far longer than the painting's article! Possibly it should be. Johnbod (talk) 02:44, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

My views on the "pages get worse the higher you go" issue are, I think, fairly well known. I don't generally see it as a problem that the high-level pages are fairly uniformly terrible on Misplaced Pages (Crop, Speech, Prose and Adult, take a bow); where Misplaced Pages shines is its ability to cover the more obscure topics in detail. If I wanted to know about crops, the fact that the Misplaced Pages article is 112 words long (!!!) is just an inconvenience, as I can find out about the topic elsewhere without any trouble—but Britannica and co aren't going to tell me about urad beans, marula, tatsoi and other individual crop species other than the usual cabbages and wheat.

That seems reasonable—as a rule of thumb, I would think there to generally be more to say about the subject of a history painting than about the artwork itself, aside from a few biblical or classical themes where very little is actually known about the subjects so the story is how the artist chose to represent the theme.

In defence of the trains, planes and boats brigade (my first ever FA was Hellingly Hospital Railway, so I feel honour-bound to come to their defence), part of the reason for the bloat in the number of articles in these topics is the insistence of the small cliques that own WP:RAIL and WP:MILHIST upon taking an "every grain of sand" approach, insisting that every individual ship, railway station etc has its own article even when there's very little to say about it. As recounted somewhere in the morass of text above, when I wrote Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway, the trains people were shrieking that every tram stop needed to be a separate stand-alone article, even though it's far more use to any reader to see them all listed together for comparison, and it meant ridiculous articles like Wood Siding railway station where the most exciting thing in the history (literally) was the fact that the stationmaster propped a ladder against an oak tree. (And then, when I did concede and do it as six separate articles, someone else accused me of only doing it because I was a "star collector" looking to get the credit for multiple articles.) To be fair, planes, trains and boats are nowhere near the worst offenders for the "every grain of sand" approach—species articles win hands-down on that one (List of non-marine molluscs of El Hatillo Municipality, Miranda, Venezuela, anyone?), with cricketers running them a close second. (The MCC archives caught fire in the 19th century, so nothing is actually known about most early cricketers other than their names on scorecards—but they played at least one match at the highest level, so per WP:Notability (sports) their articles can't be deleted, leading to such informative articles as Smith (Cambridge University cricketer (1831)).)

Much as I dislike Etty and everything he stood for, I am sorely tempted to push The Sirens and Ulysses (redlink, natch) through DYK, FAC and TFAR just to see Eric's current tormentors' discomfort at having a giant slab of Manchester-based muscle-man/naked-teenager/rotting-corpse Victorian proto-pornography on the main page. Although I opposed Cirt's "Fuck" nominations at TFAR for reasons I still stand by—tripping the porn filters and getting Misplaced Pages blacked out in schools hits the people who need it most the hardest—I am coming to see why he's doing it. While Misplaced Pages's had its fair share of problematic editors and disputes over how to deal with them in the past, the current situation seems to me to be the first time that Misplaced Pages has explicitly embraced the language of suppressive persons and potential trouble sources – iridescent 17:29, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

I think those Scientology terms describe quite well what's going on here, but it's never seemed any different to me. Eric Corbett 18:13, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

I think what's different is the lack of any pretence at fairness. In previous cases of people being declared non-persons by the WMF (Ottawa, Kohs, Peter Damian etc) you might not have agreed with it, but if you asked Jimmy Wales or Sue Gardner their reasoning, they'd talk you through how the decision was made and why. In your case the WMF are explicitly giving "I don't like you" as their reasoning. The fact that on this occasion the charge against your "incivility" is being led by the man who gave us You should however have instead taken your pen, punched a hole in her windpipe and looked on as her attempts to wave for help got increasingly feeble., You're a lifeless, soulless, dickless, witless, spineless individual who makes up for his own lack of social life or integrity by treating the ridicule of others as the first port of call in correspondence, thereby ensuring that you remain a corpulent unwanted cancer on the scrotum of humanity, and We could have a Peter Damian one! as anatomically vacant as a ken doll "punching him in the face feels like punching the real thing!" is not lost on me. – iridescent 18:26, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

But it's lost on those two, and their boss. Ottava Rima ought to have been allowed back ages ago, as I've said repeatedly. I don't ever recall working with with Peter Damien or Kohs, but from what I've seen of their contributions elsewhere I can't see any justification for the continuation of their bans. Unless of course it's just to stifle free speech, which seems increasingly likely. Eric Corbett 19:06, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Victorian painting and anal bleaching

I'm not too bothered about very common concepts like adult (which on a quick look seems to do a decent job, and whose hilarious lead pic justifies the price of admission alone) but I very much believe we should be doing things like Victorian painting well - actually Prof Google doesn't have much that is easily digested. One front line of wiki-prudery at the moment is Anal bleaching, where pics are not allowed (see talk). Johnbod (talk) 21:17, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Give me a few days, and I'll put the shell of Victorian painting together; I have enough floating about the house to create at least a core. I suspect it will end up being virtually a disambiguation page—Edwin Landseer, George Richmond, Horatio McCulloch, James McNeill Whistler, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti are only linked by geography and time, and lumping them together because they were prominent during the reign of Queen Victoria makes no more sense than lumping Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Malcolm Morley and Tracey Emin together as prominent during the reign of Elizabeth II.* If I limit it to "paintings which viewers think of as typically Victorian", realistically it's going to be a prelude on Frederic Leighton, the PRB's greatest hits as the main body, and a postscript on Watts.

Victoria's birth and death aren't really good cut-offs in a more general art historical sense. Either one takes Turner, Constable and Blake as marking the start of the period, all of whom pre-date the period (and two of whom died before her coronation), or one takes the foundation of the PRB more than a decade into her reign; likewise, typically "Victorian" symbolist/romanticist art remained the predominant theme until vorticism and the War shook things up.

It comes as little surprise that the Shock And Disgust at anal bleaching turns out to be orchestrated by the GGTF. (The mind boggles at how this is covered by the "gender gap", since the article makes it clear the procedure is used on both male and female bumholes.) If it's not possible to source "before" and "after" pictures of the same person, I can kind of see the point that the images are potentially misleading, given that it's not possible for the viewer to know what effect is down to the bleaching and what is down to natural coloration. Given Misplaced Pages's connection to the International Penis Selfie Database, it would surely be possible to find something suitable. (If you're looking for pictures of unattractive arseholes with an unnatural level of whiteness, this page would be a good place to start.) – iridescent 18:48, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

*Even the Tate Gallery has belatedly recognised the stupidity of trying to categorise British art by date, and has finally re-curated their permanent collection by theme. By a happy coincidence, this re-hanging has led to the most poster-friendly works (Ophelia, The Painter and his Pug, Beata Beatrix, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, Flatford Mill) all being near the gift shops.

That would be great! I forgot that I (mostly) had done a section in Art of the United Kingdom - I've now redirected Victorian art there, though there's precious little on sculpture. Some of that fits your prospectus above. I'll leave Victorian painting in the hopes you take it. Johnbod (talk) 22:38, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

The Sirens and Ulysses is now blue. It would be appreciated if you could look it over—this is my first significant mainspace edit for four years, and I have no great desire to read VAMOS to see how it's changed so it's probably in breach of something. I'll do Victorian painting when I get the chance. – iridescent 22:44, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Very nice - nothing much on a quick one-over. I've added a (no doubt ineffectual) Pharoah's Curse against an infobox; please remove if that doesn't convey your views. I notice that Manchester Art Gallery contains NO links to articles on specific works there, nor does it have a category! Pah. Johnbod (talk) 15:21, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

The lack of an infobox is as much to make a point as anything else—as RexxS once pointed out to me, my views on the box-or-no-box debate are actually more strongly in the pro camp than Andy Mabbett's. That said, I think this is a poster child for "article which is more appropriate without an infobox"; there is literally nothing an infobox would include that isn't already in the sentence "The Sirens and Ulysses is a large oil painting on canvas by the English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1837", and keeping it box-less allows the lead image to be large enough that the viewer can actually see what it's a painting of.

I did notice the lack of a Manchester Art Gallery category when I was trying to find appropriate categories for this. I believe (but don't quote me) this may actually be the first Misplaced Pages article on a work in the MAG—at least, I can't think of any others. (The only really well-known work I can think of in the MAG collection is Leighton's Captive Andromache For its size and importance, the MAG actually has very few well-known works; back in the 19th century the Walker Gallery and even the deservedly-maligned Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery did a much better job at picking works that in hindsight were of lasting significance, whereas the MAG tends to be full of tat which mill owners thought would look nice on their bedroom wall. Plus, Manchester has never been a hotbed of painting so there's no local boy to fill the space; the one Manchester artist who actually is of major significance, Lowry, had all the important works poached to Salford. (I look forward to the irate post from someone at WP:GM about my slur on their great artistic tradition, to which I reply that the word "artist" only appears twice on List of people from Manchester, for Fee Plumley and Peter Saville respectively. No, me neither.) – iridescent 16:22, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Alfred Waterhouse was an artist with a drawing board and a set square. And he worked in Manchester. Does that count? Nev1 (talk) 17:23, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Oh, I'm not dissing the creativity of Manchester—Manchester was where George Stephenson, Frederic C Williams, Metrovick and Marx & Engels between them designed and built the entire modern world (and where a provincial coroner in Eccles made the landmark ruling on liability for industrial accidents that made the modern world possible), has a musical heritage ranging from Barbirolli to Bez, and a remarkable architectural history in those places like Ancoats where neither the council nor the IRA managed to get at the buildings—but for whatever reason, virtually no tradition of the fine arts. This is probably not unconnected to the fact that for most of the nineteenth century the entire place was generally invisible under a blanket of smog. – iridescent 11:30, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

(adding) I was also astonished at how little Misplaced Pages has on the actual story—I was expecting to need to include a "this is about the painting, for the story of Ulysses and the Sirens see XXXXX" hatnote, but aside from two sentences at Siren (mythology) and one sentence in Odyssey it doesn't appear to be covered anywhere on Misplaced Pages. – iridescent 16:34, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

(ec)At the least there's Work (painting), The Hireling Shepherd, The Scapegoat (painting) (all waaaaaay better known than the Leighton, surely), Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, Manfred on the Jungfrau (Madox Brown), Stages of Cruelty. I bet there are a few more - some may not even be Pre-Raphaelite. I think Manchester was almost entirely reliant on gifts - Brum had Thomas Bodkin and a budget for a crucial period, when prices were cheap. According to Misplaced Pages, the Barber was only founded in 1932, and only had 7 paintings when Bodkin took over on 1935 - it's a collection formed in the Depression. Not that it has a frigging category either - there's at least The Harvest Wagon. Johnbod (talk) 16:45, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

I probably have an exaggerated impression of the significance of the Leighton, as last time I was in the MAG a lunatic attacked it with a knife, which is the kind of thing that leaves an impression. – iridescent 17:02, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

What, while you were in the building? Wow. I see I've been mixing up the Barber and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, not having been to either for a long time. The latter also has no category, but a gallery of top works with articles, just what Manchester needs. Johnbod (talk) 17:05, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

I imagine the people who write about Manchester have by and large had the drive kicked out of them by now, given the sustained assault they've been under. WP:WikiProject Greater Manchester#Participants reads like the Wikimedia Foundation's private death list. – iridescent 17:17, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Just noticed I never replied to your original question—yes, while I was in the building, although I was on another floor so all I knew of it was an alarm sounding and some flustered staff. Captive Andromache has form for being damaged; it also got attacked by suffragettes back in 1913. (Suffragette attacks on railway stations is another redlink I have a vague intention of turning blue at some point, as the suffragette anti-railway campaign is something that's completely forgotten nowadays—at least three stations—Saunderton, Blaby and Leuchars—were not just damaged but destroyed.) – iridescent 17:35, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

✓ Done – iridescent 18:55, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Thoughts on the form of Sirens

Regarding , I think Etty was the first to show them in human form although it's not something I know a great deal about; certainly Robinson seems to think he was. All the sirens I can think of in art prior to Etty either had chicken feet, or fish scales. The fully human women in classical art are nymphs, nereids and sprites rather than true sirens—the Metamorphoses makes it very clear that the sirens were part-bird. Richard Green claims Etty's sirens were a lift from the nymphs in The Disembarkation at Marseilles, which seems eminently plausible—Etty certainly liked the work enough that he made his own copy while in France. – iridescent 18:31, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I thought so. A look at Commons shows vast numbers of artists following the top-shelf approach after him; I couldn't see any before. I've started Category:Collection of Manchester Art Gallery, now 10 strong. I'm sure there are more. Actually Category:Collections of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has 15. No Barber, Port Sunlight cats. See Category:Collections of museums in the United Kingdom. Johnbod (talk) 18:42, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

If you don't mind a bit of extreme OR, Etty was unschooled in both the literal and the figurative sense—he'd been an apprentice printer before he discovered he had a knack for illustration. Since he hadn't had either the training in Ancient Greek classics, nor the academic training in the 'correct' way to paint various subjects, he presumably didn't feel it necessary to follow the traditional approach.

I don't know if he sparked a revolution, or if it was just a change in fashion (presumably inspired by the PRB), but chimeras seem to disappear from English art altogether at about this time, not just in the case of sirens—aside from heraldic uses and a couple of mermaids I can't think of any more recent gryphon, minotaur, selkie etc in any significant work. Someone will no doubt pop up to correct me.

I may make another brief return to Etty, having come across the sheer what-the-hell-is-going-on-here factor of Male Nude with Arms Up-Stretched. If Sirens was considered obscene, I can't imagine what the Victorians must have made of this, which looks like the promotional poster for a gay sex club as painted by a Soviet Realist. – iridescent 19:03, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

@Johnbod, noticed your tidy-up of Manchester Art Gallery and categorisation of the paintings. Can you think of a way that isn't horribly clumsy to make it clear on Work (painting) that FMB painted this one twice; there's a large version of it in Manchester and a slightly different version in Birmingham; he finished them both at the same time, so one can't treat the first one finished as "the original" and relegate the other(s) to "replica" as Misplaced Pages does with Beata Beatrix. The Last of England (painting) (Cambridge and Birmingham) has the same problem; interestingly, in both cases it's the Brummies who get overlooked in the infobox. – iridescent 11:33, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Likewise The Derby Day and The Scapegoat. Aren't the articles clear enough? My preferred solution to all the many art infobox problems is to remove the infobox, but I think they can cope with 2 versions; . The Scapegoat just has two. Johnbod (talk) 02:43, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

TLOE yes, Work no—the article only discusses it as a single piece and makes no mention of there being multiple versions, so any reader would reasonably assume that only one version exists, and that if they want to see it, they need to go to Manchester. It's not something I'd lose sleep over—for something like Virgin of the Rocks with a high number of readers who are specifically interested in the differences between the versions it's necessary (although whoever thought the best solution to two copies of a painting existing is two infoboxes should be drowned like a kitten), but unless and until Dan Brown writes The Pre-Raphaelite Code there's not going to be the same stream of people wanting to know where and how they can make a pilgrimage to the original to search for the hidden clues every art historian in the world missed up to now. (3200 views in the past three months; for comparison Tarrare had 100,000.) Besides, anyone interested enough in FMB that they'd want to know where they could find Work would presumably have Birmingham Art Gallery on their to-do list anyway for TLOE and Pretty Baa Lambs so would find it when they got there. – iridescent 11:30, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Actually Andy Mabbett appeared to me in a vision last night, with a fiery sword, and I have added the Brum Work, with a 2nd infobox. The Brum ref you gave above has raised an issue as to whether we date the Manchester one correctly. Johnbod (talk) 18:49, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't know, but I suspect both sources are "right" regarding the completion date. The PRB were notorious for tinkering and retouching; I can quite believe that FMB completed it in 1863, then came back and made some changes a couple of years later. – iridescent 19:09, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Almost 13,000 views. Sex and death is still a winning combination, it appears. – iridescent 20:16, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Texas Revolution peer review

Hi Iridescent. I've just opened a peer review for Texas Revolution as the final step before we try for FA status. I hope I've addressed all the concerns/comments that you made earlier, and I'd very much appreciate it if you could take another look and let us know what you think. Warning: it's really long now. Thanks! Karanacs (talk) 14:52, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Will do. All you people in the thread above, that goes for you as well, particularly Eric, since you're presumably the ones who'll be supporting or opposing at FAC. – iridescent 16:25, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Karanacs, I've not forgotten—will get to this when I get the chance. – iridescent 13:11, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Today's featured article/March 19, 2015

Hi Iridescent. A summary of a Featured Article you nominated at WP:FAC will appear on the Main Page soon. Does the article need more work before its day on the Main Page? I had to squeeze the summary down to around 1200 characters; was there anything I left out you'd like to see put back in? (And if so, what would you like me to remove to make room?) - Dank (push to talk) 21:27, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Surely this one would make more sense to run on 15 September, since it's so clearly tied to a specific date? Certainly, a 285th anniversary isn't a particularly significant one, but it still makes more sense than a random date, especially when we have Eraserhead in WP:FANMP with clear date relevance. (If I were in charge of scheduling, personally I'd keep this one back until 2017 and run it on the day construction starts on HS2, but that's not my call to make.)

Do you have any objection if I rewrite the blurb, or would you prefer I make suggestions and the delegates do the actual rewriting? (Bencherlite was generally happy for people to rewrite the blurbs, while Raul was notoriously touchy about it; I don't know how you prefer to do things.) The current wording seems rather unbalanced, and makes what was arguably the most notorious fiasco in the entire history of civil engineering sound like some kind of triumph. (Yes, the bad publicity ultimately created the Industrial Revolution, by drawing the public's attention to these new inventions called "machines", but that was a happy accident.) I appreciate this is a difficult one to summarise, as it's essentially a combination of three articles (], ] and ]), all of which are significant in their own right but which are so intertwined that it's impossible to separate them into separate articles.

Plus, while describing William Huskisson as "a Member of Parliament" is technically correct, it's very misleading given that the man was one of the architects of the 19th-century world while MPs are two a penny—it's like describing Douglas MacArthur as "an American soldier". – iridescent 22:12, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Brian is doing the scheduling for March, so I've just pinged him. I had the same reservations about what to focus on that you do ... and if you can get something done in 1200 characters that doesn't raise more questions than it answers, you're more than welcome to take a stab at it. The only reason I didn't say more about William Huskisson was that I was out of space. - Dank (push to talk) 22:35, 1 March 2015 (UTC) P.S. striking "take a stab", some see a negative tone in that. - Dank (push to talk) 23:32, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Iridescent: If you feel strongly that the article should not run on 19 March, then I'll defer it. The problem is that most featured articles are tied to specific dates in some way, but I have to find articles for all the dates not covered by TFAR, and that inevitably means choosing some that would perhaps be a better fit on other days. If there was, say, an upcoming 100th, 150th or 200th anniversary, I obviously wouldn't pick it, but 185th (not 285th) doesn't seem particularly special. And I liked the article (I'm from Liverpool). But I'll go along with what you decide. Brianboulton (talk) 23:33, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I tweaked it to add a bit about Huskisson; we're right up against the 1250 limit (1246), so you'll have to take something out if you want to put something in. If it doesn't run on 19 March, then save it in the form move it to WP:Today's featured article/requests/Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. - Dank (push to talk) 02:47, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Dank, how about this as an alternative (1238 characters)? This strips out a bit of background and redundancy, and also fixes an error from the lead (which I've also fixed in the article) regarding the placement of "for the first time", while bringing in a bit about the riots so all the major aspects (opening/accidents/rioting/funeral/reaction) get at least a mention. Feel free to revert any or all of it. This is a pig of an article to summarise as it's such a sprawling saga—the legacy section alone is the length of some articles.

Brianboulton, I don't have strong objections to running it now (and am aware of what a pain it is to de-schedule a TFA), and certainly have no attachment to a 185th anniversary. This is (literally!) Misplaced Pages's only Liverpool FA that isn't about either football or the Beatles—it seems a shame to me to blow it on a nonspecific date. Since come May's elections Britain will either have a Cameron government with a manifesto commitment to Northern Powerhouse and Northern Hub, or a Milliband government with a manifesto commitment to HS2, it's pretty much a given that fairly soon the railways of the northwest will be all over the papers. – iridescent 12:24, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Very nice. - Dank (push to talk) 12:41, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

OK, I'll defer it and await a TFAR nomination. I'd make this September rather than 2017 – who knows what may happen before then? Brianboulton (talk) 13:52, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Cheers for that. If you're after eccentric Victorian "better living through engineering" projects, you might want to try Noel Park, although it needs a bit of a clean-up. While you're here, could I ask you not to schedule Tarrare until this truly bizarre "chamber opera for puppets" gets a launch date—if anyone's going to take on a project as eccentric as setting this to music, I feel the least we could do is give them a spike in interest in their subject. Despite having hardly any incoming links, this page gets about 400,000 views a year purely from chatter about it on Reddit and Twitter—when it does run, I confidently predict it becoming the most-viewed-of-all-time TFA not to have an accompanying image. (If you ever want to have Jimbo Wales turn up earnestly asking you to reconsider your position, Pig-faced women has yet to run.) – iridescent 14:12, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

What about Wotton railway station? I'm keen to hold the railway theme if possible? Brianboulton (talk) 16:47, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Sure, although bear in mind that its sister article Waddesdon Road railway station was the one that set the QAI group nuts about 'low standards' when it ran a couple of years back. You might want to go for Brill railway station instead, which is marginally less dull. – iridescent 02:38, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

OK, Brill it is. I have removed a couple of twerpish additions to the text - maybe you could glance at it before 18th, to see there aren't other idiocies hiding away. I expect Dan is watching this page, so he will know that he has to work on the Brill blurb, but I'll ping him anyway. Brianboulton (talk) 19:05, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Done with the TFA paragraph, have a look. Again, I'm right up against the size limit, so if you want to put something else in, take something out. - Dank (push to talk) 22:15, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

How about that, which preserves all the meaning but brings it down to 1189 characters?

Not sure how you feel regarding images that aren't directly of the subject, but while we don't have an image of the station itself (it wasn't much to look at, anyway), File:Original Locomotive and Train, Wotton Tramway.jpg might be a good illustration for this, as it gives an impression of what it must have been like in operation, and doesn't show any other building so isn't going to mislead anyone regarding what the building looked like. – iridescent 13:48, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

Pinging Crisco 1492 on the image question. I'll go make one edit where I may not be getting the point; otherwise your edits are fabulous. - Dank (push to talk) 14:34, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

• Train image is fine. Uploaded locally (and thus not subject to UK copyright laws), published before 1923. Source is working. Good to use. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:38, 5 March 2015 (UTC)

More cemeteries

Just dropping over here to say firstly that I did see your comments above about the Memorial tablets article - many thanks for those, and I will get back to that eventually. Secondly, I wanted to pick your brains about London cemeteries (not the Big Seven, but the smaller ones). The one I visited the other day was South Ealing Cemetery (red-linking this; unsure what makes a cemetery notable). This was mostly to photograph the Cross of Sacrifice, though ironically there is no real place to use that photo and it was a horribly gloomy day anyway. What I did stumble across was the graves of a couple of Polish generals (Ealing having a big Polish community, during and after WW2). I managed to add the image to the Polish Misplaced Pages article here (pl:Henryk Piątkowski (generał)). The other one was pl:Kazimierz Wiśniowski. As far as I can make out, the article over there says he was buried in Gunnersbury Cemetery. Which is still roughly the right area of London, but not the same cemetery. Maybe I should find some Polish editors to help out... Finally, I noticed your user page linked to Yngvadottir's retirement/departure essay. If you are willing to say something about what was said there, would here be a good place? Massive amount said there, and lots of responses that don't seem to actually discuss anything about what was said in that essay. Carcharoth (talk) 00:44, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

My attitude towards notability is at odds with Misplaced Pages custom-and-practice. WP:ITSUSEFUL is listed as a "argument to avoid" in that essay people keep quoting as if it were holy writ, but to me it's the single most important criterion. There's no point wasting time writing and maintaining something in which nobody will ever be interested, and if a lot of people want to know about something than Misplaced Pages ought to host an article on it even if it doesn't strictly meet the arbitrary notability criteria. Thus, my rule of thumb for cemeteries would be "what is the likelihood that someone will look this up?"—is there anything architecturally significant, is someone famous buried there, is it near to another major landmark which will generate traffic, does it have a particularly interesting history… By this measure I would say South Ealing is automatically notable, by virtue of Polish people wanting to pay respect at the generals' graves, but whether it's worth the effort is another matter. (In practice, the notability criterion for London cemeteries seems to be "if anyone can be bothered to write about them", if Category:Cemeteries in London is any guide. Bizarrely, this doesn't appear to apply to the rest of the country—Category:Cemeteries in London has 50+ entries while Category:Cemeteries in Manchester‎ has only one entry and Category:Cemeteries in Newcastle doesn't even exist, despite the northerners being much active on Misplaced Pages than the southerners.)

It looks like en-wiki doesn't have an article on Kazimierz Wiśniowski, but does have one on his wife (I guess this author didn't get the memo from Jimbo about Misplaced Pages only caring about male achievements), which slso concurs that he's buried in South Ealing. I can't imagine it would be too hard to find a Polish-speaker able to fix the pl-wiki article—Piotrus springs to mind.

Sure, ask away about Yngvadottir's essay, about 90% of which I agree with—here is as good a place as any, since most people who'd be likely to chip in will still have it watchlisted. (WT:RETENTION would be the other obvious place, but from what I've seen of it despite the good intentions that page tends to be something of an echo chamber of people slapping themselves on the back over how caring and supportive they are, particularly since Dennis Brown left.) – iridescent 10:13, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: 1) Thanks for the ping. Fixed. Do you have a picture for his article? 2) Since Misplaced Pages:Notability (architecture) hasn't passed, some relevant guidelines are Misplaced Pages:Places of local interest and even better, Misplaced Pages:Notability_(geographic_features)#Buildings_and_objects. Over the years I have found myself more and more in the deletionist camp (due to uncovering ever larger layers of spam), but I am still very open for geographical objects, which are rarely spammish. For cemeteries, many (if not all) of them are of historical and cultural interest. Many have the status of the status of cultural heritage or national heritage, so if a refer can be found for that, it's totally fine to create an article. Of course GNG applies, so other sources are fine, too. I have created commons:Category:South Ealing Cemetery, as Commons can have categories for defined entities even if we doubt their notability. Unfortunately, this suggests it is not classified as a monument yet. However the "10.9 Statutory listed buildings and ancient monuments" (can't copy link for that file) lists "Two Chapels at South Ealing Cemetery, (197) Cemetery Lodge (includes the Boardroom), (199) South Lodge, and the cemetery boundary wall to the western boundary at Ealing Cemetery (70m) – (Grade 2)". I think a valid argument could be made that notability can be inherited by a building if some of its immovable architectural elements (walls, statues) are recognized as notable. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:13, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Piotrus. A couple of thoughts:

• (i) I've added two more photos (that someone else took) to the Commons category - those show the front and back of the two chapels at the main entrance. When I went at the weekend, they were still boarded up and in a state of some disrepair, as were some parts of the cemetery. Not as bad as some cemeteries I've been to, but I am guessing more affluent councils like Kensington and Chelsea who look after Gunnersbury Cemetery which is the other side of Gunnersbury Park from this cemetery keep that one in better condition. In terms of notability, there is not a huge amount, I agree, but sometimes you can find more in the earlier history - this one used to be called 'Ealing and Old Brentford'. THere is also stuff that can be said about the burial companies themselves.
• (ii) You and Iridescent may (or may not) want to look at what was said (or claimed) on notability back in 2010 at Talk:List of cemeteries in London. See also List of cemeteries in England. Some things that need fixing that I don't have time to do properly right now: (a) remove the incorrect claim that Southern Cemetery, Manchester is the largest in the UK (see also this - not a reliable source, but interesting); (b) re-add the red links that were removed with this edit (one of those red links is now an article at Macclesfield Cemetery), and add blue links to Template:Cemeteries in England. Possibly follow up with the editor who incorrectly removed red links from the list and explain why red links are good.
• (iii) For an idea of how to handle things within one article at a local level, see Cemeteries and crematoria in Brighton and Hove. The main author there is Hassocks5489, who may want to comment here, so I've pinged them. There is probably a WikiProject that might be able to help as well.

I think that's everything so far. Carcharoth (talk) 09:13, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Death comes to mind, through I don't know how active it is. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject Death looks fairly moribund, if the talkpage is anything to go by. I personally would say that as regards cemeteries, the same argument applies as is used to justify Misplaced Pages's tiresome "every railway station needs to be a separate article" policy—since by definition, it's certain that any given cemetery will have received multiple independent non-trivial coverage ("Funeral of xxx to be held today"), even the smallest village churchyard can be presumed to meet WP:GNG even if one doesn't have the sources to hand. I don't really like the "everything needs to be a separate page" approach and think cemeteries are an obvious case where a single "Cemeteries in town/country" is more informative than a separate article on each one, since it allows readers to see the broader trends of different sites and methods of burial going in and out of fashion, and what impact they had.

I'd be reluctant to push "notability can be inherited by a building if some of its immovable architectural elements (walls, statues) are recognized as notable" too hard, as that opens the floodgate for an article on every street containing a building considered notable. Given the hassle it took to get The Roundway deleted, on a short residential street which has never had any building of the remotest significance on it (The eastern half of The Roundway is residential with a newsagent, a Chinese takeaway and a Snack Bar in a small parade at the junction with New Road. The western half of The Roundway is also residential with an off licence and an Indian Takeaway, almost opposite Risley Avenue Junior School.), I'd hate to open that particular floodgate, since it would set a precedent for "anything containing something notable is itself notable, and all the potentially notable elements need to be mentioned", and lead to the unwelcome return of pages that look like this.

Regarding Talk:List of cemeteries in London#What is notable?, I wouldn't pay the slightest attention to it. One user does not get to unilaterally invent a Misplaced Pages-wide notability policy, let alone on an obscure talkpage in which no other editor has ever participated. I'd argue that cemeteries are something which need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, since the situation varies so wildly geographically—a tiny Jewish cemetery in Eastern Europe, or a parish churchyard in Berlin Mitte could be highly notable by virtue of having survived intact to the present day even though it has no particular architectural significance or notable persons interred there, while a huge municipal cemetery in the US might not be particularly noteworthy since the US tends towards large out-of-town cemeteries so something enormous by European standards wouldn't be notable in context. By JHvW's criteria neither Postman's Park, Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, Cross Bones nor Cannock Chase German war cemetery would qualify as notable, and it's questionable whether even cemeteries of major significance like Piskaryovskoye would meet them without exercising his "special historical significance" get-out clause. (Even the huge 44,000-burial Indiantown Gap National Cemetery doesn't meet any of his criteria.)

On the subject of CWGC cemeteries, I've cleaned out the worst of the fluff at War Cemetery in Kohima (which I'm sure isn't the correct name), but a lot of work still needs to be done. The author is the same person who wrote London in the 1960s, of which roughly 50% consisted of wildly undue weight, fabricated sources and outright lies, as documented at Talk:London in the 1960s#Removed material, so I don't really want to go in all guns blazing in case he feels I'm victimising him.

(While the two of you are here, and on the subject of Ealing, Polish War Memorial could do with some serious attention. Thanks to its location on the M40 motorway between London and Birmingham, at the point where traffic jams tend to build up, it's possibly the best-known war memorial in the entire UK, since "tailbacks as far as the Polish War Memorial" is a phrase used almost every day on traffic reports.) – iridescent 17:10, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

There are similar problems with schools. I well remember the Polish War Memorial from my time in London for exactly the reason you say, repeatedly getting stuck in traffic there. Eric Corbett 18:28, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Eric, while you're here, is my comment at Misplaced Pages:Featured article candidates/The Sirens and Ulysses/archive1 regarding "likely" (in American English, "likely" is both an adjective ("it is likely to depict") and an adverb ("it likely depicts"), but in British English it's only an adjective.) actually correct? I felt fairly confident while saying it (and the CUP guide backs me up), but am starting to doubt myself. – iridescent 18:52, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I consider "likely" in that context to be an Americanism, as I'd say "probably". The argument about "likely" being only an adjective in Br English has some merit, but I wouldn't invest in it. Eric Corbett 20:03, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Certainly an Americanism in my book, though like many of these it may be getting a foothold among British youf. 22:11, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I'll leave some comments on cemetery-related articles here in a day or two, per Carcharoth's invitation. Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 19:08, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Hassocks (er, that's a place name, isn't it? I'm sure I've been there at least once.). Oh, I see! I'm going to try and work out which cemetery we don't have an article on, which might be easiest to write about. Quite a few to choose from... (probably not South Ealing, as it turns out). As for the best-known war memorial in the UK (a comment by Iridescent somewhere up above), sure that is The Cenotaph, Whitehall? Carcharoth (talk) 23:54, 17 March 2015 (UTC) Hmm. It's not as easy as I thought to find a clearly notable cemetery that doesn't already have an article. And I got distracted by an article on a site about derelict sites in London... Anyway, anyone here have any ideas for cemeteries that should have articles? Carcharoth (talk) 00:38, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

I'll see your Cenotaph, and raise you Trafalgar Square and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. I'd still be prepared to bet a reasonable amount that the average Brit hears/reads the words "Polish War Memorial" far more often than they hear or read the word "Cenotaph", particularly if they live in the south.

The most obviously significant English cemeteries Misplaced Pages doesn't currently have an article on that spring to mind are (on a quick think):

• The lost eighth member of London's big seven, Victoria Park Cemetery (went bust, had the gravestones removed, and is now a public park called Meath Gardens);
• Brookwood Military Cemetery (at the moment just a paragraph in the main Brookwood article, despite being the largest military cemetery in the UK—and yes, I'm obviously aware there are very good reasons no sane editor will touch it);
• Greenwich Cemetery (not East Greenwich Pleasaunce, but the big one which also has a significant military cemetery);
• Woodlands Cemetery, Gillingham (a surprising redlink—it's a major naval site, and has the memorials and in some cases the mass graves for the casualties from the HMS Princess Irene, HMS Glatton and HMS Bulwark, as well as the bombing of the Chatham Drill Hall);
• Botley Cemetery in Oxford (which is a particularly surprising redlink, given the obsession of WMUK with QR codes, since Botley was the site of the CWGC's QR code experiment).
• Gardens of Peace, Hainault, the largest Muslim cemetery in the UK;
• Cambridge City Cemetery;
• Catterick Garrison Cemetery;
• Haslar Royal Naval Cemetery (another surprise omission, given how feverishly active the naval history people usually are);
• the two big Plymouth cemeteries (Weston Mill and Efford;
• Isleworth Cemetery (which exists, but in such a sorry state I'm tempted to delete it; it currently says more about Alice Ayres than it does about the cemetery, and describing a Victorian skivvy as a "household assistant" is taking politically correct Americanism to an insane extreme).

I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly in the north (my knowledge tends to get hazy once you're past Milton Keynes). If you're going to take "includes elements considered of architectural or historic significance" as a criterion for notability, then just searching "tomb", "grave", "gravestone", "tombstone" and "burial" on Images of England brings up 9912, 659, 170, 209 and 402 hits respectively, although obviously some of them will be within churches or multiple hits on the same graveyard. (Doing it through the listed buildings register brings up lower figures, but still enough to keep anyone busy for months cataloguing them.) The Anglican and Catholic tradition of grave reuse makes JHvW's proposed "five notable burials" criterion doubtful (if the grave no longer exists, does it still count as a notable burial?), but if you accept it as "five notable people were buried there" than you could make a case for at least 50% of the village burial grounds in Europe being notable, since over a thousand years virtually every village will have seen five people who are "notable" by Misplaced Pages standards, even if their articles haven't yet been written. (I could create, and justify the existence of, a separate page on the tiny graveyard of St. Mary's Church, Chesham in a matter of minutes if I didn't feel it would be a disservice to the reader.) – iridescent 18:04, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: Any chance for the image for pl:Kazimierz Wiśniowski? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:36, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, Piotrus, I've now uploaded the image. See File:Grave_of_Kazimierz_Wisniowski_and_Halina_Szymanska.JPG. I put it on her article, but will leave you to put it in the Polish Misplaced Pages articles. Carcharoth (talk) 01:55, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

Some thoughts from me, on cemeteries and more generally.

• One of my main interests here is improving the general, overall coverage of particular geographic areas (let's use Brighton and Hove as an example, since that's where I do most of my work.) On that basis I am an advocate of what you might call the topic-based approach: rather than lots of little, stubby articles which could flirt with AfD territory, I concentrate on writing comprehensive articles which cover all aspects of a topic area. (Hence I would eventually like to write e.g. "Cinemas in B&H", "Theatres in B&H", "Breweries in B&H", "Economy of B&H", "Housing in B&H" etc. etc.) So in Cemeteries and crematoria in Brighton and Hove, for example, I researched and wrote about all of them, even the small and obscure ones which only merited a few lines, and covered related stuff like church burial grounds. I was helped greatly by the fact that a decent-sized booklet had been published on the subject (Dale 1991: see the bibliography), which I was able to cite frequently. I would say only two of the cemeteries would genuinely be notable enough for a standalone article (Extra Mural and Woodvale), and it just made a lot more sense to combine what I would have written in those standalone articles with material covering everything else in the city. In summary, my suggested approach to articles on cemeteries (especially in urban areas) would be: consider writing a general article covering a whole city/local government district/London borough, and write about every cem/crem in as much detail as you can based on the available sources. On that basis, something like South Ealing Cemetery would be on the borderline of standalone article or major section in Cemeteries in the London Borough of Ealing.
• Regarding historic tombs etc. (particularly those with English Heritage listings): my thoughts would be to include everything in a "Memorials" section in the relevant church article, as demonstrated at e.g. All Saints Church, Patcham. That obviously requires the church article to be written as well, but virtually all churches with notable monuments, memorials etc. would be notable enough in their own right for a pretty decent article to be written.
• For places too small to write a standalone article either for Cems/Crems or for an individual cemetery, a possible alternative would be to incorporate it into a "Public services in ..." article, as I have done with Public services in Crawley and Public services in Worthing. Such dry topics may struggle to pass the interesting-ness test mentioned by Iridescent above ("...There's no point wasting time writing and maintaining something in which nobody will ever be interested"), admittedly!
• However ... if there is just one notable/interesting cemetery in a place, and no others to write about (so that a "Cemeteries and crematoria article in..." couldn't be written), especially if it has memorials/tombs/burials etc. of heritage interest and/or notable people, I would personally be inclined to write a standalone article.

Not sure if that lengthy stream of consciousness helps very much; hopefully a few interesting thoughts are buried in there! I will add more if I think of anything pertinent. Will keep this page on my watchlist. PS Good to see Brill on the Main Page today! Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 13:24, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

I think we're broadly on the same page—my comments regarding "every listed building" are a discussion of where the limits of the envelope currently are, rather than where I think they should be. I think Misplaced Pages ought to be covering everything which anyone might find of interest, but find the insistence of separate articles for everything to be actively damaging. Brill railway station is actually a pretty good example of this—it (and its four friends) only exist because of WP:TRAINS's insistence that "every railway station which had a timetabled passenger service needs to be a separate article". As far as I'm concerned, these would be far more use to all concerned as part of a single page in which people can compare and contrast them. (My proof-of-concept page for this approach to the Brill Tramway still exists at Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway.)

I agree that the place for burials in churchyards is in the article on the church (I didn't pick the example of St Mary's Church, Chesham out of thin air!). I can't think of any cemetery or burial ground that isn't going to be attached either to a place of worship, a local authority, a notable company or in very rare circumstances an employer, so the question of "where to put the mention of it?" should hopefully never arise.

Regarding doing it by local authority, it would probably work well in small and medium-sized towns, but I imagine it would fray when you get to the cathedral cities. Somewhere like Exeter or Norwich probably has well over 50 churches, each with their own burial ground, and each of which has enough notable features to justify a mention. (For a big cemetery like Highgate, Brookwood or Glasgow Necropolis, even List of notable burials in… articles would be among the longest pages on Misplaced Pages if they were done properly). – iridescent 18:50, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Briefly (as it is late...), I was re-reading this, and was reminded by your claim about 'List of notable burials in...' articles that I had a number of years ago quoted this bit over at Talk:Burials and memorials in Westminster Abbey: "Over 3,000 people are buried in the Church and Cloisters and there are over 600 monuments and memorials." Do you think that is more or less than the scale of what you were thinking of with regards to the big cemeteries? Just curious as to what you think the ballpark figures would be? Actually doing an article like that 'properly' (as you put it) is not easy. I once took a crack at Poets' Corner (some of the discussions on the talk page might be of interest). Carcharoth (talk) 01:50, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

The ballpark figures would probably depend on how the list was formatted. Something like List of American film actresses or the existing Westminster Abbey article, where the entries are just a Wikilink and minimal information, could reasonably include a much greater number than something like List of tablets on the Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice where each entry includes detail on the person, an image of the marker etc. Provided the list is split with subheads for ease of navigation, I would imagine the "reasonable length" limit would be around the 100kb mark, with the number of entries depending on the detail of the entries.

It's possible to go much longer—List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States is a browser-crashing 784kb, with List of United States counties and county equivalents and the ludicrous Opinion polling for the 2015 United Kingdom general election (which someone should really AFD—it's about as pure an example of WP:RAWDATA as I can imagine, and is three times larger than the equivalent Nationwide opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2012) coming in close behind. I personally would say that, once an article or list goes above that 100kb mark it ceases to be of much practical use, and should be split up unless there's a very good reason to keep it together. For cemeteries, the split would be fairly easy—just go by the Misplaced Pages parent categories of each burial, to result in List of scientists buried in Anytown Cemetery, List of soldiers buried in Anytown Cemetery, List of writers buried in Anytown Cemetery etc. It would probably be worth asking Tony1 what his thoughts on realistic maximum sizes would be, given that he's the person most likely to raise concerns about them.

This is wiki-heresy, but it may not be worth the effort to split the burials lists up, or even to create them. Very few of them get much attention—Westminster Abbey is something of an outlier as it's such a well-known building and gets Google traffic from "where is buried?" searches, but something like Burials in Glasnevin Cemetery gets roughly half the monthly pageviews of the spectacularly obscure Whipping Tom, while Tarrare had as many visitors in the first two days of this month thsn List of people buried at Arlington National Cemetery—arguably the most notable cemetery of them all—had in the past 90 days. If the public interest is really this low, it would probably be more important to get the articles on the cemeteries themselves up to scratch, rather than worrying about the lists. Yes, I know I've always been a leading advocate of the idea that Misplaced Pages's mission is to highlight obscure topics rather than to duplicate Britannica on well-known ones, but equally there's no point spending the amount of time it would take to do justice to these lists if the readers aren't there. (In the particular case of Westminster Abbey, I'd be sorely tempted to just send people here rather than try to replicate the list. Since the Abbey's own records are by definition going to be more accurate than Misplaced Pages, and their website is optimised for searching in a way Mediawiki could never do, trying to replicate it seems doomed to end in failure.) – iridescent 15:54, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

This discussion of lists reminds me of List of Fellows of the Royal Society and how that is split up. Template:Fellows of the Royal Society shows how the list has been split up alphabetically (this came first, I think), and then for some reason it was 'decided' (there might have been no discussion) to do it by year as well. That doesn't seem that sensible to me, but I didn't object at the time. Oh, *groan*, look at List of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 1661. What the hell is Template:FRSyears for? Anyway, back to the Abbey. I think the monuments database you found there is new-ish. I don't remember there being anything like that 5 years ago. I'm glad they have done that (or at least started it). It dies say "The list is NOT COMPLETE at present, but further entries are always being added." I am extremely pleased to see they are including monument inscription transcripts and translations (from Latin). That will be very useful to add to the articles on the individuals. It is interesting that they have 90 listed for Poet's Corner. I bet they don't have the monuments that were moved to the triforium. Though come to think of it, they will list them under 'triforium' (hopefully. Hannah Pritchard was one. Ah, they do have her here. Very good. They definitely didn't have that four or five years ago. Excellent that they have done that. Wonder why they did it? I suppose I'd better not ask, as I might be told it was there all along and I'd missed it somehow... Carcharoth (talk) 18:41, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

If I had to guess, I'd say a certain wedding prompted a flood of interest in Westminster Abbey from people hitherto unfamiliar with its history, and they got fed up with answering "what am I looking at?" queries, so decided to write it down. For all I know, they copied you—I've certainly noticed recent additions to at least one major reference work looking startlingly similar to existing Misplaced Pages pages.

Bear in mind that my opinions on these things are not representative of anyone but myself, and there are certainly people who'd argue that there should be no such thing as an upper limit. It's not that long since List of people by name was a page people were sincerely arguing in favour of keeping, and we still have behemoths like List of Australian diarists of World War I and the trainwreck of over-referenced listcruft at List of Dutch inventions and discoveries, and nobody except me seems particularly keen to get rid of them. – iridescent 19:07, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Um. Did you see my name in that discussion? :-) For an example, search for "obscure historical people". Seriously, if biographical articles were properly maintained in a database it would avoid pages like John Aiken (disambiguation) and George Butterworth (disambiguation) and Charles Hopkins. All the human name disambiguation pages. I am surprised no-one has tried to tackle that sort of thing. Probably because (according to Template:Hndis) there are over 46,000 such pages. But probably just as many missing. I forget what the number of biographical pages is now. Somewhere around 1.3 million. But I suspect that is an underestimate. I still see biographical pages with no talk pages and hence not tracked through something like Category:Biography articles by quality. Gah! Never get me started on biographical things! Carcharoth (talk) 21:14, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

"... by quality"—now you've hit one of my pet peeves, those "article quality" rating templates splayed all over the place. Almost my first, newbish substantial contributions to Misplaced Pages was the biographies of the federal judge in Puerto Rico under Woodrow Wilson (Peter J. Hamilton). A few months after I wrote it, a wikiproject came along and tagged my article "start class and low importance." Those were both accurate ratings, but it was fortunate that I was already invested in the project by that point. I've often wondered whether, if my initial contribution had been tagged "start class and low importance" the day I wrote it, I would have wanted to write any more. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:53, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Another break

Newyorkbrad, as you may know you have hit one of my pet peeves, the monumental "we've always done it this way" bureaucratic inertia that characterises Misplaced Pages. (Try to come up with a convincing argument other than "it's the way we've always done it" for the existence of almost any aspect of Misplaced Pages, from Arbcom to In The News to sidebar navboxes to the civility policy to barnstars. In what other environment would "Block per no climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man" or "obvious duck or at the very least meat" be considered a rational comment? In fact, in what environment other than Misplaced Pages's warped and un-self-critical culture would WP:No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man even exist?)

That article assessment scale is a by-product of a decade-old pet project of Jimmy Wales to create an offline version of Misplaced Pages for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so, and the Importance/Quality metric was used to determine which articles got the limited number of berths on the CD-ROM. Nowadays, the girl in Africa is far more likely to have high-speed mobile broadband than she is to have a computer, CD reader and reliable power source to run them, and the CD version of Misplaced Pages hasn't been published for years. However, "because we've always done it this way" Misplaced Pages persists with a grading scale which runs "F, G, B, C, Sta, Stu", with an additional grade between G and B only available to articles on hurricanes, computing and military history. You've been here so long it probably seems natural, but stop and think how messed up that must look to every outside observer, and there's no rational reason to keep doing it other than that understanding it gives some people a momentary buzz of "I understand this secret code".

As long as the mainpage remains in its current format I can see grounds for keeping the FA and GA grades, as they determine eligibility for the main page. I can also see grounds for keeping the "stub" classification as it theoretically draws attention to articles in need of expansion, although realistically I question the value of it. (How many people looking to write something actually go through Stub categories looking for something to write about?)

Those "importance" categories were necessary in the days of WP:1.0 when the WMF could talk seriously about "producing a print version of Misplaced Pages" and it was necessary to decide what was worthy of printing, but are pointless now. Quite aside from "importance" being completely subjective, importance in Misplaced Pages terms doesn't necessary equate to importance elsewhere, since the most important function of Misplaced Pages is collating information not easily available elsewhere—for Misplaced Pages, John Sherman Cooper is a more important article than John F. Kennedy.

I completely agree that "importance" tagging of brand new articles is a pointless and WP:BITEy exercise, except in cases where the article has obviously been moved out of a sandbox in a reasonable state of completion. However, you're not going to change it, since these people have too much time and emotional energy invested in maintaining the status quo. The obsession with tagging and categorization is a perfect storm caused by the interaction of a number of the more toxic aspects of Misplaced Pages's internal culture and the WMF's inept meddline, and Yngvadottir summed it up better than I ever could.

Carcharoth, I'm not sure how any system running on Mediawiki could avoid pages like John Aiken (disambiguation). No matter how they were categorised and filed, Misplaced Pages still needs to account for those cases where people type ] into articles without thinking to check if there's more than one person by that name—the only viable alternative I can see is an unsightly This article is about Air Chief Marshall John Aiken. For the painter, see John Macdonald Aiken. For the hockey player, see John Aiken (ice hockey). For the cricketer, John Aiken (cricketer) and the like at the top of every page which is currently linked to by a disambiguation page, which doesn't seem to be any more user-friendly. – iridescent 17:03, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

1. Don't get me started on that. I would love it if the WMF configured the Main Page to make every feature opt-in and cookie-controlled, meaning people (including the general public, not just logged-in users) interested in DYK, TFA, OTD etc could choose to keep seeing them, while people could perma-hide those parts they aren't interested in. Not only would it give fields not currently represented on the MP—random articles, featured sounds, country- or topic-specific FAs—a chance to prove their worth, it would also drive home how little most readers care about some of Misplaced Pages's Cherished Institutions™. I would give reasonable odds that given a free choice, more than 50% of readers would opt for a Google-style main page and choose to hide every element other than a searchbar, and more than 90% (probably more like 99%) would choose to hide In The News and On This Day. Because it holds such exalted status in Misplaced Pages's internal MMORPG, it's easy to lose sight of how little the outside world cares about the content of the main page. Taking 1955 MacArthur Airport United Airlines crash (not to single it out for any reason, but just because it's a recent TFA on a reasonably interesting topic), it got 18,742 page views on its day in the sun. On the same day, the main page got 17,081,542 page views, meaning the highest profile link on Misplaced Pages's main page had a click-through rate of roughly one reader in a thousand. It would also finally put a stop to the interminable discussions at Misplaced Pages:Main page redesign proposals which have been going on without result for eight years now.
2. Although ideally not under those names. German Misplaced Pages's "Exzellenter Artikel" and "Lesenswerter Artikel" ("Excellent article" and "Worth-a-look article") seem much more accurate descriptions of what those categories are used for.
3. On the subject of articles which have been moved out of a sandbox in a reasonable state of completion, Template:Did you know nominations/Victorian painting could do with some attention.
4. If you ever want to use your position as the Cicero of the Wiki for something practical, take Misplaced Pages:Vital articles to MFD. I struggle to think of a more pointless exercise than trying to sift through the 6,929,384 articles on Misplaced Pages attempting to produce a definitive list of the 10,000 most important.

Uh,I may come back to this later, but you do know what happened to Cicero, right? :-) Carcharoth (talk) 23:08, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

When I make a snotty comparison, the comparator is generally carefully chosen. I assure you I'm aware of what happened to Cicero and why. Opinion divides roughly evenly nowadays between those who see him as one of the greatest defenders of rights and justice in history who was able to put into words the thoughts of the people and was willing to stand up to the most powerful of interests in the name of liberty, and those who seem him as an obnoxious reactionary whose efforts to defend an indefensible ruling oligarchy against the tide of reform ultimately led to the failure to introduce necessary reforms and the collapse of the very system he was trying to defend. – iridescent 23:25, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

My own opinion on Cicero is (c) - he was an obnoxious suck-up who inflated his own importance through his (admitedly great) writings and in the end dithered so much he couldn't decide what to do and ended up dead when no one really wanted to kill him, they just wanted him out of Rome. But I'm a cynic at the best of times...Ealdgyth - Talk 23:57, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Those "importance" categories were, and sometimes still are, useful when there were enough people manning the decks of wikiprojects to do something about Top Importance/Low quality articles, but almost all wikiprojects are now so dead that the whole bannering bollocks is just a waste of time in most cases. The B to Start range covering most articles was always judged mainly on length anyway, without any sense that some things are well covered in a short length, especially when nobody knows that much about the subject, as in medieval biographies. Nobody takes "Vital Articles" at all seriously, not even at the Core Contest (& they have no influence over anything, speaking as one myself). Johnbod (talk) 23:27, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Core Contest has no great influence as an institution, but has a lot of influence owing to who's involved. Regular editors see names like Cas and Coren, and assume "this must be important." You'd be surprised how many people take WP:VITAL seriously—a variant of that list is also used to generate the equally pointless List of Wikipedias by sample of articles, which some WMF people take far more seriously than it deserves.

In terms of wikiprojects, realistically almost all except MilHist are dead or dying. I still put the banners on because it's what the bot uses to update Article Alerts, which I know some people do still use – iridescent 10:20, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Another break (missing articles)

With apologies to Iridescent for dumping a huge amount of text here, I'm putting down some thoughts I wrote on another website (Wikipediocracy). It was part of a discussion about missing articles, but might be better placed here, depending on whether there is anything sensible to say.

The initial premise, that there are a large number of articles yet to be written, I don't think anyone here will disagree with. But I've yet to see a systematic approach to demonstrating that. The usual approach tends to be to work from big lists in userspace or projectspace based on the contents of other encyclopedias or similar content.

It would easily be possible to come up with big lists all day long. But the other side of the coin is the number of articles that do exist. If you have been using Misplaced Pages for years (as many here have), then you will have noticed that red links do get filled in, but it is very difficult to get a feel for the rate at which they are being filled in and created (let alone whether the creations are mostly stubs or proper articles).

Can anyone here think of a way to systematically do that? You need to take a standard list and generate data such as year of creation and what state the article was in at the time of the survey. One example I came across today is here: Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Biography/Science and academia/Science Hall of Fame

"This table is a comparison of Misplaced Pages articles on scientists against Science's January 2011 Science Hall of Fame (SHOF) list."

I came across that because science biographies is one of the areas I read about and edit on in Misplaced Pages. Deciding where to draw the line is not so easy though. In the past week, I was attempting to find information on a range of early 20th century geneticists and biologists and other scientists. What was interesting was that the list (maybe not completely random, but a fair sample) had about 34 people with articles already.

I then made a list of those 34. I've added the month and year of creation after the article name, and the current talk-page assessment status (plus a re-assessment if I disagree with that). Survey done in April 2015 (this seems to have morphed into a 'is Misplaced Pages improving' post):

One article from 2001:

• Alfred Russel Wallace - Sep 2001 - FA class

Four articles from 2002:

• Thomas Hunt Morgan - Jan 2002 - B-class (Nobel laureate)
• Stanislaw Ulam - Feb 2002 - GA class
• Wilhelm Johannsen - Mar 2002 - start
• Barbara McClintock - Jun 2002 - FA class (Nobel laureate)

Two articles from 2003:

• Sewall Wright - Apr 2003 - start (more like B-class)
• James McKeen Cattell - Jul 2003 - start (more like B-class)

Six articles from 2004:

• Titian Peale - Apr 2004 - start
• Walter Bradford Cannon - Apr 2004 - start (more like B-class)
• William Bateson - May 2004 - start - tagged since August 2009
• Ernest Everett Just - Jul 2004 - start (more like B-class)
• Edwin Conklin - Jul 2004 - stub (more like start)
• Alfred Hershey - Sep 2004 - start - tagged since July 2013 (Nobel laureate)

Eleven articles from 2005:

• Carl Correns - Feb 2005 - start - tagged since April 2009
• Richard Goldschmidt - Mar 2005 - start
• George Harrison Shull - Mar 2005 - stub (more like start)
• Rollins A. Emerson - Mar 2005 - unassessed (start)
• Edmund Beecher Wilson - Mar 2005 - start
• Theodor Boveri - May 2005 - start - tagged since February 2013
• Thomas Milton Rivers - May 2005 - start
• Milislav Demerec - Apr 2005 - start - tagged since February 2013
• Curt Stern - Oct 2005 - start - tagged since March 2012
• Albert Francis Blakeslee - Dec 2005 - start
• William Keith Brooks - Dec 2005 - stub

Three articles from 2006:

• Ross Granville Harrison - Jun 2006 - start
• Kristine Bonnevie - Jan 2006 (trans from Norwegian WP) - start - tagged since December 2011
• Edwin Joseph Cohn - Apr 2006 - start - tagged since February 2013

No articles from 2007

Three articles from 2008:

• James V. Neel - Jan 2008 - start - tagged since March 2011
• Jesse Francis McClendon - May 2008 - stub (more like start)
• Edward Murray East - Jun 2008 - stub

One article from 2009:

• Alexander Hollaender - Nov 2009 - start

No articles from 2010.

One article from 2011:

• Norman Giles - Aug 2011 - stub - tagged since February 2013

One article from 2012:

• Edwin Linton - Feb 2012 - unassessed (stub)

No articles from 2013.

One article from 2014:

• Selig Hecht - May 2014 - unassessed (start)

No articles from 2015 (yet).

Four (4) stubs; twenty-two (22) starts; five (5) B-class; one (1) GA class; and two (2) FA class.

Ten (10) articles were tagged.

Conclusions from that are nothing new - lots of articles created early on in the history of Misplaced Pages, with the article creation slowing down but continuing ever since. Article assessments and tagging are often outdated, so are an unreliable guide unless combined with manual checking. Some articles have improved, most have not. Is Misplaced Pages improving? Probably, but could be better and could be improving faster. Simple tasks are being left undone. More effort and more focus needed.

There were 10 with no Misplaced Pages articles.

• John Whittemore Gowan (1893-1967)
• Alvin Nason (1919-1978)
• Warren P. Spencer (1898-1969)
• Benjamin Paul Sonnenblick (1909-1998)
• Edward Laurens Mark (1847-1946)
• Jack Schultz (1904-1971)
• Andre Dreyfus (1897-1952)
• Winthrop Osterhout (1871-1964)
• Hans Gustav Emil Bauer (1904-1988)
• Maurice Whittinghill (1909-1998)

The question is how many of these should have Misplaced Pages articles? Some may be too obscure to have anything sensible written about them. My rule of thumb is to see whether the birth and death years are available, and if an obituary was written.

Some are a real struggle to unearth the information (for all the above, I only had the names and nothing else, sometimes just the surname and initials). For Whittinghill, you find a death notice buried deep in an online copy of the November/December 1998 copy of the Carolina Alumni Review. In the case of Nason, it was a real struggle, eventually finding this on some website called 'LibraryThing', which as best I can make out would be someone who owns a book by Nason (who published a number of standard biology textbooks) putting up some biographical details. From that, you get birth and death years, and a possible middle name of Abraham. That then led me to this index (Gale's Literary Index), which has an entry for Nason (and where an obituary was published). Warren Spencer, I eventually found by following a breadcrumb trail from Wooster College to his birth year (1898) to his obituary published 6 years after his death.

Of the above, two have an article in another language Misplaced Pages:

• pt:André Dreyfus (Portuguese WP)
• de:Hans Bauer (Biologe) (German WP)

The only ones I am sure are clearly dead-cert notable are Winthrop Osterhout (biographical memoir published by the National Academy of Sciences) and Edward Laurens Mark (Hershey Professor of Anatomy and Director of the Zoological Laboratory at Harvard University). The others I am not sure about yet.

Anyway, if someone approached this systematically, you might be able to find out whether certain topics are (slowly) being filled in, and at what rate, and you might be able to identify areas that are neglected, but is this sort of analysis something that would point up a glaring deficiency in the current approach (or lack of approach)?

One view is that in some cases it is not that the information has not been published, but that it is not yet widely available or online. It might seem that lots is available online, and much more is available than was 10 years or so ago, but there are still huge amounts of published information that the current crowd-sourced approach is not capable of picking up unless libraries and archives and journal/book publishers do more to put information online (but in some cases there is little incentive to do so, and in some cases much incentive not to). Carcharoth (talk) 01:06, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I now follow new Fellows of the Royal Society. When the 2015 crop is announced I'll look to see how many already have articles - all will be notable - also comparing genders. This was last year (and WMF blogpost). Fewer than 50% of the 2012 set have bios (still), though the photos we now get encouraged 100% of the 2014s to be done. The same should be done for the US National Academy. This study is also interesting. Johnbod (talk) 10:07, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure there is really any point trying to demonstrate that there are a large number of articles still to be written, since it's self-evidently true. Just pick any category where any reasonable person would concede that every entry in said group is considered noteworthy, and you'll find swathes of missing articles or one-line stubs. Even the most minor work by Vincent van Gogh is considered of great significance and is worth millions; van Gogh painted around 900 oil paintings and 1300 watercolours, but Paintings by Vincent van Gogh and its subcategories only contain around 200 entries. And when you get away from the A-list artists, visual arts coverage is far more spotty—The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate, which I wrote yesterday, is only the second article on a William Etty painting on the whole of Misplaced Pages. (The Manchester Art Gallery holds about 25,000 items, most if not all of which are independently notable in Misplaced Pages's "non-trivial coverage in more than one independent reliable source" terms; Category:Collection of Manchester Art Gallery contains 13 pages, and two of them were just written by me.) Misplaced Pages currently has 6,929,384 articles; the British Museum alone has a collection of eight million items. Even today there are pages on significant topics which are Featured Articles on other major wikipedias (wikipediae?) but still redlinks on en-wiki: fr:Symbolique du cheval/Symbolism of the horse, pt:Escultura etrusca/Etruscan sculpture, Beleg van Delfzijl/Seige of Delfzil, fi:Noitavainot Ruotsin valtakunnassa/Witch hunts in Sweden, es:Pintura barroca de España/Spanish Baroque painting, it:Storia di Torino/History of Turin, de:Hauptfriedhof Frankfurt/Frankfurt Cemetery are all in fields where en-wiki is typically fairly hyperactive.

If I had to draw up a mechanism for such an exercise, I'd find lists which can reasonably be assumed to be definitive (a list of artworks in a particular gallery, a list of players who have played for a particular sports team, a list of species in a particular family, a list of every named village in a particular county, and so on). Take a few of those from various countries, and compare them against Misplaced Pages to see how many of their entries have corresponding Misplaced Pages pages. You would need to discount pages under (say) 500 words, to avoid counting pseudoarticle placeholders like Yuri Luchko, Luxted and Brachinus turkestanicus. As I say, I'm not sure whether trying to quantify it would be a worthwhile exercise, since whatever Somey might say, Misplaced Pages is nowhere near close to filling in the redlinks and entering the maintenance phase. (As of 2011, there were 953,434 documented-and-catalogued animal species, 215,644 documented-and-catalogued plant species and 43,271 documented-and-catalogued fungal species. Just filling in the blanks on those alone would literally take a lifetime.)

As per Johnbod's & NYB's comments above, don't take article assessments very seriously. I can't remember which article it was, but I know there was at least one article which was assessed as "start class" two days before it passed FAC.

On "Simple tasks are being left undone. More effort and more focus needed.", this is one area where I think Somey got it right. As the number of articles rises but the number of editors doesn't, it becomes impossible to monitor everything. "With the article creation slowing down" is probably more an artifact of the particular field you're looking at, than a general Misplaced Pages trend. Don't believe everything Peter Damian tells you—the article growth rate has remained virtually constant since Misplaced Pages moved into the mainstream in 2005. (As I've said previously, I think Misplaced Pages as originally envisaged died some time between 2009 and 2011 and a lot of what appears to be activity is just extremely prolonged death throes as people fight over what shape Misplaced Pages 2.0 will take, but the processes do still go on and the new users do keep on joining.)

Regarding "who is creating these articles", that's no mystery—some people create long articles on things they're interested in, and a few people with a disproportionate influence go through lists creating stubs.

I agree regarding "it is not yet widely available or online" as an issue. Indeed, I always take links to Google Books in the bibliography as an immediate red flag, since something sourced to GBooks is only going to capture those sources Google hosts, which introduces an immediate systemic bias (for legal reasons, GBooks almost exclusively offers "free preview" only for works in American collections, and for recent publications is overwhelmingly dominated by American publishers). – iridescent 10:28, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

But really, a far bigger problem than "missing" articles is existing articles that are crap & haven't changed in 5+ years. For Visual art, this includes the Old Master bios still mainly EB1911 (almost all) or the almost always pathetic "Art of Fooland" articles. I've always been tempted to propose a ban on new articles for say 6 months, except for new MPs etc. Johnbod (talk)

I entirely agree. I don't think it would ever be accepted, but I would love it if Misplaced Pages stripped out all the text copied from the EB1911/EB1902, Catholic Encyclopedia etc. It was arguably necessary on "something's better than nothing" grounds in the early days, but is now an embarrassment. (The very fact that the phrase This article includes content derived from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1969–1978 exists on Misplaced Pages ought to serve as a badge of shame.) – iridescent 10:44, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

The stagnation was the main reason I reactivated the stub contest. Actually and the core contest for that matter...Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:30, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

@Johnbod, regarding the Old Masters, I suspect a lot of the issues are just that they appear such daunting tasks to take on. Etty has been the subject of four significant books, two of which are sitting on the table beside me and the other two of which are outdated hagiographies which can be discounted—if I had a free weekend, I could sit down and write a 10,000 word biography of him and be confident that it's not missing anything significant from the literature. If I were to decide to do something with the (atrocious) Jan Brueghel the Elder, which at present is virtually a verbatim cut-and-paste from EB1911, I'd need books in English, Dutch and French, and probably German and Italian as well, published over a span of 400 years and many of which will only be accessible in copyright libraries, to be confident I hadn't missed anything significant.

@Casliber, as I think I've said before I am very sceptical of the whole "core contest" concept, which seems to be as much an exercise in "established editors" bullying FAC reviewers into passing articles which don't meet WP:WIAFA as anything else. (One of the low points in Misplaced Pages's history is when Jesus passed at FAC. The idea that a Misplaced Pages article, no matter how well written, is "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature" on a topic this widely covered is ridiculous—for that to pass was a step right back to the days of "Brilliant Prose Candidates") To put the whole "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature" thing in context, the Bibliography of British Railway History as of 1998 listed 25,000 books on the history of British Rail alone—the widely covered core topics by definition can't meet WP:WIAFA as currently worded. – iridescent 12:27, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Yeah I know, we've had this discussion before - I kept the prizes for the core contest trivial for that reason so that there wasn't too much angst. I think you're being too pessimistic about literature and that many people can sift and prioritise the most salient/core points. "Featured" does not mean "perfect".....anyway....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:44, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Most of the medieval Welsh bishops need articles (Bishop of Bangor, Bishop of St David's, etc). As to the Scots bishops. And the Norman bishops (Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rouen - which is the archdiocese of the province - the suffragan's are much worse). And those are just the ones on which I have a chance in hell of actually getting to them - the rest of the French medieval bishops are on par with the Norman ones. I've never even looked at the German, Italian, or Scandinavian ones, I'm afraid I'd cry. And the English monasteries are in sad shape too - I looked for Woburn Abbey, which is a fairly important Cistercian house - but there is no separate article for the monastic house, it's subsumed in the article on the country house .... I could go on and on. And that's just the medieval ecclesiastical history articles. The redlinks in American Champion Older Dirt Male Horse are scary if you know anything about American racing history... or we still lack articles on a lot of early winners of the Belmont Stakes. Harness racing suffers worse - Messenger Stakes is mostly not even redlinked and Hambletonian Stakes is almost totally redlinked. Both of those are in the triple crown of harness racing (Messenger is for pacers, Hambletonian is for trotters). There is plenty to write - it's just not glamourous. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:48, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes—anything that isn't high profile tends to fall by the wayside unless it happens to be someone's pet project. Pick any list from Category:Lists of Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom or Category:Lists of United States legislation—which are surely the easiest articles of all to write, as the source by definition will always be available, and explain the thinking leading up to each piece of legislation—and count the redlinks. – iridescent 14:11, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I think the bigger problem isn't that the topics aren't glamorous, or even that some are more obscure - it's that many of these articles need print sources or sources otherwise not freely available online. A lot of people just don't have access to those sources. The Misplaced Pages Library efforts over the last few years are priceless for helping editors access these sources, but most of us are already operating at maximum WP-editing level. For editors like us, our lists of what to write are just getting longer and longer, rather than work getting shared across even more people. Karanacs (talk) 14:47, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with that—that kind of goes with my comment above about Google Books. I'm spoiled by being a member of the City of Westminster's libraries which are arguably the best in the world, but the great majority of Misplaced Pages editors don't have access to reference libraries (or don't have the particular skills to find what they're looking for in a reference library). This puts them at the mercy of what they can find online, which in practice generally means Google Books, and GBooks is very biased in terms of which books make it onto their systems. – iridescent 14:11, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree of course, & maybe we need to publicize the free resources online more. Few of them realize it, but for Old Masters & art generally anyone in the UK can access the Oxford/Grove Dictionary of Art via their library or Manchester Central. The full monty as outlined above is of course the ideal, but most OM bios could be improved a few 100% by simple rewrites using Grove, & eg the Metropolitan catalogue bios that are online (globally). The Met has over 1,000 titles fully online as PDFs (essentially anything out of print) which covers most things very well. Johnbod (talk) 21:00, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I would actually support "ads" at the top of Misplaced Pages saying "Want to help? Free source (link) - help us write articles on X". Sure, we need money too to keep the servers running, but if we want volunteers we may have to ask for them (and point them in the right direction). Karanacs (talk) 21:04, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, and just shouting more loudly that you can edit, which, ten years after the big media blitz, many people are again unaware of. Johnbod (talk) 21:24, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

There's a grammatical fiction in considering "allowed to edit" to be synonymous with "can edit". Eric Corbett 21:42, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Certainly, but "the encyclopedia any is theoretically capable of editing providing they comply with a set of arbitrary rules which aren't publicised anywhere" doesn't scan. Johnbod's main point stands—I'm always astonished as how many people think Misplaced Pages is written by an editorial panel somewhere, and that the "you can edit this page!" banners that appear when you read Misplaced Pages logged-off are just an invitation to apply for jobs at the WMF, along the lines of the "You could be driving this bus!" signs you see on the back of buses. – iridescent 15:06, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Break again: completeness

<outdent> On "Misplaced Pages is nowhere near close to filling in the redlinks and entering the maintenance phase", I agree, but some limited areas maybe should be in this fabled 'maintenance phase'. There should be a mechanism for that, a plan of some sort, but there isn't. Carcharoth (talk) 23:26, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

On "the widely covered core topics by definition can't meet WP:WIAFA as currently worded" - the example I am most familiar with there is what happened with the improvement and nomination of sea as a featured article. I went back there for the first time in a while, and found the following on the talk page: Talk:Sea#Lead sentence and Talk:Sea#Missing. No idea whether there was any follow up there. World War I is another example, a rather topical one given the centenary events. It is an interesting example also of a topic that is being revisited and having more written about it with thousands of books being published in the past few years and over the coming years. Where do you draw the line, though, and at what level of expertise? If someone better able to do such an article comes along (e.g. a retired professor in that subject area), should the article be redone or would effort be better directed elsewhere? Is Middle Ages a counter-example, or an excellent example of how to do this sort of thing? Carcharoth (talk) 23:26, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm confused with your last sentence - are you saying there are some issues you have with the Middle Ages? I'm not sure why the "or" is there... it implies (at least to me) that the two phrases are opposites - but the first phrase seems to be saying that Middle Ages is the opposite of sea and WWI, which you seem to be saying are deficient. So if MA is a counter-example of bad core topics (thus a good treatment), why use "or an excellent example of how to do this sort of thing?" as it's not really an "or" kinda thing. After working on MA (and then dealing with POV pushing sockpuppets for almost six months in 2014), I can't say I'm at all interested in ever working on anything large scale-topic wise again. It was hellish. The collaboration with some of the contributors was great (Johnbod did wonderfully with the art/architecture topics) but the aftermath is not much fun at all, as everyone seems to do nothing but snipe at your efforts... and nitpick. It's obviously gonig to be impossible to completely cover everything as well as possible in a summary article ... but I tried my best. In all honesty, dealing with MA and the sockpuppets has seriously damaged my interest in wikipedia and I've never really recovered it to the levels from before working on it and dealing with the sockpuppetry. Ealdgyth - Talk 23:58, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant it was a counter-example, an excellent example of how to do that sort of thing. I've struck the 'or' (I suspect I rewrote the sentence without re-reading it properly). I think you (and others) did an excellent job on that article. Having said that, the fact that you found it hellish means something. Probably that there wasn't enough support. Were the POV-pushing sockpuppets specifically pushing a POV at the Middle Ages article? I must have missed that. I saw some big argument about the lead image, but didn't follow much after that. Carcharoth (talk) 00:49, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Bulgarians. Talk:Middle Ages/Archive 7, Talk:Middle Ages/Archive 8, and Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppet investigations/Sumatro/Archive. Basically early December 2013 to early June 2014 was spent on it. Ealdgyth - Talk 00:55, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Those discussions (or more accurately, "beratings") about Bulgaria are actually quite a good example of what I mean by "the widely covered core topics by definition can't meet WP:WIAFA as currently worded". I have no doubt at all that the current article is a good and representative summary of what readers are looking for in an article entitled Middle Ages—lots on the clash-of-civilizations thing between the West, East and Islamic worlds, lots on the the developments in France, Germany and Italy that led to the creation of nation-states and modern Western European culture, and a quick skim-through of the Slavic nations, the Mongol advance and other things necessary to put Western Europe in context. However, unless you're planning to write a 200,000-word article, you have to omit or severely restrict things. (The word "France" appears in the article 40 times, the word "England" appears 30 times, the word "Hungary" appears five times, the word "Lithuania" appears once.) I completely agree with the balance you've chosen—the overwhelming majority of English-speaking readers are going to be primarily interested in the background to the events that shaped Western Europe (and its cultural siblings in Western European former colonies) which means lots on Charlemagne and his successors, little on the Mongols. However, it does mean some areas are of necessity skimmed-over or omitted altogether. (I'd be interested to know if the corresponding articles in Slavic languages tilt the balance the other way, and—for instance—cover the Uprising of Ivaylo and omit the Jacquerie.) As currently worded (it is a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature) it's literally impossible to meet WIAFA with an article on any topic too broad to cover in a single article, since you're by definition leaving something out.

To be absolutely clear, I do not support and have never supported the addition of the "thorough and representative" language to the FA criteria and certainly not the precriptivist change which removed "characterized by". As far as I'm concerned the current wording wilfully misrepresents what the seven people who supported it thought they were supporting, which from the context of the discussion was clearly an attempt to reduce the use of low-quality sources where more reliable alternatives exist. (Those seven supporters read like a "where are they now?" section—only two of them have edited Misplaced Pages in the last six months.) Virtually every article to have passed FAC since 2009 has passed only through the application of IAR when it comes to 1(c)—even on the most niche topics imaginable like Daniel Lambert or Wood Siding railway station, I'm well aware there are reliable sources in existence which haven't been used, and aspects of the topics which haven't been mentioned. When it comes to the likes of Sea, that crack becomes (IMO) too wide to paper over with IAR. (I was having thoughts along these lines while thinking about whether to finish off Victorian painting or leave it in its incomplete-but-adequate current state. If I add a paragraph apiece just on topics which would need to be covered for it to have any pretence at comprehensiveness, I estimate it would take the article to around the 100,000 character mark, and that's on a relatively minor topic in a single country.) – iridescent 20:59, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

I started a response to defend that sentence in the FA criteria and then realized while writing that you are mostly right. I think many of my niche articles do cover every single source I can find on the topic (he number of sources is limited). For my larger articles (like Texas Revolution), I interpret that phrase as "adequately covering the consensus of modern scholars on the topic and mentioning the most notable newish theories". If I meet that threshold, I'm satisfied with my article. Otherwise I'd be spinning endlessly in the research phase (and TX Rev took 7 years as it was). As a reviewer, for a niche topic I have to trust the nominator, and for the larger topics I might be able to identify a gap or two if it's something I've come across before, but it's more likely that I won't know enough to know what I don't know. Karanacs (talk) 21:50, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

There's a slight degree of hyperbole—on something like The Sirens and Ulysses it probably is reasonable to claim that every significant source is covered (at least I hope so, as I claimed it in the FAC)—but that's something of an edge case as it spent 150+ years hidden from view. For something like Jesus (or Barack Obama, or India, or Dinosaur, or any of the other FAs on widely-covered topics), 1(c) compliance becomes either becomes:

1. An exercise in damned knowledge, where a reason has to be found as to why any source not used in the article doesn't qualify as part of "the relevant literature" (and we've all done this at times—you presumably remember my needling you over the lack of Spanish-language sources on TX Rev, and I certainly remember Carcharoth complaining about my not sufficiently covering memorials on OOTL&MR) See the contortions on the Jesus FAC to justify discounting as unreliable every author who didn't treat Jesus as a historical figure;
2. An exercise in institutionalized IAR, where collective blind eyes are turned to the fact that the letter of the law is being disregarded.

Neither is particularly desirable; they both reinforce the stereotype (which has some basis in fact) that FAC is the habitat of a self-appointed elite who think that rules are only something that apply to lower mortals. But because we've done it this way for years, there hasn't been a single substantive change to WIAFA since the 2009 changes which brought in "it is a thorough and representative survey". (For more of my thoughts on the institutional failings of FA, see this very long 2008 thread, as my views on the matter haven't shifted substantially.) I'd be quite interested to hear what people with a solid background on Misplaced Pages but no history at FAC actually think of the process these days—I suspect that to most editors, let alone readers, WP:WIAFA looks as much like the catechism of a crackpot cult as Jimmy Wales's civility manifesto does to me. – iridescent 20:36, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, except for your observation on civilnation of course. There are some subjects on which hundreds if not thousands of sources have been written, and nobody, but nobody, ever has or will ever read them all. "Completeness" doesn't mean that every single source ever published has been consulted, it simply means that every significant point of view has been considered. I've occasionally been asked at FAC why I didn't make use of such-and-such a source. to which my usual response is because it doesn't add anything new. Eric Corbett 21:17, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

The point I'm trying (badly) to make is that 1(c) explicitly says "thorough", not "reasonable", and no longer has the "characterized by" get-out clause, so the FA criteria as currently worded are asking the authors to do the impossible. Even if you don't read it as "cover every source" and just as "cover every significant aspect of the topic", it still becomes impossible to do for high-level articles—writing on any big topic inevitably means making value judgements as to what gets kept and what gets excluded. (Why does Manchester mention the Buzzcocks and not Simply Red?) Since participants in FA reviews pretty much by definition ignore "thorough and representative", why do people insist on such strict enforcement of every other criterion? To be absolutely clear, I'm not advocating for strict enforcement of "thorough and representative", I'm advocating for it to be dropped. – iridescent 21:04, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Long aside about the Manchester article

On the subject of Manchester, I know Chetham's Library claims to be the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, but it's a doubtful claim sourced only to their own website, and shouldn't be allowed to stand in the lead of an FA without a proper source. The Bodleian Library, Kederminster Library and Francis Trigge Chained Library all predate Chetham's by decades. – iridescent 21:04, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Not quite. Chetham's claims to be the "oldest free public reference library", not the oldest public library. Eric Corbett 22:08, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Sure, but what Manchester says is "the oldest public library in the English-speaking world", which is a much more specific claim.

The Manchester article really needs a good wash and brush up at some point, there are some things in there which would make me fail it if it ever came up for review:

• The words "bold" and "independent" don't appear in either of the sources for the claim that " recognised as a bold, independently minded city";
• I've never seen the nickname for people from Manchester written as "Manks", only as "Mancs", which would make sense given that it's an obvious contraction;
• "The Peterloo Massacre … elevated Manchester's importance which eventually culminated in city status" sounds a very doubtful claim; surely if anything, it diminished the city by scaring off investors? What elevated the city's importance was a certain railway opening a decade later;
• "linking the city to sea" is grammatically wristslappable, unless one's following a very archaic "the goods went to sea" form of words;
• That the 1996 bombing is "the most financially expensive terrorist attack other than 9/11" is a questionable claim that needs a much better source than an 18-year-old Independent article—the Baltic Exchange bomb (no article? really?) and the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing both surpass it in terms of repair cost, and almost certainly had more impact in terms of indirect tourism costs as well;
• "Manchester was the site of the world's first railway station" is flat-out untrue. MOSI likes to claim it, but Manchester Liverpool Road railway station isn't even the world's oldest surviving railway station (that would be Mount Clare in Baltimore), it's the oldest surviving purpose-built railway station on an inter-city line with scheduled passenger service. Britain's first railway station was Swansea The Mount railway station, opened in 1807.
• "Manchester is regarded as the birthplace of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom" needs a big fat citation needed—Barbara Bodichon and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson are usually considered the creators of the suffrage movement, and were both active on the Women's Suffrage Committee before the Manchester Suffrage Committee even existed.

And that's just from the lead alone (this version, should it change). I do appreciate that an article like this is almost impossible to maintain, since everyone wants to say their piece. And yes, I do realise that the article which passed FAC has very little in common with what exists today – iridescent 16:17, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree with you, it's pretty much impossible to maintain without getting into loads of fights, which obviously I can no longer afford to do. Eric Corbett 17:08, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

The more I think of it (admittedly, I don't think of it that much) the more bizarre that "Manchester is recognised as a bold, independently minded city" seems. Quite aside from the fact I imagine every city's occupants like to think of their city as "bold and independently minded", I can say with some degree of certainty that if I stopped people at random and asked "what characteristics do you most associate with Manchester?", "bold and independently minded" wouldn't be top of the list even if I were doing said questioning in the middle of Piccadilly Gardens. – iridescent 20:37, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Another arbitrary break—stubs and BLPs

Going back to the subject of completeness, I rustled up lists for the awards presented by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The two main awards are the Hayden Memorial Geological Award and the Leidy Award. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is only one article missing from the former (out of 39) and only three articles missing from the latter (out of 26). I wasn't sure whether to make the other two awards into separate lists , so put the lists in the Academy's article: Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art and Richard Hopper Day Memorial Medal. Only one (of 11) missing from the former, and four (of 19) missing from the latter. The overall total is nine (9) missing from a total of ninety-five (95). That is 9-10%. A few years ago, I suspect the number of red-links would have been higher (the filling in over time can be shown progressing as you move forward from 2001 to the present).
Anyway, the nine missing articles (with some potential sources) are: Gilles Joseph Gustave Dewalque ; Warren Poppino Spencer ; Herbert Barker Hungerford ; Donn Eric Rosen es species; Guy Tudor ; Lawrence A. Shumaker ; Andreas B. Rechnitzer ; Charles A. Berry ; and Robert McCracken Peck . I've made lists like this in the past, and sometimes it is more interesting to wait and see when (if) the articles get created (and why) rather than create them now. If anyone has a lot of time on their hands, they can look through Talk:Howard N. Potts Medal, Talk:Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute), Talk:Franklin Medal, Talk:Stuart Ballantine Medal (I cheated here and turned three of the redlinks blue myself).
I'm wondering, if I go back to just the lists I created, and make a master list of redlinks still to be filled in, how long that would be and how long it would take to fill in... Reading and writing biographical articles can be rather a surreal experience sometimes. Like living several lifetimes in one. Carcharoth (talk) 02:06, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

As I've just upset Mishae by pointing out (perhaps more roughly than necessary, but someone who comes out with gems like "I understand that majority of people on Misplaced Pages are Jewish" gets a limited degree of AGF) that a topic theoretically meets Misplaced Pages's notability guidelines doesn't necessarily equate to it being a good idea to create an article on the topic. Some people just don't have enough interesting to say about them to justify creating an independent article rather than a line on List of …—I suspect some entries on those lists would be better off red, as any biographies would literally be "He was born, he led a blameless but uninteresting life, he did this one thing which makes him technically notable, he died". Is there any reason other than "it would leave a redlink on some lists" for Misplaced Pages to be hosting Thomas Burgoyne? (Head on over to Category:Living people and click five articles at random. I'll be surprised if you can make a legitimate case for a stand-alone article, other than "it technically meets Misplaced Pages's notability guidelines so it can't be deleted", on more than two of them.) – iridescent 16:17, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

SBHB agrees with you. :-) And see what I said here. I suspect Comrade Boris had been reading what I said.

• "I really favour not having a biography article at all until after the subject is dead (and at that point, if needed, the historical assessment process starts, or in some cases concludes) and up until that point you either have no article, or a strictly word-limited article (plus picture if available) with a link to an official website or other resources, if they exist. The reason for limiting the word count is to make it easier to maintain BLP articles as short informative stubs (I mean really short!). On the other hand, if you don't couple that with a tightening of the notability criteria, you end up with a Who's Who directory. But that might still be better than the current situation." - Carcharoth. I then turned up at WP:BLPN and pointed out that Barclay Knapp was a sad lonely article with issues, and SBHB made a bid for a scorched earth approach: "Instead, Misplaced Pages should have a goal of eliminating 90% of BLPs by year-end 2015." - Short Brigade Harvester Boris.

To be clear, I do realise that some of the redlinks on some of the lists aren't really worth the effort it would take to do a proper article. But it would be easily possible to do a short set of footnote-style appendix entries if you put to one side the (foolish) pretence that appearing on a separate page makes it in some sense an 'article'. It would not be an article, it would be a brief aside, a digression. There are some examples at User:Carcharoth/Article incubator/Fleming Memorial Lecture. I spent far too long going through that. Some of the people on that list most definitely will never have articles, despite me redlinking them there. They are a fantastically varied bunch, reflecting the change in British radio and television and telecommunications from the 1940s to the present day. J. T. Mould appears to have been a barrister (KC) who assisted Ambrose Fleming with patenting his thermionic valve. There doesn't appear to be much more to say about him than that. Henry Grainger Jenkins and Thomas Robertson Scott are likewise obscure (something to do with inventions of fluorescence for TV screens and crystal valves respectively). Gordon H. Cook appears to have been something big in lens manufacturing. There are two FRS people there: Harold Barlow and James Dwyer McGee. It was interesting to find an article already existing on Geoffrey G. Gouriet, and other early BBC engineers in that list include R.D.A. 'Darrell' Maurice, Arthur Valentine Lord, F. Howard Steele, G. Boris Townsend, and C.B.B. 'Bill' Wood. They could probably all be lumped together in a treatment of the early history of the BBC and its research and development departments. Then you have a succession of lords (and a lady) and several BBC Chairmen and Controllers, again interspersed with some people who are obscure (or were boring 'business people' , or earning lots of money, or playing corporate musical chairs, or all of the above). All I remember about Peter Laister is that he was ousted from whatever TV company he was at in a boardroom coup the year after he gave that talk. I hadn't looked up who Phil Sidey , Albert Scharf (de:Albert Scharf), Kenji Aoki (Managing Director NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and Rupert Gavin were (though I have now). I had guessed mid-level TV executives of some kind. Bruce Bond was something to do with British Telecom. Articles on businesspeople leave me cold, I can't get interested in that at all. What happened with Barclay Knapp was just sad. It was ignored and tagged and ignored again for years and the Misplaced Pages 'article' outlasted the 'source'... On these TV company bigwigs, I could put a sentence or two saying who they are (or more relevantly, what role they held at the time and why they gave the talk), and that would be enough. Contemporary sources announcing the lectures would give that. Ditto for George Russell and Samir Shah. I am still rather amazed that David Ingram on that list turned up at the NPG here. Anyway, enough of that. I'm going to create a hndis page for David Ingram and turf the singer out to make way for that. Maybe by the time I have done that, you and SBHB will have made some headway with the BLPs? Sorry about the lack of paragraph breaks. Carcharoth (talk) 02:07, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

One of my many ideas which will never be put into practice until either Jimmy Wales is sent off to spend more time with his wristwatch, or Google finally manage to create a version of Knol which isn't a piece of crap and Misplaced Pages disintegrates into irrelevance, was to give every BLP subject the automatic right to stubbification; anyone, no matter how prominent, unhappy with the state of a Misplaced Pages page about them would be able to request that it be reduced only to non-disputed information ("Sir James Paul McCartney MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. He is a former member of the Beatles and Wings, and has had a lengthy solo career.") and locked in that state. Provided it eliminated the positive as well as the negative it wouldn't cause an issue with bias (if anything, it would reduce puffery), and it would avoid the sea-of-redlinks which SBHB's proposal would create. Sure, it would mean some Misplaced Pages pages would be uneditable, which would make the usual extremist "The Man is trying to suppress information's right to be free!" libertarian conspiracy-theorist fuckwits who hang round Jimbo's talkpage cry, but Misplaced Pages already has pages not everyone can edit—"anyone can edit" has never meant "anyone can edit everything in any way". Why should something purporting to be an encyclopedia be acting as an unhealthy combination of advertising host and defamation platform for any person unfortunate enough to unintentionally meet an arbitrary guideline? If readers care about these people, they are perfectly capable of looking them up somewhere else, and if "somewhere else" doesn't exist, that's generally a pretty good indication that the person isn't important enough to justify coverage. – iridescent 16:09, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Next meetups in North England

Hello. Would you be interested in attending one of the next wikimeets in the north of England? They will take place in:

• Leeds on 12th April 2015
• Manchester on 26th April 2015
• Liverpool on 24th May 2015

If you can make them, please sign up on the relevant wikimeet page!

If you want to receive future notifications about these wikimeets, then please add your name to the notification list (or remove it if you're already on the list and you don't want to receive future notifications!)

Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:52, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Mike Peel, I probably can't make any of those, but I applaud the advance notification—it always puzzled me why London events were always announced months in advance, while those elsewhere (even the ones like Manchester which are regular as clockwork) aren't announced until a couple of weeks before.

I'm not sure how much work it would be, but I think it would be a good idea to list the whole of the UK rather than just North of England. Someone in (for instance) Derby can get to Manchester, Birmingham or London in much the same time, someone in Newcastle might find it more convenient to go to Edinburgh than the traditional English meetup cities of Manchester & London, etc. Plus, there are some people who wouldn't consider attending a Misplaced Pages meetup in their local area* but would be happy to make a day-trip elsewhere.

*Some people will have had a falling-out over articles on their home town, and be reluctant to attend a local meetup as they're concerned they'll run into someone they recently had an on-wiki shouting match with, but would still be perfectly happy to meet people with an interest in Misplaced Pages on neutral ground. I can also think of at least two UK cities whose local Misplaced Pages groups have acquired a reputation (justly or not) for attracting fruitcakes, loons and weirdos, where people who'd never consider attending their local meetup might be perfectly happy to take a 45-minute train trip to somewhere else. And of course, there are going to be some people who want an excuse for a day-trip to London/Glasgow/Manchester/etc, or are going to be visiting somewhere anyway.

I would also suggest it would be a good idea to have whatever bot is going to deliver these notifications deliver them to all the county/city projects listed at WikiProject England, WikiProject Scotland and WikiProject Wales. Even the moribund ones like WikiProject Sheffield and WikiProject Gloucestershire might still be watched, or at least occasionally read, by people who might be interested in coming. – iridescent 10:59, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

It's been pointed out on the UK mailing list that there is as yet no set of off-wiki email groups that such people can sign up to. In addition to what you say above, these would be potentially very useful for the large group of people who sign on much less than they once did, but might still be interested. Johnbod (talk) 14:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

I think that's an excellent idea, although any off-wiki notification system would have to have a very strictly limited remit to being only for notifications of public events. It would be very easy for such a list to become an off-wiki version of Article alerts and a de facto canvassing mechanism, and lead to a lot of negative blowback. One only needs to look at how many variations of "please come and comment at foo discussion" posts—some of which no longer even pretend to be anything other than canvassing—there are on the GGTF mailing list to see how quickly something set up with the best of intentions can slide down that particular slippery slope. Given the history between San Francisco and Development House, it's safe to say a UK mailing list wouldn't benefit from the "those aren't abuses, they're good faith errors of judgement" blanket indulgence granted to the GGTF, the Education Program and other WMF pet projects.

An elephant in the room that would have to be confronted if the notifications process went off-wiki is eligibility. Are you going to allow anyone interested to sign up, or try to restrict it in some way, and if it's moderated who decides who can join the mailing list? I'd support allowing anyone who wants to sign up, given that they can find out the dates just by watchlisting Misplaced Pages:Meetup/UK if they care, but bear in mind that this does mean you're likely to find yourself emailing invitations to some rather colourful characters if they choose to sign up. – iridescent 15:16, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

I think we're talking about an email group maintained by one person, with a "bcc" list, so just easy one-way notifications of events in particular locations rather than opening dialogue, or wider discussions. I don't think you can reply to the group on those (not sure - may depend on the email brand used). We should be anyway. The UK list remains for broader stuff. Johnbod (talk) 15:32, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

It still raises the issue of eligibility, though. While in practice it would just be reposting already-public information, there's a psychological difference between  '​This event was publicised on a publicly-viewable board and we have no way to restrict who reads it, and the event is held in a public place over which Misplaced Pages has no control regarding who has access '​ and  '​Misplaced Pages sent a written invitation to a convicted paedophile, to an event whose own publicity said "hopefully younger Wikimedians will still feel welcome and safe"'. You can guarantee that the latter is how the usual suspects will spin it in The Register and The Daily Dot. – iridescent 15:46, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Nice idea! This notification was somewhat a test to see if user talk page messages were effective. The results are rather more interesting than I expected: a number of people have signed up for the wikimeets, whilst others have asked not to receive such messages, and most (particularly non-regulars) have not acknowledged the notification yet. I was a bit surprised by the number of banned users on one or another project that I encountered when circulating the notification.

I like the idea of having a UK-wide notification list, and circulating it to the project talk pages too. I suspect that we need to have a wider discussion in the UK community about it first, though. There's the point about mailing lists vs. on-wiki notifications that you've raised above, but I'm also worried about the possible accidental "outing" of people on-wiki as living in a certain area when they don't want that to be known, and that people might find UK-wide notifications to be too general/diluted. We'd also need to consider how often it would be sent around, particularly given that some wikimeets are planned well in advance while others are quite short-noticed, as well as how to deal with interested people in areas where meetups aren't currently happening.

I'm wondering if we should do some sort of survey asking past and potential wikimeet attendees questions like those at User:Mike Peel/Wikimeet survey. Thoughts/edits to that page would be very welcome! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:34, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

User:Mike Peel: I'm possibly more susceptible than most to "make it nationwide", as my work tends to take me all over the place. RexxS and HJ Mitchell would probably be better place to say how many people go to events outside their local areas, since they seem to know everyone involved in Misplaced Pages.

I would think that at a minimum, it would be worth circulating the big regular ones (London, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds) to all parties, even if you don't circulate all the more minor short-notice ones. With the possible exception of Oxford and Cambridge, most people in Great Britain are going to visit at least one of those six places occasionally regardless of where they live, and I can easily see people tweaking their itineraries to attend events if they have enough notice that they're taking place. I would guess that, once a regular mailing was up and running, the more ad-hoc meetings would start to see the advantage in arranging and publicising themselves in advance. (The current arrangement, where people publish a sign-up sheet and cancel if they don't get enough signatures, is woefully inadequate.)

I don't think outing people's location is a legitimate concern, provided you stick to published lists of attendees at previous meetings or membership of projects. Both are already public information, and neither actually discloses anyone's location (as evidenced by the fact that you've just included me in a North of England mailing even though I live squarely in the southeast). A GB-wide mailing list (GB, not UK; I would assume NI users would be more likely to be interested in events in RoI than in the mainland) would surely address any residual outing concerns anyway as it wouldn't distinguish between a subscriber on the Isle of Wight or the Isle of Lewis.

My comments on your proposed survey questions are:

1. Which city are you based in?

   Probably not necessary to ask to this level, as some people might not feel comfortable disclosing this level of information particularly if they live in smaller towns. How about using the nine standard regions (right) for England, North/South for Wales, and Glasgow/Edinburgh/Other for Scotland? That will give you almost as accurate a picture of how people are distributed, without raising privacy concerns.

2. How far would you travel to attend a wikimeet?

   This needs to be asked, obviously, but the answers will probably be incoherent. It would probably make more sense to treat it in terms of time and expense, rather than distance. (In much of the London periphery, it's literally quicker to get to Europe than to the other side of London; Greater Manchester and Merseyside border each other, but psychologically and logistically may as well be in different time zones, and so on.)

3. How would you like to be notified about future wikimeets?

   Makes sense, although I'd probably leave out Twitter, since that's not only inviting the recipient but every weirdo who happens to be subscribing to the Twitter feed.

4. How far in advance would you need to be notified about a future wikimeet?

   I'd reword this to "prefer". Nobody needs to be notified—it's not like someone will die if they don't get to see Ironholds give a powerpoint presentation on the progress of Visual Editor. I'm not even sure it needs to be asked at all—surely it's always going to be preferable to have as much advance notice as possible, so those who want to go don't make alternative plans for the day and those coming from further afield can get their train tickets at cheap advance rates.

5. Would you prefer to receive notifications about wikimeets

   Yes, good question

6. Would you be willing to organise a wikimeet in your city?

   Throw in a "if yes, would you need any assistance setting it up?"

7. Would you prefer meetups in a pub or cafe?

   Sensible question, "pub" seems to have become the default and I'm sure it puts some people off

8. Would you be willing to abide by Wikimedia UK's Friendly space policy]?

   I wouldn't be willing to sign up to that as currently worded, let alone would I encourage anyone else to. I certainly have no intention of giving a blanket promise always to "show friendliness and courtesy to volunteers and staff", given the distinct lack of friendliness and courtesy shown by certain volunteers and staff (and founders) in the past. Deliberate intimidation, stalking, unwelcome following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention, as well as all the stuff about discrimination, is already covered by criminal law so forcing people to explicitly pledge it comes across as a monumental assumption of bad faith (I'll guess someone at WMUK has just cut-and-pasted this from an American document, where such things do need to be spelled out given the different legal framework regarding discrimination and anti-social behaviour), while such things as sexual or distressing images in public spaces is far too vague, since it effectively means "anything which anyone, anywhere could potentially find offensive". I've just written The Sirens and Ulysses which is liberally illustrated with images of naked women, naked men in a bondage pose, and a heap of rotting cadavers—under this policy, I wouldn't be able to show it to someone if they asked me what I'd been doing recently. (Two days ago the main page had an image of a dead body being recovered from a collapsed building, which surely qualifies as a potentially distressing image.) And do I really need to point out the ridiculousness of banning "discrimination on grounds of age" for an event held in a pub, where the publican is not only permitted but legally obliged to discriminate against unaccompanied minors? This whole thing just seems like a fancy way of saying "the management reserves the right to refuse admission" and "troublemakers will be ejected", couched in inappropriate US-style pseudolegalese. – iridescent 18:57, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks again! I'm also inclined towards thinking on a nationwide basis, and I've attended wikimedia events from Portsmouth to Edinburgh. ;-) The minimum list sounds sensible. Your response about outing locations puts my mind to ease about the problem. :-) On the survey questions, (1) is a very good suggestion, (2) I'm not so sure about how easy it is to take "time" and "expense" into account when considering locations, but distance is a much easier metric to take into account (also, I cross the Greater Manchester and Merseyside border quite often!). (3) I'm inclined to expand the list rather than remove items, (4) I agree, (6) sounds sensible. On the friendly space policy: yes, it was originally a US-written document, but it was rather more considered than just a copy-paste (see the history of the page). You raise good points against it, which mean that it should probably be reworked. However, I don't think it's assuming bad faith; rather it's setting out expectations (in the same way that Misplaced Pages's MOS supports many standard guidelines without assuming bad faith). I'll continue working on the draft survey, as this does seem like something worth doing before trying to do nation-wide wikimeet notices. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:27, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Oh, I know it's not possible to take time and expense into consideration, or expect people to quantify it—it was more a general observation that "geographical proximity" doesn't psychologically mean "close", even when you disregard the peculiar quirks of British geography. (Ilfracombe and Swansea are less than 30 miles apart, but are a 170 mile drive; the train from London to Weymouth takes roughly twice as long as the train from London to Lille; to get from one side of one of the big urban areas to the other can literally take hours.) Huddersfield is one stop out of Manchester on the train but may as well be a different planet as far as the locals are concerned, while well under half of the population of North London will cross the Thames in any given month. (RS for that particular claim.)

On "friendly spaces", without knowing a great deal of the back-story here I can see why it was considered necessary in the US, where the culture of "free speech" and "free movement" is much stronger than it is elsewhere. In the UK context, it just looks like an attempt to codify "Don't be a dick" into Bradspeak—virtually everything in it is already covered by UK law regarding anti-social behaviour and discrimination so doesn't need to be written out, while per my previous comment the "sexual or distressing images" clause is a weapon that could be turned on virtually anyone. (Your own userpage has a photograph of a human corpse on it.) If they seek to participate for reasons other than the advancement of our charitable objectives, then the Chief Executive should recommend to the Board that that individual be excluded from all Wikimedia UK activities is also a very weird clause. I'm sure many editors have little interest in "promoting and supporting the widest possible public access to, use of and contribution to Open Content of an encyclopaedic or educational nature or of similar utility to the general public" (WMUK's charitable objective)—most editors on Misplaced Pages are here because they have an interest in a few specific topics, and couldn't care less about encouraging wider public access to open content as a whole. By a literal reading of this, if I turn up to the Oxford meetup because I'm interested in meeting Redrose64 in the flesh, WMUK not only has the right but the obligation to kick me out. The whole policy could be replaced with "We reserve the right to eject or refuse admittance to people whose conduct we consider inappropriate" and nothing of value would be lost.

Add one more question to the survey: "What would be the most convenient time for you?". Sunday at 1pm seems to have became a default time, but that appears to be something people have drifted into rather than the result of discussion. There are plenty of potential reasons the Sunday afternoon slot might be putting people off attending: the generally poorer transport links on Sundays discouraging people from coming into town; religious reasons; clashes with sporting events; the likelihood that students (who make up a significant part of Misplaced Pages's editor base) have weekend jobs; childcare issues. If the occasional meetup were held on a weekday evening rather than weekend daytime, it might attract a completely different crowd and broaden the participant base from the usual CAMRA types. (Of course, it might be an abject failure and there are arguments against it—the most obvious ones that spring to mind are that it would make it harder for people who travel in from further afield to get home afterwards, and that the venues are more likely to be crowded—but I think it would be an experiment worth trying.)

Oh, add another question as well—"Is there anything in particular you'd like to see at events?". There are all sorts of things that might help broaden the meetings away from the core "group of people discussing template markup and kvetching about admins", ranging from special guests ("Your chance to meet Jimmy Wales!") to more formal workshops and debates (if you could get NYB and Malleus mic'd up and on a stage together, you could probably get people to pay to listen), to help sessions ("Your chance to ask questions without having the fact you didn't know the answer preserved as part of the public record and held against you for the next three years!). Publicising "wiki-celebrity will be here, here's your chance to meet them!") has historically been something WMUK has done very poorly—Sue Gardner's attendance at a 2010 London meeting to offer her thoughts on the state of the WMF was probably something a lot of people would have been interested in attending, but "Sue Gardner will give a talk with slides" sounded about as appealing as being stuck in a lift with Theresa May. – iridescent 17:23, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Composition of the GGTF

@Mike Peel: Two more, both of which should probably only be used if the survey is fully anonymised:

• Do you feel the organisers of Misplaced Pages meetups and events should be making more of an effort to make them welcoming to women? If so, do you have any suggestions?
• What is your ethnicity? (checklist for ethnicity questionnaires for UK organisations). Do you feel the organisers of Misplaced Pages meetups and events should be making more of an effort to make them welcoming to members of minority ethnic groups? If so, do you have any suggestions?

I know "Gender gap" is Jimmy Wales's current hobby horse, but it would be worth quantifying whether people in this country actually feel there's an issue, and if so whether it's an issue worth directing resources towards and whether it's an issue that affects their participation in events. Per a comment I made last month here, I think much of the whole "gender gap" drive is an artefact of current US debates around identity politics and has very little relevance to en-wiki editors in the UK, Australia and Europe where those particular battles were fought to a stalemate by Blair and his imitators, and where ethnic diversity, rich/poor polarisation, a focus on city-dwellers at the expense of the countryside and the digital divide are likely to be of more pressing concern today.

(Statistic which those who profess themselves so concerned with "systemic bias" might do well to ponder: the Gender Gap Task Force membership list as of today breaks down as Australia 3, Canada 5, India 2, New Zealand 2, UK 6, USA 46, others 1, unknown 5. Even in the unlikely event that all the "unknown"s are from elsewhere, ⁄₄ of GGTF participants are in North America.)

IMO if WMUF has a gap that causes concern, it's not gender but ethnicity—the participants in an event in The Most Ethnically Diverse City In The World™ shouldn't look like this unless the event in question involves Nigel Farage. (Per the #More cemeteries thread above, the UK has a huge Polish population but I'm not sure I've ever seen a Polish UK-based Misplaced Pages editor other than Daria, whose mainspace contributions can be counted on one hand. Popping over to pl-wiki, clicking Losuj artykuł a few times, and looking at the interwiki links to see how many of the topics have no corresponding article on en-wikipedia is striking.) And the coverage of topics of interest to the black and Asian communities in Britain makes our coverage of Poland look positively outstanding—if a cathedral article were as dismal as Manchester Central Mosque, Birmingham Central Mosque or London Central Mosque (or an equivalent Christian category as non-existent as Category:Hindu temples in Greater Manchester) there would be outcry. – iridescent 15:31, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Actually, Marek immediately to the left of Sue in the 2010 pic is very Polish (UK-born). I'd better not link to his user name. Maybe you should come to more meetups! Johnbod (talk) 16:14, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Huh, you live and learn. Still a singular lack of non-white faces, though. I do (very) occasionally attend, or at least poke my head into, Misplaced Pages meetups, albeit never the London ones. – iridescent 15:50, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

DYK

• I decided to take your DYK, Victorian painting - it is on the urgent list. I am about giving it the green tic. I would like to discuss only some minor things with you. May I ask if there was any reason to avoid the word classicism and neoclassicism in the lead? Hafspajen (talk) 18:44, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

• In the specific context of British painting in the Victorian era, I'm not sure it really makes much sense to speak of classicism/neoclassicism. The Royal Academy traditionalists didn't by-and-large see themselves as upholding the traditions of Greece and Rome, they saw themselves as building on the Italian tradition; neoclassicism in Britain was effectively an architectural trend. In this context, "classical" refers to the trend in the late 19th-century (epitomised by Edward Burne-Jones and Frederic Leighton) of pretending the last 200 years hadn't happened and painting stylised pastoral scenes; using it in the lead to mean something different would, in my opinion, just confuse readers. – iridescent 15:01, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Pet wikipeeves

Starting a new section here simply so my reply doesn't get lost, as the page has moved on since the other day. (I'm pleased to see it, and you, so active here again.)

Thank you for the background and history of the article-rating system, which you are right helps explain why it evolved the way it did.

I agree that "we do it this way because we always did it this way" is a poor reason to do anything. At the same time, we can't be in a state of perpetually reevaluating everything we do, because that leads to a state of too much discussion and not enough action on anything, to say nothing of the distraction from mainspace. And all experienced editors have probably come to the conclusion that "perennial proposals" will never be implemented. But once in awhile, suddenly, consensus changes and proves us wrong about that. (Not that it was a huge change, but the implementation of inactivity rules for administrators, after several years of agreement that there shouldn't be any, is an example that comes to mind.)

I happen to generally approve of the structure of the main page, but again, that might just be out of force of habit or what I am used to, as opposed to thinking that it is what we would design if a group of editors were given the blank page and asked to redesign it. One discussion forum that I've been participating in on-and-off lately is WP:ITN/C, which selects blurbs for the "in the news" feature and the accompanying "recent deaths" (RD) line. Speaking of my pet peeves ... There is a strong view frequently expressed there that no one's death should be posted to RD unless there are abundant inline citations in every section the person's article. The stated rationale for the rule is that the main page is for "our best work" and any article without lots of specific references can't qualify as that. The operational value of enforcing this view is that it can motivate people who want the RD posted to spend the time improving the article and adding references, before attention shifts elsewhere. On the other hand, the downside is that highly notable RDs sometimes don't get posted due to disagreements about article quality, because some or other section is unreferenced, even though the article quality is perfectly reasonable and is well above average for Misplaced Pages articles as a whole. (I am not talking about unreferenced negative or controversial statements; sometimes it's a list of film credits or the like.) When I urge that such an article get posted before the recent death is no longer "recent," I find myself accused of losing site of the project's goals and seeking to reduce the quality of the encyclopedia. Feh.

Another example I have wondered about literally for years, but hesitate to raise even now, is featured article review (FAR) and featured article removal (FARC). This is a process I haven't yet participated in (I still need to get my FA done, or for that matter started; pfui on me for stalling on article-writing by spending my time writing this sort of thing), and have participated in very occasionally if at all, and I certainly don't mean to be critical in the least of the people who organize the FAR process and participate in FAR. But ... is this a process that serves a purpose that justifies the time spent on it? I can understand reassessing if an article that was promoted to FA long ago hasn't yet been mainpaged. But, let's suppose an article was promoted to FA in 2006 and ran on the mainpage in 2007 (those were the dates for the article that's at the top of the FAR page as I type this). What is the value in asking in 2015 whether the article still meets the FA criteria or not? If the effect is typically that editors move in and further enhance or renew the quality of the article, great! But is that what usually happens?—does this process indeed motivate article improvements, or does it merely distract attention from the next round of articles? (I put to one side the fact that an improvement often demanded is more inline citations, which to my taste threaten to turn articles into footnote salad.)

Or am I asking the wrong question, and undermining one of the few quality control mechanisms we have, when what we need is more of them rather than fewer? We definitely need more quality control. I noted in this book review I wrote last summer that we have a dozen dedicated noticeboards, for everything from copyright problems to sourcing issues to edit-warring ... but we don't have a space (beyond individual article talkpages that may be drastically underwatched) to raise concerns about whether the article content is right or wrong....

I suppose the Village Pump is the place where proposals for changes in how we operate are logically posted—but the discussion there is often diffuse. I wonder if there should be a method of selecting one particular aspect or feature of the project at a time and convening a community discussion for, say, a month about how to improve that aspect? Someone would have to show some leadership in selecting the discussion topic, and since the project is in some ways intentionally leaderless, I don't know if that is practicable.

Thoughts? This has been unusually meandering even for me, so take from it what you will. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:03, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Sure, permanent revolution is almost as bad as stagnation, but it's still better than the current Misplaced Pages model of punctuated equilibrium, where the main driver of change seems to be the personal whims of a half-dozen people in San Francisco, at least some of whom give the distinct impression not just of being eccentric but of being outright insane, and where when change does come it's handled so badly that it makes things even worse. At the highest levels, Misplaced Pages has too many true-believers in the Agile Manifesto, which to the rest of the world is a fringe management cult that never really caught on outside its California heartland but to the clique at the heart of the WMF is a design for life which the peasants of the editor base are too uncouth to appreciate.

I can completely understand the argument for demanding perfect sourcing on anything in "In The News". The purpose of that section is, theoretically, to show that Misplaced Pages covers recent events as well as traditional news sources; it doesn't do anyone any good to have articles full of speculation. If I had my way, that section would be gone. To every normal reader, it doesn't say "showcase to highlight the fact Misplaced Pages covers a range of news", it says "news ticker that tends to be three days out of date and have a strange obsession with US sports". (Pick any ten non-US people and ask if "the NCAA Men's Championship (MOP Tyus Jones pictured)", currently on the main page, makes the slightest sense to them.) To me, In The News pretty much by definition highlights the articles which are new, incomplete and prone to edit warring—I don't get why anyone would want that to be Misplaced Pages's public face. Misplaced Pages does have some areas where it excels, but ITN and DYK are pretty much waving a big flag saying "look how bad we are!" and "look how boring we are!" respectively.

I never had very much involvement with FAR, so can't really comment. I can certainly see the argument for delisting—there's a bold link on the main page saying these articles are "the best articles Misplaced Pages has to offer", which you don't want to be listing Kitsch, Kammerlader, Imagery of nude celebrities and other fine members of WP:FFA. Someone like Eric Corbett,Bencherlite or Nikkimaria could probably explain the thinking better. I think you may be crediting FAR with more influence than it really has—the number of successful delistings is very low (there have only been 1069 FAs delisted in Misplaced Pages's entire history, and that includes crap from WP:Brilliant Prose days like this). It's necessary, though—if FA status were for-life, all that would happen is that the assessment process would become impossibly difficult for anything other than the blandest and most non-controversial thing to pass. (See also: WP:RFA, WP:RFB, Work with us.)

I'm not sure how much use internal discussions, no matter how focussed, are going to be. The nature of Misplaced Pages is that any discussion will result in "no consensus". To push changes through you'd need a mini-committee with the authority to issue binding RFC closures (either a standing committee or recruited jury-style case by case), which would probably be too much of a step towards GovCom for anyone to accept. – iridescent 16:52, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

I've been thinking about this for the past couple of days, and I think I have an idea. Not necessarily a good idea, but an idea, anyway. I'm offline this weekend, but will try to hone it in my head, and write it up for discussion on-wiki Monday or Tuesday. Who knows, maybe it'll help. Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:25, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

(Quick driveby "and another thing"), I have to take issue with "an improvement often demanded is more inline citations, which to my taste threaten to turn articles into footnote salad". Since one thing everyone involved with Misplaced Pages, from Jimmy Wales to Thekohser, would concur with is "Misplaced Pages should not be treated as a reliable source in its own right", those inline footnotes are essential for people using Misplaced Pages to find out exactly where the information has come from and to be able to verify it for themselves. If I had my way, "a citation for every fact, immediately after the fact in question" wouldn't just be permitted, it would be compulsory. A correctly-written Misplaced Pages article is essentially a directory of sources on the topic, rearranged into narrative form. – iridescent 07:01, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

That's not a bad characterisation of a decently written Misplaced Pages article. Eric Corbett 16:15, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

......which is why I tell folks with some expertise on a subject to skip to the bottom and peruse the refs instead. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:23, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Regarding "footnote salad": just before I effectively stopped doing article work, I commissioned this template: Template:Ref supports2. You wrap it around the inline citation <ref>Blah blah</ref> or <ref name=Blah blah/> or whatever, so when the reader hovers their mouse pointer over the footnote marker the text supported by the source appears in a "popup".

If you have a sentence whose various parts are supported by different sources, you can cluster all the footnote markers at the end of the sentence but still be clear about what is supported by which source. (See footnote markers 14 and 15 here). You could use this to cluster all the footnote markers at the end of a paragraph, reducing the "salad" effect while still unambiguously associating the text with its source, like here.

I've enabled "previews" or something in my preferences so a big preview box obscures this function for me, but it works well for 99% of typical readers who haven't customised their settings; and it doesn't help those using text-to-voice. Log out if you want to see what the typical reader sees.

This isn't the final solution, obviously, but something like this that highlights (rather than pops up) the cited text and workes somehow for the sight-imapired should be available. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 22:08, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

That approach may work in some cases, but is it not simpler to take the approach of using footnotes (more properly endnotes, as seen in some books) to explain what sources have been used for parts of a particular passage? And then to put the references on the endnote. That way you have just one thing to click on the end of each passage. i.e. Bundling citations. Carcharoth (talk) 23:48, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

My solution gets the footnote markers out of the body of the paragraph into a cluster at the end, so improves (a bit) the footnote salad problem, and is a little more functional for the reader, but bundling reduces the string of footnote markers at the end to one, and so deals better with the footnote salad problem. My approach might be slightly simpler for the reader but I think both are as simple for the editor. It's probably horses for courses. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:54, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Would {{Ref supports2}} be able to handle the situation where multiple references support a single fact? This situation isn't wildly uncommon—Jan Bondeson, for instance, is a perfectly respectable medical historian. He's by far the most readily available source on the history of teratology, so I try to cite to him where possible as it makes it easier for readers to check for themselves. However, he also has something of a (well-deserved) reputation for sloppiness and inaccuracy and for passing off his own opinions as undisputed fact, so whenever I cite him for something contentious I try to cite something else to back up the claim, even though it leads to double-footnotes and Brad's dreaded footnote salad.

An obvious drawback I can see is the same problem I have with list-defined references, and even citation templates to some extent; that it makes the edit window absolutely incomprehensible to newcomers. A new editor, even one with no experience, can grasp "put the fact, then put <ref>, then put where you found it, then put </ref>", and even though they may not get the reference formatting correct they'll get the information in place in such a way that it's easy to clean up later, or to see exactly which source they've used and explain why it isn't appropriate to use.

Under the {{Ref supports2}} system, the edit window is frankly incomprehensible; a new editor wanting to amend this 16-word paragraph will be confronted with The tender twig of this plant is used as a toothbrush in south-east Africa and India.{{Ref supports2|<ref>Saurabh Rajvaidhya ''et al.'' (2012) ''International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research'' Vol 3(7) pp 1995-2005</ref>|"The tender twig of this plant is used as a toothbrush"}}{{Ref supports2|<ref>A Hooda, M Rathee, J Singh (2009) , ''The Internet Journal of Family Practice'' Vol 9(2)</ref>|"used as a toothbrush in south-east Africa and India"}} when they click "edit". To quote my comment to NYB on the article assessment scale a couple of sections up, "You've been here so long it probably seems natural, but stop and think how messed up that must look to every outside observer".

If I were a new editor confronted with that, my reaction would be "those people who say Misplaced Pages is a club of self-important nerds speaking an incomprehensible private language were right", and never try to edit again. The academics and professionals Misplaced Pages wants to attract aren't, in general, going to want to take the time to learn an arcane markup language which isn't used anywhere else; the Visual Editor project may have been an expensive fiasco thanks to the ineptness of Brandon Harris and the arrogance of James Forrester, but the WMF were correct to try to pursue it.

If I were making the decisions, I'd be pushing a system where one highlights a block of text in edit-mode, clicks "reference this", and fills in a pre-formatted popup citation template, with the references themselves being saved as subpages in a separate namespace so they aren't visible in edit mode unless one clicks "edit references". However, I am not the one making these decisions; that would be these fine characters, none of whom have ever shown any great degree of willingness to listen to anyone suggest things aren't perfect the way they are, unless said suggestion already happens to be their pet project. – iridescent 16:56, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like a reasonable idea, if only it weren't for the gender gap being the only issue of any importance this year. Eric Corbett 17:08, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Meh. Enough bigshots are "choosing to move on" from the WMF, that it's a reasonable bet that either (1) it's in desperate trouble and the rats are leaving the sinking ship; (2) Lila Tretikov is so unpleasant people are refusing to work with her; or (3) some kind of major change is afoot. The WMF is notoriously rolling in cash, and Lila Tretikov appears perfectly decent and competent, so the smart money would have to be on (3). If this half-baked notion is any indication of the direction they plan to take Misplaced Pages in I don't hold out much hope, but (to go back to my comment above about permanent revolution still being better than stasis) it's encouraging to see someone in charge who's willing to consider making major changes to Misplaced Pages's stagnant culture, even if I don't agree with the particular proposal. – iridescent 17:33, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Break: "core contributors"

A few days ago Lila announced a restructure of the WMF's engineering division.

"...I wanted to share more about the plans for the Community Tech team. The creation of this team is a direct response to community requests for more technical support. Their mission is to understand and support the technical needs of core contributors, including improved support for expert-­focused curation and moderation tools, bots, and other features. Their mandate is to work closely with you, and the Community Engagement department, to define their roadmap and deliverables. We are hiring for a leader for this team, as well as additional engineers. We will be looking within our communities to help. Until then, it will be incubated under Toby Negrin, with support from Community Engagement. ..."

(My bolding.) Gathered here on Iri's talk page are a few core contributors (I guess - what is a core contributor?) who could be working closely together with Toby and his successor to get them making things that actually improve editor efficiency and the reader experience. I hope the thoughtful people here do engage with the Community Tech team - when it becomes an actual thing. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:53, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

So what sorts of technical tools or features do y'all think "core contributors" need or would like? Iri? Anthonyhcole? Eric? Nikkimaria (talk) 17:46, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

"Core contributors" are an easier group to talk about than to identify. Is someone who doesn't contribute any significant writing, but spends a lot of time copyediting or fact-checking, a "core contributor"? How about someone who does a lot of work restoring images, but doesn't actually create anything original? How about the bot writers? How about myself, who has only written three articles in the past three years?

Top of my list would be a decent referencing system. The current situation is a mess of twelve years of fudges and compromises. I can say with certainty, as I've intentionally avoided articles affected by it, that the WP:CITEVAR policy in particular is actively damaging—if someone wrote a shitty three-sentence stub ten years ago on a topic, than even if I have the knowledge and time to write a full-length FA on the topic I'm literally forbidden from using anything other than whatever referencing system the user chose ten years ago. (On at least one occasion I've just ignored the previous referencing system and overwritten the article completely, but I'm well aware that invoking IAR in this way leaves one open to challenge and even sanctions should one of the previous editors have complained.) I would ideally have a single approved reference system, with an automatic right for any author to convert any existing articles using one of the previous deprecated systems into the new system without fear of challenge or reversion. Ideally, references would be invoked from a separate Ref: namespace, and only visible when "show references" is explicitly toggled, rather than cluttering the edit window. (Yes, I'm aware there are js scripts that mimic this, but the new editors aren't going to be aware of them, and any fix relying on js is always going to be a klunky compromise.) – iridescent 22:17, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I normally (except in medical articles) normally just add in my own usual non-template style for articles that are not well-developed. If people want to convert these, as some do, then fine. If it really is a stub that I'm going to more than double, say, then if no one has edited much recently I might redo it all in my style. I can't recall anyone objecting. Many articles have mixed styles, & some like standardizing them. It seems less of an issue than a few years ago. Johnbod (talk) 01:15, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Nikkimaria, I used to patrol Recent changes (medicine), and may do again some day. I'd like patrollers to be able to mark each entry on the recent changes feed as we check it with "Reviewed by Anthonyhcole", "Reviewed by Johnbod" or whatever, so it's obvious what has and hasn't been checked by someone with a grasp of MEDRS. Most changes do get checked, but some are missed. This feature would allow patrollers to catch the few that no one has looked at. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 10:24, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Another issue that occurs to me regarding {{Ref supports2}} is that it includes the text which is supported by the reference. Since, when you start approaching FA level, there shouldn't be any fact that doesn't have a reference, then at a minimum—assuming each statement supported by only a single reference—you've more than doubled the size of the article, since every sentence will be "text, {{Ref supports2}} template, reference, repetition of text". For something like Tourette syndrome, with a lengthy body text and many multiple citations, it would easily push the article size to around the 300,000 byte mark. – iridescent 17:42, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Yep, it's a wall o' wikitext back there, if you use {{Ref supports2}} for a whole article. As I said above, it's not the final solution - because of what it fills the text editor with, because it pops-up the supported text rather than simply highlighting the relevant article text, and because it doesn't work with text-to-voice. But it's useful in limited cases.--Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:29, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Break: FAR

Newyorkbrad, to answer a few of your FAR questions. But ... is this a process that serves a purpose that justifies the time spent on it? I can understand reassessing if an article that was promoted to FA long ago hasn't yet been mainpaged. But, let's suppose an article was promoted to FA in 2006 and ran on the mainpage in 2007 (those were the dates for the article that's at the top of the FAR page as I type this). What is the value in asking in 2015 whether the article still meets the FA criteria or not? If the effect is typically that editors move in and further enhance or renew the quality of the article, great! But is that what usually happens?—does this process indeed motivate article improvements, or does it merely distract attention from the next round of articles? (I put to one side the fact that an improvement often demanded is more inline citations, which to my taste threaten to turn articles into footnote salad.)

See:

1. The percentage of FAs that were restored to status when FAR was active at Misplaced Pages:Unreviewed featured articles#Stats

   Of the half, or 523, FAs that did not have inline citations when that requirement was added in 2005 because of the Siegenthaler controversy, one third were brought to standard. Many needed citations to conform with the new requirement, but many had other problems. (As probably the editor still working at FAR who has been there the longest and was the most active, I can't really agree with your statement that most of the work is in improving inline citations, although vetting uncited text is part of the work.) In the next batch (unreviewed list generated in 2008), that ratio has fallen to one in five (see Misplaced Pages:Unreviewed featured articles#Unreviewed stats and my discussion below of the cultural shift). But there are still significant "saves" and article improvement at FAR, and even those articles that are defeatured are typically improved by the process.

2. Chart of FAC/FAR numbers over time at User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox#FAC and FAR stats.

   To answer your questions accurately requires separating the period before 2010, when FAR was an active process, restoring a third of deficient FAs to standard, and after 2010, when FAR fell off the map. Before 2010, most of the editors who worked at FAR were also active at FAC, both writing FAs and reviewing at both ends of the process, and the processes worked hand-in-hand, assuring the integrity of the bronze star across the board. After 2010, FAR stopped processing basically, well, anything; the reviewers who spent so much time at both ends (FAC and FAR) mostly departed (for reasons many will recall), and there was a cultural shift away from the notion of maintaining the value of the bronze star across the board. Post-2010, FA has become a one-way process (once an FA, always an FA), where articles by an increasingly small group of nominators are promoted by an increasingly small group of reviewers, most of whom do not participate in FAR to help assure the overall quality of the entire FA pool. A culture of pride in the bronze star existed pre-2010; that has been replaced by a TFA culture.

   This one-way street has led, in turn, to a separate problem of extra review required when choosing Today's featured article for the mainpage, as there are so many deficient FAs "on the books". The TFA schedulers can no longer assume that an FA is mainpage ready. And where one person used to be able to pick and schedule all TFAs, we now need apparently three. Whether we assess at FAR, or assess via a separate effort that has sprung up to address the moribund FAR at User:Dweller/Featured Articles that haven't been on Main Page, resources are going into sorting out the deficient FAs anyway.

3. A rough estimate of the number of missing FA nominators at Misplaced Pages talk:Unreviewed featured articles/sandbox#Missing FA nominators_.3F.3F.

   Because of the cultural shift and the drop in FAR reviewing, FAR has fallen at least six years behind in processing relative to what it ran pre-2010. Add to that the number of FAs that are no longer watched by their original writers, and probably one-third to one-half of our current FAs are deficient. So, how can we choose from a pool of largely deficient FAs, and what the heck is an FA, anyway, if most of them are bad?

4. The longest FAs trend at Misplaced Pages talk:Unreviewed featured articles/sandbox#Summary of longest FAs.

   In examining only the longest FAs, several issues came to light, that hopefully will be looked into and be addressed once the worst of the bunch are identified and can come to FAR. If you review the section above that data, you'll see that my brief analysis there identified multiple BLPs a) whose original writer is gone and they aren't likely being watched, and that b) have doubled or tripled in size since they were last vetted in a review process. Potentially LOTS of really bad text in articles wearing the bronze star, including BLPs.

Is FAR worth the effort? Well, improvement does happen, regardless of outcome. And, if FA has become a one-way street, why are we still running FAs on the mainpage? Google hits are really where the action is now anyway, so shouldn't we be striving to assure quality across the board, for all readers, rather than focusing review on whichever FA is going to run TFA (that is, focus on overall improvement rather than one day's hits)? What about after TFA, and the third to half of FAs that are full of unvetted crap? Restoring FAR to a functioning process-- and hopefully restoring a culture that values the star across the board, not just as fodder for TFA-- will hopefully bring quality back up across more articles, and not just for those that run TFA. That was how the two processes worked historically-- it was a matter of pride in the bronze star and a desire to maintain quality across the board. Whether that culture can be restored is another question, but I'm game to try. If ongoing reassessment is not done, what is an FA, anyway? It has increasingly become something that three people pass. If we eliminate FAR, why not eliminate FAC as well ? The skill set is the same, and for FAC reviewers to take a moment each day to also check or pitch in on a FAR should not be a big deal.

HTH.

Iri, relative to autism and schizophrenia, Tourette syndrome is not densely cited at all ... have a look at that citation wrap issue at autism, for example!

And since you're on the topic of "Pet wikipeeves", one of mine is FA writers who only review FAs of their "friends", won't review anything else to help train up others and improve the overall pool, can't be bothered with FAR, don't care about the overall quality issue, only care about getting TFAs, and will never Oppose a FAC because <gasp>, then someone might oppose one of theirs! If we decide that FAR isn't necessary, let's do away with FAC as well. But please be assured, there was once as much pride associated with restoring an article to status at FAR as there was in getting one promoted at FAC; just ask the old-timers (oh, you can't ... with the exception of Ceoil, most of us who once worked there are mostly departed). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:11, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I can confirm Sandy's point that the number of things being nominated for main page appearances which need remedial work seems to have risen sharply. I'm not sure if the collapse of FAR is wholly to blame for this. Newyorkbrad mentions In The News somewhere in the morass above—a glance at Misplaced Pages:In the news/Candidates shows the exact same problem TFA sees, of people nominating things to appear on the main page which have glaring issues, and anyone who raises questions about problems being mobbed and abused. (The Rambling Man could probably give a better idea of the problems there.) I can see the exact same thing happening on T:TDYK as well, to an extent it never used to.

(Regarding not opposing at FAC, I'd put myself into that camp to some extent, although not out of concern that someone might oppose me in retaliation. If I see an issue with a particular article, I'll try to raise it on either the article talkpage or one of the authors's talkpages. I remember how daunting it was coming in to comment at an FAC which already has a huge amount of back-and-forth on the nomination page, and feel it makes sense to have as much of the discussion as possible away from FAC. Texas Revolution is a good example—my support at the FAC itself is only a couple of sentences long and looks like a drive-by, but it's off the back of an enormous "here is every single issue I can see with this article" thread at Karanacs's talkpage.)

I can't say for sure, but I'd say with a fairly high degree of confidence that this is all a direct consequence of the particular cultural shift Yngvadottir identified in relation to the collapse of New Pages Patrol—the departure/driving-off of a large proportion of the "old timers" over a relatively short period of time broke the institutional memory and triggered a major cultural change. The loss of so many experienced people so quickly also had quite a severe impact on Misplaced Pages's culture of mentorship. When you or I started, if you weren't sure of something you'd ask someone and most people were glad to help; now, the culture of helping still exists to some extent, but who is helping whom seems to create a subculture of tribal obligation. (I dare say NYB remembers how many Arbcom cases' "evidence" pages were an exercise in who could bring more people saying "this editor has helped me in the past so I'll support them" to the table.)

Per "why are we still running FAs on the mainpage?", I personally don't think we should. I stand by my comment a few sections up: I would love it if the WMF configured the Main Page to make every feature opt-in and cookie-controlled, meaning people (including the general public, not just logged-in users) interested in DYK, TFA, OTD etc could choose to keep seeing them, while people could perma-hide those parts they aren't interested in. Not only would it give fields not currently represented on the MP—random articles, featured sounds, country- or topic-specific FAs—a chance to prove their worth, it would also drive home how little most readers care about some of Misplaced Pages's Cherished Institutions™. I would give reasonable odds that given a free choice, more than 50% of readers would opt for a Google-style main page and choose to hide every element other than a searchbar, and more than 90% (probably more like 99%) would choose to hide In The News and On This Day. Because it holds such exalted status in Misplaced Pages's internal MMORPG, it's easy to lose sight of how little the outside world cares about the content of the main page. Taking 1955 MacArthur Airport United Airlines crash (not to single it out for any reason, but just because it's a recent TFA on a reasonably interesting topic), it got 18,742 page views on its day in the sun. On the same day, the main page got 17,081,542 page views, meaning the highest profile link on Misplaced Pages's main page had a click-through rate of roughly one reader in a thousand. It would also finally put a stop to the interminable discussions at Misplaced Pages:Main page redesign proposals which have been going on without result for eight years now. The overwhelming majority—as in, well over 99%—of visitors to the main page don't click a single one of the links on it and don't care what goes on the main page.

If the WMF really wanted to make Misplaced Pages's article assessment processes mean something, they'd have a chat with Google about having article quality ratings and maintenance templates affect PageView ranking, so (for instance) articles with the {{BLP unsourced}} template are hidden from search results, or only pages of at least GA status or higher can appear as the top Google hit. Sure, this would hugely incentivize gaming the system, but it would also hugely incentivize people to take maintenance and assessment tasks more seriously. Moonriddengirl, Ironholds, is there any obvious reason this wouldn't work? – iridescent 10:08, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Iri, your kind of FA reviewing (commentary on talk) was not and is not the problem of which I speak :) On the cultural issues, I guess I would sum it up as the star-collecting culture won. It's no longer about overall quality, rather more now about how many stars can an individual accumulate, with little concern for what it means to have a bronze star that was endorsed by only three editors and that is standing in a pool of perhaps 50% B-class articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:57, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't know. I know nothing about Google's page rating algorithms. If you want me to look into it, feel free to drop me a note at User talk:Mdennis (WMF), and I will see what I can find out. :) Any investigation would be preliminary and lightweight, of course, before consensus is developed, and we'd have to figure out whether Google has the capacity to handle articles from English Misplaced Pages differently than articles from other projects unless the consensus was movement wide. There are some projects that don't even have a GA process. But as Moonriddengirl (and having read precisely the last paragraph of this, since I seem to have been pinged on a specific question) I have to say I'm not so sure that having only pages of at least GA status appear as the top Google hit is the best service to our readers. Just because content is not our best doesn't mean it isn't the best information that's out there on a subject, and while some subjects it's critical to get it right, on others less-developed content can still be of service. For instance, I've worked on a fair number of articles related to obscure jazz albums that could not become GAs (or I feel sure shouldn't) because there really isn't enough sourced information to expand them into GA-worthy articles, but they're still the best overviews of those albums available on the web. (And I know this because I exhaustively researched some of these myself prior to the creation of the articles. :)) --Moonriddengirl 12:16, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

And conversely, just because something is our best, doesn't mean it is even good-- we have some really bad, even POV, FA content out there, and I have BLP concern ... Much more so than when there was a culture that valued the bronze star, and I can't even speak to what is GA these days, except for the GA reviews I know of that have been open for maybe half a year, with nothing happening. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:37, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Absolutely agreed with Sandy. For Featured status to be meaningful from a reader point of view, we'd need a lot more activity in terms of FAR and similar processes - I've seen some hair-curlingly bad FAs simply because they were passed a long time ago, meaning simultaneously that they were greenlit under more loosey-goosey rulesets and that they've had a lot of time in which to accrete crud. Like Maggie, I have no idea about Google's pagerank algorithm, but I don't think it's a workable response; we should be coming up with genuine positives of doing maintenance, rather than having any kind of incentivisation scheme that is centred on 'dangling potentially-bad content in front of the reader and hoping this terrifies contributors enough to make sure it's not potentially bad'. Ironholds (talk) 18:23, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm thinking more of persuading Google to omit articles we know are problematic. There are certain maintenance templates which can generally be assumed to mean a reader shouldn't trust an article ({{BLP unsourced}}, {{Medref}} and {{Hoax}} are all instant red flags; likewise a {{Disputed}} tag or {{Update}} tag which has been in place for more than a certain number of months). It does neither Misplaced Pages, Misplaced Pages's readers, the article subjects or Google's advertisers any good to have things like this at the top of Google's search results, and might also do something to limit the flood of spam and poorly-written gibberish once writers came to realise they were no longer going straight to the top of Google's search results. The thoughts regarding preferential treatment for "quality" articles was something of an afterthought; per my comments to Brad above, I think the article assessment scale is a vestige of a failed decade-old pet project of Jimmy Wales to create a print version of Misplaced Pages, and would happily abolish it. (Even GA/FA have outlived their usefulness—they're necessary in the current setup as they determine what qualifies for TFA and DYK, but I question whether that's really necessary. If the bronze stars were abolished tomorrow, TFA would work just fine as a group of people discussing whether any given article is high enough quality to appear on the main page, in exactly the way ITN operates now.) – iridescent 22:17, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

I couldn't disagree with moving away from the whole "vestige" aspect of assessment, including FAs, since FAs can no longer be said to represent a pool of "our best work", GAs represent little, and below that, few WikiProjects are even accurately assessing at all anyway. I don't think we'd miss much if we abolished the whole article assessment system, FA included. But neither can I agree that ITN or DYK "work" or that TFA could work either sans FAC/FAR as a means of showcasing whatever might replace the current process (I could see TFA continuing to have turf issues). Without FAR or FAC, we could lose the TFA space as well. I'd see Misplaced Pages moving in a direction of doing away with the main page as we know it ... I sure don't get my news from ITN, and don't want to see most of what DYK produces, and wouldn't want to see anything on a mainpage modeled after those two processes, or TFA trying to operate in the absence of FAR/FAC. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:34, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

You know my thoughts; I think www.wikipedia.org is a far better design than en.wikipedia.org, and that the overwhelming majority of readers don't want to see anything on the main page except a search bar—I would bet that if the WMF did one of their A–B tests, giving half of readers the current main page and half a Google-style blank screen, the majority would prefer the blank screen, rendering the whole concept of FA moot. (There is a precedent for deprecating a featuring process, as those who remember WP:Featured sound candidates can testify.) I can see TFA continuing in the absence of FAC, as some kind of combination of the original spirit behind DYK and the old Brilliant Prose Candidates; a group of people assessing whether the nominated articles are interesting enough to warrant appearing on the main page, and have no obvious issues. (Other sites with an equivalent to TFA—Britannica being the obvious one that springs to mind—must have some kind of similar "is this accurate enough that it won't embarrass us, and interesting enough that it won't bore readers?" process happening behind the scenes.)

That ITN and DYK work isn't in doubt, since they continue to produce a steady stream of ITNs and DYKs. Whether they work well, let alone whether the existing setups bear much resemblance to the actual motivation behind their creation or are of any benefit to readers, is very much open to question. (The Sirens and Ulysses was one of the most-read DYKs in February, with around 13,500 views. On the day it ran, the main page had 11,983,191 views, meaning 99.89% of visitors ignored it.) – iridescent 09:03, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Speaking as an eventualist, I would suggest that comments that FA has outlived its usefulness are focused on product rather than process. That is, the usefulness of FA as an ongoing process cannot and should not be measured by examining the overall quality of individual FAs left trailing in its wake, but rather on the relative difference that these ongoing processes exert upon the encyclopedia. To determine the value of FA itself, don't fall into a prescriptivist focus on the difference between WP:WIAFA and any given extant FA. Instead, think of FA and GA as ceaseless engines for relative improvement, and they come out with strongly positive value. Imagine FA and GA were abolished today; what engine would drive the process of would article improvement? Wikiprojects, to some degree, as a cluster of content domain editors.. a few other sources, too. It would continue, but in greatly reduced quantity, with less directed editor energy and with less explicit guidance. Everything is in process, and the process of positive change is what's important. This is a true eventualist outlook.• Arch♦Reader 12:04, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

That's only if you make the category mistake of assuming that "compliance to arbitrary guidelines" is synonymous with "quality". The GA and FA processes don't measure "quality", they measure whether the article complies with WIAGA and WIAFA which is a completely different matter. Victorian painting or Destruction of country houses in 20th-century Britain don't remotely meet WIAGA or WIAFA, but by any reasonable measure are of much higher quality than the FAs Wood Siding railway station or MissingNo.. – iridescent 12:18, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

You're explicitly looking at product rather than process, while the entire point of my comment was that the primary value of the entire ratings system (along with FA status as its tentpole social good, and the FAC subprocess as an added layer of goal-oriented interaction among editors and groups) is that it strongly encourages the process of article improvement. That is to say, FA/FAC/GA/GAC/PR/WikiProject A reviews etc. are not primarily guarantors of measurable article quality (though they often have that outcome); instead, they are social constructs that encourage interaction with the goal of article improvement. Articles are socially constructed, even in the context of one editor working alone (though that seems counter-intuitive, the sole contributor is generally working within boundaries that are determined by the larger discourse community). THe ratings system, FA/FARC/PR etc. provide several related things: venues for interaction defined by the goal of article improvement, a set of conventions for pursuing that goal, and various social goods (generally, the approval of peers) for motivation. Absent that system, we would have isolated WikiProjects and isolated editors pursuing the same goal, but with vastly reduced interaction, a sharply constricted audience for feedback/approval, a vastly reduced store of social goods that reward this behavior directed toward this goal, etc. I'm not saying that an awards-based system has no drawbacks; it can be gamed, and gaming does occur. But the relative availability of opportunities for gaming FAC/GAC/MilHIst A are far fewer than for other subprocesses, e.g., article ratings drives (where folks just use AWB and blindly steamroll a "B" status on any number of articles of any quality). This is seeing the entire article improvement sphere in the light of both social constructivism and

Etty

Nah, it was two &nbsp in sequence- I had to re-enter the thing to cure it. Didn't get it the first time. The Etty "Varnishing Day" thing came from that anecdote about Turner and Constable ("He has come here and fired a gun"). Do you know if Etty was "skied"? I have this fantasy that the RA were conflicted- they want the painting as near the ceiling as possible, but are worried about its size and weight. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 13:23, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

No worries, well done for spotting them.

Paintings were only skied when the Royal Academy was still on the Strand, and the RA had to cram the Summer Exhibition into the Great Room with its high ceiling. The 1837 Exhibition was held in the Trafalgar Square building, which was purpose-built as an exhibition space and had long corridors with lower ceilings (the present-day high vaulted ceilings weren't added until the 1880s), so the issue didn't arise. Something like The Sirens and Ulysses wouldn't have been skied in any case, even when the RA was still at Somerset House; a monumental grand style painting by a full Academician—especially someone like Etty who was touted as being the heir to Reynolds and Titian—being hung anywhere other than on the line would have been a major scandal. – iridescent 16:01, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for that! Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 05:46, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Victorian painting

On 14 April 2015, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Victorian painting, which you recently created or substantially expanded. The fact was ... that Victorian painting became so unpopular that Flaming June (pictured) was worth just £50 in 1963? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Victorian painting. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, live views, daily totals), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Thanks from me and the DYK project. Victuallers (talk) 16:16, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Well done! 6400 views on the day. Johnbod (talk) 10:50, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm vaguely surprised it's as low as that—that's less than half what Sirens got, on a much less mainstream topic. I believe the particular lesson to be learned here, regarding who is actually reading the Misplaced Pages main page, is "DYK illustrated with five breasts" beats "DYK illustrated with one breast". With this in mind it will be interesting to see what The Destroying Angel…, with its all-male breasts, gets. (There are a couple of female ones in the background, but at mainpage sizes they're not noticeable.) – iridescent 20:48, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

"Breast thoughts" definitely caught my attention. Eric Corbett 21:05, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

6.4K is pretty good, but boobs will beat bucks every time for DYK views. Johnbod (talk) 03:03, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Support that impression. While my typical topics, singers and hymns, get views in the three-digit range, one where I mentioned sex made it to the stats, the other not even, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:56, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

And fat northern blokes beat everything mentioned above combined at DYK.

I still take a certain pride in Daniel Lambert ranking higher on Misplaced Pages:Today's featured article/Most viewed than Elizabeth II on the day of the Jubilee, Michael Jackson on the anniversary of his death, Olympic Games on the day of the closing ceremony, and American Airlines Flight 11 on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. (Almost everything above Fat Daniel on that list was either on a current event or celebrity which would have had that kind of traffic level anyway, or got an external boost from Google Doodles or an incoming link on a major website.) – iridescent 16:41, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for reflecting

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:04, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. It rather belatedly occurs to me that although it's not a literal translation, in this context a better translation of Gerechtigkeit might be "integrity" or "decency". "Doing the right thing" has a slight whiff of "following instructions" about it. – iridescent 22:21, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Decency sounds good, but has also more than one meaning, no? Is there a better term for "doing the right thing", when it means "do something not correct, against the rules, if it is right in the situation" ("just", "decent")? I recently read here again: "Last decent person to leave needs to remember to lock the database." --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:15, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

"If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining reality, ignore it"? Personally I'd say "decency" is unambiguous in this context, since it's obvious that it doesn't refer to "not making lewd comments or dressing provocatively", but it maybe doesn't have enough impact. I completely understand the concept you're trying to describe—the opposite of "Befehl ist Befehl"—but it maybe doesn't translate so well into English other than as legal-sounding phrases like Lex iniusta non est lex. If you read through the myriad of translations of Proverbs 21:3, you'll see how many of the finest writers of all time have struggled to render "being ethical is more important than slavishly following instructions" into appropriately dignified-sounding English (choosing any two from "right", "just" and "judgment" seems to be the way to go). – iridescent 13:46, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

In one of the cases I think of, the crime/"abuse" was to protect an article. I can imagine worse. I may not mention the name of the article without giving a reason to cite me to arbitrary enforcement again. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:08, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

I added "decency" and "integrity" to the top of my talk, thank you ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:13, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

LDR

You mentioned LDR, and I had no idea what it stands for, - guessed from the context that you mean list-defined references? I had no idea of background and history but saw them and use them where I may (unless for more complicated articles where I want to quote different sections of one source), example pictured above. They simply make sense to me. Whenever I want to fix a ref in an unknown article (add a title to a bare url being the most frequent wish), I find it so much more helpful to find that thing where I expect it, under the label "References", than searching through the complete article. If I want to fix a date in a ref by some author, I find it so much more helpful to know where to look in an alpha-sorted list. If I want to change text in an article, I find it so much more helpful not to have to "read around" the longish refs. A newbie will probably edit the whole article anyway, - section editing is not the first thing they will see. If editing a section, you may find a named ref in one, while it is defined in another. - I had no idea that my view is a minority but don't mind ;) ---Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:03, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

You're not going to convince me on this one. Whatever marginal benefit they provide is overwhelmed by the downside of their acting as a de facto mechanism for enforcing article ownership by making articles effectively uneditable (explained in more detail here and here). Whether the new editor is editing an individual section or the entire article is immaterial—it's completely counterintuitive to expect even experienced editors, let alone newcomers, to know that on perhaps one article in ten thousand—which aren't marked in any way—they need to edit two separate and completely unrelated sections if they want to make a change, and are unable to remove a statement from the body text without generating alarming-looking red error messages. The LDR system wasn't the result of any community desire for such a process, it was a single developer unilaterally implementing it because he was "in the mood to patch something". I have always refused as a point of principle to touch any article in LDR format (if Merridew and his cronies want to make such a fundamental change, then as far as I'm concerned they've taken responsibility for that article and I'm washing my hands of it), and would encourage everyone else to do likewise. There's no legitimate reason to be using LDR; the only reason people use it is because it discourages other people from editing articles, which the "everything I've written is perfect and I don't want the peasants messing with it" brigade loves as it given them an official reason to revert any change they dislike as unreferenced, without having to waste their time providing an explanation to those less-experienced editors they consider beneath them. – iridescent 11:29, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

(General point—whenever you see someone on Misplaced Pages using an acronym and you're not sure what it means, you can always find out by typing WP: followed by the acronym into the search box, in this case WP:LDR.) – iridescent 11:36, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

You are not going to convince me on this one because the newbie editor can still add their ref the way they are used to, it will show in the proper position, and it's up to someone maintaining article consistency to format it to make life easier for people like me ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:43, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

No, that's not how it works. On an article in LDR format it is literally impossible for someone unfamiliar with the obscure, little-used and poorly-documented LDR system to remove a referenced statement from an article, now matter how untrue or inappropriate it is, without generating error messages, unless they're aware that they need to remove the reference from a completely different part of the page at the same time. (If a reference is defined in the references section but not invoked in the body text, readers will see a big red Cite error: A list-defined reference named "foo" is not used in the content error message—try it yourself.) There is no legitimate reason for (at most) one article in 10,000 to be using a completely different referencing system from the rest of Misplaced Pages, with which there's no reason for editors to be familiar.

I agree with you that "named references defined on first appearance" also causes a problem, and if I had my that would be deprecated also; the only reason I ever use that system is because AWB is set to force articles in which a reference is used twice into the "named ref defined on first appearance" format, picking unhelpful reference names like "ReferenceA", and long experience shows that the people who run AWB tend not to have the common sense to actually look at the articles they're "fixing" to see if the fix is actually an improvement; by defining the named references it at least makes it possible to give them sensible names. The referencing system on Misplaced Pages is a hopeless mess and really needs a complete rebuild from the ground up into a single format (probably a separate Ref: namespace), particularly given that once Visual Editor goes live referencing will become even messier than it already is. Per my comment to NYB above, You've been here so long it probably seems natural, but stop and think how messed up that must look to every outside observer, and there's no rational reason to keep doing it other than that understanding it gives some people a momentary buzz of "I understand this secret code". Unfortunately AFAIK the WMF have never shown any inclination to grasp that particular nettle. – iridescent 12:06, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Let me be the newbie editor seeing the red message: I would search for "Foo" and find it, and if I didn't I would simply leave the message in the ref section for the next person to fix, - it's not in the way of understanding the article. Sorry, I still fail to see a big problem here. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:18, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I tend to agree with you, Iri. I do use "named refs" but I try to make them understood - using things like "authorname#" where the number is the page number. I do not like sfn but that's because I like having the name of the work in the ref as well as the author and page number. LDR is complexity for complexities sake. It's entirely possible to do short references that don't clunk up the editing text without making them so entirely complex that new editors can't grasp it. Not only new editors, but anything that makes someone collaborating with an article more difficult should be depreciated. I feel the same about using things like the age templates or the fancy "hlist" crap in infoboxes or the circa template. Some of our technically inclined editors seem to not understand that simple is better..Ealdgyth - Talk 13:37, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I use LDR for simplicity's sake but said enough above. "sfn": YOU can define what's in the ref name (in {{tl|sfnref]] instead of "ref=harv"), and if you like the work there, define the work. I never studied these things, only observed, Kafka for example, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:10, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I think in principle, some of the same objections to LDR apply to the sfn system; in practice, that's probably mitigated in your scenario by the fact that works so referenced are usually cited multiple times throughout the article (so removing one won't create an error) and most articles has a mixture of sfn for works cited many times and <ref> tags for one-off sources (which can be copied by the hypothetical newbie). Having the refs off in their own namespace and some sort of semi-automated tool to look them up and add them without having to lard the article with templates would indeed be ideal; unfortunately, the WMF's current design philosophy seems to involve creating tools that make easy things easier and hard things harder.

I view this as a symptom of a larger problem, though: in the post-Seigenthaler (?) era, we've increasingly adapted this philosophy wherein the article itself is treated as a finished project, rather than a work in progress where imperfect contributions can be dumped and picked over. (Unless no one else is watching the article, in which case, do as you please.) There are perfectly good reasons for this, and I wouldn't want to go back on the progress that's been made in referencing, but I feel like we've never really developed an organized support structure for article development to replace what used to happen on the article itself. You can use a Talk page for virtually anything: compiling lists of references, drafting new sections, writing article outlines, etc., but in practice that's entirely dependent on the list of individual contributors. And it's much easier to just revert a subpar contribution than to drop it onto the talk page with appropriate commentary. To use a chemical analogy, we've reached a point in many articles where further improvements have a very high activation energy, and we should be thinking about what exactly makes those improvements hard, and how to catalyze them. Choess (talk) 15:23, 6 May 2015 (UTC)