Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:18, 18 July 2016

YouTube 'articles'

Was it really over a year ago since this talk page discussion? I was reminded of this when I came across this YouTube 'presentation' that looks like a spammy automated reuse (without any attribution that I can see) of Misplaced Pages articles (probably lots more like that). I don't frequent YouTube much, but is that relatively common? I remember some of the discussions around some reuses (some were correctly attributed, others were not). Misplaced Pages:Copyrights is confusing. Where is the place to mention this nowadays? Carcharoth (talk) 12:56, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

I think it's fairly common, given the thinly-veiled contempt the WMF displays towards editors nowadays; the original version of Qwiki had an automated process to "presentationify" every page on Misplaced Pages, before Yahoo bought it out and shut it down, while even on Misplaced Pages's much-vaunted official mobile site—which a dev will likely pop up shortly to explain is The Future Of Misplaced Pages and berate me for showing insufficient respect to—you'll search in vain for anything as prosaic as 'attribution to the authors'. The official process to report things like this is Misplaced Pages:Mirrors and forks#Non-compliance process, but I'm not sure the WMF still have the heart to pursue copyright violators any more, especially given that the strings of the WMF are firmly pulled by Google these days, for whom ripping off other peoples' work wholesale and passing it off as their own making use of the differential in licence arrangements between Misplaced Pages and Wikidata by encouraging people to mirror key elements of Misplaced Pages onto the CC0-licensed Wikidata to allow subsequent reuse without attribution is a fundamental part of the business model. If you care, Moonriddengirl will be able to advise if the WMF still takes things like this seriously and if so who to speak to. ‑ Iridescent 23:04, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

• Many moons ago, I started the article Three Wolf Moon. I was subsequently amused to find this used as the basis for episode 2 of The Things You Learn on Misplaced Pages – an Arthur Albert production on YouTube. I was quite impressed by the production quality of this and so feel flattered by the attention. I suppose the plan was to make money from the advertising on YouTube but it doesn't seem to have gone viral yet. The crowd at the London Wikimeet seemed to enjoy it yesterday though, when I showed it to them. Note that the Misplaced Pages page averages about 250 hits per day and so is still doing quite well compared to the YouTube version, which only averages about 5 hits/day. Andrew D. (talk) 16:47, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

• I do think it's a shame Qwiki lost their nerve with regards to their original model. I thought it was a fantastic idea—RexxS presumably recalls my prosletysing for its ability to convert a Wiki page into a spoken-word presentation without slavishly reading out the text word for word, or to create animated slides, with dots moving about maps and the like, all using software to extract the data from the article itself and a few key parameters like coordinates, without pissing about with Wikidata and the like—although I'll admit I never understood where they expected their revenue stream to come from. As you can see for yourself by heading over to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and ticking "Related Pages" and then flipping around a few random articles, for all Jimbo and pals' posturing about intelligent interpretation of embedded data, the WMF is still in the stone age when it comes to even the most simple data-centred work. ("Spoon: see also Maple syrup", "War: see also Germany", "Idiot": see also Friedrich Nietzsche", "Church: see also Liverpool" and my personal favourite, "Ugly: see also Kate Bush".)

  The popularity of Three Wolf Moon probably comes from it being on Misplaced Pages:Unusual articles, which generally drives a consistent fifty-or-so views per day to each article on it; if the article is interesting enough, this then gets magnified by orders of magnitude every so often whenever a celebrity stumbles across it and tweets a link. Of everything I've written, the most-viewed is consistently Tarrare, which gets well over half a million pageviews per year despite having virtually no incoming links (it's hard to get a field more niche than 18th-century French teratological case studies) owing to massive spikes whenever a celebrity or high profile blogger stumbles across it. (Incidentally, Three Wolf Moon and Tarrare give "see also J. R. R. Tolkien" and "see also Napoleon", respectively.) ‑ Iridescent 13:40, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

• I do remember it well, and I also thought it was a great idea. Was that really four years ago? It's easy to pull in content from Misplaced Pages articles and make a skin to display them in a nicer format; perhaps we should revive the idea? --RexxS (talk) 18:06, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

• Wikiwand does do this already, although I personally think their format is cluttered, confusing and almost unreadable. The problem in my view would be getting people to agree on what an advanced reskin which fundamentally changed how the articles are presented, as opposed to fiddling with fonts and image placement, should actually look like, given that (for better or for worse) most Misplaced Pages articles have been explicitly designed with viewing in Vector in mind, and that once Visual Editor becomes the default this will get even more pronounced. (While you're here, you may want to see if I'm unfairly maligning Wikidata and all who sail in her a few threads down.) ‑ Iridescent 18:14, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Hate videogames?!

I'm usually the type of nosy person who likes to dive into reasons why people have strong emotions for or against whatever, and I'm a huge fan of games. I'm probably missing tons of conversations you already had about this thing, but what is it about games ya don't like? If you were recommended a game based on what you disliked about games (such as it gave you vertigo or you didn't like the complex controls and the recommended game did not have them or something like that) would you try it? I'm just insanely curious about things that don't matter :P Sethyre (talk) 20:20, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Sethyre, just realised I never replied to this. I don't hate videogames; my comments regarding "my disdain for the topic" relates to the coverage of videogames on Misplaced Pages, rather than the topic per se. Misplaced Pages's videogame articles generally (with some honorable exceptions) tend to be drivel like this, and to combine an inappropriate level of detail with a jargon-filled vocabulary which is incomprehensible to non-insiders. I suspect it's largely due to the newness of the medium; the conventions for how to write for a general audience about books, films, paintings etc have been developed over decades (in the case of books and paintings, over centuries) and are widely understood, whereas most games journalism is in specialist magazines/websites aimed at aficionados, and thus those people who write on the topic tend to find it difficult to write for Misplaced Pages's general audience, where the target reader is "bright 14-year-old with no prior knowledge of the subject".

On the broader topic, my attitude towards games tends to echo that of Mel Croucher (whose autobiography ought to be required reading for anyone interested in the history of the industry, provided you can overlook the self-pity and self-promotion). I think the technical limitations of the gaming consoles of the 1990s-2000s stifled a lot of the creativity of the early Atari/Commodore/Sinclair days and pushed the industry off course into a rut of derivative shooting/jumping/running games for over a decade. While the industry is now starting to move away from this towards the genuine interactive experiences envisaged back in the early days of computing, the damage is done as to those outside the bubble, "video gaming" is synonymous with gratuitous violence and the over-use of primary colors so they quite reasonably feel "this has no relevance to me". That then creates a bunker mentality among the gamers themselves who feel (with reasonable cause) that something which is of great importance to them is being unfairly belittled by mainstream culture, and you end up with the kind of standoff and mutual hostility you see now. None of this is unique to videogames—the transition from "small group who see themselves as the cutting edge" to "accepted part of mainstream culture" has happened with every new art form in history. ‑ Iridescent 11:23, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

I have a tough time finding any reason to disagree with this. In fact it's pretty much spot on, moreso than I initially realized. I suppose the rut of games that we see now is comparible to how novels exploded in the fantasy sci-fi genre, trying to emulate JRR Tolkien, or how every movie needed to have that action movie star during the 80s. And with the description of the mainstream games, which are over the top to the extreme, I have to agree that I don't find it appealing to me. I'll take Banjo-Kazooie over Call of duty any day of the week. Sethyre (talk) 19:58, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

What I find striking is how little originality there tends to be; despite modern computer systems being literally millions of times more complex, I can think of very few games which aren't effectively prettier graphics and a larger game-world on top of a basic game structure dating back to the days of cassette tapes and 48kb-128kb memory. (I'm old enough to remember the first incarnation of Elite, which if you disregard the crude graphics is almost identical in both design, gameplay and complexity to all its spiritual successors like Eve Online and Wing Commander.) The aforementioned Mel Croucher autobiography has an amusing episode of him returning to the industry after a 25-year gap and Steam being unable to list Deus Ex Machina 2* as it didn't fit into any of their "war, sports, strategy, simulator, platform" pigeonholes. ‑ Iridescent 14:07, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

*a truly bizarre, intentionally incomprehensible and virtually unplayable game with an A-list voice cast ranging from Christopher Lee to Joaquim de Almeida—well worth buying for the Ian Dury soundtrack even if you only play it once.

TPS - I asked an acquaintance in the know about that Steam listing. Alledgedly the inside story is a bit different ;) And by 'in the know' I mean 'makes decisions about what goes on steam'. Functionally its different these days anyway, as they have moved to a more wikipedia-like category system where you can tag anything in completely made up categories. So if I want to search for 'Gothic noir match-3' genre I can. The rise in ease of self-publishing means all sorts of original stuff is on steam. Granted on a basic mechanic level you will not find anything new, but pen&paper & boardgames have that to blame, rather than previous videogames. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:06, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Probably, but Croucher's version of events (All we had to do was submit Deus Ex Machina 2 to a panel of mature, expert and savvy Steam assessors who would recognise the concept and the quality of our game and release it to an eager public. Unfortunately Steam changed the rules on August 31st and handed over decision-making to a bunch of bananas. Green bananas. Democracy is a very good thing, except when green bananas are enfranchised … Steam invited me to tick an appropriate box to categorise Deus Ex Machina 2, a product that could not be categorised when video gaming was in its infancy, let alone now. I was offered the choice of Casual, Platformer, Massively Multiplayer, Racing, Horror, Shooter, and similar formulaic pap. I toyed with the idea of ticking all the options, but I thought it best to be honest and accept the fact that no category fitted and the Steaming voters may not be wholly accepting of my game.) is more entertaining. FWIW the thing is on Steam now (I just looked)—the comments section on it reminds me of the reaction to the Sex Pistols circa 1977. ‑ Iridescent 14:43, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately he didn't really understand how to work (or game aha) the greenlight system. Greenlight was not about putting a product up there and letting random monkeys vote up your game - people who took that approach (and Croucher appears to have initially gone that route) often encountered the bananas approach. If you worked by growing your community fanbase, you would generally have enough to get *anything* greenlit. This of course infuriates more experienced developers because some really really terrible stuff gets greenlit while (subjectively) more 'worthy' products by less social media savvy devs languish. It was also a slap that if you were an established named developer (or in some cases, single party 'names') you could bypass the greenlight system completely. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:16, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I suspect he assumed that he'd get enough support from the retro-gaming community to give him instant acceptance; Automata does have genuine cult status in certain circles. (If you can rustle up a Spectrum emulator, iD is still one of the most peculiar games ever created, while iOS and Android ports of the 1985 version of Deus Ex Machina are decent sellers in app stores 30 years on and have aged surprisingly well.) In hindsight he should probably have marketed it to music and film fans and not treated it as a game at all—it's barely a game by any reasonable definition of the word, more of an interactive music video, and the presence of Jon Pertwee, Christopher Lee, Frankie Howerd et al would have created a decent buzz among people who normally wouldn't be seen dead near a videogame. ‑ Iridescent 15:43, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Frankie Howerd, really? Martinevans123 (talk) 16:01, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Really. He appeared mainly in the 1985 version; Croucher took a dislike to him, and largely edited him out of the 2015 version. You can pick up the soundtracks of both versions on iTunes or Amazon for a few bob if you're curious. ‑ Iridescent 16:17, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

How amazing. Perhaps his article needs attention. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:28, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

This is a (probably copyright violating, but I can't imagine they'd object to the free publicity) walkthrough of the whole 1985 version. There's an example of Howerd in action at 18:00 minutes exactly; Ian Dury's extraordinary turn as a singing sperm begins at 10:30. I would recommend playing the whole through start-to-finish (you don't have to watch it) as the soundtrack is genuinely astonishing, especially for its time. ‑ Iridescent 16:44, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Infobox & Wikidata

At VPP, CFCF raised the example of Gout where it works well/as it supposed to. I actually tested it and found it worked *exactly* how I feared it would. I posted my results there but I think it got lost in the mass of replies below the actual voting. Pasted with some additions here for your perusal.

"So what actually happens when I remove Field = Rheumatology by editing the Gout article in the template section on wikipedia - because I have left it (field) blank, the infobox pulls the 'Specialty' from Gout at wikidata and populates it accordingly. You can see from the switch (in the infobox) from Rheumatology (wikipedia) to rheumatology (wikidata). However Gout's specialty field at wikidata is sourced to wikipedia, and the wikipedia article does not actually state in the article that Gout is in the Rheumatology field. Except in the infobox. Which is unsourced (unreferenced). (it probably doesnt need to be as its a sky is blue issue - for doctors anyway). In this case not an issue, but it clearly demonstrates the problem with the process. On a BLP this would be madness."

(I just checked, and someone has added a reference on wikidata since I did my test, so it is at least sourced there now to somewhere other than back to wikipedia)

The problem I have currently, is that the above example actually deliberately violates Misplaced Pages's policies on sourcing and verifiability. By automation. If I hadnt known what I was doing in advance this is what happens when I find dodgy info in an infobox.

1. Click edit

2. Remove info from parameter.

3. Save and sip Tea.

Now here is what I would need to do with wikidata adding content.

1. Click edit.

2. Remove info.

3. See info is still in infobox after saving.

4. Click edit again and check info is not there.

5. Go to template page to try and work out what the hell is going on.

6. See template is pulling data from Wikidata, but no explanation as to why or how to fix/prevent it.

7. Go to wikidata and attempt to change/remove info.

8. Get reverted by wikidata gnome who says it 'isnt wikipedia'.

9. Get bored of arguing, go back to article, remove infobox.

10. Pour away tea and open the rum. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:24, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

{{{name}}}
{{{fullname}}}
{{{other name}}}
{{{native_name}}}
{{{caption}}}
{{{name}}}{{{map caption}}}
Coordinates: Unknown argument format
OS grid reference	{{{osgridref}}}
OS grid reference	{{{osgraw}}}
Location	{{{location}}}
Country	{{{country}}}
Denomination	{{{denomination}}}
Previous denomination	{{{previous denomination}}}
Tradition	{{{tradition}}}
Churchmanship	{{{churchmanship}}}
Membership	{{{membership}}}
Weekly attendance	{{{attendance}}}
Website	{{{website}}}
History
Former name(s)	{{{former names}}}
Authorising papal bull	{{{bull date}}}
Founded	{{{founded date}}}
Founder(s)	{{{founder}}}
Dedication	{{{dedication}}}
Dedicated	{{{dedicated date}}}
Earlier dedication	{{{earlydedication}}}
Other dedication	{{{otherdedication}}}
Consecrated	{{{consecrated date}}}
Cult(s) present	{{{cult}}}
Relics held	{{{relics}}}
Events	{{{events}}}
Past bishop(s)	{{{past bishop}}}
Associated people	{{{people}}}
Architecture
Status	{{{status}}}
Functional status	{{{functional status}}}
Heritage designation	{{{heritage designation}}}
Designated	{{{designated date}}}
Previous cathedrals	{{{previous cathedrals}}}
Architect(s)	{{{architect}}}
Architectural type	{{{architectural type}}}
Style	{{{style}}}
Years built	{{{years built}}}
Groundbreaking	{{{groundbreaking}}}
Completed	{{{completed date}}}
Construction cost	{{{construction cost}}}
Closed	{{{closed date}}}
Demolished	{{{demolished date}}}
Specifications
Capacity	{{{capacity}}}
Length	{{{length}}}
Nave length	{{{length nave}}}
Choir length	{{{length choir}}}
Width	{{{width}}}
Nave width	{{{width nave}}}
Width across transepts	{{{width transepts}}}
Height	{{{height}}}
Nave height	{{{height nave}}}
Choir height	{{{height choir}}}
Diameter	{{{diameter}}}
Other dimensions	{{{other dimensions}}}
Number of floors	{{{floor count}}}
Floor area	{{{floor area}}}
Number of domes	{{{dome quantity}}}
Dome height (outer)	{{{dome height outer}}}
Dome height (inner)	{{{dome height inner}}}
Dome diameter (outer)	{{{dome dia outer}}}
Dome diameter (inner)	{{{dome dia inner}}}
Number of towers	{{{tower quantity}}}
Tower height	{{{tower height}}}
Number of spires	{{{spire quantity}}}
Spire height	{{{spire height}}}
Materials	{{{materials}}}
Bells	{{{bells}}} ({{{bells hung}}})
Tenor bell weight	{{{bell weight}}}
Administration
Parish	{{{parish}}}
Deanery	{{{deanery}}}
Archdeaconry	{{{archdeaconry}}}
Episcopal area	{{{episcopalarea}}}
Archdiocese	{{{archdiocese}}}
Metropolis	{{{metropolis}}}
Diocese	{{{diocese}}} (since {{{diocese start}}})
Province	{{{province}}}
Presbytery	{{{presbytery}}}
Synod	{{{synod}}}
Circuit	{{{circuit}}}
District	{{{district}}}
Division	{{{division}}}
Subdivision	{{{subdivision}}}
Clergy
Archbishop	{{{archbishop}}}
Bishop(s)	{{{bishop}}}
Auxiliary Bishop(s)	{{{auxiliary bishop}}}
Abbot	{{{abbot}}}
Prior	{{{prior}}}
Subprior	{{{subprior}}}
Provost and rector	{{{provost-rector}}}
Exarch(s)	{{{exarch}}}
Provost	{{{provost}}}
Vice-provost	{{{viceprovost}}}
Rector	{{{rector}}}
Vicar(s)	{{{vicar}}}
Dean	{{{dean}}}
Subdean	{{{subdean}}}
Archpriest	{{{archpriest}}}
Precentor	{{{precentor}}}
Succentor	{{{succentor}}}
Chancellor	{{{chancellor}}}
Canon Chancellor	{{{canonchancellor}}}
Canon(s)	{{{canon}}}
Canon Pastor	{{{canonpastor}}}
Canon Missioner	{{{canonmissioner}}}
Canon Treasurer	{{{canontreasurer}}}
Prebendary	{{{prebendary}}}
Priest in charge	{{{priestincharge}}}
Priest(s)	{{{priest}}}
Assistant priest	{{{asstpriest}}}
Honorary priest(s)	{{{honpriest}}}
Curate(s)	{{{curate}}}
Asst Curate(s)	{{{asstcurate}}}
NSM(s)	{{{nonstipendiaryminister}}}
Minister(s)	{{{minister}}}
Assistant	{{{assistant}}}
Senior pastor(s)	{{{seniorpastor}}}
Pastor(s)	{{{pastor}}}
Chaplain(s)	{{{chaplain}}}
Archdeacon	{{{archdeacon}}}
Deacon(s)	{{{deacon}}}
Deaconess(es)	{{{deaconess}}}
Laity
Reader(s)	{{{reader}}}
Student intern	{{{student intern}}}
Organist/Director of music	{{{organistdom}}}
Director of music	{{{director}}}
Organist(s)	{{{organist}}}
Organ scholar	{{{organscholar}}}
Chapter clerk	{{{chapterclerk}}}
Lay member(s) of chapter	{{{laychapter}}}
Session clerk	{{{sessionclerk}}}
Treasurer	{{{treasurer}}}
Churchwarden(s)	{{{warden}}}
Verger	{{{verger}}}
Business manager	{{{businessmgr}}}
Liturgy coordinator	{{{liturgycoord}}}
Religious education coordinator	{{{reledu}}}
RCIA coordinator	{{{rcia}}}
Youth ministry coordinator	{{{youthmin}}}
Flower guild	{{{flowerguild}}}
Music group(s)	{{{musicgroup}}}
Parish administrator	{{{parishadmin}}}
Servers' guild	{{{serversguild}}}
]

break

I agree, which is why I support making importing from Wikidata opt-in only; Wikidata's information integrity is even worse than Misplaced Pages's, and there's no obvious way to see duff edits being made in Wikidata which filter through onto Misplaced Pages. (Even if you're willing to see your watchlist degenerate into incomprehensible gray goo, selecting "show Wikidata edits" just fills your watchlist with unhelpful comments like (A Wikidata item has been linked to this page.) which isn't any actual help; I do get the feeling the Wikidata people don't appreciate that their pet project is utterly incomprehensible to outsiders.)

Quite aside from the issues with Wikidata's dubious approach to referencing, there's also the bloat issue. There are some infoboxes like {{infobox protein}} which only have a limited number of fields and in which it's uncontroversial that all the fields should be populated if the data is available, and there certainly should be a means by which people can decide to activate automated importing in those cases. There are also a lot of infoboxes like {{infobox church}} which have an absolute bucketload of fields, most of which can very easily be sourced-and-referenced but which would make the infobox longer than most articles if they were filled in in full (see right).

User:Dank is the person you need to convince of this, as he's the one closing the RFC; on this page I can assure you that with a few exceptions, you're very much preaching to the converted if you're against the "Wikidata will solve every problem" cult. ‑ Iridescent 16:56, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

My gods, that's a monstrosity of an infobox! Ealdgyth - Talk 17:06, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

It's by no means alone. ‑ Iridescent 17:21, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Lumme - they're even worse than that monstrosity at Winston Churchill! (No-one has ever been able to explain the sense in adding "Preceded by" and "Succeeded by" for each and every cabinet position, which makes the whole thing an unwieldy mess!) - SchroCat (talk) 17:24, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Inspired by your comment, SchroCat, I have trimmed the Churchillian infobox, which still leaves it gargantuan. Kablammo (talk) 18:28, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

In some defence of {{infobox church}}, some of the fields are mutually exclusive (nothing which has the Churchmanship field completed is likely to hold any relics, for instance) and some of the fields like "demolished date" will obviously be blank in many cases, but it still doesn't explain why we'd ever need an entry in flowerguild = or organscholar =. Take it up with these people; I dare say you'll see a few names you recognise. ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

User:Only in death (great username btw), add anything you like to the RfC. I have no problem with long comments. The deadline on the RfC is in about 3.5 hrs. - Dank (push to talk) 17:30, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

By an odd coincidence, I'm about to start work on making a Wikidata-enabled version of {{Infobox church}}. The RfC is predicated on the wrong premise, of course. The real question is no longer about how the infobox designers should decide to pull data from Wikidata, but about how we can devolve the decision to editors at the article level. I'm currently trying a solution where each article with an infobox can implement a whitelist and a blacklist, so that the information is only fetched from Wikidata for whitelisted fields, but fields that are blacklisted are never displayed for that article. We'll see if editors are interested in taking control of those decisions for themselves. --RexxS (talk) 18:21, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

It's more that there are two different issues which have become entangled. "Is Wikidata reliable enough that en-wiki should consider importing data from it without manually checking each instance?" and "What is the best mechanism for importing data from it?". The two questions are hopelessly entangled—if one doesn't accept that Wikidata is accurate, that has a major impact on which mechanism ought to be used. (If one concedes that Wikidata is untrustworthy, then the default position pretty much has to be opt-in; this is a separate issue from "do we want every field autopopulated?".) Plus, of course, there's the way Wikidata sources information from other Wikipedias which may be in disagreement with this one—to pick a not-at-all-random example, if you flip through the various language versions of President of Brazil you'll see there's no agreement between the various languages about who holds this post, so how do we decide which is the correct version to use? ‑ Iridescent 18:34, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

The first question has to be answered affirmatively before we even start to think about the second. If data from Wikidata is less reliable than our present article, then we shouldn't be importing it. I understand the result of Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2 to mean that editors were content to import data from Wikidata within infoboxes, but you may be right that it's time to ask the question again. I've made a demo tool that allows anyone to see what data and references are available on Wikidata by pasting {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/WdRefs|seeRefs}} into any article and previewing it. That might help folks decide whether the Wikidata information is suitable for inclusion in the article.

As for President of Brazil, if we're thinking about importing data from Wikidata, then we don't have to worry about how other Wikipedias treat a subject. On Wikidata, President of Brazil (Q5176750) shows: officeholder (P1308) as Michel Temer (Q463533) (start date = 17 April 2016); and five others with different start and finish dates. If we want to use Dilma Rousseff in our article President of Brazil instead, then it's simple to supply her name in the infobox ourselves. A local value will always override anything from Wikidata - at least in any infobox that I've had anything to do with. That keeps the decision in the hands of the article editors, and that's how it should be IMHO. --RexxS (talk) 19:57, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Unreferenced statement added by a driveby IP; as I've pointed out on the RFC, even the man himself scrupulously avoids referring to himself as "President". When Sarah talks about the problem of Wikidata combining oversimplification of complex issues and a failure to check potentially problematic statements, this is a textbook example. ‑ Iridescent 20:07, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

I quite like the "(Tag: new editor changing statement)" auto-generated edit summary. It didn't take more than a few seconds to correct the Wikidata entry for President of Brazil (Q5176750), and one of the results of regularly importing data from Wikidata would be that we would have noticed any drive-by edit to Wikidata immediately, rather than months later. What Sarah hasn't got to grips with yet is that the type of problems potentially besetting her from Wikidata are identical to the problems she gets from Misplaced Pages editors. The only difference between "genre" being adding from Wikidata and being added by Misplaced Pages editors, is that it is trivial to stop it from Wikidata, and often difficult to revert stubborn Misplaced Pages editors. Wikidata doesn't edit-war with you. --RexxS (talk) 20:48, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Hmm. I think Temer is the president of Brazil right now (he holds the office, even if it is only on a temporary basis), and I can find plenty of reliable sources that will refer to him as the interim or acting president of Brazil, if not the president (without any qualifier). So why did you remove his name, or at least not fix what appears to have been broken? The reason there's not a lot of edit warring at Wikidata is that there aren't enough people working there to care. But there will be, and then we will have epic battles that will affect not just one project but dozens. Mark my word. Risker (talk) 20:58, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

The reason I reverted, Risker (nice to hear from you btw!), was that the drive-by IP had overwritten the entry for Dilma Rousseff, rather than adding an entry for Temer. I made no arguments about who should properly be referred to as President currently (although the official Brazillian government website shows this: http://www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov.br/presidencia if folks want to argue about it). I merely restored an entry that had been deleted out-of-process. If you - or anybody else - care to add an entry for Temer to President of Brazil (Q5176750), that's fine, but please don't remove other accurate entries in doing so. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 21:10, 14 June 2016 (UTC) Update: I've added Michel Temer (Q463533) along with the correct start date and a reference. All's well? --RexxS (talk) 21:21, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

On Brazil, I'd consider "Acting President" to effectively be a regency rather than a transfer of office, but I concede it's not something about which I care a great deal. On Wikidata, I'm more inclined to side with Risker on this one—at the moment Wikidata is calm because it's something of a backwater, but once it becomes widely known that changes there will affect multiple-language Wikipedias, it will become a venue for huge editwars in which the warring parties don't even speak the same language so are literally incapable of discussing the matter and coming to a consensus. Sure, one can make the entries appear on your Misplaced Pages watchlist, but if you're not in the know then both the summary and the diff itself for an edit like Created claim: Property:P2604: 170941; ‎Created claim: Property:P2605: 7385 (the most recent Wikidata edit on my watchlist) may as well be a string of random characters. Yes, I do appreciate that Misplaced Pages itself is subject to editwarring, but Misplaced Pages pages tend to be watched more often, and even when they're not then serious problems are much more likely to be spotted and fixed by random visitors. This edit remained live and unfixed on Wikidata for over two years despite being in the high-profile description / en spot which is automatically shown in search results and the mobile site. ‑ Iridescent 14:40, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, Risker seems to be admonishing me for removing Michel Temer, without understanding that I was actually fixing the problem that the IP had wiped out all trace of Dilma Rousseff from the record and nobody was showing as President of Brasil between 2011 and 2016. Surely you can't be on her side in thinking that's a good idea?

I don't think there's any disagreement that Wikidata has very few active editors to curate 18,000,000 items of data. The result is that vandalism is hard to spot and slow to be corrected. I suppose the question becomes "should we care?". The answer, IMHO, is "yes" mainly because of all the other small language Wikipedias that could potentially expand their coverage of many topics (or at least get a stub to start with), if only Wikidata could provide reasonably reliable data. At present, it's not an assumption we can make, sadly. The only way that I can see of improving that position is to engage the efforts of the editors of the largest Wikipedias to help watch over corresponding topics in Wikidata. I can't see that being a popular option, of course, because of the general parochialism of so many editors here. --RexxS (talk) 16:08, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Not at all; I agree with you that we shouldn't be overwriting Rousseff with Temer since the situation is complex and she's still theoretically the office holder. (Note my comments on the RFC.) Regarding Wikidata, I'm not sure you'll ever be able to persuade the editors of the big Wikipedias to take an active interest. Along with Commons it's acquired a reputation, rightly or wrongly, as having taken over from Wikiversity and Simple English Misplaced Pages as en-wiki's dumping ground for problematic editors; the only way you'll overcome the "why the hell should I want to get involved with that pack of weirdos?" factor is if, as with Commons, you can make Wikidata so essential to the functioning of the other projects that even people who strongly oppose its very existence have no real alternative but to engage with it. ‑ Iridescent 16:30, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

But that's only if you can overcome the flaws in its very existence. WD is founded as a suppository repository suppository of base gobbets of "information" that it disseminates. This only works when the world can be pigeon-holed into neat boxes. Unfortunately that means some of these factoids—in many cases the banalest droplets of data—are ripped from their context and therefore people's understanding.

It's an even bigger problem when third parties try and use the data, and do so poorly. For example, the Google boxes for both the actors John Barrymore and Bernard Lee both have definitive information about their birth where there is no such clarity in real life (Barrymore's dates are uncertain and there are two possible locations for Lee's place of birth), and the sources are split in their opinions. Not Google, based on their use of WD: they "know" which one it is, and have stripped out the real-life uncertainty. That's only one of the problems of a computerised fact-stripping: WD mistakes data for knowledge and facts for understanding, without ever understanding the difference. It is the triumph of factoids over understanding, and a horrible, horrible concept. – SchroCat (talk) 16:45, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata gives dates of birth for John Barrymore (Q95034) as 14 and 15 February 1882 (Gregorian), as does our article. It's not reasonable to blame a sister project for the misuse of its information by a third-party, even if that party is Google. The actual problem with Barrymore's entry in WD is that there is only one good reference supplied in the whole page, and what is needed is to supply references for all of the information there. John Barrymore is a Featured Article on en-wp, but only 1 in 10 of the different language Wikipedias have an article on him. I want my friends who work on the Welsh Misplaced Pages to have the tools to get started on adding all of those missing articles: if we could generate a set of key facts and a list of decent references, we'd be well on our way. If that information were available on Wikidata, I could do that for them, and I find it disappointing that more editors here don't share my passion for spreading our knowledge to other Wikipedias. --RexxS (talk) 19:40, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

And that's the problem right there. We can control what we put into articles and to some extent what goes into the abyss of WD. That's our responsibility and we manage it fairly well. With WD that responsibility is abrogated, which is something I'm not happy with. It's great to point the finger at the company that's largely funded WD, but if the a main funder of the project is using the data so poorly as to provide misleading information, it's something that leaves me extremely uncomfortable. You've raised the second major, major problem I have with WD, which is the utterly unsourced nature of what - 80, 90% of the information? (Are there any figures for the percentage of information that is unsourced in WD? And I don't mean that contains a dubious reference to Misplaced Pages, I mean an actual reference) And its proposed to fill in empty fields in IBs (or generate new articles) with these oceans of unsourced facts crap? You may be happy to fill shedloads of articles with unsourced nonsense rex, but it leaves me deeply concerned and reaching for the vandalism button to revert them all. – SchroCat (talk) 20:16, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

The signpost op-ed has some numbers. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:37, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Ouch.... And people think that it's sufficient to use that to generate non-existent articles, or to populate empty idiotbox fields? Please tell me that only the data that is supported by citations from external sources are to be used (unless common sense makes an unexpected but timely intervention and ensures this doesn't happen). Thanks OiD. – SchroCat (talk) 21:50, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

See my above testing with Gout (which thankfully now on Wikidata has a source that isnt Misplaced Pages). A wikidata enabled template just imports whatever fields are populated at Wikidata. (When the fields are removed here) To prevent a wikidata template from importing info from wikidata, you need to put the field in but leave it blank. As far as I am aware there is no way to tell a template here to only import wikidata if the info at wikidata is sourced to a third party. And even then it could be sourced to literally anything and it would still import it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:54, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

A wikidata enabled template just imports whatever fields are populated at Wikidata - a ridiculous generalisation that's like seeing an Appaloosa and claiming "all horses are spotted". Template:Infobox medical condition (new) does that because its users requested it to work that way. Template:Infobox book/Wikidata/Sandbox doesn't do that because the request was for an infobox that didn't autopopulate without the editor at the article specifically enabling it. Take any book article and preview {{Infobox book/Wikidata/Sandbox}} in it. Then come back here and try to tell me "A wikidata enabled template just imports whatever fields are populated at Wikidata ... To prevent a wikidata template from importing info from wikidata, you need to put the field in but leave it blank." --RexxS (talk) 22:54, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I will stick with using actual live examples rather than your sandbox thanks. Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:03, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

@SchroCat: Where do you get the disinformation about Google being the major funder of Wikidata? The first year grant was 50% from Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, 25% from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and 25% from Google. Since the first year, it's been funded by WMF. If you want to know what references are available in Wikidata for an article, preview {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/WdRefs|seeRefs}} in it. I made the tool for folks to check in the hope that some will be responsible enough to actually try to improve the referencing. I can see that narrow parochialism wins out every time. --RexxS (talk) 22:54, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

What a bloody farce it all is. We all sweat blood to get articles to the highest standards possible, including hours of endless research into topics. We endlessly debate the smallest changes in punctuation and minor word alterations to ensure the meanings of our texts are clear, and the source reviews we have check minute details to ensure that what we write is adequately covered in sources. Now some bright spark has thought it would be a "good idea" to drop referenced, unverified and probably incorrect bollocks into articles with no verification process? What an utter clusterfuck! If enforced idiotbox data population is the order of the day, it automatically downgrades every graded article we have back to zero, because unreferenced and unverified information in an article is the quickest way to FAR, FLRC and GAR. At least drive-by IP vandals can only cock up one article at a time, not the few million that WD vandalism will affect! – SchroCat (talk) 23:01, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

"narrow parochialism"? No, rex. It's about having standards and adhering to them. And just because some people don't bow down at your altar of WD, it's not a sign of narrow parochialism, just a different way of looking at something. – SchroCat (talk) 23:07, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

And yet the vast majority of the sourcing on Wikidata that you're whining about is imported from English Misplaced Pages. The very same pieces of information that you're so proud of when viewed on Misplaced Pages become "unverified and probably incorrect bollocks" when seen on Wikidata. So which is it? I have no great love of Wikidata, so you can cut the ad hominems. My interest is solely how we can leverage it to improve other Misplaced Pages projects, as well as this one. You really make my case about parochialism for me. --RexxS (talk) 23:12, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Break 2

Oh FFS, I'm guilty of "narrow parochialism", and having concerns about standards in Misplaced Pages is "whining", and yet I can cut the ad hominem comments? It comes as no surprise to see you revert to your usual 'style' once again rex. There is no "narrow parochialism" here, despite your oft-repeated PA: I'm not accusing foreign language wikis of providing dross which we here should guard against (you've erroneously leapt to that conclusion all on your own). I'm concerned about erroneous data from all wikis, including en, which we are going to rehash across the entire project and which is then repeated on third the party sites that don't even care about getting nuanced or confused details right, as long as they can shove some factoid in their 'one-size-fits-all' field. Try replying without the snide insults this time rex – they say much more about you than your targets. – SchroCat (talk) 05:46, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

OK, you're both talking past each other. Quick refocusing:

• SchroCat, RexxS makes a valid point that most of the unsourced data on Wikidata is actually sourced from somewhere and has just become detached from its source, and the issue is instilling a better culture of sourcing on Wikidata rather than jettisoning it altogether;
• RexxS (implicitly) makes an even more valid point that given that this is a WMF pet project, it's not going away so it's up to the individual Wikipedias to reach a modus vivendi with it, in the same way en-wiki has reached a grudging acceptance of Commons parking their tanks on the lawn. (It also occurs to me that it makes it considerably more difficult to set up a Misplaced Pages fork; whether you see that as a positive or a negative is up to you.);
• SchroCat also has a perfectly valid point; the intersection of "Assume good faith", "You can't copyright a fact" and "All language Wikipedias are equal" at Wikidata has unintentionally created a culture of poor sourcing in which the audit trails on sourcing and citation have become severely attenuated, and unlike Commons (or even the backwaters like Wikisource and Wikiquote) Wikidata doesn't have the culture of admins and gnomes to cope with the volume data they've absorbed, and it's not "parochialism" to point out that the big Wikipedias are likely to be better at spotting and fixing errors on-site than if they're exported elsewhere. (I'd add that, because of its radically different structure and steep learning curve, Wikidata doesn't even have the last-resort fallback which Wikivoyage, Wikispecies et al have, of being able to post begging letters at noticeboards on the big Wikipedias asking editors to temporarily move across to help clear up a backlog.)

All of this could do with some actual numbers. I'm not going to spend time writing up a grant application myself, but I could certainly make a case that it would be worthwhile if the WMF diverted a fraction of the funds they spend flying the party faithful to an annual knees-up, or producing site-wide banners inviting all-comers to suggest the best way to get rid of people to whom Jimbo's taken a dislike, on some actual figures for Wikidata's accuracy. I'd suggest a genuinely random sample of 10,000 Wikidata entries and 10,000 Misplaced Pages pages, and checking every claimed fact against reality. If the Wikidata model is working as its proponents claim, it should have an accuracy rate well above en-wiki's, and some actual data to that effect would go a long way towards silencing its critics. If Wikidata's accuracy comes out below en-wiki's, then per my comments somewhere near the top of this monster thread that's a powerful case for the "opt-in only" position. At the moment, from that RFC it's obvious there's a clear split between "Wikidata is unsalvageably bad" and "Wikidata is a miracle cure", and neither faction has much data to back their position up. ‑ Iridescent 13:45, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Also, pinging Jayen466 to this discussion given that he's the one responsible for popularising the "Wikidata is inherently unreliable" concept. ‑ Iridescent 13:55, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Iridescent, The problem is that "most of the unsourced data on Wikidata is actually sourced from somewhere" is way too vague to allow data dumping onto the various wikis. Don't forget many of the articles that could be infected by this data will be BLPs. We hold a high line to BLPs, and insist on sourcing even when we happen to 'know' that something is true. One of my utter bugbears is the addition of unsourced data onto any article, and it's second nature to me to insist on any addition to articles to be reliably sourced. WP:CIRCULAR is there for a very good reason ("Do not use articles from Misplaced Pages (whether this English Misplaced Pages or Wikipedias in other languages) as sources") and is another long step away from the accusations of parochialism - narrow or broad! - SchroCat (talk) 14:02, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Sure, but the information that's sourced to Misplaced Pages could presumably in every case be sourced to whatever source that Misplaced Pages used, and the issue is that whoever initially imported it to Wikidata couldn't be fagged, rather than that the source doesn't exist. "Sourced to Misplaced Pages" isn't something you ever want to hear in an ideal world, but it's not necessarily the Mark of Cain some of the Misplaced Pages Review crowd make it out to be. ‑ Iridescent 15:58, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

But how—in the worst case BLP argument—do you ensure that the piece of WD that is imported across is one where there is a piece of 'separated' sourcing, as opposed to an unsourced piece, or a piece of vandalism (either on WD, or on some source article). That's a fairly big risk some people want to take based on way too little information. It may not be the mark of Cain, but it's a dramatic step backwards in terms of quality, verifiability and basic standards of sourcing. I really don't know what the rush is here. Getting WD up to scratch is a good way to start before we start dumping what I suspect is a lot of crap into a lot of places. SchroCat (talk) 16:27, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

The rush here is that a number of people with influence on the WMF operate businesses which are predicated on the ability to distil Misplaced Pages articles to a series of data points, and that the dead hand of the Knowledge Engine hasn't yet released its grip. I really don't think that's unduly cynical—regardless of the ultimate quality of the product, I don't think it's really in dispute that the reason it was rushed through was that Jimmy and pals are looking ahead to a day when Misplaced Pages can be written by source-analysing algorithms and editors can be dispensed with altogether. ‑ Iridescent 16:33, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

@RexxS, isn't an infobox that didn't autopopulate without the editor at the article specifically enabling it the very embodiment of what's being described at the RFC as "opt-in"? ‑ Iridescent 15:59, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Not exactly. What the "opt-in" proponents have been asking for is an infobox where the editor has to write |isbn=FETCH_WIKIDATA or something like that in every field where they wanted to fetch the value from Wikidata, and then check that the result is sensible. Who is going to do that in an existing box when there's already a locally supplied value there? So it reduces the incentive to make use of Wikidata on the English Misplaced Pages. Also, if someone later adds, say, a value for date of publication to the Wikidata entry for the book, an editor on en-wp still has to enable it by adding |pub_date=FETCH_WIKIDATA to the article infobox, even though they have seen on their watchlist that the new value has been written to Wikidata and is sensible. It also means - if you take them at their word - that folks like Mike Peel will by told by some wikicop that they have just reverted all his changes to {{Infobox telescope}} because it's "opt-out".

If we replaced {{Infobox book}} by {{Infobox book/Wikidata/Sandbox}}, there would be no change in how the article displayed. In that sense, it's "opt-in". They would have to add |fetchwikidata=<list of fields to be imported from Wikidata> to enable the named fields. But if someone wanted to create a new article on a book that already has an entry on Wikidata, they could use {{Infobox book/Wikidata/Sandbox}} with |fetchwikidata=ALL and it would autopopulate with the values available on Wikidata - in other words it behaves as "opt-out". In addition, if Sarah wants to make sure that "Genre" never gets displayed in a particular article (perhaps because it's agreed that genre is not well-defined for that book), she can add the parameter |suppressfields=genre to the infobox and it will never display Genre, even if somebody specifically writes it into the infobox locally. By having both a blacklist and a whitelist (which can be a list of fields to fetch from Wikidata or "ALL" for all fields), we can be much smarter about how we decide to get our information from Wikidata. I've written a new Lua Module with the calls that should allow any infobox be modified for use as "opt-in" or "opt-out", or any desired combination, and also go some way to solving the problem of having to leave html comments telling editors not add "genre", or whatever.

I've created the tools (I hope) that will allow each side to have the Wikidata-aware infobox that they have asked for, but I'm faced at every turn by the "Little Englanders" who will make the point over and again that Wikidata doesn't offer much to a well-developed Misplaced Pages like the English one (which I don't dispute), but go deaf when I ask them to consider how much benefit the smaller language Wikipedias could make of using what may be developed here. --RexxS (talk) 19:00, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

But again, I think you're talking past each other. As I read the above, Wikidata will generate a lot of work for little gain on English Misplaced Pages (and ditto for the other well-developed projects like German and Polish), but will hugely benefit the smaller projects by allowing them to fill in gaps automagically. However, there's certainly a case to be made that that is just a variation of the "the primary purpose of Misplaced Pages is to be as machine readable as possible" argument. This is a view that does still have strong support in certain circles, particularly among the Silicon Valley types who control the WMF. However, as Lila Tretikov has recently illustrated fairly spectacularly, it's a deeply unpopular view among the editor base on which the big Wikipedias rely. (A disconnect and lack of understanding between a foundation that's increasingly run by people connected with Silicon Valley, and the volunteer community of editors who worry that may reflect a change in the WMF's focus from user-generated content to one led by automated data results, to quote our own article on the issue.)

Playing devil's advocate, I could make a perfectly valid and probably just as widely-supported case that the WMF should be actively closing down the smaller Wikipedias, or at least cutting them loose to sink or swim, and that the "little England" (and little Spanish, French, German) mentality that Misplaced Pages should be focusing on getting the widely-read projects in order is the correct one. (If the Siegenthaler controversy had taken place on Old Gothic Misplaced Pages nobody would ever have given a damn.) Why should donor funds continue to be spent on hosting and actively supporting projects whose recent changes feeds look like this, and which are clearly moribund? (The only three Wikipedias ever to be booted off the servers by the WMF are Klingon, Toki Pona and Siberian, all three of which are constructed languages which have never had a native speaker.) Sure, this WMF-created script can write articles from Wikidata and could inflate any given Misplaced Pages by a million new articles, but that would just leave a million new unwatched pages ready to degenerate into "Kyle is teh gay" and SEO spam.

TL;DR summary: The RFCs aren't asking the right questions, which should actually begin with "Does English Misplaced Pages have a duty of care to other language projects and to non-WMF commercial websites who reuse our data, or is our primary purpose still the English-language, non-machine, reader?", since the answer to that question will shape the answers to everything else. The only person who's really asked this question at a high level is Doc James, and look what happened to him. ‑ Iridescent 14:55, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Aside: you need to maintain the indentation level on the otherwise blank lines if you want to be kind to screen readers (as we should).

Anyway, there's a lot of non-moribund small Wikis that could make use of some automation to help broaden their coverage. I'm sure you wouldn't want to tell my pal Robin that he'd be better off abandoning the Welsh Misplaced Pages, even though its recent changes look like this. I'm no advocate of automatically creating millions of unwatched articles as spam magnets (although Magnus's Reasonator makes a great starting point for any keen editor wanting to get started on a new article), but there's a case for creating list articles on current topics - Rihanna discography comes to mind - via a central database, rather than having to keep fans editors busy on each Misplaced Pages updating their articles every time a new album comes out. That's likely to be my next project.

You're right about the primacy of the question about En-wp's duty towards other Wikipedias, but I honestly believe in wmf:Vision and I take seriously the idea of "every single human", so the question is already answered for me. I know that others won't agree with me, but that's one topic where I don't share the fashionably cynical attitude. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 16:35, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Data≠knowledge. There's nothing cynical about that rex, it's as bald a statement of truth as facts≠knowledge. And when that data (or those "facts") come from sub-standard or misleading sources, that's doubly the case.

Can I ask what will happen on one of the data dumps is there are two variables on WD for one field?? This must have been considered already, so how is it proposed to deal with it? – SchroCat (talk) 16:50, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Sure, I believe in the principle of "every single person on the world is given access" mantra, but I think there's a perfectly reasonable case to be made that duplicating Misplaced Pages 293 times is not the best way to go about it. For better or worse, a dozen or so languages are dominant and are becoming ever more so. One could certainly argue that "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" is considerably better served if we teach her English, French or Arabic and thus give her access to the versions of Misplaced Pages in which the facts have at least a fighting chance of being comprehensive, reliably sourced and fact-checked and whatever she's looking up probably has an article (and also give her access to the sources, which are much more likely to be written in one of those languages than in her own), than by giving her a Misplaced Pages in her own language which consists of 5000–10,000 articles, most of which are unsourced and unmaintained stubs. And at least those are languages which actually have speakers; I fail to see why a penny of donor money should be spent on ensuring Misplaced Pages is available in Old Church Slavonic, Classical Chinese or Gothic. Yes, "focus on languages which are widely spoken" is cultural imperialism, but that ship sailed a century ago; regardless of whether one likes it or not, "English, Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic are the world's lingua francas" is just a statement of fact.

Welsh Misplaced Pages isn't really a good example to use, since it can be reasonably assumed that every Welsh speaker over the age of five is also going to speak fluent English or Spanish, and will be used to flipping over to the English version of something if the Welsh version is unsatisfactory, so the grey-goo issue is a lot less pressing given that readers can easily copy references across from en-wiki. Welsh and Irish Wikipedias are also something of an outrider, as they have Robin and Alison keeping them in line; I suspect that Scots Misplaced Pages, Norfuk Wikkapedya and the like are far more representative of "minority language/dialect delete as appropriate in a place where everyone speaks English". ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

@SchroCat: Yes, we all accept those truisms, but the data needs to used to help build articles, not as a substitute for article-building, and that's where I object to your mis-characterisation of my work. Again, let me remind you that the data which you describe as "from sub-standard or misleading sources" comes overwhelmingly from English Misplaced Pages and its peers. You should be directing your ire at the very articles you're worried about "contaminating", because that's where the data is coming from. Now if you want to complain about the poor quality of Wikidata references, that's up to you. I'll merely observe that I've been editing Wikidata to add references; I originated the idea of making an link in Wikidata-aware infoboxes to encourage other editors do the same; and I've created a tool to allow Misplaced Pages editors to preview the data and associated references available in Wikidata, in the hope that they'll spend a few minutes there improving the entries. You've made 81 edits to Wikidata. I'm sincerely pleased you added a reference for Bernard Lee's place of birth and I don't want to do anything to discourage you, but you are obviously well-aware of how much work is still needed to bring up those references to scratch. I wish I could convince you that complaining about it isn't the solution.

@Iridescent: But teaching the girl in Africa to read English and providing her with a decent quality article in her own language aren't mutually exclusive options. It's not as though I could make any impact on teaching an African to read English, anyway. Most of the cost of providing that article doesn't come from donor's money anyway; it's the cost of time and effort by many volunteers who write, translate or adapt the articles. That's a reason why I'm part of WikiProject Medicine Foundation which has a goal of providing good quality medical articles in as many languages as possible. Although I won't be asking for them in Old Church Slavonic, Classical Chinese, Gothic, or even Valerian. --RexxS (talk) 18:53, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

"You should be directing your ire at the very articles you're worried about "contaminating", because that's where the data is coming from": as far as I understand it WD harvests data from idiotboxes, where no references are held if the information is also held in the article body. My "ire" (actually despair) is directed towards the sub-standard method of factoid-gathering, and the misguided concept that somehow data=knowledge. Again, I'll ask: Can I ask what will happen on one of the smaller wikis when in one of the data dumps, there are two variables on WD for one field? – SchroCat (talk) 19:08, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

That, at least, can be answered definitively, as mediawiki:Extension:ArticlePlaceholder has started to go live on some smaller Wikipedias. This is what is currently output for John Barrymore on Haitian Misplaced Pages. ‑ Iridescent 19:16, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Urgh.... I'm underwhelmed by the brave new dawn. I largely wrote the Barrymore FA, and I think I've just lost some of my understanding of him based on that! I see no knowledge there at all, just a series of random pieces of information that will leave Haitians going "huh?" That's an even bigger embarrassment than I feared it would be! – SchroCat (talk) 21:14, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

break 3

To be fair, those Wikidata-generated placeholder pages intentionally look like that, to make it clear they're autogenerated lists of factoids rather than anything human-written. It does serve its basic purpose, in that a Haitian coming across a mention of Barrymore somewhere and wanting to know who he was can at least find out the absolute basics, which is all these placeholder-pages are supposed to do. If bot-written articles ever get authorised, they will look more like this. (If you think that's bad, wait until this goes live; unless I'm seriously misunderstanding the proposal, this is possibly the stupidest idea I've ever seen from the WMF, as well as having the lamest name ever.) ‑ Iridescent 21:23, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

It depends what the basic purpose is, I suppose, but that doesn't provide knowledge or understanding as far as I'm concerned and is another example of the woefully misbegotten concept that factoids and the same as knowledge. It is also going to leave Haitians more confused than having no article. I suspect any non-Enlish speaking Haitian will ignore it and shove one of the written articles through Google translate, if they actually want knowledge or understanding. As to the "reasonator" version, it's disheartening to see that although they get both dates of birth lower down the page, the "lead" gives just the one. So there is a basic error of fact in the opening line, which is a concern. Still at least the lead tells us he is an "actor, stage actor and film actor", just so there is no doubt. (I'm mystified by the gallery too: I'm not sure why half those images are there, yet many of the related ones we have on Commons are not showing: most odd.) my eyes glazed over when I started to read "StrepHit": maybe I'll try again in the morning if I can raise my spirits to do so... – SchroCat (talk) 21:43, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I've no idea where Reasonator is getting the images from—File:Louisa Lane Drew c1840-48.png appears on Barrymore's entry, for instance, but isn't in use on any page related to him on any project as far as I can see. Magnus Manske wrote the script, if you care enough to ask.

If I'm understanding StrepHit correctly, if you give it a subject it will scrape the internet looking for mentions of that subject, and parse whatever it finds into Misplaced Pages-formatted text complete with references. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea is presumably not familiar with the contents of the internet. Plus I need to repeat that I don't think I could come up with a worse name than "StrepHit" if I tried; it sounds like a battlefield medication for scarlet fever. ‑ Iridescent 21:55, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

At least Louisa Lane Drew is related: there's a pic of Robert Morley in there, which is odd, as I think they only appeared together in one 1938 film! – SchroCat (talk) 22:08, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Am I to understand that we are going to have articles including BLPs compiled by a machine from information found anywhere on the Internet? Presumably this is at an early discussion stage given the number of issues this raises, including how the program will determine which webpages are reliable sources (and which ones are gossip rags, attack pages, or for that matter outdated mirrors of Misplaced Pages), and whether an actual person will review the material before it goes live. Is there somewhere this is being discussed? Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:01, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Meta:Grants:IEG/StrepHit: Wikidata Statements Validation via References. To judge by meta:Grants:IEG/StrepHit: Wikidata Statements Validation via References/Timeline#Biographies, the plan appears to be to create a list of "approved biographical sources" which will then be data-mined, although since the whole thing is written in purest techie gibberish (After inspecting the set of verb lemmas, we found lots of noise, mainly caused by the default tokenization logic of the POS-tagging library we used. Therefore, we implemented our own tokenizer, to be leveraged by all modules) it's difficult to be sure. This is probably the wrong attitude to take, but I suspect if you point Greg towards that page and give it a couple of weeks he'll come back with an in-depth analysis of all its pros and cons which will be much easier to read than the proposal itself. ‑ Iridescent 22:09, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. There already is a thread about StrepHit underway in Another Place, although so far they've only gotten as far as making fun of the name.

As I think about it, I suppose that to a very limited extent, this type of automated article-starting has assisted in creating one type of articles—that being (US) federal judges' biographies that originated with material taken from the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges. The "articles" so generated are initially hyper-choppy sub-stubs, but they are something; and they do have the advantage that the editor looking to write the real article is starting with some basic information rather than a completely blank page, which probably makes the real article more likely to be written. But the FJC database is organized in fields that are pretty much the same for every entry, and includes only basic information; I'm not sure to what extent that will extrapolate to many other sources. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:20, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

If you really have an urge to dredge up ancient history, there was an attempt to do something similar once before, using a bot to create auto-generated stub biographies from the persondata on German Misplaced Pages where an article existed there but not here. It was not universally welcomed, and virtually everything created via the process ended up being deleted. ‑ Iridescent 22:25, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) That's the bit I'm interested in, Brad. Getting a start on an article is the single best use of any of the databases we have access to. It's true that not all databases as as well-organised as the FJC, but there's the challenge: to create a system that can deal with a multitude of different collections of information and provide the aspiring article writer with a decent enough start for them to actually write something more than a bare collection of facts. It's easy for the snobs to sneer at stubs and start-class articles, but every article had to start somewhere. Of course, the obvious elephant-in-the-room is the lack of cast-iron reliable sourcing, unless the database itself can be considered a RS. That's one of the the reasons why I regard Wikidata as a failing project now - it needed to have sourcing "baked-in" from the very start. I could write Lua modules to import information from Wikidata only when it is referenced to something better than "imported from the English Misplaced Pages", but we'd end up with very little to import. If someone can come up with some good idea for attaching references to all of those unsourced statements, I might be prepared to change my mind, but I'm not expecting that any time soon. The best I have to offer right now is to use Wikidata in infoboxes wherever possible and try to encourage editors to see the associated Wikidata entry as part of the article, so that improving the quality of the Wikidata would be seen as improving the quality of the article, but that would require a real cultural shift. If we insisted that the Wikidata corresponding to an article had the be the same quality as that of the English Misplaced Pages article in order for it to become an FA, we'd soon have the badge-collectors falling over themselves to improve the referencing. One can only dream ... --RexxS (talk) 22:47, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

"All unsourced statements are deleted after six months"; I'm sure a bot could be written to do that (since, unlike on Misplaced Pages, on Wikidata it's always clear what fact a source is intended to support). Yes, people would scream blue murder at the start when the database size suddenly shrinks by 75%, but the culture there could do with some shock treatment, and unless it shakes off its reputation as Misplaced Pages's idiot stepchild SchroCat's attitude is always going to be the prevailing one. ‑ Iridescent 22:55, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

"Snobs"? "Badge collectors"? And you're trying to win people over to your side by insulting swathes of editors who spend their time trying to improve the encyclopaedia? Stacking barbed wire comments around things does not build bridges rex and isn't going to help people have the open minds you want them to. – SchroCat (talk) 08:15, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Exactly. You take the attitude that only you are trying to improve the encyclopedia, and can't accept that others might be trying to do the same in another way. Unlike you, I'm prepared to accept that different people can make improvements that aren't just related to increasing the number of stars on their user page. You want to build bridges? Start by acknowledging that the contributions of others aren't automatically inferior to your own. --RexxS (talk) 11:47, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Exactly what, rex? I'm afraid you have totally misrepresented my viewpoint there. I have never said that you are not trying to improve the encyclopaedia (show me the diff where I have clearly said that). You can also dig out the diff where I've expressed the opinion that the contributions to others are inferior to mine while you're about it (it's not what I believe, so good luck looking). It may help to try and find some common ground rather than drive people apart, which is what you're doing here, or to try and focus on your own arguments, rather than try and badly double guess my thoughts on my fellow editors. My view is—has always been—a lot less divisive than you are being here. Yes, disseminating knowledge is what we are about, but my view on what constitutes knowledge (and even better, understanding) differ considerably from the factoid driven approach. Go ahead, sneer at the people who enjoy writing articles, but it reflects rather badly on you rather than them I think, and is unlikely to win many over to your line of thinking. – SchroCat (talk) 12:08, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

break 4

Yeah, I have to agree with SchroCat there. I personally don't particularly like the badge collecting mentality on Misplaced Pages—I think the badges-and-barnstars culture can sometimes deflect editors away from what's necessary in favour of what will give them shiny barnstars or a higher placement on WP:WBE—but I recognise that this is a minority view and I don't see what's to be gained by denigrating those who don't subscribe to it. On a skim of the 23 signatories to the statement that "infoboxes are integral to the encyclopaedia" on the assumption that those are likely to be Wikidata's core supporters, and disregarding the six who are indefblocked and/or have blanked their user pages, 13 of 17 have some kind of high-score-table or row of shiny topicons on their user page. The MMORPG mentality is so heavily embedded in Misplaced Pages that you're never going to shift it, and sniping at those who participate in it is just going to alienate the people whom you need to convince that Wikidata isn't some kind of hostile force parking its tanks on Misplaced Pages's lawn. ‑ Iridescent 10:11, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
Note: intervening comments have separated this reply from the comment being replied to; the statement to which I'm agreeing is the one beginning ""Snobs"? "Badge collectors"?", not the later comment, regarding which I don't agree with SchroCat. I believe there are many circumstances when the factoid-driven approach is the correct one, most obviously languages where there's unlikely to be much interest in a topic and thus doing a full translation is not a good use of time, but where we still want to cater for those few people who do have an interest. (As a concrete example, very few Haitians are likely to ever want to read about Adam Gilchrist, and translating this 8500-word article into Haitian is not going to be a sensible use of anyone's time, but having the auto-generated entry means that some Haitian who sees a reference to him somewhere can at least find out at a glance that it's an Aussie cricketer who's being discussed. And yes, I know I'm picking on the Haitians here, but that's because Haitian is similar enough to languages I at least vaguely understand that I can tell at a glance what the information being imported actually says.) ‑ Iridescent 15:31, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Actually Iridescent my last comment was more about the approach than anything, but as you've raised it, let me explain my problems with what we've classed as the "the factoid-driven approach" (and I'm working in the (possibly mistaken) assumption that we're both coming from the same point in describing the "the factoid-driven approach"). Let us take our non-English-speaking Haitian who has come across their entry for John Barrymore. They learn "John Barrymore" is an American male Homo sapiens who was an actor who lived between February 1882 and May 1942. They learn he was related to others called Barrymore (no information on who or what they were, and no links to other articles). That's pretty much it. Can you see my problem with "the factoid-driven approach"?

Was he a good actor? Well received? Awards? Action? Shakespearean? Comedian? Tragic? Light entertainment? Musical? (Dancer? Singer?) Lead actor? Bit part player? Impact on the craft of acting? An acting legacy? Changed the approach to acting somehow? Happy life or tragic? Teetotal or alcoholic? Any thoughts on what his relations did (Antecedent, contemporary and modern)? Opinions of others who worked with him?

There are a few thousand other points that we should cover to get close to proper knowledge or understanding, but you get where I'm going, right? The poor bloody Haitian has a name, some other names and some dates. He has some "data" that the world's most popular encyclopaedia promises him ... but fuck all in the way of knowledge or understanding about what the topic "John Barrymore" is all about. There's a shed load of money being shovelled about by people whose intelligence is far greater than mine, I'm sure, but to no useful end. I fully agree that the best thing we can do is to teach 'the girl In middle Africa' how to speak good English/French/Arabic/etc, (or even, if Jimbo Wales could persuade the funders to engage brains before throwing away their money to work on a way of translating the articles in an efficient way). But WikiData has sad and pathetic aims: it reminds me of the proverbial school report for under achievers: sets themselves low targets that they fail to achieve.

The differences between you and I are not that great; those between you, I and people like rex are slightly wider, but the aims are not that different, just the approach, and what is considered "useful" information. Cheers – SchroCat (talk) 21:47, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

By "the factoid driven approach" I'm using "factoid" in the British "information presented in an extremely condensed format" rather than the American "unreliable statement which has become widely accepted owing to repetition" sense.

A lot of readers of any article are going to be people who've seen or heard something mentioned somewhere and want to know what's being talked about, but don't want to read a full article on the topic. Take this article; my reaction on reading that (and I suspect the reaction of every other person reading it except the most diehard chin-strokers) was "who the fuck are Robert Morris, Charlotte Posenenske and Rasheed Araeen and why is the self-proclaimed most popular modern art gallery in the world boasting about having a collection of works by these people I've never heard of?", and skimming the lead paragraph of each article makes it clear that these are modern minimalist sculptors, which is all I want to know and it saves me reading the full biographies of people in whom I have no interest. (If you want an example closer to home, every biography ever written of Drew Barrymore will mention within the first couple of paragraphs that she's John's granddaughter; I assume that a Freddy Got Fingered fan looking her up and wondering why one grandparent is mentioned when the other three aren't only wants to know "he was a big-shot actor in the early 20th century" and doesn't want to read all 8500 words of his bio.) Since the proportion of people browsing Misplaced Pages on phones ("this painting by Henry Clarence Whaite is nice, but I've never heard of him, who was he?") is only going to rise, the need to get Misplaced Pages articles into a format such that reading only the lead section will give you all the basics you need to know is going to get ever more pressing.

While I disagree with the infoboxers about the best format to present information, I do agree with them about the basic principle; we should aspire to a situation where a reader can find out the basic facts about any given topic within 30 seconds. The dispute between myself and the QAI infobox-obssessives isn't over the principle of the factoid approach, but over how the factoids should be presented; the QAI-ers think that everything can be and should be distilled into a little box at the side of the page, and I think that on complex topics that can lead to oversimplification and to giving undue weight to those facts which are selected to go into the box, and that often a well-written lead paragraph is going to be more effective than trying to cram everything into a box. (There's also a separate issue on arts-and-architecture articles, in that in these cases a large lead image is going to be of far more use to the reader so they can see at a glance what's being described, and it's not a good use of space to have an box of text squatting on the most valuable piece of space on any given article.)

I'm by no means saying that those autogenerated entries are good, but that they're better than nothing. Something like the Haitian entry on William Etty may seem virtually useless to us, but I strongly suspect it's quite literally the only Haitian-language text on Etty that's ever been published anywhere, and it means that a Haitian seeing him mentioned somewhere can at least find out "he was an early 19th-century painter from York" which will hopefully at least give some context to whatever they're reading. Yes, Haitian is a really bad example for me to be using, as Haitian readers are invariably going to understand French so will just read that instead, but it's handy to use as one can puzzle out whether the facts it's pulling from Wikidata are actually accurate.

Despite appearances, I'm actually a strong supporter of the principle of Wikidata—I just think the way it's been implemented with its cavalier attitude towards sourcing and its domination by a small clique with a strong "you're not one of us, turn round and go back the way you came" mentality is atrocious and has poisoned the well against anyone who wants to make it into a viable project. Likewise, I do actually believe in the principle of infoboxes—as RexxS once pointed out to me, my "articles should have infoboxes by default and the burden of demonstrating that any given infobox is a net negative should be on whoever wants to remove it" position is actually harder-line than his own—but I can also see that there are going to be numerous cases when trying to summarise a complex story into a small set of facts and figures is going to actively mislead readers. ‑ Iridescent 09:47, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi Iridescent, As I said before, there are many points on which we agree (the presentation of information in a small box just isn't good enough in many cases and the benefits of a good opening paragraph to cover the main points of why we've got an article on an individual are just two of them).

Where we largely differ is, I think in the value of what is presented in the WD articles. Etty, for example, is nearly worthless (as is Barrymore, as below). Although our Haitian learns he's a British painter of the 19th century, s/he is still not much further forward. We're back to the same sort of list I identified about Barrymore (Was he a good painter? Well received? Awards? Genre? Style? Realist? Impressionist? Portraits? Landscapes? Impact on the art? Legacy? Opinions of others? Even—and this is a fundamental for an artist—show me some examples of his work!) You're working on the assumption that "early 19th-century painter from York" will answer the questions of the Haitian: I work from a slightly different perspective in wanting to give more information than just the insufficient barest of bones.

To make the same point on Barrymore: ("every biography ever written of Drew Barrymore will mention within the first couple of paragraphs that she's John's granddaughter ... only wants to know "he was a big-shot actor in the early 20th century"). While I freely admit the Drew fan (assuming it is a Drew fan that's looking) may not want to read all 8500 words of John's .en bio, the poor-bloody Haitian doesn't actually learn that Barrymore was even a "big-shot actor", just that he was an actor and no other real information (they may actually end up even more confused because the page that's there doesn't even list Drew as a relative, just her father, in an unlinked single mention). The classification of "big-shot" is something you've attributed, not what WD shows (we're back to the point that the information of Good actor? Well received? Awards? Action? Shakespearean? etc is needed for understanding – even the tiny amount of "lead actor" to classify him as "big-shot") These WD sorts of pages are largely pointless except to confirm that something existed. The Haitian wanting to see who Barrymore was, will do the sensible thing and either look toward the French version, or stick one of the other language versions into Google Translate and get enough information from the prose of the lead to at least gain the knowledge and understanding that the Haitian page doesn't provide them.

Of much more use to the Haitian would be a page titled "John Barrymore" and a set of links that show:

• Show Google translation of .en Wiki version (8,500 words; FA-rated)
• Show Google translation of .fr Wiki version (100 words; stub-rated)
• Show Google translation of .de Wiki version (770 words; ??-rated)
• Show Google translation of .es Wiki version (450 words; ??-rated)

At least give the reader who wants to learn something the tools to actually find information. There is more information in the lead of the .en article than in the others, but if there are after information (and what WD provides is so limp it almost doesn't pass as "information" in any real practical sense) then giving them the chance to actually find something in one of the better populated articles makes more sense. (Sure add the links onto the page where the pointless WD exists if you want, but make the access to some proper information a priority for the reader).

Another possibility would be to auto-translate the leads of one of the wikis into the other languages (pick the longest lead as being more likely to contain the most information), but that's too haphazard and still retains the same problems of a lack of sourcing, although an argument of pasting a sign along the lines of "translated from xxx wiki, where the sources are maintained" could be made.

Personally I'd be with you in deleting all the unsourced information from WD and forcing it to adopt a culture of sourcing as a basic standard. Without that, it'll always be seen as being potentially deeply flawed. – SchroCat (talk) 13:43, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Sorry for the numerous walls of text on this, but it's a thorny problem with many facets to it (awful mixed metaphors there). Unless there is something outlandish in any response I promise I won't clutter your talk any further! Cheers – SchroCat (talk) 14:14, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, but Google Translate will only get you so far; they support 103 languages, but there are 293 Wikipedias. There are quite a few major languages which Google can't handle—how do we best serve something like Burmese (33 million speakers, so hardly an obscure dialect only spoken by a gaggle of enthusiasts), Akan (11 million speakers), Fula (24 million) and so on? The likelihood of anyone ever writing a non-stub article on the Barrymores and Ettys of the world is minimal, so at least the autogenerated boxes will give them something to fill in the very basic background. Plus of course there's a vocal minority (almost exclusively in the US, but the US has disproportionate influence on Misplaced Pages) of Free Culture libertarian nutcases who see Google as part of the global conspiracy to build the New World Order and would do their best to derail the slightest attempt to cooperate with them. (Just watchlist Jimmy Wales's talkpage for a couple of weeks and you'll see them in action.)

Per my comments near the top of this thread, I think Misplaced Pages would do a much better job of getting towards the "a world where every single human has access to the sum of human knowledge" ideal by admitting that cultural imperialism is here to stay, focusing on the dozen-or-so languages which are going to dominate the world, and diverting the money which currently goes on various pet projects and on free holidays (sorry, "travel scholarships") for the cronies of people in authority towards providing free language lessons for anyone who wants them. (The Googles and Microsofts would likely be happy to loosen the purse strings for this, as every extra English, French, Arabic etc speaker in the world is one more person to read the adverts they host.) However, this is unlikely to happen as long as Jimbo remains at the top, since it goes against his world domination fantasies. ‑ Iridescent 15:44, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

break 5

• Personally I am just working on a one-button script that removes any data on a BLP sourced to wikidata. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:23, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

• That wouldn't work either, unless we go the French route and ban the use of Wikidata altogether. Some of what's in WD is perfectly acceptably sourced, or has been imported from perfectly acceptably sourced articles on other Wikipedias. What's needed is to remove all unsourced data from WD, and a mechanism for automatically displaying the citation to the original source on any WD-generated statement on Misplaced Pages; the burden of proof should be on Wikidata for every statement they make, rather than expecting us to verify every statement they make for which they can't be bothered to find a source. (I could make a decent case that the best thing to do with WD is to scrub the database completely and rebuild it from scratch, but such a decision would need to come from the top and as long as the WMF remains controlled by big Silicon Valley donors and Jimmy Wales's cronies, that's not going to happen.) ‑ Iridescent 10:39, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

It works for BLP's as the BLP policy supersede's the general sourcing policies. Anything unsourced or poorly sourced can be removed per the BLP policy. It doesnt work elsewhere as the general sourcing/reliable sources etc only say information may be removed. As wikidata itself an unreliable source, and the majority of the data there is not sourced reliably or to other wiki-projects, it fails all of the criteria for use in a BLP. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:02, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

What would probably work better is something that would highlight the unreferenced WD statements and add a massive "this might not be true" Scarlet Letter marker to every unsourced statement. If the unreferenced statements just disappear, most readers won't even realise the problem exists; heavily-read pages filling up with unsightly tags will probably do a better job of getting people to actually fix the issues. ‑ Iridescent 11:05, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

The main problem with this is Wikidata is being used to populate infoboxs. And it is really just too big a hassle to attempt to highlight whats wrong with an infobox - and as far as I know no one ever tries. They delete the faulty content from the infobox or the box itself. As the current process to prevent wikidata importing info is to leave a blank field (rather than delete the field) there really are limited options in dealing with it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:20, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

That's simple enough—any item in an infobox sourced to an unsourced Wikidata statement is displayed in an intentionally clashing bolded green on red or something equally horrible, together with an unremovable marker linking to instructions on how to add a source to Wikidata, until either it's deleted or a source is provided. If we deliberately made articles containing unsourced statements look like shit, people would start fixing them pretty quickly. ‑ Iridescent 15:55, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Ha, well I will try that next time and don my flameproof longjohns. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:11, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

It would probably need a WMF diktat to make it stick (and probably ought to be hardwired into MediaWiki rather that trying to do it in wikitext markup for each infobox), but if it's established both that there are genuine concerns for the data integrity of Wikidata, and that despite these concerns en-wikipedia is going to continue importing from Wikidata, then some variation of this might be worth considering. Paging SlimVirgin, who seems to be the person who currently has the most to say on the topic, to see what she thinks. ‑ Iridescent 16:17, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

If you really want to force the issue, then set the software to automatically {{noindex}} any mainspace article containing an unsourced statement from Wikidata. ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

I was hoping for a |Wikidata=no parameter at article level, so that we could switch off the retrieval from Wikidata. SarahSV 23:00, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

For those interested, my (probably naïve and underinformed) suggestion is here. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:36, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Note for once the bot archives the thread Brad's linking to and the link breaks; the proposal is to have Wikidata export onto talkpages rather than article space.

I can see an obvious drawback to that proposal, in that the articles where importing from Wikidata is likely to have most utility are going to be articles on obscure topics which likely don't have many watchers. If new information about John Major comes to light it doesn't really matter if Wikidata picks it up or not, as someone will add it within minutes to the article if it's appropriate, but if Wikidata picks up new information about Almeric Paget it could take years for the same data to find its way into Misplaced Pages without an automated process. Thus, these obscure topics are where Wikidata has most value. However, a bot post to Talk:John Major will probably be read and reacted to appropriately within a few hours at most, but a bot post to Talk:Almeric Paget might literally go for a decade before anyone actually sees and actions it. ‑ Iridescent 16:50, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Three years ago ...

quality standards
... you were recipient no. 517 of Precious, a prize of QAI!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:25, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

"Quality standards"? That doesn't sound like me. ‑ Iridescent 13:43, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like me four years ago ;) - today I'd rather praise the precision of illustration above, but four years ago, I didn't even know what arbcom means, nor had I worked on Kafka, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:38, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

The World At Mind's End

Hi Iridescent,

I see that you deleted a page I created last week titled "The World At Mind's End", which is an LP/CD by the UK band Skywhale. The reason for deletion was notability. The A9 tag said that notability requires, among other things, a current wikipedia article about the artist who made the recording. Well, I also started a draft for the band Skywhale last week which is in the wikipedia review process, so am requesting that the LP/CD article be re-instated (if possible) until wikipedia has reviewed the Skywhale article, which links to the LP/CD article.

Thanks Cjcooper (talk) 00:26, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Restored to your userspace in User:Cjcooper/The World At Mind's End for you to work on it; once you feel it's in a fit state, use the "Move" tab at the top of the page to move it back to its original title. Bear in mind that Misplaced Pages articles need to be sourced to reliable sources, and that the use of discogs.com as a source is explicitly forbidden. If you're having trouble finding sources, I'd strongly recommend posting at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Progressive Rock, as there's a fairly good chance one of the participants there will have a big stack of '70s music magazines in their loft. ‑ Iridescent 07:32, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

About me

How do I turn myself around? I can't communicate well with others]. I want to be useful in ITN, but I've not produced good results. I want to raise issues, but people pity me a lot. I guess I am an issue, huh? I've come here to discuss myself here, not at ITN, which would drive away the purpose. I need help on being useful and influential at ITN, but I am uncertain on what it takes to be useful there. --George Ho (talk) 17:15, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Per most of the comments you're ignoring on the AN thread you recently started on exactly the same topic, there comes a point when mentoring is no longer appropriate. If after a decade on Misplaced Pages, 80,000 edits, a set of unblock conditions which spelled out in extreme detail exactly what you were doing wrong and which issues of your conduct you needed to address, and Begoon painstakingly talking you through the issues, you're still not getting it, I'm not sure what exactly you're expecting anyone else to say. I have literally never seen you comment anywhere and not immediately launch into extreme WP:BATTLEGROUND behaviour the moment someone disagrees with you, regardless of how trivial the issue in question is. (For the benefit of the TPWs, this threat is prompted by George taking on all comers over the issue of whether WP:In the news/Candidates should use level 3 or level 4 headers on its subsections.)

To be blunt, if for any situation in which your participation isn't mandatory you need help on being useful and influential, my advice would be that that situation is not one in which you should be participating. I don't understand why you would deliberately aim to participate in any area where you don't consider yourself competent when you're not obliged to do so, and it's not as if WP:ITN is exactly an area of high importance which needs all the help it can get.

While it ended badly (to say the least), you might want to take a long hard look at User:Mattisse/Plan. Mattisse was another editor whose undoubted abilities in certain areas were offset by her tendency to pick fights for no apparent reason, and the rules drawn up to try to prevent her being banned are likely to be very similar to the rules imposed on you if and when someone's patience snaps and you're taken in front of an ANI ban discussion or to Arbcom. Even if you manage to avoid that, they're a good set of rules to follow in general, anyway. (Plus, you might also want to bear in mind what happened to Mattisse as a salutary lesson that even the most valuable and productive editors will be kicked out if dealing with their disruption becomes too much of a timesink.)

I'd also really strongly advise taking the "I'm considering retirement, please beg me to stay" header off your talkpage. It means that the first thing any visitor to your talkpage sees is a garish multicoloured banner which most (if not all) readers will interpret as overinflated self-importance or trolling for attention. If you want to stop editing Misplaced Pages, just stop editing Misplaced Pages; I think I speak for virtually everyone in saying that editors who constantly retire and unretire, posting variations of "without me you're nothing" in the process, are not a group which is generally held in high esteem. ‑ Iridescent 17:43, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

I did read the AN, and I didn't want to comment further there. I'm just "out of control" guy, which... saddens me. I didn't mean to get myself into messes that I have made. I guess I did. Now I'm feeling terrible about being a nuisance, but I don't which part I did. If at WT:ITN, I don't know whether I should feel guilty on those. If I'm unsuccessful at this time, then I guess I should owe people apologies and then try to make up to everyone, but I don't know how. If successful, then what should I do? George Ho (talk) 18:02, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

For the record, I cried myself all the time whenever I felt regret about walking on the desert path. And I don't know how to get out of that path without help (or self-help). If this one doesn't prove that I'm trying to make up for my errors, maybe I don't know which else is, but I'll try to prove to you somehow. George Ho (talk) 18:14, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Re-reading the unblocking conditions, I must say that most of conditions have changed. User talk:George Ho/Mentorship discussions is inactive at the moment (marked "historical"). I now have only one mentor left. Right now, I'm in deep trouble. If help is unwarranted, I guess I'll accept that and need advice instead. As for listening to others, why can't people say "influence" instead? "Listening" sounds vague to me. I did listen, but I am not influenced by opposing sides... well, I hate to admit that the opposing sides may have a point on one thing or another. --George Ho (talk) 18:40, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

I am complained about being a poor listener. Therefore, I want to find a book that can help me effectively listen to people. I am torn between this and that. George Ho (talk) 18:49, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Bluntly, just stick to improving articles. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:47, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

What TRM said—if you're not confident of your own competencies in particular areas, why are you getting involved in them in the first place, let alone trying to bully those people who are experienced in those areas, particularly when you've been warned about your aggressiveness and refusal to accept consensus for quite literally a matter of years? Per this thread you link to above, I get the impression you think Misplaced Pages editing—and writing in general—can be boiled down to a set of mechanistic, predictable rules, and the world really doesn't work like that. (Regarding self-help books, don't expect them to be much help in the context of Misplaced Pages. Misplaced Pages is a global project, and social interaction is very culture-specific; if you followed Carnegie's "Six Ways to Make People Like You" in Britain you'd be liable to be punched in the face.) ‑ Iridescent 21:13, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

How was I a bully? Well, I was very pushy because I wasn't influenced by their opinions, but bullying? Anyway, I lately am trying to make up for petty talks by asking uploaders lately whether to add, replace, or delete images. As for working on areas, maybe it's not easy feeling like a loser in battle? Or, maybe I don't like the stereotype of Wikipedian as controlling elites? Or maybe I want to be useful in certain areas? Or maybe... I wanted to show people my skills proudly? Or... I don't know? George Ho (talk) 21:53, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Regarding rules, I... I... I had to follow them, but I was too strict and unprepared for changes. Right now, I struggling to learn how to ignore but then follow the same rules, like I'm doing to images. I added images and then nominated them for discussion at FFD venue. People would see me as being disruptive for not following fair use or NFCC. Actually, I was trying to engage people into improving consensus. No matter; I'm disruptive to their eyes. George Ho (talk) 22:15, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Now this? Are you really trying to canvass an ANI or Arbcom case against me George Ho? Really? The Rambling Man (talk) 21:20, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

FWIW, I read that more as "do you think I'd be overreacting if I complained about this?", and in all fairness "get a second opinion before shooting your mouth off" is exactly what people have spent the last five years telling GH he's supposed to do. ‑ Iridescent 21:25, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Now that the ITN bot successfully archives another section without problems, shall I make a bold request at Template talk:Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates? If both of you, TRM and Iridescent, allow me to do so, then I shall make an apologies to the ITN community for my recent behavior (or behaviors) if that is necessary. Then I'll close that discussion in WT:ITN after the outcome of the request there if you can accept what I should be boldly doing at the template talk page. George Ho (talk) 00:10, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

What useful purpose do you think it would serve? (This is a rhetorical question, and I really don't want an answer on this talkpage.) If you can't come up with an answer better than "I like my way better and I don't care how we've always done it", I'd strongly counsel against it. While the concept of permanent revolution is integral to Misplaced Pages, the community has always taken an extremely dim view of change-for-change's-sake, particularly when it's couched in "do things my way or I'll have a tantrum" or "if you disagree with me I'll cry" terms, and I don't think I'm being particularly controversial in saying that your continued posturing (this latest burst of pointless fight-picking dates from just a few hours ago) is rapidly exhausting whatever goodwill you have left. Why are you so obsessed with changing things?

Incidentally, I'm not sure why you're suddenly treating me as some kind of WP:ITN big cheese. It's an aspect of Misplaced Pages I've always held in even more disdain than I hold the rest of the Main Page, and any comments I've made there have been in the context of trying to prevent the MP becoming even more of an embarrassment than it already is. If I had my way, ITN, OTD and DYK (and possibly TFA, TFP and TFL) would be sent the same way as Featured Sounds—the MP is an cluttered, ugly and virtually unreadable archaism from Misplaced Pages's early years with ever-decreasing utility in the age of mobile data and direct links from search engines to individual articles, which only survives because while almost everyone dislikes it, nobody can agree on what should replace it. If I had my way, the Main Page would look like this. ‑ Iridescent 20:10, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

In other words George, stop. Stop trying to solve problems that aren't really problems. Stop falling foul of your own admission that you cannot communicate adequately and are often misunderstood. Stick to editing articles and reduce your interaction with other editors until such a time that you actually believe yourself that you can communicate without causing more issues. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:16, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

I know I said my last post was my last in this thread, but I've just noticed this. If you really see your role on Misplaced Pages as "a warrior battling for what I want to do", then to put it bluntly Misplaced Pages is not the place for you. ‑ Iridescent 20:49, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

User:Four dimensional mass

Hi Iridescent, just following up - I wasn't trying to be bitey when I marked this for speedy deletion, and I understand your comment that it looks like "usual userspace goofing around" but my concern was particularly the last paragraph claiming that this is information that "can not be sold or used with out written and signed permission" and earlier that this is their "companies method" and they have "legal documents" regarding it, which to me seems to be claiming something a little more than usual "goofing around" and feels inappropriate for wikipedia. That may well not be the case, but I will leave it with you here just in case you missed those claims for some reason. Melcous (talk) 00:16, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Sure, the copyright claim and "cannot be sold or used" make it technically a policy violation, but no sane reader is ever going to take a claim to be the inventor of and sole rightsholder to the concept of "exponent 4" seriously. Whether the Established Editors™ like it or not, new users do use their userpages as a sandbox to play around with Misplaced Pages editing. First impressions are important; unless they're posting libels, spam or something grossly inappropriate, then plonking a speedy deletion template on someone's userpage within a couple of hours of their first edit just means they conclude that everything they've heard about Misplaced Pages being governed by a humourless clique who see themselves as the Internet Police was true all along, so why should they stick around to try to do something useful? ‑ Iridescent 19:39, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Just realised the above could be misconstrued—just to be clear, I'm not accusing you of being part of a humourless clique who see themselves as the Internet Police, just pointing out that that's what the general public tend to think of us. ‑ Iridescent 21:22, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

User:Vurrath

Vurrath (talk · contribs) did it again, almost as soon as the page came of lockdown this morning. There's also a huge load of prosaic nonsense on his talk page. I have reverted the edit again, and posted an explanation of our policy regarding the disambiguation of related subjects on his talk page, highlighting how ti applies in this particular case. Will that be enough to stop this silliness? Only time will tell. This is Paul (talk) 18:06, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Oh, joy. Given that I've always been a very vocal opponent of the concept of WP:NOTHERE blocks (which generally translate as "I don't like you but I can't find an actual policy you've violated") it would be hypocritical of me to pull the trigger in this particular case, but I have to say this guy looks like the very embodiment of the concept. This is a very heavily-watched talkpage (there are more than twice as many people actively watching this page than are watching Tony Blair itself), so I imagine by posting here you've ensured enough eyes on him that any further foolishness will be reverted fairly quickly. The nonsense on his talkpage, I'd say just leave; nobody's being forced to read it, and redacting it will just provide evidence that Misplaced Pages is part of the Great Global Conspiracy To Stifle The Truth. ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Natalia Fedner

Hi, a page titled Natalia Fedner was deleted on June 8 for sourcing authority. Since the page was created there have been more high authority mentions on Entertainment Tonight, Complex Magazine and Racked. Would it be possible to continue editing the page to meet notability guidelines? Thank you DarrenDorsey (talk) 11:56, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

✓ Done. In its present state she has almost no chance of surviving articles for deletion—she needs sources which are about her, rather than articles on other topics which happen to mention her in passing; at present the only information which is adequately sourced is the list of people who've worn her clothes, and "celebrity bought my product" doesn't confer notability in itself. Paging Drmies for info, as the original nominator for deletion. ‑ Iridescent 15:11, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks. Yes, it needs more, but I won't rush to nominate it again. Drmies (talk) 01:15, 24 June 2016 (U

• Thank you. Will edit with additional sourcing asap. DarrenDorsey (talk) 12:58, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Made Man (website)

I saw that you recently deleted the page entitled Made Man (website). I understand that you cited two reasons for deleting it: 1. no indication of importance. To this I would respond that the website Made Man receives over 4 million views per month, and is a subsection of a larger company entitled Defy Media, which runs Smosh and Honest Trailers. 2. Unambiguous advertising. To this I would respond that there were mere facts posted on the site, but if you thought the language may have been promotional, there is ample opportunity to change that language to become more objective. Ljeome (talk) 18:37, 23 June 2016 (UTC)ljeome

Ljeome, the deleted article contained no indication of notability (which has a specific meaning on Misplaced Pages—you need to indicate why significant reliable sources consider the topic important), and of the five "sources" four were press releases and the fifth was this. If you really insist I can undelete it and move it into userspace for you to work on it, but I'll warn you that it's absolutely certain to be deleted if recreated as a Misplaced Pages article in anything like this form. Misplaced Pages isn't a directory, a hosting service or an advertising portal; if something isn't the subject of non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent, reliable sources, it doesn't get a Misplaced Pages article. Also bear in mind that Misplaced Pages articles have to be neutral, and if you're covering positive commentary about a topic you also have to give appropriate weight to negative commentary. ‑ Iridescent 19:23, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Please undelete Poligon or move it to my userspace

Please, can you undelete the Poligon article or move it to my userspace so that it could be further improved? Mitar (talk) 06:05, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Hey Iridescent—the user asked on IRC, so I userfied it for them. — Earwig  06:52, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

No problem—per my comments on DGG's talk, I've no problem with it being undeleted, but I don't think it has a chance of surviving as a standalone article unless sources are provided to demonstrate actual notability rather than just the fact that it exists. "The first and largest coworking space in Slovenia" is tenuous at best; as you'll see from the slew of redlinks and non-links on Coworking, even for the coworking heartlands of California and London we tend not to have stand-alone articles on the individual projects, and what articles there are tends to be spam like Parisoma which would be very unlikely to survive AFD. ‑ Iridescent 08:35, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

…and promptly recreated in mainspace under a different name. I won't renominate it myself, but be aware that Misplaced Pages tends to take a very dim view of people who try to use us as a spam portal. ‑ Iridescent 08:17, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

That moment where you're checking your watchlist and you think "Whoa, me?"

That. It was easily 50/50... Glad we're making a start on resolving this particular issue. Cheers, The Rambling Man (talk) 20:10, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

The more I think about it, the more I'm coming to feel that deprecating the Main Page and replacing it with www.wikipedia.org is starting to look like the most sensible option. Adding up the total editor time wasted in pointless discussions about TFA, OTD, ITN, DYK and TFP must be at "if all this effort had been directed towards something more useful we'd have cities on the moon" levels by now. Google has had a blank main page for well over a decade and they appear to be surviving. ‑ Iridescent 20:20, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, retro-engineering it back to something useful would be just fine for me. Ironically though, worst thing about Misplaced Pages (beyond the idiots and trolls) is the search feature. Unless you get the subject title bang on, forget it. Google solved that problem way back. Nice doing business with you. Bon Sunday. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:38, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Now, let's be fair. Special:Search is much improved since User:^demon & co. re-wrote the whole thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Some of us love working on such a cutting edge internet project. Zoom!! Martinevans123 (talk) 21:07, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Main Page and pageviews discussion

Question: The info must exist as to how many pageviews the search page vs the main page gets. If the search page significantly outnumbers the main page, why spend all the time and efford on the main page? DYK is clearly a credit-seeking process, but I dont follow ITN so dont know if it is a similar process there. Effort vs reward should surely carry large weight. Not to mention the take up of administrative time that could be better spent. (Not to mention Fram and TRM would get a break from fixing constant errors that will cease to exist) Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:20, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

The search-only page probably doesn't get that many views; it's only displayed if you enter "Misplaced Pages" in the address bar without specifying a language.

The Main Page gets about 18 million hits per day, but that's an artefact of the fact that typing "Misplaced Pages" into a search engine or clicking the logo on any page takes you there, rather than that people are actually interested in it. The most prominent item on the Main Page—TFA—generally gets around 20,000–30,000 views per day*, while when it comes to DYK getting more than 25,000 views is considered so extraordinary there's a special page dedicated to articles which have managed it. This implies that at most about 1%–2% of visitors to the main page are actually looking at the content of the main page.

If I were the WMF, I'd replace the main page with this proposed redesign by Guy Macon for a week and see what happens. That would still allow all the TFA, TFL, OTD, DYK, ITN clutter to continue as normal but it would only be shown to people who wanted to see it. My prediction would be no impact at all on readership numbers, and that while it would cause howls of protest from the MMORPG-ers who treat getting on the main page as the winning of Misplaced Pages Points, we wouldn't get a single complaint from any actual readers—the general public really could not give a shit "that while Inger Hanmann created enamels for the Copenhagen Airport, her daughter Charlotte made processed photographs of the urban environment?". ‑ Iridescent 10:10, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

*There are some TFAs that get page views in six figures, but those are few and far between and often the result either of the topic being heavily covered in the news on that day or of Google Doodles, meaning the traffic will be coming direct from searches and won't be an artefact of being displayed on the main page. Other than Nick Drake (run on the day of the SOPA blackout, when the main page was itself the subject of significant news coverage so more people than usual were looking at it) and the April Fools TFAs, the only TFAs in the entire history of Misplaced Pages to get more than 200,000 views which didn't relate to a current news story or that day's Google Doodle were Emma Watson, Lynching of Jesse Washington, D. B. Cooper, Daniel Lambert and Gropecunt Lane; you can literally count them on the fingers of one hand. All of those except Watson were unusually interesting stories, which probably got more traffic from "hey, look at this" on Twitter and Reddit than they did from the MP itself.

I would be ecstatic to avoid main page day with any FAs I'd worked on. And I only use DYK as a way to get more eyes on an article (like GAN or FAC)... I long ago quit being excited about things I worked on appearing on the main page. All it generally means is a bunch of crap and bs. Ealdgyth - Talk 15:53, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

I think we should do something along the lines of or possibly (note: you have to use the up and down arrows -- no newfangled "scroll bars" here!). It's clearly what a lot of people want our main page to look like... :(

Would anyone be interested in creating an RfC at (possibly at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (proposals)?) proposing that we replace the current main page with User:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page for 1% (randomly chosen) of our visitors for a week, followed by 10% of our visitors for a week if there are no obvious problems? The statistics on that would give us a solid answer to the question "does all of this DYK, OTD, etc. material really need to clutter the main page, or would having it as subpages linked from the main page work just as well?" Such an RfC would have to address the fact that Misplaced Pages:Perennial proposals#Redesign the main page claims that the idea of redesigning the main page has been "rejected by the community several times in the past" --Guy Macon (talk) 18:19, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

I think it would be well worth considering, although you'd almost certainly have to fight off an organized attempt to block it by certain elements (particularly at DYK and TFP) who see mainpage appearances as some kind of affirmation of their identity. Before this goes any further, paging our friendly neighborhood Community Liaison (Product Development), Wikimedia Foundation to ask if this is a change which would be blocked by the WMF before ever reaching the A/B test, since there's no point going any further if it will be strangled in the cradle. ‑ Iridescent 22:49, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Let me see who's made it home from Wikimania. Changing a page that gets millions of hits might be Kind Of a Big Deal. At minimum, Ops' Performance team (that's User:Krinkle and friends) would have to agree that the servers probably wouldn't fall over. We'd also have to find out whether the infrastructure currently exists for this (I'm not certain that it does). I don't know if any other teams would have a reason to care. I'll find out. Ping me in a couple of days if you haven't heard from me by then. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

In the meantime, I would very much appreciate it if other editors would review my "list of links and a searchbox" proposal to make sure that I chose the right links. Also, can the wording be improved? I wouldn't want anyone to reject the basic concept because of a poor choice on my part. Please post any comments on User talk:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page. Thanks! --Guy Macon (talk) 08:01, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Per this thread, it looks like the point may be moot, since it appears that this design—which somehow has achieved the difficult feat of being more cluttered and ugly than the existing design—is going to be imposed by fiat regardless of whether anyone actually wants it. ‑ Iridescent 09:26, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Hello, I wanted to provide some context that may benefit this endeavor. The Misplaced Pages.org portal sees about 14 million page views a day. Less than the Main_Page on the English Misplaced Pages, but the portal is not language-specific. ~90% of visits to the portal are direct. I've also shared this thread with the Discovery department to make them aware. Hope that helps. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 17:00, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

CKoerner (WMF), thanks for that; I wasn't aware there was any way to count its views (and certainly wasn't aware its views were so high). I do think a full-scale A/B test of a minimal mainpage design would be a worthwhile exercise—the working assumption of most main page redesign proposals has always been that all the clutter on the existing main page needs to be included on any proposed redesign, and thus the proposals are just differing opinions on how a series of cluttered boxes should be arranged. If there's not in fact a need for it all to be included, it radically affects how discussions about Misplaced Pages's look and feel ought to proceed.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see a cookie-controlled main page where readers (not just logged-in editors) choose which elements to display on the main page. People with no interest in any "Today's Featured Whatever" could restrict the page to a google.com style blank page with a searchbar; people with an interest in general knowledge could leave the page at default settings and it would look like it does now; people with a strong interest in trains could set it to show today's featured train, and so on. This would allow people to customise the main page to show information in which they're actually interested, rather than information in which the small cliques who control the assorted corners of the main page feel they ought to be interested, it would put an end to the constant "the main page has a systemic bias towards/against (insert country)" complaints since readers in New Zealand, South Africa and all the other countries which argue (with some justification) that they're underrepresented could choose to be shown Portal:New Zealand/Selected article, Portal:South Africa/Selected article etc instead of the vanilla Featured Article, and it would revive the generally moribund Misplaced Pages Portals since it would provide a strong incentive for portals to provide interesting content and to update themselves regularly. By looking at who chose to show/hide which elements, it would also make it possible for the first time to measure which aspects of Misplaced Pages are actually of interest to readers beyond a crude pageview count, and save people wasting time on things which the readers don't want. I appreciate this would be a major cultural change and would generate an not insignificant extra server load, but it's not insurmountable, and I do think a drastic reconsideration of the purpose of the main page makes more sense than the tinkering with formatting seen at Misplaced Pages:Main page redesign proposals and Misplaced Pages:Main Page alternatives. ‑ Iridescent 23:04, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

We seem to be talking about two different pages. Chris is working with the Discovery team on the 'main page' for www.wikipedia.org, not for the Main Page at en.wikipedia.org. One of the changes that Discovery has already made to the www. page is making the search box bigger, which is right in line with what you want to do here. Their next proposal seems to be making it simpler. And, importantly, they just ran an A/B test that showed (for www., which of course might not be the same results as for en.) that simpler = measurably more interaction.

So I have asked around a couple of times this week, and the story seems to be that Ops would have to agree to an A/B test, that Discovery might have the tools to do an A/B test on different designs for the Main Page here, and that Reading may be interested. It's easy to figure out which Ops people to talk to: questions about performance issues go to the Performance team. For Discovery, I think you want to start with Deskana. So far, I'm interpreting Reading's interest as "please send us a copy of the results" rather than "we'd like to work on this", but I'm only guessing, so I may be wrong. In the meantime, Deskana is probably the next person to talk to. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF), I wasn't clear; my first paragraph above was about the www.wikipedia.org portal, and the second was a more general musing about the feasibility of a preference-controlled main page. I agree entirely that simpler will lead to more and better interaction—there's a reason the websites of the Amazons and eBays of the world, whose business models depend on getting the balance between "getting people where they want to go" and "showing people stuff in which they might be interested" correct, have spent the last decade getting steadily less cluttered.

I don't know how official Talk:Main Page#The new Main Page is, but given the "this is going to happen regardless of how many objections and how little support it has" statement I assume it must be endorsed by SF, in which case presumably the point is moot at least for en-wikipedia, if there's an agreement that "keep everything that's already there and add even more clutter to it" is the way to go. ‑ Iridescent 08:23, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The new main page czar did say "your proposal has not gained any significant traction ... if you actually were to get a 1000 signatures, no doubt it would seriously be considered", so I say we should test that assertion by putting together a proposal for the one-week one-percent of users test of my proposed page and see if we can get those thousand signatures supporting running the test. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:48, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

I'd support that (again with the "if the WMF devs are willing" proviso; if you go to the trouble of rounding up a huge group, and are then told it's not possible for technical reasons, you're just going to annoy a huge bunch of people). As a variation on a theme someone's raised on the proposal talkpage, it might make more sense to make the change for 100% of users on a smaller wiki for a month and see if the number of readers varies wildly in either direction. That way, one doesn't have to mess around with A/B analysis, but can just look at whether the number of pageviews falls/rises when the new-look page is put in place and when it goes back to the old version. The obvious testbeds would be something like Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, where the reader numbers are high enough not to be impacted by "both the regular readers are on vacation" issues, and where every editor can reasonably be assumed to speak fluent idiomatic English so can shout at the devs if something goes wrong without having to rely on translators.

To get the change made here, the route I'd take would be to canvass the opinions of as many well-regarded editors as you can think of before then. People are far more likely to be swayed by support or opposition from the Newyorkbrads and Slimvirgins of the world than they are by the pondlife who hang round Jimbo's talkpage and will oppose anything on general principle, so if they're going to oppose you want to hear their reasons beforehand so you can try to address their concerns. (You're not going to get 1000 supports, so don't set that as a marker since it just gives ammunition to those who want to block the proposal who'll be able to say you failed to meet your own promises. The only times in Misplaced Pages history that 1000 people have supported anything have all been massively-publicized major votes.)

Of course, with my cynical hat on, given that the new self-appointed Pope of the Main Page has redefined "consensus" as "anything one person wants to do provided they have the moral strength not to allow anyone else's opinion to sway their purpose", you could just unilaterally change it to whatever the hell you want. Given that he's about to redesign the sixth most viewed page on the entire internet based on a "consensus" of himself and a driveby support from an IP, he can hardly complain. ‑ Iridescent 18:16, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

So I finally managed to get the right questions and the right people in the same place at the same time, and the answer is disappointing. The short story is that the tools to do this properly don't exist, and creating them would require a significant investment of dev time, which is not likely to be forthcoming any time soon.

The fact that these tools don't exist has already caused problems for other projects, so that investment may happen in the future. However, given that the fiscal year began seven days ago, and given the "that's an #Epic task" reactions, I do not expect work on this to start for at least another year, if then.

There might be ways to fake parts of this (e.g., post an alternative for a couple of minutes per hour, and use redirects to track click-through rates), but the data might not be usable, especially if you're looking for a small change.

I'm sorry about this. Personally, I wish that we could run this test. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:05, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Per my comments in the #Gadget help? section below (which I've moved up and attached to this thread, as it's all regarding the same issue), I think the way to go regarding testing would probably be to persuade one of the smaller wikipedias to serve a s guinea-pig for a month, and see what impact it has on reader numbers.

Part of the issue at play here, I think, is a fundamental divide regarding the purpose of the Main Page. There are some people who see its purpose as helping people find what they're looking for as quickly and easily as possible, and others who see it as a mechanism to teach readers about what Misplaced Pages does and how it does it. The two positions aren't really compatible, and websites with far greater resources than Misplaced Pages have struggled to square the circle of combining "second-guessing what the reader is looking for" and "making the reader aware of what else is on offer". It doesn't help that (as with other discussions regarding Misplaced Pages's appearance, from the Manual of Style to Visual Editor) the main page redesign proposals have historically attracted some of Misplaced Pages's most vocal assholes, so a lot of people who probably have something useful to contribute won't go near them. ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Neutral notification if anyone is still following this thread

Draft talk:Main Page#RfC: Main page update ‑ Iridescent 17:22, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Gadget help?

At it was opined that "2135 gadget users seem to think the new page is a good idea." I would like to explore the possibility of making my proposal at User:Guy Macon/Simple Main Page into a gadget. I an completely unfamiliar with this area of Misplaced Pages and don't even know whether I am suggesting something stupid. Needless to say, I want to do everything right as far as getting approval/consensus for such a gadget. Ping User:SMcCandlish: got any advice for me on this?

A bit of background: I have years of programming experience, but it is 99% in the following areas: Tiny embedded assembly language programs that run on microcontrollers with 256 bytes of RAM total. managing teams of engineers and developers creating hardware and programs in C or C++ to test aircraft components. So far I have avoided anything resembling a Misplaced Pages bot, gadget, template, etc. as being completely outside of my field of expertise. I think it may be time for me to change that. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:04, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Don't take "2135 gadget users" as some kind of demonstration of mass appeal; that's just more Edokter bullshit. The nature of Misplaced Pages means that there will always be some users who will test any gadget (some of whom then abandon their accounts or get blocked with the gadget still switched on, leading to that account being permanently shown as using the gadget). When you actually look at the data Edokter's gadget is one of the least popular gadgets on Wikipedis, despite his putting it into Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and thus showing it as an option to every single user on Misplaced Pages.

I don't really know a great deal about the technicalities and procedures of the gadget namespace. I'm not sure I've ever installed a gadget in my life, and I've certainly never edited one—I try to keep my settings as near to the default as possible, to ensure that whatever I'm seeing is what the readers will see. MZMcBride always seems to know about things like this. Per my comments in the earlier thread, it would probably make sense to to speak to WhatamIdoing and/or Deskana about what the WMF's take will be since there's no point working on something that they'll veto.

On a purely practical note, making your version into a workable gadget would probably be more complicated than Edokter's version. Edokter's version may superficially look different, but is in practice just an extremely clunky reskin without any significant content change, whereas yours is a set of links to allow the individual elements to be viewed separately. WP:TFA, WP:ITN and all the other elements aren't designed with readers viewing them separately in mind, and you'd need either to create stand-alone pages, or have a mechanism for making the links point to {{Misplaced Pages:Today's featured article/{{#time:F j, Y}} etc, neither of which will be a superficial matter and both of which would add an extra layer of complexity.

Given that it's looking obvious that there's little support for clearing away the clutter altogether and you'll probably at a minimum need to keep TFA transcluded—and that getting rid of the other elements while keeping TFA will lead to increased prominence for TFA and in turn prompt a furious blowback from FA editors—it's possibly not worth the effort tilting at this particular windmill. I do think the suggestion on the talkpage of rolling your design out to the smaller Wikipedias as a way of reducing the backlogs on their Main Pages, which can then in turn act as a testbed as to whether readers (as opposed to editors) will be actively hostile to the change, is a good one. ‑ Iridescent 07:43, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: Maybe try simple.wp: first? I dunno, though; the "we did this at the Foo-language Misplaced Pages, so en.wiki should do it too" argument is not always persuasive. There have been a few cases (mostly from de.wiki), but this argument often falls on deaf ears, and en.wiki has a long history of leading, not following. As for the ping to an advice request: I'm not a gadget developer yet, so I'm not sure I'd have anything to suggest, on the tech side. Regarding the general idea, I haven't really been clear in my mind on whether the Simple Main Page thing is proposed as a demo of what content would be available there, to be styled later, or is meant to represent the finished product more literally, nor whether it's meant as an alternative (kind of a portal-in-a-gadget) or a replacement. If it's meant to represent the final product (whether portal or replacement), I think it's too austere, but I can see a lot of users, especially mobile ones appreciating the "leanified" content structure of the page (i.e., from a function not just form perspective, though the form in the broad sense has much to do with why it could be helpful, even if the style, at the detail level, is more like a 1996 website). As for overall improving the Main Page in general, I'll paraphrase-by-screenshot what George Carlin said about US state mottoes: "Somewhere between 'Live Free or Die!' and 'Famous Potatoes', the truth lies. Probably, it's a little closer to 'Famous Potatoes'."  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼  14:50, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

I got up enough of a head of steam to finally write up some thoughts

You might conceivably be interested in my latest maundering in user space. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:43, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

On the specific issue of Drmies I probably shouldn't comment, since I don't believe I'm currently on his Christmas card list.

I've been annoying the deletion tag-bombers recently by going through CAT:CSD and de-tagging those which don't actually qualify for WP:CSD#A7 (which is actually extremely specific as to when it can be used) before the usual suspects can run their "delete all" userscript (I've been deleting all those which do deserve it, don't get me wrong). While it's fairly well known that I'm no fan of shitty stubs and think most of the South Street, Bromley—style hyperstubs would be more usefully merged into lists, it's easy to forget that almost every good article began its existence as a bad article. Misplaced Pages's "create enough sewage to fertilise the flowers" may be (deservedly) derided as an academic approach, but in getting coverage for topics which wouldn't be covered in a traditional encyclopedia it works considerably better than any other approach. Paging SV, Blofeld and OR (no, the other one), all of whom may have something to say either here or at User talk:Yngvadottir/A Case Study.

I may be being unfair on Wikipediocracy—I haven't had many dealings with this incarnation—but I'm not sure this is negative enough for them to be interested. The impression I get is that while the old WR certainly had its share of creepy weirdos and semicoherent bores with severe cases of verbal diarrhoea, it also generally took a "what are the problems with Misplaced Pages and is it possible to fix them?" tone (neatly summarised by Greg's old I really loved the original idea behind Misplaced Pages userpage), whereas in its WPO incarnation it does a better job of keeping out the creepy weirdos, but seems to approach everything with the base assumption "Misplaced Pages is inherently evil and anyone trying to fix it is part of the problem". ‑ Iridescent 21:32, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Actually, paging User:Pigsonthewing as well. While I disagree profoundly with him on many things, there's probably nobody more experienced with the kind of situation you describe. ‑ Iridescent 22:12, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

This reminds me of an episode of the old "Misplaced Pages Weekly" podcast, in which a group of editors created a new article in real-time, and the new article was tagged for either CSD or AfD (I forget which) while the first draft was still being written. I've addressed a couple of actual or suggested instances of newbie-unfriendliness this week, ranging from this absolutely awful block to this question. Was this club (of Wikipedians who aren't driven away early in their careers) always this hard to get into?

Yngvadottir, if you ever need a copy of any deleted material for a reason such as adding info from an old version to a current article, please feel free to ask me (or I'm sure any of dozens of other people).

Iridescent, on a completely separate note (and so feel free to subthread this), I've been unhappy all month about the way the disagreement between you and Drmies about the User000name block played out, or rather didn't play out as the conversation moved on. When I read the AN thread between the two of you, my impression was that Drmies decided to use a standard block rationale, rather than give the deeply problematic editor more attention; and he just chose the closest one he could locate on the menu. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:29, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

can't we all just...get along? Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 22:49, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I've been saying since the dawn of time that New Page Patrol causes more problems than it solves, as it's populated by MMORPG types who see it as a point of principle to tag things for deletion within seconds of creation. Sure, this is perfectly acceptable for attack pages and obviously unsalvageable spam, but Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as importance or significance not asserted is usually full to the brim of pages on people and companies which are almost certainly significant in Misplaced Pages's terms, but get deleted before anyone has the chance to flesh them out—and then people complain that Misplaced Pages's coverage of current businesses is poor! A lot of the problem is a single overly-persistent regular who has extremely poor judgement but considers himself untouchable; I'd estimate that at least 50% of the deletion requests I decline were tagged by him.

He just chose the closest one he could locate on the menu doesn't wash; he specifically gave "User is not here to edit Misplaced Pages" as his blocking rationale in the ANI discussion. While the individual problems listed under WP:NOTHERE can on occasion be rationales for blocking, the relevant one in this case, "Users who, based on substantial Misplaced Pages-related evidence, seem to want editing rights only to legitimize a soapbox or other personal stance", doesn't apply since aside from his userpage and (arguably) a single edit to Kike none of his other activity appeared related to any agenda. (A user may have extreme or even criminal views or lifestyle in some areas, or be repugnant to other users, and yet be here to "build an encyclopedia", to quote verbatim from WP:NOTHERE; I'm aware of at least one outright Nazi who's among Misplaced Pages's most active editors.) Don't get me wrong, User000name appeared to be an utterly charmless character, but indefblocks on the grounds of an admin personally disliking an editor can end in a lot of unnecessary hassle (I'm sure I don't need to give examples), particularly when they come from arbs and are thus effectively unappealable. ‑ Iridescent 23:07, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

• I am mobile so I can't indent nicely. I don't mind anyone disagreeing with me. I do mind a charge of dishonesty or favoritism (you just repeated it), so yeah, we're going elsewhere for Hanukkah. My block was obviously not an ArbCom block and if you think that I somehow got the Cloak of Untouchability when I got on that mailing list you're wrong. Sorry for butting in. Drmies (talk) 21:56, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

A very fast note while gobbling breakfast, because I don't think I'll be able to get online from work today. Someone else has now started this discussion: Misplaced Pages:Village pump (policy)#Notability guidelines and policy for eSports; I was pinged, which was very kind, passing along notification. According to Misplaced Pages Review, this link says that the article they were writing in realtime for the podcast got deleted; I can't verify because I never did replace the dead speakers on this computer. Regarding the case study, I reminded myself that there's also a response from the organizer of the series of meetups to someone else making the point that new editors at these editathons need to be told about our requirements, at Misplaced Pages talk:Meetup/Regina/ArtAndFeminism 2016/University of Regina, and at least two relevant sections at Misplaced Pages talk:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism. I've been trying very hard not to name and shame—Kobnach just told me politely that the piece seems wishy-washy—but I will say that I'm very disturbed by some stuff there. (There were also apparently issues of plagiarism with some articles, as there often are with new editors.) @Newyorkbrad: thanks for the kind offer; unfortunately without the admin glasses I generally don't know there is deleted history, and when I do thanks to there being a notice about deletion, I can't evaluate it, so that's that I'm afraid; I have to leave that stuff to those of you who do have them. And now I have to dash, sorry. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Break: editathons, New Page Patrol, and userpages

Don't believe everything you read on Misplaced Pages Review; the article in question was Frog Legs Rag, and while it was indeed tagged for deletion within 30 seconds of its creation it was never actually deleted In fact, WR is right and I'm wrong; it was indeed deleted, by the admin who's probably the single worst offender for bulk-deleting-without-bothering-to-check, as part of this bulk deletion. Although it survived deletion I'm not sure it's a great advert for the Misplaced Pages model, given that it took 100+ edits by some of Misplaced Pages's most experienced editors working flat-out over a three-day period (plus additional edits to upload the sheet music to Wikisource, the cover art to Commons, and performing, recording and uploading a recording of the music in question) to create a 317-word stub which averages four page views per day (most of which will be search engine crawlers) and hasn't had a non-trivial edit made to it for five years.

I've never been entirely convinced of the utility of editathons. I completely understand the principle, but I'm not convinced they really serve their stated purpose. None of the people who sign up for the day ever seem to stick around afterwards; if we want a mechanism for raising awareness of "anyone can edit", for recruiting new editors and for getting new editors up Misplaced Pages's initially-steep learning curve, I personally think it would be a more productive use of resources to concentrate on formal "this is how you do a, this is how you do b, this is how you do c, don't do d or e and here's why" lessons and getting them publicly disseminated. The existing approach of encouraging editors who don't really understand Misplaced Pages policies and practices to either edit existing articles and annoy the people who are trying to keep said articles in decent shape, or creating new articles without understanding what Misplaced Pages's looking for thus demoralising the new editors when their efforts are deleted, doesn't seem to be particularly productive. Someone will no doubt pop up with a counter-example, but I can't think of a single editor recruited during an editathon who stuck around for more than a few days afterwards. ‑ Iridescent 09:41, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

There is currently a CSD:A7 issue at ANI. Article inappropriately tagged (should be PROD or AFD as it does assert significance) - article creator removed tag and edit warred with tagger claiming it was vandalism. I see a lot of these (inappropriate tags), but what worries me is since it seems to be a widespread misunderstanding, how many are actually Speedy-del without anyone realising it was incorrectly tagged? Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Lots. If it's incorrectly tagged but has no chance of surviving AFD, I'll IAR and delete them anyway, but at least I always look; there are plenty of admins who just run a bulk delete script over the categories. If you want to run a breaching experiment, find something obviously notable and put a backdated PROD template on it so it immediately goes into CAT:EX, with a completely nonsensical rationale, and see if it gets deleted. ‑ Iridescent 12:08, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

(Back from work, still awake, trying to prioritize.) That's quite a case study in itself about the rag article, and I had no idea there even were admins who bulk deleted speedy categories like that. That's clearly an unusual example, but what a collaborative effort.

I have to share one sequence of edits from the meetup project talk page: ; ; . I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I'm deeply cynical about editathons, and the one acquaintance who went to one reported something worse than I'd imagined: that it was almost entirely a lecture about the gender gap from the angle of the WMF's theory of the natural lifestyle of the editor, i.e., hope that the gap can be fixed when the long-standing editors have shuffled off. And that even less editing got done than I'd imagined. But editors I respect a lot are involved in them, not just WMF hacks. Maybe it's my teaching reflexes, but it seems so obvious to me that the organizers should help the new editors to succeed in adding content, and that means explaining things, and either preparing a list of sources in advance or being ready to spring in and add some; and that it's a crying waste of people who turn up because they're interested in contributing to the project; it's cruel; it wastes potentially useful material (crowdsourcing is our strength, not an awkward messiness to be circumvented by only permitting new articles from people we know, on subjects we know)—and it's a stupid waste to hold these things in libraries and museums and not have the articles make use of the sources available there. Is everyone now thinking of a library as a place with Wifi and a meeting room, even people who organize and run encyclopedia editathons? You know, I'm almost angry enough to run an unsanctioned editathon and show them how. I'd have to wear a bag over my head or something because people upload pics of everything all over the Internet, and I'd have to take time off, and I haven't yet thought of a good location, but yeesh.

New Page Patrol is a knotty problem. The rolling list of new pages is awe-inspiring, and will always include an utterly unpredictable mix of:

• erudite topics incomprehensible to non-specialists
• perfectly reasonable article starts on a topic the particular patroller knows nothing whatsoever about
• mass creations where all that shows in the new pages feed is the top of the infobox and there could be anything inside
• utter silliness
• ads
• things where there will be disagreement as to notability
• woeful fragments from those who hit "save" when they have little more than a title—some of whom have very bad internet connections
• appalling English (problem now officially made 10 times worse by WMF "content translation" tool, which evinces deep contempt for what we do; but it would be a problem even without the WMF, and of course a small minority of articles are created here not in English at all)
• articles requiring emergency deletion for good reasons—I had no idea how many of these there are until I became an admin and took a good look.

—I've said before that I was shocked and saddened by the breaching experiment that drove off the experienced NPP. I don't like the shooting gallery stuff either, but the encyclopedia does need a watch kept for the bad stuff. Also if, as I contend, we are now attracting a lot of editors who are not very familiar with encyclopedias in general, we shouldn't be surprised we also get editors who are unclear on the purpose of NPP. I recently had a new article of mine tagged as "insufficient footnotes", which is pretty much the opposite of what I would have expected. The tagger was a new patroller who, from the conversation I had with them on their talk page, hadn't realized it's the yellow-highlighted articles that should be the highest priority on patrol, not the unmarked ones created by editors with the autopatrolled right, and appeared to think it was a comment field—tag all the new articles with the most appropriate tag. They hadn't fully realized the tags implied criticism.

I have one suggested solution. Refocus on why we're here: to create an encyclopedia. A new article is a potentially useful gift. We are headed down the path towards what they do over at de.wikipedia, where their pages on what you should put in a new article include the admonition to think long and hard about how much of other editors' time you will be using up on the evaluation of any new article you are thinking of writing. I did it once and it was a grim experience, not 100% because of my German. We're also collectively giving a lot of mixed messages about what we're about, from the dangerous myth (again, WMF-promoted) that just about all the important stuff has been written about, through the obsession about minutiae (MOS, citation formatting, avoidance of red links(!); those appear from the outside to be the main concerns in many GA and FA reviews, which is horrifying), to the tectonic battles about what topics are (especially) worthy, including the tunnel vision about women's biographies. What should matter is writing and improving writing. That's the only thread of coherence around here, after all.

And then we can have the conversation about varying views of notability. It's overdue, because of course hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe, with massively varying backgrounds, levels of education, and life goals are going to disagree about what should be in an almost infinitely expandable reference work. Unconscious or otherwise entrenched bias is actually a big concern of mine. It's just that absent the context of us all working together to write an encyclopedia, it's just politics and encounter groups, and that is the rest of the Internet.

Didn't there use to be an entry at WP:NOT about "not an experiment in creating a eutopia"?

And that brings me to avowedly Nazi editors, and you and Drmies (whom I greatly respect and have bothered with several e-mails, though I'm afraid he's pissed off at me right now). There are a lot of opinions I disapprove of; but I try to be brave enough to defend people's right to have them. If we want to be the encyclopedia anyone can edit—and I believe quite strongly in that, maybe except for illiterates and the dangerously insane—we need to be inclusive of an unimaginable range of opinions, just as we need to try very hard to include people of all social classes, and the WMF should be testing for accessibility to the handicapped as a matter of course. What matters is their editing. Also, there's the big consideration that people can change. Many people go through several political positions and several religions in a lifetime. In some cases in a year or two. I probably agree with Jimbo Wales about fewer things than I have fingers. But I think he was right to crack down on userboxen and decree that they should take the form "This editor is a — or is interested in — ". It's divisive to have editors proclaiming their affiliations and waving their banners. (It can also have a chilling effect on other editors, as obvious in this case and that may be what Drmies meant If we go back to what I think is actually policy imposed by Jimbo at the time, we'll hurt sweet people like Hafspajen a bit, but I think they'll understand. And we'll be able to focus on editing. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:22, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure anyone does still bulk-delete pages—remember I was gone for five years, a lot has changed in that time, and what is and isn't considered acceptable conduct from admins is certainly included in those changes.

Regarding editathons being almost entirely a lecture about the gender gap from the angle of the WMF's theory of the natural lifestyle of the editor, this is WMF policy, and it's actually the Andy Mabbetts of the world who still think the purpose of Misplaced Pages training is to teach people how to edit Misplaced Pages rather than to recruit an online army to right the world's wrongs who are now the voices in the wilderness. You can get your own WMF-approved Systemic Bias Kit here, should you so desire.

New Page Patrol in my opinion has never recovered from the WP:NEWT campaign of organised harassment. (Yes, that's what it was; "breaching experiment" gives too much credit. They intentionally tried to create articles which didn't technically meet deletion criteria and hid the sources within wiki-markup or in foreign-language text to make it impossible for any reasonable reader to find them without unreasonable effort, and then publicly humiliated whoever happened to fall for it; as far as I'm concerned every person involved should have been indefblocked as trolls.) It's suffering particularly badly as one of its most active participants has severe competence issues, which is rubbing off onto enthusiastic newcomers who see him in action and have no reason not to assume that plastering maintenance tags over anything you haven't heard of isn't what's being asked of them.

Regarding new pages, what would probably be the sensible course of action in an era where the number of articles keeps rising but the number of patrollers keeps falling, is to strip regular editors of the ability to create pages, with all new pages automatically created into a noindexed draftspace and a restricted group of people with at least a vague degree of clue (1000 edits/90 days?) having to manually approve them and move them into article space. Yes, it would be Sangerification and the WMF would probably block it as a matter of principle, but the crapflood is reaching the point where the nature of the disease requires so sharp a remedy.

You'd be surprised just how many reviewers do think GA/FA reviewing is purely a matter of MOS compliance, and will overlook any issues with the actual quality. Not wanting to name-and-shame, but consider this GA review from only a week ago as a particularly egregious example. I see someone has now taken that one to GAR, at least.

The old "multiple independent reliable sources" criterion may be a poor one for notability, but it's the best we've got. It's very hard to predict what readers actually want to read, rather than what we think they ought to be reading; as I've mentioned before, of everything I've written Tarrare consistently gets the most pageviews, and it's hard to even imagine a topic more obscure. Even monumentally dull articles like Quainton Road railway station consistently get around 30 readers per day—coincidentally, almost exactly the same pageview level as Cats That Look Like Hitler, the starting of which is surely my finest accomplishment. If you want a rather snarky aside, 30 pageviews a day is exactly 30 time as many as the first example I picked at random from Keilana's much-publicised drive to create the articles she thinks editors ought to be writing rather than the ones they actually write. Looking at other examples from that list, it doesn't seem like I've inadvertently cherry-picked a particularly low-traffic one, either.

If I had my way userpages would be deprecated altogether, or reduced to a minimal "My name is xxxx, I live in yyyy, I am interested in zzzz"; I don't really see why anyone should have a userpage longer than User:Newyorkbrad as an upper limit. I have absolutely no issue with someone declaring themselves a racist, a Stalinist, an ISIS-sympathiser etc on their userpage provided they do so neutrally—as long as they're not proselytising I view it as commendable honesty that they're noting the fields in which they won't have a neutral point of view. That's not the case here though; this userpage was undoubtedly unacceptable and I've no issue at all with it being deleted, but the correct response to an otherwise-reasonable editor whose userpage you consider unacceptable is to ask them if they're willing to blank it and if they decline to take the userpage to MFD, not to haul the editor to ANI, round up an angry mob of the usual suspects who just like saying support block as it makes them feel important, and then enact an out-of-process block on the editor in question. (The editor in question has now rendered the question moot by using the Deplorable Word in his block appeal, but the underlying principle stands.) ‑ Iridescent 20:35, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Well of course I have an extremely long user page :-) I think I still disagree with you regarding acceptable user page statements: it can very easily have a chilling effect or, conversely, produce an invidious assumption of bias, and it's very important to me that there be no pressure on editors to reveal identifying information. Plus, just as I like user names (the IP editor last known to me as 75 proposed assigning them on registration and was surprised by my shocked reaction), I like seeing people's creative formatting of their user pages, with pictures and so on. I believe that degree of acceptance of the conventions of what's now called "social media" puts us at ease and helps us remember folks' handles. If I were Editor:XA409 I'd have difficulty remembering my own nick and would give up on remembering others', and I'd feel less welcome partly because people would have less of an opportunity to form a mental picture of me as an individual. I suspect folks also find it easier to remember who I am because they can associate me with that bizarre user page, although I haven't got the reaction I expected from adding a photo of myself '-) I was creeped out by "Wikilove" initially, but when I started receiving such gifts I rapidly changed my mind. And with that I must hit the sack. Apologies for long-windedness. And P.S.: Please, please don't give me a still lower opinion of the WMF. I keep trying to remember they mean well. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:58, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Although, I can flip that around and say that users' increasing familiarity with social media has acculturated them to an environment of ultra-minimal user customisation (the closest thing to a "userpage" you'll get on Twitter, Facebook etc or on a phpBB forum is the ability to choose a background image and a profile photo, and maybe a couple of very basic facts about yourself), and that Misplaced Pages's fancy userpages are a throwback to Misplaced Pages's creation during the era of Myspace, Bebo and LiveJournal and actually makes the site look something of an outdated relic. (See also this thread for more of my views on unnecessary clutter.) Remember, an ever-increasing number of readers and editors are using the mobile site (particularly since the software is too stupid to understand the concept of "screen size" and assumes everything running iOS or Android is a phone, so even if someone's editing on a 13-inch iPad Pro with a larger screen than many laptops, it'll still serve up the mobile site), and all those userpages people spend so much time carefully laying out and formatting are unreadable crap in mobile view. I don't really object to WikiLove, which is just a blinged-up version of barnstars; compared to some of the WMF's batty "editor engagement" schemes like MoodBar, AFT or whatever the hell this is, it's benign and easily ignored by those who don't care to get involved (and don't get me started on the "thank" button). ‑ Iridescent 22:26, 1 July 2016 (UTC)
So reassuring to hear that the WMF plans to be "smart but human". I can sleep safely in my bed, knowing that Jimmy Wales is keeping Misplaced Pages free from both superintelligent robots and talking dogs.

Sidetrack: pageviews and biscuits

Okay - that page analysis is scary. That's much worse than Miss Meyers, who is the perennial example of a "too short FA". As for userpages - mine is mainly a "what I should be working on" or "what I've worked on" - with only a bit of editorializing on non-Misplaced Pages subjects. Ealdgyth - Talk 22:18, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I think my personal least read is Glass Age Development Committee, which as far as I can tell has only ever once had views in double figures. I've always felt that there's probably a genuinely interesting story to be written there, if only I (or someone) could be bothered to actually dig it out. ‑ Iridescent 22:26, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Dramatist Studio of Sweden. There may be one that's even less popular. Increasingly, my articles don't even get their talk pages created. However, at least they rarely get AfD'd, especially since my AfD success percentage is way below what's required at RfA these days. On the other hand, I got to create Autocunnilingus and Techno Viking (for which there was at least one vid on YouTube about how awful it was Misplaced Pages didn't have an article). So it evens out. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:08, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

In early 2008 comments made by singer and actress Madonna brought the link between biscuits and sexual activity into question, in which she blamed then-husband Guy Ritchie's lack of interest in sex on overconsumption of biscuits.

I'm still smarting over Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Biscuits and human sexuality (if you'll forgive a moment of WP:ABF, one of the most blatant "I don't care what the consensus is, I don't like it" closes in Wiki-history). Even the obscurest articles can take off if something happens to give them critical mass—Broadwater Farm was for years an article so obscure that Misplaced Pages Review used it as one of their go-to examples of a pointless Misplaced Pages page, until it suddenly found itself the focus of the world's media four years after I wrote it. Actually, Ordish-Lefeuvre system beats Glass Age for lack of readers. (Astoundingly, more than 20 people per day manage to end up at Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed somehow.) ‑ Iridescent 16:25, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Sporfle. (Geographic bias! If it had been cookies it would have been kept!) Yngvadottir (talk) 17:17, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Biscuit≠cookie; biscuits can be sweet or savoury, cookies are always sweet. If it had been kept it would have been expanded with a long aside about the curious history of the Graham cracker (lest we forget, originally invented as a medication to suppress the desire to masturbate), so it needed the broader term. Of course, this does provide me with a pretext to haul the finest image in the whole of Commons's fine collection out of retirement. ‑ Iridescent 17:28, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I see; my food knowledge is not very extensive. That's a very special image, but I can't help regretting the waste of all those lovely biccies, especially the bourbons. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:37, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

What I find hilarious is that at least two Wikipedias are using it as a straightforward illustration on their Oral sex page.

That uploader has a much more interesting upload history than the usual "here are 200 photos of my garden shed" Commons contributor. The images all look like photographs at first glance, but when you zoom in they're all made of something peculiar.

At some point I'm going to translate es:Mondongo (artistas) just to give a pretext to get one of these onto the Main Page. Plasticene Red Riding Hood is particularly disturbing if you click onto her face in full resolution. ‑ Iridescent 16:08, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

<g> I found enough sources! Yngvadottir (talk) 18:48, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

The biscuit one works pretty much perfectly at mainpage size (see right); there's enough detail to see that something is going on and that it's not a straightforward photo, but not enough detail actually to make out the biscuits. I'd confidently predict that at either DYK or TFA it would make the all-time top ten for pageviews. If nothing else, it would be worth it for the comedy value of the angsty shouting match between the Gormanistas and the WP:NOTCENSORED True Believers. ‑ Iridescent 15:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Doitdoitdoitdoit!

Heh. I saw your ping the other day, way up at the top of this thread, but have fallen behind on WP. Now I finally start catching up and find that biscuit picture again. As a thread on this talkpage gets longer, the probability of seeing that image approaches 1... ;) Opabinia regalis (talk) 18:09, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Since at virtually any point in the last two years there's been at least one work of 19th-century pornography under discussion on this page at any given time, nobody can really claim to be horrified at seeing Naughty Bits here.

I did a bit of digging but can't find anything that will push Mondongo over en-wiki's notability bar, but my Spanish is not great. I'll keep digging.

There's obviously something in the air in Buenos Aires when it comes to images. To go back to one of my other regular hobby-horses of bizarre grave markers, my all-time champion for the coveted "what the fuck was the funeral director thinking?" award is Argentinian, and it's a matter of great sorrow that the works of Xul Solar are all still in copyright (Google them). ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I really think I have enough at this point, including 2 major Spanish-language newspaper articles (from different years) and an AP article. Here's a useful summary of the purposes of the Seria Negra, which would enable proposing that as the DYK image:

En la serie Negra optaron por bajar modelos de Internet y reproducirlos con galletitas vulgares, que en sus tonalidades van del beige al chocolate, que no sólo apelan al consumo sino también a la monocromía, a lo vacuo, al porno del todo por dos pesos, a la deserotización, a lo mecánico y rutinario. A la aldea global masificada en el sexo virtual.

However, annoyingly, I can't substantiate their having works in the permanent collections at the Tate Modern and MOMA, only participation in exhibitions. Anyway, I have a long bookmarked list now.Yngvadottir (talk) 20:31, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I can find out for Tate Modern. (I'd be surprised if they didn't, given that any artist from the last 50 years whose work is relatively cheap is likely to be represented in either Tate Modern or Tate Liverpool. The combination of Blair pissing money into it when it was being built, and Cameron slashing their budget to the bone, means Tate Modern and Liverpool have a vast amount of space and not a great deal to put in it other than the relatively small collection they inherited from the old Tate Gallery, and will consequently buy any old tat provided it's cheap.) ‑ Iridescent 20:40, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Good—I thought as much but couldn't find them listed. Mondongo (collective) is started, but has umpteen things that need to be added, including the English source that is half the footnotes in the Spanish article. And the Commons category needs creating before it can be added to both. However, I must now go to bed. Yngvadottir (talk) 06:43, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Commons:Category:Mondongo (collective) created—I've created it under that clunky name despite Category:Mondongo being a redlink since Commons has quite a few pictures of the soup which will obviously be the primary usage if anyone creates a separate category for them. Maybe it ought really to be at Category:Mondongo (grupo de artistas), but if es-wiki can't be bothered to create a category themselves I don't see why we should pander to them. (I note in passing that some po-faced Commons admin who apparently doesn't understand the concept of "list artworks under their titles" has moved File:Blonde teenie sucking.jpg to File:Cookies and biscuits are used to make this sexually graphic image.jpg— maybe I should move File:The Scream.jpg to File:Pastels overlaid with oil paint are used to make this image of three men on a bridge, one of whom appears distressed.jpg.) ‑ Iridescent 08:08, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I think I'm done. What's missing is the claim about the permanent collection. You may want to swap in Little Red Riding Hood as a replacement for Fogwell as lead image or make more sweeping changes. Taringa! unfortunately is a social media platform, so I tried to minimize my use of that fine source (and did not add the years of birth of the 3 founders from it). It's an orphan, but I imagine we have an article on food art or épater les bourgeois where it can be linked. There are only 2 red links, a low number for stuff I do. If you want to nominate it for DYK, feel free, but I don't participate there any more so I will pretend not to notice. I added the Commons category to the Spanish article, so maybe somebody over there will wake up and add a pic; for some reason the only one from the set that I see being used there is the Fogwell portrait at es:Quilmes. Oh, and pinging Xanthomelanoussprog, who may want to get in on this. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:10, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

• Ping response. It was Eid al-Fitr today; the streets were full of Muslims in holiday mood, and after 7 years the Chilcot Report is published. Hmm… lXanthomelanoussprog (talk) 21:22, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I bought a Japanese cloisonné vase the other day, thinking it was Chinese. Anyway, it has mica flakes incorporated in the enamel- which makes me think that the Mondongo portraits of Juan Carlos et al is glass painted with lacquer and not mica-pigmented. Xanthomelanoussprog (talk) 22:17, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do if I can find anything else to add, although looks like an excellent job so far. I may not get round to it for a couple of days as my availability will be patchy. ‑ Iridescent 11:08, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

DYK

Now at DYK, if anyone wants to nip over and review it. If you've never done one before, reviewing is very easy. If anyone can suggest a better hook, do feel free—I've unsurprisingly gone with That Image, as I think I know Misplaced Pages's core readership (teenage boys, basement-dwelling nerds, and people who prowl the internet looking for a pretext to feel outraged) well enough to know which of the five options is likely to generate the most interest. The article is good enough even in this unfinished state that I suspect at least some of the people who only visit it in the hope of seeing boobies will stick around to find out more about modern Latin American art. (Whether this happens is measurable; see if pages like Centro Cultural Recoleta have a detectable rise in views on the day.) ‑ Iridescent 17:24, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Comments at CheckingFax RfA

It seems that "I won't be commenting further" is too difficult to follow. If you really want to continue down this rabbit-hole, you might want to take this thread from two months ago, nominating an obvious copyright violation at GA last week, or the false claim in the nomination statement to have "taken an article to FA" (every edit to the article in question) as further jumping-off points. If you feel the need to discuss it further, there are 62,129,214 places other than my talk page on which to do so. I note in passing that if my oppose and every oppose citing me had switched to support, the RFA would be at 11 supports vs 18 opposes, and would still have tanked. ‑ Iridescent 17:35, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I was rather disappointed in your oppose comment here. It would have been helpful if your comment had actually explained what had happened rather than an editorialization with no summary of the facts. As far as I can tell, the question at at the Carey Grant page had to do with access dates for books in a Google Books citation templates, and whether or not to use a certain type of quotation template. As far as the ANI dispute, it seems to center around a citation template which was changed to "Last name, firstname; Lastname, firstname" from "Lastname, firstname and Lastname, firstname". It seems to me that this was blown way out of proportion. Am I missing something? II | (t - c) 06:24, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The whole point of an RFA comment, on either side of the line, is "editorialization", since one is expressing one's personal opinion, not cited facts. I included links to both Talk:Cary Grant and the ANI thread precisely so people could make up their own minds; those who disagree are, I presume, perfectly capable of typing "Support, I do not agree with the concerns raised".

It's precisely because the issues were trivial that they're problematic; someone standing up for deeply held principles is understandable, and won't necessarily be grounds for opposing provided the candidate indicates that they're aware of the issues about which they hold strong views and knows when to step back. On the other hand, someone with a very recent history of escalation and heel-digging over petty disputes (and petty disputes in which their position is squarely against Misplaced Pages policy—regardless of how much I personally dislike it, WP:CITEVAR is very well established) is problematic. I'd recommend reading this thread to get more of the background, as it gives a good taste of the "but I like it better my way!" mentality at play here. There's also the question of omission; that this set of disputes are so recent he can't have forgotten them, so their not being mentioned either implies that he doesn't consider them important, or that he's intentionally hoping to hide them. (I'd personally consider filing an RFA with a contentious ANI thread in the very recent past as prima facie evidence of poor judgement, regardless of who was in the right.)

Given that the RFA in question is now closed, I see no reason to put the boot in to someone who's already on the floor—RFanything is an unpleasant experience at the best of times, particularly when you get more opposition than you expected—so won't be commenting further. ‑ Iridescent 08:09, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

You are of course free to editorialize - I'm not saying don't provide your opinion - but I am free to be disappointed at those who editorialize without providing a minimum set of facts upfront to place that editorialization in context. Particularly when you're the first !vote which puts you into a position of influence. You did a bit better job here, but I still don't think the picture is entirely clear. CheckingFax owned up to making some mistakes in

User:ImperfectlyInformed, that's how RFA works, it's not your call on what people give as the reason for opposing. The fact that so many opposes were given and it swiftly aborted tells me that there was probably a good reason behind why so many people opposed.♦ Dr. Blofeld 08:40, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld (talk · contribs), on Misplaced Pages we generally like to make judgments based on substance rather than surface level metrics such as number of !votes, whether we're in AfD or RfA. So I hope you take a look and make a judgment on your own rather than taking the word of people, many of whom cited Iridiscent's comments (or the one person who erroneously cited Newyorkbrad, who didn't even !vote). Misplaced Pages is frequently criticized for its hostile environment. It's up to all of us to figure out how to make the Misplaced Pages community sustainable. One of the things about User:CheckingFax is that he clearly makes an effort to be welcoming and help out new (and existing) users, and he doesn't lose his cool even if he doesn't always communicate perfectly. II | (t - c) 17:12, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Nemessis

Hello,

Previously you deleted the Nemessis page under A7. It appears the user recreated it with the same content? I retagged this for speedy deletion, please let me know if this does not qualify or if I should use a different process this time around? Dane2007 (talk) 02:17, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:G4 only applies to pages that were deleted "via its most recent deletion discussion", and not to speedy-deletions, so just consider its recreation as an unorthodox way of requesting WP:REFUND. I've undeleted the history of the original, to ensure the existing article is correctly attributed in the unlikely event that it's kept. ‑ Iridescent 15:01, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you!! I appreciate the additional information :).Dane2007 (talk) 19:48, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Non free image question

Dear Misplaced Pages administrator Iridescent, A while ago I put a logo on the my pet monster cartoon article from this website http://www.toonarific.com/show_pics.php?show_id=2533, and it is also the opening scene. Every TV show article on Misplaced Pages has the opening scene in the info box so this one should be added too. Also the image is not copyrighted. Can I put the image back up?— Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidgoodheart (talk • contribs)

Davidgoodheart, of course the image is copyrighted; see the big notice at the bottom of the page you link that says "Copyright 1998 Toonarific Cartoons"?

We can only accept copyrighted content under very limited circumstances; see Misplaced Pages:Non-free content criteria#Policy for the details. Basically, you need to explain where you got it, why it's necessary that we include it, and where and how you intend to use it. The best place to ask would probably be Misplaced Pages:Teahouse/Questions; I have no involvement with television articles. ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Why do you think I am removing !votes?

I am moving long discussions to the talk page. I don't understand.—_Chat:Online 14:20, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Kraftlos and MSJapan's votes were caught up accidentally. HighInBC 14:21, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You do realise this is a wiki and everyone can see you removing the votes, right? Just count the totals before and after your edit. ‑ Iridescent 14:25, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Indeed. I didn't realize I moved them with the discussion until it was pointed out to me. Sorry.—_Chat:Online 14:27, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

And I wasn't counting the totals.

What Xeno said here. Even disregarding removing the oppose votes, you're not being helpful, you're being disruptive; there's a difference between clerking inappropriate comments and blanket censorship of dissenting opinions, and you're squarely on the wrong side of it (and I say that as someone in the support column). Unless and until RFA becomes like an Arbcom election with just "yes" or "no", people have a right to make reasonable responses about any comment they deem fit. ‑ Iridescent 14:31, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

My apologies. I was simply moving the discussions which seemed to have been getting long to the talk page. It wasn't my intention to be disruptive.—_Chat:Online 14:33, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Henley & Partners page deletion

Hi, you deleted my page "Henley & Partners" on 23 June for unambiguous advertising. I would really like to have another go at editing the content so that it no longer reads like an advertisement. Is there anyway that you might restore the content to my talk page so that I can keep working on it? I would also apreciate any feedback and tips on how to make the content read better.

Thank you

Mara.ispas (talk) 12:52, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages isn't an advertising portal. A Misplaced Pages article needs to demonstrate that multiple, independent, non-trivial reliable sources consider the topic significant, and to give a neutral summary of the topic. Other than a short "History" section, the article I deleted consisted of a lengthy and irrelevant list of publications, some puffery about a non-notable award, more puffery about "social responsibility", and a note about how great the current Chairman is. If you want, I can undelete the page to your userspace so you can work on it, but I'll warn you it will need a complete root-and-branch rebuilding to be appropriate for Misplaced Pages. ‑ Iridescent 13:01, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback, I will definitely spend more time on it before I attempt to move it into the live space again. Please may you go ahead and un-delete the page to my userspace.

Mara.ispas (talk) 13:57, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Restored to User:Mara.ispas/Henley & Partners. ‑ Iridescent 14:49, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Decline of CSD for Subhan Sahib

Hi, I noticed that you declined the CSD for Subhan Sahib with the reason being 'Seriously? How do you get "no assertion of notability" from this?'. I was wondering, why? Did you not notice that virtually the entire article is a copy and paste from Asaf Ali, an entirely different person. Only the first line and infobox actually relate to Subhan Sahib, and certainly do not indicate any notability. The article was also previously deleted for being a copy and paste. May I suggest that you reconsider your decline and instead delete the article. Thank-you David.moreno72 (talk) 06:02, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't matter; The criterion does not apply to any article that makes any credible claim of significance or importance even if the claim is not supported by a reliable source or does not qualify on Misplaced Pages's notability guidelines, and Indian independence activist, Freedom fighter, Bus Owner, Agency for various Products, Owner of Bharatha Matha Rice Mill is undoubtedly a claim of significance. WP:CSD#A7 is intentionally very specific and extremely inflexible, and is intended as a mechanism to allow us to delete articles by people writing about their friends and family, not as a means for getting rid of poorly-written or inaccurate content; this is clearly someone trying to create a new article by copying the format of an existing article, rather than an attempt at deception.

Misplaced Pages's bureaucracy may be frustrating, but it exists for a reason—slapping speedy-deletion tags on new material contributed in good faith just because the creator is new to Misplaced Pages and doesn't yet understand the rules is a hostile act which just drives away potential contributors. Remove whatever material is inappropriate from the article and (if necessary) nominate what's left for deletion via WP:PROD or WP:AFD as appropriate. ‑ Iridescent 06:20, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments, it's always good to get feedback from highly experienced administrators. I have done what you suggested and removed the inappropriate material and added a WP:PROD tag. Again, thanks for your comments. Cheers David.moreno72 (talk) 06:46, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I've restored the legitimate content you've removed, and speedy-declined your WP:BLPPROD; given that the man died in 1987, this is obviously not a BLP. ‑ Iridescent 06:58, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Sitush, you know more about this kind of thing than me; do you think this one is salvageable? ‑ Iridescent 06:59, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Since Sitush is only editing sporadically I'll chime in. I doubt this is salvageable, there are many many people who were peripherally involved and arrested during the Quit India movement, most of whom don't have anything written about them (including a few on my family tree) except in the records of the local police station that made the arrests. In this case, the grandson of the subject seems to be keen on getting his name on blogs and records and that's about all the evidence there is to it. As for the rice mill, any rice or flour trader is known as a rice mill in Tamil Nadu and these are small mom and pop shops, not a mill of the General Mills kind. The only stuff I could find in Tamil is related to another Subhan Sahib who happens to be a son of Tipu Sultan. cheers. —SpacemanSpiff 08:03, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree about the rice mill (and I strongly suspect the "bus company" translates as "owned a battered van which ferried people to and from the railway station"). I'll give it a few days to see if anyone can add to it—the online documentation of Quit India is not great (and spread across a dozen languages), and it's perfectly possible that someone will dig up an old press cutting regarding his having done something particularly noteworthy. ‑ Iridescent 08:19, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Institute of Food Research

Hello Iridescent,

The page titled Institute of Food Research was deleted a few weeks ago citing G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion. Whilst the language may have been promotional, I think that there should be an opportunity to address this as I believe the Institute of Food Research meets the definition of notability as there are many independent reliable sources from which a more neutral article could be produced. Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hhu362n (talk • contribs) 12:29, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

The topic is undoubtedly notable, but the page I deleted was to all extents and purposes a press release (right down to describing the subject as "we"), and I'm not going to restore it (feel free to try your arm at WP:REFUND if you disagree). If you can write a neutral article on the topic based on reliable sources, feel free. ‑ Iridescent 14:34, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

help desk

Your comment makes no sense in the context of that thread. If one can construe that thread as somehow having something to do with you then they could construe it as having something to do with absolutely anything at all...please go read the thread carefully and reexamine your assertion about it (as you were not assuming good faith and just trying to find some cover for criticizing me in an irrelevant way)..68.48.241.158 (talk) 14:49, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Why yes, you're clearly here to write articles, not to argue. As you've just been told on your talkpage, if you have something useful to add to articles Misplaced Pages will welcome you, but if you just want to push a personal agenda about why you think 1⁄7 of active editors being admins is too low a ratio to anyone who'll listen, Misplaced Pages is probably not the place for you. Sure, there are people who dedicate a great deal of attention to reforming (or radically restructuring) Misplaced Pages's creaking governance structure, but they're either long-term participants in Misplaced Pages or long-term observers of Misplaced Pages, who can explain why they feel that the current system isn't working, explain how they think a proposed change would function better and how to mitigate any potential downsides to change, and (crucially) judge a conversation well enough to understand when to withdraw.

I've wasted more than enough time responding to your mixture of ill-informed conspiracy theories and bizarre proposals, and am not going to engage with you any further. If you do want to complain about how the Misplaced Pages admins were all mean to you, without stopping to consider why you get blocked so regularly, I believe that WikiProject Editor Retention and Wikipediocracy are the traditional venues. (Be aware that any attempt to complain that myself, HighInBC and The Blade of the Northern Lights are in any kind of conspiracy will likely get you laughed out of either of them.) ‑ Iridescent 16:26, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

WPO tends to have *less* patience with editors like that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:40, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

a simple apology would have sufficed..as your comment in that thread is exactly what I describe, as any reasonable person can discover..and is again indicative of poor admin behavior that I've continuously run into...your link to fancy data about my contributions is meaningless too as I largely change articles indirectly via talk discussion in a collaborative way...but I'm fine with not directly engaging with you too...68.48.241.158 (talk) 17:50, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Userfied copy of deleted FCCLA article

Can I ask for a userfied copied of the article you deleted for FCCLA. Between FCCLA and Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, there are about 400 articles linking in, overwhelmingly from high school articles where there is a local chapter. It should be simple to expand it to meet notability standards, but it would be easier if I can have a copy of what was deleted. Per this source, the organization has 200,000 members in 6,500 chapters nationwide, and sources should be available. Alansohn (talk) 20:25, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Restored to mainspace for what that's worth—move it to userspace if you don't plan to work on it fairly soon, as there's no way it will survive another deletion request in this state. At all of two sentences long, there's not a great deal to work with. An article also existed at Family, Career and Community Leaders of America which I'm not restoring, as it was a cut-and-paste copyright violation of their website. ‑ Iridescent 16:00, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Deletion of VITA Zahnfabrik on 23 June

Hello, you deleted the page "VITA_Zahnfabrik" on 23 June for unambiguous advertising. In the meantime I have an english translation of the original german article which I published in the german wikipedia on 5 June without any negative responses. Would you please restore the old article, so that I can apply the changes?

Thank you Dinkelberger (talk) 15:02, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

userfied by me. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 15:19, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

The ed17

He was never an "enemy", just someone acting in flagrant disregard to the community, using the main page as a playground. And I thought that before I was told about his little Prince joke. Thanks for closing the discussion. As I said, if nothing else, it just means more scrutiny of his errant behaviour henceforth. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:11, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking as much of your spat with NYB as with Ed himself. You do sometimes give the impression of treating minor comments with which you disagree as being worthy of full-scale handbaggings; I know WP:ERRORS and WP:ITN (and the MP in general) attract more than their fair share of self-important windbags who gravitate there because no other place on Misplaced Pages will put up with their incompetence (and I'm sure you know the two people I particularly have in mind), but I do sometimes get the feeling you've been immersed in the corrosive culture over there for so long that you assume anyone making any comment is doing so out of either malice or stupidity. ‑ Iridescent 19:18, 18 July 2016 (UTC)